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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.
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
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.
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.
"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).
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