On Entangling and Testing Net Neutrality

P3titPrince writes "In an NYT op-ed today, Timothy B. Lee argues that legislation specifically guaranteeing Net Neutrality would in fact be less effective than just allowing the status quo." From the article: "It's tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage. Economists have dubbed this process 'regulatory capture,' and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970's. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition." Relatedly, winnabago writes "Computerworld reports on a potential method for testing a net connection for neutrality. Somewhat similar to Traceroute, the software uses spoof packets that appear to be from a potentially throttled source and compares the transmission time to that of neutral traffic."

Comments

NN?

[robpoe]

Why has Google bought all the dark fibre that they can? Easy! When telcos start clamping down on 'Net connections, we'll all be on the GoogleNet.

Net Neutrality problems solved, at least for Google.

Re:NN?

[Apocalypse111]

So, about this GoogleNet...
Will it be invitation only?

Re:NN?

[Trigun]

Google should champion the .web TLD, and create google.web
Rebuild the net the way they think that it should be. Tie in all services to their brand new .web. Create a gmail address, get a site, a gbuy account, adsense tied to the site, a marker on google maps, the works! Think of the datamining that they could do then!

Of course, the last time I told them that, they never answered me. Maybe I shouldn't have sworn so much in the email. Telling them to 'fuckin' bury Microsoft' probably didn't add to my ideas credibility.

Re:NN?

[Anonymous Coward]

we'll all be on the GoogleNet.

Net Neutrality problems solved,

Until Google changes their name to Sky.

Re:NN?

[Apocalypse111]

With all the fleshy pink things gone, there will be no more Net Neutrality problems. The problem would still be solved, but this is more of Final Solution. I for one welcome our new mechanical man-slaying overlords.

Re:NN?

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

When telcos start clamping down on 'Net connections, we'll all be on the GoogleNet.

This will never happen. Google bought all that dark fiber so they could ferry all their massive internal dataloads from A to B without paying through the nose for it. They made a long term decision and figured it would be cheaper in the long run to have their own transcontinental (G)LAN rather than keep ponying up to the major telcos. Big companies do this.

Do you think those fibers are still dark? Right now they're probably at full capacity shifting the teraquads of dataload upon dataload upon dataload back and forth between to Google legions of analyists and their analysiers, so they can confirm that, yes indeed, people really do think those ads are search results.

Re:NN?

[mrchaotica]

It would also probably have helped if your suggestion made sense. How could creating a new TLD -- which has nothing to do with Quality-Of-Service or TCP/IP itself -- fix anything related to net neutrality?

Re:NN?

[eln]

Don't worry, this is Google. Even if it's invite only, within 6 months of the Beta release everyone will have more invites than they know what to do with, and we'll be seeing 50 posts a day on every Web board out there asking if anyone wants an invite to GoogleNet.

Re:NN?

[Trigun]

They are building their own network. The more people that they put on their network, the less problems they will have from other networks. And I told them this before the net neutrality debate anyway.

Besides, if they got everyone using all google services, do you think that people would stand to be throttled from google's free services by their own internet providers because their providers are offering competing services for a price? Not likely, especially if Google has a comparable service, or is willing to sell cheap bandwith to local resellers. Google could simply overwhelm the entire marketplace if they have to, they just have to get everyone using more than just google.com.

Re:NN?

[Wesley Felter]

That dark fiber doesn't run to your house. Think about it; the evil is all in the last mile.

Re:NN?

[Maxwell'sSilverLART]

With all the fleshy pink things gone, there will be no more Net Neutrality problems.

With all of the fleshy pink things gone, there will be no more need for, or traffic on, the internet.

Re:NN?

[Apocalypse111]

With all of the fleshy pink things gone, there will be no more need for, or traffic on, the internet.

See? Problem Solved!

Re:NN?

[budgenator]

Enkido's 768 service is now available in Manhattan, where the company owns 3,500 route miles of optical fiber and is already within 200 feet of anywhere. Enkido's first 768 customer is Deutsche Telecom. ... To clarify, T0 or DS0 is 56Kbps or 64Kbps. T1 is 1.5Mbps and T3 is 45Mbps.
OC1 is 52Mbps, OC3 155Mbps, OC12 622Mbps, OC48 2.5Gbps, OC192 10Gbps, and OC768 is 40Gbps. Enkido's 768 service, Bob Metcalfe

Now that's what we're talking about it would be like getting a drink out of a firehose hooking your 'puter up to one of those puppies! Seriously you could run almost 900 T3 lines through one of those and google owns how many? Each dark fiber could be lit up to be an internet backbone straight to a google-box parked outside the Central Office of every phone company that slowing packets to gtalk; it's just a matter of what you light the fiber with.

Re:NN?

[OldManAndTheC]

...shifting the teraquads of dataload upon dataload upon dataload back and forth...

After reading that, both I and my PC need to take a dump.

Re:NN?

[aplusjimages]

Or will it be open to the public and then within the first day they have to close it off because too many people signed up. Then it will go into email waiting list.

Re:NN?

[Captain Splendid]

Oooooh, so close! You forgot to mention that it will be in beta for a long time...

Re:NN?

[Jonsey]

TeraQuads, as in Uplink style TeraQuads? One of the most fun non-graphically intensive games of the past 5 years.

Re:NN?

[sumdumass]

Unless google becomes an ISP, i doubt it would have the effect your looking for.

What is needed is a simple law that says, " with peering in it's current state, no company can charge more for certain types of trafic based on the ip adresses, domain names or companies it originates from or is intented to go to then it would for any trafic from others of the same. No internet trafic can be charged a surcharge, degraded or otherwise manipulated without reguard to the consumers rated trafic speed. In the event of purposful manipulation of trafic that results in a consumer not getting traffic at thier rated speed, the consumer will be entitled to a full refund of fee's and fine not less th fen $1000 per occurance for each consumer effected shall be paid. Repetitive purposful violation of this law will carry a penalty of five to ten years in prison spread accross those resoncible but not to be less then 2 years concurent and tripple the fines."

With this, all trafic would be treated the same, real penalties would be included and harsh punishment for companies who don't think the penalties have teeth.

Spoofing and net neutrality

[Rob T Firefly]

Somewhat similar to Traceroute, the software uses spoof packets that appear to be from a potentially throttled source and compares the transmission time to that of neutral traffic.

This brings forth a very serious issue I haven't seen brought up elsewhere.. if net neutrality does get squashed, how much of a serious crime will something like this be? If we move to a tiered Internet, how many huge companies (and their respective purchased government officials) will cry "fraud" every time someone dares to make a packet appear as though it came from a higher tier? The mind boggles.

Re:Spoofing and net neutrality

[duranaki]

They can probably lump that in with the same fine for blowing through a privately owned toll-road without paying. Per packet infraction though, of course.

I've been trying to figure out how the government will mandate that it's covert snooping data not be throttled back. Those will be the packets to mimic. You can bet AT&T will want those delivered to big brother without delay.

Re:Spoofing and net neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

None. In fact it will become VERY BIG if net neutrality goes bad, unstoppable and undetectable by any legal or technical means.
We will see new "portals". Not the web portals that you think of now, but point to point gateways between
parts of the globe which are tunnelled through adaptive multi route connections. The adaptive part is the key to this
and the mentioned software is a vital component. Internet proxies will spring up where traffic basically disappears into them
to emerge elsewhere. Sure you will have higher pings / slower delivery times, but the bandwidth / throughput will be immense.

Although superficially similar to TOR these new gateways are not intended to provide security or anonymity, they are designed to obfuscate the traffic from the carrier. No amount of legal mumbo jumbo is going to be able to do jack about this, it is an inevitable future if the carriers start to be selective on traffic. Unless they *physically* disconnect their networks and isolate themselves there is nothing the carriers can do about it. The days of traditional routing are probably numbered.

The internet (in the original ARPA concept) was designed to route around problems. It is by design an adaptive system. If the carriers become a problem they will be routed around. It's that simple. Net neutrality can only ever be a short term problem, until the system adapts to counter it.

Thanks to the greed of the telcos the net will evolve one step further and we will have them to thank for an even more robust and reliable network topology that can detect and adpat to threats to its connections.

Re:Spoofing and net neutrality

[Firehed]

If they can pay to screw me over, you can bet I'll do my best to screw them over so I don't have to pay.

Doesn't make it right, but I'd like to see them jail every internet user on the planet when they all do the same thing.

Re:Spoofing and net neutrality

[twistedsymphony]

Well someone could setup something along the lines of a SETI@home that does nothing but send random packets and monitor for net throttling...

Ummm... no...

[sterno]

The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

That's EXACTLY what's already happening. The telecom companies have long been doing this and the whole net neutrality discussion is being prompted by those same telecom companies wanting to loosen the rules (you know, using their lobbyists to get favorable regulation). Further, I would argue that the return on investment from lobbying is so large that any business of sufficient size will invest heavily in lobbyists. They'd be dumb not to.

Net Neutality needs to happen before we give the telecom companies any more leighway in other areas. The reason is simple. If we do not do this, then if we find that we need to impose it after the fact, they will have already invested billions in business built around the new regulatory structure. At that point, they can legitimately claim it would be expensive and onerous to do it. Today, if we put this regulation in, it doesn't fundamentally change the nature of the network they already have.

Re:Ummm... no...

[Brew Bird]

Hello, the NN law we are talking about also puts a freeze on CLASS OF SERVICE, something my customers are screaming they need for thier IPVPNs. Obviously that is NOT on the public internet, but it would seem to make sense, if a carrier is going to invest the money in thier infrastructure to support that for private networks, it should also be available to public networks.

If you understand how CoS works, you will relize that turning that on a public network will have little or no affect on 99.999% of the hosts connected to that network. This is law for the sake of law, and certainly not going to protect google or vonage from anything. It could concievably make it MORE difficult for them to do business, as the carriers begin to oversubscribe thier infrastructure more, lack of effective CoS will put vonage out of business.

Do you really think Vonage can make a case that the cable company has to buy more Public Internet access because Vonage's application doesnt work right over thier network? Aint gonna happen!

Re:Ummm... no...

[mrxak]

Laws for the sake of laws seems to be all that congress is capable of these days. There are far too many important issues that are being ignored because a few celebrities are making videos and people are listening to FUD on all sides of the issue. I want my government to do something useful, and let the market sort things out.

Re:Ummm... no...

[mrchaotica]

Indeed, the industry is already being regulated; we're just trying to make sure that regulation continues to be favorable to us.

Now, the best solution is still to either deregulate it entirely (and by that I mean end the agreements that give companies sole access to right -of-way for laying wires, etc.), or to nationalize the lines and let the companies compete to provide service over them. However, either of those would be much harder to accomplish than net neutrality.

Re:Ummm... no...

[mrxak]

As my previous posts should indicate, I'm very much in favor of cutting down on the regulation. We need to stop the government-created monopolies first, and everything else will follow. If you have a choice of 6 different MSOs for all your telecom needs, there are some very strong market forces against doing anything the customer won't like.

Re:Ummm... no...

[KDR_11k]

Yes but demonopolizing a market is difficult and needs tons of additional regulations during the initial phase. First you'd have to abolish any exclusivity to rights the monopoly has. Then you need to tie the monopoly up to prevent them from damaging the still weak competition. You'll also have to strengthen the competition to shorten the time you have to keep the former monopoly on a leash. The problem is that the natural (most entropic) state of any market is a monopoly and you need a lot of money and time to force that market to move against entropy. Do anything wrong and you'll quickly see the market collapse back into a monopoly (or an oligopoly, i.e. a few large companies that collude so the effect for the customer is the same, see for example the record industry).

Re:Ummm... no...

[not already in use]

I don't think so. Ted Stevens said what he did because he is an expert on the internet and has genuine concerns.

Re:Ummm... no...

[mrxak]

You need to abolish exclusivity rights, agreed.

You need to tie the monopoly up, no. I don't expect new companies to suddenly spring out of the ground and immediately offer service. A bank isn't going to give a loan to do such a thing. But, existing companies could easily expand their networks into the regions of others. All it takes is one cable company to start offering service in another cable company's area and everyone else is going to follow suit. There will be chaos. Prices will drop to try to keep out competition, some cable companies will go out of business. But hey, if the end result is that your cable bill is lower and some of the bigger slow-moving companies that haven't done anything new in 10 years get wiped out and split up, how is that a bad thing?

You have to strengthen the competition, again no. This is survival of the fittest. The government doesn't need to get involved. The idea is to lower prices and improve service, not spend taxpayer money to artificially lower prices and improve service. That does nothing. As soon as government support ends, prices will pop back up and you'll have done nothing. If you really want to do anything, provide incentives for companies to expand their networks, by say, giving tax breaks on new lines for a limited time. But remember, you'd be doing the same thing for every company, since you're not just encouraging Company A to move into Company B's territory, but also encouraging Company B and C to move into Company A's.

But really, the best thing you can do right now for bandwidth speed is to drop the franchising process. Verizon will expand their fiber network a lot faster, and it will put serious pressure on Comcast, Time Warner, Cablevision, and the like to either drop their prices dramatically or boost their speed (Cablevision has already boosted their speed recently). CableLabs will roll out DOCSIS 3.0 a heck of a lot faster when its member companies are screaming for faster speeds to compete. My area saw cable speeds increase almost fourfold as a result of DSL pressure only a few years ago, but now DSL is the low-price low-speed ISP, and they really aren't competing with each other anymore. We need another major speed war and some direct competition over TV service. And hopefully AT&T and some other cable companies will enter the fray. But this won't happen with more laws and restrictions.

