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Net Neutrality, Schlocky Salesmen vs Monopolist Plumbers
Andy Kessler has written a short tongue-in-cheek summary of the net neutrality debate over on the Weekly Standard. Kessler identifies the two sides as the 'schlocky ad salesmen' (Google, Yahoo!, etc) and the 'monopolist plumbers' (Verizon, AT&T, etc) and when you add the politicians to the mix it creates a pretty untenable situation. From the article: "But the answer is not regulations imposing net neutrality. You can already smell the mandates and the loopholes once Congress gets involved. Think special, high-speed priority for campaign commercials or educational videos about global warming. Or roadblocks--like requiring emergency 911 service--to try to kill off free Internet telephone services such as Skype. And who knows what else? Network neutrality won't be the laissez-faire sandbox its supporters think, but more like used kitty litter. We all know that regulations beget more lobbyists. I'd rather let the market sort these things out."
Google may have stumbled across a very expensive but robust solution.
The "internet" didn't get big until the 1990's because that's how long it took for just modems to get out from under Ma Bell's monopoly thumb. There's very many articles here on /. about how the telcos tried to sabotage regular 56k dial up... like we never get that because they won't clean up the lines! Every Net Neutrality argument misses this point. It's like now that stuff is faster we forgot what life was like when we "rented" phones, and paid $$$ per minute charges. What's even more disheartening is that there's a good share of Reps and Senators that were in Congress when we Made THAT rule... and when we broke up Ma Bell... and they STILL don't get it!!!
...which is at the end of TFA. Kessler raises the issue of arguing for an application of eminent domain. The government-granted monopolies (cable TV and the RBOCs) aren't motivated to provide serious broadband at a reasonable cost—in fact, they're motivated not to (e.g. if you have the bandwidth needed for IPTV, you'll ditch plain old cable and even digital cable)—so pay them a reasonable price, grab the plant, and hand it over to someone who will do so.
(I'm glad that the item was linked to, but it would have been nice had the summary summarized TFA in its entirety (like, say, my submission of it that was rejected... not that I'm bitter, you understand...).)
RTFA here. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Artic les/000/000/012/348yjwfo.asp
The summary does injustice.
The author is neither pro nor anit-net neutrality. The next paragraph following the quote in the summary starts with "But what market?"
Kessler acknowledges that the Teleco's are aging giants and that something needs to be done. At the same time he does not think that NEt Neutrality and regulation are the right answer.
He does bring up an interesting tactic of using the Kelo ruling on eminent domain to sieze teleco wires and hand them to new players who want to expand and innovate.
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
"This wouldn't even be an issue if the ISPs were not government-sanctioned monopolies"
Umm, they're not, with the exception of ISPs who are an arm of a telco -- and even in that case, the ISP subsidiary is not a government-regulated monopoly.
The telcos, whose fiber they are using, are government-regulated monopolies.
Perhaps you misunderstand what the whole point of regulated monopolies are, why they came about, and what the current problem is with how they are regulated.
The government regulates, and allows these companies to exist:
(1) To provide universal service. There is no economic incentive to lay cable out to Bumblewatsit, so in order to make sure the telco monopolies do, they force them.
(2) because of cost of entry. There is a natural monopoly in telco because of the cost of cabling and other infrastructure.
(3) Largely because telephone service is considered a necessary utility, government wants everyone on equal footing when it comes down to acquiring service.
So what's the problem? It's not the monopolies themselves, they are the most efficient way of delivering these services -- the government needs to ensure that the consumer is not gouged, however. The problem is that government regulation has fallen short of its mark, and the telcos (who are in their strong position in terms of internet service due to their monopolies granted for telephone service) are taking full advantage of the pay-to-play government we have now.
if you actually look at any individual telecommunications market, and see real competition
OK, look at my market. Cablevision (OO). Verizon DSL. Dialup, from many providers. This isn't about the ISPs, this is about who owns the fiber they transmit over, and the monopolies that exist in the throughput fiber market.
