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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
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."
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.
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.
For example, if a web site advocates the blatant overthrow of the United States Government
cue to just a bit over 200 yrs ago. we, OURSELVES, overthrew a corrupt and unjust government. we were 'rebels' back then going against an established (very much so) kingdom.
how is today any different? if you EVER get a government you can't stand (we're basically at that point, now, right?) you do have the 'right' to overthrow it.
now, the ones in power will try to reverse this; just like jolly old england did 200+ yrs ago. we forced the issue and did 'illegal things' (according to the king).
history judged us as 'right'.
but why is this old-and-trusted concept now verbotton?
seems the new king isn't very different from the old king, when it comes right down to it.
look at the US constitution; all over it implies and outright states that no government can be trusted and that the balance of power must ALWAYS be on an edge to keep both parties honest.
remove the ability to 're-align the government' or even get a new one and you're right back to where we were 200+ yrs ago. they say 'jump' and we have no guns or powers left to say 'no!'.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
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.
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.
Actually, I'm pretty sure I've missed quite a few more cases of potentially unlawful communications.
Do also bear in mind that 'legal'/'lawful' doesn't stipulate the jurisdiction - it could be 'Lowest common denominator', e.g. discussion concerning the weather and praise for the king could remain the only legal communications in all jurisdictions.
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
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".