Democrats Pan Google-Verizon Net Neutrality Proposal 156
GovTechGuy writes "Four House Democrats wrote to the Federal Communications Commission, urging them to write strict net neutrality rules and reject the framework put forward by Google and Verizon. The lawmakers, including Rep. Anna Eshoo, who represents the district containing Google HQ, said the Google-Verizon proposal increases the pressure on the FCC to come up with actual net neutrality rules, and characterize the deal as harmful to consumers and beneficial for the corporations. In particular, the letter took issue with two pieces of the Verizon-Google proposal: exemptions for managed services and wireless services from strict net-neutrality rules."
Re:You know what (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree that traffic should be tiered, but it should be tiered not on a pay-to-play basis, but rather on the technical merits of prioritizing a particular class of traffic. Traffic that requires low latency for correctness (live audio/video streaming) should have highest priority, followed by light web browsing, followed by long-running downloads that run for hours at a time, simply because delaying packets for those different types of traffic cause vastly different impact on the customer's experience.
If a company wants to pay for faster bandwidth, that's certainly within their right by mirroring their content closer to the end users. They should not be allowed to pay to artificially degrade the traffic of other companies, however. That's a fine line. Moving a server closer to the customer doesn't impact the speed of anybody else's traffic. Creating a high speed secondary backbone for pay-to-play, by contrast, does because that second backbone between ISPs is bandwidth that would otherwise be used for bulk traffic.
The most important thing, however, is really that any protocol-specific optimization *must* be done in a consistent and nondiscriminatory fashion. Companies like Comcast should not be allowed to do QoS prioritization for their own VoIP service but refuse to do so for Skype, Vonage, et al. That's a clear antitrust violation, and that's the sort of thing that NN rules really need to address, since there have been accusations of such abuse happening already.
Re:About time. (Score:3, Interesting)
They -seemed- to be doing a good job, despite stonewalling and slowly rolling out service that is generally two steps behind most of the rest of the world even in the highest density regions of the states.
And now that they only see money these days, manipulating and destroying the openness that the internet offered for the sake of their other business interests (which are in direct conflict) only serves them. They'd happily follow a Cable/Satellite tiered access system if not for the utter shit they'd catch.
Personally, much like phone systems all internet services should be marked as Tier II common carriers and forced to ignore the content of their customers communications.
Managed services are a good idea, if... (Score:5, Interesting)
Managed services are a good idea, if they are run on top of a neutral network. As long as that physical network is developed by an unbiased entity and resold fairly with no oversubscription, ISPs should be free to carve out as much bandwidth as they can pay for. As demand increases, regardless of content, investment in additional capacity will follow.
The problem with the existing situation is that as long as the ISPs own the underlying physical network, the "manages services" aren't running on top of the Internet, but rather the Internet is transformed into a "managed service". There is no incentive whatsoever for the ISPs to invest in additional capacity beyond what they require for their own services, so investment in the Internet is dead, and its value for future innovation is lost.
Re:Best argument ever. (Score:2, Interesting)
What I can't understand is why this concept of just getting what you paid for is so damn difficult for people in office who seem to be championing Net Neutrality yet want to overly complicate things with regulation on top of regulation.
1. Creating long, complicated laws gives themselves (lawyers) and their best friends (lawyers) job security as they endlessly argue about what those long, complicated laws really prohibit or allow.
2. Creating long, complicated laws gives them an out when they choose not to follow them, AKA the Charlie "I didn't realize I was not in compliance because that stuff is complicated" Rangel excuse.
3. Unfortunately, society seems to believe that the proper measure of whether a particular Congress has been "effective" is "by how many reams did they expand the US Code?" We should be measuring their effectivenesss based on how much they trim from the law.
Re:About time. (Score:3, Interesting)
> Last I checked, most consumer-level cable connections such as what most have with comcast explicitly forbid running a "server" on the line in the contract.
That would be one of the first things to be prohibited by any regulation worthy of the name "net neutrality".
The customer pays the ISP to transfer packets. Whether those packets belong to a connection initiated by the client or by another system is none of the ISP's goddamn business.
