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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?
This honestly seems to[o] stupid to actually be real. Anyone know for sure?
Shouldn't you work that out before putting it up on the front page?
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
1) One might argue that net neutrality wouldn't be a net cost to customers but it's hardly a "blatant lie" to suggest it would. At this point, one can only make guesses as to how market forces would net out in either situation.
2) Even if that claim were obviously false, the submitter's argument against it is a total non-sequitur.
3) People who write "seems to stupid to actually be real" shouldn't throw stupid.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
That Congress makes these laws and then passes them off to the FCC. They'll make some half-assed bad law. The FCC will be lobbied everyday by the telecoms until it works out in THEIR favor and we'll be even worse off because they'll have worked the laws against the market. It may take a decade to undo that kind of damage if it even happens.
This is not geared to the /. crowd. While there will be be some in here who will buy into it, the vast majority will see it for what it is.
This is being addressed to the ignorant consumers and politicians. Sadly, they are the majority. As it is, if you really want this to not happen write your reps. Better yet, if you have the time, or contacts, educate them. keep in mind that these companies have BILLIONS backing them and are sending "educators" (lobbyists along the lines of abrahamoff) to help your local politicians understand the issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Makes Microsoft's FUD look a bit tame by comparison.
Net Neutrality is not the answer to the problems seen in the US. The correct answer is to make the largest players rent out their infrastructure with bitstream access and LLUB (Local Loop UnBundled).
As soon as other companies can buy access to the customer and sell them services, then the largest players can't offer degraded or bad service, because the customer can go elsewhere. The problem that Net Neutrality tries to solve is a problem because the customers in a lot of areas don't have many companies to choose from. Solve that problem instead of trying to enforce Net Neutrality and the US will be much better off.
Learn? Not from this 30-sec pile of crapload called advertisement. I watched it from the beginning to the end and there is nothing, nada, zilch substantial, only baseless accusations.
What Google and other companies on the other side need to do is to come up with simple way of explaining how the routing works (nailing the "tubes" cavemanship as a positive side effect), and why messing with the routing is bad for the internet.
Google et al needs to pick up the challenge and reply with their own advertisement.
Generalizing: is there something that consumers can do all these industry associations? Is it possible to slap some anti-monopolistic laws against those bastards?
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
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.
Well, here is the other side.
Once the above occurs, the telcos/cable will start charging for the connections from one to the other. All in all, this is beginning of the end of the net IFF the tellcos are allowed to charge on the other side of the connection.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Government.
"Affirmative Action", "Homeland Security", "War on $flavour_of_the_month", "Electoral Recounts"...
Well, *I* know that when somebody opposes XYZ's position on the grounds that XYZ are full of "blatant lies" and that "truthful information" is just a click away, over here, just take the red pill kthxbye, THEN I become suspicious of both parties' position and motives.
/. Sometimes, when one is right, yet doesn't have corporate backing, one feels the need to stress one's message so that people read/hear what one is saying.
:-)
What if XYZ's position is full of blatant lies and truthful information IS just a click away? Pretending that the veracity of a message is determined by its cool, calm exterior is as idiotic as believing something just because it's on
For some reason the Democrats think that not being aggressive keeps the constituency happy, despite the last two presidential elections, where a dispassionate wet towel lost it all by virtue of not growing a f-king spine. Or, at least, it was close enough to steal both times. And the dispassionate wet towel took the beating without nearly enough moral indignation, because the wet towel thought the exact same thing you do.
Better to be a spineless wet towel than allow passion into my voice, thereby potentiating the emotional sway of some people based solely upon that passion.
I mean, come on. You rejecting an idea based on the fervency of some jerkoff script kiddie somewhere in Albequerque is as bad as you believing it because of the same fervency. No disrespect to jerkoff script kiddies in Albequerque, of course.
Please stop stalking me, bro.
The Internet is the last bastion of ideas and real social discourse that the modern media has. TV and newspaper are all owned and operated by political agendas, and they don't allow the public to talk back. Once the free discussion we have on the Internet is gone, things are looking bleak.
No one can say for sure how far the telcos will run once they have won power over the Internet, but I, for one, don't want to find out.
We have seen an explosion of telecommunication technology and consumer options since AT&T was broken up and the telephone industry was transformed from a monopoly into a set of carrriers that could each compete on level ground. Many here might be too young to remember how the phone company used to argue that the integrity of their network would be compromised by even adding a diifferent (not AT&T) handset to a line in your house. At that time, AT&T's network ended (barely) at your ear.
There were plenty of jokes about the break-up at the time and it was impossible back then to see what the full effect of this might be. But today, we have a recent and relevant history to help guide our decision-making. Level ground, competition for services and not territoriality of infrastructure is what gives consumers choices while driving up profits. I believe Net Neutrality is ultimately better for service providers, too, though they appear to be too greedy to see it.
I've not been hearing comparisions by the media or analysts of Net Neutrality to the phone system break-up but the parallels seem compelling to me. To the extent we can bring the argument to "people who matter", perhaps this is a way to get past that disengenuousness that is the hallmark of today's politics.
Just look how the BP petroleum company runs all those corporate image advertisements that say how much BP cares about the environment.
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?
We understand the opposition's side just fine. They want to make more money and they spread lies to do so. The net is going to be paid for by the consumer, whether indirectly through Google or by the consumer directly doesn't change that. What net neutrality does ensure is that the consumer, by paying directly instead of indirectly, has the power and right to choose. For the network operators that means real competition instead of backroom deals with other big companies. That's why net neutrality is good for consumers and bad for network operators: Competition means lower prices for consumers and lower margins for network operators. It's quite clear WHY the opposition does what it does.
Time Warner Cable in Green Bay, Wisconsin has been airing this advertisement. I agree with some of the other posters that we should look at both sides of the issue before calling the commercial a blatant lie. Being someone who has worked for a long time in the telecommunications industry, I feel that Net Neutrality is essential for freedom of speech, nothing more. Let's face it, the monopolies that currently "own" the bandwidth in the United States are going to, "raise the cost to consumers," with or without Net Neutrality in place. Why make it more difficult for unpopular ideas (ie, those without big corporate funders or lobbyists) to have a voice?
The thing that I found most disturbing about the advertising was its total lack of substance. Never once does it explain how or why costs would rise, etc. It felt really slimy, like a poorly done political mudslinging ad (which, some would say, it was). My gut reaction is that nothing in the advertisement was blatently illegal, just very very unethical simply due to what it does not say. Deceipt by omission of fact is still indeed a lie.
I was dong some work in Austin, TX two weeks ago and saw it every commercial break during some periods. I couldn't believe it myself - all "political" ads like this just say "don't understand it, just be against it". Sad part is it works.
This might be a weird question, but what happens to international traffic from outside of the US to the US? It seems unlikely that sites from Abroadistan will be itching to pay US telecoms for priority access into US homes.
Does anyone even realize that the internet isn't a US only affair? That abandoning network neutrality could result in isolating the US?
How do you figure it'll cost the consumer more? Net Neutrality basically means the service providers can't double-dip and try to invent profit where there is absolutely no expense, thus unnaturally inflating the cost of the internet as a whole, by making service providers pay for the end users' end of the network connection, when end users are already paying for it, and service providers already have to pay for their own end of the connection. By making such unfair fees illegal, the failing of Net Neutrality "will cost the consumer more", not the other way around.
