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Musicians Demand the Internet Stay Neutral
eldavojohn writes "124 bands — including R.E.M., Sarah McLachlan, and Pearl Jam — and 24 music labels are sending a clear message to keep Net traffic neutral. The Rock the Net campaign wants all traffic to be equal instead of allowing providers to charge a fee for certain pages to load faster than others. These musicians are the latest to join the Save the Internet campaign, which has the chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in its camp. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., spoke at the campaign's kickoff. I think it's obvious that musicians (especially independents and small labels) will find themselves with the short end of the stick if they are asked to pay a fee to have their music streamed as fast as larger bands or even corporations."
I'm all for net neutrality, but did they really believe that their opinions matter?
I think one of the best things I noticed about this article is the news site it is taken from. Not Wired online, not the Register, not any of the usual, tech-oriented news sites. CNN is read by the technoelite and the public in general. The entire Net Neutrality issue needs to be in the public view-space.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
That is just slick marketing, like when Marilyn Manson's lyrics decry capitalism. It helps get a bigger share of the disaffected youth dollar.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
"You don't know the history of psychiatry. I do. I studied psychiatric history, which somehow proves something about drugs." -Tom Cruise
"They are well known people with large followings"
But large followings for doing _what_, exactly?
Why should I take medical advice from, say, the local mechanic or car repair advice from the local doctor? Or, for that matter, any advice from Paris Hilton?
I have an idea: Why don't you go ahead and do that with your art and stop trying to tell everyone else what to do with theirs. Lead us by example.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
Considering that Slashdot is owned by the VA Software Corporation, do you think it's funny that it is portrayed as being a fighter for the independent etc. etc. Or is it possible for a corporation to not be evil all the time?
Apples and oranges. Botted systems represent a security risk to the ISP and to other customers and are not providing a commercial service. (Incidentally, it's also probably against their Terms of Serivce to run a botted system, but TOS is only pulled out when it benefits them...) Net neutrality is ISPs charging companies to use the faster lanes which ends up getting passed to the consumer and is nothing more than a money grab.
...like ISPs do anything about spam and viruses now to begin with. They'd claim common carrier and do nothing like usual.
Should someone sending spam be given equal priority to the 'net as someone trying to send emails to colleagues?
Oddly, if you QOS port 25 the spam goes through just as fast as the legit email. Incidentally, this is an argument for quarantining systems, not net neutrality.
Net Neutrality means throwing up our hands in the air and allowing the Internet to become a useless mess of spam and viruses since the power to handle them would be stripped from ISPs. It means giving up on streaming video and audio. It means giving up on VOIP.
Plus it's not giving up on video/audio and VOIP...it's giving up on third party streaming video and audio and VOIP. Why should Verizon allow Vonage's VOIP (yea, i know the patent issues, bear with me) to travel as fast as Verizon's VOIP solution? Without competition, Verizon has no reason to improve their service either.
Net neutrality = competition allowed to exist = better for consumers.
Do you do to your job just for the love of it figuring that if your employer pays you it's just "an extra"? Why is it that when people with day jobs go to work it's a given they will be paid but when an artist works and tries to get paid for it s/he is "crass", "commercial", "a sellout", etc.
Kinda stupid if you stop to think about it...
Caveat Utilitor
The problem with that reasoning is that EVERYONE thinks their application is critical. And the arbiters of who gets the priority access are not neutral - they want to give it to whoever pays the most. So...
Situation #1: providers oversell "priority access", leaving the "critical" applications fighting it out for bandwidth just like they do now (and the "non-critical" apps wishing they had their 56k back)
Situation #2: Providers ration "priority access", which keeps speeds high for "critical" applications but drives up the price of that access via the laws of supply and demand. Providers realize that therey have no incentive to use those higher profit margins to invest in better infrastructure, as the poorer the infrastructure, the more they can charge for "priority access". (Think Enron pulling plants offline to make electricity rates spike and California brownouts)
Situation #3: Government, quasi-gov't (ICAAN), or NGO control of access. Does ANYONE think this is a good idea?
Here's another thought - maybe telesurgery isn't that good an idea.
"As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly." A. Carlson
Most of the people who want "net neutrality" probably don't want to ban QOS outright.
