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In Net Neutrality, It's Jeffersonet Vs. Edisonet
PetManimal writes "Curt Monash has a middle way on the Net neutrality debate. He writes that the classic 'Jeffersonet' — which includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and most websites created in the first 13 or so years of the Web — is 'the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide,' and cannot be compromised by a tiered Internet. On the other hand, a reliable, tiered scheme is required for what he calls the 'Edisonet' — which consists of 'communication-rich applications such as entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings of all kinds.' Commenting on Monash's proposal, blogger Richi Jennings points to a lack of investment in Internet infrastructure and IPv6 technologies at the root of the problem: '...if an application writer makes assumptions that ignore realities such as the speed of light or temporary congestion, their application's going to behave badly. But no premium QoS in the world is going to help that. My sense is still that the ISPs that are complaining about net neutrality are simply being greedy and don't want to invest money to cope with the growth in usage.'"
The problem is that the bigger tubes are just too expensive and since the internet isn't just a big truck, it's really hard to be able to transport these newer and bigger tubes to where they need to be laid.
...Jefferson was a hit with the ladies. Obviously his solution must be superior.
Today's lucky number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
It would make total sense to deploy all of the high bandwidth
applications such as video on IPv6, and keep the existing
e-mail and web applications on IPv4.
Total sense.
But, the darkside has frozen IPv6 deployment because
they want to control it all!
It really is that simple.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
If you're worried about neutrality, emigrate to Sweden.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
This net neutrality argument has been going on for quite awhile, is there something I'm not getting? From what I know (not much), protocols like MPLS have QoS features to distinguish between types of traffic, and they supposedly do a decent job of it. What more is needed then?
Is it not sufficient that packets be differentiated according to the Class of Service? Why do those that argue against Net neutrality seem to imply that differentiating among ISPs is somehow going to make an improvement?
I can explain it for you, but I can't understand it for you.
Greed is the root of these problems- eliminate it and everyone will do better (including the ISPs!)
It's like I've always said, the internet is one humongous frontier in which lawlessness and disarray abound. We've tried to deal with the lawlessness of the net - just take a look at how well security firms are doing - but the disarray, the poor infrastructure, is something the normal user never thinks about. They'll care about where their credit card numbers go, sure, but not how long it takes to get to a particular web page (unless they run a 56k modem).
But since I long for the day of rich communication apps and online gaming, I'd like an improved infrastructure so heavy applications can get their work done smoothly. How would somebody (or a group of people, for that matter) go about organizing infrastructure?
A system with guaranteed bandwidth aka "net neutrality" aka "truth in advertising" would allow you to spend your bandwidth however you want. This seams like it would foster adoption of high bandwidth service such as "entertainment, gaming, telephony, telemedicine, teleteaching, or telemeetings". A tiered system would probably let you use low bandwidth things like email, web, and text chat at your full speed, but would charge you extra or throttle you for high bandwidth items. A tiered Internet is the enemy of newer multimedia services.
------ Take away the right to say fuck and you take away the right to say fuck the government.
Some sort of synthesis of both sides, while always useful in bullshitting high school and college papers, is not always the right way in the real world. Freedom is to be favored over commercial interests in an arena like the internet, which provides massive public good but not QUITE enough profit for the companies to be happy.
Communications over the internet work pretty well now, despite the drain that youtube &co have put on the system. Sure, there could always be better infrastructure, but letting the wealthy and businesses insulate themselves from internet-wide problems will only decrease the impetus to improve the infrastructure by letting the most powerful market forces sidestep all the problems. This is the same reason that health care for so many Americans sucks: the rich decision makers are not forced to use the same system. Don't let that happen to internet service.
Although the moon is smaller than the earth, it is farther away.
Hamiltonet and Teslanet?
Interesting comparison. Not to belittle the likes of telemedicine, but when it comes to the vast majority of users/uses, the jeffersonet has been used to do real work -- communicate, sell, buy, co-ordinate. The edisonet, on the other hand, touting quality video, and other high-bandwidth options are not truly profitable at this time.
I suppose video meetings would build telecommuting, but that brings up the usual video-phone problem. Today, high-bandwidth and video is used for fun. 14 year-old girls may love watching videos of my sister's cat, but neither of them profits by it. Until such edisonet features are adopted by a substantial number of truly worth-while endeavours, this edisonet is totally useless. like cell phone faceplates.
Why shouldn't we consider "communication-rich" applications to be a fundamental part of the internet in the same way that email and web browsing already are?
