Slashdot Mirror
UK Minister Backs 'Two-Speed' Internet
Darkon writes "UK Culture minister Ed Vaizey has backed a 'two-speed internet', letting service providers charge content makers and customers for 'fast lane' access. It paves the way for an end to 'net neutrality' — with heavy bandwidth users like Google and the BBC likely to face a bill for the pipes they use."
The providers are the users now?
the internet works just how it works. to be sure to have some packets go faster then others...
dont they need to inspect every packet, see who send it and then decide to put some on the slow lane?
if the fast lane its bandwith isn't pretty much filled, isn't it stupid to put stuff on the slow lane?
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/open-internet-enhances-our-freedom-of-speech/
I can hear it now, almost a throwback to the 60's...
"dangburn newfangled hippies with their free love, free net, free information! Every redblooded {American|Brit} knows you get what you pay for! Can't have vagrants just lolligagging around on the net! The pricetag filters out the hoodlums!"
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
Google and the BBC already pay for the "pipes" they use, and end users pay for the "pipes" they use, where is someone not getting paid in this?
...larger pipes cost more to maintain :)
My book: Friendly F#, fun with game development and XNA; my game: Galaxy Wars by VSTeam; my gamedev language: Casanova.
What are Slashdot's feelings on net neutrality generally? It seems as if it's something we should care about, but most here don't seem to mind.
If nothing else, it could increase complexity in a system that should stay simply IMHO.
Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
How is the bandwidth Google uses not being paid for now? I know that ISP's charge me money to access the internet, and I'd imagine that Google already pays whatever service provider hooks their network into the internet. What am I missing here?
Let me get this right:
The BBC, who I have to pay by law, will have to pay Virgin Media, my ISP, who I already pay.
My money is going to who for what exactly?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
If my business is small and doesn't need much bandwidth, I pay $$ for a DSL line. If I'm Google, I pay out the ass for a bundle of OC192s. As long as it's all content-agnostic, who cares?
Google pays for internet right now right?
The major peers trade traffic with each other and the billing of that traffic usually ends up a wash.
Google crawls the intarwebz using bandwidth, then presents search results to people also using bandwidth. I expect they have a pretty heavy bill for the pipes they use now.
If Google doesn't want to pay for more exclusive access speeds or priority of service why would their bill go any higher than it is right now?
Google spent a lot of cash on having distributed datacenters so people get fast results without priority of service agreements, so why would they bother paying for such things now?
I understand if Bing started paying for Priority service Google might seem slower, but really most of Google's speed comes from their computers, indexing technology and distributed datacenters, not backroom service agreements.
Should I assume UK Culture minister Ed Vaizey was picking on Google because it's aname everybody knows.
This is great. If they do that, Google can just cut those guys off from their network entirely, and they can wither and die as they should. Google has quite a bit of dark fiber. Shouldn't be too hard to finish out the rest of the network.
Get rid of these damn telecoms with their crappy business models.
...surely make you lose your mind. Everything, all the time.
The Eagles have already shown beyond a reasonable doubt that a 2-speed internet is inherently a bad idea. Let's just keep it at the same speed it is now. Shall we Mr. Culture Minister?
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
But they don't pay for all of the pipes... Remember all that Dark Fibre they bought up in 2007?
I remember thinking they're preparing for this sort of thing (in one form or another) - they're pretty good at anticipating trends. If they've got the backbone bandwidth to trade for last mile bandwidth they'll be able to operate at substantially lower cost than other high bandwidth users (read:Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, Twitter - prime competetors all).
Windows in 6 Bytes (IA-32) : 90 90 90 90 CD 19
How about a ten speed internet so you can downshift for steep hills?
IMO, this is about moving money to ISPs who are (in the UK) generally local companies whereas service providers are often foreign owned.
Net neutrality should probably be a WTO issue.
... pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
It almost seems like the minister thinks that net neutrality is about the single/home user ("power-user" or otherwise) vs. the corporation, and that this is all about ISPs trying to get big companies to pay more than the single/home user for their internet usage. Either that, or he's trying to make the average voter think that that's the crux of the issue. The problem is that abolishing net-neutrality would make perfect sense if that was what was actually going on!
I can't help but wonder if this isn't a bit of misdirection or misinformation directed at the masses for the purposes of getting a bill (likely rife with kickback potential) passed.
I really just hope that these "bandwidth users" like google outright refuse to pay, and instead instantly cut off access from those ISPs which threaten them with such stupidity.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
2 speed internet mandated by law is a great idea!
If and only if it has the following two speeds:
- The minimum guaranteed reserved bandwidth I pay for (which is currently almost always unknown, and can change without notice)
- The maximum burst bandwidth I pay for (which is what they currently advertise)
Currently there are too many oversold connections with burst speeds of 20, 30, 60 or even 120 mbit being sold without any mention of the minimum reserved bandwidth, and those speeds become lower and lower when they oversubscribe the line. Consumers need to know the minimum as well as the maximum bandwidth they are paying for.
* smartass notice: yes I know you can't guarantee an actual minimum bandwidth in practice, but I'm talking about the uplink (i.e. 100 mbit uplink shared with 50 users = 2mbit guaranteed, in contrast to the maximum advertised speed which would probably be 20mbit in this setup).
Nominally, this proposal will have no detrimental impact on any current service. Put simply, ISPs are being given the option to offer a "premium" service to those data suppliers who wish for their content to be delivered at a "premium" rate, at a premium price, thereby improving their perceived web experience.
To the simple-minded, this is a perfectly straightforward case of adding value to a service and charging for that added value. Nobody has to pay anything extra if they don't want to. However, this doesn't address the brutal reality.
Firstly, ISPs already saturate their bandwidth as far as they're able in order to be competitive. The creation of an express-lane for premium content will, by default, require the degrading of non-premium content delivery. Certainly the increased revenue could be used to improve infrastructure and have a net benefit on all bandwidth, but ISPs are businesses and it's fundamentally naive to assume this will be the result.
Secondly - and more importantly - this move would change the culture of the web irrevocably. In the first instance, content providers will have to pick a camp, and we will be faced with a two-tier system. Two-tier will just be the beginning though, and companies will have to quickly start incorporating their "content deliver" streaming costs into their business strategy. Like any variable, contracted service, it will be open to competition, abuse and legal dicking-about. It will change the very nature of the web, and we will all suffer from the lack of an even field.
A more subtle problem would be the loss of impetus to improve the efficiency of data delivery. As things stand, it is in every single person's and organisation's interest to constantly strive to improve the bandwidth-efficiency of their sites, languages, algorithms and services. As soon as the big guns find themselves able to take a short-cut to improving their users' web-experience by paying for it, half the major driving force behind these innovations in efficiency will be gone.
I'm sure there are many other reasons to oppose this change, and I honestly can't think of any compelling reason to approve it - unless, as I said, one takes the short-sighted, uninformed (or plain greedy) stance that this would improve certain uses of the web, at least for now.
Meta will eat itself
This story seem sort of... redundant? Of course they pay for the "pipes" they use, just like everyone else out there.
It seems slightly silly to me that the content providers have pay for their network access in order to offer their services, which they usually do for free. A contentless net is a useless net, so it would seem reasonable that a content provider get their connection at very cheap prices, at least. Of course this will never happen, but let's say, for argument's sake, that Google started to aggressively renegotiate their peering agreements. It would seem that anyone not willing to peer with them at dictated terms would be left with an unsellable Google-less Internet.
The smaller content providers obviously cannot do anything so straightforward without at least uniting their power first, but if they ever did, I think the ISPs would be the ones to fold first, after all they have to sell _something_ to the home customer.
Naturally, that would mean every web page instantly becoming uselessly heavy with ads and no concern for bandwith usage, so let's hope they never get around to it.
(Full disclosure: I work at a company that hosts several relatively large web services.)
Seriously... we all know Google etc already pay for the uplink, power, servers, etc, and the "users" that are using bandwidth are the people requesting. Who are also paying ISPs already for what they use (the ISPs wrote the contracts!).
Logic and reason aren't going to work here or they already would have. It's unfortunate Google has sworn off evil; they're in a unique position here to do what a less philanthropic business would have long ago: start demanding payment from ISPs, especially the big ones. Hey Comcast, want your users to have fast access to Google? You should start paying Google then. Or maybe AT&T will sign and your customers will go there, because everyone uses Google.
Of course, this will cause politicians etc to start whining about fairness, antitrust, and how the net should be neutral to large players. Congratulations, we win. =P
Don't think of it as a flame---it's more like an argument that does 3d6 fire damage
This seems interesting,
I don't know exactly what he is proposing, but a good idea could be...
The users pay the same amount of money and a guaranteed a minimum bandwidth... so suppose you are downloading some stuff from a random place(say xyz), you will get your minimum speed,
now here is the catch, the big companies (say youtube), can pay extra to the isp's so that on their websites you will get more than a minimum speed that you pay for,
so in the end, suppose i pay for a 4 mbps connection
i get 4 mbps when i download from xyz
and get 12 mbps when i download(stream) from youtube
everyones happy :) (or is someone not?)
"bandwidth users like Google and the BBC likely to face a bill for the pipes they use"
They already face a bill for the pipes they use. Now someone wants to make them pay a bill for the pipes end users use to get to google and bbc, even though those pipes are already payed for by the end users.
Contact information if you wish to express your opinion about this:
http://twitter.com/#!/edvaizey
http://www.vaizey.com/text.aspx?id=36
I wonder what these ISPs would think if Google, Facebook and the like would start charging THEM, for letting their users access their services?
BT Internet: "We demand you give us money for the privilege of providing free content to our customers"
BBC: "No. Fuck you. What now, bitch?"
BT Internet: "Er... please?"
Seriously, what leverage do they actually have? People don't have a tiny speck of loyalty to their ISP except insofar as they get hassle free browsing. If the BCC stops working properly, they'll bitch like crazy to the ISP (not the BBC), and when it doesn't get fixed, they'll switch to some other ISP in a heartbeat. They dont want "The Virgin Web Experience", they want to go to the website they've selected, and they dont give a shit who takes them there as long as it isn't someone who dicks them around.
I don't want to play the e-lawyer here, but there might even be a prima facia case for them breaking the contract on the grounds that the service they've purchased is no longer fit for use, and being able to switch immediately. And you can bet that if that is the case that the BBC will be trumpeting it from the rooftops.
The BBC could easily make a banner on their front page that only shows to people connecting via any ISP that tried this: "Your ISP is deliberately reducing the speed at which you connect to our website. Click this banner if you are experiencing problems". Clicking takes you to a list of ISPs that operate in your area that don't limit connections.
Everybody who is on the internet already pays for the pipes they use. Do you think the BBC sent some people in dark clothes to LINX in the middle of the night and got themselves free cable or something?
I'm probably missing something, and someone will correct me hopefully, but how will a multi-tier system work with the multiple ISPs? When I access google, sometimes the traceroute will run all the way out to Europe and back to the United States to access the site. how are all the different ISPs involved going between here and there going to manage a tiered system? Will every one of them charge google a fee, or force the connection to go around when the subscription price wasn't paid? It seems to me that this could get horribly messy very quickly and the law of unintended consequences would force the countries hosting those ISPs geographically to quickly step in, creating a regulations nightmare a million times worse than simply preserving an open network would.
i ~ Celebrating Science, Cyberspace, Speculation
Sigh. It isn't clear that net neutrality is really neutral: there's Netflix for instance. How much of the bandwidth is porn?
I think it needs to be strongly regulated, I think the profits need to be capped. But we are not neutral on the air we breath, the water we drink, indeed the volume of our own public voices: we can be all of us drowned out.
Maybe reserve some bandwidth for the open market, sell it like radio space to the highest bidder.
But don't see the whole spectrum, don't make everything for sale.
And if we don't like it, yeah, we can move. That's how everyone got here: they chose here instead of there, for whatever reasons.
But with the supreme court outcome on money in elections, we certainly can't cast a meaningful ballot.
Ah yes. That famously foreign-owned BBC, ITV and Channel 4. All of whom run free-to-Net streaming video services.
...probably believes in a two-tier society generally, the nobility and the peasants! ;-)
This is a man (son of Lord Vaizey) who accidentally got £2000 worth of furniture delivered to "the wrong home", including an antique chair and paid it all back when the accounts committee found out.
Now imagine [Comcast after having vertically integrated with NBC] are [throttling] ABC.com, Google, Yahoo, etc., etc. If they can get this practice federally labeled legal
Then they'd be smarter than the average antitrust lawyer.
they need bandwith for this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATBr_b-6ZKI
Basically its to let the service providers be free to make internet a feudal domain, just like how the current corporate business world/economy is. Each network will be a feudal domain on which the provider will be free to decide what happens, who travels, who sees what and who cannot see what, behind the guise of charging. Dont like something ? charge more. Competitor ? charge much more.
Its something everyone should be against. The correct way for the isps to get out of the shit they have put themselves by overselling, is to invest the heaps of UNDESERVED cash, they have made. they were basically selling capacity they didnt have. until users started to utilize what they actually have BOUGHT. and now, they chicken out, and try to charge the content providers, because they cannot go to the customers and say 'hey, we SCAMMED you, actually we didnt have that capacity. now, you have to pay more, for what we have sold you'.
its as simple as that. it was a scam, and proposing that internet be broken into feudal domains with spheres of influence to fix it, is beyond medieval. anyone who proposes it should be castrated from political life.
Read radical news here
Everybody are used to paying for pipes of internet.. It's called business now.
Initially Internet was just between few universities, so nobody paid for that. Just lay down the cable and maintain your equipment. Now we have to pay...
Google could just as well ask british ISPs to pay for being accessed, and prioritizing their traffic :p
The BBC is largely the problem (for the ISPs). They spent years telling everyone how awesome their hugely over-subscribed services were for streaming media and the like, then the Beeb came along with the iPlayer, everyone started using it and the ISPs were faced with two choices: Upgrade their networks to actually provide the service they sold to their users or spend almost as much money lobbying the government to force the BBC to pay them for the privilege of transporting their content over the last mile.
This is the backside of censorship
If only the big media outlets have the pipes to get the word out then the message can be more easily controlled.
Why do MS and GE need their own networks?
Why were the rules changed to allow this?
Look at the dates that all of these things happened for yourself
Big corps need contracts and favors, Government needs the media to stay on message.
If just anybody can spill the beans, it queers the deal.
Ending net neutrality will result a surge in compressed transport and CPU usage. Higher latency, higher CPU usage. More frustration and more wasted energy.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
Dick move, Ed Vaizey, dick move.
See, if you have a 2 tiered internet, then the terrorists will obviously use the faster one. So by supporting a higher speed internet, you support terrorism.
Today I have a connection from Cox. It is advertised as something like 20Mb/sec - which is a burst capacity not anything you can rely on continuously. The rate I pay has nothing to do with actual costs but instead is geared to increase market share because in the ISP business it pretty much costs the same to have 1 user in a suburb as it does to have 80,000. So it behooves the ISP (cable, DSL or whatever) to grab as many customers as they can.
Hence we have things like the $14.95 DSL offerings.
As you might guess, even after they have the customers they can't jump the rates up. Business users pay 2-3 times as much for exactly the same service because they aren't competing for the customers in the same way.
So the ISP is now looking for how to actually get paid for their costs. They can't raise prices because that would just drive customers away without decreasing their costs at all. We've tried the "government subsidy" in the US and that didn't work so it is unlikely to work in the UK.
Maybe they can create a new class of service "really fast" and price it 3 times as much as the "pretends to be kinda fast" service that exists today. The difference would, of course, be simply slowing down the current tier and leaving the new service alone.
The other alternative is to get someone else to pay. Google, perhaps?
Is there a British politician ....anywhere.... who doesn't come off as a total fuck-tard with craptacular ideas when it comes to anything technology or internet? Seriously, I've heard more dumb-ass ideas spout from British politicians than I would get from American politicians, and they have worse ideas than low-functioning mentally challenged folk in the psych ward of the prison for the criminally insane. How is it that they 1) keep coming up with this rubbish and 2) don't have an aide or supporter with a bat and good sense. --when the aide reads the rubbish, the bat could be swung, keeping the rubbish from being presented and the politician looking like an idiot.
This should be ringing alarm bells with everyone. The Internet community in the UK just does not have a strong enough voice to prevent this being rushed through. Here is an email I've just sent to the Minister for "Culture"... I hope that he can stop golfing long enough to read it:
Dear Mr Vaizey,
I've been reading with interest the world you're doing against net neutrality. In the States, net neutrality has really taken centre stage, with the online community as a whole outraged over the proposals to do just as you are doing, restructuring the Internet in a commercial and self-serving way. The only real difference is that in the States, law makers are more up to date with technological advancements, coupled with the fact that the American Internet community is more vocal, meaning that it is not an issue which can be bundled through. I believe that in parliament though this could very well happen, members of the house often lack the technical knowledge to see just how damaging this would be to the Internet as a whole.
Free, unrestricted, non-capped access to the Internet is something which must be protected at all cost. Your suggestion would mean that a class based system would exist on the Internet, with the better system being available to those that could afford it. Your original proposal may not allow for this directly, but once bandwidth capping is in place, it would only be a matter of time. In essence, it would
completely restructure the Internet as we know it, changing the very essence of what is has achieved since inception; the removal of class and creed. This can only be bad for the consumer, and in turn, your
constituents.
I would urge you to reconsider your position, and the actions you are planning to take, unless you want to permanently damage something which is sure to be the cornerstone of our futures. You would indeed
be historically remembered as such, the "culture" minister that was responsible for the sell out of the Internet.
Yours faithfully,
Luke O'Connell
People who spout things like "google will need to pay for the pipes it uses" don't understand the market forces at play and likely don't have any knowledge at all about what a typical peering agreement looks like. Google will continue to get a "free ride" and rightfully not pay squat for connectivity well into the foreseeable future.
This fast lane business for large scale high bandwidth content does not scale. Even if you as an ISP decided that you will prioritize x traffic good luck getting the rest of the infustructure outside of your administrative control to care or agree with you.
In my view the only practical way to bring high-bandwidth content to the masses is via local aggregation at the ISP using the Akamai model. There is no reason ISP could not charge more for services which rely on ISP operated local aggregation caches for IPTV and other content.
Google's been buying up dark fiber right? Any of that happening in the UK?
Also, if they had enough of it, would they just cut out the middle man and with him, the bullshit?
that this is really about the users getting forked over?
Unhappily,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
What /.ers are talking about when they refer to net neutrality is the neutral treatment of data based on the content of the data, NOT the manner in which the content is transmitted. That is a very important technical distinction to make that is commonly misapplied when the term "net neutrality" is used without understanding the underlying issue.
Your electricity bill is "electric neutral" already. If BC Hydro were to overturn "electric neutral" they would bill you differently not only the quantity of electricity you used, but for the purpose to which you put the electricity. They could do things like bill you more for powering a non-BC Hydro branded/partner TV or fridge, but they would sell it to you as a "discount" for using their services. If you complained, they would say oh just switch to a competing provider!
Except the only other "competition" colludes with them in price.
And that is how we ended up with the FTP over VOIP protocol.
And if the ISP is using QoS with traffic shaping you'll get only some very limited fraction of your data rate with parameters suitable for streaming. The rest will either be dropped or bumped down to "best-effort". (Probably dropped: Even if the ISP DOES have a box smart enough to demote it, you marked it as being useless-if-delayed. So it gets dropped if it's held up, to avoid chewing up backplane datarate with packets that won't be used when received.)
Net result of using FTP over VoIP is to make your REAL VoIP packets lose their priority and/or be dropped, while not appreciably helping (and possibly drastically throttling) your FTP traffic.
= = = =
This was done before - a LONG time ago (in network time scales). QoS / Diffserv was defined in the network protocols back at the start of things. But an early Microsoft product shipped with a network stack that "improved" its performance by marking everything for higher QoS than it needed - long before VoIP applications were common (or even generally available). Net result was that for several generations of buildout the backbone hasn't trusted the user's class-of-service markings - and won't in the foreseeable future, either (until there's some benefit for the ISPs to honoring SOME of them, along with a billing structure that pays for packets that get premium service at the expense of others).
It was this institutionalized "cheating" that led to the development of packet inspection, so ISPs could identify customers' traffic that really did need special service to give the user a good "internet experience" and adjust its handling appropriately (thus giving the ISP an edge on the competition). Of course, like fire, tools to identify traffic type can also be misused to the customers' disadvantage (such as protocols that compete with a product of the ISP's owner). And the requirement for the ISP to pick winning and losing protocols stifles innovation.
Thanks again, Microsoft.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
...that making money involves contacting a local MP. It is my theory, but has not been proven, that the recent spate of government bankruptcies i.e. Ireland, have more to do with corporate handouts and low corporate taxes than it does with providing health care and services such as roads o the public. [ Whey have countries such as France, which has had good social programs in place existed for the most part of the last 40 years and now why is this issue raising it's head?] After all Canada has had all of these in place, and yet we are one of the better off countries without as much debt. When in fact people get on the radio and talk about governments losing money because of health care, and then when asked why Canada is in pretty good shape, their answer is "better managed financial institutions". Giving more money to corporations for things such as the Internet without no real gain seems like more of the same but now instead of just giving tax breaks consumers are actually enticed to pay more for their Internet connection - a more active form of corporate welfare.
Society use your Sciences
The anti-trust lawsuit collapsed against Microsoft precisely because the judgement phase wasn't handed down until a republican was president.
That and because it was U.S. v. Microsoft, the executive branch of the federal government bringing suit, as opposed to Netscape et al. v. Microsoft, a private-sector entity bringing suit. Can you characterize the difference between how the judicial branch handles civil antitrust lawsuits under Republican and Democratic legislative and executive branch?
I noted it before but no one payed notice. Google has horded fiber "the likes of Gad hasn't even seen!" (jaja---Dune ya'know.) They will not need to pay _anyone_ to carry their "huge" traffic.
Here is a citation from Mark Stephens, aka, the current Robert X. Cringely,
"I spoke recently with an old friend who is a bandwidth broHe buys and sells bandwidth on fiber-optic networks around the world. And he told me something that I found not completely surprising, but I certainly hadn't known: Google controls more network fiber than any other organization.
[snip]
It is becoming very obvious what will happen over the next two to three years. More and more of us will be downloading movies and television shows over the net and with that our usage patterns will change. Instead of using 1-3 gigabytes per month, as most broadband Internet users have in recent years, we'll go to 1-3 gigabytes per DAY -- a 30X increase that will place a huge backbone burden on ISPs. Those ISPs will be faced with the option of increasing their backbone connections by 30X, which would kill all profits, OR they could accept a peering arrangement with the local Google data center."
In turnover terms, Sky is around 50% bigger than the BBC and it's Australian owned.
But really, I'm talking more about services like Facebook or Skype.
This would prompt major content providers to buy up ISPs and de-prioritise everybody else's traffic on their network. The end of the internet as we know it, ultimately replaced by a handful of heavily-corporately-censored private networks.