Republican's 'Net Neutrality' Proposal Called 'Bait and Switch' (techcrunch.com)

Remember that net neutrality legislation introduced by Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.)? TechCrunch is calling it "half-hearted" -- and suspect. It's not going to happen, it wouldn't help if it did and Blackburn isn't someone you want writing this kind of legislation. Among other things, she thinks it's the ISPs' job to police content, and voted to kill the Broadband Privacy Rule.
In fact, Blackburn's legislation would deal a "fatal blow" to net neutrality, argues Evan Greer, campaign director at the nonprofit Fight for the Future, writing in Newsweek: Already one of Big Cable's best friends in Congress, Marsha Blackburn, who has taken more than $600,000 from the industry, is pushing for legislation that would permanently undermine the FCC's ability to enforce open internet protections. This bait and switch has been in the works for months. The telecom lobby's end game is to use the crisis they've created to ram through legislation that's branded as a compromise but amounts to a fatal blow to net neutrality... We don't need legislation that's been watered down with kool-aid.
A better solution, he suggests, is pushing Congress to overrule the FCC with a Congressional Resolution of Disapproval.

Comments

Choice #3

[rsilvergun]

Stop voting Republican. It's already been pointed out that they're the ones behind this. And vote in your primary. Voting doesn't do any good if your just voting for Republicans running with a D next to their name (Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelocy, I'm looking at you).

Re:Paid prioritization.

[dgatwood]

So you want YOUR things prioritized, but you don't care about other things being prioritized, even if they might be considered of value to other people.

Because it's the holiday season, I'm going to assume that you simply don't understand how the Internet works, rather than dismiss you outright as a paid shill. On the Internet, packets move between devices called routers at a speed determined largely by the type of physical interconnect between those routers. At each router, packets are delayed. The delay is usually very slight. However, when packets need to flow through a connection that cannot accommodate the full incoming data rate, they are delayed until there is enough room in that connection to accommodate the additional packets.

As long as that overload is relatively small, users usually do not perceive the delay. For example, if the user is playing streaming video, the player requests several minutes of content at a time, and requests the next few minutes of content long before it actually needs it, so that by the time it gets to the end of the content that it has already downloaded, the next chunk of content is already there. Similarly, when the user is loading a web page, that initial latency is usually only a small part of the total page loading time, so the user doesn't really notice it.

There are exceptions, however. Some technologies, such as real-time streaming—things like Skype, video chat, etc.—are considered inherently low-latency protocols. Delays of even a few hundred milliseconds can make the difference between being able to use the service and being unable to do so, both because talking to someone over a high-latency connection is very difficult and because echo cancellation fundamentally depends on low latency. Thus, there is a fundamental, unavoidable technical reason why these protocols must be prioritized; if they are not prioritized, they become completely nonfunctional. Quality-of-service prioritization is critical for preventing latency spikes that would otherwise break these latency-sensitive services. So when the GP said that VoIP needs to be prioritized, it was not an "I want my voice streams to be faster" sort of desire, but rather an "I want voice streams to work".

Other services, no matter how much value other people might consider them to have, do not have hard latency requirements, and thus prioritization of those services provides no benefit to users. A user either has enough bandwidth to the destination to handle streaming at a particular quality or he/she doesn't. If the bandwidth isn't there, that problem can't be fixed by changing the priority. There are only two ways in which paid prioritization could affect the average bandwidth between a user and a given service:

• If the ISP is deliberately not buying enough bandwidth, it can use the lack of laws against paid prioritization to allow them to extort money from other companies on the Internet who are not their customers to pay for buying more bandwidth. This is bad, because it allows ISPs to hold arbitrary companies hostage and causes a complete breakdown in the way that Internet service is billed. Instead, those ISPs should either put pressure on their peers to get better peering agreements with faster service or raise the prices of their service so that they can afford the needed bandwidth.
• An ISP can throttle some other service to make more room. So if Netflix paid for prioritization, the ISP could reduce bandwidth to other services and use it for making more bandwidth available to Netflix, breaking those other services. This is bad, because it is inherently an unfair distortion of the free market and represents unfair competition.

In every case, paid prioritization causes harm for consumers, and benefits only the ISPs. In no case can it create any benefit for any consumers. Period. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something—probably Internet service.

Re: There is nothing wrong with the proposal

[Rakarra]

Throttling is reducing bandwidth regardless of how much is available. Basically it is creating "artificial congestion".

Prioritization doesn't reduce bandwidth per se, unless the network is heavily congested.

It's like the "toll lanes" on a freeway. It's not too bad for the people who pay, but it's a lane that was taken out of service from general traffic, thus making the traffic for non-payers even worse.