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Game Theory Computer Model Backs Net Neutrality
Stu writes "'A world without net neutrality is one devoid of intellectual development' said Sir Tim Berners Lee in a presentation to congress last week. Well, now there's a computer model that uses game theory to back that forecast up. Developed at the University of Florida, the model shows that everyone loses if the IPs get their way — even, eventually, the IPs."
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It makes sense that an ISP with a given set of customers would want to extort content providers by slowing down the connections to those who don't engage in payola. But wouldn't that put the ISP at a big disadvantage compared to another ISP that continues to upgrade the speed of connections and not charge the content providers?
Oh, like these "facts" are going to stop Ted Stevens from being a tool. He doesn't need "figures" and "information" to poison his waterhole.
*woosh*
I'm an idiot. Didn't realize there was a spelling error in the summary...
Internet Providers, we are dropping Service from ISP since customer service these days is generally abysmal.
You're funny.
Really, you are. You take companies that have natural physical monopolies and then try and act like there are some competitive forces working against them when infact the only thing that keeps them from completely raping the customer are the relevant governmental regulatory agencies.
You must be too young to remember Ma Bell...
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Thats what governments do, they govern things.
And it is needed. If it isn't done, eventually one ISP will rise to the top, and be the ones to decide what you see and what you don't. When that one ISP finally takes over and claims its monopoly, we need to have some checks and balances in place.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Who cares?
Yes, it would be nice if everyone used perfect English, there were no typos or punctuation errors, and someone corrected grammatical errors before they hit the main page. But at the end of the day Slashdot is all about discussing the news, communicating new discoveries, inventions, and the progress of technology. This is not a spelling bee. While it's certainly possible to argue that incorrect use of the language can impact the communication of an idea, the majority of errors found in submissions are insignificant by any standard. I wish the Grammar Nazis would find something better to do with their time. Submitting interesting stories rather than irrelevant complaints about spelling, for example.
Their model do not account for innovation, they use fixed parameters, a very neat toy model. The real world doesn't behave like that, it is much more complicated.
Do they foresee Google raising WiMax masts? Do they foresee P2P based webservices?
The article says:
"More important, the researchers found that the incentive for broadband service providers to expand and upgrade their service actually declines if net neutrality ends. Improving the infrastructure reduces the need for online content providers to pay for preferential treatment, Bandyopadhyay said."
Of course it does, but then your competitor has an incentive to expand and upgrade their service so that they can charge lower prices. How can the model not take *that* into account?
If this kind of simulation had any validity, planned economy and sovietism would work. We know it doesn't.
\u262D = \u5350
"In Japan and Korea, where there is net neutrality and much greater competition among broadband providers than in the United States, there are also higher broadband speeds," he said."
Call me crazy, but I would think it's the "greater competition among broadband providers" that is spurring the higher broadband speed.
You could replace 'net neutrality' with 'rice paddies' in that quote and it would still be accurate.
Um, no. Everyone may lose, but those who most abuse the market will be the ones who lose least, in precisely the sense of the classical tragedy of the commons. Indeed, that's precisely why everyone is likely to lose, because the absence of neutrality rules promotes ever greater abuse. Which is precisely why a regulatory and enforcement regime is needed.
"The network" is not natural and has no natural state. The network has previously been largely neutral because of government policies enforcing certain aspects of neutrality on important parts of the network, though those policies are currently only in the form of shifting FCC practices, not law.
I'll tell you what good it did. That non-acoutistic-coupler modem that brought networking to end-user consumers in the first place would not have happened or would have been substantially delayed if Ma Bell had not been broken up. The breakup forced (among other things) them to allow other companies' products to be connected to the telephone network. I remember going down to the GTE store to rent a handset just a handful of years after the breakup because nobody else made telephones yet. I remember watching the landscape change, as I'm sure does anyone who remembers the late 70s and early 80s. The breakup of AT&T was a very good decision.
Unfortunately, we're seeing them come back together, like a bad sci-fi movie (was that Terminator 3?) or something. Fortunately, at least we are moving towards a duopoly with the cable companies serving as a little bit of competition. Unfortunately, we were already seeing stagnation in the markets because a duopoly is not sufficient competition to do much good, and I'm sure the stagnation will just get worse with time. Maybe municipal WI-Fi and other disruptive technologies will improve things, but I'm not holding my breath. Short of ubiquitous municipal fiber, it's downhill from here... at least until people get so sick of the new AT&T that they force it to break up again.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Eventually, phone service will become monopolized. We're already seeing it happening. I think the major national long distance phone carriers are down to three or four, and the number of regional landline carriers to the door are also down into the single digits.
Likewise, the number of airlines merging has greatly exceeded the number of new airlines, and the number requiring huge government bailouts to keep from closing their doors is staggering. Were the government not propping it up, they, too, would likely devolve into a monopoly within a decade.
So what was your point again?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
"Natural physical monopolies?" I think it's you, rather than he, that is joking. The abusive monopolistic power of ISPs and similar telecommunications service providers is handed to them by the regulation of the government. Government effectively grants monopolies to these companies through exclusive rights to lay dark fiber in certain areas, etc., adds a pile of supposedly consumer-beneficial regulations on top of that, and wonders why barriers to entry are so high, industry oligopolies form, and the competitive forces of the market aren't working. So since the "free market" isn't working, they add MORE regulations. When these fail to help, much less solve, the problem, someone comes up with the bright idea of actually rolling government interference back. Laudable, but when you do a half-assed job that only removes a few of the limitations on the market, you're left with an even more nonsensical regulatory structure. Which plays right into the hands of statists, who now get to claim that deregulation doesn't work and the "free market" is clearly a failure.
Here's the deal, people. There are only 10 of the so-called Tier 1 ISP. They are AOL, AT&T, Global Crossing, Level 3, Verizon, NTT, Qwest, SAVVIS, Sprint, and XO. You'll notice that many of these guys have absorbed many of other Tier 1 providers. For example Verizon now owns what used to be UUNET. They've also absorbed many of the Tier 2 ISP's. Quoting Wikipedia, "By definition, a Tier 1 network does not purchase IP transit from any other network to reach any other portion of the Internet." which is a definition I can live with.
What that means to you lay people is that whole freakin' globe is being carved up by 10 companies. Everyone else ultimately pays one of these 10 guys for bandwidth. How hard do you think it would be to get 10 CEO's to agree to charge Google for example, at the rate of 1 cent per click?
I'm not the kind of person to start screaming for the government to step in an start regulating things, but I would like to see the internet adjusted so that there are peering points that match the physical borders. I'd like to see the US goverment say that if you start charging content providers the peering points for the USA will be unavailable to you. If you're stateside, we'll charge with Anti Trust and RICO violations. Since American's buy more stuff on line than most anyone else, I think that this would prove an effective deterrent to this sort of stupidity out of the ISP's. They're already fat from the profits that they make off selling the rest of us bandwidth that must be used to send worms, viruses, and spam to each of us every day.
If they want to be more profitable, stop the worms, viruses, and spammers. That will leave plenty of bandwidth for the rest of us to do some thing amazing.
2 cents,
QueenB.
HDGary secures my bank
People who respect excellence don't deride others as elitist. Conceited or self-righteous maybe, but you didn't say that, did you. Whenever I hear someone use the term "elitist" negatively, I hear them shouting: "I am terrified of excellence."
You then further prove my point by engaging in ad-hominem attacks, rather than providing any kind of useful analysis. Who cares if he got beat up a lot as a kid? How does that make his description of the slashdot community any less accurate?
"second you aren't worrying about the depth / development / support of an idea"
How much does it cost each person who reads your post and trips on your grammar/spelling error? Typos are one thing. Lose and loose is a not-thinking-clearly problem. If you can't take the time to express yourself clearly, how can you expect anybody else take the time to figure out whether you know what you're talking about or not?
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Wow, you really thought about that.
I hate to be the one to bear bad news though, but some "geek identity" characteristics.. like HAVING to display intellectual superiority, even when it's meaningless to do so... is simply neurotic behaviour rooted in fundamentally low self-esteem.
Smart people understand that proper spelling and grammar are important in some cases... probably not so much in offhand, informal forum posts. Grammar nazism is much like judging a person by how they dress... I thought the hallmark of smart, rational people was supposed to be a tendency to judge based on merit, not appearance? If the substance of an idea is sound, does it matter if it's wearing shabby grammar?
I would respectfully submit that if proper spelling and grammar are really that important to you or anyone else, that you take a look at how and why you judge people. Certainly if you hold rationality to be an important trait, as most geeks do. And I would also submit than you as a person have more worth than simply acting as a grammar policeman on a forum, correcting people who don't give a shit about what you think about their spelling. Really, you all do. I'm serious. Please believe me, we'll all be better off if you do.
The countries in question are small and high tech, with population densities that make it a lot cheaper to provide services. I also suspect that lot sizes are smaller, so the costs of physically connecting to broadband are cheaper.
In the US, with certain exceptions like NYC and San Francisco, we have lower densities so it requires longer runs for physical wiring. This can be a major problem if you are looking at various forms of DSL, which have distance restrictions. Even if the cost differences in the wiring are relatively trivial, you would need a greater number of distribution nodes to serve the same number of drop points. In this, all of the broadband providers are in the same boat.
Then you have our laws regarding utilities and property rights. While people may want the services that come in on the wires, broadband included, they often object to stringing more wires. Furthermore, the organizations that put up the poles, or the underground utility corridors, aren't usually going to let others use their facilities for free. That's another cost that the broadband providers have to handle, reducing their ability to make a profit and their incentive to enter a market.
As a further complication to the above, local governments often restrict competition through agreements with various service providers. The idea, in an ideal situation, is to get the best price/service possible for the community while avoiding mayfly organizations that could spend millions and leave the community without the services. Whether this works depends upon the community.
While it would be nice to have increased broadband competition, I would hate to have it be the type that ends up with dozens of extra lines on telephone poles or streets that are torn up every few weeks because yet another group wants to provide services.
That does bring up another point. Do either Japan or S. Korea have NATIONAL telecommunication companies that provide the backbone for broadband? If they do, that might be another reason for their advantages.
lose and loose? seriously, you can engage concepts such as net neutrality but can't untangle the semantics of lose and loose in passing? I find it hard to believe that lose and loose is draining brain power...
I think most people have seen some version of the phenonmenal power of the human mind demonstration. Sure, too many mistakes make something unreadable and destroy an author's ethos, but think claiming that switching "lose" and "loose" signifies a "not-thinking-clearly" problem is taking this to extreme. Did anyone read the first post and not recognize the author's intention?
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I can untangle it just fine. It does, however, distract a reader. I bet you could understand me just fine if I poked you with a fork while I explained something to you, but you'd probably find it annoying, and it would distract you from my explanation.
Same deal.
Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
Government does subsidize the network. Governments have given telcommunications companies money and or tax breaks to buildout the networks therefore they are being subsidized.
Someone came up with the bright idea of charging the other end. Google is paying almost nothing for their connection (check prices on OC-192 connections) and is making billions off the people looking there. Maybe they could pay more?
Google does pay for their connection, they pay thier provider. What the telcoms want is to double bill them. If thier provider isn't making money it's thier responsibility to raise prices, it's not my ISP's responsibility to try to extort more money from Google.
FalconShould there be a Law?