Slashdot Mirror
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."
brought to you by the captcha: fickle
FTFS:
What is an IP? It can't be an intellectual property, since they don't have will, so they can't get their way. I'm pretty sure it can't be internet protocol.
Did you perhaps mean ISP?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I just feel sorry for the IPs.
RIP 127.0.0.1
We hardly knew you.
SF Bay Area indie music: bandega.com - Never miss a show again
Their couldn't be any other explanation!
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
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?
Hey, the rest of the world can run these internets and intarwebs however they like, but THIS IS AMERICA and we don't appreciate none of that intellectual development garbgage. We prefer our internets to be about sending videos of people getting hit in the testicles, underage girls shaking their ass on their webcams and flash videogames targeted at school children on Kraft Foods' websites.
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.
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!!!!
I think they're could be...
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The explanation's are just too complicated for us meer mortals.
Your really pushing it with that comment, buddy.
The Rise and Fall of Online Community
Its a sure thing.
My take: the real fear is monopoly control of the Internet. Since monopolies are a problem independent of the Internet, we need to strengthen anti-monopoly laws rather than pretend we're living like it's 1969 on the ARPANET.
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.
Remember Ma Bell? I get my local and long distance service from them right now. I'm just lucky I've got a non-ATT cellular provider. Oh wait... Edge Wireless is an affiliate of Cingular Wireless, which means it is part of the largest digital voice and data network in the U.S.*... shit!
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Look, let me explain something about group dynamics in general and geek psychology in particular. Every group develops little markers that let members know if someone is a part of the group. Particular ways of speaking, writing, or acting, little jokes, that sort of thing.
Many geeks grew up as outsiders. We were smarter, but lacked social skills. Dumber but more popular people felt threatened by our brains and put us down, picked on us, and so forth. One characteristic that groups of those dumber people adopted as their group marker was a disdain for all things intellectual. One thing many geeks have adopted is just the opposite, a respect for all things intellectual, to distinguish ourselves from them.
Do you see where this is going?
You come on a geek message board spouting anti-intellectualism, "Oh, you dorks, proper spelling and grammar don't matter. Get over yourselves." You have just identified yourself as "one of them," an outsider, probably anti-intellectual, most likely of the same sort that picked on many of us as kids.
Proper spelling and grammar are one of our shibboleths, along with Natalie Portman, hot grits, and Beowulf clusters. It isn't primarily about communication, although that is a factor. It is about identity. We are geeks. Geeks are smart. Smart people spell words correctly and use proper grammar. That is who we are.
When people here correct your spelling or grammar, they are really just trying to carry on our culture, and help you fit in. You don't have to, but if you don't, you will be seen as an outsider by many here. That's just how it is with people. You know the old saying, "When in Rome..."
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
You must be too young to remember Ma Bell...
I agree with the other guy. Breaking up "Ma Bell" was dumb, all it did was create lots of little regional monopolies. Didn't like the service? Well, you could always move across the country. Far more good was done by forcing the phone companies to allow people to buy their own phones from anyone who made a compliant phone.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
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.
The problem is that pricing has been pushed down to the point where it is almost a losing game to win market share. That's nice for the consumer and it was nice that all this service could be provided without much hardware investment.
That was great when the connections were not being used much.
The issue today is who is going to pay. And nobody wants to just raise end-user prices. While that might be the fairest way to do it, it would shrink market share and be a shakeup for the entire ISP industry.
We could have government subsidies pay for it all, as is mostly done in other countries to keep prices low. That means taxes pay for cheap Internet service. So the people that don't have it have to pay - not so fair.
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?
Of course, making Google, CBS Sports and CNN pay more for their connections just comes back around to the consumers anyway. There is no escaping that prices are going up. The consumer is going to end up paying, one way or another. The only question is how many middlemen are involved.
While I applaud the advocacy, the bad new is "intellectual development" is not what the telcos and media conglomerates have in mind.
Exactly. It's profit maximization they're after.
If they think they can make Google pay to serve their customers, they'll have a customer revolt over not being able to access Google. Google's packets are more valuable than those originating at a leaf-node ISP. Leaf-node ISPs will find themselves paying Google's ISP, not Google paying them, to get their users access to Google. They'll create a money flux across the network that won't change the status quo of their profits. It'll just be alternating currency between ISPs rather than direct currency profiting them: A¢, not D¢.
