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."

Comments

There is no "net" to be "neutral" with.

[dada21]

The Internet does not exist. It is a figment of the imagination of people in power and the laymen who listen to them. I come from a glorious history of the BBS days (I ran a fairly large multinode Chicagoland BBS for years) where I witnessed the "birth" of the consumer Internet -- thousands of interconnected mini-networks that created a larger one. Now it is millions of mini-networks that make up this thing we call the Net, but it still doesn't exist. There are thousands of Internets, and there is no real way to regulate them.

We have to realize that EVERY law that goes into existence does so for two reasons:

1. To try to fix some problem that exists TODAY.
2. To try to give more power to the few who love power over the masses.

These both go hand-in-hand. Laws don't regularly leave the books, so they stick around for generations, usually preventing new creations from makig our lives better. The power passes hands from one politician to the next, and the elite few know they can use that power to make their lives better at a very small expense to each individual of the masses. What do you care if a regulation costs you US$10 a year more? When 100 million taxpayers each pay that US$10 per year for a regulation or preferential treatment, someone is taking in US$1 billion because of it. It is in their interest to keep the laws on the books.

Net neutrality doesn't matter because the Internet as it is today doesn't matter. Over time, preferred networks will have to occur in some way, and that is OK. AOL had their own network, but it failed. Compuserve had a huge "Internet" for years before IP was the preferred transport, and it failed. Google has its own network of caches and archives, but it isn't what people want to browse (I rarely use Google's cache, unless a site is down or gone). Right now people will switch from ial-up to DSL to cable based on their desire to access information quickly. You can switch over in less than 2 weeks, sometimes days.

But there are reasons some are precluded from switching easily. Usually it is because a local municipality or state has laws creating a monopoly provider. You can't blame competition for this -- you can blame government. Now some people want to give more power to the Federal government even though the Constitution says they can't have that power. It won't matter -- the politicians are producing large amounts of FUD (along with the businesses that rely on government's ability to create monopolies in markets) to scare the average consumer into believing the "Net" will fall apart if it doesn't remain neutral.

It won't happen. As long as government doesn't create monopoly powers through Internet regulations, the Net will change to what the consumers want. Right now, the municipalities that dictate which monopoly provider can give the residents access create HUGE problems for those residents. States that do the same also create a huge problem for their residents. Imagine if we pushed those problems to the national level -- we'd all lose the ability to work around monopoly-mandates created by government.

Don't do it -- don't give the Federal government ANY chance to regulate or require ANYTHING. Let competition give us what we want. Competition crushed AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy in the U.S. Competition crushed the BBSes that hung around while ISPs gave users more information and quicker. Competition crushed the modem to be replaced by 8 different ways to connect to other computers. Competition crushed the CD, the DVD and the newspaper. Let it crush more so we get more for less.

Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with.

[BalanceOfJudgement]

As long as government doesn't create monopoly powers through Internet regulations

I frequently read your posts, and sometimes I wonder what you're really after.

The government has ALREADY created monopoly powers for internet companies - unless you want 45 different lines running down your street, you get one, maybe two providers.

The tradeoff that these natural monopolies provide is that they don't get to benefit from being a monopoly (i.e., regulation and price ceilings). It's a non-ideal solution for an unsolveable problem, but it's a necessary solution that is practical, much as the anti-regulation crowd may hate it.

Everyone I've seen rail against regulation on the grounds that "regulation never encourages competition" always seems to forget that Net Neutrality proponents are only trying to restore the very balance that DID exist, the balance that the FCC removed last year.

Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with.

[dada21]

The government has ALREADY created monopoly powers for internet companies - unless you want 45 different lines running down your street, you get one, maybe two providers.

Huh? Why is this a problem? 45 different lines won't occupy much more space than they already do -- plus I doubt we'd see this problem as I think we'd see companies dedicated to pulling lines to re-lease to others if we had more competition in the municipalities. To think that every company would want their own lines is unrealistic, just as every company doesn't do their own website hosting or handle their own business card printing in house or whatever. Companies that can offer services to others will always be around. I'd rather see 3 or 4 competitive line-leasers than 1. In my community, we already have about 8 ISPs over various mediums (and 2 WiFi ones).

