AOL is doing poorly, but that’s because its business model was geared to dial up users. For the better part of a decade it owned more than 50% of US ISP market share.
No, because e-mail doesn’t need much speed or bandwidth at all.
Incorrect. The companies /already/ pay for how much bandwidth they use. The proposed situation would mean they have to pay a “tithe” to every ISP their data might possibly come across.
Current situation is that they pay upload bandwidth fees to say, Covad, to send it to “the internet” and anyone who can access “the internet” can access it as fast as they can receive it, provided your upload speed is high enough.
What Net Neutrality prevents is a situation where, for example, GE has to pay Covad to get a 100Mbps line, then they need to pay Qwest, Time Warner, Level 3, and others another bit of $$$ so that their customers can access that full speed.
That is, of course, something of an exaggeration… in reality something that extreme /may/ not come to pass, though with how business has been going I wouldn’t be surprised if someone tried it. A better example is happening right now with Comcast, where they’ll falsely spoof RST packets to anyone running a torrent program in order to make it look like the torrent has disconnected.
(all this is extremely simplified. I’m at work right now… writing an IPV6 handling library, as a matter of fact)
As said you already pay for the volume you use. This is different. This paying to let others access your data. Or even more.
One immediate issue is VOIP. At one point it was cheaper to get basic, no frills, no long distance AT&T phone service and internet and then get a VOIP service like Skype of Vonage. It would be in At&T’s best interest to block that in areas where they are the only broadband provider. Should they be allowed to?
It’s not the technical effort that I think makes it pointless but the ROI. If an ISP puts some sites on the “slow list” it will annoy users. Unless the ISP is cheaper, users will switch to a different ISP. If the ISP is cheaper than users get to make a decision–cheaper ISP or a wider ISP. Choices are good.
That says to me that the market knocked down AOL without any government intervention.
Access to a site is one of two directions of traffic on an electronic highway. isn’t bandwidth sold as a paired service?
I think that’s a different issue. It’s like selling a CD and having a competitor use the free space on a CD for their purposes. I’m surprised that the FCC hasn’t ruled on it (maybe they have).
FTR, I’m not happy with FCC getting involved and I’m not happy with carriers reshuffling the deck so I’m playing devils advocate in the hopes of fleshing this out.
That’s… not even close to a correct comparison. Unless you have a CD that was paid for by taxpayers. Remember that laying lines for telecommunications requires government intervention in the first place, due to property rules and the like. The FCC /has/ to be involved somehow, or you don’t get an internet at all. Unless you really think every single person who has a fiber line running through their property will agree to do so for free(or a nominal fee).
I think a more apt comparison would be a private agency building a toll-driven highway(which, again, also involves government interference due to right of way and the like) and charging trucks from company XYZ Shipping 3x as much as trucks from Bill’s Delivery.
But then we get into the monopoly matter. If your only high speed choices in your area are, say, Comcast cable or Verizon DSL, and they’re both throttling everything that’s not paying them, how many customers are going to go to dial-up?
Thats not what they are talking about. The issue is that the content provider needs to pay a toll or bribe at every bridge and gate(the routing isp connections).
Every ISP will be jumping out and crying “stand and deliver!” You already paid for your internet. And (lets say youtube) has paid for its hosting.
Its like having to bribe every mail sorter that touches your letter… after you bought stamps. If you dont, somewhere along the way your letter just stops.
I used to sort and deliver mail. I’ll go through what it involves getting just across town and I will fill in the points where you’d possibly have to grease palms in a crooked world.
[ul]
[li]You drop the letter in the mail.[/li][li]Someone comes and empties the mail box[bribe][/li][li]They drop it off at the post office.[/li][li]It gets machine/hand checked for an out of town destination/valid stamp[bribe][/li][li]It gets sorted by neighborhood[bribe][/li][li]The mail sorter sorts it by house and street number[bribe][/li][li]The delivery person takes it to its destination[bribe][/li][/ul]
The last two are usually the same person, but you can see it gets handled quite a lot. If there are problems with the mechanical sort(the first sort) then it goes through another person(one of the attendants of the sorting machine).
ISP traffic works much the same.
At any point you are trusting the mail handler not to toss your mail aside. And the same goes for the ISPs who route your streamed video.
You have to remember the providers aren’t going to outright CENSOR things. They are going to make it hard to get to.
For instance, I go to YouTube, I get their in 1 seconds, I go to MeTube and it makes me 7 seconds to get to.
All you have to do is try to use the Internet with dial up. See how long you’re going to wait for certain sites. Honestly try this, use dial up. See how long it takes for some sites to load.
So the people ABLE to PAY MORE, will get their message through. Those who can’t will not.
We already have a similar problem with Google. It’s not Google’s fault, but it happens when there is not enough competition. Also remember the Internet isn’t fair. Some areas of the country don’t have all the access other do.
There is a thing called unintentional collusion, which is akin to price fixing. Now if you’re a publicly traded company price fixing is a HUGE no-np, but it comes about anyway when there are too little competitors.
For instance, if you notice on a corner there may be 3 gas stations. They can’t go to each other and make an agreement to set the price of gas for their stations. This would be price fixing. But if they simply watch each other and observe, over the course of a couple of weeks they easily see what the bottom line is for each other and the price of gas on that corner, becomes stablized. In reality by simply watching they were able to fix the price of gas on that corner at a minimum. This isn’t illegal.
But you can see the more competitors the harder it is for them to observe each other and to see and make a bottom line.
This is an off topic example but people are astonished when I tell them, I live 3 miles NW of Willis (Sears) Tower and I get NO OVER THE AIR TV stations. Why? Because of the buidlings and their density. I can’t afford cable and I can’t have a DISH or put up an antenna. Thousands of others in Chicago are in the same position. With analog TV I got 16 stations. Digital TV I get ZERO.
Fortunately I can take my laptop and go to the park and watch TV there if I must. But the point is I was getting something FREE and how if I want it I have to PAY FOR IT.
Do you care about my plight? No, of course not, but thosands of people in Chicago are cut off from something as simple as TV. It has happened in NYC and Philly and San Fran as well as many other cities.
Why don’t they do something, why were they allowed to do it in the first place? Now TV isn’t the Internet, but the point is, when you talk about companies and government screwing over people, it doesn’t come overnight, it comes little by little so you don’t notice.
We already tax XYZ for shipping 3X as much as other companies (fuel tax). We also charge more for letters traveling to another country.
How is paying more for extra service diffferent? If Bill’s Delivery is using X bandwidth then why shouldn’t XYZ be charged 3X for using 3 times the amount of Bandwidth?
In the given scenario, no one is using 3 times the “amount of bandwidth”*. Bill’s Delivery and XYZ are using the same amount of bandwidth, but their shared ISP – call it DomCast – is charging XYZ three times more than Bill’s for the exact same service (for any number of reasons).
- A perhaps not-so-minor nitpick: “bandwidth” is a measure of the (near instantaneous) data transmission rate, e.g. 1Mbps, which I don’t think is what you mean. In fact, ISPs do charge more for internet access that has higher bandwidth and always have; AFAICT no one is complaining about that and it’s not part of the Net Neutrality debate. Rather, the concern of net neutrality is (at least) two-fold: (1) the anti-competitive nature of charging different prices for the same service and (2) charging multiple times for service that has already been paid for.
Unless you’re using “bandwidth” to refer to “quality of service” (Qos) tiering, which does often come up in net neutrality discussions. But that’s exactly why I don’t think it’s a nitpick to ask you to use more precise terminology.
Magiver, you don’t seem to understand how peering and transmit works on the Internet. Bill’s Delivery already has paid for the use of the bandwidth – or more properly, Bill’s Delivery’s ISP has paid. ISPs have contracts with one another to allow traffic to flow from one ISP to another. In many cases a small ISP will pay for transit on a larger ISP’s network. In this case, the small ISP agrees to carry the larger ISP’s traffic and vice versa, and the small ISP pays a fee based on how much data is transmitted. Very large ISPs will typically engage in peering agreements instead. The principle is the same – both ISPs will carry each other’s traffic – but in this case neither is required to pay for the privilege. The reason for this is that the amount of traffic transiting in either direction is expected to be about equal, so rather than the cost of tracking all that data and billing the other for it, they just agree to call it equal.
I agree that there will be short-term instances where this could be a problem. ISP service is so cut-throat, however, that Comcast or Verizon will get many more customers if they offer a more open service. This appears to be one of the things that happened to AOL.
I could certainly be using the wrong word. I’m thinking of the volume of data that affects a node of customers. If I’m in a node with someone moving large volumes of data my speed goes down. I can see charging based on the service speed and the volume of data used.
As to the thread topic, I don’t understand how servers could collude with each other over individual customers. If General Monster Corporation is paying Communist Cast for better service how would the competing servers help or hurt this process without breaking monopoly laws?
It’s not that simple. Or, better: large volumes of data do not necessarily affect anyone’s data rate. I (and/or others, I’m sure) can expound on that if you’d like, but it’s a bit of a distraction. From what I can tell, the only time this is actually a problem is when an ISP has over-sold their capacity.
It seems that every time I re-read that, I come up with a different interpretation of what you’re asking. If you’re asking a technical question, i.e. how, it may require more information than you want. Can we just agree that it (an ISP manipulating data traffic) can be done?
If you’re asking a legal question, then yes, you’ve hit on the thread topic. But it’s not clear to me how you wish to work “monopoly laws” into the discussion; in relation to the scenario we were discussing, it seems like a non-sequitur. Honestly, IMO, the issue is more fundamental; the monopoly charge only comes into it when giving a real-world dismissal to overly idyllic free-market arguments (i.e., that assume the existence of competitive markets, no bar to entry, etc.).
No, technology knocked down AOL. Anyway, even if we give credit to “the market”, are you seriously suggesting you don’t see a problem with things like this as long as the market can sort them out in seven years?
I’d rather have the market sort it out than the government. I don’t see the AOL example as especially egregious and if that’s the worst we have to put up with then I don’t think we need any special legislation.
Do we need special legislation to assign domain names?
If speed isn’t a function of what is sold then this thread doesn’t make sense.
I’m asking the legal question. If servers collude to give preference to customers then monopoly laws would apply.