Renob, what do you think of the following situation?
You are a Vonage customer. Your ISP, planning to introduce their own telephone-over-IP service, starts blocking or degrading traffic to and from Vonage and every other VoIP provider, causing your Vonage service to be so unreliable that you can hardly use it. The next month, they introduce their own “blazing fast” telephone service, which coincidentally doesn’t suffer from the same problems that they inflicted upon Vonage.
This is not a case of you, or any other Vonage customers, using too much of your ISP’s bandwidth. It’s just your ISP taking resources away from something you want to use, and giving those resources to something they want you to use instead.
I get a different internet service provider. The market takes care of your situation.
And, SteveMB, it’s not a matter of buying bandwidth, it’s a matter of allowing market forces to work in order to bring innovation to the Internet. It’s about allowing companies to invest in better ways of bringing Internet services. If they can’t make money on the investment, it won’t happen. Economists have already stated that allowing the FCC authority to enforce net neutrality will slow investment.
All right. Now let’s say that, like most Americans, you only have one or two alternatives in the first place (if you’re lucky), and they all either have their own VoIP services they want you to subscribe to, or they’re planning on rolling out such services. No matter where you go, you can expect that they’ll block some service you want to use.
Will you just sigh and tell yourself it’s OK because blocking Vonage has allowed your ISP to “innovate” by offering exactly the same service?
What part of “local last-mile monopoly” eluded you when the issue was raised upthread?
Again, that’s why your suggestion can be taken seriously if and only if it is explicitly contingent upon prior removal of existing franchise arrangements.
Buying bandwidth for one’s desired purposes IS how market forces work in this context.
Which has been going on quite well under a regime of de facto neutrality (enforced by the technical difficulty of identifying and selectively degrading traffic from sites that decline to provide a double-dip payment for the bandwidths the customers who are trying to reach them has already purchased).
Economists have said all sorts of nonsensical things. Not to speak ill of the dead or anything, I saw an obituary of the late John Kenneth Galbraith that acknowledged some of his howlers (e.g. a 1980s statement about the Soviet system’s “efficient use of manpower”).
What happens if the person violating neutrality is a backbone provider, like AT&T or Verizon. Your ‘last mile’ service may change, but they will still slow down your Vonage connection where it hits the Internet.
What if they do it unless you buy your last mile from them?
I posted an “I dunno” above, and I still don’t - and I’m a working economist, if that means anything. Two questions I’d raise, though: Is the internet like the road network or like KFC? and has the impressive development of the internet been due to unfettered capitalism or astute planning from its academic instigators?
This is not a question of markets or not markets. This is a question of the rules within which markets operate. Even Hayek smiled upon planning for markets.
If you want a Coke with your bucket o’ KFC, there’s nothing stopping you from going to KFC for the chicken and then going next door to McDonald’s for a Coke. There’s some extra cost in walking next door and buying a soda without the combo meal discount, but it’s negligible. OTOH, you can’t use one ISP for some web sites and another ISP for others without paying twice as much per month.
And of course, KFC has competition. There are other fast food joints that serve chicken and Coke if that’s what you’re into; even McDonald’s has a few chicken items. OTOH, in most cases, your only choices for broadband internet access are The Cable Company and The Phone Company, and they both have incentives to block/degrade access to many of the same services. (I just checked The Phone Company’s site, and apparently I can get DSL now… until recently, Comcast was the only choice here.)
If a company has to bribe an ISP to keep from being essentially blacklisted by the ISP, everyone’s costs go up.
And, of course, political pressures would come to bear, as well. Verizon wouldn’t be allowed to accept money from Playboy to speed up their connection without coming under attack by those who hate Playboy. (I picked Playboy even though I don’t even know if they have a web presence.) One ISP decides that you don’t really need to read the Daily Kos. The other one says no Drudge. A third slows Fox News to a crawl.
Everyone always seems to distrust the media, but people really want the media to be able to control not just what information they give you, but what information you can find on your own?
