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FCC Commissioner Blasts Verizon On Net Neutrality
destinyland writes "FCC chairman Julius Genachowski says that net neutrality rules 'will happen,' promising the FCC 'will make sure that we get the rules right... to make sure that what we do maximizes innovation and investment across the ecosystem.' But the same week, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps announced that the public should not stand for deals 'that exchange Internet freedom for bloated profits,' mocking the tiered-data plans of the 'Verizon-Google gaggle' and accusing them of wanting 'gated communities for the affluent.' Speaking at a New Mexico hearing, the commissioner warned the audience against proposals that would 'vastly diminish' the Internet's importance, blasting 'special interests and gatekeepers and toll-booth collectors who will short-circuit what this great new technology can do for our country.' (The text of his speech is available as a PDF file at FCC.gov.) He concludes by acknowledging that 'you can't blame companies for seeking to protect their own interests. But you can blame policy-makers if we let them get away with it!'"
This ought to be entertaining. :)
Personally, I don't trust either the FCC or Verizon.
Tsk America. How on earth did this guy slip through the net? Isn't the name a bloody clue this is a pinko who will undermine your countries economy... oh wait... to late.
On a more serious note, novel way to resign. I wonder how many policy-makers choked on their breakfast or had to have it explained to them that some people think that it is not their job to protect the interests of companies at the expense of everything else.
Brave guy, but somehow I feel any praise I write is like writing a eulogy.
I fail to see where does the complexity of those rules lay. It seems that the only need for complexity starts exactly where net neutrality ends.
"How dare those popular internet companies be popular? They're making our customers use more data! Charge them money!"
Unfair price models are the problem driving that. X per month is simple and a good idea for most customers, X per gigabyte is simple and a good idea for most ISPs. Neither is exactly fair in every circumstance, and choosing between them is essentially the same as choosing who to give the benefit of the complex situation. Their only advantage is that they can be explained in under 5 words.
I'm not sure it's possible to come up with an alternative pricing system that doesn't end up as an even more unfair black box model where you only find out how much you've spent when the bill comes.
Policymakers are great about talking up justice for everyone and saying no to special interests until thy actually have to put pen to paper. The FCC can make all the noise they want, but until this Net Neutrality is actually on the books and being enforced call me skeptical at best.
Surely you can blame then when, in the course of protecting their interests, they bribe and corrupt a system designed to protect the interests of the majority, in order to create blockades that add no value whatsoever to a product that got paid for with tax money.
unhindered: when you get a packet, move it on when you can.
when you ask for 300GB/sec it won't be in one packet, so you ask for a packet and get a packet back. Over a 100GB/sec pipe, you can't ask for 300GB/sec so no hindrance in effect
Keep going? On what?
Net Neutrality is WHAT YOU HAD ALREADY. These laws, unlike most (because, probably, they don't serve commercial interests but the american people) had a sunset clause and the clause ended recently.
You know, all those companies and innovation and money and increased revenue you had in the 70's to 2000? Under Net Neutrality.
But COMPLAINTS about Net Neutrality? Now THERE'S a money-to-lawyers scheme...
More like gated communities for the effluent if the internet becomes Failbook + Twatter...
[quote]You're being deliberately stupid [/quote]
You're projecting. Again.
"Because last time I looked an HTTP get or post was a helluva lot smaller than data stream that can be returned"
But your ethernet card doesn't KNOW HTTP. It sends a packet.
In response, you get maybe thousands or millions of packets, but those packets are sent and routed without fear or favour and only as fast as the network allows.
"so it's quite easy for a bunch of users to request more bandwidth than is available."
No, it's quite easy for a bunch of people to request a lot of information. But One person can do that just by expecting the 15Kb JPEG image to turn up within 1.5ns.
[quote]And of course now you'd have to define "when you can" in unambiguous terms.[/quote]
So where are the laws stating that you MUST put a gallon in a quart pot???
Speed of network. You can't push 300GB down a 100GB/sec link in one second.
You picked a strawman that is vacuous and stupid, rather like yourself.
IT IS EASY PEASY.
It was already written in law and worked, but it sunset.
If it wasn't easy-peasy to do the first time, just continuing the laws as they were IS.
But, no, you have a teabagger mentality and anything the gubmint does is wrong.
Well protect your own property.
