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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."
There has also been some confusion over authorship. Mr. Lee is not to be
confused with Tim Berners-Lee, Web inventor and NetNeutrality proponent.
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.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
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.
May the Maths Be with you!
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
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.