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Is Net Neutrality Really Needed?
darrad writes "An opinion piece over at the Wall Street Journal lays out an alternate theory on why we have new regulations from the FCC on Net Neutrality. There is a lot of talk about this subject, particularly among the tech sector. Most of the talk centers around preventing companies from charging more for traffic or black holing other traffic. However, the question should be asked, is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go? Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
We all know what we want: We want Comcast to be unable to charge Google extra for the service of letting customers access Youtube. But it's really hard to phrase this well enough and clearly enough that it lets network admins do the kinds of QoS and traffic shaping things they need to do in order to provide good service, or for that matter, block unwanted traffic entirely.
I am not at all convinced that getting the government involved will improve my life.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
It's not a choice: one is not "handing it over control to political appointees". It is simply saying not packet dicrimination. So yes there will be regulators but they do not have fiat control, just enforcement responsibilities.
Thus this discussion is starting out on a false premise.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
Yes.
Should ISPs be free from regulation?
No.
Do you trust someone with a profit motive to screw with your connection, or someone with a political motive?
Xavier Rabourdin for president 2012
I've been spreading the good word of Net Neutrality for the last five years. Why is it that now, after I've stopped caring since the FCC passed this non-functioning solution under the banner of Net Neutrality, do I actually see people talking about the issue?
a typical anti-neutrality shill.
And who wants to do that? Net neutrality is not about regulating the Internet, it's about regulating telecomms with one simple rule: "all traffic should be equal".
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
Yes, very much so, which is why we dont want companies regulating it. Content or availability.
Whether or not you think the FCC's alleged power over internet connections is useful, legit, or otherwise constitutional, there -is- a new influence that we can now bring to bear against people trying to disrupt the structure of the internet, e.g. Comcast v. L3:
The FCC has shown itself to be vulnerable to PTC-style interventions, where a large segment of organized users more-or-less simultaneously demands intervention against a regulated entity--see nipplegate for details.
A PTC-like organization of interested internet users (Hey, Anonymous--you guys reading this?) could force the FCC to levy fines against ISPs that engaged in activities that contravene usability of the internet for various users.
What we have here is an opportunity. Sure, the whole structure is not perfect, but that can be changed. Let's -use- this opportunity.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
To assume that a lack of government regulation is the same as no regulation is to completely overlook the corporate regulation that those who want net neutrality oppose. I would always rather have the government regulating instead of the profit driven anti-competitive private sector.
Time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so- Zaphod beeblebrox
Wall Street Journal obviously has no dog in that hunt...
In an environment of "the customer is always right," the market can be trusted to deliver exactly what is in the customers' best interests without any form of outside interference.
In an environment of telco monopolies, multi-year contracts, terms which the provider can change at will, and more; it becomes necessary to restrict what providers can and cannot do because the customers are left powerless other than as voters who tell the government what they want.
Net neutrality is a misnomer. What is needed is are regulations to stop ISPs from doing any or all of the following:
Discrimating by site. Non-DDoS traffic to site "A" should not cost more than going to site "B".
Add/modifying/deleting in flight traffic. Throttling/QoS is one thing, adding adds via Phorm, or changing people's postings to Web boards in flight is another.
Blocking/slowing down one site, just to make another site seem faster.
Unneeded snooping on connections. Traffic should be considered PII, stored only a few days to check for security breaches, then binned. It is not to be sold to any ad companies who want router logs.
Expanding infrastructure. We never see Japanese ISPs wringing their hands in front of the Diet and saying how they are being driven into the ground by people in Tokyo watching TV on their phones. Nor do we see this in Korea or Singapore. ISPs build infrastructure, not just whine about people actually using their services.
We need to address issues exactly, not bundle them under the hazy "net neutrality" topic.
How cute. The WSJ has dug up somebody who thinks that only governments are capable of "regulation".
States generally reserve the most dramatic flavor of regulation for themselves "Don't do X, or men with guns will put you in a cage"; but corporations, particularly monopolists and oligopolists, are easily capable of exerting influence on par with fines, taxation, censorship and almost any other flavor of regulation short of that promising imprisonment or death....
Cable companies have a huge incentive to protect what is otherwise a dying industry. They will do whatever it takes to block or otherwise interfere with those services that are going to kick their butts. This whole "you didn't pay for the bandwidth" is crap as it is their customers demanding these services and thus if anyone is going to pay it should be the customers. Except at wholesale rates bandwidth is nearly free. Even if you downloaded a gig an hour 24/7 the cost to provide this on a per customer basis is a tiny fraction of what customers are already paying per month. Most of the costs of providing high speed connections are things like call center support and marketing. The tech portion while large is actually tiny per customer per month.
In what way is a large, powerful institution that can control the flow of information NOT a government? In what way is showing preference for certain packets over others NOT regulation?
Anarchism is feudalism. There is no such thing as total deregulation--the choice is about who gets to regulate and how much say you and I get in it.
The original Howling Frog is a fictional character and has no UID.
I look at the link and I think, "Gosh, is the Wall Street Journal capable of delivering an objective opinion on this? They do, after all, have a stake in the issue."
So I click through, and there's the sub-head: "The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who's who of left-liberal foundations."
Technically, I have to actually read the article to come up with an opinion. But I had a chili dog for lunch, and I don't need to be nauseated any further. I might even agree with the article's conclusion, but I doubt I'll find the reasoning sound.
An opinion piece over at the Wall Street Journal
Since being taken over by NewsCorp, I'm not sure you could describe any of their articles as anything else. They're just GOP/big business shills now, RIP the news organization that used to make a meaningful contribution to our society.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
You might as well ask, "Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the privately owned bridges be free from regulation?" or how about "Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the banks remain free from regulation?" or maybe "Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the electric company remain free from regulation?"
In any case the answer is "NO!" Vital resources should be regulated by the government because the government, for all its flaws, is ultimately answerable to the people and private companies have shown again and again they put their profits first and do great harm to society in pursuit of that, whether it be by dumping poison in our nation's rivers, gouging individuals using monopolies, Misusing money put into banks with risky investments, or leveraging resources to influence politics for profit.
A better question isn't if the government should regulate things, but "Why are we still letting private companies and foreign nations" influence our politics through campaign contributions, lobbying, and political adverts when the vast majority of individuals thing it should be illegal?"
If they were willing to either A) deliver all of us the kind of bandwidth promised in their Unlimited*** plans, or B) charge by the megabyte instead of by the month, this should be moot. I paid for that bandwidth, and I'll use it as I see fit. If I need to prioritize my own traffic, I'll do so with my router. That way my streaming video doesn't interfere with my VOIP calls.
But they're not talking about that, are they? They don't want my streaming video to interfere with their other customers' VOIP calls... which would seem to suggest that they don't actually have the capacity to deliver their Unlimited****** (up to) 10Mbps** that they sold to everyone in my neighborhood.
We have this fundamental problem where these companies have oversold the bandwidth, and the only solution they're willing to consider is to invent rules that will give you less of what you paid for. Because any other solution would force them to abandon an already-misleading marketing gimmick.
I think the last thing anybody wants is one or more government's interfering with the Internet.
Perhaps the best solution would just be to define "Internet Access" as a utility that provides unrestricted use of an Internet connection. Just like the power
company can't introduce fancy tech to prevent me from powering a TV if it does something the electric company doesn't like, if I'm paying for a service, I
should be able to use it as I see fit. I personally think that companies shouldn't be able to advertise a service as "Internet" if they are blocking certain sites,
certain ports, or other services I may wish to access.
It is just ridiculous that to be able to connect to something on Port 25, I have to pay twice as much for a "business" account. What is happening here is that
corporations are trying to "Re-AOL" the Internet so that it conforms to their business models.
I apparently forgot that sig != uptime...
The Internet is not going to remain free, regardless of what happens. Either Telcos and content providers integrate to add value to their commoditized dumb pipes and control where users go through caps and channel pricing, or the government regulates what Telcos and ISPs can and cannot do to users. One is the guaranteed effect of a capitalistic system in a market with very high barriers to entry, the other is the result of a population wanting some input on how a market prone to the creation of monopolies.
This means that the argument that a lack of regulation is the same as a free system is a flat-out lie. It necessarily implies that corporations will never engage in monopolistic rent-seeking, which is clearly false.
The only question then is: who gets to control the Internet? A corporation, or a bureaucrat? Furthermore, will control be left to an entity that is guaranteed to create a system that is designed to maximize its profit, or to an entity where the common citizens has even a chance of providing input?
This doesn't mean that any regulation is good. Some regulation will lead to the same result as no regulation. Some will lead to worse results. But there is at least the chance that it will lead to a better result. What's more, other countries have already shown what kind of regulatory environment is more beneficial to users than the one that currently exists in the US. So it's not that it's hard - it just requires some politicians to be afraid of their constituents.
Finally, I'd like to point something out that Americans seem to have a hard time understanding: a corporation is not a person. Furthermore, a corporation behaves like a sociopath. This means that things that benefit a corporation are not the same that benefit society as a whole. Remember that next time a corporate lobbyists argues that what's good for them is good for the country.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
The FCC doesn't "control" the internet. It is merely prohibiting ISPs from controlling their customers' access to the internet. The electric company sells you electricity, they don't get to tell you how you can and can't use it - that's the nature of net neutrality.
yeah like your (USA) health system is soooo good for the masses, once corporate greed gets involved forget it.
The crux of John Fund's ENTIRE article is, to paraphrase, "Net Neutrality is bad because it was created by SOCIALISTS! AND MARXISTS! AND THEY DON'T DENY IT!"
That is, of course, the problem with a lot of the commentary about Net Neutrality (although more on the side against Net Neutrality than for, I've noticed, although maybe that's just my own biases showing). None of the commentary actually address the issues of why Net Neutrality is or isn't necessary. Rather, it devolves into arguments about collateral issues like crying socialism like John Fund does here. He thinks Net Neutrality is bad because a "socialist" came up with it. As if a person's political views will render a person's idea per se invalid.
There are always those who thinks the way to score political points is to try to fit the word "socialism" as many times as they can into an article and call it an argument.
My postings are informational and does not constitute legal advice. Act on it at your risk.
How can a carrier offer anything but net neutrality? It's the same hardware, it's the same software, therefore it's the same service; the only difference is an artificial one created by the carrier. I don't know about the US, but in my country there are consumer-protection laws which prevent business from charging two different prices for the same service.
Don't stop where the ink does.
It's a primary means of information. Not regulating it means corporations will control where you can go, adn tyou will ahve no course of action.
With government regulation you have rights, and due process. You also have a voice.
