Slashdot Mirror
Network Neutrality — Without Regulation
boyko.at.netqos writes "Timothy B. Lee (no relation to Tim Berners-Lee), a frequent contributor to Ars Technica and Techdirt, has recently written 'The Durable Internet,' a paper published by the libertarian-leaning CATO institute. In it, Lee argues that because a neutral network works better than a non-neutral one, the Internet's open-ended architecture is not likely to vanish, despite the fears of net neutrality proponents, (and despite the wishes of net neutrality opponents.) For that reason, perhaps network neutrality legislation isn't necessary — or even desirable — from an open-networks perspective. In addition to the paper, Network Performance Daily has an interview and podcast with Tim Lee, and Lee addresses counter-arguments with a blog posting for Technology Liberation Front."
As long as companies are involved with some having more sway than others, you can expect them to abuse their position in the name of greed. It's simple human nature. Say all you want about how companies will police themselves or that the market will sort itself out. However, reality has shown us time and time again that this isn't the case.
This guy's the limit!
Since this is from the CATO institute, I will just go ahead and assume all their conclusions are bullshit.
Another paper by the libertarian-leaning CATO institute also said this: Banks, financial lenders, and mortgage providers "work better" if they are responsible and provide only secure financial investments, and are therefore not likely to enter a worldwide financial meltdown. For that reason, financial oversight legislation is neither necessary nor desirable. QED.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
$traceroute slashdot.org
traceroute to slashdot.org (216.34.181.45), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
1 10.100.56.1 (10.100.56.1) 17.348 ms 17.801 ms 18.228 ms
2 10.220.17.1 (10.220.17.1) 3.171 ms 3.270 ms 5.564 ms
3 * * *
4 * * *
5 * * *
.....
28 * * *
29 * * *
30 * * *
May the Maths Be with you!
For anyone that doesn't have the effort to slog through 36 pages of Internet history that more or less tells us what we already know (that up until now, the internet has been pretty open), the gist of the conclusion is "We shouldn't bother with network neutrality regulation or worry about those in charge abusing their local near-monopoly status, because hey, the market will work it out!"
There's also a nice helping of "The government is the worst monopoly of all, and we should never allow them to pass laws to restrain the actions of near-monopolies, because hey, the market will work it out!"
In other words, we should trust that despite the massive amount of money and energy the companies controlling our "tubes" are putting into fighting network neutrality legislation, they won't ever abuse the privilege to screw us if we just leave things the way they are. But if they are not allowed to screw us, that's when we have to worry about monopolistic behavior!
Color me unimpressed by the overwhelming force of logic there...
The idea that neutral networks work better seems plausible enough; but that doesn't imply that neutral networks are what the market will achieve. If I can improve my position by building a walled garden and sucking everybody inside dry, that will impose considerable externalities, and probably represent a net loss in efficiency; but I'll do it anyway because I get the gains, and other people suffer the losses. Unless this paper has an atypically good reason for why externalities will be internalized in this market, I am wholly uncomforted by the fact that neutral networks are more efficient.
As long as politicians are involved with some having more sway than others, you can expect them to abuse their position in the name of greed. It's simple human nature. Say all you want about how government will police itself or that the market will sort itself out. However, reality has shown us time and time again that this isn't the case.
So, it's a nice theory, but Ontario (and most of eastern Canada) disproves it nicely.
"The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The law embodies the story of a nation's development...it cannot be dealt with as if it contained the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics." - Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
It is for this reason that the internet will continually be subject to attack. It is a public resource and history has taught us that public resources must be managed, regulated, rationed, and controlled. People here on slashdot and in the technical community believe that the internet is different, that it should not be subjected to the same restrictions that are placed on other public utilities like the roads, electricity, or other infrastructure. But our community is ignoring hundreds, arguably thousands, of years of human history which has inevitably converged towards the same result -- Public resources must be managed resources.
