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EFF Reviews the Verizon-Google Net Neutrality Deal
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "The EFF has written an analysis of the Net Neutrality deal brokered between Verizon and Google. While the EFF agrees with substantial portions of it, such as giving the FCC only enough authority to investigate complaints, rather than giving them a blank check to create regulations, there are a number of troubling issues with the agreement. In particular, they're concerned that what constitutes 'reasonable' network management is in the eye of the beholder and they don't like giving a free pass to anyone who claims they're attempting to block unlawful content, even when doing so in such a way that they interfere with lawful activities. On balance, while there are some good ideas about how to get Net Neutrality with minimal government involvement, there are serious flaws in the agreement that would allow ISPs to interfere with any service they wanted to because there is no algorithm that can correctly determine which numbers are currently illegal."
...how's that "let companies police themselves" stance on net neutrality working out for you?
Living With a Nerd
The FCC should be the end all and be all of communications
control. Sadly many of those on the commission , are Bush
appointees.
That needs to change fast. Same with the SEC.
Call me naive and stupid but...
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/08/05/0327200/Google-and-Verizon-In-Talks-To-Prioritize-Traffic?from=rss
So they both lied?
Limited FCC Jurisdiction — Good
Standard-Setting Bodies — Interesting
Reasonable Network management, Additional Online Services — Troubling
“Lawful” Content and Wireless Exclusions — Fail
One thing that seems good (mostly for content providers, but also consumers) and a few things that could be good for consumers, but still favor ISPs. Sounds like Verizon agreed, "We will let the FCC regulate on a case by case basis, as long as we get broad powers manipulate our other services, and block content we fear is unlawful." The standard setting body is iffy, since as the article points out, these groups tend not to be on the consumers side.
It will be interesting to see where this goes, but personally I am against the idea that they will throttle torrents, or downloads cause "they are consuming too much for it to be legal".
I'm a popular stranger, I'm nobody famous, I'm a famous nobody.
And the agreement states that "lawful" content will not be interfered with.
But who decides what is "lawful"?
Is this an invitation for the ISPs to take on a police role?
Is it a way for big telco and the media companies they have merged with to decide that someone's content might be unlawful, because it is politically subversive - only because it questions government policies that the telco and media companies support?
ISPs should not be in the business of deciding what is lawful content and what is not. I hope the agreement does not presume that they will be in that business. That is a job for the police and the courts. ISPs should only act on legitimate police requests (i.e., those with warrants or some other transparent or traceable due process) and court orders.
"So long as your ISP claimed that it was trying to prevent copyright infringement or helping law enforcement, it could be exempted from the net neutrality principles."
So all they have to do is claim? "Preventing copyright infringement" seems to be high up on the list of motivators for anything the ISP's do anymore (and the Feds for that matter). This is so vague it seems like it could be stretched to essentially allow the them to do anything they wanted under the guise that it is "effectively reducing pirating."
If we want to avoid letting a strong regulatory body decide, I suggest using civil law to fix the problem of net neutrality:
Allow plaintiffs to claim damages based on the inequality of their traffic.
This way, if Joe Small Site finds out that Crazy Big Network is dropping or delaying his packets, he can sue them.
Fear of lawsuits seems to trump even fear of the death penalty in this country, so it might work...
Futurist Traditionalism
That's just not true. I don't have any lines to my house and I use satellite. Don't have line of site? Use a cellular connection. There are options.
It will be a victim of "blocking unlawful content'. There is plenty of court rulings that just because a very small non-infringing use exists does not mean that thing is deemed legal. Most BT traffic is unlawful, around 95 to 98% by some measures, so it is only a matter of time until such protocols are blocked.
Yes, for a while it will be possible for some tech literates to get around that but it won't be possible for most people. And it will get harder and harder as blocks and detection get more sophisticated, just like breaking bluray is far harder than it was for DVDs.
Anyone else think it's odd that we're reading an article about a group of lawyers commenting about two companies coming together to broker a deal about what the government should be allowed to do?
Isn't that a little backwards? I mean, I like the EFF. But the idea that we need lawyers to tell us what's good and what's bad seems odd.
And having two giants acting like they can simply write legislature is balls to the walls wrong. The FCC can do whatever the laws says they can do, Google and Verizon be damned. Who writes those laws? Those that We The People (tm) put in power.
Oh, I don't know, slick. Maybe Verizon's legal counsel might come up with a list of suggestions based on, you know, statutes, case law, stuff like that. For example, if a web site advocates the blatant overthrow of the United States Government or is dedicated to the distribution of child pornography or warez, they might tell their technical staff to take it out of Verizon's DNS or throttle it down to uselessness.
