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Network Neutrality Threatened In Norway
eirikso writes, "In June 2006 NextGenTel, one of the biggest broadband providers in Norway, decided to deliberately limit the bandwidth from the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. The CEO of NextGenTel, Morten Ågnes, told the Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten that they will give priority to the content providers who pay for better bandwidth. The Consumer Council of Norway takes this as a serious threat to network neutrality in Norway and wants to call a meeting with the biggest broadband providers in Norway to find a solution."
It's not news anymore, if you read the fine article (blog, whatever). There has been an update to the text that says that the broadband provider caved in to pressure to stop the throttling.
Slashdotters in Norway should call NextGenTel and ask if they give equal bandwidth to all hosts on the Internet. If they say no, say no thanks, wait an hour, and call again with the same question.
Then repeat until you believe the message has been delivered. Bad luck if this crowd are a (near) monopoly.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
I realize there are arguments in favor of network neutrality, but as a huge fan of alliteration, I'm really looking forward to reading the headline "Network Neutrality Nixed in Norway."
I'm glad to see that the bad publicity was enough to prevent it from sticking. Hopefully that's enough on this side of the world as well.
As a side note, that update was the first thing in the article (second, counting the disclaimer). You'd think the poster/editor would've noticed that...
No! Next thing they'll be doing the throttling my Norwegian p0rn!
Look, increasing the costs of your bandwidth isn't stable proposition in a free market. Someone will come along and be cheaper. The governments should be doing their job to make sure there is a free market in place rather than a cartel. Make sure that anyone who does want to charge more has to make their exchange available to competitors.
Deleted
I think this is a trend that we'll have to get used to. When someone realises that they're in a position of power as an intermidary, they can, and often do, play both ends against each other for their own profit. It's a model employed by super-markets and record companies, price fixing by controlling supply and demand.
ISPs already employ charging models based on usage per month for their customers(consumers), charging (content)suppliers based on usage is trivial for them.
It's not like Telia doesn't do the same....
Although not as open about it as NextGenTel.
Telia has a serious marketdominance in the ADSL-field and refuses to let smaller operators in to use the infrastructure without having to pay insane amounts of money.
Peering is also a thing which Telia is abusing to their own ends. If you're not a big provider you can't get a peering to Telia (unless you pay insane amounts of money or know someone high up at Telia-sales).
The way other operators have to go about and do is to buy traffic exchange with operators who are big enough to be able to buy the amount of traffic required from telia to get the low prices and still resell at more humane levels (although still "reselling").
If the operator you're on is trying to get to Telias network without Internetexchange in sweden you'll have to go over international carrier... Which in return results that going from sweden to holland and back will give additional delays.
When big companies can hoard the good peer-points the market for small operators will be dampened unless your small company has a deal with an operator big enough to get tier2 access to the likes of Telia.
I posted this to Slashdot yesterday and updated it minutes ago, just before it went live here on Slashdot. I think the example and story still is important. It took three months and a lot of bad publicity before they changed their mind.
.. for those that do not pay extra is sort of similar to a gas station demanding a higher price for cars that are fuel effective.
When you are sure of something, you probably are wrong (search for "Unskilled and Unaware of It").
See how things work out:
1. isp limits availability of site X
2. people complain to site X
3. X blows the horns that it's in fact isp's fault and everybody should contact the isp and nag 'em
4. people nag isp
5. isp caves in and removes the limit
when the objective reason for the bad service is not in the provider and people are told this, they'll understand. They can still read and comprehend written text.
so, what now: pro-neutrality or anti-neutrality? The truth is in the middle as always.
as the Internet grows, we'll definitely see some more intelligent traffic allocation to allow for more varied scenarios to be implemented directly on the Internet,versus specialized networks.
but blackmailing sites to pay every single ISP out there and their own hosting provider: it simply won't fly.
watch them fail again and again.
The basic problem here is the expectation that domestic broadband should be able to run at peak throughput, 24/7, for an attractive flat-rate price.
But that's exactly what the ISP's are selling right?
If the ISP is unable to offer this then maybe they shouldn't have sold it to their customers in the first place?
They just assumed that not all costumers would use their full bandwith, they estimated the avarage bandwith use.
When is turns out that their estimate is wrong then that's their problem, not mine.