The tradeoff that these natural monopolies provide is that they don't get to benefit from being a monopoly (i.e., regulation and price ceilings). It's a non-ideal solution for an unsolveable problem, but it's a necessary solution that is practical, much as the anti-regulation crowd may hate it.

Of course they get a benefit -- they get to set the prices without competition. They get to keep new technologies out of the market, as well. Cell phones were kept out of the market for decades because of Ma Bell's power over everyone else. DSL and Cable were kept out for a long time while old laws were replaced. It is a non-ideal solution because there is an ideal solution -- allow competition.

Everyone I've seen rail against regulation on the grounds that "regulation never encourages competition" always seems to forget that Net Neutrality proponents are only trying to restore the very balance that DID exist, the balance that the FCC removed last year.

It NEVER existed because the "net" was too young and companies were still trying to overcome technological barriers. The FCC is a great evil and arguably unconstitutional. No new law will create any balance or harmony, you have to be incredibly naive to believe that a new law will "balance" a market that is already very competitive and working just fine. Net neutrality, as I said in my OP, is FUD. It doesn't need to exist based on a law, it exists fine without any regulation.

Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with.

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Don't do it -- don't give the Federal government ANY chance to regulate or require ANYTHING. Let competition give us what we want. Competition crushed AOL, Compuserve, and Prodigy in the U.S. Competition crushed the BBSes that hung around while ISPs gave users more information and quicker. Competition crushed the modem to be replaced by 8 different ways to connect to other computers. Competition crushed the CD, the DVD and the newspaper. Let it crush more so we get more for less.

I consider myself a Republican, but I'm going to say something against the party line - the free market does NOT solve all ills! Where exactly is this competition of which you speak? Tell that to the masses of Americans who do not live in large towns and have only source for broadband. Where exactly do they go when their local broadband provider charges them AND Google and friends more?

Guys like you always spout off the same tired nonsense - "If company A charges me too much for broadband, then I'll go to company B!" What exactly do you when there is no company B in your small town?

There are things in life in which it is useful to have government regulation. There are things in which it is useful to not have government regulation. I feel sorry for you that you are yet another person too blind to see that. You are going to get your wish. It's clear that Net Nuetrality is dead and for better or worse (probably worse) we're going to have to live with that.

By the way, AOL and Prodigy are both still around. I don't know about Compuserve. In the case of AOL, I think it wasn't just competition that killed them but other factors.
1) Increasing technical knowledge by their customers who finally realized that there was more to the internet than AOL and its hand holding.
2) Increasing desire of Americans to move to broadband with the realization that AOL didn't really offer any value for the extra money if they already had broadband. It's one thing to pay AOL for a dial up connection. It's something else to pay for broadband AND then pay for AOL on top of that.
3) AOL's prices weren't very good compared to the competition.
4) AOL's very unpopular mail campaigns may have, in fact, turned off potential customers.
5) AOL's terrible reputation for customers being unable to cancel service surely was a huge negative. If you're a 22 year old graduate on your own for the first time are you going to sign up with a service that makes it essentially impossible to cancel? Probably not.

Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with.

[Red Flayer]

But there are reasons some are precluded from switching easily. Usually it is because a local municipality or state has laws creating a monopoly provider.

And often those people would have no access to broadband if it weren't for regulated monopoly. In exchange for building out to West Dingleberry, the telco is granted the sole right to serve that area. Otherwise the risk outwieghs the potential profit.

As long as government doesn't create monopoly powers through Internet regulations, the Net will change to what the consumers want.

Hardly. As long as there is competition in a hugely capital-intensive market, you'll have a minimum of providers undercutting potential new competition, along with collusion. At best you'll get very, very slow one-upmanship without major capital improvements.

Competition crushed the CD, the DVD and the newspaper. Let it crush more so we get more for less.

Let it crush more? So that we have fewer, not more, options as to how we get deliverables? Unregulated markets of non-commodity goods (like internet service) result in monopolies and oligopolies. That's the natural state... even your totally unregulated Austrian model has to adjust for monopolistic force in order to work properly. If you really want better performance in terms of net result for the consumer, you either need to take actions to prevent monopolies, or take actions to regulate them -- whether you're from the Austrian school of thought (such as yourself), the Keynesian (such as the FRB), or another (such as myself). In the case of the telcos, it was determined that regulation was a better bet because of the alternative would have either been state-owned infrastructure, or no service to less dense areas.

Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with.

