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Australian ISPs Claim Net Neutrality Is an 'American Problem'
RATLSNAKE writes "The heads of some of the most popular Australian ISPs were all interviewed over at ZDNet about Net Neutrality. For once, they all seem to agree, and they say it's a problem with the US business model, or the lack thereof. They discuss why they don't think it's an issue in Australia. Simon Hackett, the managing director of Adelaide-based ISP Internode, had this to say: 'The [Net neutrality] problem isn't about running out of capacity. It's a business model that's about to explode due to stress. ... The idea that the entire population can subsidize a minority with an extremely high download quantity actually isn't necessarily the only way to live.' Of course, this also explains why we Australians do not have truly unlimited plans."
> "Their problem is that unlike Australia, they [offer] truly unlimited plans."
Except that the following countries also provide unlimited plans: Canada, Japan, Korea, Germany, The Netherlands, Sweden, Singapore ...
Wait... if I am not mistaken, it is faster to list the (quasi-industrialised) countries, which don't provide unlimited plans: Australia, New Zealand.
"Between strong and weak, between rich and poor [...], it is freedom which oppresses and the law which sets free"
I'm quite happy with my ISP.
I am with Optus, I get full ADSL2+ speeds and 20/40GB (20 peak, 40 off peak, and yes, peak is 12 noon to 12 midnight, off peak is the reverse).
I download enough to satisfy my needs, and the price is quite fair ($70 p/m).
I've only ever gone over my cap once, and that was to rebuild a Linux server for a mate.
I'd rather have a realistic cap than have some fucktard diddling with my packets.
As for "every Australian" you've ever talked to... what, is that a grand total of 5? I am a self confessed geek with lots of geek friends, we all love our ISPs because we're not idiots. We don't go for price, we go for quality and download capacity. I can only think of maybe 5 or 6 people I know that hate their ISP, and they aren't geeks - family members who didn't consult the family geek before getting their plan.
Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers. I think the main downfall of the US is not having body like the TIO (http://www.tio.com.au/) to deal with ISPs fucking you over. I've had bad ISPs in the past that have tried to screw me, what do I do? Contact the TIO and have them fight my case for me. I don't go to court, I don't really need to do much other than contact them, give them details, and they do the investigations. They pull server logs, demand details of the case, and basically make the ISP think twice before dicking their customers. They don't enforce the laws, or even make them up, they are purely there to mediate cases. They have a "fee" structure that makes it hard for ISPs to see a net gain from screwing customers.
Case in point:
An ISP wasn't delivering advertised speeds for my connection, I said I wanted out due to false advertising. They returned saying I needed to pay AU$550 to release from the contract. Well, I wasn't going to take this laying down, so I went to the TIO. They investigated the case and ended up ruling in my favour. While they weren't fined (this is something for Fair Trading or Consumer Affairs, depending on the state), they were liable for AU$1500 in fees due to not responding at the first and second level of investigation. I ended up paying nothing, they ended up $2050 in the hole for being dickheads about it.
I digress, if you want to hear about people bitching about ISPs, talk to a Kiwi... or an American...
Net "neutrality" (I am still bewildered about how that term is valid) seems like a big excuse for ISPs in the US to punish their customers.
It's a big excuse for ISPs in the US who chose not to re-invest in their ifrastructure with the billions of tax break dollars they received in the past decade .
In particular, cable companies here have done nothing to improve their core. They kept ramping up the claimed speeds in the last mile, but never bothered to fix their core networking so it could handle all those leaf nodes at full speed. Pretty much every cable company in the US requires transit from some other ISP before they hit major backbones, and they pay dearly for that.
But, the ISPs that did any forward thinking and build out are not punishing their customers with total byte caps or speeds reduced from maximum.
I think the whole entire "Net Neutrality" argument is a scam. IMO it's about two things primarily:
First, I think it's about making a whole lot of money for, and giving corporate welfare/protectionism to large communications companies that have had plenty of the subsidies from the govt and taxpayers in the past - technology is making things they used to charge an arm and a leg for free, or practically free - look at VOIP for one - and every year the web and our networked society seems to progress more.
Second though, and more importantly, I think it is about control and censorship. The government and these large media conglomerates don't like that people can get any sort of unfiltered information they'd like from around the world in real time. They don't like the fact that people can get news up to the minute from anywhere on any subject that they are interested in that is likely less biased, more accurate, and less full of "agenda setting talking point spin" than they can from TV News* (which has really become absurd, it's Paris/Britney mixed with a health dose of paranoia-behavior-control). They don't like it that instead of having some fascist douche like Bill O'Reilly telling people "what the news means to them," people can either look it up on their own or find their own place full of smart people with diverse views to have conversations with (Slashdot being a perfect example).. They don't like how the net can be used as a tool for orgaqnization and mass communication by practically anybody.
When one of your main goals is control, and knowledge and information are pwoer - the internet is your enemy.
*Now everything I have stated as populist advantages to a free internet can also have their downsides, for example - not all news online is accurate, honest, agenda free - but compared to what you see on TV it is, especially if you are even halfway savvy consumer of media you can find it easily. Also, anything that can be used to spread information can also be used to disinform - but I don't think anything comes close to the amount of disinformation/one-sided information and societal control as network television does.
So these are the real drivers of anti-net neutrality: Money and control. All of this stuff about not having enough capacity, and how strained the internet is - those issues can be solved so many ways properly without creating a digital ghetto for non-corporate/big money websites.
Except that's not what net neutrality is. Net neutrality isn't about charging everyone the same price regardless of how much bandwidth they use, or requiring that everyone has unlimited network capacity. That's silly. It's not even about saying that certain types of traffic can't be prioritized over others -- net neutrality wouldn't prevent ISPs from throttling bit torrent, for example (though there is overlap in the people who support net neutrality and the people who oppose such throttling).
Net neutrality means that Microsoft can't pay your ISP to improve your bandwidth to MSN search while throttling the bandwidth to Google. Net neutrality means that your ISP is not allowed to charge you for bandwidth and then also charge websites to actually connect you to them. (Google is already being charged quite a lot for bandwidth.) Traffic of different types (web vs. bittorrent vs. whatever) can behave differently, but traffic from different sources should be treated the same, to avoid protection-racket style abuses (nice site you got there, it sure would be a shame if my 50 million subscribers were no longer able to reliably access it...)
So, no, net neutrality is not at all about all users paying the same amount regardless of their level of usage. But some of the ISP monopolies have managed to frame it that way by implying that the rules that would apply to destination sites (Yahoo vs. Google) are actually rules about individual subscribers (large versus small bandwidth demand from a single individual). The intent of net neutrality is that ISPs should only be charging for throughput at the network endpoints they control, not at both endpoints of all connections, so we don't end up quadruple-charging for every transmission (as opposed to the current double-charging, which is reasonable since it allows the two parties to the connection to share the cost of the bandwidth they both use).
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