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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."
The less regulation the better. Especially considering who will be writing such regulations.
Developers: We can use your help.
OK line up boys and girls. On my left: those who think that the Federal Government should run the Internet for the good of the public, because those big corporations are EVIL. On my right: those who think that free-market competition should decide the winners and losers, and will drive the Internet's evolution much faster than the stranglehold of the --- perhaps not "Evil" but at least "Slow, incompetent, and stifling -- Federal Government.
Where do you stand?
Think carefully, your future is in your hands.
Then call or write your representative.
I bet all this started over some telco exec trying to figure out a way to cash in on google's success. When I first heard about what they wanted to do I distinctly remember blowing it off and saying "it will never happen, it's too ridiculous for anyone to take seriously", i guess i was wrong. This illustrates a pretty sad state of affairs in the business end of the Internet.
I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
As long as our fine congress has as strong a grasp of how the Internet works as Senator Ted Stevens how can they fail to make the right decision?
"I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday. Why?
Because it got tangled up with all these things going on the internet commercially."
Personally I think 5 days is pretty good to transfer an entire Internet to your personal office. I however have lower expectations than our esteemed Senator.
Sometimes my arms bend back.
There were two questions asked and a total of six statements from the two men. Not to mention the fact that the only response to the question "wouldn't companies have to pay a premium to get their content to end-users" was "Bellsouth has promised not to do that." No mention of the policies of the other 4 major ISPs, and no mention of the possible conflicts of interest that tiered pricing would bring about. It would have been nice if the pro-neutrality guy had raised these issues- and had some backbone. (All he does is blather a little about dark fiber.) Or, barring that, if the interview/debate had been longer, so we could get more of a sense of the depth of this issue.
Sono koro, bokura wa, sore ga sekai no shinjitsu da to shinjite ita.
Okay, so Slashdot has this lively debate about Net Neutrality. And paid "experts" stage a lively-looking debate about Net Neutrality on the news. But in the end, does it really matter?
When it comes right down to it, the only people who matter in the debate over net neutrality are the congressmen. If we leave "the market" to decide, it will decide against neutrality-- because "the market" consists of a small pool of telecom monopolies, and they will always "decide" in their own interests.
And the congressmen, the only people whose votes matter here, don't understand this issue-- they're just voting along flat "Government intervention good!" versus "Government intervention bad!" party lines. So basically, what happens on the "Net Neutrality" issue isn't about what's best technically, or what's best economically, or about what's best for the public-- it comes entirely down to, which party line will win? Which party is better at pushing their line? More specifically, it comes down to, which party will win the 2006 elections?
And we already know the Republicans are going to win the 2006 elections. There just isn't any alternative-- there's no opposition. The Democrats aren't even trying. They're just sitting back, letting the Republicans set the agenda of Congress and the terms of every debate, and failing to either distinguish themselves from the Republicans or establish themselves as a credible alternative. The only time the Democrats even manage to get enough media attention for the public to remember they exist, it's over embarrassing internal bickering. And with no impressions of themselves in the public mind except internal bickering, the Democrats are going to lose.
So the "Net Neutrality" debate has already been decided, based on entirely external factors. What does Slashdot have to add?
All that will happen is that a number of the sites will change to p2p rather than a server. All in all, this will work against the companies that are hoping to make a few bucks off of companies like google and MS.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
We don't have a free market, if we did corps like Verizon would not install DSL equiptment then refuse to light it up.
I give up.
At some point in the future, I may write one final document about why I am for net neutrality, put it on the Internet, and send it to my congresscritters.
But for now, it just hurts my head to even try to begin to understand how anyone continues to be fooled. I don't understand how anyone can believe this bullshit:
Or this bullshit:
Maybe South Park has the answer. Maybe we've all buried our heads in sand...
