Net Neutrality Fight

[Arlos]

OK folks. This is something we NT denizens can actually put our money where our mouth is to some extent. Dunno if you guys know about this fight or not. Basically, ATT, Comcast & the Baby Bells are trying to get new legislation pushed through Congress that would fundamentally change and destroy the internet as we know it. They would get the right to selectively choose what traffic does and does not get allowed to pass across their network, and to force any online business to pay huge fees if they want their websites to be accessed in anything approaching a timely manner, if even at all.

For example, if AT&T developed their own search engine, they could automatically re-route any of your requests for searches to their own website, or could throttle the bandwidth to Google, Yahoo, etc. to a bare fraction of their own. They could unilaterally decide that Nameless Tavern is a subversive website and block all accss to it. Ultimately, the internet would no longer be a place for fere exchange of ideas and open commerce. It would be a lot more like your TV's cable service, where you have access to only what your provider decides to allow you, and that's based on who pays them the most money.

There's a website, http://www.savetheinternet.com/ which has a lot more information about what's going on. There's also links on it for you to file Electronic petitions with your Congresspersons opposing the bill that the Telcos are trying to get pushed through. Basically, every single major Consumer advocacy group is opposed to the bill, and the only ones supporting it are the big Telcos. Unfortunately, they have VERY deep pockets, and are literally spending millions and millions on lobbying efforts. More information can be found at http://www.isen.com/blog/ which is a blog from a former high-up AT&T executive.

I've alerady sent in a petition, even though I'm fairly sure my local reps wouldn't voe for this in a million years. I urge the rest of you to do the same.

-Arlos

[Tikker]

I know at work we've had a lot of discussions about this(i work for a big regional ISP/telco)

part of it's been blown out of proportion (the initial discussion was that companies wanted the ability to provide higher QoS to their own products, not impact other companies stuff. ie internet service is a best effort service, and 3rd party voip would be treated simple as packets, while company VoiP is treated as a SLA'able service.)


There are companies out there taking the stupid stand that google/yahoo/etc should pay them to run data down their pipes, which I think it way out of whack


Last I checked we were the last major ISP in canada that's not throttling P2P, or any ports at all

[Lyion]

/signed and added to my RSS feed.

[Spliffs]

I sent it to my 21 myspace friends, omg I am an activist.

[KaiineTN]

Posted it on Myspace omgz.

[dammuzis]

signed and forwarded to my frothing at the mouth right winger friends

[Narrock]

OK folks. This is something we NT denizens can actually put our money where our mouth is to some extent. Dunno if you guys know about this fight or not. Basically, ATT, Comcast & the Baby Bells are trying to get new legislation pushed through Congress that would fundamentally change and destroy the internet as we know it. They would get the right to selectively choose what traffic does and does not get allowed to pass across their network, and to force any online business to pay huge fees if they want their websites to be accessed in anything approaching a timely manner, if even at all.

For example, if AT&T developed their own search engine, they could automatically re-route any of your requests for searches to their own website, or could throttle the bandwidth to Google, Yahoo, etc. to a bare fraction of their own. They could unilaterally decide that Nameless Tavern is a subversive website and block all accss to it. Ultimately, the internet would no longer be a place for fere exchange of ideas and open commerce. It would be a lot more like your TV's cable service, where you have access to only what your provider decides to allow you, and that's based on who pays them the most money.

There's a website, http://www.savetheinternet.com/ which has a lot more information about what's going on. There's also links on it for you to file Electronic petitions with your Congresspersons opposing the bill that the Telcos are trying to get pushed through. Basically, every single major Consumer advocacy group is opposed to the bill, and the only ones supporting it are the big Telcos. Unfortunately, they have VERY deep pockets, and are literally spending millions and millions on lobbying efforts. More information can be found at http://www.isen.com/blog/ which is a blog from a former high-up AT&T executive.

I've alerady sent in a petition, even though I'm fairly sure my local reps wouldn't voe for this in a million years. I urge the rest of you to do the same.

-Arlos

This pisses me off.

