I’ve been hearing the FCC may be proposing a “pay for priority” service for the internet. Basically companies with big bucks would pay to use the high speed connection and everyone else would get kicked down to a lower speed. Overall costs go up.
I’ve mostly found the same AP story on a few sites, but there’s got to be more to this right? Does the FCC really think this is a good thing? Can this be reversed if they do it?
This doesn’t sound like a good idea to me. One thing I like about the internet is that it (usually) levels the playing field.
There is not going to be any “fast lane”. That terminology, as this article explains, is PR bullshit. Nothing is going to be speeded up. Data from some sources, that pay for it, is going to be prioritized over data from other sources, which in consequence, will be slowed down.
The FCC is not proposing this, but is proposing allowing such things by removing regulations compelling Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality is the concept that networks can charge based on the amount of data transferred, but not the type of data. So they can say, “we charge $0.50/Gb for data”, but not “we charge $0.25/Gb for email, $0.75/Gb for kitten pictures, and $50/Gb for porn”. As far as the network is concerned, data is data.
Similarly, they can slow down traffic to deal with the amount of data, but not the nature of the data. So they can deal with congestion by throttling bandwidth, but they can’t throttle Netflix packets and not Google packets. The concept of a “fast lane” that Google, say, would pay extra to be on contradicts this.
There is no fast lane. There is only the status quo, except by toll only now, and everyone not paying the toll is forced off the freeway and onto surface roads. Maybe gravel roads, since the onces deciding how nice the non-freeway roads are also collecting the money from the tolls.
The freeway will be a bit faster, because most of the plebs will be forced off of it. And the plebs? Struggling along like the second-class citizens most megacorporations see them as. “If you’re not paying me, you don’t matter.”
I doubt if the SDMB would be noticable affected, because it’s not a huge bandwidth site. But graphics intensive sites, like say videos or online games, or anything downloading larger amounts of data will the ones taking the hit, especially the small ones, who aren’t as likely to cut a deal with say Comcast.
I’ve wondered who will be able to collect money? Just the ISP, like Comcast or my DSL provider? Or will anyone that has a machine that is moving data around be able to charge a free or decide who’s data packets they want to slow to a crawl?
The players are the backbone sites that run the big pipes. It’s their very expensive infrastructure that makes the internet possible and they’re looking to maximize their profits.
Something will pass, but the devil’s in the details.
I’m assuming if they do cut a deal, they pass the cost on to the customers. My wife was just talking about how I should cut back on my on-line gaming. This might ruin my argument that it’s cheaper than hanging out at bars.
Not necessarily. Sensible online services are priced to optimize revenue, so if their price goes up, the number of people subscribing goes down enough that there is no increase in revenue (but conversely if the price goes down, not enough new people subscribe to cover the loss of revenue). An increase in costs to the service doesn’t change that equilibrium, but can make the service no longer viable to provide if the maximum attainable revenue is no longer enough to cover costs of supplying the service.
I think the most insidious aspect is that many of these “last mile” networks (Time Warner/Comcast/Verizon/&c.) also provide services (Cable television, Phone service) that are competing with internet equivalents (Netflix, Skype). If they can demand that the competing services pay up or be put in the slow lane, there is an anti-competitive aspect here.
They’re as full of bullshit as the text they’re complaining about.
The ability to provide differential services allows business models that are likely to provide incentives to build more infrastructure to support the extra bandwidth applications.
Currently, service providers build the cheapest network they can to provide a service that you’ll put up with, or the cheapest network that competes favorably (in their view, in some way) with their competitors. Why should they do any more than that? It would be a disservice to their stockholders to build more than the customers are willing to pay for. That would still be true. The same competitive forces would prevail, and you’d get the same (crappy, if you want to call it that – I don’t) service.
The wonk talk about “fast lanes” and the repartee about “bullshit” are both making the same mistake, looking at things through lenses of their favorite color. The truth is somewhere in the middle. Best case versus worst case, neither one being particularly likely.
