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Poll Says No Voter Support for Net Neutrality
Giants2.0 writes "A survey conducted by the Commerce Committee says that Americans don't know what net neutrality is, and they don't want it. Ars Technica reports that only 7% of respondents had ever heard of net neutrality, but the report questions the fairness of the survey, which was crafted by the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation to assess support for the current version of the Telecommunications Act of 2006. The survey suggested to respondents that net neutrality would prevent ISPs from selling faster service or security products, both of which are not true." From the article: "The very brief net neutrality description used by the pollsters is somewhat misleading insofar as it suggests that net neutrality would bar Internet Service Providers from selling faster service than is available today. Strict net neutrality does not concern itself with ultimate transfer speeds available to subscribers, but instead focuses on how different kinds of Internet traffic could be shaped by ISPs for anti-competitive purposes. For instance, strict net neutrality would not prevent an ISP from selling extremely fast 35Mbps connections, but it would prevent ISPs from privileging traffic for their own services for competitive advantage, or degrading the traffic of competing services."
Just last night I saw a commercial on TV urging viewers to vote No on a proposition about Net Neutrality. It was trying to say that it would cost consumers more, or at least allow ISP's to charge more. This was in the St. Louis area. Has anyone else seen or heard of anything like this in non-internet media lately?
There is no mod option "-1: Disagree" for a reason. "Overrated" is not an acceptable substitute. Post something instead.
The only question I have (for the committee members touting these results) is, "Senator, when did you stop beating your wife?"
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Gee, that's amazing. I wonder if that could be because almost all the media in the US is owned by ten megacorporations, and they don't report on things that they don't want us to hear about?
If this subject interests you, I suggest watching Orwell Rolls in his Grave. (ObDisclaimer: link to a review on my website, amazon referral link if you clicky from there. You know what to do if you want to find it somewhere else. I do not sell ads, I don't get money for page views.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
>Americans don't know what net neutrality is, and they don't want it
How can anyone have an opinion on something if they don't know what it is?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The problem is that in most places, you can't just turn into the arms of a competitor, because there might not be any.
I mean, really.. that is a completely inaccurate description of Net Neutrality. Not only is it deceiving in its results, but it also misrepresents net neutrality to those that potentially have never heard of it before. What bothers me is that if this is the first instance of some of these people learning about net neutrality, then the poll not only came to the wrong conclusions but also might negatively affect these people's future feelings on the manner.
It seems to me that it is extremely unethical for a committee to try and shape public opinion through the misuse of untrue information on their survey.
Justin - Don't be afraid of my blog, it won't bite.
Reminds me of the UK poll to see if people wanted ID cards. I can't remember the exact numbers but it was something like:
Do you want an ID card? 85%
Do you want an ID card if you have to pay for it? 7%
So the govt reports 85% support and that will cost you GBP150 pounds each please.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
The ISPs already have a structural advantage in that it is far easier to push high speeds from their servers to my home than from a random spot in the Internet (less hops, they contol all of them) so I don't believe that requiring them to play fair would completely remove their advantage in providing content to me, but if despite this advantage I request data from some other service, I expect my ISP to not throttle that connection. There are bottlenecks enough in the net without artificially constricting flows to give your own services an advantage.
By phrasing the question the right way, you can imply that net neutrality would limit services and download speed. In that scenario, you'll get an overwhelming response (from those who don't know what net neutrality is) that net neutrality is a bad thing. Phrased another way, you can imply that without net neutrality, Comcast and the baby Bells would be able to make web sites harder to reach. In that second scenario, most respondants would favor net neutrality.
For comparison, Cato has similar things to say about polling for support of school vouchers. When you imply in the question that other countries are doing it with great success, people are in favor. When you imply that it would hurt the public schools, people are against it. Shocking.
Only 13% of young americans surveyed could find Iraq, but you still went to war there. I was under the impression that neither public knowladge or approval were prerequitites for American laws.
May the Maths Be with you!
I'm currently studying political science and public opinion, and 7% strikes me as very impressive. I'd be even more suprised if 7% of representatives that have a say in the issue understand it any better than the way it was outlined in the report. That being said, I am more than a little troubled.
The public good doesn't have a lobbying firm.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
It's a series of Neutralized Tubes that contain much pr0...er information....Vote AOL in 2008!
the mods may say you posted flamebait, but to me it's a flame that warms my heart. rock on, brother! --chebucto
"Do you want to decide which web sites you can surf, or should your ISP make that decision for you?"
this signature has been removed due to a DMCA takedown notice
And that's how you skew a poll. Funny or insightful, I'll take either.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
How does this not suprise me? The majority of net neutrality information was distributed on sites (like this one, which most people don't read because it doesn't offer coupons for the gap) or by shitty emo youtube videos(which no one takes seriously). I'm sure the issues been catered to look pointless in the eyes of printed media so thier pappy coroporations can get a heads up from the ISPS to make sure you get an extra DRM'd lassie in 240 by 320 for your video portable.
Nice poll. I believe it should be verified with a second one. I propose a proved question type:
Do you support net neutrality or do you support terrorism and child pornography?
No, the problem is that it doesn't really matter if you switch ISPs if your packets still have to travel through networks owned by other ISPs that alter policies based on packet source.
In other words, you are on the west coast with ISP A.
The server you want to talk to is on the east cost with ISP B.
Backbone provider C sits in the middle, and your packets want to cross over their network.
C decides that B hasn't payed them enough money, and thus slows down packets to and from B that cross over C.
From your end, it looks like service is degraded and your ISP sucks. What do you do? Switch ISPs? It won't help if you still have to cross C to get to B. So there's really no way to "vote with your dollars" in this case -- as if that would work anyway, because like I said you won't know the root cause.
Network neutrality is a basic part of the net's design. So basic nobody thought to codify it until it became clear that certain money grubbers want to eliminate it. Sorry GP, but regulation is the only way to fix this problem.
The enemies of Democracy are
What a timely article...just finished a lecture with my class where we talked about net neutrality and how a tiered Internet system would most likely result in "haves" and "have nots" based upon the ability and willingness to pay. When I asked my class of 25 how many had ever heard of "net neutrality," not a single hand went up.
Typical. They had never heard of ICANN, either.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
Its seems like just a few years ago that I say a web address in an advertisement for the first time. The internet has changed so much over the past few years. The one thing I've always appriciated about it was how open and vast it was.
Now I just feel this being segmented, sliced up, analized, commercialize, and legalized. Don't get me wrong, some of it has been good. Would have never gotten outta dial up days if nothing happened to it but the face of the internet in another 10 years scares me.
Am I gonna need a passport to go to a website in another country?
Will I have to log into more then one "Internet" depending on who I am and where I want to go?
I think, the price of the internet should eventualy move to nothing, with the right commercalization wouldn't commerce want to you log on to the net like they want you to turn on your TV?
-- Disclaimer: I can't really back up anything I post on
They don't know what Common Carriage is either, but benefit greatly from it. Net Neutrality is basically trying to re-frame Common Carriage as something new, unnecessary and unproven rather than old, essential to business, and time tested. It was what allowed all the small ISPs and software companies to flourish in the last two decades: it prevented newer business and services from being locked out by more established ones, it prevented ISPs and hosting companies for being liable for the content produced by their customers.
Now that a handful of megacorps have crushed or absorbed all of the small ones, and it's really hard for these to crush or absorb each other using the same methods. Going back to the pathetic crumbly, balkanized patchwork of non-interoperable, 1960-style proprietary networks seems to be what these want to try again. It gives exponential advantage to larger market share. Common Carriage is preventing these megacorps from balkanizing the net. So far...
