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Net Neutrality or Not?
Reverse Gear writes "CNN has two commentaries about net neutrality with quite opposing viewpoints. Craig Newmark discusses how the legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives would efficiently remove net neutrality, while Mike McCurry writes about how the big companies should pay their fair share for the physical upgrade of the internet. From Newmark's commentary: 'Telecommunication companies already control the pipes that carry the Internet into your home. Now they want control which sites you visit and how you experience them. They would provide privileged access for themselves and their preferred partners while charging other businesses for varying levels of service.'"
Google pays for the bandwidth it uses.
I pay for the bandwidth I use.
Greedy telco's, the big companies already pay their portion. I pay for my bandwidth, google pays for theirs.
is that we already pay for our bandwidth, and so do the content providers. Tax dollars subsidised the building of the infrastructure. Fees paid to the phone companies were expressly for this (Universal Access)... We need to stop the greedy SOB's that can't stand the fact that their revenue stream from analog phone is gone...
Of the two, Craig Newmark makes the better argument... however, neither explains how we have already PAID for the access to the sites we visit. However, the BEST argument I have seen so far is the ninja from "Ask a Ninja" http://www.askaninja.com/news/2006/05/11/ask-a-nin ja-special-delivery-4-net-neutrality
No offense, but I'm not going to shell out an extra $50 or so each month for some "gold package" that lets me talk to you guys and read the lefty political blogs.
Removing net neutrality might make sense, if the telecoms weren't monopolies that is. If they weren't monopolies they would be competing with each other to provide the best service to the customer, and thus wouldn't want to charge content providers for bandwidth (possibly at all), since they would want their customers to desire their services, and they would only desire their services if they could access content. However as it stands the telecommunications companies are monopolies, so there is little motivation for them to provide the best service. As a monopoly they simply want to charge as much as the market will bear, and if Google is making money off ads clearly they can afford to pay more to the telecoms. The fact that laws doing away with net neutrality might be passed is sad evidence how much our politicians are in the pockets of big companies.
Philosophy.
If the telcos are so worried about big sites not paying their fair share, why don't they just raise bandwidth rates? This is a free market after all. If I were company X and ATT raised my bandwidth rates, I'd shop around... If i couldn't find a better rate, i'd be stuck... kinda like buying gas :)
Mike McCurry writes about how the big companies should pay their fair share [CC] for the physical upgrade of the internet. From Newmark's commentary: 'Telecommunication companies already control the pipes that carry the Internet into your home. Now they want control which sites you visit and how you experience them. They would provide privileged access for themselves and their preferred partners while charging other businesses for varying levels of service.'"
Maybe the government should sieze control over the main backbone and make the upkeep/upgrade no longer a responsibility of the major providers. ISP's would all compete for the last mile hookups/billing, allowing other companies in who don't already own part of the highway itself.
They can try to earn more of their revenue from these supposed services they are going to bring in - if the services really are all that fantastic. If they really are cooking with gas, they should have no beef with a truly level playing field with Google. If I don't like the fact I can't get (competing service) as well with ISP Alpha because they're partnered with TVIP-X, I'll just drop them and move to ISP Beta since they treat everyone the same.
Wow, I didn't realize Google got free bandwidth.
Telecomm providers always had the right to give you crappier service.
If you wanted a T3 and didn't care how bottlenecked it was upstream you can buy it from a local ISP. If you want one that can max out to nearly any other site, you buy from a Tier 1 ISP.
If the Tier 1 starts to offer you crappy service, you change to another one.
If the Tier 1 ISPs collude to offer subpar service and fixed prices, then fix that with antitrust.
As long as it's a free market, there's nothing to worry about. While you may only get to choose 1 or 2 ISPs for your home broadband use, anyone with major bandwidth can choose at least 5 or 10 different Tier 1 ISPs.
Regarding the last mile, this same bill also explicitely authorizes localities to provide last mile service. I'm not sure why a federal bill would be needed to permit this, but there it is.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
It seems like, among all the applications that use IP, some of them are time-sensitive, and some of them are time-insensitive. And ones that are time-sensitive seem to be quite variable in the amount of time-sensitivity. For example, I may want to download or upload some file overnight--as long as it's done by the following morning, I don't care how long it took the packets to get from point A to point B. Or I may be surfing the web--in which case I'll probably want the packets to move pretty much as fast as possible. Or I may be on an interactive ssh session, in which case I may also want faster packets.
If I understand it correctly, this whole "net neutrality" thing makes everyone treat "bits as bits"--my overnight download is exactly the same as my web surfing which is exactly the same as my ssh session. This seems like a huge waste--why shouldn't we have the ability to shape our bandwidth based on our needs? Obviously there's room for abuse (such as Comcast blocking or degrading VoIP packets from competing companies, but leaving its own alone) but aren't we throwing the baby out with the bathwater by disallowing any sort of discrimination based on packet contents?
Or am I just completely misunderstanding the whole "net neutrality" thing?
Dlugar
Computer Go: Writing Software to Play the Ancient Game of Go
So without net neutrality, a theoretical entity that owns big pipes and is against this greed could figure out which packets are being prioritized and which are being deprioritized on incoming pipes from other providers. Then on their pipes, swap the priorities.
Wait until symptoms manifest. We don't know how to effectively stop non-neutrality before it happens, and either way, we can't know what the side effects of our actions will be.
It's just that we have to continually remind ourselves, the telcos, and Congress that certain pricing policies are blatantly unacceptable, in addition to the multitude of other issues that we track.
At a minimum the telcos should be forced to act as common carriers. That means everybody pays the same and gets the access they pay for. No playing favorites.
The telcos could create whatever rate scheme they wanted but they would have to treat everyone equally. Actually, the telcos are currently common carriers. It would be necessary to pass legislation to make them otherwise.
If they don't want Net Neutrality, let's take away their common carrier status! After all, if they're discriminating against content, that means that they're taking some responsibility for what content goes where. I can't wait for the first telecom VP who ends up on trial for aiding and abetting a child molester.
Gold silver or bronze it doesn't matter.
Any site who doesn't pony up this ransom will suffer when a gold paying site runs a live stream and requires all the bandwidth.
Remember, its paying for prefenrential delivery, not for open access, we will still be able to access the other sites, but only when bandwidth allocation is available, think of it as paying for a hardware interupt in the curcuit.
liqbase
The only way our government is going to stop screwing everybody in order to help out big business is if the one's who are responsible for this crap get voted out of office. Don't forget that in November.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
With net neutrality, the users pay for access to the internet and the web sites pay for their bandwidth. That's how it should be.
why is cell phone internet access in the US so terribly useless.
its not just the low bandwidth and the tiny screen, its because
its packaged as a delivery media for ringtones and crappy games.
not just as a pipe.
the value of the internet is that there isn't necessarily some
marketing shmuck in tan slacks and a blue shirt sitting between
me and what i want to do. its a free-for-all. if those people
had been involved from the beginning it would have been worthless.
do whatever you like. dont mess with my rfc 791.
I don't know why people are surprised by this. The internet has become the only effective free press that almost anyone on the planet can both read AND write to. As such, it's a constant thorn in the side of everyone who wants to control the flow of information. That means every government, every business, pretty much everyone who has soemthing to gain by focusing any segment of the public towards their own goals.
The free ride is over. It was destined to be over the moment the internet was opened to commercial activity (1992?). It just took the pointy-haired types a few years to figure out why they needed to pay attention.
Mike McCurry says something like "Several conservative organizations have also spoken out on similar problems. And as a recent Forrester Research analysis concluded, if these regulations become law, "Legal costs will shoot through the roof -- draining the pockets of everyone involved." That may be great news for lawyers, but not for ordinary consumers who'll be forced to pick up the tab."
But wait. So, let me get this straight. Not changing the internet from what it has been for all of its existance is going to cost all the consumers? How does that make sense. McCurry's main argument is that the "BigInternetBusinesses" need to pick up their fair share of the cost for improving the internet, but to me it seems like the telcoms just need to figure out how they can make a profit without changing the entire way the internet works. They never seem to mention how ending Net Neutrality would cripple small businesses. And it seems like McCurry likes to take every argument for Net Neutrality and warp it through ways that make no sense what ever until the arguments are actualy against Net Neutrality. This guy is nothing but a lobyist and everything he writes is nothing more than loby material. He shouldn't even be aloud the space on a news site.
To those that hate government intervention on principle, I'm not big on it either. However, in this situation, we'd end up worse off with the few network providers with an iron grip on who gets to see what. It's just a matter of who gets control.
