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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.'"
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.
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.
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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In short, no. You're right, but that's not the point.
You're falling victim to the common misconception that this is all about charging consumers more for 'premium content'. That is a straw man constructed by those who want to destroy net neutrality.
This is all about toll roads. The telcos want to charge everyone who uses their network, every time, and they want to do so prejudicially, letting their friends through cheaply, and charging killing rates to others. As things stand right now, Google pays one price to access the Internet, and everyone who has paid to access the Internet can access them. The price determines the quality of the service, but they only pay it once.
What the net neutrality 'debate' is about is that the Telco A wants to charge every bit of traffic that passes onto its network from Telco B, regardless of the fact that Telco B has already been paid for Internet access. In other words, Telco A is setting up a toll booth, and charging companies for something they've already paid for.
(There are numerous permutations to this scenario, but that's the simplest way I can express it.)
This practice is the precise antithesis of the end-to-end network that we like to call the Internet. Net Neutrality is not about consumer choice, it's not about quality of service, and it's not about new business opportunities. It's about whether we still want an Internet. If you do, then you must support Net Neutrality.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Then all we have to do is eliminate human life, and the problem is solved.
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Another way of putting it (with limitation as always): are ISP like public roads? If not, then highway owners can block certain brands of cars or limit them to 1 lane. Or free to choose to interface with an undesirable highway competitor by limiting the interconnection to 1 lane on they side vs the 4 lanes that are required (and that the competitor has already built). Which highway will have more leverage, and be able to force their terms on all other highway contractors? And when that happens, the will be a lot of great roads to certain places, and incredible traffic (or no connection at all) to other unfavored locations (like certain cinemas, certain plants, certain cities, certain car dealers, etc).
WOuld that make the economy great? Wow, we'll have great roads to places we wouldn't have gone in the first place, and crappy roads to very promising and desirable places. If you contro, here people can go easily, you control the economy.
unfinished: (adj.)
paid astroturfer alert!
the government funded the development of and generously subsidized the internet we have today, the telco input was minimal at best.
basic economics says the concept of moral hazard always applies, in this case removing a monopoly's minimum quality requirements will result in terrible service.
They have to actually upgrade their infrastructure, and they wont do that if you allow them to "ration" based on sender/recipient and/or content type.
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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.
I understand what you mean, but it's not quite described right, so I'll clarify for others.
What you are trying to say is that the ISPs are in a way trying to sell access to their customer base to the internet services. They are asking the sellers of video, VOIP and other services to pay money to the ISP that the customer is using. Basically they want both sides to pay for access through the "last mile". The customer is already paying for the service over the last mile, but the ISP wants the sender of those services to pay too, otherwise they might get unsatisfactory service. At least, that's the popular interpretation around here, and I think it's the most plausible.
The ISPs might say that they would be offering a premium improved service to Google, iTunes and such, but in reality, I would expect that they would just degrade service for customers of services that don't pay. I just don't think the big ISPs can be trusted to be honest about this.
In a nutshell, very much so. I don't expect them to lay extra cable to shave a few milliseconds latency to, say, Google if it paid. Getting the result in 0.495s instead of 0.5s wouldn't even start to be an incentive to pay for the premium service. What is indeed more likely to happen is that the the answer time would jump from 0.5 to 2.5 for everyone who doesn't pay.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
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!
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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You will have to eliminate the universe. Even galaxies are greedy. Big ones eat little ones. The universe will eat itself back into a singularity and poop out a new one. There, now you know the original of everything.
What?
I think the best comparison (and the one that historically goes with my point of view on the matter) is to compare ISPs to the telephone companies when the telephone first started out. In the beginning of the 20th Century, after the Edison patent expired and when the telephone network was recognized as the most important part of the system, marketing types would come to your front door and say "Join our network! Your good friend, Mr. Google is on our network, if you'd like to call him, you should join us!" So you would. The next day, another salesperson would come and say "Join our network! Your doctor, Dr. Kaspersky is on our network, if you'd like to call him, you should join us!" Not wanting to make Mr. Google sad, you'd just get the second phone installed. The next day, another salesman would come by and say, "Join our network! Your furniture mover, Mr. Ballmer is in our network, if you'd like to call him, you should join us!" Not wanting to make Mr. Google or Dr. Kaspersky sad, you'd join the new network as well. Pretty soon, you'd have 10 telephones in your living room. So the government stepped in and made the public telephone system, which coincidentally works almost exactly the same (fundamentally) as the internet does today.
This is exactly the same as net neutrality. Both networks provide a means of remote communication. The internet may move a lot more information and may be growing at an ever-increasing rate, but it was built a century later. The internet is still a relatively new system - we're still learning just how big the enormous amounts of data we can transport, but the ISPs are still complaining about laying new lines. Phone networks are old technology, but all the telephone companies switched to digital telephony in the 60s to allow the massive amount of people getting phone services.
It costs money to keep a public network running, but once the the public telephone system was established, nobody was calling to bring back the old system. The problem is that the internet is a little bit more complicated than telephones and so the politicians don't fully understand the repercussions of their actions. We need somebody in Washington to stand up and explain that the series of tubes that make up the internet is the same as the series of tubes that make up the telephone network (and with VoIP are becoming the same tubes) and that they've already made legislation regarding it that works and they don't need to waste their time.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
Agree completely - IPv6 has almost identical QoS/CoS features (DiffServ code points aka DSCP, which supersede the old TOS byte but are used in similar way), and is really not at all relevant to net neutrality or QoS. IPv6 is really about avoiding the need for NAT, and will primarily be taken up for very large IPTV / Cable TV deployments, e.g. Comcast which is already IPv6 in core IP network and going IPv6 for the home networks as well, due to sheer number of addresses required (beyond what you can fit behind a 10.x address - 100 million needed). Other IPv6 early adopters are US federal agencies, AsiaPac (esp. China and Japan), and IMS (possibly, can be used with IPv4).
I don't think router performance is really an IPv6 issue - most core routers already do hardware-based forwarding and are IPv6 enabled, and many network cores are now MPLS based, in which case you just tag the IPv6 packets with an MPLS label on the provider edge (PE router), on ingress to core, and MPLS switch them across the core, just like IPv4 on top of MPLS today. So any MPLS-enabled cores (e.g. BT's 21CN, where they are replacing the whole legacy PSTN phone network with IP core and VoIP/IMS) can adopt IPv6 very easily, without any real performance hit.
The real issue is adoption and chicken/egg issues as you say - this is why Comcast is important, as it provides its own content servers for IPTV, as well as the whole core and aggregation network, and manages the home network equipment (set top box, cable mode, VoIP adapter, etc) - so their decision to go IPv6 a while back will act as a model for other large IPTV deployments and help move the equipment vendors across a wider range of kit, as well as driving IPv6 support in software such as NMSs, OSSs (operational support systems, e.g. inventory and activation), etc.
But the ownership is secure.
They build a new pipe. The rules are that you pay $x/Mbyte. So, duplicating the capacity will let you make twice the amount of money you made last year (in the case of flat rate, it is seen as being capable of selling to twice the customers than last year).
The point of net neutrality is not whether you're going to charge me for downloading warez or whatever. The point is why should you charge more for downloading from TPB instead of yourtelcowarez.com service. After all, the pipes don't care (for the argument's sake, let's assume both sites are equally far away).
Obviously there is a problem of oversold bandwidth, and now that people is starting to use it, they bitch about it. Basically they want to raise prices without saying so (pay $5 to telcowarez.com subscription + ISP subscription = ISP subscription + make TPB pay $5 for "premium content" = ISP subscription + make me pay $5 for "TPB premium content access" = telco makes 5 extra bucks).
The problem is that they'll overdo it and they will eventually demand $5 for each site. That kind of Internet would definitely suck.