The 'no regulation' concept is bullshit. Either the government will regulates it or corporations with regulate it.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
FTA:
"The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled by regulations that treat the Internet like a public utility."
How will the consumers be losers? We're treating the companies that maintain the conduits of the Internet like a public utility and we should keep it that way. Do we have the water and power utilities telling us how to use our water and power? Should the water company prevent us from buying bottled water or buy it only from them? What if there are new start-ups with good ideas - I doubt these regulations will "stifle" these newcomers.
Of course we don't want bad regulations. But to say we shouldn't have any regulations is a bad idea (see Wall Street as a guide).
Sanity.html - Error 404 not found
The Internet has never been free of regulation. In fact, it was originally envisioned as a switching network much like typical telephone systems. I recall reading somewhere (can't find the article, please link to it in response if you have it), that it was a political end-run around the telcos, who apparently did not see it coming, that led to its current packet-routing form instead of a switched version (at least for the commercial Internet we know today). The telcos and others obviously (due to pushes to "shape" traffic a la Comcast) still want the degree of control and revenue extraction that a switched system would provide them. It is only now that the back-end providers have the hardware sophistication necessary to analyze every packet to the degree necessary to do this. Hence, now is when the need for regulation comes up--it wasn't needed before because the problem was not possible.
And I for one find the current FCC rules to be a major step in the right direction. Now we have precedent that the Internet does in fact fall under their regulatory umbrella, and that they are working to protect citizens using the Internet from over-reach by those with a monopoly on the physical network in their areas. What is allowed and is not allowed will certainly change as the technology progresses, but for now, what they have developed is certainly better than nothing.
A WSJ blogger? Are you kidding me? Has Slashdot fallen so far that now you're promoting for-profit hacks like this guy?
For shame. This article is 100% unrecyclable trash.
Except it isn't.
To paraphrase the old management joke: big, fast, cheap - pick two.
And not everybody is going to pick the same two. Especially politicians who don't care about your data.
Is your driving need...
Streaming/bulk data? a per-packet charge is going to cost you a LOT. The data difference between a Netflix-streaming couch potato and email-checking grandma is several orders of magnitude. Will your bill be four-five digits? or will her bill be pennies? Remember: "all traffic is equal" so you're going to pay per packet, and grandma's 'net bill isn't going to approach zero.
Time-sensitive data? you want low-latency pings for your multiplayer games, you'll have to pay for prioritization - or, well, you can't because "all traffic is equal". Get your packets in line behind a buffered movie.
Cheap data? since nobody can pay for prioritization even if they want to, you all get cheap data - and cheap does not necessarily mean inexpensive.
Careful what you ask for. You might get it.
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
The problem isn't to regulate ISPs to make more ISPs. The main problem is the last mile. They have basically allowed a monopoly at the last mile and then didn't force either the telcos or cable companies to share the last mile that they have had as a monopoly for the last 40-100 years. If you won't open up the last mile to competition, and you won't make them share, then you aren't going to ever have real competition. To see this all you have to do is look at how many locally owned ISPs there were 15 years and look at how many there are now. If you setup a form to ask users which ISP they use, you could list 10 of them and you would get 90-95% of the population with those 10. That is because of the last mile and the way the telcos and cable companies have been able to illegally leverage their monopolies to keep competition out of the marketplace.
Neither, but I do trust one simple-to-understand-and-enforce rule ("you shall indiscriminately handle and deliver packets") to take it out of the hands of both.
If there were only a name for such a rule...
I think net neutrality as it's currently being proposed simply treats a symptom, not the cause. The cause is that telecom and cable companies have virtual monopolies due to access to public property that is granted to them exclusively. This allows them to pull whatever shenanigans they please; not just prioritized service. They have fiber wire just laying there unused because they don't feel the need to compete -- there's no one else around after all. They can price their plans ridiculously high (Verizon Wireless, I'm looking at you) without fear since they have sole access to a creme de la creme slice of spectrum that no one else is allowed.
If we truly want change, the various levels of governments need to pool some public funds into developing line and spectrum sharing technology. Plenty of non-profit organizations out there (EFF for instance) can provide technical input and ways to improve it in the future.
Then and only then will there be true competition when it comes to the internet. Anyone can start a cable company if they choose to invest in the routing/server infrastructure. Communities would be free to setup their own service with one giant pipe to the nearest hub. Competition will keep prices down and force companies to improve service instead of sitting back and raking in cash (and charging all sorts of nebulous, borderline scam fees).
> maybe that's because there isn't much difference between the two.
Especially in the Internet biz. For 99% of customers the choice is between a huge bloated government granted and regulated monopoly telco and the almost as bloated government grated and regulated cable company. Then there is a couple of wireless options here and there most of which are owned and operated by the monopoly telco and will never deliver enough bandwidth to matter.
But the bigger problem with the FCC is the newspeak. Whenever progs open their piehole words come out but they don't mean what normal people assume they mean. "Freedom is Slavery" "Ignorance is Power" "Ministry of Truth" "Network Neutrality" You can bet your last dollar that the absolute last thing the FCC has in mind is "Neutrality".
Hopefully the courts will knock this one down as fast as the last attempts by the FCC to exceed their mandate.
Democrat delenda est
However, the question should be asked, is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go?
That's actually not a relevant question in regard to the recent decision. No power was granted to political appointees that they did not already have under existing law. What happened was the parties to whom power was granted in existing law chose to exercise it in a manner which is proactive and provides advance notice and clarity as to how it will be applied, rather than the reactive, case-by-case manner in which the same political appointees have previously used the same grants of authority to pursue the same ends.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?
(1) The internet wasn't free of regulation before the net neutrality order; it was already subject to FCC oversight which was exercised on a case-by-case basis exercising the FCC's statutory authority, on top of that, it is subject to generally applicable laws, and, on top of that, the ability to offer connection services is subject to a wide variety of government regulations securing property rights, creating easements for specific purposes, governing telcos and cable providers outside of their ISP roles, etc.
(2) The concept that the internet should be "free of regulation", whether that means actually free of regulation (i.e., lawless) or merely free of the particular kinds of regulation adopted this week is a political point of view, and the attempt to portray it as if it were a universal norm independent of political viewpoints is extraordinarily disingenous.
If there isn't some regulation for 'fairness' to protect us citizens, you end up with comcast.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I think he's probably referring to his wireless internet plan, and you're thinking strictly in terms of wires.
this post again?
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Gosh, is the Wall Street Journal capable of delivering an objective opinion on this?
No one is capable of delivering an "objective opinion" since opinion is, by definition, subjective.
Exactly
"The campaign to regulate the Internet was funded by a who's who of left-liberal foundations."..."(They are the Pew Charitable Trusts, Bill Moyers's Schumann Center for Media and Democracy, the Joyce Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Ford Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.)"
you know, the same people that fund the Evil Crazy Scary Commie Socialist Dirty Hippie Kids Show uh...what was the name of that again?
Oh yeah. SESAME STREET.
If the FCC gets ahold of control over the internet they will screw it up really, really badly.
FCC has had "control of the internet", insofar as they do with the recent Report and Order, for some time. The only thing the Report and Order does is provide advance notice of how they will exercise that control, rather than the exercise of control being exclusively reactive and ad hoc (though based on the same principles that the recent Order is based on.)
This provides clarity to consumers and ISPs as to the rules that will be applied and reduces uncertainty for all market participants.
The FCC works for the phone companies, who are the ones pushing against net neutrality.
But, oddly, the position -- against net neutrality -- that the phone companies were pushing for secured the support of only two of the five members of the FCC, and now is being taken up by the people saying that the problem is the FCC. Which is, you know, kind of odd if the FCC is controlled by the people who are against net neutrality.
The entire article just talks about what leftist-liberal-marxist-socialist groups are supporting network neutrality. There is no evidence that this guy even knows what the issue is. You could replace "Network Neutrality" with "Lowering Taxes" or "Abortion" and not even notice. There's only one single attempt to even talk about the legislation:
There's little evidence the public is demanding these rules, which purport to stop the non-problem of phone and cable companies blocking access to websites and interfering with Internet traffic.
That's the only "fact" he stated, and it is completely wrong.
Yet President Obama, long and ardent backer of net neutrality, is ignoring both Congress and adverse court rulings, especially by a federal appeals court in April... He is seeking to impose his will through the executive branch
You know, this might be a bit off-topic, and I don't mean to sound trollish, but where the hell was this attitude when it was needed for so many other things, like the war(s), healthcare, Guantanamo bay etc?? Why couldn't Obama have this GWB-like attitude of "fuck it, Ima gonna do what I wanna do" for all those other important topics? I follow US politics to some extent, but I'm still a little confused here - I.e. can he override a decision in congress if it doesn't have a 2/3 majority vote, but not in the senate? I'm gonna look this up now, but any elaboration would be helpful.
Global warming and other natural disasters are a direct effect of the shrinking number of pirates - Gospel of the FSM
There are no "natural monopolies". The idea of "natural monopolies" was one that was popularized to justify the government interfering in the telephone market to create the original AT&T monopoly.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Note:Anti-Net Neutrality arguments are automatically marked down as "troll."
You're going to get f*cked, and no it cannot be avoided. The only question is who's face you want to see in the mirror...
Opinion:=TMyOpinion.Create(Me);
Not the newspeak-named lie of a policy that just came out.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't you just adopt my political point of view?
A more honest way of saying the same thing.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
If I need to prioritize my own traffic, I'll do so with my router. That way my streaming video doesn't interfere with my VOIP calls.
Dear raging lunatic, I would like to introduce Mr. bidirectional. Unless you control both entry and exit routers for the network, you can't do prioritizing. I'm sure you're convinced this problem was introduced by evil AT&T people in black suits with fresh baby blood on their teeth and shoes, but a course in network theory is likely to provide a slightly less extravagant explanation that is somewhat hard to get upset about.
But they're not talking about that, are they? They don't want my streaming video to interfere with their other customers' VOIP calls... which would seem to suggest that they don't actually have the capacity to deliver their Unlimited****** (up to) 10Mbps** that they sold to everyone in my neighborhood.
Of course they don't, but don't worry : they have such plans too. They're called "business" or "synchronous" bandwidth. Of course, you'd best be willing to pay 10 times what you're paying now (and more).
Since even 10 times the price you have now results a profit margin of maybe 50%, there is no possible way to deliver what you ask without quintupling the price (at the very least, since the cost of the internet backbone infrastructure is unfortunately related to the product of all bandwidths worldwide (specifically clients * servers, both averaged, in other words, peer-to-peer networks massively raise backbone costs even without counting the increase in traffic)). Raise bandwidth too much before technology catches up, and you're seriously fucked as a telco. Of course the marketing department can *claim* stuff for free.