This is an unpleasant truth, and an unpopular one. We're terrified, in many cases rightly so, of the government coming in. But witness what the lack of government regulation has done. When the internet was first opened to the public, there was no commercial interest, but as commercial interests moved in there was no central governing authority. And so a myriad of organizational nightmares have evolved in every aspect. The DNS system has factured, with lawsuits and international pressure abounding. Peering agreements between large ISPs have become power battles that have sometimes resulted in significant fractions of the network being inaccessible to the whole, or degrading performance. We have governments erecting giant firewalls, and the thousand cultures of the world now battle for control over what goes in to their part of the network. Everybody has their own ideas, and it is now little more than anarchy. And none of these battles is concerned about performance, democracy, or the other ideals that net neutrality activists advocate.
We were so scared of the government that we let corporations come in and seize control of the infrastructure. Now the future of the internet is a question of economics, not idealism, and corporations are battling and lobbying to become the largest and most powerful. Consolidation is happening in the ISP market in every country in the world. And as that consolidation continues to occur, and fewer players are in the market, it will bias ever more heavily towards control and regulation... But it will be a control based on economics favorable to the corporate interests, not the users, not the private citizens.
It's time to admit that we need government involvement. It's time to sit down at the negotiating table and decide what the fairest way to ration and regulate this resource is. That's the only consideration of the law, and it's best we do it soon before these corporations become so entrenched that only the most desperate of solutions will bring relief. And once we decide what we, as a country, want to do with this resource, then we need to set about making treaties with other countries to bring some level of regulation to a global level.
This is going to happen. It has to happen. The only consideration now is how to guide this process toward a fair outcome.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Surveying the wreckage of the credit crisis, Alan Greenspan says he made one very big mistake.
The free-market cheerleader and former maestro of the U.S. Federal Reserve Board conceded yesterday that he wrongly thought banks had an inherent interest in shielding their institutions and their shareholders from risk.
That assumption turned out to have been dead wrong as financial institutions brought the banking system to the brink of failure in recent months after loading up on exotic mortgages and risky derivative products such as credit default swaps.
"I made a mistake in presuming that the self-interests of organizations, specifically banks and others, were such that they were best capable of protecting their own shareholders and their equity in the firms," Mr. Greenspan bluntly told a U.S. congressional committee exploring the role of regulators in the financial crisis.
"Something which looked to be a very solid edifice and, indeed, a critical pillar to market competition and free markets did break down.
"And I think that ... shocked me. I still do not fully understand why it happened."
The staunch belief that banks could manage their own tolerance for risk underpinned Mr. Greenspan's aversion to heavy-handed banking regulation during his record 18-year tenure at the helm of the Fed.
Mr. Greenspan was an early devotee of author Ayn Rand, whose 1957 novel Atlas Shrugged inspired a generation of libertarian thinkers who believe in the right of individuals to live entirely for their own interest.
There are enough cases, eg, NebuAdd, NX-domain wildcarding, P2P traffic disruption, where the ISP gains a large net benefit from behaving in a non-neutral manner, and as high-bandwidth ISPs are a duopoly at best for most individuals, unless you can reveal their practices AND the threat of regulation & marketplace rebellion, the net becomes unneutral.
Remember, the "market will take care of itself" was also promulgated by CATO in respect to Wall Street, and we know how well that worked out.
Test your net with Netalyzr
But the Internet is a two-way street, with clients and servers. If the client-side ISPs decide to start throttling, then the server-side providers can decide to start throttling those ISPs as well.
Do you really think that people will stick with an ISP that has slowed-down access to Google? I think Google is in a good position to threaten ISPs into maintaining net neutrality. Imagine going to Google and seeing a note telling you that your ISP has caused your access to Google to be throttled, and suggesting that you call your ISP or move to another ISP.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
The article is just full of utter nonsense that should be clear to anyone knowing anything about the internet. The ONLY way to gaurantee that ISPs will not censor the net is to gaurantee that they dont, in the only truly enforceable way, with law. It is all too easy for the ISPs to implement hardware and software that will restrict access to or impede access to certain content. The consumers, given the near monopoly position of the ISPs, would have little other choice than to put up with this. It could also be that only exorbitantly priced service tiers would offer unrestricted access to the internet, meaning access to the full internet would only be available to a small, wealthier segment of the population. Furthermore, even though an uncensored common carrier, whether it is postal or electronic, is essential to free speech, I am unsure if enough consumers would realise the great importance of this to take demand a change of their ISPs behaviour. ISPs of course can just reject that request and leave consumers without recourse.