Re:Ummm... no...

[budgenator]

I got an idea, we'll just spin-off the infrastucture portion of the businesses; make the companies that provide the local-loop, the back-bone, and the service all sepparte companies and they'll sell access to content/service providers.

Re:Ummm... no...

[Qzukk]

If you really want to do anything, provide incentives for companies to expand their networks, by say, giving tax breaks on new lines for a limited time. But remember, you'd be doing the same thing for every company, since you're not just encouraging Company A to move into Company B's territory, but also encouraging Company B and C to move into Company A's.

It's hard to say. I really want to say "if you do nothing, nothing will happen" and that Cablevision will advertise service in new markets: "Setup fee only $50,000,000 for the first house, $50 for everyone else!"

But perhaps simply the threat of competition will get things moving again. Maybe Cablevision won't ever move into a new market, but if they think someone will move in on their market, they'll beef up what they've got. Consumers win, even if they're still stuck with Cablevision or whatever.

Obvious

[Kelz]

These people are just stating the obvious. Very rarely will government regulation have any good effect in the long term; it just slows down innovation and takes years to go away.

Do YOU trust your congressman to not just create a huge beauracracy, with new laws being stuck on whenever they want to "protect the children/fight terrorism".

Re:Obvious

[mrxak]

Somebody please think of the tubes!

Seriously, we need to end this madness. I want my congressman to debate real issues, subjects that (hopefully) he knows about. People screaming for net neutrality are completely ignoring the historically proven facts of economics. We do not want people like Ted Stevens running our internet.

Re:Obvious

[donaldrobertson]

People screaming for net neutrality are completely ignoring the historically proven facts of economics.

Like Enron?

Re:Obvious

[NeutronCowboy]

What TFA conveniently fails to point out is that all the players in the telecoms industry are ALREADY regulated. In other words, every problem that is associated with Net Neutrality legislation is already present. Huge bureaucracy? Check. You can even see directly where regulation affects your bill - it's hidden in those emergency fund fees, connection fund fees, access fees and all kinds of others that I forget. Players that have a huge interest in meddling with congress and elected officials? Check. Or why do you think that Comcast has a government sanctioned monopoly to deliver my cable? Monopolies propped up by regulation? Check. Check. And check again.

The idea that Net Neutrality bills will somehow change the telecoms industry from being a free-market free-for-all to being a regulated nightmare is at best naive, and at worst a blatant lie. It already is a regulated nightmare. A net neutrality bill is only supposed to prevent current monopoly owners from further gaming the system.

You know what I'd really like to see? A government-regulated utility that only controls the wires. No service, no nothing. Just pure hardware. And ATT, SBC, Speakeasy, AOL and all the rest can compete on services all day long. Either that, or forbid anyone who owns wires to sell service. What's that you say? That'd be inefficient, and there'd be no incentive to develop new technologies? I'm sorry, but I've been stuck on the same crummy DSL speed for the last 6 years. I physically can't get a better connection, unless I ask SBC to lay some fiber to my complex, or move closer to the DSLAM. Thanks to the existing monopoly, there already is close to zero innovation. I don't think swapping out one stagnant entity for another is somehow gonna make me worse off. Plus, I get to vote out politicians who don't fund Internet improvement bills. I can't do anything like that with SBC.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

History proves that regulation is bad, if you want proof just look at the U.S. economy during Hoover and compare that with F.D.R. or maybe Chile during Pinochet's rule or perhaps look at the England during the Thatcher years. Civil liberties and the economy... oh wait.

Re:Obvious

[mrxak]

Any corporation falsifying their books and commiting securities fraud (and insider trading) should get what's coming to them. But what's Enron have to do with this?

Re:Obvious

[gilroy]

Exactly. That's why, 30 years after the Clean Air Act, America's skies are in fact worse while the economy tanked.

Except, oh, wait. That didn't happen. In fact, the skies are vastly cleaner than they've been since the 1950s while the American economy has surged for 24 years with only two minor recessions.

Despite the mantra "Government can't work", the uncomfortable fact for neo-Friedman anarcho-capitalists is that, in fact, it can. Which is why the conservatives have officially seceded from the "reality based community" -- If you don't get the facts you like, change 'em.

Re:Obvious

[Durandal64]

Enron is a poster-child for corporate regulation. Beyond the fact that they cooked the books, they also had the state of California by the balls for quite a while. They'd artificially introduce power outages to squeeze every last dime out of their customers, and they did it while laughing on the phone with each other about how much money they were making off of others' misery. All because the Grand Conservative Experiment gave them a free hand to do so. (Although Gray Davis could've just sent the National Guard into those power plants and taken them over by force, such measures are not part of your standard free market.)

Make no mistake, a completely deregulated market will result in corporations running roughshod over the consumer. The Libertarian ideal of a totally free market where competition cures all ills simply does not account for real-world factors like barrier to entry. If no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry), competition only exists among established players who can simply collude to fuck the consumer up the ass, since they know that there won't be any hot-shot upstarts with new ideas like "not gouging your customers" entering the market to steal a piece of the pie.

All a corporation has to answer to is its bottom line. They don't care about people's suffering as long as it makes them money. As another example, look at what happened when Saint Reagan removed regulations on radio station ownership. All of a sudden, exactly six corporations started controlling the entirety of American radio.

Re:Obvious

[DamnStupidElf]

Do YOU trust your congressman to not just create a huge beauracracy, with new laws being stuck on whenever they want to "protect the children/fight terrorism".

With the quality Congress-persons we have, it's only a matter of time until a law is proposed to protect terrorism and fight children, and THEN we'll all be living in Soviet Russia.

Re:Obvious

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I hate the idea of trusting my congressman (although maybe Ted just needs some of Google's fiber to help clear his tubes), I'm far less eager to just trust a monopoly.

The problem here is the lack of competition. I'm not so worried about the government holding back innovation here. It might happen, and that would be a problem. But's that's not what's causing problems here.
The real concern is that the telcos, as monopolies with vested interests, are adamantly opposed to innovation. In order to maintain their position and their profits, they are willing to hold back everything else, and extract an above market price for what they provide.

Why degrade VOIP services? Because the telcos are scared of competition for phone service, and will do anything to prevent it.
Why charge google extra? Because there isn't anyone else to compete with them.

This is a problem of monopolies behaving badly. Either the telcos need to be broken up better this time, or we need to scare them straight (eminent domain on their networks maybe?).

Blah.

Re:Obvious

[mrxak]

I don't think anybody's arguing for letting companies cook the books, nor throwing out anti-trust laws. I know I'm not. I am arguing for ending the regulation called cable franchising. I'm arguing for ending the monopolies that regulation has been enforcing. If a MSO makes up numbers for their accounting and colludes with other MSOs, by all means go after them. But, let other MSOs enter each other's markets. Right now the only organization that is colluding with these companies is the government.

Re:Obvious

[ffejie]

You know what I'd really like to see? A government-regulated utility that only controls the wires. No service, no nothing. Just pure hardware. And ATT, SBC, Speakeasy, AOL and all the rest can compete on services all day long

What happens when the copper isn't good enough, or the Coax isn't fast enough and you need fiber? You need the government to upgrade it? Good grief.

Also, it's a pretty simplified view (some would even call it Ted Stevens-esque) to think that the wires are just tubes that any service can be put on. Those wires need to be hooked up to a box, and that box needs to have services running on it. It's very difficult to have one box tie a few hundred or thousand wires together and then make AT&T, Verizon and all the rest run service over it. Sure it's possible, but who owns that box? What if the box needs to be upgraded? What if the box goes down? What if Verizon wants to provision a new service on that box to give you faster speeds, different access, worse service, better service etc, but AT&T doesn't want to innovate?

Additionally, if a government utility were to own all the hardware -- you've just eliminated the service providers all together. Many of the features that run over networks (such as VPN, Security, Voice) are built into hardware. These aren't software apps running on servers that are powering this stuff. There are serious problems with this approach.

Re:Obvious

[robertjw]

...no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry)

One of the major prohibitive costs in many industries, (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry) are directly due to regulation. Pharmaceutical research, development and manufacturing wouldn't be as cost prohibitive if it wasn't for the FDA hoops that have to be jumped through and all the patents that have to be filed and defended. I'm not saying there shouldn't be some kind of approval proscess for drugs, but many industries would be much more competitive if the government regulation didn't get completely out of hand.

Re:Obvious

[vertinox]

Very rarely will government regulation have any good effect in the long term; it just slows down innovation and takes years to go away.

You mean like Patents and Copyrights?

Or maybe you mean like Standard Oil Co. or Ma Bell?

Then again... A lot of innovation came out of Ma Bell.

But I'd think more innovations happened after its break up. Its not that government regulation hinders innovation, it is the lack of competition that does.

Sometimes competition needs to be cramed down people's throats with an iron fist.

Even if this means regulation... A company that is a monopoly and has no regulation has no finacial need to innovate.

A company that is forced to compete will have to innovate or die.

Re:Obvious

[Thanatopsis]

Dude - you have NO idea how things work in the real world. We have see the world without the FDA. It was called 19th century america with it's snake oil medicine that would be just a likely to kill you as cure you. I have no interest in going back to that.

Re:Obvious

[robertjw]

Dude - you have NO idea how things work in the real world. We have see the world without the FDA.

Yeah, like Vioxx?

Again, I will reiterate, I'm not saying we don't need some kind of drug review. All I'm saying is getting FDA approval on a product is one of the most difficult and expensive steps in the pharmaceutical business. Current estimates are that FDA approval costs $800 million dollars. The US is the most expensive country in the world to get approval. Heck, the FDA still can't agree on the benefits of ASPIRIN for heart attack patients.

The FDA panel was merely being scientifically "pure" in making this vote. One of the panel members noted that what was needed is a seven-year trial enrolling 15,000 patients in the moderate-risk group, and until such data was available FDA should not give its stamp of approval.

But while agreeing with this opinion, another panel member further noted that aspirin's overall benefits have been so well-documented that it would probably be unethical (and certainly unfeasible) to actually perform such a trial.

It's quite possible that the FDA has cost as many lives as it has saved by being slow and expensive to approve drugs. I think you are the one who has NO idea how things work in the real world.

Re:Obvious

[Registered Coward v2]

Make no mistake, a completely deregulated market will result in corporations running roughshod over the consumer. The Libertarian ideal of a totally free market where competition cures all ills simply does not account for real-world factors like barrier to entry. If no new players are able to enter a market due to prohibitive cost (like, say, the pharmaceutical industry), competition only exists among established players who can simply collude to fuck the consumer up the ass, since they know that there won't be any hot-shot upstarts with new ideas like "not gouging your customers" entering the market to steal a piece of the pie

Except CA never fully deregulated the electric industry - they capped prices to consumers and let supply prices rise to demand - where each supplier essentially got the price for the last KW - so they had every incentive to choke the pipe and drive up prices. CA, in added bit of stupidity, mandated that the electric companies (not the producers of electricity) had to meet demand no matter the cost (which they could not recover). They were forces to pay market rates and could not control demand via blackouts. No wonder they went bankrupt.

The politicians promised lower electric prices and lined up to support deregulation - funny how the father of deregulation demanded a paternity test once he found out what he had spawned. Once again the invisible hand hit politicians with a clue by four; and once again they failed to get a clue.

Re:Obvious

[KarmaOverDogma]

He's not MY congressman and is not A congressman; He's a Senator (not MY Senator). What he IS is the Peter Priciple in action, being president pro-tempore of the Senate. And yes, he's not known for being the sharpest tool in the shed; he IS known for his outbursts on the Senate floor.

And no, I don't trust him to unclog "teh internet tubes."

Re:Obvious

[JesseMcDonald]

Exactly. That's why, 30 years after the Clean Air Act, America's skies are in fact worse while the economy tanked.

Except, oh, wait. That didn't happen. In fact, the skies are vastly cleaner than they've been since the 1950s while the American economy has surged for 24 years with only two minor recessions.

The problem with air pollution can be directly traced to the (government's) courts' newfound refusal to treat pollution as a property-rights violation, as it had always been treated in the past. Once individuals and businesses could no longer sue for damages resulting from pollution, "external costs" started creeping in; industrial plants could dump waste into the air and water without worrying about the damage it would caused to others' property. The Clean Air Act and related legislation created an adequite, but much less fair, efficient, or effective, patch for the government's own failure to perform its primary duty. Such legislation would never have been necessary if the courts had done their job instead of propping up failed merchantilist policies.

Despite the mantra "Government can't work", the uncomfortable fact for neo-Friedman anarcho-capitalists is that, in fact, it can. Which is why the conservatives have officially seceded from the "reality based community" -- If you don't get the facts you like, change 'em.

Anarcho-capitalists have, to the best of my knowledge, never held that government interference in general necessarily leads to economic collapse. Rather, they generally hold that government interference in the market[1] (a) generally fails to achieve its intended aim[2] as individuals wise up to the changes and reimpose their original subjective valuations and (b) always, to the extent that it is enforced, inhibits the ability of the market to fulfill the demands of the consumers. Between these two points, unlimited interference would eliminate the market altogether, and thus leave the economy in total chaos, but limited interference would only make things mildly worse than they would have been without the interference. It is important to note that in a generally progressing economy (one in which the amount of capital goods and the productivity of labor are increasing) the interference need not result in an economic regression; the interference may simply limit the rate of progression.

