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Why the FCC Will Probably Ignore the Public On Network Neutrality
walterbyrd writes The rulemaking process does not function like a popular democracy. In other words, you can't expect that the comment you submit opposing a particular regulation will function like a vote. Rulemaking is more akin to a court proceeding. Changes require systematic, reliable evidence, not emotional expressions . . . In the wake of more than 3 million comments in the present open Internet proceeding-which at first blush appear overwhelmingly in favor of network neutrality-the current Commission is poised to make history in two ways: its decision on net neutrality, and its acknowledgment of public perspectives. It can continue to shrink the comments of ordinary Americans to a summary count and thank-you for their participation. Or, it can opt for a different path.
Don't even need to read the summary:
$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
The FCC does not regulate torches and pitchforks.
... so where is the systematic, reliable evidence that not being neutral in the way you treat traffic is somehow better for the future of the Internet? There are two parties: money grubbing corporations looking to maximize profit by double dipping and "the people" that require net neutrality in order to be able to build their future on it. Sure, the party that donates the most money will win.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
The FCC chair is a shill for Comcast and that ilk.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
... what was actually going on here. The republicans are against lots of government regulation. They just don't like it in general.
So if you put things to them in that context they're going to be biased against it.
The failure on our part was to explain properly to them that the situation only exists because government regulation makes it very hard for anyone to compete with the big ISPs. If you made that clear it would change the context of the regulation to them and would sway some of them.
Understand where different people are coming from on these issues or you can't reason with them.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Rulemaking is more akin to a court proceeding.
No, it's more akin to negotiating a price over some martinis and sending the courier to the bank to make a deposit. The "court proceeding" is also a charade. It doesn't have to be this way, but nobody gives a shit, and will reelect the same scum who are doing this, next month, and again in two years. Let's not talk about the government any more. Let's discuss why people want it like this. The government is just a reflection of it.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The real reason is we don't live in a republic anymore but a plutocary. Even a fair courtcase would find in favor of net Neutrality
I have received some very nice e-mails from my representatives agreeing with my correspondence to support NN. Even more shocking, one made a complete turn around. I feel that our voices were heard a little! The best line was from Maria Cantwell stating "Without strong protections, broadband Internet providers will likely favor their own or affiliated content, service, and applications because they have the economic incentives and technical means to do so."
These networks are owned by the ISPs. It seems to me that government, before it steps in and tells them how best to run their networks, should have the burden of showing how net neutrality is better for the network than prioritization schemes.
I wish I had points to vote this up.
What you describe is exactly how it's supposed to work. If the government wants to control the hundreds of billions of dollars of network infrastructure that private companies have invested it, it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest.
And - frankly - it's not. Motivating competition in the last-mile space is a MUCH more effective method for achieving the same interest, AND has lots of other benefits as well in terms of driving prices down and service-offerings up.
"government of the people, by the people, for the people". our system seems to have lost track of the basic principles. just as the courts ignore portions of the constitution, such as "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", or "a well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state".
Not to say that there isn't lots of money and influence-making behind the scenes, but a key problem with policies that are desired by corporations but disliked by individuals is that the corporation can and will pay for evidence to be created supporting their position.
Evidence has a loose definition, of course, and a responsible regulator will do their homework to tell the difference between shoddy evidence and strong evidence. But when evidence is submitted that explains how a policy decision plausibly leads to [xyz] effects, that wins real points.
What is sure is that on the other side, even millions of people getting together won't produce hard evidence that a court/rule-making body can rely on. In the end, even millions people's opinions will only amount to a few soft statistics.
Filling this gap on the "people's side" is somewhat the role of academia/thinktanks/non-profits to fill, but in a fast moving industry they are unlikely to move faster than a corporation that wants to back something.
I think some of the ISPs are worried that legitimate packet prioritization is going be outlawed along with other sorts of prioritization due to ignorance of technology by legislators or regulators.
I've had discussions with coworkers in IT that were very sharp but still couldn't understand why it might be beneficial to prioritize voice packets over web traffic, for example. They really believed FIFO was the only fair way to treat packets and that anything else was somehow morally wrong.
