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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.
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
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.
maybe it's just better to wait and see what happens
No. See my letter to my congresscritter.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
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
Yeah, while that's a great ideal, it's not the reality right now. Personally, I have two choices for broadband interent: Comcast cable, or SBC DSL. A duopoly hardly is a good environment for fostering consumer choices. While capitalism is great and all, it breaks down when there are monopolies (or duopolies; they don't really allows for much more competition than monopolies). As it does not make sense for multiple companies to hang wires all around the country, a monopoly is assured. In order to protect other services which might use the wires of that monopoly (wires which were, by the way, laid partially with public money) from the monopolies' own interests (i.e., other VoIP providers from the monopolies' own VoIP service), regulation is neccessary.
Put more simply, this has nothing to do with reliability. This is about a few companies controlling the internet.
In the beginning the universe was created. This made a lot of people very angry and is widely considered as a bad move.
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
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...
I think all the reasoning against net neutrality doesn't recognize the fact that I, joe consumer, paid to surf the internet. The ISPs can say they'll favor certain corporations, but that's not what I paid for. They are trying to sell a resource, already paid for by me, at the other end. That's double dipping and should be illegal.
Besides, the article is illogical. The very entities like Google CAN pay corps the extortion fee to be in favored status. It's the smaller guys that get fucked. Tom Giovanetti can pretend that this will threaten Google's/Microsoft'sMSN/OtherGenericBigBadGuy business model. And then there is the real world.
Tragedy of the commons is a pretty good example, but it doesn't fit the net.
The whole commons mentality is "If I don't use it somebody else will."
However, this doesn't work with bandwith. There is no free bandwith just laying around to be snatched up by anybody. You pay for your bandwith, websites pay for theirs, and if you use more bandwith, it costs more.
Thus another way of looking is this is that the thing we need to fear is too few corporation controlliing the internet
This is the entire problem. Most small towns usually only have the local cable company and the local phone company supplying broadband access. There are only a few national telcos with most of the lines under their control. The stage is set for rampant extortion.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
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.
Hi Russ... I read you regularly, even though we don't always agree.
On this, we do. Right now, the commercial internet works because I pay someone to connect me to the internet and give me a certain amount of bandwidth. I do this for my connection at home, because I want bandwidth to get what I ask to see. I do this for my server at a data center, because I want bandwidth to get to people that ask to see me.
When I use bandwidth to my own server, like when I get my email, I pay twice for that bandwidth. I pay for sending the email from my server, and I pay for receiving the email at my desktop. And that's fine. It makes perfect sense to me.
What isn't fine is that now someone in the middle is saying that I should have to pay them extra so I can use the bandwidth I'm already paying to have. They seem to be of the opinion that I need to pay THREE people for the bandwidth I use. I understand that there are two ends to the connection, so I need to pay people on both sides. But this third charge is someone in the middle. How many "third" charges *are* there? How many networks does my data traverse on the way from point A to point B? Can they all charge me? When? If I go from network A to network B and then back to network A, do I have to pay network A twice?
This is a big-ass can of worms. We need to keep it well and truly sealed.
Microsoft cheerleader, blue flag waving, you got a problem with that?
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
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.
It's worth noting that capitalism actually creates monopolies. Because you mix free competition and strong law, you allow companies to manipulate legal bodies in order to create law that is to their advantage.
Please don't tar libertarianism with the same brush as capitialism. Under libertarianism, there would be fewer laws that could be used to create monopolies or duopolies. This would mean that you've probably end up with a large number of smaller businesses, with few reaching into multiple areas.
The problem with the Net Neutrality issue currently is not that we need a law in order to protect the internet from these multi-tiered systems (because as it is, if Bell try anything, they're unlikely to succeed), but that we need a law to protect from a law artifically empowering these multi-tier systems.
In short, libertarianism would mean that there would be no political merchants (such as senators) for the businesses to buy, because the effect of law would be so small. The internet would continue the way it always has done, because a) you probably wouldn't get large, powerful monopolising businesses like Bell to cause these issues, b) creating an "empowerment law" like Bell need would be impossible and c) smaller businesses with mean more competition, and enough newcomers to ensure that no companies take "fat cat" payola like the multi-tier system.
