New Network Neutrality Squad — Users Protecting the Net

Lauren Weinstein writes in to announce the new "Network Neutrality Squad" — NNSquad. Joining PFIR Co-Founders Peter G. Neumann and Weinstein in this announcement are Vinton G. Cerf, Keith Dawson (Slashdot.org), David J. Farber (Carnegie Mellon University), Bob Frankston, Phil Karn (Qualcomm), David P. Reed, Paul Saffo, and Bruce Schneier (BT Counterpane). The Network Neutrality Squad ("NNSquad") is an open-membership, open-source effort, enlisting the Internet's users to help keep the Internet's operations fair and unhindered from unreasonable restrictions. The project's focus includes detection, analysis, and incident reporting of any anticompetitive, discriminatory, or other restrictive actions on the part of Internet service Providers (ISPs) or affiliated entities, such as the blocking or disruptive manipulation of applications, protocols, transmissions, or bandwidth; or other similar behaviors not specifically requested by their customers.

Comments

Great idea...

[Facetious]

...awful name. I can't help but think of Geek Squad, and that doesn't make me happy.

Re:Great idea...

[d34thm0nk3y]

..awful name. I can't help but think of Geek Squad, and that doesn't make me happy.

We already understand the issues surrounding network neutrality (and Best Buy). To a normal person a name reminding them of the people who fixed their computer adds credibility.

Re:Great idea...

[widget54]

I for one welcome our unlikely super hero's

Re:Great idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it looks really interesting. Too bad Comcast won't let me access their sites. :-/

Re:Great idea...

[dascritch]

Network Neutrality ? Squad ?

Terrorist Buzzword Threat Advisory : Yellow
May rain bananas during the evening

Re:Great idea...

[Anonymous Coward]

I for one welcome our unlikely super hero's Our unlikely super hero's what? dog?

I for one welcome our unlikely super heroes themselves.

Re:Great idea...

[tkdtaylor]

When I see NNSquad I think Non-Nude ... helping to keep porn of the tubes everywhere!!!

Re:Great idea...

[Bigon]

.. and awful webpage

Re:Great idea...

[Zenaku]

Agreed. The should have called it the Crush Comcast Coalition.

Re:Great idea...

[SeaFox]

Argh! Atrocious!

I, for one, welcome our unlikely superheros.

Re:Great idea...

[bigdavesmith]

...the people who fixed their computer...

I don't think Geek Squad has such a shining reputation that this is a good defense for the Net Neutrality Squad's choice of name. From what I've heard from personal word of mouth, even 'normal people' don't have the best successes with Geek Squad. And then we all know the exceptional stories, like the guy who was collecting porn off of each client he visited.

I'd let 'Squad' rest a few more years. In the mean time, there are lots of other options.

Re:Great idea...

[copowi]

While some big-hitters have signed up to the Net Neutrality Squad and while such a squad will keep the issue of net neutrality alive, it does have a negative impact because it reinforces, once again, the existing paradigm of corporate-controlled media. Once again the idea that all we can do as users is to monitor and protest every time the corporate-owned media tramples on our freedoms is also reinforced.

This play nicely into the hands of the corporate media executives who may be momentarily embarrassed by being caught out but know that all takes is a little spin and a little time and before long we back to the status quo. Does anyone really believe the corporations will actually reform as a result of such exposure? Or will they redouble their efforts at masking their actions so they are not as easily discovered in the future? This is nothing sinister; it is how corporations work. Their only goal is to deliver the highest profits for their shareholders, and the control over the data that flows through their networks has the potential to deliver extraordinary profits.

While ever this economic incentive exists, corporations by their nature will do whatever it takes to achieve this aim. This includes pumping millions into lobbying to ensure any legislative threat is removed or minimized. That is why I don't hold out a lot of hope for the legislative approach.

If we are to save the Internet we need to shift the battleground by shifting the focus to the real problem and the real solution. The real problem is the corporate structure which is simply not suitable for the delivery of essential services. The corporate profit motive approach to mobilizing action works well in some instances, but it is increasingly being exposed as inadequate in essential services like health, and I argue in essential services like the Internet.

So what is the solution? It is emerging in initiatives like CUWiN (the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network) is a world-renowned coalition of wireless developers and community volunteers committed to providing low-cost, do-it-yourself, community-controlled alternatives to contemporary broadband models.

For just $499 you can buy a CUWin kit to start your own wireless mesh network in your area. But CUWiN is not the only option. Community networks are popping up everywhere exposing the real battleground. "The big telephone and cable companies are using their lobbying clout in Washington and the state capitals to outlaw municipal broadband systems, prevent competition and undercut local control."

FreePress.org started the Action Squad HQ with the aim of "fighting back against big corporations and their high-paid lobbyists and politicians by organizing to educate local elected officials and build networks in their communities." But the initiative is consigned to the back pages and seems to have stalled.

Why? Because it has hit the brick wall of the existing pervasive paradigm which places the corporation at the centre of society. What we need is not a Net Neutrality Squad, but a squad who sole objective is create the necessary paradigm shift by exposing the real problem and promoting the only viable solution: community-owned and community-operated Internet.

By Our Powers Combined...

[Pantero Blanco]

They certainly have some big names on the list. I hope that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and they're more effective at getting politicians to listen than they were when standing apart.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[Pantero Blanco]

It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.

I have more money, and less time than most people to have to deal with the unwashed masses. I should have the option of paying for better QOS if I feel like it.

No. Different tiers of internet service are like having a first-class and business-class seating section. You pay for X downstream and Y upstream.

Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[Wesley Felter]

There's always the possibility that ISPs could voluntarily (after receiving a few visits from the NN Mafia, er Squad) adopt network neutrality principles.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[plasmacutter]

what BS rhetoric.

allow me to bring you back down to reality from your rabid right wing frothing.

The "open market" as you so quaintly call these broadband monopolies is failing us. They are deliberately censoring websites, blocking protocols, forging packets, and illegally giving data on our internet use to the US government.

The only thing left they haven't done is implement the great firewall of china, something even the bush administration would not get away with.

So, in short, they are already as bad as the government could ever be with the internet. Regulation can only make it better

That's not Net Neutrality

[norminator]

It's not about how fast your general Internet service is... that already works the way you want.

It's about how fast the sites you're getting your content from are, based on how much they pay your ISP. Want to buy TV shows and movies from iTunes? Better hope they paid off your ISP, and if customers in general want good service, Apple would have to pay all of the ISPs. Want YouTube? Better hope they paid up. BitTorrent? Games? Good luck.

Net Neutrality does not mean that the ISP doesn't discriminate against you based on how much you pay. It also doesn't mean that the ISP can't give certain types of traffic higher priority. It does mean that the ISP can't discriminate against traffic based on what site the content is coming from, and I think it doesn't suck, and is very important to understand.

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[darjen]

Question for you: do the ISPs own their equipment?

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[darjen]

The question is not irrelevant. They are selling a service that is only possible to provide on the communications gear that *they purchased*. If you are willing to argue that they don't really own the stuff they provide that service with, then who does? Society? The problem with this for property advocates such as myself is that it is a very slippery slope. Who knows what other rulings against property will come of it - or how courts may use this precedent to justify taking others property for some kind of "common good". If you favor net neutrality, you should start your own telco without charging content providers extra for what bandwidth they use, rather than using the saw to prevent others from using property that they legally purchased.

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[Pantero Blanco]

The "it's their equipment" argument is irrelevant. A person's freedom to do what he wants with his property doesn't make him immune to laws dealing with contracts, advertising, etc. If an ISP has a contract with a customer to provide a service, they have to provide it.

Who knows what other rulings against property will come of it - or how courts may use this precedent to justify taking others property for some kind of "common good".

You mean like using tax money to build telecommunications infrastructure?

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[darjen]

So if it's not under a contract, they should be able to set the terms of a new contract if their customers voluntarily agree with it, right? Your argument, though perhaps valid under the current circumstance, assumes that public money was already invested, and their business wouldn't exist without it. That may some merit, but of course I am against using taxpayer money for any telecommunications purpose, including infrastructure. The problem here is that the initial use of public dollars has led us into a downward spiral of regulation. That makes it harder and harder to get out of it as we go on. So the proper solution in my mind would be to allow private entities to build up their own networks, with their own money, wherever they can get customers. In order to make it equal and ethical for everyone, tax money should be completely taken out of the equation in all circumstances.

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[AeroIllini]

Yeah, they sure did purchase that property legally.

With a government-granted monopoly over a municipality, and with government-granted rights to bury their legally-purchased property under other people's legally-purchased property.

I think if you are going to be given special rights by the government, then your responsibilities to that government (and ultimately to the people who are governed) are much higher than someone in a standard free-market scenario. It seems that the politicians have forgotten that little point, choosing instead to champion The Almighty Free Market, when in this market there is no such thing.

If the ISPs want to buy all the land their fiber is buried under, and the local government wants to allow more than one provider to do the same in the area, then they have a right to say "we can do whatever the hell we please with our property". I will just give them the heave-ho and move to a provider that gives me what I want. But since there is no competition, the telcos have a much higher responsibility to society than someone without a government-granted monopoly.

If you want to look at it from a backbone perspective, consider this: all of these major telcos are interconnected in a giant mesh, and it is impossible to get access to "The Internet" without crossing over between these providers. The internet is an end-to-end network; the stuff in the middle shouldn't be providing much other than access. So if Google is hooked up to Comcast, and has paid Comcast for fast access, but you're hooked up to Quest, and Google has not paid Quest, then Google will still be slow for you, which is unacceptable. And if we make sure that everyone pays everyone else for every connection, then it's just a giant payola clusterfuck where all the money ends up in the middle, and the little guy is squeezed out of the market.

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[darjen]

Please see my other response in this thread... I think it applies to what you said as well. The problem is that once we begin regulating industry it is difficult to extricate ourselves from government control. We have got to break out of it some how. It might be painful at first but it would be best for the long run to end all subsidies, public infrastructure development, and regulation on telecommunication.

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[epee1221]

The problem is that once we begin regulating industry it is difficult to extricate ourselves from government control.

Just remember to remove the things that keep monopolies in place before you remove the things that keep monopolies in check.

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[AeroIllini]

I agree that regulation in general is bad, but not every situation can be solved with a free market. Several conditions need to apply, including the capability for competition and entry, which can't happen in the natural monopoly situation of wired networks.

I've explained my thoughts on this before, so I will point you to my previous post.

Re:That's not Net Neutrality

[darjen]

I read your post, and I'm not convinced in the natural monopoly excuse. I say excuse because it reads as an apology for state intervention when none such action necessarily needs to take place. For more on what I am talking about, you might want to take a look at this: http://www.mises.org/journals/rae/pdf/RAE9_2_3.pdf

In my opinion, that article pretty much demolishes any reason for any company to be given monopoly privileges by the state. I would even go so far as to say that monopolies are always created by the government, as was the case in the 19th century when utility monopolies first started to come about. Furthermore, since the deregulation we now have Verizon FIOS and AT&T television services all beginning to compete against each other, even after all this time of supposed natural monopolies that were put in place by the government. I say let competition reign!

