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European ISPs Ask ITU To Limit Net Neutrality
judgecorp writes "The UN telecoms body, ITU, is busy writing new regulations for international telecoms — and European service providers, through their body ETNO have urged ITU to enshrine a two-tier Internet by defining a right for service providers to charge more for end-to-end quality of service, as opposed to best efforts connection. The two-tier Internet is opposed by Net Neutrality advocates, and has been outlawed in the Netherlands."
End to end quality==phone network. Best effort==internet.
FUCK & YOU.
Whole world is corrupt. I swear.
Screw those telco's. It's time us slashdotter get of our lazy ass and create that peer-to-peer wifi/radio system.
To me, the danger (which has never come to pass in a lasting way) is that an ISP would potentially degrade services for competitors.
Again, that has not really come to pass (the Comcast DDOSing of torrents was about the only example, and they were spanked for it). Exiting laws, without network neutrally, prevent such shenanigans.
But I cannot see in any way why a consumer would not WANT to be able to pay for some premium network service with guaranteed levels of quality for one application (and by that I mean in the network sense) rather than having to pay for an entire internet connection with much greater speed and quality.
As we seek to replace phones and TV with pretty much just internet it makes a ton of sense to me to allow cable companies to charge for "premium internet" for a portion of content and/or services.
That is why network neutrally laws do much more harm than good; they protect against a danger that is not real while retarding the advanced internet of the future from arriving at our doors.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Until networks are government-owned, said government is incorruptible and network neutrality is enshrined in the constitution.
Even then, it only ensures relative safety for the country which meets the above three criteria.
What I'm saying is, fighting against these laws isn't enough.
Someone in Europe or North America is going to enact a severely tiered internet at some point, and everyone in favor of net neutrality needs to be ready with an alternative that will change the game.
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. --Will
The phone companies who will soon be out of dedicated phone lines and texting plans to rip people off with.
'nuff said.
As you've seen, packet-based data transfer is what defines a packet-switching network. But—to confuse the issue a bit—referring to a packet-switching network is a little like referring to tail-wagging canines as dogs. Sure, they're dogs. But any given dog can also be a collie or a German shepherd or a poodle. Similarly, a packet-switching network might be, for example, an X.25 network, a frame relay network, an ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) network, an SMDS (Switched Multimegabit Data Service), and so on.
Use Netflix? It counts towards your 250GB limit. Use Comcast's Xfinity service? It doesn't.
So what??
It's not harming in any other way, access to any other service.
What they are giving you is a discount that is reflected by the technical reality that they can transmit video to you over their own network for a lower cost than access to services on the internet at large.
Again it's not harming the quality of anything you receive from anywhere. It's not making it more expensive to get video from one source over another on the internet - just letting you access videos that are not technically "on the internet".
You are also getting files stored on your own hard drive for free without using any of your data cap! Does that piss you off also? Don't you think that if you play music held on a server in your living room Comcast should deduct that from your cap as well?
Here's a final question - name a single network neutrality bill that would prevent Comcast from doing what they are doing, and why.
Because quite simply, that's not something network neutrality laws address at all.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Come on, ATM required quite expensive dedicated hardware. If you can use the same hardware you own today, but Comcast can guarantee for a fee that accessing video from one particular server will not have hiccups in playback, you don't need to do anything hardware wise to make that work.
Once network service was commoditized to the point where the hardware is not special or expensive, other services that did not make sense before can finally work.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Comcast continues to treat its own Internet delivered video different under the cap than other Internet delivered video.
In reality it SHOULD be different getting something from a local network verses a more remote store.
The flip side of your argument, is that you are literally calling to be charged to access data on other computers in your own house.
WHY?
It seems to me that common sense should prevail, and that in the end things that cost less should be charged less for.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
These guys are not ISPs, these are telecoms. They (apparently) succesfully pushed out of the business real ISPs and are now trying to pose as such. In fact Internet is and was succesfull because it works by "best efforts". I would argue that ISPs (EUROISPA) would have different attitude towards "net neutrality".
Having two tiers doesn't violate net neutrality. Net neutrality is not screwing with your customers because you don't like what they are doing (paying your competitors for video and such). But if I can pay extra to set my own 802.1p tag and have that QoS honored by the ISP, that doesn't violate net neutrality at all. Now, if the ISP set that bit in a manner I had no control over, and did so to their benefit, but not mine, then that would violate net neutrality.
Also, since when does the ITU make "regulations" as opposed to defining standards that others can choose to adopt or not? A country may choose to legislate ITU standards as law, but the ITU doesn't write legislation or regulations themselves. That's like calling RFCs laws. Any ISP that doesn't accept avian carriers is breaking the Internet Law.
Learn to love Alaska
Most of your internet connections go through networks which are not owned by your ISP. This is a cheap excuse to build more complex price-plans confusing the consumer and generating more profits. My internet connection goes all the way to 11!
