Slashdot Mirror
Nobody's Neutral In Net Neutrality Debate
ygslash writes Michael Wolff at USA Today has a long list of the many stakeholders in the net neutrality debate, and what each has to gain or lose. The net neutrality issue has made its way into the mainstream consciousness, thanks to grassroots activism and some help from John Oliver on HBO. But it's not as simple as just net neutrality idealists versus the cable companies or versus the FCC. One important factor that has raised the stakes in net neutrality is the emergence ("unanticipated" by Wolff, but not by all of us) of the Internet as the primary medium for distribution of video content. And conversely, the emergence of video content in general and Netflix in particular as by far the most significant consumers of Internet bandwidth. So anyone involved in the distribution of video content has a lot to gain or lose by the outcome of the net neutrality struggle.
Is slavery wrong?
Is the First Amendment a good idea?
Is the Second Amendment a good idea?
Are civil/gay/religious rights a good idea?
Etc. etc. Important things matter and people care about them. That's why we call them 'important'.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
And yet, only one side should matter; the people.
And no, corporations aren't people and each person counts as one, regardless of their bank account and army of lobbyists.
Who are the stakeholders? Well, let's see:
Only one of these "stakeholders" have opinions that actually matter, and that stakeholder sent "a groundswell of 3 million citizen comments, most of them, presumably, against the FCC's approach" [and in support of regulating ISPs as Common Carriers].
I think we're done here.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
If streaming video is a problem for ANY one then it should be a problem for EVERY one. That's the basic idea of equality being fought about here. A natural monopoly should not be able to abuse it's position to sabotage competitors in different markets. This is also basic anti-trust.
The entire issue only exists because we tolerate (if not actively encourage) monopolies.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
I would really like to see the true cost of bandwidth, that is what it costs to run day to day. I'm guessing that the telcos are exaggerating more than a little bit. I really don't believe for a New York minute that video content is putting much strain on resources. Heck, I'd really like to see the honest, undoctored resource use statistics. I think the argument against net neutrality is all about wanting an additional revenue stream: nothing more, nothing less.
But lots of Goody-Two-Shoe types for the past 10 years have been saying that nobody legitimately needs lots of bandwidth.
Only those bandwidth users were evil pirates and no one else is doing anything wrong on the internet at all....
Now it seems consuming a lot of bandwidth watching legally purchased video services is simply the norm.....
Where are all those people from years ago lining up to admit they were wrong? For years and years I was just a dirty little pirate for my large bandwidth usage (streaming electronic music legally) and my old ISP used to give me crap all the time about my top 10% usage.
Now I'm just "normal" which properly indicates that my past usage was in fact needed, allowable, required, and not illegal.
Suck it conservative naysayers. Lots of bandwidth usage is *LEGAL*.
My family back in the UK get 60mbit down and 20 up whilst I get crap here in the US, supposedly the most advanced nation on earth. BTW, my family in the UK are not in a majorly built-up area. They live in a smallish village of about 12000 people.
Not happy...
He anticipated and wrote perceptively on the subject five years ago - http://www.cringely.com/2009/0...
It is ludicrous that the mainstream media is only now getting a clue. This says much about the media in general.
Prove anything by multiplying Huge Number times Tiny Number
In the 90's we (the tech-geeky people that had been on the Internet since the 80's) were telling everyone including the FCC that within a decade we would be streaming live and on-demand high-definition video over the Internet. At that point we were already doing it with audio (Net2Phone, SIP, MP3, Napster, Icecast, ...) We even formulated protocols for it and reserved space in the IPv4 range for things like broadcast and multicast (and multicast works incredibly well for distribution).
The problem is that neither the FCC, Congress nor anyone that was able to put pressure on the ISP's made sure that the ISP's kept up with the advances in technology. I moved to where I live now almost a decade ago and I still have the same amount of bandwidth than I did back then. TWC/Comcast, AT&T and others haven't upgraded their base broadband speeds since the early 2000's. DSL in most of the US is stuck at ~2Mbps, Cable at 10Mbps. In the mean time the world has moved on to 100Mbps and 1Gbps being 'normal' for respectively DSL and Cable. Heck, these days I can get satellite at the same speeds and cost (longer delays though) than Cable and DSL.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Unanticipated my ass... I worked in the telecom industry and it was well known 10 years ago that this is the path that broadband was headed... This is disingenuous spin by greedy corporate fat cats...
As with most mainstream articles on this topic, it just simply doesn't get what network neutrality really is. The problems start with the first sentence.
