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.

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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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[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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[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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[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.

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

"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.

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?