net neutrality: eBay makes play
By karch4511 Posted in User Blogs — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I received this letter from eBay CEO and President Megan Whitman today concerning net neutrality.
Dear karch4511,
As you know, I almost never reach out to you personally with a request to get involved in a debate in the U.S. Congress. However, today I feel I must.
Right now, the telephone and cable companies in control of Internet access are trying to use their enormous political muscle to dramatically change the Internet. It might be hard to believe, but lawmakers in Washington are seriously debating whether consumers should be free to use the Internet as they want in the future.
The phone and cable companies now control more than 95% of all Internet access. These large corporations are spending millions of dollars to promote legislation that would divide the Internet into a two-tiered system.
The top tier would be a "Pay-to-Play" high-speed toll-road restricted to only the largest companies that can afford to pay high fees for preferential access to the Net.
The bottom tier - the slow lane - would be what is left for everyone else. If the fast lane is the information "super-highway," the slow lane will operate more like a dirt road.
Today's Internet is an incredible open marketplace for goods, services, information and ideas. We can't give that up. A two lane system will restrict innovation because start-ups and small companies - the companies that can't afford the high fees - will be unable to succeed, and we'll lose out on the jobs, creativity and inspiration that come with them.
The power belongs with Internet users, not the big phone and cable companies. Let's use that power to send as many messages as possible to our elected officials in Washington. Please join me by clicking here right now to send a message to your representatives in Congress before it is too late. You can make the difference.
Thank you for reading this note. I hope you'll make your voice heard today.
Sincerely,
Meg Whitman
President and CEO
eBay Inc.
This debate has popped up a few times on RS and I think the debate has been good.
I would hate to think that content provided by certain companies couldn't get through to me quickly even if I wanted it.
But I hate even more the thought that a company can invest billions of dollars in fiber optic cable and have to control over how that cable is used.
I guess where I get hung up is on what the consumer actually pays for. I pay for my high speed Internet connection in order to access the content that I want. I expect that the money my fellow subscribers and pay cover the cost of the bandwidth we eat up.
Perhaps that's naive. But isn't that the Internet? Sure some companies have made the investment in infrastructure. But they made that investment to offer their customers high-speed Internet, not sell bandwidth to marketers.
I will be royally ticked if I get Fios or something else and my bandwidth and speed gets eaten up by companies that have paid Verizon money to get high-speed access to me.
Then again, is a lousy seconds a terrible price to pay to ensure that these investments in Internet technology are made in the first place. And shouldn't content providers shoulder at least some of the cost of the Internet infrastructure since they are the ones using up all the bandwidth in the first place?
So the questions I've used to consider this issue are:
- What do consumers pay for when they buy high-speed Inernet? for me, it's for quick access to whatever the heck I want. Don't mess with that Verizon.
- Who should pay the price of infrastructure development? Surely the cable-layers as it's a business development expense for them. But those costs are passed on to the consumer. If there is a way to share the cost burden with the eBays of the world, why not do that? Though I'm skeptical that I'll see any of that savings.
- Regardless of the answers to those questions, why the heck should government regulate this? By regulating the government pokes its nose in where it may not belong and, worse, picks winners and losers by default. Either we will reimburse the cable-laying companies through higher rates or some sort of bogus tax/user fee. That sucks.
- If we're looking for a free market solution, what's the market?
Discuss, if you're not sick of this topic already.
Look at it this way: I went to Borders today, and picked up the first of Harry Turtledove's Great War series. I was Borders' customer, and Borders was the publisher Del Rey's customer. At each step in the chain of the book getting to me, one person paid another for services rendered.
The Internet works the same way. When I reach Red State's web site...
Red State pays its ISP, apparently theplanet.com.
The Planet pays alter.net for its Internet connection.
alter.net and Verizon have a peering agreement (I believe) such that they connect to each other so their customers can reach each other.
And Verizon charges me.
So the question is: What business is it of Verizon's to charge Red State? Every packet was paid for in every step of the way, save the peering agreement.
And if that doesn't work, why shouldn't they have to charge me, their actual customer, instead of some third party they have no business relationship with?
This sounds a lot like the discussion of who owns our phone records, as it also seems to revolve around the question of what it is the consumer pays for.
Seems like some of the bright minds here on RS could dive into these murky waters and come up with an underlying principle between their teeth.
completely agree. the part i was missing was the idea of "peering agreements" between hosts and ISPs.
that's been repeated many times here. Content providers like eBay and Yahoo! and Google stand to lose a lot of money if they don't pay access providers. But they stand to make a heck of a lot of money if they can start offering more video services that require higher bandwidth.
Selfless defenders of freedom they are not.