There is another solution: Actually start lighting up all the dark fiber, build the infrastructure that our tax dollars are supposedly paying for, and deliver actual, real, reliable bandwidth. This will probably be a result of increasing the flat-rate cost, which will probably be a result of ever more people discovering ways to actually use the bandwidth they're given. I have a housemate who's not very technically inclined, but watches live baseball games on his Powerbook, so we are going to have to face up to the reality: Moore's Law of (CPU|bandwidth|storage|GPU|resolution|wireless) isn't going to let up anytime soon.
My local ISP is making a lot of noise about fiber to the home. Their goal seems to be a gigabit pipe to everyone's house. I doubt they'll be able to come close to filling it, but at least they're thinking ahead.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
No, it isn't what they are selling. In the small-print of every ISP I've looked at, they say that the peak throughput is not guaranteed. If you want a 1:1 contention rate, there are ISPs that will sell it to you - at a price. My non-guaranteed ADSL package costs me a few dollars a month. The same ISP will sell me ADSL with a 1:1 contention rate for several hundred dollars a month...
The same goes for hosting packages. A lot of the "fabulous monthly bandwidth for 35 cents" offers work by throttling per-second bandwidth to make exceeding their monthly bandwidth impossible. In practice, this means that no-one will ever get close to using the headline bandwidth figure unless they set out to generate traffic with exactly the right profile, and there will be a bottleneck as soon as there is a peak in requests, even if the total monthly bandwidth is way below the headline figure. You can get fully-burstable bandwidth, and you pay a lot of money for it.
I agree that there's a problem in how broadband is sold, but I really don't know how an ISP would translate, say, a 50:1 contention rate into terms that my grandmother would understand or care about.
Virtually serving coffee
The funny thing here in Germany is that usage-dependent but reasonable billing for larger data volumes seems absent in the end-user market. You either get
-really cheap access for a few GByte/month, but exceeding the limit gets you a bill way out of proportion. Like 5 euros for the first 5 GBytes but one cent for each following Mbyte, so a month with 10 GByte volume would cost you 55 euros. Note that I made these figures up on the spot, but they do illustrate the character of most volume-limited offers.
-or the typical flat-rate where the provider takes a loss from the power users.
I'd really expect providers to offer something like 5 euros for the first 5 GBytes and 50 cents for each extra GByte. That would save them a lot of headaches with power users and still be a good offer for the average user.
C - the footgun of programming languages
-- I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
No, it isn't what they are selling. In the small-print of every ISP I've looked at, they say that the peak throughput is not guaranteed.
Yes, that's what the small print says.
Based on that no costumer should expect peak throughput 24 hours a day.
Yet when i watch an ad from my local ISP it's telling me that i'll have a superfast connection, and how i'll be able to download movies and music at the speed of light 24 hours a day, with no download limits. *
Though technically they are not promising it, in my opinion they are implying that i'll have peak throughput 24 hours a day, even though they know they can't give me that.
And i think that's what most other consumers come to expect too after seeing those ads.
I think that's the problem with selling broadband, a problem for which ISP's are mostly to blame. (Of course the costumer is to blame too, for not reading the small print.)
* There's a 'fair use policy' in the small print.
Was the ISP throttling all audio/video broadcasting or just Norwegian sources or just NRK? It'd be an easy way to steer what information people get by limiting access to certain sources or views.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
I don't quite think you understand the issue.
There are four parties involved.
A. The content provider
B. The content provider's ISP / Hosting provider, whatever
C. The consumer
D. The consumer's ISP (in this case NextGenTel)
Note - A is _NOT_ a customer of D.
If A wants to serve more content at higher speeds, no problem, they pay B more money.
If C wants to get more content at higher speeds, again no problem, they pay D more money.
No one has any problem with that concept.
The problem is when D decides that they can extort money out of A, by throttling the traffic between C and A unless A pays them some money - regardless of the fact that D doesn't actually provide any service to A. They try to use the justification that with there being so much high bandwidth content around that they can't handle the load anymore, so someone has to pay. But they gloss over the fact that someone _IS_ paying: C, the customer that actually requested the content from A in the first place.
If C's internet habits are really costing D money, then they should be charging C directly, not charging the sites they visit - that's just insane.
I don't know how any of these companies think they can possibly justify it - they already have the means to cover their costs, it's not the content providers' fault that the ISPs are greedy enough to try to charge coming and going.
Advanced users are users too!
"What is it with these neo-communists on /. who think that people shouldn't be allowed to pay for higher quality service if they want it? Do you guys picket the airlines for offerring first class and coach?"