They've got more in common with Tony Soprano than any business visionary. "That's a nice website, it'd be a shame if no one saw it. Telcos and cable companies are tripping over each other on the way to congress and the courts to try to each other from entering their markets. They'r threated by civic minded citizens in townships sick of listening to telcos tell them how great the network connectivity they get will be, and how they're doing them favors, but they'll just have to wait a few more years to get fiber out there.
It's a simple money grab, they see the cash Google and them make and they want to wet their beak. Right now the content providers have been outlobbied. They haven't been out-argued, just out-lobbied. Being a monopoly is great work if you can get it. You don't have to worry about competition, just the occasional complaints from the people that don't much like that they pay more.
The government should have no say in what happens to the Internet, but big business shouldn't either.
Commercialism has been nothing but a plague to the Internet...the only thing it has done is allow that segment of the population that are likely to render the rest of us extinct to discover one more thing to screw up, in their suicidal quest for the increased bottom line. Now, to top it off, we're having to rely on the utterly corrupt, craven, senile geriatrics of the American legislative branch to prevent their fellow parasitic vermin from destroying the net completely. Why do I not feel more optimistic?
The Internet was initially developed by infinitely more redeemable human beings than anyone in either the American government or corporate world. The future of something that has been developed by those who are self-aware should not be decided by those who are not. As much as the Internet means to me, it pains me to see its' future being decided by groups which I fervently wish did not exist in the first place.
For those unutterably wretched human beings whose lives also revolve entirely and exclusively around money, the rest of us are waiting patiently for you to grow up and recover from your sickness. Your addiction is in need of rapid treatment...if it is not treated soon, you may well end up destroying the rest of us along with you.
No, think of the pipes and wires that you use to go online as the car you pay for by renting. The question is, should the rental car actively resist the steering wheel when you pass by a burger king and instead redirect you to a McDonalds because McDonalds paid the rental car agency a bribe.
God, I hate stupid f*ing metaphors. The thing is easy enough to understand, I can't believe how the debate gets convoluted by the other side: You are already paying for net access. Now your telecoms aren't quite satisfied with your payment and want to double dip by collecting on the other side of the pipe. The problem is, that as a consumer, this isn't what I paid for. I paid for internet access, not Verizon's Paying Friends network. This is fraudulent behavior against the consumer, plain and simple.
In his anti-NN article, Mike McCurry, who obviously knows how the net should really work instead of how it current did for the last XX years wrote:
Their thinly disguised self-interest happens to be my self-interest in this case too. Rather than your stance, which coincides as the thinly disguised self-interest of the bells.
Oh, and no matter what, the consumers will pay for the upgrades. Let's not pretend that the corps will pay for it and not pass it down.
Pass a law that all porn must be downloaded in HD. The problem will take care of itself.
But Slashdot found place for only one in the front-page summary. Am I the only one to sense bias?
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Like most slashdotters, I feel and instinctive affinity for net neutrality. And I think having a medium where all "content providers" are equal has been great plus, not only for internet culture, but also for the level of competition in internet commerce.
Still, the tremendously increased investment that can be conjured up by the profit motive is nothing to be sneezed at. I was using the internet as a graduate student before there was a web, and I remeber the ruckus over the first advertisment that appeared on usenet. Like most usenet denizens of the time, I was appalled, and I thought that commercialization would destroy our beloved cooperative internet. Obviously, I was dead wrong. So having been proved wrong once, I'm not inclined to dismiss the power of the profit motive to provide us with an infrastructure capable of doing things we haven't even dreamed of yet.
If the bells sold these connections knowing that they could not support them, they should be sued for fraud, they shouldnt be charging us MORE money to fix their fuck-up
It's sad to see how much of a whore Mike McCurry has become.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
And CNN is publishing industry press releases as news, but hey, what's new?
Notice no disclosure that he's completely freaking paid for by the telecom industry, who do you think Public Strategies' clients are? And "Hands off the Internet"? That's an astro-turf campaign, noticed the crappy wanna-be underground looking propaganda that's been popping up on blog-ads, that's them. More info at DailyKos.
Editor's note: Mike McCurry is a partner at Public Strategies Washington Inc. where he provides strategic communications counsel. He is a co-chairman of Hands off the Internet, a coalition of telecommunication-related businesses. McCurry served as press secretary to President Bill Clinton from 1995 until 1998.
More coverage by kos, john marshall, la times, matt stoller.
This is just like the telcos claims over open access. Every regional telco has been granted monopoly status for years, we the users paid for that infrastructure, and we'll use the same model in the future if need be. These claims of eminent domain are horseshit distractions. They were when they strangled and drowned the CLECs and they are now as they try to do to the Internet what the cell companies have done to wireless. I don't use my phone other than to talk, data services currently lack value over the cell networks in the existing price structure. They want to impose the same pricing structure possibilities on their segments of the Internet. Just like access to the copper, they want you to pay for what you've already paid for. Mike McCurry is getting paid to help these people steal from you; for this payment, he's trying to convince you that being stolen from is in your best interest.
These assholes will kill the goose that laid the golden egg if allowed. Support Save the Internet, don't let them do it.
Stop them cause Mike McCurry is a Jeff Gannon-wannabe manwhore.
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
If they want to interfere with how we communicate, which is the opposite of what they're supposed to be doing, they will eventually be replaced. Their true power is in the last mile, and various wireless technologies could erase that power for about 80% of Americans in a very short time. The bigger bastards they are, the shorter that time will be. Here's where I also like to point out why subsidizing industries is bad... it hurts diversity and stifles new technologies. We wouldn't be so beholden to these companies *right now* if we hadn't handed them monopolies.
They're hooked up to their neighbours connections, just like me... ;)
The big network providers already get to charge by bandwidth. If Google uses a lot of bandwidth, then they pay more to their own ISP, which, in turn, does the right kind of accounting with its peers. Right now, we have a mostly neutral system in which bandwidth is fungible.
What rankles network service providers is that the current infrastructure doesn't give them much freedom to charge by what people are able to pay; that greatly reduces their opportunity for revenue. Telephone companies, for example, have been able to charge a premium to individual residential customers because individual residential customers don't have much ability to negotiate. While that premium may be small in absolute terms, it's huge in terms of percentages. The same is true for other customer categories. They also want to be able to continue to charge excessive rates for specific services, such as voice. With the proposed changes, network providers can implement that kind of differential pricing again.
There is absolutely no justification for any of this; all it does is create market inefficiencies that make telecommunications services unnecessarily expensive. Both from an economic and a public policy point of view, net neutrality is clearly the better system.
The first step is to develop a nomenclature that Joe Sixpack (read: your elected representative) will be able to understand is A Bad Thing (TM). Instead of calling it "non-neutrality," using evocative and descriptive phrases such as service discrimination or biased delivery or prejudicial routing might explain more clearly just what the telcos are up to.
blog
according to savetheinternet.com, Hands Off The Internet is an astroturf group set up by the telephone and cable companies, so Mike McCurry from the opposing viewpoint is just a corporate shill.
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
while Mike McCurry writes about how the big companies should pay their fair share for the physical upgrade of the internet.
You mean, like, by paying for service, proper, which we already do? Hands off the internet, jackass.
The commentary against Net Neutrality is written by Mike McCurry, former whitehouse press secretary. So obviously everything he's saying is wrong and full of lies, right?
The proper response to tiering is a TCP/IP death penalty. Basically "if they tier, don't peer". If $FUCKTARDCORP wants to make a tiered intarweb, source-route around their asses. If they screw up the last mile, find another ISP. This is a battle that should be fought in routing protocols and markets, not in Crapitol Hell.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get you
...they did have to search for it.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Currently ISP'S are Common Carriers. They recieve legal protection because of this. If they start blocking or regulating traffic they will put themselves into a defacto position where they have to police said traffic. If they are blocking traffic from websites that didnt cough up they will be in a position of liability for not blocking P2P traffic or emails between terrorists. The above being said what the heck was going on in congress ? Did the braincell they collectively timeshare have the day off when they passed this ? I mean my god lets say the phone company decided variable rate pricing was a good idea ahh youre a wealthy bank want to call your customers its going to cost you.
The corporations will do whatever they can get away with to increase their profits, including pushing so called "net non-neutrality" upon an unsuspecting public. All they need to do is divert lots of money into the Halls of Congress to accomplish thier goals.
Strange isn't it? Mike McCurry goes from being a press secretary in the Clinton White House, to being a telecom industry mouthpiece. I wonder how much money they are paying McCurry to totally bend the facts to fit the telecommunications agenda? I didn't know he was such a sell out until that CNN piece.
------ Tim O'Brien
Thus keeping you away from the "lefty political blogs".