Realistically, you have two choices: either Verizon jealously guards its prerogative or you will get the law enforcement authorities in this country using the FCC to ram down a f#$%-you-up-the-@$$ set of restrictions like they did to telecoms via CALEA. At least in the former, they have the freedom to unblock content based on user feedback without worrying about the feds.
The key point is, to whom would companies have to prove their service was worthy of a waiver? If it's the government, then basically that means the government would become the approver of all new internet businesses. Who in their right mind would want that? So, what if it was some other body, such as a standards body? Same problem. Is there any organization that we should trust to be the gatekeeper?
No. This whole notion eviscerates the very meaning of "free" in "free market".
What's unfair about the current situation is that some private businesses are trying to commander the public parts of the internet for their own purposes. The obvious answer to this situation is to have a fully-public network that is owned entirely by the people, and can be used by one and all, exactly as the interstate highway system is used today. Private businesses that want to build private infrastructure should absolutely be allowed to do so, but only in parallel with the public network.
Let there be interconnects between the public and private networks, just as private roads interconnect with public. But once a private business puts its data on the public network, public rules apply. Once the data is on it's own network, it's rules apply.
Trying to munge these very different access models together as the EFF recommends seems to me to be a hopeless cause. "Good fences make good neighbors." Better to have clean separation of concern.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
With the arguable exception of child porn, there is (or should be) no such thing as "unlawful content," in the United States; only "unlawful use of content." Unless a provider is either a party to, or a mediator of such contracts, their involvement is neither desirable nor justifiable.
If service providers want to be responsible for the traffic they carry, then I propose making them liable for allowing any port scans, malicious payloads, SPAM, fraudulent advertisements, or unsolicited phone calls (VoIP) to reach my network. What's good for the Goose, right?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
historically, and i mean since the inception of a "corporation" as an entity created to sell things to consumers, freedom hasnt been at the forefront...no more obvious is it than in software and computing where the idea of "patent everything, share nothing" has dominated the industry for decades....
Im sure for all slashdotters the idea of a "neutrality" act being crafted by two of americas most monolithic corporations sends up red flags and klaxons as it naturally should. consumer "freedom" acts, as a parallel, normally only afford the consumer the freedom to continue consuming from the provider. Only when governments intervene do consumers begin to realize real freedom...an example being the banking reform that prevents banks from automagically enacting overdraft protection fees and overdraft protection in general...bankruptcy as a "service."
as the internet was invented by a government, do corporations have the power to regulate its usage terms? Could this be a tipping point where corporations change? or their lobbyists and greased politicians become too ineffective to resist public outcry...I dont know if anyone will have a clear understanding of what was going on here for years to come.
Good people go to bed earlier.
How is this technology and not 'your rights online'?
Regulation by corporate/government fiat is always a SNAFU waiting to FUBAR on US, EU, RU....
Why, typically there are two causes: (1) Incompetence or (2) Megalomania. Sometimes both are part of suicidal symbiotic parasites homicidally consuming cultural and economic health to the point of extinction.
Maybe, there should be a lobbyist-free judge (Germain-Governor) and jury (professional-peers) process that develop economic, education, medical, technology... laws for governing bodies (without modifications, amendments, or edits) to vote on.
Jury selection would be performed by Public and Private peaceful adversarial contest. Judge selection would be by Jury selection. Always have a small and diverse odd-count jury (7, 11...17).
Why let corporatist or dogma (fascist) determine and write laws in their own petty and selfish interest.
The key point is, to whom would companies have to prove their service was worthy of a waiver? If it's the government, then basically that means the government would become the approver of all new internet businesses. Who in their right mind would want that? So, what if it was some other body, such as a standards body? Same problem. Is there any organization that we should trust to be the gatekeeper?
No. This whole notion eviscerates the very meaning of "free" in "free market".
Hmm, not quite. You've forgotten the context. It's not that they would be gatekeepers of all traffic, it's that they would be gate keepers of traffic getting a higher priority. IE company A starts prioritizing certain news sources traffic over other traffic. They would have to show that this is neccessary(for an emergency evacuation signal or something) or stop giving that traffic high priority. Not that they would have to drop that traffic entirely.
Today there are two ways content is delivered on the Internet. I has been that way for a number of years, at least since 2000 and maybe longer.
Way one is the way we are familiar with - User A connects to Server B and content is delivered. Slowly. Through whatever forest of routers and links are needed to get from A to B.
Way two is evidently a secret to a lot of people. Akami. This company has servers co-located in ISP centers all over the US and other parts of the world. User A no longer connects to Server B but instead connects to Akami caching server C which is right there at the ISP where User A's service is hosted. Content is delivered across the internal ISP network very, very quickly. Much, much faster than from a remote server.
How do you get your content on Akami caching servers? You pay. Lots and lots. But your users then get really excellent service. Isn't this what people are talking about trying to prevent from happening? The whole pay-to-play model is already here and it isn't going away.
Sorry, but we lost the idea of treating every server identically at the dawn of the Internet when it moved from University computers to commercial entities.
#6 means you're OK with the Chinese firewall. Would this be correct?
#3 means you hate whistleblowers that tell on illegal issues with industry or the military. Would that be correct?
#4 means you're OK with thoughtcrime and hate the separation of church and state. Would that be correct?
#2 is not a criminal issue, so you're OK with private laws and unaccountability. Would that be correct?
#1 means you hate secure computing with your bank, which means that #5 is broken. Would this be correct?
I'm sure that's written on the post-it note stuck to VerGoozon's massive campaign donation checks; 'just a suggestion'.
1. Subscribers are not limited in content choices based on service provider.
--Consumers are legally responsible for the content they consume. Content providers are legally responsible for the content they provide within the terms of "safe harbor" provisions and the terms of services agreements of their hosting companies, if any.
2. Subscribers are limited only in the amount of content they serve/consume by their agreements with their respective service providers/hosts.
3. There must not be legal barriers, exclusive franchise area agreements, etc., to limit a service provider's entry into any geographical area or consumer choice.
Well, that's the way I feel about it.
And then there's method 3, wherein they decide that Akami-style servers are too expensive. We'll just throttle every connection from someone who isn't paying us. Any site suddenly growing and getting a lot of business? We'll throttle them. Even if they're not our customer and we're just the middleman, we own the roads (thanks to a lot of humongous government grants), so we can demand the tolls.
Doesn't anyone remember? That's WHY we came out with Net Neutrality, because the big telecoms were talking about exactly this kind of plan, where they could charge rent from any site whose traffic passed through them. Never mind the fact that those sites pay for their internet access, they could squeeze money out of people simply because we let our networks become privately owned after they were built with billions in public funds.
I expect my internet connection to be like the electrical outlet; dumb. It shouldn't care what I'm doing. It should provide equal priority to all traffic I’m creating. And actually provide advertised speeds.
The ISP shouldn’t care what kind of traffic is traversing its lines after it’s paid for. It’s only because they see the potential to steal more money from customers that they’re even bringing up tiered layers.
The #1 problem with "net neutrality" is that EVERY net neutrality proposal to come out in the US that has a snowballs chance in hell of actually being adopted has had loopholes big enough to fly an Airbus A380 through, usually under the guise of "lawful content"
I have no problems with ISPs who want to block spam on their networks or stop denial-of-service attacks comming from (or aimed at) their networks. But there has to be a better way to word the exemptions for "unlawful content" (or whatever it is) in a way that lets ISPs block the genuinely bad stuff without being able to block or interfere with protocols like BitTorrent just because they have no way to separate legal content from illegal content.
As for wireless, the whole "wireless cant be neutral because its bandwidth constrained" argument is garbage. If wireless is bandwidth constrained, just limit the up/down stream bandwidth a device can use at any one time (so devices cant take up all the bandwidth to the exclusion of other devices) and introduce caps on the total amount of transfer a customer can use (i.e. charge more if you want more bandwidth). The latter is what carriers are already doing, both in the US and elsewhere.
Yes, I see your point; technically, the control would be only over priority.
However, I was persuaded by the EFF's argument the FCC is especially susceptible to "regulative captivity" -- that is, to becoming dominated by the industries they are supposed to regulate, and winding up regulating out the newcomers to the market, instead.
Ultimately, he who controls the priority decision can control the end-user experience to a very large degree. If I can make my data arrive first, wouldn't that be as effective a block on my competition as if I had locked them out altogether?
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
The only thing that comes to mind after seeing this is....
A double negative can make a positive, but a double positive can never make a negative.
<sarcasm> Yeah, right </sarcasm>
Verizon used to be Bell Atlantic. Bell Atlantic used to be one big company but it got broken up. If Google grows too influential they'll have to be broken up too.
We need to figure out exactly what this phrase means before we just agree that it's fair. Unlawful communication could be obscenity, and since everybody on the internet breaks the law now all communication is unlawful and what does that mean?
Verizon and Google need to spell it out to-the-letter. Vagaries have no place in legal documents other than to implement some kind of imbalanced legal dynamic at some point in the future.
boycott slashdot February 10th - 17th check out: altSlashdot.org
"free pass to anyone who claims they're attempting to block unlawful content, even when doing so in such a way that they interfere with lawful activities" Like censorship groups that demand the shutdown and/or monitoring of all porn sites to prevent child pornography, or the creation of the Patriot Act "to catch terrorists" that has been used to jail non-terrorists, or double digit IQ TSA assholes making people take off their shoes "for our safety".