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[TWX]

I have a feeling that most users are too stupid to understand what their ISPs do, and if people-in-the-know don't organize to fight it that it will just get worse.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[Dorkmaster Flek]

I could be wrong, but it sounds more like they're looking for technical documentation and solutions to the issues rather than lobbying politicians for new laws. Also, do you really think that we even have "open market operations"? ISPs in North America have government regulated monopolies and it's killing our ability to keep pace with the rest of the world in connection speed and penetration to the majority of the population. I agree the solution is not more government regulation, but to kill these geographical monopolies.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[DustyShadow]

Net neutrality has nothing to do with your ability to buy a faster service from your ISP. It has to do with not allowing providers to prevent you from accessing certain sites or protocols.

expand their mandate

[FLoWCTRL]

The formation of this group is an excellent idea.

Once they start finding and pressuring individual ISPs found guilty of "non-neutral" behavior, it will create incentive for customers to leave that ISP and go to a competitor. Sometimes there won't be a competitor, such as in many rural areas.

The logical progression is to encourage consumers to form their own local groups and move to community-owned Internet access. This new NNSquad should expand their mandate to provide resources that help and encourage communities to achieve network independence.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[MonGuSE]

Network Neutrality doesn't really mean government regulation at all. It just means that all packets have as much right to the road as any others. If you try to block your competitors packets you get slapped, if you try to use anticompetitive practices you get slapped, if you act in a monopolistic manner you get slapped. However you are free to do whatever else you please beyond that. If you want to charge ridiculous amounts to all of your customers fairly you can, if you want to drop all of your peering agreements feel free, if you don't want to invest in your infrastructure and continue wringing every last dime out of your existing infrastructure go ahead... What we need to be regulated better is public rights of way and who has access to them until wireless is mature enough to handle broadband in large deployments.

How does Google find access to pipes that don't exist? There are basically 3 or 4 major players that everyone relies on and you can't just lay new pipe on rights of way that you don't own. Then there is the matter of incumbent telecoms and cable co's and their regional monopolies. If you want high speed internet you deal with 3 companies, Time Warner, Comcast or AT&T. There is nothing stopping time warner sticking up a roadblock to Google, Yahoo and MSN and say go here instead. In fact they already do that to a degree by taking over your browser settings with their client software. They have a portal that is steadily growing in size and services that is being supported by their near monopolies in what 40% of households in the US? Most of the US population isn't dense enough to attract a lot of competition because of the cost of laying cable. Ironically a lot of that cable laying is subsidized by tax payer money but is granted for sole use to one company. In a couple of years if we don't stand our ground on network neutrality we will have a cell phone esque market place for our internet services where we have to pay 10cents a search and 5 cents a dns lookup and 25cents an email and yadda....

Right now the major players are sitting on their pipes wringing as much money as they can out of them and doing the minimum amount of upgrades necessary to maintain the status quo. That is why the telecom companies are having bandwidth issues. The rest of the world is eventually going to surpass our pipes and offer a ton of dynamic content that we can't access because the infrastructure in the US can't handle it. Just like the cell phone industry is leaps and bounds ahead of the US industry in the rest of the world. Same in the console market and hand helds. I could go on but I digress.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[griffjon]

...Which, technically, is also government regulation, just regulation that's been underutilized in the past few decades. While I'm not exactly a fan of "Big Government;" it does have some usefulness in providing a "fair" and open playing field, which is what net neutrality is about. We all rejoiced when the FCC struck down exclusive cable contracts in apartment buildings (http://politics.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/29/2152212), which is an important step at loosening local cable monopolies. Perhaps it could be a good thing?

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[kebes]

it really means government regulation I agree that the government should keep its regulating to a minimum. The free market can often find optimal solutions to a variety of problems. However, there are two important things to keep in mind with regard to communication infrastructure: (1) It is already regulated; (2) It involves numerous layers of monopoly, hence it will never be a pure free market.

One of the important things to remember is that communication infrastructure requires using a limited public resource (e.g. burying cables on public property or even easements on private property, or using the limited bandwidth of wireless spectra ...). So no matter what, some kind of regulation is required. Moreover, some kind of government monopoly grant will be required (it is ludicrous to have hundreds of companies lay independent cable infrastructures, or compete for bands by building bigger and bigger transmitters).

So, given that government involvement (and moreover, the creation of various forms of monopoly) is inevitable, the question cannot be "do we want the government involved?" but rather "what do we want government involvement to be?"

The incumbent communication companies are, basically, abusing the monopoly status that was granted to them. That monopoly status was granted with an implied (and only occasionally codified) ethos: namely that this would create widespread access to the resource for the citizenry. Things like prioritizing traffic and double-charging people for access are explicitly contrary to the intention with which the monopolies were granted. Hence, it is totally reasonable to ask that government amend the agreement with these companies, so that they actually deliver the service they were supposed to deliver.

Put otherwise: why should government keep giving monopolies to companies that are not acting in ways that benefit the citizens?

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[DMUTPeregrine]

I think it's more like the airline charging the receiving hotel to take you. If they don't pay to get you off the plane, you sit there for eight hours.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[doas777]

I think you guys need to read up on the topic. Teired service is NOT like your first class/economy example, though it may head that way eventually.

ok heres the deal. AT&T is mad because Google is making money off selling ads to THEIR users without writing a check to AT&T. the users paid for their access, as did google, but AT&T wants to double-dip, and charge Google for access to THEIR subscribers.

so lets say AT&T and Yahoo! entered into an agreement whereby Yahoo would be the default search provider for AT&T networks. AT&T could then degrade or eliminate traffic to google, in an attempt to sway user preference. would you keep going to google if it took 35 seconds to load, while yahoo comes up at lightspeed?

Teired service comes in two flavors. one is paid for by web providors, the other by customers.
1) Google pays AT&T for perfered access to THEIR customers. google would have to pay off every ISP nation wide if that were the approach.

2) create user packages where the user would pay extra for access to sites that AT&T does not have deals with. For $19.95 you get yahoo, and email. for 29.95 you can get google (but not any of the sites linked therein), and for 59.95 you can get access to the internets 200 most popular sites. full access to the internet available for $.20 per site hit. be sure not to hit reload...

neither gives you any more than you have today, all it does is take away. I pay my bill. if that isn;t enough for them, then they either need to raise their prices, or live with it.

I heard Tim Berners-lee came down on the anti side of NN. I read his arguments and while they are valid from a network engineers perspective, he's completely missing the consumer protection aspect, which is the whole reason the rest of us are discussing NN.

I am not a commodity that AT&T can buy and sell. if AT&T wants to charge companies for access to AT&T subscribers, then they owe us subscribers a check, not the other way around.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[epee1221]

If Network Neutrality is legalized, it really means government regulation. The Internet regulated by the FTC/FCC, and we know how wonderful that won't be.

Slightly better than an Internet regulated by AT&T.

Re:Too vague!

[jav1231]

Suppose the request comes about by the first customer hogging more than his share of bandwidth?
How can he? If he buys 1.5Mbps down and 512Kpbs up how can he take more than that? Right now ISP's are saying if he takes his 1.5Mbps he's taking more than his share. I say no, he's taking what he paid for.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[vertinox]

Do we really think open market operations won't solve the issue?

The problem is that telecommunications in an inherit monopoly with no free market involved.

The only true free market solution would be to allow a complete free market in which eventually all the telecommunications would merge due to market pressure resulting in one big monopoly which at that point would dictate whatever they felt like as the service and price thus ending the free market.

So the paradox is that we can't reduce regulation as it is now without destroying the free market.

The only way we could get a sustained free market is actually use temporary government regulation to break up the current monopolies and pass a permanent law that says no telco company can ever merge with another one and force line providers out of the content providing business.

Yes... That sounds like the total opposite of a free market, but your going to have to break the bone to set it right to eventually get back to the 90s style of internet ISPs in which the phone company owned the line but didn't provide the service and the free market let ISPs flourish.

I remember a time in which prices of dial up dropped and speeds improved because there was competition between mom and pop 56K ISPs. Now what do we have... Verizon, ATT, and Comcast and chances are you may only have one of them in your area if you want broad band.

If the govenrment came in a said, "OK, you can own the lines but you can't sell internet service" and then forced the telcoms to lease their lines to a slew of competitors we would see a compitition.

I would go as far as to say we need another baby bell break up. Heck.... It was the only way to real spur a free market with Ma Bell.

Re:Too vague!

[Urza9814]

If one user's activity degrades the quality of another's connection, then the ISP is selling a product that they don't actually have. I should be able to use all the bandwidth that I pay for.

I'm so glad for this

[Seismologist]

I'm so glad that there are "users" (of the internets?) looking out for me. That is one less thing for me to take of my worry list, however the following still remain:

1. Global warming impacts

2. Poverty in my country

3. Iraq war

...

4. Profit?

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[BlueMerle]

If Network Neutrality is legalized, it really means government regulation. The Internet regulated by the FTC/FCC, and we know how wonderful that won't be. Do we really think open market operations won't solve the issue? I mean if some ISP's are going to be double charging Google for access, I'm willing to bet Google can easily figure out a way around them.

If Net Neutrality isn't legalized, it means that ISP's will regulate traffic based entirely on their whims. Give me government regulation over that any day!!

"Layer 3" might be better

[Burz]

...or something that evokes the Internet Protocol.

People need to be reminded of what the ISP's role is: The offer Layer 3 service in the form of IP. Muck around with the protocols above that and you've not only stepped outside the bounds of an ISP, but are guilty of false advertising and data falsification.

Defence of Free Thought

[spleen_blender]

I wonder if the big telecoms realize how badly they will be entrenched in cyber-guerrilla warfare with people like you and me if they somehow pull off grasping control of the net. It would be nice and a hell of a lot of fun to have a fully morally justifiable reason to engage in offensive action against the people trying to control information. I just imagine a Thermopylae style engagement between the two sides, and it sends shivers down my spine when I think about what we are actually trying to defend.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[DragonTHC]

what about when "some ISP's" are going to block ssh access on your account and tell you that you can only have ssh access through a business account which costs double what you're paying? What about when "some ISP's" are actively blocking bit torrent on their whole network and tells you that "if the file you want is legitimate, you can download it from a website"? does it matter to them that you want to help seed the torrent for the new OpenSuSE 10.3 DVD? (using your bandwidth is not allowed under their Acceptable Use Policy). "some ISP's" want you to surf the web, check your email, and play online games. That's it.

Under such a system where they could actually restrict your access to anything else the Internet has to offer, well, that's like AOL. While I agree that the FCC is really not an agency we want on our Internet, the free market will undoubtedly destroy itself after hurting the consumer beyond repair. Net Neutrality is good for business. In the U.S.'s current climate of deregulation and monopolization, we need something there to protect the consumer.

