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Policy Wonk Castigates Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "Tom Giovanetti, president of the Dallas, Texas based public policy think tank Institute for Policy Innovation envisions a chaotic world as a result of Net Neutrality. He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet, leading to failures of IPTV, VOIP, and emergency services which depend on VOIP. Is he right or wrong?." From the article: "... government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models. Net neutrality regulations would severely restrict broadband providers' right to enter into contracts and to try new business models while protecting the business models of Google and Ebay." Compare this with George Ou's commentary on this subject from yesterday.
I think Tom Giovanetti's reasoning is very justifiable. Often times as humans we are quick to criticize, and very hypocrytical. We should ask ourselves how often we complain about the government regulating this or that and trying to solve problems that don't exist, while at the same time cheer on legislation that would have demanded things such as net neutrality. Now, I'm not saying that there aren't valid reasons for either or both, but it's a rhetorical question that I think we should all be asking ourselves.
Anyway, this is one of the reasons why I'd love to see the government set up a site for everybody to go to, where they can see each of their legislator's votes on issues, as well as a quick comment on the reasoning for voting that way (or longer per the legislator's desire), and put this out there in a very accessible location, and make this a manditory part of the legislative process. The site could be organized in a way such that citizens could easily see the reasoning behind other legislator's votes as well, so that counterpoints are clear to citizens.
This would all help us be better informed and make good decisions, as well as help the government keep itself in check ("I voted no on this legislation because it contains 'xxxxx' add-on legislation that I don't agree with"). Debates would always be there and available to citizens in a way that they can do it at their convenience, and don't have to try and dig up all this information themselves. Essentially, this idea would function a similar purpose as that of a judicial decision opinion (clarifying the decision). We don't need big media to give us all our info anymore. We can get it right from the source. The internet is a very powerful thing. LEVERAGE IT!
Anyway, I know that rant was slightly off topic, but I felt it to be relevant since originally my opinion was leaning towards enacting net neutrality legislation, but I still had my doubts, and this reasoning has made me think that maybe it's just better to wait and see what happens before we get too hasty to legislate, though I still do think that publically funded infrastructure should still be publically owned and unhindered.
A community-oriented lyrics site
I'm sick of the British-Centric slant slashdot insists upon.
Now good day!
Corporate shill says private companies should be allowed to control the internet. Film at 11.
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
First off.. they have been saying one thing or another would "overload the internet" for ages and it has yet to happen.
second. i want to know what his stance on music downloading is given this quote:
"government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models."
if he's against "online piracy" than he is a hyppocrite.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Maybe they should think about taking "Life and Death" stuff off the internet, a back-hoe could take out a large part of the net for a day or two. If emergency reponse people are relying on vonage or skype for critical communications, that is a serrious problem.
Over a day and a half of fury about how the internet is being sold by the u.s. house to the big bucks, my head now aches.
I f.ckin do not believe how you, u.s. people can ALLOW for such debate to even take place, such s.hit rule the agenda, and do not blow your congressmen's senator's ears off about the matter.
The biggest revolution, since the french revolution, the internet, is being handed over to the minority elite.
This is our 'thing'. This is the 'thing' of our times. This is one of the most important thing in our times.
My head really aches, and im weary.
Read radical news here
If an emergency service depends on VoIP, someone needs to be sacked NOW! Dont wait for the service to fail ... failure is certain.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
The internet today is mostly neutral, and people accesing Victoria's Secret haven't brought it down.
The telephone system is neutral, but some telephone numbers are clearly more popular than others. Yet this hasn't brought down the phone system.
The reality is that the engineering of the network (including capacity planning and expansion) is done precisely on the basis of traffic flows. There is also congestion control. The internet is not like the public highway system, where capacity problems take years and hundreds of millions of dollars to solve.
Even if a zillion people did all try to get to the Victoria's Secret web site all at once, that would probably not affect my ability to access my email or read CNN's web site.
VOIP uses UDP. When you get network congestion, you simply get packets dropped and your -oice get- littl- ch-ppy. TCP stacks will send fewer packets per second when packets get dropped.
Ignoramuses keep bringing this issue up as if it's going to KILL THE INTERNET, so we MUST CHANGE INTERNET POLICY. They tried this back in the early 90's when IBM was running the T-1 Internet backbone through some subsidiary. What didn't work back then still won't work today. For an arbitrary packet on the Internet, you cannot tell in which direction the value is flowing; thus you cannot figure out who to charge.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This ignores the fact that people and companies adapt. I'm sure the 911 service won't just hope things don't fail; for example, I cluster the servers that handle 911 dialing on our campus because I don't "hope they won't fail." It's like in the 70s when people thought we'd be out of gas by 1996. They forgot to consider that people make adjustments as the world around them changes. We have more gas now than ever. Same with bandwidth.
I wouldn't want the government to control the internet. I would rather see the consumer make a choice and go with whichever Broadband provider suits their own personal beliefs and politics.
I would rather see a more unreliable internet than see the US gov't decide what is considered "Neutral" or not. This guy seems to be more libertarian than most of the senate. I like him.
The State should not get involved.
The unintended consequences of any act upon a complex system are far greater than the intended consequence - if the intended consequence even occurs at all.
Morevoer, State intervention upon one issue opens the doors to State intervention on many issues.
Do we really think, overall, that the sum of State intervention will be positive or negative?
Given past performance, suspectibility to lobbying, short-sighted political behaviour, "it's for the children", simple incompetence and failure to understand the issues, I'd be far happier with zero State intevention.
Suchs laws would severely impact the contracts broadband companies can enter into.
That's the entire point.
They've been handed full or near monopolies on data communications, and with monopoly comes restriction.
Because they already have, already are, and will continue to screw over the consumer.
Heck, even companies that do not have monopolies have huge restrictions on screwing over their customers when it comes to conflicts of interest. For example; some investment banker isn't allowed to tell you how great company X is, if a different unit of his bank happens to be seriving company X's IPO. That's really just plain common sense.
Net non-neutrality is very simple, basic, econ 101 vertical monopoly. Nothing at all suspect about wanting to curb it. Yes, it happens to benefit other companies. In fact, making sur the vertical playing ground is even benefits the entire economy, and not just broadband companies rights to enter into contracts.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
Basically, the premise of the tiered system is that companies like your tube, google, etc don't pay for all the bandwidth they consume. NPR's Market Place had a horrible story on last night claiming that with out extra cash from these large web sites, they can't expand bandwidth.
It's the dumbest argument ever. 1) Companies that large connect directly to top tier providers. These companies are paying hundreds of thousandsands of dollars to the top 10 internet back bone providers for fat pipes into the internet. 2) We have tons of dark fiber still running across the US. Companies liek Qwest invested millions upon millions of dollars in infrastructure for customers who still don't exist.
We don't have a bandwidth problem. We have a problem with a congress that doesn't understand infrastructure.
BTW: Here's the list of house member who voted NO the ammendment:
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2006/roll239.xml
This "think tank" was founded by Republican Dick Armey in 1987.
As usual, you just need to follow the money in these matters and this is very revealing. The last year that records were kept regarding Dick Armey's contributions you'll see that his top contributor was Allegiance Telecom. Other notables in the "Dick Armey" include National Cable & Telecommunications Assn, Verizon, BellSouth and SBC. It's all here at open secrets.
Politicians remain lapdogs to their masters even after leaving the Hill
i too would trash net neutrality ....
....
NOT !
Unfortunately im not a person that puts money ahead of principles, but apparently there are many that do.
Read radical news here
...that it shouldn't be the services that have the most interesting content (and thus have the most people access it) that get the biggest pipes, but the ones that crawl the deepest into the rectum of the telcos?
That what you want to say, Mr. Giovanetti?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Someone downloading gigs of porn at a time from a P2P server hasn't overloaded the internet, but a 15 second streaming video from Youtube will? If porn hasn't overloaded the internet, and caused it to collapse in on itself, nothing will.*
A server may fry, and a kitten may get hit by a car, but that's about it.
*(except price gouging...)
Those who believe the Internet is private,
find their privates are on the Internet.
We need to ask ourselves if this is a tragedy of the commons or a case where uniform access decreases costs or provides more public-goods. I don't know which it really is.
The tragedy of the commons is what happens when a resource is provided that lacks a proper mariginal cost for increased use. The classic example is private property versus unrstricted access to public grazing land. By charging a small price for admission per sheep to the land or by making it private, the incentive to overgraze it is removed and the total amount of meat sustainbly raise actually is higher. In this case if it's case where there is simply not enough baqndwith for everyone to do voip, and I don't pay any extra to do VOIP, then it's going to be over grazed and everyone gets a crappy connection. On the otherhand if the connection cost already is sufficient to expand the network to handle all the users that want voip or if we can prevent this from becomeing a power law network with critical links then it may be that the more users the better some sort of p2p works.
Thus another way of looking is this is that the thing we need to fear is too few corporation controlliing the internet and resulting in bottlenecks on backbones. In the long run to get high bandwidth we will need p2p that does not traverse a central backbone.
Assuming that the p2p scaling effect will not be sufficient and the tragedy of the commons wil happen then the way out is to have a pricing schedule. We can put that schedule on the users or on the content providers. the latter is what the backbone owners want since it means no net neutrality and control. The former would be better but I can imagine the cheap ass slashdotters used to paying a tiny sum for all-they-can eat internet won't like it.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Oh yeah, I'm sure that the telecoms will ensure VOIP quality. NOT!
mmmm chocolate covered internet...
What do you mean that's not what it said!?
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
He gives away his real agenda with this distinction, in that the important question, for him at least, is not whether the "traffic" was requested with purposful intent, but whether or not the "traffic" was determined to have a valid intent. That is NOT the job of the telcos/cable cos.
That's an interesting twist. He uses the dictionary of OSS and piracy movements: stop using laws to protect someone's business model, Internet should be free to try new methods of doing business and so on.
Is this an attempt to appeal to the techies among us?
