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

well

[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.

Re:well

[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.

Re:well

[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 They want to prop up their outdated business model (television content) by blocking video content over the internet (which is vastly cheaper for consumers).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.

Re:well

[TooMuchToDo]

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

Re:well

[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.

Re:well

[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.

Re:well

[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.

Re:well

[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.

Re:well

[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.

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...

[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.

"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

[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

[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

[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: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.

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?

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.

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: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.

"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: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.

'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.

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 ?

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)

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: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.