The state of the market at any given time represents the best possible allocation of resources in the estimation of each individual member to the best of that member's knowledge and abilities. If there is any actual defect, it is within the ability of any member of that market to make a tidy profit from bringing about a better arrangement. Political interference is thus necessarily an attempt to impose an arrangement of resource allocation not believed to better represent the will of the consumers; if it was believed to be more efficient, its advocate would have more profitably implemented it through the normal market processes.

Furthermore, all the anarcho-capitalist writings that I have run across (the ones associated with the Austrian school of economics, anyway) are very much fact-based and grounded in real-world history. In my estimation their theories have been much more successful both in explaining economic history and in predicting the outcomes of government policies than most of the mainstream (Keynesian) model-based theories, particularly in the areas of credit manipulation and tax-funded spending programs. To work, model-based systems must reduce future human action to a predictable component: a given intervention must always produce a given result or the model fails. Unfortunately for the Keynesians, humans don't work that way. We learn. As soon as people begin to adapt to the manipulation the intervention tends to lose its effectiveness. People tend to resist the manipulation of their activities; ever-increasing levels of intervention beco

Re:Obvious

[Qzukk]

They were forces to pay market rates and could not control demand via blackouts

If you're proposing that simply turning off service to paying customers is a viable method of "controlling demand" then I'd hate to live in your little world. If demand for airline flights got too high, would you rather drop a few out of the sky or build more airplanes? Maybe if too many people were shipping packages for Christmas, a few could wind up in some ditch somewhere without a problem?

Now clearly, capping consumer prices to prevent using price to control demand didn't help matters. But even if the government had not done so, I fail to see how that would have stopped Enron from faking supply shortages or shutting down generating plants in order to drive up the price of electricity. It probably would have prolonged the situation, since they'd have been able to soak the entire population of California instead of just driving the transmitters bankrupt. In this, we can see the parallels with the current gasoline situation here. Despite record profits, the oil companies just can't seem to afford to build refineries that don't poison the neighborhood or blow up and kill everyone, not that the regulations they whine about seem to be stopping them from doing either at their existing plants. Why should they, anyways? If they spend their money to increase supply, the gravy train stops since by limiting supply, they make the most money for doing the least amount of work.

If you want a real solution, you should ask why the transmitters chose to go out of business instead of building their own power plants to replace the plants that Enron was running incompetently. Faced with losing business entirely to plants that weren't being shut down at random, they'd have shaped up pretty quick. Looking around online, I could get 7 acres of land in california for under a million dollars, put a plant square in the middle and have a nice little buffer zone around the edge. Buy land from a farmer and you could probably get it cheaper, with a bonus for your liability insurance if the only thing your plant can kill is a handful of cows and chickens, but then you'd be facing transmission issues to get the power into town.

Re:Obvious

[Registered Coward v2]

f you're proposing that simply turning off service to paying customers is a viable method of "controlling demand" then I'd hate to live in your little world. If demand for airline flights got too high, would you rather drop a few out of the sky or build more airplanes? Maybe if too many people were shipping packages for Christmas, a few could wind up in some ditch somewhere without a problem?

No - my point was that the politicians setup the system for failure - they needed to keep a pricing mechanism in place to make the system work. Markets will do this naturally - in the absence of price controls in the old USSR shortages and lines took the place of price to match supply and demand.

Now clearly, capping consumer prices to prevent using price to control demand didn't help matters. But even if the government had not done so, I fail to see how that would have stopped Enron from faking supply shortages or shutting down generating plants in order to drive up the price of electricity. It probably would have prolonged the situation, since they'd have been able to soak the entire population of California instead of just driving the transmitters bankrupt.

The companies acted just like the politicians set them up to act. If I can make X dollars running plant A or X+Y running B and not A; guess what I'd do? CA's transmission system played a role as well - it's design is such that only a limited amount of power can be wheeled in.

In this, we can see the parallels with the current gasoline situation here. Despite record profits, the oil companies just can't seem to afford to build refineries that don't poison the neighborhood or blow up and kill everyone, not that the regulations they whine about seem to be stopping them from doing either at their existing plants. Why should they, anyways? If they spend their money to increase supply, the gravy train stops since by limiting supply, they make the most money for doing the least amount of work.

They also plan long term - there is no assurance that the current situation will continue and they risk overbuilding and driving down prices as a result - not a smart business move.

If you want a real solution, you should ask why the transmitters chose to go out of business instead of building their own power plants to replace the plants that Enron was running incompetently. Faced with losing business entirely to plants that weren't being shut down at random, they'd have shaped up pretty quick.

They weren't permitted to own and operate plants - the legislature (an a broad group of special interests) wanted to take that away from the evil utility and introduce competition. They wouldn't even let them enter into long term supply contracts; no the politicians knew what is best and that was to force companies to buy on the spot market and to pay whatever the cost was for the last kw. The transmission companies wanted a reliable supply at predictable prices but the politicians made sure they couldn't do that.

Enron and others figured out how to use the rules established by the CA legislature to their own benefit - had they been a little more careful they would have gotten away with it.

AIR, Enron actually ran few plants in the US - they were trading electricity; not generating it. That's why they were able to drive up prices by using trades to force higher priced plants online.

Of course, the politicians could not say they screwed up - it had to be the evil corporations that took advantage of CA.

Looking around online, I could get 7 acres of land in california for under a million dollars, put a plant square in the middle and have a nice little buffer zone around the edge. Buy land from a farmer and you could probably get it cheaper, with a bonus for your liability insurance if the only thing your plant can kill is a handful of cows and chickens, but then you'd be facing transmission issues to get the power into town.

Build a powerplant in CA? And run transmission lines? Good luck with that one.

Re:Obvious

[Qzukk]

If I can make X dollars running plant A or X+Y running B and not A; guess what I'd do?

risk overbuilding and driving down prices as a result - not a smart business move.

And herein lies the problem. Neither regulation nor the free market will change this fundamental mathematical equation. Regulation or not, if nobody wants to break the gravy train and build more plants so that people can get the electricity they need, then I'm out of ideas. You got any?

They weren't permitted to own and operate plants

At least part of that's explained, though corporations have had centuries of experience flaunting regulations. Why didn't the board of directors of California Transmission, Inc. simply erect California Generation, Inc? It worked well enough for Custer Battles, who even made their new companies operate out of the same address when the military banned them from contracting with them.

Re:Obvious

[Registered Coward v2]

If I can make X dollars running plant A or X+Y running B and not A; guess what I'd do?

risk overbuilding and driving down prices as a result - not a smart business move.

And herein lies the problem. Neither regulation nor the free market will change this fundamental mathematical equation. Regulation or not, if nobody wants to break the gravy train and build more plants so that people can get the electricity they need, then I'm out of ideas. You got any?

Profit is what breaks the gravy train - once companies see they can make an acceptable profit by building a plant, they will. That's what drove the building of merchant (non0utility owned plants) a few years back. Competition works but too often politicians and others want to "fix" problems and only mess things up.

They problem is that it is a lot easier to build a manufacturing plant than site a power plant - people don't like transmission lines; you need to be near a fuel source (or build a nuke); all of which adds uncertainty and raises the required return to make it a worthwhile investment.

This isn't just a CA issue, the rise in natural gas prices and rising demand for electricity is going to force some rethinking of our energy supply strateg y - to the point where we will see licensing and construction started on a new nuke plant in the US within 5 years.

They weren't permitted to own and operate plants

At least part of that's explained, though corporations have had centuries of experience flaunting regulations. Why didn't the board of directors of California Transmission, Inc. simply erect California Generation, Inc? It worked well enough for Custer Battles, who even made their new companies operate out of the same address when the military banned them from contracting with them.

As regulated entity the transmission companies can't simply create a new company and build plants - the regulators would be very concerned that the regulated side was being used to subsidize or otherwise prop up the unregulated side; plus they'd be accused of using the plants to drive up prices every time there was a spike in the price.

The root of the problem was the CA legislature's attempt to have it both ways - reduce electric prices to consumers, and force the generators to bear the pricing risks.

As for Custer Battles; government contracting is a whole different beast than operating a regulated utility.

Congress is involved, remember.

[krell]

The net-neutrality legislation might actually make the problem worse. But at least it bans flag-burning, provides federal funding for Air America, declares Feb. 13 to be "National Nathaniel Hawthorne Awareness Day", and pays for 6 years of new shoes for Sen. Harkin! That's what counts the most.

Re:Congress is involved, remember.

[lividdr]

I'd suggest modding the parent funny, but it's probably more informative or insightful. That, my friends, is a sad thing.

That last bit.

[GundamFan]

As much as I support the idea of Net Nutrality (at least the idea of telecomms not "double dipping" or controling user access to content) that last bit about testing a network for nutrality is interesting to me, I wonder what kind of things you could find out about the state of the "free" internet we wish to protect.

The more I read the more i begin to realise that maybe market presure will keep the Telecomms honest... I know I wouldn't pay fpr access that didn't let me use services just because they say it is more exspensive to provide access to that content (I don't think it is, technicaly 1 million hits on google should be the same as 1 million hits on 1 million small servers).

Re:That last bit.

[mrxak]

Market pressure will keep the MSOs honest, like in any free market. The problem is that with over-regulation being what it is already, we don't have a free market. How many cable providers are in your area? It's not enough to just throw out these net neutrality efforts, but we also need less restrictions on competition. We'd all have a lot more/cheaper bandwidth if it wasn't for franchising laws.

Re:That last bit.

[schwaang]

We'd all have a lot more/cheaper bandwidth if it wasn't for franchising laws.

The real problem with franchising is that cities don't seem to bother with negotiating a good deal, which requires being willing on ocassion to switch providers. When was the last time you got to *vote* on your telco or cable provider?

OTOH, you now have apartment owners locking into 10-year contracts with cable companies to prevent incursion of future video provided by telcos. That's free market competition, except of course that the individual apartment occupants get no choice.

Re:That last bit.

[mrxak]

The real real problem with franchising is that it's takes 6 months to a year and who knows how much money to negotiate each one. And they have to be negotiated with every single municipality. Franchising is slowing up or stopping other companies from coming into an area. If it wasn't for franchising, I most definitely could vote for better service. I would of course be talking about voting with my wallet, spending money on the company that provides what I want at the price I want.

As for contracts wtih apartment buildings, such is life. The choice for the occupant is that nobody says you have to live in that apartment. The owner of the building can make whatever contract they want that provides them with the service they want (the service that will attract and keep tenants) at the price they want.

Re:That last bit.

[schwaang]

The real real problem with franchising is that it's takes 6 months to a year and who knows how much money to negotiate each one.

I think you mean it takes 6 months to a year for a municpal bureaucrat to pull the contract out of their throat and sign it as given, don't you? I've seen next-to-zero evidence that *any* "negotiating" takes place on behalf of rate-payers in the places I've lived. Not the case with garbage contracts and such, but definitely the case with cable and telco.

In Palo Alto, CA, which has (or did 10 years ago when I lived there) it's own cable service and its own power utility, the rates were significantly lower than in surrounding communities. Imagine that.

Re:That last bit.

[Anonymous Coward]

As for contracts wtih apartment buildings, such is life. The choice for the occupant is that nobody says you have to live in that apartment. The owner of the building can make whatever contract they want that provides them with the service they want (the service that will attract and keep tenants) at the price they want.

The problem is that except for the minority of apartments that contract with the cable company to provide "free" cable, the tenants contract with the cable company themselves. What right does the apartment owner have to interfere with my cable contract? Can I charge the early termination fee to the landlord if I move in and a month later the landlord forces me to cancel my contract so that they can contract with some other company to provide exclusive cable for a decade?

Re:That last bit.

[mrxak]

Negotiations are definitely happening. I don't think it even matters who's negotiating what, the important thing is that it's slowing down the process, and keeping the competition out. If you want to compare, look at Australia. They tend to have more competition with cable companies overlapping their areas of service. They have excellent service from what I hear, with some pretty dramatic improvements in the last 10 years. I'm also glad you brought up public-owned cable service. So long as companies are allowed to compete against city-owned cable, I say the more the merrier.

Re:That last bit.

[mrxak]

I really have no idea. You're talking about landlord rights and appartment contracts, which is well out of the scope of this discussion. IANAL, so all I can say is to read your contract carefully. Generally there's more covered in there than you might expect. Again, nobody is forcing you to live in any particular appartment, and it's not the cable company's fault if you have a problem with your landlord. If you don't like any part of the deal on your appartment, you don't have to move in, and you certainly can move out.

Re:That last bit.

[schwaang]

I'm also glad you brought up public-owned cable service. So long as companies are allowed to compete against city-owned cable, I say the more the merrier.

Of course they can compete. The city-owned cable exists at the pleasure of the citizenry. They are free to demand that their elected officials dump the city-owned operation in favor of a more "Comcastic" offer. (As indeed many municipalities are turning their waterworks over to giant commercial entities that promise lower rates.)

Re:That last bit.

[sgt_doom]

I would suggest instead that you ask the next question: Who owns the telecoms? And who is buying up as many telecoms as they can???? An interesting indicator as to the future you espouse....

Easy...

[GillBates0]

Google is buying all the fiber because of it's well known benefits. Fiber absorbs several times their weight in water, resulting in softer, bulkier stools, which makes it easier for traffic to pass through the colon.

Anybody who's experiencing problems due to clogged Tubes is well-advised to deploy as much Fiber as possible.

Re:Easy...

