Network Neutrality Back In Congress For 3rd Time

suraj.sun writes "Ed Markey has introduced his plan to legislate network neutrality into a third consecutive Congress, and he has a message for ISPs: upgrade your infrastructure and don't even think about blocking or degrading traffic. The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week's introduction of the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009' [PDF] means that legislators will duke it out a third time. Should the bill pass, Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device. Rulemaking and enforcement of network neutrality would be given to the Federal Communications Commission, which would also be given the unenviable job of hashing out what constitutes 'reasonable network management' — something explicitly allowed by the bill. Neutrality would also not apply to the access and transfer of unlawful information, including 'theft of content,' so a mythical deep packet inspection device that could block illegal P2P transfers with 100 percent accuracy would still be allowed. If enacted, the bill would allow any US Internet user to file a neutrality complaint with the FCC and receive a ruling within 90 days."

Comments

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[killthepoor187]

I'd be a lot happier if the government took back the last mile and opened it up to more third party distributors. I think the real problem is the pseudo-monopolies on broadband services.

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[Shadow of Eternity]

Same, but given the choice between that never happening and this having a snowball's chance in hell I'll give the snowball a go and warn the rabbis to keep an eye out for flying pigs.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed. If it weren't for the near-monopoly on broadband, the market would theoretically be able to weed out the bad companies that don't adopt a neutral stance. The problem with this legislation is that, on one hand, we might get a win on the net neutrality front, but on the other hand, the same companies that are in power are going to stay in power and find some other way to abuse their customers.

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[sys.stdout.write]

I think the real problem is the pseudo-monopolies on broadband services

Maybe - but we already have anti-trust laws on the books. Codifying net-neutrality is definitely a step in the right direction.

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[MaskedSlacker]

The big (legal) win for net neutrality is that it fucks the cable companies good and hard.

Cable companies are as bad as the MAFIAA. They want to prop up their outdated business model (television content) by blocking video content over the internet (which is vastly cheaper for consumers). Net neutrality stops them from being able to do this, and shatters their control over television markets.

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[TooMuchToDo]

Ask your local government to provide municipal broadband. It's the same thing as taking back the last mile.

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[Wrath0fb0b]

Agreed. If it weren't for the near-monopoly on broadband, the market would theoretically be able to weed out the bad companies that don't adopt a neutral stance.

You are making a lot of assumptions here without even stating them, let alone proving them.

For instance, you assume that the marginal cost of maintaining a neutral network is identical to a non-neutral one, which might not be true. If the non-neutral one has significantly lower upkeep, it might win out as an inferior but cheaper product. That is, even if consumers prefer neutral ISPs to non-neutral ones, that preference only goes so far towards convincing them to pay a higher rate.

Another important assumption is that the consumer preference function really distinguishes between neutral and non-neutral. For the vast majority of consumers this might not be the case -- especially with less-tech savvy older folks that use the net mostly for email/light web and don't notice any filtering. For those consumers, there is no product differentiation being neutral and non-neutral at all.

So yeah, if the costs stack up right and the consumer preference actually does favor neutrality, then a free market would deliver it. Those are some pretty big caveats though.

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[harrkev]

I can understand that the cable companies want to preserve some bandwidth for their own use. However, I think that net neutrality is too heavy handed, and doing nothing is even worse.

How about this as a compromise: the cable companies have to guarantee a certain "net neutral" bandwidth. Then, this is the bandwidth that they are allowed to advertise.

Therefore, if they have a 20-Gbps link to your house, but they offer 7-Mbps of open bandwidth, with 13-Mpbs reserved for their own downloadable movies, they can only advertise 7-Mpbs service.

This would kind of solve the whole thing. The cable companies can partition the bandwidth any way they like. They can reserve bandwidth for their own movie services. The customer still gets what is advertised.

Makes sense to me... Can anybody poke any logical holes in this (other than "Cable sucks, let's screw them")?

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[The Moof]

VoIP is also a big one. The FCC investigated Comcast back in January for degrading competitors' VoIP while pushing their own service (which was not degraded). http://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/012109-fcc-comcast-voip-management.html

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[Silentknyght]

Agreed. If it weren't for the near-monopoly on broadband, the market would theoretically be able to weed out the bad companies that don't adopt a neutral stance.

You are making a lot of assumptions here without even stating them, let alone proving them.

For instance, you assume that the marginal cost of maintaining a neutral network is identical to a non-neutral one, which might not be true. If the non-neutral one has significantly lower upkeep, it might win out as an inferior but cheaper product. That is, even if consumers prefer neutral ISPs to non-neutral ones, that preference only goes so far towards convincing them to pay a higher rate.

Another important assumption is that the consumer preference function really distinguishes between neutral and non-neutral. For the vast majority of consumers this might not be the case -- especially with less-tech savvy older folks that use the net mostly for email/light web and don't notice any filtering. For those consumers, there is no product differentiation being neutral and non-neutral at all.

So yeah, if the costs stack up right and the consumer preference actually does favor neutrality, then a free market would deliver it. Those are some pretty big caveats though.

I gave up moderation in this thread to reply to this post.

First, there's nothing to suggest either (a) net-neutrality will present a higher marginal cost or (b) net-neutrality will present a lower marginal cost on the same. Given this, it's logical to assume no change.

Second, consumer preference is moot if there is no outlet to express said preference. Few consumers--slashdot crowds included--will opt to forego internet to flex their meager muscle against the monopoly; internet is such a necessity that people are going to choose some internet over none, even if it's sole-sourced. Moreover, this point piggybacks on your earlier point, which seems to assume that neutrality carries higher costs, and therefore there is a cost function impacting consumer decisions in a hypothetical neutral vs non-neutral decision.

Ultimately, lets first get to a free market, and then we can take a look at your points.

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[Anonymous Coward]

Makes sense to me... Can anybody poke any logical holes in this (other than "Cable sucks, let's screw them")?

Broadband is sold for speeds "up to" a certain level, it's not guaranteed. Therefore I don't think you would be able to enforce the amount of neutral bandwidth you're getting. The ISP could always just tell you that you're not getting the advertised speeds because of network congestion, while their own services worked well, because they have separate infrastructure for them.

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[Chris Burke]

Therefore, if they have a 20-Gbps link to your house, but they offer 7-Mbps of open bandwidth, with 13-Mpbs reserved for their own downloadable movies, they can only advertise 7-Mpbs service.

That's actually more restrictive than net neutrality because it would mean they have to guarantee a certain minimum bandwidth in order to advertise that bandwidth. Which is fairly unrealistic. Even if they actually upgraded their equipment instead of whining about how expensive it is and pocketing all their profits like douchebags, it'd still be the case that cable service would likely be degraded during the prime-time hours when everyone in your neighborhood hops on the same shared connection.

Net neutrality isn't about guaranteeing a minimum amount of internet bandwidth. Net neutrality is about not discriminating based on type and more importantly source of internet packets. For example, Time Warner doesn't want to degrade the internet in general, rather they'd like to degrade performance for packets from Hulu or Netflix specifically. Degrading the internet in general would make Time Warner look bad compared to DSL, while selectively blocking/degrading Hulu packets would make Hulu look like a bad choice compared to TW cable TV.

Another commonly proposed non-neutral situation is where TW or other ISP degrades Google's packets unless Google pays them specifically (as opposed to the ISP Google already pays and who has peering agreements with the would-be blackmailing ISP, meaning they're already getting paid once).

But for Time Warner, it's all about hurting online video services, without hurting their own cable internet business.

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[Anonymous Coward]

This is exactly what AT&T does with their "UVerse" service. You get a fast enough pipe to get TV, but you have a pitifully slow Internet connection. I'm not sure if they're neutral about how they let you use your open connection, but it seems like it's such a small amount of bandwidth that they don't care if people saturate it.

Is this kind of service reasonable or should the customer at least have an option (perhaps at a significantly higher cost) to use some of the huge fiber connection for other things?

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[Chris Burke]

This would kind of solve the whole thing. The cable companies can partition the bandwidth any way they like. They can reserve bandwidth for their own movie services. The customer still gets what is advertised.

Again, I just want to make this clear... It doesn't solve the problem. The customer gets what is advertised... unless it's a site TW doesn't like. Because you haven't required them to be packet agnostic (i.e. "net neutral"), they can still do traffic shaping to suit their agenda.

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[Chris Burke]

For instance, you assume that the marginal cost of maintaining a neutral network is identical to a non-neutral one, which might not be true. If the non-neutral one has significantly lower upkeep, it might win out as an inferior but cheaper product. That is, even if consumers prefer neutral ISPs to non-neutral ones, that preference only goes so far towards convincing them to pay a higher rate.

Okay, well then at the very least a free market would result in us getting much better and much cheaper service than we currently are, since the cable companies are making money hand-over-fucking-fist right now and not investing it in improving service. I don't recall the exact number but last I checked TW was spending millions on upkeep on their network, and made billions in revenue off their cable internet service. Again no exact number (though it's public) but it was a profit margin of easily 1000%. No way does the difference between neutral or non- erase that margin.

So, worst case: Competition means that cable companies have to either drop prices or improve service, either way resulting in a profit margin that is somewhat sane, and a much better value/dollar for the users.

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[commodore64_love]

>>>Cable companies want to prop up their outdated business model (television content) by blocking video content over the internet

Sorry to break the news, but it's already too late. Comcast, Time-Warner, and Cox have negotiated with the cable channels to put all video content behind a subscriber wall. So if you want to watch Eureka at scifi.com, you can't because it will be locked. Want to watch Mokn on usa.com or Kyle XY on abcfamily.com? Nope. Again you'll be blocked.

CC, TW, and Cox claim they pay for these programs, therefore they should be able to limit streamed cable programs to only their customers, and that's what will take effect this Fall 2009.

So the only video content that will still be available for free are the broadcast nets (NBC, FOX, CW, etc) and the older reruns like Bewitched or Munsters or M*A*S*H on hulu.com

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[mea37]

Not bad, but three things:

1) Is it practical? Aren't there cases where, to be useful, network traffic shaping takes place well upstream of a specific end user's broadband link? Can that always be translated into "you have x MB with which to do as you please?"

2) What about companies that want to sell services that aren't technically "neutral" but which differentiate them in ways that some customers want? Under the proposed law, I guess they can't. Under this proposal, I guess they can, but have to advertise 0MB/s as that's the total amount of "neutral" bandwidth.

3) If an area is effectively monopolized by a single broadband provider, then changing the rules for how they advertise won't accomplish much.

You can address the 2nd concern just by making it a more comprehensive "labeling law" - you have to clearly tell the user how much of their bandwidth is "neutral", and maybe if you advertise additional bandwidth in terms of Gb/sec (or Mb/sec, or whatever) then you have to give certain information about how you shape that traffic.

That alone would probably keep legislators occupied for a while (not necessarily a bad thing), but I don't know how you'd deal with the other issues.

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[fwice]

Therefore, if they have a 20-Gbps link to your house, but they offer 7-Mbps of open bandwidth, with 13-Mpbs reserved for their own downloadable movies, they can only advertise 7-Mpbs service.

Makes sense to me... Can anybody poke any logical holes in this (other than "Cable sucks, let's screw them")?

For one thing, 7 Mbps + 13 Mbps is not 20 Gbps

:]

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[MobyDisk]

I think that doesn't work for two reasons:
1) Nothing stops them from offering a really tiny tiny amount of neutral bandwidth
2) It will still influence the markets
- Let me clarify this last point. One of the problems with a non-neutral internet is that if a major ISP partners with one content provider, it puts the others at a disadvantage, which impacts the market. Imagine if Comcast decided that Amazon was their preferred MP3 store, so it got a full 20-Mbps; but the iTunes music store only got 7Mbps. People will perceive the Amazon store as faster, and spend more money there. It has unfairly biased the free market system.

It would be similar to having wider roads go to Home Depot stores than are going to Lowes stores. The fact that there is a guaranteed to be at least some road, at least one lane wide that goes to Lowes, does not fix the problem. Fundamentally, the road system must be neutral. Same with bandwidth providers. Same with transportation (which is where the term "common carrier" came from). Attempts like yours allow loopholes, and create a mess like what the US tax code has become.

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[bennomatic]

I think you're totally right, and my solution would be tiered pricing for consumers. Like the GP said, true competition could make this a reality.

As far as I'm concerned, if I could choose from 10 DSL/Cable/Fiber vendors to provide my Internet, chances are they'd all be clamoring for my patronage, even if I'm a small customer. As such, they'd offer me options ranging from $10/mo to $80/mo in $10/mo increments.

Each option would allow me to choose my maximum sustained and burst speeds, say 1 Mb/s with a 3 Mb/s burst, 3/6 and so on. The lower end would all have relatively small upload speeds (i.e. 1/4 of the sustained max download), being consumer-oriented, but for home office workers, the 10/20 plan might have a synchronous 10/20 upload upgrade.

The advantage of something like this is that it ensures that someone who's paying very little can't overwhelm the network with Hulu or P2P or some such, and that people who do want to push a lot of data can do so without running afoul of arbitrary (and sometimes anticompetitive) limitations. Even more important, there's not a cap per se, so people on the low end won't have to live in fear that they'll be billed for overages or threatened with disconnection.

And I know for a fact that this sort of thing is not impossible to do. Some time back I worked for an ISP where we did bandwidth-controlled hosting. We modified our BSD-based web servers' TCP stacks so that we could indicate in a config file how much bandwidth should be available to a given IP address. Since each site had its own IP (Yay for us having a class B address!), we could offer entry level hosting rates for a site on a virtual 28.8kbps connection vs. a 56kbps vs... anything. It was very cool No reason this couldn't be done for end users.

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[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

[Citation Needed]?
They are already payed royalties by sites like Hulu to rebroadcast the shows. And, by all accounts, Hulu is doing quite well. I can't image they would try to ruin that.

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[maxume]

Requiring that advertised speeds be available 80% of the time (or whatever) would not be onerous for the ISPs.

It might not be perfect, but it would help address things like DSL being advertised as if the connection will maximize the technology (which between line quality and distance, almost never happens).

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[Wrath0fb0b]

(1) You are correct that there are no reliable data on costs. I would dispute, however, that this means that the most rational assumption is "no difference".

For one, a neutrality mandate from Congress can only increase costs or keep them the same since, in the absence of a mandate, the telcos could chose between neutrality and non-neutrality. IOW, if neutrality is cheaper then an FCC mandate makes no difference (since providers would do it already), otoh, if non-neutrality is cheaper then the FCC mandate increases costs. No matter what uncertainty there is about the cost function, the expected cost difference of the mandate is strictly non-negative.

(2) Yup, current market conditions are far from ideal and effectively obscure market preferences. We don't know what the function is because people don't have a choice.

My basic point is that (1) and (2) means that you probably should not make any predictions about what might happen in a hypothetical ideal free market for internet. One that we certainly don't have today.

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[CodeBuster]

Net neutrality isn't about guaranteeing a minimum amount of internet bandwidth. Net neutrality is about not discriminating based on type and more importantly source of internet packets

This is similar to a problem which is present in health insurance markets; namely, if the insurance companies (or the ISPs in the net neutrality case) cannot charge some people more and some people less depending upon the amount and type of services used then everyone will have to pay the average amount of the cost of those services spread out evenly over the pool of subscribers. Another example is the old "split the check evenly" dilemma when it is obvious that some people in the group have eaten a way more expensive meal than others. In any case some people will be required to pay more than they otherwise would have had the charge had been based upon relative use instead of split evenly between heavy and light users. If this drives the price up enough then it might squeeze out some people near the margins who cannot afford to pay the higher "average" price.

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[Anonymous Coward]

I think the G-P meant "guaranteed net-neutral," not "guaranteed amount of bandwidth."

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[Anonymous Coward]

Well..the flaw is...cable sucks.

No--seriously--if you permit that, what they'll do is "guarantee" 56K, and reserve the rest for themselves. It's only remotely viable if this somehow would guarantee competition for the unreserved portion. Worse than that, they'll change advertising to "up to 20M with comcast partners." Give it a few years, you'll have AOL back on the cable companies.

You suggest regulating what they can advertise--but that should fail on first amendment challenges... No...if you give them an inch, they'll claim the entire equator.

Open up the last mile backbone--outlaw regional monopolies, and update the definition of broadband to grow exponentially annually for a decade with a suitable alpha value.

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[rtfa-troll]

For one thing, 7 Mbps + 13 Mbps is not 20 Gbps

Let me tell you that your application for Verizon marketing department is hereby declined. Thanks. Don't call us, we'll call you.

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[commodore64_love]

Grrr.