How about a poll phrasing it this way:
"Are you in favor of equal access to the net or would you prefer to allow groups and businesses to be closed out by the big players and to allow ISPs to give you slower service unless you pay extra?"
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Damn you, thalidomide!
isn't there an inherent flaw in net neutrality? my isp (road runner) offers trailers of the movies they have on the on-demand chanel. if i wanted those same trailers off imdb for example, it is slower then downloading them off the road runner servers. under this law, wouldn't road runner be required to throtle bandwidth to their own server to match the speed to imdb? or am i just way off.
...For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
I'd give you both, but I don't have either at the moment, so I'll have to offer one of my home-brew mods, a +1 Sad But True.
At the rate we are going I would not be surprised to see that level of push polling being done in the next few years. If it hasn't started already.
--MarkusQ
Even if a survey has a genuinely random sample, you _can't_ be sure how much it means until you know the exact wording of the questions.
That's a separate issue from "push polls", which are meant to change what people think as opposed to simply getting the desired answer. An example push poll was a telephone "survey" in the 2000 South Carolina primary asking "Would you be more likely or less likely to vote for John McCain for president if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?".
...at least this sort of survey. Asking the general uninformed population about an issue they know nothing abount and can formulate the questions in anyway that makes your conclusion valid is improper. If they had asked the same question of informed internet aware users, such as visitors to Slashdot, arstechnica, anandtecg, toms, dslreports, etc...the results would be different than what they wanted them to be no matter how babdly and twistedly they formulated the questions.
Net Neutrality needs to happen its good for everyone, the ISPs must not make the rules, the people using the internet must.
Power Corrupts,Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely, leaving one person(group)in charge is absolutely corrupt.
How can so many people know so little about something that they all use every day, and is vital to our economy and way of life? Do we need to tell them that their ISP will slow down their MySpace if net neutrality isn't regulated?
I know it may seem stupid, but the term "Net Neutrality" may be a stumbling block to the average American. When was the last time anyone but the Swiss got really worked up about neutrality?
Maybe we can call it "Not being sodomized by the bastards" or "Not paying extra for crap service" or "Leave my Skype alone!"
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
That's because they are systematically blocking any objective measures for reporting what they are doing so that we could vote them out when they don't do it right. There is no penalty for classifying documents that should be public, there is no penalty for having secret meetings, there is no penalty for issuing no-bid contracts. All of these should be illegal in a representative government.
How many of us have gotten off our asses to communicate that to Congress? There's more to gauging an issue than polls, and incoming comments to Senatorial offices can have a big impact. As few as a couple hundred well-worded letters or phone calls can swing a Senator's vote one way or the other, especially on more "niche" or technical issues.
Start here:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/=senatetally
Most Senators are not on record and so are more likely to be open to influence from their constituents. Your best bet to describe, in simple terms, why it is important and why it is a major voting issue to you. It does not have to be a magnum opus, just a short e-mail, letter, fax, or phone call.
And if you one of those who don't understand or care, I invite you to read this:
http://www.savetheinternet.com/=faq
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Because their leaders tell them so.
It's the core principle of advertising.
Sorry for the redundancy in my subject line.
The net will be regulated. The net is too important to too many people to stay off the political radar. If we don't support the regulatory process to work in the people's favor, the companies will certainly not abstain from making it work for them. The market is powerful, but it cannot work in the presence of rules which explicitly turn market forces off, like zoning laws. If you can only get your broadband internet access from one phone operator and one cable operator, and nobody else can bury cable to bring the internet to you, then there is no market to speak of. Network neutrality is a kludge, but a necessary one.
No voter support? BIG SUPRISE! There's no voter support for anything that gets press here on slashdot. Where are the voters who support guys like Larry Lessig and Richard Stallman? Republicans and Democrats are guilty of ignoring corporate rule over technology for too long! Support EFF, CreativeCommons, FSF, Knowmore.org, FreeCulture.org... and all the other folks who want to see innovation and invention survive and not be swallowed by companies who put greed above all else, threaten democracy, and pollute the political process.
Check out http://alternativefreedom.org/
Features DangerMouse from Gnarls Barkley, Lawrence Lessig, Richard Stallman, Bunnie "X-Box Hacker" Huang, DOSEONE and EFF Superstar Jason Schultz.
I'm afraid you've been misinformed. There's only one media company in the US.
The most useful thing we can do here is to write to our Senators. If enough people write, they pay attention. Besides, you'll probably get a nice glossy photograph in the mail.
I'm generally as cynical about the government as anybody else here on Slashdot, but I think there are certain situations where it makes sense for the goverment to intervene.
Those cases mostly arise when the market either has already, or threatens to create a situation that prevents future competition in the market. For this reason, you have anti-trust laws and lots of other regulations; the goal of them is to create a basically level playing field on which various firms can compete for business. This is how the system is supposed to work. Let the market work when it can, but when it won't produce the desired outcome on its own (where the desired outcome is determined through the democratic process), then there's a place for regulation to step in and create the environment where it will.
Now I think we can all agree that the outcome that most users want is not one where there is nothing but a series of regional monopolies, dispensing to users your telephone, cable TV, and internet, and charging exorbitant rates to do so, far in excess of what other people in other parts of the world pay. Therefore, if this seems to be the likely result of noninterference, then the government has a mandate to inject itself and regulate.
Although the government does have a history of mucking things up where it's not needed, history does show that there are times when regulation by some sort of governing body is both necessary and in the long run, beneficial. (E.g., securities markets.*) Also, governments have been engaging in infrastructure-development projects since probably the beginning of recorded history, and in the 21st century, the Internet is as much an important economic thoroughfare as the Interstate Highways are. Allowing a small number of companies to control and manipulate our electronic "tubes," would be akin to handing over control of the highways to Ford, GM, and Chrysler in 1955, so that they could prohibit Japanese cars from driving on them.
* - For a pro-capitalist analysis of the development of the U.S. securities markets prior to regulation, I recommend reading The Scarlet Woman of Wall Street; I think most people who advocate complete deregulation aren't quite appreciative of how rough things were prior to its introduction.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Democracy is great! At least it was until the marketing and lobbying set in.
Just how much more blatant can you get with "buying" votes? Unfortunately, people don't want to be informed, they want to be led. They want someone to tell them "That's the way it is, swallow it!", and they even get away with it.
Is free press really that bad? In countries where censorship is running rampart, people distrust government and press, and they try to find the truth. Often with their life at stake should they be discovered as "dissenters" who want to know the other side as well.
Why don't we? Why do we believe every lie fed to us?
Why are we happy when someone tells us how it's supposed to be? Because we're (still) free?
Why are people so complacent and lazy and delegate thinking to someone else?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
(I'm just glad the above comment inexplicably is at a +2, as someone might actually end up reading this)
A more obvious conclusion is that once again, America's population has been lied to by its own leadership
Yes Yes Yes. Obvious. Duh. Why doesn't X see how obvious it is. They must be stupid. Let me explain how it is, stupid heads.
Somehow, George Bush has found a way to steal Al Gore's internet back away from the people and turn it into oil somehow, And further, its all just a plot by the Liberal media megacompanies to make it look like its a plot from the right to maintain preferencial access to their lobbiest group constituents.... ad nauseum
Allow me(Mod -3 Flame, Troll, Sarcasm), as obsurdity rarely is pointed out to allow constructive behavior to flourish.