It's a pretty weak attempt, given that the entire "tiered" model is about preserving the big ISP-s business model (they are afraid people will use what they pay for, once), and giving them the freedom to wreck Internet and blackmail any online business for extra income (sites to pay all ISP-s for priority traffic).
The FUD about YouTube and company breaking the Internet is hilarious. We don't have one single instance of a single site breaking the "Internet". Doesn't he know the Internet is not a single entity, it's a huge assload of P2P connections, and it's quite some work to break it all at once?
Which leaves the problems at the "last mile". But that's why you have staff 24/7/52 to fix those "last mile" problems.
Yes, if we were in a situation where individual customers could vote with their feet on net neutrality this anslysis would have a point. There would be less government regulation and the market could sort out whether people value net neutrality.
However, there is little to no effective competition in the internet access market. Sure there is a bit of competition between the cable and phone companies and electric companies always claim to be just about to deploy broadband over powerlines but these providers control the lines and can make life very difficult for any other DSL providers. Besides even if your broadband provider believes in net neutrality it isn't clear you don't still suffer from privleges granted by an upstream carrier. In short their is no easy way for competition to exercisce its judgement that net neutrality is worth paying for (and with enough money surely people could expand their pipes).
I mean just imagine if the local phone company announced it was going to charge you double if you called any buisness that didn't join its prefered buisness program (i.e. paid it money). This would be extortion and phone regulations rightly prohibit it because otherwise phone companies could use their monopoly position to exact almost arbitrarily high profits.
If you liked this thought maybe you would find my blog nice too:
Let me see if I'm understanding this.
If there is enough bandwidth then everyone's traffic will get through regardless of Net Neutrality. If there is congestion though, without Net Neutrality only traffic from sites that paid the extortion fee will get through.
Does this not lead to a situation where it is ideal for an ISP to maintain a certain level of congestion at all times in order to ensure that there exists a reason to pay the extortion fee?
One the other hand with Net Neutrality in place it's in the ISP's best interest to maintain an adequate level of bandwidth to make sure everyone's traffic gets through.
Why the hell would any mission critical or emergency service be using the Internet as a medium for transport? These services should be on their own redundant private networks.
People have been predicting the death of the Internet for years. First 56k modems were going to do it, then the glut of DSL and cable subscribers. Now it's going to be all the fibre to premises customers and Google. After that it will probably be WiMAX because now we're going to have kilometers of wireless coverage that anyone can jump on. These people seem to forget that bandwidth is a two-way street. You might have 5Mbps down, and all your neighbors, but the hosted server most likely has a bandwidth lock at 1Gbps or so... that's your limiting factor, not how much bandwidth you can pull down.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I view this much like road access. I pay for the road via my taxes and I can then get in my car and drive where I please. In certain exceptional cases I'll pay a bit more to go somewhere (toll road), but for the most part I'm free to drive as I wish. If the access companies want to charge ME for something that actually costs them money, then fine. Instead they're saying something like, "We'll charge Wal-Mart for the privilege of allowing tax payers the ability to get to Wal-Mart's store." The supplier doesn't cost the access company money directly, the person going to the supplier does. Charge the source of the cost. Regardless, this essentially makes some internet sites more expensive (because they'll have to charge customers/members more, or lower the service quaility) than others that has loose or no correlation to costs incurred by the provider-of-access to the given site.
rs.internic.net
Corporate shill
Am I the only one who thinks that VOIP is still too new and immature for emergency services to depend on it? It isn't even profitable yet; just look at the whole Vonage IPO farce. We can't even rely on our cell phones half the time - we certainly shouldn't be relying on the Internet for such critical services as 911. The 100+ year old telephone system is still the most reliable network on the planet.
Check this segment FTFA:
Suddenly, the TV image goes pixilated, and then dark. The phone call drops. You hear yelling from your teenagers' rooms. But that's not all.
Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios. In an ambulance, the EMTs are trying to call in vital signs for a patient they are transporting to the hospital, but they can't get through.
Is it an alien invasion? A convergence of planets or some other astral phenomenon? No, it's a convergence of a different sort. Turns out that tonight is also the night of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show, as well as the night Coldplay releases its latest song online. And YouTube has just released embarrassing video of a major Hollywood star having a ``wardrobe malfunction.''
My question is: how does prioritizing help. If a neutral net can't handle all of this at once, how could one claim a tiered Internet CAN.
And if it's not at all about being able to handle all at once (but about blackmailing service providers), but prioritizing one over the other, which of these should fail?
The quick answer is that VOIP and police stations should have high priority and the rest can go to hell. But is this (to quote the article again) "the converged, always-on, interconnected world we've all been dreaming of".
Would you let some corporate or government entity to anonymously decide which stuff is important and which is less important?
Is the stuff from those who pay more, more important?
Is Coca Cola's site more important than Pepsi's site? Is Yahoo more important than Google?
Plenty of questions, for which the answers will change with every shift of power, as people "on top" work on doing what's "best for us", since we're apparently told we don't know it ourselves.
want to use the strong arm of government to lock in the certainty of their existing business models
This guy should write to the RIAA/MPAA...
In fact they simply encourage it. The reality of a tier system is that those with resources and can afford it will use it and pay more, and those without will suffer. The result is a system that will bifurcate again and again into a class based net system that will leave the poor behind and the rich to be free and clear of the burdeons of the net as it is now. What this all means is the Net Tier System (NTS) will encourage discrimination. I do hope that this guy is wrong in his assessment, I find it flawed.
A lot of policy wonks are for and against it. That's what policy wonks do, they research issues and take sides.
You know what would be news? Is if a libertarian think tank like Cato came out in favor of network neutrality. Why? Because that would be a major policy group going against what is normally expected of them.
at least we have a slight chance to influence a corporation, government, ours, theirs, whomevers, have proven time and time again that they are beyond our influence.
the primary difference between corporations and governments is that there will always be at least one other corporation wanting to sell us something different while government will simply strike the same old tune over and over and over.
yeah I know some corporations wield considerable power but even they are beholden to governments. do you really want all the cards held by government?
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
Trusting the big telcos and cable companies to act in the best interests of their customers is like hiring a python as a babysitter. They're going to act in the best interest of the bottom line. If the market is savvy enough to make acting in the interest of customers a competitive factor, then they'll do it. If it's not, then they'll screw their customers to make more money and their customers will just bitch and moan, but won't leave.
A very real fear is that a telco says "this pipe is reserved for general internet traffic" and never increases the size of that pipe. As time goes on, they continue to expand capacity, but all new capacity is reserved for the pay-for-play lanes. The original pipe stays its original size for years, getting more and more congested until any company that wants to reach this telco's customers with any kind of speed or surety needs to pay the telco for access to the pay-for-play lanes. That's an unregulated net where filtering and prioritizing has gone awry.
On an overregulated network, where absolute neutrality is enforced, you have the doomsday scenario where World Cup streaming takes down the Internet.
A middleground I think works is that you enforce a ratio of neutral pipe width to free prioritized pipe width (for ensuring that certain services can maintain a certain minimum level of quality) to pay-for-play prioritized pipe width (where a QOS is guaranteed to anyone willing to pay the premium). As capacity grows, all of those pipes grow at a proportional rate. So if BellSouth/AT&T lays new fiber that triples bandwidth across their backbone, the neutral pipe width triples, the free prioritized pipe width triples, and the pay-for-play pipe width triples.
It's figuring out what's a fair ratio and a workable way of monitoring it that's the trick.
Start a happiness pandemic
It can not be that hard to understand that network neutrality isn't about getting something without paying for it. If traffic is going to increase, then networks will have to be improved and somebody is going to pay for that. Network neutrality just means that you can't put the cost on the account of someone who is not connected directly to your network. You'll have to charge your clients or the providers who are peering with you. This makes the cost structure transparent and it allows everyone to see if they get a good deal on bandwidth. This level of transparency is what network providers fear, because they know that bandwidth isn't all that expensive. It's a commodity, so competition can always come in and customers understand that they can get the same product from them. Not without network neutrality though. If YouTube doesn't pay the other provider, you're stuck with your provider whom they do pay. Markets work best when products are comparable. That's a prerequisite to competition.
I have been following this whole discussion, and I want to clear something up for everyone. Network engineers, this one is for you...
General uninformed public, meet Quality of Service (QOS). Simply stated, the concept roughly is:
To allow for differentiated levels of service (ex. best effort, guaranteed delivery, etc.) based upon the content of packets and type of transmissionTelcos, ISPs, etc. should not.. and I repeat.. NOT!!! be able to discriminate against different users of their bandwidth, lines, etc. However, they SHOULD be able to discriminate against different kinds of packets, because different kinds of packets (packets carrying video, packets carrying VOIP data) can vary greatly in size and can greatly impact performance.
The Internet as you know it today is considered to be "best effort" delivery. That means that there is no guarantee that a packet will make it from point A to point B. It's insane not to allow ISPs and telcos not to add a premium that guarantees that. HOWEVER, they also need to have laws passed that force them to also maintain their best effort level of service for the base level of Internet services. It's like telling FedEx that they can't charge you more for air shipping than ground shipping!
If we don't agree with the arguments for QoS, then let's just not implement it! Sheesh!
SixD
The author is not an independent researcher. He is a paid shill for an-industry funded think tank founded by one of the more aggressively pro-corporate members of the House GOP leadership.
Let's not forget that "net neutrality" is the STATUS QUO. The telcoms want to change the system to take net neutrality AWAY. Recognize this, and the author's "straw man" argument collapses. Shame on the Mercury News for printing this corporate PR garbage on its op-ed pages.
Why is it called COMMON sense when so few people have it?
Damn. I wish I had known that before I spent the time to become RACES certified.