This is what I think ISPs should be prohibited from doing:
1.Discriminating or throttling or blocking based on source/destination addresses (and that includes forcing companies like google to pay more if they want full speed over the ISPs network)
2.Applying any kind of throttling based on port number. QOS is fine (that is, giving VoIP packets priority over BitTorrent packets) but throttling is NOT. If a network link is 1.5MBps and no-one wants to send traffic other than BitTorrent traffic over that link, the BitTorrent traffic should be able to use the entire 1.5MBps link (obviously if someone starts sending VoIP packets, then the network link wont accept as many BitTorrent packets and the BitTorrent download will slow down). This would specifically prevent the (increasingly common) practice where ISPs give you 1.5MBps or whatever speed but no matter how perfect the network conditions, BitTorrent or Emule or whatever else is limited so it can never go over 128KBps or 256KBps or whatever. Write in an exemption for cases where there is a direct threat to the network or to another network (e.g. someone spewing out packets as part of a DDOS attack)
These measures would still allow ISPs to completely block ports used by malware as well as measures like blocking port 25 to cut off spam zombies. And it would allow ISPs to apply QOS so that your VoIP packets have higher priority than the BitTorrent packets. But it would prevent ISPs from deciding that if you access CNN.com you can have the full 1.5MBps speed (assuming the rest of the network can handle that) but if you access YouTube.com or download something over BitTorrent, you cannot ever get more than 256KBps unless you pay extra for it (or google pays extra for it in the case of YouTube)
Let me guess. You probably are one of those who thinks a band is cool until they start to sell. After that, you consider them sell-outs. Am I accurate on this?
I remember the 80's radio scene. My local rock station was pretty much like this from 1981-85:
Van Halen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Pink Floyd, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aerosmith. There was no R.E.M. or U2 or INXS or Husker Du or The Cure any alternative band being played on mainstream radio.
While you may consider these guys corporate now, they were not corporate bands in the early to mid 80's. 1987 seemed to be the breakout year for U2, R.E.M., The Cure, and INXS and alternative music in general to get actual air play. Then Nirvana came along in 1991 and alternative became mainstream.
> Nobody "owns" the Internet. If some ISPs or backbone companies decide to limit bandwidth to certain sites, then they will simply lose business to the service providers who don't limit bandwidth.
And then you have the people that only have a "choice" of 1, maybe 2 ISPs. If that one ISP, or both ISPs do the throttling, then the user doesn't have the ability to change service providers. That theory might work if one realistically had a choice of a multitude of service providers. It doesn't work in a monopoly or near-monopoly.
> And what would prevent musicians and their fans from using P2P techniques for distributed streaming?
The ISP throttles traffic on anything that isn't going through their web proxies. Default traffic gets capped unless you are going to a "blessed" site that the ISP has obtained $$$ from to make them blessed. So much for your P2P traffic.
They're citizens with a stake in the outcome, like you and me. What exactly offends you? That each participant isn't ranting all alone on a street corner? Do they have any less right to get together than the folks who were astroturfing faux-neutrality with a blog ad blitz a few months ago?? Do you believe those guys should "Shut Up And " do whatever it is they do?
Because it is allowing companies to slow down service for those that don't pay. Under the current arrangement, everyone has equal access. With what the telcos and cable companies want to do, some company gets to pay them to be "high priority". This means that the higher-paying traffic bumps all the normal, non-paying, traffic, making everything else go slower.
To do a real-world analogy, let's say that you have an eight lane highway. Normally, any car can use any of the four lanes in either direction. Now, we're going to do the telco money-grab on the road. I'll pay for "high priority" service on the highway. If I'm traveling down a lane, you, as a non-payer, must get out of my way, no matter what the traffic congestion looks like. This will result in me getting to my destination faster, and it taking longer for you to get to yours. In other words, I would be effectively paying to slow down everyone else while allowing me to go faster.
I have a problem with this, since I pay for my Internet connection. I agreed that I wouldn't always get the full bandwidth I paid for, due to various circumstances beyond my ISP's control. I *did not* agree that the ISP could deliberately tamper with my traffic to make some things slow, and some things fast. I would imagine that my ISP did not agree to that with their upstream provider, and they with theirs. It is a radical change in the way the infrastructure works, and makes it a different beast.
If a company wants to charge more for a connection that tends towards lower latency (a T-3 instead of a cable modem), that's fine. If someone wants to charge more for 10Mb of upstream bandwidth than for 5Mb, then that's also fine. It is *not* fine to say "we're making other companies' traffic get precedence over your traffic, unless you pay us more".
No, that's what it meant to you. What it meant to record labels was MONEY. If it didn't look like it would make money, they wouldn't put it out there.
The only musical movement I can think of that died before it was commercialized was hardcore punk. It was a creation of youth and came from a point of ignorance which frankly was one of its strengths - punk didn't involve acceptance of what people told you that you couldn't do. And no one ever really made much money on hardcore.
Rock, however, came straight out of the studio. It was a commercial creation from the beginning.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"