[Arlos]

Just to clarify: Which portion of it pisses you off? What the telcos are trying to do, or that people would protest against it?

-Arlos

[Hound]

A slightly different perspective, from today's issue of the
Wall Street Journal, A19.

What Congress Is Learning About 'Net Neutrality' - Google, eBay, Amazon,
Microsoft, Intel, etc. are spending millions to tie up Congress in a
bogus debate about "net neutrality." Verizon and AT&T are the targets,
thanks to high-speed Internet connections they are starting to provide.
The telcos have made clear that they, like existing high-speed Internet
providers, will need to recoup their investments by reserving a share of
their Internet pipes for their own value-added services, and for other
content distributors who are willing to pay for access. "Net neutrality"
would result in an increasingly unreliable Internet as more and more
high-bandwidth applications contest for space on networks that nobody
would have an incentive to expand. So the real issue is not
"censorship," but where the money will come from to support an Internet
capable of handling the services consumers demand. Microsoft, Google,
Yahoo!, etc. all worry that their own battle for supremacy would drive
them to shift billions of dollars to the telcos in a race to put their
own multimedia offerings in front of consumers.

I'm still trying to understand the issue from all sides.

Understandably, the telcos want to increase their profits -- but at the same
time, if the consumer demand is there, then presumeably the incentive to
"expand the networks" would be one of competition for your dollar, i.e. if
AT&T won't, then Verizon or Qwest or someone else will, and the question
becomes who can do it the cheapest.

With increases in the volumes of data transmitted, physical transmission media
will need to be upgraded and installed to keep pace -- it seems to me that the
customer is going to pay for it one way or another, either directly to the
telcos, or indirectly via the third party service providers who would pass any
increased bandwidth charges the telcos charge them on to their consumers.

[Arlos]

The bigger issue isnt' who pays; it is inevitable that the consumer ends up paying one way or the other. The issue is more fundamental than that. IT's whether or not ISPs should get to decide who does and who does not get to have data pass over their network. As I said in an earlier post, the difference will eventually become the difference between the internet of now, where you can get to anything, anywhere, and if something is slow, it's not because an ISP has decreed it should be, and Cable Television, where you get what the provider decides to give you, and no more.

THAT is what the fight is over. The moment you allow ISPs to determine the flow of data based on who owns it, you have fundamentally transformed the internet into something wholly other.

If the Telco bill gets passed, it would not at all surprise me to see one of the Telcos get bought by Google or even a consortium of content providers, who then use "We Honor Net Neutrality on *OUR* backbone!" as a marketing tool slogan to tatract more business. We'll see, though. Hopefully it never becomes necessary to find out, as the Telco bill got shot down.

-Arlos

[Tikker]

that's pretty much it



from a telco side


why would I invest $500 million bucks to upgrade a network to FTTH, only to have other companies use that connection and not give me a chunk of the pie?

[Arlos]

Ultimately, even if net neutrality passes, market pressures will demand it, Tikker. All it'll take is 1 telco biting the bullet and doing it, and using the resultant home-user-visible (and, more importantly, big business visible) performance increases could mean they have a HUGE leg up in the market. Also, you can make up for some of the costs, because newer systems are usually easier to maintain and monitor, once the techs get up to speed. Think of how much faster LANs and WANs have gotten since even 10 years ago, and how much easier it is to manage them now despite the fact that technology is radically different.

-Arlos

[Hound]

So if market pressures will demand it, maybe it would be a better idea to keep the
Federal government out of this debate entirely. Let the market decide without
any "assistance" from the government.

You think AT&T is throttling your bandwidth to Google? Switch providers.

I was under the impression that there was already legislation
in place that dictates that the telcos cannot deny competitors access to their
existing physical lines/infrastructure ( Telecommunications Act of 1996
http://www.fcc.gov/Reports/tcom1996.pdf ). Why do we need further legislation?

http://www.oregonlive.com/search/index. ... ede&coll=7

This article suggests that if you tie it up in too much red tape, it will hinder innovation
and have have effects that are opposite the ones the net neutrality advocates intend.