Net neutrality, the FCC's effort to govern broadband providers who supply Internet access, enters a new chapter as
Net neutrality is not the name of an FCC plan. It is the principle upon which the internet was created. They make this out to be some new regulatory effort, rather than something that has been around for decades.
There's the pro-business side, reflecting the interests of the companies that have paid for the broadband — cable operators and telcos. They naturally want to be able to charge bigger users higher prices
So now the author implies that net neutrality means that they can't charge bigger users higher prices. Bigger users do pay higher prices! They always have, that makes perfect sense. Then it says:
That's the logical growth area of their businesses —charging the distributors of data as well as the consumers (you and me).
Distributors and consumers do pay for their data.
The article is trying to be "nice" to everyone: identify each player in this topic and paint them out to have a reasonable interest. But to do that, the article must omit the core issue which is that cable and telecom monopolies want to double-charge distributors who have already paid. But if you mention that, it is kinda tough to make it look like each side has a fair and balanced interest in this. The article paints out 5 different interested parties, but there are really only two: the greedy monopolies who want to make more money without having to invest in infrastructure, versus everyone-else.
I am loathe to read the article linked within this one titled "RELATED: A Q&A about net neutrality" because I fear yet more inaccuracy.
Internet providers should have two choices:
1) They choose to be neutral, but in doing so get government monopoly protection. They also must keep their prices to a reasonable level, as defined by the FTC.
2) They choose to not be neutral. Now they can make deals with websites to boost their performance or throttle whatever services they want, but they must now offer to rent their lines out to any company that promises neutrality for a reasonable rate, again set by the FTC.
It's the best of both worlds, really. This pretty much guarantees consumers have a neutral option, but non neutral companies can gain customers who are interested in "the fastest Netflix around" or whatever other partnerships ISPs can produce.
Whenever you enter into a debate on any issue, no one debating is neutral. If they're neutral, they wouldn't debate. They need to have some level of interest, and some set of concerns about the outcome of the debate. You can't expect people to be neutral, but you should know what their interests are and let that information inform your understanding of their argument.
Me, for example. I have an interest in the net neutrality debate. I'd like to have a good/fast internet connection that is not filtered/throttled based on business interests that don't align with my personal interests. I'd like to have access to things like Netflix. I also work in IT, and I don't want to have to deal with, fix, or work around any random/stupid restrictions that I might face due to Verizon deciding that some kinds of traffic don't suit their profit targets for this quarter. Beyond that, I also believe that free and unfettered access to the Internet has become a 'free speech' issue, to some extent. I'm in favor of net neutrality because I'd like to live in a free and well-functioning society.
So those are my interests. What are the interests of some of the people who oppose net neutrality?
I think it's pretty neutral to say that I should get what I pay for and not have some toady at Time Warner deciding what's worthy of being passed along at advertised rate.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There is no free market when it comes to ISPs. If I don't like Time Warner Cable's service or business policies, I have no other ISP to go to. Yes, I could leave entirely, but then I'm without Internet access (not an option when you're a web master, like I am) and Time Warner Cable still won't change their policies. If your only plan of action to force a group of companies to change is "everyone in the US cancels their Internet service", your is doomed to failure. Saying "let the free market decide" when it comes to ISPs is essentially saying "let the big ISPs do as they please no matter what they do."
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
1) On the one hand, it seems to be fair to force users - be they companies or individuals - to pay based on usage. Based on how many packets they put on the network. Currently they do not do that. What they do is to pay for their connection. If you want a very high speed connection, you pay for that. The ISP won't guarantee that speed, except in bursts. Kind of like how a 2 x 4 piece of lumber is really 1.5 x 3.5. Conflicts arise when people try to use the full connection bandwidth in a sustained manner.
2) On the other hand, lack of net neutrality would open the floodgates for corporations to manipulate traffic. To create slow and fast lanes, to favor content, to create yet another pricing tier for American consumers who already pay among the highest prices in the world for high speed internet.
Based on the fact the government is already under regulatory capture (head of FCC is a telecom executive, head of FDA is a Monsanto executive, 2nd in command at the central bank is a Citigroup executive, etc, etc), allowing net neutrality to be defeated will result in a bad outcome for consumers.
Net neutrality is not perfect, but it's much better than ceding more control to cable companies.
It is ludicrous that the mainstream media is only now getting a clue. This says much about the media in general.
