network neutrality

[Scratch705]

Has it occurred to you that network neutrality will, in fact, entrench the status quo more effectively than any supposed monopoly? Ten years ago, if you wanted broadband internet, you could pay $150/mo for ISDN or hundreds more, plus thousands in setup costs for a T1. Depending on where you are, today you have choices of cable, DSL, FiOS, 4G wireless, satellite, municipal WiFi, and wide-area WiFi meshes. Technology marches on, and I expect we will have more choices tomorrow, unless we create a cartel through government intervention.

Could a network neutrality-free world lead to content constraints? Possibly, but much of it would happen to the consumer's benefit. *1* I can imagine some twitchy gamers or day traders would pay extra for service that has priority, low-latency access to game servers or stock brokerages, respectively. *1* On the other hand, consumers wield power too; many ISP took notice of the drubbing Comcast received after it tried to stealthily throttle P2P traffic. Some people would opt for metered, per-bit pricing, and content providers could partner with service providers to colocate their applications to reduce bandwidth costs for the consumers. Some other would want to pay for discounted internet service in exchange for viewing partnered ads before connecting to any website. These choices benefit consumers and reduce costs but would be impossible under network neutrality.

*3* If you don't like the way broadband is structured today, with caps, limited speeds, and poor service, then you ought to consider that network neutrality will entrench the present situation permanently. Any innovation that involves rethinking network access will be met with resistance from content providers. Similarly, innovative content services that need bandwidth, and that would benefit from partnering with carriers will be shut out. You will have two large corporate lobbies, each vying to use the big stick of .gov against each other in order to protect their turf. The consumer and innovator will lose.

1st bold: That right there is just stupid. then lets relate it to guns/ammo then. i'm sure those shoot would love to pay extra fees to buy ammo b/c they would want to shoot. maybe at ranges, there will be an extra fee for every certain amount of rounds you shoot. that way those who shoot lots will have to pay more than those that go to shoot only 50 rounds.

stock brokers might be willing to pay for the "extra" (and this term is used very loosely) bandwidth but 90% of gamers will not. most likely the parents will pay those extra fees (since more tens game than adults), and those who don't live at home, will either slow their gaming online and thus affect the gaming industry to make less multiplayer enabled games (which is a step back to the 80s and early 90s before internet was born)

then you are also forgetting the personal agendas of the ISP. i'm sure they are mostly anti-gun and with this new throttling practice now legal, they can make all gun related websites/content slow to a 28.8kbs crawl and then make gun companies pay double the rates of other companies to make it "faster"

2nd Bold: yea because it was unthought of for ISP to throttle selective traffic. with what the ISP are fighting for is to make it legal to throttle traffic they deem "not important" and if you want to make it "important" to the ISP, you can pay a extra fee to get it faster.

3rd bold: I like my internet today. I have no caps (except my speed tier which i'm at basic since i can't afford the higher speed when my current speed is more than enough). my service is pretty decent. it works 99% of the time, and the only time it goes down is when TWC is doing service at 3am about once a month.

and you forget, other developed countries don't have their ISP yelling for net content control and they have way faster speeds, more coverage in their country, and better service than we do in the USA. so what you are saying is that Americans are too stupid to handle the internet? that we need ISP's to become our nanny and watch and control what we can see/hear/touch and only if we decide to pay more can we get the content that was put up for free for everyone to see? (disregarding piracy since there will always be piracy just like there will always be blackmarket)

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/te...t-speeds_N.htm The median U.S. download speed now is 1.97 megabits per second — a fraction of the 61 megabits per second enjoyed by consumers in Japan, says the report released Monday. Other speedy countries include South Korea (median 45 megabits), France (17 megabits) and Canada (7 megabits).

just a snip from article to show how slow our internet really is. and this was from 2007. here is a link to a more recent study of average speed

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0908/

top speed for home users (not companies/government) and in this link you can compare prices of broadband and speed given.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0711/

Isn't this regulation of the internet? Disagree. Competition will always be more effective than regulation.

