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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!
"No, you shouldn't worry about prioritization, in fact it can help startups."
What? Wasn't that what everyone was worried about to begin with? That those with all the purse strings would be able to lock out these very startups you're claiming will benefit the most from this setup?
Of course, Comcast owns NBC and Universal Studios.
"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...
It appears to me like thay are paid shills of the Telecommunications Industry hiding behind "non-profit" "think tanks"
Berin Szoka used to work for the PFF: (from Wikipedia)
The Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) was an American market-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C. that studied the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. Its mission was to educate policymakers, opinion leaders and the public about issues associated with technological change, based on a philosophy of limited government, free markets and individual sovereignty.[1]
PFF was funded in part by the digital media and communication industry.[2]
Brent Skorup works for the Mercatus Center: (From Wikipedia)
Washington Post columnist Al Kamen has described Mercatus as a "staunchly anti-regulatory center funded largely by Koch Industries Inc."[3] Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, has called it "ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington.”[2] The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center "the most important think tank you've never heard of."[2]
The Mercatus Center was founded by Rich Fink as the Center for the Study of Market Processes at Rutgers University. After the Koch family provided more than thirty million dollars[2] to George Mason University, the Center moved to George Mason in the mid-1980s before assuming its current name in 1999.[2] The Mercatus Center is a 501(c)3 non-profit and does not receive support from George Mason University or any federal, state or local government, but rather is entirely funded through donations, including some from companies like Koch Industries[3] and ExxonMobil,[4] individual donors and foundations. As of 2011, the Center shows that 58% of its funding comes from foundations, 40% from individuals, and 2% from businesses.[1]
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"
No, The Free Market will solve all that. Unless Government interferes.
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.
It's warm and feels good to let it flow.
But after a while you realize that in the end you will stink and be dirty.
Don't do it!
Just saying it like it are.
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.
> The only thing they designed it for in the beginning was simple http.
In the beginning, when the internet was designed, http wouldn't be invented for another 15 years. Http has only been around for half as long as the internet has.
I have been in the telecom industry for for many years. The issue that most people don't understand is that the infrastructure is "shared" amongst all subscribers and somebody has to pay for it.
One of the common questions I always got from Telco operators is "how many subscribers can your mobile system handle"? My snide answer is "100 billion"....as long as nobody makes any calls. The question they should be asking is "how many simultaneous calls can your system handle?". Then the answer becomes 100,000 peak busy hour calls. The Telco customer should know what their *expected calls per hour per subscriber* are and then they can calculate the number subscribers they can handle.
The "expected calls per hour per subscriber" (or expected bandwidth per subscriber in this case) changes the calculation significantly. Netflix and other content providers have been a game changer in recent years because they have drastically changed that number. The ISPs know they can't provide every subscriber peak bandwidth at the same time. When subscribers used their "promised bandwidth" in 2 second bursts to quickly load a WWW page, the ISPs had no problem providing it. But now that subscribers are demanding their "promised bandwidth" in 2 hour "bursts", the playing field changes dramatically. ISPs, of course, can engineer for that load, but then "somebody" needs to pay for it. That "somebody" is either the subscriber in the form of higher ISP subscription rates, or the content providers in the form of "throttling fees" which they will undoubtedly pass on to their customers or advertisers.
Net neutrality simply shifts who is paying for the cost of all that equipment for our access. One way the end user will end up paying for it directly, and the other way the end user pays for it indirectly through higher content fees, or goods and services that are more expensive due to higher advertising fees. In the end we all have to pay for it.
I tend to fall on the side of Net Neutrality (and consequently would be willing to pay the ISP more for access), because otherwise the big players (Netflix, Google, etc.) will become more entrenched as they are able to pay the throttling fees while some upstart with a great service can't afford it.
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.
User bobstreo posted the best analysis yet of this so called "news" - reproduced below. Berin Szoka and Brent Skorup are almost defiantly industry shills:
It appears to me like thay are paid shills of the Telecommunications Industry hiding behind "non-profit" "think tanks"
Berin Szoka used to work for the PFF: (from Wikipedia)
The Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) was an American market-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C. that studied the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. Its mission was to educate policymakers, opinion leaders and the public about issues associated with technological change, based on a philosophy of limited government, free markets and individual sovereignty.[1]
PFF was funded in part by the digital media and communication industry.[2]
Brent Skorup works for the Mercatus Center: (From Wikipedia)
Washington Post columnist Al Kamen has described Mercatus as a "staunchly anti-regulatory center funded largely by Koch Industries Inc."[3] Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, has called it "ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington.”[2] The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center "the most important think tank you've never heard of."[2]
The Mercatus Center was founded by Rich Fink as the Center for the Study of Market Processes at Rutgers University. After the Koch family provided more than thirty million dollars[2] to George Mason University, the Center moved to George Mason in the mid-1980s before assuming its current name in 1999.[2] The Mercatus Center is a 501(c)3 non-profit and does not receive support from George Mason University or any federal, state or local government, but rather is entirely funded through donations, including some from companies like Koch Industries[3] and ExxonMobil,[4] individual donors and foundations. As of 2011, the Center shows that 58% of its funding comes from foundations, 40% from individuals, and 2% from businesses.[1]