[mrxak]

I have to say, that's the most creative joke I've seen about this whole thing yet. Somebody mod this guy up!

Re:Easy...

[HoboMaster]

No kidding... Wish I hadn't already used up all my mod points.

Re:Easy...

[twistedsymphony]

My monitor almost got a Mountain Dew shower reading that one...

Re:Easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ted -- is that you?

Re:Easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

Dear sir,

You win at the Internet.

Re:Easy...

[Anonymous Coward]

You really need to get some of these.

Net Neutrality law is bad law

[Anonymous Coward]

I would say that any new law is a bad law. They are either a dupe of something already in place, take away our rights, favor some stinking rich folk, contradict what the Founding Fathers intended, and so on.

The question I have.

[The Living Fractal]

Net neutrality. The idea that all content is created (and thusly allowed to traverse the internet) equally. Ok, so I have a couple questions really.

The first, what happens if encryption makes it impossible to really tell what anything is? How does a non-net-neutral ISP then determine tiered prices for the content? Does encryption effectively enforce Net Neutrality?

And second, if an ISP wants to charge a customer more because they are simply using the bandwidth or transfer limits which the ISP already sold to the customer, what is this telling us? I mean, if I buy 50 gigs of transfer a month and I use it all, that's ok right? Until all of the suddend everyone is using it all. And then the ISP is saying "wait wait wait, yea we sold you this, but uhm, if you are all going to use it then this isn't going to work". In effect the same as the cell companies when they sell you minutes. If everyone is using their cell phones, your phone is pretty much useless "network busy".

I mean, what the hell?

TLF

Re:The question I have.

[jfengel]

For Question 1, the problem isn't so much discriminating based on the content as discriminating based on the sender. That is, if amazon.com has paid the fee and bn.com hasn't, you get faster access to amazon's web site than bn. (Especially if "slower" means "nothing at all".)

Which could lead to discrimination against content you don't like (e.g. fast access to nra.org, shutting aclu.org to a trickle), but it's site-based, not something you can fix with encryption unless you start talking about fancy stuff like onion routing. Even that doesn't really help, because they could throttle everything except packets directly to their paid providers.

What guarantees network neutrality is your ability to switch to a neutral ISP if you don't get the access you want. That only works if you have competition among ISPs, which too many people don't.

For your second question, there's also a notion of using special protocols (quality of service, QoS) to guarantee certain bandwidth between two sites on a site-by-site basis. So if you want to watch a movie in real time, and you want to guarantee that there's at least 1 Mbps available between the sites, the ISPs want to be able to charge you for that guarantee.

Most ISPs make very little in the way of guarantees to individual users. (High-level providers like the one amazon uses are a different story). Guaranteeing 1 Mbps constantly requires a lot more hardware than they have now, and most of the time that's just fine, because most Internet traffic comes in short burts. It becomes not-fine only when you have a specific requirement, like watching a movie or a VOIP conversation, or a web site that you absolutely must keep running 99.999% of the time or you'll scare away the customers.

Re:The question I have.

[The Living Fractal]

Thanks for the quick answer.

About this part: "What guarantees network neutrality is your ability to switch to a neutral ISP if you don't get the access you want. That only works if you have competition among ISPs, which too many people don't."

So if NN is important enough to people, then a neutral ISP will win market share. But if some ISPs are quasi-NN, i.e. they aren't net neutral but the majority of consumers won't even notice, they will probably win more share and make more money?

It's an interesting topic. I wonder, if bandwidth could ever be cheap enough to make this a non-issue. Seems like no matter how much bandwidth we have, we find ways to use it up.

TLF

Re:The question I have.

[deadmantyping]

I wonder if for instance, Google, which is used by a large portion of internet users to find anything on the internet, were to not pay the fees that ISPs decided they needed from them. Would that drive people to change things? If you suddenly could not use Google what would you do? Where I live there isn't a big choice in internet providers. So I'm either stuck with dial-up, satellite, or the cable company, to which I currently subscribe. Maybe the ISPs would have to allow Google's traffic because of the public outcry? That seems more likely than the ISPs becoming net neutral.

Re:The question I have.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bandwidth will never be cheap enough to make this a non-issue. Bottom line is that if the telco companies think that they can extort more money out of users, they will. Bandwidth was not and never will be an issue.

Re:The question I have.

[Wesley Felter]

The first, what happens if encryption makes it impossible to really tell what anything is? How does a non-net-neutral ISP then determine tiered prices for the content? Does encryption effectively enforce Net Neutrality?

Encryption just shoots yourself in the foot, since an ISP can just put all encrypted traffic into the lowest-speed or highest-cost tier. So instead of the ISP penalizing VoIP, now they will penalize all your traffic.

Re:The question I have.

[jfengel]

Broadband service requires rather expensive physical infrastructure in the form of wires or fibers, and access to that will always be somewhat contentious. So there will always be a limited number of ISPs. In rural places, that number may be 1. Even in cities, there will be only a limited number.

Especially since, as you point out, each is compelled to break neutrality or be forced out by a cheaper company.

It is an interesting topic. My own personal take is to let the phone and cable companies try breaking neutrality and see if they really do use it just to provide QoS and improved access, or if they do what many Slashdotters fear: extorting content providers like YouTube and cutting off access to sites they don't like. I'm reluctant to let Congress legislate it for exactly the reasons listed in the article.

But if the ISPs really do screw it up... I'll be mighty ticked.

Re:The question I have.

[BlueDreaux]

You also have to keep track of what type of encryption mechanism you're using. Some packets are bigger than others, some packets fit under the payload of a specific encryption protocol, others, in order to guarantee quick compression->delivery->decompression have to stay at a relatively fixed size for the end-to-end software to work optimally. From there you can usually tell what type of packet it is whether its encypted or not. Do you really think they're going to keep things to the first two layers of the stack in order to implement this? In short, encryption only encrypts the contents, not the type of the contents. Of course there are exceptions to this statement that depend on the type of encryption you're implementing.

Re:The question I have.

[budgenator]

I'm pretty much a free-market, keep the government's nose the hell outa our business kind of a guy, but it seems to me that the advertising about anything to do with the internet, bandwidth and transfer is pretty much a bald-faced lie and I just don't understand why the FTC doesn't fine a few of those bastards into bankruptcy over false advertising.

Re:The question I have.

[Jherek Carnelian]

Encryption just shoots yourself in the foot, since an ISP can just put all encrypted traffic into the lowest-speed or highest-cost tier. So instead of the ISP penalizing VoIP, now they will penalize all your traffic.

Which is exactly what they will do anyway.

Your only hope is for a (stupid) ISP to take a contract to provide "enhanced" service to traffic based on the type of traffic. Then you can tunnel your own protocols inside packets that look like the "enhanced" service.

But, if the ISP does the intelligent thing and "enhances" traffic based only on the end-points, then there is nothing you can do, but get a new ISP which you probably can't do anyway because regulation has already restricted the choice to two or less for the majority of Americans.

Tangentially related...

[jdaly]

There has also been some confusion over authorship. Mr. Lee is not to be
confused with Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor and NetNeutrality proponent.

Timothy B. Lee

[Anonymous Coward]

Timothy B. Lee is not a thinly disguised Tim Berners-Lee, despite the apparent similarity of names.

TBL

[Anonymous Coward]

..Timothy B.Lee...

Is that like Tim Berner Lee's new nom-de-guerre?

Re:TBL

[Anonymous Coward]

TBL - or Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor - has written and spoken publicly in favor of net neutrality. Here's a blog excerpt:

Net neutrality is this:

If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.

That's all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.

Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.

Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn't pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will.

There have been suggestions that we don't need legislation because we haven't had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net neutrality in the past -- it is only recently that real explicit threats have occurred.

Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry.

Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can't photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.

Let's see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations.

I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.

Ah! I See!

[NickFortune]

legislation specifically guaranteeing Net Neutrality would in fact be less effective than just allowing the status quo.

Right, gotcha. So regulation is evil because regulation can be subverted, and that would end up with ISPs free to do as they liked. While legislating against Net Neutrality would mean that ISPs got to do whatever they wanted too. Only sooner.

So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want. Which is better. Apparently.

You want to run that one past me again, Timothy B?

Re:Ah! I See!

[Anonymous Coward]

"So regulation is evil because regulation can be subverted, and that would end up with ISPs free to do as they liked."

No, it would end up with ISPs using government to put up barriers to competition, or in the worst case, actually get sanction to violate people's rights. A business simply "doing what they like" is constrained by competition and other market pressures. Once you get to buy a gun-by-proxy, you can throw market pressures out the window.

Re:Ah! I See!

[robertjw]

So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want. Which is better. Apparently.

No, TFA recommends preserving the status quo (which is as good or better than where we are ultimately going to end up) rather than wasting a few billion taxpayer dollars letting the government get involved.

Re:Ah! I See!

[NickFortune]

No, TFA recommends preserving the status quo

And did TFA have any ideas on how this was to be achieved, sans legislation?

I seem to have missed that bit.

Re:Ah! I See!

[NickFortune]

A business simply "doing what they like" is constrained by competition and other market pressures.

Call me a communist, but I never really bought into this concept of a Holy Sacred Market with all these mystical powers or self regulation. It seems to me that a cartel can raise as effective a barrier to competition as a regulator.

Re:Ah! I See!

[robertjw]

And did TFA have any ideas on how this was to be achieved, sans legislation?

The whole quote was
So TFA cleverly recommends a middle road of preserving the status quo, which would leave the ISPs... erm.. free to do whatever they want.

We don't need any (new) legislation to allow the ISPs to do whatever they want.

Re:Ah! I See!

[Abcd1234]

Shhhh! These poor anarch-capitalists have such fragile egos. Blithely poking holes in their religion is rather cruel.

Re:Ah! I See!

[NickFortune]

What I'm getting at is the author of the original article seems to be trying to imply tbat a laisser faire approach is some kind of clever compromise that will resolve the situation to the satisfaction of both camps, when in actual fact it's exactly what Net Neutrality opponents have been campaiging for from day one.

This chap is not an honest pony. He's a shill, and he's offering propaganda dressed up as sweet reason.

Re:Ah! I See!

[robertjw]

What I'm getting at is the author of the original article seems to be trying to imply tbat a laisser faire approach is some kind of clever compromise...

I didn't get that from the article at all. The author is simply pointing out that government regulation has a history of supporting the interests of big business, not the consumer. The Net Neutrality camp's campaign may very well backfire on them. I think his points are very well presented. If the citizens of this country refuse to look at the historical performance of government regulation we deserve exactly what we will get.

Re:Ah! I See!

[NickFortune]

I didn't get that from the article at all.

mmm... he's still saying, in effect, that the best deal for the consumer can only be had by giving the ISPs exactly what they want right now, as opposed to making them work for years in order to subvert the intent of any regulation. Seems to me that the man is either dishonest, hasn't thought his position through, or else is a total idiot. Given that he can frame a coherent argument, the first option would seem to be the front runner.

Meybe he's just arguing that the consumer is going to shafted whatever happens, and the sooner they drop their pants, the sooner they'll get used to it. That would at least be internally consistent.

Then if we want to get picky, there's the whole false dichotomy of presenting the choice as either economic darwinism or death-by-regulation, when there is surely a spectrum of options in between.

government regulation has a history of supporting the interests of big business

Big business has a history of supporting bug business, too. All that says to me is that "money talks".

If the citizens of this country refuse to look at the historical performance of government regulation we deserve exactly what we will get.

You could say the same about total deregulation. That doesn't always work to the customer's advantage either.

Personally, I think both extremes are stupid and harmful. Maybe we all need to re-learn the concept of a happy medium

Re:Ah! I See!

[robertjw]

Maybe he's just arguing that the consumer is going to shafted whatever happens...

No, actually he's arguing that the market won't allow telecoms to make tiered bandwidth a viable economic model. There's no need for regulation because the competition in the market will prevent the kind of abuses that are alleged.

Pre-emptive legislation is unnecessary. Regulation can always be enforced after someone attempts to abuse the system. Just the threat of potential Net Neutrality laws should be adequate to keep the telecoms from doing anything too nasty.

You could say the same about total deregulation. That doesn't always work to the customer's advantage either.

Deregulation demands more responsibility on the consumers part. Government regulation can make things safer for the consumer, but they also limit a consumer's choices. Inevitably some of these unavailable choices will be better options for the consumer. In this particular instance the consumer will only get the shaft if they choose to either continue to do business with an ISP that demands a tiered service or if they choose not to circumvent the throttling by other means. Net Neutrality will only protect the consumers that don't actually care about their service adequately to show their ISPs that they won't stand for bandwidth throttling. Ebay, Google, Yahoo, etc... are pushing the Net Neutrality because they stand to loose the most from it. Many consumers may accept the restrictions put for the by the ISPs and those restrictions will cut directly into Google's profits.

Total deregulation may not be an acceptable alternative, but we need an acceptable method to eliminate the corruption and greed from our government officials. The problem isn't the regulation itself, it's the actions of those conducting the regulation.

Re:Ah! I See!

[NickFortune]

No, actually he's arguing that the market won't allow telecoms to make tiered bandwidth a viable economic model.

Amazing the difference a good night's sleep can make. I've just re-read the article, and I think I' being rather too hard on Mr. Lee. I still don't necessarily agree with him, but it looks like I went into knee-jerk response mode there.

Regulation?

[MobyDisk]

Why does network neutrality require a regulatory body? We've had neutrality for a long time with no regulatory body enforcing it.