it is regulating the companies that provide us the gateway to the internet, not the internet itself as that would be impossible. This NN bill is only on stand b/c 2 of the major ISP are arguing that throttling of internet speeds and also lowering of what constitutes as broadband speed should be done so they can provide to more rural and urban areas with existing infrastructure (ie they are too cheap to lay more lines down and invest in better technology to boost the capabilities of what is available). and what competition will there be when all the major ISP decide to move to internet control? there would be only a handful of people with the amount of money and power to be able to open up a new ISP and provide the same speeds as we have today (5mb/s minimum) and have it nationwide.

ISP have natural monopolies. There is no competition that they will have to compete with. In my area, TWC is/was the only game in town. Sure FIOS is making their crawl and more and more of the city is able to choose now between TWC/FIOS, but just last year no one would of had that choice. Plus Verizon is one of the two ISP arguing for more control of the internet, and lowering broadband standards (ie lowering the minimum speed to what is broadband)

[Telperion]

1st bold: That right there is just stupid. then lets relate it to guns/ammo then. i'm sure those shoot would love to pay extra fees to buy ammo b/c they would want to shoot. maybe at ranges, there will be an extra fee for every certain amount of rounds you shoot. that way those who shoot lots will have to pay more than those that go to shoot only 50 rounds.

stock brokers might be willing to pay for the "extra" (and this term is used very loosely) bandwidth but 90% of gamers will not. most likely the parents will pay those extra fees (since more tens game than adults), and those who don't live at home, will either slow their gaming online and thus affect the gaming industry to make less multiplayer enabled games (which is a step back to the 80s and early 90s before internet was born)

So if the ISP misunderstands its customer demographic, its "gamer latency enhancement" product will fall flat. Whatever. You miss the point - there are certainly people and content providers who would pay for reliable low-latency links to each other at a lower cost than leased lines. Network providers can supply this demand, but not in a world of government-mandated network neutrality.

then you are also forgetting the personal agendas of the ISP. i'm sure they are mostly anti-gun and with this new throttling practice now legal, they can make all gun related websites/content slow to a 28.8kbs crawl and then make gun companies pay double the rates of other companies to make it "faster"


2nd Bold: yea because it was unthought of for ISP to throttle selective traffic. with what the ISP are fighting for is to make it legal to throttle traffic they deem "not important" and if you want to make it "important" to the ISP, you can pay a extra fee to get it faster.

ISPs are in the business of making money, not advancing politics. As it is, webhosting companies could charge gun-related websites more, but they generally don't, since they want business. Comcast throttled bittorrent traffic because a small number of people were using tons of bandwidth, not because they had ideas of some traffic being "important" or "not important". They way they went about doing network management was wrong and idiotic, and they richly deserve getting fined. If only there were a way to charge people for the bandwidth they actually use, and partner with high-bandwidth applications to build out infrastructure and deliver data at a lower cost ... well there won't be with network neutrality, so we'll have to live with caps and throttling.

3rd bold: I like my internet today. I have no caps (except my speed tier which i'm at basic since i can't afford the higher speed when my current speed is more than enough). my service is pretty decent. it works 99% of the time, and the only time it goes down is when TWC is doing service at 3am about once a month.

It's a shame you'd like to keep the status quo for everyone just for your benefit. I personally would like it if I could have a metered access plan. It's the fairest way to charge for access, and I won't have to subsidize the 5% that download a terabyte of porn and pirated movies every month. Since you mentioned speeds, in a metered world, there would be no need for speed tiers and ISPs would have a real incentive to offer their fastest speeds to ALL their customers. They get paid by the bit, and a fatter pipe means they can sell you more bits. Mo bits, mo money, goodbye speed tiers. As it is, you only get your money's worth at the higher tiers if you are acting as an abusive customer, which is why they are so expensive.

[Trendkill]

At no time do I believe our government has our best interests or freedoms in mind....so.

Hell no...

