This past week saw the resurrection of Net Neutrality as a divisive issue. Some folks (people like Google, and, well, us) are in favor of Net Neutrality, while other folks (primarily the ISPs) are against it. Not long after the FCC announced its intentions, six Republican senators, three of which who received quite a lot of money from AT&T, proposed an amendment to a bill to stop the FCC in its tracks. The senators later rescinded their amendment, saying that they were now open to a “dialogue” with the FCC.
Which brings up to today’s point: are there any angels in this debate? The Wall Street Journal recently, I guess, came to the defense of the ISPs: why should Google and whoever else be allowed to profit off the Internet Service Providers’ networks? Why should, say, Time Warner, subsidize Google’s online applications with its broadband network when it (Time Warner) doesn’t stand to make any money?
That’s how the Wall Street Journal characterizes it, at least.
The WSJ says that people like Google (I keep bringing up Google because it stands to benefit the most from an open Internet) want to maintain the status quo: it doesn’t want to have to pay Time Warner (or whoever) hand over fist just to keep it from shutting off access to Google Maps.
The WSJ also brings up how one of Google’s top lobbyists, Andrew McLaughlin, recently got a job in the Obama Administration as deputy head of telecom policy. The scary implication, of course, is that now Google will get whatever the hell it wants because one of its former guys is now in a proper policy-making position. If only things were that easy.
So, basically, I’ve just said nothing other than that this Net Neutrality business can get really complicated if you want to devote the time to it. I stand to benefit more from a Net Neutral world, so I’m in favor of that, which is only logical. You’re free to disagree, of course. In fact, I encourage it! More opinions expressed = a better chance of coming to a well-informed conclusion.
Pip pip! I concur old chap. Quite swell indeed. Toot toot mum’s the word. Tally bally ho!
Arf!
The problem with the Fox Street journal sorry I mean Wall Street Journals argument is that google does pay for there bandwidth just like everybody else so they shouldn’t be penalized because they found a way to make money hand over fist using a service they payed the isp’s for.
Hahahahahaha such a funny error in the beginning of your post hahahahahaha oh my
If you really want to argue it, sure I’ll never walk away from a good argument. There are a few problems with Net Neutrality, as it’s proponents have cleverly branded it.
1: Technology advances quickly, and legislation proceeds at an excruciatingly slow pace. For that reason alone, it is usually a bad idea to approach technological issues with legislative solutions.
2: The most ‘egalitarian’ solution may not always be the most efficient solution. TCP/IP is very good at what it designed to do. Unfortunately time-sensitive delivery of packets in an orderly fashion is not what TCP/IP is designed to do. As such, streaming and real-time protocols are a lot less efficient than they could be on a network designed to segregate time-sensitive packets, and handle them differently than other traffic.
3: Is some bizarrely idealist notion of the inherent rights of packets to all be treated equally, really worth legally slamming the door on future network topology advances that don’t adhere to this endowment of civil liberties on bits?
4: Aside from the odd automatic hatred we all have for utilities, I often wonder why it is that people automatically side with the content providers’ right to make maximum profit, when it is the telco who actually bears the maintenance and infrastructure cost of the network. I mean, as a content creator, I’m happy I don’t have to pay those infrastructure costs, but being intellectually honest, I can’t honestly say that I ‘deserve’ to get out of those costs.
I don’t mean to be closed minded to future technologies, but what desirable technological advance could possibly benefit from reduced civil liberties?
The point is packets and bits are not people. To limit technology, because you don’t want to segregate or discriminate against certain bits, is to get so caught up in the metaphor, that you lose touch with reality. I’m not talking about literal civil rights, but carrying the ridiculously weighted language of the Net Neutrality concept to its logical end. There are many technological benefits to be had from segregating time-sensitive traffic from time-insensitive traffic, and then routing the time-sensitive packets differently than the others. This is exactly the sort of thing that Net Neutrality would prevent, in the name of “packet equality.”
I understand your wanting to separate the bits from the people, but unfortunately that can’t be done.
Much like newspapers and firearms, the internet is also a tool that humans use. None of them have life in and of themselves; therefore, they are 100% useless and inert without human intervention.
It certainly isn’t perfect, but Net Neutrality is the least flawed principle that would enable humans to express their free will through the tool called “internet”.
Now, if we could just figure out a common definition of what Net Neutrality actually is, this post and all of its comments might not be worthless…
This is quite a simple argument: I pay for that access. Period. If ISP’s complain about their network not working or otherwise, introduce competition or charge more. I am willing to pay for what I get, and I would rather have untouched access.