I guess I should inform the local police/fire/EMA that they should dump the hundreds of thousands of dollars of radio equipment they have, because obviously such archaic equipment is useless to us in an emergency. They should obviously be using skype or vonage.
all those poor ISP's shouldn't have sold me and everyone else Broadband internet connections with marketing that suggested we would be able to stream high quality music and videos and get d/l music files...etc
....now when it starts getting here... the ISP's suddenly realize they have not built the infastructure to support it?
if they didn't have the infastructure to support it.
the ISP's just want google and yourtube to pay for their poor business model / marketing.
for years and fucking years this (much video/audio content) is what everyone said the interent was moving towards
actually I am happy to see you, however that is in fact a banana in my pocket.
Is there anyway that individuals could begin to make a large internet based off of wireless routers? Has somebody been looking at doing this? I really think taking 'business' out of the internet entirely is the way to go. Maybe slow at first, but I would rather be able to have my own server on my own router. DNS would be hard but not impossible... I can see that the old internet is no longer going to work for most of us.
The acronym "DMCA" springs to mind. Ah well.
Unfortunately, due to consolidation, mergers, rabid anti-spam measures, and hard-line corporate push towards 'consumerism' on virtually any kind of internet connection- that's just not true anymore.
A few years ago, it used to be that Apple would bring Akamai to its knees every time they had a big announcement, and anyone that used Akamai (which was a large number of popular sites) would suffer; a million mac users would be trying to load up the webcast or hitting "refresh" a thousand times on store.apple.com or www.apple.com.
Google is another example. Google is so ingrained in people's brains that I watch fellow -professional- sysadmins ping "www.google.com" as a test of whether a machine has DNS and outgoing connectivity. People hardly bookmark things anymore; they just "google it" and sift through the first 6 hits or so to find what they were looking for.
Here's my point: pick any one of the big giants in the internet world today. Now picture they're gone- wiped off the map by a disgruntled employee, a natural disaster, or more likely these days- a corporate scandal (imagine what would happen if Google was the next Enron. If you think that's impossible, look at the Google CFO's background.) Now think about how much that would hurt the web. We've made progress in some areas of the Internet (DNS- you have lots of choices for registrars, though GoDaddy has become the largest by far, and now represents a similar risk), but lost massively in others.
I have ONE choice in internet service provides in my town. I live 20 miles from Boston, but because of "Gentlemen's agreements" that are pervasive in the telco industry, I can't get DSL because Comcast is in our town. 10 years ago I could pick from a dozen dialup ISPs, national, regional, and local- same for ISDN. Now I have ONE choice, and I live in one of the more wealthy and technologically advanced states in the union, and I'm not permitted by my ToS to run a webserver, email server, "discussion board", or "Internet relay chat server". I believe I'm not even allowed to run a VPN server. My ToS clearly states that I am a "consumer" of information services. That's progress?
Please help metamoderate.
There is just so much confusion over what this issue means. How can anyone say that Net Neutrality would cause anything, when it is what we already have today? This isn't about adding regulation - it is about preserving the system we already have this is working great.
When explaining net neutrality to lay people, make sure you mention that it is merely legislating how things already are today. It makes it much easier for people to understand and they can see through FUD like this article very easily.
"Policy Wonk Castrates Net Neutrality." Probably would have been just as accurate, actually.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:GOBPKZ4kT-4J:ww w.faulkner.com/freereport/contentdeliverynets.htm+ akamai+caching+server&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=7
Theres alot of meaningless to this phrase
To me net neutrality means not discriminating on the basis of origin. Example Verizon/ATT/Bellsouth/Comcast cant arbitrarily decide to play with packets from google to make yahoo the only search engine that works.
Then theres neutrallity based on type of service but not origin. An example would be VOIP from vonnage would work just as well as VOIP from comcast on a comcast cable modem. Similar arguments are there for video.
MOST ISP's have not been neutral in terms of type of service for quite awhile. Most retail ISP's will block mail ports, some block peer to peer ports, others customize your total bandwidth usage. Its hard to make the argument that its not a good thing to have some regulation on the type of service a connection is used for. Lets face it blocking the mail ports helps keep bot nets in check.
- Armstrong Foundation
- Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
- Gordon and Mary Cain Foundation
- Carthage Foundation
- Jaquelin Hume Foundation
- Earhart Foundation
- JM Foundation
- F.M. Kirby Foundation
- Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation
- Sarah Scaife Foundation
- John M. Olin Foundation
- Roe Foundation
Unfortunately for their donor "privacy", 503(c) organizations have to file lists of their donors every year. Assume that the telcos will show up in the next filing statement... and that the "policy wonk" is a corporate shill who'd be bloviating in favor of Net Neutrality if Google had paid IPI first. Or NAMBLA if that pedophile organization had paid IPI off to generate "neutral" opinions.Here's another IPI opinion:
Tech Public Policy stuff
I wish we could get the USPS to charge his Institute for Policy Innovation a surcharge for delivering their mail to people. Get the telcos to charge the Institute for Policy Innovation for letting its outgoing calls into their networks.
Opposition to net neutrality is about men in suits who "don't get this whole intarweb thing" but want to milk it for every dime they can.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Telecoms should beware. Google, Microsoft and Ebay are king and the law protects the Telecom and Cable companies -- not the content provider.
Telecoms want to charge more for higher bandwidth services. Fine...lets assume they do so and charge Google, Microsoft and Ebay more.
Ebay screams bloody murder. Cuts off all access to IP address from said Telecom. Their users (and anyone going through their pipes) can't reach Ebay. An economic hit for Ebay as they lose customers (who struggle to find new internet providers) and the Telecoms drop their ISP connections to customers and provide only Trunk services.
The Telecoms chortle with glee. They're making more and not having to deal with customers anymore (less cost).
Then Google demands access at 1/3 cost. Telecoms are agast! Cut costs for Google?
Microsoft announces Micro-Fiber...a new backbone connecting several major ISPs (AOL, MSN and Earthlink) -- which incidently match the current Telecoms backbone. (Microsoft has how much cash on hand?)
Google recontacts the Telecoms. 1/6 profit is better than no profit (which is what they face if Google goes with Micro-Fiber...and is thinking of it). Telecoms pray for a turf war between Microsoft and Google....but Ebay and Google both decide that Micro-Fiber is far cheaper (and Google is considering their own Goo-Fiber if costs increase too much)
3 years later, Telecoms backbone is known for a high speed connection to a collection of poorly run p0rn sites and hacker-wares. The Government is called in to clean up these sites and a judge determines that if Telecoms can be fined if they don't clean up their act.
Things go downhill from there for the Telecoms.
(Think I could work for a think-tank?)
All this telco "Net Neutrality" mumbo jumbo just means that AT&T can charge put Google in a bidding war with Yahoo to speed searches and content over AT&T's Internet hops. In addition to the money Google already pays to the carriers for carrying its vast Internet traffic at the connection point.
Anyone who paints it any more complicated than that is spinning. For a fee from someone, whether directly from the telcos or some ideology thinktank gobetween.
--
make install -not war
...but they say he is a good man, so maybe his advisors are just confused...
Besides, gifs in pages already choked da internet to death, as eveyone predicted back then. :P Idiot retards.
This guy is nothing more than a Joe Sixpack dressed up in a suit. He knows nothing more about internet than my grandma does. People have been screaming, running around with their heads cut off yelling "The internet's going to explode any day now!". Well, if it does, good. Serves those bastard ISPs right for not giving us what we paid for and what they explicitly promised. If you want to stop this crap, DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT! Send an email by way of this page and even better, send a handwritten letter (on real paper) to your senator. We must protect our freedoms, the freedoms that the government (or more correctly, big corperations) are leaching away a little bit at a time.
Who's his wife? Vagina CoastGuard
Youtube has a finite amount of bandwidth, they are not given free reign to the entire backbone, they are allow to send out as much as they pay for - period. The worst that will happen is youtube will suffer a slashdot effect and be swamped. If the case is that the backbone needs to be upgraded then upgrade it. Maybe if the damn telcos stopped offering ghastly amounts of bandwidth to subscribers for near nothing it wouldn't be a problem.
Be careful what you offer, you just might sell it. And that's exactly what's happened, youtube could have a gigabit connection to the internet and it wouldn't matter a damn bit if the telcos weren't selling 6Mbit DSL for $60/mo, yet turning around and selling 1.5MBit T1's at $600/mo. Which is it? Is the bandwidth really worth something or not? Make up your mind telcos.
Content providers pay dearly for high bandwidth connections, yet the same telco will sell the ability to download for a fraction of that to DSL subscribers, then they whine because they don't have enough bandiwdth to cover it all and expect the content providers to pay to the price again because it's the telco that sold the DSL too cheap.
I'll give you another reason not to trust the invisible hand to write QoS rulesets: because the rulesets are too opaque. ISP's will be constantly playing with complicated QoS rulesets, naturally *without* notifying customers. When I'm shopping around for an ISP, do you honestly think they'll volunteer the fact that they cripple Vonage to promote their own service? No way. The sheer complexity and unavailability of information from ISPs will make it difficult or impossible for consumers to really know what they're getting, and thus for corrective market forces to work.
I'm sick of the British-Centric slant slashdot insists upon.
/. 2!
Y? U cn spk maricun @
Nuke @ U!
If the power companies could do the same thing, they'd bill SubZero for making power-sucking refrigerators stylish, and send a bill to Mitsubishi for those big DLP HDTVs that use a lot more power than a 13" black and white.
If the oil companies could do it, there'd be a Prius surcharge to Toyota, for creating a product that interferes with their business. (obviously the Prius costs them revenue that they deserve!)
The problem with this issue is that our Representatives stopped representing the people a long time ago. The people who want a tiered Internet have lots of money to buy off our Representatives, and slick lines to make it sound like they're doing something they believe in. The truth is that they probably don't know, don't understand, and don't care about anything so long as the bribes keep flowing.
The net isnt some satellite tv or cable service where there is just one interest involved. This is a public fucking network and you need to share you bandwidth with other people or find some other technical means to get your traffic delivered with out interruption. Dont ask the rest of us to to suffer because you want to have priority over others...
The interests of the public should always trump business interests, Because they have the resources to work around these types of problems.
