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Father of Internet Warns Against Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "At a recent talk at the Computer History Museum Robert Kahn, co-inventor of TCP/IP, warned against net neutrality legislation that could hinder experimentation and innovation. Calling 'net neutrality' a slogan, Khan also cautioned against 'dogmatic views of network architecture.' A video of the talk is also available."
So we should allow the highest bidder to choke off the bandwidth from their less wealthy competitors? Honestly, can someone explain to me how this would be a good idea?
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
Kahn != Khan, so is the blurb talking about two different persons?
Fuck the internet, I'm going back to throwing rocks with notes attached.
I wonder, if net neutrality falls apart, and we end up with people charging more for high-speed pipes to certain places, will that generate a big boom in building VPN/GRE/IP tunnels to attempt to work around it? If so, that could become a very lucrative business for Cisco or any other tunnel-equipment maker/provider. Hmmm..makes me wonder if there is a new conspiracy about to brew....
- E
I don't think he's against neutrality, just legislation as a means to enforce it. Because, then, if someone does come up with a better system later, it will be hard to implement. However, the telecom's current proposal isn't really better, and does need to be dealt with somewhere.
http://bgcommonsense.blogspot.com
KHAAAN!
If I were you I wouldn't trust what this guy has to say.
At a recent talk at the Computer History Museum Robert Kahn, co-inventor of TCP/IP, warned against net neutrality legislation that could hinder experimentation and innovation.
Well, as a genetically engineered superhuman, you might want to listen to him. He's a lot smarter than you.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Um, how does this make him the "Father of the Internet"?
Co-inventor of TCP/IP, OK, but "Father of the Internet"?!? What about the CERN guys, what about the router folks, what about the...everyone else who co-invented a piece of technology that enabled the existence of the internet?
Just ranting because I'm kind of sick of hyperbole.
He's right! Any legislation will hurt the ability of people to innovate. What he missed is the biggest reason to oppose net neutrality legislation ... any legislation is another step to the government fully regulating and controling the Internet. This is something we must avoid at all costs. So far we've been lucky that the government hasn't come in and totally regulated it. We've got to work to push back what it does control now.
Who is "we", and who put "we" in the position of being in charge of what everybody else can do? If "we" is the government, I think "we the people" can count on them botching being in charge of the Internet.
Lawrence Lessig supports net neutrality and so should you. http://www.lessig.org/ The Christian Coalition supports it, too. http://www.cc.org/content.cfm?id=329&srch=neutrali ty
Wouldn't net neutrality help to stop the ridiculous arbitrary blocking of ports that many ISPs impose, which basically keeps people from using the Internet as it was intended?
Another reason not to use windows...
If anything, I would think that allowing corporate entities to throttle bandwidth for whichever site or service they choose, then hold that service's customer availability up for ransom would do far more damage to "encouraging capabilities" and "inventivize innvation". After all, money that might have gone into R&D from these companies (see: Google, Microsoft) might have to be used just so they aren't impeded from their customer.
It would also stall innovation on the end of ISPs- if they note that their current systems can't handle traffic from a certain site or service, they just throttle back that site/service, make them cough up dough, then use that dough to get more systems to handle the bandwidth (or just release the throttle, upgrade nothing, and screw the consumers; depends on which ISP we're talking about). So instead of handling it with improvements, they'll just look to throw more money for more of the same solution. (Which, granted, could be what they do now.)
Perhaps he's saying that the government shouldn't get involved on pro- or con-neutrality, which I can understand more, but then that opens the door for the greedy corporations to start throttling away.
A side thought on net neutrality: If an ISP decides to limit access to such sites as Microsoft.com, thereby hampering the Windows Update service, and the computers that can't get updated turn into botboxes (for spam or virii- or both), would the ISP then be liable for any damage caused by the spam/virii?
Ok now we have to agree on the number of 'A's for the "tagging beta".
I agree with this guy. We can't even begin to imagine what our children are going to invent after growing up in this early phase of the internet culture. I, for one, am not excited about letting the geriatric politicos shackle our kids from innovating in ways we cannot anticipate today.
Just wanted to let everyone know, I'm totally neutral on how to spell the guy's name....
(FFS, it's spell two different ways in the f%cking blurb!)
KHAAAAAAAAAAN!
Note to editors: the man's name is Kahn, you misspelled it in the second to last sentance.
Philosophy.
A law is advocated to stop behaviour some people see as undesireable. The perpetrators have no such opinion. Whatever impels them to do the undesireable act continues to operate, and they just find a way around.
On net neutrality, in a competitive market, premium services will result in lower prices for bulk services. What do I care about 2000 ms latency when I'm downloading ISOs? I just increase RWIN.
Breaking a forerunner of "net neutrality" is how the Internet got it's international costs so low. Going from channel-switched [voice] to packet-switched [data].
...the neat thing about laws is that they can be revised or repealed at a later date. Unfortunately, during the time that laws are in force, they often generate special interest groups that come to depend on them. ( In the 80's there were still lobbyists who worked to maintain mohair laws - initially passed to make sure that WWII troops had uniforms ) Every unfair law seems to create lobbyists, and the more unfair that it is, the more money someone makes from it, and then the stronger the lobby.I feel comfortable with good ol' Vint on my side.
He's the other guy responsible for TCP/IP and, in my opinion, a bit more deserving of the title 'Father of the Internet' - although it really is more of a "founding fathers" situation.
I may make you feel, but I can't make you think.
Don't forget to use the tags system appropriately...
Net neutrality IS just a slogan, and not a very good one because it means different things to different people. To Robert Kahn it obviously means locking network protocols, which obviously he is against.
But the central issue already has a name--it's called "common carrier." ISPs need to be held to a standard that is content- and author-neutral. My Web site or e-mail or video should not be able to be blocked or slowed based simply on what it says or who wrote it. I don't care about the technology that gets it there--just get it there and don't let me be discriminated against.
Common carrier is so important, and so ingrained in our way of thinking, that to some people it's impossible to imagine that it can't exist. But the fact is that it must be specified by legislation, and right now for Internet services it is not. This is the essence of the issue.
Network protocols, frankly, are not. The network protocols used on telephone and cell phone networks change all the time, but the right to have your call delivered remains. Trucks and tracking technology are improved all the time, but the right to have your package delivered has not changed in over 100 years. There is no shortage of models for how common carrier can be enforced without hindering innovation.
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.
damn beat me to it.
"Net neutrality" requires that the government first define "neutral".
Follow that to its logical conclusion and you can only conclude that passing "net neutrality" will end up resulting in government regulation of the internet.
Does anyone here that's a good idea?
So, can you explain to us why government regulation of the internet is a good idea?
What if the Hokey Pokey really is what it's all about?
Since internet bandwidth has limits (it can be clogged with enourmous amounts of material) those paying the most money can get the biggest chunk of that bandwidth. If the demand for bandwidth is high enough, that means the people on the low end of the scale get 'choked' for bandwidth.
I find it fair that people who pay more get more bandwidth and less latency. What would be unfair is if the phone companies claimed to give customers a certain bandwidth and latency and then didn't- something that falls under 'breach of contract' or 'fraud'.
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
Not Robert Kahn, but Museum R. Kahn, talking at the recent Computer History.
100:1 On an Al Gore Joke
6000:1 On a "Kahhhhhhhn!" Posting
Anybody want to post over/unders for number of posts on above subjects?
So much cliche fodder in one article.
"The Wright brothers were the first to fly with a heavier-than-air machine, but boy did they have a lousy plane"
Why would i care what this fool has to state on the internet. It is a well known fact that Al Gore invented the Internet. What does Al Gore have to say an net neutrality?
since when has the govt done anything neutral or fair? fair trade? free trade? none of it is fair, and free costs more. the tax cuts have only increased tax, if only for someone else. why do we believe their telling the truth about this? hes right, people shouldnt have to pay more, or less, for their connection speed and going to some sites. i have read comments on here that say it could create a new 'tunneling' service, and i agree, but wont that come about anyway? corporations already 0w3n the internet. cisco makes nearly everything to keep it running. and M$ provides something for, what, 90% of the people. they need no more control, net neutrality is not the answer. there should be no bill, or legislation about it. it should be running as it has been for the last twenty years. anyone for net neutrality is against you. WW IV is being fought right now, in your heads wake up....
If your content is "worthy", people will pay what it is worth to see it. The installed bandwidth will increase to meet the demand (absent any non-competative tinkering like monopolies or goverment franchises, which may be the problem here).
Well, the only reason why prioritisation of the internet would be needed is if there was more data than the internet can handle effectively.
So if MS pay and get quicker access, then it follows that, the person NOT paying for faster access must be getting slower access.
If MS got faster access and Google got the same access, then there wasn't a problem with the network being congested in the first place, was there?
Or would the internet be upgraded for MS traffic?
My stance is that, since the experts are disagreeing over the issue, the worst thing to do is to write something into law.
In fact, I believe the only reason the issue is so important is because too many things have already been written into law. Specifically, existing laws make it difficult to set up ones own telecom operation. This is what makes the incumbents so powerful, and this is why we need to be worried about them locking people out or providing suboptimal service.
If the barriers to entry were lower, perhaps we could have different carriers for different niches, rather than what is basically a yes/no proposition.
If you _really_ want to know my opinion about whether there should be net neutrality or not, I would say there has never been, nor will there ever be net neutrality. There are always some who get better service than others, even if nobody is making a specific effort to make it that way. While I think ensuring everyone can have a certain minimum level of access to information has some merit, network neutrality is either a misnomer or taking things waaaaay too far.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Seriously, who is the "father" of the Internet. You have the guy who developed HTML, you have everyone who worked on ARPANET, you have everyone who worked on TCP/IP. So who is the father? People need to stop using the name father to refer to people who were in on the early development of the Internet. It is confusing. Besides this guy is an engineer. What does he know about regulation and best business practices?
John Hodgman and Jon Stewart explain Net Neutrality
I'm not looking forward to PneuMail.
There are smarter, more determined, more knowledgeable people out there than you. That's basically it.
... something ... which will make internet access faster, cheaper and more pervasive than it is now. What that something is, no idea but I'm sure it's out there.
If the ISPs choke off their neighbours, the said smarter/more determined people will become upset by poorer bandwidth and will come up with
Deleted
Using this definition, I am very confused, as I would expect Kahn to support this type of thing. He talks about innovation a lot. I always thought the prevailing consensus was that if ISPs have their way and quash NN, little companies would be effectively "locked out" of the Internet.
Am I wrong here?
That wasn't funny. No really. That was so not funny. It wasn't funny in any way at all. Period. Get a real sense of humour.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Not sure that's a very convincing argument.
I don't live in Chicago. I sure as hell don't want to pay for their highway. Therefore, having toll roads so that it doesn't cost me more in tax dollars sounds like a really good idea.
After all, having the government pay for something doesn't make it "free" it just distributes the cost among a whole lot more people; people whom, in many cases, will never see the benefit of what they're paying for.
If you want to show that government funding for something is a good idea, you have to be able to demonstrate that it's good for everyone who's going to end up footing the bill, not just the metaphorical Chicagoan who doesn't want to pay a toll.
Nobody likes paying tolls, but I think a lot of people like paying for roads they don't use and which may be on the other side of the country even less. That's why you have toll roads: it spreads the cost of a project across the people who actually use it, and assumedly who derive some benefit from it. (The arguments against tolls usually take the form of demonstrating that "people who use" and "people who benefit from" are not the same.) While a toll-free highway in Chicago would be understandably popular to residents there (just like the Gravina Island Bridge is popular with residents of Ketchican), I doubt you'll find a lot of support for it in Honolulu or Miami: after all, those people are going to ask, what are they getting by footing Chicago's bill?
The argument people are making against network neutrality is similar. Someone who doesn't use much bandwidth, and sticks mostly to services provided by their ISP, isn't going to like a 'neutral' net, because to them, it means a higher bottom-line cost than a tiered service might. In other words, they're basically subsidizing heavier users, or users of content that would cost more on a non-neutral net.
If you want to argue against the opponents of network neutrality, you have to come up with some sort of salient argument why it benefits the user who just wants a minimum level of service for the cheapest possible price. What does the $12.95/mo. DSL user, who does nothing but check email and look at things that are on the Comcast portal page, going to get from network neutrality, other than the possibility of higher rates?
Now, for the record, I support network neutrality, but comparing it to toll roads isn't going to help the cause any. If anything, "toll roads" are exactly the argument that the telcos and big ISPs are going to make. You don't want to go down that path.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
And just when you thought he was going to be campaigning global warming for the rest of his career, here comes the father of the internet, Al Gore to warn us about this disastrous net neutrality!
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
And the mother of the internet warns that the internet better get this room cleaned up and that trash taken out before its father gets home, young man.
The GP post mentions the efficiency of free markets, and you spout off about geek dreams from 10 years ago. WTF?
And you sure as shit are buying "goods and services" from your ISP.
When people talk about Net Neutrality, do they mean ISPs can't do any packet shaping at all?
I am, for example, all for ISPs giving lower priority to VOIP if they need to. What I am not OK with is some VOIP company paying an ISP to give them greater priority priority, while the company that can not afford to pay gets shafted.
Working in this article like "the ability of systems engineers to improve latency and jitter issues" make it sounds like no packing shaping at all is allowed. Is that right?
Call it a petition: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people ... to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
You've killed my Internet, you Klingon bastard!
Can you point to actually abuses today that would be remedied by law? Or are you just panicking along with everyone else because of what a phone company blowhard spouts off but actually takes no action on?
Any company that moved away from true "Common Carrier" use would (A0 loose customers by the bucketfull, (B) increase support costs tremendously through customer complaints from the ones that did stay, and (C) face lawsuits out the wazoo from any number of organizations seeking blood now that they no longer were a real "Common Carrier" and thus immune from lawsuits.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
We have to have some priorities here. The telecoms want to charge content providers *now* and want to push independent publishers in an invisible slow tier *now*. So we need a solution to this.
And we also have this concern that a bill would hinder eventually, at some point, innovation.
Well here what: there's tons of innovation to be done that won't be against a law mandating net neutrality. We have a solution that works, is neutral and can be improved hell of a lot, before we hit some eventual obstacle to further innovation.
So I say: let's solve the issue at hand, and when this hypothetical so-much-better and incompatible with neutrality network is invented, we can change the law and adapt to it.
I mean, putting a law doesn't set it in stone. Even the constitution can be amended or altered if changes in our reality demand so. It's stupid not to take the obvious steps and save what we have right now, only because we've not yet found the absolutely perfect solution.
There's no absolutely perfect solution. There's just people who realize we need one, and people who wanna argue about it forever.
Wouldn't net neutrality help to stop the ridiculous arbitrary blocking of ports that many ISPs impose, which basically keeps people from using the Internet as it was intended?
No. It's about the interchange agreements between large carriers more than about what any limitations a given ISP can impose on you.
And, it's a bad idea because there is no need for it and it creates more laws where none are needed.
If it will not help you personally, and will hinder the efficiency of network management, why support it?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
And what I get is two answers, that in my view are opposing. On one hand, he says he thinks "the net" should flourish with innovation, not just on the edges of the net, where things have traditionally happened, but inside the net as well. And then he goes on to say that he's opposed to anything that fragments or otherwise exclude players in the net.
I'm with him on the latter, but I fail to see where or how any commercial entity operating for profit will care anything about the network's integrity if they can make profit from limiting the performance of others. "Competition" is often defined in exactly that way, after all.
Ultimately, it comes down to either trusting commercial, for-profit entities not to interfere with internet traffic at large or legislating a prohibition against such activity. Ideally, any such legislation should essentially say "innovate all you like, but you cannot reduce the performance of competing traffic." Wisdom illustrates that no commercial can be trusted not to interfere with competing business without requirement of contract or law.
With all due respect to Mr.Kahn, who I am told invented TCP/IP: Just why should we give any weight to his notion of the best way to keep the Internet from becoming just another channel for corporate interests, instead of the wide-open agora of information and ideas that it has become.
We have lived during a rare time, when such a powerful medium has somehow managed to keep from being completely commercialized past any recognition of the fragile and open universe it was for its first decade. There may be no way to stop the dictates of the almighty "marketplace" from having its way with the Internet like a brute with a virgin child, but I give credit to those who are trying to think of ways to keep it free for a few more years.
If we ever see the full-out commercialization and commoditization of the 'net, we will have lost something precious - something that made the turn of the millennium a great time to be alive.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Depends how network neutrality is defined.
If network neutrality means that every single IP packet ought to be processed equally then it is a big hindrance to innovation because basically, we will never see the emergence of differenciated QoS on the net. The later is deseperatly needed to support interactive video services such as the ones we are developping. This is basically Kahn's point.
Internet has been designed to be a dumb but very robust network (rememeber the Rise of the Stupid Network) as opposed to telephone network, more complicated and offering services at the network level rather than on terminals themselves. Kahn's view (and I share it) is that Internet may need to provide smarter services such as several class of transport and a real bandwidth management.
For instance the current media transport standard which is Real Time Protocol is the best we can get but comparted to an ATM virtual circuit, it is pretty depressing.
Some people would like to make a compromise and define network Neutrality as uniform handling of services across ISPs. But then this would require to define:
This way too much regulation for ISPs and anglosaxons :).
http://dorgan.senate.gov/documents/newsroom/net_ne utrality.pdf
Read the draft rather than just guessing. If you have a problem with it, then you should be able to list the specific section you don't like, and "all of it" isn't an answer. Let's debate what's actually out there, not someone else's summary of it.
Learn to love Alaska
The article is by Andrew Orlowski, the same guy that reported that Jimmy Wales was dead as part of his ongoing attack on Wikipedia, printed fabricated e-mails, and otherwise upheld the fine standards of Register journalism.
Has anyone actually listened to the audio to hear what Kahn actually said?
--MarkusQ
I thought Al Gore was too busy with Global Warming to comment on Net Neutrality.
Mr. Kahn seems to be completely overlooking the fact that ownership of the national network backbones is very concentrated, and that these owners are pushing hard to use their virtual monopoly position to maximize ROI. They have no incentive or stated intention of innovating or adding significantly more capacity until they've rung every last dollar out of what they've got.
It's common practice for various industries to sponsor economists, attorneys, academics, and engineers at non-profit think tanks, so it would be all too easy to suspect a hidden agenda in this case. However, a few minutes of Googling Mr. Kahn and the CNRI didn't turn up a smoking gun, so it may be that he's just being native about the market conditions.
Luke, help me take this mask off
This whole debate concerns censorship. After all, censorship is becoming America's favorite past-time. The US gov't (and their corporate friends), already detain protesters, ban books like "America Deceived" America Deceived (book) from Amazon and Wikipedia, and fire 21-year tenured, BYU physics professor Steven Jones because he proved explosives, thermite in particular, took down the WTC buildings.
Keep the internet free and neutral forever.
the telecom companies probably paid him handsomely to make this statement.
Not passing legislation or abstaining from new legislation on the matter is a third choice in the net neutrality debate. This is still not the greatest option and does not imply that the free market will solve the issue in the end, as there are still a great number of people locked into a single broadband provider because of a lack of competetion. What abstaining does allow for is the customer in such a market to sue his ISP, or for a content provider to sue an ISP. That way a specific practice can be analyzed and a legal precedent can be set, without broadly effecting network policy with overly general legislation.
Tech people are most likely the 5% of the people flooding the internet with P2P traffic which consumes 50% of bandwidth. Network neutrality is your (very targeted) subsidy, Why would anyone reading slashdot be against it?
Let's get this guy and Vint Cerf in a rasslin match!
The issue is that providers have oversold bandwidth, and are now afraid that one day, people are going to start to actually use the bandwidth, and they will be exposed. The issue here is that they were relying on favourable contention ratios, but when people actually start to download those movies, there will be problems.
Because bandwidth ill now be shown to be more scarce that believed, the price is going to go up. However, I do not think there is any need for net neutrality for this to occur. It is simple supply and demand. ISPs should be made to deliver what they promise. If they say I have 10Mbps upstream, then if someone is trying to download from me from elsewhere, then he better be able to get 10Mbps from me, assuming his downstream matches. They should just price accordingly.
As the dude said the issue is not about net neutrality at all. It's about people not understanding whats important in the evolution of a such a system, the whole of the Internet must not fragment if it to grow as one, but at the same time if it is to grow at all, it needs crazy ppl doing crazy things that may isolate them more from the rest of the net. The point is to make it easier for the rest of the ppl to find these unknown few, other wise growth will be slow due to self imposed fragmentation. Think of it as mutation in a collections of cells, the most important type of mutation in this case is one which changes how the cells interact, however since we don't know what each cell is gonna do, we don't know the result of the mutation. we can only try it and hope for the best. but on the scale of the Internet this must happen naturally. and must not be suddenly forced on every single element of the system. Since in the case it is a 'bad' mutation the system cannot evolve to get rid of it, since no since cell has the original form any more, thus there is nothing to compare it to, to know if it is better or worse.
We have lived during a rare time, when such a powerful medium has somehow managed to keep from being completely commercialized past any recognition of the fragile and open universe it was for its first decade. There may be no way to stop the dictates of the almighty "marketplace" from having its way with the Internet like a brute with a virgin child, but I give credit to those who are trying to think of ways to keep it free for a few more years.
And it's amazing all this happened while the internet was unregulated. Imagne what would of happened if it had been regulated.
FalconShould there be a Law?
i think ive seen this article or several articles like it, once every other week, for the past 6 months.
if this were an image board id be posting the dead horse.
"Suffocating net innovation . . . would create heroic camaraderie."
$META_SIG_JOKE
I think the public utility comparison that you make is somewhat valid currently because of artificial monopolies, but the situation is rapidly changing as the difference between telephone and cable dissolves. Monopolies should be crushed, because they interfere with a proper market. In most places that I am familiar with (large US cities), cable companies have artificial monopolies via government "franchises". In this case, the government is the problem because they created the artificial scarcity. Notice how cable companies are fighting tooth-and-nail via regulation to keep telephone companies out of the video market. If and when the telephone and cable companies all start offering the same services (voip, pots, television, internet, etc), you will see more market forces in the data delivery market. As the monopolies break up because of the new technology, competition will cause supply (i.e. bandwidth and physical cable) to meet the demand, because the artificial barriers will be gone. The only thing standing in the way is the use of regulations to enforce artificial monopolies.
> When people talk about Net Neutrality, do they mean ISPs can't do any packet shaping at all?
No.
What we're fearful of is, say, Corp X making only their VoIP service usable by hobbling all the competing services. Or of them charging companies like Google for access to us (e.g. unless Google pays up, they hobble my ability to get to Google through them).
So what people don't like are abuses of packet shaping for anti-competitive reasons, or for the sake of extortion. Simply turning on QoS and making sure that telnet and VoIP have high priorities than, say, FTP, is perfectly reasonable, although I'd point out that the client can do that on their end, too (and they probably know their own traffic shaping needs better than the ISP would).
See also: Save the Internet.com
Disclosure: I currently work at a telco albeit a very, very small one in a remote corner of Alaska. I used to work at a marginally larger telco, also in Alaska.
/. We want the net to work because we use it, too.
The idea that sparked net neutrality is good: having an ISP extort money from Google, Youtube, MySpace, etc. is a Bad Thing (tm). The Internet was built on open standards, and in the spirit that built the Internet, ISP's should work together to make the Internet as useful as possible. I really don't want to see turf wars between Verizon and Vonage (as an example) break out across the net. And, especially in rural areas, you can't really count on market forces to sort things out, since there may not be a competitor that you can switch to. I know in some areas where my employer provides Internet services, there aren't any realistic alternatives.
However, I have yet to see a network neutrality proposal that is able to discriminate between reasonable prioritization and abuse by the ISP. For example, the company I work for provides class-of-service to customers who need a priority bad enough to pay for a top-tier service. We have a customer that provides telemedicine to rural areas, using VVoIP. This is a lifeline service to a lot of "bush" Alaskans. Can you really argue that someone's MP3 or divx download should be running at the same priority as a telemedicine video conference where a doctor at a rural hub is trying to talk a PA in a tiny, remote village through stabilizing a patient so the patient will survive long enough to get a medevac flight out to a real hospital? Also, all of the draft net neutrality legislation I have seen looks to me (IANAL) as if it would prohibit any blacklisting based upon source or destination address. At the ISP where I used to work, we maintained static and dynamic RBL's and the like in an attempt to minimize spam sent to our customers' inboxes. Judging by the e-mails our customers sent to our abuse e-mail, by far most of our customers *wanted* this service (actually, many of them griped that we weren't filtering enough). While we also used heuristic filters, the blacklists were our first line of defense against spam.
In the end, I simply don't trust Congress to write a law that adequately balances between legitimate prioritization and blacklisting by an ISP and abusive actions in an attempt to squelch competition (send me an internet through the tubes, if you think Congress is savvy enough to write a good piece of technical legislation...groan, and *he's* from Alaska, too...<shakes head in frustration>) I would rather see market forces determine what an ISP can and cannot do. Perhaps the big boys like AT&T and Sprint are different than the small ISP's where I've worked, but in my experience, most of the network engineers are decent people like most everyone else on
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Every time this comes up, it comes down to this:
Every soundbite explanation I've seen of what "net neutrality" should do has been a disasterously bad idea. Most of them would prohibit me from tar-pitting spammers or just plain dropping their traffic, because I'm not allowed to drop their traffic in preference to someone else's, because that's not "neutral".
In a world of oversold bandwidth, reliability costs extra. Just deal with it already. We have been doing just fine without this legislation for twenty years; we don't need it now.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
How much he's getting paid to say that...
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
I see your point about regulation, but shouldn't a market be given the chance before it is regulated? We do not know for sure how customers will react to ISP tiering. We do not know how colo's and ISP's will peer without enforced neutrality.
Right now, the big content providers *do* get preferential treatment. This is already happening. I have read that Yahoo only pays for half of its bandwidth. It gets the other half for "free" because the ISP's want to peer directly to the Yahoo network and Yahoo wants to peer directly with them. This saves each side on transit costs. It also makes each service appear faster because they are decreasing latency and hops. Is this fair to the little guy that cannot directly peer?
For all we know colo's will start offering premium peering for the little guy. You can be small, but you could pay an extra fee each month to get premium routing to ISP's and be just like the big guys.
I say, let the market work. If we see a problem, then pass laws. Trying to pass a law before the problem fully manifests itself can cause stupid laws that hinder progress.
the laissez-faire approach you advocate will help the monopolists and would-be monopolists and harm everyone else.
Not quite, if the markets were governed by laissez-faire economics there wouldn't be the telco or cableco monopolies. Laissez-faire would allow anyone able to offer phone or cable service to offer them, but instead we have government granted monopolies.
FalconShould there be a Law?
Any of you knuckleheads notice the tag 'shill' on this article? hahah. slashdot /is/ still funny.
You should understand that the ISP end of the industry has been involved in building the customer base, overselling facilities and fighting all efforts at any sort of realistic pricing. Business customers are charged 10x what home customers are charged for identical service, often with the business getting capped at lower levels than home users are.
This is partly the result of the last 20 years or so of marketing hype and selling to the lowest common denominator. You buy a 21 inch display and bring it home to find out in tiny print that it isn't 21 inches but "19.8 viewable inches". There have been plenty of lawsuits over this kind of thing, and I don't see it stopping anytime soon.
Where we have gotten ourselves is a race to the bottom for Internet service - whoever can deliver "services" for the lowest monthly price wins, at least for 99.99% of the consumers. The fact that Plan A may be more restrictive if you do certain things vs. Plan B which costs more is lost on the average consumer - they are voting for the lowest price per month. And that is pretty much where the thinking stops.
Step forward to people actually using the oversold bandwidth and you will (any day now) see that the "service" doesn't work as it was hyped. Of course, they have your agreement to lots of fine print that really says they aren't delivering anything at all, just a vague promise for some kind of "Internet stuff" that their lawyers didn't understand when they wrote the agreement. So you really want to use that bandwidth you have been sold? Well, that is going to cost more.
Do you really think the large, consumer-focused ISPs are going to deliver a message to their customers that prices are now going to be tinged with reality? That maybe selling 1Mb of bandwidth to a business costs the same as 1Mb of bandwidth to a home user? No, I don't think you are going to see that at all. This would drive significant numbers of home users back to dial-up connections or dropping the whole think altogether.
What we are going to have instead is the folks making piles of money with advertising that these consumers are soaking up (and evidently acting upon) paying the freight so the connections are still priced unrealistically. So you can have your $14.95 a month DSL connection with free Yahoo advertising included at no additional cost. While the business down the street is paying $70-80 a month for nearly the same service, except with the word "business" in it.
It will be Google, Yahoo and MSN paying or the end user paying. I don't think they are going to make the end user pay, ever. It would kill the user base and shrink the number of eyeballs looking at all those ads. That it might shrink the folks responding to phishing and stock scams would be a good thing, but that isn't going to happen either.
Google or you - one of you is going to pay.
Damn that tagging system and its inability to standardize semantic tags!! (a little off topic, but this post was flagged as having too few characters per line! I hope adding this to it makes it post... nope, I'll add some more. Seems you can't just post a list. shucks. ahh well here is some more text that should add to the number of characters per line... i wonder how many random sentences i need to write before it lets me post. seems 12 characters per line is too few)
Given that it would take the power of government to compel a company to say whether or not they had actually "taken no action", I'd say that the various CEOs have opened Pandora's Box, and now must deal with the consequences.
The kind of action this bill is meant to prevent would be quite visible and have a number of people the Telcos were demanding money from screaming at the top of thier lungs - like Google did when they raised awareness about the whole issue.
Laws are a means of last resort, not something to add just in case possible someday might do something bad!
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I thought Al Gore invented the internet!
The FCC also thought they had the authority to unbundle the last mile network and set network access pricing...how'd that work out for them?
The fact of the matter is that the FCC is directed by Congress and their authority is limited by the laws that are passed. Even when Congress tries to specifically authorize them to do something--like unbundling--the committee can fail if the wording is not clear.
If we want to protect ourselves from abuse by the ISPs, the only sure way is for Congress to pass a clearly worded law that says so. I'm not saying that current bills do that; I haven't read them. I'm just saying that that is the minimum we should be happy with. Right now Internet services do not enjoy such protection under the telecommunication laws. They are specifically exempted from common carrier status, in fact. So the FCC does not have much of a leg to stand on, when it comes right down to it.
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.
"You want low latency in your game traffic?"
Then you'd better hope the game company decided to pay the toll imposed by every network provider between their server and your PC.
"How about smooth VoIP conversations?"
Ditto your VoIP provider, as well as potentially your ISP and the ISP of the person you're talking to (if they're also on VoIP).
"Would you like your ISP to block the spambot from filling your email with nonsense?"
That'd be nice, but I'd rather put up with the spam then give my ISP and every ISP between me and the person I'm emailing carte blanche to pitch or delay every message I send.
"There are good reasons for prioritization and blocking,"
I don't see why net neutrality needs to prevent prioritization. Shouldn't it be possible to write the laws in such a way to outlaw traffic shaping based on who the sender/receiver are while still allowing shaping based on what they're sending.
I'll grant you blocking is more problematic, but do you really want any network provider on the net to be able to arbitrarily block your traffic with no accountability?
"none of which any of our current legislators can comprehend"
Then perhaps we should try explaining it to them.
"If you don't like your ISP's policies, find another. If you have no choice, go talk to your local city council about laying municipal fiber"
And how does that help if some douche-bag backbone provider decides to throttle all traffic coming from a website I like because that site didn't feel like paying the toll? Unless you're suggesting that my municipal fiber network will have transatlantic cables...
Note that I'm not necessarily saying that net neutrality laws are a good thing, or that we wouldn't be better off keeping the government out of these things, but I do think you're over simplifying the argument a little.
I wish I were as sure of anything as some people are of everything
for one reason. When ONE phone company and ONE cable company control the traffic, they will squeeze every dime from every angle that they can.
This is the propoganda evoked by the right wing... except that neutral has been defined for over 100 years, it's called common carrier access. The phone companies have used that for a long time without any problems, and the Internet, until last year (when the FCC changed the status of data networks), was **also** governed by the rules of common carrier. Yet, the right wing never complained about Internet overregulation during the common-carrier years. In fact, they wanted ot regulate it more. But now... well, that's a different story...
Anyone who tells you that net neutrality will somehow burden the Internet with overwhelming government regulation is inherently lying or is completely unaware that until 2005, the Internet was "regulated" by net neutrality rules with no complaints.
Thanks,
Mike
... sorry, but it had to be said ;-)
You have to legislate conventional broadband for the simple reason that it involves property easements - people running cables through semicommunal and private land. Without this it would be impossible to have wide-scale broadband. Obviously you also can't count on the broadband providers to operate in the best interest or self-interest of the consumers.*
Until or unless you eliminate the broadband monopolies (and residual power of the monopolies that now exist) you need something like Net Neutrality. The reality is that most people have very limited choices in terms of affordable broadband - 0,1 or 2 actual providers. (A million people reselling the same monopoly DSL doesn't count separately.) When you're thinking about backbone peering connections, I'm anti-NN. But for the VERY SMALL number of monopoly providers it's essential.
Net Neutrality should ONLY apply to monopoly providers. And for them we need it - they have an anticompetitive business model at their very core. Chances of SBC letting VoIP operate fairly over their lines? Zero.
For example, SBC (at least) STILL hasn't opened up DSL (last I checked, in IL) - they're required to offer 3rd party DSL and 3rd party POTS service... BUT YOU CAN'T HAVE BOTH. 3rd party POTS means you can only buy DSL through SBC.
*Witness the crazy things they've done to prevent anyone from offering municipal broadband of any kind. When a majority of citizens of that town want it, they convince the state legislature to make it illegal!
Looking for freelance Actionscript (Flash/Flex) or ColdFusion work and/or freelance developers. Email me, put Slashdot
I thought Al Gore was preoccupied with global warming.
Net Neutrality is a techincal problem, and the solution will consist of
* Anonymous communication
* Encrypted datara transfers
* Mesh networks
Simply put, just bypass the ISP.
Net Neutrality is a slogan. It means nothing.
Dont you know, anyone running MPLS as their core network is already prioritizing traffic on their backbone?
Big supprise, Internet access has the highest packet loss on the backbone. It is totally 'best effort' service.
All because some droid at ATT got told about the cool things that ARE being done with QoS, CoS, and Tail Drop, you guys have your panties in a wad over something that simply isnt practical.
Then he further displays his ignorance, by claiming they arnt getting paid for other companies use of the network??? We all know that is clearly NOT the case. Everyone pays for access to the network.
Being able to differentiate traffic on the network is a HUGE value add carriers need to be free to offer to customers. Otherwise, the only way they can make themselves more attractive is by spending billions in infrastructure upgrades, while all the while being told thier prices are too high. If they think they can make money selling higher quality bandwidth on their network, why should we be passing laws to stop them?
As long as access to that bandwidth is available to anyone who wants it, there should be no problem.
Will it jepordize some companys? Yes, absolutley. The same way these pump and dump dial up providers did in the mid 90s, offering $9 a month dial up access, if you paid a year up front. Folks that were in the access business for the long term had to quickly change the way they did business to be able to survive in the face of such insane pricing.
There is little revolutionary in this 'problem'.
Its just the network growing up a bit more, and certainly not in an un-anticipated direction. Honestly, why do you think we invented IPV6, QoS markings and queuing systems for IP?
To those who believe this can only lead to a monopolizing of internet voice by the last mile carriers, I ask you, what has changed? Voice, as an application, has long been designed to favor the regional or local carrier. Even the current laws concerning transporting voice 'long distance' acknowledge doing a call over VoiP is still a long distance call, and that fees that apply to a normally trunked call apply to voip trunked calls.
To those who fear content providers will be squeezed out, I say, fear not. The Google's and Yahoo's of the world are premier customers of the network. Not only do they already get better pricing for access than anyone else, they have plenty of documentation showing the value they bring to a carrier's network. Do you really think any carrier in their right mind is going to try and figure out how to double charge these guys, in an effort to do what? Add money to the bottom line? or totally piss them off to the point where they simply stop serving that carriers customers? Whoops! Now your network doesnt talk to yahoo, google and microsoft? Your network now has zero value to me, Buh by!
It works both ways, friends. Never Fear. The Internet routes around these issues all on its own. The only protection it needs from government, is in its physical infrastructures. The rest seems to be sorting itself out quite nicely!
The Internet exists because of the regulation (aka standards) that has been enforced with a reasonable amount of evenhandedness on all communicating parties. Without that, we'd still have the cacophony of incompatible, proprietary standards that you see in LANs, with every company implementing their own "standard" that's intentionally incompatible with competitors' "standards".
Regulations and standards are totally different beasts. People have to obey regulations which are government created laws or they can be fined or jailed. Standards, on the other hand though, people are encouraged to follow so there is interoperability between different networks. People are not required to follow standards, but if they don't all that happens is that they won't be interoperable which discourages clients or customers, they are not fined. As an example, the vast majority of websites don't follow W3C Web Standards yet they aren't fined.
FalconShould there be a Law?