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A Case for Non-Net-Neutrality
boyko.at.netqos writes "Network Performance Daily has an in-depth interview with Professor Christopher Yoo from Vanderbilt University Law School on his opposition to Net-Neutrality policies. While some might disagree with his opinions, he lays out the case for non-neutrality in an informed and informative manner. From the interview: 'Akamai is able to provide service with lower latency and higher quality service, because they distribute the content. This provides greater protection against DoS attacks. It's a local storage solution instead of creating additional bandwidth, and it's a really interesting solution. Here's the rub ... Akamai is a commercial service and is only available to people who are willing to pay for it. If CNN.com pays for it, and MSNBC.com does not, CNN.com will get better service.'"
I can't read the site because it's loading sooooooooooooooooooo damn slow. Oddly enough, cnn.com and msn.com load instantly. So, unfortunately, I can't read his defense of net non-neutrality. I guess I'll just check out some of these shopping links instead.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Akamai is a distributed hosting service, not a common carrier.
This guy is seriously a professor?
All the start-ups have no chance.
Remember, no one hears you scream when you are being censored.
I'm a little puzzled by the anti-net-neutrality stance on slashdot. So many of you are libertarian "marketplace will solve anything" types, so I'd think that you'd be philosophically against the government stepping in to prevent what companies do with their own infrastructure.
I mean, I'm against net neutrality, but I'm pretty liberal so that viewpoint meshes with my beliefs. But why are you all against it?
FTA: The broader comment is that the architecture of the Internet is based on a thirty year-old technology, TCP/IP. If you talk to most technologists, they believe TCP/IP is now obsolete.
How is this fundamentally bad? It's 30 years old and therefore unusable and obsolete? If anything, I would praise such a technology for being so versatile as to last this many years. Take the bullet for example. I don't hear the military complaining that it sucks just because it's over 250 years old.
Oh yeah, wasn't banning the use of evoting supposed to be bad because it was tying them to "an old technology"?
Partial Credit: The Engineer's Best friend
"Well, the bridge didn't fall all the way down!"
Sure, only those who can afford it can use a service like Akamai to get their bytes better transit over the 'net, but that's called capitalism. The core problem with non-net-neutrality is not that one person would be able to pay more than the others for better service, its that the same companies who provide the infrastructure would be the ones charging for tiered service. Akamai is a third-party, and while we all might think of them as infrastructure because they provide such a critical service to so many very very large sites, they aren't the telcos providing core access to the 'net itself.
It's like any other utility - power, water, gas, etc. - where it costs a lot to buy the equipment needed to access large amounts of the utility at once, but you still pay the same rates as the guy who can't afford the bigger water pumps, better power grid, etc.
The whole Akamai argument is a great argument for a non-neutral except for the minor point that Akamai doesn't in any way violate net neutrality.
My nuts make a distinctive 'whistle' sound when I step out of the shower and run about the apartment to dry off.
Huh? How is the last-mile market competitive? Where I live, I have 1 option for high-speed internet: the cable company. The phone company refuses to build a switching station to offer DSL. As far as I'm concerned, I'm living in a monopoly market, the very opposite of the one described in the article.
I wouldn't have a problem with network non-neutrality if the ISP market was a competitive one, allowing me to switch to a better ISP if my current provider was not meeting my needs. Given that I don't live in that kind of a market, I support network neutrality as it provides a compromise solution that meets the needs of most people while causing as little harm as possible.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
You didn't pay for it. You didn't do the R&D. You spent 40 years promoting Minitel, calling the internet a waste of cold-war defense spending. Now finally, you're complaining about being left out of the internet.
I'm somewhat neutral on this topic.
'sig' deleted due to the stupidity of it's 'nature'
Just so everyone's clear, this is also the Professor Yoo whose theory of the unitary executive underlies Bush's claims of vast (and hitherto unknown) power - power to do things like read your mail, listen to your phone calls, and look at your bank transactions - all without a warrant or any judicial review. As well as the rejection of the 1,000 year old doctrine of habeas corpus.
Review the Alito hearings if this isn't familiar to you.
Professor --
Akamai and Net Neutrality don't have much to do with each other. Its services would be useful no matter what. All they do is take common content and place it "near" where it will likely be needed. It's a caching service, essentially. I don't think anyone has a problem with that business model.
Think of the Internet as being like a highway system for information. Net Neutrality basically says that if you're building roads and connecting them to the main highway system, you must let anyone use these roads. That's how the Internet grew; everyone brings their own network, and pretty soon we have a nice global network (yes, this is dumbed down, but hey).
Think of Akamai not as a provider of highways, but as a warehouser. Kind of like how Wal-Mart knows that people in Dubuque, Iowa are going to want to buy beer for Super Bowl weekend, so they arrange to truck it to their stores ahead of time. That way, locals don't have to slog all the way to St. Louis, MO to get their brewskis.
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Nope.
Net Neutrality means that carriers cannot discriminate based upon the type of traffic you're sending. HTTP traffic and SSH traffic would be treated equally. Whether that's a good thing is for you to decide.
What you describe is the current (neutral) model of pricing. I'm charged based upon how much data I send. If I want to send more data, I have to pay for additional bandwidth.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Net neutrality *actually* means everyone pays the same for net use, regardless of how much they use the net.
Really? I pay $40 per month. I'd always assumed Google paid a bit more than that.
(end sarcasam) Dumb-ass!
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
Bullshit.
You and Prof. Christopher Yoo make the same fundamental mistake. Net Neutrality is *not* about preventing people from optimizing the Internet!
It *is* completely about preventing abuse of monopolistic power by telco companies. (This is espcially urgent in light of the reconstitution of the old AT&T). It is to prevent telcos from offering "protection" for your valuable content.
AT&T: That's an awful nice video service you've got there Mr. YouTube. It sure would be a shame if somthing were to happen to all those pretty little bits flowing over our network...
YouTube: What could happen to them?
AT&T: -laughter- Hey guys...he wants to know what could *happen*! -more laughter-
People always say that this can't happen because of competition. Again, bullshit. What ISP you use doesn't matter in the slightest; at some point, your bits *will* cross AT&T's network. If you don't pay the "protection", your poor little bits might have one hell of a time making it to their destination.
Insisting on "correct" English is like saying that there is only one, definitive recipe for chili.
sPh
Is a really bad analogy, and it also proves that you don't need to remove net-neutrality for the megacorps to have the option to pay a premium to ensure their sites load quickly for everyone. It's a bad analogy because Akamai isn't making other connections slower by its presence, while removing net-neutrality _may_ speed up a handful of sites (I find this arguable, especially when dealing with cable internet, where at a downstream of 300+ KB/s, most sites load so quickly any speed increase would be negligible to the end-user; it only matters for downloading larger files) it is far more likely to slow down many sites for many users. It worries me that there's actually a chance of net-neutrality being brought down, because I can easily see what _will_ come of it: the slow death (or at least crippling) of homepages, indie-game sites, small businesses, small non-profit organizations, and any other entity not paying a premium to some megacorporation for the privilege of getting what they didn't have to pay extra for before the loss of net-neutrality. Though his analogy _does_ lead me to think, why not just make more Akamai-like services? Then the ultra-rich could pay for privileged hosting _without_ screwing over everyone else.
By reading this you acknowledge that you have read it.
The problem is peering chokepoints, not transmission protocols or distributed content hosting or anything else he talks about. Consumer end users are only served by 1 to 3 broadband providers in any given market, so those providers can act like selective gatekeepers unless they are legally prevented from doing so. Without net neutrality (more properly referred to as common carriage), they can hold the audience "captive" and charge for access. This radically distorts the market.
For example it would really hurt Akamai's business model. Let's say I pay Akamai to host my content. Well my users still have to connect to Akamai's network through their local broadband service provider. Without net neutrality, my content could be lagged or even denied by that local service provider unless an additional fee is paid. So the speed advantage of Akamai is negated locally, plus there's an extra cost to me. Of course Akamai could just pay the local access fee for all their customers--thus raising their costs.
The argument that net neutrality would prevent all technological advancements is, to me, mostly a red herring. A bad bill might do that, but it's entirely possible to legislatively protect common carriage, while still allowing pay-for-service improvements like Akamai. The point is to prevent malicious slow downs (audience hostage situations), not to ensure total fairness for all when in comes to advancements. The former is the important fight, but most opponents of net neutrality focus their commentary on the latter.
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.
I think we all understand the desire for QoS application tagging, to support high bandwidth low latency streams. I think net neutrality folks would be willing to accept a compromise which allowed for a public QoS standard. The real issue is transparency and censorship.
I don't want a private company to have the power and the right to censor material I might want to download, simply because directing my browser somewhere else might generate them more advertising revenue. Further, I want QoS tagging and bandwidth limits public. The Professor really avoided the private censorship and public accountability issues.