You know about net neutrality. I know about net neutrality. I know a friend who knows about net neutrality. My friend might be a republican. You might be opposed to republicans. I might be Microsoft.
You both might hate Microsoft.
All three of us might be in favor of Net neurality.
Guess what's going to happen if we waste our lungs bitching at each other over none issues like party leaders tend to?
Guess whats going to happen if each of us agrees to go out and honestly inform people about net neutrality, with out tying a bunch of other unrelated selfish political crap to the issue?
Please read my sig, its very applicable. Feel free to use it.
Here is something for all of us 'Creationist' laughers to take a bite out of and chew:
(from Wikipedia, bold added http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality"
Network neutrality regulations are supported by large Internet content companies such as Google, Yahoo, and EBay, consumer rights groups such as Consumers Union, liberal blogs, and the Democratic Party, as well as some elements of the religious right
I hope and pray that people are going to be able realize the point I'm making - please send me a P.M. if you don't - I would be happy (and its my duty as a U.S. citizen) to explain. Here's a hint: the ideas I'm advocating here don't apply strictly to the isolated instance.
Yarr!
Advertising is a poor, failing, ghost of an attempt at the power of honest word of mouth. -Locution Commando
...the unwashed masses are ignorant.
And this is news?
And you know why there aren't any? Government monopolies!
You can't block Net Neutrality on the grounds that it introduces government regulation to the net, when the very existence of the infrastructure on which the net runs is due to a whole raft of government-granted monopolies, government claims of eminent domain, etc.
The day I can start charging Verizon rent for the lines they keep on my property, instead of just giving them those rights for free because the government tells me to, is the day I'll buy the "no government regulation of the net" argument against Net Neutrality.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
How about waiting to see if there actually is a problem? Right now there is nothing to fix. Nobody has implemented tiered service yet. Nobody has targeted packets to slow them down yet. I say at least let the market try first (may or may not work), then if an actual problem arises, try regulation. Once regulation starts, it's only going to get more pervasive. There is a good chance that regulation will be worse than the problems that may arise without it.
Finding other idiots on
Lets say you want to get to Google.
You dial into (or are connected to) Ma and Pa ISP
Ma and Pa ISP connects to some local back bone
local back bone connects to a national back bone
national back bone connects to major ISP
major ISP connects to Google
Now, let's say that the national back bone ditches out on NN. That national back bone sends Google a bill saying "pay this much or your service will be degraded." So, if Google pays them, great. Except then the Major ISP is going to tell Google that if they want premium service on their side, they'll have to pay them more as well. No biggie, at this point Google is just shelling out a few extra checks a month. But then it hits the local back bones. Networks all over the world demand that Google pay them directly to get non-degraded service. And then it comes to Ma and Pa, they get the best of both worlds, they can bill you an extra fee for "preferred services" and the can bill Google for it's traffic.
Even if you switch from Ma and Pa to another ISP, you'll still hit non-neutral traffic in between you and Google.
The infrastructure industry is demanding more money. Fair enough, there are two ways of getting it: The NN way, increase your bill rates. Or the non-NN way, bill the providers and users an extra fee.
Using the NN way, the implementation process is simple, you increase your bill rates. No new technology to implement, no new personnel, no new sales, etc.
Using the non-NN way, the implementation process is incredibly complex. You need to first implement new hardware over the network to take advantage of the performance. Then you need to establish a billing system for the new services. You need to increase your staff to manage the new billing and sales requirements. You need to advertise and educate. You need to spend a whole lot more money to get the extra income. Which means it is significantly less efficient.
NN or non-NN, either way the infrastructure will get the money they need/want. The question is how much will it cost the customers (consumers and businesses). And from what I've seen, implementing a non-NN solution is going to have significantly more overhead, costs, and problems than just raising the rates.
Not to mention the inevitable use of unfair practices to leverage business opportunities. Imagine if AT&T choked all VOIP traffic to a snails pace. Just by disrupting VOIP on their back bones they could literally crush the VOIP industry overnight.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
If the policy is strictly based on destination and not on content, a traceroute or tracepath would probably show what's going on. Especially if several users from several ISPs compared their findings (as they certainly would).
So if some sort of packet prioritizing is enabled by the providers, it's likely that most users will quickly hear of it through the grapevine. Whether they will be able to do anything about it besides whining remains to be seen though.
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
Democracy dies when voters get their non-news from television instead of researching sites like Vote Smart, when voters leave school without a basic education and never get it later.
/. readers in the US, help your country: use Google and go find things out.
How can US voters make wise decisions if they don't know who borders whom, or the difference between Sunni and Shi'a (read to near the end)?
I keep six faithful serving men
Who teach me well and true
Their names are What and Where and When
And How and Why and Who. -- Rudyard Kipling
The public has a knee jerk reaction when asked if they are for or against something they have never heard of. "Against" wins every time. This reaction can always be relied upon for "push polls" and other kinds of false statistics.
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
and they don't care about the internet. For most people, there much more important things to worry about than a series of invisible tubes.
Well, not to take sides here, but that is exactly how S.2917 proposes net neutrality should be defined: A prohibition against offering tiered Internet services.
The problem here is that there is no one definition of "net neutrality" that is accepted by either side of the issue. Spin is put on the definition depending upon one's perspective. Given the context of this one specific bill, the poll question as stated is not misleading.
To argue that this poll (or any other) is biased is futile, unless both sides agree to the rules of the game.
If Google, YouTube, and MySpace put banners on their screens informing people about Net Neutrality and what it'll mean for their services, this issue would go away quickly.
- gtaluvit (prnc. GOT-tuh-LUV-it)
Exactly. I think we should give the big telecoms the kind of "free market" they've been harping about. I doubt they'd like it very much without their government protected monopoly territories.
The sad thing that you have to ask yourself is whether or not people care about being lied to. Or that they care at all for that matter.
People don't care until a problem directly involves them. And the kicker is, even if you can explain why they are impacted, they will still give precedence to the short-term benefits.
And the worst thing of all, if anyone truly cares about an issue, how can they be certain that any data or conclusion given is valid. I have a limited amount of time, and a limited skull, I'm lucky to be an expert in any subject at all, and have a partial understanding of a couple auxiliary subjects.
I wish I knew how to make this critism of modern life and potics constructive, but I don't.
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
Is not a poll, it's an opinion of 800 people.
A poll should be at least 100,000 people
800 is a fart in the wind with an error factor +/- 800
-- I am the NRA, enough said...
My kingdom for mod points right now...
Despite the crassness of parent, it's a pretty accurate representation of what a good portion of the rest of the world is feeling. TV and media distract the average American suburbanite into not thinking about what actually matters. As long as they can drive to their office job in their SUV and come home their TV, everything in the world is fine. They don't have to think because they pay to have someone think for them.
You're welcome here in Canada. We're far from perfect, but we're a world better.
Arrrrr-genius. (talk like a pirate)
Most of the American public is too naive to see this. Most of the America public is too naive to realize that in many ways, the internet is the last bastion of true journalism in the country--quite possibly in the world. It should be obvious that they don't care about or "don't want" net neutrality. A free internet is different than being spoon-fed "news" in soundbite-sized pieces; it requires independent thought. A free internet scares the crap out of the telcos because it takes control out of their hands and puts it back in the hands of the public. They want it locked down just the same way as the traditional mass media before the public wakes up and sees the need for hip-waders, though I don't know that there's really anything to be afaid of on their part. The results of the "survey" clearly show that the American public is far more stupid and docile than could possibly have been imagined.
"osake no hou ga, biiru yori ii" to omotteiru.
