Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
= Grow a brain...
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.
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
I do not respond to cowards. Especially anonymous ones.
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.
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.
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.
Well someone could setup something along the lines of a SETI@home that does nothing but send random packets and monitor for net throttling...
Collector's Edition