Net neutrality can only be assured, adn free speech therefore, with it being required by law and ISPs being recognised for what they, as common carriers and that they should be required to carry all information over their networks unmodified. To allow otherwise is to open the door to censorship, and to make these corporations the functional equivalent of the Chinese government, blocking whichever sites which suit them. This would have an effect exactly equivalent to government censorship that it should be considered the same as government censorship.
Net nuetrality is also unnecessary for the ISP. They claim it is needed to raise revenue to maintain the network. This is utterly incorrect as they can use bandwidth tiers to do this. Speed and performance levels should apply without discrimination to all content flowing over the network.
Net neutrality is to protect consumers rights and free speech rights, by assuring every person can access all information made avialable on the internet and publish their own content which can be accessed to anyone else, without it being blocked.
We can expect conservative organisations to be prejudiced against the interests of free speech and the people and to be high biased towards large corporate interest whom they represent and who finances them. They are highly ideologically biased to an approach which endangers individuals freedoms in favour of large corporations, by dismantling the voice of the people, our democracy, and removing all restrictions from corporations which turns them into an unelected plutocracy which takes the functional role of a totalitarian government. I oppose totalitarianism in the form of corporation or government, often either which are different in name only, and therefore I oppose censorship of the internet by corporations or government, and I support Net Neutrality laws passed by our democratic government to assure that ISPs are not permitted to block access to content.
The only thing ISPs care about by default is that their users aren't abusing access to the Internet through means like taking up too much bandwidth or doing illegal things. They don't care whether you spend your day on Slashdot or Stormfront. If left up to their own devices, which they have been so far, they let their users go wherever they want until the law says otherwise. What makes you think that the government is more likely to come in and say that they must do this, rather than come in and tell them they have to block access to certain sites and opinions? There's already precedent for the latter, but not the former, in many Western states.
the meltdown is due to human psychology. i did not know you needed regulations to create panic and fear. i suppose if we had no regulations, the very concepts of panic and fear would disappear?
fact: an unregulated market is subject to times of irrational exuberance, and times of panic and fear. there is absolutely no prerequisite to these truths, and no escaping them. the only way to save ourselves form the excesses of irrational excitement or hysteria is regulation
if you don't believe or understand that, you ar ein some sort of denial and choking on some massive propaganda
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Net neutrality is to protect consumers rights and free speech rights, by assuring every person can access all information made avialable on the internet and publish their own content which can be accessed to anyone else, without it being blocked.
Your crazy if you think that is what the government will actually do. Look at the direction those same governments have gone so far with respect to civil liberties and freedom of speech. You want to hand the keys to the entire communication infrastructure over to them and say, "promise to do the right thing, okay". You will be delivering censorship on a silver platter, in a more augmented and frightening way. Large corporations can become corrupt, that's inherent in human nature, but there are steps you can take to combat them. Large governments, tend to become tyrannies and removing them typically requires lots of people to die. On an unregulated Internet we are free to write our own applications, encrypt communication and take our own steps to work around greedy, short sited ISPs. Once the government is involved, you will either be a terrorist or pedophile if you do so. Think about it because once you hand it over you will never get your truly free Internet back again.
Greenspan was one of the people responsible for changing regulations that led to this crisis. Once he became FED chairman in the 1980's he started circumventing the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/wallstreet/weill/demise.html
In 1933, Senator Carter Glass (D-Va.) and Congressman Henry Steagall (D-Ala.) introduce the historic legislation that bears their name, seeking to limit the conflicts of interest created when commercial banks are permitted to underwrite stocks or bonds. In the early part of the century, individual investors were seriously hurt by banks whose overriding interest was promoting stocks of interest and benefit to the banks, rather than to individual investors. The new law bans commercial banks from underwriting securities, forcing banks to choose between being a simple lender or an underwriter (brokerage).
In August 1987, Alan Greenspan -- formerly a director of J.P. Morgan and a proponent of banking deregulation -- becomes chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. One reason Greenspan favors greater deregulation is to help U.S. banks compete with big foreign institutions.
