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Network Neutrality Defenders Quietly Backing Off?
SteveOHT writes "Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers. The story claims that Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon have quietly withdrawn from a coalition of companies and groups backing network neutrality (the coalition is not named), though Amazon's name is reportedly once again listed on the coalition's Web site. Google has already responded, calling the WSJ story "confused" and explaining that they're only talking about edge caching, and remain as committed as ever to network neutrality. The blogosphere is alight with the debate.
"Evil," says Google CEO Eric Schmidt, "is what Sergey says is evil." We are all fine.
Need I say more? They're grabbing headlines once again for confused reporting.
No!
You get "fast-priority" because Google put a server closer to you.
This is similar to what Akamai does.
So it's not unfair around the internet, only that google gets faster because it's closer
how long until
This is google paying more to provide a faster service, not paying more to provide the same service. there is a difference.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
The RSS headline I got was "Network Neutrality Foes Quietly Backing Off?"
This was fixed by the time I got to the web.
Talk about confused...
http://lessig.org/blog/2008/12/the_madeup_dramas_of_the_wall.html
I keep hearing how we need NN regulations because there is so little competition, but I also don't see much being done by NN advocates to eliminate local and state franchising laws which make it harder for companies to enter cable and broadband markets. If Google were more libertarian than liberal, I would expect them to be proposing a referendum in California to sweep away all of the franchising laws so that there are no local or state limits on who can enter what Internet or TV market.
Part of the logic behind franchising laws is that they give more revenue to local governments, but so what? Most local governments can do without, and if you really need to help them with funding, then the obvious solution is to give them more latitude to tax their residents.
Its not, thats the point.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
The WSJ is now owned by Rupert Murdoch, who also owns ISPs in Europe. For him net neutrality is a threat to a potential revenue stream. All we're seeing here is the 'editorial independence' of the Murdoch press.
All intents and purposes. Not intensive purposes.
Is this kind of carry on not just asking for a "useful" virus? (Not proposing it)
There are plenty of smart people out there who are for net neutrality and a number of them might consider it lawful (or even their duty) to exploit the infection vectors that have served botnets for so long, to provide an "inoculation" that reverses the effect of this unrequested distortion of the network - "stealing from the rich" so to speak, which will inevitably "give to the poor".
Genesis 1:32 And God typed
struggle to see what the problem is here really. It sounds rather like Google are buying dedicated (virtual) pipes to move data around. Millions of companies already do this and no one complains. Flame away, I get that foot in mouth feeling.
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
net Neutrality is like election finance reform. The people trying to gain access are all for it, but once access is gained, the urgency seems to fade away.
Google needs net neutrality where it is weak, but exploits sweet heart deals where it is strong. The ISPs should be careful, in this economy, the infrastructure that they depend on can be bought by Google or Microsoft. More over, if Google or Microsoft could buy or build a few major backbones, they'll be screaming bloody murder FOR net neutrality.
I think Google has done the numbers, though. They are banking on semi-truck sized compact portable data centers and using existing the existing backbone as merely the pipeline for cache coherency. So when you run google apps, you are getting your applications only a few hops away without sprint in the way.
I will paraphrase an old expression, never under estimate the data bandwidth of a semi-truck sized data center driving two days across country. Think about the number of raw terabytes that can be shipped vs transfered over the backbone.
For actually reading what is going on rather than wild and moronic speculation based on a stupid headline and bad summary.
The only change I can believe in is what I find in my couch cushions.
It's a contradiction to buy your way into the fast lane with ISP's and then say you want equality for all. I say...the best way to maintain neutrality is for everyone to do nothing except for all ISP's to give all users faster speeds. Any measure of fairness is had at the user level and NOT with content providers or website owners. The best things that site owners could ever do is to maintain the health of their sites, make them easier to use, and make them more desirable to use. ANY manipulation if favor of ANY site at the ISP level defies the very purpose of NN.
This can be turned around - there's just too much money to be lost by paying twice for the same bandwidth.
And Google, and Microsoft, and Yahoo, and Amazon are all in the "paying twice" camp, not in the "charging twice" camp. Which is why I'm skeptical about the claims.
No, it's not, because Yahoo is paying to ISPs, and so is Altavista.
That's why the ISPs like it so much. It's all working exactly the same as today - if all your customers have "premium" contracts, that means the quality of service is still the same overall, as no-one has priority over anyone else - except that you charge everyone extra for the "premium".
What with Google's admission that they manipulate search results I won't trust them anymore.
