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The Real Issue With Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "TechDirt brings into focus one of the largest problems in the net neutrality debate, not the issues themselves, rather it's the people involved and the lies they like to sling. An example of this is certainly the number of lobbyists that are being looked to as 'experts' and getting their opinions published as such. One specific example was a recent piece published in the Baltimore Sun by Mike McCurry, a lobbyist working for AT&T who claimed that with new legislation working for net neutrality Google wouldn't have to pay a dime. In response, TechDirt has suggested that McCurry should swap telco bills with Google, somehow I doubt it will happen."
"Competition crushed the CD, the DVD and the newspaper"
The DVD is in its prime right now. For that matter, CD sales are still brisk (even now) and there's a lot of dead trees turning into newspapers.
Where were you when the voynix came?
Here is a list of senators and their positions on Net Neutrality...
http://www.savetheinternet.com/=senatetallybyvote
You can call toll free through the Capitol switchboard at 888-355-3588.
Ted Stevens is trying to force a vote on Thursday, so there is little time! Each phone call is considered to be worth about a 1,000 votes the general election, so your phone call will make a difference!
The follwing three senators are crucial:
- Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas
- Ben Nelson of Nebraska
- Joe Lieberman of Connecticut
You can make a difference!!! Call now!
Thanks,
Mike
The reason you have no "Company B" is probably government regulation. Sure, I don't what anyone to dig up my street at any time, but how realistic is that? It's expensive to dig up streets, even without government regulation, so I doubt it would happen regularly. "Company A" probably has a government enforced monopoly on the right of ways. "Company A" is happy because they own the market, and you are happy because no one is digging up your street. If you really want a open market with competition, you have to allow anyone to dig up your street at any time, or have the customer install their own line to a location with easy access to multiple providers. Then there is option 3 which is have a government run ISP... I believe the less government the better, so that is not really an option (for me).
You live in a trailer park in south milwaukee and drive a used toyota corolla.
Actually, I now own 6 mobile homes in my area (halfway between Milwaukee and Chicago) and am expanding that holding to at least 20 throughout the country in the next few months in hopes of a pending bubble collapse that will leave a lot of families needing a place to move to. The mobile home idea came directly from Gary North's article on opportunities and living expenses last year (the article I link to is a more recent recap of his 2004 opinion that I can't seem to find right now).
Last year the lady and I drove new cars (Land Rover, Volkswagen and a Lexus) and lived in a large house and had a few vacation homes. Liquidating these unneeded assets have expanded our ability to do what we want (travel, spend time with our church, etc) rather than worry about how we'll pay the bills each month.
Who, exactly, do you think wants to "mimic" your lifestyle? Junis?
I'm not sure who Junis is, but considering that I've helped a few dozen people downside their lives and increase their happiness and free time in the last year (through example alone), I think far more people would wish they made adaptations like I did.
There were years when I made a strong 6 figures and had really zero to show for it. Now I can make 1/2 my previous income but my monthly living expenses are about 90% lower. If you're working 50-60 hours a week and have no money to travel, raise kids, spend time with friends and family and do the things you want to do, you may not realize how profitable it can be to downsize extravagently. Owning a US$400,000 house in Chicago was not as amazing as I thought it was (especially since most of my friends owned similar homes on 95% debt). Owning 20 US$20,000 trailers throughout the country that I can live in when I am on a work contract really makes my life easier. Try it sometime.
As for the Toyota Corolla, that has been a long standing joke between friends here and in real life. We're a 4 vehicle family (SUV, Toyota beater, car to drive customers around in and a joy ride vehicle). We're still trying to downsize all those vehicles to two.
I wrote a quickie article in an attempt to simplify network neutrality for the lay person.
(I linked to the Google cache 'cuz my server won't take the load and Coral Cache seems to be down)
You've got to consider the source...Mike McCurry
FTA:
Mike McCurry (born 27 October 1954) is best known as the former press secretary for Bill Clinton's administration. He is a Washington-based communications consultant and is associated with the firm Public Strategies Washington, Inc. and the internet technology firm, Grassroots Enterprise Inc.
McCurry is a partner at the influential Washington, D.C. based lobbying firm Public Strategies. In 2006 he has been lobbying on behalf of major network carriers, in part through a coalition www.handsoff.org, for the removal of internet regulations in the controversial network neutrality debate. Organizations, including www.savetheinternet.com claim that Mike McCurry and the "handsoff" campaign are using deceptive and manipulative arguments to support their position.
It's not the ISP that is going to be charging their extortion tax. It's the long haul telcos. So, it won't matter if I start my own ISP, I still have to hook into ATT, or some other major telco. And that's why the lack of net nutrality sucks. I'm already paying (as an ISP) ATT big bucks for my T3's or whatever pipe I need.
That bandwidth is PAID FOR. Repeatedly.
Google pays for the bits that go to and from their pipe. So, If I send a packet to google, I pay to send the packet (admitedly, only fractions of a penny for a single packet, but you'll have that), Google pays to recieve and reply to that packet, and then I pay to recieve that reply (every bit going over my line requires bandwidth, and therefore I have paid for that bandwidth, even if not paying per bit or minute etc).
The packet both ways uses up bandwidth on two connections that are both paid for. The consumer pays the ISP, the ISP pays the Telco, and so on. So, that comunication has already been paid for. And now, the telco wants MORE money just to keep the packets going at the speed they are at today.
