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Net Neutrality a Threat to Online OSes?
tomtechie writes "OSWeekly.com talks about net neutrality and how it would impact the world of operating systems, both online and offline. The author states, 'I know of a couple of people who support the legislation despite the fact that it could possibly enable ISPs to restrict access for those who are not willing to pay a premium fee for broader access. They have a strong belief that it is needed in order to make sure that ISPs have the tools and funds to expand their already overtaxed networks. Keeping in line with their belief system, this allows ISPs to make sure that developing connectivity can in fact, keep up with the explosive demand for broadband in more places. In other words, it allows for fatter pipes.'"
If you can't grow your broadband, get a loan. If you can't get it, don't expand. If you can't host a service, don't host it. Simple as that.
ISPs don't host mirrors of popular free content out of generosity or because they are such open source fanatics, they do it so you suck that 6+gig image from their local mirror (i.e. only generate traffic inside their net, which they can charge you for but costs them zip) instead of leeching it from overseas (which costs them as well as you).
Don't fall for that, please.
As for "online OS", could anyone tell me the benefit of having even less control over the OS I'm running?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
for them to stuff our money into. Stop paying the CEO's 400million a year and put some of the cash into the pipes if they're not good enugh. Don't pull it out of my pocket.
He whom you called four-eyes yesterday, you call Sir tomorrow.
Two Hundred Billion Dollars were set aside for exactly this purpose. To charge people TWICE is just a way of getting more money.
Come on. Where did the money go?!
AccountKiller
If the money I pay to send/receive my bits is not enough to fund the network, then charge me more for my bits. That's fair, and has the added benefit of not destroying the very soul of the Internet.
How come no ISP rep can discuss (i.e. oppose) net neutrality without talking about "incentivizing" the creation of higher-capacity networks. 1) Damn, "incentivize" is an annoying word. 2) The incentive to build high-capacity networks is the profit you will get when customers subscribe to your service.
Car analogy time! Does GM require that the automobile-production needs to be "incentivized"?
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
Isn't one of the fundamental principals of capitalism that the strongest companies will survive? In other words, for a company to be strong, it needs to invest in itself to give itself a competitive advantage over others? To me, it seems like "fattening the pipes" is just something else that needs to be a corporate investment. The telcos/ISPs/whatever seem to be saying "pay up or we won't invest in making things better".
I just can't wrap my head around why ISP's need a NEW chargable interaction. If the ISP needs more money to improve their pipes, either raise the prices for your customers or gain more customers.
What's so hard about that? If Google's traffic is bogging your network, raise the price on your contract with Google. They will either pay the price, so you can expand, or they will fire up the dark net, opening tons of your pipe back up.
The back bone carriers increase rates for the high tier ISPs, they raise rates for the low teir ISPs, they raise rates for what the consumer's pay. Viola! The pipe bilders get more money, the consumers and businesses still pay for them, and no one gets censored.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
It would never happen that way, because as the last page states Google are the "server masters" and they cannot to evil, so I ask you, how can they "run" this Broadband-OS when it would be evil to do so? That's right, they wouldn't be able to, it goes against their programming.
Also, if something like that did start to happen, Google would most likely start to be an ISP which doesn't restrict things... watch out Verizon.
One last thing, I wonder how this would affect me, being as I am Canadian; or even anyone else in the world.
--Valthan
Net Neutrality is not a business concept, it's based on a theory in computer science that the most efficient and cheapest networks are those based on the principle that protocol operations (i.e. TCP/IP) should occur at the end-points of the network.
See "End-to-end arguments in system design" by Jerome H. Saltzer, David P. Reed, and David D. Clark:
This principle was used by DARPA when it worked on Internet design and it's the reason TCP/IP communications have experienced massive growth.
It's a principle supported by almost everyone except the backbone owners. Verizon's CEO has said many times that the pipes belong to him and if you're going to make a profit off them then he wants a cut too (referring to Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, et al who oppose Net Neut).
An example of a non-net-neut service is a cell-phone. I'm no fan of government regulation, but I don't want my ISP bill to start looking like my cell-phone bill.
I also don't understand why people can't realize that "net neutrality" means preserving the existing internet. It's all about equality of packets. Everything else on the subject is FUD. Light the dark fiber or charge a proper fee base on bytes-per-second (megabytes per month doesn't control tube-clogging, it's more like a truck model). We're really supposed to believe Google doesn't pay for all the video they're transmitting? Hah.
(By the way, OSWeekly could unclog the tubes with a better web design. One sentence per page to maximize ad loads is ridiculous and I sure stopped reading by the third page.)
Unfortunately for Ted Stevens' tubes, it doesn't work that way. Right now the broadband providers have a motivation to create larger amounts of generally available bandwidth. What would happen under a regime that doesn't include net neutrality is that they'd make more money, but there's no reason to believe they'll invest that money in bigger pipes on the consumer end.
Right now, how does a broadband provider get more money from a customer? Offering more bandwidth or providing additional services like VOIP, IPTV, etc. But if net neutrality isn't protected, then that's no longer where they make their money. They will make their money in creating tiered services and charing external providers to get different levels of service through their network. So rather than competing for your dollar, they'll be competing for Google's dollar, or simply pricing superior service in such a way as to eliminate competition for those services mentioned above.
As soon as subscribers become nothing more than a pool of consumers for broadband providers to sell to service providers, bandwidth will stop increasing. What incentive would they have to offer 10Mbps to you if 5 is sufficient to provide the services they want to offer? They'll be investing in equipment to tier their network services, not in putting fiber into your house.
Furthermore, consumers will be paying for this tiering through more expensive services. The bandwidth providers will either charge too high of a fee to use their tiered service and force out competition or they'll simply charge a fee to the competitors just below the level that forces them out and the consumer will pay for it in higher subscription fees and more ads. So what you'll see if your monthly bill will slowly creep up due to lack of local competition, but your bandwidth will not increase significantly and your overall cost for network based services will go up.
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It says the strongest companies will survive, but strongest is just defined as richest. It's kind of like how evolution says that the "fittest" survive, but fit doesn't mean good, it just means the ones most likely to pass on their genes. Similarly capitalism ultimately rewards only those companies who do whatever it takes to fatten their bankrolls optimally, even if from an objective perspective those companies don't look very healthy or aren't making very good products. Like, for example, if there's a company that has a choice between increasing their profits by making a better product or increasing their profits by bullying the government to give them lots of money, and it's cheaper to do the second for a greater payoff, then capitalism ultimately rewards the company who will do that.
This is the difference between "Free" USA and "Communist" Europe I guess...
In europe, Internet access is already 5x faster for easily half the price. In most of western europe, you can get a 20Mbps pipe in your house to deliver internet, tv (over IP) and phone (VoIP, although they do not call it that there or even make any difference for it).
In Europe, they forced the local operators (usually state owned) to open the local loop, allowing anyone to install their equipement to connect your house to their network. The result? Healthy competition driving the services up and the cost down.
Sure, Europe has a much higher population density than the US, BUT, if that was the only problem, you would have that level of service in any metropolitan area capable to sustain it. This is far from the case here... What happenned is the telcos concentrated on low speed "broadband" and low price. Consummer answered on those terms. You can grab a 1.5Mb/128kb for less than $15 (if you already pay for phone service, get into a 1 year contract and promise your first born) while in Europe, they get 20Mb/1Mb, phone and TV for 30 euros (which is about $40).
"Communist" Europe regulated (forced the operator to open the loop) and got competition. "Capitalist" USA protected the interests of their lobbyists and got a price gouging.
This 'article' makes no sense. It seems like the ravings found on the blog of a google fanboy, seeded with the buzzwords of the month -online OS, anyone?- and that somehow made it's way on the front page of /. . The author makes the hypothesis that ISPs would deliver cheap access to MySpace and Google in exchange for running an onlineOS? What is that? These websites are the reason people pay for broadband in the first place... This would be like ordering a trio burger at the restaurant and being told that, in order to get the burger, you need to watch a 5 minute ad. Ridiculous.
I should have known better than to click through past the second page, but once I did I had to work my way out of the muddle that was this story. It's like when someone leaves the newspaper open to the sudoku on the subway.
page 1: "Since I have yet to find a non-biased reference to the issue, I will simply use Google's explanation." And I'll tell you the flip side too, which is that if the ISPs could charge for higher tiers to build fatter pipes. Oh, and "Once again, this is just one opinion and definitely not one that I support myself."
page 2: WebOSes aren't awesome yet, but if you don't have net neutrality, then, uh, those ISPs could block things like would-be awesome webOSes.
page 3: The idea of a webOS will be in a tech museum as some kind of pipe dream [my pun] by 2009, of which "Google was supposed to be the father"... But the author "already explained how Google is already very much offering an online OS from [his] previous article".
page 4: We get rural penetration but the poor rural people cannot afford to pay for the google/myspace tier, so the companies will offer them a discount so long as they use the Broadband-OS, which "guarantees that they control how you do your day-to-day activities"
page 5: ISPs are rich and smart. They'll actually get Google -- "Yes, Google. The server masters of the universe." -- to build your Broadband-OS. And the cable companies want in, too.
I'm not sure how exactly googleOS was museum-grade obsolete and also making the proprietary Big Brother OS, but that's the story as best I could understand it.
Keeping in line with their belief system, this allows ISPs to make sure that developing connectivity can in fact, keep up with the explosive demand for broadband in more places. In other words, it allows for fatter pipes.
I agree that that is the theoretical ideal that the free market shoots for. However, given that this is not a free market we are talking about (many of the players involved have explicit fiat monopolies, and all have contract-established trusts), the free-market argument doesn't necessarily hold water.
The very real fear is that the legal right to restrict access will be used as a barrier to entry. Most major corporations in the US today focus massive resources on developing and expanding barriers to entry, because they allow you to charge above-market prices. Patents, exclusive contracts, volume contracts, per-employee licensing, per-computer licensing, and dozens of other lawyerly schemes; all these things are thinly veiled barriers to entry based on government and court fiat power. They destroy the competition on which the free market depends for efficiency. All these things are heavily invested in by corporations that claim to be free market capitalists, but are in fact oligopolists and fiat monopolists.
It is killing our global competitiveness. We're getting our asses handed to us in the auto market by China, Korea, and Japan because the cushy barriers to entering our auto markets made Ford, Chrysler, and GM fat, lazy, and stupid (not respectively, all three are all three). Blocking competition is nice in the short run from the corporate executive's stock-option perspective, but it is miserable in the long run. For the consumer it even sucks in the short run.
That is the real problem with net bias - it is another way that corporations are granted a legal right to bar entry.
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I don't buy it. I can't see how any ISP, under the current regulatory regime and network architecture (which is what net neutrality is (mostly) trying to preserve), could justify killing a network-centric OS, other than to whine about how much bandwidth it's using (boo-hoo).
I think it's a very poor, misleading article.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
True - and it's exactly like every other tax-supported network, such as roads and the mail system. These projects are ultra-critical national infrastructure, and they seem to do just fine with public support.
It's telling that these other systems also have "neutrality," and it works extremely well. The USPS has no interest in delaying your parcel by two weeks. Every driver on the freeway is bound by the same set of rules. And guess what - when we need extra capacity, the taxpayers buy it! What's wrong with that system?
The difference is that unlike these government projects, the internet backbone is almost entirely privatized. It's true that ultraconservatives ordinarily support privatization as "more efficient" than government support. But haven't we recently seen some phenomenally anti-consumer behavior in privatized industries? And this administration is hardly a "typical" conservative gang - the federal bureaucracy has grown explosively under its leadership. Odd, that. I guess it depends whether the heads of the corporate shepherds are your friends.
The problem, as future economic historians will state in tragic retrospect, is that unlike the federal government, private corporations do not have their customers' best interests at heart - often they're in direct conflict. We don't put Microsoft in charge of our missile defense network, because every 20 minutes, they'd be hassling the federal government to pay their monthly licensing fees for the laser-guidance software!
It's more evidence of our shameful government that has completely discarded the notion of serving the people.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Tiered Pricing Will Create Bandwidth Shortages.
Rather than increasing available bandwidth, tiered pricing will have precisely the opposite effect. It will create an economic incentive to keep available bandwidth below needed levels.
The proof is really quite simple. Tiered pricing is being sold as a "guarantee" of network speed and latency. If you pay the premium, you'll get a "guarantee" that your packets will go through at a certain speed and rate of reliability.
Large organizations -- the ones you're actually trying to extract higher fees out of -- don't take marketing bluster for granted. They actually measure network performance. They assign a dollar cost to network speed, packet latency, dropped packets, and overall performance visible to end-users. Using this metric, they decide which network provider will offer the best network performance for the lowest cost (note that "cost" includes not only the fees charged by the provider, but the calculated costs assigned to network performance metrics).
Now, let us assume there's enough bandwidth for everyone, and all packets get through with more or less equal speed and latency. The organization measures network performance and discovers this to be true. Thus, since there is no cost advantage to switching to the higher tier of service, no one will subscribe. The money the telco hoped to rake in does not, in fact, appear.
So, what do you do? Create a shortage. Or, more accurately, route the tiered traffic over the newer network infrastructure, and let everyone else use what's left over (which you neglect). Poof! Now packets over the lower tier are getting delayed or dropped like crazy. Performance on that tier of service suffers, which "costs" you money according to your metrics. So you consider the higher tier of service. If the cost increase of the higher service tier is less than the calculated costs of dropped packets on the lower tier, you switch.
In other words, the only way to get large subscribers to actually pay more for "premium" network service is to create an incentive to do so by ensuring that the non-premium service sucks. And as long as the higher tier exists, the lower tier will experience a perpetual shortage (because the large organizations don't stop measuring performance).
I absolutely guarantee you that the telcos long ago had accounting graphs drawn up that assign "costs" to various packet delivery performance metrics, and already know the exact level of bandwidth shortage required to get organizations to pay more. They will not exactly "create" this shortage. They will simply plow their dollars into new, faster network infrastructure, over which will exclusively be run the higher service tiers. The lower tiers will be left with the existing infrastructure, and the occasional hand-me-downs from upgrading the higher tiers.
Some people may observe that tiered service already exists. Well, yes, but not in the same way. Typically what you're buying is higher bandwidth. Once you get to a certain bandwidth level, quality-of-service guarantees are in place more or less by default (example: you can't really get a T3 link without a QoS guarantee). However, no matter what your endpoint capacity is, your packets are still pretty much running over the same routers as everyone else's, so everyone gets to share the pain of a choked router. However, with the tiered service model the telcos want, which router your packets go through will depend on what service plan you have. Which leads to artificial shortages.
In summary: The telcos are knowingly lying to your face. Tiered pricing will not reduce bandwidth shortages, but will instead establish the economic incentives to create them.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
What part of the internet has the government "censored" to date? I've been reading articles via Slashdot and the EFF for years, but I can't recall a single instance of this.
China, on the other hand, is much more authoritative, and has a much stronger interest in censoring the internet. Yet they've largely failed. Why? Because even with an army of government-dime censors, it's really impossible to censor anything on the net. The same thing happens as when the government censors obscene material - the targeted item becomes hyped, copied, and traded on black markets. Think 2 Live Crew: their "banned" album sold tons of copies - notwithstanding its bombastically crappy music!
The difference: It's impossible to block information, no matter how bad the government wants to do so. But it's entirely possible to block competitors - just killfile google.com until it pays its Broadband Access Regulatory Fees, or whatever deceptive moniker the Telcos want to slap on it. That's what should worry you.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
I agree - it is extortion. Notice that we won't get faster, bigger, better pipes unless we all PAY? Bring back the independents. I remember a time when the telcos did not offer DSL - it wasn't worth it to them. When the market hit critical mass they saw billions at stake. "Don't make us subsidize our lines to the independents at unfair prices" they cried. "If we're going to build this thing out we can't lease our lines for less than what it costs us." Well, the FCC changed the regs and guess what? The independents are gone. And yes, consumers' prices have dropped (remember when the telcos said they couldn't lease their lines for less?). But the ante has been upped. If you want the build-out to continue you must pay more - extortion. Now service providers must pay MORE and consumers must pay MORE for higher speeds. Bring back the independents. Their business plan worked for less money and by now they know how to provide higher speeds and bigger pipes. Has this topic been beat to death? Ask your congressman if they have any idea what this is about.
It's also really easy to dismiss someone who seems to be a clueless ivory tower fucknut, but it looks like neither of us has done the easy thing here, and we continue to discuss the issue.
Personally, I don't want to talk to people who will dismiss me because of my language; it's a filter.
The simple fact is that in a huge number of places in this country there is only one option: dialup. In an even larger number, there's two options; dialup and one broadband provider. Even where there are two options, do you really think that they won't both go to non-neutral access? If they don't do it at the same time, it will only be because one of them is waiting for the other one to go belly-up so they can have a monopoly on high-speed access before they, too, make the switch.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"