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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.'"
Unfortunately, this won't work that easily -- perhaps that's why the ISPs want to charge the service providers and not the end-users: it's easy to lie about the protocol/content of the packet, but it's very hard to lie about the source and destination address.
Indeed, people are going to be pissed off -- which is why I expect some ISPs to stay away from packet discrimination. People who care about it will simply flock there. The market is a better solution than hackers.
I think you left out one big point. Net Neutrality is not about stopping ISP for charging different amount for different levels of bandwidth. It is about stopping the ISP from charging content providers for different kinds of content.
It would be as if the phone company charged you one rate for calls where you discussed your family and a different rate if you discussed computers.
In general it is the difference between telephones (where you pay to be connected to someone else) and cable (where you pay for a kind of content) Net Neutrality would guarantee that the Net stay a communication tool and not just a form of entertainment.
Also it is only in the contexts of common carrier status. If an ISP want to take responsibility for the content that it is delivering then it can not get the government protection of common carrier, and jump into the wild.
The biggest problem I have with this bill is that the lines aren't the telco's to regulate in the first place. Here's the sequence of events in the form of a chat log:
Telcos: Hey congress, we want to build fiber to have a faster internet for the future. Would you please pay for it?
Congress: Sure! That sounds like a swell idea. Here's some money!
Telcos: (Later) Congress we ran out of money! Can we have some more?
Congress: Sure! Just finish the daggone thing already!
Telcos: (More Later) Congress we ran out of money! Can we have some more?
Congress: Sure! Just finish the daggone thing already!
Telcos: (Even More Later) Congress we ran out of money! Can we have some more?
Congress: Sure! Just finish the daggone thing already!
Telcos: Congress! WTF! We want to be able to charge people more for using these lines you paid for with taxpayer dollars!
Congress: FINE JUST GO AWAY
They rejected an amendment to a bill, and passed the unamended bill. The bill makes it possible for ISPs et al to ignore the entire idea of net neutrality, amongst other thing. The amendment was intended to enforce net neutrality.
At least, I think that's right.
Large media conglomerates going for the throats of providers.
Why? Because a large media provider will pay extra so their video and other content will get faster downloads. Like for example Disney paying TimeWarner. Then, however, to Disney's surprise, the speed of their media on the Internet only improves a little - very little.
Why? Because in order for the so-called 'toll lanes' or 'fast lanes' to actually make any real difference, each and every piece of equipment in between the provider and the consumer will have to have a compatible configuration - each and every switch, firewall, and router. Ultimately the end ISP has the most ability to impact how much prioritization will improve performance. So, Disney shells out millions to TW, only to find out they got snake oil. Large contracts like that don't get negotiated without SLAs, all of which have rebate clauses. Which will inevitably get enforced. In court.
Each time a packet crosses to another providers network, the treatment of prioritization setting in the packet will change, if respected at all. Who could possibly believe that AT&T will treat Verizon's IP priority settings exactly the same as their own. So, the likelyhood that telcos will be at eachother's throats is a possibility as well. Run a traceroute and see how many providers the takes to get to google, apple, or Disney. Then think about how well those providers will be at deploying effective prioritization amongst themselves. Not very well will be the answer.
Its kind of like locking a bunch of cannibals together in a room with no food. All the better.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
So when google lights up all that dark fiber and goes into the ISP business, will I be able to tell Verizon to stuff their toll lanes or will Verizon still be able to stick their fingers in the pie due to Interconnects?
Sadly, most people probably wouldn't even notice. I know for a fact that some major companies are already doing some downthrottling, and apparently not enough people are noticing to even call them on it.
I recently had an experience myself where I canceled my unlimited long-distance service with Bellsouth and the same day they downthrottled my 3 Mbps account to 1.5 Mbps speed (probably a measure aimed at those dumping them for VoIP service, to make VoIP look bad). Being a geek, I noticed right away and called them on it. They explained that they must have "made a mistake" (yeah, a "mistake" that just happened to have occurred on the exact same day I cancelled my long-distance plan with them) and returned me to 3 Mbps with curious ease.
Now, if a big company like Bellsouth has the balls to do something so brazen, it must mean that they KNOW that most of their customers will never notice. And that was MUCH more obvious than site-specific down-throttling.
-Eric
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I was listening to (I believe) NPR the other day and an advocate of the telecoms explained the situation to make it sound like the new multimedia applications (YouTube, Google Video, etc) were the bad guys. But, behind his explanation was this:
"We've traditionally used bandwidth as a marketing stat. The average Joe never uses the full extent of their available bandwidth. But now, new applications are popping up and changing this at our expense. We also believe that the providers (google, youtube, etc) are serving these applications at no cost so, instead of charging more for bandwidth, we'd like to do something entirely more profitable."
The straw man here is that the providers *do* pay for their side of the bandwidth. It just boils down to the fact that the telecoms would rather implement greed instead of pragmatism as a solution.
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I've always thought of this the other way around.
The ISPs are making money by providing access to Google et al. Shouldn't they be paying Google to have access to their networks?
No one would sign up for an ISP without access to the major websites. So google is providing value to that ISP and the ISP should pay for it. Not the other way around.
But, and here's the question I've been struggling with over the last few days, what happens when the connection is encrypted? HTTPS or SSH or SSL or TLS? What can you route on? Source and dest IP only, I would think. Maybe that will be the lowest on the pole - "if your connection is encrypted, it gets the lowest service, since we can't tell what is going over that connection." Seems that's a good way to keep Joe Sixpack from using encryption - "hey, my stuff is running slowly. Guess I won't use that encryption stuff." Not that he uses it anyway. Maybe that's the next step in the bill - "in order to enforce this bill, we must require that all communications be unencrypted." Kind of a scary thought, no?
The reason why they want tiers is this:
You (consumers) pay for your bandwidth. The ISP sells bandwidth but it oversells it because they know that not everyone will be online downloading a 1.7 Gig file at the same time. So it's economical for them to offer low low prices on the bandwidth they sell to us (consumers).
Now that people are doing bandwidth hogging things like downloading movies from big commercial websites, and now that the Last mile ISP's want to bring you bandwidth hogging stuff like IPTV, they have a dilemma. They've oversubscribed their pipes. There is a growing need to move more data; they'll either need to pass that price on to us, the consumer, or someone else.
They've chosen someone else, the big commercial bandwidth providers.
There's a reason why this is so: sites like google and yahoo wouldn't make a single solitary dime of profit if people didn't visit their site. The ISP's don't want us (consumers) to go away by raising our prices, so they charge the commercial companies on the other end of the pipe, either by making them pay a dollar figure for priority access to us (the consumer) or by limiting the bandwidth available over the last mile.
We (consumers) are driving this change with our internet usage patterns. The network infrastructure if evolving; let it do it's thing without legislation.
The market will find the path of least resistance one way or another.