The customers of Nextgentel are the consumers that pay for their broadband connection. The only reason consumers pay for broadband is that there are content providers out there that create a market for the ISP. These content providers may or may not be commercial, but they all pretty much already pay some ISP (which may or may not be Nextgentel) for their high-bandwidth Internet Connection. So when a consumer tries to access some content he/she has already paid for accessing that content, and the provider has already paid for delivering it.
What the ISP is trying to do is squeeze money out of both sides, both the consumer and the provider. The result is that consumers (that have paid for their service) will have a hard time getting to smaller indie-sites, non-commercial sites and other content providers that can't afford to pay these extortion fees. Only the big ISPs has enough muscle to be able to do this sort of thing, and thus it serves to limit the number of ISPs available and thus reducing competition.
Also, it reduces the choice of the consumer, negating one of the big sales points of the Internet in the first place. Because it reduces choice, it has a strong possibility in limiting free speech as only big media corporations will have the money to have their voice be heard.
You don't have to be a communist to object to these to effects.
Just NRK apparently. Other Norwegian sites, such as newspapers, were not affected.
Just as well that they did stop this throttling practice.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
> THE. INTERNET. IS. NOT. A. SET. OF. PIPES!
;)
That's right, everyone knows it's tubes
Lameness filter encountered. Post aborted!
Reason: Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
bah - they're not even my caps.
Advanced users are users too!
That's all and well, but the problem here isn't just that the ISP (NextGenTel) isn't delivering the announced data speed. If the source of this data can't sustain the maximum speed promised to the customer, the latter will get whatever is available. All nice and well, nothing to see there.
However, the issue at hand here was that the ISP itself decided that a certain media site (NRK) could not be allowed to deliver at its max throughput, but would be limited by an action of this ISP. At the same time there was no such discrimination of other media sites, NRK cried foul, the Consumer Protection people got on the case, and NextGenTel the ISP finally relented. There wasn't the matter of billing a bandwidth-hogging consumer, but throttling one of several high-bandwidth producers, a rather different problem.
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
It's not about not being allowed to pay, who here says "you shouldn't be allowed to pay for higher quality services"? No one. The problem is an ISP that decides who should get through. What do you think will happen to startup web services not well financed if they start getting rubbish speeds for not having the money to essentially bribe the ISP?
Capitalists should be interested in having as many corporations as possible be able to place a solid mark on the web, and surely having to pay more to get your traffic through is an obstacle for this?
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It's not about not being allowed to pay, who here says "you shouldn't be allowed to pay for higher quality services"?
Btw, I'm saying this from the POV of the customer, not the business. I'm obviously arguing against a business being able to do this as, again, it stifles the competition among corporations, especially when the smaller businesses start getting involved in the equation.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
It's part of the same issue insofar as the ISP needs to balance its books. Their solution was effectively to tax the providers, starting with the biggest one, and it sounds like it would have boiled down to an indirect government subsidy. Getting money from the providers means they need less money from the end users. And the consumer organisation is out of touch with the realities of broadband costs, which sounds par for the course.
Virtually serving coffee
Forget Norway!
We're goin' to Kenya.
Life is rarely fair. Cherish the moments when there is a right answer.
I am posting the parent a second time (parent not my post) with easier to understand labels.
The examples may be poor but they only serve an illustrative purpose.
Parent post follows:
I don't quite think you understand the issue.
There are four parties involved.
A. The content provider [e.g. YouTube]
B. The content provider's ISP / Hosting provider, whatever [e.g. Comcast]
C. The consumer [e.g. You]
D. The consumer's ISP (in this case NextGenTel) [e.g. AOL]
Note - [YouTube] is _NOT_ a customer of [AOL].
If [YouTube] wants to serve more content at higher speeds, no problem, they pay [Comcast] more money.
If [You] wants to get more content at higher speeds, again no problem, they pay [AOL] more money.
No one has any problem with that concept.
The problem is when [AOL] decides that they can extort money out of [YouTube], by throttling the traffic between [You] and [YouTube] unless [YouTube] pays them some money - regardless of the fact that [AOL] doesn't actually provide any service to [YouTube]. They try to use the justification that with there being so much high bandwidth content around that they can't handle the load anymore, so someone has to pay. But they gloss over the fact that someone _IS_ paying: [You], the customer that actually requested the content from [YouTube] in the first place.
If [You]'s internet habits are really costing [AOL] money, then they should be charging [You] directly, not charging the sites they visit - that's just insane.
I don't know how any of these companies think they can possibly justify it - they already have the means to cover their costs, it's not the content providers' fault that the ISPs are greedy enough to try to charge coming and going.
