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Democrats Pan Google-Verizon Net Neutrality Proposal
GovTechGuy writes "Four House Democrats wrote to the Federal Communications Commission, urging them to write strict net neutrality rules and reject the framework put forward by Google and Verizon. The lawmakers, including Rep. Anna Eshoo, who represents the district containing Google HQ, said the Google-Verizon proposal increases the pressure on the FCC to come up with actual net neutrality rules, and characterize the deal as harmful to consumers and beneficial for the corporations. In particular, the letter took issue with two pieces of the Verizon-Google proposal: exemptions for managed services and wireless services from strict net-neutrality rules."
They -seemed- to be doing a good job, despite stonewalling and slowly rolling out service that is generally two steps behind most of the rest of the world even in the highest density regions of the states.
And now that they only see money these days, manipulating and destroying the openness that the internet offered for the sake of their other business interests (which are in direct conflict) only serves them. They'd happily follow a Cable/Satellite tiered access system if not for the utter shit they'd catch.
Personally, much like phone systems all internet services should be marked as Tier II common carriers and forced to ignore the content of their customers communications.
Managed services are a good idea, if they are run on top of a neutral network. As long as that physical network is developed by an unbiased entity and resold fairly with no oversubscription, ISPs should be free to carve out as much bandwidth as they can pay for. As demand increases, regardless of content, investment in additional capacity will follow.
The problem with the existing situation is that as long as the ISPs own the underlying physical network, the "manages services" aren't running on top of the Internet, but rather the Internet is transformed into a "managed service". There is no incentive whatsoever for the ISPs to invest in additional capacity beyond what they require for their own services, so investment in the Internet is dead, and its value for future innovation is lost.
> Last I checked, most consumer-level cable connections such as what most have with comcast explicitly forbid running a "server" on the line in the contract.
That would be one of the first things to be prohibited by any regulation worthy of the name "net neutrality".
The customer pays the ISP to transfer packets. Whether those packets belong to a connection initiated by the client or by another system is none of the ISP's goddamn business.
A net neutrality law should specify which parts of the IP header the ISP is permitted to examine and for what purposes. Examining any other part of the packet (e.g. TCP/UDP ports, TCP flags, etc) should be considered an illegal wiretap.
The fundamental principle of the internet is that routers only know two protocols: IP and ICMP. Anything and everything beyond that is just "payload", meaningful only to the endpoints.