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FCC Commissioner Urges, Don't Regulate the Internet
Brett Glass writes "In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell makes a case against government regulation of the Internet, opining that 'engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.' With state governments pressuring ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet, and a proposal now in play for a censored public Internet, McDowell may have a very good point." McDowell is one of the two FCC commissioners who did not vote with the majority to punish Comcast for their BitTorrent throttling.
McDowell is one of the two FCC commissioners who did not vote with the majority to punish Comcast for their BitTorrent throttling.
So by 'not regulating' he means that ISP's should be free to throttle whatever they please? Interesting stance.
If the government doesn't step in, it won't be engineers regulating the internet either. It will be Sales and Marketing managers (or maybe someone higher up the food chain) trying to squeeze every last drop of profit from their paying customers.
Light a fire for a man and he'll be warm for a day. Light a man on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
Realistically, we want some middle ground between regulation and lack of regulation. Obviously we don't want the government to do something overly obstructive and bureaucratic, or something that makes it difficult to have a web presence, but we also don't want to have so much power in the hands of a few telecoms and providers that essentially they can do whatever they want, including stifling competition, charging twice for bandwidth, or taking billions of dollars in government subsidies to lay unneeded cable.
(To pick a few examples.)
Similarly, we want enough anonymity that people can report corruption anonymously, but not so much anonymity that it's impossible to track down people who abuse kids and post videotapes of that on the web. Web regulation is a complicated issue.
Thousands are enslaved every day. A River of In
One or the other will be regulating the internet. There is no perfect solution, but at least with government there is a chance of some accountability. If it's left to comcast, ATT, etc al, there is zero chance.
Caveat Utilitor
It looks like USA and Sweden is copying Chinas "Golden shield" to protect its citizens. Sweden with the new FRA law, and US censoring Usenet.
I really hope we can stop this before the politicians try to "protect" me too.
Most muslim states are of course already "protecting" its citizens heavily.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.
If the problem was only an engineering problem, I might agree... but since this has vast political, economical, and social consequences, and could undermine the entire Internet as we know it, I think governments should step in and pass a law that simply states "don't discriminate against traffic based on the source/destination."
I know government regulation can make things messy, but I don't know why it has to be any more complicated than that.
Duh, I meant "et al".
Caveat Utilitor
But if ISPs are found messing with the neutrality of the connections, then they should be held liable for all content that comes across their lines. It would establish one of two senarios. A) they leave the traffic flow alone and thus avoid a ton in liability. B) they go into complete china lockdown mode and allow nothing even slightly questionable through. If B occurs, then there will eventually be enough resentment to eventually re focus on why telecom is a big monopoly. Right now average joe doesn't care. As long as average joe can watch Utube and porn, the status quo remains. This whole net neutrality issue wouldn't even exist if the free market wasn't botched/hijacked in this country.
Regulation in and of itself can also be a slipperly slow. That is why we need Net Neutrality laws. Yes, it's a form of regulation in a sense, but it's the best we can probably do.
Net neutrality is to regulation what the GPL is to copyright. It is regulation designed to subvert "regulation" by making the imposition of restrictions on the internet illegal.
Anyone who does not understand this is ignorant, and anyone who opposes it is willfully corrupt.
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This is almost like the time the High Council at the Klingon Empire forced Worf into secrecy about his fathers trechery, but at the end of the day, the information was still made available. It is not logical to assume that even with such firewalls in place to sensor content that the unsensored content will become unavilable. This debate is similar to the fight about what children watch when in front of the television, and honestly, a more in home solution is ultimately the winning choice....
WWPD - What Would Picard Do?
yes there is a perfect solution: net neutrality laws.
Net neutrality is a government imposed regulation making it illegal for anyone (the state, the MAFIAA, or the telcos) to regulate the internet.
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What's that? You've changed your mind?
Because you own the spectrum and there's no longer a valid technical reason to grant it exclusively. Government granted monopolies on spectrum is a primary internet regulation someone that believes in free markets should oppose.
Laying cable and fiber in other people's back yards and public property is a privilege. Those granted that privilege must accept public regulation in return for the public servitude. Think about that for a while and you realize that the Internet is already highly regulated but the regulations do not always serve the public interest. Common carrier and net neutrality is the least the public can ask in return for exclusive use of public property. The public can and should also demand competition in wired service. Someone who believes in free markets would lower barriers to entry and use of wired networks.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Some people (read:ISPs) say that laws protecting Net Neutrality are regulation which will stifle innovation and mess up everything, but laws which exist to safeguard freedom still need to exist...
Like the Bill of rights... Maybe Net Neutrality shouldn't be a regular law, maybe it should be an ammendment.
Net neutrality is a government imposed regulation making it illegal for anyone (the state, the MAFIAA, or the telcos) to regulate the internet.