No insult intended but I'm guessing you haven't had to deal with "mainstream media" much directly. I have on several occasions and let's just say that they were severely clueless. This sort of technical argument is WAY too subtle for them to deal with properly given that it isn't the sort of thing most people really care about or notice in their daily lives. They could do it but it requires too much effort and doesn't draw enough eyeballs. Furthermore a lot of them have some built in conflicts of interest. NBC is owned by Comcast. I very much doubt they are capable of being truly independent reporters on this issue.
It creates the impression that everyone is a "stakeholder" with reasonable motivations and roughly equal claims. This seems false, since the cable/telco positions aren't transparent at all about what their "stakes" are and their position isn't about some "fair" outcome but about achieving an UNFAIR outcome where they are in a position to approve/disapprove and charge rents over circuits already paid for by their own customers.
It totally ignores the business Comcast, et al is trying to defend against competition -- video distribution, as well as their underinvestment in networks which have left whatever legitimate claims they may have -- oversubscription of their last mile networks leading to congestion and problems.
From the outset, it seems biased in Cable's favor -- "There's the pro-business side, reflecting the interests of the companies that have paid for the broadband â" cable operators and telcos." You're fucking kidding, right? They "paid" for nothing -- we, the consumers, purchasers of their services, have paid for the broadband. Underinvesting in your network and then wanting to squelch service until you get paid again is what's happening.
Is currently ONLY happening in the USA.
And ONLY on ISPs which are both effective monopolies and where what's coming off the 'net competes with something they offer themselves as a core business.
If there was effective competition in the USA, this wouldn't be happening. Handwaving about "Net Neutrality" is a dog-and-pony show to try and distract from the elephant in the room - which is for the vast majority of affected americans, the ISPs in question are the ONLY game in town for broadband connectivity.
If they're neutral, they wouldn't debate.
I debate things all the time that I have a neutral viewpoint on. Usually I do this to point out that there is another side to an argument that has some validity that the person I'm debating is not acknowledging. Sometimes I debate a topic to help figure out what I believe about a topic. Only an idiot takes a side in a debate without first trying to understand the relative merits of the different sides being debated. Having a debate where the goal is to poke and prod arguments rather than to convince the other side can be extremely useful.
Hell slashdot itself is pretty much clear evidence that you do not actually have to believe in a position to debate the issue at hand.
"As much as 70% of Internet-distributed data is now video, 50% of it from Netflix. This new video industry — growing exponentially and transforming the nature of entertainment — is getting a free ride on the cable and telco investment in broadband. Arguably, this is unsustainable free distribution, overtaxing networks and slowing the Internet for everyone."
I just gag on "free ride". 11M Netflix subscribers pay Verizon/Comcast/etc $50 * 12 * 11m = $6.6 billion a year for this "free" ride. Margins on Internet services at Verizon/Comcast are believe to be in the 90% profit range.
I can help the FCC solve this. Require that ISPs provide at least one settlement free peering point for each customer in their network with no peering point providing access to less that 10,000 customers. 10K because after all they are ISPs and they should do something for that $50/mth (i'm sure Verizon would immediately declare this settlement free peering point to be the customer's wifi node without this rule).
You know what's funny about this? AT&T owns almost all physical phone lines in my area. They're legally forced to lease the lines to lesser, more local and 2nd rate DSL providers at a "reasonable" price. Now if TDS leases lines and uses a ton of bandwidth on AT&T's lines, AT&T doesn't bill them per 100GB or something like that. So even AT&T has to admit that it's not being damaged by high bandwidth or they would be charging lesser carriers more money if a bunch of their customers hop on Netflix, BUT THEY DON'T. Less infrastructure upgrades means more profits and that's it. It's not like netflix is collapsing their backbone.
Given: TV will be working over the Internet.
What's great about this new TV over Internet is that it is a lot more flexible than traditional cable TV.
This means more diverse program program content.
It means new content providers.
It means new delivery funding models.
This will challenge the existing access and content providers.
Given: There is and will continue to be a natural monopoly in Internet access to the consumer.
The major access provider is the cable company who has a separate, vested interest in TV.
Question: Would the consumer be better served if this access monopoly did, or did not limit/control how this new TV works.
If the answer is it should not control TV, then how does this work?
How is the bandwidth necessary to support this funded, and at what margin?
Answer: This is silly. If we had fiber we would not care about the bandwidth.
There is likely enough revenue in Internet pay for the fiber, but maybe not with the business models the providers are accustomed to.
The cable folks are in a conflict of interest because is would gut the TV part of cable.
