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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.'"
But how much choice do consumers really have? Most can only chose from one or two providers. Hard to punish them in the marketplace with those realities.
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.
The problem is lack of competition thanks to the deregulation of the last decade or so that was supposed to enable more FIOS and DSL service paid for by our tax dollars.
Instead the telecoms said thank you and blocked competitors. Remember the amount of ISP's you could chose from back in the 90's compared to today? My point exactly.
You have 2 ISP's. DSL or cable and both throttle your traffic.
So what are you supposed to do?
http://saveie6.com/
I can't wait until my options are cable monopoly throttling, or phone monopoly throttling.
There are some problems the Government actually is capable of solving better then the market. The market in this case dictates that throttling is good for the bottom line, and ending net neutrality is even better for the bottom line.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
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!
If the government was smart, they'd turn right around and say "OK, you're now a regulated monopoly. This is the maximum you can charge. We know you don't need more to expand your network because we already gave you money to expand your network!"
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.
As a former customer of Comcast, let me tell you something: THEY'RE GOING TO RAISE YOUR RATES NO MATTER WHAT!!
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.
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.