Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla Offers FCC a Net Neutrality Plan With a Twist
An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Foundation is filing a petition asking the FCC to declare that ISPs are common carriers, with a twist. 'The FCC doesn't have to reclassify the Internet access ISPs offer consumers as a telecommunications service subject to common carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act, Mozilla says. Instead, the FCC should target the service ISPs offer to edge providers like Netflix and Dropbox, who need to send their bits over ISP networks to reach their customers. Classifying the ISP/edge provider relationship as a common carrier service will be a little cleaner since the FCC wouldn't have to undo several decade-old orders that classified broadband as an "information" service rather than telecommunications, Mozilla argues.'" Here's the Mozilla blog post and the 13-page petition.
since the FCC wouldn't have to undo several decade-old orders that classified broadband as an "information" service rather than telecommunications
But that's the problem. They are telecommunications services and not fixing that bad decision is just lipstick on a pig.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
FTA:
I think the problem here is that the ISPs want to be big media but they are really only telecoms trying to step out of line and disrupt the flow of information to get more money. They are greedy pigs. We should nationalize them all and simply take over their operations. They are EXACTLY LIKE traffic lights to be quite honest.
Would you want your highway/city traffic information management operated by competing corporations?
Would you want your city and state police run by competing corporations?
We have tolerated ISPs for too long. Nationalize.
Please, imagine if you had to deal with Comcast to get from your house to work every day.
Those of us who work virtually this is EXACTLY what we are doing.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Seems like half of a fix to me. Should all be common carrier status. Why settle for half a fix?
You just know ISPs gunna find loopholes in half a fix.
the cable companies did it to themselves...by charging netflix to carry their programming they became a common carrier.
In other words they can offer speed ups to paying customers but they have to be under RAND terms including to their own
services their own services would have to pay for the same rate for the same bandwidth.
There's DRM attached: each stream is encrypted differently.
Support my political activism on Patreon.
Under the current rules, treating the Internet as an "information service" treats it exactly like Compuserve, AOL and Prodigy - virtually all content is presented by the service themselves, rather than relaying information content from providers to consumers. And we all know that the prior is exactly how the Verizons, the AT&Ts, the Comcasts and the TimeWarners of the world want it to be. The fairest way is to treat the ISP portion of the business as a common carrier - they have to treat "internal customers", like NBC/Universal in TWC's case, exactly the same as they treat external customers, like Netflix. It's fine to charge extra for expedited service handling for real-time data like voice or streaming video - but you have to treat all comers the same - using published tariffs, with allowable discounts based on volume of data and # of endpoints. But to allow things like Comcast used to do - purposely degrade certain traffic types from certain providers because it competed with their own offerings - that should be illegal. Net Neutrality is not about treating all traffic equally - realtime data like voice or video telephony and streaming video should always be treated with expedited handling with a minimum of queuing delay and jitter. But similar traffic types need to be treated similarly - else the whole thing falls apart. That's what any internet engineer familiar with traffic engineering will tell you.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."
That's a downright stupid suggestion. If ISPs can't charge service providers and get their millions, under this proposal, they'll charge users ("Want to access Dropbox at acceptable speeds? You need to sign up to our Cloud Package for an extra $20 a month!"). They won't throttle the service, they'll throttle the user. It amounts to the exact same problem.
Here's the simple solution - internet access, in today's day and age, is as vital as a landline phone service was back in the day. Be it banking, filing taxes, signing up to health services, or whatever you want to consider, internet access is not "vital" in the sense that it is increasingly difficult to live a normal life without it. Thus, all internet access should be protected by common carrier regulations.
All.
Service providers through to users.
The only people who oppose reclassifying ISPs as common carriers are people who are deeply, profoundly opposed to the government in any and every way or shills of ISPs who want to protect their ability to gouge customers and rake in obscene profits.
They are common carriers providing vital communication services.
The golden age of freely flowing information is over.
Why? Nothing is blocked, it is just slower. This sucks for streaming, but streaming is not the only way to share information. Speeds that will not work at all for Netflix work fine on The Pirate Bay... It just requires people to think differently and not stream everything but download it instead. And having a local copy is a good thing.
First they came for Netflix...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
So you point out how the conglomerates successfully bullied the most popular streaming service into paying them a bribe for good speeds...and don't see how that's going to play out with services that don't yet have Netflix's market share?
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Obama should grow a pair. Instruct the FCC commissioners to reclassify, or be dismissed. If they call as if he's bluffing, fire all of them and replace them with commissioners that will do the reclassification. These snots serve at the pleasure of the President and, in turn, the people. It's high time someone blew up their perceived fiefdoms.
