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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.'"
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
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
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.
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?