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Net Neutrality Summit
Castar writes "BoingBoing has a post about an upcoming summit in San Francisco about the issue of Net Neutrality. The EFF and speakers on both sides of the issue are gathering to debate and spread awareness of Network Neutrality, which is an increasingly important topic. The FCC, of course, might have the final word."
I think "Net Neutrality" is the wrong term, because it allows people to twist the argument to the wrong thing. I am more concerned with network transparency, and honesty. Make them say what they are doing and why. This will keep the Comcasts of the world somewhat more honest...
Then it sounds like you've heard about the phony thing that the lobbyists are calling network neutrality. I find this to happen so often I wrote an article about the Myths of network neutrality.
Your second paragraph sums-up most of the myths quite well. AT&T etc. say that network neutrality proponents want a system where everyone pays the exact same amount, and nobody can pay for higher levels of service. That's not true at all. They are trying to redefine network neutrality to make it look bad. What they are basing that on is the fact that network neutrality propoonents want to make it illegal to artificially delay one person's network packets in favor of someone else's. Allow me to give a specific example:
Scenario 1:
I want 1MBps down/1MBps up. So I pay $10/month.
My neighbor wants 10Mbps down/1MBps per month. So he pays $40/month.
Google wants 1000MBps down/1000MBps up. So they pay $10,000/month.
This is totally fine and network neutral. Nobody has a problem with that. AT&T/Verizon/etc. want to make it out that network neutrality prevents that. It does not.
Scenario 2:
The pipe for my street is a 10MBps up/down pipe.
My neighbor wants 10 MBps down.
I want 10MBps down.
I call the phone company and say I'm only getting 5MBps most of the time. So they offer to make my packets higher priority over my neighbor. So my neighbor now gets 1MBps if I'm downloading a file at 9MBps. So he calls and complains, and gets the level 2 priority as well. So now we are both back to 5MBps. So I call and get level 3 priority, and so on and so forth. This is not network neutral. IF the phone company wants to change their TOS to say that the "PEAK" is 10MBps, and the total shared is 10MBPS that's fine. And if I call and say I want more bandwidth, they can say "oh, we can do that, but we have to upgrade the trunk like so that will cost you." That's totally fair and neutral.
This game isn't new. When caller ID came-out, they charged for a code that disabled caller id on outgoing calls. Then they charged for special caller-id units that displayed the caller information even if it was blocked. So then they sold stuff that blocks calls from non-caller-id phones. Then they sold codes that get around the blocks. etc. etc. They never provided any new services ever -- they just pitted their customers against each other and sld phony pseudo-services.
IMHO, the FTC should ban such a practice. All it will do is make the phone companies richer, and they won't have to upgrade their trunk service anymore, they can just re-sell the same bandwidth over and over again.
... there was a company called ATT. The fairy godmother DARPA asked ATT to build it a redundant network that could survive links being severed in a nuclear war. Oh, DARPA also wanted the ability to plug any computer it wanted from ATT's competitors into the network. ATT told the fairy godmother to take a hike, so the fairy godmother asked the hippies at Berkeley and MIT to build it for her instead. And of course the hippies let anyone who wanted to connect to the network and opened the code and the Internet lived happily ever after.
Oops, or at least they lived happily until another company called ATT and its evil brothers and sisters Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner reared their ugly heads again and wanted to take unplug all those happy services which they don't have revenue sharing agreements with. They also want to lock you into crippled phone/computers so they can charge you $2 for a ringtone and $0.15 for a text message.
We do need some minimum level of Net Neutrality. We do not want a world where Verizon users cannot access AT&T websites. I believe that most people can agree to that. This minimum of accessibility also has to be at some reasonable level of speed. It needn't be entirely neutral, that is, at the highest speed available, but if it is offered only at the lowest speed available then it is essentially the same as no access. This minimum inter-network access has to be at least mid-level speed to be effective.
Beyond this we must ask which ways of charging for bandwith and content are acceptable and which are not. A big error made by amateur free market thinkers is that they believe that a free market means no rules. Free markets still operate within some level of rules such as no stealing and a certain requirement for transparency. Once information is not available to the consumer as to the difference between products offered this becomes no longer a truly free market.
I am OK with paying for the bandwidth of the connection coming into my computer. I am also OK with the website paying for the size of the bandwidth leaving their servers. What I am not OK with is interference in between the two. My connection provider should not be able to decrease my bandwidth because they do not like the website that I am accessing. Similarly the website's connection provider should not be able to decrease their bandwidth because the connection provider does not like me.