I read it in my local paper about five months ago that CC, TW, and Cox are losing subscribers, because customers are watching shows online for free instead of paying. Therefore they want to lock-up their cable programming (USA, TNT, SyFy, et cetera) behind a wall that only subscribers can bypass. Perhaps if you read YOUR local paper once-in-a-while (or tried google) then you'd already know about it instead of accusing me of making-up lies.

Anyway here's the best article I could find: http://newteevee.com/2009/07/14/first-broadcaster-to-join-comcasts-ondemand-online-cbs/ And another: http://www.businessinsider.com/cable-companies-ganging-up-on-hulu-2009-2

So say goodbye to being able to watch Monk or Kyle XY or Eureka or Closer or Deadliest Catches online. Only subscribers will have access to these cable shows.

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[nine-times]

I think the key thing should be to disallow the physical infrastructure provider from providing service. I may be wrong, but it seems to me like this could open up competition.

So what I mean is, right now the telephone company and the cable company have a duopoly (in most places) for the physical infrastructure. However, you can still get 3rd party ISPs under certain circumstances. I have Speakeasy DSL, which runs over Verizon's network. So what I would suggest is this: Verizon be disallowed from providing voice services, ISP services, or video on their network. The cable company, likewise, should not be allowed to offer TV anymore, nor should they be allowed to be an ISP or VoIP provider. Instead, they'd have to open their networks to companies like Speakeasy to provide whatever services they wanted. Pricing for service providers should be required to be uniform, i.e. Speakeasy gets the same deal as every other provider, and the physical infrastructure providers (the telephone company and cable company) aren't allowed to make special deals. I think this should just be the trade-off for being granted the pseudo-monopolies you're talking about.

I think something like this is necessary because the right to build physical infrastructure must be, by it's nature, limited. We can't have lots of companies digging up the streets, fighting over who's going to run water or electricity to your house. It may be possible to have multiple networks, but we aren't ever going to have enough to have robust competition. Therefore, either they must be run by some level of government (not necessarily the federal government) or they must be pseudo-monopolies granted to private companies. In the latter case, those monopolies should be well-regulated so that service providers can compete openly.

I'm not sure I've made my case adequately, but hopefully I've made a little bit of sense.

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[Eil]

The problem with this legislation is that, on one hand, we might get a win on the net neutrality front, but on the other hand, the same companies that are in power are going to stay in power and find some other way to abuse their customers.

So it sounds like "net neutrality" is basically going to be defined by the FCC. This is the same FCC that bends over backward (and forward, I suppose) to please the mega corporations that they're supposed to be regulating. The one that has sold off almost all of our public airwaves to private commercial interests. The same one that thinks the First Amendment isn't really that big a deal after all.

I am not hopeful.

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[Curunir_wolf]

Or... the Feds will put them in irons and abuse us directly

And they probably will. I was 100% advocating for network neutrality legislation a few months ago, but seeing the stuff they are passing (or trying to) these days, I don't trust the criminals in Washington to pass anything that doesn't screw us all.

Note the liberal use of qualifiers all over the bill:

...to protect the right of consumers to access lawful content, run lawful applications, and use lawful services of their choice on the Internet; enable consumers to connect to such networks their choice of lawful devices, as long as such devices do not harm the network;

"Lawful" all over the place, loopholes big enough to drive a truck through. No gambling (they've recently outlawed it), no copyright infringement, none of those pesky applications that allow you to infringe, etc. Oh - and we will of course be subject to whatever measures are needed to keep all that evil "unlawful" activity off our "free and open" Internet.

...to ensure that consumers receive meaningful information regarding their communications services;

So you evil ISPs better be logging everything so you can provide that for your us!! err.. I mean, your customers. :/

define the term âprivate transmission capacity servicesâ(TM); â(5) clarify whether private transmission capacity services may not be subject to the duties described in subsections (b)(5) and (b)(6); â(6) ensure that private transmission capacity services do not undermine the purposes of this Act and do not diminish or degrade the level of Internet access service offered to the public by the same provider

No doubt the ISPs will jump on this section as justification for selling VPN as a separate service, with separate and additional fees, and they have to block VPN for "basic" service due to federal regulation.

ââ(4) REASONABLE NETWORK MANAGEMENT.â" The term âreasonable network managementâ(TM) shall be defined by the Commission through regulations.â(TM)â(TM).

Oh, crap. That's not too broad, is it?

Better watch this one closely for amendments, folks. They're not grabbing nearly all the power they could with it...

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[Grieviant]

Except that bandwidth shaping is not only used to make competing services look bad. In Canada it is almost universally applied by the major ISPs to all torrent traffic, which at times results in a painfully slow d/l rate, even on well-seeded torrents.

Not long ago, Slashdot carried an article about a survey in which the majority of respondents considered shaping to be a "fair" pratice. IIRC, there was some dispute about whether the result was actually meaningful or if it was the product of clever wording of the question posed to ingorant subsribers, but I honestly think a guaranteed minimum QoS would be appealing to many consumers.

Aside from the obvious performance issues, something like this could essentially force ISPs to admit how badly they oversell their network. Realistic compromises should be possible, i.e. different bandwidth and latency guarantees based on traffic type and time of day. It might even provide enough incentive for more aggressive network upgrades. At minimum, it puts a leash on how greedy they'd be allowed to be with the shaping algorithms.

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[turbidostato]

"Broadband is sold for speeds "up to" a certain level, it's not guaranteed."

Hence the "the cable companies have to guarantee a certain "net neutral" bandwidth" part.

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[curunir]

I say let them keep their last mile infrastructure, but we take back the $200 billion they pocketed that we gave them to build out the broadband infrastructure and combine it with the funds Obama has allocated for broadband infrastructure and create a program to help communities deploy last-mile fiber. The government agency could provide guidance, planning, bulk purchasing power and partial matching funds to communities that want to pitch in for the rest of the cost.

If a sizable portion of the country received broadband through municipally-owned last-mile infrastructure, competition would sort out the entire net neutrality debate since the barrier for entry to become a broadband provider would go way down. More competition would mean consumers have a choice between neutral and non-neutral networks. If neutrality is really important to people, they'll choose neutral networks. If it's just BitTorrent users wanting to max out their pipes at the expense of others, they'll all choose neutral providers while the rest of the people will choose cheaper, non-neutral providers. Either way, people will get the option to pay for what they actually want.

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[turbidostato]

"if the insurance companies (or the ISPs in the net neutrality case) cannot charge some people more and some people less depending upon the amount and type of services used then everyone will have to pay the average amount of the cost of those services spread out evenly over the pool of subscribers."

And the problem with this (specially on basic services like health care) is?

"If this drives the price up enough then it might squeeze out some people near the margins who cannot afford to pay the higher "average" price."

You forget that by the very market forces averages are waaaay below the top percentiles (to be precise, the curve curtosis is very low and mode is quite assimetric) so in order to cover for the top users on a system where users don't choose their expendings average costs grow less than peanuts. In other words: in order to be able to cover the one out of a ten hundred thousand cancer case that costs a million you need to increment one dollar a year the average costs of your bill, which is quite an affordable increment, the alternate is paying a dollar less and being completly screwed when you "win" the lotto of an expensive treatment. By the numbers of familiar bankruptcy due to health issues in the USA not quite an unthinkable case. Don't believe on the numbers of those taking advantage on segregating the market (i.e.: the health insurance companies) specially when you see their profit margins at the end of the year and you envvy them.

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[jd2112]

For one thing, 7 Mbps + 13 Mbps is not 20 Gbps

Sure it is, if you are using the same math used to calculate damages for the (MP|RI)AA

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[Anonymous Coward]

no one said you lied. God forbid someone asks you to backup YOUR point rather than being like most of the posters on here and passing something patently wrong as fact. Had you just placed at least one of those links in your post in the first one, no one would be calling you out on anything. Things happen, people miss snippets of news, especially in a local paper where sports and celebrities dominate the first 50 pages, and relatively more important stuff gets buried.

With that said I love how we gave these asshole ISPs our money to improve infrastructure only to have them try to extort money and essentially have EVERYONE pay twice. And they wonder why people torrent shows...

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[daemonburrito]

Finding out that phrase is there made my hair stand on end.

The phrase is an infamous trademark of Comcast and the anti-NN lobby: http://www.google.com/search?q=REASONABLE+NETWORK+MANAGEMENT.

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[Taikutusu]

Obligatory:

http://xkcd.com/558/

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[Anonymous Coward]

First, there's nothing to suggest either (a) net-neutrality will present a higher marginal cost or (b) net-neutrality will present a lower marginal cost on the same.

Incorrect. The concept itself suggests there would be one of two outcomes for ISP's... 1) Money paid against hostage content 2) less bandwidth used overall.

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[Trahloc]

Problem is when they start getting clueless clients who complain "I can't download XYZ at the *guaranteed* speed of 7mbps!" because the line between here and buttswala goes over a port thats at 99.9% capacity. So even that system has holes in it. Personally I'm slightly leaning against net neutrality, I see pros and cons to it and the extreme cons out weight the extreme pros. Providers who give crappy service should be dealt with in the market, users who have 'no choice' usually do but its not the path of least resistance.

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[blackraven14250]

Yep. They should also allow equal access to different types of roads. For example, I can start my business on a one-lane local road, and easily move to a location next to an interstate without having a massive amount of hoops to jump through. This is obvious, and I think it works that way with the internet, but the obvious needs to be stated or else it loses it's magic. Then, it dies because someone forgot why it was there to begin with.

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[shutdown -p now]

Your analogy is not suitable here. What net neutrality means is that you pay a certain amount per kilobyte of data transmitted, regardless of where it comes from. Those who download more still pay more; in fact, it could even be progressive if ISPs hate mass downloaders so much.

What net neutrality does mean is that the ISPs cannot take that kilobyte of data, and charge you more or less depending on some arbitrary label they decide to put on that data (VoIP, high-def streaming video, P2P...).

This has nothing whatsoever do do with "splitting the check".

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[shutdown -p now]

For one thing, 7 Mbps + 13 Mbps is not 20 Gbps

Perhaps, but what do you care if it's billed at $0.01 cents per megabyte?

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[Dragonslicer]

What net neutrality does mean is that the ISPs cannot take that kilobyte of data, and charge you more or less depending on some arbitrary label they decide to put on that data (VoIP, high-def streaming video, P2P...).

That isn't what net neutrality means either. What it does mean is that ISP's cannot delay or charge more for data depending on source or destination. It's perfectly valid to prioritize VoIP packets over bittorrent packets, since VoIP is so much more sensitive to delays than bittorent, but the ISP is not allowed arbitrarily delay VoIP packets to everyone except their own service or the service of some other company that's paying them extra to be a "preferred" service provider.

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[Ximok]

Therefore, if they have a 20-Gbps link to your house, but they offer 7-Mbps of open bandwidth, with 13-Mpbs reserved for their own downloadable movies, they can only advertise 7-Mpbs service.

Makes sense to me... Can anybody poke any logical holes in this (other than "Cable sucks, let's screw them")?

For one thing, 7 Mbps + 13 Mbps is not 20 Gbps

:]

Failed to mention 19+ Gbps for neighbor-net ;)

Re:well

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the key thing should be to disallow the physical infrastructure provider from providing service. I may be wrong, but it seems to me like this could open up competition.

Why not just prevent towns from entering into exclusive contracts with providers?
And allow towns to create their own municipal net (wifi/fiber) installs without worries of being sued.

Doesn't need a much government oversight and it's much easier to enforce.

In your example, what happens if $ISP acquires $LINEPROVIDER?

Re:well

[Runaway1956]

"How about this as a compromise: the cable companies have to guarantee a certain "net neutral" bandwidth. Then, this is the bandwidth that they are allowed to advertise."

Good idea. And, how about the electric company gets a similar deal. They can channel all the voltage and Kw that they want to your house, but you only get to use x amount for electronics. They find a method to "tag" electrons for refrigeration, for heating, for cooking, and set limits on the usage. Usage for entertainment is completely unnecessary, so they get to charge double for that.

Yeah, I can see people jumping on this.

The cable, telephone line, or whatever, that supplies digital access to the outside world should be exactly that - digital access. The same electrons flow through the same wires, the customer should have the right to decide how he is going to use those electrons. (or photons, in the case of optical fiber)

Screw these sweetheart deals based on ancient technology.

Re:well

[turbidostato]

"Problem is when they start getting clueless clients who complain "I can't download XYZ at the *guaranteed* speed of 7mbps!" because the line between here and buttswala goes over a port thats at 99.9% capacity."

What's the problem? The clueless client sue the telco, the telco shows its capacity to be the legal one, the clueless client loses the trial, pays his lawyers and everybody is happy again.

Re:well

[$1uck]

I like the idea. Personally I think the companies providing the physical wire/cable/signal should be like a utility. They ought to meter your usage and maybe put a minimum amount (for maintenance) (possibly different rates for different times of the day). I know everyone loves the "all you can consume" model but this is unrealistic. If usage was metered, people would be more proactive about securing their networks. If that zombie pc was costing you an extra 30 bucks a month you'd take care of it. Additionally, if the amount of money the network provider could make from you was limited by the size of the tube coming into your house, you better believe they'd find a way to provide more bandwidth.

Re:well

[locallyunscene]

First, there's nothing to suggest either (a) net-neutrality will present a higher marginal cost or (b) net-neutrality will present a lower marginal cost on the same.

Net neutrality represents a higher cost by limiting the methods a cable company can "generate revenue". If Company A is net neutral while Company B is not, then Company B can go make a deal with Disney to give their content higher priority at some cost. Company B can then turn around and offer (temporarily)lower prices to the consumer than Company A can.

Re:well

[shiftless]

OK then, how about this: 100% of a service plan's bandwidth must be network neutral when the total bandwidth is less than 6 mbit, 80% above 6mbit, and 60% above 20mbit. The other part of the bandwidth can be throttled or degraded as the provider pleases. Also, extra bandwidth which is for company provided services only (i.e. streaming TV, VOIP, etc) would not count towards the totals. I think this would make a good compromise.

Re:well

[Trahloc]

So your solution is to create even more useless bullshit lawsuits? I'd rather the worst nightmares of net neutrality become true. We have enough frivolous lawsuits as it is, we need to figure out how to stem the flood not take it up a notch.

Re:well

[Starcub]

That's actually more restrictive than net neutrality because it would mean they have to guarantee a certain minimum bandwidth in order to advertise that bandwidth. Which is fairly unrealistic.

Why is that unrealistic? It should be extremely easy to guarranty a minimum amount of bandwidth simply by responsibly partioning your bandwidth amounst your various customers so as not to oversell your capactity. Isn't that what the guarranty is supposed to be with ISP's offering BW rate based service tiers? I'd much rather know that my service will always be at least 10Mbps and happily surprized that I'm getting 100, than told I should be getting 100, but actually only getting 10.

Re:well

[Starcub]

So yeah, if the costs stack up right and the consumer preference actually does favor neutrality, then a free market would deliver it.

You mean if the costs stack up in favor of the providers, then the 'free market' would deliver. As another poster pointed out, it doesn't matter what consumer's want -- the internet is too important and the market will pay the cost anyway. Therefore, it is govt's responsibility to protect the consumer's interests -- especially since, as the legislation points out, there is a (govt. granted) monopoly in the communications industry.

Re:well

[mattwarden]

First, there's nothing to suggest either (a) net-neutrality will present a higher marginal cost or (b) net-neutrality will present a lower marginal cost on the same. Given this, it's logical to assume no change

Assume no change by default? By god, you are an economist!

Re:well

[turbidostato]

"So your solution is to create even more useless bullshit lawsuits?"

Did you forget the part about *clueless* user? Net neutrality when properly understood and legislated is good for the user. Of course no one can stop a clueless-anything from sueing (see SCO) but that he ends on shit is nothing but good for natural selection.

Good news, bad news...

[MaskedSlacker]

If the summary is accurate (I must be new here) this is probably the best we can hope for from politicians in the US.

I'm not happy about allowing ANY packet inspection without a warrant, but I don't foresee winning that battle.

Re:Good news, bad news...

[Bacon Bits]

Deep packet inspection is still circumvented by encryption. What it boils down to is that if you don't encrypt your data, someone will read it. This means unencrypted data on the Internet doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Basically, the Internet becomes subject to Open Fields.

Re:Good news, bad news...

[Mendoksou]

Especially not in the regulation from ISP side (there'd be a better chance if it just limited the ability of third parties to requisition or request such data). People still seem to think that internet traffic is public domain, which is like saying mail I send to my parents is privy to the USPS's inspection to make sure it isn't copyrighted material or child porn, imho. It's ridiculous, but people (especially those who still see the internet as "new" just don't understand it the way we do.

Re:Good news, bad news...

