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?

[Ana10g]

I'll attempt to clarify the issue that the telecoms are taking with the current setup (note that I support the issue of Net Neutrality). Yes, currently, when a hosting contract is signed, you do pay for the bandwidth to get to the first node (or your provider's node, over a few hops). But, the problem the telcos are having is that when traffic originating on a separate part of the network onto another provider's network, the second in line just has to forward the packets on around, without charging for that traffic.

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.

What I would like to know is if the backbone providers already charge a fee to connect to one of their nodes directly. I'd like to think that they do, but it's an uneducated guess.

Re:Moonie Times

[Doc Ruby]

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All the Moonie zombie TrollMod horde can muster is 50%? Moon's astroturf budget must be shrinking.