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U.S. House Rejects Net Neutrality
tygerstripes writes "A recent vote in the U.S. House of Representatives has led to a rejection of the principle of Net Neutrality from the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (Cope Act), in spite of massive lobbying from prominent businesses. According to the BBC, the bill '...aims to make it easier for telecoms firms to offer video services around America by replacing 30,000 local franchise boards with a national system overseen by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'. However, according to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, 'telecommunications and cable companies will be able to create toll lanes on the information superhighway... This strikes at the heart of the free and equal nature of the internet.'"
When I opened up this Slashdot article in Internet Explorer, the headline read "U.S. House Rejects Net Neutrality" but when I opened it up in Firefox it read "Wealthy Old White Men Reject Yet Another Form Of Equality."
In it's raw form, the internet is a communications device. You section it off--and you're going to piss people off. The more people you piss off, the more hackers you'll spawn. I for one hope that these "toll" lanes are violated right off the bat by the best and brightest of the Ukraine & Russia.
My work here is dung.
I realize that "net neutrality" is conventional wisdom among geeks, but I remain very skeptical. To summarize:
1)bandwidth is already plentiful; we're talking about hypothetical harms here. (For the record, I actually downgraded my broadband a few months ago, with absolutely no complaints).
2)companies already pay for ISP's and webhosting; tiered service is not anything new. Anyway, webhosting costs have been decreasing in price. I find it highly unlikely that this downward trend won't continue across the board.
3)The thing I find strange is that if anything, tiered pricing, by passing on costs to distributors, could ultimately benefit consumers by lowering subscription costs. Tiered pricing could increase flexibility. I really am not sure. But that should be for private industry to decide. Even if legislators were relatively well-informed and up-to-date, the pace of technology change tends to outstrip that of legislative oversight; this legislation will probably be obsolete on the day it is passed.
4)So what if SBC decides to implement a tiered system of bandwidth! Consumers just stop renewing their contracts if they hate it enough. That's much better than making courts and legislators do a lot of hairsplitting about what legislative intent was/should be.
5)I worry less about tiered service than I do about ISPs blocking p2p traffic. Then again, I see no need to enact legislation merely to keep certain ports open.
6)as an independent content producer (and soon a distributor), I want the Net environment to be as unregulated as possible (even from laws that purport to ensure acess). If some ISPs are going to charge for tiered service, either they better offer substantial benefits to customers or people will abandon them in droves.
7)what concerns me more is restrictive Terms of Service and EULAs. If ISPs offer twice the bandwidth for half the cost, that is great. But if the saving comes with all sorts of extra provisions on TOS, then the battle has been lost.
8)There is a certain arrogance to the notion that consumers can't be trusted to act in their self-interest but require government's "help" to be protected.
9)I think the harm being addressed here is that consumers and businesses need more alternatives for obtaining net access. They shouldn't be in a market where they only have one ISP to choose from. To use myself as an example, the only way I can obtain DSL access in my apartment complex is by getting SBC phone service first. SBC could double the prices of a landline, and I'd have no choice but to swallow it. Then again, I could easily switch to a wireless phone carrier that includes wireless Net service. Or if worse comes to worse, I could obtain satellite. But government regulation would introduce an element of uncertainty and legal wrangling that could deter the offering of new services. For the record, I had a legal dispute with SBC, so I ended up going with a local company for DSL (although I still had to pay for a landline). It's still possible even in the day of semi-monopolies to withhold support from the incumbent ISP.
Robert Nagle, Idiotprogrammer, Houston
I assume we're talking here about ISPs discriminating in favour of their own paid subscription services, as opposed to the backbone operators doing the same. Now the ISP's infrastructure is private, and there seems to be a competition among ISPs. Will they all practice packet discrimination? I doubt it.
You can say that this breaks the "spirit of the internet", but some packet discrimination is essential when routers have to choose which packets to forward first, especially when some traffic should be low-latency, other high-bandwidth, other low-priority. I agree that the best solution is for the end-users to pay for their traffic, not the solution provider, but again -- it's the ISP's infrastructure and they can choose their own business model.
Of course that wouldn't pass. The Federal Communications Commission doesn't exist to provide government regulation of the communications sector in order to protect consumer interests. That would be patently ridiculous because the USA is a free-market economy, which means you can just run your own copper wire to your neighbor's house and start your own network if you're not happy with the one that exists. And if you don't get a permit to dig you can always use a pair of tin cans and a string.