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
As I understand (from the summary, I didn't RTFA), this doesn't violate net neutrality. "Best-effort" vs "quality guaranteed", aren't all consumer connections "best effort" currently?
As long as "best effort" doesn't really mean "we're gonna selectively slow down whatever we feel is using too much bandwidth" I'm ok with that.
http://www.itu.int/home/feedback/index.phtml?mail=itumail
So, suppose an ISP wants to market itself to gamers. It provides a high speed connection to game servers, negotiates a direct connection, and offers guaranteed bandwidth and latency. Web packets as a result my be delayed by a fraction of a second.
Is this not a service that gamers might want? Is it not something that would be illegal with net neutrality?
The law is a blunt instrument. if you make something illegal, you catch a lot more than what you intend.
It is not "discrimination" to simply give you a better deal on something locally.
It takes nothing away from anyone else if I give you something for free.
I am not sure why this concept is so hard to grasp.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
When US gov't killed off 3000 phone companies to give AT&T the monopoly (because of 'national security reasons', but in reality because monopolies make better money donors to politicians), that's when the problem was born actually.
There is no reason why a business should not be able to discriminate and sell various types of products that do different things, like give preference to traffic that is more profitable.
There is no reason why in a competing market there wouldn't be various products that would also provide access to the Internet that does not discriminate between traffic, but sells access that is understood to be 'neutral' to the content.
But what am I saying.... of-course there is a reason and this reason is lack of competition that originates from government creating monopolies in everything, including delivery of electrical power, water, gas, sewer services, but also telecommunications, etc.
The actual solution cannot be legislative, all of that always ends up creating unintended consequences and causes the exact opposite effect of what is being legislated. The solution is a market solution, but this will not be allowed. So of-course this will be legislative and don't for a second think that you all will be winning from that type of a 'solution'.
You can't handle the truth.
Secondly, they do (too slowly) upgrade their networks whereas with enshrined "premium services" means they can squeeze you for access AND the site you want to get to for access which will reduce demand and avoid or at least delay even further access to the internet.
Thirdly they will enshrine walled gardens where the ISP can sell THEIR internet hosting THEIR products and screw over anyone daring not to use the approved connection software. I.e. only their VOIP to their customers. Other VOIP or conversations to other ISP customers will cost you extra.
Fourth: effective denial of access. If you want to retrieve over BitTorrent, you need a premium service. If you want to access Tor? Premium. Web mail? Premium.
IIRC, Chile also enshrined Net Neutrality in to Law.
Any other countries, besides Chile and Netherlands? I would expect Sweden to be the first...
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the ITU is busy writing new regulations for international telecoms ??
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"By endorsing the concept of “quality based delivery”, it will be possible to establish new interconnection policies based on the “value” of the traffic (not only on the “volume”), enabling new business models and implementing an ecosystem where operators’ revenues will not be disconnected from the investment needs made necessary by the rapid growth of Internet traffic."
http://www.etno.be/Default.aspx?tabid=2500
This talk of policies based on value is troubling and most certainly against the concept of net neutrality. "enabling new business models" is surely a euphemism for allowing carriers to impose levies on businesses that use the connection their user is already paying for. They're disconnected from revenues in the same sense that the post office is disconnected from revenues when I open my "diamonds by mail" business, sending thousand pound diamonds at the cost of a first class stamp. Carrying my diamonds costs Royal Mail too much money? Fine, raise the price of stamps. ISPs, charge your customers for the bandwidth they're using, and by all means offer lower latency packages for gamers. Just don't think that you can start slapping on levies simply because you feel you should be cut in on the profits someone else makes legitimately using your service. How about allowing toll road operators to levy a value added tax on motorists who've been shopping? Picked up a nice new diamond ring in the city, and now driving back home via a toll motorway? Seems only fair that the road operator get a piece of the action, after all why should they receive just £1.50 when the guy who sold you that ring trousered over £500? You wouldn't even have been able to go to the city if that toll road didn't exist!
(US-centric) Most average Joe internet connections are allowed to reach a MAXIMUM bandwidth, while commercial accounts can be given MINIMUM bandwidth availability and are charged for their average bandwidth. As long as particular services/sites/protocols aren't selected for or against, I'm comfortable with an "up to" and "at least" bandwidth price modeling. However, if ISPs actually need to throttle my paltry 350KBps at any time as standard network management practice, then they are over selling their network and should legally be held accountable.
If I have a data cap, isn't it in the ISP's best interest to allow me a ton of bandwidth to gobble it up very quickly and start charging overages?
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surely they could restrict what is sold under that trade name to just services that send traffic on a FIFO basis. service providers could sell what they liked, but just not call it internet.
Nullius in verba
It's Telephone Companies and not ISPs which do want to limit net neutrality. Different fish.
"The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse