Comments on: NET NEUTRALITY: A REAL CONCERN OR LIBERAL SCHEMING?

By: Orison

Orison — Tue, 09 May 2006 00:34:56 +0000

The internet is not the product of the telcos, or of any corporate capitalist entity. It was a very successful government project: pure socialism. Let’s give it its due! Like the Post Office, it aspires to universal, and not just the most profitable, service. “Net neutrality” is the status quo; we can’t draw any conclusions from current service about the “harmlessness” of dispensing with it. The internet has a history of brilliant innovation; the telcos don’t. I think we’d be crazy as citizens to tamper with an overwhelmingly successful distribution model, and give up the only mass medium with a fair and level playing field.

By: SlimGuy

SlimGuy — Wed, 03 May 2006 17:31:17 +0000

I am one of those high usage individuals and I pay thru the nose for it.

I am a daytrader and data feeds direct from all the exchanges and various realtime news feeds I subscribe to.

I have a high end setup here due to the massive amount of data being moved into this house for my servers to crunch over. My ISP offers 3 tiers of service, the highest being 6meg dsl. For my setup I have a Linksys router that combines the seven 6 meg dsl lines I have , yup 42meg in.

My real gripe is that my isp refuses to sell a “naked ” dsl line even for lines beyond the first, so I have to also pay for 7 phone lines! Like I am gonna use all of those phones at once.

By: Matt S

Matt S — Wed, 03 May 2006 03:03:58 +0000

Rick, thanks for the shout-out. Appreciate your showing both sides. I would be thrilled if folks took a look at my arguments, but Typepad is down right now! Sorry for the dead link.

Anyway, McCurry was an embarassment on this. He is on the right side of the argument, but his post was incoherent at best. I cringed, and then begged the HuffPo to give me a column to explain it properly. No response yet…

The question is not, do we want the telcos to “block” content. That’s a straw man. Of course they will do everything they can to make money, like any other business.

The only truly progressive (did I just use that term???) and permanent solution to selfish companies is a free market. History is clear on that. Let new entrants come in and serve the customer in a hundred differnet ways.

A highly regulated market prevents new entrants, leaving the remaining players too powerful and also beholden to government. A terrible combination, and exactly what we have here in Cali with our utilities.

I don’t love the telcos. I love the interweb and the people who build it. I think we should have freedom up and down the stack and let the customer make the call.

By: Andy

Andy — Wed, 03 May 2006 00:29:55 +0000

I’ll believe you when I see the details of what they want to do, and specifically a proposed bill or rule change. Until then I will remain skeptical.

What you describe, Cosmo, sounds like the phone system in the UK. Unlike here, there are no free local calls. You pay for the calls you make, by the minute. So those that use the phone more, pay more - those who use it less, pay less. Here in the US you pay a flat fee for local phone service, and now, with many companies, you pay a flat fee for long distance too, no matter how many calls you make. The flat-fee system is what we have with both ISP’s and web hosting (to a lesser degree). Converting to a pay-by-the byte system, it seems to me, would add a lot of complexity and overhead for companies, and confusion and headaches for users. Flat-fee is the wave of the future. Adding extra fees for premium service is fine.

Anyway, I’ll reserve final judgment to see what the final proposals are.

By: CosmoReaxer

CosmoReaxer — Tue, 02 May 2006 23:08:20 +0000

Alexandra, the telecoms have already agreed not to block sites. There was much whining from the anti-corporate left until they did, and now they’re still whining, natch.

The thing about if you have content, you want it on all the networks. Conversely, owning a network or broadband is that you want the best content on it. If a company was to degrade service, it would be at their own financial peril. And if they did anyway, there are other broadband options, and with more investemnt there are going to be more options not far down the road.

By: CosmoReaxer

CosmoReaxer — Tue, 02 May 2006 22:53:57 +0000

Tom’s got it right here.

I concur that the highway analogy is inapt, but if we are going to use it, let’s point out a way that it works against Andy’s (and so far, Rick’s) argument. Think of the 18-wheelers who have to pay higher taxes to drive on the same highway you do. Why? They’re heavier, do more damage to the highway, basically they’re using the resources more than you or me.

So why don’t those who use more bandwith pay more? After all, bandwidth is getting tighter and tighter, and as Adam Penenburg (he’s the guy who caught Stephen Glass) in Slate earlier this year, 80% of traffic now is P2P file sharing.

Shouldn’t they pay for it? Or, the telecoms want Google and Yahoo to pay for it. Either way, right now you’re subsidizing the tiny percentage of people who use a lot more bandwidth than most of us.

And one more on the highway comparison. The Internet is many networks, not one. It is much more redundant than the national highway system. The analogy isn’t very good. But that doesn’t mean I won’t use it against itself!

Plus, I’d think twice before agreeing with Jane Hamsher on anything.