So, go ahead and open it up for competition. Who is going to lay the thousands and thousands of miles of fiber on speculation that they can compete?
Not only that, but by opening up the market, you've just limited your ability to regulate that market. So what you'd get is people in dense markets getting options, while people in scarce markets getting dick-all.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
My parents have a choice of internet providers. They can choose the Cable company... or they can get dial-up access. That's it. About one out of every five people in the U.S. do not have any real choices. Saying "the free market should work out this problem" is fine in theory, but in practice, it fails miserably because we do not have, have never had, and likely never will have a free market in information services. The barriers to entry are too high for the relatively small ROI.
You can tell that most of the people giving these opinions have never lived anywhere in the South, where over half the population lives in rural areas, and where broadband availability is spotty, at best. An awful lot of hard-working Americans depend on the government to protect them from abusive monopolies like the telcos. That's what net neutrality is really about---ensuring that users have the freedom to choose where on the internet they go without getting inferior service because their ISP is playing extortion games. The ISPs have already said that they hope to do this. This isn't hypothetical. This is in the planning stages.
Back in the early days of telephone, the government did something really smart. It passed laws that said that the phone services had to make phone service available to any customer no matter how far out in the weeds they lived. It wasn't always pretty---indeed, it often included using parts of fences, etc. as sections of the connection---but everyone had equal access to the technology. Government intervention could do the same for data services, but the big boys don't want that. They want to be able to charge companies for preferential access to their customers while simultaneously locking their customers into their service by limiting competition in the marketplace, through distance limitations (only servicing the customers they can cover at a minimal expense), through not providing DSL service on all of their COs or cable modem service in all their served cities, and through trying to block CLECs from being able to provide data services on their lines. In short, they want to have their cake and eat it, too.
The way I see it is this: the telcos and cable companies should have a choice:
Make the law such that the company can choose which to do. Then, the free market might stand a chance of working this out....
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Think of Google, MySpace, iTMS, etc. as the content providers -- much like NBC, VH1, etc. provide content for traditional cable service. Then you can see that the "tiered internet" concept is ass-backwards: cable companies pay the content providers (TV networks) for the privilege of serving up their programming, because that is what drives the local cable market. Similarly, Internet content providers are what drive individuals to sign up for broadband service. The major Internet sites are already providing the content to the telcos and cable operators free of charge. Thus, the concept of a "tiered" internet is pure and unprecedented greed.
Verizon has installed all the equiptment necessary to provide DSL service in my town - this is according to both the local techs and online account access.
They refuse to offer the service to anyone because they are trying to blackmail the PUC into doing what they want.
Their actions do not make any sense.
Can the market really sort this out? In a word ... YES.
The problem is that RARELY is the market allowed to anymore. People fear Monopolies. Me? I Look at them not as problems, but oppotunities in disguise. Linux would NOT be where it is today, if it weren't for M$ Monopoly. Linux, IMHO, is a direct result of the Market routing around a break in the system.
Some systems, it just takes longer to route around the problem, but it eventually will.
Take Oil (Petroleum) for example. A hundred years ago, a naturally occuring monopoly occured in the marketplace and Standard Oil controlled a M$ type share of the Oil and Gasoline market. Along came do-gooders creating laws that broke up the company into itty-bitty pieces. Today, we are OIL dependant, and have no alternatives (to speak of).
Let us say, for the sake of arguement that nothing was done 100 years ago and Standard Oil was left untouched. Today, we would probably have 1) more mass transit 2) cities and highways designed for effiency alternative transportation etc 3) alternative fuels 4) no wars over oil (Iraq/Iran???) and the pety dictators world wide.
The unintended consequences for breaking up Standard Oil are completely unknown, but I am 100% sure that the world would have routed around the problem by now. But for political expediency and short term gains, we chose otherwise, and are living with the consequences.
Necessity is the mother of invention. We don't "need" another fuel source, so none has been invented. Relating this back to M$ and Linux, WE needed an alternative to M$ and Linux was the route around the problem (over simplified version).
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Lets see, congress drags the big search engine executives in and reprimands them for cow-towing to the Chinese in their censorship efforts. Then when the tel-cos decide they want to censor not with regard to politics but in the name of The Dollar, congress is all for it. This is a perfect example of the ridiculous state of our affairs.
Censorship for a political gain = bad
Censorship for a financial gain = good
It makes me sick to my stomach.
I don't think ISP's will degrade or restrict access to web sites (stop your typing about port 25 and craigslist now). I do think what they will do is offer private or exclusive bandwidth to their partners. For no extra charge to the end user I expect them to cordon off a portion of their fiber bandwidth to be used exclusively by their partner.
Let's say you have a fiber connection and a 15mbps plan. I think the ISP would give you a value added extra 5mbps for dedicated for use by a third party, let's say MSN.
So in your house you have your son using up bandwidth playing counterstrike, your daughter chatting away on skype while downloading a Warner movie using Bittorrent and your significant other watching a streaming video on how to boil water from YouTube.
You want to check your stocks so you go to google, google has to share that 15mbps connection with the other apps and is slow, so you switch over to MSN and find it blazingly fast in comparison. So you start to use MSN more and more and google less and less. Is that because MSN is doing a better job then google? No it is because the ISP has partnered with MSN. Over time this will limit your choices and you will find that you only use you ISP's partner services.
Has your ISP violated the tenets of Net Neutrality? They are not blocking your or slowing down access to sites.
I think that in the context of this article, it should be obvious that those are the ISPs I'm discussing.
Precisely.
Perhaps you misunderstand the fundamental problem of monopolies, which is their ability to use their power in the monopoly market to expand and control additional markets. In the case of these ISPs (telecommunications companies), they are using their mandated toll-control of the public byways to establish toll-control of the actual information being transmitted.
I don't see how this disputes what I said. They are monopolies, and they are abusing their monopoly power.
I asked for real competition. You have two monopoly providers (okay, a duopoly -- but is that such a benefit?) of high-speed access, and you have real competition in the only area where it doesn't matter much anymore (dialup? You might as well call a cross-country rickshaw driver real competition for the airlines.)
The physical laying of lines should be kept separate from the communication of information. Do this however you like -- even have the government buy the lines with tax money (which is effectively what's being done anyway, just with an additional layer of obfuscation).
Don't get me wrong. I agree that there are fundamental physical constraints involved, as with the sharing of any public resource. The solution, however, isn't achieved by using government-enforced monopolies wherever possible. The solution is to use government-enforced monopolies only where monopolies must exist by the physical nature of the system. In this case, the actual pieces of information being transmitted are independent of the physical system; all bits of data can be treated alike with no consi
You know, this isn't exactly 100% related to the article, but, one thing I've been wondering about since I first heard about this is, what's to stop the companies from deciding they don't like, oh, say their competitors or someone who hasn't paid his extortion fees (and don't kid yourself, by every definition I can find -- except the one that relies on the word "illegal" -- this is extortion plain and simple) on schedule and setting latencies to that site so incredibly high that it causes anyone trying to visit to get a timeout? Essentially cutting that site off of the web as far as anyone is concerned. Even if they can't get away with setting it that high, imagine if some big online game company accidentally bounces a check or something. If they add any latency to those lines at all, the game company goes right down the pot. Online games just don't work once heavy latencies start. Who would pay to play, say World of Warcraft, when latency can never go under 1s (and I might add that they are kind of shooting themselves in their own foot with that background downloader saturating people's connections and causing latency to shoot up to 1+s while the average joe doesn't know what's causing it or how to disable the thing.)
I'm really worried that we may be looking at a heck of a lot worse than making the competition's websites act really slow. I'm afraid they may have the ability to cripple online games the moment they have a disagreement with the game company (essentially pay up or I'll break both your legs type of thing) and cut competition completely off the web as far as their customers are concerned -- not just make the sites slower. This really scares me because it puts the Internet largely in control of the ISPs and if they get too greedy, they can essentially make the Internet a useless thing for US citizens -- essentially killing the Internet as far as we would be concerned.
