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.'"

Comments

All I know is...

[The Anarchist Avenge]

...Jefferson was a hit with the ladies. Obviously his solution must be superior.

The lack of IPv6 deployment is your clue

[SpaceLifeForm]

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.

Am I not getting it?

[arun_s]

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?

Re:Am I not getting it?

[iangoldby]

There is certainly one thing that you do get, that many other people are missing, and the ISPs and others with a big financial stake would dearly love everyone else to miss.

That is that when people talk about net neutrality there are two different things they might be talking about:

1. Differentiating between packets based on packet type/protocol. This is already done and most people think it is a good thing.

2. Differentiating between packets based on where they came from, or where they are going to.

The big companies who argue against net neutrality say that we can't have net neutrality, because (1) is absolutely essential to keep your VOIP calls glitch-free when capacity is limited.

What they don't like to mention is that actually the reason they don't like net neutrality is because they want to make deals with selected networks and content providers to extract money from them in return for giving their data higher priority.

He got it right

[jigjigga]

Greed is the root of these problems- eliminate it and everyone will do better (including the ISPs!)

Re:He got it right

[heinousjay]

Then all we have to do is eliminate human life, and the problem is solved.

Re:He got it right

[iminplaya]

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.

NO

[246o1]

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.

The value of standards

[wombatmobile]

"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.'"

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.

More anti-neutrality fud from monash.

[plasmacutter]

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.

Re:They have it backwards

[grcumb]

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.

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.

Think about the business

[Oddster]

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.

It's sorta like this

[Moraelin]

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.

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 ;) 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."

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.

Re:It's sorta like this

[fferreres]

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.

Re:It's sorta like this

[Jeff DeMaagd]

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.

Re:It's sorta like this

[Moraelin]

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.

Re:It's sorta like this

[ASBands]

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.

Re:It's sorta like this

[jez9999]

And if they use the term, 'series of tubes', they should be shot.

Re:It's sorta like this

[SunTzuWarmaster]

Hahahahahaha, fair. No really, fair. It's not fair. It's business, it is called a competitive edge. It works like this:

your money ----> ISPS (---- money from websites for services

Or in Slashdot terms:
1. Charge customers for services
2. Charge service providers for customers
3. Make this legal???
4. Profit!

Imagine that you getting internet it is process, like baking a cake. The websites are the ingredients in your cake, and the bakers are the ISP. You paying for a internet and downloading content is like having the cake. Then, ISPs charge individual sites for the right to be purchased (eaten/consumed). In a very real sense, this is them having the cake AND EATING IT TOO.

Re:It's sorta like this

[dkf]

That depends. If they say "the internet is going down a series of tubes", we should laugh and agree.

Re:It's sorta like this

[vic-traill]

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 ...

Point of clarification - the Edison patent was for the carbon transmitter (which made the telephone a practical device), not for the telephone system itself. Bell's first transmitters were voice-powered water xmitr's.

Wikipedia says:

In 1879, the Bell company acquired Edison's patents for the carbon microphone from Western Union.
YMMV.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison

U.S. Problem?

[Genocaust]

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.

Before just crying "greed!", read this

[sim000]

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.

Re:Stupid

[plasmacutter]

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.

Middle Way? Bah!

[NickFortune]

Net neutrality is both necessary and workable for what I call Jeffersonet, which comprises the "classical", bandwidth-light parts of the Internet.

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.

Re:Middle Way? Bah!

[FireFury03]

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

Ah, but the thing is that you probably aren't already paying for it. A lot of people seem to think that if they have a residential 8Mbps DSL then they are entitled to use that whole 8Mbps 24/7 (e.g. leave Bittorrent going all the time). However, the only reason residential connections can be so cheap is by having users contend with eachother for bandwidth - i.e. you can use up to 256Kbps (for example) on average and can burst up to 8Mbps. This is a good service really - most people want web pages, etc. to come down quickly (i.e. bursts up to a high speed) but much of the time their connection is idle (causing a low average usage).

I think the idea of forcing content providers to pay for the bandwidth on the consumer's end of the network is a terrible idea though (the consumer is already paying for their connection, why should the content provider pay more? If the consumer is choosing to use high bandwidth content then charge that consumer more, not the content provider). However, I am worried that outlawing non-neutrality would also squash the ISPs' ability to do legitimate traffic shaping.