If ISP’s want to filter it or shape my traffic fine, then give me that access free. If other companies are paying the ISP’s to shape traffic, why I pay ISP’s?
QED.
I agree. The ISPs should be up to the task of providing this service. The problem is that competition is low. Cable and TelCos made deals with municipalities all over this country to get near exclusive access to the residents in those locales. Now they’re ensconced and without much competition. They can basically write their own ticket and it seems like they are trying to do just that.
Regarding Lee Lloyd’s points (2) and (3):
First, TCP is not the only protocol that can be run over IP, there are real-time protocols, often running over the User Datagram Protocol which was INVENTED for the purpose of real-time, non-sequenced delivery. Of course you can layer lots of other things on top of these basic protocols to produce a variety of effects.
Second, the net neutrality argument does NOT say that every packet is treated precisely equally. The point is that there is no discrimination on the basis of origin or termination of the packets. Any user of the Internet should be able to reach any other user without discrimination. The actual traffic treatment might well vary but that variation should be rooted in the class of service required, not the particular parties involved.
Some of us believe it is feasible to offer differentiated service classes (e.g. different maximum bandwidths or latency bounds) and would understand differentiated pricing for them. I pay more for my business FiOS service than I would have paid for ordinary residential service but I get a higher upper bound on capacity as a result, for example.
Well, if Net Neutrality is limited solely to origin and termination issues, then someone better make that a lot more clear to some proponents of Net Neutrality. I have spoken to a lot of Net Neutrality proponents who feel that neutrality means no packet shaping, no packet filtering, no port blocking, no preferential treatment of services based on packet type, no tiered service levels. There are a great many people who feel that Net Neutrality should keep their ISP from blocking P2P clients, should make it illegal for for an ISP to charge extra for video packets, and will protect them from having their traffic throttled when they upload too much.
I am all for the idea that “any user of the Internet should be able to reach any other user without discrimination,” but that is most definitely not the full extent of what I have heard both content providers and policy wonks shove into the Net Neutrality omnibus. The most common set of principals I have heard forwarded under the name Net Neutrality, is the idea that “bits are bits” and infrastructure providers should be legally prevented from being able to charge different rates for different types of traffic.
Isn’t it quite simple? Google etc don’t actively transmit their data over the end-user ISPs network, the end-user requests the data. So why should anyone hosting anything pay for that? They already pay for their data to be available on the internet. It’s not like they deliberately flood some ISPs network with random data with no destination at all nor is the data “trespassing”.
The government should not intervene in a market that is working well. Net Neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. ISPs are not out there charging specific providers for bit preferences. They have neither the time, nor resources to police that. Their interest is simply to provide the fastest service to customers at the lowest price, so they can attract more customers. If that market fails (e.g. if it becomes monopolized), then the government should step in, just as they did with AT&T back in the 80s. But I analogize this initiative to proposing re-regulation of airlines. The free market has brought the price of airline travel way down (to the point where airlines are operating on such slim margins that they often file for bankruptcy). Most of you are probably too young to remember the days where air travel was mainly for the rich, because government regulation restricted market forces from bringing prices down. Net Neutrality will just have the effect of driving consumer prices up and decreasing consumer choice.
Once the government gets involved they will be here to stay. They will be monitoring everything in the name of and to insure net neutrality. It seems to me that it is another form of control and a diminishing of free enterprise. Please can someone tell me if what I heard is or is not true. In order to pay for monitoring the internet the proposal is to include a .5% tax on all electronics and not even those electronics related to the internet. If that is true then which would you see as the worst. Government taking your money or free enterprise.
Here we can make some basic considerations: the government can control things, (FCC) or the corporations can control things (AT&T/Comcast/etc.) OR ….
…. an open consensus of Internet users can control things, and even bring in policy, service and regulations overseen by the government and corporations.
Is there a way we can build a consensus of commoners? We have the inventor(s) and upstarts, inspired supergeeks and entreprenuers, and freeware and shareware, the blogosphere and community meeting grounds; the creative commons, wiki-world, shared resources and free university. It’s the only democracy anywhere — perhaps that’s ever existed!
In Scandanavia, it is said, citizens see the good of the common wellbeing all around them, so have continual incentive to “share the wealth” by working hard and “sharing the wealth.” Effectively, this is private enterprise regulated by the common share.
Can a global group of us continue to grow this democracy and use it to engage the entire world? If we limit anyone or keep the net unavailable to some, are we depriving them of basic rights and freedoms?
The internet is our only hope, I fear, for survival.