[Anonymous Coward]

What it boils down to is that if you don't encrypt your data, someone will read it. This means unencrypted data on the Internet doesn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

NO NO NO NO NO! A "reasonable expectation of privacy" has nothing to do with the feasibility of being spied upon. If it did, then these days telcos could just as easily do speech recognition on all your phone calls in order to help target advertising (like Google does with your gmail traffic).

The distinction is important because so far as US law is concerned, the consequences (and warrant requirements) of spying are determined based on whether you have "a reasonable expectation of privacy".

Since (again) that expectation has nothing to do with how technologically easy the spying is, you still deserve to have that expectation so long as you demand it.

I, for one, am not ready to give up a legal expectation for privacy online, as your wording seems to have done.

Now does that mean that bad guys (or ethically challenged companies) won't spy on unencrypted internet traffic, just because you reasonably expect it to be private? No, but it does mean the consequences to them if they get caught are will prohibit many corporations from doing flagrant sh*t without your consent.

100 percent accuracy .

[Anonymous Coward]

"A mythical deep packet inspection device that could block illegal P2P transfers with 100 percent accuracy would still be allowed." Sorry just had to snicker at that line, especially since nothing is 100% , hell some of us aren't even sure if we exist. We all could be a figment of the creator's imagination or some Matrix existence. One thing I am sure of is that I am babbling .... I think ... err ummm

Re:100 percent accuracy .

[RoFLKOPTr]

"A mythical deep packet inspection device that could block illegal P2P transfers with 100 percent accuracy would still be allowed." Sorry just had to snicker at that line, especially since nothing is 100%.

Exactly. That's why such a system will never be allowed.

Re:100 percent accuracy .

[Bakkster]

It doesn't need to block illegal P2P with 100% accuracy, it simply needs to allow 100% of legal P2P traffic. Most likely, this would result in a diminishing returns wild-goose-chase, but as long as it doesn't return false-positives, they're free to try.

Re:100 percent accuracy .

[Anonymous Coward]

As long as it doesn't have any false positives, it WILL be allowed. Even if it only detects 1% of illegal transfers, as long as it doesn't falsely identify legal ones as illegal it looks like it would be kosher under this law.

Re:100 percent accuracy .

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Actually you forget that people do have some tolerance for mistakes, and judges are people. Sure it's not allowed theoretically to have a p2p blocker screw up, but a judge will soon enough reduce the demand to something like "a good faith attempt to avoid and fix false positives" being good enough.

That's exactly why we have judges, of course.

Re:100 percent accuracy .

[interkin3tic]

"A mythical deep packet inspection device that could block illegal P2P transfers with 100 percent accuracy would still be allowed." Sorry just had to snicker at that line, especially since nothing is 100%

I'd say that depends on who is doing the verification.

"We find that our own deep packet inspection method blocks only illegal P2P transfers 100% of the time we tested it (1 out of 1). Our techs put a Brittney Spears MP3 on a file sharing service, running the inspector from that very computer instantly verified that the filesharing was illegal, was shut down, and the computer was automatically set on fire, killing the techs running the test. We deeply regret their loss but their sacrifices were not in vain in the war on file stealing."

Re:100 percent accuracy .

[Nethemas the Great]

Exactly. That's why such a system will never be allowed.

I suspect that it will be far more likely that 100% will become a "fuzzy" value...

I really think that this whole debate should be rephrased as a 4th amendment issue. Just because we're speaking of a "virtual" domain does not mean we should permit an erosion to our reasonable expectation of privacy in the conduct of our affairs. What's to prevent every tel-co system between source and destination from sniffing our business for their commercial gain? I would assert that encryption isn't an available option for the vast majority of a typical person's internet usage. Even the safeguards of encryption will soon be evaporating as quantum computing comes online.

Nice laws

[sakdoctor]

But just in case, encryption and protocol obfuscation for EVERYTHING.

i may agree, but ...

[neonprimetime]

"This bill will ensure that the non-discriminatory framework that allows the Internet to thrive and competition on the Web to flourish is preserved at a time when our economy needs it the most."...
President Obama has repeatedly called for Net Neutrality...
If enacted, the bill would allow any US Internet user to file a neutrality complaint with the FCC and receive a ruling within 90 days.

... how much more is this gonna cost me? i don't think i even want to imagine how many tax dollars would need to be spent to actually have enough staff and resources to rule on every compliant within 90 days.

Re:i may agree, but ...

[Skye16]

Good question, make the fines steep enough that every time your cable company gets found out, their fine pays for the FCC workers who go through every complaint.

Re:i may agree, but ...

[Alzheimers]

You try living without the internet for 90 days. Then we'll talk about how much it's worth to you.

Re:i may agree, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think I'll ever me addicted enough to the internet that I want 30,40,50% etc of my wages taken from me by uncle sam to ensure the internet stays up and running. I think I can find other things to do with my time ... I've seen the outdoors, and they can be very enjoyable! we need to be concious of the government programs we're creating, and if we're going to create more crap for the government to control, it damn well better be a profitable endeavor ... I'd rather not go further into debt.

Re:i may agree, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

It really isn't too hard to write a script to say, "Thank you for your concern, we have looked into the problem and found the ISP to be within their rights." That will be able to slog through a nation's worth of complaints in 90 days.

Re:i may agree, but ...

[Mad Merlin]

I've seen the outdoors, and they can be very enjoyable!

That's a filthy lie and you know it.

Re:i may agree, but ...

[Niris]

I still do what my nerdy forefathers before me did. Play RISK and D&D.

Re:i may agree, but ...

[visible.frylock]

No.

See police, courts, and speeding tickets.

See patents and the patent office.

See the monstrosity called US Code and US Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. Written by lawyers, which coincidentally, takes an army of lawyers to manage.

Re:i may agree, but ...

[gsmraxe]

Early this morning I was woken up by the sound of my answering machine resetting itself because the power went off then came back on. When I got up, I was in a panic, "My computer is turned off!" After taking my dogs for a walk and noticing the elec company trucks all over the main street, I realized what was going on. When I got back, everything was up and running. I had to load up Vuse (Azureus) and get those torrents running again. I have a ratio to maintain ya know! ;-)

living w/out the net for 90 days is no option for me.

"reasonable network management" LOL

[megamerican]

That's all you need to read and it should be obvious that this bill is not net neutraility. That means that any ISP that has good connections inside the government will be exempt from any rules.

which would also be given the unenviable job of hashing out what constitutes 'reasonable network management' â" something explicitly allowed by the bill.

The word reasonable doesn't show up in the Constitution yet the Supreme Court always rules the government can reasonably restrict your right to bear arms. The 2nd amendment is something which is a very touchy subject to a large portion of Americans and they still are able to trample all over it.

What do you think will happen with net neutraility, a topic which the vast majority of Americans simply don't know they should care about?

This is simply going to codify the large corporations ability to shape traffic, block p2p, etc... The only thing Congress could do to ensure a neutral net is to get out of it completely and break up any monopolies these companies now enjoy and let the people to directly dictate what they want from their ISPs.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[youngdev]

someone please mod parent up

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Trepidity]

That does seem like a truck-sized loophole. I think some variety of loophole will end up in any bill that gets passed, though, because at this point the idea of at least some traffic shaping is accepted pretty widely. It is still possible to concede that while insisting on neutrality with respect to sites--- say that, sure, they can prioritize email over bittorrent, but they can't prioritize foo.com traffic over bar.com because bar.com failed to pay for the high-tier service. I see that sort of source/destination discrimination as more insidious than per-protocol discrimination.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Locklin]

Except that cable companies can provide their IPTV or VOIP on their own proprietary protocol (unshaped), and shape the competition's protocols -especially those non-commercial or low-budget ones that use p2p.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I wouldn't have a problem with "reasonable" exceptions...if everyone else's definition of "reasonable" was the same as mine.

Reasonable always sounds so nice. How can you argue against the inclusion of something reasonable? We all know that extremism is a bit dangerous, after all, so having a little bit of elbo room to keep things reasonable sounds like a good idea.

But the person saying the word "reasonable" and the person hearing it can (and often will) have vastly different ideas of what that means. It sounds good to both of them precisely because they disagree on what it means.

And the meaning is changed again by those who interpret the law generations later.

I don't think this problem has a solution, either.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[raddan]

Network management is a fact of life. Many automatic mechanisms (e.g., load-balancing of circuits) need to know the state (e.g., load) of a particular circuit in order to balance traffic across another one. This is 'reasonable'. Other measures are 'reasonable' too.

People may disagree with me, but I also think that it is reasonable to make sure that jitter-sensitive data (like VoIP) is treated differently than Bittorrent traffic, which is not at all sensitive to jitter. The IP suite of protocols are extremely limited when it comes to flow control-- they can only do congestion prevention or egress rate limiting. If you're at the point where congestion is a problem, everyone is going to suffer. If that means that someone's Bittorrent traffic needs to be capped, I'm OK with that.

So the only other solution to 'reasonable' traffic management is overprovisioning. I know that your average Slashdotter thinks that ISPs should not 'oversubscribe' their lines, but saying this reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the way packet switched networks work. I run networks. They're always oversubscribed. That's what makes them better than the POTS network-- the realization that most of the time, you don't need all that bandwidth for everybody. This is why packet-switched networks are cheaper, and counter-intuitively, more reliable (there was a paper in the '70's that showed that pooling memory resources vs statically allocating resources made out-of-memory errors orders of magnitude less likely; sorry don't remember the cite of the top of my head, but, same idea). Overprovisioning to the fantasy-level of a Slashdotter is very expensive because you're not just talking about extra bandwidth in the endpoints-- you're talking about bandwidth at the core.

The Internet always has had, and probably always will have growing pains. Right now VoIP, video-on-demand, and Bittorrent are competing for scarce resources. Until then, operators need to manage traffic. I will leave how as a discussion point for every else.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Sandbags]

1) they left the definition of reasonable to the FCC, for which standards already exist thanks to the case against Comcast, and which those requirements can be further refined.

2) Apparently you;re unfamiliar with the original drafts of the constitution, often used by the supreme court and others to determine the mindset of those who wrote it. You see, the constitution was revised multiple times, much of it in order to make it fit to a small number of pages for simplicity of replication and distribution to the million plus people who needed to see a copy after it was ratified (a massive expense in 1776). In those drafts, Jefferson had penned "The right of the free man to bear arms on his own lands, being necessary..." The forefathers felt this was redundant, as that was the existing law, a FREE, LAND OWNING man was allowed to have weapons within the bounds of his own lands.

You also need to considder that A) we had no organized police force, only magistrites and jailers and B) in the fronteir, the only defense on your own land, which could be tens of thousands of acres, against invaders, the Spanish, indians, and more, was for people to arm themselves, as we also not only did not have a military, but most of our borders were wholy undefended.

Jefferson and the rest of our forfathers had NO INTENTION of letting just anyone run around town with guns. let alone had they imagined "portable" machine guns or weapons easily concealable capable of inflicting mass casualties. It was for the protection of one's own lands in the fronteir, for the ability to hunt on one's own lands, and for if and when the local government or state called you to arms in defense of self, town, god, and country. If you would actually read some real history, including one of the 6,000+ letters Lincoln alone wrote about stuff like this, or visit some of our colonial towns and dive into the history, get an understanding for what life was like in the late 18th century, you might have a greater appreciation for what we have today.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[The Moof]

I think some variety of loophole will end up in any bill

Well, yea! It's not polite to put in stuff explicitly saying "except for my campaign donors and lobbyists" these days.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[maxume]

It's bizarre that you are using euphemisms like overprovisioning and oversubscribing, all the damn companies need to do to avoid that whole game is to advertise what they are actually willing and able to sell for $25 a month.

If it isn't unlimited transfer over a guaranteed 2 Mbps pipe, stop trying to convince me that it is in your advertising.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[R2.0]

"and for if and when the local government or state called you to arms in defense of self, town, god, and country"

Given that the founding fathers had recently fought a war where they were defending themselves FROM their own government, I think they may have had a broader view than you attribute to them. Maybe Jefferson's wording was ditched, not to save space, but ebcause a majority of the other founders didn't like it?

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

Sadly I think this bill basically outlaws quality voip service, unless that's the only type of traffic going over the link.

And it does not outlaw the preferential treatment of specific sites by limiting peering connections "as long as no discrimination is done on the core network". Letting specific peering connections at the edge of the network fill up and even congest (or even specifically directing certain sites through congested links) does not at all seem to be covered.

Obviously in practice this congestion is what carriers use to give preferential treatment to specific sites.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Trepidity]

That's true, but the regulators don't have to be blind. There are plenty of existing industries in which bad-faith attempts like that to circumvent restrictions are regulated.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Chris Burke]

People may disagree with me, but I also think that it is reasonable to make sure that jitter-sensitive data (like VoIP) is treated differently than Bittorrent traffic, which is not at all sensitive to jitter. The IP suite of protocols are extremely limited when it comes to flow control-- they can only do congestion prevention or egress rate limiting. If you're at the point where congestion is a problem, everyone is going to suffer. If that means that someone's Bittorrent traffic needs to be capped, I'm OK with that.

To some extent, that's fine. Different uses need different quality of service -- VoIP is low bandwidth but latency sensitive, while Bittorrent is bandwidth intensive and latency insensitive. There's no reason to cap bandwidth, just use a different router scheduling policy for the two different packets. VoIP gets priority but by its very nature this shouldn't hold up the Bittorent for long. If it does and the "VoIP" app starts eating bandwidth like it's a file transfer, then de-prioritize it.

Honestly, just implementing a multi-level feedback queue like they've had in OS schedulers for decades (though admittedly it's easier to implement wrt processes vs connections) would do what you're asking for, and fairly so without having to "cap" or otherwise actually degrade Bittorrent or any other specific app. As congestion increases, everyone's bandwidth-intensive applications would degrade proportionately as expected during prime-time hours, while the latency-sensitive applications would still be serviced reasonably well.

The most important part of net neutrality is not about preventing any kind of QoS based on packet type. It's about discriminating based on source. It's about degrading a movie file that came from Hulu vs some site Time Warner approves of.

Net neutrality doesn't prevent them from doing what you're asking. It just means they can't do it in a discriminatory way that is ultimately designed not to make life on the network better, but to protect their other businesses.

The Internet always has had, and probably always will have growing pains. Right now VoIP, video-on-demand, and Bittorrent are competing for scarce resources. Until then, operators need to manage traffic. I will leave how as a discussion point for every else.

Easy. It's a two step process:
1) Implement source- and type-neutral management policies that are based on actual usage, not assumptions that certain kinds of traffic, or certain sources of traffic -- who coincidentally are always competitors of the ISPs' media business -- are "evil" and must be slowed down or blocked.
2) Invest the ludicrous profits these fuckers are making into increasing capacity, so prime-time degradation isn't a very big deal.

Net neutrality doesn't prevent this. In fact it probably makes it more likely.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Chris Burke]

Given that the founding fathers had recently fought a war where they were defending themselves FROM their own government, I think they may have had a broader view than you attribute to them. Maybe Jefferson's wording was ditched, not to save space, but ebcause a majority of the other founders didn't like it?

Maybe. But more likely given all of Jefferson's writings on the subject, is that the GP's reading of the 2nd Amendment as not supporting the idea of armed rebellion is simply wrong. Egregiously so, considering his admonition to read the Founder's writings. Hello? Jefferson was constantly on about the need for the people to remove governments that don't represent them, and do so through organized rebellion. And that explicitly included the government he helped create, should it become necessary.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[bionicpill]

The problem with this is you're discriminating against the type of traffic and saying some is more legitimate than others. Why is someone's http traffic more important than my bittorrent traffic, or more important than someone else's ftp traffic. We are all paying for the use of the network, so you need to let people use it however they like. If some user is being abusive of the network, that's a different discussion all together.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[AK Marc]

If it isn't unlimited transfer over a guaranteed 2 Mbps pipe, stop trying to convince me that it is in your advertising.

What advertisements are you looking at with "guarantees" to Internet sites at line speed? Or is it a case where you don't understand what "best effort" Internet access is?

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[CodeBuster]

for if and when the local government or state called you to arms in defense of self, town, god, and country

Which is becoming an increasing problem these days for military recruitment, especially with urban west coast recruits from states like California. If a recruit has never held or fired a weapon in his or her entire life then it requires substantially more training in order to bring that recruit up to a minimal level of competence with rifles, machine guns, and other modern projectile weapons than someone who grew up around guns and using them for hunting and target shooting. In fact, there is even evidence to suggest that other countries, Japan in WWII for example, were substantially deterred from invading by the large civilian population of gun owners who were at least competent in the use of their weapons.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that--he was allowed to have arms on public lands, and pretty much anywhere but inside a church in most states (and nations)--more or less anywhere but ...places it would be deemed poaching. But that's okay, feel to add extraneous details to artificially limit the scope according to your pre-existing beliefs and conclusions

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[maxume]

I understand exactly what ISPs are selling. The reason I don't like it is that they make little to no effort to make it clear to people that just want internet service, without spending the time to understand the technical details.