What I don't understand is how people seriously claim they didn't know beforehand comcast wouldn't deliver 10 mbit synchronous full-time bandwidth. I mean, really ?
Democracy *might* work ... if people were to have a clue before getting involved. Government interference is what created AT&T, comcast and so on. What is the solution to this problem ? Ah, *more* government interference, of course, which is going to make things *so* much better (after all, last time AT&T controlled only all phones, while now all television sets and computers will be included in the new all-encompassing government telecom entity)
Q: Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?
/. article earlier this week about how Comcast lets it's ISP peering points slam to 100% and congest, because it is in their interest to create poor response for streaming competition and force those companies to pay to locate services within their networks for fees.
As somebody who has already been modded to 5 said, Internet yes - ISPs no. And what is the internet other than a collection of Tier 1,2 and 3 providers. And the Tier 1s, the AT&Ts and Level 3 and such, they have a oligopoly partially caused by de-regulation. Regional competition in the DSL space, like Rhythms and Covad, was shoved aside because of fair use considerations to the central offices for equipment. They were shut out. Cable - same thing. The Comcasts were never mandated to allow their cable infrastructures to be shared. So they didn't. Which is why only now the Telecom's, using the old phone infrastructure, can complete against cable. Celestial like DirectPC never had a chance in hell to be anything other than a last resort technology.
So de-regulation caused this oligopoly. There was already a
If the FCC doesn't stop this via regulation, the Tier 1 providers will simply force the upstream peering points to differentiate classes of service. Tier 2 providers can only send so much Skype into AT&T's network and any more than 10% of the pipe will get congested using QoS. Because it's not in AT&T's interest to support the flow of voice when they themselves are in the business of carrying long distance and supporting the PSTN. Why should they? Who will stop them if they band with Global Crossing and Level 3 and Qwest and say "why the fuck should we cut our own revenue carrying Skype when we don't want to?" And if the Tier 2 provider buys a bigger pipe to the Tier 1 carrier, the Tier 1 carrier can say "I don't give a shit if you have a 10Meg or 10Gig pipe, you can only send us 1Mb/s of Skype traffic and that's all."
Who can insure that their isn't collusion? Only the Federal government can.
As others have pointed out, it is in the Tier 1 providers INTERESTS to create artificial scarcity of bandwidth. A Tier 3 provider buying upstream pipe from a Tier 2 should be federally mandated to buy at least 50% of the bandwidth he is selling in aggregate to end customers. There is PLENTY of dark fiber and equipment to handle that, even if we are talking about a company like Comcast that sells an entire medium size city all 100Mb pipes using new DOCSIS specs. Add up all the bandwidth sold, and federally MANDATE that they purchase upstream capacity to support all that.
I found the WSJ article is just a rant, with cheap attacks on the messengers (tells stories about net-neutrality proponents which are supposed to be evil communists, etc). Doesn't really discuss the issues, nor contain much information.
http://stephan.sugarmotor.org
I think the biggest problem we have is how we pay for our connection. Back when speeds were fairly limited and the data we were retrieving was fairly small, a monthly rate tied to connection speed made sense. People got used to this scheme. If you wanted pages to load faster, you paid more for you your service. It was easy to understand and didn't take much to manage.
As speeds increased, the types of data accessed changed and more data was consumed. Now that we have the potential for really fast connections, we also have the potential for enormous data usage. Services like Netflix get noticed because they use an incredible amount of data. You have some households that are using enormous amounts of data while others are using far less. It would make sense to scale based on usage, like all other utilities. I think we get into very tricky issues when we look at wireless services. You can physically transmit only so much data. While your speeds can be fast, in order to make sure that as many customers as possible can use the service, you have to do some type of limiting. This normally comes as a data cap. People don't like those because it makes them think about their usage.
While I think all services should be allowed, and we need to make sure one isn't getting an unfair advantage over another, we have to get our expectations back in line. Many providers don't have the backbone to support all of their users maxing their connections 24/7. The ultimate solution would be a unified, equally shared network. As long as we have various companies owning various portions of our network, we will always have problems. The only other fair solution is to pay for your usage.
But that is the future of electric service, or haven't you heard of the smart grid? They want to charge different rates based on their costs, in the case of electricity they want to charge by time of day. ISPs are talking about charging based on their costs, which vary by time, destination and QoS.
Democrat delenda est
Has been exempted from this ruling. Preventing throttling / censorship by ISP's is valuable even if it is done by communists. We can watch for any unhelpful moves from julius in the future. In the meantime I suggest getting familiar with and supporting the tor network for your censored / charged android communications. It's easy to get around paying for facebook by the month / pageview by going through the tor network. Now we know how people in iran and china feel. There is a tor android app available. Not sure if it is available on itunes however.......
However, the question should be asked, is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go?
Yes.
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?
No.
"I don't care about the Constitution!" --Bill O'Reilly, November 17, 2009
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?
Is that a rhetorical question? Because the internet ISN"T and WON'T remain free of regulation. In fact I can't really conceive of how you would have any sort of social activity on that scale without some form of regulation. The only actual question is what the regulations are going to be? I suggest they be regulations that favor end users and entrepreneurial activity rather than supporting large monopolistic networks. Since we are so fond of car analogies here, doing away with net neutrality is similar to having every road be a toll road. It can work in theory but it generates far less economic benefit to society as a whole.
Unregulated markets have a strong tendency to behave in ways that aren't in the interests of consumers. (see our current financial crisis if you need a timely example) The economics of delivery of internet service are very very similar to that for telephone service. Economies of scale matter greatly and there is a strong tendency towards natural monopoly as a result. Once an ISP has control over delivery, they effectively have a monopoly and can charge monopolistic prices. (this is already true in some cases) They also can stop competition completely if unregulated. Comcast for example owns a social networking site. It would be trivial for them to block or charge high prices to Facebook which competes with them. Without network neutrality I'm quite confident the internet as we know it would never have happened and certainly would be a far less dynamic and interesting place.
You clearly didn't pay attention in Econ 101 when they went over what is necessary for a free market, what barriers to entry into that market mean to competition, and where infrastructure fits in when discussing efficient markets.
It's unfortunate that your ignorance seems to be the common opinion of American voters.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Should users be regulated on how they use the Internet? No.
Should providers be regulated on how they restrict users of the Internet? Yes.
Do you really want a Microsoft funded provider slowing down you Google searches to the extent that Google is unusable?
Do you want a provider owned by one media conglomerate slowing down streaming video from everywhere else so that they are the only option?
Do you want a provider black holeing requests for web sites they do not agree with?
Do you want all your search requests re-directed to Bing?
Without regulation providers can make decisions on how customers interact with the Internet that are better for their bottom line and not necessarily for the customer's benefit.
There is a major flaw in the article's argument. They state that most people are fine with the way the Internet works now. That part is true as net neutrality is the norm right now. The flaw is what do we do when net neutrality is not the norm and people fell issues of providers restricting traffic? Do we regulate then? Isn't that a bit late? There is no problem with what providers are doing now; the problem is what they could, and some companies are trying to, do in the future.
The rules adopted by the FCC are very close to the position recently approved by IEEE-USA and prepared by the IEEE-USA Committee on Communications Policy. The position can be found at http://www.ieeeusa.org/policy/positions/NetworkTrafficManagementNov10.pdf The position is on Network Traffic Management and not on "net neutrality".
From a white paper that preceded the position statement (http://www.ieeeusa.org/volunteers/committees/ccp/docs/NTM-whitepaper.pdf), there are multiple ways to define net neutraliry. One is to say "a bit is a bit". That is neutrality across applications, but is not technically accurate. A bit in file downloading has different quality-of-service requirements than a bit in streaming video. The alternative definition is to say that ISP's should be able to manage their networks for quality-of-service to different applications, but not to discriminate between users having similar applications, especially based on commercial considerations and side deals. That is neutrality across users running the same kinds of applications.
The IEEE-USA position is that quality-of-service should be stated and transparent. Higher QOS could be priced differently by ISP's. However, the parameters of QOS are well known (bandwidth, packet loss, latency, jitter, and availability/uptime) and users can figure out what they need for their applications. ISP's should be held to their stated QOS levels and should not be allowed to discriminate against content, applications, or services within a given QOS level.
That is substantially what the FCC decided yesterday and it is the proper policy.
There is very little problem with the Internet. This is a solution looking for a problem. All this is going to do is legalize companies discriminating against other sites online. They are going to say it is legal for me to make sure my network runs well, since I can't control the big bad Internet out there. So they will QoS the local traffic to give everything local better traffic rates. Then they will basically lackmail companies like Yahoo, Netflix, and other CDNs (Content Distribution Networks) like Akamai, one of the first. You want great web performance to your web site you should put your content servers in our network for huge monthly fee. Thus those sites will work great because they are part of the local network. Backbone providers will do the same thing by offering large websites direct connections, now they are part of the network, so they can QoS that traffic. The entire time every company will be saying, Hey you said we could manage traffic to make our networks run the best possible, it's not my fault that I don't/can't control traffic out there on the big bad Internet. This is how these companies will grab as much money off the table as they possibly can. Then they will say heavy bandwidth users are a problem for making our network run like crap. So we are going to go to a measured service since we can manage traffic to make sure our network runs fine. Then consumers will still pay $40-$60 a month for Internet but have limits like 30gig and each extra gig is $5. All this does is legalize what they have wanted to do for years, but haven't because they were afraid of market forces in response to this type of plan.
All this has done is screw the consumer, and screw innovation.
You want real Internet competition. Stop letting the telcos and the cable companies have monopolies on the last mile. Stop letting them use their historic monopoly status to trample and destroy anyone who tries to compete at the local last mile level. Telcos and cable companies have had monopolies on the last mile for 40-100 years. The cities and the states are then bought off by these companies to make it impossible to even run your own lines to compete against them. These companies have used their monopoly status to run all the other ISPs out of business. They have propped up the Internet side using the other side of the house (phone & TV) to drop prices so low that others can't compete, and attacked other ISPs by lying about them, then once they are gone they start jacking up prices. All you have to do is look at how many independent ISPs there were 15 years versus now. Now about 90% of the US uses one of 10 ISPs. That isn't free market competition, that is monopoly leveraging and market collusion. I have seen telcos and cable companies tell the state and cities that independent ISPs have no business trying to compete with them for the Internet. That it is their domain, they know best and if you don't want huge problems you shouldn't allow these guys to exist. The telcos and cable companies were very pissed that the independent ISPs existed years ago. They saw them as taking food out of their mouths, they were an affront, and should not be allowed to exist. They waged a campaign against independent ISPs and were very successful, using lobbying and fake grassroots groups.