The phone companies don't seem willing to make the leap, which is understandable given that they have no clue as to what regulatory environment they will see.
Municipal Broadband is a possible kickstarter.
We need competition among ISP's, but the natural monopoly prevents this.
One answer is to separate this natural monopoly from the ISP role.
This might make the folks owning the pipes common carriers who sell through separate, competing ISP's.
To be useful, this would have to strike a balance on the price these pipes so that both
a) ISP's can offer service at a reasonable price
b) the pipe owners have an incentive to put in fiber
It's not clear if such a balance is possible with the phone/cable or municipal utility business models.
I have spent a lot of time on this. I will share where the rabble rousing going on here is _off_, and let you decide.
1) Net Neutrality is...
A new buzzword hijacking 'Open Internet', which is the philosophy carriers and network operators have been using since day one to guide their decisions on how to make the network work. It is based on the idea of fairness, openness, and equal access for everyone as an ideal, but allows for the reality of private ownership of infrastructure, and business drivers that dictate how the network infrastructure is managed and operated.
2) Net Neutrality is NOT..
.
a) a fight to ensure you 'get what you paid for'. If you believe this, you have been mislead as to what you paid for. You did not pay for 100Mb/s to netflix. You did not pay for 5Mb/s to netflix. You paid for shared public access to the rest of the networks your carrier has connections with, subject to availability of common shared resources, with NO guarantees of uptime, packet delivery or even that it will work when you switch it on. The mentality that 'I'm not getting what I paid for' is promoted by content providers in order to make you feel cheated. it is not reality.
Since people like using roads as an example, I will just point out, your road taxes are small, because you share the roads with everyone in your city. When you all try to go someplace at once, you end up creating congestion. Why are you not out protesting that 'I paid for my lane, the city just needs to build more roads so I don't have to wait'? Because it's a ridiculous statement, thats why. a large percentage of the time, those roads simply aren't over-used, so it would be a poor use of time and materials to make it larger to absorb a short window of time when it's running at capacity.
For those who like to point out how much America sucks for Internet speeds, Whip out your calculator, and tell me how the hell you expect to connect 300 million people spread out over an area of nearly 4 MILLION square miles, for a comparable cost to connecting 25 million people over 38,000 square miles. and 10 million of those people live in one relatively small metro area. Distance covered increases costs, and it's not only unfair but profoundly unrealistic to expect costs to be anywhere close to similar comparing such vastly different infrastructure requirements.
b) a gimmick for your ISP to shake you down for more money to get what you want. If this were true, you would already be paying for access by country or site or anything else. You don't. You won't. The technical challenges alone make this a non-profitable exercise. Anyone remember when some LD companies figured out that billing in 5 minute increments instead of 1 minute increments meant they actually made MORE profit, because they saved on the time and effort it took to do all the accounting?
c) some way to force content providers to choose a slow lane or pay extra for a fast lane. I wouldn't call this 'force'. I would call it the same option that has always been present in the design of the network. I would also observe that the reality of 'fast lane/slow lane' is based on our freeway example, not on some kind of toll road vs HOV lane example. The fact is, the way things work now, the 'fast lane' is dedicated bandwidth a company buys to improve it's performance when transferring larger amounts of data than the shared best effort peering infrastructure is willing to invest in supporting. Throw a little math at the problem. If you have a shared exchange interface with 20 other networks, and ONE network is consuming > 50% of the bandwidth, that is UNFAIR to all the other networks, if that also means the total bandwidth begins to regularly exceed the available bandwidth. To further simplify matters, lets say 95% of that bandwidth is coming from ONE customer on that other network. The network engineers all look at each other and say 'this isn't natural growth of the network, this
So you're not neutral. You're picking a side that you feel is under-represented, and you're taking that position.
Sometimes I genuinely am neutral. Just because I understand both sides of an issue doesn't mean I necessarily give a crap about the issue. To give a rather silly example I genuinely do not care one way or the other about the relative merits of emacs versus vi. I understand the arguments and can articulate them if someone seems to misunderstand something but I genuinely do not care about either side of that debate. I am the very definition of neutral there. (Actually my opinion is something along the lines of "a pox on both your houses") Whatever agenda I have has nothing to do with favoring one side or the other, hence I am neutral.
on some level, you need to be interested, and you need to have some kind of agenda-- even if that agenda is just "entertainment at flexing my intellectual capacity".
Interest is not the same thing as opinion. There are lots of things I like to understand but don't really care about the relative merits of one side or the other.
