Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Yeah, it's a small distinction, but a powerful one.
The whole point of Net Neutrality is not to make everything neutral, as the telcos want you to believe....the point is to have fairness. So if you're using Vonage VoIP, or using Skype VoIP, or ANY other VoIP, it's okay to prioritize those packets so long as you prioritize everyone's VoIP traffic exactly the same.
That's where the telcos want to confuse people. And they're doing a great job with this confusion *grumble, grumble*.
AccountKiller
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.
You're completly misunderstanding. Actually no you're not..you're just not cynical enough.
Net Neutrality only concerns itself with the source of a packet. QoS rules can still be applied, but they need to be applied without regard to the source of the packet. Why the telcos are so big on killing net neutrality, is exactly so ISPs can give their/their allies internet applications huge advantages over competitors. In fact, everybody knows this. This is why there are actually changes to various anti-trust regs that are being pushed along with killing net neutrality.
The one thing I have to say is, if internet companies have to pay to send their content over telco pipes, then the telcos should pay the content providers for providing the content that makes people want to have internet connections.
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
Well that's where we need to concentrate the efforts.
Net neutrality becomes irrelevant in a market with choice.
Take the natural local monopoly away and give it to the localities and all this becomes irrelevant.
I wonder if this is the entire reason this debate is centered on the net neutrality provisions, to take attention away from the real issue, the breaking of the local monopolies.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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!
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.
No, protocol based traffic shaping is already allowed and in use (and that is fair).
The end of net neutrality means that if you sign for VOIP service with company A, and that company doesn't pay YOUR ISP's (extortion) fee, your ISP will (at least be able to) lower your traffic quality (possibly to such a degree it is no longer functional). And maybe your ISP offers a competing VOIP service. Since they don't have to pay themselves this fee, they have an unfair market advantage (and they could set the fee to whatever they want)...
Also, it could completely disolve the peer-to-peer nature of the internet. I'm not talking about file sharing. If person A wanted to have a video-conference or whatever with person B, in order to ensure decent service, A would need to payoff B's ISP and B would need to payoff A's ISP.
This sort of prior arrangement isn't very feasible in a network of peers...
Don't fall into the american media delusion that in order to be fair and balanced, you must present both sides of every story. If there was a story about the government proposing to chop off baby heads and offer them as a sacrifice to satan, would it be necessary to present both sides of the debate?
"Chopping off baby-heads? Why, that's insane!"
or,
"How do we know that offering baby-heads to satan won't solve all our problems?"
Must we link and quote from both articles? And yes, handing the internet over to the telecoms to devour is just that crazy.
Yes, but this is not about bandwidth. That is a commodity and it is lowest price. The telcos are pushing for a way to decommitiditize this; basically access to end-users. In addition, this is being pushed by several large companies. This allows a company like MS to control the net. Sadly, once this starts, I think that we will witness the break apart of the internet.
Funny thing is, if congress would remove all monopolistic actions and actively prevent a local monopoly (except for possible a very local access monopoly by a company that provides nothing but CO to/from endpoint) in any community, then it would stand a chance. But this congress and admin will not do that. This is all about large company protection that will guarentee the break-down of the net in the USA. Sad, really.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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...
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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;
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.
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