First, any individual can check their own connection for neutrality and bring a lawsuit if it is violated. Every law doesn't require a special oversight regulatory organization to monitor it all the time.

Second, if such a body is required, the FCC is the logical choice. They wrote the current neutrality laws, and they already hold power over the telecom companies. I don't really like the FCC, and I don't think any regulatory body is necessary, but if one is necessary then it should be them.

Re:Regulation?

[Ken Hall]

Picture if you will..

A couple of swarthy guys in ill-fitting pinstriped suits in the offices of Amazon.com:

"Gee, Mr. Bezos, it would really be a shame if the response time to your servers was to get SO much worse, but after all, bn.com is paying us to make sure their customers get good response, and the bandwidth they need has to come from SOMEWHERE. Now if you were to make a small contribution to our "infrastructure fund", we can see if there's anything we can do to prevent that..."

I had a friend who was about as anti-regulation as one can get, and even he had to admit that a free market can turn to extortion very quickly without at least basic rules to make sure everyone has access to a level playing field.

Re:Regulation?

[ProfDumb]

We've had neutrality for a long time with no regulatory body enforcing it.

Not so, not at all. In the early days of the internet, the "backbone" of the internet was provided by the Department of Defense and the various non-profits (mostly universities and non-profits) who ran the internet day-to-day embedded "net neutrality" into the basic protocols of the internet.

When the government decided to turn the backbone over to be run by private firms, the FCC explicitly required net neutrality as a condition of that decision. Only very recently did the FCC change that rule (2005, I believe). When the rule changed, telecomms started to float the idea of creating different "tiers" of service, where content-providers would bid to have traffic on the "good" tier.

It is that suggestion that has led to an attempt to restore the old (original) rules; this time via legislation.

Re:Regulation?

[robertjw]

Only very recently did the FCC change that rule

Evidence that we probably shouldn't put the FCC in charge again, since they already dropped the ball once.

Re:Regulation?

[ProfDumb]

Evidence that we probably shouldn't put the FCC in charge again, since they already dropped the ball once.

Well, you are in luck, since the net neutrality legislation doesn't leave the decision in the hands of the FCC in again!

Re:Regulation?

[robertjw]

since the net neutrality legislation doesn't leave the decision in the hands of the FCC in again!

The net neutrality legislation? I wasn't aware that any net neutrality legislation had passed congress. In fact, I was pretty sure there hadn't been any. Until a bill is written, discussed, amended, voted on, passed and signed into law there are no guarantees what form it will take. Congress could easily put the FCC back in charge. In fact, I can't imagine who else they would put in charge. The FCC will probably have to enforce this and we all know they are pretty busy making sure the children don't see nipples on TV.

Re:Regulation?

[NormalVisual]

Only once? I fail to see why the FCC should be involved with anything that doesn't directly involve technical or legal aspects of RF spectrum licensing/enforcement, and they should not be involved *at all* when it comes to content.

Re:Regulation?

[binarybits]

Dude, you have no idea what you're talking about. The 2005 Brand X decision concerned whether the cable companies' "last mile" was subject to common carrier regulations. Once they lost that, the FCC deregulated the Baby Bells' "last mile" too. But the backbone, as well as all non-telephone based 'net connections, have never been subject to anything like network neutrality regulations.

Re:Regulation?

[MobyDisk]

You completely missed the point. We've had the internet for fifteen years now, and we've had network neutrality without any regulating body to enforce it. Why do we suddenly need one now? What has changed?

Furthermore, your example failed to include the correct # of pinstriped suits:
- The one on the swarthy guys would be the jail outfits
- The suits worn by Mr. Bezos' lawyers
- The suits worn by the DOJ lawyers
- The antitrust suit against the telecom

Amazing how justice can work even without a regulatory body in place.

Re:Regulation?

[MobyDisk]

Can you please post more on this? I've been doing my homework for the past month, and everything I've read says the exact opposite: That the backbone has been subject to common carrier laws since the day the first telephone lines were run. Maybe you can point me to a reference on this subject? It is very confusing.

Re:Regulation?

[binarybits]

I don't know of a good general reference, but here's the general history: the Baby Bells were subject to common carrier regulations--first the "computer inquiries" of the 1960s-80s, and later the "local loop unbundling" regime that the FCC imposed after the '96 telecom act. These weren't regulations of the Internet as such, but rather were designed to prevent the Bells from using their non-Internet monopoly position to give them an unfair advantage in the Internet market.

The rest of the Internet--including cable providers like Comcast, Tier 1 providers like Global Crossing and Level 3, and providers of business-class Internet service--have never been subject to any kind of common carrier regime. The cable companies were declared to be "information services" exempt from most regulations soon after the 1996 Telecom Act was passed. And other non-residential Internet providers (AFAIK, anyway) has never been subject to the FCC's jurisdiction at all.

I've never heard of the FCC putting conditions on NSFNet's privatization of the backbone. The NSF web page summarizing the hand-over doesn't mention it. I can't prove it didn't happen, but I've never seen any evidence that it did. Perhaps "ProfDumb" can enlighten us.

No net neutrality will kill innovation

[Travoltus]

Who except the big corpos can afford to pay the "premium" bandwidth fees?

No net neutrality will only make the big telcos rich and small businesses woefully uncompetitive.

Foreign companies not affected by tiered bandwidth costs will eat our lunch.

Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation

[Kelz]

The government doesn't have to regulate the internet, but they DO have to regulate the telco's. Just tell them NO when they want to set up a teired internet.

Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation

[mrxak]

The "big corpos" can also afford to sue the ISPs into the ground if they try to extort them, and customers getting degraded service can jump to another ISP. That is, if deregulation happens, allowing actual competition.

It's really quite simple. If you let congress get involved in the internet, then everybody is going to be lobbying congress 100x more than they are now. Things will turn against the public's interest pretty quickly. And quite frankly, I don't trust the government to get it right to begin with. Any net neutrality legislation will be poorly-worded, include all kinds of pork, and ultimately takes attention away from more important issues.

Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation

[Travoltus]

De regulation won't allow for more ISP's to happen.

a) the copper or fiber was all laid by one telco in a certain region.
b) the telco of that region thus owns all that fiber or copper.
c) the telco of that region which owns that fiber or copper, can flatly refuse to allow any ISPs on there.
d) deregulation makes it easier for them to refuse.

Exactly how does competition happen then?

BTW Congress isn't entirely inefficient like you claim it is; after the Do Not Call List came into being, my telemarketing calls dwindled to ZERO. No "market research" calls, and not even any political calls.

So no, not all legislation passed by Congress is poorly worded or takes attention away from more important issues.

Going by your logic, a "no income tax" law would also be "poorly-worded, include all kinds of pork, and ultimately takes attention away from more important issues."

Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation

[mrxak]

Exactly how does competition happen then?

Simple, companies lay down their own copper or fiber. Verizon already did it a few towns away from me, as they've been doing around the country. But I'm probably not going to see any of that fiber for another few years. Not because Comcast will say no, but because Verizon has to negotiate with each municipality to get a franchise, a process that can take years.

Going by your logic, a "no income tax" law would also be "poorly-worded, include all kinds of pork, and ultimately takes attention away from more important issues."

Well I at least consider a "no income tax" law to be less relevant than say, cheaper medicine, stem cell research funding, getting homeless people off the streets, helping Africa fight AIDS, Iraq, getting more jobs, and a plethora of other issues. I can also almost guarentee that there will be pork added. A bill like you describe would have people just itching to add things to it. As for poorly-worded, that depends on which intern had the job of typing up the draft. By the way, thanks for mentioning the Do Not Call List. Do you remember that list of exceptions such as political groups and candidates?

Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation

[Abcd1234]

Simple, companies lay down their own copper or fiber. Verizon already did it a few towns away from me, as they've been doing around the country.

Okay. Now *you* set up a company and start doing the same. What? You can't afford it? You don't have the *massive* resources at your disposal that a company like Verizon does? Oh. Hmm... so much for competition, then.

See, competition ain't competition if it's among, say, 2 or 3 big players who can choose to collude to fuck you up the ass. Welcome to the telecom industry.

Re:No net neutrality will kill innovation

[Travoltus]

"Simple, companies lay down their own copper or fiber. Verizon already did it a few towns away from me, as they've been doing around the country. But I'm probably not going to see any of that fiber for another few years. Not because Comcast will say no, but because Verizon has to negotiate with each municipality to get a franchise, a process that can take years."

Simple? You call that simple? Even with no regulation involved, that is an extremely expensive proposition. You're running c/f through the streets but then how many central offices will that require? How many customers do you think you will pick up? Granted, strategy #1 is to go for the customers who have no service, but how far will that go? Stop me if I'm speaking in error here.

Verizon might be able to do that for a few cities, but the reality is that most companies prefer to open up existing network's c/f and use it instead, for a VERY good reason: it costs millions, or billions, to run your own c/f network. If they can't do that, competition will be quite stifled even without regulation. Again, please feel free to stop me if I'm speaking in error here.

Plus, some of that 'regulation' may have to do with the constant tearing up of roads to put an ISP's c/f in, and the re-tearing up of roads for putting in another ISP's network. Imagine doing that over and over again for each new competitor. Traffic problems, anyone?

In summary? The word 'natural barrier to entry' comes to mind. Without regulation, these barriers still exist by the sheer nature of the scope of the project.

"Well I at least consider a "no income tax" law to be less relevant than say, cheaper medicine, stem cell research funding, getting homeless people off the streets, helping Africa fight AIDS, Iraq, getting more jobs, and a plethora of other issues. I can also almost guarentee that there will be pork added. A bill like you describe would have people just itching to add things to it. As for poorly-worded, that depends on which intern had the job of typing up the draft. By the way, thanks for mentioning the Do Not Call List. Do you remember that list of exceptions such as political groups and candidates?"

But if even the laws you like will be loaded with pork... does that not damage the credibility of all the "reduce Government NOW!" legislation that Libertarians are dreaming of? Congress will be needed to act to repeal all that evil "regulation"; in so doing, who knows what pork could come of that?

What I'm saying here is your goal is self contradictory.

And yes, I do remember that list of exceptions. I haven't received those calls. I felt very lonely during election season. Ok, no I didn't... but still... heheh... ok I admit, YMMV on that one. Some people will get those "exempt" calls. But come on, the DNC act cut down 99% of the friggin calls. It's outrageously effective for the majority of us who use it. I believe we can agree the DNC act is an exception to the alleged "rule" that Congress always makes bad laws. I can also cite the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as having solved more problems than it created... of course, white supremacists would disagree.....

By the way, just so you know, Net Neutrality is the status quo, and has been ever since these 'internets' were created. It is ISPs and Telco's, not us evil opensourceniks, that are trying to change things.

Strange...

[sterno]

I have zero objection to the notion of the carriers tiering their network to expedite services provided that it's provider neutral. That means, if you are going to offer changes that make a VOIP call work better, you have to make it available to everybody, not just your own internal services. What the telecom companies want to do is create a competitive advantage in the IPTV space. If they can force their competition to pay higher rates to provide similar quality of service, then they have an innate advantage just because they control the pipes. That's anti-competitive and harmful to the consumer.

So long as they as it costs as much for them to provide a given service as a competitior, I have no problem with them creating tiered services.

Re:Strange...

[Brew Bird]

The network has evolved. Nothing is keeping the carrier's network from continueing to offer best effort service at the same price they have always done.

CoS is a way of keeping bandwidth prices low, as it allows the carriers to gain better use of edge oversubscription. If they are forced to continue this rediculous growth model of simply building more bandwidth, your going to be seeing some serious price hikes, now that the false competition has gone out of business.

Lets face it, the folks that undermined the market in the late 90s are long gone. They took thier investers money, built a 'brand', and sold it off to someone interested in long term sucess. In the meantime, they changed the expectation of the consumer of what they could expect for thier dollar. Like so many things associated with money in the late 90s, these were FALSE expectations.

Now that thier is service differentiation coming available, there are a lot of hurdles to jump. Consider:

CoS STOPS at a carrier edge. If Vonage wants to have low latency QoS to all of ATT customers, it's going to have to buy service direct from ATT, and stipulate they want low latency on it.

Today, Vonage can simply get 'best effort' internet from anyone, and service ATT customers. THAT WILL NOT CHANGE.

However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative? Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.

Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!

Re:Strange...

[mrxak]

I can see the tv ads now "our ISP doesn't slow down VoIP provider X, so switch to our internet tubes today!"

Provided there are options, things will be just fine. The trick is to make sure the consumer has options. Right now the government has all kinds of barriers to make sure that the only option you have is the one they have given monopoly rights to. That's your problem.

Re:Strange...

[sterno]

However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative? Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.


They have that infrastructure because they have control over the pipe into my home. In most locations the competition for that pipe is, at most, two companies (one for phone and one for cable). There is a natural monopoly in this because it's incredibly expensive and legally complicated to wire up individual homes. This was acknowledged long ago and government regulation helped make wiring up all those homes feasible. It is more efficient to have one or two companies have exclusive access, but because it's limited, it's also important for those companies to be regulated.

Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!

More accurately it'd be like the people who are GIVEN a high rise apartment getting cranky when the people who gave it to them want to come over for a visit and check out their great view.

Re:Strange...

[sterno]

Provided their options, then yes. The trouble is that with the average house getting service from one or two providers, and those providers controlling so much of the access throughout the country, competition is unrealistic. Odds are in this country you have Comcast cable, and AT&T phone service. Now you might get your internet service from some other company (SpeakEasy, AOL, etc), but in the end, all of it comes over the same set of wires that are owned by one of those two companies.