And before some people chime in and say "but that's not what we mean", let me say that's exactly what some people mean by net neutrality. Maybe it's not what you mean, but there's no guarantee that your more informed view of net neutrality is going to be made into law.
Except that those private companies have received 1. direct subsidies, 2. Free intellectual property usage (basic TCP/IP technologies) and 3. free usage of rights of way.
So, since we, the public, have heavily subsidised those privately owned networks, we should also have the right to regulate them. Finally, since the ISPs have been pushing for local monopoly status, they should accept that they are treated like a local monopoly (subject to regulation).
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
No, that's not how it works. You don't get to (essentially) trick them into using technologies, and then say, "well, since you're using that thing we put into the public domain, now we get to tell you what to do with it." The same thing with subsidization. Just because I donated to a kickstarter campaign today doesn't mean I get to go to the company five years down the road and say "Remember that $100 I kicked in? Now I get to tell you how to run the company, even though you never agreed to that at the time."
As for "free usage rights of way", those rights of way aren't free. They pay for them. There may be government assistance in terms of mandating that - where necessary - they are given the ability to buy the rights of way through eminent domain, but make no mistake, they weren't "given".
1) Thank God they don't pay attention to most public comments. Can you imagine the magnitude of the disaster that would result from a California style of mob-rule in Washington? We definitely DON'T need THAT.
2) They pay far too much attention to their corporate sponsors instead of doing what they are paid to do- use their brains and think about how to give us the best possible services. It's no surprise that the Republicans have a major hand in screwing us all, after all, their platform includes denial of science.
These networks are owned by the ISPs. It seems to me that government, before it steps in and tells them how best to run their networks, should have the burden of showing how net neutrality is better for the network than prioritization schemes.
You've got your cart on the wrong side of your horse, young man.
It's up to the ISPs to demonstrate to the people (via government) that they're using the resources —to which they have been granted limited monopoly rights— in the public interest, and that their pursuit of profits is not leading them into anti-consumer activity such as creating artificial scarcity for extortionary purposes when negotiating with other network operators, holding their users hostage, arbitrarily throttling bandwidth to customers whom they have testified are causing network congestion when in fact no such congestion exists.
For example.
Network Neutrality is the neutral position. It's not telling ISPs how to run their network - it's telling them to stop fucking with their customers' traffic. It's telling the ISPs to stop indulging in funny business and get back to making money the old-fashioned way: by providing an actual fucking service.
But yeah, fuck big government and Ayn Rand and America Fuck Yeah and all that because... Oh, I don't know, because who the fuck cares any more? This stopped being a dialogue years ago.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Oh, frell off. you know, I know, everyone knows that net neutrality doesn't mean every connection has the same latency and bandwidth. It doesn't mean you can't prioritize a skype connection over a download.... It means you can't prioritize Company A's traffic over Company B's traffic because Company B didn't pay the ransom. It especially means you can't prioritize your own content over everyone elses to stifle competition.
Damn Trolls...
If you need to prioritize voice traffic on your network then you're network is in serious need of an upgrade. 20 years ago when VOIP was brand new this was a necessity as 6.4k/channel was actually a chunk of your connection. In the modern world we live in with 10, 40, and 100gig ethernet available to the players being discussed in this thread and you're talking about 6.4 being a laughable amount of traffic. The only reason it needs to be prioritized is because of the DPI systems imposing completely unnecessary bottlenecks on these networks.
As someone that manages hundreds of networks for companies ranging between 5 computers and 5000 I can confidently tell you that VOIP doesn't require QoS anymore. The only remaining prioritization comes in the form of HD video transmission, this can be throttled during times when there is legitimate congestion. Of course the ISPs in question actually aren't congested to the point where Level 3 is trying not to break its sarcasm unit when Verizon trumps out that old chestnut. When a single 10gig link costing about $1500 to deploy at the most is all it takes to alleviate congestion its pretty easy to come to the conclusion that the cause of the congestion isn't the network, but that of business policy creating a problem that doesn't need to exist.
it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest. And - frankly - it's not.