But really, how can any thinking person not see that these are complete and absolute fucking lies? If they're not going to filter, degrade, or impair any service, why wouldn't they be FOR net neutrality? Or at least neutral -- why would they care if there's a regulation forcing them to do what they're already promising they'll do? Simple: Because they're either outright lying about their intentions, or you need to read between the lines: "Not filtered or degraded" doesn't necessarily mean "As fast as anyone else". And "degraded" compared to what? Whatever the fuck they want.
This is not a conspiracy theory. This is not a communist plot. This is the simple truth: Without net neutrality, the Internet as we know it will be gone, and the American Internet will be as bad or worse than the Chinese "Internet".
But I give up. I really don't think there's anything more I can do.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Have you been touched by his noodly appendage?
They'd burn even more VC money than they do now. After all, what's the difference between unprofitable and more unprofitable?
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.
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.
Competition will keep the Internet cheap and fast -- not laws. NN will only decrease competitive opportunities, and we all know the law will end up with 5000 pork barrel adders that have nothing to do with the title.
The articles you see in papers and news sites all seem to boil it down to companies having to pay more for the larger amount of bandwidth they use. But that can't be it, because that's what's been happening all along. End users pay more for a faster DSL connection. ISP's pay more for a fatter pipe. This is the way it has always been... so to say that this is in danger of happening doesn't make any sense.
On the other end of the spectrum is the idea of charging based upon the nature of the content. VoIP, for example, being billed at a higher rate than, say, Usenet or web surfing. This is akin to the phone company charging you (or somebody) more if you use your telephone to dial the police or hospital than they do if you dial your mom. In fact, what might be more accurate is if the phone company charged less when you were talking to your mom about her meatloaf recipie... and then charged more when the nature of the conversation turned to "... make sure that you remember to give dad his heart medication!". That would be billing based upon the nature of the content.
I've seen some argue that this would merely be capitalism at work. It's charging what the market will bear. Getting the "heart medication" part of the message through is more crucial to you than getting the "meatloaf recipie" part through... and the phone companies should be able to charge what it's worth to you.... not what it costs them, right? Well, all I can say to that is that there are situations similar to that which the American people have pretty much agreed are unfair. Look at profiteering, for example. When a hurricane hits some region and the stores start charging $20 per gallon of water, we've pretty much agreed that that's crossing the line... partly because the increase in price had nothing to do with an increase in costs. (yet also partly because the predicament that the buyers are in wasn't forseeable).
Plane tickets would be a counter-example, however. Airlines have all kinds of tricks to get more money out of the people who can/will pay more. Charging more if you don't stay over a weekend is their way of getting more money out of the business travelers (who are traveling to a weekday conference, having the company pay for the airfare, and don't want to spend the weekend away from their family). This is an incarnation of price-discrimination that we've come to accept.
Which of those you feel NN falls into is up to you... but I think we need to start by giving our lawmakers some more-accurate analogies.... because the "fatter pipe" thing is just way off.
Who cares what happens to YouTube? It's not the government's place to say "We need to make sure YouTube doesn't get screwed over by Verizon." This just in. Businesses compete for your dollars. Some win, some lose. If the government helps one over the other, the people who suffer are consumers.
What is needed is less regulation, not more regulation in the guise of "Net Neutrality." Less regulation would give people more of a choice so that if they are big YouTube fans and their current ISP is making it hard for them to watch videos on YouTube, then they could switch to some other ISP that is not doing that. If YouTube has such huge benefit to consumers, then it would be very profitable for a compettitor to offer YouTube enabled service.
The big problem is that there is already so much regulation that compettition is scarce. As consumer we should hope for less regulation instead of net neutrality. Of course big companies with vested interests like Microsoft and Google would rather seek government protection, but that's not what would be best for consumers.
Seems to be the same with lots of things. Deregulate and a few behemoths buy up everything, and you're left with no real choice.
I don't know how to keep things from doing this. Market forces favor oligarchies forming in anything with nonzero barriers to entry, and supplying bits takes money.