Why oh why on a technical web site like slashdot people keep missing peering agreements? Only big company's like Yahoo and Google have the content lots and lots of people want. Because of this, big ISP's want to directly peer with large content companies. This saves both companies money by keeping traffic off their transit links. It also gives the content provider a short cut to the consumer. Less hops and lower latency. Is this fair to the little guy?
Let's answer his "stupid" comment. Let's explore what his version of 2009 will look like. Let's say I'm at home watching the latest Naruto on my new IPTV -- not even high-def. My brother's playing some open source Quake 3 mod online with some friends. My mother's on the VOIP phone.
Suddenly, well, the same scenario. The TV grows pixellated, then dark. The phone call drops. I hear my brother throwing a tantrum about his lost game.
Across town, the police on the beat have to shout over static to reach police headquarters, because they're still using old-fashioned radios.
What's going on? No alien invasion, except maybe a couple of tools in Congress. No, this is really two things:
- The police can't afford any newfangled Internet radios, because their IT budget was shot just paying the extortionate Internet fees.
- There's a big game on, and 10 of my neighbors have turned on their new HD IPTVs to watch.
The second one is more interesting. Since the HD show is "high priority", and since the ISP (typically) oversold their bandwidth, those 10 neighbors are soaking up 90% of the bandwidth. The other 90 of us who just want to browse the web, make phone calls, or watch some low-res, unpopular video, are stuck with only 10% of the available bandwidth.
The guy at ZDNet actually had the real solution, though he didn't know it: Have users set QOS on their own routers. Have ISPs actually be required to provide the bandwidth that they advertise, so they are forced to stop overselling, so that your own router is the only place you'd have to set QOS to have your VOIP be perfectly high-priority. If it's more expensive for the consumer, so be it.
But, I think a lack of net neutrality will end up costing consumers way more in the long run. ISPs will use the "but the intarweb is clogged and we have to build more pipes!" argument to charge more to consumers, but continue to oversell whatever pipes they have. They'll then charge content providers a premium, and the content providers will pass the expense on to the consumer. The only fast, free services will be things like Google, who can afford to pay the price, and can't afford to lose customers by trying to charge them.
Oh, by the way, these two guys have different visions of the future. George Ou wants net neutrality to continue in spirit, and he's right -- neither VOIP nor gaming is enough to cause problems -- but he apparently missed the memo on HD IPTV. Tom Giovanetti is smart enough to see HDTV over the Internet, and truly wants a tiered Internet, with QOS making the YouTube videos and Victoria's Secret websites go slower (or become unusable) so people won't miss the Big Game.
The final flaw with George Ou's argument is the assumption that anyone actually has a choice what ISP they use. Even in an area with more than one ISP, you'll have to get new hardware and spend some time switching over. That, and it's assuming that consumers are smart enough to blame their ISP and not the website. Without net neutrality, it wouldn't be hard to imagine Joe Sixpack saying "MySpace and YouTube are slow. They suck compared to Google Video and newyorktimes.com."
I don't think I've ever been quite this active before, but I think I'll go start researching where my congresspeople stand on this issue. Voting with our dollars won't work, not this time. It's time to vote with our votes.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
The real irony is that content companies have nothing to worry about. Telecom and cable companies will never have the leverage that content companies fear, because content is king, not pipes. It is content that customers care about, not wires. Network operators won't ever be able to use content as leverage to block or degrade the content their customers want because their customers would reject it, their competitors would pounce on it and the market won't tolerate it.
I find it constantly surprising that articles like this continue to argue that the telcos would never use paid pipes to their advantage or say that this is a non-existent problem. They seem to forget the fact that the net neutrality debate really heated up because BellSouth is already trying to make it happen. So how do they continue to get away with the argument that this is a 'non-existent problem'?
In its 2004 annual IRS return IPI lists 26 reports in English and gave testimony before Congressional committees twice. Of the reports ten related to policy affecting the drug industry (such as prescription drug policy and reimportation), eight were supporting social security privatization, four were on communications policy (such as opposing municipal broadband networks), one was on opensource software, another on internet taxation and two on general topics. Its congressional testimony was backing the deregulation of wireline communications in Texas and support for social security privatization.
The Institute for Policy Innovation is a think tank based in Lewisville, Texas and founded in 1987 by Congressman Dick Armey to "research, develop and promote innovative and non-partisan solutions to today's public policy problems."
He is also chairman of Citizens for a Sound Economy. CSE is often described as a "consumer group," but according to internal documents leaked to the Washington Post, 85 percent of its 1998 funding came from major corporations. "The 'citizens' in question [are] companies like Amoco, Bell Atlantic, Citibank, General Electric and General Motors".
Armey is also co-chairman of Alliance for Retirement Prosperity. According to the March 13, 2004, edition of the Los Angeles Times, the Alliance for Retirement Prosperity is a new group to be led by Jack Kemp and Dick Armey. The Times reports that this has irked the AARP, "an advocacy group for people age 50 and older that opposes diverting Social Security taxes into private accounts" due to the fact that the new organization carries a similar name and is also "advocating the changes."
from the article:
Across town, police on the beat suddenly can't reach headquarters on their radios. In an ambulance, the EMTs are trying to call in vital signs for a patient they are transporting to the hospital, but they can't get through.
Go form your own Internet. Don't try to take away the Internet in order to ensure that emergency services and voip and all-in-one convergence devices run ok on it. Likely people will continue to flock to voip and new technologies we haven't even thought of, because the quality is good enough. But if you have to destroy the Internet as we know it (by creating a two-tiered Internet, thus limiting innovation) in order to run life or death services, go run those services on some other network.
I am so tired of this.....over and over again the :
"Google is flooding some providers network! YouTube is flooding some providers network! The travesty of these bussiness's practically stealing from these providers!"
BS! BS! BS!
Google/youTube/et. al. are not flooding the providers. The USERS on the providers network, who have PAID for a given connection OFFERED BY THE PROVIDER are flooding the PROVIDERS network using the connection the PROVIDER MARKETED/SOLD/CHARGES the USER for to get to these services and more! Sorry you POS providers, if you can't hold up your users with the connections YOU HAVE SOLD THEM then thats YOUR FAULT! Not google's, not youTubes's, not even your users....its YOURS as the provider. You cant afford it, raise your prices/change your plans, or suck it up and pay for more bandwidth.
I can't believe all of the talking mouths who can't get their head around this.
Why isn't this common sense!
And I can't believe this guy has the nerver to say "Net Neutrality" has anything to do with "preserving a business model". fsck'ing hell...it does the exact opposite!
dimes
If you are sending information on which people's lives depend over a wire that you do not control both ends and the middle of, you're going to lose some people. EOF.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet, leading to failures of IPTV, VOIP, and emergency services which depend on VOIP. Is he right or wrong?
Tom Giovanetti is a complete fucking moron if doesn't grok that the public Internet exists primarily for entertainment purposes, information sharing and some e-commerce. It is not a cheap WAN link for mission-critical business or public safety applications for folks who are too damned cheapskate to pay for proper WAN links.
All you people who were asking why the rest of us didn't want America to have control of the internet - DO YOU GET IT NOW??!
FSM, grant me the serenity to preview that which I cannot change...
Help me out: why should we distrust George Reyes? I haven't seen anything too exciting yet (except perhaps a lackluster education).
C'mon, are you telling me this *isn't* a face we can trust?
barack to the future?
Telcos want to compete with cablecos and everyone else in the world in delivering "IPTV". They want to leverage their oligopoly advantage in controlling the backbones to compete with what would otherwise be a level playing field.
Porn always forecasts the trend in comms/entertainment tech markets. Amateur porn and tiny little producers/distributors are the majority of porn consumed. TV of all genres will go the same way, now that the Internet has hit critical mass of high bandwidth consumers. Telcos can't compete with such a diverse array of content competitors on a level playing field, so of course they're working to fragment and unlevel the field.
Giovanetti of course knows this. His analysis doesn't come from any ignorance but the willful kind. The principles are obvious, the break with the decades-old, unprecedentedly successful "neutral Internet" too blatant to miss. He's shilling for corporations who benefit for his thinktank's "less regulation" ideology. As usual, deregulation promotion masks corporate anarchy in the name of "freedom". Freedom for corporations to exploit us without government protection.
--
make install -not war
Notice what wonderful measure the "Institute for Policy Innovation" has supported up to now: making "private accounts" part of social security. Obviously, this kind of crap is endemic to the mindset. The old Social Security program, and Net Neutrality too, are based on the idea of universal service. This is not good for the neocon baboons. They want a winner-take-all philosophy in all things, and they're willing to lie about what they doing in order to bamboozle people into going along with it.
Instead of a "chaos" of YouTube and all these other services clogging the net, you should understand that Net Neutrality is what we have now. It is the Internet, which is chaotic, true, but which produces universal access. What will happen if and when this is overturned is nothing less but the destruction of the Internet, in favor of the feudal control of the telecom monopolies. Instead of spending all that money on buying out competitors and buying congress critters, SBC now AT&T, spend those tens of billions on fiber to the home, or wireless access to a broadband signal. Like the 45 mbps we were supposed to have by now if we just deregulated you.
I see no problem in tagging VOIP data used by emergency services and giving it priority over google, but that should be the end of it. Everything else will be on a level playing field and private companies cannot dictate any special traffic beyond that.
We don't need a government law for this, we should keep them far away. The free market will fix this. Here's an idea: Google and YouTube simply don't pay the extortion fee. Wow, that's an amazing thought, huh? If there is degraded service, customers are going to complain to their ISP - let them explain it. There is competition now for broadband. If my cable company provided crappy service, I'd switch to DSL or vice versa, and there's satellite, Sprint's wireless product, etc... I don't get you people, so willy nilly in your ideals. Generally you're anti-government-regulation but now all the sudden you want more pointless laws and regulations?