So long as that is the case, competition can only exist in a regime of government regulation that forces it to exist.

Re:Strange...

[Qzukk]

However, If ATT wants to compete with vonage by putting a VoIP service on it's own expensive infrastructure, with the added bonus that it WILL work better because they have access to low latency QoS on the ATT network, how is that anti-competative?

So do you have a problem with accessing google right now? Vonage? Amazon? If there is no problem, then why would Google, Vonage or Amazon pay for "better" access? You're missing out the strongly implied threat that if Google, Vonage, and Amazon do NOT pay up, then "something will happen" to make them wish they had. It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it, and it's still not ethical today.

Vonage still has access to the same infrastructure, if they chose to.

No, they have access to their ISP's infrastructure, with the assumption that their ISP is supposed to manage their connection to the other networks.

If I traceroute the path from here to Google, I go through Covad (our ISP), BBnPlanet, L3, and finally Google's network. So according to you, in addition to Covad charging me as a customer, BBnPlanet, L3 and Google's own network have the right to charge me as well? If I go to a Kinko's and pay them to ship a box via FedEx, I should expect to get a bill from FedEx in the mail?

Re:Strange...

[mrxak]

There are a lot of cable comapnies out there, plus AT&T and Verizon are both now offering video services. The problem is that each one is restricted for the most part to set regions, and there are lots of hurdles to jump in order to expand your network. You say that competition can only exist if regulation forces it, but it's regulation that's preventing it. There is no competition. Franchising law needs major reform. We don't need more rules.

Re:Strange...

[budgenator]

Claiming this as a 'reason' for needed net neutrality is like saying people who choose to shell out for a high rise apartment need to wall up thier windows because they have an unfair advanatge over a bum living in an alley!
Actualy I see it like I'm paying for two one bedroom appartments, but one of the people I'm paying for is living in the High-rise and his expensive lifestyle is forcing the other to be a bum in the alley! If I'm paying for 768K of "best effort" DSL, that's what I want, but what I'll be getting isn't "best effort" it's what's left over after the sharks have feasted. Maybe I'm not understanding something here but to me net neutrality means each packet is treated equaly in each network segment, a packet bound for vonage is treated the same as a packet bound for Comcast voice on comcasts network untill one of them hits the edge of the network, then the packets are all treated equally by that network.

Re:Strange...

[grcumb]

"I can see the tv ads now "our ISP doesn't slow down VoIP provider X, so switch to our internet tubes today!" ... Provided there are options, things will be just fine."

For heaven's sake, would you stop with this nonsense. This is not about ISPs; this is about carriers! I'm sick of people trotting out this mendacious argument that everything will be fine if we can just switch ISPs. Network Neutrality has little or nothing to do with the last mile. It's all about the backbone carriers, who are proposing to extract a tithe from anyone who wants to use their bandwidth, in spite of the fact that they've already paid for Internet access. This behaviour is unethical, and currently illegal. The carriers want to change the rules, and in so doing ring the death knell of free access to information.

There is nothing 'fine' about criminal conspiracy, whether Congress rubber stamps it or not.

Re:Strange...

[mutterc]

It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it

You forget, corporations are not allowed to have any ethical restrictions on their behavior above legal restrictions. Ethics get in the way of continuously increasing profit growth rates - that's bad for the shareholders.

As for legal restrictions, once the ISP becomes a "competitor" of those services, who will blame them for downgrading their competitors? Right now there's no law saying Time Warner can't kill my connections to VoicePulse because it competes with their DigitalPhone service (even though DigitalPhone doesn't provide the IAX termination I need). That's what this whole debate is about.

Re:Strange...

[Brew Bird]

So do you have a problem with accessing google right now? Vonage? Amazon? If there is no problem, then why would Google, Vonage or Amazon pay for "better" access? You're missing out the strongly implied threat that if Google, Vonage, and Amazon do NOT pay up, then "something will happen" to make them wish they had. It wasn't a legal or ethical business practice when the Mafia did it, and it's still not ethical today.

Simple, they want access to lower latency for streaming media services. Normal Google/Amazon services would not be affected. In addition, due to the nature of CoS SLAs, the ONLY way Vonage is going to be able to get any type of legitimate binding promise from ATT is if ATT is thier ISP. THAT is what I meant by 'access to the same infrastructure' all they have to do is purchase it.

You are acting like the big telcos want to take something away, which is NOT the case. They simply want to be free to add another layer of service onto the existing infrastructure which they built and own, without having people scream that they are being screwed.

The FACT is, in order to enhance the ability of the current network to deliver realtime media, you either have to fund more infrastructure upgrades (throw bandwidth at the problem) or turn on some kind of prioritization (QoS/CoS) on the network. Thats the technical FACTs of the problem. The excercise of funding and marketing such a solution is what Net Neutrality SHOULD be about. Instead, people are twisting it to sound like it's about free network access for all.

If I traceroute the path from here to Google, I go through Covad (our ISP), BBnPlanet, L3, and finally Google's network. So according to you, in addition to Covad charging me as a customer, BBnPlanet, L3 and Google's own network have the right to charge me as well? If I go to a Kinko's and pay them to ship a box via FedEx, I should expect to get a bill from FedEx in the mail?

Your already paying all those people, indirectly. You pay Covad, your ISP, who is purchasing/swaping bandwidth from BBn, who is swaping/purchasing bandwidth from L3, who is SELLING bandwidth to Google. The ISP is acting as your agent and doing a bulk purchase aggreement for access to other networks interconnected by other carriers.

Kinko's pays FedEx on your behalf, so you dont have to deal with them. Nothing stops you from taking your business to FedEx directly. And FedEx has content priority. you pay more, your package goes through faster. What a concept! A PROVEN, ACCEPTED business model!

Re:Strange...

[Brew Bird]

Actualy I see it like I'm paying for two one bedroom appartments, but one of the people I'm paying for is living in the High-rise and his expensive lifestyle is forcing the other to be a bum in the alley!

Wow, I dont see that at all. It would be more like you were paying for half a two bedroom apartment (the bottom half) and your roomate let you use the 'nice' room when he wasnt there.

If I'm paying for 768K of "best effort" DSL, that's what I want, but what I'll be getting isn't "best effort" it's what's left over after the sharks have feasted.

Thats the definition of 'best effort'! It means your carrier is making ZERO promisses about delivering your packets ANYWHERE. Maybe you need to re-examine your definition.

Maybe I'm not understanding something here but to me net neutrality means each packet is treated equaly in each network segment, a packet bound for vonage is treated the same as a packet bound for Comcast voice on comcasts network untill one of them hits the edge of the network, then the packets are all treated equally by that network.

You do understand it correctly. All packets have an equal chance of being dropped on any segment for any reason.

However, 'each packet being treated equally' is not what the applications being used on the network require anymore. Realtime services require prioritized processing. It does no good for an ambulance to sit in traffic. The application (transporting a possibly dying person to medical care where they can be saved) REQUIRE prioritization over other traffic. Thats why the law requires you to yield right of way to emergancy vehicles.

In order to provide a similar infrastructure on the internet, the carriers have to implement not only a prioritization scheme, but all the support services to validate, document, and maintain those schemes. All of these things cost money. It is NOT wrong to want to get paid for your work.

The only way you can currently get this type of service, however, is to buy it directly from the carrier in question. Carrier to Carrier QoS isnt implemented yet, as carriers havnt figured out how to pay each other for it yet...

Man, what

[Anonymous Coward]

As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage.

We're seriously to the point where the high-paid lobbyists trying to influence the government not to enforce net neutrality are selling their goal on the basis of "but if you pass net neutrality, then the telecoms will hire high-paid lobbyists to influence the government!"

This has long since passed the point of farce. On the one side we have telecom monopolies and members of the "all government is bad always" religion; on the other side we have absolutely everybody else.

Re:Man, what

[binarybits]

If I'm a highly paid lobbyist, I want to know why I'm not rich yet.

free market vs. protectionist troll

[delirium of disorder]

Yes, when the government intervenes in the economy, it tends to do so in favor of the interests of large corporations, because big business leaders either own the politicians or are the politicians. It should be obvious that this isn't what those campaigning for net neutrality want. We want an Internet where a user can connect to any host just as easily as any other. Servers that get more traffic have to pay for more bandwidth, just like clients that want to transfer more data must buy a faster connection. However, the ISPs in between client and server should not artificially make extra money by demanding additional charges for popular content or by throttling some services and prioritizing others. ISPs should just route IP data and not look at what application layer information is being carried. Those who want net neutrality should use whatever tools they can to achieve this goal. They can take a political route by lobbying for common carrier and pro net neutrality laws. Politicians don't really serve us, so civil disobedience might be more effective. We can subvert attempts to split up the Internet by mirroring, port redirecting, various types of data encapsulation, and proxying. We can also try to work within the free market by switching to more neutral carriers, starting up more neutral ISPs if none exist in an area, and by educating consumers. The principal of net neutrality is sound. There may be legitimate criticism of certain tactics (like trusting congress to do what we want), but that doesn't invalidate what we are trying to do.

Re:free market vs. protectionist troll

[ScentCone]

starting up more neutral ISPs if none exist in an area

But what if you want to start up an ISP that is not more neutral? What if your purpose in doing so is to woo certain end users that fit a particular business profile or that require a certain type of customer service or payment mechanism? I should be able to start up an ISP as I see fit, and serve those customers that I choose in the manner and at the price that I choose to. My service may turn out to be neutral, or it may not... but it's my service. And any legal change that forces me to do it in a certain way, or for certain users in such a particular way, is the opposite of neutral: it's government telling me how my new business must relate to my customers.

Someone should point out...

[amRadioHed]

that the author of this article is this Timothy B. Lee, not this one.

Re:Someone should point out...

[Toba82]

That's what I was going to ask. This didn't sound like something the father of the web would say.

AHHHH...

[sterno]

Thank you for pointing that out. I was really baffled to see him coming out against net neutrality.

Bandwidth commodity trading

[fahrbot-bot]

This may be the rational against neutrality:

From: Rude Awakening
Bandwidth commodity trading--or the trading of financial instruments that allow carriers to hedge against future dips or upswings in the price of bandwidth through forward-selling and forward-buying--is indeed stalled, according to Tony Craig, executive chairman of Arbinet-thexchange. "There's no underlying physical delivery model with integrity upon which contracts can be based," Craig said. "That doesn't exist in the bandwidth world."

Ditching the neutrality model will allow the telcos to make more money based on trading bandwidth and futures. Even more scary:

From: Making bandwidth a commodity: Reality or just a good idea?
One company in the bandwidth exchange arena is Enron Communications, which is trying to recruit support for the model from service providers. Following the lead of its parent company Enron Corp., which helped transform the natural gas and electricity industry into a commodity, Enron Communications is planning to revolutionize the way bandwidth is exchanged.

While Enron may be out of the picture, an idea they wanted foster must be met with some suspicion...

Lee ignores one point...

[Karl Cocknozzle]

Unlike a one-railroad Western town, most broadband customers can choose between cable and D.S.L., and a growing number have access to wireless options as well.

...but of course, since DSL and cable-modem services are (almost universally) sold by publicly-held corporations, and given that public-companies operate on a "monkey-see, monkey-do" level, it seems hard to imagine a scenario where one major provider charging tier prices to media companies would not lead to ALL of them doing it. For the board of directors NOT to do so when it was clearly a legal, viable means of increasing revenue, would be a violation of their responsibility as directors of that corporation.

Lee is correct--regulation can backfire, but it doesn't always. Occasionally, it works out just fine and catches on... See also: 40-hour work week and Family Medical Leave Act. These are the reasons you know your father's faces, and the reason your mother was able to go BACK to work after having you. A good rule puts things in balance, and these rules IMO meet that test. I also think net nuetrality does as well. If the big ISPs need revenue to build out their networks to provide "video-on-demand" they should do it like every other business in the world does when they want it to expand--pour profits back into the business! How arrogant and ridiculous to assume that everybody else should pay so that AT&T can minimize their risk on investing in what will eventually be a profit-bonanza for them.

Re:Lee ignores one point...

[Anon-Admin]

See also: 40-hour work week and Family Medical Leave Act. These are the reasons you know your father's faces, and the reason your mother was able to go BACK to work after having you.

Do you work in the tech field? 40 hours? More like 60 to 80 hours with no overtime. I even had a boss that announced his new cost saving measures, Lay off 1/2 of the IT Staff and every one was required to work a minimum of 80 hours. He saved 1/2 his budget and got promoted for it.
As to the Family Medical Leave Act, Ha! My Wife was fired for trying to take maternity leave. They just forgot that she had asked for the leave and fired her for not showing up to work. A lot of good it has done.

Re:Lee ignores one point...

[robertjw]

Exactly. This just means everyone is on salary and a 'professional' now so they don't have to pay you.

Due to our 40-hour work week we spend 2.5 more weeksand three months moreat work than do our Japanese and western European counterparts, respectively

Yeah, a great example of regulation working for us.

Re:Lee ignores one point...

[Bryansix]

The 40-hour work week is a great regulation. However it is one that is subverted by hiring exempt employees even when they do not qualify for exeption. Still I agree that it does more good then harm and I generally like it. FMLA on the other hand is a nightmare of fraud and lost profits. See Here.

Re:Lee ignores one point...