[Narrock]

Just to clarify: Which portion of it pisses you off? What the telcos are trying to do, or that people would protest against it?

-Arlos

What the telcos are trying to do. How incredibly insane of an idea.

[Lyion]

Interesting WSJ Op Ed on this

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial ... =110008391

The Web's Worst New Idea
Google and Microsoft team up with Moveon.org.

Thursday, May 18, 2006 12:01 a.m.

If ever there was a solution in search of a problem, "Net neutrality" is it. Sometime recently, someone got up on the wrong side of bed and decided that the freedom that has been the hallmark of the Internet now threatens to destroy it.

Suddenly the Internet service providers, which you always thought were there to let you get onto the Net, are going to keep you off it unless the government imposes new laws and regulations. Congressional hearings have been held. Vint Cerf, Internet progenitor and now Google evangelist, evangelizes. Thus has the cause of Net neutrality in its current incarnation become a new and ardent crusade of the political left.

Net neutrality is generally billed as a way of reining in Internet service providers (typically phone and cable companies), some of whom have made noises about charging content companies extra fees for guaranteeing priority to certain kinds of services. Net neutrality is supposed to save us--and Google and Yahoo--from this supposedly unconscionable behavior. Its effect would be more damaging.

It's worth putting this zealotry in a broader historical context. In the decade or so since the commercialization of the Internet began in earnest, the number of users, the speed of their connections and the variety of things they can do on the Net have all rushed forward. Blissfully, but not coincidentally, all this has been accomplished with a light regulatory touch. Excepting pornography and gambling, no bureaucrats have decided what services could be provided over the Internet, or who could offer them or how they could charge for them.

The result has been rich and diverse. Web surfers can make phone calls--sometimes free, sometimes for a fee. They can legally listen to music, either free, by subscription or by paying per song. They can watch some network television shows online--again, some are free and supported by ads; others charge per program.

Some of the service ideas have been bad, and failed. Some are wonderful. But many would never have been tried if the Federal Communications Commission had been able to tell businesses whom they could charge, how much or how little, or what they could or couldn't sell on the Net. Freedom, in other words, has been the Web surfer's friend.

Enter Net neutrality, which has so far found its only official expression in a nonbinding policy statement issued by the FCC last year. The FCC statement says, "consumers are entitled" (our emphasis) to the "content," "applications" and "devices" of their choice on the Internet. They are also "entitled to competition among network providers, application and service providers, and content providers."

Take a moment to pause over this expansive list of "entitlements." If we take the FCC at its word, access to online pornography is now a right, even though in a different context the FCC is increasingly preoccupied with policing "decency" standards on television. We'd have thought FCC Chairman Kevin Martin would find all that entitlement talk a little embarrassing, given his campaign for decency standards.

But at least the FCC's guidelines were just that--guidelines. Increasingly, and with the backing both of the Moveon.org crowd and "Don't Be Evil" Google, a movement is afoot to give these entitlements the force of law. Congressman Ed Markey has introduced a bill to "save the Internet" by codifying Net neutrality principles in law. The FCC would be charged with enforcing "non-discrimination" and "openness" rules.

Under a law like this--variations are floating around both houses of Congress--the country could look forward to years of litigation about the extent and nature of the rules. When the dust settled we'd have a new set of regulations that could span the range of possible activities on the Net. What's more, the rules aren't likely to stop with the phone and cable companies that have Mr. Markey and his friends at Moveon.org so exercised.

Non-discrimination cases could well be brought against Net neutrality backers like Google--say, for placing a competitor too low in their search results. Google's recent complaint that Microsoft's new operating system was anti-competitive is a foretaste of what the battles over a "neutral" Net would look like. Yet Google and other Web site operators have jumped on the Net neutrality bandwagon lest they have to pay a fee to get a guaranteed level of service from a Verizon or other Internet service provider. They don't seem to comprehend the legal and political danger they'll face once they open the neutrality floodgates. We'd have thought Microsoft of all companies would have learned this lesson from its antitrust travails, but it too has now hired lawyers to join the Net neutrality lobby.

