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AT&T's Net Neutrality Doublethink
GMGruman writes "George Orwell would be proud of AT&T, as Bill Snyder explains in this blog post, for its new ads saying it supports Net neutrality when in fact it is working actively to scuttle proposed FCC rules that would clearly ban discriminatory practices against different types of data, such as video streaming or VoIP. It's also trying to get government subsidies to build a substandard broadband network for the under-served areas of the US. If it and its carrier partners win, 'Internet freedom' will mean freedom for carriers to be the 21st century's robber barons."
...electricity companies trying to charge you different prices for using different applicances. We already have "electricity neutrality", why isn't net neutrality taken for granted?
i wish there was a tractable way of making lying in an ad a criminal offense punishable by death for all those responsible...
weinersmith
With the AT&T network, "under-served areas of the US" includes pretty much the entire country, including isolated rural towns like San Francisco.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Broadband is one of those cases where experience matters more than ideology. Ideologically, we might say we should have no government interference in the broadband market, or the government should provide broadband to everyone, but what really worked is the government giving the carrier a measure of guaranteed returns on their investment in exchange for satisfying some general social obligations. This worked stunningly well in the old electric industry, where state PUCs did regulate rates, for sure, mandated service levels, for sure, but, at the end, the shareholders of the electric company got a nice dividend check every year. Not a growth stock, but a reliable dividend stock, a good service for consumers, a good company to work for in the community, and it was really about as much of a win-win deal as anyone could get until everyone got greedy - consumers and shareholders alike, and screwed it all up with electrical deregulation.
To wit : I really don't have a problem with taxpayer subsidies for rural broadband IF the broadband companies subsequently tie themselves to Public Utilities Commissions for the setting of rates in the way electricity worked in the better and pre-deregulation days. Give the rural carriers the monopoly, have the government set the rates. That provides badly needed service, the government gets its social responsibilities fulfilled, and the carrier owners get a nice dividend check.
This isn't rocket science. But we just have to get rid of this awful grip of capitalism / socialism black and white thinking that has seized our minds and focus instead on historically that which has worked to build our communities.
This is my sig.
Robber Barons? You, sir, slander the good name of brilliant men like Jay Gould and Daniel Drew. How dare you!
If it and its carrier partners win, 'Internet freedom' will mean freedom for carriers to be the 21st century's robber barons
What do you mean - will be? We already pay a ridiculous monthly fee for piss poor access that you can't even get in most parts of the US. The areas that do get broadband access are all carved up into local monopolies so that users can stay crowded on the same cables as 10 years ago that can no longer carry the load and if you do try to use the broadband you paid for you get disconnected or throttled by the carrier. So how is this any more than business as usual?
mmmm...forbidden donut
I remember when the internet first went private. None of the telecos minded inheriting the original infrastructure. But now that it's time to invest in new technologies, they whine like a spoiled little kid. Somebody call the whaaaambulance.
They're trying for the same deal the big banks get. Taxpayers shoulder the infrastructure investment, but the telecos get to run it and make obscene profits without any real oversight.
Our 40 year "government regulation is bad" experiment ended with disastrous results. Without a referee looking out for the interests of the public, which has a lot of skin in this game, the telecos are going to ride us all like a carnival pony, just like Wall Street.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
They'll be robber barons because like in the 1800s, they bribed/gamed the governmental control system in place to achieve monopoly power.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Would it not be nice for consumers in these rural towns to be able to vote with their dollar and pick the best carrier.
"Hmm, I could choose AT&T who wants $60 to be able to browse 4chan, or, I could choose INTERNET4YOU who will give me free access to every site for only $40"
Why is the government supporting the creation of bigger and bigger monopolies?
More like "Net Neutrality Doublespeak", no?
How long do you think it will be before all those buffet restaurants go out of business? Why do you think they and their customers have tolerated such an unfair pricing structure for so long?
Why would Orwell be proud? I think he would be horrified. He wasn't adulating the society in 1984, he was writing in fear for what ours might become. The book was supposed to serve as a wakeup call. The fact that we're inching closer to this society might make his prediction correct, but I don't think he'd be happy about that.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
No he wouldn't. Describing something in a work of fiction isn't the same as advocating it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
This wasn't a 40 year experiment. We had much the same thing going on in the late 1800s and early 1900s with much the same results. We didn't learn our lesson the previous two times, so I expect we won't learn our lesson this time either. In another few decades, the big corporations and big financial companies will whine that following the law is too hard and the sheeple will listen to them.
It always amuses me how so many of you will jump on the band wagon that a company using the government's regulations to its benefits means that there isn't enough regulation, or that the overpowering government in all aspects of life as abhorred by Orwell is the same as AT&T business practices. Stop and take a look at what those who want net neutrality are actually asking for: The government should create rules that force service providers to charge the same regardless of usage. Who sets the price? Who sets the service requirements? Since it has to be "Fair" this always means everyone is equally miserable excepts those who set the price and service levels who always get the best while the public gets the worse. This is exactly what Orwell warned about in his work. Remember, inner party gets the best food and even some privacy while the others get the worse or none at all. Yes, I do not want any government in my life except as strictly spelled out in the preamble of the constitution. Now about the robber barons of 1800, that was also over regulation and the government getting too involved. When a business gets support from customers it caters to customers, when support comes from the government it doesn't need customers.
Actually...the Post Office is a poor analogy.
1) You can buy better service (Priority Mail, Express Mail...).
2) There IS a lower class of service than First Class (Parcel Post...).
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
I've got it! We can create our own open source network lines. Each person will go to the hardware store and buy 10 meters of fibreoptic cable and dig a trench in front of their house. We can take our spare parts and combine them and make servers! Power to the people! Stickin it to the man! Yeah!!!
"Before God we are all equally wise - and equally foolish"
Albert Einstein
ISPs DO IN FACT have to pay for the data you send and receive. Yes, they do.
Peering arrangements do not cover the cost of the connection to the NAP. If, say Cox Cable in Arizona wants to interconnect to the other Cox state networks, they can do so and it's just their way of dealing with interconnection. But when they decide to connect so, say MAE-West, they pay for the connection into the NAP. It may be an OC-148, or something truly studly, like a really hot fiber. These circuits are not free, as they require right-of-way, actual genuine fiber (which they may share sometimes with others in the jacket - true), and of course the hardware to make it work. Price out some of that some time.
Now, true, the cost is shared amongst the many many subscribers, and they could choose to peer in one NAP, though in fact that would be bad practice, with single point of failure stuff and all.
But the reality is that not only would Cox (as an example) have to provision enogh connections and capacity to at least prevent customers from flooding the lines with 'I can't get' calls, but most peering arrangements at the NAP require you to provide enough bandwidth to actually receive what other peers send to you (on request from your subscribers, usually) or they see you as not playing fair. This gets you either booted off the NAP or throttled (or ignored, see Cogent v Sprint) and your users get poorer performance. Providing adequate service in a NAP peering is non-trivial, and the big carriers do not let you off. If you're a small ISP, you usually partner with a bigger one to avoid this sort of thing. I know. I was a small ISP. My carrier was MCI for a long time, and they had me 3 hops from MAE-East, a nice multi T1 connection. When we downsized to BBN, we got a dual T1 that was 25 hops away from a midwest NAP, which was a little off the beaten path and increased our latency about 12ms on average. But it was cheaper. Boss wins.
The concept that somehow your ISP doesn't really pay for their ultimate connection to the 'Internet' is ludicrous and misleading.
And having said that, Cox cable is probably more interested in the high-volume users that 'distort' the local networks and might be causing congestion. This is where most 'oversubscribing' is noticeable, and where the pproblems for the ISP are most difficult, IMHO. And where they need to decide what level of service they wish to provide.
That should be interesting. That's where individual customers will be hurt, and will fight back.
And you wrote:
"ISP's per-MB usage charge is just added there to discourage customers to actually use their connection."
That's one pricing formulation. Another would be to price higher volume users to recover costs, while not discouraging them or losing them to competitors. This formula is not so commonly used, since real competition is ineffective in most of the U.S., though there are other pressures and this is not nearly so simple as most of us would like to believe. Of course, the impact is plain and obvious, so we tend to think that the cause is also plain and obvious.
Don't think I am defending packet inspection and service filtering, nor am I defending the US ISP marketers. But let's keep our focus on reality. They should be expected to carry any traffic their users request, without discriminating on the basis of volume or source, and they should either price their service as necessary (or desireable) or describe their services accurately so customers can make informed decisions and have reasonable expectations. And MOST importantly, they should not discriminate on the basis of the source of the data. For instance, throttle based on URL (hulu.com, for example) or traffic type (H.323, for example) and then offer an unthrottled service of their own which is substantially identical (HD video streaming, for example) and delivered via the same method (TCP/IP). This would be discriminatory in a way we should not accept - like restraint of trade, the ISP could throttle some vi
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Nope... you're correct, but metering electric usage is, IMHO, a little more of a necessity than metering Internet usage. Electric power generation involves very real and substantial costs that aren't really a matter of one-time investments and minimal upkeep to "upgrade" so more power is supplied. EG. If I put several large businesses on a power grid and they start drawing a lot of electric power, I very well might be looking at putting another generator online to handle the load. Every hour that generator turns, it's using up coal or oil or natural gas. Or let's say bigger dollars were invested up-front to go with a nuclear plant instead? Ok, great ... but that's kind of like trying to avoid paying for spent inkjet cartridges by purchasing a more expensive color laser printer to do your heavy color printing jobs on. Eventually, the bill comes due by way of a set of 4 expensive toner cartridges, a new fuser and drum. With a nuclear plant, you're looking at a HUGE cost of disposal of radioactive waste at some point .. and don't forget the cost of hiring all the employees who keep it operating safely.
By contrast, dealing with "heavy bandwidth users" is a different beast. Yeah, eventually, you might need to upgrade some back-end circuits, or even invest in new routing/switching gear. But that new Cisco switch you put in isn't going to require a whole crew of employees operating it 24 hours/7 days to keep it functional. The new optical fiber you put in isn't going to consume more natural resources you're paying for, the more data moves through it.