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
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...
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.
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.
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