Hidden transfer caps are probably a bigger problem than poorly stated rate figures (but I'm pretty sure that only a very small fraction of DSL customers come anywhere near getting the actual number used in the 'up to' statement, making it pretty easy for me to call it advertising bullshit).

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[raddan]

For the record, I am not at all opposed to Net Neutrality. In fact, Ed Markey was my Congressman until very recently, and I've written him a number of times to give him my opinion on the matter.

You're right about discriminating on the basis of source, too. That is the key part of the Net Neutrality debate. Unfortunately, the uninformed information-wants-to-be-free file-sharers jump in there and confuse the issue a bit.

Unfortunately, this part:

Honestly, just implementing a multi-level feedback queue like they've had in OS schedulers for decades

is spot-on, but also not possible with our current Internet architecture. TCP has a feedback mechanism, but it's in the wrong spot in the network stack. The problem isn't at the two ends of the connection, it's in between. By the time the TCP state machine has been notified of a problem, it's way too late to do anything subtle-- instead we backoff exponentially. But more than that-- TCP doesn't know anything about channel capacity. It would be nice if the network could be a little smarter about informing the sender what it could use.

Absent good mechanisms for managing these things, the ISPs are always going to fall back on the "this is my network and I can run it any way I want" argument, so your two-step process isn't so simple...

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[cdrguru]

I would think inner-city youths have plenty of exposure to guns and many have experience firing them as well. All sorts of bad gang-banger habits with guns that it requires lots of training to help them overcome. Illegal weapons are very common in cities in the hands of children as young as 10 or 12.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[commodore64_love]

P.S..

Maybe we should eliminate ALL negative feedback - for both buyers and sellers. Just have nothing but mandatory positives for everyone. But you wouldn't support that would you? No because you like to screw it to the sellers, because you HATE sellers. You love ruining sellers reputation because it makes you feel like a Big Bad Buyer screwing it to the man. You probably laughed when you you heard my stories about the woman who stole eighty dollars from me, or the guy who couldn't read the word "VHS" and left my an undeserved neg, or the paypal claim to try to get a refund.

Your a Buyer on a mission to destroy seller's lives by negging them as often as possible. You LOVWE neggging them which is why you would Never support the idea of removing negatives from ALL feedback. You like the power it gives you to Blackmail a seller into giving your partial refund or free items or other perks.

You love negging sellers too much.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Lendrick]

Get a screenshot of this comment -- I'm about to side with a libertarian.

I'm a liberal. I agree that Net Neutrality is something that ought to be codified in law. However, I don't believe that this law does it as written. This whole "reasonable" thing smacks of "let's throttle bittorrent because it *might* be used for piracy".

How about mandating absolute network neutrality (no throttling, shaping, blocking, etc) and then enforcing the laws we already have? The days where the Supreme Court keeps VCRs legal because of substantial non-infringing use are long gone. We can't trust the court to protect us from this.

Anybody reading this law and not getting a little nervous ought to get their head checked.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[AK Marc]

Maybe we should eliminate ALL negative feedback - for both buyers and sellers. Just have nothing but mandatory positives for everyone.

Again, you are a lying sack of shit. Either feedback is eliminated, or it is left in with mandatory positives. Eliminating it wouldn't allow for mandatory positives, it would just disappear. The problem is that I'm fighting your lying whines with facts and logic, and it's hurting your head. Take an advil and go to a more appropriate site for your maturity level, like sesamestreet.org. You don't address my specific points (you repeatedly say that leaving feedback against buyers is useless, and that it's necessary or the whole system will collapse, directly contradicting yourself in every post). What's the matter, are they too much for you? I'll get you your Elmo blanket and you can have a nap.

You probably laughed when you you heard my stories about the woman who stole eighty dollars from me,

I did. Did you fight the chargeback? Did you show the credit card company the tracking information showing she received it? If so, they would have kept the charge on her account, and you'd have your money. So, how did that go? Did you sue her? Did you report her to the police for fraud? Or did you just smile because then you had a story that you could use for the rest of your life about how bad buyers are? I'm thinking you've milked it for much more than the $80 you lost, if you did actually ship the item. And given the fact that you mention nothing about you actually trying to collect, I'm guessing you were too lazy to do anything about it. But oh, you get to tell the story 1000 times to anyone that doesn't stab themselves in the eardrums with an ice pick. Isn't that how your mom died?

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[bartoku]

I am glad you brought this up! I have been worried about this. I want my cable, DSL, fibre and cellular ISPs to be dumb pipes as much as the next Slashdotter, but I worried about the quality of service when I needed it for making a VoIP call while my neighbors P2P has the same priority. I do not work in networking so I am hoping for your expert feedback on my understanding and ideas.

I agree that "jitter-sensitive", like VoIP, data should have priority in high traffic situations over less sensitive traffic like Bittorrent traffic. But I am not convinced that automated network management systems are where I want the decision to be made. Plus I may feel my Bittorrent traffic or what appears to be less sensitive traffic to you or the system is important and do not want to leave it to the automated network management to decide what to prioritize. I would bet net neutrality is a pipe dream for wire based networks and essentially impossible for wireless networks. I do not see why we cannot achieve the overprovisioning fantasy-level of service on the ground, but agree it is most likely a waste of resources. But in the air, it seems today at least, there will always be very strong technical reasons for why people cannot just have all the bandwidth they are willing to pay for, it is not just artificially limited by politics and the lack of infrastructure spending, but by the natural limitation of spectrum real estate. That being said I think a tiered internet service will be necessary even if net neutrality is implemented. No, not the evil tiered plans we hear with service providers like Google paying, the other way around.

First off I will make the assumption that there are four major classes of internet traffic types: low-latency high-bandwidth (video conferencing, remote desktop today, 3D video and smell streaming tomorrow), low-latency low-bandwidth (VoIP, gaming, live chat and collaboration), high-latency high-bandwidth (bittorrent, one way video streaming), high-latency low-bandwidth (text, and simple web pages). Maybe the latency factor would be replaced with reliability or quality, some quantity that measures the jitter factor. Now this is not to unlike how I see the current mobile industry today: messaging (low-bandwidth, high reliability), voice (mid-bandwidth, mid-reliability), data (high-bandwidth, low-reliability). I like it this way to a certain extent. I know someone streaming YouTube videos will not delay my voice calls. But what is disappointing is that I am stuck with my carriers voice service, I cannot use my own VoIP application, service, or protocol. With net neutrality would all three tiers be smashed into one? Would the YouTube videos get streamed with the same priority as my VoIP? That is what it seems would happen, and you and I agree this is not a good idea either. But do I not want the dumb pipe analyzing my packets and deciding for itself what priority to give them? No, what if it judges my VoIP not as important, either intentionally and maliciously to push the carriers own voice service, or just unintentionally. Or what if I really want to stream that YouTube video down, NOW. Well then I let the carrier know what priority or tier to place the connection in, and I pay based on free market demand for that tier. The ISP then has no choice but to treat it like any other packet in that tier, whether it be voice or P2P or streaming video, I just pay accordingly. If the low-latency tiers get clogged up they boost the price for using them and hopefully get rid of the YouTube streamers or P2P traffic costumers that can wait. This also reduces the overhead on the ISP's side as well with packet inspecting equipment and cost.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

A cannon loaded with shot is just as deadly as any machine gun. They had those in that day and individuals could own a cannon.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[int69h]

Any reference to back this up? The military is all about breaking down what you know and teaching you to do it their way, or so say my friends from San Diego.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[CodeBuster]

"In 1960, Robert Menard was a commander aboard the USS Constellation when he was part of a meeting between United States Navy personnel and their counterparts in the Japanese Defense Forces. Fifteen years had passed since VJ Day, most of those at the meeting were WWII veterans, and men who had fought each other to the death at sea were now comrades in battle who could confide in each other.

Someone at the table asked a Japanese admiral why, with the Pacific Fleet devastated at Pearl Harbor and the mainland U.S. forces in what Japan had to know was a pathetic state of unreadiness, Japan had not simply invaded the West Coast. Commander Menard would never forget the crafty look on the Japanese commander's face as he frankly answered the question.

'You are right,' he told the Americans. 'We did indeed know much about your preparedness. We knew that probably every second home in your country contained firearms. We knew that your country actually had state championships for private citizens shooting military rifles. We were not fools to set foot in such quicksand.'"

The above was excerpted from the Wikiquote page on Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Combined Fleet during WWII. The discussion explains how a particular quote concerning a "rifle behind every blade of grass" may have been erroneously attributed to Yamamoto who had indeed expressed reservations about entering into war with the United States in other well-attributed quotes, even if he made no specific mention of private gun ownership.

However, the above quote is good second-hand (i.e. better than hearsay) evidence that private gun ownership was and is a substantial deterrent against foreign invasion. In fact, it is also known that Hitler was deterred from invading Switzerland for similar reasons (i.e. a rifle in every home), comparing Switzerland to a 'porcupine'.

As for the military stripping recruits of everything they know, I cannot speak from first hand experience. However, there is a certain familiarity and practice with ones muscle memory and hand-eye coordination that comes from frequent handling and firing of rifles that would undoubtedly be useful when later qualifying at the rifle range. One might expect that recruits who grew up shooting with proper instruction (NOT gangbangers who shoot sideways and are lucky if they don't shoot their own foot) and were more familiar with guns would have better initial scores than those who did not. Perhaps someone else can confirm this?

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[sonicmerlin]

During the CRTC hearings in Canada a few weeks ago, an ISP detailed the traffic management methods it employed to handle the massive upsurge in traffic that occurred after Michael Jackson's death. They simply prioritized time-sensitive applications while de-prioritizing time-insensitive applications like Bittorrent. The end result was that no one experienced any slowdown in speed or quality, including Bittorrent users. And this was during a massive, massive upsurge in traffic. Really, the whole idea of "expense" espoused by US ISPs is ridiculous. They make far too much money and provide far slower speeds than ISPs in the East to be worrying about "expenses".

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[calmofthestorm]

That's a little bit different than throttling bittorrent to the point where it takes a year to download an Ubuntu image like Comcast used to do. I'm so glad I moved and ditched those fuckers.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[calmofthestorm]

As in, the jitter sensitivity vs effectively blocking a protocol. Really what we need to do is separately consider bandwidth and latency. Perhaps allow shaping by latency (so that ssh, http, voip, etc get higher priority than bittorrent, etc) but not by overall bandwidth.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[commodore64_love]

Leaving negative feedback for buyers STOPS a scam artist in his tracks - stops him from stealing any more product from sellers. Eventually all those negs lead to suspension, and the scam artist can no longer access ebay.

Without negative feedback for buyers, the scam artist can not be stopped.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Starcub]

So the only other solution to 'reasonable' traffic management is overprovisioning. I know that your average Slashdotter thinks that ISPs should not 'oversubscribe' their lines, but saying this reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of the way packet switched networks work. I run networks. They're always oversubscribed.

Do you know why they call it "the internet"? The internet is a connection of various independant networks. ISP's provide access to 'the internet' as a last mile service. Packet switching is a technology used to direct traffic across the independently operated network nodes that make up 'the internet'. An ISP has direct control and responsibility for the network that they operate. ISP's certainly can refrain from oversubscribing their capacity, they simply chose not to.

Overprovisioning to the fantasy-level of a Slashdotter is very expensive because you're not just talking about extra bandwidth in the endpoints-- you're talking about bandwidth at the core.

So don't provision your network beyond what your core is capable of handling. In other words, don't pocket the profits and return crappy service in return, but invest in upgrading your core capacity so that you can ensure the BW rates you advertise. Why is that such a difficult concept for 'network managers' to understand?

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[AK Marc]

Leaving negative feedback for buyers STOPS a scam artist in his tracks

You said that leaving negative feedback will result in a new buyer account being made, and not a suspension, or any other sanctions that would stop anyone. What would stop a scam artist from getting a new account with no feedback and continuing to scam? That's what you said you'd do if you ever had trouble with your buyer account.

Oh, and you never told me what my eBay ID is. Were you bluffing when you said you found it? If you are uncomfortable posting the ID here, though I don't know why, you can also do something like post my feedback rating, or anything else that indicates you actually found it and aren't a liar that's full of shit.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[raddan]

You're either being willfully ignorant or stupid. Let's do a simple calculation, shall we?

Assume, for a moment, that Comcast has 5 million subscribers. For simplicity's sake, let's say all of those five million people have "guaranteed" 5Mbit data plans. Also, for simplicity, let's say that Comcast has a single backbone trunk so that we essentially have a star network.

(5*10^6 bits/sec) * (5*10^6 subscribers) = 2.5*10^13 bits/sec required bandwidth at the trunk.

That's 25 terabit/sec. Under your plan, Comcast would need to lay enough fibre (and switches-- don't forget about those!) to handle 25 terabit/sec connections. At the moment, the state of the art in optical communication is OC-768, which can do roughly 40 Gbit/sec (IIRC, the theoretical ceiling on fibre bandwidth is 50 terabit/sec, but we're nowhere near being able to achieve that at the moment). In order to provide for 25 terabits/sec, you're going to need 625 of those OC-768 concatenated into a single trunk.

Now, OC-768 is basically so expensive that if you have to ask what it costs, you're not a customer, but we can try to extrapolate the cost. A leased OC-3 will typically run you $12K USD/month. Let's say that the actual cost is half that, so $6K USD/month since Comcast clearly will own their own lines. Let's naively say, too, that since OC-768 is 256 times faster than OC-3, that it also costs 256 times more (it's probably more, since it's state of the art). And we need 625 of them:

$6000 * 256 * 625 * 12 months = $11.5 trillion dollars annually. For comparison, the GDP of the United States is roughly $13 trillion. And this is only for the cable-- you also need equipment, cable-layers, engineers, and lawyers to negotiate right-of-way.

Now, somewhere along the way, some engineer's going to say, "hey, most of the time, we only need 1/100000th of that bandwidth to satisfy 99.9% of our users." What do you think they're going to do?

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Anonymous Coward]

I went through Army Basic Training at Ft. Leonard Wood in the 1980s. At the beginning of marksmanship training, the drills made it quite clear that any trainee's experience with civilian rifles would not help with M-16 marksmanship. We were trained with the M-16A1 (the A2 hadn't yet replaced it), but the current model of M-16 is fundamentally the same. So it would seem to be of no significant advantage. I do recall a couple of recruits who were genuinely anxious about firing a rifle, so perhaps for them there would have been some advantage to having developed comfort with firearms, but there was apparently no general training advantage, and the drills explicitly advised us to forget anything we learned from firing civilian rifles. Some of that might have been "do it the Army way" dogma, but in my experience, the Army genuinely strives to properly train its recruits. Also, note that most trainees get no training in the M9 pistol, so civilian pistol experience is unlikely to be helpful.

Maybe capability with civilian arms helps with more specialized military skills such as sniper training. I have no experience with that, so perhaps someone else will comment.

- T

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[sonicmerlin]

I think what he's saying is not to underprovision to the extent that you experience network congestion. Instead invest those billions in profits back into the network and upgrade. If Japan, Sweden, Korea etc. can achieve two order of magnitudes faster connections than the US (1gbps connections), then I think we can manage.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Sandbags]

Jefferson's ideas of "organized rebellion" WERE incorporated into the constitution, in the form of the balance of powers (which did not previosly exist), the abiltiy for people to be removed from office, and the election processes. Forced rebelion is the only way to fight an aristocracy, but guns are completely unnecessary in a land where free speech, the press, and rights to assembe and protest are highly protected, and where processes to remove rulers, laws, and judicial rulings are readily available to the people.

In his days, he never expected the political process to be tied up in courts for 3-5 years, but lets face it, corruption charges against politicians go QUICK.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Sandbags]

I taught my wife to fire rifles, handguns, and shotguns in a matter of hours. By her third time at the range she was scoring over 40 on 5x10 targets at competition range.

If it takes "extended time" to train someone who's never held a gun, those people have other issues...

In fact, personally knowing several drill instructers, and having a general in my family, they seem to be of the opinion it is EASIER to train someone who is completely green vs. someone who "thinks" they know how to use a weapon. knowing how to aim in a general direction, fire, and clean a weapon is easy, doing it the RIGHT WAY is harder, and harder still if bad habits have set in...

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Sandbags]

and how does any of this go against adding the simple phrase "...on his own lands" to the right to bear arms? The above would STILL BE TRUE.

The right to bear arms on one's own lands whoever would NOT give untrained, unlicensed, undeputized citizens the right to walk around city streets with concealed weapons, and thus anyone who would be found with one not in a clearly maked, locked case, with amunition seperated, would automatically be a criminal, and be assumed to be posessing the weapon with the intent to use it (as any weapon not in a locked case clearly would have a reson for being so).

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Sandbags]

First, our forefathers forcibly rebelled against their government because their government INVADED their lands by force. Peacable means were attemted first and failed, including protests and more. The states suffered under sanctions for years prior, and considering it was illegal under the king to do such simply things as MAKE CLOTH,sanctions were quite harsh...

Second, there is no precess for removing a KING from Office and supplanting a new leadership other than KILLING ONE or winning a war. We built into the constitution means for dealing with government OTHER than violence. Also, having arms "..on his own lands" still prevents the government from having a coup...

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Sandbags]

Please refrain from using the word common where the per capita incident of such is less than 1%...

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[CodeBuster]

The phrase "...on his own lands" was consistent with the wording of other laws and official documents of that period which generally restricted rights and privileges, including the right to vote for example, to white male property owners. However, if one wants to interpret the second amendment in that way then it is inconsistent not to interpret the other rights, which where historically worded similarly, the same (i.e. only white men who own land can vote). This is a similar line of reasoning to that taken previously by opponents of the second amendment who held that the term "the people" meant something different in the second amendment (i.e. a "collective" right) than what it meant in every other case where "the people" was used (i.e. the right to free speech). IMHO, the rights were written in plain language and should be interpreted plainly. The drafts probably do contain alternate wordings (they were works in progress after all), but even the engrossed (official) copy of the United States Constitution, which was handwritten and signed on parchment and therefore not truncated for printing convenience, uses the abbreviated wording (i.e. not "...on his own lands").

As for the carrying of weapons and the intent; IMHO, it does NOT follow that simply carrying a weapon in a state which renders it accessible and ready for use can be taken as Res ipsa loquitur or "the matter speaks for itself" evidence that the bearer intends to use it in crime (other than simply carrying it which is not a crime but a right). The utility of weapons, especially when carried for self defense, is largely dependent upon them being ready and accessible for use should the need arise (this is why the Supreme Court struck down the mandatory trigger lock parts of the DC gun laws). So it cannot be said that just because someone is NOT transporting their weapon in a locked case that the only possible explanation is that they intend to use it to commit a crime (other than simply carrying, which in and of itself is NOT a crime according to the United States Constitution).

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Chris Burke]

Jefferson's ideas of "organized rebellion" WERE incorporated into the constitution, in the form of the balance of powers

You're seriously going to nitpick out the fact that I didn't explicitly say "organized AND ARMED rebellion", and then try to play it off like JEFFERSON didn't explicitly say so? Please. Jefferson, while whole-heartedly embracing the principles of Democratic government, was very cynical about it actually continuing to represent the people and not reverting to de-facto tyranny. He most definitely maintained that fear of armed revolt was a valid way to keep governments in line -- all governments, including the one he created. He most definitely maintained that people should be allowed to keep arms expressly for that purpose. You can't have read his writings and say otherwise, so try the WP page at least.

All the most famous quotes you've heard from Jefferson regarding revolution, "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants" for example, and "what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms." come from a letter that was regarding a revolt against the government of the state of Massachusetts, as in part of the United States! No talk of hunting or protecting your property from injuns, no, instead he says of the rebellion: "God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion."

So, yeah, sorry, but your thesis that Jefferson thought guns as tools of rebellion were unnecessary in a land of free speech is, shall we say, grossly at odds with reality.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Sandbags]

Um, the original constitution was truncated extensively, explicity for publication... The fact it was hand written is because you have to have a copy first to bring to the press to have replicated. They knew the original (3 copies of it actually) would be circulated including the signatures to the heads of each colony as proof of the original, but they also new tens of thousands of copies needed to be circulated to each small town. Parchment was not cheap, nor were presses and press time. Limiting it so a few pages not only provided a significant savings in cost of replication (and time of replication which itself may he been more imoirtant) but it also made the document more specific, and left all the remaining powers to the states to be decided elsewise.

In today's society, in this country, given the near everpresent video surveilance or outright security presence, and cops close at hand, few if any people should be carrying loaded weapons for self defence. This becomes even more limited if the criminals also don't have guns of their own.

Further, noone said you had to be a COP to carry a gun, simply a deputised person, or former military person. And "concealed" shoudl not be an option. Weapons worn VISIBLY on your hip, in plain sight, with a holster containing a photo ID of your also clearly visible through a plastic cover on a permit would be quite sufficint. And with even 1 in 50 people so permited, and carying, criminals would be highly wary of any such crime. Also add to this shop proprieters and owners, for which the shop can be considered an extention of their land, and naturally this also allows you to have a gun in your house/apartment. Now within a very short distance of anywhere a crime can happen, is a weapon to defend people, but the only people who might have a weapon who don't have clearly visible authority to do so are automatically criminals...

Further, look into the evidence into gun restriction and per capita crime rates. In nations where handguns and other weapons have been banned in public places, crime rates often spiked for a very short period (weeks or months) but the existing crime rate is FAR below where it was previously. Many of these countries are not even permitting "on your own lands" but simply saying "no guns unless deputised" and still they're safer.

We needed guns because we had no police, no army, and a sparse population. We had no defense from outside, and no defense for ourselves, yet the STILL wished initially, to restrict weapons to one's own lands. You still have them, you could still rebel if you really felt you had to, you can still defend yourself and your country. Just in public, and in shops, and on open streets, you have to rely on the COMMUNITY or the GOVERNMENT to protect you from crime.

Go further: If not only did every person who wanted so have a weapon, but also had a strict training program to use that weapon, and was only certified to carry one if considered a marksman (which even my wife easily became in a few hours in a shooting range with simple instruction, where having previously fired guns for years on her family's farm she couldn't hit a barn...) then criminals would not only know you had a gun, but it would eliminate the nearly TWENTY TIMES as many cases of accidental shootings, and also of people being killed with their own weapons of self defense due to the lack of understanding of how to actually defend one's self with it. Crimains fear the confident, and the prepared, but far beyond that, it;s a small chance you'll be mugged by gunpoiont and actually get shot, you're FAR more likely to be ACCIDENTALLY shot by your own gun, or shoot someone accidentally with it... THAT we really CAN do something about, even if we don;t limit how can and can't have a gun to anything more strict than making you take a class (which btw, you have to take one to even get a FISHING license in some states, yet you don't need to take a class to garry a loaded gun???? and that's infringing on your rights to make you???)

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Sandbags]

Try associating some of those quotes to dates first of all. Shay's rebellion happened before the signing of the constitution, and all of the work Lincoln and others put into that document to end the likely needs of armed rebellions were not available in Massachusetts at that time.

Lincoln also said "Let common sense and common honesty have fair play, and they will soon set things to rights." and;
"The arm of the people [is] a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree." and;
"Whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends [i.e., securing inherent and inalienable rights, with powers derived from the consent of the governed], it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness." This quote alone, spoken BEFORE the rebellion in MA in 1776, makes no mention of ARMED rebellion, nor do most of his quotes stating his support of rebellion, only that the people require the power to unseat their government. If that can be done with pen as easilly as musket, then the musket can be rele=gated to other needs and spared from the streets.

Further, to Ben Franlin in 1808 Jefferson wrote: "In no country on earth is [a disposition to oppose the law by force] so impracticable as in one where every man feels a vital interest in maintaining the authority of the laws, and instantly engages in it as in his own personal cause." ...and my closing statement: "In a country whose constitution is derived from the will of the people directly expressed by their free suffrages, where the principal executive functionaries and those of the legislature are renewed by them at short periods, where under the character of jurors they exercise in person the greatest portion of the judiciary powers, where the laws are consequently so formed and administered as to bear with equal weight and favor on all, restraining no man in the pursuits of honest industry and securing to every one the property which that acquires, it would not be supposed that any safeguards could be needed against insurrection or enterprise on the public peace or authority. The laws, however, aware that these should not be trusted to moral restraints only, have wisely provided punishments for these crimes when committed." Written in 1806 to the people of the united states in his 6th anual message to the people. In shorter terms, we set up this government to be run by men and women we place a level of trust and moral expectations in, but in that same government are clear rights of the people, and punishments for those who seek to abuse the power trusted to them where morals fail. Also the mention of the short term assumed that even one who abuses, who might not be easily removed, and in short span, be replaced should the people in mass object, none of this requiring armed force, and any means other than spoken or written word and the excercise of personal choice.

You can find statements about "blood should be spilled" but that blood remember need not be the PEOPLE'S! Treason was a hanging offence, it was the blood of the CORRUPT he intended to spill, corpses he counted in the tens ("the few, or a dozen" we words used), not in the hundreds expectant of an armed conflict of a mob.

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Chris Burke]

Try associating some of those quotes to dates first of all. Shay's rebellion happened before the signing of the constitution, and all of the work Lincoln and others put into that document to end the likely needs of armed rebellions were not available in Massachusetts at that time.

Yes, the U.S. was under the Articles of Confederation and were flawed but not undemocratic. At no point did Jefferson indicate that his repeated statements about the importance of armed resistance was pending the passing of the Constitution at which point they would be obviated. In fact it was in that very letter (which you should really read) that he was complaining about the proposed Constitution, specifically about the power and lengthy term of the judiciary. Oh but I'm sure what he really meant was "Once this constitution is passed, government will be perfect and the people will never need to engage in violent struggle for their freedom again."

Also, it's JEFFERSON not LINCOLN. For fucks sake.

This quote alone, spoken BEFORE the rebellion in MA in 1776, makes no mention of ARMED rebellion, nor do most of his quotes stating his support of rebellion, only that the people require the power to unseat their government.

In 1776, there was no need to specify "armed", even though at times HE DID. The reason is because "rebellion" and "revolution" were automatically tied up in the notion of The Revolution, i.e. the ARMED rebellion. So yes, you can find times he did not explicitly say "armed". If you think that means not armed, you're fooling yourself because the times he mentioned both rebellion and arms separately but in relation to one another demonstrates that the two concepts were linked to him. The word itself implied armed. The precious few exceptions that existed at that time required explicitly stating that it wasn't violent, though even the "Bloodless Revolution" still involved armed forces (and armed conflict).

And nevertheless, Jefferson did not believe that democratic institutions on their own would mean the government never went against the people. He even said so in that letter you didn't read.

This notion you have, that Jefferson's blatant support for the right of the people to rebel did not include arms, is wrong, stupid, ahistorical, and basically some crap you made up to support your pre-conceived notions. You really should do more than just click the links I gave you and look at dates. Read the man's writing. He often spoke on the subject, and only abject ignorance could make you so unaware of his meaning since he was quite explicit. Yes you can cherry pick quotes that if not considered in context don't necessarily imply arm revolt. Then there are quotes which in context or not in context explicitly tie together the notion of arms and rebellion against democratic governments. Ergo anyone concerned with the truth would realize that he supported the concept of a people capable of armed rebellion, even if that was not the only method he considered.

It's an existence proof. To support your thesis, you would have to show that Jefferson never explicitly supported armed rebellion against democratic governments, and you absolutely cannot. You can only ignore them and then butcher what's left.

I mean it's great that you don't think the people should have the right to have guns for purposes of armed resistance. I'm not saying you can't have that opinion. I'm saying don't spout bullshit pretending that Jefferson agreed with you. Be honest, and say you disagree with him. His stance is blatantly clear, and the contortions you are going through to misunderstand it are painful to read.

Even Franklin you twist from saying that democracy makes armed resistance less likely to implicitly tying it to the idea that it could never be necessary and thus could not be provisioned for in the Constitution. You're twisting his words as badly as Lincoln's(lol). Stop it.

You can find statements about "blood should be spille

Re:"reasonable network management" LOL

[Starcub]

I have no idea what ISP services a subscriber base as large as your numbers suggest and has that kind of BW requirement to meet. I can tell you about my experience with internet access service.

I have a dial-up account that provides (advertises) service at $12/month. Assuming my ISP uses an OC-3 to connect me to the internet, then they have the ability to guarranty about 2700 customers a minimum BW of 56kbps. 2700 customers paying $12/mo means they can afford to lease an OC-3 at about $33,000/mo. There is no reason whatsoever then for my ISP to throttle my 56k connection by half, and yet they do, and have done so for months on end. If ISP's have blown this problem out of proportion in the broadband market, then they have oversold their capacity -- I don't care what it costs.

Would same rules apply to cellular companies?

[Anonymous Coward]

So if I get internet on my cellphone, does this make my cellular provider an ISP, if so would they legally have to allow tethering?

Re:Would same rules apply to cellular companies?

[Chyeld]

Depends on the nebulous definition of 'network management' I would imagine. If it means your carrier can go "Oh noes! Tethering = unstable network" then no.

Re:Would same rules apply to cellular companies?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ideally we decouple phones from services from bandwidth...

Buy X phone, subscribe to Y service(s) and buy your bandwidth from Z for maximum mobility.

i.e. I buy my nifty iPhone, subscribe to Google Voice for my voicemail and phone # tied to that phone because I like them and I buy my bandwidth from Sprint because they've got the best signal in my area

More competition for hardware, service and bandwidth providers can't be a bad thing for consumers.

Re:Would same rules apply to cellular companies?

[angelbunny]

Yes and no.
Yes your cellular provider is an ISP. Yes the ISP has to allow tethering BUT
No the phones do not have to allow tethering.

If you get a phone that supports tethering like through an app on windows mobile your cellular ISP has to accept it. However, if you get a phone that could have tethering support but doesn't then you can't get tethering.

In other words, the cell companies can legally make it a pain in the ass to get tethering but they can legally not stop you once you've obtained it, but the cell phone maker could potentially try to stop you.

Re:Would same rules apply to cellular companies?

[intheshelter]

I hope that is true, but something tells me it's not that simple. I think you signing a contract with a cellular company may give them some rights in areas like this.

GNU-THINK

[jameskojiro]

Kinda like new-think instead it is GNU-Think. Call a Bill "Net Neutrality" and people will sign it even if it does the opposite.

three quarks for muster markey!

[JackSpratts]

atta boy ed. and hey while you're at it dump that pesky dmca. hide it in some other amendment to 1934 nobody'll read either...until it's too late. muahaha!

- js.

Don't forget the telco(s)

[StreetStealth]

You're right on about the cable companies, but don't forget that your DSL provider would gladly do the same thing for your VOIP setup -- degrade your third-party voice service to the point where your only viable option is their first-party service.

Re:Don't forget the telco(s)

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

And what does it mean in practice ? The way dsl providers and large telco's "discriminate" in traffic is by peering relationships (e.g. with google). If a site is big enough and has enough money, they can get a direct private link into their network, whereas they let cheap content providers who won't pay (*cough* cogent *cough*) have only a single connection and then let it overflow. They refuse to expand that connection, except if cogent pays a large fee, which they simply won't do.

Does this law mandate that telco's peer with everybody ? Or does it simply prohibit a few types of Qos ? The first would be a very good thing for competition, the second would be very bad indeed.

Of course, knowing lawmakers (or Obama), I'm guessing it's the qos stuff. Does this mean that it's de-facto illegal for providers to deliver voip service that keeps working well when you're torrenting ? That would certainly constitute discriminating traffic, and it's something that's a bit of a necessity for a well-functioning service.

Re:Don't forget the telco(s)

[turbidostato]

"Does this law mandate that telco's peer with everybody ? Or does it simply prohibit a few types of Qos ?"

It seems neither of those. By the letter of the news, "Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device" they simply need to declare illegal anything they don't like and then ban it from their networks. So, "it's illegal to pass traffic produced on one network to another without explicit consent" seems to be a law we won't have to wait too much to see approved.

Re:Don't forget the telco(s)

[hairyfeet]

Yep, I love how folks that don't really get the nastiness of politics will see a bad thing as a good thing. What this will do is make it easy for cartel...err I mean ISP, to simply have the stuff they don't want declared illegal and banned, probably with nasty fines and/or investigation if you use said "illegal" software.

Doesn't anybody remember how we have been seeing all this stuff like "Obama's secret security on P2P!" and how for years we have had boneheads, including those in government just run Kazaa and share everything, so why is this news? Because it is to make Joe clueless scared of P2P, so that when they go to make it illegal for their cable/DSL cartel buddies and their friends in the *.A.A (who Obama put....what? Five of them into the justice dept?) they won't get as big a stink as folks would give now thinking it is kids on some Napster ripoff. Expect Nancy Grace to start drilling into their heads any day now that "P2P is just haven of child molesters! You are a pervert for supporting that filth!".

Isn't it sad how they can keep running the same playbook and get away with it over AND over AND over and pull it off? Take this "net neutrality" bullshit. Make the last mile public and this problem would be solved tomorrow, as competition would weed out the douches. But they don't WANT a free market OR competition, because those things don't give them treasonous bribes...errr I mean campaign contributions, so instead we get this crap that at first glance look like a win for the people but a little reading shows it is just another cartel payoff. Let me put it this way: When was the last time you saw anything that was 100% pro little guy and anti-corp passed in this country? What, the late 70s? Earlier? It isn't being a cynic if they really are crooked.

Re:Don't forget the telco(s)

[Trahloc]

So long as this doesn't get in the way of me nullrouting a client for nonpayment/abuse/(d)dos's it wont effect me. Increasing your bandwidth is what you *should* do as an ISP, not lower it so that you can save a couple bucks and piss off your clients.

I'm curious if prepending ASN's would fall under 'discrimination/degrade/interfere' ... if so thats a big no no in my book as well.

Re:Don't forget the telco(s)

[blackraven14250]

Just one thing I'd like to point out:

Politicians are known for building a tower of lies. However, regardless as to how well you engineer the tower from the beginning, the materials you build the tower with can only support so much, and will only go so high before they come crashing down.

The way I see it, they're the ones falling from the top of the damn thing. It's gonna hurt when they hit the ground.

Re:Don't forget the telco(s)

[Wowsers]

The problem of service priority is not just in the US. Here in the UK I left my last ISP because they announced that they will be traffic shaping, throttling certain protocols for priority. An excellent example I remember is the ISP's own VoIP service was to be treated as top priority packets, and something like Skype was to have lower priority. It was a no brainer to leave. The problem is in areas which have no competition and you're locked in to the shyster ISP.

Re:Don't forget the telco(s)

[hairyfeet]

But it isn't the politician you have to worry about. You see, the politician is a person. He can get busted with his hand in the cookie jar, or in a page's pants. The thing you have to worry about is the SYSTEM that the politician sets in place. For an example, see Goldman Sachs. They have been ripping off folks and pumping bubbles up for...what? 120 years or so? How many of them have been head of the Fed? How many of their alumni have had major power in the political arena in the past 20 years?

You see, the politicians that set up all the sweetheart deals for Goldman and let them into the Fed for the first time are rotting in the ground. But Goldman is still here, they are now "too big to fail" and have their alumni making sure they will have the inside track on the next bubble, I'm guessing cap & trade or another green scam. It isn't the man you have to fear, it is the system he sets in motion. Because once power reaches a certain critical mass, then short of revolution there is almost no way to stop it.

Would this apply to the app store?

[HappyDrgn]

Would this apply to the app store? Apple has been actively blocking certain applications from the market for some time now, just wondering how this applies to that market.

Additionally, there was a long time where I could not access AIM services through my Verizon blackberry, it was blocked by Verizon, but has since been lifted and I'm able to use the service fine. I'm curious how this will play out with cell companies and their practices of blocking applications and protocols that compete, or make it easier for consumers to work around expensive competing telco offerings. It's certainly not something specific to Apple, or even something new to telcos in general.

Re:Would this apply to the app store?

[angelbunny]

Unfortunately no. Apple is not an ISP.

Any company that sells hardware can today legally restrict what you run on their hardware. It is a messy subject because if the law changed other companies could legally sell their games to console hardware and you would have the atari issue all over again. If anything Nintendo was the one who started the whole licensing developers thing.

Spammer's delight?

[LoadWB]

Seems like this would also cover the oubound SMTP port 25 blocks that ISPs use to prevent direct-to-MX spam. It is an illegal activity, but SMTP is a legitimate protocol. Thoughts?

Re:Spammer's delight?

[Atti K.]

My ISP does it like this: outbound port 25 is blocked (probably inbound too, never tried) by default, you can use only their SMTP server. But if you need it, you can ask them to open it up for you, explaining shortly why you need it. The whole thing is done online, within their website. They specifically state there that if you're sending spam, they will block it again. Disclaimer: I'm in Europe, but I think such a solution would be legal even under the net neutrality act, and still prevent large amounts of spam from infected PCs. The approach seems right: if a user doesn't know what port 25 is, they probably don't need it. :)

Re:Spammer's delight?

[cdrguru]

What's illegal about it? Spam may be undesired and unwanted but there are plenty of ways it can be sent legally.

Also, with ISPs not cooperating (much) how many spam convictions have there been? Two or three, maybe. Without the ISPs getting on board, which they are loath to do right now, there can be no enforcement and almost all "enforcement" is vigitante action.

Re:Spammer's delight?

[pandymen]

block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device

RTFA. The fact that it's a legitimate protocol doesn't change the legality of the content. Using your logic, pirated movies are illegal content, but they are sent via a "legitimate" protocol.

Re:Spammer's delight?

[LoadWB]

Yup.

"CAN-SPAM"

[oneiros27]

Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device

I'll have to read the bill, but if this is like the last ones, I have my same complaints -- spam is legal under CAN-SPAM (so long as it meets certain requirements), and this will make it illegal for ISPs to block it unless it's 'illegal'.

Re:"CAN-SPAM"

[FunPika]

Will the ISPs be able to simply say "We terminate your service if you use port 25, which we can not legally block."?

Re:"CAN-SPAM"

[FunPika]

Oops...think I replied to wrong comment for some reason...

Re:"CAN-SPAM"

[locallyunscene]

Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device

I'll have to read the bill, but if this is like the last ones, I have my same complaints -- spam is legal under CAN-SPAM (so long as it meets certain requirements), and this will make it illegal for ISPs to block it unless it's 'illegal'.

If we have to allow some undesirable aspects of free speech to continue in order to have free speech, and so far this has always been the case, then I would have no problem writing my representative to sign this bill.

They tried that in the US

[P0ltergeist333]

See the telecommunications act of 1996. This opened up the market for new companies to come in and provide data services over existing lines. Those new companies upgraded the hardware for data, then Greenspan ratcheted up interest rates over 2 points over two years. This helped to start the telco / dot com bubble burst. You then had companies with huge debt from upgrading equipment, a glut in capacity, and their stock prices falling along with the dot coms. One by one, they went out of business, and guess who bought up all the new equipment in their own closets for pennies on the dollar? The ILEC's.

Re:They tried that in the US

[R2.0]

You are forgetting a very crucial point - although the 1996 act "forced" ILECs to open their lines to 3rd party providers, the Ilecs - Verizon especially - fought it tooth and nail. From charging outrageous fees for access ("Your fees are too high". "Really? Compare my fees to the other providers in the area." "There are no other providers." "Exactly.") to "accidentally" disconnecting random 3rd party wires every time a union electrician entered a CO (Oh, no - something broke? Sounds like I'll need some OT to fix it), the ILEC's made sure that, though access was available, it would never really work.

Re:They tried that in the US

[FesterDaFelcher]

disconnecting random 3rd party wires every time a union electrician entered a CO

Sounds good, but can you backup these claims?

Re:They tried that in the US

[blackraven14250]

Occam's Razor! Corporation only exists to profit, said disconnections get more profit (in indirect manner, deceasing reliability and increasing their appeal relative to the competition), corporation would do it.

Re:They tried that in the US

[R2.0]

Prove? No. But the data are that DSL lines would frequently cease working, and the problem was that the wires were disconnected in the CO. I had this happen to my company more than once. How do wires, properly terminated, suddenly become disconnected? It wasn't the copper trolls.

It was also "common knowledge" among the DSL workers, although that isn't exactly data.

Re:They tried that in the US

[P0ltergeist333]

Yeah, I don't know how I could have left that out. Thanks for the assist.

Does this mean the iPhone...

[bhagwad]

Does this mean that Apple can't discriminate between wifi and regular internet connection? Can they be taken to court for not allowing Skype to use regular Internet Server over EDGE? What about Google Voice? Does this sort of legislation ensure that carriers can be treated as "dumb pipes"?

Hoping against hope here...

Re:Does this mean the iPhone...

[Ziwcam]

Apple is not a carrier. They make the phone. They run the App store.

Skype is not a carrier. They make the application.

AT&T *IS* a carrier. But, obstinately, they have no control over Skype or Apple. Apple could still say "Nah, we still want Apps over 10MB to be downloaded over WiFi, for the sake of our customers experience".

Re:Does this mean the iPhone...

[angelbunny]

No this does not. Apple is a hardware vendor not an ISP.

Re:Does this mean the iPhone...

[cdrguru]

If you want a cell phone that has data rates subsidized by voice charges, you are going to have to live with the carrier blocking ways around voice charges.

If you want a cell phone with data that isn't subsidized in this manner, you aren't going to like the bill. You can get a cell modem for around $60 a month with a 5Gb limit on it. After the first 5Gb the rates go up. This starts to show where the billing is going to go with unsubsidized cell phone data plans.

Today, I have unlimited data at $19.95 with a cell phone. I expect if the data wasn't subsidized by voice charges it would be more like $219.95 a month for something that carried 20-30Gb a month.

Too much regulation as it is.

[MaWeiTao]

The most effective way to address this problem and foster competition is to break up the existing structure and excessive regulation that makes it next to impossible for new competitors to enter the market. If this means wresting control of the last mile from providers, so be it.

This wont necessarily guarantee quality, but at least it should ensure that you have a number of competitors to choose from when you want to switch. When I was overseas the quality of the cable service I originally had was utter crap, barely better than dialup. I then switched to DSL, which was a good deal better, but still not as good as I have now. But at least, I had options which forced these companies to lower prices or improve service. I don't remember what I was paying now, but I think it was in the range of $15 a month or so, which is a far cry from the $50 I pay now.

What always happens with these damn regulations? The government steps in to regulate something obvious to appease the masses and then turn around and make concessions to companies in some other way which ends up screwing people up in the long run. And the irony here is that a lot of this is done for the sake of the "small guy" but the end result is that it really ensures that those already established have the resources to survive and thrive. It pretty much helps guarantee monopolistic control for some companies.

At least I happen to be living in an area where there is some level of competition, which basically means one provider for cable and one provider for DSL. So like most other service providers it's like they compete in a vacuum and basically only acknowledge each other by ensuring their prices match. Which reminds me, one thing I'd like to see abolished is this bullshit with contracts.

Re:Too much regulation as it is.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard for new companies to emerge because of the huge infrastructure investments it takes to start an ISP. As it is right now, there is at least some regulation for these natural monopolies. You would have them removed?

Re:Too much regulation as it is.

[Lokitoth]

Which reminds me, one thing I'd like to see abolished is this bullshit with contracts.

You have an out for that - pay the full price (rather than the lowered "introductory" price) and you will not be locked into a contract. It is your choice which to do.

'Up To'

[Odin_Tiger]

Net Neutrality is important and I hope it succeeds, but I what I would really like to see - that is, what would have the greatest impact on me personally - is requirements for reasonable QoS and limits on the 'up to X speed' marketing. That would be in keeping with the 'upgrade your hardware' statement. I'm tired of paying for a certain level of service, only to discover that between 3:30pm and midnight or so, my bandwidth / latency are utter shit because the ISP has more customers than it's hardware can handle during prime use times, but they get away with it because, on average (figuring in non-prime time hours), their service looks pretty good.

Re:'Up To'

[cdrguru]

Sadly, for the US the only solution is for someone to come in an eliminate the neighborhood nodes. You have X bandwidth to the node and 1000 homes connected to the node. When all 1000 are trying to download music, movies and watch Hulu you have a serious bottleneck that was never completely thought out.

You also have the economic realities of connecting 1000 homes in 500 neighborhoods. They were never going to run a 100Mbit dedicated fiber to each and every single home. They were always going to use some kind of concentrator. That means unless the concentrator has 1000 times the bandwidth that is being sold you aren't getting dedicated bandwidth. In reality, you are unlikely to get a fiber connection to the head end over 500Mb. So if marketing of streaming video succeeds 1000 homes get to divy up 500Mb - an average of 0.5Mb per home.

Works fine when 90% of the customers are web surfing and reading text email. Doesn't work so well when 90% of the customers are watching Hulu or other streaming video services. This isn't really fixable, either because to even get 500Mb you are dealing with 10 OC3 fiber connections (48Mb each). Sure, run an OC3 to each home. The home user will be plenty happy with paying $4K or $5K a month for their Internet connection.

Reality is going to intrude someday. Probably won't be this week.

What about content providers?

[ArhcAngel]

ESPN 360 blocks access to anyone visiting it's site from any ISP that didn't pay ESPN a subscription fee. I don't mind ESPN charging me for access to their content in fact I expect to pay for quality content but throwing up a page saying something to the effect of oops! looks like your current internet provider isn't one of our subscribers. You should switch to one of our "partners" below. isn't what I would call neutral. IMHO it's a direct attempt to turn the internet into just another cable provider. What do you think your internet connection will cost as more & more sites start charging the ISP a subscription fee?

Re:What about content providers?

[billcopc]

No, eventually you will migrate to a cheaper ISP that's not being blackmailed by all these content providers. Switching ISPs, for most residential users, is extremely easy. You call up the new guy, give him your credit info, then call the old one and cancel your service. There is no loyalty in the ISP business, people jump ship all the time to score a better deal or faster service.

Re:What about content providers?

[calmofthestorm]

Um...in most of America you don't have a choice. That's why it's a /monopoly/. Until we get some regulation (or competition, but that's just not going to happen) this is an issue.

Unfortunately, I'm still not convinced this bill actually does anything.

This will kill P2P

[commodore64_love]

Yeah I know - I'm being pessimistic, but I've seen what happens to new technologies. DAT (digital audio tape) was killed in the 80s because even though it had legitimate purposes, the courts decided it would mainly be used to steal music, so it was blocked from entering the U.S. for retail sale. Only the professionals had access to DAT machines.

I expect P2P to suffer the same fate as DAT did -

- "Yes these programs like Utorrent have legitimate purposes, but 99% of the traffic is illegal content, so I've decided it's okay for the Megacorp ISP to block these peer-to-peer packets." - Signed, Judge Clueless

Re:This will kill P2P

[Lucidus]

Sorry, but your facts are wrong. I sold many DAT recorders to retail consumers in the late 80s and early 90s. There was strong opposition from the RIAA (surprise!) but they were not successful at blocking the technology. Total sales numbers never approached what Sony had hoped for, but that was largely due to market forces. The Audio Home Recording Act of 1992 effectively levied royalties on DAT recorders and blank tapes, which further discouraged sales.

Re:This will kill P2P

[Dan667]

P2P is not a hardware. And if they are dumb enough to try and block it, a new shiny software package will probably be out the same day works around any restriction. It would be an arms race that the ISP is hopelessly out matched and resourced to try and win.

Re:This will kill P2P

[commodore64_love]

I don't believe you. I lived in the U.S. and I looked-and-looked-and-looked for DAT (tm) recorders to replace my analog cassettes, and they simply did not exist here. Not in Radio Shack or Sears or Wall-to-Wall Sound. Nobody sold them.

Then I went to Germany in 1990 and the DAT recorders and blanks were literally everywhere. I later learned the reason Europe had them, but not U.S. stores, was because their was an U.S. injunction to block them from entering, except for use by professionals.

Not until 1993 did Digital Compact Cassettes (DCC) arrive on the American scene and appear in retail stores, which of course is Not the same standard as DAT (tm) and ultimately failed.

Re:This will kill P2P

[commodore64_love]

You're probably right, but it would be a royal pain to keep upgrading to new programs. If the consumer gets frustrated then the Cable company has won.

BTW the reason folks like Comcast have a monopoly is the same reason your local phone, natural gas, and electric companies have monopolies. It's considered impossible to create a competitive market in these areas, and they are excluded from antitrust laws.

Re:This will kill P2P

[tlassanske]

Think about this scenario: Say the ISP is legally allowed to block your P2P traffic. What if it chooses to only block selected portions of it? Your download has failed, but the ISP still gets paid for the bandwidth you used (and you may not even be able to tell exactly why the transmission failed). So you try again, fail again, and pay them again. So you pay your ISP for the bandwidth to download more software to get around the ISP's software, and they are still able to block your traffic (if not now, with the next iteration of their sniffers). The only person winning this scenario appears to be the ISP, as you are paying them over and over in your attempt to access the illegal content (much of which is probably quite large).

Re:This will kill P2P

[sonicmerlin]

Your signature cites FOX NEWS. What...the...heck. I'm sorry, but that automatically disqualifies you from ever offering a political-related opinion ever again.

Re:This will kill P2P

[Lucidus]

I am sorry you don't believe me, but that doesn't change the facts. I did display and sell DAT recorders, mostly from Sony (e.g. DTC-75ES), at a couple of different high-end shops in the Bay Area. I'm not particularly surprised you didn't find them at Sears or Radio Shack. They were moderately expensive, they were never very popular, they were not a success in the market, but they emphatically were available.

As I type this, I have in front of me a couple of pre-recorded DATs, released in 1988, which I dug out after reading your post. I keep around them as conversation pieces (along with related oddities, such as pre-recorded CD-3s and MiniDiscs), although this is the first time in many years the topic has arisen.