That said, it has to be done carefully, and I’m not particularly confident that lawmakers are as interested in getting it right as in getting campaign contributions or being able to make sound-bytes, and I’m confident the service providers don’t have their customers’ interests first in mind. However, the knee-jerk “free network” folks also don’t tend to understand the free market and what might actually be best for everyone isn’t necessarily “everything should be equal and free”.
ISPs have basically promised N customers that they would each be able to use B amount of bandwidth. Then YouTube and Netflix came along and it became apparent that the networks (backbone + ISP) could not really provide N x B.
The ISPs started looking around for someone to pay for the necessary upgrades. It’s difficult to increase the consumer charges by much, so maybe some content providers could be made to pay. The way to squeeze money out of Netflix or Google is to threaten to slow down their traffic selectively. For this, you need to abolish Net Neutrality.
It used to be that ISPs charged by the minute connected or by amount bandwidth consumed. If they still did, we would not be having this problem – ISPs would be cheering for Netflix and YouTube and World of Warcraft as much as the rest of us because all the movies and cat videos would be enticing users to consume more of their product (bandwidth) and they would get paid for that automatically.
Unfortunately for the ISPs they went over to always-on flat rate billing as a standard, and consumers far prefer that, to the point where going back to billing by bandwidth is unthinkable. (At the time that kind of billing was quite a good deal for ISPs because consumers prefer fixed billing so much that they’d switch over even when their costs would be lower with per-GB billing). So they need to find a way to make other revenue.
And her you put your finger, inadvertently, on the nub of the problem. Everything (except some, rapidly diminishing, aspects of government regulation) is run for the benefit of stockholders (and, indeed, stockholders qua stockholders, even when the stockholders interests as people conflicts with their interests as stockholders, as it quite often does.)
As for all this “truth is somewhere in the middle” shit, way to get your interests steamollered over by those who know exactly where their “stockholders” interests lie, and are not interested in any namby-pamby compromises.
Nonsense. This is being used, almost exclusively, to let companies hold onto monopoly-granted business models that are failing. Customers are cord-cutting at an accelerating rate, giving up the extremely expensive Cable TV plans in favor of internet streaming solutions. It has nothing to do with bandwidth limiting, since the total amount of bandwidth isn’t changing.
The cable companies aren’t slowing down kitten pictures and YouTube, they’re throttling Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, because those compete with their cable TV franchises. Within hours of the most recent net neutrality decisions, Netflix became all but unwatchable on several providers, and they’ve already had to pay Comcast an extortion fee in order to not basically lose all their customers. Just try to watch Netflix over an AT&T data connection, but notice that AT&T Livestream video works just hunky dory.
Want to give up net neutrality? Fine. But it has to be paired with actual competition for ISPs and cable companies (something that doesn’t exist today because of protected monopolies) or the “benefits” will be purely one-sided, and consumers and fledgeling internet businesses aren’t going to be that side.
The analogy I heard once: Suppose I have an apple stand. I sell both apples and apple pie. The pies cost more than the apples I put into them, of course, since I also have other ingredients and put some extra time into those. People buy both apples and pies from me, and I’m happy.
Now a new baker comes to town. They buy apples from me, and use those apples to bake pies. But they’ve got a better recipe than me, and so their pies taste better than mine, and are cheaper, too. People still buy apples from me: In fact, they’re buying more apples than ever, thanks to the new, better pies. But very few people buy pies from me any more, because they can now get better, cheaper pies elsewhere. I want to get that pie market back.
Under the proposed new regulations, I would be able to change my price structure for apples, so that anyone else pays the same price for apples they always have, but the new baker has to pay twice as much for them. This drives up the price for the new baker’s pies to the point that they can’t compete with my pies, and so I’m again the only pie-seller in town. I like this, of course, but it’s terrible for the other baker, who goes out of business, and pretty bad for everyone else, who can’t get the good, cheap pies that they like. Should this be allowed?
In case it’s necessary to unfold the analogy, the apples are bandwidth. The pies might be telephone service (with me as the phone company), in which case the new baker is VoIP providers. Or the pies might be TV shows (with me as the cable company), in which case the new baker is Hulu or Netflix.
