The risk is that it ends up taking intolerably long to load esotericwebsite.org’s pages while Google News loads blisteringly fast.
It’s about content PROVISION, not speed of access to content. Within the limits of my ability to afford a reasonably fast server and connection to the internet, my bytes ought to be able to get to your computer no slower than some big media content provider’s content.
If various ISPs start doing things to make some bytes go through faster than others, one likely result is that the internet ceases to be a place where anyone can publish content of their choosing, and becomes more like television.
When we say Net Neutrality, what are we talking about here?
A) It means the neutral treatment of customers by ISPs. It means that if I want a packet of data and Big Corp wants a packet, the ISP doesn’t give preferential treatment to whom it delivers the traffic. My speed should be the same as Big Corp’s. It’s blind to the customer that is requesting service.
B) It means the neutral treatment of data by ISPs. It means that if I want a packet from fox.com and you want cnn.com, the ISP can’t discriminate against us. It can’t, say, block or slow traffic to cnn.com for any reason. It’s blind to what data is coming across its network.
If you mean the former, I see no reason why that should be the law. ISPs are service providers…it’s right there in the name. If it wants to deliver better service to higher-paying customers, that’s their right. I can either pay or not pay. They have the right to piss me off or grant my every last wish, just as a restaurant, gas station, or hotel does. There’s no reason why legislation should have the reach to control that behavior.
If you mean the latter, then I’m completely against it. That’s some evil censorship going on there. If I’m paying for a service, they shouldn’t care how I use it anymore than Ford can tell me “We’ll give you the car, but you can’t go to Atlantic City.” I bought the bandwidth, so I should be able to use it as I see fit. And I worry about the slippery-slope implications of allowing legislation that says the government can regulate what sites I can see and which I can’t. Before you know it, it’s “interstate commerce” and under Congress’s jurisdiction.
Anyway, that’s my conservative viewpoint. I have no idea if my fellow conservatives feel the same way.
Congratulations, you’re FOR Net Neutrality, which means that the ISPs can’t discriminate like that scenario in B. So you’re against the official Republican stance on Net Neutrality, and in agreement with Franken.
So ISP’s should not give priority to packets that are being sent for the purpose of real-time gaming, or HD streaming, but should rather treat them exactly the same as the packets coming in a bittorrent download?
So ISP’s can’t offer low-latency services for content providers who are trying to provide real-time interactive products? It’s all got to go at the same priority level, even if some of the packets really don’t care about millisecond-level latency?
Let’s say I’m a content provider with a cool new 3D interactive product. I absolutely need to have latency below 10mS to make my product work. I’m willing to pay a premium for the ISP to give my packets priority. But the law is going to stop me?
The biggest problem with net neutrality is that it is aimed at solving potential problems with the network as it exists today. It cannot know or predict what our demands will be for new products in the future.
Here’s a thought experiment for you: Let’s say the U.S. mail had been subcontracted out to several “independent mail providers” in each city. Let’s further assume that some people wanted to pay those providers extra to provide priority mail delivery. So a ‘mail neutrality’ movement arises, and the government decides that “Mail is mail”, that no one should have a right to prioritize their mail over anyone else’s.
Guess what wouldn’t exist today in that world? Federal Express. UPS. Any sort of priority mail service. And you know what else? We wouldn’t have known what we missed, because we never saw that cost to society imposed by regulations which stopped innovation. You can’t miss what you never had - you can’t even know that you lost something. But you did.
That’s the real fear behind government regulation of the internet. Or at least, that’s one of the fears. Another is that it will eventually be hijacked and captured by the special interests once the activists get their way and move on. Another is that the regulation will create unintended consequences which will require more regulations, and once the government has its regulatory boot in the door of the internet, it will start to be slowly choked just like brick and mortar businesses have been choked by the myriad regulations that have piled on them over the last century.
Yes. Yes that’s exactly right. How do the ISPs know which one is more important? Users can request QoS and the like, which sounds like what you’re arguing for. Net Neutrality doesn’t actually stop that, it’s meant to stop things like spoofing RST packets to /break/ bittorrent downloads.
