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What Will Come of the FCC Comcast Hearing
The FCC held its hearing on network neutrality and Comcast today at Harvard. One commentator not afraid to predict what will come of it is O'Reilly's Andy Orem, who writes: "The mere announcement of an FCC hearing on 'broadband network management practices' was a notch in the gun of network neutrality advocates. Yet to a large extent, the panelists and speakers were like petitioners who are denied access to the king and can only bring their complaints to the gardeners who decorate the paths outside his gate. What we'll end up getting is a formal endorsement of non-discrimination as a policy that Internet providers must follow, leading to continual FCC review of current practices by telecom and cable companies."
Network Neutrality refers to ISPs double dipping on charging/extorting fees for both users paying for their connections and web sites paying for prioritization of traffic according to origination and destination. It does not refer to protocol-based QoS. It does not mean a flat, unmanaged, unQoS-ed Internet. By repeatedly and deliberately misusing this phrase, its importance is being weakened.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
Thats the FCC will do, Jack ... The majority of their hearings either come up unresolved or contrary to the public good. Business intrests win out more often then Joe citizen under the current administration... Though unlikely to change much even after administrations change... Once the damage is done it takes years, sometimes decades before things are set back right.
5) "And finally, I'm mad at the public for taking the lazy route and accepting the cheapest form of half-crippled Internet access instead of a high-capacity bidirectional connection that could make us full Internet citizens. Let's not blame the telcos--or at least not stop with them. No one in a position to care has cared enough."
As long as the majority of the American public has access to Youtube and Myspace (and now Facebook), they're largely happy campers, apathetic to every other aspect of the internet, especially the technical ones or the ones that require any amount of thought. It's just like television; as long as there's American Idol and Lost, everybody's happy. Nobody cares about matters of substance like what's being reported on the major news outlets.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
Prof. Timothy Wu, the man who DID first coin the term "Network Neutrality" testified at the hearing, and he seemed perfectly satisfied that discriminating against users' BitTorrent uploads is a fine example of a Network Neutrality violation.
... who already have defined ways for applications to identify time-critical, jitter-sensitive packets and have defined what carriers should do about them.
In your example, the incentive is MONEY gained by charging content providers extra fees for carriage and then giving their traffic preferential treatment.
However, in the Comcast example, the incentive is MONEY saved by eliminating BitTorrent traffic and then putting off the new plant installations installations and additional transit fees that would normally have been paid to handle user demand.
So what's the real difference?
And nobody wants an unmanaged un-Qos'ed internet. But most people think that how the Internet works is the job of the IETF and the Internet Standards
Otherwise, how do you write software for an world-wide internet when half-a-dozen ISPs and transit providers on any given path want to "tune" the higher-level protocols to their own secret views on how the Internet ought to be prioritized?