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

Re:well

[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")?

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:well

[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.

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

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.