Net Neutrality is the Constitution of the Web.
One or the other will be regulating the internet.
There's another option other than government and companies: the free market.
If you don't like your ISP's handling of the internet, pick another ISP. Vote with your wallet. It's not hard.
And there's plenty of competition if you actually go looking for it. Sure, you might get only one cable provider and only one phone provider, but there are far more ways to get online than just two. Look it up.
Allowing the government to regulate the internet is what got us into this mess in the first place. The reason you only get to choose one cable company or one phone company is due to government regulation. Get rid of that, allow the free market, and all this "net neutrality" crap goes away.
With state governments pressuring ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet
Wrong. Lets get this clear - The recent push to shut down usenet access is being led almost solely by Andrew Cuomo - the Attorney General from NY - some guy who you probably never voted for. In fact, you've probably never even seen his name on a ballot.
Isn't it cool how some douchebag elected in a different state gets to dictate national policy?
Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
You seem to be forgetting the concept of open source governance.
STFU and go get an education. Goddammit, I am so sick of you "free market" wackos. For the LAST FUCKING TIME: A truly free market requires regulation, otherwise it's only free for rich entities. It takes a real moron to not see that. And we have far too many of you real morons in the US already.
Most self-regulating industries operate by requiring (by government and competitor pressure against non-conforming companies) a company to join the independent (but private) regulating agency. The agency can then regulate the members; members in violation are fined, threatened with expulsion (putting them out of government shield that is the regulation agency and all alone in front of Uncle Sam), etc.
Self-regulation does not mean "the corporation will do the right thing out of the goodness of its heart" - that's no regulation! Self-regulation might (I'd be skeptical, given the tiny number of major ISPs out there and the close cooperation between companies in the upper-tier ISP industry) be an option here... but what McDowell is suggesting is not self-regulation.
Of course what McDowell is literally saying is that engineers should be the policy-makers for ISPs... I would fully support legislation to that effect!
Will turn the internet into one firewalled zone and turn it into censored version of TV(brainwashing).
Just another clever attempt to get people who are normally for "regulating the internet"(Net Neutrality people) to contradict themselves. You can be against the Usenet bans without making this joker credible.
Actually, "network neutrality" -- as defined by the inside-the-Beltway lobbyists, such as Free Press (AKA "Save the Internet") -- involves massive regulation of the Internet. It would regulate and constrain ISPs' acceptable use policies and pricing schemes. In some cases, it even amounts to a requirement that ISPs meter service by the bit! The fact is that any definition of "network neutrality" that goes beyond prohibitions on anticompetitive behavior is not neutral at all.
No, I haven't forgotten. That's very nice and all, but no teeth == no power == meaningless. Don't get me wrong, I am watching hopefully. But it is no solution to actual problems of today. What are they going to do, send an RMS clone out to slap comcast around? On second thought, while perhaps less than effective, it sure would be fun. If y'all do that, can I go along? :)
Caveat Utilitor
Here is the trade association (read: telecom lobbyist group) that he served as assistant General Counsel and Vice President: http://www.comptel.org/.
From his bio:
Libertarians, I know he's speaking your language with this regulation==evil talk, but he does not have your interests at heart.
I totally fail to see how allowing ISPs to inspect and mangle data passing through their system is "pro-competition" or even "anti-regulation". These people want to destroy the internet as we know it.
One or the other will be regulating the internet.
There's another option other than government and companies: the free market.
The free market requires regulation. Think of what would happen in a market with absolutely no regulation.
The USA isn't censoring Usenet... it's encuraging ISPs to drop an area that has become too much of trading point for illegal files. The ISPs are complying willingly because it's not been profitable for them to run, and most users won't miss it.
Still, services like Google Groups and EasyNews are still up and running. There's no threat to those as of yet.
I don't see anywhere in any net neutrality draft that requires they charge by the bit.
This is not a requirement.. metering is the isp's being greedy, and they don't need net neutrality laws as an "excuse" either. They're already trying to impose it with "pilot communities".
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The very notion of "illegal files" is the essence of censorship.
Copyright may be called by propaganda terms like "intellectual property", but it is censorship (which can be performed by anyone, not just government, BTW) at its core.
The only factual error in his article was a minor, technical one regarding the response to the "Internet meltdown" back in the 80's. (Van Jacobsen's kludge did not prioritize traffic.) But he understands that Comcast wasn't censoring, or trying to (contrary to the lobbyists' bogus claims). He understands that network management is necessary to keep the bandwidth hogs from taking over. He recognizes how bad things can get once the nose of the camel of regulation is allowed into the Internet tent. And while he's a Republican, he shows that he's above the nasty partisanship that has infected Washington, DC by quoting Bill Clinton. Finally, he calls for cooperation rather than constant feuding and head-butting such as have been going on during the whole proceeding. This shows a level of perspective and maturity that we haven't seen from the other Commissioners. Good for him!
