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Senators Bash ISP and Push Extensive Net Neutrality
eldavojohn writes "Remember when Verizon sued the FCC over net neutrality rules? Well, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Al Franken (D-MN) see it a bit differently and have authored a new working bill titled 'Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection Act of 2011 (PDF).' The bill lays out some stark clarity on what is meant by Net Neutrality by outright banning ISPs from doing many things including '(6) charge[ing] a content, application, or service provider for access to the broadband Internet access service providers' end users based on differing levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery of Internet protocol packets; (7) prioritiz[ing] among or between content, applications, and services, or among or between different types of content, applications, and services unless the end user requests to have such prioritization... (9) refus[ing] to interconnect on just and reasonable terms and conditions.' And that doesn't count for packets sent over just the internet connections but also wireless, radio, cell phone or pigeon carrier. Franken has constantly reiterated that this is the free speech issue of our time and Cantwell said, 'If we let telecom oligarchs control access to the Internet, consumers will lose. The actions that the FCC and Congress take now will set the ground rules for competition on the broadband Internet, impacting innovation, investment, and jobs for years to come. My bill returns the broadband cop back to the beat, and creates the same set of obligations regardless of how consumers get their broadband.'"
Won't someone think of the oligarchs!
Please, Al, please run!
Technoli
Speaking for the pigeons, we approve. We don't want to sniff or otherwise inspect your packets. We just want to deliver them and get our feed.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Franken is one of those comedians who, with age, has gotten less and less funny and more and more nutball. Most of them are SNL alum too, which must say something about the mental toll of being on that show. Dennis Miller and Janeane Garofalo, I'm looking in your direction.
But on this and the Comcast/NBC merger, the guy is dead on. Who better to appreciate the depths of evil at NBC than a SNL alum, after all?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
"Citizen" is not synonymous with "consumer", and in this context, "consumer" is the most appropriate term.
I didn't think Franken sounded any better than Coleman in the last election and voted for the devil I knew.
I must say that I have been shocked to see his name so often attached to great ideas (actual NN, ending ACTA secrecy, etc.). I will definitely be sending my vote his way next time around; I think he is one of the few senators with people's rights actually guiding him.
The problem is that all telcos are waiting US decision to very soon spread those policies around the world. Will be very difficult to revert once they have control over all internet information. Besides, there is a deeper problem illustrated by two Brazilian episodes: 1) YouTube was blocked to the whole country due a decision involving a celebrity sex video (really). 2) Telcos already advertise promotions like "free social network access", not to mention dozen of lawsuits against Orkut for cloned profile, etc.
Putting all together: As soon as telcos start to dictate internet's tone, will be much easier for governments to implement restrictions without consulting people's right or even the content/service provider.
Let's hope not!!
The key is that everyone should get what they pay for. If I pay for 768kbps, then I should get at least 768kbps. If google wants to pay extra, then I'm ok with google gettting to me at 2mbps, but not with google paying my ISP so that yahoo only comes to me at 250kbps.
I should get what I pay for.
Google should get what they pay for.
Party X should not be able to pay for party Y to get less than what has been paid for.
All ideas^H^H^H^H^Hprocesses in this post are Patent Pending. (as well as the process of patenting all postings)
IMO, the annoying part is ever being called a "consumer."
It reduces my existence down to the one-dimensional act of consuming. Makes me feel like some sort of herd animal grazing on whatever slop the farmer is throwing in front of my face.
Granted, there is utility in only focusing on one dimension when that's the one being, ahem, focused on. For example, IT calls the individuals who operate computers "users."
But from an economic standpoint, it is dangerous to reduce people to consumers, because it locks you into thinking that that is their actual purpose for existence. We see this a lot now: that consumption = good, and any diminution in consumption is somehow bad.
Words are powerful, and "consumer" is not a positive word.
Jesus H Christ, why is a former comedian the smartest politician we have? It's embarrassing that this guy has to come to Washington to kick some sense into them just because our elite educational institutions have been pumping out the smartest dumb fucks on the planet for years.
Tiger Blooded Bi-Winning Machine
...then why do they pass laws and ordinances mandating their existence? If you don't believe me, try starting your own phone or cable company sometime.