I don't understand why so many people here are like 'Oh, well, we'll wait until they enact it and then if it's a problem we'll stop it.' Welcome to the reason you pay Income Tax, morons. It was instated in WWI, then stopped after WWI. Then it was instated for WWII, and then it never stopped. And that's why we pay income tax. Because a bunch of people did the exact same thing -- 'Oh well, it will only be here for the war ...'
Let me try and break this down into small, understandable chunks:
Scenario A: The Die Hard Gamer
Johnny plays Unreal Tournament 2004 and Quake 4 almost religiously. He has a nice DSL connection and usually sees ping times under 30ms to his favorite servers. His DSL provider contacts him and informs him that due to a restructuring, his $54.95 a month now only allows him 'Standard' service. He notices that his ping time has risen to over 200ms during his gaming sessions, significantly impacting his ability to play online games, but sees no other real latency issues while surfing. Another phone call to his ISP informs him that for the low, low price of $14.95, they will stop prioritizing his gaming packets lower than all other traffic. They would call it the 'Gaming Extreme' package. Now, Johnny is spending $15 more a month, just because his ISP has the ability to prioritize his traffic as they see fit.
THAT SUCKS.
Scenario B: The Mom and Pop Shop ISP
Mom and Pop start an ISP and have a big contract with Concentric, one of the bigger backbones. A high percentage of their customers are in the SW, and a lot of what their customers do involves servers in the NE. In order for the data to get from Customer to End Server, it passes through Mom and Pop, Concentric, Cogent, and Level3. (I know, I know, it wouldn't likely go through that much.) Cogent and Concentric are at odds, because Cogent wants to charge Concentric $1.00 per megabyte for priority speeds. Concentric told Cogent to stuff it, so now every packet going through Cogent has 4x the latency of 'priority' traffic. As Cogent is a bunch of idiots in this example, it's not much of a stretch to assume that Level3 dislikes them as well. Level3 won't pay Cogent for priority traffic, either. So now, Level3 is slowing down Cogent's traffic, and Cogent is slowing down Concentric's traffic. This results in your latency being between 500ms and 750ms, instead of 30ms to 50ms. All because some assface in a suit at some table wants his $1.5M salary pushed up by another $250k/year.
If reading THAT doesn't make you understand that 'waiting to see' is the stupidest idea in the history of stupid ideas, GET THE HELL OFF THE INTERNET. No one wants you here if you don't have the slightest of interest in the longevity and perserverence of the network.
To the darkened skies once more, and ever onward.
Thsi is the perfect time to speak up and tell people around you what Net N is really about. Inform them of what is really being proposed
Send people to web site where they can educate them self about the issue http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality or http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html)
Remember
If you don't vote you can't complain
If you don't speak up youll never be heard
~ Diagonally Parked in a Parallel Universe ~
In reality this argument isn't even about if the Telcos CAN do this.. like with bank fees, they're just "training" the public for when they flip the switch... they're not even ASKING at this point.. they're TELLING!!!
Another example of asking people a question without properly explainting it, as demonstrated by The Man Show.
Help End Women's Suffrage: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yrSs1ClzU4w
I agree that 'troll' is unfair. If he'd said 'off topic', I would rate it fair, though I see why you link to this topic.
/. system seems better than any other out there, but let's face it, any system that allows anybody to participate will be flawed.
The
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.
Americans are stupid, ignorant jackasses... ...the same fucknuts who were duped into electing Bush twice... ...Not intended as a troll or a flame...
Hopefully you see the fallacy in these statements.
Jesus, Canada is looking better and better by the day.
If your above comments represent how you truly how you feel about 300 million of your countrymen (I am assuming you are currently living in the US), then perhaps you are correct that moving to Canada would be a solution, although I imagine any location's citizens would eventually disappoint you. Before you change your citizenship, however, it might behoove you to get out of the house, change jobs/cities if you have to, turn off CNN/Fox/Al Jazeera, and find some others with which to surround yourself, because there are millions and millions of educated, enlightened, culturally diverse, and philanthropic Americans all around you.
in the beginning. Net Neutrality is not about charging more for us to get what we want. Net Neutrality is about charging more to the content providers such as Google and YouTube and MySpace because they send out a lot of data such as videos. The biggest reason that Net Neutrality is coming up is because ISPs are finally getting into the VOIP services. They want to be able to slow down the performance of services like VOIP for providers like Vonage or Skype so that unless Vonage or Skype pay them more money there service will suck but the ISPs VOIP service will be great. The problem I have with all of this is that the content providers (vonage \ skype \ google \ youtube) are already paying for the bandwidth that they put out. But Comcast and\or RoadRunner don't like it because google is paying MCI for their bandwidth and Comcast\Road Runner have to carry their traffic anyway. Think of it this way, I am in a truck that is licensed in Iowa so I pay my registration money to Iowa. I have to travel to Indiana and pass through Illinois. Now Indiana and Illinois are pissed off because they have to let the truck use its roads to get to Indiana but don't get any money to keep up the roads that the truck is using. So what do they do? Put in a tollway to say "If you want to use this road you need to pay for it." We already do this in our world. The problem is that the internet was created so we didn't have to worry about this crap and we can get anything from anywhere. If the company is complaining that they aren't making enough money then they can kiss my ass and go somewhere else.
the telcos are so used to introducing new features and charging for them that they simply cannot conceive of a way to make money otherwise.
for example: want your phone number listed? pay to be listed. too many crank phone calls from being listed? pay for caller ID. Caller ID not helping you screen effectively? pay for our privacy manager service.
the last thing anyone (except the consumer) wants is a price war between similar competitive services. the telcos and cable co's want to keep their services as apples to oranges as possible.
sarcasm:
-noun
1. harsh or bitter derision or irony.
After all, Cable companies are commissioned to deliver Cable TV, not internet. Where do Cable Companies get their internet access from? Most don't have upstream sataliite feeds, so they must be paying for land lines. Land line mean they are ALSO TELCO CUSTOMERS!!! While cable companies can do most of the stuff by satallite, they will loose ALL of their VOIP services and internet connections..over night! They do realilze that the TELCOS have monopoly over phone services... over phone lines, with no net neutrality, they don't have to allow VOIP to connect to their networks. While most people can live without cable, most cannot live without phone. That's the telco's magic bullet. They will be able to upgrade EVERYBODY (profitable) to high speed internet and put TV on it as an "information service" Cable won't be able to do the same.. the telcos will be able to charge thru the noze for VOIP. Cable companies LOSE! Which side are they on again?
There's a clip that sums up Net Neutrality pretty well here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDRGdVf6Mf8 Share it with your friends.
Yes, but such a shame that none of them are running the country
Conquest's 3rd Law: Every organisation behaves as if it is run by secret agents of its opponents.
This is what the federal government said about Microsoft's anti-compeditive practices back in the mid 1990's. Would you say they have sure done a great job of regulating Microsoft since then?
A big problem is that whenever one of these massive companies notices a potential regulatory threat to their cash cow, they simply sponsor a few senators and their parties and get the entire thing stopped.
While this isn't a NN issue per-se, it appears that my ISP is playing with my service slowing it down when it suits them (and inconveniences me). It might just be tinfoil hat stuff, but its been too regular. I've been meaning to set up a script to ping various servers over time, and map the trends. (I'm a scrip noob, any help appreciated).
So while I appear to have a 'neutral internet' (across services), I do appear to have interference when I've been gaming for 'too long'. I'm not being switched from the motor-way to a toll-way, they just regulate the number of cars I can use on the existing motorway.