Hold on... you don't trust someone because they're honest about something? I don't quite follow your logic here... Whether you like or dislike what they do, you can't say they're not trustworthy if they come right out and say "yep, this is what we do" (unless they're lying)
If a company came to me and said, "give us all your data so we can sell it to other companies!", I'd trust them. I wouldn't do business with them, but I'd certainly trust them to do exactly what they said.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
...and which is also what google have been doing for quite some time, if i remember correctly - they have datacenters around the world _already_.
so, another case of journalist not getting it ?
Rich
No, it's like how if you download something from Amazon, you download it from a local s3 cache instead of them copying it over the backbone multiple times. This provides MORE bandwidth for everyone, including Amazon's competition.
Well, this is why network neutrality is so hard to get right. Of course it's not much different from what Akamai does. Of course anybody could do it. But of course it's going to shut out the majority of sites in favor of those which can afford to get in bed with all the last mile ISPs. If Google and all the other big ones go right to the ISPs, why would any ISP work on upgrading their internet connections? Most users will think that other sites are just slow, when in reality the slowness is caused by a drastically underdeveloped connection from the users' ISP to other networks. In order to compete, you would then have to pay for the fast delivery of the data right to every ISP's doorstep: That's effectively the same as "we throttle you unless you pay up", i.e. not network neutral.
Straight out of political science, one way you can be fairly sure someone's promise is trustworthy is if he tells you something that could in no way improve your opinion of him.
Textbook example: Mondale's promise to raise taxes. I believe he would have done it. Saying it only hurt his electability.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
If they had said they were doing that from the start I'd agree with what oyu are saying but I believe they were purposely vague about how their search works. Didn't you always think Google hits were the result of their search algorithm?
So since the US taxpayers paid for that cable that means we should get to say how it's used. I agree with you.
It wasn't just the telecoms that now "own" it that paid into its construction cost you know.
We had a huge hubub about telephone lines some time back and THANK GOD we can actually choose our long distance providers now or else we'd be in a libertarian nightmare of monopolies and high prices.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Which has NOTHING to do with "Net Neutrality", even though the anti-neutrality people don't QUITE seem to get that it doesn't prove their point or that anyone's turning their back on things.
Net neutrality is about applying the same consistent rules for all content and not munging for "quality of service" reasons the stuff. If Google's stuff gets there to you more robustly and quicker, it's because it's spending quite a bit of money putting HARDWARE they maintain closer to you and more of it.
The stuff the net neutrality people are harping on about is where the crap the ISP's are shovelling gets priority unless you pay them protection money.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Instead, each ISP hosted a server on their own network for this content. The BBC just sent one copy to each ISP and their customers then fetched it from their local copy. The same thing can be done to a degree by setting the correct cache flags, assuming your ISP provides an HTTP proxy. It only really makes sense for very large sites where a significant proportion of the ISP's customers are going to want to access and get a lot of static data. It's not applicable in the general case.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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I forgot to say - it's not about the ISP making sites pay, it's about ISPs saving money. Their customers will complain if YouTube is slow or doesn't work, and this is the cheapest way for them to ensure that it's fast.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
This ISN'T insightful.
This isn't backing out. If you understood what Net Neutrality actually meant, you'd understand that this is quite a bit different.
In the Google story, all they're doing is putting dumb bit shovels closer to you.
In the thing that people for 'net neutrality' are talking about, the ISP gives higher priority to the content THEY provide and unless you pay tribute to each ISP, they do nothing or actually degrade your priority, meaning you stuff gets to you slower or not at all- depending on whether it's the ISP's crap or your content provider paid their danegeld.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I still think that the results I get from Google are the result of their search algorithm. However their search algorithm is manipulated by various factors (many of which I'm sure they don't tell me about, and some that they do), and I have no problem with that. If I want information about French Poodles, I'll type "French Poodle" in to a Google search box and get some links to useful information back - honestly, as a "searcher" that's all I really care about. I don't mind that some results may be prioritised over others for any kind of reasons, as long as I get the info that I want. And I especially LIKE some kinds of manipulation such as them storing my search history and then tailoring future searches around it. It means that when I search for "wine" I get results about the WINE project whereas my ex-girlfriend gets results about a rather delicious grape-based alcoholic beverage.
The day you start paying for search results is the day I feel you're entitled to complain about them being manipulated - they never promised they wouldn't do so, so it's only reasonable to expect they would. (especially if you consider that most people such as myself see nothing inherently wrong with them doing so)
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
Also on facebook as: DroppingAcidDaleBewan
Net Neutrality is somewhat a myth. Network providers already prioritize their own traffic in many ways like edge caching. Or, they might change the way data is serviced to allow a more requested provider better access. Absolute Net Neutrality is a myth.