At first thought that's something phone companies wouldn't care about, but big media companies with intimate ties to people in power do suppress unwanted opinions.
In it, Geoff points out that for a very long time, telecommunication companies were monopolies or in some cases oligopolies (a few companies controling the market). They owned everything from the handset on one end to the handset on the other end and any feature like "call waiting" or "answering machines" had to be bought from them.
Depending on what part of the world you lived in, from the 70s to the 90s, these companies were forced to change from market monopolies to competative markets of differentiated goods. This is almost always a very rough transition to make and many companies, in any industry, often go bankrupt before they can make the structural, political, technical and cultural changes need to survive in such markets. The telecommunication industry is no different.
While the telecommunication companies are still trying to deal with competing in a differentiated market, e.g. the 80's slogan from AT&T "they are making second class phones!", to the huge number of options on cell phones, Geoff points out that they are really facing an even harder transition. They are having to go from a competative market of differentiated goods to a market of commodities. Even companies that are used to competative markets have a hard time successfully transitioning to commoditiy markets, again, they require even more changes to the organization. People just want to push packets.
Telecommunication companies thought they could create differentiated products like "video on demand" where everyone would get their TV, movies and music from the telecommunication companies. Instead, P2P systems have taken care of those needs, with the result of people not wanting huge downloads from a central company, but rather they will download from other "end users". But, even TV shows and Movies are just the tip of the iceberg. People are generating their own content and are bypassing the both the traditional media companies and the telecommuncation companies. They are creating pictures of their kids, and porn, They are creating blogs and small business websites. New features of the net are not added by the big companies under careful regulation, but spring forth from millions of places. The amount of data that is being passed around that has nothing to do with the big companies is mind boggling, and it is just going to get bigger.
People don't want content from the ISPs, they want packets pushed around, and that means a commodity market for packet delivery. Telecommunication companies that can adapt to a commodity market will survive. Ones that can't will talk about how they need to charge people for their "enhanced content".
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
Stop linking random pages that give us no clue as to their contents.
The symptoms are already there. I haven't been able to get to knoxville.craigslist.org from bellsouth since this whole thing started. I think maybe they are looking for official permission to do what they are already doing.
Several conservative organizations have also spoken out on similar problems. And as a recent Forrester Research analysis concluded, if these regulations become law, "Legal costs will shoot through the roof -- draining the pockets of everyone involved." That may be great news for lawyers, but not for ordinary consumers who'll be forced to pick up the tab.
I realize that usually more regulation == more legal costs but with net neutrality all it means is that providers can't discriminate based on the origin of the packet. Shouldn't enforcement be easy since there shouldn't be a lot of grey areas?
But without net neutrality you now have the legal costs of all these contracts between the telcos and different websites, making sure those contracts are being properly enforced and that they don't cross the line into censoring sites (I assume those safegaurds exist) could lead to some massive legal costs.
Does anyone know where these extra legal costs with net neutrality are supposed to come from?
I stole this Sig
A few years back in the UK there was an ISP called Freeserve (now known as Wanadoo). It was a dial-up ISP, and it was free. In the sense that you still paid standard phone charges, but there was no actual charge for an account at Freeserve - not pre paid, not monthly, etc.
How did this work? Well, Freeserve basically went to the telephone companies and made agreements with them to get a share of the profit the telephone company makes by charging you for the telephone call.
What if a model like this could be adopted for the internet? It could provide a decent fair ground.
Say you're Google. You pay the ISP you peer with a fee. Rather than the ISP keeping that fee for itself, adding it to it's funds, and paying it's standard peering charge with the ISPs that ISP peers with when next due, what if the ISP split up the fee, kept a section of it for itself, and the ISP the ISP peered with? (And so on.)
This would be opposed to a specific ISP demanding money from Google for it to be able to serve pages to it's broadband users. In this system, the ISP would get some money, but they would not be the only one doing so, and so they would not be able to get away with charging overly high prrices.
I probably haven't thought this through too well, but I'd like to know if there's anything in it.
Trust me, it won't. If Malda can find some way to milk more money out of the saps who actually subscribe for this shit, he'll do it.
This battle is irrelevant to consumers. Rather, it is a battle of Google et al vs Comcast et al with respect to which group has to deal with the idiotic consumers such as you find here on slashdot.
You pay for your bandwidth one way or another. Either the access providers are going to start to have tiered services to consumers (hell, mine already does to some degree) or they are going to force the content providers who gobble bandwidth to pay more. These content providers will then pass the cost on to you. It doesn't matter in the end from the consumer's point of view. If you use lots of bandwidth, you will pay more, either to Google or Comcast. This is fair, in my opinion.
Most of the whiners around here just realize that without "net neutrality", all their P2P sites will be relegated to the slow lanes. Boo frickin' hoo. Yes, my legitimate VoIP and iTunes downloads should get priority over your piracy.
"investment in the physical infrastructure necessary to provide high-speed Internet will slow down, the U.S. will fall even further behind the rest of the world [in broadband deployment], and our rural and low-income populations will wait even longer to enter the digital age."
So the big tele companies are being the good guys here for wanting to gouge various internet sites, screw the users, and roll out to the "poor, rural areas" only to have more customers they can gouge and control?
Try buying a subscription like I just did. Not only do I still see ads and get confronted with confusing "subscribers only" features, I think this is costing me about four bucks to send this message.
We can still voice our opinion to the people that make these decisions. Check these out to find out how to contact your Senator.
It's Our Net - Contact A Senator
Save The Internet - Sign The Petition
If net neutrality isn't legislated, then every cable and Bell customer is going to be staring at AOL circa 1999. AOL was a perfect example of: We know that what you really want to see are all these companies who have paid us for front-page access to your eyeballs. Want something else? Well, there is this crappy thing called "the internet" that you can try to browse if you can find it...
...to make money"?
I remember a time when companies would actually lay out their own capital to improve their offerings, in the hopes that the initiative would make enough money to pay for itself and turn a profit.
Now, these greedy bastard telcos want to maintain their obscene profits while making their customers dig even deeper to pay for infrastructure upgrades. They want to have their cake and eat it, too. The only thing they are willing to spend their own money on anymore is getting the laws passed that will benefit them at the expense of the public.
this is allowed. Nobody is stopping them. If you believe that its a free market out there, then you must accept that the market will charge what the market will bear.
Not enough money to upgrade the internet? RAISE THE RATES. Google Yahoo and other content providers getting a "Free ride"? RAISE THEIR RATES.
Prioritising packets has nothign to do with protecting the bottom line. its totally uneccessary for the reasons they give. It is about being able to finely control every little packet you get, so you can be billed accordingly.
Why give up the incredibly profitable Long Distance business model for the "flat rate" model of the internet, when you can convert the internet into another "long distance" service?
--My signature is six words long.--
If this has already been discussed, sorry. I am all pro-net-neutrality and so on, but aren't the telcos fighting for being able to charge by type of service and not to be able to charge by provider ?
It makes a certain amount of sense that streaming video or VOIP should be billed differenty from other traffic, simply because they do have different requirements - both bandwith and esp. latency. Then all businesses who want to provide streaming video will be paying the same higher prices, which isn't inherently anti-competitive.
Now, before flaming begins, I am not saying it is a good thing; I am simply looking for some clarification.
A shining example of this is video on cell phones. Sure, sounds like a great idea in theory; get CNN or BBC on your phone while sitting on a train.
In reality, at least in the USA, just about the only content available is movie trailers. Advertisements. So, you are supposed to pay to download (at unbelievable prices) an advertisement? Doesn't sound like much of a benefit to the early adopters.
USA is just sitting around and waiting until a cell phone provider comes out with a cheap, reliable, "no extra charges" plan. They have them now, but it'll kill your pocketbook. They want to overcharge in just about every case. Wanna send an e-mail on your phone? Ok, that'll be $.10 per kB. Wanna send that picture you just snapped of your kids to grandma? Ok, that'll be $1.
Come on. No one wants to pay for those services when they are already paying for the service.
Why read the article when I can just make up a snap judgement?
And then some. A monopoly provider will always maximize their profits at a price well above what a free market would bear. They don't care that fewer people can afford their service as long as they get to squeeze more out of those who can. The net result for them is more money for less effort. The net result for everyone else is a much lower level of service. That's exactly what the people who fought tooth and nail against modems want.
As long as government keeps other people from laying lines to provide local service and as long as the Bells claim common carrier status, net neutrality should be a given. It is sad that anyone would even consider otherwise.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
If this was really about deploying QoS, I think there would be far fewer arguments. The technology for QoS is well defined, short of the mechanism needed to charge individual customers and distribute the revenue to ISPs. This is actually harder than one might think because your data for a QoS-enhanced video conference would usually traverse multiple ISPs. If the ISPs were serious about figuring out how to do this, and then giving customers a better video-call for a per-call charge, I think most of us would be happy for the extra service.