This should be before the Federal Trade Commission. These companies are simply taking money for services they do not deliver.
If I pay for X MBs of bandwidth, that's what I expect to be able to use. If Comcast throttles that bandwidth, regardless of what I'm doing with it, they are not delivering what they said they would when they took my money.
What do yo mean by "illegal"?
I believe "illegal" is a term used in criminal law, and referring to things like illegal drugs.
Or are you referring to work under copyright or products that are not "Genuine" as in Microsoft "Genuine" products?
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
FTA: "Each time, engineers, academics, software developers, Web infrastructure builders and others have worked together to fix the problems"
Simply but, this is no longer the case as there is profit to be had. There is some benefit in creating artificial scarcity. They have absolutely no reason to allow the most bandwidth possible, because as simple economics would tell you, if supply goes to infinity than the price goes to zero. In most cases I would even argue that they want to not meet demand fully.
Just like the California "Energy Crisis". If you consider the scenario that if you provide enough power for everyone they will pay $1/kW, but if I only provide 90% they will suddenly pay $10/kW. I just found a way to increase my profits by 10x and actually reducing my costs.
The requirements advocated by the meddling lobbyists and lawyers at "Free" Press amount to a requirement that ISPs meter by the bit... and they admit that.
The reason is simple. Bandwidth costs money. If you don't constrain the amount of bandwidth people use implicitly (by prohibiting bandwidth hogging behavior such as P2P) or explicitly (by throttling), the only way to ensure that a user does not cost the ISP more than he pays per month is to charge by the bit. They try to soft pedal this and instead make bogus claims that Comcast is limiting "free speech," because if consumers realize that Free Press is trying to raise their bills and put them on a meter, they'll rebel. But it's the truth.
See the section on this, near the end of my testimony before the FCC, at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html.
I agree with McDowell with one giant exception: the laissez-faire approach will only work if there is competition in the last mile. Given that most people only have 1 or 2 choices (huge telecom and/or huge cable company), I really don't think the conditions warrant a completely hands-off approach by the FCC. Once I have several high-speed ISP options, then I'll agree with him.
Also, does anyone know what exactly Mr. McDowell is referring to when he talks about the Internet bandwidth crisis and solution of 1987?
Why offtopic? The idea of "small nation, big internet" is a valid point.
There is no perfect solution, but at least with government there is a chance of some accountability.
Think long and hard whether these are the folks you want governing the Internet.
Iraq.
Warrantless wiretapping.
Torture.
Habeus corpus.
Vote fraud.
DoD contracts.
What accountability?
The real litigious bastards...
The very notion of "illegal files" is the essence of censorship.
Copyright may be called by propaganda terms like "intellectual property", but it is censorship (which can be performed by anyone, not just government, BTW) at its core.
I couldn't have said this better myself.
The notion of owning and controlling the distribution of information is antithetical to a free society. The fact that the "progress of science and the useful arts" clause is so brief comes from heated contention of the merits of allowing copyright to exist in the first place. Our founding fathers were pretty fresh and raw from the old copyright cartels founded and abused by the crown.
I'm sure if you brought them all forward in time to today, and gave them the last year or two of the YRO section to read, a few would turn around to the others and scream "I TOLD YOU SO!"
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I suppose next we should not regulation presidential elections. Another brilliant idea from a mind of a Republican.
Let us impeach Bush already. My ISP's Korean engineer is more American than Bush.
If ISPs aren't required to keep the internet open and free, then they can work in collaboration to charge for access, slow down or block access, and in short destroy the Internet as we know it. It's great if your idea of the Internet is a medium dominated by corporate interests. If so, than you can lap up this latest from lobbyist cum chairman McDowell, and sit back eagerly as he and others work to turn the Internet into a version of television. Corporations want profits and control of content, officials want funds and control of content, everybody wins (or at least those who matter).
We are a decade or so past where we can just say, let the engineers decide, and trust that some PHB isn't going to step in and make a bad policy. The importance of the Internet as alternative mass media is too vital to not protect through a little bit of regulation. McDowell tries to make his regulation = death to innovation FUD pitch, but net neutrality would spur innovation.
You can prioritize traffic in a neutral fashion, that's all many of us are asking, and that's all the regulating that is required.
The internet must be regulated. Either by the government or competition. Right now it has neither in some places.
If we decide it should not be government regulation, then no broadband monopoly can be permitted in any location so that competition can regulate it.
And by "the internet", I mean "the internet in the US" because, I'm pretty sure that's all we're talking about here, and that's all the jurisdiction the FCC has.