Standards for voice applications, meeting applications and graphics applications have already been developed, published and endorsed by the W3C, 3GPP and ITU. Let's use them.
Photon speed limit: 299,792,458 meters per second
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
monash is just another one of these anti-neutrality people pushing the same exact "rationing" of existing resources these telcos were trying to push off in the first place. only hes calling it a compromise.. (in much the same way the RIAA asks for the moon and stars.. then asks for carte blach regulation as a "compromise")
its very simple.. the "jefferson" net would be perfectly applicable for all these media intensive applications if they upgraded the freaking infrastructure like they were supposed to in the first place
they were given grants and local monopoly contracts on the promise of laying new fiber, they didnt and are now wanting to "ration" crowded lines in order to shoehorn in applications which would have had room to spare if they had upheld their part of the bargain.
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You make it big by buying things overpriced, gobble up the competition at the expense of the consumer, charge for your lack of efficiency, pay whatever is necessary to get the competition to sell out, charge even more as you become one of two competitors in your market, then you sell everything and let it all tumble down, later to repurchase it and resume your domination. And its all done on bare bones, used Pentium III crap machines because he's too cheap to buy the machines new. And you operate your empire out of a run down office building while using the lowest possible output light bulbs because you don't want to pay too much overhead. Overhead eats profit you know. What does this have to do with the topic? Everything. Its penny pinchers like this that destroy America's competitiveness at the expense of joe public. The same types of elitist people run big telephone. The same types elitists run big entertainment. There is no room for fluff or overhead when profit is everything.
Actually, Tesla and Edison were involved in a "war of the electric currents" over whether alternating or direct current would become the standard, with a lot of propaganda being flung around. (I suggest the book "Empires of Light" about this.) What if Congress had stepped in and demanded that DC be the national standard, instead of letting the engineers and businessmen figure things out in an atmosphere of free competition?
Those early electric networks were haphazard and dangerous, but they worked well enough to help build the modern world.
Revive the Constitution.
Before you cry afoul in agreement that the ISP's don't want to invest in new infrastructure and are greedy bastards, remember for one second that in telecommunications terms, the Internet is still very young. Before this, the last major jumps in the sector were television and satellites, 50 years ago. Before that was the radio a half century earlier, and another half century back gets us the telegraph. The Internet in its current form is barely 15 years old, and at most you could peg it at 20.
Much of the infrastructure was laid down during the dot-com boom days of the late 1990's, so much of the hardware itself is only a decade old, and at the time was quite expensive - there's a reason that Cisco is huge. The ISP's just have not seen the return on hardware investment in the Internet that they had in the phone business before undertaking any massive overhaul of the underlying network, as a transition to IPv6 would be.
The whole tiered internet system is (surprise!) purely motivated by the money to be made, of course. Yes, it might end up sucking balls for the home user, but then again, maybe they'll have the monetary incentive (or when it becomes viable, perhaps some startup company will) to upgrade the network, which is good for everybody - after all, they do need some kind of bandwidth to push more digital HD channels.
Personally, I would dislike my packets being lower priority than somebody else's. I'm just saying that you need to think about it from a utilities business perspective, not a technology business perspective - their business is a service, not a product as such.
"My sense is still that the ISPs that are complaining about net neutrality are simply being greedy and don't want to invest money to cope with the growth in usage."
Ya think?
It's sorta like this: it's not about what protocols you implement, but about who you allow on "your" network, and at what price or at what speed.
;) Or "you can get high speed access to MSN Search, because Steve Balmer was more than happy to pay to 'fucking kill Google', but you might have problems using Google or getting your site indexed by Google."
What protocols don't solve is being able to say, "ok, if you want high speed access on _my_ network, you have to pay extra." That's the problem. From just a neutral protocol's point of view, for example VOIP is VOIP is VOIP. A non-neutral approach could say, for example, "ok, you can use VOIP with our client and our paid service, but Skype users can eat shit and die... or at least get their pipe throttled until they have an incentive to switch to ours." Or, "you can play WoW on our network because Blizzard gave up and paid the tax, but you might notice a lot of latency and disconnects in SWG because Sony wanted to play hardball." Or viceversa, although it would probably count as a crime against humanity to make people play SWG
It's all about walled gardens and monopolistic practices. You only make so much money with just one interchangeable product or service, so you'll want some kind of trade obstacles that give you some kind of a (semi)captive market. You'll want that people who want your product or service X, also have the incentive/FUD/lack-of-choice to also buy the less competitively priced Y and Z from you. That's where the money is.
If you look around you, that's how most people who make money, make it.
E.g., take iTunes. Not the worst case of shearing penned sheep, to be sure, but nevertheless an example of how it works. ITunes itself doesn't make Apple much money, and it actually caused the music companies to make a lot less money than with a CD. The companies wanted to kill the single, but iTunes made them kill the album. Previously they'd sell you a whole CD, now you just buy 1-2 tracks at 1$ each, and they don't even get the whole dollar. ITunes is basically priced not to make Apple or the music companies a profit, but to keep any possible competitor unable to make a profit.
However, iTunes just happens to have this proprietary DRM that works only on an iPod. (Yes, as Steve Jobs is quite happy to tell you, the DRM is there because the RIAA wanted DRM. But, no, they didn't ask for a DRM that works only on his players. The lock in is _not_ RIAA's demand.) The iPod is quite a bit overpriced. If you want to use iTunes, you pretty much need an iPod. And IIRC, Apple sells around 1 iPod for every 10 songs sold on iTunes. So iTunes doesn't make Apple much money, in fact, it barely makes enough to keep the servers running, but makes you buy another product from them.
The key to making money there is the whole not being neutral.
The big ISP's now would like to get in the same kind of position. They have a service which doesn't make a fortune, and as long as they stay neutral, they have no way to coax/coerce you into buying an overpriced product to go with it. They'd like to be able to do something like that, because that's where the money is.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Is it just my perceptions, or is this mostly a U.S. problem? I'm prepping to move from living just outside of Tokyo to Texas in a month -- and I'm not looking forward to it.
U.S.: Paying $60+ for 5mb/768kb cable/dsl -- with possibilities to have my service terminated for over-using an "unlimited use" service
Japan: Paying $60 for 100mb/100mb fiber -- no hidden catches
I don't know how things are across the EU, but I know that the U.S. has a sorry, outdated infrastructure in place and it's like pulling teeth to have companies upgrade their already oversold lines.
It could be that the only purpose of your life is to serve as a warning to others.
I'm sure some people already have as it's quite old a paper, but those who simply attribute all these problems to greed should understand it's just not so simple. Read The Broadband Incentive Problem white paper from MIT. After that, read a bit more on the current situation.
Now all we need is a way to distinguish these packets. How about a new bit?
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That finally explains the missing part of the etymology of the 'Jefferies tubes'! :-D
Its almost a tie between "teleteaching" and "telemedicine", but I think "teleteaching" wins.
At least it wasn't "e-teaching", or, (the horror, the horror...) e-teleteaching.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Basic economics is not something to be poo-pooed away. Ridiculing the companies and people who helped build the internet we have today and criticising their opinions on its future development is a sure-fire way to fuck your credibility in the arse. I hope like hell nobody listens to this shit.
Net neutrality is bullshit.
Those papers were released by the telcos under the MIT press, it has nothing to do with MIT's perspective.
This would be like "re-examining" the issue of the DMCA by reading RIAA press releases.
Its very simple, DARPA and government grants gave birth to the internet, and the majority of the infrastructure it runs on was already there. Now they don't want to actually lay dedicated infrastructure because they think they can ration what's left to milk more money without putting in their fair share to properly widen ted steven's tubes.
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What we need are 3 or so packet priorities, universally defined across the (ipv6 I guess) net,
to handle traffic with different latency requirements,
but just charge the end user as usual for bandwidth, or for classes of bandwidth
usage (peak and sustained), as part of their ISP package. If they want more movies or lots of voip,
both of which would use high-priority packets, then more bandwidth would be used up, so more
bandwidth charges would accrue. There is absolutely no need to charge any of the players more
for sending or recieving high-priority packet streams, because they automatically (send) get more packets
per second or per hour so their bandwidth charges will cover their increased net utilization.
This seems really simple to me. What's complicated?
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Edison-Net my ass.
What it comes down to, is that net neutrality makes the internet a network of thousands of toll bridges where every ISP and backbone provider can dip into the pockets of monied dotcoms and extort money from them to play ona level field on their block of the internet.
This is double dipping. It should be their customers who pay for the Bandwidtdh and QoS they get, not the sites the user frequents.
If the user wants to watch streaming video all day and talk to all his buddies on skype with fast bitrates, then let him pay for it.
The issue here is simple. Create tiered internet packages for different types of users and MARKET those packages to your current users.
I decided to get rid of AT&T and found that speakeasy et al offer many more types of packages with different levels of QoS.
Funny how AT&T can't be bothered to do what the little guys do and instead want to lobby the hell out of Congress to essentially force Google ad others to pay them exorbanant fees.