[Abcd1234]

LOL. And instead of blaming the actual people at fault, the corporations, you blame... the regulation. Because, somehow, the regulation made the corporations do it! Brilliant! It's thinking like this that allows corps to get away with fucking murder while people turn the other way, and instead whine and complain about an overreaching government.

It makes me wonder if the libertarian/anarcho-capitalist movement is just a cover for the corps, who would rather just undermine the voters directly rather than the representatives they elect...

Net neutrality, rah, rah, bah, humbug

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, I'm for net neutrality, the way I'm for world peace, ending world hunger, and all that stuff -- in the abstract.

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, I'm sure Osama Bin Laden is for world peace, too -- but I doubt when I speak of world peace I envision the same thing. Or rather, if everyone could agree on a common vision of world peace, we'd have achieved it, we do not have world peace precisely because while everyone might claim to be for world peace, everyone has different views on what that means.

So of course everyone is for net neutrality -- people running around going "Oh noez, big companies are going to take away our freedoms! You're not against freedom, are you?" People running around going "Equality! Neutrality! Freedom!" etc. Of course no one is going to say they're against those things.

But... how do you expect to legistlate or regulate such things if you can't get a concrete definition?

Does net neutrality mean that ATM and frame-relay QoS services go away? (I know of some ISPs who bought frame relay circuits with lots of CIR, and of ISPs who bought frame circuits with virtually 0 CIR -- I know whose traffic has priority on the network (to those who think the net today is neutral -- HAH!))

What about equal access to colocation facilities? Who gets to go in and play with the wires? Be kind of annoying to find out some no-name company registered in another country has 'accidently' attached something to your physical connection... I know of colocations where you can't go without a union guy around, and facilities where techs would refuse to go at night without an armed escort. Someone going to pay for those things for the little guys so everyone is 'equal' and 'neutral'?

Equal opportunities to build network gear? I mean, should that start up being able to stick in custom gear into a colocation whenever they want, or do we want to have some testing first to make sure it's not going to catch fire?

Handicap access? Should we treat everyone's network connection the exact same in terms of QoS, or lack of QoS? Should we have 'equal treatment' in a technical sense, or make sure everyone has 'equal access' to services?

We could just shutdown the Internet completely -- that would be 'equal' and 'net neutral' to everyone. Sort of like Armeggedon would result in world peace after everyone is dead. Certainly satisfies the requirements... right?

Sure, it benefits folks in more affluent urban areas to suggest opening up the 'last mile' (sic), because perhaps the local governments could afford to maintain the last mile (or half mile, or wireless, etc.) Of course, if someone is living in a rural area (like, say, in the Appalachia, where mountains and valleys make wireless a bit iffy) where the 'last mile' might be more like the last five miles... Well! I suspect in those areas there are phone companies that would be thrilled to dump non-profitable infrastructure maintainenance on small rural governments.

Let's hash out some *real* policy details -- starting from the hardware, physical network deployments, physical network operations and maintenance, and working our way up. Let's see how long 'everyone' (sic) is for 'net neutrality' (sic). What is it? How will one test for it? How will one measure it? How will one enforce it?

But, be assured, I am quite for net neutrality, net freedom, and all that stuff. Like world peace. Of course, if I could implement net neutrality the way *I* want it... a lot of you might start the massive whining. For those reasons, I an quite against any legistlation for net neutrality until someone offers a real policy plan -- realistically, the network will never be perfectly neutral. The question is where can we get agreements on what will have to be compromised on (security/reliability of facilities/infrastructure vs. ability to innovate and deploy, emergency services vs. every day use, handicap access vs. 'normal' access, rural low density connectivity vs. urban high density areas vs. access costs vs. maintenance/opex, etc.)

I don't see much policy, mostly I see whining.

Re:Net neutrality, rah, rah, bah, humbug

[hawfizzle]

this is a great post. the only real interest the government has with net neutrality is with censorship and the limiting of packets from sources it deems offensive or blah or blah. anyway yeah, great post.

what if we try it their way for a little while?

[emagery]

Look, here's the deal... the point of this article is wise, and I hate the idea of the internet being subverted into a serious of highways and back alleys where protection money is the order of life.

BUT, we really only have the word of the two sides, here... who among us is in a position to KNOW, absolutely, for sure, what AT&T or Comcast would do under X and Y circumstances... on the one hand, they say that competition would lead to ingenuity and 'regulated' status would stifle it (Though haven't we had quite a lot of ingenuity even so?) ... on the other side, they're saying this'll lead to internet thuggery and that we'll all lose freedoms and rights, etc. Since both complaints are rhetoric, and based upon 'we said','they said' barely-factoids, I honestly do not know how things will turn out.

BUT... everyone always approaches these battles as if, win or lose, this'll be the way things will remain forever and ever... When has that ever been the case? Laws are repealed or modified all the time, companies rise and fall.

So the question is... why don't we just TRY it their way for a year or two... why don't me draft some sort of compromise bill that allows them to attempt to fulfill their rhetorical promises, but allow us to repeal the whole stroke should they succumb to the temptations net-neutrality people worry about? Hell, if they tried to hold pipelines hostage, who is to say the public can't simply REPLACE the infrastructure entirely?!?! ... my point is, there will never be a point where we are entirely without options to change things for the better... even if our gov't when totalitarian on us, we could still resist/fight back, tear it down, etc ad nauseum. If that's the cause... simply tearing the foundations out from under the telecomms is just as achievable if they really do betray us when given the opportunity.

Re:what if we try it their way for a little while?

[DarkDragonVKQ]

I wish we could do that. "We'll give you a 10 year trial period to see what you can do without net neutrality...ok 10 years up. Wait people still don't have fast access and your still screwing them over with your monopoly? Ok we're taking back that fiber that we gave you with the people's tax money and regiving it out to smaller groups". But..this is America and not to mention that's pretty unfeasilble. Ideal but unfeasible.

Re:what if we try it their way for a little while?

[emagery]

eh, i'd agree with 'idealistic' ... but if they could build a pyramid back then, we could commandeer the net now... just a matter of willpower and effort =)

My difficulty with all this is that NEITHER side can produce incontroverible (able?) evidence... it's all claims and accusations...

who wrote

[jdaly]

this, in favor of NN.

Re:who wrote

[amRadioHed]

Is this perhaps what you meant to link to?

Bring on the test!

[Valley Redneck]

Talk about being able to punish bad actors. If this research leads to a little GUI desktop app that tells what packets your ISP is throttling and how much, bad actors will have nowhere to hide. Geeks everywhere will blog the offenders into submission, and "Cable Modems w/no throttling!" suddenly becomes a very nice selling point. Wish I could have made it to Black Hat...

Re:Bring on the test!

[budgenator]

years ago my son was installing cable tv system's, the pole to pole stuff, not pole to house; well one day he came over and hooked up a state of the art stealth wavemeter to our cable system. It was quite obvious that adelphi was trying to push 850MHz of signal through a 500Mhz coax and the whole system needed a good sweeping just to get the 500MHz to come through to spec rather than good enough that most people don't complain.

Just my view

[Anon-Admin]

If Microsoft is the answer to the problem, you did not understand the problem!

%s/Microsoft/The Goverment/g

Government sucks, but is there another option?

[tnk1]

I happen to agree with the view that more regulation is problematic and ultimately stifling. However, it may be a necessary evil. Constantly maintaining the status quo against lobbyists who are paid top-dollar to push for their employers' views would be difficult. The only way you could avoid it is if you could somehow prevent government from stepping in later on, when the public interest has moved to the next issue and the lobbyists can move in and quietly make changes. Or do you think the corps will just give up and allow the status quo to continue if they lose the first battle?

At some point, you are probably going to have to get the government to take your side of the debate, because the government, by its nature, can't stay out of any argument that it is invoked in that has significant public interest. Government is run by politicians who will use your issue (or the lobbyists') for their own benefit if the opportunity arises, and they rarely know (or even care) what the long term effect is. Unless you enlist governmental inertia on your side, you are talking about a serious uphill battle to maintain a non-regulatory atmosphere in a contentious environment.

In short, the People still trump lobbyists, but only when they are paying full attention. The public is fickle and can lose interest. Lobbyists are well paid and never change their focus, because it is their job to be focused. It may be necessary to strike while the focus is there, and that may mean that win or lose, the choice is between the situation getting worse, or a whole lot worse.

MORE PAID CRAP - Yes, this is what it is :

[unity100]

"It's tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise."
And this is all i am going to think and say about such shit that is produced by 'lobby companies' (oh god, what a fantastic name for paid propaganda work) - CRAP.

PAID crap to FOOL PEOPLE.

And I for one....

[Nonillion]

Robpoe wrote...

"Why has Google bought all the dark fibre that they can? Easy! When telcos start clamping down on 'Net connections, we'll all be on the GoogleNet."

And I for one welcome our new GoogleNet overlords; I would like to remind them as a trusted 'whitehat' hacker, I can help round up others to toil in their underground IT caves.

Holy Crap!

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't believe this wasn't filed under Your Rights Online (YRO).

Not a very good example...

[Anonymous Coward]

I doubt that many recent air travelers (or airline employees) would agree that degregulation of that industry is such a wonderful thing.

Unfeasible? Surely you jest!

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember, this is *America*, where we just recently repealed part of a tax levied to pay for the Spanish-American War, and that was barely over a century and change ago. Sure, we didn't repeal the whole tax, but no need to rush into things. There'd be no problem with granting a trial period... how does one year sound? I'd offer two years, but since I don't have any children, I don't know who would still be around after two "years" to repeal it.

Drug war.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Doesn't make it right, but I'd like to see them jail every internet user on the planet when they all do the same thing.

Back in the '60s a lot of people thought the solution to the drug laws was civil disobedience - lots of people buying and using drugs clogging the legal system, forcing the government to throw in the towel.

You can see how well THAT worked.

Re:Drug war.

[plague3106]

It would have worked, but all the people that got high forgot what they were doing..

Re:Drug war.

[Korin43]

Well it worked.. at least, the clogging the legal system part did. Not that anyone pays attention..

Re:Drug war.

[pingveno]

When it comes to marijuana, the pot heads somewhat succeeded. Marijuana has been downgraded to a secondary concern in the face of more destructive drugs such as meth.

if honesty is imp. enough elect honest politicians

[Anonymous Coward]

If honesty is important enough to people, then the honest politicians will take over Congress...

Oh wait, that only works if the laws haven't rigged the entry rules so that nobody offering what people want is allowed to play in the game!

Go back to reading Adam Smith and stay in academia where you can pretend a horse is a sphere.

Even better

[sterno]

Even better, check this out. This Timothy B. Lee guy is apparently also a big supporter of Intelligent Design. Excellent. I think this confirms I'm on the correct side of the issue :)

Re:Even better

[simeonbeta2]

Ummm, no. Tim Lee is a big proponent of school choice. About ID he says (and I quote) "for the record, I think the theory of intelligent design is nonsense". Funnily enough, I have exactly the same reaction as you: after reading Stoller's attempt at a hatchet job of a technology commentator I have appreciated for quite some time, I thought "I knew I was on the correct side on this issue!"

Bad Analogy

[Nom du Keyboard]

The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970's.

This is a truly bad comparison. After deregulation new airlines (e.g. People's Express) could get started while previously single-state restricted airlines (e.g. PSA and SouthWest) could expand outside of their state. In fact it took big states like California and Texas just to support a state restricted airline before.

Afterwards all airlines got relatively equally access to the necessary resources (e.g. airports), and I could choose among a large selection of air carriers for my trip.

This isn't the same as when there's one coax cable and one copper twisted pair coming to my house. I don't have a good choice of competition in this monopoly market.

I'll tell you who I am willing to choose however. It will be the first company who brings fiber to my curb at non-extortionaire prices.

Re:Bad Analogy

[vertinox]

I'll tell you who I am willing to choose however. It will be the first company who brings fiber to my curb at non-extortionaire prices.

So very true. I hate Verizon with a passion, but if they can bring FiOS to my house, I'd make a pact with the devil himself to get it.

Re:Bad Analogy

[pe1chl]

On the other side of the street here, they get fiber to the home for 50 euro per month (= like 60 USD).
This includes 10 Mbps up/down Internet access, telephony, and a basic cable TV package (about 30 channels).
Upgrade to 100 Mbps Internet is also available.

Would you call that reasonable?

Timmy is on a dangerous long term cost plan.

[BlueDreaux]

First of all P3titPrince, I think you should go read the current legislation as well as the proposed new legislation and the proposed amendments. Net Neutrality is the status quo.

What is happening is the backbone providers are big, and nationally funded, enough that they can invest in research that allows them to make things run smoother. Upon discovering that they can make things such as VOIP, SIP, RTP and the other high bandwidth protocols run smoother by discriminating against protocols that don't need as much guaranteed bandwidth the marketing end of these companies put their two cents in and said why limmit the discrimination to the type of protocol when we can make more money by discriminating against who the company is and what type of service plan they have. Now under the proposed new legislation the protocol type is the good part, with an exception that I'll explain in a bit, but when amendments are submitted to make sure that the buck stops there and that companies/organizations are not the objects of discrimination.... well for some reason the lobbiests are fighting like hell against those amendments.

I'm no politician, so I don't know the inner workings of what goes on in politics, but it has been my experience in life that people don't fight like hell for the right to do something unless they're bloody well going to do it once they have the right!

