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."

Comments

According to Slashdot

[Jedi Alec]

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.

Re:According to Slashdot

[mcrbids]

Anything the government does is evil, restricts freedoms and is inefficient by definition.

So please, stop this evil FCC man in his tracks.

Moderated funny, I don't think that was your intent.

And it's bullsh-7. Take your bullsh17 anti-gubbmint sentiment and cram it up your backside. Spreading this kind of toxic poison can only serve to get people hurt, and it's clearly starting to undermine the United State's ability to maintain it's position of power.

If "da gubbmint" sucked at everything, why is it important to have one? If "da gubbmint" wasn't necessary, then Rwanda (which effectively has no government) would be a fscking paradise. Yet, despite having no evil gubbmint holding down the people, there's hardly a better example of hell on Earth. Rapes and crime are so rampant, basic infrastructure like roads, water, and power are almost nonexistent. Starvation is the order of the day for those who haven't already been killed by the nearest tyrant.

Contrast that with YOUR privileged life: The glorious cell phone at your hip that work so well do so because of gubbmint regulations that standardize their broadcast signals, and make those frequencies available. FCC police keep it that way, too. Aircraft don't typically fall out of the sky because of stiff gubbmint regulations that require frequent mechanic reviews so well that an otherwise very dangerous activity has become one of the safest means of transportation... period.

And I can go on and on.

1) Roads that cost $1,000,000 per mile that are so extensive that you generally expect to go anywhere you like, anytime you want.

2) Public education available for nearly your entire childhood that made it possible for you to read this post,

3) Military that protects your interests very effectively.

4) Police that keep "bad guys" from robbing you, raping you, or killing you.

5) Fresh, pure, clean water so cheap that it's often not even measured. You walk to the sink. You jigger a handle and voila! A virtually endless supply of clean, cheap water so pure that you can pour it straight into your car.

6) Cars that are safe to drive! You'd think it was in the interests of the car companies to make safe cars, but paradoxically, they've bitterly opposed every single measure introduced by the "gubbmint" to improve either safety or fuel economy. You can get into a car crash at highway speeds and total the car, and even in these circumstances it's most likely that you'll live and suffer only minor to moderate injuries. You get 250 or more miles on a tank and it doesn't break the bank.

7) Food that's safe to eat. Go to China and you don't really quite know what's in your baby food. It might be good, protein-rich baby food, or it might be Melamine. How do you know? Well, it's the US "gubbmint" that identified the problem and stopped the flow of melamine-infested food before too many people got hurt. I buy my chicken at the local grocery store without having to worry about much more than the price because of strict "gubbmint" regulations on food handling. And China is a pretty good country - it's far worse elsewhere.

How much longer should I go on? Talking like gubbmint is somehow universally bad is just idiot talk. Sure, it's got it's problems, but the idea that it's somehow the definition of evil is... wrong!

Get lost, and come back when you have something intelligent to say!

"new regulations could hinder THE DEVELOPMENT..."

[skirtsteak_asshat]

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.

Re:What's the catch?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, it would make their more expensive traffic filtering, blocking, and shaping equipment less valuable and harder to sell.

Re:What's the catch?

[yuriks]

I don't understand the position of the equipment makers in this objection

Selling traffic shaping solutions, presumably.

Re:What's the catch?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

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...

The inventor of the world wide web disagrees

[earthforce_1]

http://news.cnet.com/2100-1036_3-6075472.html

But he isn't a trusted expert on anything, right?

Translation: "Develop" means .....

[Jerry]

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.

Re:What's the catch?

[GrpA]

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

Motorola's take...

[Anonymous Coward]

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:

1. How much they will pay us for each phone sold, and
2. How much they will charge the customer for each phone sold.
3. What features their customers will get, and how much they will pay for them.

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.