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Robert McMillen: What Everyone Gets Wrong In the Debate Over Net Neutrality
ygslash writes "Robert McMillen of Wired claims that we have gotten Net Neutrality all wrong. While we are all busy arguing about whether there should be regulations preventing large content providers from getting preferential bandwidth, McMillen says that not only have the large content providers already had preferential bandwidth for ten years, but that by now this has become an inherent part of the structure of the Internet and in practice cannot be changed. Instead, he says, the Net Neutrality discussion should be about ensuring a free and open competitive market for bandwidth, so that anyone who wants bandwidth can purchase it at a fair price.
While there might be outliers, I generally do not hear the pro-NN crowd claiming that direct peering or colocation should be outlawed, only that traffic should not be shaped based off its origin. So if some data comes in through, say, Level 3, all that should matter is that the data is coming through that pipe, not where it originated from on someone else's network.
No. Net neutrality is about ISP's not violating their contracts with their customers.
My ISP works for ME. I pay them to provide X amount of service. As such they are legally required to provide me with X amount of service, even if take full advantage of their service and use X amount of service every single second of the day. They can't promise me 10gb/second, and then only give me 10gb/second for ten minutes a day, switching to 5 gb/second after those ten minutes.
They are perfectly allowed to give me MORE than 10gbs a second, if someone else - like say Google - offers to pay for it.
But they can decide to not give me 10gbs because netflix refuses to bow down to extortion from them, even if I am using all 10gbs every second of every day of every month. Nothing netflix or other companies do gives them permission to break their contract with me.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
No, the net neutrality "commies" would have the taxi which takes you to the restaurant drive at the best speed, and not slow to a crawl if your restaurant of choice hasn't paid off the taxi company.
...is not a worthy goal. Robert McMillen is essentially saying "the market is historically uncompetitive" (and thus broken) "but that's not the point" (i always love it when people tell me that their point is the point) "you should be able to receive [only] that broken product at a fair price". If he actually believes and understands what he's saying then he's promoting a system of government supported monopolistic and anti-capitalistic cronyism. (i'll leave it to Godwin to apply a label to that system)
When someone with technical background says "It cannot be changed" it smells corruption. There are times when things cannot be changed because technical constrains (that should fade with time), time, money, etc. Everything can be changed if it is well designed and based on something real. But this is based on money and profit, it can change, and it should be chaged, as soon as possible. This is not a technical problem or limitation, this is stupidity at the service of profit.
http://www.quasarcr.com/
Well, his chart is a good clarifying bit. But aside from that, he seems to be in complete agreement with John Oliver and all the other stories I've read on the topic: the problem is, truly, not with fast lanes, but with slow lanes. If they were not dicking with Level 3 by giving them a more congested link than they give Google, we would have nothing to complain about. The point about the last mile is also true, and going back to Common Carrier-based regulation would address that point, because it would re-open the ability of the FCC to require carriers to sell last-mile bandwidth to their own internal business units for the same price that they sell it to competitors. This is not something new to the discussion, although I will admit that not every article about Net Neutrality covers it.
So I guess this article is worth reading, because I think it does hit on all the major points, but the characterization that it's the first to do so, and that everybody else has gotten it wrong, is essentially clickbait. Forgivable, since in this case the article is worth reading.
There's nothing wrong with Netflix, Hulu, Google, or anyone else for that matter, going directly to an ISP and saying "Here's some equipment; if you install it, your users will be able to get our content, which is a big reason they pay you, faster." There is, likewise, nothing wrong with the ISP saying "Sure, let's get that equipment installed. It's gonna cost you $10,000.00/mo to use our facilities and backbone." And, there's nothing wrong with the two parties agreeing to, and implementing that. What's wrong is the ISP moving the intermediary providers (e.g. the backbones) between them and the provider wishing to install their equipment onto slower links until the provider agrees to pay the fee (at which point, the intermediary becomes irrelevant and probably remains on the degraded link), thereby degrading service for everybody. Especially when there is a peering agreement between the ISP and the intermediary provider and/or the intermediary is willing (and even asking or begging) to pay for the link they were on before.
And if you think that's not exactly what happened, please, explain this.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
This analogy is falling apart, but: It's not a demand that all entrees be equally priced. It's whether the guy who owns ALL of the restaurants in town can charge more for fish and deliver it cold and 20 minutes after the other seafood entrees sent to the table if that fish was sourced from a competitor instead of from his own fishing boat like the other seafood items. Not really a problem in a competitive market, but a big problem in monopolies and duopolies.
I love the Free Market crowd. I usually just challenge them to show me a free market, one that isn't tinkered with by a large organization (government or private) anywhere in the world.... I'll wait.
Free Markets are a useful tool to explain some economics concepts, but do not exist in real life.
It's not an either/or thing, but a question of how much impingement there is on the consumers' freedom to choose before you can confidently declare the market free or closed.
For example, grocery stores are a free market almost everywhere - there are different companies competing for your food-buying money, no artificial barriers to entry, and the choices can be freely made or changed without any undue burden on the consumer.
Out here (PDX Metro) we have chains like Kroger (viz. Fred Meyer) Albertson's, Safeway, Thriftway, Wal-Mart, Target, the organic/new-age stores like Whole Foods, New Seasons, Trader Joe's, the little independent operators (including ethnic stores like Uwijamaya (Beaverton), various Latino, Vietnamese, Filipino, Russian and Halal markets, etc), and finally the farmers' markets and vegetable stands. Sure, they have various regulations (see also FDA, USDA, ABC and other various state boards), but a typical middle-class family can pick and choose what and where they shop, can do so in almost a literal heartbeat, and these stores all know it.
As a result, these stores go out of their way to entice you to spend money there, and none of them would dare try to overtly screw you over, lest word get out and the store's sales collapse. They also know full well that anybody can open a new store, wow the customers, and suck up all the money (which is why the local New Seasons store is giving Whole Foods and Trader Joe's a huge run for their money). The barriers to entry are relatively low - most of those barriers being related to food safety regulations.
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On the other extreme, you have the telecoms, which are pretty much a closed market. In a given area, you have a couple of choices, each with various restrictions or limitations. Minus dial-up, you're usually stuck with one or two at the most (Cable and/or DSL), with perhaps a third if you're lucky (FIOS). In rural areas, you;re stuck with maybe one if you're lucky (usually low-end DSL). They know full well that you have no real choice, and they happily collude on pricing, caps, and limitations. Comcast knows full well that Charter or Time-Warner aren't going to show up and provide competition for cable broadband. CenturyStink knows that they won't see another DSL provider rear its head and start providing competing DSL. And besides, where are you going to go? If you get mad at Comcast, your only other options are to ditch your 50mbps cable line for a 15-20 mbps DSL line in most cases, or if you can still get FIOS, you could go there, but either way, the 'competition' is not all that much different if they also decide to screw you over when it comes to how fast and how much data you give/get. Finally, the barriers to entry are relatively high - only someone the size of Google could intrude on their cozy little setup.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?