Instead of going through the trouble setting this up, ISPs want to do something far easier -- filter based on the source or destination of a packet and put packets indiscriminately into a different queue based on who it is coming from or going to. Then they simply charge people who want to put large numbers of packets into the high priority queue, namely the large content providers. Of course, the resulting service might not be any better. To get priority service for all its users, a company like Google would have to pay all ISPs who play this game along all paths between it and any customer -- essentially all ISPs in the entire Internet.
Even if an ISP is only interested in prioritizing its own traffic (to give itself a competitive advantage), it might not get very far. ISPs do not typically carry traffic end-to-end from user to user, so the priority they give their traffic may be wasted once the traffic gets to a competitor's ISP!
I'm tempted to let the ISPs hang themselves on this one -- if large content providers refuse to pay, and the high priority queues stay empty, then what? They get blamed for artificially slowing down all Internet traffic? Not pretty.
One scenario: In a competitive environment, rival ISPs (in the backbone) will end up fighting each other to offer the best possible price for the best possible non-tiered service, and those offering more expensive tiered service will end up losing their customers.
Don't get me wrong, I'm totally on the side of net neutrality and keeping the fucking telecoms from getting paid twice for selling the same bandwidth -- I just thing that, rhetorically, thumping the "keep net neutrality" meme over and over is going to confuse the issue. Because it's not really about keeping the net neutral -- it's much simpler than that.
The problem is that companies like AT&T are claiming that Google is getting a "free ride" because Google's data goes over AT&T's pipes, but Google isn't explicitly paying AT&T. The problem with this argument is that AT&T's bandwidth IS getting paid for, just not by Google. And Google IS paying for bandwidth, it's just not paying AT&T for it. Google pays its ISP, that ISP pays another ISP, and so on along the chain, somewhere in which sits AT&T.
AT&T gets paid; the problem is they want Google to not only pay its own ISP to send data into the Internet, AT&T also wants Google to pay AT&T to "insure that your data gets high-priority treatment." This is unnecessary and statements like McCurry's that claim it's important to ensure the future of the "creaky Internet" are horseshit.
The mantra is this: The telecoms want to get paid twice for selling the same bandwidth. When someone wants to get paid twice for selling the same thing, that's usually called fraud in the real world. Ever seen "The Producers"?
"Destroy science and religion. Science would re-emerge exactly the same; but not religion." - Penn Jillette, paraphrased
I could see the sales pitch now... "We offer free Net Neutrality!"
"I pay for the bandwidth I use."
Including that "Maxed-out both ways","always on","24/7/12","$50/month","dragging down the entire neighborhood" broadband connection.
The nature of the Internet is that all of the ISPs rely on each other to create the value of their individual services.
Even without network neutrality, a two-tier internet would likely never occur. For it to happen, all of the backbone providers (yes all, not just some) would have to enter an agreement to provide the second high speed lane and share compensation for it (sound familiar?). If any network decides not to enter the agreement, no premium rate traffic crossing their network would see any benefit. This greatly reduces the value of the premium lane.
The only thing I'd be worried about without network neutrality is that services like Vonage would likely get blocked by the telcos to prevent competition. Not that some of them aren't already trying to do that.
>I didn't know he was such a sell out until that CNN piece.
You mean him being a White House press secretary didn't tip you off?
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Even if they weren't monopolies or oligopolies, the vast majority of consumers would probably go for the "cheapest" ISP. "Cheapest" would probably imply: the one most "subsidized" by large companies. Subsidized probably means: relatively suppressing the little guy.
"If the bells sold these connections knowing that they could not support them, they should be sued for fraud, they shouldnt be charging us MORE money to fix their fuck-up"
Go for it, big talker Just don't expect us to fight your battles.
Yes. God forbid any information enters your brain that does not re-enforce your already held beliefs. You are much better off exclusivley watching fox news, reading free republic, and listening to Rush.
There is no sense in even coming near information or ideas that may contradict what your god and fox news says. Remember those liberal elite intellectual bloggers are probably french and most definately communists who hate america.
evil is as evil does
So how would it work for stuff like slashdot, blogs etc, right now most of the blogs are free, but when tierd internet comes in, who would pay for a new blogging website that comes up.
What about the case where I generally have text in my website, but then do post some video's from time to time? Would this mean, I get two bills one for the regular use vs, one wherein there is streaming video?
Doesn't make too much sense to me. It is very straight forward that this would be the death of FREE internet real estate. I for one would never pay to post stuff so that others can read.
The article for neutrality was pretty good, but it failed to catch some counter-arguments. The first-class plane ticket or "toll road" analogies are false - you can already pay more for better service overall. ISPs charge more for extra bandwidth and higher consumer speeds. Now they want to charge providers for bandwidth on both ends: bandwidth for the amount of data they send and tier fees for being accessible. It would be more like collecting tolls from trucks AND collecting taxes from their destination. Your destination/company doesn't pay the fee, you can't drive on the toll road. It's like charging for stamps AND having the recipient pay.
Did you ever notice that *nix doesn't even cover Linux?
My 2 years-old often said its not fair to such and such. In meal-life, it is as subjective as saying someone being normal.
Whatever the telcos said, the arguments are simple: I built it, I own it, its fair I can do whatever I want.
They built the network, and we pay to subscribe. Fair. If they limit the service, we switch. Fair. If all of them limit their services, then what? They call it de facto standard, market practice, economic model and such. Then we are supposed to live under its shadow. Fair?
The Internet being so important with billions of people and trillions of dollars at stake. Imagine what it will be like if ALL the roads in US are owned by a few companies. It is nonsense and dangerous policy to let a handful telcos to own the network and let everyone look for their grace in the first place.
Let's think about what the fair shares these telcos can rightfully claimed. Practically every activity you do on Internet. It will be fair to charge for accessing websites across cities, to charge for downloading files or email attachments, to ask websites paying connection fee, tax every online transaction, or even every HTTP request just like making phone call. The technologies may not be easy to implement, but with the astronomical profits can be generated, I doubt if any telco not tempted to invest.
Certainly, we can switch from telco A to B, but it will only be jumping away from the lion's month into a tiger's claw.
~ bonelyfish
If they do this there will be huge problems with prices going up most likely. Due to the fact that companies will have to pay for bandwidth they will just make their rates higher so we have to pay more for services which would then screw us over. But if they do go through with this I plan on appealing it all the way I really don't care I'll go major in political science if I have to because this is a load of bull.
They are creating pictures of their kids, and porn
Wow, I don't think that comma is quite enough of a separation between the two.
People who lie are going to hell, but people who get paid to lie, and lie knowing that they're lying, have a special place reserved for them in hell. Pity Mike McCurry.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
http://metavid.ucsc.edu/blog/?p=27
my take on the net-neutrality issues and how it will impeed the types of projects we are working on.
I have a provider for my website and I have a provider for my connection.
If I get too many hits on my site, I get to pay extra.
If I download too much, I get to pay extra.
So if I use extra bandwith, I pay extra. And this as a user and as a content-provider.
I can only asume larger sites get bills about usage as well.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Craig's pizza order analogy is much better than the freeway lanes analogy. Remember this one, folks, next time you try and explain net neutrality to somebody who doesn't know what QoS is.
I never clip my fingernails for fear of dangling symbolic links.
I can already prioritize packets entering and leaving my network. I seem to be one of the few people gifted with an ISP who gets it, meaning I pay for 2 mbit, I get 2 mbit, they don't do anything to it. That means I can prioritize my traffic -- I can set ssh and counter-strike to be top priority, http next, and bittorrent last. I can even do that with specific sites -- if I wanted to, I could make Google faster than Yahoo.
The difference is putting that under my control, and putting it under the control of the ISP. More than that, they have specifically said that they'll give preference to Yahoo over Google if Yahoo pays and Google doesn't.
Of course, this lets BT traffic from my neighbors clog my access, so they should be able to throttle our entire pipe, on a per-person (not per-protocol) basis. And they should be required to tell the truth if they do that. They should post speeds of, say, 500k during peak hours, up to 6 megabits when no one's on.
I'm sure that if people actually saw the peak-hours, real-world max bandwidth as prominently displayed as the theoretical max, ISPs would actually start building the infrastructure they say they need money for. And again: If you actually had 6 mbits to the backbone, guaranteed, I'm sure you'd have no problems prioritizing your own traffic.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
INSRT STD HYP
God, I miss mod points.
Of course, they currently don't have common carrier status. But we should make it clear that in order to be exempt from what people do with your service, you have to be a common carrier.
I'm going to sleep now. Anyone else want to work out the implications for services like MMOs? I'd sure as hell like an MMO to force freedom of speech, but I'd also like them to be able to ban cheaters and harassers, and I don't want to require them to allow people to set up their own server with their own content.
Or, really, what does common carrier status actually mean, not just in terms of benefits, but in terms of responsibility? Just how neutral does a common carrier have to be? Because I want my ISPs to be 100% neutral, and my games to be maybe 50%...
It's hypocritical, I know. It kind of goes with things like, I want everything on my box to be opensource except multiplayer FPS games, because that would make it too easy to cheat.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
As I see it, the real problem here is that ISP's bank on the fact that you'll use a lot less bandwidth than what you think you're paying for. The broadband connection to your house is (almost) always on, and if you wanted you could download stuff at a pretty decent clip 24 hours/day, 7 days/week. Nobody really does that, though... most subscribers probably only use their connections for a few hours each day, and even then they probably don't get anywhere close to capacity. ISP's count on that behavior, which is one of the reasons that they usually prohibit running a server.
That's really not the case so much for Google and other big content providers. They pay for a certain level of service and expect to use that much all the time, and they pay for a guarantee that they'll have it.
Video and other services obviously mean that consumers are going to use a lot more bandwidth than they currently do. Content providers will pay for their end, but the consumer end of the system is still going to be swamped. ISP's will have to deliver the sort of bandwidth to consumers that consumers already think they're paying for. Raising consumer prices therefore means ISP's will have to confess their bait-and-switch ways, so that's not appealing. The only other option is to squeeze content providers.
One wonders why the ISP's can't simply turn on some portion of the zillions of miles of dark fiber that's already in place. I'm sure there's hardware to be purchased and all, but upgrading networks this time around ought to be pretty inexpensive compared to previous upgrades. That cost seems like a small price to pay to cover up the fact that they've been overselling their networks for years.
everyone pays their fare share NOW. this is all about the telcos wanting to CREATE A BRAND NEW STREAM OF REVENUE to offset their losses due to VOIP.
PERIOD.
don't let the fox frame the argument for watching the hen house, people.
i don't blame them for wanting this, but i don't believe they are entitled to it... we weren't born to feed them cash one way or other.
Websites these days are WAY heavy on the bandwidth, and from this perspective the bandwidth providers have a valid point (Google's minimalist designs notwithstanding).
Perhaps providers should be able to enforce a sliding, "bandwidth cap" that kicks in at various numbers of page views. If a site is willing to take steps to reduce network traffic by simplifying the HTML, compressing, reusing connections, and using less graphics/flash/java/etc., then they should be exempt from surcharges. This sliding bandwidth cap should be uniform among all providers/ISPs and approved by a committee composed of major and minor players (perhaps like ICANN was supposed to be).
OTOH, if some high-hit site is going to be a total bandwidth pig, then they should either support the network infrastructure or be relegated to low-priority connections.
I would think that this could be implemented in a fair and balanced manner, and, in the old days of the internet, it would be. Now, it will be some totally corporate fascist wet dream cooked up by AT&T that screws everybody.
Oh, for the good old days...
...for the telcos. He gets paid big bucks to spin things in their favour. The big thing I have issue with is when he says that either the content providers pay for infrastructure improvements, or the consumers will be forced to. Well, DUH! Either way, the consumers will still be forced to, by virtue of the fact that any costs they don't pay directly will simply be passed onto them in the form of higher prices. If you pay to drive in the HOV lane of the motorway, who's to say Verizon or Comcast will honour it? They may fetter access anyway...
'He who has to break a thing to find out what it is, has left the path of wisdom.' -- Gandalf to Saruman
I've never posted on Slashdot.
But I've been reading several of these threads about Net Neutrality here on Slashdot, and I honestly think that you guys are missing a very important point. Perhaps the point that both the content providers and the ISPs are colluding on to try to deflect the real issue here. It's not about making more money, and it's not about double dipping.
It's about control: control of the medium itself.
I'm willing to bet pretty much everyone here has put up a web server at one point or another, for whatever reason. Personally, I've done it on occassion purely to avoid the kind of regulation I'd get placed on me on some free webservices or even some pay webservices. But think about what this net neutrality issue will mean in the long term for people like me and perhaps you.
In the short term it might look like some sort of attempt to raise the bottom line through a method of "extortion". But almost all content providers in the small to mid-sized range use hosting services. These hosting services in turn host a large number of those small or mid-sized content providers in turn. If the backbone ISPs start signing these hosting companies up to their "allowed" or "high quality" lists, and a few bigger companies sign up... they really don't need to do it in an aggressive fashion. They dont need to shut us out of certain websites. They can grow this over the course of ten years, without anyone noticing, and slowly but surely there's going to be one result.
The guy who puts up a server of his own isn't going to be seen. You all know the barriers that have been raising to this. The spam blacklists, the security blacklists, the increasing number of barriers to getting a server up that can be seen by everyone. Costs are going to go up. Red tape will rise. Regulation will increase.
This net neutrality is not the first step. It's just another one toward an end that I think you should all be discussing here instead of the unfairness of double dipping. You guys should be discussing how and why the internet is going to turn into TV and radio before it: just another tool for the corporate world.
Is this really what we want?
This is the same sort of fear mongering that statists have always employed. "If service X is in private hands and under private control, there will be nothing to stop them from doing whatever they want with it! Therefore, it must be regulated!" Of course, they neglect to mention that if these "big greedy corporations" don't deliver a product that people actually want to pay for, they don't stay in business.
Okay, fine then, I'll read up on this Net Neutrality thing later, if it means we'll start seeing articles on other things.
- RG>
Hey pal, this isn't a pleasantforest, so don't waste my time with pleasantries!
it's about control!
Right now, an open and neutral Internet empowers any of us to do interesting things. The old school power structures are nervous about this for the same reasons they did about the printing press way back when.
No matter how the money flows, the expectation that just anyone can make a difference on the Internet will have been reset. Now, to make a difference, you are going to not only do something that empowers people, but also get along with the established players.
Time and time again, history has seen this all play out. The established players either adapt or slowly become marginalized. It's a tough deal --so tough they will always resort to legislation and litigation rather than just step up and compete on even terms for our mutual benefit. --even though their wealth comes from us!
Blogging because I can...
You have people running and controlling the infrastructure whom belong on both sides of the political spectrum. As such, expect to see MAD (Mutually Assured Disconnection) take place. It won't belong before ALL forms of political descent takes place for the sole purpose of shutting up the other guys.
How ironic! Rather then the government preventing political speech, we will be doing it ourselves...and be far far more effective in doing so.
Life is not for the lazy.
It's not like big companies like google and MSN would be the ones to "pay their fair share" in the case of loss of neutrality. If Some company decides to chop off access to one of the 'big' sites, then wayyyyyy to many of their customers are going to freak.
It's the smaller companies that are going to have to shoulder an uneven burden of "their fair share". Not only are they going to have to pay, where the larger and more populist sites are unlikely to, but they're going to pay more per byte because both the carrier and the site owner are going to have to recover administrative costs associated with the payments -- and that money is not going to come out of the big companies that will be paying either nothing, or a discounted fee.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Watching fox news, reading free republic and listening to Rush? LOL! I guess my sarcasm has been getting too subtle for a lot of people lately.
Telecommunication companies thought they could create differentiated products like "video on demand" where everyone would get their TV, movies and music from the telecommunication companies. Instead, P2P systems have taken care of those needs, with the result of people not wanting huge downloads from a central company, but rather they will download from other "end users".
Wrong - people DO want huge downloads from a central company, but they can't get that, so they're downloading from other end users instead. Things are slowly starting to change: now you can get some of the content you want, for a little more than you'd like to pay for it. In time, you'll be able to get more content for less money, but that's several years away (and remember, if Apple didn't have a monopoly position, they couldn't negotiate prices down as low as they are now - they had to fight pretty hard to keep songs at $0.99, and were only able to force the record companies to agree because the record companies can't afford to lose Apple's customers altogether).
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Google's ISP pays the telco for the bandwidth the ISP uses.
The Internet works. It pays for itself well, even better than centralized payments. Except if you're the telcos, and you have "unleveraged assets": legalized blackmail you bought in Congress and Mike McCurry's lobbying office. You could get paid not only by Google's ISP (or their ISP, etc), but also by Google itself, because you can cut them off anyway.
The telco answer to the Net Neutrality that has created $HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS in wealth, connected BILLIONS of people worldwide, and has been THE ONLY REALLY GOOD NEW THING PEOPLE HAVE DONE FOR GENERATIONS is Net Doublecharge. Which will make telcos even richer than their current blackmail and bribery has. And will of course destroy exactly the innovation and investment the telcos and McCurry are whining about as if they wouldn't drown it in a bathtup the moment they thought they could sell its soggy corpse.
--
make install -not war
ISPs are not common carriers.
The true issue behind net neutrality still comes down to money. But let's think in even easier terms and it boils down to two sides - the have and the have not. In the current scenario, the big telecommunications company believe that it isn't enough to charge only the customers that consume the media, they would also like to charge the providers of that media a means to distribute said media in question. Does this make any sense at all? Or perhaps something in existence will shed some light on the subject.
Let's take the example of a commerical shipping company, i.e. Federal Express. On any given day, countless numbers of business require Federal Express to deliver various goods through out the world. A customer makes an order request and pays for the goods and services as well as the shipping/handling. The bulk of the money is paid toward the company from which the said goods were purchased from while a portion of the payment is allocated for the cost of transporting the said goods to the customer. Should the customer choose an expedited means of shipment, the customer is given the option to provide additional funds to cover the cost of expedited transport of the said goods in question. After time spent in transportation, the goods arrive at the customer's location, an individiual signs for the delivery and receipt of package and the transaction is complete.
Similiar to the Federal Express transaction above, a computer network behaves very similiar but at a much higher repetition. But the basic model still holds true - a customer (client) makes a order request to a provider (server), a customer pays for the cost of transportation (2Mbps down/512kbps up), the provider (server) hands over the package (packet), Federal Express (various telecommunications company) delievers it to the customer at the rate they have paid for (2Mbps down/512kbps up) and the transaction is complete.
This is how things were when Network Neutrality was assumed.
Let's analyze what happens when Network Neutrality is removed from the original Federal Express model. But to make things simpler, let's take a simple shipping transaction.
John Smith needs a kick ass muffler from Unique Auto Sports and he needed it yesterday. He makes a call to Unique Auto Sports and orders the part and tells them to ship the part in question using Next Day Air. John will cover the cost of the added expense of shipping - not a problem. Now, a few years ago Unique Auto Sports wasn't big. They were doing ok business but lately with the hot new trend of compact sports cars modifications, their businesses is SOARING. Everyone wants it Unique and if it's not Unique, it's just another car. Business at Unique Auto Sports is definitely very, very well.
Lucky for Federal Express, they have an exclusive deal with Unique Auto Sports. Federal Express is the official delivery of Unique Auto Sports. Ground Shipping, 2-day air, next day air, all no problems. What needed to be done, Unique Auto Sports passed that information on to their customer, and it was part of the cost of shipping and handling. Network Neutrality in the past for Unique Auto Sports assumed that regardless of 1 package needed to be delivered or 1000 packages to be delivered, the cost of shipping a package was still on a package per package basis. Prices were already set and in place and it was very well defined. The cost of per package shipping using 2-day air was the same for one package or 1000 packages. With Network Neutrality removed, because Unique Auto Sports is doing so well and because their volume of is now higher than before, Federal Express would like Unique Auto Sports to pay a monthly fee of $10/package delivered. If Unique Auto Sports does not pay the monthly fee of $10/package that is to be delivered, Federal Express won't have to try to deliver the packages in the frame of time that Unique Auto Sports have rightfully paid for.
I am by no means an expert in Law, but at least looking at dictionary.com, we find the definition to the
Every ISP oversells its bandwidth because not everyone maxes out their pipe all the time. Even if everyone wanted to watch streaming media all day, people work and sleep on different schedules. It's probably true that right now the ISPs are too oversold, but it's relatively simple (if not cheap) to buy some fatter pipes at the central offices.
Overselling has always existed: "All circuits are busy" is just an extreme form of QoS hardwired into the phone network. IP has QoS built in, it's just up to the routers to interpret it. There are lots of ways to implement QoS in a net neutral way, and most of them don't require special pricing models unless additional QoS needs to be purchased.
All ISPs have to do is allocate enough of their total Internet bandwidth to QoS packets, and divide this up to their customers. Customers choose which packets they want to prioritize, and the ISP's routers just mark excess QoS packets from individual customers as normal priority. In fact, this applies to any network node, not just ISPs. Net neutrality in this case means that except for ensuring that peers don't exceed their QoS limits, networks let the peer decide which packets are high priority.
This is a desperate attempt by the telcos to maintain their monopoly. What they don't want anyone to talk about is the vast amount of dark fiber that is unused and how data compression technologies will continue to increase the capacity of said fiber. What they want you to believe is that the "pipes" of the creaky ol' internet are going to collapse from overuse in the near future unless they perform all kinds of "upgrades" and are allowed to charge all sorts of new fees for bandwidth that is "prioritized". Just another scam brought to you by America's corporate overlords.
This is why I love T-mobile. $10 a month, unlimited text and picture messaging (including email) for up to 5 lines (3 in my case). $6 a month, completely unlimited data. On top of that, my Motorola Razr has a mini-USB to USB cable that it came with, allowing me to upload media from my computer to my phone. Instead of paying $3 for a ringtone or whatever the going rate is, I can rip any of my CDs to my computer, then upload them to the phone to use as ringtones.
I don't know if it has to do with it originally being a European company (which I actually first grew to like when I lived in Germany for the half year before they started doing business in the US) that simply bought the network of an American one and went from there, but T-mobile seems to be doing "the right thing" for the most part. And boy is it nice that they unlock your phone for free for you, so if a friend's phone battery dies, said friend can simply stick their SIM card in mine and use it (Unless, of course, they have Verizon, which doesn't use SIM cards).
How many fulltime jobs can one man have?
"Mike McCurry writes about how the big companies should pay their fair share for the physical upgrade of the internet."
i assume the "big comapnies" are companies like google, ms, etc. that need
lots of bandwidth to do their business.
but please, i don't understand. aren't the big companies paying some other network
company for the net access like i pay my isp for the net access?
doesn't that give income to network company?
why on earth would network comapny sell their services AT A LOSS 'cause this is what
the sentence:
"Mike McCurry writes about how the big companies should pay their fair share for the physical upgrade of the internet" implies?
are network companies stupid?
would a car manuafturer sell a car at below production cost, then
lament to goverment that the buyer "should pay their fair share for the physical
upgrade of the car production plant"?
Let's call it what it is: Cable companies are pissed that people can access porn (and other content where big money is to be made) at the same price as /. (and other content where little money is).
It's a big cash-in on the guy who invented a better mousetrap and is using our cheese!!! without paying us for the added value!!!.
Disclaimer: I work for a "triple-play" company (phone, dsl, video-on-demand). I very seriously believe in 5 years we'll be either selling DSL and nothing else, or we'll be out of business.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Exactly it! Why do people pay for a connection? Just for the hell of it?
It's like buying a radio... you buy it to listen to radio stations. You buy an internet connection to access the web. No web, no connections, no telco revenue.
Dear Telecoms,
Really now, do you actually think putting lipstick on a chicken will fool us into thinking it's no longer a chicken? Let's see now... many years ago you tried to screw us consumers over by asking the government to treat data packets over dial-up modems differently than regular voice traffic. You were slapped upside the head then, and now you want us to kick you in the nuts too?
Look, a packet is a packet is a packet is a packet. It doesn't matter if that packet is a 0 or a 1. It doesn't matter if that packet is an analog signal or digital signal. It doesn't matter if that packet comes from Yahoo or Fuck-the-telecoms.com. The pipe is there. It flows. End of story. You are nothing BUT a common carrier of packets.
Don't try to put lipstick on yourselves, because you're not fooling anybody, especially not with the awful stench you carry around.
eTrade SUCKS
If you accept the COPE without net neutrality bill as logical, then i would like to present one more bill that will better our lives, foster innovation and business in a free market environment, with the logic employed in COPE :
We need to privatize TRAFFIC LIGHTS piecemeal. Every traffic light at every junction should be contracted to the highest bidding contractor. These contractors should be able to decide HOW the traffic flows, and they should be able to SET PASSAGE TOLLS at each traffic light, junction SEPERATELY.
And in a free market environment, unregulated of course.
They should have the right to PRIORITIZE traffic for the HIGHEST payer, the less paying drivers should HAVE TO WAIT until the most paying, prioritized traffic have passed from the junction. If need be, undefinitely.
Old ladies, young lads in will have to wait in their cars, as they do not have the cash to pay at every junction (just like their websites under cope). but hey, its a free market. Middle class citizens will be arriving home from work much, much late, as they cant afford to pay at every junction, but hey, at least WE WILL NOT HAVE ANY BOTTLENECK IN JUNCTIONS.