Question everything
Since the US seems to be in a constant grip of government granted monopolies when it comes to broadband access (you can aparently choose between one cable company or one phone company), there is already regulations - monopoly.
You can't have an unregulated monopoly (maybe duopoly) situation and expect free market competition to solve all problems, since you can't just vote with your wallet.
To me it's rather obvious what must be done to avoid regulations: Remove the forced monopoly. If you can't do that, then regulate the damn thing so your citizens (not consumers) get an actual reasonable product.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I used to think that any kind of government regulation of the Internet would be a bad thing, according to the "slippery slope" principle. Now, after reading about the concept of "net neutrality", I've decided that some regulation is probably a good thing, and that there's a difference between regulating speech and regulating utility.
I want the FCC to keep out of other people's business with regard to content, but I also want them to ensure the internet remains "neutral" with regard to protocols and routes.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
Let him know what you think on the FCC website.
" Robert McDowell makes a case against government regulation of the Internet, opining that 'engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems."
"McDowell is one of the two FCC commissioners who did not vote with the majority to punish Comcast for their BitTorrent throttling. "
So do we love him for his "hands off" governing philosophy, or do we hate him for his "hands off" governing philosophy?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
.
That's a nice sound bite (typical of bureaucrats nowadays), but an engineering problem (bandwidth utilization of P2P networks) has been turned into a business opportunity -- restrictively low caps with excessive overage charges --- by the ISPs.
So, in effect, the lack of regulation due to "engineering problems needed to be solved by Engineers" has evolved into "engineering problems being solved by accountants".
I'd rather have regulation.
if u think internet has ur own jurisdicktion......
then go make laws......but make sure u have the nuclear weapon to destroy the whole world before ur sexy pics get blown.....
if u mean free as in freedom , not free of charge...
then u should embrace it.....
don't try to think of 'control' or 'possession'...politicians....u never know what 'counter attack' can be done when u go online
After that, think long and hard about the alternative.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."
There has been a lot of this lately. I have my fears and doubts. I have an idea of where this is heading. Kind of curious how all this will play out. It sucks that it had to get to the point where we're at now, but it's amazing to see people able to see an opportunity for the development of new businesses the way Yahoo and Google did in the early to mid nineties. It will be a great time for investors when they find the right type of product that will perform.
In order to prevent the duopoly system from abusing their powers the FCC should be doing their job which is regulating communications. As the internet falls under their power they should be required to protect the consumers who pay the taxes that put the system in place instead of turning a blind eye to price gouging, decreasing bandwith limits in the digital age, and lets not forget slowing ones connection to 1/5th its speed so as to not have to ever invest in real infrastructure. Free market does not work when the two major players work together rather then compete with each other...
Yes there is "competition" between two separate monopolies.
Oh Joy.
One thinks it can ignore the customers because it has the local
phone communications monopoly and the other thinks it can ignore
the customers because it has the local cable TV monopoly.
If you're really lucky, you will have 2 whole competitors for
something that is what a European or Asian would call broadband.
If you're like most US consumers, you will have only ONE of those
monopolies providing something that the rest of the world would
call broadband.
If you're really unlucky you'll just be out of luck and stuck
back in 1992.
Great "free market" there.
The notion that there can be a healthy free market among a small
number of natural monopolies is assinine beyond description.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Teeth == power == big problem (e.g., all problems anyone ever has with government).
Give the Metagovernment a couple years, and I suspect you will see real powerless power. (Yeah, it's a Zen thing. Well, an open source thing, anyway. Freedom is power.)
This is the beginning of a very slippery slope. What if Comcast decides to ban all torrent traffic?
Then take your business elsewhere. Is that so hard for the average Slashdot reader? Many people seem to be totally unaware that they are the invisible hand.
Choice is a very good thing, but achieving it through forced structural separation has an ugly downside.
What would you do if the government forced you to let competitors use your pipes at wholesale rates? Even with rate of return protections, the incentive to invest big bucks in building better pipes is greatly diminished when your competitors reap all the benefits of your investment without any of the risk. While I love CLECs as much as the next person, I wonder if there'd be more VRADs and DSLAMs if forced openness weren't the law.
Why is there just one phone company and one cable company in most areas? Cleary, it doesn't have to be that way. Overbuilding is already happening in some places like Chicago and DC. RCN has built a cable network from the ground up entirely in neighborhoods where an incumbent already exists. It feels great to ditch Comcast for a cheaper cable company.
Natural monopolies do exist, but it's unclear if last-mile networks meet the definition. The main reason it looks that way so often is because of greedy municipal franchise boards that force new entrants to essentially sell their souls to the devil. "Want to bring service to our town? Fine," they say, "give us 10 percent of gross revenue and promise to give service to everybody within 5 years. Otherwise, hit the road, even if it means residents are stuck with too few choices."