Right now, today, both Amazon and eBay list used DAT recorders for sale, and several new ones show up under a quick Google search. Or you could check Wikipedia, which will corroborate what I am saying. Or of course you can remain misinformed - whatever you prefer.

Re:This will kill P2P

[cayenne8]

"Think about this scenario: Say the ISP is legally allowed to block your P2P traffic. What if it chooses to only block selected portions of it? Your download has failed, but the ISP still gets paid for the bandwidth you used (and you may not even be able to tell exactly why the transmission failed). So you try again, fail again, and pay them again. So you pay your ISP for the bandwidth to download more software to get around the ISP's software, and they are still able to block your traffic (if not now, with the next iteration of their sniffers). The only person winning this scenario appears to be the ISP, as you are paying them over and over in your attempt to access the illegal content (much of which is probably quite large)."

Well, what you say would be true, if people paid per the byte or Kbyte downloaded, but that just isn't the case, at least, I've never heard of a plan like that.

Everyone I know pays a set monthly fee, so there is no 'gotcha' from trying to download/upload all you possibly can. It cost the same for a single web page access, as it does to download a dvd.

Re:This will kill P2P

[BlueStrat]

Your signature cites FOX NEWS. What...the...heck. I'm sorry, but that automatically disqualifies you from ever offering a political-related opinion ever again.

I'm sorry, but your automatic knee-jerk reaction, showing that you've bought into the "Fox News is teh Ebil!!!1ONE" bias without bothering to determine whether a reported fact may or may not be true in a particular instance simply because of the source disqualifies YOU from ever being taken seriously in ANY discussion on ANY topic.

Good DAY Sir!

Re:This will kill P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

You're probably right, but it would be a royal pain to keep upgrading to new programs. If the consumer gets frustrated then the Cable company has won.

BTW the reason folks like Comcast have a monopoly is the same reason your local phone, natural gas, and electric companies have monopolies. It's considered impossible to create a competitive market in these areas, and they are excluded from antitrust laws.

[citation needed]
They don't have a monopoly in my area and are definitely in a competitive market.

Re:This will kill P2P

[evanbd]

If they want to block p2p, things have already gotten difficult. In darknet mode, Freenet is decidedly difficult to block. It talks to no centralized servers ever, and it has no obvious protocol signature that you can spot with DPI (every byte that goes on the wire is encrypted; yes, that includes connection setup). You could catch it with traffic analysis, but that's far more expensive than the normal DPI gear most ISPs are currently willing to deploy.

Re:This will kill P2P

[blackraven14250]

They are trying to implement this in the US, however. I know they aren't having much success in many places, but that doesn't change that they're putting the idea out there and hoping it catches.

Re:This will kill P2P

[calmofthestorm]

Suppose instead of blocking it you focused on detecting it, and use was punishable with ten years in prison. I'd stop using it, even for legal purposes.

Re:This will kill P2P

[BigMeanBear]

You are the Worst Person in the World!

Re:This will kill P2P

[icebraining]

In a darknet like Freenet's, you only communicate with a small set of peers (usually people you trust), and to get data from other people it has to pass trough all the "friends" in between: you can't connect directly to the data holder. This is why the Freenet is *sloooow* compared to most P2P apps.
But there was already a "semi" darknet, allowing direct connections: Kazaa. And I prefer to leave it buried.

Re:This will kill P2P

[u38cg]

Hi from communist Britain! Over here, although utility infrastructure is supplied by regional monoploies, I purchase the actual services from a number of competing companies. These companies then negotiate their own terms with the infrastructure provider, and competition keeps them (vaguely) honest. I can get whoever I want for my broadband (sorry, BT), and I'm certainly not obliged to go with the local monopolist for my service (unless I live in Hull, but that's another story).

Re:This will kill P2P

[commodore64_love]

>>>Your signature cites FOX NEWS. What...the...heck

Actually it cites OBAMA "in his own words". Yeah the Obama speeches are hosted on the foxnews server, but so what? It's still Obama speaking.

Re:This will kill P2P

[Starcub]

P2P is not a hardware.

If it were hardware, or performed in hardware, it would be protected in this bill...

Re:This will kill P2P

[Dan667]

I would download linux distributions on P2P until they sued me then counter sue for emotional distress or whatever seems as stupid as their claim. When I get my million dollar settlement I could then retire and move to somewhere warm with a beach.

Re:This will kill P2P

[Hurricane78]

What are you talking about? Professionals nearly exclusively use DAT and DAT-like digital video cassettes for their recordings even today. It's the only thing with an acceptable quality. Only SSDs have a chance of replacing them. My father and my two brothers work (separately) in the business, so I should know.

Re:This will kill P2P

[evanbd]

Freenet also has an opennet mode, in case you don't know enough other Freenet users to run darknet effectively (you can have both types of connections, too).

The reason Freenet is slow has little to do with darknet — it's because requests have to get routed a few hops regardless of whether you're on opennet or darknet. The reason for this is anonymity; if you connected directly to the source of the data in order to get a high speed transfer, that would give away both which node requested the data and which node was storing it. Freenet trades speed for anonymity.

That said, Freenet certainly could be faster. It's been improving in speed in recent updates (though slowly). There are a couple major changes in development that should be out soon that will make another big boost in speed. The trick is figuring out how to improve speed without sacrificing security, which makes the problem rather hard.

Re:This will kill P2P

[BlueStrat]

Your signature cites FOX NEWS. What...the...heck. I'm sorry, but that automatically disqualifies you from ever offering a political-related opinion ever again.

I'm sorry, but your automatic knee-jerk reaction, showing that you've bought into the "Fox News is teh Ebil!!!1ONE" bias without bothering to determine whether a reported fact may or may not be true in a particular instance simply because of the source disqualifies YOU from ever being taken seriously in ANY discussion on ANY topic.

Good DAY Sir!

Oh noes!! "-2 Troll"!!!

I'm sorry mighty /. mods, I will try hard to be more biased against Fox News in the future and not allow any of that independent thought stuff to interfere, I promise...OK?

Fox News has always been Evil.

We have always been at war with Eastasia.

Winst...err, Strat

Re:This will kill P2P

[ElSupreme]

Except your local phone, natural gas and electric companies have to oblige to regualtions. Where your internet and cable providers have to answer to no one.

Yes there are government 'sponsored' monopolies (utilities), but cable and internet aint one of em.

Re:This will kill P2P

[badkarmadayaccount]

Hello, Taiwan? Did you get that Verilog tarball? Great, start production at full blast, our databases can't keep up with with preorders.

Re:This will kill P2P

[Anonymous Coward]

IIRC hull has to support the same law as BT, it's just no other company wants a chance at such a tiny subscriber base compared to what they could get with a similar deal with BT.

Re:This will kill P2P

[u38cg]

Yep; LLU costs a bundle plus Hull uses different wire from everyone else so you need calibrated equipment.

Re:This will kill P2P

[sonicmerlin]

I highly recommend you watch "Outfoxed". You don't understand that Fox News is nothing more than a *propaganda machine* that uses its "Fair and Balanced News" moniker to influence American culture and society in ways that are opposite to the very idea of a democracy.

scary sounding

[Gogo0]

'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009'

sounds great! who would vote against a bill that preserves freedom?!

so... what did they hide in it?

Another underhanded bill

[billcopc]

Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device

No, Mr Markey, you don't fucking get it. Back to the drawing board, please!

IANAL, but I am wise enough to know that the bolded words are a LOOPHOLE. Every single bit of data should be transmitted without obstruction by the ISP. If they can't be trusted as judge, they certainly can't be trusted as executioner either. Let law enforcement do what law enforcement does, and keep the ISP out of it. The only thing this bill will cause, if succesfully passed into law, will be to spur the introduction of many more bills to codify a slew of "unlawful" things the telcos want to police. It's not like they have any shortage of lobbyists and contribution money. Take the whole thing out of their grasp.

If a highway construction guy barricaded a highway, by his own whim, because he suspects "his" highway might be used by drug traffickers, is he legally permitted to do so ? Or is that considered vigilante behaviour ? Then why should we allow ISPs to be vigilante internet cops ?

Re:Another underhanded bill

[cdrguru]

Then why should we allow ISPs to be vigilante internet cops ?

Because (a) nobody else wants the job, (b) nobody else can do the job, and (c) the job really, really needs doing.

Wouldn't it be nice if botnet's were declared to be illegal? They aren't for the most part today. And because of that botnet traffic can't really be interfered with. Kicking a clearly infected computer off a network just raises a firestorm of protest because today it is not something that is clearly sanctioned. So small ISPs just watch as a few customers consume the network while saying "Looks like another botnet wave."

Similarly, there is no clear way for law enforcement to proceed when network intrusions occur. Right now the standard pretty much is $25,000 in provable damages. Until you have that, the FBI will not get involved and local law enforcement just passes everything to the FBI. The result is script kiddies get away with everything until the do something "really big", and then law enforcement may step in. May. Sometimes. Especially if the target isn't a Fortune 100 business. This is not a good solution.

Should the ISP be the copyright enforcement agents? Probably not. But there are literally hundreds of other enforcement activities that the ISP needs to be fully on board with. Sometimes this means doing something and other times it is just assisting. Today they are sitting on the sidelines and often as not actively preventing any enforcement activity from occurring.

Re:Another underhanded bill

[Anonymous Coward]

If a highway construction guy barricaded a highway, by his own whim, because he suspects "his" highway might be used by drug traffickers, is he legally permitted to do so ? Or is that considered vigilante behaviour ?

Sounds like a good premise for an action movie. I can just imagine a shotgun-wielding Bruce Willis yelling "Not on MY highway!", just before blowing up a van full of drug dealers.

Re:Another underhanded bill

[locallyunscene]

First of all, the proposal you suggest ignores traffic shaping for QoS which is essential to maintaining a healthy system. Second, ISP's could all ready act as "Internet Police", but they don't want to take on that responsibility. The above bill would at least make a vigilante action that affects lawful traffic unlawful itself, and therefore prosecutable. That's a step better than the legal gray area now, IMO.

Re:Another underhanded bill

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree... Who's going to determine what is a "lawful" application?

This is lame, I'm writing Senator Markey right now...

Re:Another underhanded bill

[seekertom]

Another point of view.... I watch netflix shows on my laptop. I seldom watch my cable-powered tv. Why? It's because of all the fk$%^kg commercials! Years ago, we had ota tv, funded by commercial sponsors. That seemed reasonable. Then came along paid subscription tv, cable tv, and it was supposed to give us commercial-free tv, since the service was paid for directly by the consumer, not the commercial advertisers. However, corporate greed intervened and after market share was gained, the rules changed and commercials crept in to cable tv, slowly at first, but eventually ending up with more commercial than content like we have now! What's worse, so many of the commercials are advertising the damn show in progress! How stoopit is that? Point is, get rid of the heavy load of commercial interruptions and I'll go back to watching tv again. Sounds like competition working in favor of the consumer, but if the isps are legally allowed to block or interfere with my netflix shows, they effectively eliminate competion, and that sure as heck ain't the American way! Thanks for lis'nin' seekertom

DPI automatically degrades lawful traffic

[riceboy50]

Wouldn't the mythical deep packet inspection mentioned by the summary interfere with and degrade lawful traffic? It seems like only tactics which do not degrade legitimate traffic would be admissible from my uninformed understanding of this legislation.

Re:DPI automatically degrades lawful traffic

[BigMeanBear]

DPI doesn't necessarily mean that it happens before a switch or router forwards a packet. Flows of traffic can be analyzed separately from the processes of a router or switch in making packet forwarding decisions. This separate analysis can influence adjustments to QoS rules. So, no, DPI does not necessarily interfere with all traffic.

Needs work

[crusisredux]

This act doesn't account for any legitimate use of differentiated services. As an ISP that also offers VoIP, by classifying voice traffic over data traffic on our local network, even to the degree that it has a negligible impact on data traffic, would be in violation of this act. I think it needs to be amended to take into consideration legit uses of differentiated services, and not just as an evil that big telco and cable companies can use to prevent or limit access to content of their choosing. In spirit i would support this act, but it going to take some modification to insure it doesn't create the anti-competitive environment it's intended to prevent.

Bill's Title = True Intent of Bill???

[whoisjoe]

I'm confused. The bill is called Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009, but having read the bill, it looks like it would actually do the OP says it will. I was beginning to think that there was a rule that a bill's title has to be antithetical to its true intent (e.g., the PATRIOT Act and Internet Freedom and Broadband Deployment Act)

Couldn't this technically be used....

[TriZz]

I didn't RTFA, but the summary sounds like it could end Apple's App store. At which point do you draw the line between cell phone and computer? Internet service and phone service? I mean, they're not REALLY all that different anymore.

The end of monthly bandwidth caps.

[angelbunny]

This may not benefit google voice and it may not benefit the 'unlawful' users. But it does do one thing which imho is better than nothing:

All ISPs (cellular too) can not push a monthly cap on its customers. This means no more 5GB cap on phone ISPs, no 40GB cap on many cable isps, no comcast 250GB cap, and so on...

One step at a time.

Re:The end of monthly bandwidth caps.

[Starcub]

The bill doesn't prevent ISP's from establishing teired service levels, or employing BW caps as part 'reasonable network management' practice. It simply prevents them from discriminating based upon source, method, or content type.

This is NOT network neutrality, it's a kludge!

[macraig]

I'll repeat the same thing I told both the FCC (re: National Broadband Plan) and Rep. Markey regarding his bill:

The only true form of 'Net neutrality is the kind where the physical medium - the wires or "tubes" - is collectively owned by the public. Our network of roads is almost entirely publicly owned, and the companies that build and maintain them are contractors... we don't allow them to own the stretches of asphalt they lay down. Contractors are exactly what AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and all the others in the telecom infrastructure ownership business should be, rather than owners.

We made an error in judgement when AT&T began laying the first telegraph wires, and we failed to recognize the future import and insist that they deed the wires to the public trust. We perhaps had a second chance to correct our error when AT&T was hauled into court for antitrust issues: we could have forced AT&T to sell back the wires to We The People at that time, as a part of the judgement, or perhaps transitioned it into a non-profit pseudo-governmental agency like the USPS, rather than breaking it into smaller entities which STILL owned the wires in their respective fiefdoms.

We're still paying - dearly - for that original error in judgement and our continuing failure to recognize the error and deal with it, even belatedly. It appears that it might now require a revolution with guns to get the wires back into public hands, because the only way any of these corporations' CEOs are going to relinquish this profit-making control is by forcibly prying the wires from the vise-like grasp of their cold dead fingers.

As a result, we now talk about kludges and band-aids for the problem, in the form of laws and regulations, and we call these band-aids "Net neutrality" even though they're really nothing of the sort.

Does the FCC have the spine and "guns" to finally create true telecom network neutrality? I doubt it, but I suggest that perhaps you should try. If not, please do not entertain any of these legislative band-aids: in this case covering the wound with a band-aid will not actually aid in healing, rather only hide the wound from view and defer the surgery necessary to finally heal it. LET IT FESTER IN THE OPEN - in other words let the telecom companies section and "tier" the network - until it becomes so noxious that we're collectively ready to agree to the surgery.

Re:This is NOT network neutrality, it's a kludge!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, talk about violence and use geek words like kludge. That's how to talk to politicians, source-oriented communication all the way.

Re:This is NOT network neutrality, it's a kludge!

[Anonymous Coward]

Wires are the kind of thing that need funds and licenses to lay down, therefore they need to be controlled by somebody. If they're controlled by the government, surveillance and censorship becomes a ton easier, because there are no ISPs left whining how burdensome it is.

The only kind of global network that can be independent of corporations and governments is a wireless mesh network. But sadly we don't have an ad-hoc protocol that could work on such scale, or the free radio spectrum for it.

Re:This is NOT network neutrality, it's a kludge!

[macraig]

Where's your politically correct contribution to the dialog, then, Mister Anonymous Coward?

Re:This is NOT network neutrality, it's a kludge!

[macraig]

I think your tinfoil hat is a bit too tight. Do you avoid the highways, too, out of fear that the guvment is tracking you with unseen devices under the asphalt? Do you cringe when you pull up over a sensor coil embedded around an intersection?

Re:This is NOT network neutrality, it's a kludge!

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at Iran, they're routing everything through a surveillance/censorship center. The only difference would be that they're doing it in the name of the islamic republic, while in the western world it's always about terrorism, child porn or copyright protection.
While your current government might be less totalitarian than the previous one, by giving it control over the network, you're giving the control to all subsequent governments too.

Re:This is NOT network neutrality, it's a kludge!

[macraig]

I actually never said "the government" would have control of it: what I said is that the network would be publicly owned. It could be a non-profit or a private contracting firm(s) that actually controls and manages it for us. It could wind up being much like what we have now, the difference being that the contractors wouldn't own the wires and would not have the last word... we would.

I think your tinfoil hat is a bit too tight, too.

Re:This is NOT network neutrality, it's a kludge!

[Trecares]

While I understand your point, I also have to point out the sorry condition that a number of our roads and bridges are in, and it's not getting any better. Who's to say that the an publicly owned system will be as diligent in not only maintaining itself, but upgrading itself as better technology becomes available? Who determines what and when it's time to upgrade? What's the reasonable price and number of years for the next investment?

The problem is that there is no express mandate to upgrade equipment; and a monopoly delays progress while the company attempts to extract the most value from their investment. Opening up the lines to competition and abolishing multi-year contracts will help quite a bit. The insidious thing is that some of those existing contracts are set up to auto-renew when they expire so if you don't cancel it, you're locked into another term. I think a private, and separate company or a non-profit organization could set up standard access fees for ISP's and manage the last mile connections. They could work out deployment plans for new technology, estimate upgrade costs and so on. Their fees would be dictated by the upgrade time line and maintenance costs.

Re:This is NOT network neutrality, it's a kludge!

[macraig]

I don't see any reason why we can't retain ownership of the infrastructure and yet have private contractors to manage, control, and maintain that infrastructure. It's the ownership that would give us the ultimate control: contractors can be fired and replaced. Perhaps if we were paying the same princely sums for highway maintenance that we do for telecom network access and usage, our roads would be better maintained by the contractors we already have for that work. It seems that (a) we completely underestimated the long-term expense of building that highway (and bridge) system, and (b) we just don't have enough money to keep those contractors busy.

Even if these proposed telecom contractors weren't charging us as much as the current telecom oligopoly, I think there would still be plenty of money rolling in to keep the network greased and running. If one of them bungles the job, there will be another contractor eager to take their place.

The bottom line is still the same: true network neutrality REQUIRES that we collectively own the network itself. Calling anything else network neutrality is just cowardly manipulation.

Would Be Nice If...

[Nom du Keyboard]

Would be nice if the bill simply said that:

Customer pays for a given level of service and a given maximum number of bits transported each month. You must declare what those numbers are and not impede them in any way. False advertising of either number is punished severely. Ranges of numbers are not acceptable.

Does it need to be any more complicated than that?

Re:Would Be Nice If...

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it does.

If it is not more complicated than that, there won't be any opportunities to exploit or work around the rules for enterprising companies, would there? We can't have that, obviously. Someone PLEASE think of the money-grubbing bastards out there.

Equal opportunities and actual competition based on merits and quality is not wanted by these people.

Re:Would Be Nice If...

[jimmah6786]

I agree with and understand your statement Nom, however there would be tremendous overhead to manage an implementation like this. There would need to be hardware/software to manage, monitor, filter, and limit traffic for each dedicated line to each consumer. The traffic shaping and filtering technologies do exist, and are often used by institutions as that serve many clients/employees/students. Those of which all go through the same connection, not individual managed. Another point I also ponder is does the average person have the knowledge to make an informed decision on their maximum bit rate. Right now we have a simlar method from our ISPs you know "10Mb/s 14Mb/s and turbo 16Mb/s" (these are made up). This goes hand and hand in retrospect, let say you have a customer who is aware and knowledgeable about this "choosing of a max bandwidth". They will be expecting to get exactly what they pay for...understandable, yes. However realistically it is not. There are many factors that go into what the end consumer sees as their max bandwidth...the source of the data, how fast it is being uploaded(not the ISP), packet overhead, hardware failure, attenuation rates, signal-noise ratios, etc. This leading to my question to you..When or what signifies a a point in which you should be able to consider it false advertising? I am in no way in support of the ISPs as of now...I am a firm believer that the ISPs need to be considered for taking the law into their own hands, which is wrong. Blocking, degrading, or preventing the flow of information should be punishable, definitely, but we need a metric and a baseline. Usually these issues are not as black and white, such as a page doesn't load because the ISP took down a route to that IP source. I am hoping that with this bill it will wake up the ISPs and alert them that it is not okay to traffic shape or filter or degrade in anyway. They are a service and as such should push and pursue ways to increase customer satisfaction and improving their product, not ways to prevent its possible uses. I hope I made some sense here....be gentle.

Re:Would Be Nice If...

[Starcub]

There are already laws against false advertising. It appears as though they are not enforced. I don't think I like the idea of making the FCC the sole agency responsible for investigating violations against net neutrality laws either. I imagine this legislation is going to cost a lot and I don't know that the FCC is going to be able to devote the resources necessary to ensure sufficient enforcement. Congress could easily pass this bill while axing it at the same time, simply by cutting the FCC's budget, and appointing an industry friendly FCC commissioner.

media tycoons from Australia

[MrKaos]

The opposite number of Rupert Murdoch in Australia for many years, Kerry Packer once said that he loved it when the government tried to legislate for his interests to behave a certain way as the more legislation that was made the more loopholes there would be to allow him to do exactly what he wanted to do.

I suspect the same thing will happen here.

Re:Ear marks?

[Sfing_ter]

TNSTAAFL!

Re:well This shoudl F*CK Apple & AT&T some

[davidsyes]

According to AT&T's site:

http://www.wireless.att.com/iphone/

"iPhone is configured to work only with the wireless services provided by AT&T."

According to the article summary:

"Should the bill pass, Internet service providers will not be able to 'block, interfere with, discriminate against, impair, or degrade' access to any lawful content from any lawful application or device. "

If i understand correctly, the iPhone has a SIM card, and this means that any carrier willing or able to support and sell the iPhone should be able to. The exclusivity deal with AT&T is NOT neutral, since in overseas markets Apple is (isn't it?) forced to not have exclusive carrier deals. If Asian and European carriers using different variations of current generations of cell technology can support the iPhone, then so should US carriers be able to. So, to read "iPhone is configured to work only with the wireless services provided by AT&T." does not -- to me -- let AT&T off the hook. Somewhere in tiny minds of lawyers, bean counters and tech shapers, there had to be some serious hashing and gnashing back and forth over how to avoid anti-trust/conspiracy/collusion issues.

From what i know first hand, there are people who so badly want the iPhone but despise or otherwise don't want AT&T that they buy the iPhone, early term but only after the trial period, then keep the phone, having paid early termination, which still ends up being less than buying the phone without a contract.

Why do people have to go this route, a bunch of rigmarole bullshit extra work? I think it's because apple so jealously guards its image that it doesn't want EVERYbody to have an iPhone. Or, their calculus (mix machine/profit-margin-cache calculator) says, "mehhh, 170 MILLION is good, we don't need an extra 100M.", But, even IF apple could care less about there being 250M iPhone users, having ONE SOLE CARRIER would be a serious impediment.

So, in my serious, tin-foil-hat mindset, i'd dare say AT&T definitely had a hand in sweetening the pot for Apple to not go multi-carrier in the US. I'd say the phone's pricing was set to please Apple, please AT&T's board, and then prevent others domestic from carrying the phone. It's stupid, and it's mean. If Apple would love to have 20% of an additional 100 million iPhones and AT&T hasn't got the bandwidth, tough. Let other carriers prove they will or they have upgraded switching gear to route or manage the packets (content and quality) the iPhone sends/expects.

I ride BART almost every day (every day for work, and 1-2 times on the weekends) and on any given average commute (not even talking packed cars, but all seats full, with some standing riders), i can see 5-10 iPods or iPhones, and often 4-5 are in random clusters of unrelated riders. Can Motorola, Samsung, Hitachi, Panasonic, even HTC or Sony/Sony-Ericsson claim that? I serously doubt it.

I really hope the FCC ends this exclusivity deal and forces net neutrality down the throats of carriers and phone desingers. Design the database to CRM-like handle USER-MANAGED profiles, and knock of the delayed-billing/overbill game. Let users set up a basic profile to hard-stop calls or data streams if the handset is roaming rapidly as if stolen or passed around or cloned. Let the user have real-time syncing to the billing system to eliminate confusion, and to let the user have peace of mind.

(Had to re-write this tome because Opera 10Beta crashed on me when I used a rapid Ctrl+A keystroke (with the cursor outside the comment box). On this computer, it's repeatable. No, unlike Firefox, my beautifully-scripted masterpiece was NOT returned to the screen for me to hit "submit"....)

Re:Ear marks?

[Curunir_wolf]

sp. TANSTAAFL

What about preventing sites doing this to ISP's?

[plasmacutter]

ESPN360 has been pulling a reverse on the "charge for access" BS the ISP's whispered about to start this whole movement.

They offered it free to colleges to hook people, then demanded cable style "bulk license fees" from ISP's.

One by one they have been caving. Complaints to the FCC regarding this practice, which forces every customer to pay for services they likely don't want or use, have been slow producing results.

Why do you think that?

[mosb1000]

If they want to do this, why haven't they done it? It would be completely legal (until this bill passes).

never to see network neutrality

[b1nary atr0phy]

Too bad we'll never see true network neutrality because ultimately it's the government who determines what is and isn't lawful, obviously allowing net providers to block access at the government's discretion. Almost reminds me of when the phone companies bowed to the almighty government and tapped our phones.

Memories...

[redstar427]

Are you sure you can even remember what it was like with no Internet??
I think not!

Re:Memories...

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you can even remember what it was like with no Internet??
I think not!

Are you making fun of the GP's username?

legal vs. illegal content is poison pill

[stmfreak]

By encoding the allowance to block illegal content, they provide a "reasonable" provision that no one in their right mind would disagree with and set the stage for all future battles. We already lost to the DMCA which declared quite a bit of information and sharing thereof illegal. That could be blocked. Next, we'll see anti-P2P legislation and then they can block all those protocols and ports. Then you can look at the illegal devices and please note Apple is trying to turn an unlocked iPhone into an illegal device so your hacked tivo or homebrewed mythtv is suddenly blockable.

This doesn't give us net neutrality, it just pacifies us while moving the game into the lobbyists hands.

It's about stopping vertical integration

[js_sebastian]

And what does it mean in practice ? The way dsl providers and large telco's "discriminate" in traffic is by peering relationships (e.g. with google). If a site is big enough and has enough money, they can get a direct private link into their network, whereas they let cheap content providers who won't pay (*cough* cogent *cough*) have only a single connection and then let it overflow. They refuse to expand that connection, except if cogent pays a large fee, which they simply won't do.

Does this law mandate that telco's peer with everybody ? Or does it simply prohibit a few types of Qos ? The first would be a very good thing for competition, the second would be very bad indeed.(...)

The point is that cable providers sell you internet.. but also cable TV. So they want to stop you from accessing streaming TV over IP (unless they get a share of the money). Similarly, DSL providers sell you internet... but also phone. So they want to stop you from accessing VOIP telephony from somebody else (again, unless they get their cut). Basically, they want to control what you can do with the internet connection you pay for so they can squeeze more money out of you. If they were allowed to start doing this, they might not stop there of course. The scenario of content providers having to pay for "fast" (meaning not gimped) access for their customers seems remote, but who knows. Loss of freedom of speech etc is just collateral damage.

Does this mean that it's de-facto illegal for providers to deliver voip service that keeps working well when you're torrenting ?

Maybe I'm just feeding a troll. But no, it's not about "prohibiting" QoS. It is about prohibiting discriminating against competitors. If I have a QoS rule that says voip has priority over torrents, that's fine, so long as it applies to ALL voip use, including third party voip providers. What they should not be allowed to do is prioritize the content they sell you (their IPTV/voip/etc) at the expense of everyone else (youtube/another voip provider/etc).

Must have Fiber, ONLY 4 choices, nothing else will

[lamapper]

American consumers MUST have fiber to their homes.

The FCC should at least update their definition of high speed Internet from 768Kbps to 100 Mbps / 100 Mbps, based on Japanese success since 2000, 9 years ago.

Given the current US market, only the following four things give American consumers any hope of freedom, bandwidth and Net Neutrality, but especially true and honest high speed bandwidth.

1. Government Deregulation. (This is how Japan got first 100 Mbps / 100Mbps and now get 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps for less per month)
2. Google via laying undersea cables, http://bit.ly/y8Ra7, they may be the only company large enough in America currently to pull this off. And they have the need from a bandwidth perspective with their business.
3. Greenlight, http://bit.ly/JKiSo, assuming the Cable Companies and Telcos have not paid off your elected officials already to prevent them from coming into your town, city and/or county. As many have already posted around the net, this has happened in their areas, politicians are bought and paid for. Also assumes that peering agreements can be reached. (Net Neutrality also) The American Telco / Cable Co / Wireline / Wireless Co oligopoly is lobbying D.C. at the rate of $1.5 million per week to protect their tiered pricing. Imagine if they put this plus the estimated $300 Billion they have received in government money + taxes + fees since the 1990s into new Fiber, we would already have Fiber to our home. When you think about it, it is criminal!
4. A new telco / fiber company enters the American market without peering agreements with any American telco and thus Cable Companies, Wireless companies, etc.... And is able to successfully put their own fiber in the ground or purchase dark fiber and light it up across the country.

Those are the ONLY solutions to the telco - cable company - wireless oligopoly and political lobbying that has been hurting Americans since 1990, preventing innovation. There was a reason AT&T was broken up, remember that, if the problems were not addressed and fixed, blame your elected officials. (Especially if they are in the committees changing the bills and laws for the lobbyists) The buck MUST stop with them. If American companies wanted to give Americans 100Mbps / 100Mbps for $55 or less per month (as in Japan since 2000, 9 years ago) or 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps for $52 or less per month (since 2006, 3 years ago) it would have already happened. It has not. The only logical reason for this not to have already occurred is the oligopoly greed of tiered pricing. This fact alone speaks volumes, all bad, the industry screams regulate me or I will continue to screw you, based on their actions. Their words are lies and FUD. History is loud and clear.

Remember the technology to increase bandwidth on a single strand of fiber from X1 to X1024 has existed since before 2000! As of 2006, the Japanese are using this technological innovation to increase bandwidth from 100Mbps / 100Mbps up to 1 Gbps / 1 Gbps. They can go higher still with the same fiber that was put into the ground way back in 2000 and before. Bandwidth scarcity is a MYTH!

You have to love this quote, we can hope but we should not leave it to hope alone, we must act:

upgrade your infrastructure and don't even think about blocking or degrading traffic. The war over network neutrality has been fought in the last two Congresses, and last week's introduction of the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2009' [PDF] means that legislators will duke it out a third time.

You mean a fight over pro-anything-consumer has not won against the over $1.5 million spent every week lobbying our elected officials has not been won after two fights and we are going for a third attempt and expect a different outcome, why? Seems crazy to me also, to do the same thing and expect a different resul

what about the constitution

[paulpach]

How come no one even asks anymore whether a bill would violate the constitution?. Section 1,8 lists the 20 powers that congress has, go ahead and read them, they are written in plain English unlike any bill that has been passed in the last few decades. The 10th amendment explicitly reserves any other power to the states or to the people.

Nowhere in those 20 listed powers can you read anything about telecommunications or anything that could be remotely interpreted to justify net neutrality.

The right to free speech and assembly

[Anonymous Coward]

and be secure in your papers.

If the ISP can snoop you have no security in your papers.

If the ISP can throttle who you can speak to, you have no free assembly.

If the ISP can ban communications, you have no speech.

PS show where it says you can create a corporation in the constitution?

Re:The right to free speech and assembly

[paulpach]

If the ISP can snoop you have no security in your papers.

What does this have to do with the constitution?

If the ISP can throttle who you can speak to, you have no free assembly.

you still have the right to free assembly. They do not have the obligation to help you, especially since you are using their property and accepted their terms.

If the ISP can ban communications, you have no speech.

Same as above.

PS show where it says you can create a corporation in the constitution?

nowhere. That is why the government does not (or should not) create corporations.

If you read the constitution, it is very simple: unless prohibited by the constitution, individuals can do whatever they want. Unless granted by the constitution, the federal government can do nothing. Nowadays, they completely ignore this document, and government does whatever they want.

The constitution is not meant to restrict individuals or companies, it is meant to restrict government. That is why it explicitly says that unless a power is granted to the federal government by the constitution, that power is reserved to the individuals or the states.

If net neutrality was proposed at a state level, then yes, it would be compliant with the constitution, each state would choose whether to implement it or not.

Not true Net Neutrality, still okay?

[Anonymous Coward]

I read the PDF of the bill and, while not true net neutrality, does not seem to put any additional restrictions on "illegal" activities. To be honest the bill doesn't seem to do anything noteworthy whatsoever. It only applies to legal traffic that probably isn't touched to begin with.
Bottom Line: As a file sharer, (of both legal and "illegal" content,) should I be worried?