FCC Votes Yet Another Study of Net Neutrality

yuna49 writes to let us know that the US Federal Communications Commission last week announced a Notice of Inquiry (PDF) into: "...the behavior of broadband market participants, including: (1) How broadband providers are managing Internet traffic on their networks today; (2) Whether providers charge different prices for different speeds or capacities of service; (3) Whether our policies should distinguish between content providers that charge end users for access to content and those that do not; (4) How consumers are affected by these practices." eWeek reports that the study is targeted at whether broadband providers are treating some content providers more favorably than others. Distinctly absent is any discussion about port filtering or other restrictions on Internet usage. The two Democrats on the Commission pressed for a broader "Notice of Rulemaking" to move more quickly towards a policy of non-discrimination. The Republican majority ignored these arguments and voted for an Inquiry, to which the Democrats acceded.

Republican Majority

The Republican majority ignored these arguments and voted for an Inquiry, to which the Democrats acceded.

I don't get it...Why in the world is there a Republican majority?

Re:Republican Majority

The FCC isn't Congress, it's part of the Executive branch.

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Maybe because a majority of the people (voters) are Republicans? That is what majority means.

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Given that an incumbent generally has pretty big advantage

Yeah, but when you have the huge budgets of the MSM campaigning against the war, you might get a distorted outcome.

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Yeah, but when you have the huge budgets of the MSM campaigning against the war, you might get a distorted outcome.

Exactly which mass media outlet is campaigning against the war? I can't say I've seen any campaigning, and despite what the Bush administ

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Reporting bad things about the war is not the problem. Reporting only bad things is. You think that there are only bad things to report. That's because you believe what they say. They also believe what they say, because they don't believe anything good

Another vote?

They're going to continue this until they get the vote desired.

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It's really difficult to do, though.

Boooring...

This article is worthless without some kind of reference to tubes.

Along these lines...

My question for Net Neutrality has always been: why do we need a law like this? What is currently happening that needs to be fixed by this law? Forcing websites to cough up to be given a high bandwidth access to end users would be bad, but (AFAIK) that's not happening. I really don't see a need for this type of law, and I see no reason to make a law to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

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Network neutrality at the moment is largely a result of common carrier regulation by the FTC. The idea behind net neutrality legislation is to codify that regulation into law, rather than hoping that things don't change, and to make the regulation apply ev

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From Wikipedia Net Neutrality article [wikipedia.org]: Currently there is full network neutrality in the United States, meaning that telecommunications companies do not offer different rates to internet consumers based on content or service type; however, there are no leg

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They are at the whim of the FCC. Read the rest of the article. The regulatory environment, i.e. the 'threat of regulation', right now is enough to keep things running. The idea behind legislation is to take it out of the hands of the FCC, making it 'more g

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However at least some of the carriers have begun doing two things: a) arguing that Net Neutrality is illogical and inappropriate and that they need to implement biases, and b) implementing biases. Most noteably many users of Vonage and Comcast have seen t

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So just to follow up. It is not a solution in search of a problem it is a problem that is growing and being grown by many well-funded actors who no longer want net neutrality (but still want common carrier restrictions). The goal now is to put in place a

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Then that article is completely wrong. I'll submit an edit. That doesn't even make sense.

that telecommunications companies do not offer different rates to internet consumers based on content or service type

What? I've never heard of an ISP that didn't offer different rates to customers based on service type. Let me do a quick check here:

Earthlink [earthlink.net] has 3 plans ranging

Re:Along these lines...

However, you notice that there is no mention made of *where* your traffic goes. The fact that you pay one flat rate to access Google, Slashdot, Youtube, and what have you is due to the FCC's Net Neutrality regulation. Without this regulation, your cable or telephone company would be within its rights to charge you different rates for different web sites. In essence, the Internet would become like cable TV, with websites being broken into various tiers, and you having to pay extra to access other tiers.

Example: if Comcast struck a deal with Yahoo, Yahoo would become the default search engine, and Google would be moved into a "premium" tier, meaning that I'd have to pay extra in order to access Google. I don't have to do this today because of Net Neutrality.

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>>In fact, it would suck so much that competing ISPs would take notice at Comcast's irate customer base, and would offer Internet service at fixed, flat rates.<<

That would only apply in places where Comcast didn't have a monopoly for geographic

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Think of it as an extension of the antitrust regulations...

In this case the laws are possibly needed to control the backbone operators who will have no qualms about charging "unneutrally" once the market is ripe, which will give ISPs no choice but to pass

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When ISPs start doing this, and it actually becomes a problem, I'll (probably) support some form of Net Neutrality. Until then, I see no reason for government regulation.

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Didn't Cox communications start blocking Vonage in one of the Southern states (Tennessee, I think) a little while ago? As I recall consumer outrage forced Cox to relent on the ban, but there was no regulation forcing Cox to do so.

Re:Along these lines...

That's another myth. How does network neutrality stifle innovation? When common carrier laws were created for shipping companies, it didn't stifle innovation. Nor did it stifle innovation for telephone companies. And it isn't stifling internet companies either.

I've been replying a lot to this discussion, so let me cut down to the real reason we are in the situation we have now:
Comcast says I get 4Mbps of bandwidth. But they really divided 400Mbps across 100 customers, said I get 4Mbps (that's a simplified version). Now that everybody wants to download stuff from YouTube, Comcast finds that they don't actually have enough bandwidth to give everyone 4MBps. So they decide that maybe they can charge some customers to have priority over others. They make more money and finance their rollout of real 4MBps service. They they tell everyone it is 8MBps service, and sell another the option to give priority over other users. This cycle repeats forever. But it's a scam - one person gets 4MBps only because someone else's connection is now slowed down even further because their packets are delayed. You see, you really can't "speed up" a packet, you can only slow one down. There's an expression "robbing Peter to pay Paul" when you get behind on one bill, and so you pay another bill late to make this one on time. That's what the ISPs want to do.

A similar thing happened years ago with phone service. Phone companies would sell caller ID, and a service to block sales calls. They they sold the sales people a service to block their number. Then they sold a service to send blocked numbers to a special message that told them to leave a message. Then they sold sales people a service that got around the special message. In the end, nobody ever got what they paid for. The phone companies just pitted their customers against each other. So it is with "priority" service. Once everyone pays for priority, who has priority then?

Instead, we need to go the opposite direction than all of this. We need to make ISPs report accurate information on their service level (The FDA mandates food labeling and nobody went out of business). Then, we need to open-up the local telco lines to competition. You do that by separating ISP service from phone line service. Ex: Verizon does the local phone lines, but Comcast, Earthlink, CavTel, etc. provide ISP services over those lines. This will open-up real competition. In Maryland, they passed a law about 5 years ago that did this, and DSL suddenly appeared everywhere and new ISPs arrived. Now that the law reverted, my current ISP is likely to vanish since my local telco (Verizon) can force them out of business once the time limit is up.

It all gets really complicated. But in the end, Network Neutrality just means everyone is treated fairly. It has worked in every aspect of the telecom industry thus far. If your issue is that no law is needed, that is a reasonable position since the FCC is handling this now. But remember, the telecom companies stand to gain a lot by starting the phony "prioritization" scam, and you will find fake blogs and links all over the place with info about why Network Neutrality is evil. The telecoms see a chance at eliminating the FCC law, and the fight is really just to retain the status quo, more so than to add any new regulation.

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I am personally against the current form of net neutrality. I think that government intervetion is almost always bad. The ONLY regulations that should be passed:

1. All backbone providers must allow other providers to connect to them on a naked pipe.
2. All

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Except for throttling by protocol, I would agree. Throttling by protocol sounds reasonable, but I don't trust the ISPs to do it equitably. They'll do something smarmy like slow video then charge a special rate for it, even if there is plenty of bandwidth

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If the FCC wants to make a rule saying that two-way, real-time voice communication can have priority over other forms of net traffic because it is necessary for the service to work

I think this scenario is the crux of our disagreement. My guess is this: if prioritization is necessary to make it work, then it is because there is not enough bandwidth to go around, so either: 1) the user needs to throttle back their bit rate and/or la

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That is exactly the point. Network capacity needs to be increased.

We agree on this point.

If all the energy going into the net neutrality fight went into the fight to increase capacity we might be able to make some progress!

But if we don't get network neutrality, then the telecom companies won't increase capacity.

The whole point of network neutrality, from the telecom point of view, is to make money without spending money to increase capacity. They w

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They will not build out more capacity if they don't have the right to reserve a portion for their own use.

Network Neutrality hasn't stopped them from building out before. They are still doing it now.

Why we would stop them for reserving a portion for video and private network sevices that would help pay for the investment.

Network neutrality doesn't stop them from reserving a portion for video and private network services. There's nothing in the law that stops them from doing tha

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I really don't see a need for this type of law, and I see no reason to make a law to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

I'm sure people said the same thing about Fair Use rights. "Why do we need a law that proactively states people can use their music they

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I can answer some of those questions for you:

why do we need a law like this?

We already have a net neutrality law, which is why very little is currently happening. But the current neutrality law is really just an FCC statute called the "common carrier" [wikipedia.org] law, and the statute was weakened

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Net Neutrality has nothing to do with bandwidth to end users. I'm not sure where that one came from.

... or re-prioritize the network stream...

Having my bittorrent re-prioritized behind VOIP would slow the rate, no? Should everyone else on my block use VOIP all the time while I'm socially inept and spend all my time downloading different linux distros because I can't make up my mind, I coul

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But the current neutrality law is really just an FCC statute called the "common carrier" law, and the statute was weakened a few years ago.

ISPs are not common carriers. Therein lies the problem. Weakened? Try obliterated, at least from a networkin

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What is currently happening that needs to be fixed by this law? Forcing websites to cough up to be given a high bandwidth access to end users would be bad, but (AFAIK) that's not happening.

Yet. There have been noises lately from corporations who wish to ca

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If it's already prohibited, why pass another law? If there is no indication that providers are even looking down a non-neutral path, why pass a law?

Oh, and thanks to whoever modded my original post troll. I'll take that to mean you couldn't formulate a

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Did you not read what the man just said? Here, let me repeat what kmac clearly stated:

"Several bills recently were created (and almost passed) that would specifically allow anti-neutral behavior."

That means the telecoms are pushing bills to do exactly wha

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Watch out for those winds the government keeps secretly creating, it might blow off your tin foil hat.

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That's what duct tape is for.

BTW, you are both basically saying the same thing.

Yes, there really is no need for a new law.

The danger is that once a law is established,
it will be manipulated, even if that law specially
calls for Network Neutrality, the statu

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The danger is that once a law is established,
it will be manipulated, even if that law specially
calls for Network Neutrality, the status quo.

So...you're saying there's less likelihood of telcos manipulating the use and content of the internet if there's NO

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Sure, there's no reason to worry that the telecommunications giants would ever do anything that wasn't in the best interest of Internet users. And the RIAA only wants what's best for music lovers, right? And George Bush knows what's best for the American

stalling

They're just stalling. Sometimes it's easier to delay the affirmative plan indefinitely than to actually defeat it. Of course, it costs money, but it's "taxpayers" money, so that's all right. In northern california, we could really use a light rail system

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Every year, there is a proposal to implement this. What happens is, they spend a couple more million on "studies", and spend the rest on widening the existing roads

Congressional inquiries into Patriot HP domestic FBI illegal Enron .bomb wiretaps DMCA comes to mind.

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I have no problem with the gist of your argument, but I'm unsure as to your example:
In northern california, we could really use a light rail system, as there are a lot of people who commute all the way to san francisco.

Please be more specific as to where y

#5

#5: What happened to the subsidy money given to these providers?

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/202124 0_F.shtml

Submitting comments to the FCC

Is there a way to submit comments to the study? Most Slashdotters can answer some of those "questions" off the top of their heads. I'm not going to fault the FCC for doing more research, just so long as it is real research and not a secret way to rubber-

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It's not like the congress can solve routing problems.

Well, they could, if they took that away from the NSA.

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Your idea of fair regulation will not make things better. In fact, every thing will get a lot worse. Your provider is selling you a best effort service, and while those pipes are under utilized, everything is great. As it becomes necessary to keep pipes

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I have never had more than one choice of cable internet provider and one choice of DSL.

you're lucky that you have that. there are many places where you only get one, and sometimes you get none.

there is no competition in the residentail bandwidth market

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collusion (oligopoloy) is essentially the same thing as a monopoly. i suppose that you could get a dozen providers to collude... but the temptation might be too great for a small player to undercut the rest of the cartel. too bad that bandwidth has to be

Re:Net neutrality means gov't regulation of the ne

I totally agree. I think government regulation sucks. They should get rid of those stupid laws like Human Equality so I don't have to let them damn black people on my bus without charging them extra.

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I have thought a lot lately about the lunch counter issue. I think forcing the racists to let blacks eat at their establishment probably robbed would-be black business owners from the opportunity to make an inclusive or all-black establishment and instead

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It's no surprise that I agree with most of what you are saying because you were agreeing with me in the first place :). I think you should slightly modify this, though:

However, this would offset one of the problems that liberals often complain about: urba