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."

Comments

Re:Bell heads vs net heads.

[Dwonis]

The ITU shouldn't even be involved. X.500, ASN.1, OSI, and the rest of their ilk are proof enough that telco organizations are simply not capable of engineering good networks.

Why is a bonus a problem?

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Why is a bonus a problem?

[Microlith]

It's not harming in any other way, access to any other service.

Indeed, Comcast is not violating network neutrality here. Abusing their regional monopolies and leveraging it to give themselves an edge over Netflix is what they are doing.

Again it's not harming the quality of anything you receive from anywhere.

Which, in the context of Comcast's activities, is beside the point.

Here's a final question - name a single network neutrality bill that would prevent Comcast from doing what they are doing, and why.

Unfortunately there aren't any. A bill that would go a long way to solving the problem that is Comcast would be one that disallows carriers from owning media companies (and vice versa) and forces ISPs into the Common Carrier part of telecom law. Network neutrality and conflict of interest concerns solved.

Re:A world of difference

[mwvdlee]

Here's the problem.
1. You pay extra to access that specific site.
2. Other people who don't pay will see slowly degrading quality (simply by letting dead infrastructure hardware go unreplaced).
3. Soon everybody has to pay premium just to get NORMAL access to any site.
4. You'll see anti-competitive behaviour simply by not having a premium plan for specific competitors (nobody is forcing them to provide premium plans for every single website).

Not exclusive

[AK Marc]

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.