It is definitely a privilege in the sense that you're asking. There is nothing intrinsic to our right to the internet. However, the anti-trust laws guarantee us the right to market competition. Surely somebody will come along to compete with these ISPs by offering unfiltered content, as they as they have the opportunity (thanks to anti-trust) and right (thanks to no regulation).
The Bill of Rights protects us from government, not private actors, and for good reason.
When a company screws us, it loses money and eventually goes bankrupt. When government screws us, there's not a lot you can do.
Hey twitter... this is what the submitter believes. And he's a shill for McDowell.
Sic 'em.
Wholesale rates is still making you a profit.
Say if your competitor stole all your business but was buying all its traffic through your lines at a reasonable wholesale rate, you would be making a profit and he would be making a profit.
It would also be your fault for having a crappy retail department who couldn't retain and gain satisfied customers.
Lol, I would like to see the part about a censored public internet try to get anywhere in the U.S. without tons of lawsuits being filed against it unless they decided to cut out the part about free speech and whatnot from the constitution.
I'm no "shill" for McDowell. However, I do have a very high opinion of him and strongly agree with his stance against regulating the Internet. He doesn't have much chance of chairing the FCC for political reasons (McCain would have to win the November election, and I'm convinced that Obama will win by a landslide). But frankly, he deserves to.
Bloody hell I am sick of the 3 people who whinge constantly about twitter, give it a rest-some of us couldnt give a damn!
Do we really want to allow the government to move into regulating the internet just so that a few companies can't throttle torrents? Really!? Because when I think of the government regulating the internet, it reminds me of things like the FCC trying to fine CBS over Janet Jackson's boob. Or the fact that you can't say a swearword over the radio without risking a fine.
What does net neutrality really accomplish? What are the people pushing net neutrality trying to accomplish? People like to talk about nobel goals like allowing a "free" internet, but what they really mean is that they want to use a lot of bandwidth and not have to worry about paying for it. That's why ISPs want to throttle, or disallow services. But to my thinking, it's unfair to let some people hog the internet at the expense of the rest of us.
I also don't like the idea that bandwidth providers and content providers should not be associated. That's the reason we have to pay for cable, and watch advertisements right now. Is it really so unreasonable to ask people to pay for content directly?
People need to stop trying to write laws just to make their lives cheaper and easier. Laws are for prosecuting criminals, not making your internet cheaper.
You have to admit it's pretty funny though.
They're ACs, just ignore them. Good for a chuckle once in a while.
I'm sure he'd be happy to replace his expensive backbone with Open Spectrum and then think that P2P was the best thing since sliced bread. There's no reason his upstream bandwith should be so expensive while there's still dark fiber. In the short term, he's probably right about P2P driving him out of business. That's a shame but it's not because P2P is less efficient, it's because of a bad regulatory framework. I'd like to hear his opinion about the big picture before I call him a shill.
His homepage points to text that explains his opinion and position better than his condensed "Principles". For all of that, his Principles has very nice language about the anti-competitive behavior mentioned above.
I'd go further than him and say that owners of backbones should only be allowed to charge rates that make for a reasonable rate of return and this should be the same for everyone. It costs a known amount to lay cable. The costs to maintain it are known and the life time is known. People who wish to use the public servitude should be forced to bid against each other and then be limited in the amount they are allowed to charge. Conditions such as these eliminate his need to restrict his users. Because conditions like that don't exist, his company faces extermination by rate increases regardless of how oppressive his TOS become.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The FCC is one of the reasons we're in this mess in the first place. Sacking McDowell and all the other bureaucrats would be a good first step towards a genuinely neutral internet.
AEIOU: open-source anonymous internet currency
"Internet is a utility, like phone service or electricity, creating natural monopolies."
That's a really bad example, because the government specifically granted those industries monopolies (at the time there was this idea that they should prevent the duplication of labor, they have a lively discussion of this philosophy in the movie The Aviator). There's absolutely no reason more than one company can't run power to your house. There's certainly no good reason more than one company can't generate electricity for a particular area. This goes doubly for phone service, since in most places you can buy it through the phone company, or the cable company (or multiple cell-phone providers).
"Right now, Comcast could decide to censor the internet,"
They can censor the service they provide to you, but no company in their right mind would do such a thing (it would detract from the value of the service, and provide no benefit of any kind to the company).
"Comcast could decide to block Vonage, because it competes with their VoIP service"
Yes, that would be a good idea. So what? Will you die without Vonage? Is it really worth passing asinine restrictions on internet providers just so that you can have Vonage?
