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Battle Lines Drawn Over Net Neutrality
InfoWorldMike writes "As the U.S. Congress argues the pros and cons of network neutrality, many companies doing business on the Internet say their very futures may be at stake. Net neutrality supporters want new laws prohibiting Internet providers from blocking or degrading traffic from their competitors' networks. Determining the full effects of Net neutrality can be difficult, however, in part because the concept is hard to define precisely. Most of the debate has taken place inside the Washington Beltway, where lawmakers and outsiders have proposed several different versions. InfoWorld has a Special Report up exploring the issue with a debate between experts Bill McCloskey and Jon Taplin and some of the news that has captured the issue as it developed."
We just need to make sure that the tubes we get are free from any blockage. That way the internets flows with maximum speed. When max speed is possible through our tubes, everyone wins! Flush often to prevent nasty buildup by corporations trying to ruin the lives of our children.
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Sometimes you want to mod a post funny and insightful at the same time.
Then you realize you can't because you don't have any mod points in the first place.
Thanks anyway.
That's all, the forced "net neutrality" would amount to... Another government agency interfering with the market.
The only valid argument is telcos pessimizing traffic of companies, competing with them on something else. Against that there already are anti-monopoly laws...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
Ah, yes, terrible things like the postal service with the cheapest rates for shipping anything anywhere. Terrible things like highways, power grids, safe airplanes, safe food, safe medicine, and licensed doctors and engineers. All of these have caused problems that were not around in the 1800's with sweat shops and child labor and malpracticing quacks selling snake oil and the inability to travel across country except on a monopolistic train and buildings burning and collapsing from improper design.
The Mises Institute has a great article on why NN is a terrible idea. The article is titled Who Owns the Internet? and it really gives great insight into why the political side of NN is just another fiasco and a tool to control the Internet by those already in power.
I'm sorry, that article is trash. It's written by a graduate student, implying limited experience with the Real World of telecom monopolies. He's from Texas where there are several competing ISPs. But enough with the ad hominem... The article is trash because it is full of falacies such as praising the fair market system for allowing telecoms to own their own pipes while simultaneously lamenting the monopolies granted to the very same companies. Explain to me how letting monopolists get away with brandishing their property helps anyone. The telcos are getting big enough to be broken up again, not big enough to hand private control of the Internet over to. The article also completely ignores the fact that AT&T wants to charge third parties for routers, not just its directly connected peers.
This is an example of the horrible misunderstanding the author has. The routers are not the problem! Routers can route dozens of gigabytes per second on their backplanes, much more bandwidth than their pipes have available. Routers can be parallelized by traffic shapers that split the load from the pipes across several routers. Increasing bandwidth requires actual physical fiber runs, or better multiplexing equipment. Increasing bandwidth is generally required at the last mile, where it's least lucrative for monopolies to do so. After all, they can't charge customers $1000/month for 1Mb/s speeds. Scarcity is a scam caused by ISPs oversubscribing by several orders of magnitude, and by the insane client-server distribution model that commercial entities embrace. The Internet can literally transfer the entire Library of Congress in under an hour. That's how scarce bandwidth really is.
Businesses compete for your dollars. Some win, some lose.
And it's especially easy to "win" when you can buy a law that allows you to legally extort your competitors.
What is needed is less regulation, not more regulation in the guise of "Net Neutrality."
Actually, you have it backwards: the current law requires common-carrier status. The side that you're supporting requires that a new "regulation" be written...it just happens that the new regulation favors big ISPs, so you're OK with the idea.
Nice troll, though.
Let's try not to let fact interfere with our speculation here, OK?
Someone else pointed out that in texas, the electric lines are owned by the government and any private company is free to sell you power over those lines. I was hoping for a similar setup for the "last mile". Owned by the government managed as a utility and accessable to all the ISP's that wish to compete.
So let me repeat myself, baring such a system where by any ISP is able to use the last mile in a fair and equal basis with its competitors, net neutrality is our best hope.
The cost of entry into the last mile is simple infrastructure cost, not regulatory. The problem is that the entity controlling the last mile now wants to regulate different types of traffic differently.
We are not speaking of control on total bandwidth either, we are speaking different classes of service within the same bandwidth class (not as in more money for more and/or guaranteed bandwidth, but as in "you can't use our competitors VoIP but you can use ours").
As long as the regulation requires hat all traffic of the same class be treated equally, there isn't a problem. The moment they start trying to offer differentiated services for different providers, there is a problem. They could always unbundle the local loop, and be banned from the content service business, whcih would be another way of enforcing net neutrality.
Your last mile is a monopoly, but usable by any service provider you choose, and you can choose the content providers you want because the service providers and last mile provider hold no stake in any of those.
I can throw myself at the ground, and miss.