[bigmike82]

"Isn't this regulation of the internet? Disagree. Competition will always be more effective than regulation."
It's regulation that's keeping the internet open for everyone.

Telperion, you mention the progress that's been made. That progress has come about PRECISELY because principles of network neutrality have been strictly adhered to by the major providers.

"Possibly, but much of it would happen to the consumer's benefit."
Bull.

"These choices benefit consumers"
Oh yeah. More ads definitely benefit consumers.

"The consumer and innovator will lose."
This is where you are 100% wrong. The internet was designed with an unspoken, unwritten rule of network neutrality built in. It was only when the big boys decided to violate that rule that this uproar started. The consumer wins when he or she has full access to every portion of the internet, not simply the part that chooses to pay your ISP for the privilege.

[Telperion]

Telperion, you mention the progress that's been made. That progress has come about PRECISELY because principles of network neutrality have been strictly adhered to by the major providers.

"Possibly, but much of it would happen to the consumer's benefit."
Bull.

"These choices benefit consumers"
Oh yeah. More ads definitely benefit consumers.

"The consumer and innovator will lose."
This is where you are 100% wrong. The internet was designed with an unspoken, unwritten rule of network neutrality built in. It was only when the big boys decided to violate that rule that this uproar started. The consumer wins when he or she has full access to every portion of the internet, not simply the part that chooses to pay your ISP for the privilege.

More choices benefit consumers. Some people would want lower priced service in exchange for advertisements. Others would welcome high throughput low latency access to content delivery networks. Google and Akamai can afford to replicate their servers across various geographic locations to get the best performance for their applications. Their smaller competitors cannot match this level of investment on their own but may be able to partner with service providers to speed access to their services. Network neutrality will foreclose on these possibilities, and protect the existing players in the market. The internet was designed without dogmatic positions on network architecture, and the enshrinement of "as it is, forever shall it be" will harm consumers and innovators.

[bigmike82]

"More choices benefit consumers."
Which is what Network Neutrality provides.

"Some people would want lower priced service in exchange for advertisements."
You can have that now. There's no law that prevents an ISP from doing this. In fact, NetZero did precisely this during the dial-up days.

" and protect the existing players in the market."
Wrong again. Network Neutrality is what ensures that a small start up will have the same reach, from a network standpoint, as the big boys. There's a reason, Telperion, that all the big ISPs are proponents of NN.

"The internet was designed without dogmatic positions on network architecture"
Excuse me? Can you explain that while taking the entire RFC structure into account?

[Scratch705]

So if the ISP misunderstands its customer demographic, its "gamer latency enhancement" product will fall flat. Whatever. You miss the point - there are certainly people and content providers who would pay for reliable low-latency links to each other at a lower cost than leased lines. Network providers can supply this demand, but not in a world of government-mandated network neutrality.


ISPs are in the business of making money, not advancing politics. As it is, webhosting companies could charge gun-related websites more, but they generally don't, since they want business. Comcast throttled bittorrent traffic because a small number of people were using tons of bandwidth, not because they had ideas of some traffic being "important" or "not important". They way they went about doing network management was wrong and idiotic, and they richly deserve getting fined. If only there were a way to charge people for the bandwidth they actually use, and partner with high-bandwidth applications to build out infrastructure and deliver data at a lower cost ... well there won't be with network neutrality, so we'll have to live with caps and throttling.


It's a shame you'd like to keep the status quo for everyone just for your benefit. I personally would like it if I could have a metered access plan. It's the fairest way to charge for access, and I won't have to subsidize the 5% that download a terabyte of porn and pirated movies every month. Since you mentioned speeds, in a metered world, there would be no need for speed tiers and ISPs would have a real incentive to offer their fastest speeds to ALL their customers. They get paid by the bit, and a fatter pipe means they can sell you more bits. Mo bits, mo money, goodbye speed tiers. As it is, you only get your money's worth at the higher tiers if you are acting as an abusive customer, which is why they are so expensive.

