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New Legislation Could Eventually Lead to ISP Throttling Ban
An anonymous reader writes "Comcast's response to the FCC may have triggered a new avenue of discussion on the subject of Net Neutrality. Rep. Ed Markey (D — Mass.), who chairs the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet, introduced a bill yesterday whose end result could be the penalization of bandwidth throttling to paying customers. 'The bill, tentatively entitled the Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008, would not actually declare throttling illegal specifically. Instead, it would call upon the Federal Communications Commission to hold a hearing to determine whether or not throttling is a bad thing, and whether it has the right to take action to stop it.'"
While I hate Comcast's man in the middle "throttling" of internet packets (Bittorrent), I'm very concerned with the government getting involved. It almost feels like Alien vs Predator, "Who ever wins, we lose" scenario. Because the government will screw it up worse than it is now.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
I believe ISP's throttling bandwidth is wrong, but the answer is for consumers to punish them in the marketplace, not for government to regulate the internet. It will set a horrible precedent (IMHO).
First, giving the FCC more discretionary authority is not a good thing to do. They are very receptive to lobbying (broadcast flag, mandatory DRM ...) and industry corruption (employees that leave directly to cushy jobs in the industry they were supposedly regulating just recently). Secondly, I'm not sure where the Federal interest is in regulating businesses -- that the internet as a whole is international?
This is really a contract issue. If their TOS promise "unlimited bandwidth" then they should provide that. If the TOS say "we connect you to the internet" they should not be able to block random ports. And sending fake packets is already a computer crime (at least, if I sent fake packets to Comcast servers I would probably be charged with attempted DOS or something). So I would support a "contact terms mean what they mean" law -- not giving the FCC more discretion to help the industry to screw the customers.
And yes, it is a monopoly which has spun out of control. Or rather, an oligopoly.
How many ISPs do you have to choose from? Unless I go dialup, I've got exactly three. Fortunately, one of them claims to believe in net neutrality, and they're the one offering fiber, but that's extremely unusual. Unless you're prepared to move to where I live (a small town in Iowa), chances are, your only real option to "let the market decide" or to "vote with your dollars" is to decide that you don't really need this Internet thing anyway.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Well hopefully, they'll say "if you come out and say that you throttle after X gb transferred or throttle throughput at Y mbps, or throttle protocol Z, then we'll allow it." It'll put an end to "unlimited" bandwidth, secret caps, and so on, and force the companies to actually participate in a market without fraud, which is probably the best we can realistically hope for.
Most likely they'll say "LOL sounds like a FTC issue to us, I don't think we have the right to do anything, take your complaint to..." and then give you directions to the wrong place in true bureaucratic style.
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
You have an interesting question. Although the situations you describe can have a negative impact on customers, some provider throttles make more sense. For instance, SMTP throttling. Some providers are throttling SMTP traffic to limit spam. For some, this is a much better option than the alternatives of blocking it altogether, transparently filtering it, or taking the risk of being unable to remove a spammer before they succeed in sending millions of messages.
Personally, as the operator of a hosting provider, and as a consumer, I see both sides of the argument. As a customer, I enjoy the opportunity to use VoD, VoIP, etc... but as a provider, I understand the occasional need to apply certain limitations in order to protect the customer and the network.
When I buy a quart of milk, the jug contains a quart of milk. If I try to pour out this quart of milk all at once, it does not slow to a trickle after the first half-pint and then announce that I've reached my daily pouring limit because the dairy doesn't have the cows, feed, and trucks required to actually produce the whole quart it sold me. Not if everyone who bought milk wants to drink it at the same time.
Whatever law covers that situation with my quart of milk not being a whole quart, can also quite well handle the situation where I buy 1.5Mb/second bandwidth, and then the second doesn't actually contain all 1.5Mbits, because the company doesn't actually have the infrastructure it's selling access to. ISPs already throttle, that's why they have different speed tiers for us to buy, same as milk is offered by the pint, quart, half-gallon, or gallon.
What we're really talking about here, is that the ISPs are lying about how much milk is in the jug. If our 1.5Mb pipes have to drop to 384K when everyone downloads at the same time, then we have 384K pipes, and they should be labeled and priced as such. Throttling based on content is just a way to legitimize weights-and-measures fraud.
Personally, I find it shameful that a new law has to be passed that essentially says "you know those silly old truth in advertising laws? Well just this once, we've decided to actually enforce them once in a while".
Perhaps I'm just old school or something, but at one time, any network connection would have a committed rate, burstable (or not) and an SLA. What "broadband" provides these days is 0 bps committed rate burstable to 1-6 Mbps and practically no uptime guarantee. What they *advertise* is clearly meant to make the customer believe it's 6Mbps committed with 0 downtime.
This business of metering transfer rather than rate is for the most part a scam to make the customer think they're getting a lot more than they actually are. 1 Gigabyte of transfer sounds like a lot to people but actually translates to a rate of 3 Kbps (Yes, not even 9600 baud) and skips over discussing factors such as uplinks oversold by a factor of well more than 100 and the various dirty tricks to keep you from actually using the bandwidth you're paying for.
The ugly part is that because there has been practically no enforcement of truth in advertising, even companies that may WANT to be truthful are forced to either lie or get out of the market. If you advertise LIMITED service, even if the limits are actually higher than the secret limits of the competing "unlimited" service (and no dirty tricks to keep the customer from actually reach the limits) you will go out of business.
When ISPs say that net neutrality will bring the network down, what they really mean is that they will be forced to actually admit that they've oversold their uplink, the poor performance really IS their network, not some anonymous "out on the net" problem and they won't be able to double dip by charging two parties full price for carrying the very same packet.
Meanwhile, all of this sweeping under the rug has prevented market forces from applying downward pressure on the price of real committed bandwidth and forcing a more appropriate balance of price vs. SLA which is why we're supplying 0 SLA home broadband with expensive five nines uplinks rather than several dirt cheap three nines uplinks in spite of TCP/IP being designed to support it.
The big incumbants do NOT want the market to go that way because it would lower barriers to entry and force them to work harder for their revenue.