All the recent scare-mongering about the coming ruination of the Internet is cloaked in rhetoric about how recent court rulings and regulatory actions by the FCC have undermined certain "protections." This is mostly bluster. Companies like AOL did not migrate from a "walled garden" to a more-open, Internet-centric model because of mandates from Washington but because the alternative was extinction.

Given the impulse on the left to regulate anything that moves, perhaps the real surprise here is that it's taken this long for someone to seriously suggest the Net will wither in the absence of a federal regulatory apparatus. "Don't ruin the Internet" is a slogan with a lot of merit. But it comes with a modern corollary, which is "Don't regulate what isn't broken."

[Arlos]

Well, well, well. Talk about your strange bedfellows. If this doesn't blow the myth of this being a right/left issue, then nothing will: The Christian Coalition is going to be taking out a joint add in the New York Times with MoveOn backing Net Neutrality. That WSJ editorial looks like it was bought and paid for by AT&T, to be honest.

Starting to look more hopeful that the telco's bill may get dumped, and net neutality actually passed. Complete turnaround from a few weeks ago, and is awesome to see that grass roots petitioning still can actually accomplish something in this polarized nation of ours.

-Arlos

[Tikker]

Non-discrimination cases could well be brought against Net neutrality backers like Google--say, for placing a competitor too low in their search results. Google's recent complaint that Microsoft's new operating system was anti-competitive is a foretaste of what the battles over a "neutral" Net would look like. Yet Google and other Web site operators have jumped on the Net neutrality bandwagon lest they have to pay a fee to get a guaranteed level of service from a Verizon or other Internet service provider. They don't seem to comprehend the legal and political danger they'll face once they open the neutrality floodgates. We'd have thought Microsoft of all companies would have learned this lesson from its antitrust travails, but it too has now hired lawyers to join the Net neutrality lobby.

this is the point most miss in the discussion

If I own the network, and provide a basic level of service to a customer for whatever they want to do with their access that's fine

If I want to prioritize my service offering (without degrading a 3rd party app) that should be fine too

the 3rd party companies(mostly VoIP) are whining that their cheapass, best effort services are made to look second rate


that's where the net neutrality fight originated

[Arlos]

If I want to prioritize my service offering (without degrading a 3rd party app) that should be fine too

See, here I disagree with you. First of all, it's monopolistic. Second, data should just be data as far as the ISP is concerned. It should be irrelevant where it is from, who generated it, period. All data flowing across the network should be treated absolutely equally, with no premium "fast lanes" or any such nonsense. ISP wants to create its own search engine, say, let that engine compete on its own merits, not get an artificial and anti-competitive leg up by getting guaranteed faster access rates than any others.

Honestly, ISPs should be just about their backbones, and connecting people to said backbone. Not content, not anything else, JUST the network, period.

-Arlos

[Tikker]

If I want to prioritize my service offering (without degrading a 3rd party app) that should be fine too

See, here I disagree with you. First of all, it's monopolistic. Second, data should just be data as far as the ISP is concerned. It should be irrelevant where it is from, who generated it, period. All data flowing across the network should be treated absolutely equally, with no premium "fast lanes" or any such nonsense. ISP wants to create its own search engine, say, let that engine compete on its own merits, not get an artificial and anti-competitive leg up by getting guaranteed faster access rates than any others.

Honestly, ISPs should be just about their backbones, and connecting people to said backbone. Not content, not anything else, JUST the network, period.

-Arlos

if you want SLA quality service for best effort pricing, feel free to plow your own fiber

think of it like a trucking business
you want to business on my highway, you pay for the licence plates

[dammuzis]

more than that tikker

im at&t and i want to start a itunes rival

your argument says i have every right to deny apple and napster the same bandwith as my new service instead of letting my service compete on its own merrits

as much as i tend to be libertarian you do need to have regulations or you end up with monopolies like standard oil or microsoft (still needs to unbundle IE and WMP from the OS)