So go to Digg and stay off Slashdot. Or go muck around on Kuro5hin, the site that completely obsoleted Slashdot five years ago.
For more information, click here.
Um... it might just be that those times are generally when the internet is heavily used and your ISP and/or the ISP of the server you are playing on is probably just bogged down with heavy traffic. No conspiracy there at all.
Finding other idiots on
Your ISP *does* suck if it uses backbone C and can't be bothered to iron out the issues or switch to a different backbone. The customer doesn't need to know the technical reason for the slowdown. (Aren't all ISPs dual-homed these days anyway?)
If your web site keeps going down because the data center used by your web host can't supply continuous power, do you regulate the data center, or do you vote with your dollars by switching to a web host that has better uptimes? Does your web host keep their servers where they are and hope for the best, or do they migrate their servers to a different data center and/or find another way to mitigate the problem?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
I am finally able to Meta Moderate. If this one shows up my on radar, I'll kill it :P That's a horrible mod. Should at least be +1, Interesting, if nothing else, but troll?
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
If we can get people to agree to ban dihydrogen monoxide why is anyone even remotely surprised when, given something that the public understands even less than chemistry, the mechanisms of the Internet, a skewed poll suggests that they don't want it. A poll on a subject like this has to be skewed because absolutely everything the person being polled knows about the subject comes from the poll itself. It's definitely non-trivial to write a completely unbiased summary and certainly given the limited amount of space that you get for a poll blurb.
Riddle me this: Won't net neutrality also prevent "throttling" for reasons that aren't nefarious? With a fixed bandwidth, wouldn't it make sense to throttle services like Email where a few seconds delay isn't noticeable as opposed to VOIP, where a few seconds delay is catastrophic. Doesn't net neutrality prevent this? And thus prevent an ISP from the optimal state for it's traffic?
That's the way it is and that's the way it should be. The backbone providers provide service to other providers, and they do it for money.
Um, yes, they sell the service for money. That's not what I was saying. I was saying that the backbone provider would throttle your packets across their backbone because the target network hadn't payed the extortion money. Everyone involved has payed for their bandwidth, but because ISP B didn't pay more for "QOS", your packet gets delayed.
Google doesn't buy bandwidth from your ISP. They pay for access to "the backbone" and your ISP does the same.
I'd be willing to bet that Google does not pay for access to "the backbone", they probably buy bandwidth from an ISP, who in turn has an agreement with the backbone provider, just like mine does. In fact, there are probably several providers in between my ISP and Google's, but I was trying to keep the example simple.
It's really the same as the end-user provider case. The point is you can hold hostage any user who is on the other side of your network and extort money from ISPs who want to be able to deliver good service to them.
"Internet" is when that communication is "best effort": If you can transport the packet, you do transport it. That is what net neutrality wants to codify and end-user providers would like to change.
Yes, that's the concept. If my wording did not imply that to you, then that's miscommunication.
The enemies of Democracy are
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6UlCXXZTTh8
First of all, the same basic argument can be applied the other way: "once tiered service starts, it's only going to get more pervasive." Who's to say that getting rid of tiered service if it becomes a problem would be any easier than getting rid of regulation?
Second, the idea that all packets are equal is the basic foundation of the Internet. It's intuitively obvious that changing that would screw up the whole thing!
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Am I the only person who read the article or am I missing something? Were there two surveys?
Looks like people want Net Neutrality after all. 80% of the US population is about 100% of the US population with internet service. You could say that 100% of internet users think that it would suck to let ISPs throttle the internet.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Not precisely. It depends on if your agenda matches Taco's or not. Several people who have complained about things here on slashdot have apparently been locked out of moderation forever.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I particularly like the multi-colored "Google-esqe" text of Mumbo Jumbo and the young dot com exec on the bed where it's raining money.
The transcript just does not do this ad justice.
I think that's a big difference here, people have latched on to a kind of worst case scenario that really hasn't happened anywhere and they're pushing that as the reason to regulate. I think if there is a real problem the regulate to fix it but so far there isn't a problem, just a potential threat. Subsequently, if ISPs were to start blocking some traffic and giving preferential treatment to other traffic, it creates a ripe market where an alternative ISP could really add value. Microsoft, Google, those are fricking huge companies with a lot of money, they are completely with the means to build a new large ISP. I think IBM has created multinational networks and sold them off at least twice now.
What are the down sides of net neutrality? What's the potential worst case there? We all get dumbed down to the same speed because that's fair? Something like that? ISPs refuse to innovate and increase speed? Or maybe they cannot increase speed until they can do it for all of their customers at the same time, which in effect will end innovation or any more speed. I simply don't see a lot of good coming from regulation before there is a problem to fix.. especially when we're talking about doing it to telcos that are already clustered fucked up.
How about waiting to see if there actually is a problem? Right now there is nothing to fix. Nobody has implemented tiered service yet. Nobody has targeted packets to slow them down yet.
Yes, yet. Are you implying that therefore the ISPs might not actually want to? Then why are they fighting so hard against net neutrality? It certainly isn't because they're averse to government regulation, seeing as how that's why most of them exist as localized monopolies! There's clearly a desire to implement tiered services, and to target packets to slow them down. They will do it, it is only a matter of time.
Personally, I prefer to fix issues before they become a problem. Kinda like fixing your tire design before the first SUV flips over. But waiting until the obvious problem actually bites you in the ass sure is the typical market way of dealing with things.
I say at least let the market try first (may or may not work), then if an actual problem arises, try regulation.
I'd be interested to hear how it could work. Where's the market incentive? As I was pointing out, it's not like end users can actually affect anything, assuming they can even tell what is going on.
Once regulation starts, it's only going to get more pervasive. There is a good chance that regulation will be worse than the problems that may arise without it.
There's already regulation. Regulation is why the internet exists in the first place. Internet is better than no internet, and net neutrality is better than no net neutrality. Even if the legislation that brings it about has its own negative side effects. The balkanization of the internet is a terrible problem. I do not see a good chance that even particularly bad legislation would be worse, so long as it enforced neutrality.
The enemies of Democracy are
Your B is connected to your C, which means they have a business relationship. If C doesn't get enough money from B and therefore throttles packets with destination B, then that is not an issue of net neutrality or not. It's business as usual.
Then insert back bone provider D, E, and F into the line as necessary until the point gets through.
But the easiest way to make my example work for you would be to make the discrimination based on the target, e.g. Google, who only has a relationship with B and not C.
Happy?
The enemies of Democracy are
I'm all for net neutrality, but not in the form currently being campaigned for here and in congress. There is virtually no way that any net neutrality law that gets pushed through congress would be a good thing for consumers.
Here's what needs to happen...
The big problem in the US is that there is no competition between broadband providers. In most places, if you're lucky, you have a choice between DSL and Cable. That usually means getting service from a monopoly telco or a monopoly cable provider. Sure, there are companies like Earthlink that sell broadband services, but they have the uncomfortable position of having to be both the customers and competitors of the monopoly providers. This is never a good arrangement.
For true net neutrality, we need to divorce the companies that own the copper and fiber (local loop) from the ones providing dialtone. This means breaking up the monopoly providers into 2 or more entities each. One monopoly company that owns/services/maintains the wires, and one company that rents these lines from the monopoly provider and provides dialtone. The first one is regulated as any monopoly should be. The second is essentially a peer with all other dialtone providers.
This would put all the dialtone providers in the US on an equal footing, and give some serious incentive for them to add value since changing broadband provider wouldn't necessarily mean dealing with a company that has to buy stuff from their competitor.
There is clear precedent for this. Look at the deregulation of long distance in the 80's.
If we could ever make this happen in the current regulatory environment, then all this net neutrality stuff would go by the wayside. Any provider that wanted to pull this garbage of trying to charge both ends for traffic on a pipe would be writing out their own corporate suicide note, since people would just drop their inferior service.
QED (except for the part of overriding the lobbies of the monopoly companies)
That nobody seems to have figured out how to do that in hundreds of years should reassure you that your sense of helplessness is not an isolated event.
It is something that I imagine most Slashdotters run into in the "real world" when they attempt to explain this issue to their friends and family. For my own part, I get either dumb stares or "You're lying, nobody would ever do that."
Unfortunately, I am becoming more and more convinced that the future of our planet lies not in the optimistic hope of educating the public, but in degrees of propoganda. In a world where nearly every piece of information that is disseminated comes from a company wealthier than any human could ever be in 10,000 years, the idea of an educated populace is becoming laughable.
All that remains is a populace ruled by propoganda. What the content of that propoganda is, and what it leads to, is the question. Do we leave the propoganda in the hands of those who want the populace to be nothing but wage slaves? Or does the propoganda encourage people to stand up to their leaders and demand liberty?
That remains to be seen. I think the EFF, for example, is beginning to catch on: public education does not work. Propoganda might.
We are the fire that lights our world.. and we are the fire that consumes it.
I have to take great exception to a couple of your statements
self-righteous atheists who attack religous people.
For one, in my experience, it's almost always the other way around. In particular, one of the preferred attacks is to claim that atheists are always attacking them and trying to repress their beliefs, which is laughable in a country like the US where 80%+ of people are Christians, and an open atheist stands no chance of getting elected to national office. There is a minority of new atheists who are obnoxious asshats, but they usually calm down after a while, and they're no worse than born-again Christians, who (on the other hand) tend to never get less shrill.
Its usually the least informed who have the most to say.
For another thing, most atheists I know are quite familiar with the commmon arguments for and against the existence of God and knows at least a bit about the history of Christianity and the Bible. (Often weak on other religions, but hey, Christians are the majority religion here and are often big proselytizers.) Atheism is not a position most people come to passively or inherit from their parents -- unlike most religions. The atheists I know are well read, thoughtful, rational, highly informed people.
It's much easier to say, "don't do it" than to say, "ok.. now you did. please undo it." they'll want compensation for money they spent or will want to charge customers to make up for costs spent needlessly. if they get this and take it a step further, they'll know the general public is too apathetic to care and will keep going until we're forced to use the internet exactly how they want us too.
Reality is nothing but a collective hunch.
I really don't understand the whole fussa about getting mod points. I do get them fairly often, but I rarely use them. Given the amount of stories posted here, I only have so much time to read a couple of them, so I read the ones that are actually interesting to me (duh), meaning that I will probably want to comment on it too, therefore preventing me from modding anything on the topic.
The only way to use my mod points is to read comments on a story that I don't care about. Which is boring... and time consuming... and doesn't make sense anyway.
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
Which is why I am now set unwilling to moderate. I think the whole system is stupidly broken and I don't want to participate (any more than I have to) until it is fixed. Which might be never.
I was just bringing up the point that it's not just the old guard that's running the place. It's more accurately whoever is friends with the powers that be and that's not all the oldbies. (And it certainly doesn't include me, because I am part of the [large] group that likes to point out the utterly retarded mistakes made/left uncorrected by our illustrious "editors".)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You may think that I'm nitpicking, but that is precisely the difference that needs to be understood.
Not really, now that I get what your complaint is. See, I wasn't assuming that C had a normal business relationship with A or B. C was simply supposed to be a backbone provide in the middle of the net, which your packets will certainly cross several of on their way across the globe. It was a poor choice in wording that implied a relationship where it wasn't intended.
The enemies of Democracy are
How about waiting to see if there actually is a problem? Right now there is nothing to fix. Nobody has implemented tiered service yet. Nobody has targeted packets to slow them down yet.
A) If the telecoms don't intend to implement tiered services, then how are they going to pay for all of this magical, mythical, better Internet, which net-neutrality would supposedly prevent? They argue that they won't be able to "upgrade the Internet", but doesn't that directly imply that they want to use a non-neutral internet? It's funny since part of their defense against net neutrality is "There's not proof that anyone has been implementing tiered services."
B) It has happened. A couple of months ago, the Vonage forums had one post with many, many pages of replies about difficulties using Vonage with Comcast Internet in areas where Comcast also offered VoIP service.
C) Once the problem arises, it will be too late to do anything about it. The Guv'ment is deciding, with the help of lobbyists on both sides, whether to allow it or not. Whichever way they decide will determine the way the businesses of the Internet will align their business models. There's no simple way to go back and regulate, when everyone will have already been building the Internet in the wrong direction.
D) One of the inital cool things about the "Intarweb" was that any kid in his basement could have a website, and so could big corporations, governments, churches, schools, and anyone else. Not only will a tiered Internet take small-time folks out of the game almost entirely, it will also force the big corporations and everyone else align with specific providers for their sites to be available, or to be useable. You don't have AT&T? Sorry you can't go to Amazon.com. You don't get your Internet service from Comcast? Sorry, you can't read Slashdot. You'll have to read Comcast's own "News for nerdy Comcast subscribers". How does that not sound wrong to you?
Isn't the whole point of Common Carrier status that a comms provider doesn't have any control over what goes over their network ?
Surely if they lose common carrier status then the content owners will go after them in court ?
Hey BigCommsCorp ! Whats in that can there ? Worms you say ?
I just presented an overview of a position paper I am writing for my Engineering writing class at the University of Southern California (USC). Not surprisingly, no one in the class had ever heard of it before I had brought it up in class.
Not only is it an issue that we should look at from a political perspective, staying informed and letting your governmental representatives know your positions. It is also a professional issue, those of us who work in engineering for companies that are pushing to make net neutrality go away should make sure the public is informed of these actions and do your best to oppose them in all professional ways that you can.
Mr. Green
Somone should try to make an almost mainstream media friendly parody of the anti nautrality lobbers, something in the spirit of the Flying Spaghetti Monster and collect money for a NYT ad like they did with firefox!
That's a great explaination. I hope you don't mind if I use it when explaining this to people.
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
I don't think anyone is debating that certain protocols, such as VOIP, not get priority. It is more about denying service from others. For instance, your company sells a VOIP product, but throttles down VOIP traffic coming if it is coming from other VOIP products.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
Absolutely. It's no coincidence that your slow-down periods are on the weekend when gaming activity is peaked.
Sure, so instead of one company digging up your azaleas, you'd rather have 5, 10, 20, or more companies with rights to dig up your property and install cables?
It's more complicated than that, but basically I agree with you.
The best solution would be to breakup the monopolies. That won't happen until after the laws on political contributions are restructured.
OTOH: Quality streaming video can't happen (without local caching) unless it can guarantee a constant throughput. So perhaps net neutrality could be "crippling" (as in causing a less than optimal program structure) to the steaming media folk.
OTOH: I almost never download streaming media, so local caches sounds like a fine solution to me.
But the internet won't replace TV as long as there is net neutrality. Is this good or bad?
Also, "who would be in control" is a very vital question. I don't trust ANY centralized controller. Linux is good because any project can be forked (including Linux). If it weren't for that featuer, the BSD Unixes would have died long ago. As it is, those who need their features still have them available.