All Packets Are Equal. Don't ransom for your packets. Hey AT&T, no double dipping! Hey Comcast, no blocking means no blocking and no delaying indefinitely!

Re:Too vague!

[kebes]

I don't think you can neatly separate out "good" and "bad" behaviors like this. Well, one metric could at least be that ISPs don't violate the contracts they have with customers. I.e.: they are not committing fraud. Fraud is "bad." Your hypotheticals are not nearly as gray as you make them out to be.

What if one customer "requests" that another customer's internet performance be hindered? Is that OK or not? Not OK. Why should one customer be able to influence another customer's service?

Suppose the request comes about by the first customer hogging more than his share of bandwidth? Is that OK or not? "More than his share"? The available bandwidth is stipulated in the contract you sign for the service. The ISP has to honor that contract and deliver that bandwidth. The customer is allowed to use the bandwidth they paid for (yes, even saturate it). For the ISP to do otherwise is fraud. If the ISP enters multiple contracts and it cannot fulfill them all (over-subscribes) that is fraud on the part of the ISP.

Suppose an ISP provides special low latency connections optimized for VOIP? Is that OK or not? Sure, that's OK, as long as it doesn't degrade the performance of other customers.

Suppose they slow down large downloads? Is that OK or not? No, that's not OK. (Unless the contract the customer signed explicitly said that this would happen.)

When the world is covered with a grid of network nodes every meter, when we are online 100% of the time everywhere we go, we are going to need a network infrastructure which is flexible and smart. This vision of ubiquitous connectivity isn't going to happen if we allow the telecoms to make the rules: they will charge so much for every little service that it will be far too expensive to maintain the connectivity you mention. As for "infrastructure which is flexible and smart"--I believe that's part of what network neutrality is about. One of the issues with allowing ISPs to filter content based on type (and especially based on origin/destination) is that such a system inherently becomes inflexible. Moreover it isn't smart, because people will fight against the traffic shaping rules if they don't conform to the way people want to use the net (e.g. people will start encrypting everything or spoofing origin IP or hiding one kind of traffic inside another).

An "arms race" between the infrastructure and the users is neither flexible nor efficient. It is wasteful and frustrating. The genius of the Internet was that it was a simple system that would blindly pass packets to their destination. It was this generality and equality that allowed a whole slew of new applications to evolve. The point is that we can't imagine, today, what the next "killer app" of the net is going to be... but traffic shaping inherently says "these are the services that are important"--which means anything currently unimagined will remain unimplemented forever.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[spikenerd]

It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.

It's a bit more like this...

Thankyou for flying coach-air, and welcome to coach-France. Since you didn't fly first-class, you may not visit the Eiffel Tower or the Louvre, but you may visit any of the fine attractions on this list of businesses that support our airline. Since you flew during our limited offer, you will be permitted to purchase three souveniers instead of the usual two. And remember, don't try to visit anyone you know in France--that would be a violation of the terms of service under which you flew. We hope you enjoy your visit to coach-France. If you'd like to upgrade your service in order to visit some of the finer attractions in France, your stewardess will be happy to help you make arrangements. Please have your credit cards ready, and remember, it's a violation of Federal law to visit attractions that do not comply with the terms of this airline service.

Where's the tools......?

[russ1337]

Its all great running around banging the drum and asking users to 'join the war on non-neutrality' but it's all for nothing if you cannot DETECT non-neutrality in the first place.

I recall some discussion a while ago here on /. where someone was writing an application to detect non-neutrality... but it went quiet very quickly. Now the way I see it is that the list contains people that have the skills, or know the people who could write an application that could aid in the DETECTION of unfair practices from the ISP's.

The application could be used by the volunteers, and test the various protocols to various hosts (Skype, Google, youtube, TPB) and between the users themselves with various traffic (p2p, ping, tcp/ip, udp etc...) and see if any 'delay' occurs specific to one type of traffic. If it contained an automated reporting tool (OMG Tinfoil hat!!), then the aggregators could see trends across the various providers and not rely solely on one or two users. Of course you're entering a war of cat and mouse....

Before we can go accusing ISP's on non-neutrality, we need the tools to detect unfair play in the first place... anyone know of any?

Re:Where's the tools......?

[Repossessed]

If I personally, cannot tell that my access to something is being restricted, without the help of extra software, then I fail to see why I should care.

Re:Where's the tools......?

[russ1337]

If I personally, cannot tell that my access to something is being restricted, without the help of extra software, then I fail to see why I should care.

First they started blocking Bit-torrent... but I did not use bit torrent so said nothing... yada yada yada...

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[Jarjarthejedi]

Mod Parent Up. Very good example, it's not about getting better access, it's about getting access at all.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[theantipop]

I always wonder this about the difference between our communications industry and those in other countries where broadband and reasonable cellular phone service is common. What are they doing so different that eliminates these issues and opens up cheap methods of prolific service?

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[rucs_hack]

Under such a system where they could actually restrict your access to anything else the Internet has to offer, well, that's like AOL

As much as I hate to come in on the side of AOL you are talking rubbish.
AOL have their own software for connecting to the net, true, but once connected you can use any browser or protocol you want without problems.

I know this because until about eight months ago I was stuck with an AOL contract where I moved to. No linux net access was a pain, but that was the only problem. As much as I didn't like their client, the service was reliable, the connection rarely dropped, and tbh I was more or less happy with it. Bittorrent worked perfectly, and at a nice speed. Ok I changed to another ISP the first day I could, but that was because I prefer not to have to use their client, and I wanted linux net acess, not because AOL were restricting what I could do when connected.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[z0idberg]

Bad Analogy here we come!

So say you pay top dollar to fly first class (i.e. you paid for a fast internet connection), but the company that provides the catering for the flight (i.e. nytimes.com) didnt pay top dollar to the airline (ISP) so you get an economy class meal.

The company that provides the in-flight entertainment though (myspace) did pay top dollar to the airline (ISP) so you get top class movies, sports etc on your flight.

The company that makes the seats for your flight (google) didnt pay top dollar to the airline (ISP) so you get a fold-out chair to sit on for your flight (except when it came to this google would hopefully tell the ISP to shove it and everyone on that airline/ISP gets to stand for the whole flight).

You see how that works now? no matter how much you want to pay doesnt affect the service you get.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[Red Flayer]

Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

Or it's like paying up-front for first class on every flight you take, only to be bumped down to coach sometimes, depending on what airport you're flying into, and whether that airport has paid their 'passenger priority fee'.

Or it's like paying for Amtrak first class non-stop to Timbuktu and then being seated on a Greyhound bus that stops in Oswego first.

Or maybe it's like pay for a limo to the airport and a bus with only three wheels shows up at your door, and the driver is Otto from the Simpsons.

Or maybe it's like buying a twelve-speed bike and finding that only three gears work, and they shipped it with a banana seat and a shopping basket instead of the high-quality shock absorbers you paid for.

Where's bad analogy guy when you need him?

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[aplusjimages]

Sadly I don't think the people would do anything to change it or if they did it would be decades from now. The users would experience the suckiness of the new net and would say apathetically "I guess I'm stuck with it this way." I agree that it would suck to have the gov't get involved, and I'm hoping net neutrality tries some grass roots methods before going the Uncle Sam route, but I have a feeling the only way to stop big companies, like these, is to go the route of legislation.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[mgh02114]

Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

No, net neutrality is like saying that the airline kicks you off the plane because you are black, and the NAACP hasn't paid it's monthly extortion fee yet. You are given a stand-by ticket on the next flight, so you can't complain, because you weren't "blocked."

Network neutrality is actually redundant

[Jimmy_B]

There are two issues which network neutrality avoids, which are only loosely related. Suppose ISP A calls up site S and says "your site's traffic will get low priority unless you pay us". Now, you might think that if site S wants fast Internet access, they should pay for it. The thing is, site S is already paying for fast access - to ISP B, which is ISP A's competitor. The first consequence of network neutrality is that you can't try to bill your competitors' customers. (In this case, ISP B would probably have grounds to sue.)

The second issue is false advertising. Customer C sees that an ISP is advertising x MB/s connections for y dollars, says "great, I'll be able to download z really fast!", and signs up. Then he finds out that he can't download z as fast as he thought, because BitTorrent/sftp/whatever is blocked or throttled. This is why people are angry at Comcast - it's not just that they throttle BitTorrent, it's that they lie and say they don't.

Network neutrality is actually a redundant rule, to ban things which already unlawful for different reasons.

Re:Network neutrality is actually redundant

[pavon]

Customer C sees that an ISP is advertising x MB/s connections for y dollars Show me a single ISP that says that. The all advertise up to X MB/s and it is rare for any of them to actually reach that speed on a consistent basis. I have never seen a consumer grade ISP actually advertise a minimum guaranteed bandwidth, and there is no reason (legally or competitively) for them to do so. As long as you can get X MB/s in some situations you have no legal recourse against throttling, and potentially no recourse at all if there is only broadband provider.

Re:Network neutrality is actually redundant

[h4rm0ny]

Customer C sees that an ISP is advertising x MB/s connections for y dollars, says "great, I'll be able to download z really fast!", and signs up. Then he finds out that he can't download z as fast as he thought, because BitTorrent/sftp/whatever is blocked or throttled.

You've just caused another issue to occur to me which I hadn't really thought about until now. Currently, I can assess the likely speeds from ISPs based on the deal I sign with them (Comcast out and out lies not withstanding). If ISPs are also charging the people whose sites I visit for different speed rates, that's another factor which I have to take into account and possibly don't even have the needed information to judge it on anyway. Example:
ISP A offers cheap 8Mbps connection to public. ISP B offers 2Mbps at not much saving. Public goes yay and signs up with ISP A.
However, ISP A makes up its costs compared to ISP B by sur-charging the website hosts for decent bandwidth, whilst ISP B does not.

The result of this is that I actually get worse performance with ISP A than with ISP B because they have hidden the real costs by slapping them on the hosting companies in the form of performance surcharges. How would I, the customer, ever be able to get a real handle on which ISP would be best for me?

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[Red Flayer]

I have more money, and less time than most people to have to deal with the unwashed massAnd yet you have time to read slashdot and post inanity. Something tells me that not only do you have plenty of time, but that you yourself are a member of the massive unwashed.

Re:Too vague!

[ScrewMaster]

The point is that we can't imagine, today, what the next "killer app" of the net is going to be... but traffic shaping inherently says "these are the services that are important"--which means anything currently unimagined will remain unimplemented forever.

To put it in political terms so that our Congresscritters might better understand:

A Free State (open Internet): one in which everything is permitted except that which is forbidden.

A Totalitarian State (walled Internet): one in which everything is forbidden except that which is permitted.

I know which I'd rather be in / use.

