FCC Votes Yet Another Study of Net Neutrality 102
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 (Score:2)
I don't get it...Why in the world is there a Republican majority?
Re:Republican Majority (Score:5, Informative)
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How do you figure? The last election was decidedly favorable for the Democrats...And the last presidential election was won by a very slim majority. Given that an incumbent generally has pretty big advantage, especially during wartime, the best you could argue is that half of the voters are Republicans. Realistically, it's much less than that, because there are a lot of people who vote for whomever they like in
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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.
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Exactly which mass media outlet is campaigning against the war? I can't say I've seen any campaigning, and despite what the Bush administration wants us all to believe, reporting real things about the war that Bush doesn't like instead of warm fuzzy make believe stories about it isn't the same as campaigning, it's called "reporting".
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Another vote? (Score:2)
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Boooring... (Score:2)
Along these lines... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Oh, and thanks to whoever modded my original post troll. I'll take that to mean you couldn't formulate a coherent argument against my point because it was so brilliantly put
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"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 what you're saying we shouldn't worry about. If we don't have strong net neutrality laws soon, we will lose the best parts of the Internet within two years. People with power hate the fact that those of us without power can reach a wide audience with little
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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 status quo.
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So...you're saying there's less likelihood of telcos manipulating the use and content of the internet if there's NO law?
Okey dokey.
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I don't know what I was getting all worked up over.
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Actually, the whole thing started when SBC/AT&T [arstechnica.com] specifically said they desire to tier the Internet. It is not difficult to understand the motivation of the telecoms if you look at how SBC/AT&T and Verizon/MCI managed to end up on top of the telecom reconsolidation frenzy.
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How is this not a solution in search of a problem? Are there regulations that can be enforced, but wouldn't fall under "legal restriction" as defined in Wikipedia?
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At this point at least some of the carriers have begun to (apparently) break the rules as they see fit all the
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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 from $29.95/month for 1.5Mbps to $44.95/month for 6Mbps.
Comcast [comcast.com] has 2 plans - 12MBps burst rate for $42.95/month and 16MBps burst rate for $52.95/month.
And am I supposed to believe that Slashdot pays $42.95/month for their internet connection? I'll start
Re:Along these lines... (Score:5, Informative)
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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But then again, your example is of search engines and data aggregates.
Where exactly does regulation begin and end? In an open market economy, access to data is a commodity, not the data itself. Providers would have to establish some sort of NYSE to measure value of Web sites and price them accordingly.
Also, just because you have the entrance into the Internet does not automatically grant you access to the data. If you wish to continue your example, then owners of the servers would be able to exact tolls a
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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.
Let's imagine Comcast enters into an agreement with Yahoo, and begins charging their customers higher rates for visiting Google. I think we can all agree that would suck. 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.
Bottom line is if the customers don't want to be charged based on *what* they access instead of *how much* they access, then there will always be an eager business ready to make a buc
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That would only apply in places where Comcast didn't have a monopoly for geographic reasons. I am currently forced to use Comcast because I am too far from Qwest's switching station to get DSL service. So, in my case there would have to be a sufficiently high number of irate people for Qwest to build out its infrastructure to accommoda
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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 it on to a consumer.
After all, 1000 bytes of email is "worth" more to a consumer than the same 1kB as part of a streaming audio. Now look at the cell phone industry in the US to see the kind of shit the Internet will turn into once they reason like that.
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Re:Along these lines... (Score:4, Insightful)
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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1. All backbone providers must allow other providers to connect to them on a naked pipe.
2. All providers must use standard protocols*.
3. Providers may only throttle data/bandwidth based on protocol, not orgin/destination.
*I'd leave defining "standard" up to ICAAN, with these additional rules:
1. The protocol must be open - anyone can see how it works
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How's this? They can throttle based on protocol but only using the throttling rules that I set.
Also, the major ban
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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 latency expectations; or 2) the network capacity needs to be increased. I don't think re-prioritizing would actually solve the problem anyway. If videoconferencing was eating up that much bandwidth, then the videoconferences would likely start to interfere
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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 would rather just sell "prioritization" services. They are trying to convince the FCC and the legislature that they cannot possibly increase capacity without "alternate streams of revenue" (AKA scamming their customers)
If we win the fight for network neutr
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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 that now. Plenty of companies pay for private network services, and they can run anything they want over that. And plenty of companies run the wire themselves and use it for their own purposes. The military does. DARPA did it. Universities do it to conne
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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 purchased any way they see fit?" The record companies would never do something so consumer unfriendly as to try an dictate how people enjoy their product, or say they had to buy a separate copy of an album on tape to use in their Walkman instead of just d
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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 a few years ago. One particular ISP announced that they think neutrality is unfair, and they plan on violating it. (It was a quote about how Google doesn't pay that ISP when Google traffic went to their customers, which isn't true. I would have to dig
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Net Neutrality has nothing to do with bandwidth to end users. I'm not sure where that one came from.
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 could have my bandwidth throttled. In this case I am, btw, an end user.
throughput vs latency (Score:1)
You might want to study up on the difference between throughput and latency.
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Basically companies are decidin
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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 networking perspective.
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Yet. There have been noises lately from corporations who wish to cash in on mergers which have created large blocks of internet subscribers. Noteably the CEO of SBC has been making serious threats to change the way the internet works [techdirt.com] by charging content providers to have access to SBC customers.
And make no mistake about i
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stalling (Score:1)
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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 you live. There are Amtrak commuter trains from the South Bay (as far south as Gilroy) and as far east as Sacramento. In the East Bay and Peninsula there is also BART. These all go to San Francisco. Perhaps you meant from the North Bay (Sonoma, Napa, etc.)?
