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A Simple Guide To Net Neutrality
superapecommando writes in with a neutral introduction to net neutrality from ComputerWorld UK. While it doesn't go into a lot of technical depth, it's rare to see anything written on the subject that isn't rabid on one side or the other. "Google's recently announced plan to set up trial fiber-optic networks in the US with ultra-high-speed Internet connections puts the long running national debate over Net Neutrality back into high gear. A hot topic of discussion and debate in government and telecom circles since at least 2003, Net Neutrality, actually involves a broad array of topics, technologies and players. Here's a primer for those looking to get up to speed fast."
... or even the most important thing to worry about. Watch for big cable-companies to impose bandwidth caps and raise the price of data transfer to protect their regional video monopolies at the expense of Internet-accessible video content. Bandwidth caps are outside of the purview of NN as it's traditionally defined.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
Thats just as horrible as electric utilities making you pay per Killowatt/hour of power.
Honestly.. I would prefer a $X per Giga or Megabyte over $x for unlimited*
*Where we define unlimited, who gets throttled when and can cut you off for exceeding any internal threshold that we will not tell you about.
Seriously.. If I am curious about my power usage, I can walk outside, look at the meter, and figure out pretty close to what I owe.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
One of the most common arguments that I hear out of net neutrality opponents is that competition will somehow keep most ISP's net neutral without any messy government regulation. But what happens if all the major ISP's start blocking certain sites (like Pirate Bay)? With most people (in the U.S. at least) having at most 1-3 broadband providers to choose from, exactly where are you supposed to you go when all the big ones agree on a blacklist? And how can you open up a competing provider when all the wire and fiber are in the hands of monopolies like AT&T, Time-Warner, etc.? It's not like you can just start up a Mom & Pop broadband provider and start laying hundreds of miles of cable. Even Google will have a hard time competing with the big telco's and cableco's with the relatively minor bit of fiber optic they own.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Thats just as horrible as electric utilities making you pay per Killowatt/hour of power.
The difference is power distribution companies are not allowed to charge exorbitant fees to green power generation companies to transport that power to the end user. They have to charge the same price they charge their own coal fired power generation subsidiaries. Having a monopoly on power distribution, they are restricted from using that to gain an unfair advantage in another market, such as power generation. Claiming green power and coal power are different product even though they go over the same pipes in the same way is the same as claiming television service is different from any other data going over the cable network. You can't artificially raise the price of your competitors from a monopoly position.
I'm a comcast customer and their network is reasonably neutral, as based on actual measurements I've performed as well as looking at their network management policies. So yes, its reasonably neutral for me:
They do do DNS wildcarding (ick ick ICK), but actually have a workable opt-out (rare, most who wildcard don't).
They do block the windows ports outbound, and do dynamic blocking of spam-bots. (Not strictly neutral but arguably VERY good things)
They bias the network to allow the first X MB within a given timewindow to exceed the advertised speed, which again, is not strictly neutral but greatly improves interactive activity.
They impose a two-tier network-based QOS under congestion, measured on 15 minute timewindows, which means that light users are not generally impacted by congestion.
I haven't seen anything weird on routing: performance is usually limited by either my connection or the remote site, not the peering, so BGP issues are not coming up.
So its not strictly neutral, but the deviations are generally to my benefit as a customer (except for F@#)@#*( DNS wildcarding, but at least that has an opt-out I exercised immediately)
Test your net with Netalyzr
I have no problem with doing that with the way things are done now.
But when there is a new guy running Google (and it will happen eventually) - I don't know if I want to be fully dependant on Google services.
I think you might have heard that euphemism about eggs and baskets...
If Google provides me from everything from a computer to internet to applications... It's a scary thought if someone else starts running the show, with the only goal of seperating me from as many dollars as possible.
Yes you are off and this has nothing to do with peering agreements. At it's base, legislating network neutrality is dictating that the way the internet works now is the way it should work. ISP's are meant to be access points, not gatekeepers. Net neutrality legislation aims to prevent ISP's selling tiered services like cable companies do with their service. An ISP can't go and make an agreement with one content/service provider (say MS Bing) and throttle all competitors to be so slow as to be useless and turn around and say that you have to upgrade to the next package up to be able to use Google. Network neutrality prevents an ISP running a VOIP service and throttling Vonage into oblivion, unless you pay for the *special unlimited* VIOP package. Network Neutrality prevents double dipping, i.e. the ISP from charging you to access content AND charging content providers to be in the lower level tiers.
Legitimate QoS is not prevented under network neutrality. ISP's can, and should, prioritize VOIP over HTTP. They could even throttle BitTorrent if they wanted to.
BitTorrent is the big problem with the FCC's plan. They specifically allow ISP's to filter out illegal traffic. BitTorrent has many many legitimate uses, unfortunately no ISP that has filtered BT has ever recognized that fact and simply blocks it all.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Sorry. Xfinity Cable is not the same as Xfinity Internet. You are using Xfinity Cable to watch On Demand programs, not Xfinity Internet. It doesn't matter that the same wire is being used to deliver both, and your Xfinity Telephone service too.
By the way, our new 100MBPS Xfinity Internet speeds allow you to reach your undefined unlimited bandwidth limit 10 times sooner, so enjoy watching Xfinity Cable for the remainder of the month after you hit your limit with Netflix on-demand on day 3 of each month ...
The big cable companies should be allowed to do whatever they want with their networks. They paid for the networks out of their own pocket, free from any tax-payer subsidies, right?
Wait. What's that? They didn't? Oh. My mistake!
At least we're not throwing 7 billion dollars of taxpayer money in their general direction in the form of "stimulus".
Really? We're doing that too? You're kidding?
"IMO, I'm not a huge fan of strict network neutrality, there are cases where you want advanced traffic management techniques that would be non-neutral"
You simply don't understand what "Net Neutrality" is.
Hint: is not promoting some protocols over some others. It's about promoting some *providers* over the alternatives.
Problem is, the other baskets are Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.
They all rotate into the limelight with something awful.
Google is a really tricky company. I think they do a decent job of scaring everyone into line.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
That'll work, until someone in Congress decides that they need to censor the federal network using the boogeyman of the day (think of the children, we need to implement this ban to stop the terrorists, we're filtering to stop piracy, etc).
The federal government is no less prone to creating abuse than privately owned entities. When the government is the sole provider in town and they screw you over, it's a bit harder to get a new provider. There won't even be a duopoly to switch to since nobody can compete with a tax subsidized option.
Split the system into an independently owned, neutral company (or companies) that are regulated to maintain the network(s) and allow completely unfettered access to any ISP, cable provider, telephony provider, etc wishing to use that network. Let the ISPs compete on services while we're guaranteed a completely neutral pipe to all of them. The ISP can pay a per-customer fee for access to the network (based on max speed, guaranteed throughput, latency, etc) to keep the regulated network company doing their thing. Real competition and real options.
Stop Koolaid Politics
Because in 2006 AT&T's CEO opened his mouth and basically stated he wanted to hold his customers hostage from Google in exchange for more money. He plainly stated that he wanted to charge both his direct customers AND people who were incidentally coming across the lines. It was made plainly obvious that corporations can and would abuse their services and their customers for the sake of making a profit, especially when they had a monopoly position in areas.
My personal preference would be to force common carrier status on all data providers.
A bunch of regional monopolies serve as the only reasonably modern gateway to the most important technology of the late 20th/early 21st century, and they're more than willing to destroy what makes it unique.
The carriers should be forcibly struck blind. They've already been caught fucking with connections, and are more than willing to host and affect their networks (and customers) with conflicts of interest that serve only themselves.
You are wrong. When cable (and before that telephone) started to roll out, the local governments in the major metropolitan areas decided that they didn't want lots of wires running through the area, so they passed laws granting local monopolies. When less densely populated areas wanted to get cable (and before that telephone) the cable companies said, "Sure, we'd be happy to run cable in your area. If you'll give us a monopoly contract for your area, so that nobody can come in and compete with us." It's a little more complicated than that as there were federal and state laws that were passed to make this legal (so that the local municipalities had the authority to forbid anyone else from running cable or telephone wire). When this happened there were lots of small players in the cable market. Over time some of them were more successful than others and they gradually bought up the smaller players (and their local monopoly deals). Once the major players got big enough, they changed the federal law taking away the local municipalities' authority to select who controlled the local monopoly. Theoretically they eliminated the local municipalities' authority to grant monopolies, but since those monopolies already existed in a defacto way, all they did was eliminate the local municipalities' ability to turn the local market over to a competitor.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Power is finite and needs to be generated on-demand from (usually) consumable resources. Bandwidth doesn't fall in the the same category.
Really? Bandwidth is finite and it requires the exact same power from those exact same consumable resources, plus the equipment to deliver the data. I agree it's not quite an apples to apples comparison but it's closer than you are making it out to be. The difference is that one is a direct cost and the other is an indirect cost. They're both real costs but one can be directly assigned to a cost center and the other cannot. This has enormous implications that I think you should study a little deeper. Charging per bit is a way to turn an indirect cost into something resembling a direct cost. Not perfect to be sure but there are good reasons to do it.
For fibre, if you have something that's sitting around idle, you're "wasting" (say) 1 Gb/s of bandwidth each second that it's not lit up. It could be used to transfer information for someone, but if you've capped people and so they're not using it because they're over their caps, you have all this telco equipment doing absolutely nothing.
Whether that is a valid argument depends entirely upon whether there is excess capacity to be had and how the costs are allocated. The "wasted" bandwidth is only wasted if someone wants it and can't get it. If there is no demand for it then you have a case of excess capacity and the costs for the equipment will be higher for everyone who pays to use it. If the bit can be delivered but at the cost of slowing down other customers there is an opportunity cost in play. ISPs do need to make sure that all their customers have access to bits, not just the customers who use the most bits. There also might be upstream costs since your ISP probably pays some rate per bit for data delivered outside their own network. If bandwidth is artificially limited when it could otherwise be delivered without interfering with other customers, then your argument may carry weight.
With electricity, I'm being charged for the consumption of coal/gas/uranium (plus some overhead for transport). What exactly am I being charged for consuming when I download a bit?
The cost of the equipment to deliver that bit, the electricity needed to power that equipment, the staff needed to manage that equipment, depreciation, insurance, upstream bandwidth costs from other suppliers and a number of other costs. Welcome to the wonderful world of direct versus indirect costs. This is what makes cost accounting such an important and difficult endeavor.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant.
Comcast initiated RST attacks on users and denied it for ages. Bandwidth caps began applying, except to the streaming services provided by the carriers themselves. But if you're willing to trust a corporation not to fuck you over, well, that's your own game of russian roulette.
And the end result is people wont' get the service they want and will find alternatives. And you can make the same comparison to cars, which is a lot more appropriate. But in general, the free market works well to protect the consumer. why, because the consumer must willing pay for the service. So they're not gonna pay for something that doesn't work. Adam Smith's invisible hand is well at work, even when you're not aware of it.
So it's a monopoly, but not a monopoly. Because there are other, often inferior, alternatives to a monopoly granted by the municipality. You're saying that because dialup is available in the area, they have carte blanche to abuse their customers, am I right?
it's not really a monopoly is my point, unless you make your definition only to a narrow market. And again, the market protects customers, even with the smaller threat of dialup/satellite, it's not ideal, but it's good enough, becuase they still have to have costumers and the best way to keep/make more customers to treat them right. Most places know this, even if it doesn't always seem like they do.
You act like it's easy as it is. No, it's hard. The incumbents love how difficult it is now, they just don't like it when people get sick of their shit and apply legal pressure.
So you're saying because it's hard now, why not make it even harder?
Comcast is not legally a monopoly or a duopoly. There is no regulation prohibiting a second, third, or even fourth cable company from setting up shop. Most smart cable companies were very careful not to sign exclusive franchises anywhere.
In fact, Comcast faces stiff competition from satellite and telco providers.
The only competition Comcast doesn't face is from competing cable companies, and that is not because of regulation, it's a cost issue. Those same smart cable companies that signed non-exclusive franchises know there just isn't enough demand from potential customers to merit the cost of two supply chains. I.e., system buildout costs can't be recovered from sufficient customers. That's a defacto but not legal monopoly, but even then, wireless services are eating Comcast's lunch already.
Cable companies used to be subject to strong local regulation (I was a member of two such cable regulatory groups), but the FCC released them from that due to the increased competition from satellite and greater regionalization of companies (i.e., the first cable commission I was on regulated a local company, which eventually got bought out by a national one.)
All that said, I agree they ought to be regulated. Comcast in particular. Especially Comcast scum. But good luck with that. Even when they are shown federal law requiring them to do something, they ignore it, and the FCC has to date ignored it, as well.