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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.
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
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 :)
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.
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.
Wow, there's just no way that statement could end badly!
You make a good point. Every time the big telecom corporations talk about offering tiered levels of service so that they can offer improved, lightning-fast content, what they are really saying is that they want to restrict the flow of the internet so that customers are drawn more to their commerical poopfest.
They want to offer us fast connections to "partner" sites so that we can shell out 20 bucks for a drm-crippled movie download, or to another site where we can pay $19.95 a month to listen to streaming music.
What the telecoms really want is control over the internet similar to the way in which cable t.v. is controlled: compartmentalized areas of advertising-infested crap. The internet as it exists today is too fragmented and open to easily hypnotize the consumers. The telecoms want to change that. They want control.
A tiered internet would really suck donkey-balls, but in some ways I won't be disappointed if it happens. The internet seems to be becoming one big tool for citizen tracking and monitoring, both by the government and the corporations. Perhaps the glory days of the internet are over no matter what happens.
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.--
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.