With that point made let's get to the problem of long term costs:

Backbones are currently using a lot of dumb networks (again, the status quo). Dumb networks don't care what type of packet it is. They don't care who the packet came from. All they care about is where the packet's going and how to get it there. The hardware for this has been developed to be tightly coupled with the logical software mechanisms over the past decades to the point where it doesn't need to do as much software level work in order for the networking equipment to work and thus we have create highly efficient networking equipment that makes sure things move as optimally as our nice little routing routines can process them.

The newer technology is moving away from that and is making decisions based on the type of packet as well as well as potentially, who it came from. This is good stuff when it comes to being able to address more needy protocols as well as redirecting attacks to the eternal bit bucket in the sky.

The down side to the new technology is that it looses a bit of flexibility when it comes to being able to tightly couple the hardware to the routing routines. Since we have decisions being made on packet types and where they came from we're going to want to have optimal hardware for storing this information. But as the number of packet types grows in order to allow for more efficient transmissions, as well as to avoid being discriminated against, we will then have to replace the routing hardware in order accomodate this growth and change. So instead of investing money into laying down extra (can't resist the toung and cheek analogy) pipes for things to travel through we will find that we have our investments being spent on replacing the devices that are used to regulate what goes through those pipes.

So in the long run, we're simply pouring our money down a bottomless pit if we move away from the real status quo. No thanks! I'll pass! Stop spending money on your toll booths and just build me an extra lane of traffic to use. I'll be happy to send you an extra check if it'll ensure you make a wiser, less greedy as sin, investment with the money I've already given you.

Regs or not

[zogger]

Let's look at history in some industries without regulation, say, meat industry circa 1800s. MMMm boy howdy! That's some tasty maggots there! Chow down, make my rare! Chemical industry pre EPA, YUMMY! Mom, I want some more [insert string of unpronounceable chemical names] in my glass of tapwater! It does a body good! How about telcos during good ole ma bell days? Mom, let's call grammaw! OK dear, remember, only talk for ten seconds on the rented phone that has been exactly the same for the last 25 years, else we'll need a third mortgage!

no regs=bad news, radioactive enhanced asbestos brand corn flakes and stuff like that

too many regs=eek! despotism, bureaucracy run past amok, entrenched monopolies or powerful cartels

some sane middle ground=best hoomannz have come up with, see also "compromise", and I wish we had more of the third option

Disagree with premise

[sillygeek]

I disagree with the premise that the Net is like the Airline industry. The reason is simple - the major airports all have more than 1 carrier, and they usually go to similar destinations. So, unregulated airlines means price wars. How many people have more than 1 broadband choice to the home? I am one of the lucky ones that do, but it will be a long time before there is enough competition in this market to make zero regulation work in a positive way like the airline industry. Just my 2 cents. Can I have change back?

It really is about broadband ISPs, not backbone

[billstewart]

Yes, a couple of telco execs said things about wanting to get money from the big content providers, and got thoroughly spanked by the pundits, but it's not about the backbones - it's very much about the broadband access connections.

If you read the discussions about the telcos' TV-over-Internet proposals, the newer flavors of DSL can deliver about 20-25 Mbps to your home, and the FTTH offers can mostly provide that much shared delivery capacity, and it takes about 15 Mbps to provide an HDTV channel and a few SDTV channels. The telcos are pretty much clueless about people who'd _want_ to have all 25 Mbps for data, and they want to make money selling you television to compete with the cablecos, who are trying to make money selling you voice telephony. If you look at the scalability problems, there's no way that a telco office can support 10000 homes all watching HDTV in prime time with Unicast feeds from upstream - that'd be about 100 Gbps, and 10,000 homes isn't a big central office; they need to run multicast, and even if they do use multicast, a GigE upstream is enough for about 100 channels of HDTV; an OC48 would give them some mixture like 100 HDTV and 500 SDTV or 200/200. So they're expecting that they'll deal with the broadcast content providers the way the cable TV companies do, and sell you 1.5-6 Mbps of Internet service, which (like 640KB) should be enough for anybody.

From a VOIP standpoint, I don't know if they're planning to deploy CoS queuing on broadband or not - it depends a lot on the capabilities of the DSLAMs. The queuing that matters is downstream from the POP to your house - obviously it would be nice if VOIP got priority over web browsing and BitTorrent got lower priority, but they'd have to implement it with some mechanism like IP DSCP or TOS bits rather than trying to parse TCP and UDP port numbers. Most ISPs talk about charging money for implementing CoS - they may or may not allow you to send CoS-marked packets if you're not a subscriber, and won't do differential queuing if you're not, and almost none of them have figured out business models or technical support for different carriers to support CoS at peering points (e.g. what if they don't use the same 4 choices from the 8, 16, or 64 options?)

Technical Corrections

[billstewart]

Sterno's article and Brew Bird's parent article both have significant technical misunderstandings. First of all, even if there are only two companies providing wire into your house (one telco, one cable), that doesn't mean you only have two ISPs available. The copper wire from the telco may be rented to a DSL provider like Covad or New Edge, who run DSLAMs on it to provide Layer 2 ATM service, or the telco can provide the Layer 2 ATM service, and the layer 2 provider can rent the ATM connectivity to a Layer 3 ISP or aggregator or provide IP services themselves, and the IP provider can either provide Internet connectivity or provide PPPoE or similar tunneling service to another ISP. It's that last ISP who decides what order to put the packets on ATM or PPPoE and set policies about what you can or can't do with your broadband connection, and you've got hundreds of choices of ISPs who sell that kind of service. I use Sonic.net, who get ATM DSL from the former PacBell, who provide that on their copper; many years ago I had business DSL service from AT&T, who got ATM DSL from Covad, who used copper from PacBell.

The big impacts on latency are how far you're going (speed of light is about 100,000 miles/sec in fiber or copper), which isn't affected by what provider you use unless you get backhauled to the other coast or something, how long it takes to put a packet on a wire (depends on the packet size and wire size), and how many packets you have to wait for (at the DSL layer, it mainly depends on how oversold your ISP's regional ATM connections are, and at the IP layer, it depends on what order the packets get put on the wire - do your VOIP packets go first, or do they get stuck waiting for a bunch of BitTorrent or FTP packets?

The newer proposals from the telcos propose splitting ADSL or FTTH bandwidth into two parts - one used to carry Internet and one used to carry television. The pricing models I've seen in the press are mainly clueless about people who'd _want_ to buy a whole 25 Mbps of internet and 0 Mbps of TV; TV needs about 15 Mbps, and they're assuming they'll get to sell you 1.5, 3, or 6 Mbps of internet at prices similar to the current services, and we'll see how long that lasts :-) One channel of HDTV needs about 9 Mbps, and the most cut-throat pricing I've seen for Internet transit bandwidth is about $10/Mbps/month, so don't expect to get unicast any-source Internet access to watch HDTV at prime-time as part of the $19.95 loss-leader special; the ISPs will need to use multicast feeds from the content providers to your telco office.

As far as natural monopolies go, the economics and technology were much different back when Theodore Vail and the other robber barons got government monopolies on local telephone service and on radio broadcasting, and the argument was pretty dubious mercantilism back then (and the unnatural monopolies on wireline and radio services prevented them from competing with each other.) They're much more bogus today, but the regulatory bureaucracies are bigger than ever. I may be an official old geezer by now, but that was still way before my time. However, I _was_ around to see cable TV networks installed in much of the country, and the big issues weren't the real cost of deployment - they were the rent-seeking by towns and counties who were much less concerned about the future of telecommunications competition than they were about whose brother-in-law got the street-paving contracts, and about how much free air time the city council and public-access videos got.

Re:Technical Corrections

[Anonymous Coward]

The copper wire from the telco may be rented to a DSL provider

With emphasis on the may since a few years back all the market-bible thumpers got their wish and the FCC (partially, anyway) deregulated the telcos so that they're no longer required to rent their lines out to competitors at cost.

Now, at my company we pay $20 more per month for the priviledge of not dealing with SBC's "support" by getting Covad DSL. A lot of lesser line-reseller companies basically disappeared because they simply couldn't mark up a full-priced line from the local telco and still keep their customers (my coworker worked at one, the layoffs began pretty much as soon as the FCC decision was announced).

It's amusing though, every now and then we get a barrage of calls from our clients complaining that the server is down, it takes us 5 minutes or so of panicing to realize it's just their SBC DSL, but there's not much we can do about this. The clients just don't want to pay $20 more for a service that doesn't suck, they want us to perform miracles and make what they have work, so even with the $20 more, we're still not out from under SBC's thumb. Meanwhile, the only time we've ever had an issue with our DSL was when SBC screwed up and "accidentially" disconnected the line we had our DSL on, and Covad was great at getting our line back on by the end of the day.

Re:Technical Corrections

[Brew Bird]

Bill, thanks for the extra illumination.

Your details have helped illustrate my point very well. That being that 'net neutrality' as currently being discussed is a pointless attempt to control something which doesnt need to be controlled.

Tangled Web of Lies

[Doc Ruby]

The editorial (pro- Net Doublecharge, anti-Neutrality) is by "Timothy B. Lee". The Web was invented by Tim Berners Lee, who strongly advocates Net Neutrality.

This editorial is obviously an astroturf fraud. That the NY Times is publishing on its once mighty Op-Ed page.

Every American should be thinking about how much corporate mass media has to gain by promoting these corporate kleptocracy thinktanks which wear the political figleafs of making up Intelligent Design fairytales as they go along. Because they're running the show. Into the ground. With us gagged in the trunk.

Re:Tangled Web of Lies

[binarybits]

I don't "advocate intelligent design," which I, in fact, think is hogwash. I advocate letting parents, rather than government officials, decide what their children are taught.

What evidence do you have that I'm an "astroturf fraud?"

Deceptive Authorship

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is a link showing an article written by "Timothy Lee", not "Timothy B. Lee". I am wondering...has he always used the initial B in his name, or is this somewhat more recent.

Also note his email address, which is tlee@showmeinstitute.org. Where is the initial?

I am sick of neo-conservative tricks and double talk. This does not belong in the New York Times.

Re:Deceptive Authorship

[binarybits]

Dude, I don't have that much control over how news sources cite my name--that article (which I suspect most Slashdotters would agree with) was run in a bunch of different web sites. I didn't go around to make sure they all included my middle initial.

And you might have noticed my byline:

Timothy B. Lee (tlee@showmeinstitute.org) is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute and author of the Cato Policy Analysis, "Circumventing Competition: The Perverse Consequences of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act."

I think it's hilarious that people think the similarity of my name to that of Mr. Berners-Lee is some kind of telco conspiracy.

Anti-net-neutrality is regulation by de-regulation

[Brittix1023]

It may initially seem that introducing federal regulation for the purpose of preserving net neutrality would effectively mean, 'regulating the Internet'. Not doing so will result in more regulation however.

Recently, the article below was posted on Slashdot. It describes the situation that a servide provider, wishing to serve customers over the cellular network, would find themselves in:

http://business.newsforge.com/business/06/07/19/20 6209.shtml?tid=138&tid=3

Regulations are regarded with suspicion by economists, because regulations force providers to jump through hoops and work their way through red-tape in order to provide their service to customers. There is little *government* regulation of cellular network services, however, the cellular network companies themselves have introduced *plenty* of regulation to make up for that. In order to have access to customers, a potential service provider must comply to all the regulations that each different network provider stipulates (no chat services, for one network, no games on another for example), in addition to paying huge sums of money to even connect to the system, often some 10 times the amount that is required to operate a web service on the Internet. The regulation issue is a nightmare as the rules and regulations are different for each network; in order to operate a service on the cellular system, you must comply with several different sets of network regulations at the same time.

Information is one of the most valuable commodities in the 21st century. The Internet is a vital transport network for information, just as the road network is a vital transport network for physical goods. The anti-net-neutrality lobby has stated that the changes to the Internet proposed by the communications companies are somewhat similar building new toll-roads. Toll-roads can work well, however, the comparison is flawed. The Internet is already akin to a toll-road system; a high bandwidth Internet connection costs more than a low bandwidth one, just as driving an articulated lorry on some toll-roads costs more than driving a car (due to increased wear and tear on the road). Removing net-neutrality however, is more akin to determining the road toll based on the destination of the vehicle; you would pay less to drive to Wal-mart than to a small independent store, even though the distance to either is similar. Alternatively, going to the independent store could mean being forced to drive on a dirt track as opposed to a highway, it could also mean being prevented from going to the independent store at all; you would be re-directed to Walmart. This would all be dependent upon which company provides your 'road-service'.

Cheers

Brittix

That was a Gem of a post; Mod up, pls.

[KarmaOverDogma]

That was very well thought out and articulated post. Please mod it up.

why not use existing antitrust laws?

[eliot1785]

My question is, why can't these issues be taken care of using existing antitrust laws? Why do we need extra laws that are effectively "antitrust for the Internet"? Our existing antitrust laws were initially created in the late 19th century to address similar abuses on the part of the railroad companies, who used their monopolies to extract lots of extra money from Midwestern farmers who usually had to rely on a single railroad company to provide all of their shipping to the East. In many ways it was the same issue that we are now dealing with from the ISP's (supposedly - I would contend the problem is exaggerated).

Seriously - if an ISP is favoring their own services over other services, that is an anticompetitive and monopolistic practice that clearly falls under existing antitrust laws. If the complaints are legitimate, they can be prosecuted as such. Why does nobody realize this?

If our Congressmembers do not learn history, they are destined to make bad decisions. (I will not say they are destined to repeat it, because here the mistake would be in the needless repetition.)