Senators, ISPs, and Network Neutrality

Polarism submitted a good article about net neutrality that is currently running on Ars. It's a good explanation of where the pieces of the problem are, the government issues, the industry issues, etc. Worth a read.

Comments

Re:Why the red herring?

[morgan_greywolf]

Lets use an example. I'm looking at Toogle from the east coast. My ISP is Comcast, and (for sake of argument, I have no idea who it really is) Toogle is hosted on a west coast provider, say, Covad. My HTTP request is sent from my system to my ISP's node. The ISP's node then routes the packet to it's next hop, which might be on an AT&T network. The AT&T node then routes the packet to another node, which might be in a completely different network, and so on and so forth, until the packet reaches Covad. The response is performed in much the same way, until it reaches my system. Now, yes, both Comcast and Covad are paid for this transaction, from me in my ISP contract, and from Toogle in the hosting agreement. AT&T's complaint is that they have to carry this traffic for free across their network, and get nothing from this particular transaction.

But Comcast and Covad are paying for their upstream connections to AT&T. Do you think Comcast and Covad connect to the Internet for free? Everybody who connects pays their upstream provider. It's not like either Comcast or Covad are one of the big backbone providers.

Re:Lack of basic understanding

[uniqueCondition]

Offered at a loss

DSL/cable isn't being offered at a loss. This is simply untrue! Go check out the financial statements of your local exchange carrier (LEC) http://www.sec.gov/edgar.shtml

Lots of them make huge coin and are paying out big dividends.

Forget the huge windfall later, most assume that data will eventually be commoditized in the way voice was (i.e., things will get worse).