I'm guessing that the "gated communities for the affluent" comment is going to come back to bite him.
For one, American political discourse tends to shy away from anything that can even be remotely described as "class warfare". His comment doesn't really qualify; but once boiled into a contextless soundbite and replayed a few bazillion times on the news channels of the same cable companies on whose toes he is stepping, it sure will sound like it.
Second, it seems most likely that the rent-seeking model of tiered internet providers will be much closer to that of cable TV or old-school telco providers: that is, massive rent seeking; but much broader availability than "gated community" would imply. Everyone pays too much for cable, and everyone used to pay too much for long distance; but the companies realized that gouging everyone a bit was much more profitable than gouging half of the top quintile a lot. It may well end up being the case that only the affluent(and specifically the techy affluent) will be able to afford access to the real internet, as opposed to the "facebook and youtube over IP channel"; but that is too subtle a point to play in soundbites.
Third, and perhaps most serious, Telcos and Cable companies are actually superbly positioned to make a (dishonest; but superficially convincing) "friend of the common man" play. They are, in fact, bloated rent-seeking conglomerates; but, by the simple necessities of operating an infrastructure business, bloated rent-seeking conglomerates with very, very broad-based operations.
Most of the rents go right up the food chain to the big fish; but Verizon, Comcast, et al. have to have installers and linesmen, and technicians and whatnot in virtually every city and town. These guys aren't seeing much of those rents being collected, and are themselves paying too much for cable; but they know who their employers are. Also, since the marginal cost of adding an extra internet subscriber is nearly zero, doling out cheap/free internet access to schools, community centers, youth-centers-to-keep-at-risk-kids-off-the-street-after-school, etc. is very easy, very cheap, and good PR. All that adds up to a massive PR bonus in a broad based group of community groups, blue collar, semi-skilled and skilled tradesmen, and the like.(Obviously, it isn't as though a neutral internet wouldn't need linesmen, and a competitive internet would provide cheaper internet not as part of a cynical charity effort; but that isn't immediately visible...) This, along with a few modest, but strategic, monetary donations to the correct local charities, can be converted into a torrent of letters of support from various worthy local anti-poverty groups.
By contrast, tech companies tend to have fairly geographically narrow(or, even if geographically distributed, as with Google, Akamai, and friends, pretty lightly staffed, mostly with engineers and programmers and such) operations and human resources bases. Their customer bases are fairly broad, and they are often much more popular than the local Telcos and Cable outfits(only paranoid privacy geeks hate Google, while cable companies are about as popular as the IRS); but they have much less of the sort of presence that can translate into thousands of letters from the "grassroots". The tech guys do benefit a great many people; but most of them in smaller, subtler ways. Outside of areas that are virtually company towns, or highly-educated startup hotbeds, there is virtually no blue-ish collar bread-and-butter coming out of the tech industry(particularly since, for anything that can be shipped, hardware assembly is largely offshore). Internet competition and tech company services are likely to save everyone some dollars a month, in addition to the free speech and innovation benefits; but that isn't nearly as concrete as having a layer of people, coast to coast, whose checks you sign...
Private islands on the internet? Isn't that what we have now? I pay for a subscription to the WSJ and there is content and comments in there reserved for subscribers. I fail to see how this is a bad thing. If my traffic was being shaped so I cannot access the islands I want-- different story. I would switch ISPs in a heartbeat if they did this. I don't really trust the big ISPs, but I trust the government even less. You can bet your boots that any net neutrality bill would have loads of other provisions in there that we don't want.
when you get a packet, move it on when you can.
Over which connection? The 1000000 gigabit/nanosecond pipe for the paying content providers (Disney, etc) or the 14.4kbps modem for everyone else?
Over a 100GB/sec pipe, you can't ask for 300GB/sec so no hindrance in effect
You can ask - you just won't get it. It's called denial of service. You don't (normally) ask for speed, you ask for a volume of data. But if it comes over too slow a connection (intentional or not) you clog up the network like a highway at rush hour. Clever networks WILL intentionally route traffic they don't want over too congested a connection knowing that they can then shake down content owners and end users to fork over more dough for less freedom. It's not remotely difficult to intentionally under-invest in a network to keep it slower, especially when there is little/no competition.
Keep going? On what?
Plenty. If you are going to define how network providers are going to route traffic, you're going to have to get quite detailed about what that means. Doing this in a manner with no loopholes is REALLY hard. You're also going to have to define how it will be monitored, what will be monitored, what the consequences are for violating the rules, who is going to monitor it, and for how long and with what funds will the oversight be conducted with. Easy? I wish it were but it won't be. Net neutrality is important but keeping it is going to be quite a challenge.
Is it an internet with no price restrictions? Or no speed restrictions? Or both?
No matter what, you still end up paying a monthly fee to a relative monopoly of ISPs
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Partially lost in this whole debate is the fact that there are really 2 ways of giving preferential treatment to traffic, "caching" and "throttling". Throttling is bad, but since it's really cheap to implement the execs like it. Caching on the other hand is much harder and more expensive to implement, but it ultimately ends up being a service instead of a burden to the customer. If Google wants to pay Verizon to cache the most popular 100,000 youtube videos than they should be allowed to. The people that watch said videos get better download times and google saves on bandwidth.
I would hope that such "positive" preferential treatment wouldn't be banned along with throttling, but I can certainly see an upshot, namely enforcement. How is your average customer supposed to know whether or not you are throttling or merely just caching competing content?
Monstar L
I've gone back and forth on this issue. I do think ISPs who have monopolies to run cable to the home do warrant some regulation from the FCC, because of their monopolies. On the other hand, I also realize that in the end, customers have to pay for their access and it might not be completely unreasonable to have 'tiers' of service. If someone can't afford a more 'premium' connection, it doesn't seem out of hand to do things like throttling that customers bandwidth, but then also striking deals with content providers to open up the bandwidth for their traffic to those limited customers. So, maybe I get the cheapo internet connection, but when I download content I pay for from places like Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, etc, I get faster download and no cap on the traffic, because the content providers setup a deal with the ISP.
Now, I don't think it's reasonable for them to completely block any (legal) traffic, but I do think it reasonable to allow them to setup tiered service and tiered pricing. The key is that they should fully disclose in their advertising and customer agreements, just exactly what it is the customer is paying for. If a customer buys "10Mb/s UNLIMITED Internet", then they shouldn't throttle any traffic, because the customer was sold unlimited service at up to 10Mb/s. If the customer only wants to pay for 768Kb/s, but a content provider has worked out a deal to actually send their content at *faster* than that 768Kb/s, I could totally see something like that.
Of course, I realize that's not what the big ISPs are trying to do, but I'm just saying, as a general principle, as long as the customer gets what they payed for and what was advertised, I'm kind of ok with some allowance of tiered service and agreements with content providers to enable a better experience.
What if down the road, you do not have an ISP to switch too, or they all really just work for the same parent company or follow the same money making policy. What if I come out with a fantasic new web site and can't compete due to throttling unless I make a special deal with them.. There is a problem..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
The laws already existed. ISPF already defined which connection. BGP routing already defines what interface and route.
"The 1000000 gigabit/nanosecond pipe for the paying content providers (Disney, etc)"
If it's Disney's ISP then they already pay for which connection, just like your business defines the connection as DS3 or OC192 or whatever.
But Disney doesn't pay for MY connection, *I* pay for it.
"Clever networks WILL intentionally route traffic they don't want over too congested a connection "
And such clever networks will be spotted and it can hardly be explained away as "we didn't know" since such shenanigans aren't available without explicit instruction.
" Keep going? On what?
Plenty."
No, the rant of the idiot ended there.
Plenty of NOTHING.
"If you are going to define how network providers are going to route traffic"
ISPF and BGP define it.
"Doing this in a manner with no loopholes is REALLY hard."
Same as any law. This doesn't stop law being written. Why should it in this case? Because money is involved. Money in gouging the content creators that make the ISP worth paying and gouging the customers AT THE SAME TIME.
"You're also going to have to define how it will be monitored, what will be monitored, what the consequences are for violating the rules"
These laws were already in place when the internet took off.
You're like someone saying "Heavier than air flight is impossible and even if it happens, how do you define the safety standards and consequences for breaking the law" AFTER being shown Quantas Airlines.
It's a challenge that has already been met.
The FCC commissioner says "the public should not stand for deals 'that exchange Internet freedom for bloated profits'?" His job is to help regulate the use of public property, not implement economic policy.
Any bets how long it'll be until "net neutrality" will force some content or providers to be given preferential treatment? My guess is less than a year after implementation until some group will be found to be under-supported and will be prioritized over everyone else.
Should there not be words of support on Slashdot for such a clear and unambiguous stand from the FCC Commissioner and the FCC Chairman? This is exactly what we need to begin turning the tide.
Look at the discussion below: sidetracked in a shouting match and out of topic all the way down (at least at the time I write this...).
Please!
Am wondering if in real world someone makes a toll road to join a public funded highway will the govt allow it? For all ISP's that want to throttle or introduce their own tiered plan or build gated communities on something that is built using public funds should just get their ISP license revoked. They can build their own Internet if they want to milk their customers.
An internet with no bias. Is a Free Populace one you can have any person for free? Or is it one who can walk about freely? Or is it one that didn't have to pay to be born? Since we can't say yes to any of those, I guess the USA has no free people.
What is it about Net Neutrality that brings out the idiots building strawmen? There can't be THAT many paid sockpuppets of US ISPs on here, can there?
Public policy is supposed to be a check on that, but the first line of defense consists of decision-makers in business remembering back to some very basic lessons they were taught in the home and in kindergarten; the "sharing is good" and "be nice to others who aren't like you" kind.
The decision makers in the tech business learned different lessons in kindergarten, such as "look out for yourself because nobody else gives a damn" and "you can't please anybody no matter how hard you try, so please yourself and let everybody else be damned". Such an upbringing explains why Ayn Rand remains in print.
I write sci-fi for metalheads
Just like software patents.
We have heard that story before and we know how it ends.
Ceci n'est pas une signature.
Slashdotters talk about the technical merits of the proposals, but the politicians and bureaucrats are talking about something entirely different.
http://www.redstate.com/neil_stevens/2010/11/20/tech-at-night-red-alert/
http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/1993/10/em368-why-the-fairness-doctrine-is-anything-but-fair
The sweeping change was the loss of NN laws when they lapsed, NOT the reintroduction of them, doofus.
What's even scarier is letting an unelected cabal of business interests decide what's legal or not, which is what the ISPs are doing now that Net Neutrality laws have lapsed.
I thought Google supported Net Neutrality as we know and understand it on wireLINE services and on wireLESS services they just wanted to prioritze traffic based on the TYPE of traffic (eg - VoIP traffic would be preferred over BitTorrent). Is this not correct?
How about them Dodgers?
I am completely in line with the Commish on this one. We need to stop pretending that the Internet is anything other than a telecommunications service. That means operators have some obligation to be a common carrier of information, regardless of source.
It's not the same type of telecommunication service as a telephone network, to be sure, so you can't use exactly the same rules to regulate both services. But what the Internet is NOT is an "information" service, it's current, erroneous, regulatory category. Information services -- i.e. applications -- run on top of telecommunications services -- i.e., information technology.
This IT vs. Application distinction is just as important in the sphere of regulations as it is in the sphere of physical deployment. It serves exactly the same function: it separates concerns, so we can independently couple things together in ways we haven't envisioned yet, using innovations that haven't been invented yet by companies that have yet to be founded.
Without loose regulatory coupling, the entire Internet will become just another Apple iTunes Store experience.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
Uh, you have COMPLETELY failed to get it.
Disney pays for their ISP.
Customer pays for their ISP.
If customer is not in US, they STILL pay their ISP and Disney STILL pays *their* ISP.
In what way is nobody paying for their access?
PS Comcast Canada were throttling heavily and complained about bandwidth hogs. In court, they had to produce their proofs of the hogging.
Result: they disclosed that only 3% of their time were they maxed out before they put throttling on.
This was their big beef. The reason why they were kicking people off. Because they were full 3% of the time.
Whoop de doo.
It's only a government sanctioned monopoly if a government has forbidden another company to enter that market. Don't confuse the costs of the last mile with government intervention and restriction of the market.
The hallmark of clear thinking and good writing is that the verb carries more weight than the noun. "Has forbidden" what exactly, using which powers, on which continent, under whose dim scrutiny of the passive voice? Not important, I guess, for you, after you trumpet the golden noun "government".
In a democracy, most government sanctioned monopolies are introduced with the phrase "national security". Another example of government sanctioned monopolies (under law) are professional sports leagues (MLB, NFL, NBA, NHL). The defense industry contains many de facto government sanctioned duopolies (Boeing/one of the others).
Not an example of government sanctioned monopoly since the breakup of AT&T is the telecoms industry, unless you believe that the fall of the Berlin wall didn't end the Soviet union, even if some of the current players are just as scary. The telecoms industry, like the failed Soviet state, has been slow to shake off its roots and regenerate in its new competitive guise. Network neutrality seeks to peel one more craggy monopolist finger from the bludgeon of strong-arm incumbency tactics.
Interesting how the word "government" has entered into elite troll-speak. Amazing the number of people out there whose political agenda coincides with paralysing clear thinking. This sentiment seems to also coincide with the lack of transparency of Swiss banks. In Iraq, you had to carry your loot through the streets. Looting of America is accomplished under cover of the general public shaking their fists helplessly at big government. Many people are opposed to geo-engineering to mitigate climate change as too big an experiment, with too much at risk, but fail to see the parallel in Libertarianism as the largest sociology experiment ever proposed.
Then, and not until then, did I realize that the spirit of liberty does not exist in hungry men. People talked about a day coming when the people would become so hungry and desperate that they would rise in a revolution and sweep all before them. Such a day will never come. Hungry men may fight, but it will be for a bone--not for liberty. The perpetuity of liberty rests with those who eat three square meals a day.
~ Frederick Upham Adams (1896)
In nations with strong men forming weak governments, greed creates private wealth, generously siphoned into off-shore bank accounts. Only under prudent government--even as constrained by the sorry standards of the imperfect beast--does society achieve a balance where greed functions as a force for both private and public wealth.
The polarizers among us are convinced the marble can't rest in the middle. If that's true, why did the American founding fathers write up a constitution in the first place? Was it just a cynical act of nation building? Or are we willing to concede that the wealth of nations also exists in social institutions?
I figure our batting average in these matters will run about 50% For every Big Three that boasts then coasts, we'll get one round of politics less dire than it might have been, like the hockey player who loves the dangerous drop pass, but gets religion for a game or two after every drop pass that ends up in his own net. Fundamentally, this player believes in glory, and regards prudence as cramping his style.
America loves the drop pass.
Looking forward to the details I am encouraged by the FCC Chairman's remarks. Proof is in the pudding but this seems a step in the right direction. Please don't disappoint us FCC.
The laws already existed. ISPF already defined which connection. BGP routing already defines what interface and route.
The laws quite clearly do NOT exist in sufficient form and the ones that do exist are in danger of being changed. If the situation were otherwise this debate would not exist. Many laws governing the internet have yet to be written. Technological standards do not carry the force of law and are easily subverted.
But Disney doesn't pay for MY connection, *I* pay for it.
??? That's a meaningless statement. It's like saying you pay for your driveway. True but the little piece of infrastructure you pay for is useless by itself. I'm an accountant and do cost accounting for a living. You pay for a tiny little section of the network whose utility depends on other people paying for other parts of the network and whose cost cannot be completely separated from the larger network. You do NOT pay for most of it directly and much of what do you pay is an indirect cost which cannot easily be tied to your specific usage by the people who carry your data packets. While it is theoretically possible to figure out an arrangement for who should pay for specific packets, in reality doing so would be so cost prohibitive that the internet as we know it wouldn't exist.
These laws were already in place when the internet took off.
There are laws but many remain well behind the state of technology and others are in danger of being changed to something not in my best interest. A great deal of the legislation that will govern the internet has yet to be written.
Same as any law. This doesn't stop law being written.
Point out where I said a law shouldn't be written. Oh that's right, I didn't say that. I'm pointing out that it is HARD, not that it shouldn't or couldn't be done. The GP post was under the delusion that ensuring network neutrality was easy ("easy peasy") and that by some miracle the carriers wouldn't attempt to subvert the status-quo to their own interests.
The fact that net neutrality de-facto exists today is no assurance at all that it will remain that way. The fight for it is a legislative one, not a technological one.
Cool, last time I was marked "troll" it was because I quoted scientists in Newsweek. At least this time it was because I just stated an opinion.
Since there is a bigger world outside of the USA (Network, Internet), the gated communities will die a slow death. And competition will come in a buy out or start a second internet system which will exclude the USA. True it is hard to do, but if there is a will, there is a way.