This situation would not be practical no matter what. It would require a dedicated line, which is not subject to these limitations. I get where you’re coming from, though, or at least I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt. However, you’re asking to leave a huge gaping loophole in it that is easily exploitable to shutting out minor players and, say, small businesses to effectively censor the net, all for a fringe case that would be better handled on a specific exception permit.
The internet doesn’t work like the public road system. Net Neutrality isn’t saying you can’t do that. It’s saying something more like ‘You can’t charge Federal Express 10x as much money for the same weight of cargo for using your road.’ It’s a fundamentally different issue.
When the telegraph was invented, Lincoln’s government had to stand in line to use the service. They passed laws saying everybody, outside of government use, would have equal and fair access. Business wanted preferential treatment and fought for it. It was ruled all would have equal access after the US government. This is not a new argument, but a different time. Back then we stood up to big business. Now they own us and get what they want.
The government invented the internet, not business. Because we allow 3 providers to capture 80 percent of the market, some fools think it belongs to them, not us. We are 17th in the world in average internet speed.We have less saturation than other industrial countries. Why is that? Because they decide on profit. They have no need to compete.
The providers should not control the internet. They are extremely profitable as it is. But creating a great internet is not their aim. Making profits and making as little structural change as possible is in their interest.
Check out the four definitions of network neutrality given at Wikipedia. Three of the four disallow the Sam Stone’s scenario.
Just because your personal definition of net neutrality does not disallow QoS tiering it does not mean that all definitions of net neutrality allow QoS tiering.
I wish you wouldn’t quote that 80% statistic. It’s not quite that simple. Most people think it means ISPs, and even if you count backbone providers, it’s misleading. It’s a lot more complex than that. The fact of the matter is, the US is way behind in some ways, and pretty far ahead of other countries in other ways. What’s interesting to me is that it seems like the places where we’re ahead are thanks to what regulation we DO have. I don’t have a cite for that, but I’ll try to get one when I get back to work.
I should probably note my job involves a LOT of handling the guts of the internet. Frankly, with how little regulation it already has, I’m surprised it works at all.
The conservative anti-neutrality position baffles me, quite frankly. The internet is the most perfect example of a free market in operation. No one has special or priviledged status, and no one is allowed to put anyone else off limits. There is a low cost to entry, and unlimited competition. If your ideas or products are the best, they have every chance to succeed.
Why you’d want to alter that, where the big players in the market would be able to stack the market in their favor and shut out competitors, which has very limited upside, I have no idea. Net neutrality seems like it should not only be part of the conservative platform, but held up as an example of the greatness of the free market.
… assuming of course that conservatives are interested in a fair, free market, and not just giving the tools of the already powerful to become more powerful.
This Baker guy is an FCC commissioner? He says the FCC doesn’t need to regulate the internet. Why? It falls squarely under the realm of Interstate Commerce. It is a communications medium just like TV or radio. Baker is making the classic mistake of failing to realize that the FCC’s role evolves just as the concept of communications evolves. They’re not called the Federal COMMUNICATIONS Commission for nothing.
Then he makes another hilarious error that goes beyond being stupid and crosses the line well past the standard of lying. He says “Acting only on speculative concerns about network operators and contrary to a decade of industry practice” - but we already SAW examples of ISPs throttling bandwidth to stop data that they deemed undesirable. Comcast and bittorrent, anyone? To fathom the idea that Baker wrote this with a straight face and actually believed this pile of outright dishonest bullshit is an insult to every thinking man’s intelligence.
Furthermore, going on with the above paragraph, the FCC is logically correct in trying to prevent a problem that has already happened before and can get far worse in the near-term future. But this is why Baker tried to pull the sheets over the reader’s eyes and deny incidents like Comcast blocking bittorrent. Baker is in effect asking Americans to wait for something nasty to happen before the FCC takes action - even though something nasty (on a small scale so far) has already happened.