I was hopeful that municipal internet would provide a bit of competition, but the established players are determined to prevent that. Competition is well and good until it might hit their bottom line.
Man, you really need that seminar!
This just in -- competition doesn't exist.
Those who compete either join up with other small companies to better compete with the large conglomerates or get absorbed by those conglomerates.
See AT&T, Verizon, Bell South, etc.
I would love to believe in the free market, but its a load of ____. Sometimes a competitor comes up who tries to stay independant, usually for personal pride reasons rather than monetary ones. If you study some historical economics, you'll realize this is actually how things work.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Without net neutrality, what's to stop backbone providers from charging content providers (ex. Google) also for "guaranteed" bandwidth? They might have the "if Verizon could do it, we could too" attitude. Google could be charged multiple times for sending data to a customer because it traversed networks owned by different providers.
That would be like trying to send a letter from California to New York, and being charged an extra stamp for each state my letter goes through, just because my letter is in a plane flying through that state's airspace. In the end, my letter could cost me 10 EXTRA stamps. And that's assuming a direct flight to New York.
For the Internet to continue as is, net neutrality is a must.
Respect the laws of physics, for the laws of physics have no respect for you.
So here's a simple question. If we "need" laws on net neutrality, what are those laws going to stop that is taking place right now? If there is nothing going on today, what makes us so sure there will be in the neare or even distant future?
Verizon has said they would like to charge large companies like Google money for the bandwith users of those services use. Fine. It's not illegal, so... why have they not done so?
Perhaps THAT force that has kep the Verizons of the world at bay should be strengthened, rather than having a bunch of people that poorly understand the fundamentals create new laws that the whole tech insdustry has to keep track of.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
De-regulation is a good thing for consumers how? Yes, let's stop regulation of trusts and unsafe labor conditions and minimum wage and so forth. What kind of ivy-league masterbatory economics course did you step out of?
Less regulation does not, for the last accursed fucking time, give people more choices. I could be wrong, of course, about the... self-congratulatory ideas about economics and business. I could be totally wrong, and hell, when the telcom boys charge popular sites with little revenue and mass appeal a fuckton of money just because they are popular websites (like, oh, this one called slashdot ), so we are forced to see content driven by shitloads of ads and corporate sponsorships that get rid of any controversial, meaningful content, in the end, us consumers will REALLY benefit, we'll be in a better place and much happier for it... somehow....
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
They'd pay a bunch of money to their ISP, get a contract with a Service Level Agreement, and have an external service monitor check their web site response times to make sure that the higher speed they paid for is what they get. Then, lo and behold, they end up not getting what they paid for. Why? Because implementing QOS/Differv across the Internet will not result in consistant higher speeds. After all, each and every piece of equipment on the Internet will need to have a compatible configuration for QOS/Diffserv to work with any consistancy. And, the last mile will make more of a difference that the backbone (the ones youtube most likely paid for higher speeds). The last mile is where traffic is most variable, and fan-out occurs, and where the mapping between Diffserv and QoS will decide whose packets go into which queue. So without getting ALL local ISPs on board with compatible configurations, its unlikey that youtube's ISP will get consistant improvement for youtube.
Even more interesting is that without net neutrality, ISPs will be buried under a mountain of regs dwarfing any legislation. That's because already people are talking about making sure 911 VOIP calls get top priority. If the internet is kept neutral, ISPs can legitmately claim that there's no way to prioritize VOIP 911 calls, so government regulation would be pointless. Once the QoS/Diffserv genie is out of the bottle, they'll have to admit thay can prioritize 911 calls. At that point, there'll be no way to stop government regulation of QoS/Diffserv. After, what politician wants to be know as the one that stopped 911 calls? During a terrorist crisis?
People thinking that being against net neutrality will reduce government regulation have it completely backwards. Without net neutrality, ISPs face a regulation juggernaught out of their worst nightmare. Net neutrality is actually the only chance to limit further government regulation.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran