Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
OSWeekly.com talks about net neutrality and how it would impact the world of operating systems, both online and offline
First thought about that was WTF - how would this impact an offline system? Scanned the article and there isn't any mention of it.
Any takers, anyone?
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
The issue isn't the pipes.
It's the money.
We all know traffic shaping is going on - and that's fine and dandy so long as it's mild in degree and hard to show, and as long as it's being done to preserve quality of service.
The issue is that some jerk ISP's want people to pay them money for preferential shaping, which is basically blackmail, in my eyes.
I think you're being a troll, but I'm going to take the bait anyways.
Too many services, both public and private, are moving to the internet. My healthcare provider won't send me an id card, I have to go to their website and print it. My State Civil Service Office requires that I apply for the Technology Analyst list by online application only. New York City has put their entire database of tickets and fines online so that if I plead not guilty to a parking ticket and am found guilty, I have to go online to find it and pay it. The Internet was built with public funding and it should be a public service. If the telcos are going to battle against Municipal Wireless, then they shouldn't be allowed to charge more for fatter tunnels.
Competition over limited resources is where advances are made. Make it faster, cheaper, better - catch the market from the competitor. Easy money is just that - easy money. When MS "won" the first browser war, did it continue improving it's browser? It had corned the market after all and was rich and fat because of it. But - in spite of easy money, it had no reason to continue developing IE. It was done. Only when Firefox stepped up the competition did MS start developing IE again!
When these guys start charging more for our broadband, our services will *not* get better. They will simply get fatter and richer. They'll have less reason to innovate and compete because they have legeslative protection on the outragious fees they'll be charging their captive consumer-base. This isn't just about net neutrality - but net quality! Currently, they have to compete for every nickel and dime they get. Soon tho, they'll be able to sit back for every dollar and c-note they get. Why spend more money? They already have their basic infrastructure in place and there's lotsa dark-cable out there and their consumers are relatively happy with anything faster than dailup. You'll see *some* gimics and gizmos coming in the future - there's still *some* competition - but all in all, they'll just get fatter without really earning their wages.
Access to the "Internet" is not a right.
Access to gasoline isn't a right either, but kind of puts a crimp in your life if you can't buy it.
And I guess the telephone service isn't a right either, but kind of sucks when you need to call 911 or get a call for a phone interview for a new job to feed your family.
Then again... We don't have an inalienable right to electricity either even if it means we can't store food in our fridges or do things at night.
I mean... We can live without all above, but life would be pretty miserable.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
Once again the lie that broadband content is "overtaxing" and "choking" the internet rears it's head. The "fatter pipes" that the telcos are claiming they need to build already exist and it's called "Dark Fiber". This is due to the fact that building the fiber optic infrastructure is what costs a lot of money, so when it was built, it was built to a capacity many times greater than was necessary at the time and for the foreseeable future. Not to mention the fact that data compression technologies advanced rapidly thereafter, creating even more bandwidth. We are using a small fraction of the capacity of these fiber optic cables and the telcos are trying to extort money from us all for simply putting unused cable into general use. This would be like building a twenty lane highway, allowing the public to travel on 2 of those lanes, and then when it began to get congested, claiming that new fees are necessary for "fatter highways" that already exist.
What are you smoking? What choice do consumers have? If they are lucky, they can choose between thier Telco and Cable Provider. Often they just have one or the other. If they are real unlucky, they have dialup and thier ISP will be taking the shaft from the Telco. And don't think that even if you have a choice of ISP's on DSL, that the Telco will not be throttling everyones bandwith that does not pay thier tax.
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
I cannot imagine the current broadband monopoly setup existing forever. Many places are already served by DSL & Cable. And wimax, satellite (?), and stuff that has not been thought up yet will hopefully provide the broadband comsumer with more choice in the coming years.
If/when the consumer had more choices, the tables will turn for the providers. Suddenly people will realize they could care less about the method of access, and more about the content. Myspace, youtube, google, all of the sites popular with the kids today might think to throttle their connections to verizon, comcast and the like unless THEY cough up some money. The users will go with whoever has the best access to the content they want.
Finkployd
there are some plain and simple aspects here. *every* business wants more profit for less work; not just telcos. look at haliburton!
as far as fios is concerned, verizon is marketing it very heavily. even going as far as sending 2-day UPS letters announcing it. that, and some of their marketing materials state, 'an important announcement about your cable service'. as has been pointed out here before, fios is not PSTN, and is not regulated as such. furthermore, once your off the telco grid they won't reconnect you.
lets use the GM analogy. you're going to drive you're car and go to the casino, so i want an extra dollar per gallon for this gas because someone else is making money on it. plain and simple, this is extortion.
there is not enough competition in the marketplace for this service, due to the financial barrier to entry, to ensure the consumer gets the best service for the lowest cost. and while poorly managed corporations may eventually go out of business or aquired my more successful companies, this will not compensate those who were overcharged. the only possible manner in which to assure fair and equal service, which should be the goal of our government, is by mandating it legally.
...vividly encapsulates that post-Watergate/pre-punk/coked-up moment when you could trust no one, least of all yourself.
Personally, while the USPS has no interest in delaying a package, they also have no internally-generated interest in making sure it arrives in as timely a fashion as possible, whereas their competitors UPS and FedEx have a 100% vested interest in making sure an overnight package gets there overnight.
Also, I notice that toll roads seem to be less cluttered with lane-sucking construction areas, and overall defects in the road surface, than public highways carry.
This isn't to say that Verizon et al should have free license to start chopping up their pipes and squeezing out the less well-off at all, and if they took tax money (or even incentives) to put in the fiber, then they should be subject to (hypothetical) laws regarding availability.
Personally, I think that if anything, companies should compete amongst each other to lease ownership of publicly-funded long-haul fiber for a given period of time, then be forced into a review process every X years, much like television and radio stations are forced to do with airwaves. If too many complaints arise, they lose the rights and get no refund, then others get to bid on the given stretch (leaving the punished company banned from bidding for x number of years). If they want more fiber or want to chop it up into however, then let them each add the extra at their own expense, buy their own right-of-way to lay that extra fiber, and be subject to a lot of the same regulations that AT&T lived under when they were the big dog in telecommunications. Hell, the FCC can probably monitor most of it as it is now.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
You do have a point that such a tiered service would give an incentive to the carriers to provide poor service so that customers will upgrade - however, I don't see a problem with this kind of "tiering" in general. If I want to pay more to get better service, that's fine. It is the discrimination based on destination or content or application that is the problem.
I have no problem with setting things up so that connecting to a server that pays more to THEIR ISP for better service gives me a faster connection TO THEM, nor do I have a problem with having it faster if I pay more to MY ISP for better service (to everyone, or even to a specific service). The problem is when my ISP wants to charge Google a fee in order to allow ME to connect to Google faster, when Google isn't a customer of theirs, by intentionally degrading the connection if they don't.
Some forms of discrimination are fine: if AOL or Verizon or whoever wants to make a special deal with Google to set up private lines and caching servers to both reduce their costs and improve their customer's connections to Google, and they want Google to share in the cost of that (and presumably it would reduce Google's costs to provide the same level of service), that's fine. That might be a reason to choose one ISP over another. That's a partnership. Distinguishing that from intentionally degrading connections is the difficult part.
The main problem of net neutrality is that it would stop efficiency improvements. Example: a vast percentage of modern internet traffic is BitTorrent. What if ISPs collaborated to shunt that all onto a dedicated high speed network and take the pressure off the regular wires? Some packets are being treated unequally, but everyone's speed goes up. Net neutrality would ban that.
(Yes I know the current trend is the other way, to shunt P2P into a crawler lane - IMO they'll learn that's wrong-headed when increasingly sophisticated circumvention makes their efforts fail. The way to get problem traffic out of the way is to entice it to play "good citizen" in exchange for faster speeds, like building a multi-lane bypass around an old town with narrow streets.)