This is what COPE without Network Neutrality is.
Read radical news here
Let me bring another wonderful proposal for a bill, similar to the COPE bill without network neutrality in 'logic', to better our lives :
----
Senate should approve a bill to allow for privatization of defence
Government controlled military should be disbanded. The Companies should be able to go for, and win defence contracts for long periods of time, allowing them to produce/purchase weapons, recruit and train soldiers, do planning, maintain staff, respond to local and international threats as situations require. There should be no limit to how many such small defence divisions/commands could be created, in order to boost competition.
Also, "Hands off the military" - government should not regulate defence. Government regulation is bad for free market, for business. Free market will adjust and regulate defence better. If some business running a local defence force rebels and creates a local dictatorship, people will be able to choose another 'provider' of defence services then. If the rebels do not let people do that, another defence force could be called in to remedy the situation - no problem.
Some advantages of the privatized military are :
Better performance - Government is a bulky instutition. It is bureucratic. Taxes melt away in this structure. By privatizing the army, we will be able to optimally channel taxpayer money. That will allow us to reduce taxes around $30 per month per citizen or more. Local defence forces will be more efficient in performing tasks.
Competition and innovation - In a free market, defence and its business will thrive. Competition will drive prices low, also innovation will be much more abundant in matters defence.
Right to choose : The citizens will ve able to choose what company defends them. This way they will be better served.
Scalable ! : Free market will be much more efficient in adjusting what size and kind of military is needed where, so that it will be scalable to an extent beyond imagination.
Fire and forget : You dont need to do nothing as a citizen. Your local defence force will take care of all things for you. You just need to continue on your responsibilities... Move along, citizen. There is nothing to see here.
Of course, in a later date, some defence corporation ceo might come up and say "I have paid for this, this is my army. Im a jerk if i let them use my army freely. I have the right to take taxes from the local population, on top of the pay i get from the government, it is a free market, hands off the military" - but, oh well. It is a free market after all and they have paid for the military equipment. Also, regulation is bad.
Also it might be so that, when a local defence contractor is awarded a contract for 50 years, there might be no chance for the locals to change their defence company, legally, and they might be stuck with the company whatever they do. But oh. Its a legal right. Also, regulation is bad.
There is the slight possibility that some defence conglomerate would slowly rebel and take on the government for itself, however we should trust our businesses, for they are big businesses and it is a free market, and government regulation is bad.
So, as the same logic for COPE applies here, the wonderful congress, so wise in its wisdom and so correct in their judgment could not approve such a bill fast enough, if proposed, as they did approve cope in just 15 minutes.
But eh. Well, they arent representing the constituents are they ? You cant blame them.
Read radical news here
ISP's that decide to NOT to play this throttling game this throttling should simply advertise themselves as "EFF Net Neutral certified" etc. (yeah that means EFF would have to certify them I guess. Either that or we can take it on their word.
ISP's can advertise themselves as being throttle free.
Given how cheap regular internet access is, why would anyone want an ISP that practices bandwidth throttling? Unless there is some conspiracy to jack up prices.
Furthermore it may actually become expensive to practice bandwidth throttling. Most users will get pissed off when their favorite sites are slow. Which means they will have to target the little guy websites. And that to means overall slow experience for users. Also, managing the list of IP blocks that are throttled/unthrottled would be a pain. And furthermore, I wonder if the ISP's will have to provide a list of sites they are throttling to customers. Or is this something the EFF will have to publish?
The govt. really should make it much easier for people to to establish their own alternate telcos instead of paying money to these short sighted corporations who have what i would consider state sponsored monopolies.
This means the FCC should free up more spectrum bandwidth for independent WiFi style ISPs or free networks.
Yea. For eons now they have been overselling their bandwidth, as too little of users were ever using their allocated 512kbits, 1024 kbits etc, making good profits from selling the resources they do not have.
It is a common practice with bandwidth and disk space on the net - almost all hosting companies do that too, but to a REASONABLE extent. The system is very underutilized, and you want to make it so that it is at least 50% or so utilized.
But, these faggots, AT&T and others, oversold their bandwidth WAY TOO MUCH.
And when the video thing hit the net, ordinary people started using their full bandwidth, telcos' shit started to hit the fan.
They are seeking out a way out of the problem. But, they DO NOT want to INVEST the money they made by OVERSELLING TO US. They want SOMEONE ELSE pay for fixing their shit.
If you do such a thing in hosting business, you would be lynched. It is UNTHINKABLE. You fix your own shit.
But these white asses, SO decreipt and so rotten in the ways of conducting business, ARE PUSHING OUT LAWS TO MAKE OTHER PEOPLE & BUSINESSES PAY FOR THEIR OWN MESS.
This is unheard of. This is way beyond corruption, it is plain rottenness.
$10 million spent overnight in advertising... Proportionalize this effort and see the size of the shit they did under the tree. Guess the amount YOU will be paying to clean it.
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"Now they want control which sites you visit"
I keep hearing this. Can someone please explain it to me, or is it really just FUD like I suspect it is?
The USA and the telcos are very very free to create their own network withing the internet, AOL does this. Thats the free market at work no? Go ahead, create your own network see how it is a resounding success.
Does anyone know what impact this may have across geographical boundaries? I can only asume that if I (from the UK) want to get to google.com that I'll have to traverse a US network which my UK ISP will have had to peer with in some protracted way. But what about google.co.uk? Will British network providers leap on the bandwagon and start trying to double dip (I should coco) and if so,how are we going to stop them?
Anyone found a Government department willing to offer an opinion on this?
Natsu gusa-ya, Tsuwamono domo-ga, Yume no ato
Left hand . . . waving a sign which says we want to charge content providers for a better path and we are going to make money.
Right hand . . . waving a sign which says we are going to offer IPTV and it is gonna be great.
For some reason everyone has missed the connection between these two. The telcos don't want TV over the internet. The telcos don't want to have to provide the same kind of pipes to their competitors (for the same rate) which they are using for IPTV. The telcos want to be able to slice and dice their network as they see fit. So, why did they say anything about it in the first place. Because IPTV is not regulated because it is a data service. RF cable is a franchised service which is not a data service. Using the same rules which protect the cable operators would make it to where the telcos have no defense against internet IPTV. The telco would just become a delivery pipe for content. So, they want to be able to sell better pipes to content providers. They want to say that IP is IP. But, IPTV, and anything else that makes money for which they want a cut of the action is special. HAND WAVE!!! Get everyone all spun up about how unfair it all is, confuse the legislators, pass some complicated laws which provide them what they want . . . additional protection from competition.
When you think about it, it is the availability of content and services from Ebay, Google, etc. that create subscriber demand to even get a connection. The Telcos are the ones taking a free ride at their expense. Ebay, for instance, has invested heavily to create a community that generates content and engages users online for hours. It is this demand, or them wanting video, or a more responsive gaming experience, etc. that motivates users to shell out for a better connection. The Telcos sell access to all of these services and content to users and leverage it, although they pay nothing for it. I do not really hear people putting forth this argument, though.
Ah, I didn't polish my post enough and make my point clear enough. Geoff Huston did a much better job in his presentation that I mentioned.
The key word in the "a central company" is "a". Lots of different companies letting you download stuff pushes the telecommunication companies into the commodity market. The telecommunication companies hoped to be competing against other telecommunication companies for delivering their products from their TV and movie studios, the "great convergence" that caused Timewarner/CNN/AOL to merge and Disney to invest in the Go network, etc., not with companies like "youtube", "google" or "myspace" which no one ever heard of a decade ago.
The point in the first paragraph where I mentioned features "call waiting" and "answering machines" is that these companies were used to being the only ones that could create new features. Downloadable music would only happen when they had created the appropriate product that could be profitable, not when some company like "napster", "iTunes", or "allofmp3" figured out how to do it.
If you wanted the content controlled by your phone company, you would have to buy ISDN/ADSL. If you wanted the content controlled by your cable company, you would have to buy from them. If you wanted both of these differentiated products, well, you would have to buy both. And no one really wants any content other than what was on TV, movies or the major record labels, right?
By breaking net neutrality, these telecommunication companies hope to at least recover some of the control over packets that they send to you, even if they lost the ability to originate the packets.
SPF support for most open source mail servers can be found at libspf2.