From a strictly legal viewpoint, let me use an analogy for your analogy, and put this in terms like “restraint of trade” or “collusion.” I’m thinking anti-trust here.
Am I allowed to charge different prices to different buyers for any reason whatsoever?
Can I join with other vendors to set up a pricing structure?
I think the analogy would work better if the end consumer was always the one that bought the apples, but were taking the apples to the new baker to make a pie for them instead of buying pies directly from the apple dealer. The apple man then goes over to the new baker and says, “pay me $$ or when I find out someone I’m selling apples to is going to you, I’m giving them crappy apples and they’ll think your pies are crappy and meanwhile I’ll keep the good apples for myself so my pies will taste better”.
That’s an interesting analogy, but I think it obfuscates things a bit, because the issue isn’t the cost of the apples, but how many of them you’re allowed. See, the thing is, you’re not selling apples; you’re selling a subscription to “all the apples you want” for a fixed fee, assuming that people only want X number of apples. Which is fine, until someone comes along with a new use (apple beer?) for apples that everyone goes nuts for, and bingo, you’re out of your limited supply of apples. No longer does everyone get all the apples they want, they just get all they can carry per trip until they run out and then that’s it for that day.
Rescinding net neutrality lets you limit the number of apples used for apple beer. It also might allow you to get additional revenue for the high-demand apple beer, which you can use to expand your orchard, and have more apples total.
Or you could go back to a model of “pay per apple” and let the market sort it out. The problem is that everyone wants the “all the apples you want” model.
(Yes, I realize I didn’t get all the details right here; there is a daily limit, but if everyone picked up their daily limit you’d run out of apples and you rely on the fact that most people do NOT get their daily limit. So the analogy can be fixed for details like that.)
Now, I’m not saying my analogy changes the answer to the question, but I think it puts it in a more accurate light. I think reasonable people will have different answers as to what’s best for everyone. While I tend to be arguing on the side against net neutrality, I do see the good arguments in favor of it, and I do see the serious possibility that a free-for-all could lead to what I think would be serious abuses (for example, providing fast response for your own content products and slow response for competitors’.)
IMHO, most of the problems with lack of net neutrality are most severe in cases where we don’t have competition among service providers. If we have only one good service provider option in my area, I can’t apply any market forces by threatening to switch to another carrier. I think THAT is the problem we should be addressing.
That would be patently illegal, thank goodness. That’s called “price fixing”. It’s great for the stockholders and terrible for the customers.
In general, we want a system where what’s good for the customers is also good for the stockholders and vice versa. Price fixing is one of the biggest enemies to that. Another big enemy is externalities, which I don’t see applying here, but if someone sees that please fight my ignorance. And of course, a big enemy is when Big Biz pressures the government into passing anti-competitive legislation. In theory, this legislation should be pro-competition. However, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that in the details, Big Biz has hidden gems that work the opposite way. It’s their favorite game.
That may be true, but it certainly wouldn’t be limited to that application. However, I’m going to nit-pick the following:
Actually, it has entirely “to do with bandwidth limiting” or, better put, “giving certain traffic priority”. Either model can be used. I’m speaking technically based on what routers can actually do: they can classify packets, and based on the classification, they can provide “differential services”, including giving it a different priority, or policing it (restricting a flow to a specific maximum rate). I’m not a QoS wonk; there may be other features too.
Also, “the total amount of bandwidth isn’t changing” is a claim you can make but you’d have to back it up with a citation, because it’s quite possible that lack of net neutrality can be used to generate additional revenue which can be used to fun adding bandwidth to the network.
I can’t argue with you here, and this is a serious point that needs to be considered. But it’s one side of the coin and not the only side.
I agree wholeheartedly! Of course, I have to grant that certain monopolies were necessary (e.g., providing the cable plant, to reach the customers). Life will be better for everyone (except the monopoly holders) when we have no need for such a monopoly, which might be the case with expanded wireless coverage, if costs can come down while bandwidth goes up.