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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."
http://www.openrightsgroup.org/blog/2010/open-internet-enhances-our-freedom-of-speech/
I know, right? Google already pays for the pipes they use.
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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!"
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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?
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?
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I think most here generally support neutrality. Some argue that ISPs should be able to prioritize traffic based on type but not destination - they could give priority to latency critical, but low bandwidth, packets like VOIP at the expense of FTP; but not give priority to their own VOIP traffic above other VOIP traffic.
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Net neutrality is something that's not even something you talk about... it's just a given, like freedom of speech.
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Oh no, it makes sense to intentionally cripple the presumably cheaper lower tier products when they have a nice and shiny, and more expensive, high tier product to offer when you get fed up, nevermind that the actual cost for the provider is the same, raional thought and logic have never been a problem for a good business plan.
As for packet inspection, a perfect oppotunity to implement it widely, just wait until they decide to put noninspectable packages in the not-moving-at-all-lane-until-key-provided.
So what exactly is my role in this? Does it mean I don't have to pay my ISP anymore, because now they're working for Google and other content providers?
Or does it mean that I'll keep paying the same, but my connection will be slower because my ISP wishes Google was their customer instead of me?
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.
What are Slashdot's feelings on net neutrality generally?
To my mind, it makes sense to have pricing clearly defined based on the bandwidth you use. It should be no different than your electric bill where you're charged based on the power you use. Take my parents - They "do email," now and again watch youtube vids of the grandkids and surf the web a bit. Contrast this with my brother-in-law who is constantly torrenting, playing online games and using netflix. I'm somewhere in the middle. There should be a mechanism to charge us different rates based on our usage. My parents shouldn't be subsidizing my brother-in-law.
However the ISPs don't seem to be well equipped to build this sort of system...
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).
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Net Neutrality would not be necessary if we had true choice for consumers among many companies.
But since we instead have monopoly (like Comcast) or duopoly (Comcast/Verizon), that creates the need for the government to regulate and impose net neutrality, the same way they impose it on the Telephone monopoly.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
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.
That's exactly what happens today. Do you think your small business pays the same for Internet access as Google does?
ISPs just want an excuse to double bill businesses by threatening them to deprioritise their traffic; no matter what they already pay for their big pipes. Extortion by any other name ...
And that is how we ended up with the FTP over VOIP protocol.
/Lars
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.
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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).
Actually, they don't. Google has peering agreements in a lot of places, so they pay nothing for bandwidth. Peering agreements exist because both parties benefit from the connectivity. I suspect that an ISP that tried to present Google with a bill would be told 'we're not going to pay, we're happy to simply blackhole your network. Have fun explaining to your users why they can't send mail or IMs to gmail users, can't browse YouTube and can't search the web with Google.'
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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
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
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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.
peering agreement == barter == paying with bandwidth
I wonder what these ISPs would think if Google, Facebook and the like would start charging THEM, for letting their users access their services?
Your role is something like that of a shopkeeper. It would be rather unpleasant if your bandwidth got throttled and prevented you from connecting with customers. So you pay your protection fee ... erm, access to the supercool higher tier internet for really 'fast' speeds.
Why? FTP doesn't need low latency. It'll hardly be affected.
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...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.
Only senders pay.
Which still doesn't address the issue of a DOS attack. I don't think you fully understand the mechanics involved.
Why [have an FTP over VOIP protocol]? FTP doesn't need low latency. It'll hardly be affected.
Because to the telcoms "high latency" means "disconnect whatever transfers we don't like/aren't paid enough for" or "impersonate both sides of the connection and send RST packets".
I think most here generally support neutrality. Some argue that ISPs should be able to prioritize traffic based on type but not destination - they could give priority to latency critical, but low bandwidth, packets like VOIP at the expense of FTP; but not give priority to their own VOIP traffic above other VOIP traffic.
The challenge with prioritization over the Internet is the trust model. If my ISP were to trust my network to mark priority levels there's nothing that prevents me from selfishly flagging all my traffic as real-time just to give myself lower-latency web browsing. So clearly the ISP won't trust anyone but themselves to mark traffic. Or maybe they trust me but only permit a certain percentage of bandwidth to be marked real-time, and charging me for that privilege depending on how big of a percentage I want. This is essentially how MPLS works today.
But then that data has to go somewhere, and it may traverse several other ISPs before reaching its destination, so all those other ISPs also have to trust that the traffic is flagged correctly and act appropriately. And if ISP X is sending 50% real-time traffic and ISP Y is sending 25% real-time traffic, the equitable peering arrangements that we have today are suddenly broken. Of course the natural solution then would be a centralized command and control to dictate and enforce how all these ISPs handle and charge one another for this traffic. And naturally this would be a government entity of some kind. Extrapolate from there yourselves.
This is why Net Neutrality is important.
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It's fraud on the part of the ISP.
I have already paid my ISP for the bandwidth from slashdot.org, just as slashdot have paid their service bill for the bandwidth they consume.
ISPs want to be paid twice for the same service, and media monopolies want an unfair advantage over their competitor. This goes against the founding spirit of the internet, big media want their monopoly back.
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