The bottom line is double dipping for a single service is wrong and lobbying congress to force lage dotcoms is anti-competitive and flies in the face of free markets. If it costs too much to provide broadband service to your nusiness and residential customers, then increase the rates.
Let the market decide if it wants that service or not.
Since when has any proposal from a telecommunications company, especially the companies who own the broadly-installed infrastructure, ever encouraged competition or innovation? It just doesn't happen. The only possible way to make a "third way" happen is if the government put in some basic and strict groundrules... eg. that prevent telcos from using packet shaping to give their own services a significant advantage over competitors. Unfortunately, government performance on this in the past has been spotty, especially under Republican leadership.
both papers are telcos whining about how they have "heavy users" who actually make use of the bandwidth they (over)sell, and more people are doing this.
the solution is simple:
you don't oversell your bandwidth.
you upgrade your infrastructure, specifically last mile.
you stop scheming together trying to find ways to rip these users off/shut them out just because they use what they pay for.
you accept that youre a utility, and this means your earning curves will flatten out and stabilize, and you will be expected (and also helped) by the government to maintain and upgrade your infrastructure as needed.
it's not an "incentive problem" its a "telco mentality problem".
they need to realize their role, and until they do we'll keep lobbying to pass laws that keep them in their place where they belong.
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I read that as, "if your application uses so little bandwidth as to be negligible, then net neutrality is ok. But if you want to actually use some of that broadband bandwidth that you're already paying for, then I want to charge you extra".
Or in other words Let's compromise - do it my way.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Umm, no. Risking sounding like I'm defending the telcos (which I'm not), if your revenues are not enough to upgrade the network at the pace required by the increasing usage, you DO have a real problem. An economical, business viability kind of a problem, not just a mindset problem. Sure the prices could be raised, but only in theory - imagine the outrage from consumers like you (and me) if suddenly our access costs were hiked because "on average" people use more bandwidth. Your suggestions (like not overselling the bandwidth) sound great on paper, but good luck with implementing a viable business around those premises. And also good luck with trying to get the government to help out anytime soon.
uhhm no.. risking sounding like a complete troll, this is exactly what they hoped to accomplish with this lovely piece of spin.
if they sold the bandwidth they actually had rather than oversell it by 5 or 10 times they wouldnt have to "upgrade the network at the pace required by increasing usage" because the usage would top out perfectly with the amount they had sold.
if you can't sell the bandwidth you actually have at the prices youre at, youre doing something illegal, that is "selling below margin". But I strongly suspect they have absolutely no problem recouping their costs, they just dont have profit margins high enough, which is not our problem as the public.
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I doubt overbooking capacity is illegal in most countries - heck, overbooking flights isn't illegal either. And the overbooking ratios in e.g. DSL connections are HUGE. Of course in retrospect they shouldn't be and that's what's now causing problems, but thanks to overbooking we've had affordable broadband.
Let's take an example. You're a local medium-sized ISP with 1 million customers, each with a relatively new 24Mbps ADSL2+ line. In order to not oversell any capacity, you would need an outgoing connection of a cool 22Tbps to the outside world.
Nobody - I repeat NOBODY, not even the biggest ISPs in the world - have that fat pipes. Overbooking is, to some extent, inevitable.
don't be gettin uppity with me boy!
you provide the network, you don't tax its use.
They're using their grammar skills there.
But when walmart, microsoft, netflix, etc allow downloadable movies/games, broadband is going to be much in demand that ISP's might start offering faster services for prefered providers.
I think that we will see people buying faster QoS for some services, and companies like google providing the infrastructure equipment/software to make it happen.
And most ISP's offer better QoS for the enterprise customers, nice big fat virtual pipes for companies needing speed for medical, industrial, (voip), etc.. Also the phone companies don't own that last mile to the base station, so if you need 3G, the ISP's are selling the bandwidth.
Plus with lawsuits, let a national ISP intentionally slowdown a competitor that doesn't pay some sort of net tax. I bet there are a dozen laws to cover that.
then it's time for them to get those pipes, even if they have to freeze service at that advertised speed for a while, because they cant get away with it anymore.
It's technically illegal to overbook(i believe it falls under fraud), when airlines overbook they make it a point to rectify any disposession with ample compensation (usually first class on the next available flight). This contrasts horribly with the telcos, who will meet anyone who tries to use the internet they paid for with drawn weapons.
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...just wait for the hardware to catch up.
Farnsworth: These are the dark matter engines I invented. They allow my starship to travel between galaxies in mere hours.
