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."

Comments

Re:Way off topic

[somersault]

If I could I wouldn't just mod you down, I'd provide impactful incentives that would embolden other mods to bastardizate your karma. But I can't, so I guess I'll just have to say that I agree with you.

Re:IPTV

[PingSpike]

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.

Re:I find this funny

[UbuntuDupe]

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.

Your energy provider agrees.

[Zeek40]

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?

Re:Your energy provider agrees.

[Zeek40]

Here is how I see this scenario working out, please show me where you disagree.

1. Company A is the only utilities provider for the Towns, and is charging exorbitant prices.
2. Company B sees the opportunity to compete in the market with Company A, and invests billions of dollars in infrastructure necessary to compete as a utilities company, laying lines to the entire town and creating their power plant.
3. Company A recognizes what company B is doing and lowers its rates in each area that Company B services to sell utilities at a loss, relying on their dominant market position and the capital that they have accrued while being the only shop in town.
4. Company B tries to compete for customers with Company A, but with the new low rates company A is charging, Company B finds itself short of customers and with angry investors who would like to see a return on their investment this decade breathing down its neck.
5. Company B files for bankruptcy after it is unable to recoup its massive intitial investment in laying down infrastructure to the town. Unfortunatley, as their assets are liquidated, they find that there are very few people willing to buy a backup power plant and backup power grid for an entire town, and their investors really take it in the shorts.
6. Company A resumes charging its exorbitant rates.
7. Repeat as often as there are investors dumb enough to try to get into the market.

The problem is the massive up front investment in assets that are worth very little outside the market.

Re:I find this funny

[hxnwix]

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.

Re:I find this funny

[lawpoop]

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.

Libertarian stance?

[august sun]

Dear /.

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:

/.ers tend to have strong libertarian leanings. /.ers are also vehemently and overwhelmingly in favor of Net Neutrality, which anyway you slice it still amounts to federal regulation of a free market.

Any good answers to this? I promise there will be many +informatives/+insightfuls in it for you...

Re:Libertarian stance?

[cowscows]

Listen, the USA is not an entirely libertarian free-market, nor should it be. A completely free market is not a good idea in theory, nor would it be in practice.

The cable companies/phone companies/etc. are not currently existing in a free market. All corporate utility providers are subject to lots of government rules, and for good reasons. Many of those reasons are purely practical. Running utility lines requires a lot of wires and pipes and whatnot to be strung through our cities, or under the ground, through many different pieces of public and private property. Not setting some regulations for how all of that work would create huge logistic, safety, and performance problems. I wouldn't want six different power companies all stringing lines through my neighborhood, even if it did bring prices down some.

So why would any businessman want to get involved in this? Because when a company agreed to provide utility services under those restrictions, they were usually given a monopoly in that market, without all the work of crushing their competitors.

Technology, forever moving forwards, has led to some interesting circumstances, where digital technology is allowing some of those formally separate utilities to start to dabble in each others' markets. It's all turning to 1's and 0's, and our computers don't really care how that information gets into our house. Even the power companies are exploring bringing data to us over their lines. Add in the development of wireless, and all of a sudden these long-time monopolies are experiencing competition.

There are plenty of examples of how monopolies tend to act in response to competition. They often involve using their current power to exert influence on other companies, and force unfair deals. These deals are seldom beneficial for the consumer. The Net Neutrality movement is an attempt to head off one kind of these dealings before they become a problem.

To distill the point, let's put it this way:

The government gave many of these companies their monopoly position. And now the government is trying to keep them from using that monopoly position to unfairly limit competition and new technologies.

I guess a 100% free market argument would be that their never should've been any regulations on these utilities in the past. I don't think the argument for that is particularly strong, but even if you could, it doesn't change what has already happened, and getting rid of all regulation and pretending like it never happened is not a good solution.

The real problem: ISP blocking of ports

[volkris]

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.

Re:I find this funny

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

>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

Re:Idiot.

[lawpoop]

This is patently untrue. For thousands of years, if you wanted to be a shopkeeper, all you needed was your dad to keep shop. If you wanted to be a blacksmith, all you needed was your father to be blacksmith. That's why we have family names like Smith, Miller, and Farmer. Occupations were something that belonged within a family.

For most of human history, there was an upper class of elites, about 10% of the population, who ruled over the other 90% who grew food and served the elites. There are variations throughout the world, but this is the basic pattern. There was no free market or middle class or political freedom. Wikipedia says this about free markets: "The consensus among economic historians is that the free market economy is a specific historic phenomenon, and that it emerged in late medieval and early-modern Europe". It gets a little convoluted in places like Europe and India, where what emerges is a system of classes or casts: the religious/priest group, the warrior/nobility, and the mercantile class. But don't think that there was a free market. Kings had absolute power; they could levy fines, confiscate assets, fix prices, etc. etc. What emerged out of the class struggles of Europe was the idea of liberty -- freedom -- where nobody, not a King, not a priest, could tell you want to do. Applied to economics, the conclusion is the free market. You don't need the church fixing the price of apples, claiming that changing prices was a challenge to Go'ds natural order. Applied to politics, we get the idea of political freedom and the rights of man.

Hunter gathers do/did live in a society with greater political and economic freedom, but technically, that's before history, since history is the recorded word. Furthermore, those societies are ruled by complex system of obligations to kin, so you can't really say that they have absolute freedom. As far as taxes, they have been part of business for as long as we have recorded history. The very first writings were receipts for business transactions. You needed these so that the King's tax collector wouldn't demand more than you owed, and the tax collector wanted to see that you weren't cheating him.

So basically you're taking this libertarian fantasy of a free market and applying it backwards into history where it never really existed.