And yet, the net has made it this far operating under just that principle. Could it be that it had something going for it , after all ?
Network providers can and do charge for bandwidth and volume. Obviously, a video-on-demand enterprise gets charged more than the Straight Dope. That’s not the issue here.
Bad analogy. The more you transmit across the net, the more you pay. Transmission capacity isn’t free and the cost is passed on to the users and content providers. Always.
Network neutrality is based on the old telco ideal of a carrier - all traffic handed over to the carrier is moved with the same speed and priority. We do not allow the postal service to inspect our letters and assign them a priority based on their content. My 39 cent stamp is as good as the next guys. Likewise, we would not gladly accept the idea of Pacific Bell connecting phonecalls to Verizon phones with a lower line quality to stimulate interest in selling more Pacific Bell phone connections.
This is simply not the case. It would force the network providers to provide an even playing field. If Amazon making a sweetheart deal with the network provider makes it easier to reach Amazon and harder to reach Amazon’s competitors, what does that do the market place ? It does not exactly bode well for entrepeneurship, does it ?
and, thankfully, up until now has been running under a concept of network neutrality. Giving up neutrality is a horrible idea.
It’s akin to letting the USPS look into letters and decide which ones to deliver first. And if FedEx’ mail gets delayed in that process, well, too bad for FedEx.
One of the things that made the net a place for fast-paced development was that the carriers acted just like that, carriers. Even when the telcos acting as content providers, they competed on a more-or-less even ground (although they obviously could purchase bandwidth and traffic volume at better prices). Doing away with neutrality will give the carriers a huge competitive edge, and that’s bad news for entrepeneurs.
Skype cutting into your telephony profits? Squelch it. You’d prefer people to use your search engine instead of that Google-thing ? No prob, Google traffic just fell in priority. Your search engine may be inferior, but at least traffic makes it to it… Local ISPs will be in deep trouble if their uplink provider is competing with them for the last-mile traffic.
As to whether the US congress can write a law that will actually precisely reflect the technical issues involved and make it enforceable, that’s a different issue. From what modest experience I’ve had with lawmakers vis a vis Internet technology, I’m not too optimistic. But the idea has merit.
For instance, honoring contracts is part of the rules within which markets operate. If Joe User buys a 1.5 Mbps connection, but only gets 128 kbps when accessing certain sites because their competitors cut a deal with his ISP, then Joe User has been ripped off.
I agree that the telecoms, protected by subsidy and common carrier status, trying to pull QoS tricks to degrade potential service competitors is bullshit.
But, I’m not convinced that this behavior actually needs to be legislated right now.
If Google and Microsoft are for net neutrality, I bet that they could be pretty damned successful in thwarting this behavior merely by bringing it to their customers’ attention. When Telecom X starts throwing its weight around, the next time its customers try google.com, they get
So if AT&T wants to charge Google a premium to ensure that its content reaches its customers, that’s ok with you? Even if Google is already footing the bill for their own pipes? What about the guy down the road who comes up with a new whiz-bang application that AT&T hasn’t provisioned for. His application is doomed to fail because AT&T won’t carry his traffic because he hasn’t paid for its priority. Say what you will about ‘faster’ websites. The reality of QoS technology doesn’t make things faster. It ensures delivery of certain content at the expense of others.
And, more fundamentally, the customers attempting to reach Google via AT&T have already paid AT&T for that bandwidth. Reallocating that bandwidth elsewhere because somebody else paid AT&T for higher priority is pure breach of contract, IMO.
Actually, Google will know. Quickly. People have tried that, and then been shut down. It’s DNS hijacking, and should be very interesting to see what happens to the offending company.
I don’t get it. If ISP’s are going to be bribed by amazon and banning google, why haven’t they done it already? After all, theres nothing stopping them, the technology has been there for ages, there are no laws against it. By this reasoning, the net should already have become a balkanised ghetto. Clearly, it has not, what’s the factor that people believe is going to change all this?
Net Neutrality is not like USPS looking inside letters to see which gets to the destination faster, it’s like forcing all mail carriers to only provide one level of service only. Letter to grandma? Mass mailing catalogue advertisments? Bills? That urgent contract that is costing $10,000 every hour it isn’t signed? Doesn’t matter, all of it will get there in 5 - 7 days. Your not allowed to use an overnight courier, your not allowed to ask for it to be processed only in quiet periods to save money. Everyone gets treated the same and everyone pays the same.
QoS is an integral part of the new internet. Different data has different requirements and no amount of handwaving can change this. If my voice packet comes in 1/2 a ms late, it’s worthless to me. If I need to reliably control a nuclear power plant from 3000 miles away, then I want to be sure that my packet wont get dropped in favour of some 13 year old in Arizona getting his latest pirated Britney MP3. If I want to make a $2m stock trade via the net, I don’t want it to arbitrarily time out on me and lose me $10,000. Some classes of data are more valuable than others and this should be reflected in how they are treated.
Here’s a better permutation of the Post Office analogy.
You mail a letter to Grandma. If you want it to get there in 5-10 days, or whatever, you pay $0.39 for a first class stamp. If you want it to get there quicker, you pay more for priority, or even more for overnight, etc.
Fine and dandy. That’s dialup, DSL, and OC3.
Now suppose the post office decided that not only will they charge you for delivering your letter to Grandma, they’ll also charge Grandma for the priveledge of delivering the letter to her. If Grandma doesn’t pay, they’re going to hold that letter for an extra week, despite the fact that you already paid them 10 bucks or whatever to deliver a single letter overnight.
I pay my ISP. Google pays their ISP. Everybody in the middle has peering agreements with each other to handle the traffic between me and Google, for which they presumably have financial arrangements that are reflected in my (and Google’s) monthly ISP bill.
Why the hell should every peer between us be able to charge GOogle for carrying the traffic, when they’re already getting paid for it.
It’s double-dipping, plain and simple.
If you want hot-shit Uber QoS, you can always get a dedicated link, and you won’t screw up the Internet for everybody else in the process.
No, dialup to OC3 is about different bandwidths, thats fine, we already have that. What we don’t have is different latencys and thats what the equivilant of a courier package is. Some data is simply more time sensitive than others so people are willing to pay more to get it there in time.
Again, you have to provide an explaination for why this bribing isn’t happening already. If theres currently no laws against it and it’s such a good idea, shouldn’t it be the status quo by now?
Are you proposing a physical dedicated link? That I should lay down a cable to China every time I want to make a skype conversation? If your talking about a virtual dedicated link, then it’s going to be using the same hot-shit Uber QoS that I’ve been proposing all along.
QoS is diametrically opposed to the fundamental nature of the internet. If you want QoS guarantees, you shouldn’t be using the internet. The internet is all about best-effort, which is sufficient for most of the data on it. Only streaming and real-time media don’t work under this scheme, which suggests to me that they should be on their own network.
They have a wonderful invention that solves this problem. It’s called a phone line. Maybe you should look into that.
Operating a nuclear power plant remotely? Are you insane? Now that is a recipe for disaster; can you imagine the consequences of a security breach?
The chances of a stock trade timing out due to client-side congestion is miniscule. If there’s congestion server-side no amount of QoS will change the fact that you don’t have enough bandwidth.
Ah, and here’s the rub: who determines the value of the data? The operators of the server? Then small websites are relegated to the slow lane. The clients? That’d be a total nightmare to implement. The internet works fine now. Why should we modify it for companies with questionable business plans?
Personally, I think that streaming media over the internet is a mistake. It’s far better for me if I can download the content and watch/listen to it at my leisure. Real-time media, at least, makes sense, but the vast majority of real-time media that I want to watch I get over the TV.
I think this is a good question. My WAG is that the answer is risk aversion. Utility-type companies are not entrepreneurial by nature. Perhaps until now there have not been sufficiently established players to milk. Now the net is pretty large and there appear to be some solid companies - maybe soon it’ll be worth the risk.