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Net Neutrality Is Just "Mumbo Jumbo"
Ergasiophobia writes "It seems the National Cable & Telecommunications Association is spreading a blatant lie in the form of a commercial claiming that the net neutrality act will cost the consumer more and that it is 'bad' for the consumer. This, of course, ignores how much the cable companies will profit from the act's defeat. For some truthful information on the net neutrality act check out savetheinternet.com" This honestly seems too stupid to actually be real. Anyone know for sure?
You asking if the commercial is real?
It is. I've seen it in the Dallas-Fort Worth area once.
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
from Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS): "Opposing the heavy hand of regulation that network neutraliy represents is critical if we are to maintain the Internet as an open, evolving, and market-based tool, and to protect children and families from the negative aspects of Internet content that exist today" soo... If I'm understanding correctly, Net Neutrality will allow our children to view porn? Aaaannnd voting down net neutrality will protect the children? Hmm... but wait a second... wouldnt opposing a 'heavy hand of regulation' be the EXACT OPPOSITE of protecting people from certain types of internet content? I think giving my telecom control over which websites will get priority traffic and which won't will definitely protect me from some internet content alright. Ought to get rid of all those pesky choices and alternate points of view.
From the blog
In California there was an outrage when it was disclosed that electricity companies had deliberately idled plants while supplies were tight and then waited for prices to skyrocket on the spot market. If the current Internet network infrastructure provided by the backbone providers and Internet service providers can currently support much higher speeds and data quantities to current customers, then is the act of packet filtering and setting arbitrary low speed and data caps also effectively providing an "idled" service?
Is a tiered Internet service, where content providers would be effectively competing on a similar market to the electricity "spot market", a market based entirely on artificial Scarcity?
I've seen one of the ads - unfortunately they are very real. I thought it was pretty stupid, but I imagine it's going to carry a lot of weight with those who aren't familiar with the issue. It would sure be nice if some major company would put forth an ad campaign to smack the telcos back on this issue.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"
The large "source" providers have already paid money. That is they are connected to ATT, or MCI, or whoever. How many times do they have to pay?
Yes, they paid to be connected to a backbone provider. But what about your local broadband provider? You're paying them for your connection, you say? Yes, and that price has been so far structured on use to date. What happens when the use starts shifting from web browsing and email checking to people *routinely* downloading/obtaining all of their TV shows, movies, and so on, via legal commercial channels? Tough shit? What if their current pricing and usage model doesn't support that? Yes, you're paying for "unlimited" 5Mbps cable modem service, or whatever. And *you* can get and use that, *today*. And you can keep that pipe full 24/7 in many markets without raising an eyebrow. As long as you're one of the "1%" customers: the small group of customers that use a majority of the resources. What happens when that "1%" grows to 15? 25? 50? What happens when $50/month for 5Mbps service no longer covers their costs?
What about DSL providers whose operations may largely be supported by telephone business? What happens if they lose a quarter, third, or half of their paying $30/month landline customers to VoIP? You might argue they're already losing them to cell phones, and so on, and I'd agree. But the bottom line is, they're looking for ways to continue to support their operations five years down the road. If charging large source providers (like a forthcoming iTunes Movie Store) or "taxing" VoIP traffic are ways to continue to do it, is it surprising that they're trying to explore that avenue?
Once all companies can make more money by charging the other side, they will have no incentive for competeting to get your business. After all, they still get to charge the other side. This is a nice way to remove true market competition.
Yeah, because the competition for my home broadband connection right now (and that of MANY others) is truly dizzying.
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The "source" provider today, is Google, yahoo, etc (from tellcos POV). But with p2p growing faster, the source will be everybody. So are they saying that they will shortly split our costs based on upload/download?
p2p "growing faster"? What, you mean legitimate p2p? I wouldn't say it's "grown" since they heyday Napster. And large commercial providers like YouTube, Google, Apple, and so on don't use p2p; they use commercial content distribution networks and their own distributed services. Not p2p. So then, the "source" is "Akamai", but the content still originates from "Apple", or whomever, and that's who they're looking to charge. Even if Apple decided to distribute all the HD movies on the next generation movie store via BitTorrent, the point is they'd still want to recoup costs from Apple, for the reasons I outlined above.
This isn't Level3 and Qwest and AT&T that are doing this (at least from the backbone side). This is Comcast and TimeWarner and the local telephone providers. The companies who have MILLIONS of broadband customers paying anywhere from $25 to $50 or so dollars a month on these broadband services, and they can see a day when, as new commercial media services evolve, that their overall network usage could increase a hundredfold, a thousandfold, or more.