And Rick, my gratitude. That quote wasn’t calling YOU a street protester, it was another commenter.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 02 May 2006 22:03:58 +0000

Tom,

If it’s as you describe, then I would be OK with that, but it doesn’t sound like that from the descriptions I’ve read. It sounds like they will take the existing backbone and institute a priority scheme on it. If they want to create additional backbone capacity and charge for it things like guaranteed throughput, then that is ok. But taking the existing backbone and fundamentally changing its routing rules is not. There also must be a mechanism in any change to ensure the regular public “highway” is upgraded as needed.

I also haven’t seen any discussion of how this will work in an international context. Since traffic from websites based in foreign countries will likely travel on 2 or 3 backbones, does that mean the site will have to pay 2 or 3 different companies?

In my mind, there are still too many unanswered questions and the telco’s haven’t been forthcoming with details.

By: Alexandra

Alexandra — Tue, 02 May 2006 20:27:38 +0000

Isn’t one of the issues with this new scheme that providers can choose which websites they can allow or disallow? If indeed carriers can exclude sites that they disagree with, how is this different than what most Americans dislike about the way, say, google is acting in China?

By: Tom Dilatush

Tom Dilatush — Tue, 02 May 2006 18:31:47 +0000

I’ll start with Andy’s analogy, but come to a very different conclusion.
The Interstate Highway analogy isn’t perfect, but I agree with Andy that it will do the job for this discussion. However, the impact of a non-neutral net isn’t quite as Andy described (tolls being charged for everyone). Rather, it’s more like what’s happened out here in California where we now have some toll roads that operate in parallel with the Interstate Highway system. These toll roads charge a toll to people who decide to travel on them because of their lower congestion. Nobody HAS to travel on them, and everybody can get to where they want to go just as they used to before there was a toll road (actually, the existence of the toll road actually improves the situation for everyone else, to the extent that it removes traffic from the Interstate).
On the Internet, the “backbone providers” are roughly analogous to the Interstate Highway system. Today, everybody gets to put their packets on the backbone and everybody gets treated equally. Actually, that’s not precisely true — the backbone is already rife with special routing agreements. These are the equivalent of private connecting toll roads between Interstates, wherein one telecomm company pays another to route traffic via these special routes. So to this limited extent, the net is already not “net neutral” — but this hasn’t caused any brouhaha because nobody’s asking an end-user customer to pay for this (at least, not to my knowledge).
What the backbone providers are proposing sounds to me much like these toll roads we have out here. They’re proposing to provide an especially fast service for those sites who are willing to pay for it. Generally speaking, of course, that will be those sites that have a commercial interest in high performance. So what exactly is wrong with this? It’s not as though non-paying sites are going to get any slower — they’re not. They can still take that same old Interstate Highway they used to take. The companies who choose to take the toll road get extra service in return for their payment. How do any of us lose on that deal?
There’s only one sense in which I can see that Joe Six-Pack loses: it’s if you believe that the backbone providers will increase the capacity of the backbone anyway, to make their biggest customers happy — and then we all get to take a free ride on the big new highway they build. To me, this seems naive and silly — without the incentive of extra revenue, the backbone providers have NO incentive to build extra capacity to make everything run smooth and fast. Instead, they have every profit incentive to build just barely enough capacity to allow them to charge for all the traffic, and not one bit more. They make the same revenue for a slow delivery as they do for a fast delivery.
What they’re proposing sounds to me like a perfectly good business-like, captilist move: they see a market need, and they’d like to provide a service to serve it.
I think we should let them.

By: Andy

Andy — Tue, 02 May 2006 18:15:32 +0000

Rick,

I think the “information superhighway” analogy works here. What if our interstate highway system suddenly became an all-toll system with priority going to those who paid the largest fees? I think our interstate system is an apt analogy in this case.

For the internet, I already pay a lot of money for a high-bandwidth connection. Any user who wants that kind of connection pays extra money for it. In turn, my ISP pays money to lease the bandwidth their users uses. Websites also pay for the bandwidth they use. Sites with a lot of video streaming will have bigger bandwidth bills than those who don’t. So both sides of the equation, the websites and end users, are already paying premiums for that kind of content. What the telecoms want to do is add another middleman that we’d all have to pay by charging a toll to use the main data trunks for the internet. It’s easy to see why they’d want this extra revenue stream, but it seems to me it would screw-up everything that is good and liberating about the internet. We need to keep the system we have and instead of adding middle-man to pay, ISP’s and web hosts should pay a small extra fee depending on the amount of bandwidth they use to pay for mainentance and expansion of the main trunk-lines. I think that’s reasonable. Everyone will bear the cost in proportion to the bandwidth they use, but there won’t be any inherent limits unlike the flawed system the telco’s propose.