Dammit, I get mod points all the time, and when someone finally posts what the Network Neutrality debate is really all about, I don't have any.
-Q
This is content provider paying for normal quality service from the customer's ISP not his own. They already paid their ISP for their high bandwidth bill. Also, they wouldn't be paying for higher quality service - they'd be paying for the not having their QoS artifically degraded.
Try to make an analogy between an internet transcation and a plane flight is pretty idiotic. You don't pay every ISP between your computer and some website for every packet you send. You certainly pay every carrier that you choose to go from A to B and you can certainly pay for the privlege of first class throughout but you also had control over where you were going and which airlines you were using. The neo-communist reference is just flamebait. You are a troll.
Reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.
(comments not just to parent post)
I have a friend that works in the sales department for the buisness market at Telenor, he told me that first the ISP's competed over price, and when the price reach the floor (or close to it) they started to offer more bandwidth for the same price. They cant lower their prices anymore, but they can increase the bandwidth. Atm i pay 447 NOK (67.50 USD)/month for a 10/2 Mbit cable connection flat rate, i consider that pretty cheap.
As bandwidth grow users will ofcourse start to request "more bandwidth comsuning" services, and ofcourse as the bandwidth increases content providers can offer bigger and better(?) products.
So perhaps the ISP's shoot themself in the foot with increasing the bandwidth, since supply and dempand for high bandwidth content increase faster than they can handle (increase capasity in their net/backbone).
Telenor had a few years ago a download limit on their subscriptions, when the limit was reached the speed was reduced to 64kbit unless you bought another quaota(?). What happened was that the other ISP's just this against them in their markeding, X amount of money for this speed WITHOUT a download limit. Hopefully something simular will happen with bandwidth trotteling/prioritizing.
I wonder how many Slashdotters thought this when they see the editors screw up: "damn it, if you can run a blog with that much nonsense and be successfull, I can run one too!" and parted on their way to glory.
If by "glory" you mean "Digg," then at least a few.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Interesting, I just checked Dexter Alan Ux's link and he appears to have a grand total of 1 post.
Did you miss the "Conservative Political Activist" right under "(email not shown publicly)".
"The last thing I want to do is deal with a bunch of people who want something."
Major Major
Think about it and you'll realize the fallacy of your logic. If you allow the user to route anything as high priority, and limit the high priority bandwidth, you get precisely what we have now.
I don't think this is the case.
Suppose your connection was a 5Mb/s burst pipe, but had a high-QoS component of 128kb/s. The system would only allow you to send a certain amount of high-priority packets per second -- if you exceeded that, it would start throwing them away or just strip the QoS flag and send them as normal packets. The network backhauls would be built to allow simultaneous use of the high-QoS bandwidth, or at least build it to phone-company like standards. The rest of the 5Mb pipe would be shared and prone to degradation based on network conditions.
It would be up to you, the consumer, to decide what you want to use your 128k allocation of high-QoS for. If you want VoIP, one assumes that's what you'll want to do first. But if you want to make your porn download faster, good for you. It's your bandwidth, you can do what you want with it.
Just like now, where you can get a higher burst speed by paying more, you'd be able to buy more high-QoS packets by paying more too.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
This is how the market is supposed to work.
The only problem that I see, if the ISPs there are anything like the ISPs in the U.S., is that they engage in what I consider to be the razor's edge of false advertising. By selling you a 10Mb* pipe, they actually oversell their network. They don't have nearly the capacity it would take to let everyone use what they've sold them.
We need to stop this behavior. Yes, in the short run it might lead to prices increasing, but it would only be increasing back to the level of what they actually cost -- you don't get a 3Mb sustained transfer connection for $40 a month. You just don't.
A whole lot of problems would be solved if we just got rid of this basic misunderstanding, and forced companies to use a realistic measurement of throughput in their advertising. Then we'd start to see real competition for price and service.
* (very small type) Burst speed
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
So what stops NextGenTel from deciding to throttle bandwidth NKR (or any content provider) again, but the next time, only in a more subtle way? Like, throttling only during Internet rush hour, or routing that content provider's packets at a lower preference to other packets? How can you prove that NextTelGen is behind the lower performance, and not "Internet congestion at rush hour"?
Respect the laws of physics, for the laws of physics have no respect for you.
Someone please explain why they think the net is, or can ever be truely neutral. In my area AT&T Yahoo offers small businesses 3 connections 384K-786K, 1.5M-3M, and 3M-6M; for enterprise customers they offer OC-48 to OC-192... you get what you pay for. Every connection is a consumer and any connection can be a "Content Provider", there is no way to guarantee equal access to every content provider. The alternative is the least-common-denominator and have dial-up only, then it would just depend on how good a modem you can afford and how many phone lines you can bring in to your facility. Ah...but then that is not neutral either.
Proceed @ 11.5740741uHz
I have to commend you on this one. It is the best description I have seen and I am mailing it to a few friends that just don't get it.
Thanks
No, the problem is that Net Neutrality would prevent [YouTube] from make a deal with [AOL] to bundle faster or more reliable access between [You] and [YouTube] with their service (without also subsidizing their competitors). A dedicated link to a single content provider can be cheaper than a fast link to the Internet at large, and forcing Internet users to pay for fast access to every site through their ISP (as opposed to just those sites they wish to access, funded through a subscription to the content provider) penalizes popular sites and subsidizes unpopular ones. Just like cable channel bundling, it's nice for people who like the unpopular channels, since they don't have to pay full price, but it raises costs for everyone else.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat
"Net Neutrality" isn't about paying more for more bandwidth from a service provider. It's about making people who aren't connected to your network pay for you to transfer data at normal speed through your network to your subscribers, who are themselves paying to use the bandwidth. It's like the post office offering to a business the option to pay an annual fee - or have all their mail delivered two weeks later than it should be.
Maybe the solution will have to have some sort of financial incentive for those broadband companies to remain neutral.
For instance, since in this case, NextGenTel-whatever is getting paid by other companies to prioritize their data, why not apply a special tax (as well as reduction or inelligibility for govt grants and assistance programs) on it....such much so that it would cost NextGenTel more to unneutral than to be neutral even with the higher cost of the extra bandwidth needed.
Or maybe just the threat/idea of such a tax coming into effect might scare them back into neutrality. (hey, why do you think gas prices have drop significantly as of late? It's not because of the war in Iraq...)
Just remember, companies that aren't into net neutrality will at least understand one thing.....money.
Yeah, and people who drive behind me on the road benefit from my driving at normal speeds, so therefore I should be able to charge them for that 'service'?
Now, if D were to give A's traffic higher speeds, that would be a service. But treating them the same as everyone else is not a service, it's just normal. It's like asking for protection money: pay me and you'll be treated like everyone else. Unless of course the law explicitly allows ISP D to consider 'no traffic routining' as its basic service, meaning that anything above that is special treatment requiring compensation. However, that's not likely to be the case, especially with D's direct customers (C, i.e. us) paying explicitly for the ability to access content at normal speeds. You can define normal to be a fairly low speed, and that's fine: so long as everything gets the same treatment, that's fine; it's when a particular entity is singled out for these lower speeds (usually a competitor, or someone with cash to be shaken-down) that it becomes wrong, and why some of us would like the law to mention somewhere that this is considered 'a bad thing'. You know, so that those of us who get the shaft have some legal recourse other than 'pay D whatever they want'.
And as for the argument for less government oversight, that might well work counter to the desired level of impartiality anyway, unless of course we can go back in time. You see, at the moment, most people get their internet access through the major telecommuications companies, or the cable companies. This especially includes the sites providing the services. Now, since they're (hypothetically) allowed to, these networks can slow down traffic from all the smaller ISPs and hosting companies. The net result? People use the big ones, because the smaller ones are being slowed down by their competitors. It's just like the adoption of Microsoft Office: everyone uses it because everyone else uses it. If I don't use Office, I can't (reliably) read .doc files. Maybe I can use OpenOffice. Maybe the document I want to read has something in it that OO balks at. Who knows? But that's the reason why Office is so ubiquitous. The advocates of Network Neutrality simply don't want the same thing to happen with ISPs: everyone uses Comcast, Rogers, Bell, or Verizon because they slow down traffic entering/leaving their own networks.
-Q
Basically, what the big ISPs are trying to do is make customers pay each carrier involved. AT&T, Verizon, et al, a;ready do this with cellular service: Your monthly fee includes (nearly) unlimited calls to other customers of your cell service provider, but you either pay per minute or a higher monthly fee to call other providers' cuomers.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
A properly written piece of legislation wouldn't prevent that. ;)
I have no idea whether or not the proposed bill in the USA is properly written though
The issue is not giving YouTube faster access to customers at a price, it's prioritizing their traffic over providers that don't pay - and thus penalizing the providers that don't pay, due to the fact that bandwidth is finite.
The situation you describe wouldn't cause that - in fact, it would be better for everyone, because traffic to YouTube that would normally slow down regular internet traffic would instead be going through the dedicated link.
However, I'm not sure that's what the ISPs have in mind - that would require a whole lot of investment and there'd be very few content providers willing to do it. From the ISPs point of view it's much simpler and cheaper to use the extortion method.
Advanced users are users too!
Impose bandwidth and download limits.
Way back when 9600 was "high speed" data access, you could lease a 9600bps line with varying levels of utilisation. For example, that line leased at 20% utilisation was charged at about one third the price of a 40% utilisation contract.
The modern equivalent is data volume quotas split up into peak/offpeak times. If you exceed the quota, you get charged more (but keep the speed), or have your bandwidth shaped (eg: 1.5Mbps normally, 70kbps shaped) in order to allow other users of that service to have some utility from it.
The real problem here is the pervasiveness of "all you can eat" (aka "unlimited") ISP contracts which aren't priced at a rate that will allow the ISP to maintain their infrastructure to service the bandwidth demand of their customers.
Folks
I wrote a strong article following up this story but after talking with the CEO decided to hold it back. I believe strongly in the open net, and have publicly debated against Verizon and AT&T on Net Neutrality. I urge caution in this case. Besides the update that NRK and NextGenTel had resolved all differences and are peering at a gigabit, Stokke provided numerous details of his open video peering policy. There is ambiguity in their official statement about peering and commercial arrangements that I need to clear up and other details. Although Stokke directly supported Net Neutrality in what he said, the concept are easy to confuse. I'm witholding judgment until more facts are clearly available in English and the full situation explained.
Here's how I wrote it.
5 a.m. New York, Olav Stokke, the CEO of NextGenTel called and told me the Slashdot story "Network Neutrality Threatened In Norway" was substantially inaccurate. So I held my story, "Norway Nixes Net Neutrality TeliaSonera Degrades Norwegian Broadcasting" and hope this proves a false alarm. Stokke tells me they've resolved a peering difficulty with the Norwegian Broadcasting Company (NRK) and gave me assurances that NextGenTel was completely open to outside video. Thanks to Stokke and Birgitta Grafstrom of parent company TeliaSonera for working with me on a tough deadline, and I'll have more info next week.
------- Again, I cannot confirm the details of what he claimed, but they were consistent enough I need further research.
db
daveb at dslprime.com
I've read the proposal, and it would prevent what I just described. Can you propose any way of writing the legislation that wouldn't have that effect?
The system I described and the one you describe differ only in perspective, not in substance. In my system some content providers pay one or more ISPs to get faster access to the ISPs' customers than the non-paying providers; in your system non-paying providers get slower access than paying providers: these are just different ways of saying the same thing. Either way there is some fixed amount of total upstream bandwidth available (the upper limit of which is determined by how much the ISP gets paid, by customers and content providers alike), of which paying providers get priority over XX% and non-paying providers split the balance. It doesn't really matter if the ISP has a separate physical link to YouTube or simply reserves a portion of its (possibly expanded) upstream bandwidth to give YouTube priority (or exclusive) access. In any event, the current proposal doesn't make any distinction between the two, and I don't see how it could.
The proposal has other issues as well, such as (apparently) requiring every "broadband network provider" to provide equal access to every "broadband network", not just hosts on the Internet. Section 4(a)(1): "Each broadband network provider has the duty to enable users to utilize their broadband service to access all lawful content, applications, and services available over broadband networks, including the Internet". A "broadband network" is defined as any network capable of transmitting at least 200 kbps of user-"designed" or user-chosen data "in at least one direction." The definitions of "broadband network" and "broadband network provider" include networks provided free-of-charge by private operators; they could probably even be construed to include internal LANs if one were so inclined. I really don't want to be forced to provide Internet access to everyone connecting to my wireless access point, particularly at speeds equivalent to local network access to services on my PC -- but, as I read it, that's what this proposal would require.
As far as section 4(a)(7) goes (the heart of Net Neutrality; prohibits discrimination between data streams of the same type), it could be easily bypassed by using a proprietary protocol and defining that as the "type" of data prioritized: prioritize all YouTube Video streams (playable with a special plugin), not all HTTP; prioritize all Skype streams, not all VoIP. It wouldn't matter what the actual origin of the data is, just that the stream type can be linked to a paying content provider. Who cares which IP YouTube is streaming videos from as long as only YouTube can create YouTube Video streams?
Disclaimer: IANAL, and this is not legal advice.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat