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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.'"
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.
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
No you got it all backward. There is decent competition on the backbone level.
There's a natural monopoly on the local level.
One good thing this act has in it is provisions to encourage localities to take control of last mile. Even as a Libertarian I diverge from the party line and believe that the last mile natural monopoly should be municipally controlled.
Putting some fake competition into a natural monopoly via "must carry" laws never works out very well. Just make the physical last mile media locally owned and let the companies that want to use it rent it from the city/county.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
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
Funny.
Verizon has a fucking DSLAM installed in the local CO of my town, tells people via their online billing service that they qualify for DSL, yet they refuse to provide the service because they are trying to blackmail the Texas PUC.
Explain that.
Mod parent up.
How come no one has any videos of the _television commercials_ that were playing on network news on election day 2000? Am I the only person who noticed that, on that night, defense companies like Lockheed Martin were running commercials with slogans like "Lockheed: Getting ready with the technology to fight the information warfare of the 21st Century."
I think that there is a war on information. And we are the targets. Maybe it's time to fight back, eh?
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 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?
Who cares? Look up what your congressperson / senators voted for, and then vote accordingly in November.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
If we let companies own major local roads, they might try to put up roadblocks to charge FedEx and other wealthy companies extra money. And then local governments would have to pass laws that say "companies that own road infrastructure can't block competitors from driving around". But, as you said, that's really a band-aid. Having the ability to deny access or charge extra to individuals or corporations for really basic things like driving or communicating is a really big deal, and maybe it's better for local taxes to fund the development instead.
The problem is asymmetric costs. Because it's an INTERnet, the traffic that I put on may pass over several networks before it gets to you. I only pay my provider, but may be impacting your provider.
This sort of thing is supposed to be taken care of by peering agreements, based on the idea "If you carry my traffic, I'll carry yours." This only makes sense, though, when the two numbers are roughly equal -- ie I'm sending about as much to your network as you are to mine.
With residential ISPs, this breaks down -- most consumers are major data sinks and not data sources. Heck, how many of us have some sort of asymmetric bandwoth -- 6 MBPS down and 256 kbps up.
I don't think anybody disagrees that "broad"band ISPS need to increase bandwidth -- there are all sorts of applications which are just too bandwidth-intensive for (most of) the current technologies. (Think IPTV). The problem is that they're going to want to recover their costs somehow, and there are two sets of people out there: their subscribers and the service providers. The ISPs have made the calculation that they may not be able to change their customers an additional $75 every month. But, if they can avoid net neutrality, they may be able to get that from places like Google's video service.
The problem is that Network Neutrality has been framed as "Yahoo pays your ISP to slow down google's service." No service provider in his right mind is going to do that. (Well, there may be one. But everybody else will learn their lesson from that one.) It's really about "Yahoo paid extra to have access to your ISP's new bandwidth limit and Google didn't. So, Yahoo's video service looks better than Google's."
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?
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.
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make install -not war
You are absolutely right. It is taken care by peering agreements. In the rest of the world. In the US the telco's killed the peering points 5-6 years ago to be replaced by private peering between the tier 1 cartels.
An average EU national non-tier 1 ISP has 2-3 upstream transit connections and 30+ peers. An comparable US ISP has 2 upstream connections and that is it.
Net Neutrality in the US is dead and has been dead for 5+ years now. The net is already operated by a bandit cartel and instead of moaning Google should start operating peering points on the model of the UK Linx, Belgix, DGIX, etc. This will put the net back in order in 6 months or less. It has the resources to do that so it should put its money where its mouth is.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
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>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:
Under their self-proclaimed banner of "neutrality," Google, eBay and other big online companies are lobbying for what amounts to a federal exemption from paying. Unfortunately, their thinly disguised effort at self-interest would dramatically shift the financial burden of paying for these upgrades onto the backs of ordinary consumers.
Thanks for digging this up. It hurts my stomach and raises my blood pressure but it's a great illustration of what the anti-neutrality people are about.
See, McCurry says "...big online companies are lobbying for what amounts to a federal exemption from paying". They're paying. They will continue to pay. What's significant here is that McCurry knows perfectly damned well that Google doesn't get free bandwidth and isn't asking for it.
Good and even merely tolerable policies don't need to be sold like that.
"Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society." -- Ralph Waldo Emerson
I think a better example would be Company X owns a road they charge a toll. The Toll road gets you to where you want to faster but you have to pay for it. It does not discrimiate for or against Fedex compared to UPS because it makes money off both. If UPS finds a better way to get there then it does not pay the toll. There has got to be a balance between net neutrality and non net neutrality find it out is the hard part.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert