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Hardware Firms Go Against Crowd on Net Neutrality
Posted by
Zonk
on Thu May 18, 2006 07:56 AM
from the turncoats dept.
from the turncoats dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Some of the largest hardware firms in the world, like Cisco and 3M, have sent a letter to U.S. policymakers asking them not to be too hasty on mandated net neutrality laws." From the News.com article: "'It is premature to attempt to enact some sort of network neutrality principles into law now,' says the letter, which was signed by 34 companies and sent to House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. 'Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules.'"
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House Committee Approves 'Net Neutrality' Bill 198 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Ars Technica is reporting that the US House Judiciary Committee approved a bill yesterday that will prevent broadband providers from charging extra fees to websites for delivering their content to users." Ars's response is only guarded optimism, unfortunately. From the article: "The fate of the bill is not clear, as there are now two competing bills vying for the attention of the House floor. HR 5252, the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act, was overseen by the House Committee on Energy and Commerce and is expected to be considered by full House. That bill is seen by some proponents of 'Net neutrality as being too weak, particularly after a Committee vote tossed aside an amendment put forth by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA) that would have enshrined the principle of network neutrality into US law. There is speculation that today's bill, HR 5417, could be proposed as an amendment to HR 5252."
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Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsense. (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally believe that the government has no business regulating net neutrality. The government will be lobbied to the point where the bill actually does more damage than having a law in the first place.
If you need proof of this just look at the anti-spam laws around the world that safe-guard "e-marketing".
I actually suspect that this is going to go away by itself. Who is going to pay for this service? Imagine Google's reply to this: "You're going to make my traffic slower if I don't pay this fee? Well fuck you very much! In fact, I'm going to go to a new bandwidth provider who doesn't try to extort me.
I doubt the PHB's have done the maths on this either. History is a great teacher, perhaps they should pick up a history book. Back in England in the 19th century the price of sending a letter was calculated depending on how far it has to go. Somebody realised that the cost of calculating the tariff actually costed the mail company more than extra profit they were trying to make. They introduced a flat fee and improved profits overnight.
Ask yourselves this, how much is going to cost ISPs to administer this monstrosity? Suppose Google's homepage has to traverse 5 networks to go to my PC. How is Google's fee going to be split across these networks? That sounds like a big fucking pain in the arse to me. How many accountant's salaries am I going to have to pay to remit these funds? Balance this cost against how much additional profit are they are going to make. How much money can you make off bandwidth when it's literally pennies per gigabyte at these scales?
Simon
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:5, Insightful)
Its not the bandwidth provider they have to worry about -- its Peer Connections.
For instance, if you want to connect to the folks that are on AOL, they may mandate that if their user want to connect to your service, they want a cut. After all, it is costing them money to allow users to connect to your service.
At least this is how they see it, forgetting for the moment that the users already paid for the ability to connect to other services.
But no, its not the 'bandwidth providers' they have to worry about -- its the companies that the end users are using that are demanding the money.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:5, Insightful)
> traffic slower if I don't pay this fee? Well fuck you very
> much! In fact, I'm going to go to a new bandwidth provider
> who doesn't try to extort me."
You miss the point. It's not Google's bandwidth supplier that's the problem here. It's *YOUR* ISP. They say to Google: Hey - we have a million users, unless you pay us $X, they'll get 1Kbytes/second to Google and 1Mbytes/second to Yahoo. There is no "somewhere else" that Google can go to. Since the ISP's that get their funding this way will be able to charge their end users less, you'll start to see lower cost (to the consumer) ISP's popping up who get their funding from the sites they provide high bandwidth to.
Who loses? Well, anyone who uses Wikipedia for example. Will Wikipedia be able to pay the top 100 ISP's a few million dollars a year? Certainly not. So you'll find that access to Wikipedia will be dog slow from these low cost ISP's and access to "insert soul-sucking megacorporation here"'s encyclopedia will be fast...albeit advert laden.
I have a small web site of my own - people seem to like accessing it. Will they still come to it if it's uploaded at 1 character per second? No. Will I pay a dozen ISP's for the privilage of providing free information to their customers? No. Hence, all the 'little guys' who make the Internet such a rich and interesting place will *die* - and the Internet will be like cable TV - advert ridden - and showing the views of maybe 10 companies with 'ratings' and such determining what you see and content sinking to the lowest common denominator. Instead of Wikipedia we'll have soap operas.
So what a non-neutral net does is push the funding of the Internet from consumers (who demand good service to the places they happen to want to visit) to corporations (who will now be the only viable information providers). It's a VERY serious matter.
In an ideal world, consumers would realise this is a problem and refuse to buy Internet service from ISP's who don't practice net neutrality. However, because 99.999% of subscribers don't know anything about this issue, they'll choose whichever ISP is cheapest regardless of the fact that they'll be cutting themselves out of access to the more interesting places on the net.
So - is this a case for government intervention...sadly, I think it is.
This is the very same problem as with telephony where the government requires all phone companies to string expensive wires out to teeny-tiny non-profitable communities so everyone can have a phone. Without that, you would either have to pay a small fortune for a phone if you lived in a small town out in the boonies - or you wouldn't be able to get one at all. The 'universal service' provisions of the telephony act make that a fairer situation.
It's the same deal with the Internet - ISP's should be required to provide service to little web sites and big ones equally and let the consumers decide where they want to get their information from.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:4, Informative)
For example, I pay Cox Communications each month and in return I get unlimited access to the web (well, as unlimited as my bandwidth allows). What your proposing (rather, what I'm going to pull from your comment) is that it won't be the well established companies that pioneer this method, they have too much at stake if they're the only one adopting this. It will have to be some start-up that tries to make it's way in to the market by offering low-cost high-speed internet. Now, you've got this ISP throttling some sites, and making others faster, how does this benefit the user? If I wanted to pay $9.95 a month for dog-slow internet, I'd still be using (for example) NetZero. Now what good is it to me the consumer if the only sites I can access at a decent broadband speed are "Microsoft.com" or "CNN.com", absolutely none.
Now perhaps there is a small sub-section of the general populace that would adopt this, but I think that in the end any company trying to use these tactics of moving the cost of service off of their customers on to the "content providers" will quickly realise, it ain't happening.
To coin a phrase "It just don't make sense." Also another major downfall these companies would have to look out for is just being "kicked off" the net by the major back-bone holders.
I dunno, I just see this as being more US-centric FUD, ooh the big bad companies are out to make money by "extorting" the "good guys", it's already being done, and I'm the one being extorted. Wake me up when I've got fiber to my house, a dedicated range of IPv6 addresses for every computer in my home and bandwidth that would make a script-kiddie nut himself all for less than $50 a month.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:3, Informative)
Ummm, it doesn't? That's the entire net neutrality point. Absent these safeguards companies like SBC have incentive to offer Google and Yahoo spe
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:4, Insightful)
Will the average consumer even realize that it is their ISP doing the throttling? They most likely will blame wikipedia.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:4, Insightful)
The same way that if an operating system gets all buggy and filled with viruses and vulnerabilities, then the users will switch operating system...
Unfortunately, that's not going to happen either. The users will keep using what they have always been using and what they are comfortable with, and they will tolerate, even enjoy, any raping that the big corporations will shove up their butt, and then they'll demand more.
Cell phones, ISP's, operating systems, WalMarts, gas... the average customer doesn't want to make the effort to vote with its dollars.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:4, Informative)
riiight. (Score:5, Insightful)
"The Market" is no magical thing. It's not natural, it's not a cure-all. Markets are formed by rules and regulations. Net neutrality is a reasonable imposition on the market for bandwidth.
If you doubt the Market is artificial, ask why we don't just get rid of contract law. I mean, buyers will just gravitate to sellers who live up to their contracts, right? No need for enforcement.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:2)
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:5, Informative)
A lot of this discussion ignores how transport really works in the Internet. Having dealt with backbone issues since 1993 (ack! that's like... 200 dog years or something), let me share some perspective (apologies for length and anonymous - have a slashdot stalker/former employee who's off his meds to contend with):
How transport works
Contrary to a constant misnomer, there is not "a" backbone. There are numerous private networks operated by companies at various lower levels of the OSI model. Some own their own fiber and cable, while others lease IRUs (irrevokable right of use) - sort of like having a 15-year lease on a condo. Some have used the model Bob Collet (original senior executive of Sprintlink and CIX board chairman) was believed to have coined of "tier 1/2/3" providers. In this model, a tier 1 provider is sufficiently geographically diverse and connects to others via multilateral and more commonly (these days) bilateral connections to other tier ones. Traffic traveling between tier 1 networks is usually handled without settlement if there is not significant disparity between networks. Settlement is a nice word for fee, incidentally. Tier 2 networks are those that predominantly connect to tier 1s for their transport, and they pay the tier 1 for it. Tier 3 in the model connect to tier 2 for their transport and also pay.
Google transport
Google buys transport from several tier 1 networks. These networks have agreements with other networks to exchange traffic with each other, each bearing their own cost to get to the place where they meet up. These networks also have lots of tier 2 and 3 customers who pay them money for access since these 2 and 3 tier networks cannot afford the cost of an international high-capacity backbone which is pretty much the requirement before someone will enter into a bilateral (I'm horribly oversimplifying). Google has paid for its transport and probably has service level guarantees of traffic performance through the tier 1 networks it pays. Some DSL outfit like Verizon may buy transport from another tier 1 provider who connects to Google's tier 1 providers. If Verizon's access to Google sucks, it should get a better tier 1 or pay for its own circuits directly to Google. Seeking to charge Google for that transport is bizarre and not how things work - sort of like making rivers run backwards (which usually requires an act of Congress).
Eyeballs vs. Content
This "Google must pay Verizon for access to their eyeballs" issue isn't new. It's been fought since some first saw it rise in 1995-1996 when some NSF-connected tier ones decided to mess with PRDB (policy-routed database) routes and limit access to NSF nodes (as the NSFNET was operated by ANS under NSF contract - separate and lengthy discussion). NSF was the content of the day and a few, such as the BBN NSF regional acquisitions (e.g. NEARNET and other nonprofit networks which were acquired by the for-profit BBN and instantly pushed into a network access battles) decided to try to limit access in order to extract more fees.
BBN got hammered then, and again learned the hard way with the whole Exodus and Genuity battles. Again, one party which was mostly consumer customer oriented decided to charge the producers of content for access to those consumer eyeballs. The result was similar to the response your local cable TV outfit would get by threatening HBO that it would be dropped or relegated to one channel if it didn't pay the cable company fees for access to their eyeballs. HBO knows consumers will just switch to Dish or DirecTV. BBN learned when numerous commercial clients dropped their T1s and switched to a network that wasn't inferior in its access.
Bandwidth Hogs and QoS?
There is a real issue here, but it isn't what the consumer broadband providers are telling you. DSL and Cable Internet have numerous QoS issues, are mostly obsolete standards incapable of provid
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:3, Interesting)
To my mind, the only reason the telcos have any ability to even fight this fight is their government-sanctioned monopoly on the last mile. Basically as long as
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:5, Insightful)
Net Neutrality in my mind is comparable to forcing the Bells to allow other people to sell telephones that hooked into their network.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:3, Interesting)
Its not merely comparable, but with the increasing popularity of VoIP, it is the exact same thing.
Which is, of course, why
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:5, Informative)
I read three tomes by Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson. At some point in time electricity company was forced to sell electricity at a lower rate, which the company strongly opposed to. The government won, and later the company had to admit that they made much more profit. This story is not to demonstrate that government always knows best, but to demonstrate that free market also doesn't always know best. Your popular belief is as wrong as the opposite. The only valid point is, look at each issue individually.
Other points not discussed in your contribution: Inertia from consumers to change provider (with all the concommitant hassle, especially now you can't take your e-mail address with you).
Another casse in point: Here in the Netherlands we have to pay for all kinds of banking services, each with their own rates. Only boring IT guys got happy because of this. I think it is completely in line with current behaviour of companies to start inventing all different kinds of things to charge for. xyz packets will be more expensive than pqr packets. You see the same thing (at least over here) with Internet over your phone. One pays megabucks per megabyte. SMS the same thing. Compared to the number of bytes required for voice it is nothing, but they are charged at a premium.
There is also the contagious nature of the behaviour. If one provider does it, and charges another provider, then the other provider has to pass on the cost, and will start doing the same. And on it goes.
I'm perfectly happy with laws that require ISPs to pass thru any packet irrespective of its type.
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:3, Insightful)
I read three tomes by Robert A. Caro on Lyndon Johnson. At some point in time electricity company was forced to sell electricity at a lower rate, which the company strongly opposed to. The government won, and later the company had to admit that they made
Re:Not laws, you the reality will stop this nonsen (Score:3, Insightful)
If you need proof of this just look at the anti-spam laws around the world that safe-guard "e-marketing".
What kind of argument is thi
Self interest directed this move. (Score:5, Insightful)
What companies will profit the most from a tiered, fee-for-QoS internet? The hardware companies which make the products to do this stuff...
Mod this up! (Score:2)
It's the money stupid! (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Self interest directed this move. (Score:3, Informative)
QoS != net neutrality (Score:4, Informative)
QoS was designed into the protocol stack to allow a network provider to provide priority routing for realtime types of service over non-realtime types of service in the presence of contention for limited bandwidth. The idea is that basic services such as HTTP, FTP, and other non-realtime types of service are useful even when the link is temporarily slow, so they use a low priority. Types of services like VoIP or streaming video become completely useless below a certain bandwidth threshold, so they use a higher priority. Overall, the priority is set based on whether the given type of service is useful in the presence of low bandwidth.
It is also worth pointing out that tradionally, QoS only comes into play when there was more traffic passing through a router than the router could handle in a given instant.
The QoS protocols were never intended to discriminate based on network endpoints. If EntityX and EntityY provided the same type of service, QoS was not intended to be used to give EntityX an artificial boost over EntityY.
So keep in mind when thinking about Net Neutrality that you are discussing a whole level of issues over top of traditional QoS. In its basic form, shaping traffic based on protocol types, QoS causes no harm. Only when traffic shaping is done based on endpoints does the topic stop being QoS and start being Net Neutrality. Most likely, the traffic shaping you are referring to in your post prioritizes based on protocol types and applies those prioritization rules regardless of endpoint; therefore you are talking about QoS, not Net Neutrality.
A completely separate issue you bring up that bears consideration is the idea of what constitutes an ISP. Many organizations allow their employees to use the Internet, nominally pursuant to organizational goals. I doubt any one would object to such organizations applying whatever limits on use they want. On the other hand, commercial ISPs exist to sell Internet access to people, and should not apply traffic shaping policies, especially when only a small number of ISPs are available in a given market.
University Internet connections pose the most complex problem, but ultimately they too break down to simple categories. Within the context of administrative offices, labs, and classrooms, the university is clearly like any other organization and within its rights to limit Internet connections. However, many universities also share one Internet connection between offices/labs/classrooms and residence halls. Often, the students living in residence halls are required to pay some fee for the Internet connection (often rolled up into the costs of the dorm) and are prohibited from using an external ISP. In this context, universities clearly act as ISPs and should have the same obligations as ISPs. I am hoping that one of the outcomes of this issue is that universities are forced to differentiate their policies between office/lab/classroom and residence Internet connection, or give resident students a choice in ISP.
In other words... (Score:5, Funny)
Now sports.
Re:In other words... (Score:2)
They make the hardware to do heavy shaping of service after all.
Stop the letter-writing campaigns (Score:3, Insightful)
Regulate Who? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Regulate Who? (Score:5, Interesting)
well, what would you write... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:well, what would you write... (Score:5, Funny)
"
Dear honorable congressmen and congresswomen,
We, the network hardware manufacturers, took a bath at the end of the dot-com bubble due to (to simplify a bit) poor supply chain management (oversupply and the like). We are trying to make a compback, and find your net neutrality proposals quite troubling. We have spent a large amount of capital developing technologies that would be used, no, required, in a non-neutral network. In order to meet our revenue growth expectations, we need a non-neutral network. Please, don't be hasty. You could stifle **mysterious hand waving** technological innovation. You don't want to stifle technology, do you? Why do you hate technology? It creates jobs for Americans. You don't hate Americans, do you? Without jobs, how will they feed their children? Please, don't force a neutral internet, think of the children!
Sincerely,
The always altruistic corporations
"
Corporatese-English (Score:4, Funny)
Please don't do your job yet! Hear us out first.
'Legislating in the absence of real understanding of the issue risks both solving the wrong problem and hobbling the rapidly developing new technologies and business models of the Internet with rigid, potentially stultifying rules.'
You're all too stupid to know what to do. Let us educate you monkeys on the correct decision to make, so that we can keep doing the stuff we want to. We promise you'll come out of it looking good.
Other preferential treatment (Score:2)
Preferent
Re:Other preferential treatment (Score:3, Informative)
Well, sure, that's the surface idea, in the sense that to get packets delivered at all (this is painted as "with higher
Hardware vs Software (Score:2)
Capitalism and Net Neutrality (Score:5, Insightful)
So yeah, enforcing net-neutrality, or making ISPs common carriers would destroy the market for replacing all back bone routers with Cisco QoS capable routers. I fail to see how a profitable business opportunity for a hand full of companies out weighs the freedom and equality of service for all online service providers.
If the ISPs are NOT common carriers, can we sue them for transmitting child porn?
-Rick
Broken down . . . (Score:5, Insightful)
"Some of the largest hardware makers in the world, including 3M, Cisco, Corning and Qualcomm, sent a letter to Congress on Wednesday firmly opposing new laws mandating Net neutrality--the concept that broadband providers must never favor some Web sites or Internet services over others."
Here's how I read this:
"Manufacturers of multi-layer traffic-shaping hardware sent a letter endorsing a business model that would require heavy deployments of multi-layer traffic-shaping hardware"
It can further be broken down:
"Money Good. No make law make us lose money."
Sure there is self interest... (Score:4, Interesting)
There are the same folks who seem to believe a
Do we expect these guys to understand and make a good decision regarding the future of the internet? With that it mind, I echo this message. Don't rush into a decision. Perhaps if they take their time one of two favorable outcomes will emerge.
1 - Logic and reason will win out and good legislation will emerge.
2 - Congress will release they have no fucking clue and just leave it all alone.
I'm hoping for the latter over the former.
Maybe Cisco et. all should talk to AT&T (Score:3, Insightful)
There have been a number of cases in the past where the government says "Clean up your room. If you don't clean it, we'll clean it for you and we guarantee you won't like what we do."
If Cisco and other large hardware vendors are so nervous of the government intruding on the Internet (as they should be), then they should be talking to AT&T. Once the major ISPs drop their crazy notion that they should be paid extra for something they're already doing, then the need for government intervention is eliminated.
OBVIOUS: (Score:2)
Look at handsoff.org. It's a BLATANTLY obvious front for the telecoms. Well, somewhat blatantly obvious, they didn't really try to hide it becau
Turncoats. (Score:4, Insightful)
They want this trash because they can sell improbably expensive networking gear to starry-eyed ad executives. The fact that net neutrality -- the de facto standard until today -- brought them to this point is irrelevant.
Yes, I know they're publicly-held companies; yes, I know that their apologists will shrug and say they have to be utter bastards. Not the point.
Who would you rather deal with on this? (Score:5, Interesting)
People like Rep. Sensenbrenner in Congress who advocate totalitarian controls over your internet use [blindmindseye.com] or a private business that can't legally tell you what to do except through a contract you signed with them? Quite frankly with the way that Congress is these days, I wouldn't trust them to regulate our local parking meters, let alone our section of the Internet.
As far as anti-competitive behavior, like the Madison River issue, goes, there are existing federal legal mechanisms for handling them. It's not anti-competitive for Verizon to only sell 25% of their network. It's their loss if their customers want to pay for better access, but can't get it because Verizon is reserving too much of its network for its own service.
The problem is, as always, government regulation at every level. There are enormous government-imposed costs on starting your own broadband or television service. The best way to create a competitive market is genuine deregulation, like ending all taxes and regulations on the construction and development of local private networks. All of them. Toss that spawn of satan out with the bathwater and be done with it.
Now let me ask y'all this. If Sensenbrenner gets his way, raise your hand all of you who want the government to be your ISP via municipal services. That's a straight ticket to getting no sympathy from the court when your privacy rights are screwed by the government.
Re:Who would you rather deal with on this? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Who would you rather deal with on this? (Score:3, Insightful)
QoS vs neutrality (Score:4, Insightful)
But if you set your Cisco to give better QoS to verizonporn.com streams, and to make the streams from qwestadult.com choppy (presumably because you're Verizon, or have been paid by them) that's not neutral.
Traffic shaping where different classes of packets are given different routing preferences should not be restricted by law - within reason it improves the Net for everyone. Traffic shaping where the origin of the packets causes them to be treated differently is not neutral, not "common carrier," and should be totally illegal.
Support for Tierd Net (Score:5, Insightful)
With influence comes responsability, I pray that I am up to the task, and do it right.
Re:WHATS NET NEUTRALITY (Score:5, Informative)
The two basic arguments are:
net neutraility laws good) Here the thinking and the reason they want net neutrality laws, is that large ISP and the companies that own the trunks and large communication segments would charge companies extra money to carry thier traffic. So for instance your ISP may require Google, since they are the big named one, to pay the ISP a certain amount per year in order that you as the customer can use Google at the same speed you could reach some unknown search engine. Google does not pay and you as the customer get a slow connection on your ISP equipment to the Google servers.
net neutraility laws are bad) It removes the abaility of companies to provide quaility of service packages. So if your ISP wanted to provide an extra service where packets that are marked as comeing from a gaming server would be given higher priority then other packets. With net neutrality laws that would be forbidden.
Re:is it just me... (Score:4, Informative)
You're talking about paying more to get a faster connection. The proposal is to give you a fast connection, and then artificially throttle when you connect to certain web sites, as a way of extorting money from those sites.
Re:Hrmm... a POSSIBLE link between the two... (Score:4, Informative)
Hrmm, let's see here. Telecom providers want to charge for best access to their pipes. Telecom providers buy LOTS OF NETWORK HARDWARE. Suddenly, hardware providers agree with them! I am shocked, SHOCKED to find them in bed together!! SHOCKED!
You've hit the nail on the head here. Cisco and the gang have been trying to sell people on the new management and Quality of Service features for years. They can make a pile of cash selling ISPs the gear they need to know what traffic is coming from and going to a given location, what QoS that "customer" has paid them, and guaranteeing that the level is enforced. In fact, I work at a company that has tools that let them do that (among many other things) right now. I have stock options and profit sharing and stand to make a pretty penny myself if ISPs are not held to the same standard as other common carriers. I'm more than willing to not make that profit in exchange for things being done properly. Cisco and many others smell green. I've heard more than one network gear operator use the metaphor of the arms dealer. Arms dealers are in favor of more lax UN restrictions of arms buildup and invasion of neighboring dictatorships? Gee what a surprise.
Google already pays for bandwidth (Score:5, Insightful)
Um, they do pay more. Oodles more than you do. Net neutrality isn't about not paying for bandwidth, its about this: Lets say you have an ISP (we'll call it "Comcast"). Lets say that Google has an ISP, let's call ("AT&T"). Let's say, for illustration's sake, that Comcast's network doesn't directly connect to AT&T's network, but they both connect to another backbone provider (we'll say "Verizon"). So the connection from you to Google looks something like this --
You Comcast Verizon AT&T Google
Currently, you pay Comcast for a certain level of bandwidth in each direction, Google pays AT&T for a certain level of bandwidth in each direction, and Comcast and AT&T each have an agreement with Verizon covering the bandwidth of their users being transferred, in each direction, over Verizon's network, which instead of cash is likely an in-kind ("I'll carry your users packets, you'll carry mine") agreement. Every bit of bandwidth is paid for, in cash or in-kind, on every network that carries it, and he who asks for more capacity is paying more for it.
What the telcos want is to allow Comcast and Verizon to demand that Google negotiate, individually, an additional payment to them each directly, or face having Google's packets dropped when travelling across their networks -- and they particularly want that ability to impose those charges on people providing services, surprisingly enough, that compete with ones where telcos already are the main provide (VoIP competing with regular telephone service) or want to dominate (like video-on-demand, or advanced portal services like Google.)
They pay by the Gig... (Score:3, Interesting)
You're also forgetting that what the telecoms are proposing here isn't just looking at how much, but also where it's goi
Re:easy solution (Score:3, Insightful)
But once there's enough infrastructure in place, the ISPs will find they have spare capacity, and won't need all their incom