[MindStalker]

Beutiful, you get the government to end its support of telecom monopolies and I'll stop supporting Net Neutrality.. Deal?

Re:There is no "net" to be "neutral" with.

[Sir.Cracked]

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.

you are getting ahead of yourself....

[krell]

"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.

Re:you are getting ahead of yourself....

[dada21]

The DVD is in its prime right now.

You mean "peaking." Blockbuster and NetFlix offices are running around freaking out as we push our net connections to 1Gb/s -- more than fast enough to display HD video real time to the home. While sales numbers may keep climbing, I would venture a guess (an industry-educated guess, at that) that the DVD is already replaced with XViD and fast connections. Two more "evolutionary" steps for video and HD-DVD will be forgotten, too.

For that matter, CD sales are still brisk (even now)

I'm already helping bands sell their music at shows straight-to-iPod. A US$100 device (basically a memory stick, a button and an iPod cable) lets bands make infinite margins since they have zero distribution cost (no CDs, no printing costs, etc). It won't be long for CD to be forgotten, either.

and there's a lot of dead trees turning into newspapers.

Massive layouts at every newspaper, the resurgence of limited-distribution zines online, and the blogosphere would disagree with you in terms of the next 2 years.

Re:you are getting ahead of yourself....

[SoCalChris]

Blockbuster and NetFlix offices are running around freaking out as we push our net connections to 1Gb/s -- more than fast enough to display HD video real time to the home. While sales numbers may keep climbing, I would venture a guess (an industry-educated guess, at that) that the DVD is already replaced with XViD and fast connections.

Don't forget that a good part of the country still does not have broadband available. Video streaming in is impossible for many places, not to mention streaming in HD. Physical media isn't going anywhere, for quite a while.

Re:you are getting ahead of yourself....

[dgatwood]

The scary part of that map is that the green areas are areas in which there is still no viable competition. One telco plus one cable modem provider does not competition make. That means for maybe 3% of the country, there is a true broadband marketplace, and the other 97% still gets stuck with a bill for $50/month for 384/128k. Yes, I'm exaggerating a little, but only a little....

Re:you are getting ahead of yourself....

[SoCalChris]

According to your image, I live in an area with 1-3 high speed providers available. The one that is available offers an 84kbps connection over 802.11b, which is hardly enough bandwidth for streaming video in any resolution, let alone a resolution that I would want to watch full length movies on. The connection that they provide is often unreliable. They won't improve the connection, because they don't have any competition for us to go to instead. The phone company does not offer DSL anywhere near us, and there is no cable tv company here.

Satellite is available, but I doubt I would be able to watch most of a 30 minute tv show before they throttled my connection down for using too much bandwidth.

Re:you are getting ahead of yourself....

[Richard Steiner]

Wow, that map is seriously misleading. I live in a suburb of Atlanta which is shown as orange (4-6 providers), but the only two providers I'm aware of in our area are Comcast (cable) and BellSouth (DSL). That's two.

The same situation existed when I lived five miles away in a different city (different cable company, same number of choices: two). That sure ain't four. :-(

The map also shows most of the Twin Cities metro as orange, but I know for a fact that my old townhouse only had Qwest DSL and RoadRunner available, and there are LOTS of places that have cablemodem but no DSL at all due to distance from the CO or old POTS infrastructure that doesn't support a DSL connection.

I think the map was produced by an extreme optimist. :-)

What?!

[chipotlehero]

During the course of a political debate people are lying?!

William Randolph Hearst must be rolling (more specifically ROFLING) in his grave.

Ted Stevens

[Rorian]

So.. was Ted Stevens one of those "experts" they're talking about?

FWIW

[Otter]

An interesting point I saw recently (in Forbes, I think) is that this issue is perfect for politicians to keep fighting out. There's an enormous pile of money from lobbyists on both sides, a handful of nerds and Google suckups are the only votes to lose on one side and there are none to lose on the other. So why not keep it going as long and as loudly as possible?

As long as I'm posting -- is this Ted Stevens "tubes" stuff not becoming as annoying as flying spaghetti and chair throwing references? It's not like more than a handful of those smarmy dweebs could actually explain to you how IP or Ethernet really does work.

What the lobbyist really means

[netwiz]

Is that Google won't have to pay above and beyond their already astronomical bandwidth costs. Bloodsucking parasites...

can a wired net be old hat?