What we want to prevent is the practice of shoving a provider purposefully shoving third party content aside in order to better highlight their own content. For example, setting up your network in such a way that a Google search takes three to four seconds to return results while the provider's search results are instantaneous. Users will switch to the faster provider's search engine. Or, maybe streaming content from iTunes or YouTube is no longer smooth. You attempt to listen to a song or play a video, and you get a lot of caching going on. However, the provider's own video and music service is smoother with no caching.
This is the true issue. Is the same firm that provides the pipe (or if you live in Alaska, the tube) to your computer using its advantage to push other business they're way.
There were two types of monopolies that the government use to watch over. One was a horizontal monopoly where a single company captures a vast majority of the market and can use their clout to prevent others from entering the market, thus eliminating competition. An example of this was Standard Oil.
The other, lesser known monopoly was the vertical monopoly where the company controls the entire vertical distribution. Two examples: One was the three television networks. They were prohibited from producing their own shows for the longest time. The reasoning is that if they could, they could favor their own productions over third parties. Instead of hundreds of independent production studios, there would be three who could control payments.
Another example is Boeing. At one time, Boeing was not just an airplane manufacturer, but also owned an airline. This meant that Boeing could favor its own airline with newer equipment at cheaper rates, thus giving its airline a cost advantage over other rivals. This was back in the days when airmail was an important revenue stream for airlines, and Boeing could outbid its rivals. The government separated United Airlines and United Technologies from Boeing back in the 1930s.
This is the actual problem. Local providers of service should not be content providers too. Otherwise, their content would have an unfair advantage over other content providers. This should be enforced not just in the Internet, but also with cable and satellite television providers. You can either provide the pipe to the TV, or you can provide the content over that pipe.
If local providers of Internet service didn't have their own content they were pushing, there would be no issues with net neutrality.
ISPs would have had a huge amount of off-network bandwidth to pay for (or negotiate in peering agreements) and likely had to upgrade some backbone capacity for.
You see, this move relieves the ISPs from upgrading backbone capacity. The network doesn't get faster and the content hosters will eventually have to negotiate with many end-user ISPs to provide an acceptable user experience. q.e.d.
Missing from the article, however, is the evidence that my view is a "shift" or "soften[ing]" of earlier views. That's because there isn't any such evidence. My view is the view I have always had -- whether or not it is the view of others in this debate.
That's no moon. It's a Google Data Centre..
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
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Let me correct that for you:
Google is becoming the first open source evil empire
"Violence is the last refuge of the competent, and, generally, the first refuge of the incompetent" - Thing_1
Well, I guess we need to agree to disagree. I've always seen Google's Sponsored Links (which show up shaded at the top of a search) as "weighted" while the rest of the list as being neutral. Maybe i've been wrong for a long time! but I think not. I think most people view search engines as supposing to be neutral. (I know they aren't but I think their ubiquity lends credence to that belief.) My 2 cents.
You also get marginally faster access to Yahoo or Altavista, because fewer requests to Google are clogging the same backbone links that go to Yahoo and Altavista. Google's just making the network more efficient by moving the data closer to you. They're not squeezing other people out.
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Yeah, that's how I read it too. Telcos think "neutrality" is equivalent to money somehow. It's strictly about removing quality of service traffic shaping. If there is a big dog in the house that's eating all your bandwidth, offer to save yourself and let them host closer to the node.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
dont forget that at the fire-sale end of the dot-com bust, google went on a shopping spree for dark fiber and other carrier capacity that had been overbuilt. I don't know if they bought leases and options or outright ownership but in any case their commitment to network neutrality is conditioned by exactly one consideration: there has got to be a good fast way for joe.searchClient to see his google results and ads at least as fast as anyone else's content. If NN does that, google is for it, if some something else does that, then why be surprised if google is for that something else?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wookiee from the planet Kashyyyk. But Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it; that does not make sense!
If Google were to pay the ISP to peer to that edge hardware though, wouldn't this in effect be the same thing?
I mean wouldn't it create a disincentive for the ISP to upgrade their network except for the peers to their Premium Business Partners (TM)?
Whether they actually degrade net traffic, or do so via apathy and lack of innovation, isn't the end result for users the same? Isn't this apathy what Microsoft is so often accused of, and due to their monopoly, is accused of having a much more severe impact?