Libertarianism is very different to capitalism. If we want to start moving there the first thing we have to do is to make sure that we're very careful about the order of removal of the laws. It's important to make sure that large businesses don't lure us into only taking the deregulaion stance on areas where it benefits them. If we run a system that is fair and democratic, then our first mission is to make sure that the system stays fair and democratic at all points in the move towards libertarianism.
People who take the "He's more Libertarian! I like it!" policy are being seduced by large businesses (the grand parents is a case in point). It's better, from a liberty point of view, to ensure that Net Neutrality is legislated on. Otherwise we risk having a massively capitalist state because we've selectively deregulated (deregulation is needed to be equal in all areas, or massive problems are generated). In libertarianism, the issue of Net Neutrality wouldn't get far.
The free market has been enormously enabled by net neutrality of the past decade. For a relatively small investment, individuals and companies have access to the world as a market, with the winners according to merit. Discrimination by different type and participants in network traffic will only result in more power to the people who already have power, and less power to those that don't, regardless of merit. That may be capitalism, with elements of monopoly in places... but it's certainly further away from the free market than where we are now.
I agree. That's where the "Google or Ebay are getting rich off my bandwidth" excuses fall flat. Google and Ebay are paying some network provider for their network connection. If they need more bandwith, they will pay for it. The customers who are using those sites pay for their connection. If the telcos want to offer video on demand or VOIP to their customers, charge those who want it a fee. What the net neutrality opponents fear is what's been in place and working for years. It's not broke, so don't try to put a "bandwidth protection" racket in place to try to fix it.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
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.
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.
This is all bullshit.
The costs involved in telecommunications are in the laying of infrastructure. The cost to operate it after it is built is insignificant by comparison. Furthermore, the cost to operate it doesn't decrease appreciably with less users. You still need to run the lines regardless. It's not like when half the people turn their connections off they get to turn off half the lines and save electricity.
And this nightmare scenario, where too many people downloading a hot wardrobe malfunction cause the rest of the internet to stop, that has NEVER HAPPENED. The fact of the matter is that all this chaos exists because it has been demonstrated to be the most reliable means of running telecommunications in the public sector ever created. He talks about how all these essential services are moving online. They're not moving online because it's the cool thing to do and all the firefighters and EMS workers want to be hip. They're doing it because it's MORE reliable than the pre-existing ivory tower administered systems that predate it.
The reason why it's more reliable is because it is NOT STRATEGIC. It is TACTICAL. Highly structured systems where you say "we need to do it precisely this way and everything will work" rely on perfect information and perfect judgement, which do not exist. Chaotic systems like the internet work better because they say "we're not capable of making all these determinations and decisions on how the system should work, so we're going to lay down a set of tactics that will allow individual components to react co-operatively and intelligently to problems".
It's like the difference between a good boss, who recognizes the strength your individuality brings to the table and attempts to make it useful, and a bad manager, who tries to micromanage you and just ends up making you (and the entire system) less effective.
The internet, in it's chaotic form, is a SMART internet. Every node has the capacity to make tactical decisions, and thus react to problems that no other node even recognizes exists. Tiering, rather than attempting to progress this powerful idea, is a fundamental rejection and dismissal of that intelligence and the value it brings to the table.
I'll cap my little rant by mentioning that this whole thing about the internet being a resource in short supply is a ridiculous joke. Capacity has been growing faster than usage for a long time now, and we're at the point where free wireless mesh networks can be set up for next to nothing. Small cities with limited budgets and technical resources have demonstrated that they have the capacity to do this with no help all from any existing carrier. We could, with minimal investment in infrastucture, set up wireless networks of sufficient speed that they could assume all the burdens off the wired net for all in-city traffic, and with an intelligent caching system, it could assume a lot of the burden for inter-city traffic too. So for negligible investment (compared to laying fibre) we could practically unburden the entire existing internets physical infrastructure and use it for some new purpose without losing any of the communications we currently enjoy.
In a nutshell, the mans position is either utterly ignorant foolishness or a blatant lie intended to manipulate the people who are exposed to his bullshit, to the detriment of us all. Having seen how very warped the views of people who are isolated from reality with other intellectuals can become, I'm not quite cynical enough to say with any confidence which one it is.
-1 Uncomfortable Truth