I love it when government passes laws adding new regulations to solve problems created by government rather than just fixing their initial mistakes. The closest we got to to sanity was the AT&T breakup by the Judicial branch, but the legislative and executive branches were bought off sufficiently bought to more or less undo all of the good done there.
Help save the critically endangered Blue Iguana
Your point requires that the consumer has choice. In many areas, there is only one or (sometimes two high) speed providers. You have to have the alternate choice before you can vote with your wallet.
Atlas stands on the earth and carries the celestial sphere on his shoulders.
So you're saying that "up to" means "at least"? Do you not realize that broadband bits cost 20-40 times less than commercial bandwidth, precisely because it's shared 20-40 times? Now you want the government to change the service level of a shared circuit to that of a dedicated circuit? Any idea what this does to prices? Any idea how you'd actually achieve this, since it's impossible to build a core network that can handle all the concurrent data that the end points can throw at it?
Son, welcome to what's known in these parts as "free market capitalism" where you have two functions: to work for as little as possible and to consume as much as possible.
When corporations have the same constitutional rights as you, the term "citizen" really doesn't have much meaning anymore. "Consumer" is nothing but accurate.
You are welcome on my lawn.
(7) prioritiz[ing] among or between content, applications, and services, or among or between different types of content, applications, and services unless the end user requests to have such prioritization..
(emphasis added). It's about time something like this happened.
Man blir trött av att gå och göra ingenting.
You mean the foreign corporations?
You are welcome on my lawn.
My mom was a nurse at the county hospital in San Antonio. In the 90's the a lot of verbiage changed including calling people admitted to the hospital from customers instead of patients.
She felt the same as you regarding that term..
Maybe that's not what VOIP is for.
You are welcome on my lawn.
You know how many ISPs service the address I'm posting from?
One.
Well, I must just be in some obscure backwater, right?
Nope. This is a pretty nice area of Brooklyn. You know, in the largest city in the US.
Things are slightly better at the office. At that address we've got two ISP choices. Of course one of them is DSL that tops out at only 3 Mbps.
If the government to built out some sort of nation-wide publicly owned fiber network and let a few thousand ISPs compete to provide Internet access over it, the market could solve these problems. But as long as ISPs own the lines -- line ownership being something pretty damn close to a natural monopoly -- consumers need legislative protection from them.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
They don't advertise at least x Mbps, they advertise "up to" 6 Mbps for example. I got my mom a 6 Mbps U-verse connection and found that their advertising wasn't accurate. Turned out that they gave her 7 Mbps which is generally sustainable even over a long duration. However, I don't expect 7 or 6 Mbps to be an "at least" number.
Words are powerful, and "consumer" is not a positive word.
In line with my sig of the week, I think we should be called owners.
After all, "We built this internet one Dial-UP account at a time" for the last 20 or 30 years. We built the carriers and ISPs with our dollars. We hired them to run it, not to own it.
They run infrastructure thru right-of-way corridors granted by us, and send content thru the airways granted by us, and we pay the bills. Every month. Between cellular and internet connections most geeks pay well north of $100 per month to these companies. Its time we had our say.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
This legislation is good enough, it's smart enough, and doggonnit, people like it!
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
I would prefer to be a client. a customer may choose to buy what is provided. A client produces requirements that must be fulfilled.
No, simply because it's packet-switched rather than circuit-switched. That's the tradeoff you make. You don't get the reliability of having a dedicated circuit during your call when you make that call on a shared circuit.
unless it is necessary in order to ensure that emergency calls get through (with proper legalese wording of course).
And that's why I'm so skeptical of Net Neutrality. Oh, sure it will be great for a while, but eventually regulations will allow, or even require, different packets to get different priority, and as with all other industries, it's only a matter of time before the big players are the ones writing those regulations. "Proper legalese wording" always ends up being "wording chosen by industry" given enough time.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
... the way ISPs (and other utilities) work so that we can actually have real competition. Competition would basically fix this sort of thing, wouldn't it? Droves of people don't want X-ISP because X-ISP is throttling/sniffing/whatever traffic. Y-ISP comes in and advertises they don't do that (and in fact, they don't). Droves of people switch to Y-ISP.