In December 1996, with the support of Chairman Alan Greenspan, the Federal Reserve Board issues a precedent-shattering decision permitting bank holding companies to own investment bank affiliates with up to 25 percent of their business in securities underwriting (up from 10 percent).
Late 1999:
After 12 attempts in 25 years, Congress finally repeals Glass-Steagall, rewarding financial companies for more than 20 years and $300 million worth of lobbying efforts. Supporters hail the change as the long-overdue demise of a Depression-era relic.
Just days after the administration (including the Treasury Department) agrees to support the repeal, Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin, the former co-chairman of a major Wall Street investment bank, Goldman Sachs, raises eyebrows by accepting a top job at Citigroup as Weill's chief lieutenant. The previous year, Weill had called Secretary Rubin to give him advance notice of the upcoming merger announcement. When Weill told Rubin he had some important news, the secretary reportedly quipped, "You're buying the government?"
Greenspan was the major player in repealling the legislation which would have kept this mess from ever happening. It is very doubtful that Greenspan didn't know why Glass Steagall was enacted in the first place.
Of course he is going to plead ignorance. He doesn't want to get put behind bars and flogged by the masses by admitting he is a criminal.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
You could call the US market an "Oligopoly."
But that's understating the case.
In >80% of the US market currently, the customer is functionally given three choices: Dialup, Monopoly ISP (Cox, Comcrap, AT&T, etc), or NOTHING. They don't have a "choice" at all.
For example: no DSL is built to my home. Verizon can't/won't build out FiOS because, they claim, they don't "own the physical phone lines" so while I could switch to them as my phone provider, they have no ownership/authorization to push FiOS. Functionally, I am limited to Dialup, Comcrap, or NOTHING and even the dialup companies are dying fast.
The 'net cannot stay neutral WITHOUT legislation when you have big companies like Cox and Comcrap that have monopoly status over far too many of their customers. Hell, that's how we got this fucking-stupid "250 GB" traffic cap setup as well.
In an actual competitive market, the customer can go to the best provider. In a monopoly market, the customer is inevitably given the "choice" of either crap service or no service. Unfortunately, government regulation to protect consumer rights (which was signed away by both Clinton and Bush, little by little) is necessary because otherwise the market devolves into monopoly control everywhere, and the only "competition" happens on the fringe edges where you might have two big mostly-monopolies trying to horn in on each other's monopoly turf.
Which would you rather have?
1) A bunch of large corporations dueling it out amongst themselves, with the ones who gain and maintain the largest market share being the most successful.
2) A bunch of large corporations dueling it out amongst themselves, with the ones who gain and maintain the ears of the most powerful government officials being the most successful.
Yes, companies will abuse their positions in the name of greed. There is no way around that. When you get government involved, however, you're simply raising the stakes. Sure, you can vote out the current crop of greedy politicians who favor the corporations, but you're still stuck with the bad laws they made because it's a hell of a lot easier to pass a bad law than to repeal one. Libertarians think that it's better to pass no law than a bad law.
Additionally, as other posters have done, I challenge you to point to some concrete examples of the free market failure you believe is so rampant. (You might want to avoid pointing to the Great Depression, as that has been debunked before and will no doubt be debunked again should you do so.)
Your brain is not a computer.
go study the banking panics of the 1800s
panic sets in, feeds off itself, and destroys the entire marketplace
your comment is in direct contradiction to established historical fact
what is wrong with you free market fundamentalists?
a little regulation HELPS. it can do nothing but help. let go of your bizarre irrational fear and your cult-like approach towards free markets. you're not logical or reasonable in your approach, you're like arguing with a creationist: you've taken a single act of faith: that a completely free market is always good, and in spite of all common sense and reasonable evidence to the contrary, you will not let go of your religious deathgrip on a fundamentalist absolutist concept
the best market is a sandbox: free within certain parameters, regulated when the marketplace swings to extremes
go ahead, dispute that. i expect you to. you're not a reasonable person, you're a member of a fundamentalist religion, beyond the reach of reason
no, a completely free market is not a good thing, it is a stupid thing
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Choosing a car analogy was the right thing to do, but it's the wrong analogy.