How do you figure it's "common sense" that Net Neutrality is bad for the consumer? The failing of net neutrality would almost assuredly make the costs of starting a new online business prohibitively expensive, as opposed to the amazingly level playing field we've managed to maintain for new business starting out on the internet for the last decade. If Amazon, Yahoo and MSN are all given the high-priority bandwidth, and the "next big thing" would be relegated to whatever is left over. With the "next big thing" appearing to be slower than dirt, through no fault of the creators, the "next big thing" becomes the "last failed thing", and the only companies that are able to innovate are the likes of Microsoft who can afford to put the money into it. What happens to all the sites out there right now you love so much? Wikipedia would be toast, so would Last.fm, and del.icio.us, and Digg... maybe even our very own Slashdot, who knows. It depends on how much more expensive it gets to run a high-traffic site.
Here's my favorite part: their argument is "why should Google be able to use my pipes for free?" To truly get an idea of just how absurd this would be, think about this: AT&T offers consumers and small businesses internet service, as well as offering backbone-level service to web hosting providers and data centers. Theoretically, there could be an AT&T pipe connecting Google's servers to the internet, and an AT&T DSL or dialup connection connecting YOU to the internet, and Google would STILL have to pay for "higher priority". In this scenario, not only would Google not be using those pipes "for free", but AT&T would in fact be collecting THREE TIMES from two parties.
But, forget all of that, because the real reason Net Neutrality is good is very, very simple. What matters is that Big Telco - specifically Verizon and SBC - had a brilliant idea of how to double their profits without incurring any additional expense, any additional work, or much in the way of additional equipment (routing gear is peanuts compared to most of the infrastructure expenses they've got), all the while looking like the indignant victim, by using peoples' fear and misunderstanding of technology. They want something for nothing and they'll use all the FUD they can muster to get it.
Don't let them!!
[Z?]
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.
...
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.
I forgot to include an important counterpoint to my devil's advocate.
The cable and telephone operators - the entities that own by far the majority of the "last mile" into millions of homes - currently are stuck in mentalities that revolve around their traditional businesses. Namely, provision of television content and telephone services. Their unique position of owning wires that physically reach everyone's homes placed them in a unique position to also deliver data services. However, the burgeoning data business is still playing second fiddle to what many of these providers see as their declining core businesses.
As more and more customers shift to obtaining things like entertainment content and voice/video communications capability from internet-based services, the less customers will patronize cable and telephone operators in their traditional markets.
What the home broadband providers need to do more than anything is to start seeing themselves as movers of bits, and nothing more, and concentrate on becoming damned good at that. Instead of trying to engineer mechanisms for charging "large" content providers to subsidize their operations, they should be building out and investing in better and better IP data networks. There will be a day when I may elect to get CNN á la carte directly from CNN, obtain my TV shows and movies directly from publishers or commercial aggregators like iTunes, and my communications services from a combination of my wireless carrier and the internet. Some of these are already possible today, and are growing.
Traditional, regimented television delivery and landline telephones in many large markets are at the beginning of being on the way out. Yes, for many readers here, they already are. But for the vast majority of people, particularly those in the US, we haven't even scratched the surface in some of these areas. The home broadband operators are in the best position to move these bits we'll all need moved. The sooner they realize that's their future, the better it will be for everyone - them included.
There is a peculiar concept that if something is funded by businesses it's not costing consumers anything. The trouble is that those businesses are making their money by selling something to the consumers - so if the direct cost to consumers to use the Internet goes down as a result of a non-neutral net, then the cost to businesses goes up. Those businesses have to turn a profit so either they have to cut their profit margins or pass the costs on to the consumer in the form of increased prices. Guess which?
But worse still, everyone along the chain has to make a profit - so if I pay my ISP a dollar for net access, that's the end of the line - but if the maker of my favorite widget has to pay my ISP a dollar and therefore has to charge me a dollar extra for my Widget - then WalMart has to pay a dollar extra and I have to pay a dollar fifty extra because they have to make a profit too.
It's the same with "free" services such as Google and MySpace - yes, they are free to the end user - but the Widget makers who are paying them to advertise there are charging me more for their products as a result of that cost.
I would honestly prefer that the world were utterly devoid of 'push' advertising of all kinds and that I had to pay what these services actually cost. Sure Television would cost more, there would be a penny per search on Google and so on - but the end products I buy would be vastly cheaper as a result.
According to this: www.transportation.anl.gov/pdfs/TA/57.pdf (for example), 23% of the cost of a new car is the cost of marketing it to us! Now - which would you prefer? No adverts on TV or on the web or on ugly signs everywhere - but TV and Internet that costs (say) $20 per month more than it does now ($200 per year maybe) - but the cost of almost everything you buy being 23% less...or what we have now where a fifth of the price of almost everything we buy is the cost of advertising it to us?
So - no, I don't WANT cheaper Internet paid for by businesses - I want much, much more expensive Internet with no adverts at all anywhere - because I'm smart enough to realise that it would save me money overall.
www.sjbaker.org
The problem is not that companies want to prioritise certain kinds of traffic (eg http is more important than bittorrent, so gets higher priority), but that they want to be able to (for example) prioritise traffic from msn search over google search, because they've done a deal with MS.
The other main reason is to keep Skype et al. out of their captive markets.
When it comes to telecos, as I understand it, the competition is in reality an illusion - If your only two choices for high speed net are CableCo and Bell, then you as a consumer don't actually get to choose - particularly if (as often happens) they operate on nod-and-wink basis. It's also highly unlikely that you will know which companies the CableCo and Bell have made deals with for better access before you sign 12 months of your money away - they are hardly going to list such "commercially sensitive" information on their adverts.
To use the UPS/FedEx analogy - Imagine UPS don't serve your town, so you have to use FedEx. You place an order with Borders for some books, to discover that because they have done a deal with UPS, FedEx refuses to provide any better service than 1-week parcels. Amazon, however, have a deal with FedEx, but charge a little more for the books you want. You can get Amazon books next-day though. It means you are paying more, unless Borders decides to increase their overheads by doing a deal with every carrier. It means UPS and FedEx now have leverage in the market for selling books. Now you might say I'm making a false arguments here, because there's nothing stopping UPS from delivering. However, in the case of the internet, generally once you have a connection, you are tied down for a fixed period with one supplier - regardless of the level of service you get, and in many towns you only have a few choices anyway
There are fairer ways
- put download limits on the cheapest contracts
- impose traffic shaping based on packet type (but not source/destination)
- make it abundantly clear in the TOS what traffic shaping you do
- regulation to ensure providers who have a monopoly don't use discriminatory traffic shaping polocies
If some traffic shaping based on source/company etc. is ever allowed
- force companies to issue a list of which companies' services will recieve higher QoS, and which will receive lower QoS, so consumers can actually choose.
I'm not making any comment on the technical merit of net neutrality, rather the consumer issues.
The thing to remember is that in the case of services like this, the only consumer protections are in the law that governs the service - because the contracts themselves are written to benefit the company, not consumer (since you can't get service without signing their contract, and unless you have $millions you have absolutely no power to negotiate). It's also worth noting that once one company finds a legal (but fairly subtle) way to screw their customers for more money, you can rest assured that the rest of them are not far behind.
"let US make up our mind"
Thank you.
This net.neutrality debate terrifies me.
It's the same "we need we need we need" nonsense that gave us icann. If you look at the first time icann was mentioned on this site consensus was that it was a good thing, while a few folks said "this is not good".
Now history (or is that hysteria?) is repeating itself. It's a fashion statement and the worst form of political incorrectness to disagree.
The problem I have with this whole debate is, the insistance on changes to the regulatory frameworks and addition of new laws.
It seems to me people who insist we need new laws either have no experience in this process or are self serving and are looking to get themseleves and their friends jobs in some form.
So I ask you please please please: look at actual problems that have arisen and look at what happened and how quickly and ask yourself are there existing safeguards in place and do we want and need new laws governing the Internet?
Need Mercedes parts ?