Right now, my AT&T DSL gives me a Yahoo affiliation. It means nothing to me other than having a custom site. They make a Special Browser for the thought-deprived, which thankfully isn't even available on my Mac. But imagine if AT&T made that partnership into Yahoo's search working, and Google's being slow. Uh-uh. The corporate AT&T bums aren't gonna decide how I search.
> He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet
So he's saying that people accessing the sites they want to access is wrong, and we should stop them?
The Internet is too complex for emergency services to be relying on anyway, even if they did get priority, there are
far too many components that can break.
If the problem is that with big popular video sites there is more traffic than the end users are paying for,
then perhaps we should charge the people who *initiate* that traffic - ie. the end user.
I agree that with the theoretical "free market" this problem would solve itself, but I'm not actually aware of
any "free markets" in reality, especially not in telecommunications.
- MugginsM
Telecos and Cable companies are making money hand over fist by controlling the upload bandwidth. It's why the USA is 16th in broadband usage despite being considered the most powerful country in the world. The more companies give out upload bandwidth at consumer prices, the more they lose the control over the ability to charge 400$ a month for a meager 1.5mbps T1 line to a content provider while customers can get 40$ cable network with up to 5mbps download. Until now, companies could appease their customers with wonderful download bandwidth for $15-40$ a month and completely throttle the upload since most consumers want to download stuff faster. This makes for millions of satisfied, paying customers while forcing anyone actually wanting to provide that content to have to buy expensive prices for upload from the controlling telecos and cable companies.
VoIP, however, suddenly can't be delivered effectively over a throttled upload line which puts the telecos and the cable companies into a bind. How to deliver what their customers want without giving up control? What will happen their their revenues when content providers can suddenly skip the overpriced upload packages and just use a cheap consumer line that now provides all the bandwidth they need. Since it's a catch 22, they are pre-emptively trying to secure their future revenues with blather about 2 tiered Internet, FUD about Internet overload and big companies like Yahoo and Google making tons of money over their lines "without paying for it".
Runesabre
Enspira Online
...create their own network with their own standards separate from the internet. Then they could set their own rules as much as they want.
Oh wait, that would be too expensive. And it wouldn't have the advantage of an already established agreement between providers to carry traffic for other providers fairly (or nearly so).
I didn't realize that when ISPs started to develop the internet, taking over from arpanet and all, that they were given some implied right to abuse it for their own purposes and profit to the detriment of other ISPs.
Given past performance, suspectibility to lobbying, short-sighted political behaviour, "it's for the children", simple incompetence and failure to understand the issues, I'd be far happier with zero State intevention.
"I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."
The six thousand Iraqi civilian corpses in the morgue so far this year would, were they still able to speak, likely disagree with you that zero State intervention is a good thing.
He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet, leading to failures of IPTV, VOIP, and emergency services which depend on VOIP.
Yes, he's right! It is thus very important that ISPs not be allowed to charge a fee for increasing the bw to those sites (like the current plan). That would be taking money for something that can take down the Internet and help terrorist. The ISPs wouldn't want to be charged for terrorism, wouldn't they?
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
What a complete fucktard!
I work in local government and other than possibly internal phones I do not know of ANY government that would be stupid enough to rely on VOIP. Wait scratch that... maybe FEMA has some really cool VOIP communication systems.
Please. Were do this assholes come from.
He says a flood of undiscriminated traffic to and from Youtube, Coldplay, and Victoria's Secret will bring down the Internet, leading to failures of IPTV, VOIP, and emergency services which depend on VOIP. Is he right or wrong?
He's right, of course, because as everyone knows there will never be any more bandwidth than exists right now, and that ISPs are never able to adjust routing to handle excessive traffic. Please. Stop trying to justify the telco's attempt to "fix" something which isn't broken in order to place proprietary controls on network traffic. So far as I'm concerned, if ISPs really want the job of Internet cop, they should be held responsible for what people do with their networks. Simply using selective routing to extort more money from their customers is not sufficient reason to tier the Internet.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I wish I was a policy wonk and that I could get articles out in the press in an attempt to swing public opinion, just like Tom Giovanetti, president of the Institute for Policy Innovation. Hey, maybe I could do it right here and just respond to Tom.
"Tom, do you think I'm stupid? I mean, really Tom, who exactly is your audience in this article? Obviously you want to influence people and get them to _not_ support this 'net neutrality' thing. Clearly your audience couldn't have been me, since I had good chuckle reading about Junior and Suzie being denied their 'somethings' and EMT's losing the link (how many cc's Ringers Lactate, Rampart? Rampart come in!) as the rest of us 'bring down the Internet' to check out this season's lingerie offering. Why did I chuckle? Well, you have to admit, your scenario sounds silly. In fact, when you sit down and pull things apart, it doesn't make any sense at all.
First off, let's strip out some things that aren't relevant. I know you want to get everyone's knickers atwist by suggesting that not only will my TV, phone and computer go on the fritz because of a lingerie show, but also injured people will die with isolated EMT's and cops won't be able to call back up when things go bad.
Cops and EMT's need to rely on safety critical systems. This is a different animal than watching the superbowl or chatting with auntie on the phone. I am okay with cops and EMT's getting priority on _whatever_ system they choose to use for operations, but this part of your scenario is not about business and market economics - it's just to get a rise out of people. Peel it back even further and you become more of disappointment to me, because in the context of this discussion it implies you would advocate telco's charging government entities through the nose for these premium services. Well, cops get paid by us. So you want higher taxes? I thought the IPI would like lower burden on the taxpayer. Guess you are showing your true pro-business colors here. Fundamentally, no one is going to make a fuss if organizations that require redundant, highly reliable, fail safe (etc) communication systems get priority. Really though, Tom, I know you're not stupid and you know that folks are wary about putting things like this exclusively on packet systems, even if Junior and Suzie's parents have only a vague understanding of the issue. You are no doubt hoping that Junior and Suzie's parents won't notice a little fear-mongering.
Okay, so let's just restrict it to the disruption of my superbowl viewing pleasure. And to make you feel better, Tom, I'm not being entirely above boards in my argument here - I don't even like football - but for the sake of discussion, let's move on.
So now you've got the situation where my entertainment or personal communication systems are disrupted. Okay. I don't need to be in 2009 to wait for that - it happens right now Tom! Either way though, you would therefore like the telco's to be able to charge a premium to somebody to make sure that some 'content' actually gets through reliably. If you were telling the truth, I would agree, and say, okay Tom, if the telco's can reliably deliver the superbowl to me I might be willing to pay a little more, and maybe the NFL and the networks would too. And maybe we'd all be better off for it. Certainly we'd want this to be a market-driven affair - and the telco providing the best service at the best cost (with some margin for them) would end up winning the most customers. No need to legislate here, I agree!
Oh dear Tom, we know this if far from reality, you and I, don't we? Truth is that the telcos would actually prefer legislation that locks in their ability to offer and charge for tiered services - contrary to what you are saying - they want legislation - the just don't want the net-neutrality legislation! They don't want free market forces to prevail which would, they think, drive them further into the commodity side of things - because as you correctly noted - content is king. No one ca
"... government should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models."
Oh, you mean like how the government hasn't been preserving the certainty of the movie and record industries' business models?
You tool.
I just wasted your mod points! HA!
"overnment should be about fostering a dynamic and risk-taking economy, not preserving the certainty of anyone's business models."
Does that mean he's fighting the DMCA and coptright extensions just as hard? BEcause that's what they are all about.
~~~~~ BigLig2? You mean there's another one of me?
Oh, the shill... and the spinner. Since Napster 1.0 we keep on saying that the net will impose a new distribution model that the *AA are trying to fuck up to protect their predatory, artificial scarcity business model. But wait! It's not them, bastards, that destroy the internet! The socialist hippie dumbasses that want a fair transit medium are damaging the corporate right to profit out of artificially scarce bandwidth! My frineds, what would have been of Microsoft stock if the Hippie Internet hadn't driven MSN Network out of existence (the one you used to find on Windows '95)? Wouldn't we all be happier if we could connect to out local dial-up MSN POP and explore the treats of fenced, mall portals tailored to our consumer needs?
Down with this failing internet open model! Microsoft was right... let's all go back to BBS... it's the future!
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
We were all promised 6Mbps and there is no way the backbones can take it, sue the ISPs for false adverts.
>Fast forward a few years to 2009. You're in the living room, watching the big game in high definition on your new Internet-connected IPTV, while separately >recording tonight's episode of your favorite TV show.
This guy is talking out of his ring piece has he not clicked to the idea he is living in THE country in the world that is running headlong into STOPPING you recording something cus some slimey little bastard somewhere may miss making a few cents out of you if you record it the watch it later .
To that the internet needs to REMAIN Un-Mollested by Official twats and any emergency service using VOIP deserves to be cut off .
Pete .
1) It's either a free market or it's not. The government should stay out of this issue and let businesses figure it out. Let the telcos set up a tiered pricing structure and start gouging consumers and providers. Market forces would correct it by fostering new connectivity mediums (this would be that innovation thing everyone keeps saying is slowing down) to get around the old boys and new businesses to provide alternative access means to the "angry" (though most likely disinterested) consumers.
2) Since when is the Internet supposed to be a platform of such stability that it can support "emergency services"? There is no guarantee that everyone can access all the time, just that (hopefully) at any time the whole thing will not go down. Emergency communication services in the last 5 years both in the US and Europe have proven to be insufficient in times of crisis (9/11, London bombings) though built on solid, proven, always-on technologies. At what point did it seem like a good idea to take that already bad situation and stick it on top of a historically unreliable structure like the net?
If we are already paying the major backbone providers for access, which funds their business in return, why should these businesses complain about the price of improving the network (greater speeds, reliability)? We are funding your business with the expectation that you will continue to pour our money back into making the service that we subscribe to better. We are all already being "taxed" for access to the internet, why should major content providers be double taxed, and then pass the cost of those taxes onto the consumer just to "afford" to do what you are supposed to be doing anyway. Enhancing your product and funding future technologies. Not logging all my calls for the NSA.