It's easy to sit here and say Google already pays to be connected to Level3 or Cogent and I already pay to be connected to Charter. But what if I and a hundred thousand others all of a sudden start downloading a few 1 gig movies from a legitimate commercial provider every other night between 6 and 10pm? How can they support that? What kind of buildout to the headends and COs is required by the cable and telephone operators to support this massive surge in use that isn't compatible with their current pricing and service delivery model?
There's all kinds of arguments from both sides. I'm sure greed is ALWAYS involved to an extent. But the point is, this didn't just come out of nowhere.
Try this:
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"Right now, your ISP charges you to access the Internet, and that's it. It this way because right now the Internet treats everything equally, and is considered 'Neutral'. What ISPs and Telcos want to charge you another fee in exchange for giving them complete control over what you see on the Internet and how well you see it. Net Neutrality is an effort to stop them from charging that extra fee and taking control over what you see and how you see it."
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The funny thing about the whole discussion is that net neutrality is actually the best thing for the Telcos. If they charge content providers like Disney or Apple for improved performance for that provider's content, that provider will have to get a Service Level Aggreement from the ISP charging for prioritizing traffic. That performance improvement will be defined and monitored. When the performance falls short (Nobody will let an ISP/Telco monitor such performance), penalty clauses will automatically kick in. Also, for the Disneys, Apples, and Googles, switching to another provider is usually far from impossible like it is for so many residential consumers.
And, actually getting Diffserv/QOS to work consistantly end-to-end on the Internet is little more than snake oil. Any guarantees made about how much better some content provider's data will reach the end-user will quickly be found to be false. That's because each time a packet crosses a provider boundry (say from AT&T to TimeWarner), how its tagged 'priority' gets treated is totally up for grabs. Will AT&T treat TimeWarner's priority traffic the same as it own? Not likely. Essentially, if telcos start charging for traffic prioritization, they will end up in court faster than you can say 'lawyer', with content providers and eachother. They'll be like a bunch of cannibals locked together in a room with no food. Fine.
What it comes down to is that the Telcos have no idea what they are getting themselves into. No wonder they think 'net neutrality' is mumbo jumbo. Content providers know what it means, and have enough weight to make it hurt for telcos, and it will.
As if the above wasen't enough to establish how utterly brain-dead telcos are, the ad is evidence that the telcos think TV adds are where the 'battle' is being fought. They really have no idea what the 'blogosphere' is, or to that extent it has influence. The ad is what amounts to the dying gasps of a dinosaur, barely aware of what the meaning of the bright flash on the horizon is.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
I'm sure the telcos would make special exceptions for "foreign traffic" of some sort, for incoming traffic only. They would probably make it as difficult as possible (while maintaining a notion of "connectivity") to connect to servers outside the US. And I'm sure the government/**AA would be all over this, considering it would slow down access to The Pirate Bay, and any foreign website they do not agree with.
The problem isn't what you're paying but whom you're paying. "Tiered internet" means that a connection to the internet isn't a connection to everyone else on the internet, only to those whose providers you paid. Everybody else can't communicate with you at all or only very slowly. Let's say you're a VoIP provider. Your customers are all over the country, connected to the internet through numerous access providers who have a near-monopoly in their area. You are connected to the internet through two or three backbone providers. "Tiered internet" doesn't mean that you pay your providers more for better QOS. It means that you pay the access providers of your customers or your packets get treated like third class citizens when they enter their networks. It should be obvious that that would be the end of the diversity that makes the internet what it is today, especially when you consider that many last mile providers are phone and television companies themselves who are not interested in providing their customers with an alternative. Even if they can't differentiate between companies when they're selling "QoS", it is plain impractical to deal with every last mile provider out there if you're a startup company.
First off I support the idea of a gauranteed QOS internet subspace if you will. A background network that can gaurantee the quality of connections between computers. Be this connections for internet games or connections to transfer audio and video feeds for real time communication. And it should be comsumers that directly pay the extra costs for this background internet. Kind of like long distence service.
I don't support ISP's blackmailing websites for extorion money or being filtered out. And they will do it. Imaging the shitting quality of a site like myspace which is caused by poor design and exponential growth actually being caused by your ISP. At first it will only be the biggest sites. Or giving one site a bandwidth edge over compeditiors. But eventually it will be all sites and the ISP's will degenerate into what AOL use to be.
To me that only states one thing. Basic and fundamental services, like power, water and communications, should be a state-offered service instead of a private-offered service. When the privatization of those services enters in effect, the quality and level of service stops being the number one mission objective to be replaced by the all mighty profit. That means that, as we are all seeing in the Us, the consumer always gets the shaft.
Slashdot, fix your code or at least hire someone who is competent at it to do it for you.