[mugnyte]

  Municipalities are pushing wireless access. Home networking is hot. Wireless access is unibquitous. Add it up. Soon enough, links from one cloud to another will start to happen. When enough content exists within those hops to let users surf for longer and longer time periods before hopping to a big-pipe ISP, you're going to see this mess move on. The largest middleman of the internet to get cut is...the backbone!

    To read the (some of) local newspapers in my hometown (oregonlive), I may be able to go from the city to them. I want more wireless hosting, or perhaps mirrors. It seems this is the only path towards skipping these monopoly wires. Then, they'll have to again offer better price/value points than this garbage bill.

The lay have no way to truly know

[w33t]

How can normal, non-technical people hope to have a chance of understanding our new world of today and the laws being applied to it?

I have spent the last few months speaking (sometimes drunkenly) at great lengths about the net neutrality concept - a concept, which quite frankly, I had taken for granted (I didn't really realize the net was neutral, it's just how it has to work). Many of my friends had fallen for the idea that a tiered internet would simply mean better and faster access to video and music. After all, didn't they pay more for "premium" channels on TV?

My one friend, so adamant - largly because he is naturally agumentative - finally began to realize how easily those in power (and today information is power - has it even not been?) can manipulate the ignorant. He realized this only after he asked me to look at his computer to see why his comcast was so slow (and why his vonage was cutting-out).

I ran a simple trace route and noticed that it appeared requests to local IPs were being routed through dallas and new york from his home in Sacramento. I told him I didn't think this was the best way to reduce the latency he was getting from his long distance calls and online gaming. I hypothesize that by comcast routing some clients through these innefecient routes they were somehow load-balancing the demand on their network (of course, new york, dallas, and chicago could just be fancy names for comcast's local california routers - but it seems a dubious naming scheme for local devices).

Without me, his technical friend, he would simply continue to accept his connection as is - and in fact may begin to attribute his degraded service to the FUD of the internet "falling apart".

There are so few of us who can fully (or at least somewhat) grasp what the debate really means - how can the vast majority of non-technical, voting citizens possibly make informed decisions about this?

Net Neutrality and Quality of Service

[Anonymous Coward]

The primary justification for not having "Network Neutrality" is so that vendors can differentiate content based on how "important" it is. This is often called "Quality of Service" and measures for requesting this sort of stuff is quite established (RFC 1349), and maturing (RFC 2474). These specifications define a portion of each Internet packet that specifies how "important" the packet is, it's so-called "Traffic Class" (IPv6) or "Type of Service" (IPv4). Not only is differentiation of packets based on this service-level a good idea, it has been standardized.

What is important in Network Neutrality legislation is to ensure that Internet providers do not discriminate based on: (a) the type of content sent, or (b) the sender and/or receiver. What sort of discrimination should be permitted, however, is a differentiation of "quality of service" depending on what the sender/receiver has paid for: with the same rates applying across all of their customers. Hence, the legislation in this area should permit technical advancement in mechanism to partition service based on quality -- but not innovations which extract monopoly rent from particularly lucrative customers and/or content types (or unfavored customers and/or content types).

A good analogy is sending first-class mail via USPS, the price is the same no matter where the destination is and regardless of what the letter in the envelope says. The "common carrier" doesn't open up letters to see if there is a check/cash inside, and charge a 1% fee for sending monetary instruments. The USPS doesn't differentiate between Joe or Martha in line, play political favoritism, or deliver particular customer's mail faster than others, etc. What USPS does differentiate on is the size of the content sent (ie, number of letters) and on the speed of delivery -- you can get 2nd day overnight, etc. The point is, all businesses and content are equal from the point of view of the mail carrier. So too should the transmission of internet packets be neutral to the sender/receiver and the actual message sent.

By fighting that all packets are equal is a losing (and wrong headed) battle. What is important is that we fight for democracy on the Internet: Vonage should get the same quality of service per dollar as AT&T VoIP services and even completely unrelated content, such as Google searches. What is being sent and by whom should be forbidden from the price/quality curve - but there should be a curve.

McCurry's Favors

[Doc Ruby]

Google is worth $117B, just like McCurry's boss AT&T. He won't be swapping his phonebill for Google's. But I bet he'd still rather pay his $0 Google bill than his phonebill, even if it's from AT&T.

Do your part!

[lord_mike]

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

Re:Are you a professional writer and/or...

[Karma Farmer]

There are those who want to "mimic" my lifestyle, but they don't see how it is done.

You live in a trailer park in south milwaukee and drive a used toyota corolla. Who, exactly, do you think wants to "mimic" your lifestyle? Junis?

Re:Are you a professional writer and/or...

[jafiwam]

Wow.

Haven't seen masturbation like this on Slashdot in a while.

What, is Fark.com down or something?

Network neutrality simplified

[MobyDisk]

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)

Re:Swap telco bills? WTF?

[DrJimbo]

mi said:

Thank you for the clarification... I still doubt, anyone would want to swap their telco bills with Google with or without net neutrality, their bill is very large anyway.

That was exactly the point. McCurry implied Google was getting free Internet access from the telcos and TechDirt implied that McCurry probably wouldn't want to swap phone bills with Google. If McCurry's claims were literally true and Google wasn't paying anything for Internet access then he would want to switch with them since free is cheaper than whatever he is currently paying.

mi said:

I don't see, why it should be the government's business to decide, who gets to charge whom and how much unless there is a threat of a monopoly breaking anti-trust laws, that is. The law, which are on the books for about a century now. No need for new ones.

The telco's are supposed to already be regulated by the FCC (part of the executive branch of the government) because they are already monopolies. The current administration is trying to dismantle as much regulation as it can get away with. These efforts recently did away with enforcing regulations that had been keep the Net "neutral".

In theory at least, our government is composed of three official branches which are supposed to balance power through a system of checks and balances. If the Legislature feels that the Executive is abusing its power by being way too lax in enforcing the existing laws and regulations then the proper way for them to deal with that situation is to pass new, more explicit, laws even though there are already laws on the books that have been working just great for the past 100 years. This is how our government is supposed to function.

To put it in other words: we didn't have a friggin' Internet 100 years ago so laws that were meant to regulate the steel, gas, and railroad industries may need to be updated in order to be applied correctly to a type of monopoly that wasn't even imagined 100 years ago.

The problem with let the market decide argument...

[nhz]

is that there is almost no competitive market to allow the market to provide the service customers want. Most big markets in the US have a duopoly, where 2 companies (DSL and cable) control almost all of the broadband internet market share. And do not tell me there are wireless MANs, broadband over power, satellite broadband, and other options for customers. The majority of U.S. residents do not have these ISPs available as options.

I would agree that there should be no legislation to force any net neutrality on telcos, but these companies are expressing their INTENT to discriminate against specific content providers. And when both your dsl and cable company discriminate in a similar fashion, by having tiered services, how can you choose to take your business elsewhere?

Put yourself in the shoes of the executives at the telco companies. If you want to maximize your company's profits, the best thing to do might be to create an artificial shortage of bandwidth for everyone once ANY company is willing to pay for premium routing service. Now consider the point of view of the content providers. You might want to be the first company willing to pay AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etc. for premium routing service so that you have a competitive advantage in terms of performance. Of course, you will only want to pay for premium service if there is a performance benefit compared to non-premium service, hence discrimination is key for opening this new revenue source.

Yes, letting the market decide instead of forcing legislation is the best option in a truly competitive environment, but we do not have such competition in the U.S.

Government Monopolies blocking progress

[billstewart]

I used to work for The Bell System, back before divestiture, but this is my own opinion, not that of Theodore Vail or his successors...

It's not just the land-line telco monopoly that blocked development of radio-based telephony to rural areas - it was also the radio monopolies. (Roosevelt got lots of credit for trust-busting, but in reality he locked up quasi-monopoly control over huge parts of US industry in ways that have plagued us ever since. And the telco and radio-licensing monopolies got along quite well, thank you, because it let them avoid having to compete with each other.) It's not clear when effective radio telephony would have been developed - it was obviously easier after we got computer technology, but there are things that could have been built back in vacuum-tube days that never occurred to anybody because there wasn't an application for them, and the limited ham-radio market wasn't enough to bring costs down.

You might have ended up with rural communities on the equivalent of huge party lines or CB radio with phone patches, which would have been socially _different_ from telco service - but that could have been ok.

Re:Tier 1 Longhaul Internet Market is *Cheap*

[Sir.Cracked]

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.