Personally, I think we need to come up with a better term than "Network Neutrality". It has too many socio-political connotations that I think may blur its understanding among those not well versed in the technology. I think something along the lines of "Get Your Sticky Paws Off My Packets, You Damn Dirty ISP" would get the point across much more efficiently.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[ewieling]

No, it is like not allowing the airlines to charge both the passenger AND the city of Los Angeles for a ticket to Los Angels, CA. i.e. Net Neutrality would prevent ISPs from charging both the end user and the web site the end user goes to for access to that web site. ISPs would still be allowed to offer different speeds of service - coach class , business class, and first class. ISPs would still be allowed to ban specific protocols or usage patterns. Net Neutrality just means the ISP is not allowed to bill two different entities for the same service.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[Relic of the Future]

Or more like "Oh, you're traveling to Washington and staying at the *Ramada*? Well, that means we have to transfer you through Atlanta on the way there (I know, it's four extra hours; you'll miss your meeting? Oh well, should have thought of that before.) You see, Ramada didn't pay us to expedite travelers staying with them. If you were staying at Best Western, you could have had a direct flight."

Re:Too vague!

[Abcd1234]

I don't think you can neatly separate out "good" and "bad" behaviors like this.

Yes. Yes you can. The question is this: is the traffic shaping being done based on the source or destination of the data? If the answer is yes, it's "bad".

After that, we're talking about shaping or blocking specific services, and that needs to be handled on a case-by-case basis. If they're flat out blocking legitimate services, or shaping them as to make them unusable, I would argue that's "bad". However, if they are simply shaping to improve service performance (for example, providing low latency for VoIP while sacrificing latency for bulk transfers), I would argue that's "good".

Honestly, what "gray areas" can you identify?

Re:Boradband and its meaning

[Abcd1234]

Broadband is not in anyway related to the number of bits you can move in a given time. Its the opposite of baseband.

To you, maybe. To most of the world, the word is being used correctly.

Maybe you just need to deal with the idea that words may have *gasp* multiple meanings which may vary based on context! I know, shocking isn't it...

Focus on anti-competitive practices

[killbill!]

ISPs claim they need to end Net Neutrality because third-party websites (and pirate networks) are abusing their bandwidth. Don't let them fool us.

Conversely, some people have tried to use the free speech angle in order to defeat ISPs. I believe it is a mistake. Politicians read a letter about ISPs harming free speech, think "raging liberal", and promptly ignore it. That's counter-productive.

The ISPs' assault on Net Neutrality is not about costs. It is not about free speech. It is all about anti-competitive practices. ISPs don't want to let you download videos from iTunes or YouTube, because they have their own VOD services to prop up.

To save Net Neutrality, please focus on the anti-competitive angle in your letters to your Congressperson and Senators.

Re:Focus on anti-competitive practices

[Shadowplay00]

I like how you have politicians equating free speech with "raging liberal". It's funny because it's true

Re:Focus on anti-competitive practices

[killbill!]

It's sad, but it's true.

I hope their tactics are better than their html.

[CFD339]

That web site is.....well.....It should be called "The Glorious People's Revolutionary Website for Network Neutrality".

Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[DragonHawk]

Let's drop all the bad analogies for a minute (pretend I'm new here) and actually look at the situation.

Net Neutrality is an issue I'm concerned with. However, the only information I get from the Net Neutrality camp seems to be "the-sky-is-falling" sensationalist propaganda. So while I want to support NN, my rational mind says "Hold the phone. This is just an ad-hominem rant, not a rational argument."

Say I'm a network operator. (I am, actually. I have more than one PC at home. And quite a few I'm in charge of at work. But let's also say I'm in the business of renting access to my network -- an "ISP" as we all say.) So I've got a bunch of subscribers paying me a fee for a connection my network. I've also got connections to other operators. Some of those are transit I pay for, some are peering agreements. My customers use those connections indirectly, of course.

Now let's say I'm looking at my traffic logs, and I see that a ton of traffic is going to and from YouTube. So much so that I have to buy more transit to operators connected closer to YouTube. So now I have a bigger bill. And that cost has to be covered (TANSTAAFL).

I could raise rates for my subscribers. Or I could say to YouTube, "Hey, guys, you're a hot ticket. If you give me some more money, I'll buy a faster pipe to you guys. If not, well, you're going to be stuck on an overloaded transit line."

While I do have concerns with the above scenario, it does not make me want to take to the streets with a torch and pitchfork. Can someone explain what is so evil in the above?

If you want to propose scenarios that involve abuse, censorship, wire-tapping, giant insect overlords, etc., that's fine, but please also address plain old business scenarios like the above.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[Dragonslicer]

Now let's say I'm looking at my traffic logs, and I see that a ton of traffic is going to and from YouTube. So much so that I have to buy more transit to operators connected closer to YouTube. So now I have a bigger bill. And that cost has to be covered (TANSTAAFL). I could raise rates for my subscribers. Or I could say to YouTube, "Hey, guys, you're a hot ticket. If you give me some more money, I'll buy a faster pipe to you guys. If not, well, you're going to be stuck on an overloaded transit line." There's nothing wrong with that scenario. YouTube pays you a specific amount of money for a specific amount of bandwidth. If YouTube is getting more traffic than the bandwidth can support, transfer speeds will be lower because traffic has to be throttled. This is a purely physical issue; a connection cannot carry more data than its bandwidth will allow. Additionally, if YouTube wants to increase their bandwidth, they can simply pay you more money, with the cost increasing approximately linearly with the amount of bandwidth you're buying.

What Net Neutrality is about is making sure that traffic to YouTube is not throttled solely because they aren't Yahoo and that YouTube can buy more bandwidth at the same rate as Yahoo.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[superflyguy]

I have no problem with what you described. The only problems are that that doesn't describe what Net Neutrality is fighting, and it's based on a flawed idea of how the internet works. What the network operators want to do that net neutrality is fighting is artificially reduce YouTube's bandwidth unless they pay. So YouTube actually gets a smaller proportion of the network bandwidth than the proportion of data that's requested from them, despite the fact that YouTube paid for enough bandwidth from it's ISP and the end-users all paid for enough bandwidth to recieve it. Imagine if YouTube's ISP tried to bill you for accessing YouTube. YouTube paid for the bandwidth. The ISP has peering agreements to pass the data along to other network operators closer to you. Your ISP has peering agreements so the data can get to it. And you already paid to download the data. At what part of this process of transferring the data is everything NOT already paid for? So YouTube's ISP is trying to charge you for a service that has already been paid for. So if AT&T wants to charge Google for data that AT&T's users request, the users have already paid for service. AT&T has made deals so that it gets bandwidth on other people's routers in exchange for giving them bandwidth on AT&T routers, so that's basically free except for maintaining their own routers and connections. Which their users have paid for. At no point do AT&T and Google actually conduct business, but Google's bandwidth is passed along because AT&T is obligated by it's peering agreements and has contracts with it's users. Since AT&T is obligated to pass along the packets, how can it refuse to unless it's paid? Also, with the way the internet works, you buy faster connections between one point and another. It's either a faster connection between a two routers or between a router and a client. If it's between a router and a client (direct connection between network-operator's-router and YouTube), and YouTube pays for it, we call that "YouTube buying internet access from the network operator", which is perfectly legit. If it's between two routers, however, in practical terms it's not especially likely to provide a major performance boost, because any traffic can be routed over it, not just YouTube's, and there's no guarantee that YouTube's will be routed over it. If it's that much more efficient of a way to connect two points there will be such a glut of traffic from other sites that the capacity for YouTube's packets is limited. It also usually happens to be more cost-effective to improve connections to nearby routers than lay an OC48 connection across a continent, and if you're building an OC48, the money for it is probably going to come from other service providers buying bandwidth on it, and not YouTube individually. Also, if you ever tracert a large variety of ip's, you'll discover that it usually takes an astonishingly similar number of hops no matter where you are and where you're trying to get, and that the number of hops really has minimal effect compared to the bandwidth at each end, because the internet's designed so that hops are relatively irrelevant. Yes they increase latency, but once the initial connection's made, the data flows at the maximum rate that the slower of the two ends can handle it. So the "plain old business scenerio" you suggest really doesn't exist, unless network operator is selling bandwidth network operator doesn't have, which is fraudulent. Only if network operator doesn't have what network operator is selling does network operator need to build infrastructure to handle YouTube's traffic. There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, but There's Such A Thing As A Lunch That Has Already Been Paid For, and lunches that were paid for don't need to be paid for again by the lunch meat company.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[ewhenn]

While I do have concerns with the above scenario, it does not make me want to take to the streets with a torch and pitchfork. Can someone explain what is so evil in the above?

Sure, It's not some website's responsibility to make sure the ISP has enough bandwidth. As long as the website owner makes sure he has enough resources on his rack, that's as far as he should go. The ISP is the one that sold the user their connection to anywhere on teh web. The ISP is the one that set the bandwidth caps on broadband connections.
Look, if I owned a taxi company and a lot of my clients went to... say... the local mall.. and the cabs were broken down and all shitty... should I petition the stores in the mall/the mall owners to buy me new cabs because most of my customers go there? Of course not. Why whould the mall have to pay for my lack of business planning or unwillingness to spend a portion of the fare money on maintainance?

The bottom line is, the users pay the ISP for the connection, if they can't deliver their service for the price they charge, then that's their fucking problem and not another companies problem.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[AeroIllini]

Here's the evil:

Let's say you implemented the scheme you proposed to YouTube, and the content providers are happily paying you more money for faster pipes. The money is rolling in, and your profits are at an all-time high. Your shareholders rejoice. Champagne and caviar for everyone!

Then Joe Schmoe (a USC grad) starts a website with The Next New Thing. Joe is strapped for cash, so he can't pay you for the same fat pipes that the other websites can, so his website crawls along. Your ISP customers who try to visit Joe's site can't, because it takes 25 seconds to load. But the Microsoft site, which has a similar but inferior offering, loads almost instantly because Microsoft bought your fat pipe.

Joe could have been the next Larry/Sergey, but he was never given the chance. Suddenly, internet access is only the domain of the rich and powerful, and the little guy (who actually innovates, you understand) is squeezed out of the picture. The forces of market competition have given way to artificially high barriers to entry.

(Keep in mind, this is totally different from tiered service, which has "classes" of service based on datatype, not based on provider. So, for example, VOIP packets would be given a much higher priority than streaming video packets, which would be given a higher priority than HTTP packets. However, *everyone's* VOIP packets would get higher priority, not just Skype. And *everyone's* HTTP packets would be lower priority, instead of Everyone Except Yahoo and YouTube.)

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[crowbarsarefornerdyg]

No offense intended at all, just a friendly reminder. Add
(remove the spaces) at the end of all your paragraphs. It makes your comment easier to read. :)

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[Scott Wunsch]

and it's based on a flawed idea of how the internet works

What part was flawed, exactly? The Internet isn't just a big cloud that one pays for a connection to. Just because the customer pays for a connection to the ISP's network, and YouTube pays for a connection somebody else's network, doesn't mean that there aren't other links in between those two networks that also have finite capacity, and also cost money. Some of the big networks might have no-cost peering agreements between them, but that's certainly not how everything functions; lots of traffic flows across connections that have monthly bills associated with them. And even with "free" peering links, there is a cost to increase the (finite) capacity of peering links if that becomes necessary.

A "connection to the Internet" doesn't really exist the way you seem to think it does.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[moxley]

I understand your argument; but I think that the two types of issues are related.

First off, if you have overloaded transit lines, that is a problem you need to fix, lest you lose subscribers for providing substandard service.

Asking the content providers (who, really are one fo the main reasons you have subscribers in the first place) to "pay for placement" creates a multi-tiered situation. Once this happens then it is very easy for there to be de facto censorship and all sorts of other things that are the antithesis of what many of us hold to be at the core of what makes the internet great.

So, my point is that the solutions to the things you are classifying as non-"sky is falling" issues are the roots of the things (like censorship) which people are afraid that not having NN will bring.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[superflyguy]

I kind of think AT&T is a big network for one. And for another, yes, my analysis was somewhat simplified. But either way, the end user already bought the bandwidth, so someone else shouldn't also have to co-buy the bandwidth. Either way, a service provider should be able to deliver what is paid for by the customer and make money off of the transaction, because if they can't they either have to loose money or break the contract. So if they're already obligated to provide something, they can't fail to deliver just because someone else didn't pay them and call that good. The contract with the end user is a contract regardless of what another entity does. (Unless the other entity is the government voiding all or part of the contract.)

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[rozz]

first of all, i am neither a network specialist nor a business one nor a consumer rights/legislation one ... the below post is just a point of view, pls feel free to correct it.


there is something wrong with your scenario, just on a much deeper level than you think... the part that you described as problematic is actually 100% ok... what you dont seem to understand is that a business Only has a right to Compete, it has no right to Win or even to Survive!

concrete for your situation...
you are not allowed to "tax" xyztube just because you cant keep your business otherwise... if you cannot handle the traffic to xyztube and you cannot convince your clients to pay more => your business fails ... and there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, someone else will do it (hopefully better).


as about what net neutrality is, i think that is pretty simple and i do not agree with the confusion you mentioned (actually, i think there is a good chance you are trolling about that).
what exactly is so hard to understand? the word "neutrality"? ... the subject of that "neutrality"?
anyway, lets try a very simple definition: "the bandwidth cannot be altered depending on the content".
more precisely:

• no content-source discrimination ... you are not allowed to "squeeze" my data in order to push yours.
• no content-type blockage ... you are not allowed to block any legitimate protocol or content-type (although there may be some dispute as to what "legitimate" means).
• content-type discrimination is allowed but it should be the same for everyone (think QoS) ... e.g. you are allowed to push VOIP content over HTML content but you should do the same for every voip provider, not only for the ones you "like"...(and btw, i do not fully agree with this one)

is that clear enough?

as about WHY is that needed .. simple, to create fair competition.
otherwise the internet is a jungle and an isp that does not respect net-neutrality is a mafia racket that decides who can do what with the network .
imagine you are a "street-isp", your clients all live in a neighborhood and the streets are the network you admin ... a non-neutral isp is the neighborhood mafia that does not allow ppl to enter that neighborhood unless they pay! ... the good old "wanna sell milk in this neighb? fuck you, pay me!"
of course you have the very slippery slope of security ... the isp can pretend they block or filter stuff because that is what their customers want ... but that does not mean the customers truly want that .. and even if they want it, that only means they are retarded or just uninformed ... like those shit-scared ppl that live in gated communities thinking that they are safe and free because they pay the gate-ppl to protect them ... when in fact they just built a cage for themselves and gave the keys to someone else.

if you were not trolling with the above msg, i think you should re-think your scenario ... as the old saying goes - you should be very careful what you wish, it may become true.

Re:Net Neutrality from an operator's POV

[dabraham]

Short version: It's not a slippery slope, it's a slope made out of teflon with melted butter dressing. And you're wearing roller skates.

Longer version:
If this were a free market rather than an oligopoly A) it wouldn't be such a problem, and B) it would likely not come up. If these companies had not been typically granted local monopolies by cities and towns to provide internet access, they would have much more freedom to run their businesses as they choose.

But given that there are about 3 companies that handle something like 80% of all traffic in the US, and that they have frequently signed deals with cities & towns to be the exclusive internet provider for that area, I think that it's fair to expect them to do something a little better than "Anything for a buck".

Given how they are already behaving, I think it's fair to believe that they won't compete exclusively by offering the consumer a better deal.

In short I believe that these companies will abuse their power, and that the market will not correct it (CAN NOT correct it in areas where there is a local monopoly). Thus I believe that it is less of a problem to legally require them to treat all destinations equally, than to allow them to do as they please.

I think that the cost to us would be that smaller companies couldn't get started. Small company X re-invents a service currently performed by big company Y. Then company Y just happens to add chrome to it's site that requires it to buy all of the bandwidth that X would have bought. X dies, Y loses the chrome citing user feedback.

Honestly, I even doubt that the extra money they got from youTube, would actually go into infrastructure or reducing consumers bills. I just can't see the CEOs not getting a surprisingly similar amount in a bonus.

Re:Boradband and its meaning

[galoise]

so according to you any moving of data modulating frequencies is broadband, disregarding the actual width of the spectrum available (wich in turn determines the amount of data that can be transmitted)? you realize that that is absurd, don't you?

and yet that redundancy is apparently necessary.

[plasmacutter]

from the fifth amendment "nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law"

look at the events detailed in my sig. I guess microsoft is now "due process of law".

H.R. 1201 is supposed to require labeling and help prevent this, but it shouldn't be necessary if judges weren't deliberately ignoring the fifth amendment.

redundant laws have to be passed because if not, self interested parties will simply imply the original broader law did not apply to them. NOTE: there is a minimum wealth requirement of 100 million dollars to license this 99% effective legal tactic, thus the reason why the DMCA still stands.

Analogies suck

[SiliconEntity]

It's like saying everybody must fly coach, and nobody should be able to offer first-class or business-class seating.

No,

Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

No,

Net neutrality is like using a vacuum cleaner to pick up lawn clippings, while a dwarf follows behind you with a rake.

Aren't analogies helpful? Everyone always tries to come up with analogies to deal with things, but most of the time they are misleading and even manipulative. Everyone tries to find an analogy which makes their position look best.

I would say, instead, that issues should be analyzed from first principles. If net neutrality is good or bad, just say so, and say why. Don't say it's like a chicken with eyeglasses or a frog jumping out of a pot. That doesn't help.

Re:Analogies suck

[hopeless case]

OK. Here's my take on NN.

If you are a government annointed ISP monopoly (you were given huge subsidies and/or exclusive right-of-way to build your network), then it makes sense for the government to require you to have relatively simple and open billing policies and prevent you from playing games.

You wouldn't be allowed to charge someone a differnet rate for internet access because you thought they could pay more (like an electric company charging you more per kilowatt hour because your company making a lot of money, or giving you a discount on your bill because you bought a GE dishwasher and GE did a side deal with them), but you can charge more for a faster line.

If, however, you own a private network that wasn't given monopoly priviliges by the government, then you can make your billing arrangement however you like (third party deals out the wazoo) and the worst than can happen is your customers will get pissed and switch to one of your competitors.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[OldeTimeGeek]

If the govenrment came in a said, "OK, you can own the lines but you can't sell internet service" and then forced the telcoms to lease their lines to a slew of competitors we would see a compitition.

And then Comcast, Verizon and AT&T would just split off their ISP business to create separate companies and the situation would be the same. Without a tariff change from the FCC to create a pricing structure favoring no one, the big ISPs will always get better pricing from the telcos - which they would pass on (partially) to their customers.

Natural Monopoly

[blitzkrieg3]

Have you guys heard of the term Natural Monopoly? The telcom infrastructure is a classic example. I know everyone here on slashdot likes to think less regulation solves everything, but some cases require it. There is NO free market solution to this problem because there will never be enough competition, so we need the government to step in and protect the consumer. Otherwise, the monopolies (telcos) are free to go on limiting capacity, price gouging, and (just now) implementing packet filtering if they don't start getting kickbacks.

Re:This could work MUCH better than legislation

[DigiShaman]

Except they (the government) wont let this stand, just like they wont accept us plebs taking border control into our own hands.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[CeramicNuts]

Tim Berners-Lee is pro net neutrality! In his own words:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2732548432852483380

Another stab at this analogy.

[nobodyman]

Net neutrality is like saying that the airline can't sell you a first-class ticket, and then bump you down to coach unless you win a bidding war with another guy in first-class after you're on the airplane.

Yikes, that's a mouthful. Here's another stab at it:
Imagine the electricity company charging $.10/kWh for your lights, and $.20/kWh for your television.

Ridiculous, right? That's similar to what the ISP's are trying to do. They'd like to charge (for example) $1/GB for accessing comcast.com, and $15/GB for accessing google.com.

Cool man- hey...

[LM741N]

are they gonna ride around in a psychedelic painted heavily armed RV? filled with routers and other crap?

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[volkris]

Network Neutrality doesn't really mean government regulation at all. It just means that all packets have as much right to the road as any others. ...and where do those rights come from? How are they made affective?

Government regulation bringing them into existence and then giving them the force to affect the ISPs.

Yes it means government regulation, from inception to implication.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[volkris]

You're absolutely right, and if consumers don't care enough about the issue to make it a significant market force then why involve regulation anyway?

Wish I had mod points; it's a shame your point of view isn't more prominent on these sites.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[Mode_Locrian]

Wow, that's a great point. I hadn't considered that problem before--when you put it that way, NN begins to look not only appealing, but quite pressing as well. That's a rather grim picture of the future of the (NN-less) internet that you paint...

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[HFShadow]

What we need to be regulated better is public rights of way and who has access to them until wireless is mature enough to handle broadband in large deployments. What does wireless have to do with any of this? It's not some godsend that's going to solve all these issues and create world peace.

If you want high speed internet you deal with 3 companies, Time Warner, Comcast or AT&T. I'm not even an American but I can name several more companies such as Speakeasy, Verizon, Roadrunner etc. Besides that, who says this is an issue specific to broadband?

There is nothing stopping time warner sticking up a roadblock to Google, Yahoo and MSN and say go here instead. In fact they already do that to a degree by taking over your browser settings with their client software. Yes, there is something wrong with that. Client software is very different from traffic shaping.

Most of the US population isn't dense enough to attract a lot of competition because of the cost of laying cable. Wtf? They are shaping existing traffic, this means they are shaping users who already have broadband.

Right now the major players are sitting on their pipes wringing as much money as they can out of them and doing the minimum amount of upgrades necessary to maintain the status quo. That is why the telecom companies are having bandwidth issues. The rest of the world is eventually going to surpass our pipes and offer a ton of dynamic content that we can't access because the infrastructure in the US can't handle it. Correct, but your reasoning is wrong. All the major players do minimum upgrades because they like money and network upgrades cost the money.