Perhaps I am reading too much into this? Maybe all the law is talking about is allowing them to use those little squid-type caching services simply to speed up sites rather than applying latency to slow sites down? I can understand the idea of charging for maintenance of the servers that would be necessary to implement such a large scale caching system (though it should be the customers who want the benefits of the caching who pay, not companies who are afraid that their sped up competition will get ahead while customers get tired of waiting for their site to load.) Please someone tell me it's just the caching one?
Google: Maybe you do now...
Google lights up all that dark fiber they are rumored to have been buying over the last few years to build GoogleNet.
Insert vague reference here to it achieving sentience sometime later and starting Judgement Day.
It does not matter who wins this debate in the USA. The rest of the world should allow the US to drop off the internet forever so we don't have to put up with the big slowdown caused by American company marketing spam from people barely conscious the rest of the world exists. With luck, following the death of the internet in the USA we will see the collapse of the US economy, US society, and the belief of the American people that US law operates globally.
Bring on the NNB - life will be so much simpler everywhere else.
If you are wondering I have lived in Texas for some time now and can't wait for my great escape back to Europe in September.
Within two paragraphs, we already encounter this particular misunderstanding:
"Everyone should be allowed to hang out in the town square and use it as they please, one low price, eat all you want at the buffet."
The rest of the article isn't worth reading. That level of grasp on the problem tells me the writer already thinks in glittering generalities and doesn't understand the issue. "One low price" hardly begins to describe the current state of net neutrality.
Not too surprising, however. I've yet to see an opponent to net neutrality who can make their case without misunderstanding or misrepresenting this particular point, if they examine specific points at all.
Tweet, tweet.
The phone companies are always afraid that the cable companies have a major expansion just around the corner, or that someone will come along with a wireless solution, and put them out of business. This is entirely possible now, since VoIP has been taking off. Just as the phone companies are now examining the possibility for television over the phone lines, the cable companies are examining the potential for phone calls over their television lines :)
Basically, the phone company (the real DSL vendor, no matter who you think you're buying it from) is scared shitless that they will become irrelevant. They're pricing their services as low as possible in an attempt to get customers now under the assumption that if they already have two of three services from their telco (vox and 'net) that they won't switch over and get all three from the cable company. I think that this is an idiotic assumption because it's worth a small amount of hassle now to have just one bill for all major teleinformation services.
The cable companies are only too willing to play along because they have more money than the phone companies (or at least, that has traditionally been true, not sure about the latest incarnation of the death star) and if they can put the phone company out of business then they will win this round by default and they can start focussing on the impending invasion of wireless.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
SEC. 3. DECEPTIVE PRACTICES IN PROVIDING INTERNET ACCESS.
(1) Definitions.- As used in this Section:
(A) Internet.- The term "Internet" means the worldwide, publicly accessible system of interconnected computer networks that transmit data by packet switching using the standard Internet Protocol (IP), some characteristics of which include: i) Transmissions between users who hold globally unique addresses, and which transmissions are broken down into smaller segments referred to as "packets" comprised of a small portion of information useful to the users at each transmission's endpoints, and a small set of prefixed data describing the source and destination of each transmission and how the packet is to be treated; ii) routers that transmit these packets to various other routers on a best efforts basis, changing routers freely as a means of managing network flow; and iii) said routers transmit packets independently of each other and independently of the particular application in use, in accordance with globally defined protocol requirements and recommendations.
(B) Internet access.- The term "Internet access" means a service that enables users to transmit and receive transmissions of data using the Internet protocol in a manner that is agnostic to the nature, source or destination of the transmission of any packet. Such IP transmissions may include information, text, sounds, images and other content such as messaging and electronic mail.
(2) Any person engaged in interstate commerce that charges a fee for the provision of Internet access must in fact provide access to the Internet in accord with the above definition, regardless whether additional proprietary content, information or other services are also provided as part of a package of services offered to consumers.
