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Cisco, Motorola, and Other Companies Take Aim At Net Neutrality Rules
angry tapir writes "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced last month that he would seek to develop formal rules prohibiting Internet service providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content and applications. However, 44 companies — including Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia — have sent a letter to the FCC saying new regulations could hinder the development of the Internet. A group of 18 Republican US senators have also sent a letter to Genachowski raising concerns about net neutrality regulations."
Anything the government does is evil, restricts freedoms and is inefficient by definition.
So please, stop this evil FCC man in his tracks.
In other news, Google moves to Russia.
People replying to my sig annoy me. That's why I change it all the time.
No, new regulations could hinder THEIR DEVELOPMENT of price per byte structure which they've been salivating about for a LONG TIME. Greedy pricks. Green-wash as you are able, we will see through it and hold you accountable.
Well, it would make their more expensive traffic filtering, blocking, and shaping equipment less valuable and harder to sell.
I don't understand the position of the equipment makers in this objection
Selling traffic shaping solutions, presumably.
Simplify?
The meter-makers want a customer. Otherwise, the old stuff still works fine.
"Speaking the Truth in times of universal deceit is a revolutionary act." -- George Orwell
Passing packets freely is, relatively speaking, computationally cheap. Deep packet inspecting, and QoSing, and sorting, and ranking, and grading, and whatnoting packets as they pass by is computationally expensive.
It sure would be bad for business if potential customers (er, I mean, "the future health of the internet") didn't need sophisticated networking gear dedicated to price discrimination...
When there's little choice in what providers are available in your area, there's very little reason for ISPs to provide better service. Internet users need to be able to move to viable alternatives when Comcast and friends implement anti-net neutrality measures. If you don't like your p2p being throttled, there should be somewhere else to take your money. Get rid of those local monopolies; they are more trouble than they are worth. There are a lot of changes to the current system that would improve the situation that involve little more than discouraging monopolies and stronger enforcement of current laws.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Well if both the Corporations and the Republicans are against it it must be a good thing for the Public.
It's the whole ISP-level QOS "google please pay us extra for people browsing YouTube for it not to suck" deal that's tricky and takes fancy hardware.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Then let the "development" of the Internet it be "hindered". If IPTV takes another decade because new business models have be created to adapt to a neutral network, then so be it. I am happy to wait. If the capacity available to me grows more slowly because there are fewer deal making opportunities for ISPs and content producers then so be it. I've got enough bandwidth. Corrupting the relatively simple model of the existing network by letting Disney et al. carve it up into lucrative morsels to be passes among the elite is not appealing. Whichever content providers don't like it can just keep their stuff on cable until we drop our cable service as we've dropped our landlines. Their stuff just isn't that important to me.
The capitalist claims the market is agile. Adaptation is supposed to be swift. I believe this. I therefore believe we should permit the market to prove this by preventing the aforementioned companies from molding the Internet into models they are already comfortable with. Let them adapt to a neutral network. The Internet isn't broken and doesn't need to be fixed by Time Warner. The Internet will not fail if Ted Turner doesn't get a cut of my ISP's revenue.
There you go; an argument for Net Neutrality from the conservative perspective.
Lurking at the bottom of the gravity well, getting old
Right now they throttle people who actually use their connection to its fullest because there's little monetary incentive for the ISPs not to do this. They are for profit corporations, if it is profitable to throttle people, that is exactly what they will do. The system needs to be set up in such a way as to make it profitable for them not to throttle or otherwise restrict people's connections not just a simple legislative band-aid but actively attack the root causes of the throttling and general anti-net neutral policies.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1036_3-6075472.html
But he isn't a trusted expert on anything, right?
My rights don't need management.
Being able to extract more cash from the user base without adding anything of value by using artificial scarcity.
They've already stolen $300B in the fiber optic debacle.
Now they need to do bandwidth shaping on an antiquated US Internet trunk so they can charge for fast tracking the fat cats and slow tracking the peasants, but at higher prices, of course, because all that shaping requires new, EXPENSIVE equipment which will require higher access fees to get an ROI on that expensive equipment.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
I suspect that it comes down to margins.
In the (almost entirely hypothetical, at least at the retail level) neutral and highly competitive internet access market, demand for bandwidth is very high, because bandwidth is cheap and useful for almost anything. In the hypothetical non-neutral oligopolistic internet access market, demand for bandwidth is lower, because bandwidth is more expensive, and less useful(since uses contrary to the ISP's interests are throttled or blocked). However, in the first instance, ISP margins are razor thin, and ISPs demand heavily commodified network gear, distinguished largely by price and simple packet passing capacity. Network equipment vendors will have higher demand; but for lower margin products. In the second instance, ISP margins are substantially higher, and sophistication of network gear(along with continuous upgrades for playing cat-and-mouse with blocked applications) becomes a major competitive edge, which keeps bottom-feeding commodity gear away.
The first scenario means greater bulk of network hardware sales; but mostly bottom-feeding commodity packet passers to ISPs who are pinching their pennies until they bleed. The second scenario means selling less bulk switching capacity; but a lot more "integrated strategic traffic management solutions" and whatnot, to ISPs with real money.
Net Neutrality rules could hinder development of the Internet in directions that are harmful to the public. Unlike the parties mentioned above, I feel that hindering harmful business practices is actually a Good Thing.
"In prison you just have to shut your eyes and take it. Here you have to shut your eyes and give it."
No... If the Internet gets bigger, the legacy US hardware suppliers are more likely to lose.
Their real value-added stuff is corporate not carrier. Smart boxes that do more with less bandwidth... People need to get QOS and traffic conditioning just to make their VOIP work over internet connections without issues. If bandwidth is scarce, it becomes a valuable resource. Managing it becomes a market.
But the Chinese companies ( Huawei, ZTE etc ) are doing more and more in the high bandwidth area and it's cheap equipment, so you can afford to spend more on fiber rollouts. Some of that stuff is beginning to displace US manufacturers now.
And then when you have masses of un-restricted bandwidth and you don't need special routers anymore... Voip just works because you have lots of capacity and nearly no jitter. You don't need complex setups anymore - just cheap equipment.
So the legacy manufacturers lose out in both markets...
They could compete I'm sure, but that takes innovation and progress. It's much easier to deal with the status quo. Especially when you dumped all your best developers to concentrate on selling existing product a year ago... Damn that pesky R&D.
GrpA
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
"When the government picks winners and losers in the marketplace, the incentive to invest disappears,"
By granting monopolies government has already picked winner and losers. There is no competition in broadband and the lucky few who have a choice in broadband providers has the choice between the cable company and the phone company. A duopoly isn't competition.
I wish the letter with the name of those 18 Republican senators had been linked to if nothing else, I bet these politicians don't believe in competition or free markets either.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
According to Motorola CEO Greg Brown, Net Neutrality is, in principle, a good thing.
So I was surprised to see them in the list of supporters of this letter. It makes no sense for Motorola to allow the carriers to arbitrarily exclude devices from their networks. For those who don't know, Motorola has a love-hate relationship with the carriers. We can't just sell phones to a given carrier's customers - we must first sell it to the carrier, who then decides key things:
As an employee of Motorola, it constantly frustrates me that the carriers have the ability to make or break a phone, regardless of it's technical merits or feature set. If the carrier doesn't want a compelling feature to work on their network, it doesn't. It makes no difference if we make the best camera phone in the business if the carrier decides the user has to pay for each picture taken with the phone. It makes no difference if we have the best phone games on the market if the carrier decides those games won't ship on phones bought by their customers. You get the point - the carriers get in the way of Motorola's business model.
I hate posting anonymously, but I'm paranoid about the repercussions this might cause at work.
I don't understand the position of the equipment makers in this objection
They helped set up the Great Firewall by selling equipment to China now they want to sell the equipment to US ISPs as well. It's nothing more than the Corporate Aristocracy Thomas Jefferson warned of.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
A group of 18 Republican US senators have also sent a letter to Genachowski raising concerns about net neutrality regulations.
That pretty much guarantees it's good for the public.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
I agree charging by the amount of bandwidth used may, just may, be better but for years broadband providers sold unlimited service. The contract I signed with Time Warner for my cable, now it's Comcast, did not have any sort of limits. Now it did say the speed would be up to, I think though I don't recall for sure, 1.5MB. There wasn't anything about traffic shaping, blocking, or redirecting though. If ISPs oversold capacity it's not the fault of the users, it's the ISPs own fault. When I go to an all-you-can-eat buffet I refuse to accept the restaurant from preventing me or anyone else from eating all we can.
A price-per-byte structure, if properly implemented, could result in reduced monthly payments for grandma and a higher portion for the guy with the strange habit of downloading "Linux ISOs" all the time.
The problem with this is that incumbent broadband providers try to prevent any competition that will offer more bandwidth. How many tymes has news articles been summarized and linked to on slashdot because some incumbent provider tried to stop competition whether cable, fiber, wireless, or any other broadband? An example was in northeastern Utah a few years back. A group of communities got together to build their own Broadband Utopia. Of course the incumbents did all they could to stop it and they were finally successful in having the state government pass a law barring local governments from selling access, instead they have to sell to other service providers. The 14 cities that make up the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency built an infrastructure that will provide "100 megabits per second" to start with. That infrastructure can be used to deliver cable TV, net access, phone services, or whatever a person could think of. Because of it Comcast was "forced" to bundle "broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint" and I doubt they are losing money. I say "forced" because they only had to do it if they wanted to continue to provide services in the area otherwise people would not have been willing to pay the higher costs.
perhaps content directly delivered by the ISP would fall under this category. But I don't see why that is -inherently- wrong.
You don't see what's wrong? Try this, say only Company X provides broadband in your area, so you have no other choice for broadband, and you want to search the web. So you head over to Google and if you can connect it is slow because Google didn't pay your ISP. Or your ISP supports one political party and blocks traffic from all other parties? Do you still not see a problem?
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
Econ nitpick: SUPPLY of bandwidth is restricted because, as you say, margins are higher and expanding infrastructure costs money.
Quantity of bandwidth demanded would be higher at a lower price point, but demand for bandwidth is the same in both cases.
Because supply of bandwidth is constricted, costlier gear is needed for packet shaping, QoS and the like. This is another misallocation of resources - wasting silicon on expensive products to manage scarce bandwidth rather than simply adding more bandwidth.
I agree with the other 99% of your analysis.
DATABASE WOW WOW
The concern I always have when we discuss the idea of government regulation designed to enforce "net neutrality" is how neutral will these regulations actually be? My experience with this type of government regulation is that it usually favors some group (usually a corporation or group of corporations) over some other group (often individuals and groups of individuals). The other thing these regulations almost always do is strengthen the government at the expense of the common man. I favor the idea of net neutrality that is most often supported on this board, but I have no confidence that that is what we will get from government regulation.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
I had a nice ISP...
They were bought by EarthLink.
So I changed ISPs to another nice ISP.
They were bought by a different company.
That company was then bought by EarthLink.
I changed to a third ISP.
A while later, they were bought by EarthLink.
In any unregulated market, natural monopolies will arise as bigger players buy out the smaller players, and they will go after smaller and smaller players as their marginal ability to increase their business is eroded by their own success in controlling the market.
Unless you are suggesting regulating ownership of ISPs in a given area in the same way that newspaper and media ownership was regulated by market so that there was not a single monopoly news source, I don't see this changing in such a way that your "everyone should have a choice of providers" utopia will ever come about.
-- Terry
If you were working at an AIDS Factory would you be pissed if the government developed a vaccine?
Part of the problem is ISPs advertising false promises of "unlimited use" plans for flat monthly rates in conjunction with eye-popping speeds and then hiding what "unlimited use" really means in pages of contract fine print which states that speeds are not guaranteed, throttling or packet shaping may be used, etc. Perhaps it is time to start regulating some basic statistics of the data plan being offered; as for example with credit cards contracts where the annual percentage rates are printed front and center in larger fonts and conspicuous boxes. That way everyone will better understand what is being bought and at what price. At the very least, they should not be allowed to use the word "unlimited" in combination with any sort of advertised speeds unless they can get within some acceptable margin (i.e. 90%+) of that speed all of the time.
and they were finally successful in having the state government pass a law barring local governments from selling access, instead they have to sell to other service providers.
It is no wonder the USians consider the government inefficient. It is so corrupt that it convicts its uncorrupted parts for the crime of performing a public service.