Bad professor! No cookie for you.
Monday, we're going to get an interview with Art Brodsky at Public Knowledge tomorrow, who will present a pro-Net-Neutrality argument.
I used to work for NetQoS. I no longer do, but want to keep the excellent karma attached to this account.
Theres ISPs out there NOW that are limited VOIP traffic of other providers.
Companys who are slowling down Bittorrent traffic if not removing it all together
Of course there is many ISPs that dont
but its already happening people..
The solution is to make the programming of QoS easier. Right now, I need to have familiarity with pf syntax to do that. However, for my needs, and most small home-office needs, a set-top appliance could allow limited programming of at least a PRI queue. Online gaming uses ports x, y, and z. Set all traffic on these ports to the highest priority. Web and DNS needs to have next highest priority so surfing is instantaneous. SSH needs to be in the mix somewhere too. But P2P software certainly isn't dependent on latency, so dump it to the lowest priority.
I saw something about a "gaming router" recently. I wonder if that's how it works.
mandelbr0t
"Please describe the scientific nature of the 'whammy'" - Agent Scully
Exactly. Net non-neutrality amounts to handing over a bunch of public infrastructure to the Telco cartel to have them turn around and extort us.
Never mind the models whereby you could actually pay to slow a competitor's traffic. It's all the worst of Google Ad Words wrapped into what has become an essential service.
There is also an aspect of net-neutrality that protects you. If the mega-corp-dominated infotainment industry isn't keeping you informed on what you really need to know, you might turn online for the information. Net neutrality could kill the blogosphere and would at the very least further stratify the digital divide.
Admittedly most of the common carriers you think about HAVE monopolies, but that's not the point.
I'm definitely for Net Neutrality - AND I'm moderately libertarian. But if you're going to HAVE a government issued monopoly - like EVERY DSL and Cable company does - then they need to be regulated to be fair about what they carry.
This is NOT about someone paying for their service to be extra fast. This is about forcible bundling by monopolies. This is about a company like AT&T deciding that they want to offer a movie download service and everyone else's is going to take 1000x as long as theirs to download.
Oh, and while we're on the topic, it should always be legal for a municipality to create a competing free highspeed (including WiFi) service if that's what the voting taxpayers want. Making money off your monopoly is NOT a right, it's a priviledge. It doesn't not overrule the responsibility of government to be for the people.
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
Akamai isn't controlling the bandwidth to my house, if CNN pays for it and MSNBC does not, it does not somehow make MSNBC slower than it was before CNN paid, furthermore Akamai is not competing with MSNBC or CNN as the current internet providers are with VoIP services like Vonage.
It's a nice feel-good piece about how having money gets you places, but it has absolutely nothing to do with SBC's (now ATT) CEO demanding that they somehow deserve some of Google's money. In the section where the interviewer asks "what if there's only one ISP" he talks about how there's plenty of competition for "ISP services" like email while entirely glossing over the fact that if you've only got one ISP, and the ISP decides you only get to use their email (or VoIP or blog or...), you're boned.
He also throws out the tired old stuff about packet inspection and worm filtering, but in a world where the stated goal of the ISPs is specifically to attack Google, the "network non-neutrality" they are after will do none of this. It will look no farther than "did this packet come from a company that paid their protection fees this month" and deal with it appropriately, after all, the more they do the more expensive their equipment gets.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Just because we tend towards libertarianism doesn't mean we're chumps. Many of us have also been around long enough to remember that at the core it isn't the company's infrastructure, it's the public's, developed and paid for with our tax dollars. We willingly pay every month to use an ISP's infrastructure to access this shared asset, but we aren't dumb enough to think that they own it, any more than we think the airlines own the sky.
Furthermore, there is a very real argument that breaking net neutrality will break the internet, and real net neutrality legislation makes as much sense as the laws against destroying roads or jamming radio waves.
And finally, libertarians don't (or shouldn't) intrinsically trust corporations (or, for that matter, their neighbors) any more than they trust the government. Having some corporation decide when and if my packets get through isn't somehow more acceptable than having China of the NSA do it. I pay to access the internet, and I expect exactly that.
--MarkusQ
The problem with non-net neutrality is that eventually packets will be prioritized on the ability to pay of the sender and receiver. The confluence of technology and bean counters will result in an internet of packet toll booths shaking down both parties involved in the communication. Everyone will have to negotiate with the carriers for the right to transmit, and they should be prepared to bring their financials to the table.
Simply put, if you favor non-net neutrality, you also favor the postal service and telephone carriers analyzing your tax returns to determine just how much they should charge you for the right to use their communications infrastructures. After all, your monthly bank statement should cost more to mail than a child's letter to Santa, don't you think?
Careful what you wish for.
"Akamai is a commercial service and is only available to people who are willing to pay for it. If CNN.com pays for it, and MSNBC.com does not, CNN.com will get better service."
The agreement between CNN and Akamai results in better service for CNN and its users regardless of the endpoints from which it's accessed CNN upgraded its network without having to pay off every carrier along the way to those endpoints. Seems rather like net neutrality made things simpler and easier for Akamai.
I want faster bandwidth, I need merely pay $5/mo extra to RCN for it. Again, the contract between me and my provider. If I want faster downloads from Fileplanet, I can pay for a membership. Another private contract.
This can apply to peering, and thus poof goes net neutrality, and really that's all fine, because it's again their endpoints -- if RCN wants to run Akamai nodes and get Akamaized content faster, that's their choice, they can control the ingress of traffic as they choose. However, when the carrier decides to throttle the traffic that's now within their network to my endpoint based on whether a third party has paid the carrier fee, I'm starting to feel like I should have been a party to this contract and gotten consideration for it.
I've got no problem with a tiered Internet, as long as it doesn't solely involve a middleman taking from both sides of the communication endpoints with no meaningful input from either.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Let us be more precise:
... Oops that's not the case: If AT&T wants to charge more for a home link per byte transferred, they can do that. If they want to give a different pricing package to a business to de-escalate prices with increasing usage - they can do that! They can even charge anything they want for access to special services (like a virus filter).
Neutrality means that everyone has the same access to the same services and the same price?
One thing that Neutrality means is that they cannot charge you more for access, dynamically (or deny or slow-down access) because you are using ANOTHER Service provider's application at the other end.
Imagine if you were calling (on your cell phone) to someone in California, and your long-distance rate (or even your local access monthly charges) change depending on exactly which network and features the callee happens to have chosen. Imagine if the "worse" the choice for you the more noisy, distorted, or delayed the voices became. Or restrictions on when the connection could be made, if at all.
Not only would this be commercial suicide, but only in the long run - which it is already for the phone companies, you can be sure any such practices would be banned outright immediately.
The point is here that we buy communications services NOT to be roped into end-to-end "Services". "Communications" means more than a technological extension of our local computing power.
Allowing non-neutrality is effectively, and without forethought, granting large ISP/Telco's monopoly opportunities.
"If CNN.com pays for it, and MSNBC.com does not, CNN.com will get better service.'"
And there's the rub. CNN won't be paying for it. CNN's customers will. So what he is saying is that free Internet will be unusably slow while "pay for service" Internet will run along at current speeds. The end user will have to pay a membership fee per site visited.
How is this an improvement again?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Communism?
If you want to insert political metaphors for how a technological solution works, then the entire Internet, by design, is Communistic.
Peers are peers. Neighbors talk to and shre with their neighbors their access, because when they need it back, their neighbors will share their access. Any peer is free to talk to any other peer, and arrange to share access between them, irrespective of what other peers they are talking to.
It's exactly this "communism" philosophy that makes the Internet work as well as it has for more than 20 years. Calling it "communism" is simply McCarthyism brought into the discussion about whether "Two legs bad Four legs good" is an appropriate business model for a system designed to be "Any legs good".
Market and business decisions, and local legislation and access rules aside, the reason people in China can look at servers in the US or France or Istanbul, is solely because the internet is unbiased in how it handles traffic. A packet is a packet, and on it travels to and from where it needs to go. There is no (in most cases, shaping is another discussion) "Paid" flag on the packet that lets routers know this packet is coming from or destined for a service which paid the protection fee and now gets to run roughshod over the network.
The Telcos who are whining about net-neutrality are whining because they're trying to double-dip, and they're being called on it. I pay my service provider for access. Bob's Widgets pays their access provider for their uplink. Everyone is paid up. The Telcos are upset that market forces have deemed that access is not worth as much money as they _want_ to charge for it, so they're trying to charge for both ends of the transaction from one side of the pipe, when the other end has already been paid.
This isn't about some large user being subsidized - my end has already been paid for at what the market has deemed the "proper" price. This is about Common Carriers trying to come along after the fact and say "We didn't charge you enough for the last 10 years, here's a bill for what you should have been paying".