The roads are neutral in a very important way: any appropriately licensed driver is permitted to drive any appropriately registered vehicle on any public road suitable for the physical form of the vehicle. There are no public roads on which you may drive a U-Haul truck but not a Ryder truck.
Similarly, I want the internet to be neutral, in the sense that it doesn't matter where a packet comes from or where it's eventually going. ISPs are welcome to charge more for different levels of service. I'm not going to complain about reasonable levels of packet shaping, such as cutting down on P2P to allow VOIP through at low latency. The problem is if I have to pay more to get Google packets rather than Yahoo's.
If there were enough competition going on, we could let the market sort itself out. However, most people have limited choices in broadband providers (I'm very lucky; I've got three choices), and it's not like I can start my own last-mile internet service, getting easements and rights-of-way to run my own lines. For most people, if one or two providers do something they don't like, the only other choices are dial-up or satellite.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Okay! That was trolling, this is arguing.
First, the free market has well known failure modes: natural monopoly, where the marginal cost of entry into the market increases dramatically after the initial entry. Roads, sewers, electric and phone lines are a great example. Information asymmetry is another, and externalities are the third.
Second, money is power, and power can be used to oppress. A free market is a similar choice mechanism to a democracy, except that in a free market, it is one dollar, one vote. The more money you have, the more you can use your money to change the parameters of the market.
Third, choice. A free market does not provide real choices. It provides the illusion of choice. And where it does provide real choice, it seeks to hide the real differences in those choices, making picking the better item or service difficult.
Fourth, Destruction of intrinsic motivations. A competitive market destroys intrinsic motivation to do something. For instance, go to a bar and ask all the women if they will sleep with you. You may get lucky. Now, same thing, except offer to throw in ten dollars. You will strike out every time, because you have destroyed intrinsic motivations.
Fifth, duplication of effort. A competitive market requires duplication of effort where a socialist system does not. Each company must repeat the efforts of all other companies in a given market, instead of sharing effort.
Sixth, closed communication channels. In a competitive market, innovations aren't shared as freely as they could be in a socialist system, because that would be giving away advantage.
Seventh, waste and mismanagement. A competitive market develops its own special kinds of parasites, who add nothing of value to society yet make a lot of money. Advertisers, for instance. Or the insurance industry. These people are professional manipulators, con artists, gamblers and frauds, yet they are richly rewarded in a capitalist system.
Eight, real world examples. No company is set up internally as a free market system. None. If the free market is so great, why don't companies organize themselves that way internally?
There's plenty more where that came from, but lets see if you can refute even one of these points before I bring out the big guns.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Really, you think "wireless broadband" will be the savior? It's got more problems than wired (latency issues, distortion/signal strength issues, materials penetration issues, interference issues).
And if that weren't enough, if anything "Wireless Broadband" is already MORE restricted than wired (DSL/Cable/FiOS) offerings. For example, both Verizon and AT&T cap you at FIVE GB. Your own example (Wi-Max) sneakily enters into underlying "service provider" agreements to pull the same stunts.
Again: a FIVE GB cap, even when advertising their service as "unlimited." Use anything over that, and they cut your account instantly (while insisting, of course, that if you want to get out you have to pay them severance charges).
"Wireless broadband" is not your savior.
If you live in the city or most 'burbs you have at least DSL and cable. Also dialup and satallite but they suck. Classic Oligopoly.
Markets rarely devolve into monopoly (outside the fevered imaginations of 'know it all college hippies'). Much more typical is the other way around (additional competitors enter the market over time), which is why wireless is so important. Much lower barriers to entry.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Libertarians are Anachist
Libertarians hate govt regulation, so therefore, so do Anarchist
You want the govt to dicate what corporations?
You do realize that a corporation can be a single person, or family in my case. You want nobody to be able to open a business and make a living for themselves?
Agreed, I have no idea what your definition of Anarchy is. I think the other poster said it, you sound more like a commie, using some crazy definition of Anarchist to pass off your views as better than what they really are.
As for the flea market... why do you care what the sellers make? Don't you just want the consumers to be the ones that win? I thought you didn't care for "companies" (aka sellers). Again, you seem to be contradicting yourself.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...