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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."
No, guaranteed end-to-end quality is a private trunk line from point to point. This is basically not useful for general communication except in very rare situations. I can't imagine anyone sane being willing to pay for it unless the service providers deliberately add jitter or otherwise attempt to disrupt typical use of normal connections to force the issue, which is why the ITU should absolutely not recommend such an ill-advised concept.
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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 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.
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
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".
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).
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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.
peer-to-peer wifi/radio system.
This just isn't going to work. WiFi solves the easy problem (range 0-30 metres - you can just pull a cable if you are desperate). The difficult problem is the middle range; 100m -> 10km (or up to about 50km to 100km in country areas). At that kind of range sensible size links are expensive enough that they have to be shared, but there aren't enough people and money to easily afford a dedicated group to maintain them. At one point this was handled by individuals and little mom & pop companies in many places, but those have all been bought out now.
This is a social and technical problem. How to get enough people together to form a decent negotiating block whilst keeping the people who don't care but are needed to pay for it interested.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
(Remember we're talking about the bandwidth from your ISP, not content!)
Such is not the business your ISP should be in, it's not up to them to decide whether I get my news for 'free' from Fox News or pay additional charges when I get it from CNN. And it makes NO difference who does the paying, CNN the provider or me the consumer.
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Jesus once said, "That which you do unto the highest-ping of my brothers, so you do unto me."
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They wouldn't deliberatly add jitter - that would be legally problematic, and very embarassing if the policy were leaked. More likely would be a semi-official policy of 'deliberate incompetence' - under-investing in network upgrades, deliberatly continuing to use obsolete hardware long-overdue for replacement, not bothering to properly optimise the network. From a business perspective it makes perfect sense - when using price differentiation it is important not to make your low-margin, low-value product too good, otherwise it'll start to eat into the sales of your higher-margin offering.