Unfortunately, communications lines are centralized. At least at the local level there's no redundancy. (What kind of bandwidth can WiFi handle? Spread Spectrum? What kind of bandwidth does local use of the internet require? Possibly there's a decent solution here! But remember, this is talking about ENTIRELY replacing wired communications by wireless, so you'll need more spectrum than is immediately obvious. A cell system? What do you do about spam?)
Also, what do you do about electrical interference? Sparking power lines can even disrupt spread spectrum. (Not everyone loses power when on set of lines goes down...of course the strength of the interrupting signal varies with distance from the spark... What about lightning strikes? [I don't know.])
It's not an easy question. I know of several answers that I consider bad, and none that I consider good. Net Neutrality falls on the "less bad" side of the issue, but it's hardly a good answer.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
You didn't have to give Verizon an easement to run lines through. Maybe you didn't own the property when the easements were granted. So go find a nice piece of property with no easements (easy to do in lots of parts of the country) and then don't grant (or sell) any easements. Just don't be suprised when you can't get phone service or internet or power for that matter... The government isn't forcing you to do anything.
-- "Big Brother is Watching..."
How about we don't?
Let's be honest and call a spade a spade: Communication carriers want to bill both ends of any IP communication. If I'm in DC and call you in Seattle, does my phone company send you a bill for those minutes too? No, but that's exactly what a lot of these communication carriers are essentially proposing and mulling over.
Think of it like this: My phone company decides that when I try to call you, if you aren't a customer of theirs, they will "degrade" *MY* phone call that I initiated. And if it just so happens that my phone company offers a service that competes with you, I won't have any problems with my call being degraded as long as I call them.
I don't have anything against carriers trying to get business or make more money. But when they start entertaining ideas publicly about *degrading the services I pay for* to coerce someone else to pay them, I don't need to sit on my ass to make a judgement call whether that's right or wrong.
Your ISP *does* suck if it uses backbone C and can't be bothered to iron out the issues or switch to a different backbone.
But the ISP may not be -- probably isn't -- connected directly to the major backbones, and instead connects to a local backbone, which will pass on to one of the large backbones, which then connects to backbone C.
Why should I expect my ISP to fix problems involving this provider they have nothing to do with? And every other entity that handles the packet between here and wherever it's going? That's the whole problem: By distinguishing based on where a packet originates from (not just who the nearest neighbor handing it off was), you create a necessity for an exponential amount of "business deals" where "business deals" == "extortion money".
The enemies of Democracy are
It all does sound wrong to me. I just don't believe it is going to happen that way and you don't have any real evidence that it will. I maintain that this whole thing is way overblown and that geting the government (note correct spelling) involved in regulation based on speculation is not a good idea.
Finding other idiots on
Off topic but I noticed I spelled "getting" wrong. For some reason the words "gubmint", "guv'ment" etc really bug me and "prolly" too. The words are "government" and "probably". Just a pet peeve of mine.
Finding other idiots on
Who says you'd give rights to a dozen companies to dig up your property? Remember, its your property. If Verizon wants to lay wire across your land, they're going to have to pay rent. They don't, because the government circumvents your property rights and gives them rights that they would not have in a free market.
Of course, I'm not suggesting this as a workable solution. If Verizon had to actually deal with the free market, and obtain the right to lay line on everyone's land, they wouldn't exist. The logistics would be impossible. That's the point. The internet is a public good, like the road systems or sewer systems. The only way these systems can be created is through government circumvention of the fundamental property rights of citizens. Thus, its stupid to argue that government regulation will destroy free market competition, because there is no free market involved.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
When those companies are already at the top, what does it matter? why would they not like "free market"?
In recent years there has been a turn on supporting big businesses like AT+T, which was split up because the company dominated all of the telecomunications in the 80s, providing poor service to consumers at exorbant prices. If the government didn't step in they would still be doing that.....oh wait......
I fear the Y2038 bug
These right of way grants were in many cases not given with the owner's constent. It is very common for the government to invoke "eminent domain" to grant right of way for public utilities. In my own state of Virginia, Virginia Power can invoke eminent domain via a granting of power from the state, and if your nice piece of land happens to block the path of a planned power line, they can and will invoke it despite any complaints you may raise.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
"The Internet has changed the way people live and do business. So, how would you like to pay $1 for every e-mail you send? No? Then call your elected representative and demand they vote for net neutraility."
Break it down to something people do care about: e-mail.
Business isn't willing to pay for products, innovation and careers, so we get brands, mortgage commercials and layoffs.
Most of the time, when someone advocating network neutrality tells me what they think they want, they describe a policy under which I would be prohibited from dropping packets from spammers, or from giving questionable sources heavily throttled bandwidth.
I know that's not what most of us think we want. But when we ask people to define a policy, and give them a sentence describing the policy, that's what gets said.
And I, for one, do not want to face an 11 million dollar lawsuit from spammers (hi, spamhaus!) over a questionable law.
I am gonna be opposed to legislation of network neutrality until I see clear wording that doesn't have any unwanted side effects. Since that will never happen with a law, I guess I'd rather rely on market forces; I certainly wouldn't buy bandwidth from a company that was being abusive about their packet policies.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
So I used to hate ads that tell me I should vote yes or no on a particular proposition, but now I realise it actually makes my life easier.
When I see an ad telling me to vote no on a prop. because it will raise gas prices and is bad for the environment I check to see who sponsored the Ad, if it is a major oil company (like exxon) then I know it is FUD and I can safely vote yes.
When I see an ad telling me to vote yes for a prop. because it will help pay for medical costs associated with smoking and then see it is sponsored by hospitals, I can safely vote No.
It's all about who will benefit by the proposition passing or not passing and then who is sponsoring the ad.
The hard one is when it doesn't have a clear bias but seems to be benificial, like increasing money for schools or public parks, then I actually have to check if it will be funded by taxes or bonds (in which case i vote yes if I feel it is needed when it will be funded by taxes and no if it is funded by bonds(for whatever reason) as funding through fiscal irresponsibility is just stupid and ends up costing more).
...Also, governments have been engaging in infrastructure-development projects since probably the beginning of recorded history,....
It's probably the main thing that allowed history to ever be recorded in the first place.
If you're talking about the beginning of recorded history, you're talking about ancient Sumer, where the government controlled food production and distribution, and a system of writing (called cuneiform) was developed specifically to track food production and distribution.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
If they dont know what it is, how can they say they dont want it?
Their 'vote' should be disqualified.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I don't think you know what blackmail is: there's nothing 'incriminating' that the backbone provider has on the ISP. The backbone provider and ISP negotiate in a simple market economy to find the most efficient price. ISPs that have more clients have more negotiating power (their business is more important to the backbone provider), but meanwhile the backbone has more power because it can threaten disconnection to the ISP. This paired set of negotiating power maintains a stable efficient price, without either side being able to extort the other.
"Stumble before you crawl"
That goes for corporations (e.g. Comcast) just as well as it does a government (e.g. China). So H.o.t.I. as a slogan is more apt for those in the pro Network Neutrality camp than against. We have NN today and we don't want it to change. The level playing field on the Internet is the reason it is so much more successful than AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and their kind were. The Internet is much closer to a meritocracy than a network run by a handful of large corporations.
To argue that there should be no regulation until there is a problem to fix ignores the past problems (e.g. Madison River) and the stated intentions of telco execs (e.g. Bellsouth).
Any telco spokesman complaining about Google (or any other site) is using their network for free should either stop lying or renegotiate their peering arrangements. Every ISP has an arrangement for each of its peers, either one party paying the other or free peering. Either way it's an arrangement between consenting parties and to suggest a content provider is using their network without their consent is a lie.