“By locking in today’s Internet, the FCC may inhibit the ability of networks to freely innovate and experiment, to seek out the differentiation that breeds opportunity and consumer choice.” Wait, so by shackling the FCC so that Comcast can throttle bittorrent when they want to, you’re allowing “differentiation that breeds opportunity and consumer choice”? How is blocking consumer choices the same as … damn, my nostrils are burning from the stench of bullshit here. Worse yet Baker has failed to demonstrate how anything is being locked in. Unless he means to say “lock in” as in the opposite of companies being locked out by throttling. Hey, I know I can’t reach as far as he can, but I try.
Oh I know. Comcast promised not to throttle bittorrent. So the FCC shouldn’t force them not to. Yeah, that’s like trusting a woman when she says she’s on the pill or a guy when he says he’s been tested.
“And consumers and entrepreneurs will be affected if network upgrades and improvements are delayed or forgone, as will their ability to create or use the next great application or service.” More bullshit! How can you use the next great application or service if your Internet provider arbitrarily throttles its bandwidth?
Man, my head is dizzy from all the wrong turns this supposed FCC guy has taken.
You wanna know the funny part? He failed to address the ONE valid point that someone could make against net neutrality: that all ISPs could get around net neutrality by introducing metered bandwidth. Pay per megabyte.
I thought that’s what they wanted to do in order to get some of that Netflix money. Netflix streaming is about 20% of internet traffic at peak times. That’s taking money out of Comcast and Uverse coffers.
AT&T already tested metered bandwidth in Reno. Comcast has said ‘We have no plans for metered bandwidth at this time.’ which means nothing. Right now my internet is all you can eat(PS3 online/Netflix, no torrents or the like) . I’m not looking forward to being charged for seconds like mobile broadband.
The Internet is not really a free market. It’s true anyone can make a web page but Google has an EFFECTIVE monopoly on whether or not your page will ever be found. And it’s ranking system puts gives priority to big businesses and popular pages, thus making it difficult for people to be found. Notice I said EFFECTIVE.
To be a true free market anyone with enough start up capital should be able to enter the market. This is also untrue. Cable has a monopoly in most cities. DSL isn’t available everywhere, and VIOS and ATT U-Verse are only available in markets which are deemed profitable.
This was once the case with utilities. Kentucky was the last state to have electricity brought to all areas and that wasn’t till the early 1950s. The Great Depression was key in developing programs to bring phone and electricity to rural and otherwise unserved areas.
As the Internet gets more and more advanced, users will need higher speeds to achieve equal access. Already it’s difficult to read the Internet at dial up speeds. Of course this has nothing to do with websites, but by allowing ISPs to tier charge without compeition to drive down the fees, they are free to do what they like.
Indeed I pay about a fourth of what’s advertised by AT&T DSL for AT&T DSL simply because I was able to go to AT&T and say “If you don’t give me a low rate, I’ll switch my service.” AT&T immediately dropped my rate.
Now if I didn’t have competiton I couldn’t have done that. But not every area is as lucky as I am to have three choices: DSL, Cable or U-Verse.
Sam, when you propose a thought experiment, it’s traditional to put some thought into it.
One small difference between the Internet and the mail, which frankly should have occurred to you immediately, is that there is a government agency which delivers the bulk of the mail and which treats all of it equally.
Your “thought experiment” does not suggest that net neutrality is a bad thing. It suggests that the government should set up its own ISP. Nice work.
I don’t know what everyone else is talking about, but I only care about the latter.
Could someone explain to me how this would be any different than telling Comcast or DirecTV that instead of selecting which channels to broadcast, you must give equal access to everyone. In other words, you can’t give the History Channel priority over two guys filming each other jerking off the dog in their basement. You must give everyone equal access regardless of content.
I realize that there are intricacies between cable TV and the internet, but from a practical perspective, how is this different? If I am an ISP, and I determine that my customers want faster access to Google instead of some 911 conspiracy site, then why can’t I tweak my system to deliver that?
Not much you can do if all the providers start switching to metered bandwidth.
My problem with Mr. Baker’s logic is that it was brutally tortured and extremely ignorat of the facts. The fact is his crusade against Net Neutrality is based on a (poorly expressed in his case) concept called the tragedy of the commons. You can read up on tragedy of the commons on Wikipedia but basically a relevant example would be a surge in the population of bandwidth hogs. Hulu is a bandwidth hog that serves bookoo-bytes of data across a lot of series of intertubes. Combine that with bandwidth hog end users who stream high def video online and bittorrent pirates and all that mess and you get the potential for one hell of a traffic jam.
So while you’re avoiding paying per second/megabyte charges, everyone else is, too, and it only takes a few hundred? thousand? voracious Hulu/youtubers and bittorrenters to bring whole segments of the system to a crawl. But if they pay per megabyte charges then money is flowing in that will scale up along with the strain on the system; thus comes funding to expand the series of tubes.
However… there is a TON of dark fiber out there - arguably enough that maybe millions of Hulu viewers could view hi-def movies and not clog stuff up. This was all created by companies speculating on a much-ballyhooed exponential increase in bandwidth usage, something that never materialized. The way I see it, that means demand has a LOOOOOONG way to catch up with supply. ILECs, however, are (or were?) refusing to sell this dark fiber because it would damage their profits… IIRC.
So one has to wonder what’s going on now? Is there a severe overcapacity out there and companies have to make some minimum of per-megabyte profit (like the Saudis and their dream of >$100 BBL)? If so this makes the case for metered bandwidth totally a case of naked greed even if it is (IMO) logically justified.
If anything, the FCC has a much clearer mandate with regard to regulating cable. Congress and the courts have both agreed that FCC regulation of cable is necessary to ensure it carries out the responsibilities that come with its charters.
United States v. Southwestern Cable Co., 392 U.S. 157 (1968).
As far as the difference goes, that’s simple. There is a limited number of channels which a cable signal can carry. That means the cable companies have to be free to choose what signals to carry, to an extent. AFAIK, the only programming requirements Congress and the FCC have really imposed are that each provider’s basic tier of service include local over-the-air channels and not carry multiple channels which air the same syndicated programming.
And you could put some thought into understanding the point I was making with the analogy. It’s also true that the internet doesn’t consist of little tiny mailmen running around inside a connected series of tubes, but that’s not really relevant.
The point was if you mandate equality of access and non-discrimination of packets, you make it harder or impossible for new services which may need different levels of access. You’re essentially creating a digital commons. If no one can profit from vertically-integrated solutions, no one will invest in them. The networks will have no incentive to build out additional capacity because the applications that would need it will never be developed.
For example, let’s say that someone comes up with an idea for a 3D virtual world where people can engage in various collaborate activities that require guaranteed throughput and low latency. In today’s world, those people could contract with ISP’s to give them priority service for a fee. The ISP could then use the money earned from that to upgrade the infrastructure so that no one else’s service deteriorates.
In a net neutrality world, that doesn’t work. Because if they can’t prioritize packets, then they can’t guarantee the low latency. And if they build out the network to be faster, it could wind up just clogged with more bittorrent traffic or Netflix streaming or whatever. We’re closing the door on a whole raft of products and services which haven’t been invented yet but which might need prioritized packet delivery for them to work at all.
Another problem with this particular bill is that it allows for ‘reasonable’ prioritization for QoS purposes, but it doesn’t define what reasonable is. That injects uncertainty into the market, and opens the door to litigation every time an ISP tries to manage their network to be a bit more efficient. That will also affect investment.
This reminds me of the creation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. The parallels are eerie. Originally, the ICC was set up because people complained that the railroads had a monopoly on transportation infrastructure, and were abusing it to prioritize some cargo and passengers over others, and to charge different fees to different groups for the same type of cargo. The ICC act was basically ‘railroad neutrality’.
Once the ICC had its foot in the door, its regulatory control of transportation began to slowly increase. The railroads reacted to the inability to price discriminate by raising prices for everyone to recoup the losses from being able to charge premium prices for some content. So the ICC started setting price caps.
The result was a collapse of railroad investment and stocks, which led to the Panic of 1907.
Over time, the ICC became captured by the interests it was supposed to regulate, and became a tool the railroads used to squash competition and maintain outdated business models.
The ICC was eventually abolished, and when the industry was deregulated it led to a reduction in fees and a general increase in transportation efficiency. The ICC stopped being a positive force decades earlier, and became a mechanism for destroying innovation and investment.
You can imagine how that might come into play here - if new competitors show up to challenge existing wired ISPs (maybe wireless repeaters, or satellite services, or whatever), the ISPs will use their regulated status to plead unfair competition to the government. The government will then seek to pull the new interests under their regulatory umbrella, or simply disallow them as the ICC did to rail competitors.
The internet has been the least-regulated major economic entity we’ve ever had. Other than the limited power of ICANN in giving out domain names, there is no regulation of the internet. The result has been an explosion of creativity and investment and the most wonderful tool mankind has ever built. Now governments around the world want to wet their beaks and start regulating it. I don’t want their foot in the door. I don’t want them to have excuses for ever-increasing regulatory authority.
At the very least, we should not be supporting regulations that promise to fix problems that don’t even exist yet. Let’s wait until we start to see serious reductions in quality and availability for some because of prioritization. Then we can start talking about how to fix the problem. To pass legislation to fix a theoretical problem that may not even occur is asinine.
By the way, you’re already seeing one result of net neutrality legislation - ISPs are moving away from unlimited bandwidth plans to fixed bandwidth caps. If they can’t discriminate and slow down bittorrent and other packets for the 20% of users who use 80% of network bandwidth, the only other way they can provide quality of service is to simply cap everyone. And If they can’t charge premium prices for premium content, the alternative will be to raise prices for everyone. That’s exactly what happened when the railroads were regulated. Then the government will step in and try to set price caps, as they did with the railroads, and that will kill investment in infrastructure - exactly what happened to the railroads.
HRoark43: Net Neutrality has nothing to do with metered bandwidth. It’s all about discrimination between data from one provider vs another. If an ISP wants to institute tiered pricing for bandwidth or speed, it’s still allowed to do it - so long as it treats all data the same.
The main problem that exists that needs to be addressed is lack of competition. Given enough competition between ISPs, who cares if some try to prioritize content? Let them. Others can build their business models on equal access… Or maybe I want to subscribe to the network that prioritizes Netflix, so I have a better viewing experience. Or maybe I want an ISP that filters adult material, so it’s safer to let my kids explore the internet. This is all okay, so long as there is plenty of competition so that the market is allowed to react and I can find a service that meets my needs.
So instead of misguided regulation attempting to control ISPs, it would be much better to focus on legislation that opens up more competition. For example, in Canada the government forced the telecom companies to provide access to the wired telephone network to independent ADSL providers.
The government could also support high-speed wireless to allow more competition to the cable companies and telcos.
You could also argue that a good solution would be to use anti-trust laws to prevent ISPs from owning or having interest in content creation companies.
Use the government to open markets and increase competition, not to regulate existing markets and control the infrastructure.
And if walmart.com pays your cable company to ensure you can get access to walmart.com but not amazon.com, that runs exactly counter to the free market aspect of the internet. Oh, you can just get another ISP then - right? Well, no, not really. It’s not as if it’s practical for someone to come tearing up your roads and rewiring new fiber optic cable everywhere in order to provide a competing service. You might be able to get DSL - or you might not.
ISPs generally get a priviledged status of monopolistic control over certain resources because it’s simply impractical for us to have multiple cable networks running around in our infrastructure. So if consumers lack a choice in ISPs, and the ISPs are allowed to allow or disallow any traffic they wish, you’d have a net loss in consumer choice.
In my view, the “everything is equal” model of traffic is what has allowed the internet to be such a free market and meritocracy. You seem to be saying that essentially if the government steps in to ensure that it remains the status quo, that that regulation will stifle the industry. But that seems to be a knee-jerk reaction to the idea of regulation - in this case it would be regulation that would keep things as they are - which has worked extremely successfully - rather than giving the established players the ability to manipulate the market to their own ends to favor the entities that are already powerful.
The great thing about the free market, and the internet especially, is that if you have the right idea/business model/product, you’ll succeed. You’ll be on a level playing field with everyone else. If the ISPs are allowed to determine who gets preferential treatment, you’ll see an immediate shift where established players are given much greater power and consumer choice is reduced.