Yes, it is. See common carrier. It has been tested empirically for more than a century including physical carriage networks. The empirical testing has shown that when carriers are prohibited from discriminatory behavior, the resulting increase in competition among merchants and manufacturers who use the carriage networks results in greater overall economic expansion. It is why FedEx is not permitted to negotiate preferred carrier status with one manufacturer to inhibit shipments made by a competing manufacturer.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
So it would be easy to say "FIFO, anything else is illegal." That solves any kind of throttling and such nicely and has no way around it. However, as you note, it has the problem of making any kind of useful QoS undoable. It isn't like QoS is something that nobody wants either, there's a reason why all the nice business gear you get has support for it. Ok so we'd like to allow that. Thing is, how do you write the law so that it doesn't mess with legit QoS, but doesn't have loopholes that allow companies to throttle traffic they don't like? It isn't an easy answer.
And what kind of "legitimate packet priorization" would that be? Because I can't really think of any right now. If you have trouble delivering your real time dependent services, you can either up your bandwidth or not offer them rather than keep overselling 1:1000 and throttle everything else into oblivion.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
> everyone knows that net neutrality doesn't mean every connection has the same latency and bandwidth. It means you can't prioritize Company A's traffic over Company B's traffic
You and I know somewhat what a REASONABLE set of rules of rules might be, but GP is right as to the draft language. It basically said every packet has to be treated the same. As to company A and company B, if company A is a hospital and company B is a Nigerian prince, that's a difficult situation to write legislation for. Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first? That's not allowed if the rule is "all users must be treated the same."
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ? They are both http web traffic.
Administrators making case-by-case decisions can make reasonable decisions in most cases. Coming up with simple rules deciding what admins must do in all cases for the next 20 years is much trickier, especially for bureaucrats who don't know the tech as well.
Umm... that's the first time I heard Europe is in an alternate universe.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Network Neutrality is a great concept for the consumer, but not for the provider. So given that there are millions of comments broadly in favour of NN in the "Public Consultation" phase and a small group of lobbyists/back-room power brokers against NN, we get to see where the power lies - with the public who vote into power the politicians who set direction for the FCC, or the corporate interests behind the scenes.
The biggest part of the problem, though, is that there is no real choice in the domestic internet provider markets in the US. There is certainly the illusion of choice, but in each market, the vast majority of consumers have access to a single incumbent backbone provider who also provide "last mile" connectivity, or one of a small number of alternatives which are either themselves clients of the backbone provider re-using and reselling that provider's last-mile capability or alternative access methods which offer a service which is either inferior or significantly more expensive.
The traditional capitalist approach to this is for a smaller, hungrier, competitor to the incumbent to set up shop and offer a better service for lower cost, thus enticing customers away from the incumbent and providing the new competitor with the revenue to expand services. In this scenario, centrally enforced Network Neutrality is not required - if one provider chooses to prioritize traffic in a way that its' customers do not like, they can leave in favour of the alternative. However, the massive initial infrastructure costs associated with setting up as a backbone ISP with last-mile connectivity, so that the new competitor is not dependent on the existing incumbent breaks the model, and you need high-value independent actors, such as Google, going in and setting up their own networks, because they can absorb the huge initial capital outlay.
The alternative to having several "backbone plus last-mile" providers with broad or total coverage in each region (which would be eye-wateringly expensive) would be for the backbone elements to be treated as utilities/managed by independent Not For Profit entities, and for all ISPs to be resellers of bandwidth competing on services and price.
Once you have genuine competition, Net Neutrality becomes something that individual providers (resellers) can offer to their customers or not (although verifying that a provider actually IS offering Net Neutrality would probably be beyond Joe Public and most of them would not know or care, anyway). A customer can choose to sign up to a service provider who guarantees low latency for online gaming, or one with high video streaming bandwidth, or the odd one who offer a life-size Lara Croft blowup doll, if they choose to. Because the free market with a low barrier to entry encourages providers to provide the services that the customer wants and is willing to pay for.
That's pretty simple. Allow the user to prioritize their own traffic. There is even 3 bits set aside for this in the IP header known as precedence. Then do QoS using that as your indicator on what to drop first if connections become overtaxed. Which, was the exact purpose of those bits but no one ever actually implemented them. I'd be more than happy to tell my browser, etc to please mark those packets as "Best Effort", but please mark my actual browsing as "Priority", my netflix and pandora as "Immediate", and Skype and VoIP as "Flash".