"I just gag on "free ride". 11M Netflix subscribers pay Verizon/Comcast/etc $50 * 12 * 11m = $6.6 billion a year for this "free" ride. Margins on Internet services at Verizon/Comcast are believe to be in the 90% profit range."
Two things.
1. You didn't even bother to mention the fact that Netflix themselves most likely pays a hefty bandwidth bill to their ISP(s). So both consumers and Netflix themselves are paying for bandwidth on both ends of the cable.
2. I doubt margins are at 90%.
Ninjas don't carry tic tacs
I have no problems at all with an ISP prioritizing certain types of traffic, but that prioritization should be 1) under the control of the subscriber, and 2) it should *only* affect traffic belonging to that subscriber. My traffic and your traffic should be shaped (as a whole) based on the subscriptions that each of us has paid for.
That is, I could ask my ISP to prioritize my Netflix packets over my bittorrent packets, but if you and I have paid for the same level of service then your VoIP packets shouldn't get priority over my Netflix packets.
If a corporation does not use and has never used public funds for infrastructure, then they can do whatever they want. If they use public funds to setup an area monopoly they should NEVER be allowed anything other than Net Neutrality, or lose their area monopoly.
Broadband should be defined as anything 10Mb and above, continuous bandwidth. So they cannot use DSL as a competitor (If it is below 10Mb still), or UseNET as it is not continuous throughput.
With this straigh forward definition, all this back and forth will go away. If a company wants to do crazy things with bandwidth, then customers will have options to go to.
Scott Carr
What is with all of the offensive articles lately? Nobody is neutral? We are talking about the neutrality of handling packets. Either you want packets to be handled neutrally or you do not. By framing it the way he has, he implies that nobody is for handling packets in a neutral manner... and that is FUCKING FALSE.
Jesus fucking christ people. Stop this shit. Stop it NOW. Stop INTENTIONALLY POLLUTING. YOU, yes YOU are absolutely the epitome of evil! Just shut up already.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
So then you won't participate in a debate, because you don't care at all.
You seem to be having a hard time with this. I explicitly said I have and do participate in debates in where I don't care about the eventual outcome. Scientific debates are often like this. I might not actually care what the outcome is and I often don't have a position of my own (I'm neutral) but I do have an interest in the debate based in curiosity and an interest in the truth. I don't really care if dinosaurs had feathers or not and I am neutral on the subject but I am interested in whatever the answer turns out to be. Even when the issue at hand is solely a matter of opinion then sometimes people will debate the issue because they like to debate - not because they actually have a position of their own. Hang around law school students sometime. They LOVE to debate and don't really give a shit about whatever is being debated all the time.
Ok, so that's still a position.
Yes it is. A neutral one. The argument was that you cannot be simultaneously neutral on an issue and debate it. I'm explaining (for the last time) that that is demonstrably not true. I understand plenty of issues well enough to argue one position or the other while my own opinion on the matter at hand is neutral. I don't care if emacs is better than vi or vice-versa but on occasion in years far past I have taken one side or the other just to point out that someone isn't being factual. I don't actually have a preference between the two and use both but the debate itself I find rather pointless and annoying hence my "position" of "a pox on both your houses".
it's very common for them to not-really be arguing about the thing that they're officially arguing about.
Very true. Most of the time it is something tribal. You see our "leaders" in washington holding or disputing opinions based solely on whether the other side holds that opinion.
If I bother to argue that position, then it must mean that I have some interest
Not necessarily in the position being argued. Sometimes my only interest is in promoting a factual discussion. That means I am neutral on the issue. Scientific debate is often like this. I don't really care about what the outcome of scientific issues actually is (because the nature of the world doesn't care about my opinion of it) and I often don't understand the nuances well enough to have a well formed opinion of my own. But I do care that the debate happens, that it is accurate and that whatever is being debated gets sorted out.
Obviously, they have forgotten to ask someone who doesn't give a shit.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
"As much as 70% of Internet-distributed data is now video, 50% of it from Netflix. This new video industry — growing exponentially and transforming the nature of entertainment — is getting a free ride on the cable and telco investment in broadband. Arguably, this is unsustainable free distribution, overtaxing networks and slowing the Internet for everyone."
Netflix already pays for its bandwidth through its providers Level 3 and Cognet. Then if there is an imbalance in the traffic between them and the providers the one providing more traffic pays the other. This shit is just the big media companies trying to extort money from Netflix by intentionally slowing down their traffic.