Right now, though, because of the way ISPs share (or don't share) infrastructure and all that, we don't have competition; we have local monopolies. The fact that we allow local monopolies is why we now are struggling to regulate them; regulation may not be required, though, if we actually had competition. By "competition" I mean competition for the same customer using the same - more or less - technology; e.g., one person looking for cable can actually buy from multiple providers.
Maybe I misunderstand how it works right now, but it seems to me that allowing local monopolies is a bad idea and is the only reason we are having to go down the regulation route. Maybe if the infrastructure were public and paid for through $x-per-customer-served by the provider, thus allowing multiple providers access to the same infrastructure at the same cost (and that cost going to the local government, which would be maintaining/improving/whatever the infrastructure), we wouldn't have need for all this?
it was vendor neutral.
I think VOIP and streaming movies SHOULD get priority over bittorrent traffic as long all VOIP and streaming movie vendors are treated equally whether its youtube, netflix or comcast or my calls are made on skype or at&t.
Because some markets are natural monopolies in which the most economically efficient outcome is in fact a monopoly.
The supply curve you were probably taught in econ 101 is upward sloping, but that's actually a not-always true simplification. For instance, the supply curve of computer software is actually downward sloping, because higher numbers of customers = a lower cost to produce the software per customer. Most supply curves are actually an upward-sloping parabola, where the economies of scale create the downward sloping part and the diseconomies of scale create the upward sloping part. Most of the time, revenue is maximized on the upward sloping portion, so that's where econ 101 concentrates.
But in some cases, you can end up with a demand curve that intersects the supply curve on the downward sloping portion. For instance, if the economies of scale mean I can supply 20 billion cell phones before I reach the bottom of the supply curve, and the average person wants 4 cell phones per year, I'm not going to be able to sell enough phones to reach that minimum. But any competitor that tried to enter the same market would experience higher costs than me, which will force him to sell at a higher price, meaning that a competitor would make things even more sub-optimal. Similar stories occur when the entire demand for a product is satisfied by 2-5 competitors, except this time there's now game theory involved in what the prices actually are.
In short, it's more complicated than just "market competition solves your problem".
I am officially gone from
Net Neutrality has so many definitions floating around that it's to confusing to bother with. Until now. Despite the fact that it's a very hard-to-read sentence, I think this is actually what a violation of net neutrality: "6) charge[ing] a content, application, or service provider for access to the broadband Internet access service providers' end users based on differing levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery of Internet protocol packets". Let's just make that illegal and forget the rest.
If you do not fully agree with Net-Neutrality, then you support the Corporate Welfare State and Net-Nepotism.
Vorizon, ATT, Comcast... are all Internet Access Providers (IAP). You pay for access. /., Yahoo, Microsoft, Sony PS, eTrade, Amazon... are all Internet Services Providers. You pay for services and/or view advertising for freebees.
WikiPedia, Google,
Corporate, religious, or special interest control of access to content, information, news media is un-American and conflicts with The USA Constitutional freedom to speak, practice a religion, obtain information on science, weapons and/or art.
If you are against Net-Neutrality, then you are against US and all folks who stand for patriotism and the American way of life.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
I seriously hope you're joking that these are private networks. They get paid subsidies by the government to provide these service. They are publicly funded. If they don't want to be regulated, they can pay back all the public money and tax credits they took to build the infrastructure. Until then, they need to shutup and do the job we've been paying them to do.
AccountKiller
What Galestar has already said. If you're serious, you need to take a look at the REAL business world. I feel safe in stating that every single ISP in America has accepted tax subsidies from the government. That is to say, they've built their networks with your money, my money, everyone's money. You can't run a monopoly in this country, and expect to make all the rules without government regulation. As the article states - this is the "free speech issue" of our times. For the first time in history, the little peons and nobodies of the world can have a voice that reaches around the world. Prior to the internet, to make your voice heard 'round the world, you had to have money, fame, fortune, or a ham radio. Today, all I need is a portion of a paycheck to pay for a computer, and pay a recurring fee for internet access. Free speech. Everyone should be free to access the content that they desire, and to express themselves in whatever way they desire. Everyone - not just the people who can cough up the dough that the ISP demands for that "privilege".
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br