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."

Comments

more tubes!

[BigZaphod]

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.

Re:I'm against Net Neutrality laws

[DamnStupidElf]

I see no reason to enforce "Net Neutrality" through any law, especially since we've seen what happens when the government regulates any action -- less freedom, not more.

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.

Whether or not proponents of net neutrality want to acknowledge that scarcity exists, it does. Despite continued increase in bandwidth capacity, a router can only handle a certain amount of traffic. Just like a four-lane highway, it can only supply a certain threshold of traffic and is therefore inherently limited.

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.