Note that doesn't mean always don't throttle stuff I have marked as Flash, because then everyone will just mark everything as a high priority. Just throttle the packets I marked lowest first, and if there aren't enough of low priority packets then throttle the next highest priority until necessary. Or limit the number of packets per second for each tier, and silently treat them as a lower tier if there are too many.
The networks run physical infrastructure across public lands. Furthermore, they hold natural monopolies at both local and state levels. The government - and citizens - have an interest in equal access to that infrastructure. Particularly since open communication access is crucial to a functioning market. These ISPs are engaging in restraint of trade, hobbling competition not just in their own market but across whole swaths of the economy with potential for vast damage to market competition.
Even Milton Friedman would recognize the danger here.
As to company A and company B, if company A is a hospital and company B is a Nigerian prince, that's a difficult situation to write legislation for. Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first?
No, that's not ok. Email is already a best-effort service without guaranteed delivery. If the S&R team actually needs a particular piece of information delivered immediately, they should choose a service that is optimized for that purpose. It's not the job of every internet middleman between here and Beijing to rank the moral value of each IP packet or source.
Note that this is different from an ISP determining that an email source is "spam" and blacklisting that source.
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ?
Aside from the technical fact that the client only finds the ads in the web page text, it is (again) not appropriate for the internet middlemen to determine whether the client is more interested in images from doubleclick or images from slashdot. If the client chooses to prioritize which images it requests, that's a completely different question. The point of net neutrality is that, within a recognized communication stream, people who transfer the data should not look at the data to determine whether or how quickly to forward it. The post office accepts your letter, looks at the postage you've paid, and delivers it. It will deliver my Priority Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes, but it will not deliver Netflix Media Mail envelopes faster than my Media Mail envelopes.
The FCC got three million responses, or almost one percent of the entire US population. And FCC staffers deride the public comment process as filled with 'hilarious hallucinations.' Because, according to this staffer, those comments submitted by 'legal and economic experts' prepared under the employ of institutions with a vested interest "collated information in a more systematic way" and "from a much broader population of consumers."
Think about this. Actual citizen voices don't matter because private interests have the money to hire people and staff time to organize large submissions with systematically collated information about the population of Net product consumers. Do you see how citizenship to impact public policy has been stripped from the process, leaving the public as nothing more than consumers of product in a rigged market?
They think we don't understand. That we're simply unqualified to understand the nuance of policy. But that's clearly not the case. As highly qualified Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, including Harvard Law Professor Lawrence Lessig have been stumping for Net Neutrality for the better part of a decade. These people are not policy stupid. They've submitted comments with 'systematically collated information' by nationally and internationally recognized experts.
These FCC staffers quoted would have us believe the public is misinformed and uneducated. That is the spin they want to present to the press.
It's offensive. Regardless of what position you take on the matter.
300 billion$.
In 2006 dollars.
That's how much tax subsidy the ISP industry has recieved from the public.
subsidy that was SUPPOSED to pay for expanding the "last mile" across the country, to every nook and cranny the they did with telephone decades before.
Only they pocketed the money instead and delivered nothing in return for it.
And yes, they very much were given.
You're nothing but a shill.
Trying to assert that the internet is like "a series of UPS trucks", as you do, is not in any way an apt analogy, and you know it (or should, at any rate, if you're hanging out on a site like Slashdot).
Of course the Internet isn't a series of UPS trucks.
When something is shipped via UPS, only one party pays UPS. Sure, sometimes the other party pays the first party so they can pay UPS, but UPS doesn't collect money for the same package from multiple parties. On the other hand, ISPs do collect money for the same packet from multiple parties. This is a bad thing and net neutrality should prevent it.
If you can't understand why it's important that ISPs not be able to be paid more than once for the same packet, then you really shouldn't be in a discussion about whether the government should or shouldn't impose regulations on ISPs.
Moreover, it's the ISPs that want to change things. Previously, if you tried to get a video from YouTube, NetFlix, or some website owned by your cable company, they would have been treated the same. ISPs then realized three things:
1) Those Internet video upstarts were making the ISPs' own cable TV offerings less popular.