Eric Cantor is my representative in the House, and he voted "No" to the "net neutrality" amendment. Here is the text of my letter to him:
June 8, 2006
The Honorable Eric Cantor
U.S. House of Representatives
329 Cannon House Office Building
Washington, DC 20515-4607
Dear Congressman Cantor:
As your constituent, I am very concerned about the efforts of the telephone and cable companies to fundamentally alter the way the Internet works, and urge you to do all you can to protect the Internet as we know it and to stand up for the principle of "net neutrality."
It seems that you do not agree with this sentiment, since you help to defeat the "Markey of Massachusetts Amendment" (HR 5252). My only conclusion must be that you are poorly informed about the issue, and have allowed the incumbent telephone and cable companies to unduly influence you. Make no mistake - this is one of the most important issues of our time, and the plans of these communication companies will destroy our public infrastructure. I work in the field of Information Technology, and I have a clear understanding of both sides of the issue. Frankly, you have supported the wrong side.
I am a conservative person, and am always opposed to intrusive government regulation, especially at the national level. Unfortunately, the ISP industry does not respond well to market pressures, since most services exist as monopolies or near-monopolies, and were supported as monopolies by federal laws for many years. The market will not be able to keep the damage in check. The Internet will fundamentally change, and very much for the worse.
This is not about Google, Amazon and eBay wanting a "free ride". I understand why they support network neutrality regulation, but they are the few supporters with the deep pockets to make their opinion heard. The real losers will be the small businesses and individual citizens. I'm sure you have heard about Web Loggers or "bloggers" on the Internet. They are the freedom-minded individuals that create news and opinion websites on small budgets, and report on current issues. It was the bloggers that first revealed that the National Guard documents about President Bush, reported on 60 Minutes, were actually a hoax. Without net neutrality, these small voices will be silenced. Most are small, unfunded writers with opinions, started websites out of their own pockets. ISPs will now be allowed to silence these small voices.
My wife is very fond of researching products before she purchases them. She will go to forum sites and discussion boards on the Internet, where she can read the experiences and opinions of other people. When access to content can be strictly controlled by the big ISPs, manufacturers will be able to pay to have these websites effectively blocked, or throttled to such a degree that they are effectively useless.
The Internet is NOT television, Representative Cantor, and it should not be run like television, but the ISPs will now be given the ability to do that. I have several hundred channels of content available on my television today, and there is nothing to watch. Sure, there are be a few independent voices out there, but they are of such poor quality and so full of static that they are be unwatchable. So what do I do? I just turn it off. It appears that this will happen to the Internet, too. Do you want everyone so frustrated with the Internet that they will just turn it off?
The Internet produced one of the greatest communication revolutions of our time. It connects people with people. Not everyone can afford to produce a slick television show or advertisement and pay for air time, but anyone can put up a web site and have their message available to the world. No more. Since the big 5 media companies will want all the bandwidth they can buy to push our their content, and Google, Amazon, and eBay paying the ISPs for some of the extra left, all the small voice will be drowned out.
Please reconsider your stance. You may be given a chance to make the right decision next time.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
We should be careful with any solution from congress as nobody ever gets away scot free except ,frankly, we don't trust these yahoos in the telecom business any farther than we care to shove rusty nails into our eyes. There may never be a problem( you can laugh, I'll wait a minute) and all the foofooraw will be for nothing.
the congressmen. This is a problem that we see because
On the other hand we also need to be wary of friends that have come along lately, some of them talk a good game but have their own agendas just the same. In the end I think the market will prevail. Even the limited companies we have to choose from are more suspicious than smart and
we could have a price war blow in if one thinks the rest are gearing up to screw them. Maybe it's time for a little creative finagling on our part.
The problem is that none of these firms (cable or telco) operate in the free market. Both cable and telco companies are government granted monopolies.
If the government didn't grant de facto monopolies to these industries, we might actually see REAL competition and innovation.
Broadband over the air, or satellite-based ISPs still have a significant amount of red tape and governmental regulation to go through in order to do business. Thus the barriers to entry are exceptionally high effectively limiting competition.
Regulation 99 times out of 100 is a bad thing. Natural monopolies don't last very long, governmental granted monopolies last a very very long time.
Libertas in infinitum
That's not a troll, it's a sincere question. And I use geek in the good sense, being kinda geeky myself. =p
So, why is it that most of the geeks I know, despite being very intelligent, don't even vote? Many live even more of an apathetic couch potato lifestyle than the typical HS dropout mall rat, and yet these are college educated, smart people.
Seriously, why is that?
My theory is that a lot of tech people are less social (cliché but true) than other professional educated people, and so they take less interest in the complex and often irrational world of politics. Which makes sense to a point, nobody exactly loves politics and all the BS, but the outside world is still there and political apathy among geeks is bound to be a disaster for technology related issues. It's rather suicidal not to pay attention.
Take for example Net Neutrality, which lost today. Not because the public woundn't support Net Neutrality overwhelmingly, but because geeks didn't pay attention, the media didn't cover it, and the general public doesn't get it. Compare that with the tens of millions of dollars Telcos have spent on a massive disinfo campaign, and it's no wonder congress sold out to their friendly Telco lobbyist with the bag of money and campaign contributions. There was no politcal cost to sell out becasue the public is asleep.
Most sensible people don't want Telcos getting into the content business and using their natural monopoly to shape what services are available on the internet. Just like whenever a media consolidation issue breaks to the larger public, people don't want it. There are always two sides to an issue, and there are always paid web-buzz marketers on forum too, but generally when the public is aware of media consolidation issues they oppose them.
Here's what Telos can now do and it'll be perfectly legal:
1) Shut down sites they don't like for any reason they choose. No that's not paranoid, there is no law against that now and Telcos are free to do so. The loss of Net Neutrality means the "internet access" in one's EULA is free to mean whatever the Telco wants. It's true they won't take down any large sites right away because that would raise public awareness and cause a backlash and get them regulated. But, what they will do is guard their bandwidth like hawks so that the next up and coming site is stopped cold before becoming popular, especially if the Telco is in bed with a rival service.
2) Telcos can get into the content business and pump their own products while hobbling rivals without even telling the consumer. If for example a Bell wants to take money from AOL or whoever to pimp their site and hobble competitors, they can, and it'll be perfectly legal. How will people know or be able to prove a competitor is hobbled if it's done well? Even then, under the law as it now stands it'll be perfectly legal so there is nothing technically to complain about and the media probably won't cover complaints.
3) Due to recent legislation Telcos aren't even required to lease their lines to 3rd party ISP anymore either. So if you have a small ISP, look to see them die a slow death over the next few years as they lose leasing rights and get squeezed on fees till they're no longer competitive. Then when your local phone company has a near complete monopoly and anti-competitive advantage, what's to prevent the worst abuses on content filtering? Nothing at all. Some free market when there is no competition.
The loss of Net Neutrality is such a disaster, and it's really pathetic how uninformed and disinterested most tech types are. Democracy is only as good as the people, and a bunch of disinterested potatoes don't make for a good one. Why are tech people so apathetic they're letting the country be sold out from under them to corrupt pols and lobbyists, and yet they won't even lift a finger to save the things they value?
That's progress?
No.
That's capitalism.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
what the hell does it take to get Americans angry and up in arms??
The President getting a blow-job from a chubby intern?
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
"We dont care. We dont have to. We're the phone company." -Lily Tomlin
That seems to be quite true given the explanation on why he rejects Net Neutrality.
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
Have you all noticed every time there is an article about Net Neutrality around here the first post is always an opposing view very well written and moderated +5?
DSLReports reported that paid cable & telco PR reps are posing as consumers and spamming forums about Net Neutrality with their opposing views. I wonder if the telcos got to
</tinfoilhat>
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
They have HUGE net presence, yet, I see nothing on any of their home pages about this net neutrality matter. Where they could easily have a single tasteful sentence there pointing to a single web page with information on this, they fail it. This situation called for drastic action, and in googs case I see an additional "wow, get world cup scores here" link on their main page. retardo-you get what you deserve, too weenie to fight, you'll get kicked by the bullies every time and get your lunch money snagged. Amazon main page-Fathers Day gifts! No net neutrality info. eBay main page-L@@k! buy more used crap! as usual
Big fat weenies, the lot of them
It does no good some exec doofus on his blog buried way back in some area 99.999% of your vistors to your site never go makes a plea for help to defeat something like this. For mainstream advertising specialty companies, they are *pitiful* on the political advertising part. If you don't want to help yourself with your own site, don't expect the great unwashed masses to be psychic and find out about it. And I'll tell you one thing I learned about US politics, trying to lock the barn door after the horse gets out (waiting until AFTER some nasty bill passes into law), just never, ever, ever, ever, works, you wind up screwed and it becomes 100 times harder to get old laws made into no-laws again. Run the numbers, check the odds, how many old laws get repealed compared to new ones put in?
There are some justifications for guaranteed bandwidth. For example, one could see a portion of the net being split off for VOIP use only and it would make sense to protect that from spikes in pron DLing or whatever. So yes, I can see some arguments for protected bandwidth. But this whole debate is smoke screen for a monopoly grab and deregulation. Net Neutrality should be the norm and exceptions carved out of that on a case by case basis where justified. NOT the other way around.
The loss of Net Neutrality goes way beyond that and strips every protection against monopoly on the internet. FACT: with the loss of Net Neutrality, anyone who doesn't have a contract with a Telco assuring them a chunk of bandwidth (i.e. everyone except the largest companies) no longer has any right to be on the internet and can be completly shut down. Blocking traffic is completly at the discretion of Telcos now.
What the loss of Net Neutrality does is to completely deregulate the internet and allow Telcos to shut down any site they choose. That's no exaggeration. Now, there are no consumer protections and no guidelines on what's fair and what's not in regards to filtering.
Anyone who thinks the free market is going to ensure fair competition is a real dunce. History shows the natural outcome of a completely unfettered market is an anti-competitive monopoly. That's why we had to regulate to prevent monopolies for pete's sake!