No people, the Federal Communications Commission exists to censor those communications from swearwords and nudity, which is obviously a much more important thing for government to be doing.
Then they wouldn't have any way to know how to filter it would they?
Maybe by port number.....but they wouldn't be able to parse packets for "google" and slow those down.
My TCP/IP knowledge is rusty...but maybe you can't encrypt the destination port.......yet.
As for this:
It's utter bullshit. The ISPs won't lower the bills the end users, they'll just pocket the profits from prioritizing provider content.
Look for a technological workaround to this problem soon.
Question everything
and yet, here is a case where the government has decided NOT to add additional regulation, and just hear the hue and cry! Ultimately, if I or you, or ABC Giant Corporation(tm) pays for the infrastructure and owns the equiptment, don't they have the right to charge as they see fit for access? If I run a dry-cleaner can't I charge more for same-day service? Isn't reasonable that I might charge a frequent customer less, or I might charge more to clean your sequined tube-top? (sissy). The Cato Institue explains a more libertarian perspective on things
"The regulatory regime envisioned by Net neutrality mandates would also open the door to a great deal of potential "gaming" of the regulatory system and allow firms to use the regulatory system to hobble competitors. Worse yet, it would encourage more FCC regulation of the Internet and broadband markets in general."
Is it just me, or are a lot of people asking the government to regulate our businesses?
Kadko- *sigh* 156hrs and it looks like the work of a 12yr old
Switch ISPs to who!? As the bill notes, most US citizens, if they can get broadband at all, are limited to one or two choices... either the local cable monopoly or the local telephone monopoly. We already know AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast were heavily in favor of a tiered Internet, so if your telephone is provided by AT&T and Verizon and your cable by Comcast you are shit out of luck. Welcome your new broadband overlords and prepare to only browse their Premium Content Providers at more than 20KB/sec. If you're lucky enough to have Covad in your CO then you have some more choices for now like Speakeasy, but it's not clear whether they will be able to continue to resell those last mile circuits anymore. Also, say goodbye to Vonage as well. I was debating whether to get a traditional telephone line from AT&T when I move or switch to VOIP with Vonage, but this decision cements my choice back to the traditional POTS line. Vonage will be pushed out of business within 2 years by QoS issues.
I'd much prefer government regulation of the Internet than corporate regulation of the Internet, which is what the access providers are angling for. Verizon is my ISP, and they have been quite explicit in stating that they think Google should pay them every time I access Google. I can't say this any more plainly:
THAT'S WHAT I'M PAYING THEM FOR!
I'd rather go back to dial-up than watch them extort content providers.
[command INSERTWITTYQUIP failed: insufficient wit]
How would that make any difference? At some point, those packets are likely to ride over one of the big telco's backbones. At that point it will be subject to QOS.
Using the smaller ISP does not avoid the issue...
*** Where are we going? And what's with this handbasket?
Just how long before the European ISPs (BT, I'm pointing the finger at you) see this going on, and decide that they'd like a piece of the action.
: Your point being?
Verizon : Well, that is some nice content you've got there, be a shame if something happened to it...
Or on the other hand, how long before US ISPs start making phone calls to non-US content providers? I can see just how that'd play out.
Verizon : Hey BBC, your good friends at Verizon are supplying 30 million customers with your content. BBC
Scary stuff. I've argued against a tiered internet before, because 'the public' will always go where they can get their information the quickest. Note I said quickest, *not* the most factually correct. Big Brother doesn't need to watch you if Big Brother can control your information before it even reaches you.
Word. May god have mercy on us indeed.
I agree 100% There was an article in the latest Maximum PC by Tom Halfhill, and he was against net neutrality with the argument that high bandwidth content providers should pay more.. along the lines that 'google hogs the internet' so they should pay more, and that 'ma and pa' couldn't get fair net usage because google were hogging the BW... what what the F*&K do you think 'ma & pa' were accessing... Google!
The providers dont hog the bandwidth, it's the millions of users that are accessing it. If my content provider starts to charge me more for access to google, or slows traffic to google, in favour of their search engine, then thats gonna get me pissed.
Advocates for this tierd charging argue that its like private roads / toll roads; well it already is! I pay a fee to my ISP for the piece of road to the Internet backbone... ! I like to think of the Internet backbone as a state highway... free, and everyone gets treated the same. I pay for the private road bit, to get from my house to that highway.
This is googles opportunity to roll out googlenet... bring it on. I have faith that they will be our 'saviours' with low cost fixed fee (if not free) net access.
Or may god have mercy on my CPU core.
In my area of the country, we have Charter "High Speed" "Internet" and Verizon as a choice. Yeah, the free market is sure going to be great for my little neck of the woods.
This is terrible because the average person isn't informed enough to make the so-called free market work here. Companies being able to limit your access (even if it is only a slightly longer time to access) to the last vestige of true free speech is not a good thing, and cannot -- in my mind -- lead to good things.
Wow, that sucks. Thanks for the info. Now I have to go write my congressman and tell him I'm not voting for him again if he voted for this, and then I need to find the house voting records.
The greatest of all weaknesses is the fear of appearing weak. ->JB Bossuet, Politics from Holy Writ. 1709
Wait, you're saying that cities that deploy free Wireless ethernet are going to set up tiering on the same system? It wouldn't be free then would it? How in the world would a private business be able to tier it any less? If anything, I'd expect the private businesses in this area to embrace tiering, because with the shared medium of wireless ethernet getting priority on your packets can be a big thing and these small companies are going to need money any way they can get it.
I read the internet for the articles.
You said: "Why isn't it reasonable that if a company is making money by using someone else's resources- they should have to pay for it?"
and
"www.kadko.com"
So I went and ordered $4,000 worth of Polymeric Silazane Finish. Verizon (my ISP) will shortly be sending you a bill for, y'know, making money off of their network. Does that seem reasonable?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Your analogy doesn't apply to the tiered internet model. In fact, your analogy better describes the internet we use today. The "gas tax" is a pretty fair way of explaining how we would pay extra for faster speed (such as a high-performance V12 supercar) or higher bandwidth (trucks)- such as it is we get charged a lot more to have a T3 line than a DSL line.
The analogy would be better suited if you were to tax the destinations which cause the higher traffic; it would be akin to making you pay for your gas tax, and then turning around and forcing your destination to pay for your gas tax as well. And if the destination refused, the government would lower the speed limit to all roads leading toward that destination.
Simply stated, the telcos are just being greedy, and want to extort more money from existing customers. They don't seem to be struggling, nor do they appear to be innovating much as of late, so I don't see why the government needs to interfere and bail them out.
Sigs are for losers
Let's just add a little emphasis here... it's amazing how slippery you can be with vague qualifications slipped into your rhetoric.
...and so forth. Yes, that's very slippery of you indeed, Representative Boehner. You're a capable politician.
In other words, "If you don't like it, go make another internet; this one's ours."
-- http://frobnosticate.com
How can you compete with something that's free?
By providing a service thats worth it, obviously. If the "free" service is crap, sell service that isn't. If the residents are happy playing with crap, then curse the corporations before you as you attempt to use marketing to educate the public instead of turning them into the mindless sheep who are happy with the crap that corporations and governments sell them.
Of course, it also means that if the city is charging Google to allow its residents to access google, and google is refusing to pay, you won't be able to charge google, otherwise your service would be just as crappy, AND you'll be charging for it.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
must... stay... awake...
Right, nobody blocked VoIP at all...
"In fact, any significant discriminatory behavior on the part of broadband service providers ( BSPs ) would generally be financially counterproductive considering that BSPs make more money by carrying more traffic. On the rare occasion that a BSP may actively regulate traffic or impose differential pricing schemes on their network, it would likely be for rather sensible reasons. Network owners may want to discourage the use of certain devices on their networks to avoid system crashes, interference, or signal theft. They may want to price services differently to avoid network congestion and/or conserve bandwidth. They may want to exclusively partner with other firms to help them reach new customers and ultimately create superior services. And perhaps they may very well direct users towards some content before others because it helps them make the necessary money to recoup the huge investment required to create and build out broadband networks. "
Emphasis mine on what is by far the scariest statements I have seen to date on this topic.
Buy Steampunk Clothing Online!
My explanation:
2004 election donations
2005-2006 donations
I guess AT&T has further payments to make for this year's election, to at least match 2004...