A net neutrality law should specify which parts of the IP header the ISP is permitted to examine and for what purposes. Examining any other part of the packet (e.g. TCP/UDP ports, TCP flags, etc) should be considered an illegal wiretap.
The fundamental principle of the internet is that routers only know two protocols: IP and ICMP. Anything and everything beyond that is just "payload", meaningful only to the endpoints.
Re:Translation of the translation (Score:3, Interesting)
A) This is slashdot. We don't have to have accuracy to make car analogies.
B) The analogy would be wrong if I was trying to show that everything about legislation and everything about car choice was the same. I wasn't.
C) My analogy wasn't about what car to buy. My analogy was about what car to make.
D) My analogy doesn't make any judgement, positive or negative, on the Google/Verizon "car". Just that the Democrats don't have one.
See, Google/Verizon and these Democrats are design teams and they push cars (policy) for the factory (the FCC) to implement. Google/Verizon have one. These 4 Democrats don't. You see how simple and short that is, compared to your drawn out and highly wrong analogy?
The Google/Verizon proposal doesn't favor themselves. In fact, it would protect their competitors, to use your hideous analogy, from paying huge tolls. Maybe you should read it sometime. What it doesn't do is make additional regulation of wireless. You know, that shitty connection you have now? You'd still have it if the FCC "blindly adopted" the Google/Verizon proposal. There is no sekret $profit!$ clause where adoption means automatic price hikes. If the wireless providers wanted to hike prices, they could do it right now. Whatever reasons they have for not being higher now, would still exist post-adoption.
that's wingnut talk (Score:3, Interesting)
Right, because regulating food and drug safety meant a government takeover of our food and drug supplies....
Re:Translation of the translation (Score:3, Interesting)
verizon wants to put tolls on all but one lane on the freeway, forcing anyone who doesn't pay through the nose to use the slow lane.
It honestly worries me that you got modded insightful when you seem to have no clue what the proposal was saying. It has NOTHING TO DO with forcing tolls, metaphorical or otherwise, onto competitors.
If you had actually read ANY of the recent articles on the subject, you would know that the proposal from verizon and google would PREVENT any "fast lane" tolls from being applied to wired internet, and ensure net neutrality. It would also give FCC power to enforce it, which it desperately needs given the comcast fiasco of a few years ago.
What everyone has their panties in a knot over is the fact that neither Verizon or Google want to impose regulation on wireless-- not that they are asking for a guarentee of no regulation, but simply that their bill imposes no additional restrictions on wireless.
Google gives the reasons that
A) the wireless market has PLENTY of competition, and as such regulation is unnecessary (we are capitalist, right?)
B) the wireless market is still "young" and growing rapidly, and regulations could hamper the growth (especially given point A above)
C) If ever there is a problem in the future, their proposal does nothing to prevent further regulation, and in fact asks for a periodic review to make sure everything is still gravy (IIRC)
Really, the only reason its become a big deal is because no matter WHAT google does, proposes, or says, people want to make a big deal of it and find conspiracy theories about how Google intends to steal your identity, your life, and who knows what else.
Re:Pay Per Kilobyte? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why not just pay based on how much you use?
The issue is that the ISPs feel that Google, iTunes, Amazon, etc. are getting to use "their" bandwidth for free. You won't be getting the bill for that 100GB of data, the websites you happened to visit will.
If we're going to allow that, I think I'll have to form an ISP and bill websites $100000 per KB my customers browse.
Don't worry, I'd still bill my customers for their internet access too.
Re:Translation of the translation (Score:1, Interesting)
>>>The market is already stagnant and dominated by entrenched natural monopolies.
I have almost 15 different companies to choose from for my Wireless internet. What monopoly are you speaking of?
.
>>>Our prices and service levels are the laughing stock of the planet.
The US is the second fastest continent-sized federation in the world, second to Russia but ahead of the EU, China, Canada, Austalia, Brazil, and so on. Again, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
As for prices - I don't know. Have not done much research comparing the average EU price to the average US price.