Cubert: That's impossible. You can't go faster than the speed of light.
Farnsworth: Of course not. That's why scientists increased the speed of light in 2208.
Don't know who this guy is but he's a moron, net-neutrality means all data are treated equally. You impose tiered pricing on certain types of data to the exclusion of a neutrality network. "communication-rich applications" work fine on leased lines, ADSL was a complete joke to begin with and the telcos knowingly oversold capacity and still have the audacity to complain because VOIP is killing their cash-cow.
Grrrr.
We're moving from a small city to the countryside this summer. Access to the new house is by dirt roads, in an area of farms & forest. The internet connection is fiber to the house. Apparently, the phone company lays in fiber instead of copper whenever new circuits are needed nowadays, even in the boonies.
A package for 100/10 data is eur 79/month (of which about eur 14-15 is tax). This package includes numerous IP-TV channels, which I could live without.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
OK, this might seem like a nitpick, but I can't let it pass; I had to read this sentence a few times before I understood the true meaning, and I only did because I'm a native English speaker:
He writes that the classic 'Jeffersonet' -- which includes e-mail, instant messaging, much e-commerce, and most websites created in the first 13 or so years of the Web -- is 'the greatest tool in human history to communicate research, teaching, news, and political ideas, or to let tiny businesses compete worldwide,' and cannot be compromised by a tiered Internet.
What you mean (or he means) is that it must not be compromised. 'Cannot' pretty much means the opposite.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Sure the prices could be raised, but only in theory - imagine the outrage from consumers like you (and me) if suddenly our access costs were hiked because "on average" people use more bandwidth.
Prices on stuff go up all the time. Net connection prices have recently been reducing because of price wars, but 'outrage' if they were to increase a bit? Hardly. I'd be more than happy to pay, say, £10($20)/month more for my net access, before I even began to think about complaining. *AS LONG AS* they didn't cap or tier it.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
IPv4 has several flavors of priority marking, including TOS and DSCP; most of the MPLS (private routed IP) carriers out there are using DSCP to provide 3 to 6 priority levels, which their customers typically use to give high priority to VOIP, maybe high priority to video, medium priority to corporate data applications, and low priority to things like email, web, and ftp that aren't latency-sensitive. Some ISPs support these markings on their public internet service as well, at least on some of their services (e.g. higher-speed corporate-priced circuits, but not necessarily on DSL where the routers don't always support it.) The real limitation there is getting ISPs to agree with each other on which of the 64 available markings to use, how many values, and of course, how to charge (preferably a flat rate.)
As far as peering infrastructure investment goes, the big carriers are spending madly on this to prevent bottlenecks. It's a bit different in the US, where ~20-25 big carriers peer with each other, than in the UK, where everybody peers at LINX, but the problem for Richi should be whether his ISP buys enough LINX bandwidth to keep up with their users. Last I heard LINX and AMSIX were doing mostly ok on keeping up with demand, as long as the ISPs kept up.
Static IP addresses are really a critical issue, and NAT traversal problems are closely related. IPv6 may make this a bit easier, but basically it's an ISP administrative convenience issue (so they don't have to help customers configure PCs) and a firewalling issue (NAT's a cheap beginning on real firewalls, so everybody uses it), and the various flavors of IPv6 autoconfig may eventually replace some of it.
IPv6's big problems for now are router performance, chicken&egg issues with content providers and lack of motivation until the big addressing crunch hits.
Bill Stewart
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Nobody would bother to build a road to a location people didn't want to go, huge investment, fuck all traffic, and they'd make much more money building more roads to places people do want to go.
Even then the analogy is bollocks because you can choose your ISP. If one is crap, then there are plenty of others.
Deleted
Unless the ownership is secure, there will not be much investment — that's so obvious, it is a truism. Yet these people expect companies to invest in infrastructure, while, at the same time, trying to reduce the companies' control of same:
Next you'll see some creeps argue, that the free market is failing, and that the government thus needs to take over the Internet service provision, much like it currently is responsible for highways (is not that a roaring success)...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
what the hell are you just talking about ?
WHAT incentive ?
Do we have to provide "incentive" for those shitheads to actually PROVIDE what they were selling to us for the past 10 years in the first place ?
They have oversold THEIR bandwidth, and now they have to pay from their OWN pockets to meet what they promised. Thats whats there is to it. Neither state nor public can be coerced to patch up what they messed up.
Read radical news here
Isn't there already a tiered internet? I know that the company I work for is paying a small fortune for Akamai to serve pages via their network.
.. NOT.
there is one 'net'. and it is the INTERNET.
so quit crapping around and make due pressure for shitty telco companies to actually INVEST the unearned money they have got from OVERSELLING connectivity subscriptions.
by joining or jumping in every crappy debate they are funding, like this "edisowhatcamacallitnet" & "2nd internet" "othermorecrapolanet" debate, you are, without knowing, supporting their attempts to get out of their predicament without paying for it themselves.
Read radical news here
This is exactly the same as net neutrality. Both networks provide a means of remote communication.
The telephone network is not neutral and I don't think it has been, since perhaps the earliest days. Two words: Peak Rate.
The phone networks use variable charging to discourage people from using the resources when they're in demand -- peak time -- so that the resources are available to those who need them; it's called demand management, and it's more efficient than increasing supply ad infinitum. Mobile networks in the UK have a longer peak period than fixed line, because while fixed-line phones peak during office hours, mobile peak usage continues throughout the commute period.
Fixed-line performance traditionally didn't degrade gracefully under strain -- in general connections were simply refused. (digital exchanges are changing this though) Mobile networks slice up traffic and degrade "gracefully", but will let it get to the point where neither party can hear the other due to lack of granularity.
In these cases, demand limits itself -- people put the phone down. The claim is that the same thing happens with the internet -- people will only connect when they have a useful speed. However, if I'm at work, I don't care what response I get on my home PC if I choose to download DVD images of Linux builds, service packs for Windows, HD video etc etc for later use.
Net neutrality, inasmuch as it advocates no peak rate, turns things upside-down: it discourages people who need to use it during peak demand from using it. The downloaders don't need to -- they can run overnight -- but it's more convenient for them.
HAL.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'
I don't understand why net neutrality is even an issue.
I pay for my net connection. In fact, I'm already dealing with tiered pricing- if I want a faster connection I have to pay more for it. And if I were to transfer more than a certain amount of data I'd have to pay more for that too.
And sites that I go to pay for THEIR bandwidth.
So when I hit google apps, or nasioc, or wherever... it's already being paid for . Twice.
Is this about peering? ISP A feels like they should be compensated for shuffling a disproportionate amount of traffic between ISP B and C?
Or is this purely QoS? On top of charging more for bigger/faster pipes, they want to charge more in exchange for... not slowing things down? Through the pipes we're already paying for? Twice?
"IPv4 has several flavors of priority marking, including TOS and DSCP; most of the MPLS (private routed IP) carriers out there are using DSCP to provide 3 to 6 priority levels, which their customers typically use to give high priority to VOIP"
This kind of talk is very exciting to me. What are you wearing right now?
I am currently only thinking about my local cable provider, it doesn't include the interconnection which accumulates a lot more users than my neighbors. If I had to pay a transit fee for every download, I am pretty sure I wouldn't and would just get a DVD and watch it. After all, my station wagon full of DVDs has one heck of a lot of bandwidth. So, as in all really tough problems, we have the tragedy of the commons to deal with. IMHO, I would rather see some sort of surcharge for spurious internet usage like movie downloads and let the commons support what they do best which is the web and associated traditional applications.
If you want bandwidth, pay for it. If not, don't use it. Maybe if everybody paid per GB for bandwidth usage it would solve the problem. I would still be able to download my linux distros occasionally and surf the web.I am too. I have a contract with my ISP that entitles me to the service defined in our agreement. Contention rates don't enter into it.
The content provider is already paying. They pay their ISP bills too. The "tiered internet" argument is about the ISPs in the middle extorting cash from those who have contracts with someone else.
Personally, I'd sooner see traffic shaping outlawed than I would allow third party carriers to levy arbitrary charges on the traffic passing through their machines.
This isn't about bittorrent, and it isn't about your ISP. It's about being able surcharge web proividers so as to drive the small sites off the web. It's about being able to crush disruptive technologies such as VOIP to protect the PTT's investment in land based telephony. It's about every node in the internet being able to charge you whatever sum they like whenever one of your packets hops through one of their boxes, or else risk being deprioritised to the bit bucket.
This is what we risk if we sanction a tiered Internet. The middle ISPs have no accountability to the end users. They will have no incentive to be fair or competitive, and every incentive to soak every last cent they can out of anyone using their fibre.
There are wider concerns here than bittorrent.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Even assuming that you're talking about the iTunes Music Store, this isn't really true, since you can listen to the music on your computer and burn CD-Rs all you want. That certainly covers the vast majority of my music listening. It would be better to say that if you want to use a portable music player with iTMS, it has to be an iPod. There are ways to circumvent the DRM, but that's really a corner case.
