Verizon and Google Offer Up Net Neutrality Truce

When it comes to net neutrality, can we get along? Google and Verizon, antagonists on the question yet partners in Droid, say yes. The two companies have even teamed up to send the FCC ideas on how to handle network management disputes. 'Google/Verizon say that the Internet should function as an "open platform." That means, to them, that "when a person accesses cyberspace, he or she should be able to connect with any other person that he or she wants to—and that other person should be able to receive his or her message," they write. The 'Net should operate as a place where no "central authority" can make rules that prescribe the possible, and where entrepreneurs and network providers are able to "innovate without permission."'"

Comments

Throttling?

[SanityInAnarchy]

There's still this problem:

when a person accesses cyberspace, he or she should be able to connect with any other person that he or she wants to—and that other person should be able to receive his or her message,

Yes, but how fast?

A throttled Internet is still not a neutral network.

Re:Throttling?

[cervo]

Perhaps by saying that at least 75% of someone's network capacity has to be used to deliver all packets and the extra 25% can be re-allocated to higher priority packets or something. I'm not sure how it works.

But in principle I'm okay with throttling traffic within reasonable limits. Unfortunately due to corporate greed it is obvious what will happen. Basically people will throttle packets so slow that people like Google will have to pay, basically extortion. But still throttling has some uses if done right. A VOIP packet needs to be a higher priority than say someone's bit torrent download because it is real time. In fact most real time apps would benefit from higher quality packet.

But you need something like the operating system does. Basically in an operating system, to protect against starvation, often lower priority processes get their priority bumped up over time so that eventually they are guaranteed to get a turn at the processor. Otherwise it is possible that higher priority processes come along and cause the low priority process to starve. The same principle would need to happen on the internet.

However if you are ATT and you want to extort google, you could just make everyone's packets but google's higher priority and then google would suffer starvation of many packets and would be force to pay if a significant amount of the traffic comes through google. Rather than that I'd rather have net neutrality. But I'd be open to some type of regulations that stop people from overly slowing down other traffic (for say extortion) but using maybe the top 25% or 10% of capacity to give some special packets higher priority than others. The problem is that I don't really know how to word it exactly. And also many ways of wording it will leave the area wide open to abuse. Also remember Comcast denied it was practicing traffic management for a long time. It outright lied to everyone until it got caught. Now it claims that the FCC doesn't have the authority to regulate it (which maybe it doesn't, who knows). But if the company was so sure it was in the right, why lie until caught red handed? But anyway no matter what it thinks the law is, it tries to get around it. Either it thought the FCC had the authority and tried to avoid the issue and now is trying to challenge the authority to skirt the law. Or it was just keeping to itself for customer relations.

Anyway I wouldn't necessarily mind a throttled connection at my local ISP either, as long as it says it is throttled and all the conditions. If you lie to me that's ridiculous. And if you sell $60/month throttled connections, I think you'd lose customers as they jump ship. But a throttled connection selling at a discount to a non throttled connection would probably attract some people. I think the government should start going after companies for false advertising. If you sell an "unlimited" connection then it better damn well be unlimited. Without any type of secret caps. Some companies throttle you or even cut you off after you reach a certain cap. IF that cap is not advertised clearly and it is an "unlimited" connection they should be fined/thrown in jail. If they sell a connection that says UNLIMITED to 5 GB and then throttled to 128K then that is fine. But if you sell "unlimited" then don't come whining when people use it unlimited.

Still I'm not entirely convinced that it is all network problems and not trying to set things up. Bittorrent is right now used a lot for illegal files. But ultimately when Hollywood joins the 21st century, bittorrent could be a great cheap way for them to distribute movies. Then they just need to pay for hard disk space for a movie and seed it on bittorrent. Probably much cheaper than printing out DVDs and stuff. Ultimately they could distribute a lot of older movies that are out of production due to lack of popularity. And people would probably buy them. Even TV studios can use bittorrent to distribute tv show episodes while saving a ton on bandwidth costs. N

Re:Throttling?

[Dalzhim]

But still throttling has some uses if done right. A VOIP packet needs to be a higher priority than say someone's bit torrent download because it is real time. In fact most real time apps would benefit from higher quality packet.

Then how do you determine what application needs real time and what application doesn't to provide higher quality packets? Will the next generation of P2P applications use real-time protocols to be quicker than their predecessors? Will people with legitimate real-time applications need to go through endless and costly processes to get "authorized" as real-time apps which deserve higher quality packets? Throttling is just a new tool to make oversubscription easy. It has no advantages for the everyday customer; only downsides.

The obligatory car analogy

[jonaskoelker]

Perhaps it gets overlooked so much because it's difficult to create a car/road traffic analogy that expresses it.

Not at all.

Suppose the roads were privately owned. Dominos and Pizza Hut offer competing pizza delivery services. You really like Dominos' pizzas better, but Pizza Hut has paid the road owner of your neighbourhood to only let one Dominos delivery through for every 20 Pizza Hut deliveries, so you can't get your delicious pizza.

That'd make you quite unhappy, right? You'd feel unfairly discriminated against just for living in the wrong neighbourhood, right? You'd feel the road company servicing your neighbourhood was not providing the service you expected (despite you paying them), right? Oh, but you could of course always move. To a neighbourhood that has Dominos instead of Pizza Hut, but only lets the shipping company you hate operate. Or...

I think that car analogy was pretty easy and worked pretty well.