That's not what he said at all if you actually read the article. In fact, at the end of it, he thanked the interest groups for bringing this to the FCC's attention and publically shaming Comcast. The result was that Comcast will stop using TCP resets and implement a protocol agnostic network management system by the end of this year and they're working with BitTorrent corporation and the P4P group to improve BitTorrent efficiency as well as a P2P users' bill of rights and responsibilities. So the process of the public and the FCC putting public pressure and humiliation on Comcast did the trick.
See http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=162 and http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/88/Default.aspx
The problem with the FCC majority decision is that they're trying to enforce something that they said was never intended to be enforceable and they never went through any formal rule making process.
What McDowell is really saying is that telecom CEOs should be able to operate their cartel however they want, without the people banding together (that's what the government really is) to protect ourselves from them.
He's "protecting the engineers making engineering decisions" about as much as Bush, who appointed Republican McDowell in 2006, is "protecting the troops" by ensuring their commanders can keep the war going as long as they want.
That is to say, not at all, but rather keeping them in the line of fire for a contrived "strategy" that protects only the corporate interest.
--
make install -not war
I've read some of his posts in this story. Who is this guy?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
It's only our freedom of speech at stake after all. Let the ISPs decide what is a valid venue for speech, I say. Those perverts on Usenet and AOL and IRC and WWW deserve to be censored. Why, there was a time when I was a kid when you could GIS without safesearch and still not be assaulted by the Porn. They're only trying to make the Internet safe for the Children. We need and Internet Czar to teach oversee what's appropriate -- and maybe a great firewall that doesn't pass encrypted traffic or all this smut and incidentally dissenting opinions that benefits no honest citizen.
And maybe cameras in the front of every cable box and some mandatory programming would be a good idea too. The people need to be educated on what and how to think after all and their conformance to accepted standards should be monitored in some way so that it can be rewarded.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
To deal with it in any other way is quite dangerous.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Censorship is damage.
The Internet is designed to "route around" damage.
So it is, so it always will be.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You're not posting from France.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
I really, really wish this were true. Ever since "Ill be damned if I'll pay for a landslide" it's been considered foolish to pay more than is necessary to buy the election. That elections are always bought is assumed. No 0-budget loser is going to get herself elected no matter how good her term might be for the country.
That means that perverting elections to the highest office in the land are increasingly swayed by individuals who can move the margin by a fraction of a percent. Cheating is getting increasingly easy. If IT makes jobs more efficient then it follows that digital polling booths make exploiting the US election system easier with every innovation.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Okay, this post was not flame-bait. This is my honest opinion, and I didn't even use any swear words or call people with opposing opinions idiots. WTF? I hate the stupid fucking moderator system.
This issue of having some traffic less important than other traffic, or less legit, is a facade for the real motives here. This would be like if suddenly the telephone networks couldn't handle their call volume, so they said they were going to disconnect anyone talking about last nights Simpsons episode so that more important calls - ones about American Idol or Bill Oreilly, could get through.
and since there's no "-1 Asswipe" moderation, flamebait is all that's available.
Just because my personal opinion is that three year old boys are just GAGGING for a bit of cock, doesn't mean coming on a discussion group and saying it isn't flame-bait.
So, the question is not one of whether or not the Internet will be regulated. It seems it's going to be regulated, wither by the govt. or the ISPs. The question then is who do we trust to look out for our interests as users or the internet?
We can expect the free-market libertarians to take the position that market forces will force the ISP to do a good job, while any government control is bound to be co-opted and subverted. Those who broadly favour government intervention will largely disagree.
Personally I don't think the free market can help here. The underlying issue isn't with the big ISPs throttling their customers. The issue lies with ISPs throttling other ISPs customers. Walking out on your service provider because some third party is traffic shaping you into oblivion is not a rational response, and is unlikely to help/
So I think if regulation coming anyway, it has to be government regulation. At least then the people who use the internet have some hope of bring pressure to bear in defence of their interests. I can't see how that's going to happen if the ISPs self-regulate.
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
So you're basically saying government should not regulate internet, but ISPs should be able to ?
What do you say each morning to yourself in the mirror to begin the day - "hypocrisy" ?
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What always cracks me up: Microsoft is selling Genuine Copys!
I think Robert McDowell's only concerned about government regulation in the context of Comcast being punished for it's behavior. There's lots of pretty speeches about free enterprise and laissez-faire capitalism when businesses are screwing over consumers or workers.
On the other hand, if the government were helping Comcast develop new markets, or giving out tax breaks and subsidies; well then, can't have too much government now, can we?
Mr McDowell should look at the housing and banking industry for an example of unregulated free markets.
The problem is that when you let ISPs decide what is good, it will not be engineers deciding, but managers and marketing people. The only way to have engineers deciding about the future of the internet is for the FCC to ask a lot of engineers for their opinion and then make a regulation from this opinion .
Usenet is anarchy but what you're proposing is a real mess. Most group names are almost empty, anyway. If you need such a thing, move to an abandoned group rather than just chuck the whole hierarchy structure.
Be advised, though, that posting binaries in non-binary-name groups (that is, groups other than alt.binaries.*) is considered a violation of protocol. Giganews, for example, does not move any messages with binary content found in non-binary groups.
Now, who wants to recommend a provider with good completion and retention that carries all groups? Anyone? Is there such an animal left in the wild?
Verizon, Comcast, Time Warner - they all do it already anyway... What is the difference?
Is having an e-mail address a right or a privilege?
Is the internet a right or a privilege?
Is reading newspapers a right or a privilege?
Is free speech a right or a privilege?
In the information era, not having internet access will put you in a situation where others have advantage over you. This has not only social, but economical consequences.
Imagine a country where only the privileged ($$$) have internet access, and it's censored by the government. You can't really talk about what you want, you can't transfer information, you can't download Linux because it would take weeks (and therefore you have to get it from magazines one-year-old, and that's if you can find them)
Well, you get the idea.
Internet throttling is *NOT* an engineering problem. It's a GREED problem!
People must be allowed access to what they ALREADY PAID FOR. If the ISPs can't give Unlimited Bandwidth, then stop lying.
It turns out Attorney Generals in New York have been pushing this issue for 10 years. Dennis Vacco was the Attorney General in 1998 and here's what http://www.xuk.biz/UKLR/Landslide/thestory.htm has to say about him: "Shortly before election time in 1998, the Attorney General of New York filed criminal charges against an ISP in Buffalo, for providing access to child pornography through it's hosted newsgroups. The company chose not to contest the charges, entering a guilty plea and paying a fine. Despite this, the legal complexities were clear, due to the impracticality of a host or ISP monitoring and potentially censoring the content on it's servers."
My opinion is in common with most Slashdotters: Cuomo is going too far by trying to eliminate all "alt." newsgroups rather than the handful that focus on obscene or illegal pictures. And I agree that letting a government even begin to censor what people can view is a slippery slope and really isn't a proper function for government.
"Why is there just one phone company and one cable company in most areas?"
My understanding is that you have to apply for a TV license per municipality. When I lived in DC you could have Comcast in one country or city and across the street would be Cox because that was a different county or city. The cable companies kind of colluded by saying I won't go in your area and you won't come in mine. This is one of the big roadblock for Verizon Fios/Fios TV.
One of the solution is to create a universal TV license for the whole nation. Cable companies would realize if Phone companies and other cable companies could take their market, they need to expand to get into other markets to compensate. More service providers should allow for better options. This isn't the grand solution but it is a step in the right direction, instead of doing nothing.
"If you like Battlestar Galactica, you're probably a huge nerd." -Stephen Colbert
Let's just make another internet and forget the stupid politicians!
Twitter, you started off the thread with some genuinely intelligent and insightful comments. Why did you then piss it all away by shilling with one of your name-troll sockpuppet accounts? You just managed to retroactively justify the AC's calling you out.
They don't expect to use a F-22 without enlisting, but they do expect to use the internet without being censored.
I'd take access to an F-22 in exchange for a censored Internet. Hey, you can fix the second using the first ;)
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Why was the government formed?
The mantra was not "No Taxation!" but "No Taxation without Representation." The Libertarian ideal of the Founding Fathers is not grounded in reality. Adam Smith AND Thomas Paine favored a progressive tax rate. The Boston Tea Party was about the Crown allowing the East India Company to use their own agents instead of independent local merchants as it was about taxes. The idea that tyrants are acceptable as long as they don't hold the scepter of state was not their ideology.
Two large problems:
First, how the fsck are you going to explain this to end-users, who are just starting to get their head around the concept of "bandwidth"?
Second, charging only for upstream would tend to make it more expensive to run a home server, and is certainly biased against torrents and the like.
The reason a simple, flat price-per-bit (or even price-per-packet) is attractive is that it's more directly related to actual cost to the ISP, and it doesn't attempt to discriminate against any particular use (like "overly chatty protocols") unless they're actually costing the ISP more in raw infrastructure.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Aren't you that astroturfer hired by handsofftheinternet to spam savetheinternet with specious counter-arguments?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
They have control over our children's schools, by means of what they are taught. They have control over our health care, they let them run wild and do as they please insurance wise -- prices up, care is down. They have control over our banks, they permitted them to run wild and gave them a law so they could turn a blind eye. Now they want to control of our Internet. NO!
The Op-Ed piece is getting closer, but McDowell is putting up a bit of a strawman, isn't he? He says the choice is between engineers or politicians, but that's way too simplistic.
The reality is far more nuanced. Clearly, we need both engineers and politicians. We need them to do the jobs only they can do: engineers to solve technical problems, and politicians to make the kinds of public policies that ensure a free and open society.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
it'll happen. we'll all be gone by then though.
the internet will turn into another rupert murdoch enterprise. the bullseye on his forehead will grow ever larger.
everything is as it should be.
I agree.
There's a giant pipe laying under my street. Inside that pipe is just two cables: Coaxial and phone line. (The electrcity enters through a different pipe.) I don't see why we can't have 4 or 5 coaxial lines, running in the same pipe, each serviced by a different company. Example: Comcast, Cox, Time-Warner, Verizon.
Let the people have freedom of choice.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
It's because the FCC "deregulated" telecoms (and the line sharing regulations governing the internet).
If anything, you should be FOR regulation of the internet, because as a CLEC you're being screwed by the fact they are not compelled to lease their lines at cost to you.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Scored redundant for correcting one's own typo! Hey, have we got some winners around here or what? Taco, can't we have a mini IQ test/troll filter before mod points get handed out?
Yeah right, and whose version of net neutrality would that be? Calling laws which have yet to be written a "perfect solution" is really foolish.
When telegraph and telephone companies first started stringing the nation in the 1800s, they did not do it because the government told them to. They did it for profit. They did it because the free market rewards initiative.
No, they wouldn't have. Not without Universal Access regulation. Without it, the majority of the US would not have been wired with telephone service.
It's funny, but in a "Monty Python geek" sort of way. Sure, those Holy Grail quotes are funny, but they really lose their luster when told over and over again.
I totally agree with McDowell. It should be the job of private ISP's to regulate user access to unsuitable content, not the taxpaying state. Woo first post!
This op-ed contains a large number of scary technical misunderstandings and a whole lot of free-market ideology acting as a poor substitute for evidence. It ignores the role government R&D--both directly in the form of agencies like DARPA, and indirectly through grants to research institutions--played in making the Internet a tool accessible to the general public. This role for the government in high-risk, pure research should continue if the US is to remain a leader in network technology. It also ignores the impact of deregulation on the telecom industry in the pre-Internet era. Just because few Slashdot posters are old enough to remember the generic black phones that US companies had to rent from the monopolist Ma Bell for subpar phone service for most of the 20th century does not mean we should ignore this example. In cases like these, where telecoms can concoct sweetheart deals for local government for limited land and permission to lay lines in the ground, the potential for monopoly or oligopoly in a deregulated market is enormous. Comcast is already part of an oligopoly system, and they've received an enormous amount of federal and local subsidies and kickbacks for what is by the standards of the industrialized world a third-rate service. They should be cut off from subsidies, and they deserve the full wrath of the regulatory system to prevent them from throwing their oligopolistic weight around and failing to invest in better infrastructure. That, by the way, those federal dollars are supposed to be used for, so where the heck is my last-mile fiber-optic network?
I think you forgot your tin-foil hat at home. If you live in the US, YOU control what your children are taught--school boards are among the most low-level and direct forms of democracy in this country. Insurance rates are set by actuaries who work for insurance companies. The present banking crisis is in large part the result of DEregulation; the financial instruments used to package subprime mortgages into deceptively good-looking investments would have been illegal just twenty years ago. If, on the other hand, the "they" you mean is international finance and corporations that don't operate in genuinely competitive environments, you're right.
... it's infrastructure heavily subsidized by the federal government, which finances the entities that manage the Internet itself (e.g. ICANN) and doles out billions to telecoms to create a "modern" broadband infrastructure. That money was squandered by some companies on nickel-and-dimed mobile data which causes congestion on the current Internet backbone rather than reinforcing it, and in Comcast's case, apparently on spurious legal fees. Read Comcast's submission to the FCC in this case and you'll see what I mean. Their terms of service would make ANY use of their bandwidth a violation, by my reading--anything that causes even a marginal slowdown for another customer! They deserve to be punished for putting customers in the Kafkaesque situation of being punished for violating secret or nonexistent bandwidth limits.
If you fee that companies should not use government funds in this way, you are welcome to vote for candidates who will put conditions on how future funds can be used. It just doesn't make sense to use the legal system to enforce an all-encompassing restriction on how ISPs (who may or may not have accepted public funds, but did not in any case accept them with the understanding that it would be later used to justify these kind of restrictions) can use their infrastructure.
It's not the legal basis of the restriction--the legal basis is a 2005 FCC policy and the fact that, as I mentioned, Comcast's terms of service and acceptable use policy are legally unenforceable.
Oh, I should have said they're legally unenforceable and they make no mention of the possibility of traffic management. You like Milton Friedman, right? Remember how he feels about fraudulent contracts?