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Net Neutrality Being Examined by FTC
elrendermeister writes to tell us Computerworld Security is reporting that the Federal Trade Commission has formed an Internet Access Task Force to evaluate the validity of claims that large broadband providers should be able to limit or block web content from competitors. From the article: "Chairwoman Deborah Platt Majoras on Monday also called on lawmakers to be cautious about passing a Net neutrality law, which could prohibit broadband providers such as AT&T Inc. and Comcast Corp. from giving their own Internet content top priority, or from charging Web sites additional fees for faster service. [...] 'While I am sounding cautionary notes about new legislation, let me make clear that if broadband providers engage in anticompetitive conduct, we will not hesitate to act using our existing authority,' she said. 'But I have to say, thus far, proponents of Net neutrality regulation have not come to us to explain where the market is failing or what anticompetitive conduct we should challenge.'"
Just because the behavior isn't there now doesn't mean that we should put off neutrality legislation until it becomes a problem. The easiest solution to any problem is to fix it now before it becomes a problem.
"Net neutrality" will be pass, as lawmakers would not want to appear "not-neutral". On the other hand if the bill was called, "internet expedited service" bill, lawmakers will feel whole lot differently about it.
Just my 2 cents and hunch
Off the top of my head, here's one substantial difference. Television is strictly one-way communication, used to deliver a message to a segment of population (i.e. advertising). The Internet is two-way, capable of being used by nearly anyone for nearly any purpose.
To build an analogy using cable TV it would be more like this:
You pay for your providers full cable package, so you get all the channels. However, PBS has decided not to pay the "premium service fees" set by Big Cable, Inc., where as NBC has paid them plenty of money. You like PBS, and watch it a lot. Slowly but surely, the signal for PBS is getting fuzzier. You can still watch the shows, but the picture isn't as crisp as it is for NBC because Big Cable has decided he'd prefer your eyes on NBC, who pays them money. So he throws some noise onto the PBS frequency.
That's what we need to prevent.
What?
Since when did the FTC all the sudden start taking this anti-legislation stance? So they will only legislate issues after-the-fact? Let Comcast, Verizon, AT&T bully the market, then we will see if we decide to do anything about it . . . right!
The thing that net neutrality proponents are proposing is resistance to current talks of creating a tiered internet:
"In essence, network neutrality regulations proposed by Senators Snowe and Dorgan[4] and Representative Markey bar ISPs from offering Quality of Service enhancements for a fee.
--From Wikipedia
/* somewhat functional - fix later */
Where I live Shaw already does something very similar to this. They insert a small bit of fuzz into the analog system so that you will upgrade to their digital system.
Because the spirit of TV and the spirit of the Internet are completely different. On the Internet, anyone can publish content. I can pay the same as my neighbor and play an online game of chess, read Slashdot, and check my investments. My neighbor can swap school photos with their family, get scrapbooking tips from an online community, and participate in chain letters of impending religious doom.
It is commonly accepted that TV is a very difficult market to enter. My neighbor wouldn't have the capital to create a scrapbooking TV channel, but she could certainly start a scrapbooking Yahoo group.
Tiered Internet does make sense -- but only if you tier based on application and not by content. In my opinion, VoIP should go quicker than HTTP. However, I don't want my ISP limiting my HTTP traffic by allowing google.com to come through unmetered, but at the same time limit money.cnn.com because Google decided to pay my ISP more.
For me, the depressing part is "If broadband providers engage in anticompetitive conduct, we will not hesitate to act using our existing authority." I'm a free-market libertarian type much of the time, and my first thought on Net Neutrality is to exactly that: let them try breaking it and seeing if it the market wants it.
But the FTC's version of "not hesitating" is to establish a blue-ribbon panel to look into setting up a commission to investigate the idea of setting up a web site to solicit people's opinions. Even if I trust the FTC to be acting in good faith, I worry that the cable/telco providers would have somewhere between one and five years to stomp certain web sites to death before the FTC is able to act on their "existing authority".
I mean, how long has Microsoft been in antitrust litigation?
I think it's along the lines of ISPs doing this without informing their customers what has happened. Their customers need not know that SBC extracted a heavy toll from YouTube or Google in order to deliver their video. And that even if you could know when your connection was tiered, no market offering would exist for an untiered connection. In other words, they're levying their massive subscriber base against people who profit from them having a decent internet connection, by holding it ransom. You'll note they aren't calling it anything like QoS, because that would imply that the offering has some level of reliability / quality.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
Every time I see some ministry talking head say things like, "if there's a crime we'll prosecute!"
1. Crime? what crime? You mean rapid delivery of internet service is a crime?
2. Crime? What crime? The boss says put it on the back burner...
3. Crime? No it's "market forces" delivering "better" service.
And then there's the "swift" justice delivered in Microsoft's Monopoly conviction. A conviction is cold comfort if you're one of the guys they ran out of business.
Oh yeah, they are on the case...
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
The lack of net neutrality means that an ISP can prevent me from accessing content hosted by someone who uses a competing ISP unless I, or they, "pay extra". They're already "paying extra" to interconnect in the first place!
Do we really want to reduce the internet to a bunch of transiently connected BBSes?
You could've hired me.
In my opinion, the solution is simple.
Any carrier that wants to restrict access loses their common carrier status. The providers are probably right to say they have the right to control their own networks. However, the minute they start controlling content, they should take responsibility for it. Common carrier status is all about not being responsible for/controlling what goes over the wires.
I'm willing to bet if the FCC said "go ahead, but you lose common carrier status" none of us would ever hear another word about this.
I suppose something can't fail if it doesn't exist. "The market" only exists if there's a real choice of options, and when it comes to the U.S. version of broadband internet, "the market" has never existed on a meaningful scale. The choice is between either DSL from the bell-affiliated telco (which itself is most likely a monopoly) or cable from the likes of Comcast (or some other similar monopolistic cable TV company) or no higher speed access at all, with some places not even having both DSL or cable to choose from. That is not "the market" in the sense that Chairwoman Majoras would like to seem to be talking about.
If the comments of Chariwoman Majoras are to be believed, we should soon see the government investigating behavior itself has allowed. That would be rather interesting, and I'd tune in to see the feds stumble over their tongues trying to legitimately explain why having so few real choices in paid TV service/broadband service/land line phone service benefits me. I'd like to see why the companies that provide these services are so damn sacred that their acts can't even be challenged. I want to know why it is that government-funded and supported companies are allowed to even think that they have the right to tell me what sources of information I can and cannot seek. That, more than anything, is how I view the debate.
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
Hey Government!
If there must be a Tiered Internet (and I fear we won't have a choice), then:
Oh yes; the DMCA will become a big part of this.
The quality of the Free Market is not measured by how easy it is for Corporations to regulate the market.
The quality of the Free Market is a matter of the diversity of choices that are available to consumers.
I have no problem with a Tiered Internet that gives us more choices;
I have a problem with anything that allows Corporations to reduce the number of choices;
especially, if they gain control of the regulatory agencies.
Here comes the New FCC.
{ return clarity; }
This is all about VOIP, folks. Telcos try to stop VoIP it's plain and simple. It's not Google or Yahoo who's the target here, not even Youtube. Those companies won't be screwed much if their traffic was deprioritized by a little. VoIP on the other hand becomes unusable the second you deprioritize its realtime traffic. So telcos think they can keep their cell, landline and voip customers to themselves by deprioritizing traffic of other VoIP companies or making them pay through the nose (thereby making their rates less competitive).