if you aren't using up all your bandwidth then downgrade. no one is forcing you to be on broadband. there are still dialup services out there. if you don't need the 5mb+ speeds a month and paying the $50 bill, you can get dialup for like $20 a month.

bold 1: what product? the ISP wants unlilateral throttling of content that they deem "high bandwidth". there is no new product, this is restrictions on what we get now. how are you not getting this? this isn't some add-on service that you can opt out of. if the ISP gets their way, it is restricted movement on the internet period. no ifs ands or buts about it. as for thinking "oh you can switch ISPs" how? if both TWC and Verizon adopt this crap assed content restriction and throttling, how the hell am i suppose to switch to another ISP? there is no other ISP i can contract to in my area. this isn't like a typical retail establishment. The ISPs has a NATURAL MONOPOLY. look up that word, since you can't seem to understand. just like your water, gas, electricity services. and we all know first hand how de-regulation of these services can lead to. (californians is still paying for the enron rip-off)

bold 2: that right there makes your arguement moot. you talk about how i want to keep the status quo for my benefit then you go and talk about how you would like a metered plan. so you only want to change the status quo for your own benefit.

yea consumers sure are going to win, when the ISPs get to control how fast you access certain information on the internet.

as for the people and content providers that you keep touting that would love to pay extra to get what they have now already.... you are delusional. you talk about how the ISP are all about money, well the content providers are all about money too, why should they have to pay ISP more money to get their content to stream faster when they don't have to now.

and of course you skip the entire part of where other countries which have faster internet access than USA, don't even have this issue of "net neutrality". i wonder how that is happening? i thought having ISP control what you can access on the internet will further innovation and benefit everyone...

you are just blinding yourself to the bigger picture because all you see if "government = bad". well in this case the corporation is the one being bad. they are the one that is now trying to control what you can access and how fast.

[TurboS600]

Duh...What?

[Mute]

I don't see how anyone can worry about ISP agendas and then turnaround and expect the government to be completely agenda free. Show me anytime where the government has stepped in to regulate businesses and not wind up making it worse.

[Telperion]

Which is what Network Neutrality provides.

I've explained how network neutrality forecloses certain arrangements on network access. We both claim this as choice. But is mandating one way or other choice?

"Some people would want lower priced service in exchange for advertisements."
You can have that now. There's no law that prevents an ISP from doing this. In fact, NetZero did precisely this during the dial-up days.

Correct; this is really orthogonal to net neutrality.

Wrong again. Network Neutrality is what ensures that a small start up will have the same reach, from a network standpoint, as the big boys. There's a reason, Telperion, that all the big ISPs are proponents of NN.

It means they won't able to take advantage of some potentially cheaper ways of competing with Google, etc. other than building out data centers and peering with big ISPs like Google does. I see this as a barrier to entry that protects existing interests.

"The internet was designed without dogmatic positions on network architecture"
Excuse me? Can you explain that while taking the entire RFC structure into account?

It means exactly that. The internet is really about connecting networks, and the RFCs do not demand an adherance to a particular policy on how traffic is prioritized going between the backbone and edges. You correctly said the internet was originally application agnostic, but this need not necessarily be the case in the future.

bold 1: what product? the ISP wants unlilateral throttling of content that they deem "high bandwidth". there is no new product, this is restrictions on what we get now. how are you not getting this? this isn't some add

It was a hypothetical.

bold 2: that right there makes your arguement moot. you talk about how i want to keep the status quo for my benefit then you go and talk about how you would like a metered plan. so you only want to change the status quo for your own benefit.

I'd like the choice of a metered option, and not just for my benefit. I really like the idea of metered access because it renders net neutrality unnecessary. If an ISP is there to sell me bits, they wouldn't want to degrade the performance of competing services, althought they might price their own services preferentially. Their only interest would be serving up bits as fast as they can.

and of course you skip the entire part of where other countries which have faster internet access than USA, don't even have this issue of "net neutrality". i wonder how that is happening? i thought having ISP control what you can access on the internet will further innovation and benefit everyone...