And given that iPods hold thousands of songs, this should give you a hint that most iPods are mostly full of MP3s that would play on other players just fine. Out of the thousands of songs in my iTunes library, around a hundred are from iTMS.
So I don't disagree with you that the iTMS DRM encourages iPod purchases. But I don't think the tie-in is a significant reason people get iPods, or stay with iPods. If anything, I think it's the other way around -- people get iPods because they are better than other players out there, and then they use iTunes, and buy songs from iTMS.
-Esme
Most tie-ins work both ways, so no big surprise there. So, yes, iTunes encourages people to get iPods, and iPods encourage people to sign up with iTunes, so their next player will be another iPod too.
In fact, I'll say that any working (near)monopoly implementation would have to work in as many directions as technically possible. If you can map a sort of a flow from a product that no other needs, to one which is only needed, it becomes easy to attack the whole from that end. So if you have products X, Y and Z and you want to go walled-garden about it, in the ideal case any one of them would need (or at least encourage one to buy) both the others. If you have 10 products, in an ideal world any 1 would need the other 9.
That's how MS pwned the software market, after all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Very simple explanation.
The history of communications has been very simple up until now; one pipe = one method of communication.
Telegraph lines = telegraphs
Broadcast radio = sound
Broadcast televison = sound + pictures
Cable television = sound + pictures (originally) diced up into "channels" with one channel per signal.
Phone lines = speech (originally) + telefaxes (secondary) diced up into specific numbers
One pipe = one medium
"I have a pipe, all of my media must be streamed."
You're keeping up, right?
Enter the Internet. One pipe = unlimited media. That's bad from a content provider's perspective. The more media you can stuff down that single pipe, the less money the content providers make. The CPs have no real way of shuting off content. If they can't shut it off and turn it on, where's the easy profit?
Ignore for a moment that we are running out of pipes (IPv6 vs IPv4) and ignore that some media might be best offered over some other pipe (Internet1 vs Internet2 vs cable vs ?). The fact is that the content providers desperatly NEED their old ways of providing content or they might need to devlope new business plans. That's risky. Historically new business plans have a high rate of failure and anyone can copy you and get it right before you can.
So, this is where we are. Content providers make money by selling us a stream of content (radio and TV in channels (via advertisments)and cable and telephone in channels/numbers(via channels signal blockers)) Content providers need to cut the Internet into pipes in order ro make money with their old business plans.
Unless we are VERY carefull, we WILL end up with an internet cut up into pipes. One for each provider and one for each media.
On the other hand, if you invest in Comcast now, you may become VERY rich indeed.
Here will be an old abusing of God's patience and the king's English.
Not to take the analogy too far, but I want to go from Jeffersonianet to Tesla-net.
;-)
I.E. Wireless, worldwide broadband which is cheap, ubiquitous and enabling of communication by anyone to anyone at any scale for any content.
Quite frankly, once you blanket everything in fiber, and deploy WiMax in all metropolitan areas, we'll be 90% of the way there. Switch to IPv6, and keep researching better iterations of Wireless data transmission, and these concerns we currently have about bandwidth won't make any sense to future generations. The internet is not like the road system. You don't have to displace thousands of home owners or businesses to expand capacity 10% (build more lanes). Deploying fiber everywhere increases capacity by two orders of magnitude; and there isn't any reason you can't realistically run bundles of fiber.
Combine that with increasingly better encoding schemes, and one can imagine ubiquitous, two-way gigabit connections; bandwidth which vastly exceeds current local system throughput for most users AND servers.
Even in terms of frequency spectrum, we've got plenty of space there. Elimination of the analog channels, and switching spectrum over to next-gen technologies like Flarion's OFDM, or the latter revisions of EVDO and WCDMA, and we'll see internet connections, both mobile and fixed, which exceed our expectations for local speeds.
Building an "Edison" net, AT&T style, will kill this. AT&T believes that 6 Mbps is enough for anyone, and they are working their damndest to bring back micropayments for data access. There's no reason for this, and there's no reason for service-based QoS and tiered connections. The technology exists, now, to swamp everyone in more bandwidth than you could possibly use; and building out "Edison" style literally means figuring out how NOT to do that, and restricting bandwidth (and IP space) to generate monopoly profits.
I suspect this article is written by someone with ties to AT&T, as AT&T is trying to figure out how to rebuild its monopoly position in order to slow down communication and increase rates to boot.
Down with limited broadband! Up with speeds!
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
The last major jump in telecommunication was the cellphone, which is pretty recent. Roughly the same age as the internet, in fact. You also missed wired telephony, but maybe you were including that in the telegraph.
However, I believe that people should be allowed to discriminate, that highway owners should be allowed to block brands of cars, and that ISPs should be allowed to mandate arbitrary usage charges for traffic.
The reason those activities should be allowed is not because they are good activities, but because I do not believe it is the purview of the government to mandate what kind of peaceful, voluntary relationships people/businesses may enter into.
As long as entity X is not forcing, defrauding, or otherwise infringing on the individual rights of all parties, the government ought not be involved.
Instead it is up to you, me, citizens, businesses, voluntary watchdog groups, etc. to be conscientious citizens and consumers and drive the marketplace through peaceful, voluntary cultural change. And by leaving businesses free to compete, nothing can stop a competitor for stepping in and providing real value where an unpopular, shady company is currently entrenched.
The 'big stick' approach of government is just a slippery slope: once the government is allowed to proscribe your thoughts, actions, and otherwise voluntary interactions with others, then it is only a matter of time before they are telling you to do/say/act in ways that you disagree with, but will have no power to control (welcome to Russia/China, etc.)
Government getting involved in business is what causes anti-competitive practices in the first places, since they are the only ones who can prevent competition through the use of special franchises, subsidies, political favoritism and protectionism, etc.
The solution is not to get government power more involved in peaceful, voluntary business transactions - but to get it out of the way so real competition can occur.
Mine is Good
Overselling is inevitable when making an affordable ISP (i.e., not dedicated 42 9's uptime quadruple redundancy), but the ISPs here are now getting bit in the ass over the massive overselling they used, so they need to oversell less and upgrade their networks. Instead, they ran crying to Mama Government to buy new laws that make the mean old users stop using what the ISP sells them.
You're right; ISPs should have to do what airlines do when overselling leads to not having enough resources for their customers: refund them or upgrade them to something better in the near future to make up for their own incompetence.
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
I think there are two separate issues confounding this discussion.
The first is that at a philosophical capitalistic level, a tiered (but not sensored) network may or may not be advantageous.
The second is that at a real capitalistic level, the telecos are making arguments for all the wrong reasons, following the general sense of a greedy capitalistic oligopoly double dipping into utilities at every chance possible.
I find the latter incites an emotional response to the former, affecting the ability to speak logically about the former. I feel like the debate is better addressed when one is conscious of these two separate sub-debates, so that one can address the source of one's position.
For example, while I don't thing it's a good idea to demand neutral networks, following from my studies on similar liberal 'neutral controls' over television, I also don't think that the telecos should be double dipping simply to increase profits. If the companies do use a tiered system, it should be only to curtail economic demand on the systems enough to ensure realtime services for those applications which require it. Logically, garunteeing speed should be pretty expensive for those services which claim they can and will provide them.
Policy seems to reflect this division of ideology. For example while there is no law currently enforcing net neutrality, the US Gov't forbade AT&T from implementing an unneutral IP network for 2 years as terms of their Oligopic merger. Thus while ideologically the neutral model is not enforced, the corporate implementation of a tiered network is curtailed to directly stifle the company, and not to violate an ideology.
More like: merely QOS isn't what they're asking for. A neutral implementation of QOS wouldn't care _whose_ packets it routes, merely whether it's high priority ones (e.g., tele-medicine to reuse that word), low priority (e.g., email), or something in between. They don't need to argue and lobby against net-neutrality to implement that.
What they _are_ proposing -- outright and explicitly, not just inferred or slippery-slope -- is the ability to discriminate based on _whose_ packets are they routing, and make people pay for it. E.g., there's a lot of sabre rattle as to how Google should pay a premium. That's quite different than QOS.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Wireless Electrical Energy. Wireless Communications. Let's stop screwing around with the status quo and invent something!
Tesla > Edison
The Rapture is NOT an exit strategy.
OMG, MARRY ME! That was the best and most on-point rant I've ever read about this net neutrality / QoS bullshit!
This proposal is waaaay too confusing and complicated. Why not price the internet like electricity? Charge everyone a minor (about $5 / month) connection fee, and then charge a flat rate per gigabyte downloaded. Heavy bandwidth users will end up footing the bill for their usage, and market forces will push ISPs to continually lower their price per gigabyte. This will also mitigate problems with uncapped cable modems, as customers who abuse it will end up paying large usage fees. In addition, light internet users might be tempted to connect to broadband as their total bill could be something like $10 a month.
No, I will not work for your startup