For example, I think it's a very good thing for the ISP to prioritise protocols that _require_ a low latency (e.g. VoIP) over things like bittorrent (this sort of prioritisation isn't about making money, it's about providing a good service). But the key thing is that ISPs shouldn't be using prioritisation in order to allow massively underprovisioned services - it should be used purely to deal with unusual peaks in demand. On the odd occasion I fire up BitTorrent I should expect to get a reasonable amount of bandwidth out of it - if low priority traffic can never get the full bandwidth, the ISP is underprovisioned and that needs to be fixed.

Re:What about...

[gbobeck]

I'm still waiting to see "Less-filling-net" vs "Tastes-Great-net"

Re:I read them both, it's telco whining as expecte

[plasmacutter]

f your revenues are not enough to upgrade the network at the pace required by the increasing usage, you DO have a real problem

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.

IPv6 isn't really relevant

[billstewart]

Leaving aside the parent article's sense of humor on the topic, Richi's blog article doesn't really add up technically. IPv6 will eventually be necessary to handle the IPv4 address shortage, and maybe some of the mobile IP work in IPv6 won't get ported to IPv4, but probably anything useful will.

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.

Re:IPv6 isn't really relevant

[Cato]

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.

Re:Socialism creeping in

[Ernesto Alvarez]

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:

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.

Phone network neutrality?

[Half-pint HAL]

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.

Re:Phone network neutrality?

[ASBands]

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.

Re:Phone network neutrality?

[Eagleartoo]

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.

SBC bought ATT not to long ago and are now using the ATT name.

Re:Phone network neutrality?

[Qzukk]

Net neutrality, inasmuch as it advocates no peak rate, turns things upside-down

But that's not what we're asking to block, and that's not what the CEOs are publicly demanding. We don't care what they bill their subscribers, after all, the subscribers are their customers.

Do you remember the days of MCI and "family calling" where you could talk to selected "in-network" people for lower rates than others? Now imagine that MCI let you do this for people who were using AT&T, but while they charge you only 5 cents a minute when you were talking to your mother who had subscribed to AT&T, they would send your mother a bill for $2 a minute for having the privilege of being called by an MCI subscriber. And thats what the ISPs are talking about: they want Google's, Amazon's, and iTMS's money, so they want to bill Google, Amazon, and iTMS for the "privilege" of being able to communicate with their subscriber base. They dress it up really nice with words like "preferred" and "expedited", but seriously, when was the last time you had a problem pulling up Google's site? Do you think Google has any incentive at all to pay to make their site pull up "faster" when it's already fast enough for their users? And this is where the implied threat appears: of course Google needs to pay, because if they don't, something might happen to their packets, and that would be a terrible shame.

Bittorrent is NOT the issue!

[NickFortune]

Ah, but the thing is that you probably aren't already paying for it.

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 consumer is already paying for their connection, why should the content provider pay more?

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.

However, I am worried that outlawing non-neutrality would also squash the ISPs' ability to do legitimate traffic shaping.

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.

On the odd occasion I fire up BitTorrent I should expect to get a reasonable amount of bandwidth out of it - if low priority traffic can never get the full bandwidth, the ISP is underprovisioned and that needs to be fixed.

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.

Re:Socialism creeping in

[anothy]

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.

Re:Socialism creeping in

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

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:

I think its a little late for the ISPs to be complaining about socialism, seeing as the taxpayers have subsidized their infrastructure they now own to the tune of billions of dollars. In any case, all investment has risks, the ISPs are simply looking for a way to make money by investing in politicians instead of hardware. "You know, if not for these common carrier provisions the FCC requires, we could extort a lot more money without actually providing any more benefit, lets buy us some congresscritters!"

Oh, you built a new pipe? Great! No, we are not going to let you charge a premium for using it, no sir, net-neutrality and all... Don't be greedy, we want to trade our warez and to hold high-res video-conferences over it.

Do you even know what you're talking about? Net neutrality does not say that an ISP can't charge a premium for a faster pipe or even for running a given type of traffic faster. Net neutrality does not ban QoS, that is FUD they have been spreading that has always been shown to be false. Net neutrality is about insuring all traffic of the same type is treated the same, regardless of the source and destination. If the ISPs want to charge their customers a premium for use of some new pipe, they are free to do so. What net neutrality stops is them from charging people who are not their customers a fee for not waylaying any transit traffic from them that happens to cross their network (in violation of their peering agreements). They can charge 10 times as much for video conference traffic as they do for Web traffic and use QoS to ensure the video conference runs fast enough. What net neutrality stops them from doing is looking at traffic they are paid by peers to have cross their network, and intentionally slowing down traffic from say, Google, so that Google searches are extra slow, because either Google (who is not their direct customer) did not pay extortion, or because MS paid more than Google.

ISPs are given immunity to certain laws under the assumption that they are common carriers. They can transport child pornography without going to jail because they just carry all traffic impartially. They can carry slanderous remarks without fear of lawsuit because they just impartially carry traffic. If they decide not to impartially carry traffic, but instead to discriminate among different people sending and receiving, what benefit to society does it bring to continue providing them with special immunity to the laws?

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)...

There is not now and never has been a "free market" for internet. The government highly subsidized the infrastructure from day one, provided special legal protections to ISPs, and allowed only two in most geographical areas to run lines in the public right of ways creating government enforced monopolies. Because of those public right of ways and the geographic realities, internet service lends itself to being a natural monopoly, which never obeys free market rules anyway. Claiming then, that one given act of government interference is the cause of all problems is absurd.

I build tools for ISPs and I can tell you the ones outside the US are a lot less fucked up and are investing a lot more in improved infrastructure and bringing real value to customers as a way to make money. In a lot of Europe and even in some of south america you can buy internet pipes that allow you to filter our DDoS attacks at your ISPs peering border, not once it has hosed your network completely. People pay a premium for those pipes, but in the

Re:Socialism creeping in

[anothy]

The Internet is the result of a "spillover" of the dual-use technology. Developed by the DoD for itself, it turned out (or was wisely designed) to be usable by others. This was terrific and has since been matched only by GPS in popularity.

Mind you, ARPANET has paid only for the development of software and the standards -- it did not pay for the pipes or other hardware, that today's socialists demand be upgraded.

only half true. look at the evolution beyond the military personnel and facilities and their direct contractors. what do we see? public universities (america's most underrated socialist institutions) were the first non-DoD facilities on ARPANET. while i'm not sure who actually paid for the installation of the lines, the universities (and each point, individually, as it was added) paid their own maintenance costs. Bell wasn't paying to maintain this network.

and, of course, let's not forget that very much of that "private" network was built either with government subsidies or with money collected under the force of government ("universal service charge" and the like), not to mentioned sanctioned monopolies. i don't think it's unreasonable or illogical to assert that this imposes some degree of social obligation on them.

I believe, you just wanted to see the words "crypto-socialist" posted.

heh. i confess i really like the phrase, but that doesn't make it less true. it amazes me that more people don't see that aspect of the military. it's not like they go to any lengths to hide it.

i think you're basically over-optimistic about how the market will play out. monopolies really like to hold on to power, and tend towards decreasing costs rather than increasing services in a drive to increase revenue.

to be clear, i'm not particularly an advocate of net neutrality legislation. i'm fully in favor of the principle - i think it's important for everyone involved, in the long term, and for most people in the short term, too - and agree with the proponents of legislation that short-sighted corporate tendencies threaten it, but i'm explicitly undecided on whether legislation is the best solution. i just think the "ooo, socialism!" argument is a particularly stupid attack.

As for the distinction between Socialism and Communism -- yes, these are distinct. Their true adherents tend view the former as a prelude to the (inevitable) latter, however, so mixing them up is not really such a fallacy...

well, the Communists believe that. most modern socialists do not. take a look at nearly all of europe. lots of socialism in the mix there, but it's stable; neither viewed as nor attempting to be a prelude to communism. and, incidentally, it works very well. i suppose the confusion is largely understandable in that a lot of communist organizations call(ed) themselves socialists to seem less threatening, thus contributing to the poisoning of the word socialist.

It is highly off-topic here, though.

eh, gotta use that karma for something, right? ;-)