Slashdot Mirror
Killing Net Neutrality Could Be Good For You
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Berin Szoka and Brent Skorup write that everyone assumes that cable companies have all the market power, and so of course a bigger cable company means disaster. But content owners may be the real heavyweights here: It was Netflix that withheld high-quality streaming from Time Warner Cable customers last year, not vice versa and it was ESPN that first proposed to subsidize its mobile viewers' data usage last year. 'We need to move away from the fear-mongering and exaggerations about threats to the Internet as well as simplistic assumptions about how Internet traffic moves. The real problems online are far more complex and less scary. And it's not about net neutrality, but about net capacity.' The debate is really about who pays for — and who profits from — the increasingly elaborate infrastructure required to make the Internet do something it was never designed to do in the first place: stream high-speed video. 'While many were quick to assume that broadband providers were throttling Netflix traffic, the explanation could be far simpler: The company simply lacked the capacity to handle the "Super HD" video quality it began offering last year.' A two-sided market means broadband providers would have an incentive to help because they would receive revenue from two major sources: content providers (through sponsorship or ads), and consumers (through subscription fees). 'Unfortunately, this kind of market innovation is viewed as controversial or even harmful to consumers by some policy and Internet advocates. But these concerns are premature, unfounded, and arise mostly from status quo bias: Carriers and providers haven't priced like this before, so of course change will create some kind of harm,' conclude Szoka and Skorup. 'Bottom line: The FCC should stop trying to ban prioritization outright and focus only on actual abuses of market power.'"
bullshit!
"A two-sided market means broadband providers would have an incentive to help because they would receive revenue from two major sources: content providers (through sponsorship or ads), and consumers (through subscription fees)."
Thus it would be a disincentive to carry any data where they could not do any double billing for the bandwidth revenue. Is Berin Szoka an industry shill?
everyone assumes that cable companies have all the market power, and so of course a bigger cable company means disaster. But content owners may be the real heavyweights here
So big content providers (the "real heavyweights") can lean on ISPs to exclude access to small content providers (or at least to get better access than small content providers). That's what network neautrality is intended to stop.
When ISPs where Mom and Pops shops doing things for the neighborhood, they got some special protection and the FCC kept their hands off.
Now ISPs are huge companies and SHOULD be considered common carriers. If they start inspecting packets to see where they come from, to assign priority, they will lose the shield of common carrier. They will be expected to know more about the contents of the packets that get sent. So that Bin Laden or kiddie pron video will be on THEIR network. Do you want them to know more about the contents of what you put on the web?
Things like polluted air and water, sugary drinks, strychnine, high crime rate, police state, etc. could also be good for you. Except that they are not.
The internet is a dumb system of pipes with the intelligence at the edges, specifically so we can do things with it that non-techies don't think we can do.
Streaming video is easier than downloading large programs, as you only need to ship a certain amount per second, rather than ship it all and only be able to use it when the last byte has arrived. For real-time broadcast, which causes massive numbers of synchronized transfers, you can use multicast directely, as well as to "prime" a content delivery network node close to your particular edge.
davecb@spamcop.net
That is where the real danger lies: stacks: the joint ownership of or collusion between content providers and transport providers. If the interests of a specific content provider overlaps with those of a specific transport provider, there is an opportunity to screw the customers and competing content providers. Net neutrality aims to prevent such practices, and rightly so. You don't want to be locked out of DuckDuckGo (or even Bing) because Google have paid off your ISP.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
In the early 2000s, the federal government gave tax breaks to the then-leading communications giants to install an open high-speed data infrastructure throughout the country. The amount of taxes they didn't collect averaged $2,000 per household. Shortly after that, the companies began sales and mergers. TechDirt.com published an article detailing this scam as recently as 2013.
It's a perfect time for being wasted.
A perfect time to watch the stars.
- Burden Brothers, "Beautiful Night"
He's not talking about a "two-sided market", he's talking about an industry that is trying to double bill. The end user pays for the delivery infrastructure, and if they need to build more capacity, it should come out of the huge profits these companies are realizing. *That's* how Economics 101 works. Saying "I'd really hate something bad to happen to your bits on the way to your customer...maybe you should pay me a little something to make sure that doesn't happen" and then claiming "I need the money because bandwidth" is simply extortion. Utter bullshit, every word of it.
The argument that the poor carriers are being bombarded by all this data (when our endpoint bandwidth is much less than other places in the world) is completely absurd. It's not because the internet wasn't "designed" for video, it's because competition hasn't spurred more development by the carriers. They've been living on capital rents.
This piece is naive in the extreme: it assumes implicitly that the only players are major content providers, carriers, and "consumers", and never speakers, telecoms, and citizens.
That is where the real danger lies: stacks: the joint ownership of or collusion between content providers and transport providers.
Agreed. It's also not a new problem. Back in the 1940's there was a problem with movie studios owning theater chains, which of course only showed, or at least gave preference to, that studio's movies. Of course back then antitrust law was actually enforced (United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc.), which allowed for real competition. Nowadays corporate rent seeking is called the free market. While we're at it, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.