ISP's have offered co-location to corporations for years. It's just now that a corporation (Netflix) is competing with another service the ISP in question sells they tell them no and jack up the price of entry. DRM would be on Netflix's server inside of the ISP's data farm just as secure as if it was in their own.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Netflix has its own CDN! They are a large enough streaming provider it made sense to create their own CDN and they even made it open for other services. They're already peering on Google fiber and a host of non-US ISP's. It's only the big US ISP's that are refusing to play ball and insist Netflix pay extra for a service that would actually save them money in peering fees. Their only reason for doing this is to make their competing streaming offering more desirable.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
there are lots of streaming services who compete with pay TV
This is exactly the problem. When the ISP, i.e. Comcast/Verizon, has it's own streaming services, it's a conflict of interest for them to be 'competing' with Netflix. They can, and have, used their monopoly position as the ISP to prevent quality access to Netflix by the ISP customers.
You think that Netflix is getting 'free' internet access? They are simply responding to MY request to stream the content to me. Netflix pays they're ISP to get on the internet to provide content just as I pay my ISP to get on the internet to consume that content. Comcast/Verizon sold me a service at a certain speed/bandwidth and if they can't provide those speeds, it is their problem when people try to start using those advertized and sold speed/bandwidth.
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
sign this petition to get Tom Wheeler and any other cableco/telco lobbyist out of the FCC: http://wh.gov/lwhr8
Or how about this? ISPs creating congestion
People in cars cause accidents....accidents in cars cause people
Why? Nothing is blocked, it is just slower. This sucks for streaming, but streaming is not the only way to share information. Speeds that will not work at all for Netflix work fine on The Pirate Bay... It just requires people to think differently and not stream everything but download it instead.
Why? Because now if you want to start an internet business (streaming or not) that becomes even modestly successfully, every ISP on the planet will start looking for a way to demand a chunk of your profits. "Yeah, sorry that that little 100ms latency spike is affecting 1 million customers of yours, Blizzard, but we'll be happy to form a collaborative network-tuning relationship with you for $250,000/mo."
Cumulatively, it means that ISP's can rent-seek off of internet businesses, cutting down on the quantity and competitiveness of such businesses while simultaneously forcing them to raise prices.
-1, Too Many Layers Of Abstraction
There is a conflict of intersest between what the customer expects of an ISP (equal access to competing services on the Internet) and the ISP hosting their own service in competition with "external" services. This could be voice, streaming video, videoconferencing, etc.
Any time the ISP offers services beyond being a dumb pipe, there is a natural temptation for the ISP to prioritize the traffic belonging to their own services above the traffic coming from competing "external" services. This can show up in many ways, the simplest being to not upgrade their external connectivity as much as they could--which has the natural effect of making their own services more attractive due to better bandwidth, latency, etc.
By making ISPs dumb pipes and preventing them from shaping traffic due to any reason other than rated subscriber bandwidth, we could ensure fair treatement across all services.
Unless you have a government utility owning the last mile, there are going to be very high barriers to entry. Nobody wants a patchwork of random cable/phone companies trenching all over the place.
I don't see why this hasn't resulted in a class action law suit by the people buying internet fro Comcast. Unless they are buying "the internet except for Netflix", this should be actionable...
while (sig==sig) sig=!sig;
Send your opinions and desires about the issue of net neutrality to the FCC now using the following link: https://www.fcc.gov/comments
attach your comments to the Proceeding # 14-28, which is at the top of the list, it is entitled "Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet"
Leave a few paragraphs, tell them what you want.
You might not get what you want, but at least you'll have given them a hint of public opinion. Be nice.
again the link is https://www.fcc.gov/comments proceeding #14-28 .. make it happen. it only takes a minute or two.. as long as it took you to comment here on slashdot.
they are asking for comments, give them some.
they all said they had no problem with netflix on other CDN's
netflix refuses to pay any money to ISP's to host their CDN, unlike other CDN's
they are trying to get a better deal than their competition
I don't know any such elected people. All of our legislators were purchased.
Have gnu, will travel.
Why don't you read what someone at Level 3 has to say about the issue?
"Level 3 has 51 peers that are interconnected in 45 cities through over 1,360 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports"
"The average utilization across all those interconnected ports is 36 percent."
"A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of making upgrades – this is business as usual and happens occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers."
"the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content."
"Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe."
Five major US ISP's all deliberately refusing to upgrade their interconnect. How many "major" ISP's do you know of in the US?
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K