GPG 0x1B479C78
I see your point, however I think you've misunderstood me. Sure, mobile companies can encourage people to join their network by offering free calls after a certain time of the night or free calling to others within your network, land lines can charge you different amounts for certain times of the day, but there is a difference between what you see as a "neutral" network and what net neutrality wants to enforce. My mobile carrier charges me so much for my gateway to the public telephone network and they are not allowed to charge me more for calling a Sprint number than a Verizon number, nor are they allowed to intentionally drop my calls to carriers that are not Cingular. The former, with a twist of words, could be called "bribery," assuming some money changed hands and the latter could be construed as a form of corporate, and completely fictitious, mud-slinging - both of which are illegal.
I do agree with you that demand should limit itself, not only in the phone networks but also in the internet - there have been times I've simply walked away from my computer because the network was so incredibly slow. However, your solution to the problem (although you did not explicitly state it), has almost nothing to do with net neutrality. If ISPs charged people more for use of the internet at a certain time of the day - fine. ISPs are free to do any sort of throttling they care for, just as they are free to block you from running a server and free to block you from using torrent clients - it's a selling point for switching to a different ISP. What they are NOT allowed to do is to block you from contacting certain IP addresses or to specifically target a range of IPs for throttling. It would be like ATT intentionally not allowing you to call SBC (I hope they're not the same company) - it's simply not right.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
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!
You're about the fifth person today i've seen make the "ooo, socialism!" argument. This isn't particularly targeting you or your version of it, but the whole class of argument.
Am I the only one who finds it more than a little ironic (not to mention short-sighted and grating), considering the internet is the result of socialist practices in the first place? I realize we're largely an American audience here, but is our sense of history really that short that we can't even make it 20-30 years back? Do we not remember our origins with the ARPANET, a project nurtured in and entirely funded by America's favorite crypto-socialist organization, the Department of Defense? This is a project funded by tax dollars which fall well outside the core capitalist/libertarian conception of what the government should be doing, and while it's certainly got problems, it's worked out pretty well. While the technology wasn't necessarily the best around at the time (personally, I think we missed out on better things with datakit from Bell Labs), it was plenty good enough to facilitate growth.
But the most important aspect of all leading to the creation of the modern internet wasn't technical at all. Rather, it was the fact that its form and structure was decided outside the realm of commercial interests. The free interchange was facilitated by a design which had no interest in "walled gardens" of any kind. Wondering what the corporate, capitalist world would have come up with instead, if left to their own devices? We needn't wonder: look at AOL, or most of the national mobile networks (especially those on the CDMA side). Closed, tiered networks... all of which inhibit growth of services. Users, who're now accustomed to the wealth of readily-available (and frequently free, although that's secondary) resources on the Internet, have no interest in restricted choice, leading to (well, among the things leading to) very limited uptake of advanced mobile services. "The market" has told us that what "the market" comes up with on its own is, by its own measure, inferior to what the DoD's socialist practices came up with.
It's not a question of arguing "the free market is failing" - the Internet's very existence is thanks to the government realizing "the market" had no way of getting where it wanted to be.
Today, every mobile (and many fixed) network operator in America (and many internationally, although the dynamics are very different in other places) is struggling with the same conflict which ate AOL's business model: they want to be the walled garden, to be the guardian of the user's experience and to get paid for access to those users (walls work both ways). But the users just want the internet. Verizon want's to provide (or choose who provides, and get kickbacks from) my weather service, my news service, my search service, my photo sharing service, and so on. I, as a user, don't care what Verizon wants; I want to pick which ones I'm using. Fundamentally, that's what this whole net neutrality debate is about: the market you're so fond of drives network providers to be dumb pipes, or to at least divorce the content they do provide from their dumb pipes, but that's exactly what network operators are scared to death of. They don't want to compete in a commodity market.
A large part of me blames this whole mess on the McCarthyism-induced confusion between socialism and communism in America. We've given ourselves just the right kind of collective brain damage to be unable to tell the difference.
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.