"We don't care WHAT you provide, we just transport your data"
=> cannot be held liable for transporting
"We want to earn additional cash for YOUR traffic"
=> get sued and possibly go to jail for transporting illegal content
The costs that content providers will be passed off to the consumer in one way or another. I expect internet access from your ISP to remain relatively the same. A lot of people would simply stop using the internet if the cost was raised by even $20 a month for the average user. No, these charges will be passed on in other, creative ways that will hide them from the average consumer (who has no clue that this battle is even being fought right now, they're too busy watching Lost), or be presented to consumers in a way where they will be upset at the "content provider" rather than the telcos.
- Do you play World of Warcraft or another MMO? Expect the monthly fee to double, since they will need to become a preferred provider to every major telco in order to keep their connection speeds fast enough. Otherwise, the game won't be playable for their customers.
- Want to shop at Amazon.com or another online store? Expect there to be a non-trivial surcharge tacked on to every item so that the store can pay up.
- Enoy reading online news? Be prepared to see four times as many ads or be forced to pay a few bucks for a subscription. The news providers will need the extra money to be preferred content providers.
- And the fate of bloggers, small web comics, independent music artists, etc. that won't ever be able to generate the money to pay for being preferred providers? Expect the speeds their pages load to be about ten times slower than they are now.
Oh, and when the telcos get to "upgrading the internet," expect to see the bill in your taxes. It'll likely be subsidized heavily by the government. That way the telcos can charge you even more for the "upgraded" internet they didn't even have to pay for in the first place.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
Prof. Tim Wu at Columbia Law School testified before Congress on why Net Neutrality is necessary. Quoting from his testimony:
disclosure: I work for Prof. Wu. I just thought people here might be interested in some historical perspective on the current debate.
So, what the telecoms seem to be saying is they want to build new infrastructure and they want to charge sites access fees, possibly based on the bandwidth used by those sites.
How will these new technologies tie in to my internet connection? This all seems very vague.
My question is...which way will this go:
* Telecoms successfully build new network that is different than the internet, come up with billing methods to get money from both client and server, and...nobody uses it.
* Telecoms start charging Google and Amazon $$$ for their existing net access.
* Or the combo: telecoms try to create another network, nobody goes for it, so they are start charging GOOG and AMZN for existing net access.
Ok, let's do it like this:
Send a letter to your congressman saying that you will not be able to vote for him, since you would incurr in costs for doing it and it's not fair that (s)he gets the vote for free.
how long until
In defense of the parent, I didn't read that last statement as being a proposed new law. More of a "Personally, I think things would work better if X, but..." And it wouldn't even have to be made a law. When network upgrades became necessary, it would be sufficient for a locality to simply upgrade the network themselves and refuse to issue digging permits to the major carriers. Now, since it's the locality's pipe, they can rent it out to whoever they please. It would be a revenue stream for the city.
Of course, this would work for as long as it took for a lobbyist to bribe a small time politician into an exclusive deal. So maybe it wouldn't work after. But in any event, that's why it was a short comment, and not a three page rant. And notice he never said anything about making it a new law.
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
NOW !!!
If you do spend money to advertise and BUY senators NOW, it is possible that we can still save the equality on the net at the senate.
Theres no ethics, theres no honesty here. The telcos spent $10 million on advertising and lobbying OPENLY - god knows how many was spent as 'donations' to congressmen and women.
This is a fight of life and death. Do not hesitate, do not tarry - just spend and spend now.
You will be paying that kind of money to the telcos if you dont spend it now on lobbying if we lose.
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Server s-ISP {Backbone} y-IPS User
You pay your IPS to connect.
your ISP in turn pays for a connection to the backbone.
In turn the server pays for its' ISP connection and in turn
that ISP payees to connects the backbone.
The many corporations that connect traffic across
the backbone do so in a similarly manner.
each paying to get data move from point to point.
In the end all costs are passed back to the ISP's and in
turn to the Users and Servers.
The system works. But when One ISP owns the servers Its own
backbone a driving force to shutout competitors start to come in to play.
This is why we need legislation to make the monopolies play fair.
When your server wants to start streaming data-rich video The ISP
will charge them for the bandwidth being used.
In turn when your ISP sees that 100s of its customers are
watching the same CNN stream it will cashe it and save
on its upstream costs.
The Internet can work without double billing and monopolistic cheating.
As soon as we start double billing the servers the servers will go away.
and all that is left will be the ISP's services.
The Internet has changed the world.
We no longer have to pay per minute long distance fees for data.
The phone company dose not like this. And wants it all back.
When there is only one thing to connect to the Internet will be
like TV all you get is what is given to you. Is that progress?
But I love their music!
Verizon is cherry picking communities to do demonstration rollouts. I live in one of the first communities picked (Columbia, MD), and not even the entire community is wired. I can't get FIOS and they can't tell me when in the future I will be able to get it. Good luck seeing it if your'e not piloted.
And Verizon is not the best company to pick if you're aking a point about last mile being not a natural monopoly. They already have all the right of ways from local government
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
The telco's allocates more bandwidth to one website at the expense of another, then are they are not still using the same bandwidth they currently have? If they use bandwidth in this manner how can they need more? If I subscribe to a website in which I pay x amount of fee to download media at x amount of download speed then that's the service I'm entititled to. If I browse a site that has limited graphics why should I expect it to go slowly? I pay my ISP for a service and expect it to be fulfilled. Why should I pay for example for 1Mb broadband service and the sites I browse take about 2 or 3 minutes to access as they can't afford to pay the telco's for preferential bandwidth? If I want I can pay for higher download speeds but I can't be expected to pay the same amount of money for slower download speeds.
I just called mine.
Get up!
I already pay the phone company for net access. If its not enough they should raise there rates rather than trying to squeeze money out of the sites >>I>I payed for. If anything the phone company should give all content providers free access since it makes the network more useful to paying end users.
Back in the mid 90s, at the beginning of the dot-com boom, there was a certain class of starry-eyed fool running around saying the internet "can't be controlled". This was the same set of people who also kept proclaiming companies which didn't give all their stuff away online for free didn't "get it". At the time, I recall wondering how these people could be so naive. Once the internet became too big, everyone would be dependent on a small handful of very large companies which controlled all the major links in the internet. Those companies could then get together and begin to ... control the internet.
Here we are 10 years later, and sure enough, the vast majority of net traffic in the US passes through one of the big three telcos. And those three big telcos have now had the last laugh against the starry-eyed prognosticators. Last week's Congress vote was the final nail in the coffin of any notion of an internet which "can't be controlled". It's over, it's done. The end.
Free Hans!
I don't know 30 people you insensitive clod.
Seriously.
There is a popular notion that companies which cannot survive in an even, competitive market should not survive at all.
(Of course, some industries just aren't profitable enough for this standard -- that's what subsidies are for.)
Move into the jungle, and forget the internet. Just be ready to move if the telephone company wants to destroy the jungle for a new antenna.
Nothing will come of this. It's all bullshit "what ifs". There's no such thing as a "good new law".
The big players are going to do just fine whatever pay arrangement is set up. That's because they're big, and can inflict pain on anyone who squeezes them too hard. Google, MSN, Yahoo, etc. , will not suffer much under this new regime.
Who will suffer? Small, noisy, annoying content providers. Slashdot, for example. Without Net Neutrality, all this piss and vinegar (and truth) that gets spewed at Micro$oft and the rest of the computer and IT industry become available for throttling. Not by overt censorship, oh no! "But bandwidth is limited, you see, and Slashdot doesn't really serve a wide segment of the public, and we've had complaints from some of our large paying clients, and, well, those people are hardly RESPECTABLE. Slashdot is still available, of course, but it takes 5 minutes to load each page, since we've de-emphasized its priority. Do you know how many people are in line to vote for the next America's Idol? Now there something that is serving a broad demographic."
The Net has served as the samizdat of the new soviet/industrial States of America. If we give the big boys entire control of our digital newsprint, we little fish will be silenced.
Net Neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine of the digital era. If we lose it, we've lost just about everything.
Fundamentalism is a crime against humanity
Will these fees also apply to international publishers? What if they're unwilling or unable to pay?
Essentially blocking/limiting our access is censorship, IMO.
Heck, google alone gets so much traffic that just putting a link on their front page to savetheinternet.com would make a huge difference.
Anyone from google out there reading this?
Or does nobody actually read articles more than 24 hours after they have been posted?
I hate Liberals and Conservatives.
If you are a Liberal or a Conservative, then HAVE A NICE DAY!
Courage.
Exactly. The discussion on Net neutrality often overlooks the individual, and the small players, who stand to loose most. I find it odd that concern centers round eBay, Google and Yahoo. Yes, it is a worry that telecom companies will gouge extra margins from them, but what about the 2 man start-up. Or the frustrated activist. Or the discenting voice ?