ISP's need to either raise their rates, make less profit or stop whining. Network neutrality is a must, recently up here one of our major ISP's (Telus) blocked access to a union website. Is that something you deem as acceptable?

Nothing relevant here. Move on.

[superbus1929]

Another loud, annoying special interest group that will be beaten into irrelevancy by 2008. Film at 11.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[Naturalis Philosopho]

I know that this isn't a complete answer, but part of it is that other countries have more competition due to the fact that they don't create "regulated" monopolies in the same fashion. Here in the 'states, once one company has put in a line (be it electrical, sewer, telco, or otherwise), it would take an act-of-god(TM) for the gov't to allow another company to lay their own line on top/alongside that one from that point on forever and ever. Giving one company a monopoly is only a good idea until the industry is _just_ mature enough to support competition, but since we let companies own our politicians, the gov't will never let anyone else into a market once one provider is already in there (remaining "laws" which allow equal access being mostly a joke). It makes for cleaner looking streets (I mean, have you SEEN the tangles of power/telco lines in rural Japan, Thailand, Phillipines, etc.?) but other than that it just means once you have a provider of a service, that's the only provider you're ever going to have a "choice" of using.

daemon

[hey]

I was hoping they had a daemon we could volunteer to run.
All the daemons would create a mesh which would be used to measure ISPs speed automatically.
Any unfairness would be quickly spotted.
Who knows maybe the mesh could even be used to escape a limiting ISP?

what would a NN law say?

[hopeless case]

First of all, thanks for starting with a clear explanation of what the problem is (AT&T pissed at google).

I worry about exactly how such a law would be written, however, if congress felt it had to act to preserve "net neutrality".

What should such a law say? What well-accepted principle should it be defending?

I don't think the issue is free speech. I think is has to do with government established infrastructure monopolies.

I would start by observing that certain companies were given the exclusive right to dig up the streets and lay fiber/cable or were given enormous subsidies to do so, and are therefore huge government established infrastructure monopolies.

If the government gave you the exclusive right to build infrastructure at huge taxpayer expense, then it is reasonable that you be required to operate in an open and non-discriminatory way. Imagine if power companies could charge different electricity rates to differnet companies/neighborhoods based on how much money they could afford to pay. Now THAT'S a principle everyone can agree on. I don't see what it has to do with free speech.

If however, your company built a private network without special government privilige and you sell services to the public (or you resell internet service and don't own the infrastructure) I see no reason why you shouldn't be able to offer internet connectivity that restricts which sites you can go to based on third party deals (say a hotel wants to prefer google as the search engine their guests can use so they block throttle yahoo and others and that google offsets the cost of the internet service at the hotel).

It's not that I want hotels to operate that way, it's that I think if some group of hotels tried to do that, it would be annoying enough that the hotels that didn't do that would get more customers.

In other words, I only see net neutrality as an issue when a monopoly on internet service exists. I only see that existing in the last mile because of cable companies being given exclusive right of way or other companies being given huge subsidies to build infrastructure.

Re:what would a NN law say?

[kiwipeso]

Here in new zealand, we have that sort of problem.
The vast majority of the national infrastructure is owned by the former government monopoly, telecom.
The government recently decided to favor urban phone users in the telecom unbundling of lines.

TelstraClear rolled out a private cable network last decade in the capital, Wellington and in the main south island city, Christchurch.
TelstraClear also has a fibre backbone mainly for government and business users in other city centres.
CityLink, a former wellington city council company, has a purely fibre optic network, in Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington CBD and is rolling out in Miramar, a suburb famous for it's film studio. Fortunately, I live where the new fibre is being laid.

Back to Net Neutrality, it doesn't apply to Telstra, as it's not the monopoly, even though it is the only company on it's cable service.
On telstra, you can get cable TV, Phone, internet. On telecom, you can get a landline, mobile and internet.
Telecom is the monopoly phone player, it is opening up exchanges to competition at a reasonable price in urban areas,
  and it will actually replace the entire urban network with fibre to the node (in all towns with 500 or more phone lines) in several years.
Now I don't really care that much about the phone line service, I have a reliable Vodafone mobile which is far more useful overseas than a telecom one.
What is a major issue for telecom customers is internet reliability, first of all they have to rely on ADSL, at best getting 7-8mbit on offpeak times, finding traffic capped to miserly amounts, and then it limits you to dialup speeds.
  Along with peak time throttling of p2p, I haven't heard of anyone playing WOW with a telecom Xtra account.
But by far, the complaint that gets the most attention about telecom's xtra is the email service.
They "upgraded" the yahoo webmail "bubble" several weeks ago and took out the mail for thousands of businesses for a week,
  then they didn't offer anything to deal with the inconvenience when the spam filter trapped too much legitimate mail and people lost contracts, etc.

Now, if they were to start slowing down google or microsoft live traffic because they made a deal with yahoo, then what would people do for webmail?

Arguably, you could mention using a 3G mobile internet "solution" like vodafone, but it's pretty expensive for just 1gig per month, and slow.

Citylink I want to check out, because they have an open fibre network with a speed advantage in most of their rates compared to telstra.
However, it looks like it would just be a very complicated internet bill.

Out of 4 choices, there are 2 expensive ones (Telecom and Vodafone), 1 simple one (Telstra) and 1 complex choice. (Citylink + an ISP)
Of course, you could go with a telecom line and another ISP, but results will vary more than the reliable amount of unreliabilty with telecom Xtra. :)

Re:Off Topic but what is with FairTax.org ?

[jav1231]

Let's not fuss and fight over who ratified who! Can we all agree the tax system sucks!?

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[Skapare]

Do we really think open market operations won't solve the issue?

As long as there is too much monopoly, especially by big corporations, and especially cable/telco corporations, then, yes, I think the open market cannot solve this because it (the open market) actually won't exist.

Many companies have a big installed instructure (e.g. all the wired coax or twisted pair) that was acquired through either them or a predecessor operating as a monopoly. Do you think these companies would have been willing to install such an infrustructure had they originally been faced with (to pick a random number) 4 competitors that were also installing an "overbuild" infrastructure? The company that owns it today is at an advantage because the public gave up the right to competition in the past (and maybe even in the present to some degree).

In order for there to be true competition good enough for the market to ensure that the network will remain neutral, there will have to be quite many providers. That number needs to be fairly large and would be at a level where that many duplicate infrastructures would be extremely wasteful of finances. Imagine 8 different phone companies and 4 different cable companies running their own wires everywhere and each dropping one of theirs to your home for you to choose from. It's just not going to happen. A few towns have 2 infrastructure based competitors in various services. But even that gets expensive.

What is ultimately needed is a single company that builds, maintains, and operates the infrastructure, and allows other companies to lease it out as needed to provide various services. Think of that original phone company breakup but instead of being broken at the boundary between local and long distance calling, imagine it being broken between infrastructure ownership and all calling (one company owns the wires and a different company provides dial tone). This is the way to do it with a minimum of regulation. The infrastructure owner would be a regulated monopoly, required to provide access to the wiring as needed (e.g. whichever phone company you want to use, they get cross patched to your phone pair). The phone companies providing services would then have less regulation since more companies would be able to enter the business cheaply. We need to do internet and cable TV the same way, and effectively merge it all together. The infrastructure needs to be upgraded to fiber with each fiber running all the way from each individual subscriber to the central facility where many companies can host their equipment. Each home should have more than one dark fiber which they get to choose which provider lights it up. I suggest 3 or 4 such fibers per home. Businesses might need more. Then any company you choose to sign up with can provide whatever combination of switched telephony, cable TV, internet, or dedicated communications links, through that fiber. Then we can have real competition, real innovation, and minimum regulations applied to the businesses that matter.

One idea I propose is for the federal government to permit local governments to build these new infrastructures themselves, if they wish. This would basically be protection against lawsuits by the incumbents that choose not to break themselves up according to this idea (if we don't force them to break up). You know if any city did build such an infrastructure, the incumbent telco and cable companies would sue.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[theantipop]

So any startup can swing some wires around the neighborhood and offer up utility service?

Re:If kdawson is involved

[PopeRatzo]

We know it will suck.

Whatever your opinion of kdawson's story contributions, you don't have to be a prick about it. As time goes on, you might learn that it's easier on yourself and everyone around you if whenever you feel inclined to say something cruel, you pause a moment and think of how you'd feel if you were on the receiving end.

Whatever my opinion of kdawson as an editor may be, I have never seen him (or her) talk shit about someone the way some of us do about him.

Don't worry about those....

[Foerstner]

Without net neutrality, you can just sign up for Fox News' new ISP. Any attempt to read about poverty, war, or pollution will be redirected instantly to more positive stories.

Re:Network PRIVACY might be better than NN...

[PopeRatzo]

There's a whole lot more to Net Neutrality than just privacy. To me, they are two completely separate issues. Naturally, we should be able to have some confidence that our use of the internets is private.

But Net Neutrality to me means much more that once you are on the Internet, one packet should have the same access as any other. I don't want anybody's advertisement to get higher priority than an email from my wife, and I don't want the performance of any website to be governed by the carrier. As long as someone has paid for a fast server and lots of bandwidth, the telecom should move their packets the same way it moves anybody else's.

Re:I hope their tactics are better than their html

[Bryansix]

Their HTML is actually very clean and beutiful. The layout of the page on the otherhand could use some work.

Re:Too vague!

[jonwil]

All of the problems with people hogging too much bandwidth (and denying other people access) can be handled plain and simple via QoS.

You give all the latency sensitive protocols like VoIP and games highest priority. Then general stuff like IM, Email, Chat and WWW. After that, you give all the file sharing protocols like BitTorrent lowest priority. BitTorrent users will be able to use as much bandwidth as is available after the other more latency sensitive protocols have had their go. If its 3am and less people are using it, you can get the fast speeds on your BitTorrent download.

What the ISPs are doing is basically saying "even in the hypothetical ideal case where there was no traffic whatsoever between you and the other guy, you will NEVER get more than of the 6Mbps you are paying for on BitTorrent"

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[Crazyswedishguy]

1) Google pays AT&T for perfered access to THEIR customers. google would have to pay off every ISP nation wide if that were the approach.
Although I have no information on Google's specific use of services, I would suspect that Google (like many content providers) already does pay AT&T for "preferred" access to THEIR customers. It's called private peering, and it's used quite often to reduce delivery costs.

Private peering is essentially a contract between one content provider (e.g. Google) and one distributor (e.g. AT&T), whereby AT&T accepts to deliver the content for a lower price only to its own customers. It's different from regular transit, in that AT&T isn't just passing the content along to another provider (say Comcast) for delivery. Signing private-peering contracts with the major providers used by your customers is a way to drastically reduce costs of delivery, and also ensures a better QOS, as Service Level Agreements are easier to establish (you're not handing the content to someone who then hands it to someone else at which point you lose track of it; instead, you are handing it to someone who pledges to deliver it directly, and if it isn't delivered you know who to blame). In the sense that you get better reliability, you could call that "preferred" access.

Does it violate network neutrality? In the end, probably not considerably, even though - because you're more likely to be held accountable if you fail to deliver - it probably does increase reliability. However, content providers don't pay more by doing that, as on the contrary they do it to cut costs.

Network neutrality would be violated if AT&T were charging considerably different prices for different companies. I'm not sure how this is regulated, but given that private-peering is a contract between two entities, the prices probably do vary. But when it comes to regular transit delivery, I believe most network providers will charge the same rate to everyone.

Network neutrality generally implies that a customer has equal access to all websites for the same price, and that content distributors have equal access to all end-users (price may vary here, as transit costs differ depending on the customer's location).

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[arminw]

.....some ISP's" want you to surf the web, check your email, and play online games.......

Isn't that all that the vast majority of people who don't surf to /. or similar sites want? Maybe those who want to do more than that should get a special account from their ISP that lets then do that and also costs more? Running a torrent server is no different than running any other server. Those running servers of any sort on the Internet SHOULD pay significantly more than Mom or Pop who want to just get email from the grandchildren or check their favorite news and weather sites.

What ISPs must be prevented from doing is filtering based on content or where the ordinary user gets that content.

If running any sort of server cost significantly more, illegal file sharing would also greatly diminish, easing the pressure if ISP's to add more capacity. A basic, low cost account could allow unlimited downloading, but charge a steep premium for uploading large amounts of data, especially to a large variety of different addresses. This would also give those with infected spambot systems a good incentive to clean up their spam-spewing computers. Anyone willing to pay more, would not be subject to such filtering, but have a truly symmetrical connection to the Internet, at whatever speed they could afford. All Internet users simply are not equal and one size fits all is not such a good idea.

I wonder ...

[jc42]

Will they have enough clout to do something about the rampant port blocking? After all, this is against the main things that the Internet was designed for.

Re:Too vague!

[arminw]

.....For the ISP to do otherwise is fraud. If the ISP enters multiple contracts and it cannot fulfill them all (over-subscribes) that is fraud on the part of the ISP.......

Many businesses do this and it is not necessarily fraud. Most utilities are based on average use. I everybody flushes their toilet at once, the water pressure drops. After an earthquake or events such as 911, the phone system is overloaded and likely there will be no dial tone. Airlines and Hotels over-book. Like many utilities, the Internet utility has to be laid out for normal use throughout the day. Maybe, some of the ISPs skimp on this. In my experience, our DSL seems to max out at the contracted level at all times. I understand that cable Internet is a shared service and can vary considerably, depending on traffic. My daughter has cable and it was MUCH faster late at might and almost as slow as our present DSL at peak times.

Please start here...

[Adeptus_Luminati]

Please start here...
International list of "Bad ISPs" that throttle torrent protocols, and god knows what else...

http://www.azureuswiki.com/index.php/Bad_ISPs

Cheers,
ADeptus

Neutrality = Market protections?

[DragonHawk]

Then Joe Schmoe (a USC grad) starts a website with The Next New Thing. Joe is strapped for cash, so he can't pay you for the same fat pipes that the other websites can, so his website crawls along. Your ISP customers who try to visit Joe's site can't, because it takes 25 seconds to load.

So I, as a network operator, am required to subsidize Joe Schmoe, by paying for fast pipes to his servers?

(I'm using definitions which suit my purposes a bit there, of course, but so are you with the "The forces of market competition have given way..." bit. (In a true laissez-faire free market, competition is all about survival of the richest. Which is why a pure free market is a bad idea. But I digress.))

Point being: TANSTAAFL. If a given site is pulling more traffic, someone has to pay for that. It can be subscribers directly. That means that nifty cable, DSL, or FiOS feed gets more expensive. Maybe it's $90/month now instead of $30 or whatever. Or the cost can be pushed on to the sites that are pulling the traffic. Google, Microsoft, et. al. have deep pockets and are willing to pay for fast pipes. Why should I, as an operator, be forced to turn them away? Is it just to protect the noble idea of the little guy in a big world?

Don't get me wrong, I've got nothing against the little guy. He often deserves to be protected. And depending on who you ask, one of the jobs of government is to protect those who cannot protect themselves. So maybe the government should be protecting Joe Schmoe for that reason. But let's call a spade a spade: This isn't about "neutrality", then, it's about market controls intended to keep big money from smothering the little guy. Right?

Re:Neutrality = Market protections?

[AeroIllini]

Yeah, you're right. I overhyped the little guy there. I don't think you should have to subsidize him; there's nothing wrong with classes of service. But Joe isn't part of a peering agreement with a backbone, he's an end user purchasing access. Network Neutrality usually refers to neutrality between peers on the backbone, and the backbone shouldn't have classes of service.

But one of the other possibilities is that Joe is not a little guy, but another HugeISP. And let's also imagine (for the sake of argument of course) that both of you are also content providers, like ... say ... Comcast. Without network neutrality legislation, you would be able to actively slow down Joe's connection to your customers. So when DragonHawkTV streams faster than JoeTV for your customers, regardless of the capital Joe has poured into his TV service, how is that a fair market? Remember that laissez-faire markets also assume that the firms operate independently of one another. When they're all part of a giant mesh network, that doesn't happen.

It seems to me that there are really two mutually exclusive options for ISPs/backbone providers: either they are common carriers, or they aren't. If they are, they cannot differentiate their traffic based on provider and are network neutral. However, if they're not, then they are responsible for the data across their network (including all the nastiness that gets sent across the internet; a litigation nightmare). Right now the major backbone providers get the best of both worlds: they're not held to the standards of a common carrier because they're not classified as one, but they are also immune from prosecution for the data on their network. THAT'S the underlying problem with network neutrality. The ISPs are getting a free ride from litigation, they are allowed to operate as monopolists, they also own the backbone, and no one cries foul when they intentionally block traffic from their competitors (as an example, try using Vonage or Skype on Comcast and contrast with Comcast's own VOIP offering, which is much clearer). And that's not right.

Net Neutrality = Universal pricing?

[DragonHawk]

What Net Neutrality is about is making sure that traffic to YouTube is not throttled solely because they aren't Yahoo and that YouTube can buy more bandwidth at the same rate as Yahoo.

Okay, so, in that case, "net neutrality" really means "universal pricing", i.e., legislative prohibition against first-degree price discrimination. That I can support with little reservation. However, I've seen quite a few different claims for what NN is (see other replies to my post), and not all of those claims match yours. I suspect it is a problem for NN that everyone has a different definition. It's hard to get behind a cause when nobody knows what it is.

Re:Net Neutrality = Universal pricing?

[Dragonslicer]

Yup, there are a lot of people that seem to think that Net Neutrality is meant to destroy all forms of quality of service. Obviously (to anyone that knows a fair amount about networking, at least), amount of bandwidth used will affect connection speed. There's also nothing wrong with prioritizing protocols; streaming audio and video should clearly have higher priority than BitTorrent, since delays in audio and video data are annoying, while it isn't a real problem if it takes an extra minute or two to get a Linux .iso. The only thing that Net Neutrality is supposed to care about is the end points; carriers shouldn't be allowed to throttle traffic solely because it's coming from Google or Yahoo instead of MSN.

Utopia literally means "nowhere"

[DragonHawk]

I sympathize with where you're coming from -- that the Internet should be this utopia, where access and information are free, and everyone is equal, and censorship is interpreted as damage, and so on. But we don't live in that world. Infrastructure is freaking expensive. Somebody's got to pay for it. Somebody always has, too. Back in the bad old days, Internet access was rare. You generally had to be associated with a university or other think-tank, and commercial use was prohibited. This is not a new idea.

We can also turn the money argument around. If I can afford it, why *shouldn't* I be able to pay extra to have my packets delivered first? Shall we outlaw FedEx, since it means big business can afford to have their mail delivered sooner?

The situation isn't as cut-and-dry as the propaganda would like us to believe.

Re:Utopia literally means "nowhere"

[rozz]

are you sure you are not a troll ?! cause u awfully sound like a huge one!

I sympathize with where you're coming from -- that the Internet should be this utopia, where access and information are free, and everyone is equal, and censorship is interpreted as damage, and so on. But we don't live in that world. Infrastructure is freaking expensive. Somebody's got to pay for it. Somebody always has, too.
the street network is a huge infrastructure, someone pays for it ... and guess what, it is neutral, the lanes are the same for everyone.
the electricity network is also a huge and hugely expensive infrastructure, someone pay for it an it is also neutral, you dont get "sparky-electrons" if you pay more ... and if more electricity is needed, you just get a bigger cable.
and the above samples are not because i like "the analogy game", but to show how wrong and useless as a proof it is! ... may i ask where is your point, mister TROLL ?!

Back in the bad old days, Internet access was rare. You generally had to be associated with a university or other think-tank, and commercial use was prohibited. This is not a new idea.
back in the old days electricity was rare, you had to be edison or tesla to access it .. SOOOO?
do you have a point or you just enjoy trolling ad infinitum !?

We can also turn the money argument around. If I can afford it, why *shouldn't* I be able to pay extra to have my packets delivered first? just buy a bigger cable/more bandwidth if you want it faster ... who stops you from doing that, TROLL ?!

Shall we outlaw FedEx, since it means big business can afford to have their mail delivered sooner?
wooow, this must be the most helpful analogy ... Internet and FedEx .. is this a replay of the senatorial "the net is a series of trucks" ? are you Fokking Kidding Us !?!?!?

The situation isn't as cut-and-dry as the propaganda would like us to believe.
oh yes it is very clear ... and it will be even more clear if trolls like you would stop throwing dust.

as a conclusion.
you are an isp? very good, i pay 5$ and you give me 5mbs/sec ... and That Is All.
as about what i do with that bandwidth, fokk off, that is Not Your Business !!! ... if i like to just stick your cable up my neighbour's arse and watch her/him jumping the whole day, i need neither your help nor your permission.
mmmkaaay mister TROOOOOLL !?

Fault? No. Cost? Yes.

[DragonHawk]

The obvious thing here is that you need to be able to deliver the services you're selling in the first place. It's not youtube's, or yahoo's, or the customer's fault.

It's not anyone's *fault*. Where the heck did you get that?

You can't magic transit out of thin air. Somebody has to pay for it. The cost must be covered. This is a law of nature.

Let's turn it around: Say Google or Microsoft or even freaking Wikipedia comes to me and says, "Hey, we'd like to connect our fat pipe right into your core infrastructure, to give our end-users a better experience". They're essentially offering to pay me to give them better access. (They're paying in bandwidth, but it's the same scenario I originally proposed, just from the other direction. Just barter instead of cash.) Is that Net Neutral?

No more bad analogies!

[DragonHawk]

What the network operators want to do that net neutrality is fighting is artificially reduce YouTube's bandwidth unless they pay.

Define "artificial". I assume you're thinking of a rate limit in a router somewhere. Okay. But what if I, as the evil operator, just put a low-capacity link on the router to YouTube or whoever. Is that "artificial"? If not, why wouldn't the evil operators just do that to get around the rule? If it *is* artificial, who is going to pay for the bigger transit tubes I need to buy?

YouTube actually gets a smaller proportion of the network bandwidth than the proportion of data that's requested from them

Um, that's not how most IP networks work. You don't request bandwidth. I have routers, and I have transit links. Since it's a packet-switched network, traffic to or from YouTube makes its way across my mesh using whatever it can.

Imagine if YouTube's ISP tried to bill you for accessing YouTube. YouTube paid for the bandwidth. The ISP has peering agreements to pass the data along to other network operators closer to you. Your ISP has peering agreements so the data can get to it. And you already paid to download the data.

Is that what's being proposed? Wouldn't that situation self-correct, as YouTube would quickly stop paying their ISP, the evil ISP goes out of business, and some less-evil ISP gets YouTube's business instead. Right?

So if AT&T wants to charge Google for data that AT&T's users request, the users have already paid for service.

That really depends on what the users are paying for. Most of the time, they're paying to connect their PCs to AT&T's network. The idea is that AT&T's network is connected to other things the users want to access, but none of that is really spelled out. In the case of AT&T, it's *already* the case that other ISPs and hosting centers are paying AT&T for bandwidth. AT&T is a "tier 1" or "backbone" network operator. Everybody pays for the privilege of connecting to their network. So what you're describing is already happening, and has been since the 'net stopped being a government research project and went commercial.

Now, AT&T will have peering agreements with other tier 1 providers. AT&T needs to connect to MCI, and MCI needs to connect to AT&T. If the traffic exchange between the two is roughly equal, they will often decide to just connect each other for free, rather than paying each other equal amounts of money. It saves paperwork. But as soon as either party thinks they're not getting a good deal, they'll drop the peering agreement in a heartbeat.

I have no idea if AT&T is peering with Google or not, but if not, why shouldn't they be able to charge Google to connect to their network?

There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, but There's Such A Thing As A Lunch That Has Already Been Paid For, and lunches that were paid for don't need to be paid for again by the lunch meat company.

The Internet is not a sandwich, a taxi, an airplane, or any other bad analogy. The Internet is a group of inter-connected, autonomous networks. Please address that. If the only thing you can do is offer up bad analogies, then I'm afraid you're not going to convince me.

I suppose part of the confusion is, "What are you paying for when you pay your ISP?" You see, you can't really pay for "the Internet". The Internet doesn't exist as a tangible thing. It's an abstract concept. You can't route packets through an abstract concept. So how can we look at this? Are you paying for your ISP to connect to their network, with the hope/understanding that they have other customers/peers you happen to want to talk to? If so, those customers/peers still have to pay. Or maybe you're paying your ISP to deliver packets to a given destination (or as close as they can get them). Okay, but in that case, the other end has to pay to deliver their packets back to you. And you can't argue that you're paying for both directions, because believe me, Google's feeds are not free.

Better read that contract again

[DragonHawk]

the end user already bought the bandwidth, so someone else shouldn't also have to co-buy the bandwidth

Packet-switched networks are pretty much all concentrated very close to the point of subscribe connection. You're not paying for a pipe direct to Google. You're paying for a pipe to a DSLAM or CMTS or switch. Past that point, you're in a big mesh where everybody is mixed with everybody else. The inter-connections in that mesh are not equal to the aggregate of the subscriber "last mile" links. If they were, you'd essentially have the circuit-switched PSTN all over again. Do you really want to be paying thousands of dollars per month for leased lines?

service provider should be able to deliver what is paid for by the customer and make money off of the transaction, because if they can't they either have to loose money or break the contract.

If you want to talk contracts, go check your Terms of Service. Most ISP TOS's don't obligate them to do a damn thing. You're sure as hell not paying them to provide access to any particular destination.

Re:This could work MUCH better than legislation

[david_thornley]

Okay, the end users make a fuss, what happens? Nothing. I've seen this before.

When making a fuss makes a difference, it's because the fussers have some real economic impact. They have choices. They have competition.

In my city, I have two choices for access other than dialup: the phone company, and the cable company. The city is instituting a wireless municipal connection, which will make it three choices. If I don't like something all three of them do, I'm SOL. If there was something approximating a free market, with reasonable costs of entry, then I could hope for somebody I like to start a business I liked better. However, extending what we in the US call broadband to a city requires either rights of way or chunks of the radio spectrum, and neither are generally available.

Moreover, this isn't enough. Traffic between Google and me can be throttled in lots of different places, most of which have no direct contact with me as a customer. Suppose the roads in my city are in good shape (modulo a freeway bridge or so - I live in Minneapolis), and the roads in your city are in good shape, and suppose that all the highways between are owned by companies with no limit on what they can charge for access, and no requirements not to discriminate. Does that sound like a good idea to you?

The free market is a wonderful thing, where we can have one. Lots of problems that are frequently addressed by government regulation could be handled more efficiently by establishing a market.

In this case, we don't have a free market, and we have no real possibility of getting one. Instead, we have government-established monopolies. The answer in this case is government regulation, because the only other answer is private monopolies.

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[Thaelon]

Sorry, but you already are a commodity. Just ask the credit reporting bureaus. They charge businesses for access to your private financial history. Hell they even charge you for access to your own information.

I think you're right and the users should be the ones getting paid. But, just like individuals, corporations can always be trusted to act in their own best interests before anyone else's. If they can benefit from it and get away with it you bet they'll do it. The solution is to put in place an equally powerful opposing force. That's going to be difficult.

Re:Network Neutrality != good

[FuzzyDaddy]

You're too subtle for the mods...

The Internet exists beyond the last mile

[DragonHawk]

are you sure you are not a troll ?! cause u awfully sound like a huge one!

Pretty sure. I've been involved in network operations for 15+ years. I used to run a Fido BBS, back before the the days of the commercial Internet. I used to work for a small ISP and DSL CLEC reseller. I still participate in the ISP-Planet and NANOG lists. I'm presently the IT Manager for a small manufacturing company (~120 employees, ~70 computers, two Internet connections, and OpenVPN-based remote access).

How about you, since you bring it up? How are you qualified to comment on network operations?

you are an isp? very good, i pay 5$ and you give me 5mbs/sec ... and That Is All.

5 Mbit/sec *to where*? How about I give you 5 Mbit/sec for $5/month? Sound like a good deal? Okay, what if that 5MB/sec is to a DSLAM with only a 56 Kbit/sec frame line for it's connectivity to my core router? Or what if it has a 5 MBit/sec link to my core, but there are 5000 other subscribers on it, too? You seem to think the Internet exists only as the subscriber loop.

Re:The Internet exists beyond the last mile

[rozz]

are you sure you are not a troll ?! cause u awfully sound like a huge one!

Pretty sure. I've been involved in network operations for 15+ years. I used to run a Fido BBS, back before the the days of the commercial Internet. I used to work for a small ISP and DSL CLEC reseller. I still participate in the ISP-Planet and NANOG lists. I'm presently the IT Manager for a small manufacturing company (~120 employees, ~70 computers, two Internet connections, and OpenVPN-based remote access).

How about you, since you bring it up? How are you qualified to comment on network operations?

very nice credentials, congrats ... but this is not a "mine is bigger than yours" contest ... just for your info i am coming from the software side of IT, business software mostly.
anyway technical netw competence is irrelevant to this issue ... net neutrality is not a technical issue, it is more of a basic rights issue ... since you seem to be an american, maybe it will help to think about net-neutrality as a "all infos are free and equal" act... throw in "and for everyone" and you got it ;).
oh and btw, when you think about a law/regulation for everyone, try and look at it from everyone's perspective .. if a rule is good for you as isp or net-admin or business, or etc, it does not mean it is good for the whole system. ... and despite what you may have been told "good for business" != Good

you are an isp? very good, i pay 5$ and you give me 5mbs/sec ... and That Is All.

5 Mbit/sec *to where*? How about I give you 5 Mbit/sec for $5/month? Sound like a good deal? Okay, what if that 5MB/sec is to a DSLAM with only a 56 Kbit/sec frame line for it's connectivity to my core router? Or what if it has a 5 MBit/sec link to my core, but there are 5000 other subscribers on it, too? You seem to think the Internet exists only as the subscriber loop.

hm, do you have a tendency to uselessly complicate things? cause otherwise the above is pure trolling.
my sample was very clear and i am sure you dont need explanations ... you are only trying to derail the argument on a very technical path that has nothing to do with the initial point ... another troll sign.

Monopoloies are bad

[DragonHawk]

If this were a free market rather than an oligopoly A) it wouldn't be such a problem, and B) it would likely not come up.

I absolutely agree that the present monopoly/oligopoly is extremely unhealthy for both the commercial and network operations aspects. However, it seems to be that the way to address that is to attack the problem. Don't try to keep coming up with new laws every time the big bells find a new way to be evil. Treat the disease, not the symptoms. There are various ways that could be done. Divestiture is one, but we've seen that didn't work too well in the long run. Structural separation seems like it might be viable and effective -- in situations where the ILECs truly couldn't interfere with the CLECs, things actually worked okay, for a little while, until the market melted down.

We can ask the government to regulate the business aspects of the monopoly providers, or we can ask the government to get involved in network operations. I think we're better off with the former.

Re:Monopoloies are bad

[dabraham]

I think that I'm starting from the premise that you can't permanently fix the underlying problem. Between honest evolution of the industry, and not-entirely-honest people looking for loopholes I think that any remedy applied now would be too vague, too broad, too confining, or some combination of the above. Hell, Ma Bell was legally broken up. That's about as underlying as I can imagine, and it didn't stay fixed once there was money to be made.

And FWIW, my friends who are doctors have been talking about how there's a movement afoot to sometimes treat just the symptoms, not the disease.

I can understand Congress being hesitant to write real, structural laws governing an industry that didn't exist 20 years ago, is still changing rapidly, and that they don't understand (Senator Stevens may be below average, but I'd actually bet that he's just the one who was caught on tape). While they're trying to figure it out (which might well take 30 years), I'd like someone/thing to curtail obvious abuses. In our current environment, I don't see who could do that except congress.

Hmm, taking the disease metaphor _way_ too far, we could posit that the immune system of the free market will work this out in the long run. But since that might be 30 years (hell, 40), while that's happening, we should simply manage the symptoms. NN is thus ibuprofen... Hmm, I wonder what the tongue depressor would be in this situation...

Re:Net Neutrality Sucks

[unitron]

If you adjust your analogy slightly to include Best Western and the airline in question being owned by the same parent company you'd have it about as exactly as an analogy ever can.