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Survey Finds Canadians Support Net Neutrality Law
An anonymous reader writes "A new public opinion survey conducted in Canada finds overwhelming public support in that country for net neutrality legislation. Three-quarters of Canadians believe the government should pass a law to confirm the right of Internet consumers to access publicly available Internet applications and content of their choice — even though most of those surveyed did not know the term 'net neutrality.' The survey was commissioned by eBay." Of course the devil is in the wording. Given the survey's sponsorship, it's unlikely that respondents were presented with examples of the value that ISPs say packet shaping can bring, or asked to weigh such against net neutrality.
So what if the respondents don't understand QoS issues. Net neutrality isn't about getting rid of QoS, but about the deliberate extortion of money by ISPs and backbones to give preferential service to their own offerings and to those willing to pay. The deliberate muddying of the issue by industry shills is what gets people going "but what about packet shaping". Trying to prevent 5000 customers with Limewire at 8pm from dropping the average subscriber speed to 33.6kbs is not the same thing as demanding Google pay you money or you'll cut the bandwidth from your subscribers to them.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Just because its commissioned by eBay doesn't mean the company (the largest independent polling company in Canada) made a loaded survey, especially when AT&T is also a client of theirs. If the survey turned out to be negative for eBay, they could simply not release the information.
How about just switching my fscking packets and shove your "value added" up your ass. The contents of my packets are none of your business. I'll be very happy when IPSEC is ubiquitous and the only information ISPs will have access to is the minimum needed for routing.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Labor and public tax money. You forgot that. Speaking of, where is the fiber optic network we paid for?
Come on, name one benefit that packet shaping can bring. In all serious I can't think of a single example where it would be acceptable.
If an ISP needs to shape packets they've over sold their service, and that is their problem. Not ours.
1. Canadians value privacy, freedom, and their role in creating the open communications systems they depend on (SFU and UBC R001!)
2. Canada is used to having a high-bandwidth internet that is cheaper than the US one, faster, and in more households.
3. Only those who want to sell you less for more are in favor of killing off net neutrality.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think in this case wording is everything. It doesn't seem to me that the majority of the general public, outside of techies and their friends, is really informed about "Net Neutrality" and the debate over it.
You could probably get a poll to go either way based on how you word the question:
"Do you believe that governments or corporations should place restrictions on what websites you can visit, or charge you extra based on visiting certain sites?"
"Do you believe that private property should be respected, and that Internet Service Providers have the right to control the content they deliver, such as restrictions on child pornography, sites that contain malicious software, and terrorist web sites?"
Gifts for Geeks - Stuff that really matters!
There are laws against abuse of monopoly and laws against collusion between what should be competitors. A net neutrality law would be along the same lines.
When I pay for bandwith, I expect to be able to use it as a chose not as YOU or anyone else sees fit. I understand that this costs money and that is the source of my outrage.
Conversely, use of public servitude and spectrum are privileges not rights. Those that would use those public resources have obligations to the public. It can be argued that the current owners of spectrum and networks in this country have failed those obligations and should be removed from their position of privilege and jailed.
DMCA, Hollings, Palladium. What might have sounded like paranoia is now common sense.
If what you're saying is correct, why are we always up in arms when oppressive governments censor internet access? After all, if the government of China provided the labour in order to provide internet service for their citizens, then China has every right to limit what their citizens do. And so on for other countries. Why do we care about the "Great Firewall of China" or any other government that limits their citizens' activities online? What do we care about the Burmese bloggers?
I don't know the answers, and I don't pretend to. What I do know is that we should probably rethink what we understand as "rights" and "privileges", when it comes to novel technologies that act as mediums for free speech. Maybe the internet should play by different rules, like those that would be provided by a net neutrality act. Maybe not. But what is obvious is that the internet is somehow different than other privileged services, in that it has become a somewhat essential medium for global citizens to convene and engage in free speech.
As I said, I don't know the answers, but I do believe that your approach is not the direction that we should go in.
Sounds good. So then let's take a situation some years in the future where it's law. What happens when you are watching TV, and all of a sudden the stream starts stuttering. You call your cable company angry. They explain that TV is now delivered over IP, like everything else. Currently you have some neighbours hitting the P2P really heavy and it is using up enough of the segment that it is interfering with video traffic. They'd love to have video have a higher QoS, but alas the law says they can't. The "contents of your packets are none of their business."
Right now we have a situation where largely there's a disconnect between data, voice and video networks. They run on different standards, are handled by different equipment and so on. However that's slowly changing. VoIP is one of the first examples, but it'll keep going. Eventually we are likely to have everything routed to us over an IP network. However some of it is more important, or rather more time sensitive, than others. I don't mind if packets for my download have to wait a little bit. However with video, you've got to get me the next frame in not more than 33 milliseconds or I'm going to start dropping frames. This is the reason why video that operates over the Internet has to buffer and can't be true realtime, and even then still drops sometimes.
As such it is not a clear cut case of "just leave it alone." If everything goes to IP we are going to need a way to give priority to time critical packets. Even if that doesn't happen there's reason to want to shape packets. The big objection people have to P2P is that it eats up an unfair amount of network time. Most networks, all other things being equal, will work out so that each transfer gets an equal amount of time. Download one file via HTTP on a T1, you get somewhere in the realm of 150-190k/sec. Download a second file, they both go in the realm of 75-95k/sec. Ok, good deal. However P2P works off of lots of connections. You can have a single download having 150+ connections. So it'll grab more resources than its fair share and slow things down.
An easy solution to that, without banning P2P or something like that, is to just make P2P a lower priority than normal traffic. That's what we do on the campus I work on. We have a couple packet shapers that will put P2P packets behind others. That means that so long as there's bandwidth, everything works normally. However if we cap out, P2P slows down before other things do.
This isn't a clear cut thing. I agree that companies should be prohibited, either by law or simply by people refusing to do business with them, for charging people extortion money under threat of slowing their traffic down. However that doesn't mean we want to declare that all packets must be treated equal. Some things are just more important than others on a mixed network, and there needs to be allowances for that.
"Internet access is not a right."
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Not precisely true. There are other rights besides the "inalienable" ones. Sometimes, we create new rights and give them to the citizens.
This can be a "good thing", especially when advancing technology brings up a new issue.
Now that online video is becoming more prevalent, and people are moving from their TVs to their computer screens, it may behoove us to create and support the poor guy's right to view the same content as the rich guy.
Of course there are always trade-offs, and some who will even abuse such a right, but over-all I think it will be best for the nation to adopt a net-neutrality position, and sick the courts on those who try to profit by claiming some bits are worth more than others.
"We think people rightly feel that once they buy something, it stays bought," --Suw Charman, Open Rights Grp
It's the old adage of "better on paper". People should be holding companies liable when they pull that sort of crap, but consumers don't act in a self-interested manner anymore. Capitalism only works right if everybody involved in the process does their part to keep everybody else in check, but consumers have just rolled over and asked for it up the rear over the last few decades, so they're getting exactly what they requested now.
Talk to me about WoW and I'll punch your faggot face.
You are choosing your ISP
You're choosing your ISP from a pool of two or maybe three major players, and all of them have adopted onerous terms and conditions for you to obey with no negotiation.
Let them compete by offering it--why is there a need for legislation?
Because frankly, the ISP doesn't give a shit about you and your double-digits-a-month connection now that they've set their sights on extorting multimillions from other companies. You can vote with your $30 a month or whatever, but that's small fry compared to what they're going after.
The Internet2 project found that the costs and complexities of implementing quality of service guarantees exceeded the benefits. It was more practical to add sufficient bandwidth than it was to prioritize packets. They also predicted - and other research supports - that QoS would encourage ISPs to deliberately downgrade service in order to charge more.
"Only in America"
never let a man put his dirty how-do-you-do into your bajingo
Maybe you just haven't noticed yet, but that's exactly how it already works. If I am running a web-site, I can pay to have a faster connection to be able to better serve up my content to the demand. If I am a joe user, I can pay for a dial up connection (56k) isdn (112k) dsl/cable (1.5+ Mbps). DSL and cable even have scalable service offerings with many providers.
Given that both ends of the line already pay for scaled service, why should they have to pay _again_?
Sarbanes-Oxley was passed *in the wake of* the likes of Enron, Tyco International, Peregrine Systems and WorldCom. We don't wanna wait to be in the wake of corporations abusing their power to ruin the net, because by then it will probably be too late.
Besides, the way the US government is now, it may be the only chance to get the legislation through. Once powerful corporations decide they don't like Net Neutrality, their money will start to flow to politicians, and there can only be one outcome then.
== Jez ==
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