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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."
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.
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
Because there's no 'unlimited' plan for electricity.
If ISPs charged people according to usage, there would be no need for a 'net neutrality' bill... ISPs would be loving people who used more, instead of hating them. But then the users would be angry because they've had 'unlimited' so long.
Don't get me wrong, I'm one of those people. And I'd love to have my cake and eat it, too... But the simple truth is that I use WAY more than most people and they get to pay for some of it and that kind of thing is going to come to an end one way or another.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Not that I am on the carrier's side... But can you possibly explain the logic in this position other than that you want it?
I pay extra for a faster connection and a higher total download capacity per month. That seems entirely fair. The problem comes when carriers try to limit what kind of data you download within that limit. They are effectively trying to make it impossible for you to actually get what you specifically paid for. That is what net neutrality is about. Not just letting you download as much porn as you want while still only paying the basic fee.
Read the article -- they state that the debate over tiered pricing is over. The ISP will be implementing tiered pricing. The new debate is over how much can the government involve themselves in the matters of maintaining a network.
Disagreeing with me does not mean you get to mod me troll.
If you use more water, or more electricity, you're consuming finite resources that wouldn't be used otherwise. The same isn't true of bandwidth--the ISP is paying for a certain amount on their outgoing connections, regardless of whether or not uses are actively using it.
Benford's Corollary to Clarke's Law: "Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced."
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
WIth water, you get a specific pipe at a specific pressure (and temperature, probably) that yeilds a MAX of the water you can use.
With electricity, you get a specific MAX amperage of service that can be sustained.
Both utilities will charge you huge fortunes if you use the maximum output 24/7.
With broadband, you get a pipe that's capable of a sustained data rate. Upstream, however, data will come when it will come, subject to QoS or packet shaping. If you download at the max rate, 24/7, it's likely your hard disk will simply fill, and that's that-- your capacity has been reached.
What net neutrality does is to forward the idea that no matter where you want your data from, the carrier delivers a best-effort to deliver that data to you. In this scheme, it doesn't favor its product over another vendors; it's neutral as to the destination. Certainly latency, routing, and congestion issues apply, but it doesn't squish YouTube in favor of NBC (are you listening, Comcast?).
The aperiodicity of transaction means that congestion could be a problem, especially during the Superbowl or other 'events' where everyone's downloading at once. Otherwise, there's a fairly random distribution of duty cycle that allows bandwidth to be shared. However, older network designs, like ATM and a few others that are still carriers of data, aren't very good at doing that. Older routing equipment and ancient equipment (by modern standards) still presents a non-neutral bottleneck, although not one that's deterministic by data source.
So it's not like water and electricity, although it could still be considered a utility by other definitions. Communications ought to be a utility, and ought to be product source (e.g. the water, and the coulombs) neutral.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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.