All of this just allowed the consumer to get screwed again. Only the state forcing cities to open up is going to help. I doubt the feds have the authority to do anything about the local level.
"Free from regulation" is an interesting phrase.
By this you mean, I'm "free" to pay your ISP to assure that when you shop for what I'm selling, you experience ease of use and quick access to information from my web site, but not from the web sites of my competitors?
I'm free to spend my billions of dollars however I want.
Why should you have any say so about it?
The Government looks after the interests of the corporations, not the people.
If that hasn't been clear before, it should be pretty clear now.
Be seeing you...
In a truly "free market", private companies would have to own the telephone poles on which they run their lines, and to own the telephone poles, they'd probably have to own the sidewalks. So then they'd snap up sidewalks in walled-off shapes that keep anyone else from putting up poles or running wires into their fiefdom.
Or the government would have to lease the right to run data lines on public property to anyone who asked. But then that government would have to set a price, which means the government is now in the internet business whether they like it or not.
I guess what I'm getting at is that a "free market" for broadband cannot and will never exist.
They haven't allowed it, they've encouraged it. The government put up the poles using eminent domain. Because no one wanted the government to own the wires, but someone had to spend the bucketloads of money necessary to run all those wires, the government sponsored a single company to run all the wiring. The government offered part of the costs necessary to install the wires, and a monopoly on the use of those wires.
If you want a free market, the government has to buy those wires back from the company that built them, and allow everyone to access the wires freely at the same cost, and they also have to allow anyone to hang whatever wires they want to on Government poles at a reasonable cost so someone who thinks they can do it better than copper has the ability to do so.
And any reimbursement of the cost of the lines to the private company that installed them is going to be nailed by the Democrats as "corporate welfare" even though the resulting free market would give the consumer exactly the freedoms they want - find a plan that fits your needs and buy the thing. But the Democrats like regulation too much, and that'll never ever fly.
And any concept that includes the government owning the poles outright is going to be nailed by the Republicans as "government monopoly" even though the resulting free market is exactly what they claim they want. As opposed to an unregulated monopoly, which is what "free market" seems to be a short cut for now and what they seem to really want.
"This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
So.. My P.U.C. regulated monopoly telco raised some federal reserve regulated money on the SEC regulated stock exchange to buy some FCC regulated DSL headend gear to connect to my locally regulated monopoly phone lines which run to my HOA and zoning board regulated house where plug in my FCC regulated DSL modem so as to access my trademark and copyright office regulated domain name web sites, as I chow down on my FDA regulated cheetos while drinking some EPA regulated water from my local public utility in an effort to see some FTC regulated pr0n on the intertubes.
All that and the phone company wants to mess with my connection, but the govt can't stop them, because THAT would be "too much regulation". What a steaming pile.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And for those keeping score, here we have an excellent example of begging the question.
--Jeremy
Jesus was a liberal
Use World of Warcraft with regularity and you'll be over 20GB in no time.
Corporations own the internet. At least they own the backbones, distribution networks and a lot of the content providers. And the default state of corporations is to manipulate the business environment to maximize return. If a corporation owned a bridge it would have to charge a toll to cross the bridge, If it didn't, its shareholders would sue and replace the board of directors. The first amendment is a regulation. Traffic lights are regulation. I don't know of anyone who thinks that we're over-regulated and that the first amendment and traffic lights should go. Unfortunately, corporate ownership means that some equal and opposite force, i.e. regulation is necessary. Of course regulatory power could guarantee net neutrality along with government censorship. Unfortunately, there is no umbrella organization large enough to codify a set of rules which would assure net neutrality without th need for government intervention. No regulation? Well, look what happened when deregulation allowed commercial banks to become investment banks.
It's not about discrimination against packets. It's not even about discrimination against service providers.
It's about discrimination against people and their choice of information/entertainment/functionality sources. Anything else is a separate issue.
Separate issues include choice of peering and oversell. Frustrating as those are, they're separate issues.
We need either Network Neutrality or Mandatory Line-sharing. Network neutrality (real Network Neutrality, not the abomination that was disgorged by the FCC yesterday) is essential to ensure all legitimate traffic is treated equally because most ISPs are monopolies. If they were forced to share their last mile lines with potential competitors we wouldn't need Network Neutrality because if our ISP did something we didn't like we could switch. Unfortunately there is less of a chance that mandatory line-sharing will happen than a real Network Neutrality Order. It's a shame because I'd rather leave it up to the market than the government because the government produces crap like yesterday's Order that tries to please everyone where as the market tries to please me, the consumer. The question posed by the WSJ is nothing more than a straw man at best and at worst ideological masturbation and neither is worthy of discussion. Network Neutrality would not "grant control over the internet to political appointees." It would simply establish rules for the game, just like any other regulation. Not to mention that it would be impossible for such appointees to control the whole internet.
Free markets lead to monopolies. There is one bigger player. It has economies of scale and buys the smaller players. Then prices lower so smaller players get marginalized. Once you have two or three players the CEO's go golfing with each other. They decide to make complex buying plans to make the market non-transparant and keep a couple of different brands around too keep all the customers confused and the prices high. The free market does not exist in the wall street journal talks about it. Every market has rules and needs good rules. These rules are made by the government. Free market here is used as a catch phrase to let monopolies get away with sub standard service.
The article says, I quote:
The net neutrality vision for government regulation of the Internet began with the work of Robert McChesney, a University of Illinois communications professor who founded the liberal lobby Free Press in 2002. Mr. McChesney's agenda? "At the moment, the battle over network neutrality is not to completely eliminate the telephone and cable companies," he told the website SocialistProject in 2009. "But the ultimate goal is to get rid of the media capitalists in the phone and cable companies and to divest them from control."
Wow. Just Wow. So is the real goal is to turn an ISP into a public utility? Ok, so the author implies that the net neutrality has been perpetrated by the same groups as those who funded the "Fairness doctrine" attempt. Bad thing in my opinion, I was designed and would have put conservative side of the American public spectrum in disadvantage. But my question is this: Theoretically, how and how could the ability to deny ISPs ability to provide "tierred" Internet put any one of these political wings in a disadvantage?
Please name a "natural monopoly" which occurred without the intervention of government regulation.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Nope. Not the way it works.
There is no consumer grade service competition in my area. As a result, even the shit-poor "entry level" Comcrap offering they want $85/month for. "Business class" in my area is $300+ because Comcrap has a monopoly on that, too.
For you people claiming to live in areas that have no competition, and you have to use Comcast or just not be on the Internets, I suggest you go here, sign up, and start your DSL-providing ISP. Because it sounds like there's tons of opportunity in your area.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
If they were willing to either A) deliver all of us the kind of bandwidth promised in their Unlimited*** plans, or B) charge by the megabyte instead of by the month, this should be moot.
They aren't. Neither of those are efficient business models. That's not likely to change. Get over it.
Asking a company to lose money on the services it provides you is futile. Using the government to force the company to lose money on the services it provides you is ultimately futile too. Companies don't do business and won't continue to do business to lose money. (It's not a corporate thing, individuals don't work for free either.) They'll just stop.
I'm not sure why you cling to the fantasy that you deserve to get services at below the cost to produce them. Unfortunately, you're not alone.
Mr. Fund sounds like he's already been bought and paid for by media conglomerates. Net Neutrality doesn't hurt consumers, it hurts predatory billing and marketing practices of media conglomerates. He is just another witless toolbag on their payroll.
is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go? Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
OH! Network neutrality regulations! Yeah, that's a good question. At first I didn't think that we really needed laws to ensure that we maintained a neutral and fair network that was a level playing field for startups and giant corporations alike. If anyone tried it, I thought we'd simply jump ship and they'd suffer for it.
But then Comcast broke NN. And only a few people really cared. And I realized that the ISP market was consolidating and even if I wanted to pay more, I couldn't buy broadband from someone else. (So now I'm on DSL). And so yeah, the idea of regulating ISPs to FORCE them to actually provide a connection to the real, unfiltered, uncensored, unthrottled Internet-that-I-paid-for doesn't sound all that crazy anymore.
But you just assumed that "Network Neutrality" meant legislation and regulation. Huh. I wonder who it was that explained it to you.
Like Comcast choosing to send false NAK packets to people using particular protocols just to hinder their connection?
Been there, done that, only the Slashdot crowd really cared.
Have you heard of the FCC fairness doctrine. The Democrats keep bringing the idea back up.
No, they don't.
There are one or two Democrats in office who have raised the idea occasionally (mostly as a symbolic gesture toward the partisan alignment of certain "news" sources), and they consistently fail to receive support from any other Democrats in Congress, or any substantial number of people of any party, Democratic or otherwise.
And there are lots of Republicans who keep misrepresenting that as "the Democrats", collectively, pushing to restore the Fairness Doctrine, even when, you know, when the Democrats had a majority in both Houses of Congress and their guy in the White House, the issue never even came out of committee. (I'm not even sure if a proposal was even introduced in that time.)
If the FCC has internet regulatory rights; why do you think the FCC will not in the future apply an "fairness doctrine" to the internet?
The FCC doesn't have any rights. It has authority under specific provisions of law passed by Congress, none of which -- at least, none of which that has been cited in any of the FCC actions relating to open internet -- appears to support the kind of content-based regulation of the internet that would be required to apply a "fairness doctrine", not too mention that content-based restrictions would need to meet a high Constitutional hurdle even if they were statutorily authorized.
At any rate, what the FCC might conceivably try to do in the future is not an argument against the specific Report and Order that has recently been adopted. If you want to argue that Congress should pass a statute expressly forbidding the FCC from applying the Fairness Doctrine to the internet, well, I think that's probably superfluous and paranoid, but also harmless, and, in addition, completely irrelevant to the debate over the Report and Order recently issued regarding open internet rules.
no one should trust anything written in that newspaper since it has been taken over by news corp.
Have you looked at the rules involved in net neutrality? I guarantee you it will be a book, not a one-liner.
The material provided from the Report and Order recently passed is a hair over two pages; given that the reason that the FCC previously gave that the full Report and Order wouldn't be available immediately was that the final document would include material addressing the dissents, I would expect that what has been released already represents substantially all of the rules material.
So, while far from a one-liner, I would say it is also far from a book.
But that is the future of electric service, or haven't you heard of the smart grid? They want to charge different rates based on their costs, in the case of electricity they want to charge by time of day. ISPs are talking about charging based on their costs, which vary by time, destination and QoS.