(3) Network providers that offer special features based on analyzing and identifying particular applications being conveyed by packet transmissions must not describe these services as "Internet" services. Any representation as to the speed or "bandwidth" of the Internet access shall be limited to the speed or bandwidth allocated to Internet access.
(4) Unfair or Deceptive Act or Practice- A violation of paragraphs 2 or 3 shall be treated as a violation of a rule defining an unfair or deceptive act or practice prescribed under section 18(a)(1)(B) of the Federal Trade Commission Act (15 U.S.C. 57a(a)(1)(B)). The Federal Trade Commission shall enforce this Act in the same manner, by the same means, and with the same jurisdiction as though all applicable terms and provisions of the Federal Trade Commission Act were incorporated into and made a part of this Act.
Aire Libre
Which is the reason why Google is trying to get nationwide wireless servers running.
What they really want to become content providers, like a cable company. Instead of selling you a generic pipe, they would have you buy the "Deluxe package", which includes "basic" internet, voip, instant messaging, a music subscription, and a video subscription. All for $99.99 a month.
Plus, if you order now, we'll throw in a free six months of the New York Times, a couple extra inboxes, AND some special pop-up blocking software.
And, instead of bitching about net neutrality on slashdot, you can make friends on Comcast's social site (for a fee). Isn't the internet fun?
a free market
Which free market? Designed by whom? For whose benefit? With what barriers to entry? With what legal artefacts to codify relations between participants?
You at least had the good sense to acknowledge that there are many different free markets. But unfortunately that fact makes your subsquent claim regarding that market--that it would sort out net neutrality quite nicely--complete nonsense. Some markets, appropriately designed, probably would. Other markets most certainly would not.
Markets, like governments, are just machines. They can be well or badly designed to solve any particular problem. To simply say "a market could solve it" is like saying "a team of horses could solve it" with regard to a transportation problem. Depending on the problem, and the team, horses may or may not be the best solution. Without far more detail it is impossible to know, and you are making a statement of faith to claim otherwise.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
This is nothing. Just wait until companies start trying to squeeze the internet garden hose in ways that it wasn't meant to be squeezed. We'll get an object lesson in "the internet perceives censorship as damage and routes around it". A network that doesn't route IP in a standard way will, justifiably, be perceived as damaged. Throw hackers/crackers, offshore proxies, ad-hoc wireless networks (in legal and illegal varieties) into the mix and it'll make the file-sharing wars look tame.
Gentleman, start your un-capped cable-modem MAC-spoofing wireless gateways!
If we're lucky, the suits will kill enough golden geese to spark the kind of real innovation that will drive the incumbent telcos almost totally out of business. Somebody still has to provide reliable E911, but if we could segment that off, then the rest could be done so cheaply there wouldn't be any need to meter it.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I think there is a proper, though radical, solution to this problem:
Just split telcos/cablecos into 2 parts:
1. physical last-mile connection provider/maintainer consumer-owned (possibly also employee-owned) and heavily regulated co-ops. These co-ops should be prohibited from offering their own services on these lines. Taxes/user-fees fund the co-ops. This all should keep them from pulling any shit that would screw-over customers as they have no incentives besides keeping the customers (and [maybe] employees) satisfied.
2. for-profit service providers which use the last-mile connections. The split takes away these companies monopolies, thus losing their bargaining chip to pull stuff like charging Google for its ability to be accessed by me at a decent speed. Should they try and pull something, content providers can backlash and the end-user can change service providers.
This will never happen though because of the telecommunications lobby and the fact that it will seem to Joe Sixpack that the tel/cablecos are being 'robbed' by the state. The truth is that there should be no for-profit government-granted monopolies as the temptation for misconduct is too great. For-profit monopolies can only make money by (a) abusing their monopoly status, (b) lowering costs, (c) offering improved services. Since (c) without (a), and (b) are not as effective as (a), they'll choose (a) a lot. Gov-monopolies should all be regulated co-ops, which makes customer satisfaction [(c) w/o (a), and (b)] their incentive.
This solution would avoid the issues w/ just the free market and removes the necessity of regulation, and thus the possibility of overregulation.
I can dream, can't I?