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Congress to Debate Net Neutrality
evw writes "The NYTimes is reporting that legislation was introduced in the Senate on Tuesday in support of Net Neutrality. It is bipartisan legislation introduced by Olympia Snowe, R-Maine and Byron Dorgan, D-N. Dakota, however the article notes that Senator Snowe is one of the few Republicans that supports it. "Senior lawmakers, emboldened by the recent restrictions on AT&T and the change in control of Congress, have begun drafting legislation that would prevent high-speed Internet companies from charging content providers for priority access." This isn't the first attempt. Last year a similar amendment was blocked. However, conditions placed on AT&T in its merger with SBC have emboldened supporters of the legislation."
because Elbereth knows, when I think about things that are helpful, efficient, and beneficial to everyone, the first thing that comes to mind is "US government regulations".
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
Yeah I know, nothing to do with the article, but I'd prefer that congress draft legislation to ban the use of the word embolden. I also nominate incentivize and impactful.
Feel free to mod me down.
Oh and to you it's a living language people, I know, but these bastardizations can in no way improve our ability to communicate.
C'mon congress, learn from history. The second internet companies are allowed to make tiered internet is the day internet and porn dies. Do you want to be on the receiving end of THAT backlash?
This is a step to limit the internet companies from rippnig the money from my wallet, but letting AT&T regain itself from a century of being split was a mistake. The evil has respawned, and threatens my porn.
In Soviet Russia, dots slash you!
They're perfectly cromulent words that embiggen the language.
Why don't you stop being a knee-jerk libertarian for a minute and think about things. It sounds like you would like to repeal all laws. I'm sure you'd scream bloody hell if some Govt. backed Corporation walked up and took all your land for a casino for the "Betterment of the Community". Anyone that thinks that large corporations will look out for any interests other than the large stockholders needs their head examined. Look what happened to Enron. That's the poster child for your deregulated market.
The concern isn't that the telcos will use QoS to make their IPTV service faster. Its that they'll choke any IPTV packets that don't come from their own IPTV service, effectively shutting the competitors out of the market and leaving you with yet another local monopoly to deal with. Or try to extort money out of big content providers like google for instance. Hell, one of those fat fucks actually said he was planning on doing just that.
Net neutrality is fraudulent, because no one knows what the market will want tomorrow.
Let's go easy on the rhetoric; net neutrality might lack merit, and it's proponents might on occasion make fraudulent claims* but "net neutrality" is not fraudulent. And while I agree that people too often use static thinking when talking about markets, I strongly suspect people will ALWAYS want to know when their access to something is being throttled because the provider has been bribed to make your access more difficult by someone who can't compete on a level field.
*though more often it happens the other way around. Ted Stevens and Professor Woo, I'm looking in your general direction. Except about the internet not being a truck. That part you got right.
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Tell this to your local utilities company,they'll agree wholeheartedly because it's incredibly expensive to lay down the infrastructure to compete. Your electricity bill and water bill will go through the roof without the government smacking them on the hand. These sorts of things are natural monopolies where the cost of competing in the industry outweighs potential benefits to the consumer. There are very few cities in the US that i know of which have multiple cable companies servicing them, do you really want your only option for high speed internet access to have the freedom to determine what services (that they're not providing to you, they're just delivering) you have to pay extra to see?
Selection? Selection of what? In what way does mandatory equality of QOS negatively impact the internet? I posit that the internet owes its success to carrier's whose motivation presently is to provide the best possible service. Breaking nuetrality means it will be the carrier's fudiciary duty to degrade all traffic and underinvest in their networks in order to force all users to pay unavoidable tolls. Users who refuse will see their traffic neglected and actively sabotaged.
"Net neutrality is bad idea -- just like most regulation of industry. How about revoking some of the pro-monopoly laws that exist, and allowing the market to go where the consumer wants it to? Voting with your dollars gives us cheaper goods in greater quantity. Setting regulations does the opposite."
You are working from an unsupported proposition - that all regulation is bad - and saying that since net nuetrality is regulation, it must also be bad. Your conclusion presupposes your conclusion. That's called begging the question.
You viewpoint is naive. Read some American history about the period 100 years ago. Standard Oil wasn't created by government 'interference'.
The intense competition of the marketplace creates great incentive to cheat and deal with people unfairly in order to get ahead. A truly free market will be taken over by powerful monopolies who will work to *remove* competition. Corporations have no incentive to tell us the truth or to use less hazardous manufacturing methods if it makes them more money. They have no incentive to pay people decent wages if they could have child laborers working 80 hour weeks, or even serfs or slaves. The slaves were freed through government 'interference' in the marketplace. Children were taken out of factories and mines by government 'interference'. Workers were given 40-hour work weeks with overtime thereafter, lunch breaks, bathroom/coffee breaks, and retirement accounts by unionization and government 'interference' which allowed unions. Read some history about how labor organizers were beaten up and killed by private 'security' services employed by corporations.
The role of government is to keep the marketplace fair by creating the rules through law, and punishing cheaters. Otherwise a free market will simply reward cheaters and strongmen. Part of keeping the marketplace fair is ensuring competition. This involves breaking up monopolies. We are a democratic republic, and we have the rule of law. In order for the government to legitimately regulate the marketplace, law must be passed.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
I have a confession to make, I haven't been following the net neutrality issue closely at all. The extent of my understanding is that its proponents are calling for federal legislation ensuring that the private companies who do some infrastrutural magic to make the net possible, aren't allowed to discriminate or otherwise let business decisions apply to how they treat network traffic.
As I see it, this should give rise to a philosophical point of contention:
Namely, how do you reconcile libertarian free-market capitalism with legislation that at the end of the day will still be restricting the free-market actions of private companies.
To distill the point, let's put it this way:
Any good answers to this? I promise there will be many +informatives/+insightfuls in it for you...
How about revoking some of the pro-monopoly laws that exist
I can see it now: instead of a series of telephone poles along my street with maybe ten cables and wires running along them, it'll be a solid wall of copper and fiber, one for each company providing a service.
Oh, wait - if everyone had to run their own cable on the poles, the expense would be so high that nobody would make any money (except whoever owns the poles). That must be why some companies pay other companies to use their cables. This sounds vaguely familiar.
Even with deregulation, you're still going to have oligopoly status in the broadband market (as opposed to the duopoly status we have today), and that oligopoly status will still lead last-mile ISPs to try to double dip by charging content providers who aren't their direct customers and to try to block services that they wish to provide by themselves like VoD and VoIP.
By the way, you make a lot of generalistic claims without providing any justification for those claims. Instead of saying things like "regulation is bad" or "regulation restricts technology", you need to provide some specifics on why you think network neutrality won't work if you plan on convincing people, because those generalistic claims aren't always true.
I think this Network Neutrality debate is a bit misfocused. If we want to ensure the ability of people to speak their minds on the Internet we would do better to attack the near-universal practice of ISPs blocking ports and restricting the use of home servers.
THAT is where the free speech comes from: the people. The NN debate seems to be rather focused on the ability to choose between large companies that want to profit through our expression. Even though there may be more options it still represents a consolidation of content. If we want information we must get it from these providers; the only way for individuals to express themselves is to partner with some provider.
It doesn't have to be this way. If ISPs would let us use even our measly aDSL uplinks (that we pay for) to legally serve our own content people would be able to self publish. Software would be created to deal with the technical challenges that would arise, perhaps with legitimate P2P providing interesting solutions to some of these problems. In any case, that small change in policy has the potential to really change the way people view and use the Internet.
Network Neutrality proponents love to talk about a level playing field... lets level the playing field between the consumers and the providers as a whole.
>Net neutrality is fraudulent, because no one knows what the market will want tomorrow.
Net neutrality is _vital_ because no one knows what the market will want tomorrow.
If huge and stupid companies get to decide what internets go over their tubes(*), we won't get innovative new services coming out of nowhere. If the huge and stupid companies simply sell bandwidth for us and the innovators to use as we please, then tomorrow's applications can thrive.
(*) Poor Ted Stevens
Prioritization only matters when the network connection is congested. When it's congested, packets must necessarily be dropped. You can either drop all packets equally (your data transfer slows and your HBO starts cutting out), such as with a "neutral" Internet like today's, or you can prioritize (your data transfer slows more, but HBO stays on the air), in a "non-neutral" fashion.
Customers won't just know what's being throttled, they will actively want it to be that way.
I'm not sure why but everyone on /. seems to think libertarian must be 100% free market. The libertarian view is that government should get only get involved when the free market cannot regulate itself. Last I checked, the telecoms aren't interested in playing fair. This means we need the government to get involved.
The public highway system is most definitely better than not.
The USPS is fine for most peoples' needs.
Corporations can't fund an army.
The above government controlled systems are working pretty well. There's nothing wrong with the government legislating fair play. We need net neutrality.
Wow, first Congress solved the spam problem, and now they're going to address net neutrality!
Why don't I feel comforted?
Your electricity bill analogy actually doesn't work. In this case it is power GENERATORS that CHARGE YOU for electricity usage, they are like the content providers that charge a subscription to give you access. ISPs would be like the power TRANSMISION companies, and we pay a flat montly fee for that service (at least here in deregulated Texas)
HTML is obsolete. It's time for a new, simpler and richer markup language.
Actually, the middle class emerged during the middle ages as the bourgeoisie, which consisted primarily of merchants. The rise of the middle class over the last century or so has been primarily due to industrialization and mechanization, which has shifted more workers from away from production type labor and into mercantile and technical fields.
You're assertion that the whole of human history, up to recent times, has been the history of the free market is entirely false. For example, in feudal Europe and Japan you needed a lot more than a shop to be a shop keeper. You needed to be a member of a certain land-owning class, something a great deal more difficult to obtain than a business license. And where exactly would you say that slaves fit into the free market?
You also claim that Socialism and regulated economy are inventions of the past 100 years. However, Marx wrote The Communist Manifesto in 1848.
Your entire statement is nothing more than supposition and conjecture, interlaced with flat out falsehoods. The free market is far from perfect. There are plenty of areas where regulation is needed to ensure things operate smoothly (economists refer to these as externalities). However, you completely fail to understand the respective benefits and shortcomings of the free market and socialism, not to mention basic history.
You're asking Congress to start directly regulating technical policy with how the Internet works.
Ummm..... Technically they have since it started.
Does DARPA ring a bell?
And all Telco's and Cable Co's have been FCC regulated since day one. And if you have ever worked an ISP you'll know there is plenty of regulation on how DSL, Central Offices (the phone company ones), and DSLAMs work.
The only reason you can get Speak Easy and Earthlink DSL is because of current government regulation that forces telco's to let 3rd party ISPs use their CO's for their rack equipment.
In this instance government regulation prevents over powerful already government sponsored monopolies. You remember the telco's got all that tax money in the 90's to build infrastructure?
Well if we let the telco's go hogwild then the ISPs might as well be owned directly by the government... one that wants to charge whatever they want without.
Normally I am a libertarian, but we are far too into this to let these companies run crazy without over sight.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
So, your argument is that we should give ISPs carte blanche to turn the internet into their own personal profit wagon, just so you can watch HBO without glitches?
Network Neutrality simply means that the ISP is either not allowed to set up that dedicated network connection to the content provider, or if they decide to do it, they have to eat the cost (and by "eat the cost", we mean, "pass the cost onto the consumer").
And since that would jack your IPTV bill up beyond reason, nobody will buy IPTV. Hmmm... You know, having read all of the comments to this point, I'm coming to one undeniable conclusion: Maybe IPTV just isn't a good idea right now? If we had the bandwidth that's considered "normal" in most of developed Europe, we wouldn't even be having this discussion. But no, we live in a place where a 5Mb/s burst on a typical home connection is considered phenomenal.
Why don't we let the ISPs who want to roll out IPTV so much actually build the infrastructure that we paid them billions in tax dollars to build for us? Then perhaps we'll have enough bandwidth that they can roll out all their nifty services without needing to destroy the way the internet currently works.
I'm sorry, but if I have to choose between handing a bunch of obviously crooked corporations unfettered access to turn the Internet into their own, personal plaything, and letting Joe Sixpack suffer through some lag on iHBO.... so be it. I choose the internet.
Formerly GNU/Anonymous Coward. This message has been determined to cause cancer in laboratory animals.
Customers won't just know what's being throttled, they will actively want it to be that way.
Except that the ISPs aren't throttling based on what the customers want, they want to throttle based on how much HBO pays them to not be throttled.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
Why should anyone be entitled to all you can consume bandwidth for a miniscule amount each month?
Because I pay for it. If they aren't making money off it, they should change how they charge me, not make some backroom deal with some other company. I'm the one consuming the bandwidth. I'm the one requesting it from Google or wherever. So I should pay for my access, just like Google does. What "they" want is to still charge me $1 per month for "Internet access" so that no one else can come in with BBPL, wireless, cable modems, etc. and make money from it. They want to crush the competition with their monopoly status and low fees to the consumer, but then charge Google $1,000,000,000 to access their network at anything other than crippled speeds.
No one is complaining about the prices or speeds of their connection. The complaint is about back room deals that are designed to be anti-competitive and hurt the consumer by abusing monopoly status.
Learn to love Alaska
And HBO decides how much to pay for that service based on how much their customers (the advertisers) are willing to pay to make sure HBO stays "on-air".
The advertisers, in turn, will decide how much they want HBO to stay on-air on the basis of how much they are willing to spend to ensure that HBO's viewers (to whom their advertisements are directed) keep watching HBO, and thus their advertisements. This roughtly correlates with how much the viewers desire a clear, non-throttled transmission (though there are obviously other factors involved, such as the quality of the shows).
End result: Viewer preferences dictate the priority the ISP assigns to HBO.
"The state is that great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everyone else." - Bastiat