If Net Neutrality is true Communism, then what the Telcos want is what Communism turned into in post-USSR Russia - the Haves and the Have Nots.
This space for rent. Call 1-800-STEAK4U
I am lead to the conclusion that this guy's views are being promoted by forces who feel the internet can be treated like a toll road.
Seems to me someone should examine how exactly these cleverly packaged misrepresentations got press-time.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Do OSI networking stacks have a large marketshare? No, but then neither does Unix. They still serve their niche though.
... hello?
Just because one thing has a gigantic portion of the market doesn't mean that the smaller competitors do not work or are not viable.
Windows, Linux
As for the original article, a key counter-point is that Akamai doesn't send me any bill for using their servers whereas my ISP sure does and I darn well expect somebody who bills me to deliver the service that was spelled out in the contractual terms of service presented to me.
I have seen commercials on TV for "net neutrality", and I have been away from /. for a while, but I have no idea what the whole argument is about. I read the article, checked Wiki, but I don't see why there is an argument over giving time sensitive data priority. Could someone lend me a hand?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Dear Senator X,
What does net neutrality mean to you? Without net neutrality, internet providers can justify delaying websites for "performance concerns". Given these are poorly defined, it is not hard for them to justify a delay any website they wish. Certainly it would be difficult to explain why your campaign website takes an extra minute to load, or news sites favorable to you position are all delayed, but could they justify a delay of, say, four seconds?
What could four seconds do? A recent study showed that is all the average web surfer is willing to wait. Surely seeing only news unfavorable to you isn't going to sway every vote, but with millions of customers is it enough to swing an election?
Even if the internet providers all support you now, if net neutrality is not maintained this issue can hang over your head like a sword of Damoclese every election. Do you really want to be in a position like that?
Your constituent,
Anonymous coward.
Remember that the whole telecom monopoly came about in the US due to the government wanting to ensure Universal Service. It was a horrible thing to do - and the telecom monopolies we have today, and the cable monopolies - are all a result of that horrible thing that was done. I think we can blame FDR for it. We will never see a 'fair' marketplace for networking until the Bell/AT&T monopolies are completely abolished. Net neutrality is only an attempt to establish some ground rules to prevent abuses. That's all! Prevent abuses. If you don't prevent them, you can be sure they will occur. They'll probably occur anyway, since AT&T is all about sneering at consumers and government anyway.
He's wrong. Kind of takes the sting out of a hyperbolic rant when your first sentence is a lie. ( Iknow it's just a mistake, but no one makes mistakes anymore, it's always "lies")
Why are so many posts with factual errors modded up?
Because their domain is used to host pretty much everything, they're blocked on most education content filters due to pornography. Which means dozens of major sites fail to load properly when their CSS and images are hosted on akamai. This sort of hosting makes it hard on organizations with a need for content filtering because legitimate sites are broken in order to block that content which should be blocked.
The end result has been that those sites who depend on hosting that refers back to akamai's domain lose hits.
120 characters for a sig? That's bloody useless.
...this is an argument that focuses on a non-problem. In the scenario described the bandwidth advantage is obtained not through licensing or fees but through hardware and locality. Now you have to pay to get those things but the difference is that in a non net-neutral world you have to not only pay for those things but for the 'bandwidth' in which to operate them.
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Net Neutrality means that carriers cannot discriminate based upon the type of traffic you're sending. HTTP traffic and SSH traffic would be treated equally. Whether that's a good thing is for you to decide.
As I understand it, this isn't correct either. The goal is that traffic be treated equally regardless of source and destination. Most people agree that prioritizing traffic by protocol is beneficial for everyone.
"The problem with internet quotations is that many are not genuine" -Abraham Lincoln
they dropped al-jazeera (who was a paying customer) with no notice, no refund, no explanation. nothing. everyone suspected gov't propagandists putting pressure on them, or just flat out taking sides in the war on terror (even though al-jazeera isn't on any side)
Net neutrality *actually* means everyone pays the same for net use, regardless of how much they use the net.
Net non-neutrality means people pay according to how much they use.
Two things:
1) AT&T sold me "unlimited internet access". If they wanted me to pay for how much I use, they should have specified that in the contract.
2) AT&T does not have a contract with Google and therefore has no real right to charge Google anything, since Google does not use their ISP service, I use it.
Or are you going to claim that if you have a Cingular cellphone and call a friend with a T-Mobile cellphone, then T-Mobile has the right to bill you an unspecified amount (say... $1000/minute, it's not like I have a contract letting me know how much I'm going to be billed for the call in advance) for the call in addition to what I paid Cingular?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I'm a firm believe in the power of a competitive marketplace to provide the goods that people need in the most efficient manner. Having said that, most people have 1-3 choices for their service. This is a very limited marketplace which gives those companies a lot of power to informally set standards for pricing, service, etc.
If the market was being competed in by dozens of providers, then if AT&T had policies I didn't like I'd have a number of other providers that offer a service I want. I mean right now, I have DSL service through Speakeasy. In an unregulated market, why would AT&T allow speakeasy to compete with them for that service? They wouldn't.
If I open a trucking business, I don't control the roads between Chicago and San Francisco. Any other company can open their own trucking business and compete for business shipping goods using the common infrastructure of those roads. Imagine for a moment if all those roads were privately owned and my shipping company could charge different rates to different shippers. How would that be competitive?
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
Since when did a law professor become an expert on the technology behind the net.
He doesn't adress the issue of discriminating aginst packets based on their origin simply because their author didn't pay your extortion.
...when I call my favorite little mom and pop pizza place, I just get an automated voice on the line telling me that My call to them will be delayed by 30 minutes - but if I press 1, they will put me straight through to Pizza Hut. This sounds like an outstanding plan to me, and I fully support it.
Not A+ Certified... Not Microsoft Certified... Definately Certifiable...
He wants better roads leading to exclusive big malls, and shitty roads for all the rest of us.
Whereas Akamai is a final distribution point.
You Get the same goods around your corner from the very same people AND good roads for all us. Leading to everywhere.
Easy to choose, isn't it?
> prevent what companies do with their own infrastructure
In most cases, "their own infrastructure" was taxpayer-subsidized, with an expectation of taxpayer benefit. I've got no problem with people laying dark fiber and leasing it out, or tiered internet access packages from your local ISP. But the internet backbone is different. When the backbone favors megabuck traffic over non-customers', you've broken the internet.
You're an idiot and have no idea about the issue.
Right now a website (or other content provider) pays for the bandwith they use and the user (ie: you and me) pays for their internet access. Last I checked the former is based directly on bandwith used (more or less) while the later has lots of nice plans with various speeds (and in some places with bandwith restrictions depending on how much you pay). As a result, right now how much you pay is relatively based on how much you use the net.
What companies want to do is charge content providers a SECOND time. In other words not only do you pay Verizon for your DSL and not only does YouTube pay for their bandwith but now YouTube "has to" pay Verizon as well. Sure they could no pay but then Verizon will simply slow them down to a crawl unless they do.
In other words without net neutrality it's not goign to be based on how much you use the net (as it is now and internet providers can make it directly based on usage if they wish) but on how much the content is worth to the content provider. So streamign media would essentially cost extra for a content provider compared to downloading a file for later playback even if both use the same amount of bandwith.
there is a reason the internet grew the way it did, open protocols, open ports. My isp is blocking about everything but the ssh port. There should be a law that prohibits isp's from blocking ports, throttling traffic, etc.. I'm not saying there isn't a way around some of this, but it is totally stupid. I'm afraid to pay for services on the internet, because i'm unsure if it'll work when my isp is blocking traffic. Some of the services isp's provides are in direct conflict with the services they are blocking. Why have competition as an isp when you don't have to, this is one of the reasons why they are blocking ports in direct competition with services that are running on the blocked ports. The net needs openess to survive, that includes opened ports and if a user is paying for bandwidth, throttling down should be illegal also.
Also, if you're going to complain that network neutrality is "communism" then you're going to have to talk REAL fast to cover Edward Whitacre's apparent belief that they somehow "deserve" payment for Google's success. After all, isn't taking from the successful and giving to the rest the very essence of communism?
I'd even go further, if they charge me to use a service that's already paid for by Google, then I believe that is essentially fraud. If SBC/ATT does start charging Google every time I visit their website, then I should receive a rebate or at least a credit on my account for the amount of service ATT provided to me that Google paid for.
I can then use the extra money to pay for all of the formerly free services that suddenly had to start paying 5000 ISPs instead of just their own ISP.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I pay for my web server to have X-amount of bandwidth a month.
I pay my ISP at home for access to the the internet.
So now I will have to pay my ISP even more so they don't slow down my access to my webserver from my home.
Using Akamai is just paying for bandwidth for your server. It is nothing but hosting. It really has nothing to do with net neutrality.