#5 (Score:2, Interesting)
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060131/20212
Re:Net neutrality means gov't regulation of the ne (Score:2)
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I think we should be civil to each other, and that if a business isn't living up to that consumers should boyco
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Rather than "would", I would use "might" or "could". When you remove government force from the equation, what you can be (re
Government is the lesser of two evils (Score:1)
Submitting comments to the FCC (Score:2)
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Well, they could, if they took that away from the NSA.
Speaking as a Republican (Score:1)
Because the government built the infrastructure upon which these companies have built their businesses.
We are having quite fine Internet outside of USA. It's cheaper and faster. But then we don't have morons elected for their good looks who are trying to poke around and disturb the Internet.
Perhaps, for now. Money is more addictive than any narcotic. When the entire world population is hooked on easy access
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Your idea of fair regulation will not make things better. In fact, every thing will get a lot worse.
With all due respect; no it won't.
As it becomes necessary to keep pipes closer to capacity due to business models
Stop right there! Business models have to stay in line with regulations and laws. Your bussiness model ends where my rights as a voter, taxpayer, and U.S. citizen begin. Ayn Rand mental gymnastics don't hold up in court, or on the street. In a Free Market Economy(tm) it is imperative that poorly integrated, poorly executed business models fail. They should not be granted governmental protection from failure because thats communism. If a provider oversubscribes, event
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Stop right there! Business models have to stay in line with regulations and laws. Your bussiness model ends where my rights as a voter, taxpayer, and U.S. citizen begin. Ayn Rand mental gymnastics don't hold up in court, or on the street. In a Free Market Economy(tm) it is imperative that poorly integrated, poorly executed business models fail. They should not be granted governmental protection from failure because thats communism. If a provider oversubscribes, eventually they will wreck their own reputation unless they...
Thanks for the support. You are right. They will change their business model because the shared public internet model will fail.
No silver bullet there either. They still need Public RF spectrum/Right of Way to build. They already own the wire, but they depend on the patience, kindness, patronage, and tax dollar of John Q. Public in order to run that wire from point A to point B. They want desperately to reneg on the deal they made with John Q. Public, but before the shenanigans can begin, they need permission from his elected officials. This 'internal' network you speak of WILL NEVER EXIST unless stupid and|or corrupt public officials allow it to.
Sorry. they already exist and with the full blessing of the local municipalities they passed through. They didn't just string 1 pair of fiber when they did their build. They strung 24 or 48 or..
And it already exists. The largest internet provider in the US is building a dual backbone network. One for 'internet' and one for 'internal' traffic. Staring a hurricane in the face and
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They will change their business model because the shared public internet model will fail.
to allow the provider to gouge the consumer with QoS induced scarcity. You jumped the shark.
Sorry. they already exist and with the full blessing of the local municipalities they passed through.
your right... my bad. I Jumped the shark.
They didn't just string 1 pair of fiber when they did their build. They strung 24 or 48 or..
Well no s**t!!!
What I described IS playing by the rules.
Gee i feel better already.
Or are you going to make new rules that fit your idea of what they should be doing?
Who me? If *I* had that kind of power (read; money), I would do it in a second. Unfortunately, the peso got the say so. So they pay for new rules (called laws) that fit their idea of what they think *I* should be doing. I'm one of those educated poor people conservatives hate so much.
This new rule will require every private network in the country to be usable as 'Internet' infrastructure? If you make it so a business model fails and the company adapts a new business model, who is to blame?
If it was possible for *me* to m
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I am for certain net neutrality aspects. No provider should ever intentionally degrade a service on their network, competitor or not. But they should be allowed to sell a higher class of service. of course, thats just the type of thing a educated poor person would say is unfair as it favors those with money. They would be right if they said that, because it does. Businesses like money. Strange, I know.
You are
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If AT&T were to QoS their service through their network and just left Vonage alone to dwell in Best Effort land, is that acceptable? Should it be regulated? I don't think it should be as it is their infrastructure, but then, how could a company such as Vonage whic
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It's not happening yet, but it's certainly being considered.
LK
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And I'm saying, that little note will not buy you what you are hoping it does. It cuts deep but misses all of the vital organs and leaves a big red sticky mess everywhere. A much more surgical strike is needed. Make it illegal to purposefully degrade anyones service. Make it illegal to filter legal content. But if you make it illegal for me to continue to offer MY services on MY network at a guarunteed class of service, I have other options and I will use them. That is not any kind of threat, so
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If your ISP is not offering good access to all the sites you want, then get a better one! It's not like the congress can solve routing problems
I've lived in a small town, a medium sized city, and now in one of the largest, fastest growing cities in the country. I have never had more than one choice of cable internet provider and one choice of DSL. And cable is always better deal than DSL, though that isn't saying much. Hey, that reminds me of something else where no matter where in the country you live, you only have two choices, comes up every November.
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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 and that is the crux of the issue. if there was competition there would be no such thing as net neutrality because neutrality would be standard operating procedure for every provider lest they lose customers to a competitior..
concerns over net neutralit
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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 compatible with other providers in order to be useful or anyone could get into the game.
it's also too bad that EVDO is in the hands of the only two telcos that matter in america (at&t and verizon) who both have landline and DSL/fiber businesses to p
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It's been done before [wikipedia.org], but I also doubt it would happen easily.
We lost true NN long ago & now we fight 4 scra (Score:1, Insightful)
We lost a free and open and truly neutral internet a while ago. When and why did it become OK for every provider to dis-allow open ports and servers? Now a bunch of techno elitists will rush in and say, "Oh no one should be allow to run servers on those type of lines" and "ZOMG, spam will run amuck because people will be allowed to run servers!"
1 - The spam argument is the same as the child porn argument - take away everyone's right because some people
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