2) Those Internet video upstarts were making lots of money. (Cue dollar signs in the eyes of the ISPs.)
3) They (the ISPs) were duopolies or monopolies in most areas and thus can do whatever they want without fear of competition.
With this realization, they implemented caps and overages to "manage network traffic" (really to make it more expensive for you to utilize Internet video to replace cable TV) and they want to make "Internet fast lanes" to extort money out of Internet Video providers (further raising the cost of these) or to slow them down (making them unusable and making cable TV seem better by comparison).
It's the ISPs that want to change the status quo of every bit being treated equally so they should be the ones presenting proof as to why they need to do so. So far, they haven't presented anything compelling. Unfortunately, their lobbyist money and political influence might count as "compelling arguments" to the FCC even when the vast majority of the public scream against it.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
So why should ISP's be paid twice for moving the same packet? I'm asking since you deftly ignored the actual argument.
I understand your assertion, and simply disagree with it profusely.
There was no "understanding" associated with the tax-relief. If there was, it'd be codified in the laws and regulations surrounding such tax relief. If there had been such codification, this wouldn't even be a discussion, it'd be "no, your statutorily prohibited from doing that," or "OK, that's fine, but to do it, you need to repay the $nnn,nnn,nnn,nnn.00 in tax relief that was predicated on not doing so." Instead, folks like yourself - who actually don't understand the issue at all, get all hand-wavy about "we gave them tax relief" and assume that there was some actual agreements codified around it, which weren't actually there.
Let me be clear on something: you haven't paid for "a packet". You've paid for a pipe, capable of a given flow-rate. In this case, Netflix (for example) has also paid for "a pipe", capable of a given flow rate, into the system you get your data from. It's not nearly big enough, though, to service all the people who want to consume data from Netflix. Now, your argument is that the people who sell the pipes should just give Netflix a bigger pipe and take it on the chin because goddamnit you want to watch your Breaking Bad reruns. But the pipe Netflix needs, to do what you're asking, is really goddamned big. Big enough that if Netflix wants a pipe that big, it should damned well pay for upgrading it themselves. That includes both just the physical pipe, but also whatever the people who sell the pipes need to charge in order to able to handle the inflow of data from a pipe that big, sending it on to all the various places where those bits are going to drop back out into your laptop.
Your attempt to fixate on "charging for packets" is laudable. It certainly makes for a more compelling argument, or it would if there were any companies charging "by the packet" instead of "by the width of the pipe."
By all means, though, if you want to go to "paying by the packet" billing, I suspect the telcos and cable companies would be happy to oblige. It's a much more tenable business model for everyone involved, charging metered service, so that those who put the most actual strain on the network pay the most. But the last time a carrier tried that (TWC, 2008, in field trials in Texas) there was a hue and cry from folks - on this very site - against such "paying by the packet".
So, believe me, I very much understand the issue, and have been paying attention to it before you had even heard the phrase "net neutrality."
He's right: idiot.
Read this before you comment more:
http://www.theverge.com/2014/5...
Essentially, these companies claim Title II status whenever they want to build something because under Title II they don't have to pay for right of way to government or private entities, get to use poles and tunnels without having to pay, etc., -- in other words they get a subsidy -- but when it comes to charging customers, they disclaim Title II status.
This is a corollary of "Privatize profits, socialize expenses" -- "Privatize profits, socialize business expenses."
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
You invested? like with a prospectus and such?
I've addressed this fallacy elsewhere: the parts of tax subsidies which had actual contractual, regulatory, or statutory "requirements" tied to them have been either upheld, or worked out through the existing oversight processes. What you're asking for is something new which (frankly) nobody thought to include in the requirements when such things were being done decades ago. That's not the ISPs' fault, it's "ours" collectively for having something of buyer's remorse about the deal we negotiated with them.
But pretending that we're Darth Vader, telling them we've altered the deal and to pray we don't alter it any further is not governance, but tyranny.
I was referring specifically to municipal right-of-way fees, not easements. ROW fees are an ongoing assessment. Many times (but not always), utilities flow these costs through to the end-user. But evenso, whether one-time or a monthly fee, there most assuredly is a fee; access to the public ROW is NOT free, so you basically proved my point.