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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.'"
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'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]
Why should they have to pay twice?
For example, google pays the telcoms a huge amount of money every month for the bandwidth it uses. The people who use google pay the telcoms for their internet service.
Now you say google should have to pay again for something they already pay for
How many times does it have to be paid?
At that point it will be subject to QOS.
I think it's important to differentiate between protocol based prioritisation and toll based prioritisation.
The ISP I use does traffic prioritisation based on protocol. This is a Good Thing and should be encouraged - it means that RTP traffic, for example, gets higher priority than BitTorrent. This is great since RTP gets pretty unusable more than a few hundred milliseconds of latency jitter, but BitTorrent won't care. (Yes, I'm aware that many people complain that they want to be able to shift enough BitTorrent traffic over their 15ukp DSL connection to destroy the usability of everyone else's connections).
On the other hand, I'm paying for the internet connection so prioritising traffic based on whether the remote party are paying protection money to my ISP is a very Bad Thing - I already paid for the connection, the remote party already paid for theirs, why the hell should my ISP be demanding more cash from them and penalising me if they don't pay?
Of course, protocol based QoS is fraught with problems because you can't trust the end user to set the ToS flags correctly so you have to identify the protocol by fingerprinting instead. It's not an easy problem to solve, but it's very worthwhile.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.