They certainly don't have our idea of "network neutrality" in South Korea and Japan, oft cited examples. South Korean ISPs can block VOIP traffic that's not from their own service, and in Japan ISPs are allowed to run their own services at higher QoS than their competitors. Japan's telcos are more competitive than our CLEC/ILEC situation, that's something I'd like to see more of here.

you are just blinding yourself to the bigger picture because all you see if "government = bad". well in this case the corporation is the one being bad. they are the one that is now trying to control what you can access and how fast.

Likewise I think you're blinding yourself if you don't recognize that turning the FCC into a referee on internet architecture is actually going to make it the target of regulatory capture, either by the telcos or content providers.

[bigmike82]

"I've explained how network neutrality forecloses certain arrangements on network access."
It prevents them only from routing preferentially to their paid 'partners'. Nothing currently prevents them from combining infrastructure in places so that customer service is faster.

"Correct; this is really orthogonal to net neutrality."
Okay, so why did you bring it up?

"I see this as a barrier to entry that protects existing interests."
Potentially cheaper? You seriously think it's going to be cheaper for Mom and Pop's webshop to pay Comcast access fees than it is for them to set up a site now? The way the system is now, all they have to do is set up a website, and they're good to go. In the non NN system, they now have to pay access fees to compete with the big boys.

"but this need not necessarily be the case in the future."
Doesn't need to be, sure. I'm not opposed to changing how the internet operates IF the proposed changes are beneficial. Net Neutrality is harmful to the consumer, and to the network as a whole.

I find your focus on metered internet strange. Nothing currently prevents those companies from metering your internet service. Net Neutrality, as I understand the concept anyway, is *solely* concerned with preventing ISPs from favorably routing the contents from one provider over another because of fees paid to that ISP. Nothing currently stops providers from peering with that ISP at certain locations, nor to locate their infrastructure closer to the backbone access points.

[Telperion]

"I see this as a barrier to entry that protects existing interests."
Potentially cheaper? You seriously think it's going to be cheaper for Mom and Pop's webshop to pay Comcast access fees than it is for them to set up a site now? The way the system is now, all they have to do is set up a website, and they're good to go. In the non NN system, they now have to pay access fees to compete with the big boys.

I don't understand the subtext with "Mom and Pop" and "the big boys". If you're talking about a small business that wants a web presence, their bandwidth needs are small and they wouldn't bother to pay for extra access. I'm talking about bandwidth hungry upstarts that will consume 1+% of global network traffic and be in the same league as Google, Limelight, eBay, Facebook, etc. These companies build server farms wherever they can find cheap power, dark fiber, or both and then peer with big ISPs. Replicating this infrastructure is a barrier to entry. Would partnering with telcos to outsource some of this infrastructure management be a win-win for both parties? That's the big question and I don't think we should be so hasty to answer "no".

I find your focus on metered internet strange. Nothing currently prevents those companies from metering your internet service. Net Neutrality, as I understand the concept anyway, is *solely* concerned with preventing ISPs from favorably routing the contents from one provider over another because of fees paid to that ISP. Nothing currently stops providers from peering with that ISP at certain locations, nor to locate their infrastructure closer to the backbone access points.

Your understanding of net neutrality meshes with mine, but others in the pro-neutrality camp have introduced legislation to preemptively outlaw usage-based retail broadband billing (HR 2902). Metered access is interesting because it avoids the network neutrality question. If the ISP is just charging based on bits transferred, why would it want to preferentially route one vendor's service over another? Its interest is sell more bits, and it doesn't achieve this by degrading bandwidth the customer is already paying for.

[bigmike82]

"Your understanding of net neutrality meshes with mine..."
Okay, we're basically in agreement. As long as the big ISPs (especially the telcos) are forced to open their last-mile infrastructure to competitors (like the case with DSL now), I think that legislation is probably a bad thing. I'm not firmly saying so because I haven't studied it, but in principle, it does seem to be a bad thing.