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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."
That doesn't stop creationist ministers who don't study biophysics, self-righteous atheists who attack religous people, race-baiting anti-immigrant types who don't full understand NAFTA and GATT or people jumping the anti-welfare bandwagon without knowing anything about how public assistance works.
Its usually the least informed who have the most to say.
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.
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
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.
Perhaps this is the video you speak of?
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http://www.ncta.com/ContentView.aspx?ContentID=35
transcript: Are you google-eyed with confusion over net neutrality? No wonder, it's all just clever mumbo jumbo. Net neutrality is nothing more than a scheme by the multi-billion dollar silicon valley tech companies, to get you, the consumer to pay more for their services. Forget all their mumbo jumbo, net neutrality simple means, you pay.
Paid for by The National Cable & Telecom Assn.
Biggest crock of s**t I've ever heard. http://www.ncta.com/ContentView.aspx?ContentID=35
Yes, this commercial is simultaneously infuriating and saddening.
Infuriating because they basically gloss over the whole issue under the guise of "Computers are hard, don't try to understand," and then lie about the conclusion.
Saddening because the majority of people that watch it are thinking it's true.
Side note: How much does it cost to run a commercial? I want one that just shows a clip of the commercial, and then some guy sitting there going "Really? The telecom industry wants to save YOUR money? When was the last time your cable bill went DOWN?"
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.