To make matters worse, other deregulation a while ago means Telco monopolies are no longer required to offer their lines service to small ISP. In other words they don't even have to share their government sanctioned monopoly on the last mile anymore. So, there goes the competitive market as small ISP are gradually squeezed out over the coming years.
This is going to lead to aggressive and highly anti-competitive Telcos running turf wars on an unfettered and unethical internet. Fair competition will vanish quickly. If for example a rival company (insert mega-corp of choice) wants to pay more to shut down your bandwidth than you can pay to buy your bandwidth, that's perfectly legal now. If Oracle for example had wanted to pay to buy People Soft's internet bandwidth to depress their stock price and ease the takeover, perfectly legal now. If MS wans to pay confidentially to hobble Linux servers or companies using them, again, perfectly legal now.
The loss of Net Neutrality means there is now no regulation and turns the internet and Telcos into monopolies capable of extorting protection money, and calling that protection: perfectly legal fees.
I really can't believe the lack of awareness and apathy on this issue from supposedly tech savvy people.
His main argument is that smart is always better than stupid, and that allowing the internet to become more "intelligent" in the way it handles traffic is a good thing. Unfortunately, The whole reason that the internet worked in the first place, and the reason its so huge is that the network is dumb, and all the intelligence is at the edges.
The whole thing was designed that way.
His other argument that the government should be in the business of preserving business models is of course obvious hypocrisy. It's not about whether or not the government is going to preserve a business model, its who's business model they are preserving. Either they help out Ebay, Google, et al, or they preserver the business models of Verizon, Qwest, AT&T et al...
He would have you believe it is either protect Google and Ebay or keep the world free of protection. In reality the choice is protect innovative companies or protect old dinosaur companies that haven't invented anything in the last 40 years.
While the writer is correct in that there is no source of infinite bandwidth, by the same token, Vicoria's Secret doesn't have an infinite capacity to serve up their latest show. Neither does any content provider. Assuming that a majority of internet users will require the latest Coldplay song the moment it arrives is ridiculous. The initial argument holds no water, failing from the outset to support the tragically thin thesis.
http://fromfreedomtofascism.com/
I don't quite understand how allowing companies to priorize content is going to help the situation he describes. Victoria's Secret Fashion Show is on and Coldplay releases its latest song online? Well, what will happen is that Victoria's Secret and Capital Records are going to pay AT&T to prioritize THEIR content and everyone else still gets screwed. AT&T love this situation, of course, because they're hoping that other companies will suddenly jump in to protect THEIR network bandwidth against Victoria's Secret and Capital Records.
I like your post; it boils things down to simplicity. In reality, of course, the cost of transferring data depends on the particular route it takes, and how much it costs to maintain each of those routes. So if the cost were exactly calculated, it would be a very complex affair and hard to predict in advance.
And that route can change from one moment to the next. Well, from one connection to the next. Just do a traceroute, tracert, to the same server at different tymes and you can see how the different hops can change. Unless the net is totally redesigned and built you can't tell what pipes will be used.
FalconShould there be a Law?
He's shilling for corporations...
Oh come on, you're too cynical. He wrote this article because it was something he had to get off his chest; it was really weighing him down. I can't believe you would slight the kindness of his employer, who was nice enough to sponsor and publish his personal memoir. Just because he works for a so-called "think tank" doesn't mean he doesn't have the right to exercise his imagination once in a while! Sheesh, listening to you you'd think this guy was some kind of prostitute whoring for the highest bidder or something.
Where were you on 2001-Sep-11? So many people were online reading the news that many sites were unreachable for hours and major News outlets had to resort to publishing simple plain text single page web sites to handle the load for a while. Sure you can argue that this was a success of routing around the damage, but the fact that much of the net ground to a near halt shows that it can be argued that it HAS HAPPENED or at least nearly happened depending on how you want to spin it.
Now mix in a few greedy monopolies that want to double charge for traffic and ask how stable that will make things. Have you already forgotten that there was a recent problem with some first tier networks having a spat over peering agreements that put significant chunks of the network out of reach for a day or so? Now with extra charges involved, network fail-over or just plain old heavy load routing could get extra complicated and brittle. Be afraid, very afraid.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
Thus another way of looking is this is that the thing we need to fear is too few corporation controlliing the internet and resulting in bottlenecks on backbones. In the long run to get high bandwidth we will need p2p that does not traverse a central backbone.
Broadband dooesn't need to avoid the backbones.
A Broadband Utopia
By: Steven Cherry
"A municipally owned network in Utah is poised to offer 100 megabits per second--and that's just to start"
Utopia, as described by Sir Thomas More, the man who originated the term in the early 16th century, is an imaginary place of few laws, great natural abundance, and an absence of poverty and want. We still don't know how to cure poverty and want. But in a western U.S. desert, a utopia of sorts is taking shape for broadband users who would like to get their phone, television, and Internet services from the providers of their choice. As it turns out, this Utopia, known formally as the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency, promises to be just that, a broadband utopia. And it is very much a real place, encompassing 14 cities in northeastern Utah. It delivers to each of its 3000 subscribers high-speed Internet access, telephony, and television programming through a fiber-optic cable at data rates that now reach 30 megabits per second. Soon, service providers there will be offering speeds of 50 and even 100 Mb/s. That's enough to download a 2-hour movie in about 6 minutes, 10 to 20 times as fast as the typical U.S. cable or digital subscriber line connection, 6 times as fast as Verizon Communications Inc.'s much-publicized fiber-to-the-home service (called FiOS) and twice as fast as the new DSL now being introduced in Europe by France Telecom and others...
That's the first two paragraphs on the first page of the article, and there's two more pages.
FalconShould there be a Law?
ISPs: quit your bitching, buy a few hundred dollars worth of hard disks, and install Squid. Now a thousand of your users can all download the same 5 gigabyte movie, and your total uplink usage is 5 gigabytes, instead of 5 terabytes.
People who sell internet TV service and other high-bandwidth applications: make sure your delivery method works with caches.
Problem solved.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
QoS is not the same thing as Net neutrality. QoS is really one application vs. another. Net Neutrality is one person vs. another. With QoS I could be the user of all the services being arbitrated. QoS makes it so my VOIP gets smoother connection than my web browser or my file download. QoS does not make it so my VOIP gets smoother connection than your VOIP. If it does then I wouldn't call that QoS.
But in telecommunications, the free market has been a total failure since they broke up Ma Bell. It's long past time to realize that for these sorts of services, the free market will never and can never work, and the only way to even approach any sort of fairness is through regulation.
What's wrong with this is that there is no free market in telecommunications. The closest telcommunications come to a free market, though it's still not there, is for cellphones. The phone and cable companies have a duopoly. Even if I had enough money to invest without governmental permits there's no way I would be legally able to lay cable or fiber for either phone or cable service. Fact is is local governments have granted the telcos and cable companies the right to lay their cables. And I've only ever met one person who could choose who would provide her her landline phone service. She had two choices, however I don't know if there were two different cables available or if the same line would be used no matter what service she picked.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The Internet totally wiped out the free market's contemporary offerings: GEnie Online, Prodigy, and a bunch of other crap proprietary networks that didn't interoperate, cost a fortune, didn't give people enough freedom to be useful.
And though some may still be around, the only such service I know that still operates is AOL. And as more people use the internet AOL's subscriber numbers are falling. More and more of them are dropping AOL and going with a regular isp. There's more and more talk that Time Warner will sale off AOL because it's becoming a drain on the company.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Yes, and I will say it once again. I hope history will repeat itself. Just like when big telcos got what they asked for -- payments for termination of calls from other providers on their networks. They hoped for big fat profit, as most people would want to call someone who has local service from Bell and thus "alternative" provider would pay Bell for the right to send calls to their network. Except then there was a bunch of tiny providers who gave ISPs phone numbers next to nothing. And they got paid by Bells because Bells' customers wanted to dial into those numbers to connect to the Internet. ;)
Now, if telcos will get their way and there will be "extra expensive fast lane" for data, I so hope Level 3 will charge Telcos through their noses for accessing all content servers that live on Level 3. And they will pay to Google, or their users will get the slow treatment.
There will be a splash of Telcos' howling about how "this wasn't what they intended and we need to make things right" and everything will level itself off, more or less.
Perhaps Google Internet will be available for some too
Hyperom.com
Any idiot who depends on VOIP for emergency services deserves what they get. And failed Communications 101. There's a whole raft of dependible voice services (see POTS) out there.
But, I hear you cry, "they're not 'free'". Funny, that!
Thog
-- Butlerian Jihad NOW!
No, I'm sorry.
I pay for my broadband connection (which is currently down so I'm posting on dialup, but that's another matter...).
I work for an Internet-based business. We also pay for our internet connection, paying for speed and total traffic.
Both parties _are_ paying their way. The network _is_ paid for, by both ends of the transaction, for what they wish to do with their part of the connection. If I clear my usage levels I get cut off or throttled, if my company clear ours then we get billed more.
Neither party is getting a free ride, getting rich off the telecoms company's connections without paying properly. Both pay in full for all they require, in proportion to what they require / use.
Were my ISP to elect to throttle traffic between myself and my employer for any reason, this would be nothing more than extortion - charging because they could, not charging because they had delivered goods or service of value that attracted compensation and this compensation had not been delivered.
To say to my employer 'we'll give you a 4Mb/s connection to the world, but AOL want another £1000/mo to get you ping times below 1s and proper bandwidth', or to me 'we'll give you a 1Mb/s connection but if you want to use this VoIP provider or watch online video from the BBC (but not Sky TV) then you'll need to pay us another £10/mo' is absurd, immorral, technically unwarranted and should be illegal.
Greg
(Inside a nuclear plant)
Aaaarrrggh! Run! The canary has mutated!
In a science fiction dystopia where media conglomerates and the police state control culture and thought...er oh yea.