That is the core of this problem. The users are paying for network access. The people producing the content are paying for network access. The ISPs want the content providers to pay them even if they are not the ISPs customers!
Kind of a data black mail or protection racket. I can see them now, "Yous know it would be a real shame if some of your packets where to get lost, if you know what I mean. You really wouldn't want that now would you?"
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
I quite agree with Rakishi. This is likely so because we have similar understandings of the diffuse and loaded phrase "net neutrality."
I do wonder, though, about the example of VOIP. Sooner or later most ISPs will end up giving higher priority to voice packets. Should the VOIP providers pay more for the use of prime resources? Should the non-VOIP user pay the penalty in slightly slower packets at peak times?
Good troll, btw, you got a lot of bites with that.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
Net Neutrality means that carriers cannot discriminate based upon the type of traffic you're sending. HTTP traffic and SSH traffic would be treated equally. Whether that's a good thing is for you to decide.
As twbecker mentions in his reply to your post, I think you don't exactly have it straight, either, so I just want to clarify a little more on what he said. It's not about the type of traffic (although that's the type of argument they give), it's about discriminating based on who provides the content. If there was a way to prioritize VoIP in general, without giving preferential treatment to Comcast over Vonage, that wouldn't be as bad (although I'm not sure I trust anyone out there -- ISPs, the government, or content providers -- to decide what types of traffic are more important than others), but the real potential problem is that Comcast can screw with the Vonage traffic so that the service basically doesn't work anymore... All of a sudden, it looks like Comcast's VoIP is the only service that "works" in your area, so that's what you're stuck with (no matter how good or bad the service might be).
The problem is that the ISP's want to provide content now, and they are wanting to extort money out of all of the companies who have actually worked for years to build their content services, just to stay on equal footing with the ISP's. It's funny how one of the arguments of the ISP's against neutrality is "There's no evidence that we would mess with your traffic, so you shouldn't make it illegal to mess with it", but at the same time, they're speaking out against Google and others, saying that those content providers are getting a "free ride" on their Inter-tubes (never mind the fact that the content providers are already paying their own Internet service bills, and their customers are paying their own bills, so nobody is actually getting a free ride). Websites like Hands off the Internet are really frustrating, because it's such a twisted, astroturfing, messed up view, accusing the people who want a level playing field of trying to get money from the average joe. When actually, it's been the telecoms screwing over average joe with all of the extra charges we were paying for years that were supposed to have brought us all great broadband service years ago.
Data service providers aren't common carriers either--hence the fight.
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.
By this argument, robbery and murder must be OK. You can buy house alarms, weapons and bodyguards. If I buy them and my neighbor does not I'll be OK and my neighbor will get robbed and murdered. Here's the rub... just because there are services to stop bad things happening, it does not make those bad things OK.
His other example (actually using packet classification and QoS based on the type of service) makes a bit more sense. I haven't really been watching the network neutrality debate, but I have wondered how this is supposed to mesh in.
Currently, I classify my own uplink to make my ssh connections still go fast while I'm running BitTorrent. (Side note: for those with cheap DSL modems that don't support doing their own QoS, I highly recommend these Linux patches. Without it, tbf shaping doesn't work because its bandwidth numbers are all wrong.) QoS is extremely effective - you can have short, usually-empty queues for interactive packets (about 20 ms in my case) while still having longer full queues (more like 500 ms) necessary for full bandwidth utilization on bulk traffic.
My ADSL upstream is my bottleneck. Network neutrality doesn't come into play, because it's under my control and only used by me.
However, it's not hard to imagine a small heavily-used ISP where their connection is the bottleneck. Maybe some customers are willing to get deprioritized at peak times in favor of cheaper service. This is much like the physical world, where people use 5-7 day shipping instead of next-day air for cheaper rates. Do existing network neutrality proposals forbid this? If they do, I think they're going too far.
If laws do allow this, it gets more complicated. Let's imagine for a second that I'm paying for 1 Mbps of interactive (short queues, prioritized, drops unlikely) bandwidth on select packets, 5 Mbps of bulk bandwidth on non-select packets or the leftovers, and everything above that is dropped. In the upstream case, it's pretty easy - I can set the TOS/DSCP field to distinguish between the two.
In the downstream case, how does classification work through their network? Apparently the telephone companies have been making noises like they're going to use preferred bandwidth if it came from an IP owned by someone who paid them money. Seems ridiculous. Let's say I'm a third-party VOIP provider. My customer has to pay their ISP extra for preferred bandwidth, I have to pay my own ISP (possibly extra for preferred bandwidth), and I have to pay my customer's ISP for preferred bandwidth, too? My customer's ISP is doing pretty well on this deal, but I'm not. I don't have much negotiating position - my customer has probably already chosen an ISP, I want to get stuff to them quickly, the customer's ISP will tell me "our way or the high way". It seems anti-competitive.
The ideal thing economically would be for the customer to control the downstream classification, too. But technically, that sounds pretty difficult - there'd have to be some way for them to say "SIP packets from Vonage to me should use my 'preferred' bandwidth if available" and have those classifiers propogate through the ISP's entire network. The ISP would have to give them some sort of a web interface or something for them to do that (a lot of integration work), and I'm trying to imagine the average consumer using it successfully...nope, can't do it.
With any service, there's a fixed cost for hooking the thing up, plus a marginal cost for actually using it. For the internet because the ratio of marginal costs to fixed costs is quite low, usage of bandwidth has been treated as free in recent times (it wasn't always so - in the 80s you paid by the packet and boy was it expensive).
That is ok while the capacity is high enough that users are not competing for bandwidth. As soon as it starts to saturate you've got the problem that there is no way to efficiently allocate capacity to users as long as the marginal cost of bandwidth is zero.
But a solution to this problem needs to be based on usage, not service type. That's the key point here - service type should not be permitted to be used as a proxy for usage.
Further, because most of the network is a natural monopoly, government regulation is not counter to liberal principles on markets. Its obvious that the local loop is a natural monopoly. The backbone is also, because of network effects.
Further, allowing service differentiating is allowing the monopolist to control the market for which services can be provided, and by whom.
So legislating for net neutrality is both a fair use of legislative power and is in support of, not counter to, free market principles.
Squirrel!
I'm reading his papers, and I'm not too impressed. Read his "Network Neutrality and the Economics of Congestion", where he pontificates on that subject.
Where he goes off track is at "Fortunately, policymakers wishing to address theses problems can draw on the extensive theoretical literature exploring the economics of congestion. Much of the literature has focused on the choice between flat-rate pricing and usage-sensitive pricing. The primary finding of this literature is that competitive markets will reach an efficient equilibrium if each user is charged a usage-sensitive price set equal to their marginal contribution to congestion. 28" Reference 28 is to "28 See, e.g., Eitan Berglas, On the Theory of Clubs, 66 AM. ECON REV. 116, 119 (1976).", which is a classic paper on periodic vs per-use pricing for things like gyms and swimming pools, but is not about congestion at all.
Yao does get some things right. He recognizes that the billing cost (he says "transaction cost", but means billing overhead) for things like the Internet is higher than the cost of providing the service, and this distorts the economics from the pay-for-what-you-get model economists usually like.
But then he goes off into a right-wing rant on why vertically integrated monopolies are good. The competition between the vertically integrated monopolies will supposedly prevent prices from rising. However, he states that as an article of faith, without support. Historically, when a market gets down to small number of players, (two or three), price competition tends to weaken. The fewer the players, the easier de-facto collusion becomes.
He ignores many issues. Time scale, for example. Congestion is a problem on a scale of minutes, while carrier-switching by end users occurs on a scale of months. He also ignores contractual lock-in and technical lock-in, which makes carrier switching more expensive. If the end user's strategy is to minimize their costs over the next year, then carriers can raise their rates each year by any amount less than the cost of switching, and get away with it. He ignores that completely. (This is a chronic problem with economists. Like control theorists, they study feedback systems, but unlike control theorists, they don't consider time domain issues like stability, settling time, oscillation, and phase locking issues much.)
There's also the technical issue in Internet congestion that the congestion is mostly at the edges. If you have your own wire to the central office, as with DSL, why should there be price differentiation depending on what data you're sending and receiving? Yet it's the DSL providers who don't want network neutrality. It's not the backbone providers. Thus, congestion isn't the real issue. Wanting a bigger piece of the TV viewer's entertainment spending is.
There are people who've written well about the economics of network congestion, but this guy isn't one of them.
With non net neutrality the ISP, cable companies or whichever entity controls the last mile can give all packets to and from akamai the lowest
possible quality of service. So akamai will be forced to pay whatever price the lastmile provider sets to make sure they can actually provide
the fast distributed content delivery system they do now.
Somehow using akamai as an argument against net neutrality does not quite fly with me.
I don't know what this guy is pretending to be, a lawyer or a geek, but his arguments are all extremely uninformed.
... would allow a degree of non-neutrality" - there again, confusing anti-QoS with anti-vertical-monopoly (Net Neutrality); in fact, using "non-neutrality" as a synonym for QoS. It's not.
1) "The number of possible connections has gone up quadratically with the number of total users; so the Internet has become much more complex."
So? Is this a technological problem that is in any way related to the issue of Net-Neutrality? We seem to be handling this just fine at the moment, and if we run into problems we switch to IPv6, don't we?
2) People use different applications with different QoS needs. Providers should be allowed to provide priority to certain types of traffic.
Again, entirely unrelated to the issue of Net-Neutrality. You can get all sorts of QoS deals from ISPs, e.g. MPLS. The issue with Net-Neutrality is the ISP giving priority to their own traffic, so they gain an unnatural advantage over competing services not owned by the ISP - a vertical monopoly.
3) TCP/IP is obsolete, and companies should be allowed to experiment with protocols.
TCP/IP is not only working just fine, but it's adapted all the time. It's up to version 4, and IPv6 can be implemented by any one who chooses to. There are many protocols that use UDP over IP, and even many protocols that use IP, but neither TCP nor UDP. The past few years there have been many quiet revolutions in protocols; from dialling in using SLIP to PPP, to getting cable (docsis 1.0) to getting ADSL, then ADSL2+, p2p protocols like bittorrent emerging and chanching just about daily, people using VOIP, companies deploying VOIP on an enterprise scale (right down to global telecommunications giants switching to, egads no!, an all-IP backbone for voice).
Again, this has nothing to do with preventing vertical monopolies.
Then there are some things that just paint him as someone who has no idea what he's talking about..
How to achieve QoS? He points out that TCP (the obsolete protocol, mind you) has a Type of Service field! How ironic. Wasn't he argueing we need new protocols? Like, oh, I don't know, MPLS, which he seems to be unaware of? But then, he also seems to be under the impression that you can't choose between ISPs that offer different levels of QoS, which is patently untrue. (Nor would they not be allowed to exist if we had Net Neutrality. They just would be forced to be fair)
Then he goes on to say Akamai (not an internet service provider, not engaging much in vertical monopolies) is "an entirely different architecture". No it's not, they use DNS and obsolete TCP just like anybody else. There is nothing at all new about this architecture, mind you - in fact, it's pretty much what usenet does. We used to call sites with content closer to you "mirrors". The only nifty thing akamai adds is redirecting you to the nearest host on the DNS level. Oh, in fact, DNS root servers do the same thing on a BGP level even. And they also cache their zones. Still neutral, though.
"deep packet inspections
Oh, and the question about neutrality? Who controls the QoS, in his grand vision? He doesn't even answer it.
If you want to be anti-Net-Neutrality, fine, argue that vertical monopolies are good, or that vertical monopolies won't happen, or that Net-Neutrality laws wouldn't be effective. Don't bring up straw man arguments.
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
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dc:title="Network Neutrality Debate: A Case for Non-Neutrality"
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dc:description="Prof. Christopher Yoo, Vanderbilt University School of Law This article continues our series examining the issue of Network Neutrality. Professor Christopher Yoo joined the faulty of the Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1999, and his research focuses primarily on..."
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This article continues our series examining the issue of Network Neutrality.
Professor Christopher Yoo joined the faulty of the Vanderbilt University School of Law in 1999, and his research focuses primarily on how technological innovation and economic theories of imperfect competition are transforming the regulation of electronic communications.
In addition to clerking for Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and working at the law firm of Hogan & Hartson under the supervision of now-Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr., he has also published "Network Neutrality and the Economics of Congestion" [PDF] in Georgetown Law, and "Beyond Network Neutrality" [PDF] in the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology.
We asked him to share his thoughts on Net Neutrality with us.
akamai can't be used as justification for tossing out net-neutrality because the service it provides doesn't in any way depend on special priviledges such as TOS or bandwidth prioritisation/limitation.
akamai is just another service on the internet (albeit one with MANY more servers than most, and geographically distributed far more than most), it is available to anyone on the same terms.
The big problem i think from the internet point of view is this:
You -- ISP --- (internet) --- ISP -- Business (data you want to reach)
The internet is group of people/corporations/ISPs/phone companies that had agreed to pass traffic back and forth (peer agreements etc). However, they now see the traffic that is going through them going up and not necessarily being payed for (to them). One and/or the others get an idea, everything that passes through me should pay. Hence the call for network neutrality so we don't have to pay twice for the same thing. However, people don't seem to get the fact that the bandwidth should be accounted for, which up until recently now really hasn't been considered.
Though i think it might be nice for this (the internet) to become a public utility so the network neutrality issue goes away by everyone paying to access it. It would however have to deal with the real cost. i.e. connection AND bandwidth like most other finite resources.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
Maybe I'm dense and missed the bus somewhere, but if Akamai didn't exist, wouldn't/couldn't anyone boost their speed to end users by buying more bandwidth and/or servers to compensate? (*not to say that one couldn't do this anyways...) I don't mean the occasional slashdotting, but an overall surge in traffic in general. From what I know, most good network admins design their networks to scale up as demand dictates. Without Akamai, this would still be the case, and as long as a company were willing to spend the money, their presence on the web would be safe. Additionally, it occurs to me that if we all have to start paying a premium for a faster route to wherever we prefer to go swiftly, any content providers that use Akamai would be charged more by Akamai to host/distribute their content as well rendering this guys philosophy moot, since in my opinion he didn't think that far ahead. Let's not forget that shit rolls downhill. Am I wrong on this?
So what you're saying is that non net neutrality benefits those who can afford or are willing to pay for premium service? And from the masses I hear a resounding "DUH." In other news, slavery really should be acceptable because, hey, it benefits people who own cotton farms from not being short on labor for harvest!
Seriously, every time someone tries to exploit the masses it always benefits the people on top. Is this guy a professor of obviousness?
or else!
Good thesis on how to keep the net neutral.
http://afs.eecs.harvard.edu/~goodell/blossom/
I think it's both. The goal is to prevent abuse, and it's a good goal. But I don't really know what the specifics of the legislation would be, and it'd be easy to throw the baby (service-based QoS) out with the bathwater. See my other post for details.
This is sophistry.
When they say they "deserve" it, they mean they want to choose whether to route packets over their network based on whether Google chooses to pay them or not.
I highly doubt your residential service has an SLA guaranteeing you full possibly bandwidth to any site on the internet, including every possible upgrade they might ever install. If you managed to have such a beast, sue them if they break it. Otherwise, stop trying to force AT&T to route other peoples' packets; it's not their fault that the government fucked us over by granting them the monopoly. There's no fucking fraud involved.
Your sense of entitlement is nauseating.
Wrong personal pronoun zonk, you're supposed to post about wii not yoo.
...Akamai has basically obviated the need for a tiered internet all along, right? A third party offers caching for increased (distributed) bandwidth for the "massive commercial communications" going through the tubes. All without changing the neutrality of the network.
Your mind is clear / The things that you fear / Will fade with how much you / Believe what you hear
Except it is being paid for. Peering agreements are reciprocal, and constitute in-kind payments.
Three times, actually. Every bit sent over the network is already paid for at each end: someone pays to send it, someone pays to receive it, which every intermediary between the endpoint ISPs "paid" in-kind via peering agreements by both endpoint ISPs (or by intermediaries between them and the endpoint ISPs).
The extra toll charge that intermediaries now want to charge directly to one end or the other for prompt delivery would be a third charge, not a second.
No, that's not true either. Bandwidth is already accounted for in differential charges for different bandwidth at each ISP, so is total transfer volume for certain types of accounts (and, really, for accounts with "unlimited" transfer volume, as well, as transferring too much will get you dinged under ToS allowing the ISP to take action for "overuse" of the service, generally.)
Again, connection and bandwidth and transfer volume are charged for now.
I'm betting that this guy is the Comcast Distinguished Fellow of Free Market Economics.
Anybody who tries to equate a service like Akamai with a common carrier deserves to be ignored. I guess maybe universities aren't quite the monolithic hotbeds of Marxist thought that worldnetdaily and David Horowitz are always telling us.
Maybe it's a funk after the first few working days after the holiday, but today I'm just a little weary of people like this wrapping horse manure in grape leaves and calling it dolmathakia yialantzi.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Do you really think that government regulation of the internet would be a good thing?
Because that's what "net neutrality" amounts to.
First, the government would have to define what "neutrality" is.
Then, they'd write thousands of pages of regulations on how we all have to act to enforce their definition of "neutrality".
Then, lots and lots of people would hire lots and lots of lawyers to fight over those definitions and rules. Those fights would take years and years.
Lovely. And that's what you're pushing for when you espouse "net neutrality".
Like you said - you pay for internet access. Don't like what you get? Take your money elsewhere.
The problem is there is a lot of money being made on the Internet. And, most of it isn't going to the carriers but they get to build out capacity.
Sure, you can say that is there job. But what we have been seeing is competitive pricing in an effort to gain market share. OK, so Comcast has market share now. What are they going to do with it? The simple answer isn't raise prices as would be true in many other situations. However, to support their build-out and low prices they are certainly going to look for revenue from other sources.
Charging high-volume feeds to their system is one way. It isn't necessarily the most obvious or clear-cut way but it gets around that nasty problem of raising prices to the customer. Which would certainly have the effect of driving down usage and taking customers away from Google and others.
So, would you rather see Google pay or you pay yourself? Yes, you are likely going to be paying in any event because when Google has to pay they are going to charge more for ads which will then be passed on to everyone buying stuff advertised on Google.
I'm sure 9 out of 10 people would rather get hit with increased costs they cannot directly see rather than just having their Internet access bill jump by $5-$10 a month.
If we see the "death" of reliable POTS service in favor of Vonage (not tariffed as reliable at least), we are certainly going to see the telecommunications companies charging more for data links. Either that or just quietly go out of business when telephone service dies. This money is going to come from somewhere.
You get to choose - directly from your pocket or indirectly from your pocket.
Professor Yoo should stick to law. He has made technical mistakes that make him look like a fool.
First, Mr. Yoo states that technologists believe TCP/IP is obsolete. (WTF?!?!?!!?) He seems to have made that up, which brings his credibility into question. I can't even find a single article that mentions that concept in a search. As a technologist, I can assure him that TCP/IP is considered robust, and pointing out it's age doesn't change that.
Next, Mr. Yoo's describes why network neutrality might hold things back, but gives an example that has nothing to do with Network Neutrality. Akamai caches data and routes it efficiently, which is something these "obsolete" protocols like TCP and HTTP have special provisions for. None of that violates network neutrality in any way.
Lastly, Mr. Yoo underestimates the value of standardization. He states that "...standardization by itself runs the risk of becoming an obstruction to technological progress." We are very fortunate that Mr. Yoo does not hold a position in government policy, or we would all have incompatible TVs, electrical outlets, and the cohesive internet of today would not exist at all.
If Mr. Yoo wants to build his own private network on his own non-standard protocols, I invite him to try. In the mean time, my company will continue to operate using the efficient, standard, neutral internet we have today.
Okay, so everyone says it's bad if I discriminate against a particular entity in my QoS.
Imagine that the entity is, say, the Atriks spam network.
Is it bad of me to drop their packets first, or possibly just drop them no matter what?
Explain to me how the net neutrality legislation you are advocating for provides for the desire to drop packets from spammers. Are you relying on whether or not my users have requested the packets? On something else? What's the truck?
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
strictly speaking, there is no such thing as net neutrality.
for example, cable communication services (cable teevee, cable internet, etc.) provide different amounts of bandwidth and different priorities to different services.
dsl and voice communication coexist on the same pair of copper wires and recieve different amounts of bandwidth and priority based on the type of service.
i don't hear a lot of complaints about this existing asymmetry in how bandwidth is assigned to different communication services.
ultimately, the net neutrality debate is going to come down to quality of service. if, for example, my local ilec wants to give me extra bandwidth to support their own voip service, then that's fine, as long as their voip service doesn't interfere with the bandwidth i'm purchasing and using to access third party voip services.
if a cable teevee company wants to give me extra bandwidth to support their own video on demand service, then that ought to be ok - as long as there is some guranatee that there is no interference in how i use the general purpose bandwidth i buy for other services including rival video on demand services.
the pity is that incumbent communications companies (ilec and cable) do not want to provide any guaranteed quality of service. they are even quick to cut off or penalize users who have the temerity to actually use the bandwidth they think they are paying for. give me a guarantee that i can actually use the bandwidth i'm buying 24/7 for any purpose i see fit, then they can provide extra bandwidth for their own specialized services all they like.
of course, i don't see this happening.
when religion is no longer the opiate of the masses, governments will resort to real opiates.
Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?
... and then they built the supercollider.
While some might disagree with his opinions, he lays out the case for non-neutrality in an informed and informative manner.
What the hell does his informed and informative manner have to do with anything? He doesn't agree with me! Therefore I must shout so loud that no one can hear him!
That is the Slashdot Way...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
That being said, I can think of a lot of situations were I would and would not like a network provider to prefer or to harm traffic based on those very things.
1.) VioP 911 call. I think it would generally be a good thing if emergency 911 calls got better service. Even if someone else's YouTube video froze. -- GOOD
2.) Video on demand requires a higher cost card at the DSLAM to ensure it works most of the time. Contract between video provider, customer and ISP gets card placed in DSLAM. -- GOOD
3.) Video on demand without card is harmed to increase sales of the previous example. -- BAD
4.) E-mail link from known spammer is slowed to a trickle. -- GOOD
5.) E-mail link from a competitor is slowed to a trickle. -- BAD
While the list goes on, here is the fundamental question: Do you trust the current politicians, based on their past results with legislation such as the DCMA and Telecom reform act, to write legislation that will allow the GOOD and prevent the BAD?
I don't buy it. I don't see the people advocating neutrality getting past the cult of corporate personality involved to write a good law.
Or are you going to claim that if you have a Cingular cellphone and call a friend with a T-Mobile cellphone, then T-Mobile has the right to bill you an unspecified amount (say... $1000/minute, it's not like I have a contract letting me know how much I'm going to be billed for the call in advance) for the call in addition to what I paid Cingular?
T-Mobile has no right to bill the Cingular customer (since there is no contract between the two parties), but what would happen if T-Mobile told the Cingular customer that he or she must sign a contract with T-Mobile for $1000/minute, or else T-Mobile will cut off the T-Mobile customer's service? What if T-Mobile announced that every person in the world must pay $1000/minute in order to prevent it from cutting off that T-Mobile customer's service?
Well, if T-Mobile actually tried to cut off one of its customers because it wasn't able to make a deal with a third party, that would probably violate the contract between T-Mobile and its customer. But, to make things interesting, let's suppose T-Mobile can cut off its own customer without violating their contract. In that case, wouldn't T-Mobile be violating the rights of every honest cellphone user? Nope, it would just a stupid thing for T-Mobile to even try. If T-Mobile made such foolish demands, its customers would quickly switch to Cingular (or another competitor), and T-Mobile would go bankrupt.
But, what if the government granted T-Mobile a monopoly? Surely in that case, we would need a 'cell phone neutrality' bill to prevent T-Mobile from using its power to abuse consumers, right? The average slashdotter would say "yes", but the average libertarian would respond with "Why did the government grant T-Mobile a monopoly? Let's fix that." Personally, I'm with the libertarians.
What makes a man turn neutral? Lust for gold? Power? Or were you just born with a heart full of neutrality?
Actually, AT&T does charge Google - in a round-a-bout way. Google's ISP pays ISP X who pays AT&T. Or vise-versa. The point is, there are peering agreements in place, transparent to consumers, which take care of all the payment problems.
And actually, competitive local exchange carriers (telephones) face similar problems. But in a nutshell, Cingular and T-Mobile both have peering agreements with CLECs in place.
but what would happen if T-Mobile told the Cingular customer that he or she must sign a contract with T-Mobile for $1000/minute, or else T-Mobile will cut off the T-Mobile customer's service? What if T-Mobile announced that every person in the world must pay $1000/minute in order to prevent it from cutting off that T-Mobile customer's service?
At worst, if the Cingular Customer refused to pay T-Mobile, T-Mobile would refuse to let their customer call the Cingular Customer. If none of the Cingular users paid, then the T-Mobile users wouldn't have their phone service cut off (where the hell did this idea come from?) they simply wouldn't be able to call any Cingular users. Of course, if they tried, it would just ring forever (or have shitty line quality, or be redirected to a paying customer, or...), after all, if T-Mobile told their customers the truth about why their friends aren't answering the phone, they might lose customers.
Or, if you don't like that analogy, how about the mail? I pay to send mail. If I send more mail, I pay more. I pay and send you a letter, and your post office calls me and tells me they have your letter, but I'll need to pay again in order to have it delivered. Google pays their ISP to send packets. They pay their ISP more to send more packets. Now your ISP is calling.
The average slashdotter would say "yes", but the average libertarian would respond with "Why did the government grant T-Mobile a monopoly? Let's fix that." Personally, I'm with the libertarians.
Sure, let's see the government break ATT again, while simultaneously breaking all of the franchise contracts across the country. What, it's not going to happen any time soon? Well, then I guess we diverge. I'll go with "slap this bandaid on it to keep it from bleeding out and dying", you go with "oooo pretty red fountain". Meanwhile, I'll go back to saving my pennies so I can start a company to run conduit underneath cities and sell space to anyone who wants, putting an end to the natural monopoly. Should only take a few million years at my current pay rate.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
If taxpayers hadn't already paid to have service installed to their homes.
"Sophistry" and "Entitlement". Right. So if I pay for the packets, why should Google have to pay for them? If Google pays for packets, why should I have to pay for them? If the ISP refuses to separate this into different services, then why should they bill both of us for the same service?
Wonder when it got to the point where expecting the service one pays for was "entitlement".
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
A university (school of law) professor; knowledgeable on, "technological innovation and economic theories of imperfect competition transforming the regulation of electronic communications" or pseudo-professional marketeer platform supporting corporate-welfare-state values [AKA: FUCK THE PUBLIC]. I would break down the above quoted statement, but that would lend credence to obvious bullshit meant for politician consumption. I am sure the professor's comments will be endlessly quoted, referenced, and used in many presidential/congressional/senatorial/FCC/... reports and white-papers to justify voting for special corporate interest laws/bills that destroy democracy and capitalism.
Everyone/Biz (I know) already pays for bandwidth, quality of service, and NetNutrality as a required public utility. If a Biz or Gov wants a private service, then they should pay for it and the infrastructure involved. To treat the Internet/infrastructure as a private-rights utility is NetNepotism and anti-competitive corporatism [AKA: totalitarian welfare].
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
1) Net Neutrality means backbone network providers cannot charge content providers to supply them with preferred service 2) See #1 It doesn't prevent individuals from anything, it doesn't force you to receive all traffic at the same speed for instance. I don't think it would even prevent your ISP or network backbone providers from prioritizing certain types of traffic. They just can't charge content providers for preferred service. This levels the playing field for content providers, so my personal website would be able to be delivered just as well as google's for instance.
If none of the Cingular users paid, then the T-Mobile users wouldn't have their phone service cut off (where the hell did this idea come from?)
It's an analogy to the alleged censorship the telecoms would use on content providers that don't pay up. It's basically the worst penalty that T-Mobile can threaten their own customers with. It would be foolish...but then, isn't it foolish for an ISP to threaten its own customers with censorship?
after all, if T-Mobile told their customers the truth about why their friends aren't answering the phone, they might lose customers.
If T-Mobile lies, wouldn't they be guilty of fraud? Also, don't you think Cingular would expose T-Mobile? "Hey, switch to Cingular, because we don't lie to you like T-Mobile?"
I pay and send you a letter, and your post office calls me and tells me they have your letter, but I'll need to pay again in order to have it delivered.
It all depends on what the agreement was between you and the post office. If you paid them to deliver a letter, and they fail to do it (the receiver failing to pay does not free the post office from their promise to you), then I think they owe you a refund.
Google pays their ISP to send packets. They pay their ISP more to send more packets. Now your ISP is calling.
That's fine. Both ISPs are necessary to complete the transaction. It's simply a question of who needs who more. The party who is needed the most will make the most profit, but that high profit will also attract competition to the very area that competition is needed the most. Unless, of course, government prevents that competition from entering the market.
Sure, let's see the government break ATT again, while simultaneously breaking all of the franchise contracts across the country.
Don't bother breaking any companies; we just need every local government to nullify their franchise contracts and starting allowing competition. It's not as though I'm asking the government to spend billions of dollars. All we need is some legal reform in the libertarian direction, and the market will take care of the rest.
What, it's not going to happen any time soon?
All we need is the political will to fight the real problem.
It's an analogy to the alleged censorship the telecoms would use on content providers that don't pay up. It's basically the worst penalty that T-Mobile can threaten their own customers with. It would be foolish...but then, isn't it foolish for an ISP to threaten its own customers with censorship?
... "Hey, switch to Cingular, because we don't lie to you like T-Mobile?"
It's still a terrible analogy. If we have to deal with analogies like this, then we might as well just turn the whole damn internet off to save us all from child porn.
If T-Mobile lies, wouldn't they be guilty of fraud?
Sure, as soon as you can prove in court that they're lying. Prove that the shitty reception is T-Mobile's fault when the T-Mobile customers can talk to each other crystal clear. Prove that the Cingular user really was there waiting for their phone to ring. Absent some smoking gun memo, you're going to have a seriously uphill battle.
It all depends on what the agreement was between you and the post office.
There's an "agreement" beyond "take money, deliver letter"? Someone claimed I had a nauseating sense of entitlement, why would I not be "entitled" to a service or good I paid an agreed amount for?
Both ISPs are necessary to complete the transaction.
Well, now it's a transaction between ISP 1 and ISP 2. Why is ISP 2 billing some random company instead of billing ISP 1?
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
...how does "non-net-neutrality" affect non-Americans? Does it affect us at all? If so, then any bid to degrade the quality of service of the intertron in return for more money should be definitely shot down.
Any 'internal' US policy that could drastically affect the lives and businesses of people outside of the USA should not be passed, or even allowed to be considered, because not all of the people it affects can have a say.
Of course, this particular bid should be shot down anyway...
Net Neutrality is bad because the people passing the laws have no f---ing idea how the Internet works. All it takes is one bogus law like Net Neutrality to keep us stuck at "Web 2.0" forever.
Let's get rid of all of the incentives for companies to spend billions of dollars on infrastructure! Let's see how fast we get high speed (20, 30, 100, 1000Mbps) to the home then!
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
What makes me nervous about net neutrality is the fear that is the more we let congress legislate they will only give precedent to increase legislation of the internet. I think the solution is to tell the ATT's of the world that if they start prioritizing traffic they loose common carrier status and become liable for every thing that happens on their network. Every movie torrent, every gambling website (it's illegal in the US now). It is of course beyond impossible for ATT to police the internet so it's either don't interfere with traffic priority or spend all of your time fighting DMCA take down requests for sites you don't control. Dealing with "family" groups that want you to block all porn, RIAA and MPAA lawsuits. The only way any ISP can exist is to be a common carrier and provide equal access for all then they are not liable for the type of traffic on their network.
If he thinks non-net-neutrality is so great, then he should apply that same philosophy to tenure. Why? Because tenure can be likened to net neutrality. He can say whatever he likes no matter how stupid or profound and can't be punished for it. University tenure creates a neutral environment for him. It protects him. Net neutrality like tenure would protect us the little guys. I'll give up being a proponent of net neutrality when he gives up tenure.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Intelligence is a matter of opinion.
I mean, I'm against net neutrality, but I'm pretty liberal so that viewpoint meshes with my beliefs. But why are you all against it? I'm a little confused. You're against net neutrality and that coincides with you being a liberal? I'm a liberal and I support net neutrality - Verizon, AT&T, or Time Warner Cable have no right to limit the access of anyone to any type of content because they won't pony up fees to their respective carriers. Not to mention that net neutrality boils down to government regulation of business, which seems to be a core liberal value IIRC. So explain to me how your being against net neutrality meshes with your liberal beliefs.
Ah, another person who doesn't know what a real Liberal is about. Liberalism is about liberty and small government. Net neutrality isn't small government it's bigger government.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Just because we tend towards libertarianism doesn't mean we're chumps. Many of us have also been around long enough to remember that at the core it isn't the company's infrastructure, it's the public's, developed and paid for with our tax dollars. We willingly pay every month to use an ISP's infrastructure to access this shared asset, but we aren't dumb enough to think that they own it, any more than we think the airlines own the sky.
As a Libertarian who is, er was, against net neutrality you and others posting on this thread have given me something to think about which may change my mind so I may support net neutrality. Others have said the government gave industry billions to build out the infrastructure, such as Fiber to Curb. If so then I think it's only appropriate that there be a neutral net.
And finally, libertarians don't (or shouldn't) intrinsically trust corporations (or, for that matter, their neighbors) any more than they trust the government.
Thomas Jefferson, a Liberal as in Classical Liberal or today's Libertarian, warned of corporations. Specifically he warned of the Corporate Aristocracy.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Seems they aren't making enough money or wanting to make more by putting an artificial limit on any or all of those three items and then charge you if you want more?
Interesting, learn many new things every day. Thanks.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
First, why the government sucks at buisness: Democratic governments make decisions based on consensus of the country, decison by consensus is very inefficient.
Corporations are democratic as well. Corporations have stockholders who get to vote on shareholder resolutions as well as elect board members. And the board members may vote on where the corporation goes and how it gets there. Corporations operate by consensus. Maybe you didn't know this because you never get or read financial statements and proxies corporatons send to stockholder, but I have gotten a number of them.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Films ('movies' for you guys in the USA) over an Internet connection. This is high volume, it does make sense to get it from close by rather than a server on the other side of the world. If an ISP were to offer this service to it's customers served up from it's servers, those customers would get better download speeds than if they viewed films that had to come over the ISPs links to the rest of the world.
Everyone gains: film viewer (better download speed); ISP (don't have to pay for faster links to carry films from around the world); ISP's non film viewing customers (ISPs links not clogged/slowed with film downloads).
Downside: film viewer only gets great download speed if he uses his IPS's service. I suppose that he could choose an other ISP that had fatter Internet links - but probably pay more for this other ISP.
Discuss.
The core of the problem with net neutrality is, as I see it, a confusion of roles from the telecoms (TC). On a basic level, the _only_ thing (that I am personally interested in), is a connection to global Internet. Network Neutrality issues arise when the TC begins to provide non-connectivity based services (they starting thinking that they are an ISP (which is natural, due to vertical integration)). The entire point of paying telecoms for an internet connection is to achieve nothing but a connection (NON-BIASED routing included) to the network they were payed by the government to produce! That is it. Beginning, Middle, and End. When these connection-based providers start believing that they are the ones responsible to provide the services the internet runs on is when we run into issues. Thus, I present the following:
1) Since the telecoms are a government granted monopoly, it should be 100% possible to buy, without any "independent bandwidth rates" or other garbage, a connection (where connection means that I can route traffic to/from the internet) with absolutely no other services associated with it. By independent connection fees, I mean that it should not be possible for the local TC to charge $20 for a 1.5m/256k line to an arbitrary group (probably some subsidiary or something), and make everyone else pay $200 for the same connection. In short, I am paying for the CONNECTION, at a set rate, and nothing else. Everyone else pays the same rate (no favoritism here).
2) Telecoms are responsible for non-biased routing. Non-biased meaning "without regard to source, destination, or content type." This does NOT make QoS impossible (relative importance of traffic). Violation of this policy is cause for serious fines and/or termination business license.
3) Purchasing of a independent connection.
4) Overall bandwidth throttling is still allowed, within reason.
*) Total download bandwidth restrictions (ex. You can only download 5 GB of data a month) should be severely restricted or completely outlawed.
(The last two are not directly related to Net Neutrality, I know, but might as well be complete)
What do we gain from this?
1) Legally removes the coupling between the connection provider and the ISP (via non-biased routing), thus removing the problem with shutting off one ser
2) Fosters free market development of ISPs on a local level (the ISP becomes little more than, well, the Internet Service Provider. (DNS, Email, Webhosting). If you do not like any of the ISPs on your market, well, you can make your own!
3) Writes into law that biased routing will not be tolerated! We, the people, payed for the development, deployment, and are paying for the maintenance of these lines. Your sole existence is to maintain and upgrade the system. Period.
Potential problems with the above:
The physical connection being ran to the house. Watch out for: "Well, you can get your own independent connection, but it will cost you $100,000 to initially run to your residence if you don't get it in our in-house ISP's 10 year contract!" Unless government regulation is placed on the cost of the actual connection being ran to the residence (or, optionally, having the government subsidize the connection itself), I fear this would be the next step in TC extortion.
And just on a side note, the very idea that Net Neutrality will stifle innovation is a laugh. Lets think about this; you can either make big corporations be the only game in town, or let _anyone_ be a potential game in town. Which sounds a bit more like it could stifle any potential innovations?
With net neutrality, the carriers must make enough money to survive. If they make too much profit then the informed public (who are paying rates directly) will remove themselves from the overpriced service.
With the anti-net-neutrality stance, the carriers can pretend to their customers that they are cheaper than any other alternative. However, they can charge others access to their users and make profits that nobody is informed enough about to act upon. And, to turn TW CEO's comment around in this case: if TW are benefiting from my patronage, surely I should get a cut otherwise they are freeloading from my actions.
I've noticed that Slashdot has more opponents of net neutrality than the other sites (e.g. Digg). The people on those sites just parrot what Google says. The telecoms have colluded with government a lot more to the expense of everyone with their subsidies and monopolies, but that does not mean Google and co. do not have their own agenda either.
You are badly misrepresenting the issue here. It isn't a question of Google paying for their bandwidth (they already do), but rather my ISP (who I am already paying for my bandwidth as well) wanting to charge Google extra simply because (as you note) they've got money. This is extortion on the one hand and fraud on the other (fraud because I'm paying them for a connection to the internet, not a connection to their filtered version of it). Google is for net neutrality for the same reason I'm for laws against mugging.
You are wrong then.
You are confusing libertarianism (belief that government should only step in to solve a narrow class of problems) with anarchism (belief that the government should never step in--and thus has no reason to exist). Specifically, one of the legitimate uses of government power generally accepted by libertarians is the use of government power to prevent coercive use of force, monopolies, etc. by players in the market place; another is the enforcement of contracts. Both of these apply here.
--MarkusQ
Funny. cos' I thought a troll was a large, ugly, stupid hominid with regenerative capabilities and a 10 foot reach. Gets to be a pain, because PCs, usually medium hominids, suffer 2 attacks of opportunity before they get within melee range of this beast... unless they are using a pole arm. *shoots self*
Concerning Professor Yoo's argument: I agree that it confuses network neutrality with "hosting neutrality". The network proximity of a particular host does change the latency for transactions involving that host, but doesn't change the topology or behavior of the network that it operates on. (i.e. it doesn't change the "common carrier" status afforded to a particular ISP).
This does open up one aspect of network neutrality that I hadn't thought of though. Would it violate network neutrality for a service provider (not an ISP) to create their own network "behind" the internet that distributes content faster than using the Internet?
An example: Imagine Google dropping off proxies that, network wise, are more "local" to their users than their main servers. When users connect to the proxy, it forwards the message to Google's main servers using the "dark fiber" that Google bought long ago. A diagram to aid understanding.
And then the question that stems from this: If it's ok for Google to do it, is it also an acceptable practice for ISPs to offer the same service? Note that the only difference is the presence of the "dark net" (by which I mean the dark fiber owned by Google, not the traditional definition).
I imagine that this, effectively, circumvents net neutrality. Down the line, it may lead to the same effect as net privatization, because those that could pay for the privilege of the "darknet" would have a greater opportunity to speak. However, it would create two "zones" for ISPs, instead of just the common carrier line. In the "dark zone", ISPs do not have common carrier status. Thus, they may choose which signals cross the line. In addition, they are legally responsible for all content that goes across the line (they may be sued for DMCA & obscenity violations, etc). In the "Internet zone" they still have common carrier. They must allow all communications, but they gain legal protection from those signals' contents.
It should go without saying that only "dark" content could go through the dark zone. Otherwise, an ISP could control free speech by directing content through the dark zones that it manages. Furthermore, an ISP's dark zone, to function within the context of this idea, must utilize the Internet at its end points, and it should not segregate traffic originating from foreign ISPs. This way, if I have Earthlink wifi in San Francisco, Verizon DSL cannot prevent me from connecting to their dark zone, nor create routes that limits the use, and thus effective benefits, to only Verizon's customers. This should occur for several reasons:
Thank you for this excellent post!
I think we need to remind people that Net-Neutrality is nothing new, rather it is a way of maintaining the status quo. Many people can't even fathom the way Internet works, but they can realize that the Internet is not something we should let ISPs fuck with.
"You're everywhere. You're omnivorous."
Tag. You're it.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
You keep misstating the situation. It isn't about ISPs just deciding to deliver "Google's traffic" slowly they are threatening not to deliver it at all. And the packets they are holding hostage aren't Google's, they're mine. I requested them, using a service I paid for under a contract that I expect my ISP to honor.
The ISP's are charging me a rate far above what they would be able to get in a free market (without the government enforced monopolies they bought with their lobbying dollars) for access to a system the construction of which was heavily subsidized with my tax dollars. They are also charging Google for it's access (at a rate much higher than I pay). And then they are trying to change the rules and use their position to extort even more money, and you want to somehow defend this as a free and fair market?
Simply chanting "Corporate = Good, Government = Bad" doesn't make you a libertarian. But if you persist in doing it when the sainted "free market" corporation is using the government to charge four times for the same service, it does make you a chump.
--MarkusQ
TCP packets should have a $ field similar to current "type" field, or may be the latter should be used as such.
You as provider of content decide how fast you want your content to be distributed, so you put in your packets' $ field the amount you are willing to pay.
ISP's won't have anything to do with this, they will just collect money.
Note that "type" field is essentially about it. Whoever will use it will have to agree on different prices for different types. Otherwise, everybody will set up the highest priority type to their packets.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
You should see his outrageous thread here: Second Life Mogul Challenges Press Freedom. 13 posts, and only 7 are modded Troll so far.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Did you seriously just say "Imagine if you were calling someone in California and your rate varied depending on what network the other person had"?
;)]
Show of hands.. anyone need to "imagine" that? That's how it works over here, in the USA. Calls in-network are free, calls out-of-network are charged differently.
Not every provider does that, but they are certainly free to do so. Different people offering different choices is what makes it "competition".
[I am FOR net neutrality, but your phone example sucks
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All