(I'd have actual cent signs there if this forum would allow the Unicode character CENT SIGN (U+00A2) as a numerical entity (), named entity (), or literal character (), yet none of those come through in my Previews.)
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
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
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.
I don't know about others, but I hack code and I don't give two shits about spelling and grammar.
So, your code rarely works correctly?
FalconShould there be a Law?
They talk as if we have a lot of choice of which providers we can pick from, well most people don't.
This whole thing of charging Content Providers more to built better pipes is BS. Thats what the whole tax cut for ISP's was about, to build better pipes and to save money by the tax cuts.
As we all know cable internet is much faster then phone copper. And to update copper they need too put in fiber, which cost us.
Cable doesn't have that issue. It does cost a bit more, but you get much better speeds.
So what if all the ISP's started charging CP's? Cable would make a killing with no return to the consumer, DSL wouldn't get that much of an upgrade, not for awhile. Even if DSL co's did put in more fiber to the neighborhood DSLAMs, they still cant match what Cable can do.
So its a Loose Loose for both sides. Cable, no better speeds, DSL, a little better speeds... when ever they get around to it, and not that much better of speeds.
From what ive been told is that they(ISP's) need a better backbone, and better pipes within the ISP. For the copper lines they really need to have a damn good plan in place.
Why 'Sir' Bernie Lee-Taupins? Lord this, Baron that (hello Conrad). I've got a PhD but I don't call myself Doctor Who. Fluff, that's what it is. At least the buggers have been voted out of existence. But they'll have to be beaten with sticks before they go away. 'Sir' my ass. That's what you call the guy at the store, unless you call him George. And I'm a brit in London
Down with categorical imperatives
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?
You young'uns don't remember exactly how it happened, so let me clarify the history, and how things have gone astray recently.
It 1968, the FCC's Carterfone decision allowed non-Bell equipment to be attached to their phone lines. This led to the adoption of things like answering machines, cordless phones, and modems, all of which were banned by Ma Bell before then (so they could rent 300 bps modems for $25/month to those who really needed them).
In 1969, the FCC's MCI Decision allowed leased lines to be provided by competitive carriers. This made long-haul backbone lines cheaper. Dial-up long distance was supposed to remain a monopoly. But around 1975, MCI figured out a trick, started its Execunet service, and while the FCC opposed it once it figured out what was going on, by 1978 a court held that it was okay. That led to the rules for LD carriers that are still in effect, wherein they pay local phone companies "access" minute of use rates at both ends of a call.
In 1980, the FCC's Computer II Decision held that terminal equipment (what Carterfone permitted to become competitive) should no longer be tariffed at all, so it would become fully competitive and deregulated in 1983. It also held that "enhanced" services could only be provided by phone companies via a "fully separate subsidiary" that purchased "basic" services on the same terms as an unaffiliated party. This is the specific rule that was revoked in 2005, effective 2006, causing the Network Neutrality problem. Under Computer II, any ISP could use the Bells' DSL for a tariffed price. That is no longer the case; ISPs have no right to use Bell wire at all.
In 1982, AT&T and the Department of Justice agreed to the Modified Final Judgement, the Divestiture, which broke AT&T into pieces effective 1/1/84. At the time, long distance was seen as competitive but local phone service was not. So the "Baby Bells" were allowed to remain monopolies, providing "access" to LD companies, and local dialtone, at regulated rates.
In 1996, the Telecom Act opened up local competition in all states. It recognized that the Bells had an advantage of incumbency, a network already in place, so it required them to provide components on an "unbundled" basis, priced based on loaded long run incremental cost, to competitors. The FCC enforced this from 1996 to 2001.
In 2001, a Republican FCC majority began to roll back pro-competition rules, finding or imagining loopholes in the Telecom Act. So now it is very hard or impossible for competitive telcos (who serve ISPs, often affiliates) to get access to Bell wire at all. Again, the idea is to allow the Bells to have total control of the content of their wire -- the opposite of neutrality. FCC chairman Kevin Martin is an unabashed Bell (and rural incumbent telco -- they're even worse) lover and does practically anything to please them. But the new Congress is less impressed with him than the old one.