This is just pure greed. Period. And not one person who advocates doing away with net nutrality has brought up one argument to explain why the Telco should get paid a third to possibly a FIFTH time for the same message sequence. If anyone can explain why, I'm all ears.
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?
No, that's correct -- and that's what will happen without net neutrality.
This is entirely myopic and naive. First of all, half the time the telcos are the monopoly (when one exists) instead of the cable operators. You just as well could say "thus, the cable operators would bust up [the telco's] monopoly" instead. Second, and more important, all that will happen is that the cable company and telco would create a cartel instead.
And third, not having net neutrality will not suddenly allow new players to enter the market! It isn't going to magically cause any governments to suddenly allow new players to bury lines, and there's no real issue stopping telcos from offering "better than DSL" stuff now. The only reason it's not being done is because -- despite the billions in subsidies they've been given for the purpose -- they claim they can't afford to do it. Basically, they're being greedy (wanting to preserve monopoly profits instead of competitive profits) and are holding the infrastructure hostage in an attempt to get their way.
Right, just like how the RIAA and MPAA are figments of everybody's imagination, too! Face it, anti-trust laws are dead -- Microsoft made that abundantly clear.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I am in the green area on your map and have not yet been able to get high-speed Internet access. I live slightly beyond the end of the local cable-TV system. DSL is not yet available in my neighborhood either. The last time I checked, a hill blocked my being able to receive wireless Internet from a local internet provider at 256K - 1MB speeds. I could get a Starband satellite dish for Internet but that is significantly more than I am willing to pay. It is still dial-up only here.
The telephone lines in my neighborhood are only good for 26.4K. We don't yet have 28.8K, 32K or 56K. A QWest repairman told me that, unoffically, he had heard that sometime in the next year our neighborhood will be upgraded and DSL will then be available.
I am in Arizona, but am not out in the middle of nowhere. When I look outside I can see a fancy gated community and their golf course nearby. I can also see an airport, a hospital, a large hotel, a casino and a private university. This is not somewhere out in the boondocks.
Usually there's only one cable TV company, and usually they're the only ones who sell cable modem service on it, though sometimes they're more open than that, and sometimes RCN or another overbuilder put in a second cable system. (In much of the country, the telco is trying to get into the wired-TV business, as well as reselling satellite TV, and that's what's really driving much of this debate, other than political opportunism by carpetbaggers like MoveOn*.) Most US cable modem service has never been open - they went paranoid about users running servers from home for reasons that weren't very good then and make less sense now. And cable TV service was largely deployed on a town-by-town basis, driven by issues of what town councilman's brother got the installation or repaving contracts rather than by deep understanding of the futures of telecommunication, so the current large aggregators were buying a really random collection of stuff and most of them still understand pay-per-view much better than they understand the Internet.
Usually there's only one wireline telco, but that doesn't mean there's only one source of Internet broadband service using those wires. Most of the telcos will sell service in at least three forms:
- Layer 1 - Dry copper, which a company like Covad or New Edge rents, runs DSLAMs on, and sells connections to multiple ISPs as well as their own internet access.
- Layer 2 - Telco-provided DSLAM with ATM PVC across a concentrator network to an ISP-provider router, potentially to hundreds of different ISPs. Sometimes they insist on selling phone service along with ADSL, sometimes they'll sell naked DSL.
- Layer 3 - Telco provides DSLAM with ATM PVC to a router which they run (either running it directly or farmed out to a single partner ISP.)
- Layer 3.5 - PPoE to an ISP over Layer 3 service instead of over native ATM, or sometimes other router-based aggregation approaches.
I use Layer 2 service, through my ISP Sonic.net - not only do they offer static IP addresses, but they don't have any annoying contractual terms against running servers from home, using multiple home PCs, sharing wireless with people, or much of anything except of course banning spamming. I don't think they currently support TOS or DSCP or other QoS markings to allow me to prioritize voice (or de-prioritize BitTorrent, which is what I really need from QoS), but it would be nice if they did. Speakeasy is a better-known national ISP with similar service terms, but there are lots of others, some wide open like Sonic and Speakeasy, others as paranoid and anti-user as the cable companies.* I really like MoveOn, and I think George Bush is a Chaotic Evil threat to America's freedom and traditional values, but this time they were not only wrong, but pretty clueless about the technologies they were ranting about. That's not to say that several telco honchos weren't also either clueless about the technologies or at least unwilling to talk to the public about what they were actually selling rather than about the regulatory environment in which they were selling it, or that usually clueful netheads like Dave Isenberg weren't saying boneheaded things when they should have known better, but MoveOn was way out of their league here.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
What you are talking about is prioritization by service. What they are talking about is prioritization of service PROVIDER. They don't care if it's Google webpage or google video. They just care if Google has paid their extortion tax this month or not.
Prioritization of service is an entirely different animal and an entirely different argument. I don't think anyone is arguing that VOIP packets can't be routed differently than FTP packets or HTTP packets. That's not the issue.
The issue is when packets from redhat.com are passed more slowly because redhat hasn't paid for their speed "upgrade" to whatever Tier1 the packet happens to pass through. Nevermind that their connection and yours both have plenty of room. It's an artificial bottleneck created simply to generate revenue, when in truth both parties have already paid for their connection.
Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?