Given enough competition, none of this matters, but we don't have it. If trillions of dollars were spent by several companies each running coax, fiber or wireless networks to reach all of us, they would have to compete and couldn't leverage their monopoly (or duopoly) power to obtain dominance in other areas than access. But we don't need to spend those trillions if we just require the access piece be level and let the competition happen in the services that use the access layer.
Just model it off the CLEC system. Have one entity, probably the government, own the lines and lease them to service providers at a price regulated by some disjoint entity.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
I maintain that this whole thing is way overblown and that geting the government (note correct spelling) involved in regulation based on speculation is not a good idea.
Okay, then, to pick a nit, what is your logical basis (founded in solid evidence, of course) for maintaining that this whole thing is overblown?
It's one thing to say that you don't believe that it's likely, but a statement like that reads as if countless hours of research and/or thought had gone into solidifying it into a personal faith.
There are two basic ways to approach it, one tends to presuppose a lack of action, and one tends to presuppose a certain action of a certain type. Given that the industry lobbying against Net Neutrality is the telecom industry (who would be in a position to generate more revenue from existing services if there is no such legislation), is it reasonable to assume that there would be a lack of action on their part without net neutrality legislation to halt it?
I propose that the answer to that question is "No, it is not reasonable to assume that", and there is, indeed a fair bit of thought and research behind my thinking.
There is ample evidence that telecom companies actively lobby for legislation and/or regulation that furthers their business interests. Most notably, in recent years, against CLECs and Cable operators that wanted to offer similar services to those offered by the telecom companies.
Alongside those types of activities has been a moving-target push to get more revenue from internet services. First, internet service was expensive, DSL and T-1 lines made significant revenue for the telcos, along with local loop charges on top of the actual bandwidth charges. The unrelenting push of the internet closer and closer to the customer drove down prices for consumer and commercial broadband connections (and pretty much killed frame relay), and forced some communications companies into actual fights over previously amicable peering arrangements (Level 3 and Cogent being the prime example). With it becoming obvious that cutting off service completely to other networks mainly serves to anger your customers, and not your peering partner, there became fewer viable opportunities to generate new revenue.
Next, came the idea that Net Neutrality is meant to address, which is that of degrading service to certain portions of the internet unless an additional fee is paid by a company or companies with sites connected to that portion of the internet. "Tiered" internet service can also be called "selective" internet service, since the telco gets to select which parts of the internet will work best for their customers.
The last option, and the one that telcos don't want to use, is that of raising subscription prices. It's unattractive because it forces real competition, and because doing so will raise some pointed quiestions about Fiber-To-The-Premises and the large amount of money every single phone and internet bill contributes to the FUSF (or FUCR) fee that goes back to the telcos to build high speed connections to every neighborhood. That's government money lobbied for by them and paid by you and I.
Not having to do that means less questions about those fees, and more time to dip into the federal money supply to support their businesses.
That's a lot to think about, and it's certainly all researchable. There are plenty of reasons to think that the telcos *will* implement service degradation, if it's seen as being okay. A survey like this, while obvious to many who are paying attention, is fodder for the PR machines of those telcos to say "Net Neutrality is bad, and everyone thinks so", even if it's based on the answers of 800 people who mostly haven't heard the term.
Idontagreewithyou, I don't agree with you.
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
Let's be realistic here.
The public knows jack shit about the internet, nor is it likely to be educated by the media, for obvious reasons.
There is not going to be a public outcry, because the public is too damn stupid to know what's going on.
Ultimately all we can really do is hope that Google and their allies win out in this fight.
Except that up until a few months ago we had network neutrality. It is called the "common carrier law" and it actually still applies to most types of communications such as telephones and shipping. The ISPs haven't had time to regroup, put the hardware in place, and find a way to profit. Notice that router companies like Cisco are siding with the telecoms - they expect to get big sales from ISPs ordering new routers with non-neutral firmware support.
"Sure we know the levees are in rough shape, but who knows if we actually need to improve them? Why don't we just wait and see what happens if a hurricane hits".
The backbone companies have made it perfectly clear that they want to blackmail companies like Google into paying them a toll for premium service, even though Google pays for their access just as I do for mine. The only variable here is how greedy the backbone providers will be. Taking a "wait and see" approach when you know exactly what the problem is and exactly what it's going to do to consumers and businesses is...stupid.
It's well known that the majority of marketing strategies fail. So will pay-as-you go packets. Even if some brands manage to secure a grip over their unsuspecting customers and have them paying more for the same services and products, the Internet has adaptable and evolutionary characteristics that will enable it to overcome what the majority of us do not want.
We don't really need lobbyists. Just let the mechanics of the Net work their pseudo-Darwinian forces of "survival of the fittest" and the Net will endure in the most suitable form to meet most of our requirements.
You can't freeze water at room temperature. Likewise, you can't put packets into slavery when most packets want to be free!
That's sure as hell not what I got.
I got a form letter telling me the Senator's position on the issue I wrote about (exact opposite of mine) and I got put on his mailing list, so that I could see how he was making us all happy with lots of pork for our state.
Sometimes you just want to give up on this country and move. Does anyone know of a country that isn't AFU?
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
Yes, I know, I've had the same experience more often than I care to admit. Nonetheless, Senators' aides do pay attention to the volume of mail taking a particular position, even if they don't really read the individual letters. If enough people write supporting a point of view it makes a difference.
By the way, is the parent from Alaska? If so, I hope he'll write lots of letters.
People who support Net Neutrality government interference legislation have no earthly idea what they are talking about. These people seem to have the mistaken impression that ISP's want to control your access to increase profitablity. Actually quite the opposite. With government regulation of access speed, your costs would increase because you'd be funding the bandwidth hogs who bog down the network with hi density multi-media data. The ISP's want these companies to pay a premium for sucking up all the internet bandwidth. This is perfectly sensible way to handle use of bandwidth on the internet. Why should the consumer have to pay extra so a multi-media company can sell movies and TV reruns over the same network you use to surf and get email? You want your VOIP to stop while your neighbor watches Star Trek reruns? To keep your speed, you'll have to pay more to increase network bandwidth so the Trekkie gets his fix. Let the Trekkie pay for the bandwidth. This is really basic logic people. Don't be dummies about this. People who use bandwidth should shoulder the cost of providing it. Net Neutrality is socialism at its worst. In case you don't understand that, it means everyone is "equal" in that they get less and less since the government is very ineffective at regulating the quality of your lives.
Don't know about your ISP, but most here is the good ol' U. of K. most broadband connections sell domestic service as 'contended'. This means that while they'll selling you an N Kb/s service (where N is directly proportional to $) but you share the local pipe (20 Mb/s ??? IANANE) with K other people, where K is generally 50 for the basic service, and 20 if you pay a premium, or buy the basic business package. This generally works as long as 50 people with a 2 Mb/s connection don't all want to use their maximum bandwidth at the same time, as 2 * 50 >> 20. If I work from home I generally percieve the responsiveness of my cable connection to take a dive at about 6pm, presumably when people get home from work and start checking their email, gaming etc., although I've no figures to back this up.
I reserve the right to be wrong.
Worth watching. While the corporations would have you believe net neutrality would affect only big web providers, it would also impact internet users. How would you like tiered net service? Google? Sorry you have to subscribe to our GOLD service for that. You could of course use our crappy proprietary search engine with your current cheap level of service.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXAJbkeXoV4