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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...
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...
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.
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
No, he's not stupid. Rather he has indeed defined in unambiguous terms how to do this.
Layers 2&3 of the ISO/OSI stack (International Standards Organization, a body the US contributes to and uses for referential standards) refer to the transport and routing of information. Service neutrality is easily defined. It doesn't exist today on many US ISPs. Between deep packet inspection and service throttling, we lost net neutrality (if we indeed ever really had it) a few years ago.
Every word doesn't have to be defined clearly. Please stop drinking so much coffee before you hit 'submit'. Your anger and argumentative posture do nothing to quell the biases, especially the network biases under consideration here. Name calling and intimidation is characteristic of the insecure.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
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!