Fido-net was a user created internet. If they begin to squeeze the cables could it spur the development of another generation of grassroots networks. Might this not be more desirable in terms of human freedom than the current legislatively controlled and highly monitored public/ privite utility.
Is it the shopping and the google and the iptv that is the beauty of it or the fact that by its very nature it promotes freedom.
I think the Packet Switching Peer to Peer Internet of Ends is too powerful an idea to go away. It is a naturally emergent system from the human desire for freedom. Didn't folks used to boast it was an information infrastructure that could survive nuclear attack or was that just to sell it to the military?
Here's to interesting times ahead.
Really this article describes a complete non-issue.
IPTV will be very easy to implement even on current high-end consumer connections using IPV6 and multicast, since we only need one HDTV stream per channel, rather than one HDTV stream per channel per user, which really *would* cripple the internet.
To ensure that low-bandwidth, high-reliability applications like telnet, http, paramedic's communication of a patient's condition to a hospital, get through, QoS already does this very well.
But you sacrifice bandwidth and perhaps latency for the reliability.
However if somebody wants low-latency, high-bandwidth, high-reliability AND no-jitter in times of high use then perhaps the telcos could charge for that.
The issue is, who regulates where the telcos must stop charging. Unchecked they will start charging for everything and we are all the way to a full two-tier internet.
The easiest way to control this is to prevent them from assigning any priority at all except for the already-existing QoS which sacrifices one for another. The only disadvantage is noone can have all of it, even if they pay for it.
I could live without that tbh.
I think perhaps the telcos are sidestepping the advent of multicast in order to make an excuse to charge more..
First, it's ridiculous for these telcos to try and double dip. I collocate my web servers at a data center. I'm already paying for all incoming/outgoing bandwidth to my sites. The end user is already paying for all of his incoming/outgoing bandwidth. Where in this equation do you see someone not paying?
Second, are we at the point where the internet is no longer working due to mass flooding of traffic from XXX internet site? No not even close. So why are these greedy telcos trying to fix a problem that doesn't exist?
Third, if we allow the arbitrary tiering of the internet, it will ONLY benefit the large telcos and give them further power in monopolizing. They already have monopoly powers in local areas granted by the government. I as a Joe Public consumer have no choice in selecting my internet provider (DSL/cable). Since this government-granted monopoloy is already in place, these telcos should expect NOTHING more than net neutrality.
Lastly, if we allow the tiering of the internet, then what right would we have to complain when one day, country X decides that it wants to give traffic preference to their local competitors? This is beginning to sound like censorship isn't it? "Yeah that's right. We at [INSERT COUNTRY] don't like what you are saying about [SUCH AND SUCH], so we're going to throttle you to death. Hey it's only fair right? Afterall, you allow your own country to do the same."
Think this through. These politians are either bought (political WHORES) or they are incompetent/stupid. Either way, reject internet tiering. If one greedy ISP/telco wants to call it quits, let them. There's already more than enough profit for a nearby competitor to jump right in.
eTrade SUCKS
Ignoramuses keep bringing this issue up as if it's going to KILL THE INTERNET, so we MUST CHANGE INTERNET POLICY. They tried this back in the early 90's when IBM was running the T-1 Internet backbone through some subsidiary.
As for who did the running, the NSFNET was a consortium of IBM, MCI and Merit. IBM provided routers, MCI provided pipes, Merit provided network engineering and operations. If any of the organizations could be said to have been the one "running the Internet backbone" I'd say it would be Merit. Later -- after the T1 network had been transitioned to T3 -- the three partners formed the non-profit ANS (Advanced Network and Services) and handed the management role over to them. It may be ANS you're thinking of, and indeed ANS leadership was largely ex-IBM. Eventually ANS's assets got sold to AOL. Looks like Al Weis is still drawing a salary from the non-profit holding company that was left. Googling "NSFNET history" will get you most of this.
While there are some parallels between today's situation and the kerfuffle around Internet commercialization and privatization in the early 90's, I think there are more differences than there are similarities. From my POV the central problem at that time was that with the NSFNET the government really was paying for the backbone, which made things complicated for those in the hot seat -- if the GAO asked, you wanted to be able to say with a straight face that the taxpayers weren't subsidizing J. Random Commercial User's pr0n downloads. Clearly that's not the issue today. You're right, though, that one part of what went on then had to do with many parties trying (and failing) to figure out how to determine (and charge for) value flow.
Historical quibbling aside, I agree with your post.
people used to talk to people
... oh well .. lots and lots of talk everyday.
.. hmmm ... losing certain rights .. maybe?
then people made devices talking to devices.
then people talked INTO devices to other devices.
then people started TYPING into devices that talked to other devices.
then people started CLICKING devices that then talked to other devices.
during this whole time everybody wanted to TALK more and "cheaper".
so now we have a (gowd this sounds so stupid) communications infrastructure
that transmitts
i just think along the way we forgot that we have devices talking to
devices mostly.
how much do you (see above) 1) talk to someone else, versus 2)"interacting"
with a device to talk to somebody else?
i'm not american, but they have soemthing called "freedom of speech" i think
which covers rigerous the right for case 1). seems that right is having
a hard time in the ""new" digital millenium".
it seems certain kind of talk (=information (see: reverse engineering:
"hey how does that work?")) and certain volumes of talk and endpoints
to talk to are
dunno the u.s.a law, but is there a law that like garuntees you that
when you build a house anywhere the "local phone" company has to provide
you with a phone line? obvious you have to pay to make a phone call, but
that they MUST install a phoneline for you FOR FREE? is this not a right
of "freedom of speech" in some kind?
maybe it goes with out-sourcing trend and bad english and the gov
now thinks it's "freedom FROM speech"?
The author Tom Giovanetti is under the assumption that network access providers do not have packet throttling enabled on their routers. This is not true. Most routers today are already configured to perform rate limiting on traffic inbound and outbound. Another thing is that in any properly designed network, the users will never be able to flood off the other users. The users will always have a pipe that is limited to the bandwidth that they paid for (i.e. $59.00/month for 5Mbit down / 1Mbit up) and as long as thier pipes are big enough to handle the aggregate maximum bandwidth of each user, the provider should have no problems passing traffic for every user at that maximum sustainable burst rate without any packet loss. His article lacks a lot of facts and assumes other opinions which are not true and can be verified to not be true, and have not been true for at least 15 years now, since packet filtering and rate limiting software became public.
If you want to create a new fast pipe and charge extra for it, thats fine. But charging extra for the existing pipe, and forcing traffic that doesnt pay into a slower pipe, or no pipe at all, would be wrong.
I'm not sure how the bill was worded, but perhaps a 'no degradation of existing service' bill would be as appropriate and more likely to pass.
Yes, thanks, it was ANS that I was thinking of. And yes, they wanted settlements.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Every one of these congressional and senatorial twits ought to be forced to take an Internet test before they are allowed to even come close to legislating that which half of them probably don't understand or use in the first place. We'll see how qualified they really are!
What I really want to say, is that in order to actually have legislations and laws passed that are in favor of intelligently managing the internet, we need to get some people who actually know what they are talking about on this issue. Trained, highly skilled techs. Rather than a rich politician who is merely looking for bedtime favors from telco's. I don't claim to have any answers, but I know there are some out there who do, and none of them are in power. So I think as one of the largest technical communities with (in my opinion) a decent amount of credibility, some of you extremely intelligent
I would like to thank you all for these interesting posts, I do my best to spread the word around about this subject, and post links to
It appears that both sides ff this issue are about the protection of business models. The net neutrality fans are for protecting the new business models, and the anti-net netrality proponents are all about protecting old business models. No where do I see anyone interested in protecting what is best for the citizens of the US. As the matter is being brought before the US congress, it would appear that our representatives have a responsability to protect what is in the best interests of the majority of US citizens.......but alas, when has that recently been the motivating factor behind congressional decision making?
It appears that the telcos are a bit two faced about all of this. Let us not forget that the when the telco was approached by the US Defense Department regarding the development of packet switching networks in the late 1950's, they were not interested, as their beloved circuit switched networks we just fine thank you very much. So, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency hired civilian engineering firms to develop it. Fast forward 40 years and the DARPA is giving away the Internet (thanks Al Gore!), it's growing at an astonishing rate and now the telco is VERY INTERESTED (can you spell "big profits?"). They are currently wringing profits out of both ends of each data pipe, and trying to figure out how to make more money on the value of the content that THEY ARE NOT CREATING. I think that I would like to have congress repeal the communications act of 1934 so that I can start charging for the content that is traversing the AIR SPACE THAT I OWN! I own 1/2 acre in a small South Western town, and there are cell phone conversations, AM/FM/XM radio broadcasts traversing my air space, as well as my neighbors satellite reception crosing my property. All of the Cellcos need to be paying my for the conversations that are going on over my airspace. I also want to be paid by the TV networks a percentage of their profits based upon the ratings of the shows that my neighbor is watching over my property. What do think congress, Can I squeeze a little too? I will cut you in on the action!
Last I checked, the big telecom companies are making dumptruck loads of cash off their internet and telephone and cable services.
If demand goes up, then, according to theory, the companies will build up lots of new capacity to take care of the demand, using those bucketloads of cash.
They aren't.
Instead, they are using the cash to buy up their competitors and float lobbyists to lie for them. This is Enronish manipulation of the supply of bandwidth. They aren't taking care of the customers' needs. They are taking care of their own. This is why we used to regulate public services. They cheat, underfund infrastructure, and rake in more cash.
Scarcity = more money. Fake scarcity == way more money, AND they want to use the faked up shortages to establish control over who uses the pipes and how. The free market doesn't exist: it presupposes that the operators are insensate to the market forces around them. They aren't. They see trends and manipulate supply and law to bend money and control to themselves.
This is only going to get worse. And the only solution, wireless, is being corporatized and licensed to yet more corporations who will want to control the pipes.
It's not an URL.
/etc/hosts).
It's the original InterNIC site.
Where all the hostnames were before DNS (we downloaded them every day into
A single site that broke the Internet. Several times.