I'm not saying I disagree with you, but I'm sure to some people this kind of edge caching, and an ISP charging for prioritized bandwidth, can be somewhat-reasonably seen as different shades of grey. So maybe instead of railing on a guy about what Net Neutrality means, maybe you could point out the difference? To me, one obvious difference is that the end users of ISP services still have a recourse in fighting for better service via the government if a net neutrality law were in place. It could be argued that ISP's are abusing their local monopolies, and not providing the service they promised when being granted the monopoly. Whereas if there was no net neutrality, the ISPs could counter that argument by saying they are providing service, just different levels of it, perhaps even many different levels: Home, Media Center, Business Pro, Ultimate, etc.
meep
The WSJ's shoddy reporting has been refuted on both the Google Public Policy blog and Lessig's blog. The article is referring to CDNs, which do not figure into any kind of net neutrality calculus. Why the WSJ wanted to run this inaccurate Obama-smear article, I can only speculate (perhaps Murdoch had something to do with this, eh?).
http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2008/12/net-neutrality-and-benefits-of-caching.html
I'm sure they get that just fine. Unfortunately the truth has little to do with power-hungry people trying to get their way.
Suppose I own a big last-mile ISP. I see how this edge caching business works, and I decide: hey, guess what, I was planning to enlarge my upstream pipes and to prioritize traffic to outside destinations that pay me protection money, but screw that. Now I'm going to treat all inbound and outbound traffic equally, but give up improving my uplink bandwidth and demand that the big content providers engage me in extortionate, anti-competitive edge caching deals.
Are you adequate?
What they seem to be proposing is a method of pre-positioning their content on mirror servers near their customers. The transactions go through the same set of pipes as all other traffic, just to a different location. This is essentially the same service Akamai has been offering for 10 years. Google is just doing it for themselves with their own hardware. ISPs won't go along with it unless they can (a) get paid and (b) show benefit to their customers.
Everybody !panic
Cut spending on education. We now spend, on average, twice per capita after inflation, what we did 100 years ago for the same practical results. To put it bluntly: at least half of the money spent on public education is a complete waste that has brought no discernible benefit to the community or kids.
Anyone else misread the title?
Yeah, I did.
First I thought they were Baking off, but nahh... the days of TCP/IP bake-offs are long gone.
Then I thought they were Acking off; that is, saying "Yea', I gud yer data" in the language of TCP, but I couldn't make sense of the "off".
Next I thought they were Hacking off, but I couldn't figure out what they hacked off, or of what they hacked it.
But finally I got it right: Network Neutrality Defenders Quietly Taking Off. Finally they've gone airborne and started doing some real work!
Nice troll. Could you please get my uncle's horse o... I mean, get off my uncle's horse.
Wired has a good summary of the controversy.
See title.
If you read Google's response, it is pretty clear that they are trying to obfuscate the issue. What they are talking about is paying to put servers and data inside the ISPs and so gain an advantage for their content. This is exactly the scheme that AT&T proposed and Google condemned. Their reply is a technical splitting of hairs and a diversion. Cache end servers, etc, is all just "we want our data to have higher access and priority and will pay for it". Admit it Google, you're busted.
What the Google reply really is, is an attempt to save face and avoid admitting that if they can gain business advantage, Google will dump "principle" for profit, just like every other corporation. They are afraid that this episode will expose their "do no evil" as merely a marketing slogan intended to fool folks. Busted.
Well, now that they've admitted that it all about money, maybe they can use the AdSense bidding system to help Governors automate the selling of Senate seats too!
--"At one time, Boeing was not just an airplane manufacturer, but also owned an airline. This meant that Boeing could favor its own airline with newer equipment at cheaper rates, thus giving its airline a cost advantage over other rivals." Yes, lord help us if the consumer actually got cheaper airline tickets. Thank God the government "helped" us by making prices more expensive than they had to be.
I think that the people who are discomforted by the network neutrality implications of Google's move are't worried specifically about this one deal. What they're worried about is the possibility that the last-mile ISPs will switch strategies and try to use edge caching anticompetitively to achieve the same goals as they hope to achieve using non-neutral traffic management. Edge caching, coupled with divestment of resources toward the upstream bandwidth, can be used to meet the letter of the common definitions of net neutrality (treat all traffic the same way), while violating the spirit (delivering good bandwidth for their own in-house content and select content producers that pay them for edge caching).
So really, the thing to keep in mind here is the business models and network architecture. The network architecture choices are the following:
It is pretty obvious which of these the last-mile ISPs would prefer from a business standpoint; they get more power from the second one. The second architecture might technically be OK (or even a great idea); but IMHO the important questions are: (a) how to prevent the last-mile ISPs from abusing their position in this architecture; (b) how to implement the model without making it too costly for small content providers (who can't go and negotiate a deal with every last-mile ISP in the country or planet).
Are you adequate?
....You see, this move relieves the ISPs from upgrading backbone capacity...
But if this move of having local cache servers makes for less traffic on the backbone, is that not the same thing? How is this different from an ISP running a proxy server?
All theory is gray
nobody dare to block or slow down Google.