What you're talking about is time-of-use rates, and the electric companies have been offering that for at least ten years--possibly more--in my area. The smart grid is something different: it's an attempt to match more variable sources of electricity--solar and wind especially, in contrast to gas and coal--with electricity demand by making the whole grid more capable of understanding the flows of power going through it from moment to moment.
And the smart grid is a whole different animal compared to the sort of paid traffic discrimination that Comcast is trying. The closest analogy I could see is if the power company suddenly started shutting down my refrigerator because they just merged with Burger King.
The FCC absolute does want to control the Internet. This is just their flag plant to say that they are the governmental regulating body that will control and regulate the Internet. They have said this repeatedly. I'm not sure where you have been for the last few years.
We already have plenty of laws forbidding business practices most NN alarmists already preach are going to happen.
Please point to the existing laws which clearly address the issues of transparency, non-blocking, non-discrimination, and, in the context of non-discrimination, paid prioritization addressed in the Dec. 21, 2010, FCC Report and Order.
Or could much easier be added instead of getting the FCC into the Internet)
The FCC has been "into the Internet" for some time, though its previous actions have been case-by-case reactive rulings, and this week's action sets clear rules that are known to all parties in advance. So the idea that the alternative to the recent Report and Order was the FCC not getting into the Internet is ignorant, at best, and dishonest, at worst.
And any observed lack of competition between ISPs is largely caused by the same FCC NN want to hand the keys to.
NN isn't an entity that wants anything.
No one is arguing for handing any keys to the FCC.
Insofar as incorrect or inadequate use of existing regulatory authority in regard to its existing mandate to promote broadband competition is a problem, why shouldn't that problem be corrected by correct and adequate regulation?
It's a bit of a feel good idea with almost no practical or ethical usefulness in the real world.
Beyond the vague generalizations, what are your specific bases for the claim that the Dec. 21 Report and Order by the FCC has "almost no practical or ethical usefulness in the real world".
I honestly don't care what the FCC or government says because it all happens on their whim anyway.
What is this supposed to mean?
The mindless mob grants them the power whether I approve or not.
The FCC's power derives from grants from the Congress. The Congress' power derives from grants from the people via the State legislatures in adopting the Constitution and amendments thereto. Its not clear to me which of these groups you are attempting to characterize as a "mindless mob".
If Government is authorized to prevent something you just handed them the keys to *someday* do the opposite and allow it.
Really? So the Constitution authorization and obligation of Congress to ensure a republican form of government to every State in the Union (Art. IV, Sec. 4) hands them the keys to prevent any State from having such a government? The power of Congress to prevent slavery in the United States (Amend. XIII, Sec. 2) hands them the keys to impose it? The power of Congress to prevent States from imposing poll taxes (Amend. XXIV, Sec. 2) hands them the keys to require poll taxes?
Consumers buy business class service is just dumb. That is like suggesting if you're not happy with your flight options then buy your own plane.
The US government is refusing to regulate the internet correctly and big business is just waiting to turn it into cable tv. Unfortunately people seem to uninterested both sides will end up fucking it up completely.
I think you may have gotten off the train at the wrong place. Sesame Street was programmed by a large number of educators and psychologists. There is/was very little left or right leaning with it. It was government money that paid for most of it for a long time.
Net neutrality isn't about granting control to political appointees as much as it is denying control to everyone else.
Have gnu, will travel.
"The US government is refusing to regulate the internet correctly"
That's it in a nutshell, all this talk about the "internet remaining free from regulation" is complete bollocks, it has always been regulated.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I have a lot of problems with how the FCC regulates the air waves.
The Fairness Doctrine is being leveraged to ensure that there are only two viable political parties.
The Fairness Doctrine was adopted in 1949 and repealed by the FCC in 1987. Its not being leveraged to do anything. So you've got problems, but they don't seem to be with the FCC.
The two-party duopoly is a product of the electoral system, and has been pretty much a consistent feature of the US since the adoption of the Constitution, which long predates the Fairness Doctrine -- and has unsurprisingly outlived the Fairness Doctrine.
The Mississippi river flows through Louisiana. You ain't getting to the gulf from Iowa without going through Louisiana.
There are three power grids in the USA. East, West, and Texas. You want to sell power over the grid, you have to hook up to the one in your area. They don't overlap. No body is stopping you from laying down your own transmission lines. Go for it... Oh look, it's ludicrously expensive.
There is only so much space in the RF spectrum. If two signals get sent out on the same frequency, neither will be received. Now, that's not a monopoly, but it's a limited resource.
And in case you weren't aware, those are three examples where there is heavy regulation. Not because the government goes around regulating things willy nilly, but because without fair rules to play by, boats would crash into each other, we'd have constant blackouts, and radio would be garbled. Are they perfectly fair? No. But they do try. The resource is limited, the position unchangeable, or the bar to entry is way too high, and so they're natural monopolies.
Either you trust the government : no choice of provider (that much, history should prove)
Or you trust business : you can choose (for a little more money probably, yes, deal with it) a better provider, additionally you can build something yourself
Talk about false dichotomies. I don't trust either one and neither should you. I trust restrictions on each and a balance of power. We have separate branches of government because concentrating too much power in any one branch inevitably leads to abuse of power. We have government oversight of business to curb the inevitable excesses of corporate behavior. We allow corporations AND individuals to have a voice so that government does not abuse its power. We also have freedom of the press to keep both government and corporations (more) honest.
Both government and corporations can be a powerful force for good as well as evil in society. Laws and careful checks and balances are how we ensure that they both remain more on the good side than the bad.
Additionally your notion that there is always a choice with corporations simply isn't the case. I have precisely one choice of corporation when buying electricity, garbage disposal, natural gas, and mail delivery. I have precisely two choices for landline telecom services (a recent development from one) only one of which provides internet service to my address. Some businesses simply are natural monopolies and the only realistic way to keep them in check is through government oversight and regulation.
Not quite a fair question since there is government regulation of almost everything, and especially of businesses before they become full monopolies.
A alternate question is whether there is case where there was a high cost to entry in a field with a distributed infrastructure (railways, roads. internet, pipelines, telecom etc) where there was no government intervention and there was not a monopoly. (honest question, I can't think of one, but would be interested to hear an example).
Monopoly can also mean a lot of different things. Is Microsoft a monopoly? There are competitors, but despite making an significant effort, I haven't been able to avoid using their products because of my need to interact with other users.
Is Comcast a monopoly? In my area an alternate provider with the same performance is very much more expensive. Is that because Comcast has better technology, or because the barriers to entry are too high?
Is Chase bank a monopoly? I've never opened an account with them, but due to acquisitions my bank accounts, mortgage and credit card now are all owned by Chase - with a high cost to change to a different vendor.
I think there are many situations that do not technically qualify as "monopolies" but where the consumer's choices are nonetheless very restricted.
but the ISPs need that extra 60 a month so they just change the rules. it blows but the internet is about information and creativity. And I can pretty much do everything I want from my Kindle for free anyway. I'll go to the video store to rent my movies and the record store to get my music.
But why shouldn't the government provide internet access?
Government should only provide it if there is not economically feasible way for the private sector to do it. Economists call this market failure and it's not hard to come up with examples.
Internet access *is* infrastructure -- it is what we have governments for. The internet is like power, water, sewage, roads, and the post.
All of which are usually provided by private companies under government oversight. We only occasionally need the government to directly act. More often we just need government to provide regulation, oversight and sometimes funding. I agree that the internet is now vital infrastructure and that a certain amount of oversight in the public interest is desirable. The last thing we need is ISPs erecting unnecessary virtual toll booths to prioritize their own interests above yours and mine.
That would require a country that has no government. Which is total anarchy, which doesn't exist anywhere. Nice try though.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Net neutrality advocates main claim is that regulation is needed to preserve a level playing field. They say that a poor startup site must be able to deliver its content to us as fast as giants like Google. That's preposterous.
Rich providers are able to buy many servers and faster servers. They lease multiple T3 lines instead of one T1. They also pay big bucks to third parties like Akamai to cache their content locally and deliver it faster. For example, only Hulu.com is able to deliver smooth video to me via my smartphone tethered to my laptop. Hulu has plenty of expensive adaptive software to do that and they also spend untold millions to Akamai to help speed it along. No proposed regulations will ever level the playing field to counter the advantage of deep pockets.
Another thing bugs me. The net neutrality debate focuses exlusively on ISP carriers. Suppose instead of Comcast conspiring to slow down Google content, it is my web browser that throttles Google content? Suppose Apple starts slowing down content from any source that competes with Itunes? Suppose, Google slows down content to anyone not using the Google Chrome browser? Suppose, Hulu blocks content to people not running politically correct software [they already block delivery to Google TV]. Suppose the news networks decide to deliver different content to red states and blue states? The point is that there are countless non-ISP parties who are able to screw up a freely flowing Internet. It makes no sense to reglate ISPs and not everyone else.
I'm deeply suspicious of present day net neutrality advocates. Their proposals will not create a level playing field, nor will they regulate anybody other than the ISP carriers. I smell a hidden political agenda here; just what I haven't figured out yet.
a huge win for a slick lobbying campaign run by liberal activist groups and foundations. The losers are likely to be consumers who will see innovation and investment chilled...
Yep, typical Murdoch Street Journal editorial, didn't read the rest. I used to actually read the Journal when it was an objective paper with a conservative slant. Now it's essentially Fox Financial News. Much of their news writing contains Limbaugh-esque omissions and half truths. Their OpEd formula is to blame something on liberals in the lead paragraph, recite standard Republican Party litany, continue until trimmed for space. It's no longer the reliable source of information it once was. It's a very sad vandalism of an American institution by a mercenary bastard.
I challenge you to name one current unregulated market, or one company with a complete monopoly that isn't created by government regulation.
I'll take the second one first. Microsoft. They have been convicted of abusing monopoly power in a court of law and Microsoft did not achieve its monopoly with help from government regulation.
If you want unregulated markets that's easy too. Illegal drugs. In fact any black market - counterfeits, prostitution, etc. Oh, there are laws but that doesn't make them regulated markets. There are plenty of small scale monopolies on local markets for the distribution of illegal narcotics. Try competing with drug traffickers and you are very likely to wind up dead. That sounds an awful lot like an unregulated market to me.
In what specific manner is the Dec. 21 Report and Order a "newspeak-named lie of a policy"?
You got pretty close to one of the key issues here. Utilities (including government owned) generally do not own the land that the wires or pipes run over/under. Those lines/pipes are routed via an easement granted an appropriate government (typically city/county) because such service was considered to in the Public Interest, Convenience Or Necessity.
A Shadeless room is a brighter room.
The monopoly created by your friendly government? Even in those areas you still usually have more than one choice.
A monopoly BY DEFINITION means you have only a single choice of where to buy a product. If you have a few choices that is called an oligopoly. If you have only one customer that is called monopsony.
And even if you only have one choice you can still boycott, or vote with your feet and move.
Move where? From one town with a single provider of electricity to another town with a single provider of electricity? Wow. Great choice! [/sarcasm]
Neither of those options is available with the federal government.
You've never heard of immigration apparently... People move to different countries all the time for precisely that reason
With uniform government regulations we lose the ability to exercise our power as consumers.
Exactly when did we lose the right to vote?
So, this is what wall street, the mouthpiece of private interests, the lapdog of corporations, is doing.
it passed the stage of whether it being something good or bad, as you see, now they are posing it as questions like 'is it REALLY needed'.
all it is aimed at is, rekindling the fire in the minds of the fools that believe that there can be 'competition' in a conglomerate world in which more than 50% of the top economic entities of the world, are corporations even before countries. http://news.mongabay.com/2005/0718-worlds_largest.html
these corporations are basically GOVERNMENTS. they are bigger than governments. their reach, their effect is much bigger than governments. you can go around and buy innumerable goods and services in a state, and yet still not leave the domain of a holding that maintains a few megacorporations that dominate those sectors. and you wouldnt even know, because of proxy shareholderships, stakeholderships, co-branding, branding and so on.
and there are idiots who believe that 'free market' will handle that. yeah, it handles that. every 15-20 years, when some new technology comes, free market gives a chance for nobodies or small time companies to go big. like in the case of internet. with that, maybe it can be possible for a corporation that is not already owned by an established conglomerate may come up and get some market share, and you, as the consumer, may have 'choice'. but when dust settles, the big established conglomerates will move in with their MEGA capital, and consolidate the sector again. just like how it happened with isps. end of line sharing regulation ended in 2006, mega corps like at&t, comcast started to consolidate the internet, and, ironically, immediately at the same time they started attacking net neutrality. see how that works ?
no, free market wont avail you until a new technology is found. the established powers in a capitalist economy is always bigger than any upcoming competitor can handle. competitors are either destroyed, or bought, or subdued and integrated into the existing hierarchy. it is the way of things in situations where the society allows a dog eat dog situation. the strong subdues the weak.
see, there is THAT much lobbying, even though it is fairly well understood by now that no net regulation will mean walled gardens. there are still shitty pieces like this coming up in mouthpiece conglomerate media like wall street. you think they are doing all that effort for nothing ? you think they will not wall you off ?
you think 'competition' will happen ? lets see how will it happen in this situation http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/04/18/1318210
but actually, yeah, competition might happen. it may take 5 to 10 years for an acceptable competitor to come up and allow you a non walled garden choice. but in the meantime, your kids will grow up, you will have aged a decade, in a world in which you are not able to decide what you can do on the internet, but some corporate appointed administration.
its private censorship, for profit. its worse than any other kind of censorship. even the censorship in repressive countries, have some ideology behind them, right or wrong, an idea. but, in the case of this kind of private censorship, your life gets restricted for the mere sake of private profits of a small group of individuals.
yeah. net neutrality is needed. it is what made internet what it is in the first place. what is not needed is, lapdog publications like wall street trying to do shitty propaganda, and fools believing some school of economics which even the most prominent figure of that school have given up. http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2008/oct/24/economics-creditcrunch-federal-reserve-greenspan
Read radical news here
Exactly.. its always been regulated. And it wouldn't need additional regulation if the CORPORATIONS (telcos) continued play fairly well as has been done up through around 2000. What has changed is not the "cry for Net Neutrality", what has changed is the big ISPs committing felonies (man-in-the-middle-attacks), lying about service, and now trying to DOUBLE-charge for packet transfer (since sources and sinks both ALREADY pay for their internet connections). The WSJ piece is exactly that -- a sound-bite clustered piece of shit written by a shill for those would balkanize the Internet and return us to the days of AOL's prison-wall gardens.
The Mississippi river flows through Louisiana. You ain't getting to the gulf from Iowa without going through Louisiana.
Sure you can. You go east to the Atlantic Coast and then take a ship to the gulf.
There are three power grids in the USA. East, West, and Texas. You want to sell power over the grid, you have to hook up to the one in your area. They don't overlap. No body is stopping you from laying down your own transmission lines.
I am pretty sure that there are laws preventing you from doing that. I know that there were laws that limited who was allowed to sell electricity in a given area. I remember a time when only one company was allowed to sell electricity in the area I live in. The law still only allows one company to run electrical transmission lines to retail customers in my area.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Is Comcast a monopoly? In my area an alternate provider with the same performance is very much more expensive. Is that because Comcast has better technology, or because the barriers to entry are too high?
No, the reason Comcast has that monopoly is because there was a law that allowed local municipalities to grant a local monopoly and Comcast bought the companies that held those franchises.
A alternate question is whether there is case where there was a high cost to entry in a field with a distributed infrastructure (railways, roads. internet, pipelines, telecom etc) where there was no government intervention and there was not a monopoly. (honest question, I can't think of one, but would be interested to hear an example).
The problem here is that I can't think of one of those that did not have the government step in and impose a monopoly.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The problem then is that we can't tell if government intervention creates monopolies, or reduces their severity. My guess is that it does both - the "government" is far monolithic organization.
> This was pretty much the case during the dial-up era, but the capital
> demands for high-speed service makes it difficult to get a true
> competitive marketplace.
As someone who was there, yes the capital demands ramped up with the move to 56K and DSL (Go lookup the price of a fully loaded Portmaster 3 in 1996/7 vs a Portmaster 2 and a sack of modems) but that wasn't what changed. In that era the telcos were mostly out of the picture, selling (raping) the ISPs for dialup lines on a even basis. Then they realized the Internet wasn't just a passing fad and got in bigtime at prices nobody could hope to compete with. The head of AT&T was on the tube saying things like "Yea we expect to lose money for five plus years but we can afford it." Small 'Mom & Pop' operations started dying left and right about then as the price for 'unlimited' dialup fell through the $19.95/month level and started toward $9.99/month. Those prices were lower than the cost of telco service to handle a customer and that wasn't even taking into account the leased circuit upstream, normal business costs, etc.
But there were still big players capitalized well enough to stay in the game and the laws were on their side. Then Rep Tauzin (R-BellSouth) spearheaded the effort to gut the CLECs, the markets panicked, the equipment makers were left with worthless paper for the equipment they had been self financing to the CLECs and before anyone realized what was happening it had spread throughout the Internet and the .bomb was in full swing.
> Maybe the solution is for a municipal utility to provide a
> fiber optic line from the residence to a C.O.
That is one way. A better way would be to revisit the AT&T breakup and this time do it right. A regulated monopoly with the part that is a natural monopoly, the physical plant comprising the CO and the wires/fibers/right of ways and the rest a totally unregulated entity who buys access to an equal footing with as many additional players wish to enter the market.
Democrat delenda est
You clearly didn't pay attention or learn the history of the telephone company. The reason the government gave a monopoly to AT&T was because there were dozens and dozens of different phone companies and none of them could talk with each other and none of them would work it out so that they could talk with each other. Because of this and because the government wanted to be able to call from state to state. They setup AT&T as government sanctioned monopoly that no one could compete with. Just like the postal system used to be a government protected monopoly.
It's *logically inconsistent* for them to have both. If they control it, they are partly liable... that's a major part of the legal definition of the term.
If you make them liable for the data they transport if they control the data based on content, I can guarantee this whole net neutrality problem will go away. Regulations aren't necessary. Holding people accountable for their actions is. No free passes!
Let me quote from the preamble to the GNU General Public License:
To protect your rights, we need to prevent others from denying you these rights or asking you to surrender the rights.
That principle applies to so many different situations. People often discuss freedom under the false assumption that you have freedom unless the government takes it away from you. That view is way too simplistic. There are many threats to freedom from many sources. The fact is, lots of people will try to restrict your freedom unless they are prevented from doing so. That is what government regulation is about (when it's done properly, which certainly is not always the case): protecting your freedom by denying others the right to restrict it.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
really, whoever wrote this does not get it at all.
of course ideally the internet would be free from all regulation. unfortunately we live in a world where corporations that control the internet act to maximize their profits in ways that will hurt the consumer. who's going to stop them? our (only) recourse is to make laws that bind these corporations.
i have consumer grade competition in my area between at&t and comcast. interestingly, once you price things out you see that they are almost exactly the same price for the same service. coincidence? i think not.
NO, the Woodrow Wilson Administration wanted to be able to control this new technology and made a deal with AT&T to do so. The Woodrow Wilson Administration believed (probably correctly) that it was easier to control one large company than a bunch of small ones.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Protection from business abuse does not equal governmental abuse.
This is the standard free-enterprise fear-mongering tripe, and it has *no* place on slashdot. Protecting the consumer from abuse by artificial monopolies (or oligopolies) is just as important as protecting the citizen from abuse by the government. It is the function of a responsible government to do both.
Why worry about a slippery slope when you're already aiming for the bottom?
You might want to know that large percentage of the core Internet services are controlled by US companies, and thus can be controlled by the US government. Want a .net,.com,.org, .us domain? Yep get that from the US. Want an IP block? Better talk with ARIN the US company. Only 3 of the root DNS servers are not owned/run by American companies and could be replaced easily. The US has huge control over the Internet, that not all countries like, but considering it was basically invented in the US that is the breaks. So if the FCC begins to regulate things, depending on what they do, they absolutely could end up regulating the Internet and effecting everyone world wide.
Which is exactly the reason the FCC needs a hands off policy when it comes to the Internet itself. They could and probably will do more harm than good.
As DragonWriter points out the "Fairness Doctrine" was abolished in August 1987 - about what is termed "a generation ago" (23 years).
Mod this guy down and DragonWriter up as "Informative".
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
If there was choice... if ISPs weren't government sanctioned monopolies, then maybe. But the majority of Americans have only one choice for their ISP. That ISP can do ANYTHING they want and there is nothing their customers can do about it. I live in a major metropolitan area and even here I only have 2 choices for internet service, a single DSL provider or a single Cable company... and the Cable service is so incredibly bad that it's not even an option. In a situation like this either the ISP needs to be heavily regulated or the government simply needs to run the utility. Simple as that. Maybe if mobile broadband comes down to a reasonable pricing structure then maybe that would be an option... but theres rather obvious price fixing going on in that industry so we're unlikely to see lower prices until, you guessed it, they get more regulation.
There is a common misconception, both with Net Neutrality and with Economics, that "free" == "unregulated". That is simply not true. An unregulated market quickly becomes very *not* free as the strong use their power to protect their interests and squash the others. Perhaps a better term would be "fair" market, as what we want is for an entity to have the freedom to do what they want, without controlling what others do, so that everyone has the same opportunities. If there is no regulation, the gorillas want very much to, and will, control what others do.
...thinks that big gubbermint is the answer to every problem great, small, even imaginary (like this one).
I don't recall any ISP ever preventing me from downloading anything. Nor have I ever met anyone with such a complaint. And yet, here we are.
Sorry you guys, you have completely lost the plot. Most posts, but not most of the internet is USA offshore.
We dont like you, care much about your CRAP ISP subscription rip-offs, or your broken and benighted legal system which deliverers Justice, only to the very rich (costs in cause) tort-reform, the "American Centuary" or who is patent fucking or time wasting today, your debt is huge, your productivity carp and the whole economhy is in the tank while your leaders still do Keynsian eye-shut and continue to try to spend other peoples money.
"The problem with re-distribution/socialism is when you run out of other peoples money"
You will be very lucky to last another 10 years
The Fairness Doctrine is being leveraged to ensure that there are only two viable political parties.
If you're worried about an entrenched party duoarchy, any content-focused "Fairness Doctrine" should be the least of your concerns. Even if it were still operating (it's not, and it's pretty easy to verify both by pointing at examples of broadcast outlets that violate its principles as well as checking history), any effects it has are an order of magnitude lower than the plurality voting system.
Tweet, tweet.
TFA uses the "seven degrees of Kevin Bacon" game to tie Network Neutrality in with communism. This article is FUD and John Fund needs to either debate the issue or put on his tin foil hat and go home.
I prefer a post office analogy. The mail man doesn't get to look through your mail and charge you extra for the letters that look "really valuable". Your mailman doesn't get to block the letters from people he doesn't like, or shake down businesses, saying "I know you already paid postage, but you're mailing too much stuff out. I'm gonna have to charge you extra because you can afford to pay it".
The post office would be a highly lucrative business if they were completely unregulated, for profit, and ran themselves like an ISP. Essentially, they'd look at each package, not as a delivery to be made, but more inventory that they can sell to the intended recipient.
is granting control over the Internet to political appointees the way to go? Regardless of your political point of view shouldn't the Internet remain free from regulation?"
Regardless of corruption and ineptitude the population at least has a modicum of power over the government, it would be lovely if the internet could remain free but if it isn't regulated it will be controlled by corporate interests, they are behind the curve but they will catch up eventually.
Yes.
s/©//g
Wrong. As soon as you give the FCC a mandate over the Internet that mandate will start expanding.
In would rather see 15 big companies duking it out than the FCC gain power over the Internet.
Simple, clear laws are best. Ones that lawyers can't understand because they are too straight forward.
There are 2 things I think it must protect, and should be enforceable.
1) an ISP cannot determine where a customer can and where a customer cannot go on the internet - i.e. all IPs are accessible at all times
2) an ISP cannot charge a customer extra to visit any particular end-point (IP) - including ports.
Whatever legislation that the FCC is proposing *may* cover these 2 things. If so, great. If not, shame!
I can imagine no rules about:
* volume of data - charging me more for high volume, I can understand that. False advertising falls under other laws, along with contract law. If I agree that anything over 50 GB produces an extra charge, and that is what I agreed to, and therefore I expect a charge. However, that means a measurement should also be presented/available at all times if I'm interested... proof and track-ability is essential then.
* bandwidth guarantees - paying for ensuring that I have minimum bandwidth, I can understand paying extra too. Again false advertising falls under other laws.
* connections that occur in other countries are not guaranteed. i.e. if China blocks you from accessing their end-points from the US, tough luck. Your ISP is not involved.
false advertising law explained
We don't need crazy laws that a child cannot understand.
I seriously don't understand why these concepts are so difficult to accept de facto. It has essentially been this way for a long time. Forcing it to not change would be relieving. I would imagine that the ISPs would be able to use legislation like this to play nice with each other too. i.e. "you can't, ISP A block ISP B because you will be causing a violation of law X"
The Net Neutrality Coup
By: John Fund
Liberals like net neutrality.
Liberals funded research which supported net neutrality.
Liberals advocated for net neutrality.
In conclusion, as I have proven above, net neutrality is evil.
I don't trust any form of unlimited power: government, corporations, churches, unions, mobs, free markets, or individuals.I don't think any of them should be in charge of the Internet, or society at large. But I do believe in pitting them against one another where needed, to balance each other's ability to control my life.
I give telcos the exclusive right to run wires through my back yard and shoot electrons through the air on limited frequencies. In return, I reasonably demand that if I'm paying for their services, I can connect who whoever they hell I want to without them degrading the connection because they want to sell me a competing service.
I don't let the water company charge me one rate for water to fill my pool, and another to brew my beer. I pay for water to be delivered, and it's none of their damned business who I use it. Same for electricity. Telcos can charge me for usage, but should not be able to use their quasi-government role as a monopoly utility service to turn the Internet back into Cable TV.
When the choice is between living without Internet access, or choosing a watered-down version, there really isn't an economically viable choice for most people, any more than most people could reasonably choose to live without water, electricity, or roads. You can survive, but you can't compete. So we can't unplug, nor can we vote with our wallets.. A natural monopoly requires a balancing force, because there is no free market. The government is the way that democratic societies choose to impose the will of the people when the market cannot.
Never expected the citizens of the land of the free wanting and accepting so much of its goverment bs. A corporate police state will surely make you win the war on terror, drugs and nipples... ... oh and ofcourse, protect the children.
And that wide range of ISPs goes over who's wires, exactly ?
While it's true to say that this is not about the price of the service, it *is* actually about what competition will do to the price if it's not obstructed by semi- or actual monopolies, whatever form they take.
A consumer shouldn't have to go to business solutions to get decent service. You can also ask what "business" means, vs. "consumer" - here it's usually a bit more volume and a fixed IP. Real competition instead of agreeing with the competition to not nick customers off one another, will ensure that all services eventually, and maybe even swiftly, drop to their real value.
Real competition needs regulation, however. People love to say that a true free market regulates itself, and this is true. What those same people usually fail to understand, however, is that it regulates itself towards the best interests of it's most powerful participants, not those of the consumers. THAT is why companies will make deals with one another about limiting competition, when left unchecked.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
If you think government control over the Internet is a good idea, ask yourself how you would feel when the party opposing your personal political beliefs gets control and does things you don't like. I guarantee that you'll wish you were back in the good old days.
Why would they want to turn it into cable TV when they already have cable TV and the Internet is more popular?
Because cable TV operators have long inserted advertisements from local businesses into cable TV programming, and they want a piece of that on the Internet as well.
You can also ask what "business" means, vs. "consumer" - here it's usually a bit more volume and a fixed IP.
And an acceptable use policy that doesn't result in termination for running a server behind the connection. "Consumer" in this industry tends to mean one who uses a service solely for home entertainment rather than to produce another product or service.
Let me explain, no there is too much, let me sum up.
Not that anyone will read this, but. The Internet is due to be split in half. We're going to see a corporate whitenet that is dominated by the Disney level content and major corporations for their purposes and that is regulated primarily by the FCC to provide all the legal protection those companies demand. Then we're going to see a greynet emerge that is fairly similar to the Internet we know and enjoy today though the corporations and government will have the power to roll in to clear the "thieves forest" with the "brute squad" any time they feel like it. Verizon probably ends up controlling most of the access to the greynet because of their excellent 1G and 3G usb internet connections through cell towers and it comes down to demand. Most people don't give a crap about the anarchy and freedom a small population on the Internet like techies wants and needs. Sorry folks, all frontiers end up being settled eventually. The next frontier is the merger of biological and digital technology. Have fun storming the castle! Think it'll work? It would take a miracle!
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
Ok, you want 10mbs uncontended.
Fine.
From where to where?
From here to everywhere?
Ok, what if the google gateway is contended inthe IP-X, or thier cache is dry if your ISP has one? What then?
What if your ISP's backbone is flooded? Will you pay for them to have enough capacity to manage the peak for everyone on their backbone? Can you? Doubt it.
And if the ISP's backbone is clear, what about the CDN or the T1 network? You can't pay them directly because of the market and technical structure at the moment. Google can, Amazon can, and check it. The big content providers run their own CDNs.
And neutral to what? Voip? Filetransfer, Video? What bits of the video? The structural packets or the detail? If we are neutral we kill voip and video for what? Why should we have poor video so that someone can share toretzzz ? Ok - why should we have slow torrents so that someone can watch a video... the point is that it is a decision.
And; why IP? What about common carriage?
To get proper neutrality we need to rebuild from the bottom up. A total network rearchitecture world wide. Never, never, never going to happen again.
What this comes down to is the access network. The access network is either an mechanism of community extortion or it's a utility, like the water network or the roads.
The answer is for the access network to be run as a utility at a national level. Until we go back to that in a very large part of the world wide consumer market (so I mean the USA and Europe) we are going to go round and round with this. The mobile network is going to have the same thing in 5 years for sure.
Or - tollroads.
Now, let's be fair, some parts of every system are going to need tolls. International shipping has tolls, railways have tolls... hell roads have tolls on bridges and so on; to get the strategic links done in hard places this is what is going to be needed, but you can manage day to day without going accross the toll bridge if you want, and that has to become the case or continue to be the case with the internet.
--------------------------------------------- "In the end, we're all just water and old stars."
The Internet is not currently "free from regulation" so I don't see how avoiding net neutrality would "keep" us from anything.
If there were 14 ISPs that serviced my home I wouldn't give a rat's ass about net neutrality. But there are only 2, as a direct result of governmental regulation about who can run wires to me, and I'm relatively lucky to have that "choice". Anyone claiming that net neutrality is adding regulation to an otherwise wide-open system is either uniformed or trolling.
The US government is refusing to regulate the internet correctly and big business is just waiting to turn it into cable tv.
Do you have an example of anything that is regulated "correctly"?
Unfortunately people seem to uninterested both sides will end up fucking it up completely.
And, this is the fundamental problem with government involvement. People care about something until a law is passed. But, the real rules are defined after that by the regulators. So, the people that advocated involvement are already placated and detach themselves because they got what they wanted... the government is involved. But, the guys with the money know that's when they can come in and get what they want.
Any regulation ends up protecting the big players in whatever industry. They get monopolies granted. They get immense barriers to entry for anyone that might like to come along and offer something better. And, the politicians and bureaucrats get their share of the pie. Meanwhile, we end up getting screwed worse than we were before.
