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FCC Votes Yet Another Study of Net Neutrality
yuna49 writes to let us know that the US Federal Communications Commission last week announced a Notice of Inquiry (PDF) into: "...the behavior of broadband market participants, including: (1) How broadband providers are managing Internet traffic on their networks today; (2) Whether providers charge different prices for different speeds or capacities of service; (3) Whether our policies should distinguish between content providers that charge end users for access to content and those that do not; (4) How consumers are affected by these practices." eWeek reports that the study is targeted at whether broadband providers are treating some content providers more favorably than others. Distinctly absent is any discussion about port filtering or other restrictions on Internet usage. The two Democrats on the Commission pressed for a broader "Notice of Rulemaking" to move more quickly towards a policy of non-discrimination. The Republican majority ignored these arguments and voted for an Inquiry, to which the Democrats acceded.
Think of it as an extension of the antitrust regulations...
In this case the laws are possibly needed to control the backbone operators who will have no qualms about charging "unneutrally" once the market is ripe, which will give ISPs no choice but to pass it on to a consumer.
After all, 1000 bytes of email is "worth" more to a consumer than the same 1kB as part of a streaming audio. Now look at the cell phone industry in the US to see the kind of shit the Internet will turn into once they reason like that.
I'm sure people said the same thing about Fair Use rights. "Why do we need a law that proactively states people can use their music they purchased any way they see fit?" The record companies would never do something so consumer unfriendly as to try an dictate how people enjoy their product, or say they had to buy a separate copy of an album on tape to use in their Walkman instead of just dubbing the CD they had already bought for their CD player. Right?
That's another myth. How does network neutrality stifle innovation? When common carrier laws were created for shipping companies, it didn't stifle innovation. Nor did it stifle innovation for telephone companies. And it isn't stifling internet companies either.
I've been replying a lot to this discussion, so let me cut down to the real reason we are in the situation we have now:
Comcast says I get 4Mbps of bandwidth. But they really divided 400Mbps across 100 customers, said I get 4Mbps (that's a simplified version). Now that everybody wants to download stuff from YouTube, Comcast finds that they don't actually have enough bandwidth to give everyone 4MBps. So they decide that maybe they can charge some customers to have priority over others. They make more money and finance their rollout of real 4MBps service. They they tell everyone it is 8MBps service, and sell another the option to give priority over other users. This cycle repeats forever. But it's a scam - one person gets 4MBps only because someone else's connection is now slowed down even further because their packets are delayed. You see, you really can't "speed up" a packet, you can only slow one down. There's an expression "robbing Peter to pay Paul" when you get behind on one bill, and so you pay another bill late to make this one on time. That's what the ISPs want to do.
A similar thing happened years ago with phone service. Phone companies would sell caller ID, and a service to block sales calls. They they sold the sales people a service to block their number. Then they sold a service to send blocked numbers to a special message that told them to leave a message. Then they sold sales people a service that got around the special message. In the end, nobody ever got what they paid for. The phone companies just pitted their customers against each other. So it is with "priority" service. Once everyone pays for priority, who has priority then?
Instead, we need to go the opposite direction than all of this. We need to make ISPs report accurate information on their service level (The FDA mandates food labeling and nobody went out of business). Then, we need to open-up the local telco lines to competition. You do that by separating ISP service from phone line service. Ex: Verizon does the local phone lines, but Comcast, Earthlink, CavTel, etc. provide ISP services over those lines. This will open-up real competition. In Maryland, they passed a law about 5 years ago that did this, and DSL suddenly appeared everywhere and new ISPs arrived. Now that the law reverted, my current ISP is likely to vanish since my local telco (Verizon) can force them out of business once the time limit is up.
It all gets really complicated. But in the end, Network Neutrality just means everyone is treated fairly. It has worked in every aspect of the telecom industry thus far. If your issue is that no law is needed, that is a reasonable position since the FCC is handling this now. But remember, the telecom companies stand to gain a lot by starting the phony "prioritization" scam, and you will find fake blogs and links all over the place with info about why Network Neutrality is evil. The telecoms see a chance at eliminating the FCC law, and the fight is really just to retain the status quo, more so than to add any new regulation.
Having my bittorrent re-prioritized behind VOIP would slow the rate, no? Should everyone else on my block use VOIP all the time while I'm socially inept and spend all my time downloading different linux distros because I can't make up my mind, I could have my bandwidth throttled. In this case I am, btw, an end user.
"A witty saying proves nothing." - Voltaire
We lost a free and open and truly neutral internet a while ago. When and why did it become OK for every provider to dis-allow open ports and servers? Now a bunch of techno elitists will rush in and say, "Oh no one should be allow to run servers on those type of lines" and "ZOMG, spam will run amuck because people will be allowed to run servers!"
1 - The spam argument is the same as the child porn argument - take away everyone's right because some people might abuse it.
2 - The current situation is the worst of all possible because people who want to run servers are blocked by the AUP of their provider but zombies are free to spam and DOS and whatever as they please because providers don't block ports based on abuse.
So now we have the repub, right wing, pro big business assholes pretending that after 200 billion in give aways, consolidated monopolies and govt protected one-provider access to the last mile that its the mean websites that are blocking innovation. Yeah, google and youtube are the reason our telecomm services lag behind the rest of the 1st and 2nd world in pricing and performance - that's the ticket, its google's fault.
BTW, the only provider that I know of that did not have a no-servers or otherwise stupidly restrictive AUP was http://www.rawbandwidth.com/ they also didn't use PPPoE !!
But PacBell may have forced them to change their AUP, not sure...
True Net Neutrality:
Did I forget anything?
That would be actual Net Neutrality, the US telecomms have to be laughing at us, they take tons of tax money and entitlements then provide relatively slow, horrible service at high prices, lock in customers, treat them like garbage and then cry a bunch of crocodile tears in front of congress about how hard they have it.
Your idea of fair regulation will not make things better. In fact, every thing will get a lot worse. Your provider is selling you a best effort service, and while those pipes are under utilized, everything is great. As it becomes necessary to keep pipes closer to capacity due to business models and the average user continues to consume more and more bandwidth, services will start to fail. Video over IP will be one of the first to suffer performance degradation. Then Voip. Then any real time interactive apps. That's what happens when a best effort service is all you can get and voip and video traffic can't be given a higher level of service. Of course, the service providers will build another 'closed' ip network for their own services and they won't have to deal with the result of this brilliant solution.
Your solution of regulating equal treatment is going to lead to a more closed off Internet as service providers stop throwing money at an open infrastructure and starts spending on their own 'internal' network that will carry their services at whatever priority they want and not have to deal with it. Of course, anyone else wanting to offer a high level of service for their product could connect to this closed private network and have their services delivered with better quality than the folks who are still using the best effort 'internet' service.
Never happen, you say? It already happens. Cable delivering VOD over closed IP systems. Phone companies running their voip over closed networks.
Can't you hear the service rep now? "Oh, I'm sorry sir, that 40 dollars a month is for a best effort service connected to the public Internet. We have no control over the quality of the service that run on that network. Would you be interested in connecting to the ComWarnATTizon private ip network? For an additional 40 dollars a month you can receive your video, phone, interactive services at the best performance levels we have to offer as well as a connection to the old Internet . Should I sign you up?"
Believe me or not, you should bookmark this. You're going to want to reread this in a couple years. There are valid legislative actions that could put an end to all of this, but it will probably take everything getting fubared before antone is willing to logically look at the issue.