Name an industry that you have problems with that isn't regulated. Why is it the industries that people continuously complain about are the one's that are the most regulated? Is that just a coincidence?
I have only one cable provider in my area, and Verizon gave up expanding FIOS in my state, but I have two sat companies who are aggressively asking for my business, both partnering with the telco.
It's not that competition has gone away, it just doesn't look like it did fifteen years ago. That's normal.
I'm surprised that people trust the government "a series of tubes" to regulate something as complicated as the internet after they make obvious, repeatedly, they don't know what they're doing. The latest example? The FCC said they would have imposed stricter regulations, but they recognized Android was 'open'...
#-#
Ad Astra Per Aspera
A rough road leads to the stars
Blame AT&T and blame Google.
The real issue here is cable vs mobile. Apple has been clever enough to force AT&T into a flat-rate program where there is no reward whatsoever for AT&T to speed up its lines. In Europe (where I live), users are charged by GB so the cellphone groups are actually putting pressure in users to use more data.
Google is seeing YouTube growth in the mobile "trend" threatened and wants to speed up things. They will even go to the extent of paying ISP's to do it.
Like fixed phones (who uses them anymore?) in the near future so will mobile net access dominate. The big players will then have established themselves in such a way that there is no way a "youtube"-like startup will be able to compete as it's site will be excruciatingly slow.
This is an establishment-play by Google. A greedy play by the ISP's. A power-need play by the Government. And a suck-it-up-play for the rest of us.
Because selling chunks of the internet or at least the most popular internet sites would be much more profitable than a flat fee of $20 to $50.
Arguably that is what the likes of AOL and Compuserve tried to do and look at the xbox 360. Microsoft isn't giving people a web browser and expects you for gold to have access to facebook and twitter.
I think the only reason AOL failed is because there was the treat of an open internet and that's what people really want. But if businesses are allowed to do what they want and they all put up walls then what can you do?
Just look at mobile phones. They all act in the same way and no one is even thinking of attempting to offer the same sort of offers you find in Europe because there is no incentive to.
Do you have an example of anything that is regulated "correctly"?
Admittedly there aren't many successful cases to point you towards. However I would say that mobile phones in the UK are a good example.
They are regulated so they can't lock you into anything. Soon they won't be allowed to charge extortionate amounts for chargers either because they're being standardised.
Because there is only one type of network, your phone is yours to do with what you want and your phone number is yours to keep so they have to come with better incentives to get you to come to their network. That means most phones are free on a reasonable contact and you get more minutes, texts and data for your money because that's really all they have to compete with.
BT owns virtually all the phones lines if not all of them. They could have a monopoly on DSL and phone services but their lines are treated as a utility and they have to let anyone onto the lines if they want to offer phone services or broadband. That is the way it should be. You just can't expect every company to lay their own lines. It's not an issue of cost. It's physically impossible without the roads constantly being tore up or tons of wires hanging everywhere.
To be fair if the US regulated the internet so it was easy to switch companies you had plenty of choice you could argue that net neutrality wouldn't be needed because there could be dozens if not hundreds of companies to choose from so there would be no incentive to lock up the internet for an ISP. This is of course assuming it's regulated that the networks the ISPs use aren't allowed to modify / filter traffic.
The problem is no one wants to run a business operating their network as nothing more than a utility. But that is what needs to happen. If anyone was allowed to start up an ISP through the phone lines, cable, etc then there could be much more competition.
The owner of the networks shouldn't be able to filter or modify their traffic and they should be made to allow any business use their network to provide service. That's all that needs to be done to protect net neutrality in my opinion. If people have 20 choices for an ISP then who would be dumb enough to operate another AOL?
Do you have an example of anything that is regulated "correctly"?
Admittedly there aren't many successful cases to point you towards. However I would say that mobile phones in the UK are a good example.
I'm not that knowledgeable about UK regulations (other than the occasional horror story that pops up around here periodically), so I can't speak to that specifically. You did touch primarily on the choice aspects of it, though, highlighting the network portability. Is the entire gamut of mobile regulation in the UK without issue?
But, to go back to your first sentence, what does that say about the nature of regulation? It seems that the inevitable conclusion is we can have things regulated or not regulated and big business is going to take advantage of it regardless. So, the real question is whether we're better off with the government being involved in market decisions or not. And, bearing in mind that the entire existence of corporations is due to government involvement in the market, it would appear that if the government gets completely out of the way, we no longer have the threat of big corporations taking advantage of people. We just have people that can be held liable if they violate someone's rights, rather than a non-person entity that just has to pay tribute to it's government creator.
Yes, and isn't that exactly what net neutrality is about ? I rent a pipe from you, with x bits of capacity. What I do with that pipe should be no more your business than what I do in the house I rent is the landlord's business. And, before you mention keeping the house in good condition, I can't exactly paint my internet bright pink, can I ?
As for "home entertainment", they are not the ones who get to decide what I find entertaining. Hell, I'm a geek, it entertains me to run a server.
What a depressingly stupid machine.
I rent a pipe from you, with x bits of capacity.
Just because you rent a pipe that can burst at 6 Mbps doesn't mean you get to burst all the time and degrade other subscribers' ability to burst. Would you rather have TOS restrictions against services commonly associated with degrading other subscribers' ability to burst, or would you rather have a monthly cap plan in which the ISP automatically downgrades your pipe to 0.05 Mbps down and 0.02 Mbps up if you've transferred more than 5 GB over the past 30 days?
And, before you mention keeping the house in good condition
Viruses, worms, spam zombies, etc.
I can't exactly paint my internet bright pink, can I ?
Not exactly, but Firefox users can paint their web browser bright pink.
what (usually/should) happens is that when you rent, say, a 5Mbps pipe, you now rent the pipe for an average speed of 5Mbps instead of the more traditional top speed of 5Mbps.
That's easy to bury in fine print: the residential plan is an 0.05 Mbps line burstable to 5 Mbps.
Your point about services associated with degrading other subscribers' bandwidth is really an issue of your ISP overselling his capacity, isn't it ?
Yes. Without overselling, all services would be priced at the "business class" rate, and very few home users could afford to subscribe.
Particularly, that's an issue of termites. As long as they stay in my house (virus eating my performance and bandwidth)
Except they don't stay in your house. Spam zombies don't stay within your LAN; they send mail over the connection that you rent and through the oversold connection that you share with your neighbors.
By the same shaky reasoning you could ask why we have a constitution to protect us. The constitution is the first level of regulation. Who needs the first amendment? Get the government out of the business of regulating speech. Let the market decide. Why have anti-monopoly legislation. Who needs OSHA anyway.
I have libertarian tendencies. I don't think the government does a great job at proactively running things. I believe that the market does best at most things except ensure fair competition in the market. Let the government be negative and merely prevent the things that restrict fair and open competition. I see net neutrality as an extension of free speech needing the same protections.
But then that government would have to set a price, which means the government is now in the internet business whether they like it or not.
I actually, I think that would put them into the rent extraction business.
Which according to geolibertarians is exactly the business that the government should be in.
I suppose that the utility poles could become so heavily wired as to run out of space or lose structural integrity if enough businesses were to lease space on them
The government should set the rates such that once poles start to become unsafe, it can afford to build more poles. But as I understand real-world governments, much of the revenue would be siphoned off into the general fund to pay for unrelated entitlements.
However, the FCC still enforces the same principle under the "Diversity" moniker, with the same methodology (programming must contain content X, Y and Z in the proportions the FCC requires or your broadcast license is revoked).
Really? Evidence (not speculation or unsupported allegations) of this is to be found, where exactly?
There are a few things that grandparent might be referring to. One is the E/I requirement: three hours per subchannel per week of regularly scheduled educational programming intended for children. Television programming for children 12 and under must be carefully edited so as not to look remotely like an infomercial; the series Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh! in particular have been responsible for fines against broadcast stations. Another is "Reasonable Access" and "Equal Opportunity" for candidates to buy ad time. Read more here.
Exactly. I should have worded it better, e.g., "shut up, and go to your Cisco rep."
They'd mishear that as "shut up and go to your SisQó rep", giving them an excuse to prioritize "The Thong Song" over indie music sites.
I'm not that knowledgeable about UK regulations (other than the occasional horror story that pops up around here periodically), so I can't speak to that specifically. You did touch primarily on the choice aspects of it, though, highlighting the network portability. Is the entire gamut of mobile regulation in the UK without issue?
I think it would wrong to claim anything in this world is perfect. I believe the regulation is about as good as it can get.
There were issues where people were claiming the companies were making profits through other means like high roaming costs in other countries and extortionate data rates.
Within the EU those issues are being addressed and costs are coming down in those areas. I'm sure they'll look for some other loophole to increases costs on something but hopefully when that arises it won't be left to get out of hand.
Again, I don't think anything is completely perfect so the best way to address something is to try and do you best at first and then just keep a vigilant eye on and fine turn things to keep it as fair as possible. Too many people expect a single quick fix solution to things. I think that's why politicians get away with a lot.
But, to go back to your first sentence, what does that say about the nature of regulation? It seems that the inevitable conclusion is we can have things regulated or not regulated and big business is going to take advantage of it regardless. So, the real question is whether we're better off with the government being involved in market decisions or not. And, bearing in mind that the entire existence of corporations is due to government involvement in the market, it would appear that if the government gets completely out of the way, we no longer have the threat of big corporations taking advantage of people. We just have people that can be held liable if they violate someone's rights, rather than a non-person entity that just has to pay tribute to it's government creator.
Corporations will always take advantage of people. Just look at where a lot of companies put their factories. They're in countries where there are less regulations and the companies treat their employees like shit.
I believe we need something, like the government that is equally as large as the corporations to take them on. The way society is set up now we are dependant on large businesses. How can we push them around? I would point to mobile phones in the US. There isn't a monopoly. There is choice but they don't really compete and mobile phones are one of the few things that quite often appear to be more expensive in the US.
If there is no one regulating them who is to stop any sector from deciding it's better to stick together and keep prices high and if they do what can you do?
The only problem with using the government is that you need people who actually care about voting and understand it. Sure by lowering education standards we've made it easier for people to get into college but I think we've also ended up with people who don't care as much about education, intelligence and as a result politics and the government.
the government is free to do what they want and yes you can argue they are therefore useless but if people aren't willing to hold politicians accountable then why would they hold companies accountable especially when that society loves shopping so much?
Why just the Internet? What about if the FCC had been able to regulate the content of your telephone calls from the days of Alexander Graham Bell? Why not just let them regulate everything, since some people believe that more government and its intrusion and associated spending the the solution to Everything wrong in the world?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."