Redstate

It is the status quo. How can you trust the guys who keep telling you your phone service will get better and cheaper if we just let them have more of a monopoly on service?

Net neutrality means EVERYONE gets to use the internet at the same speed, for the same price. And there is nobody deciding what content should/should not move through the ether. It just so happens that NOW, since those protections have been eroded by LACK OF LEGISLATION, it has to be re-legislated.

Do you REALLY trust the phone company any more than the government? Come on.

But look at it more like this. You can buy whatever kind of car you like, a beat up 1970s ford or a brand new 'vette.  This is an important freedom.  

However, once you own that car you travel basically the same speed as everyone else.  You shouldn't have to pay extra money to travel in the fast lane, or be penalized for not paying and be forced to travel in the slow lane.

Next thing you're going to tell me is that we shouldn't build toll roads and toll bridges.  After all, don't we have a constitutional right to drive wherever we want for free?  (warning: sarcastic content)

"You shouldn't have to pay extra money to travel in the fast lane, or be penalized for not paying and be forced to travel in the slow lane."

This kind of liberalism where everyone should be equally miserable sickens me!

Your comment that you shouldn't have to drive more to drive in the fast lane isn't an accurate analogy since all of the lanes of a single road are identical and maintained by the same provider.  

If you want to use a road analogy ask would you pay more to drive on a road that moves faster and is better maintained?  Here in Orlando, FL we have an extensive network of toll roads that lots of people are willing to take to move faster and lots of people aren't to save money - it's their choice.  

I am undecided about this whole thing for a couple of reasons.

I firmly believe in allowing the net to be unregulated (e.g. status quo).

However- I abhor having to pay extra just download features like flash video and other things which are common now. That would hurt the whole purpose of the internet.

I mean - if I would vote - I would vote for keeping it the way it is NOW.

Maybe someone could explain who pays for what under what the phone companies are wanting to do.

I mean we already pay for bandwidth via our DSL/cable bill - what else are they wanting to charge us with? What else is there?

Is there some new and breaking technology?

My gut tells me that part of this is in response to companies like Vonyage and Skype using voice over IP.

Anyways. I am simply confused about this matter.. but if the phone companies are trying to make it to where if you want to go to site X and are offered to go to site y first (because site x's hosting company doesnt pay for what ever) - that would really tick me off.

I want to go to site x and i mean it.

So could someone clear things up? Thanks.

This is, respectfully, ridiculous.

I'm totally open to being charged more for faster service. I'm there. I've been working on that system since I started accessing the net commercially, i.e., after my bbs days. I'm generally a big fan of the free market, though I should add, not nearly to the point of idolizing it.

However, I'm against these lumbering telcos charging me for using their service (at tiered rates!) and charging the content providers a shakedown, excuse me, service fee too. Thus, iTunes won't take loss immediately, they'll pass the cost on to the paying customer, which is to say, I get to pay again for the same service. And it gets better: iTunes simply isn't profitable on a tune-by tune basis, it's a low-margin high-volume operation. Tack $.06 onto each song and you destroy the margin. Apple loses the incentive to offer the service, because they'd have to bring the cost per tune up to the point where their marginal profit is destroyed. We lose the variety of goods and services the net has to offer because it gets priced out of folks' reach (and the market for those items disappears, which means the items aren't offered), all because some of these companies have the business acumen of hydrocephaloid lemurs.

If the complaint is that these inefficient, mouthbreathing dinosaurs can't actually turn a buck on the service, they either need to exit the service, or just charge their customers more for the service, or offer a tiered access program. Ta freaking da. But they won't do that, because then their customers will leave for other service providers who do not in fact need lower abdominal surgery to have an unobstructed view of the universe. So instead, they'll just mess up the online economy and community.

And let's dispense with the "net regulation" canard, shall we? The net exists because of connections across millions of land-wire lines that are themselves the subject of regulation, and at any rate, the freaking FCC already has standing regs about this. What we're really talking about is a different kind of regulation, one that favors a group of service providers who can't keep up with the marketplace.

It has nothing to do with improving service. It has nothing to do with offering different levels of service.

The opponents of net-neutrality (telcos and cable companies mostly) want to protect and extend their monopoly with the use of anti-competitive practices. Specifically, they want to kill off VoIP and VoD services (except for theirs, of course). Net neutrality would prevent them from doing that. They don't have to block either one out-right to cut them off from their subscribers. They could simply screw up the level of performance for those sites. Streaming video or audio requires a minimum amount of network performance to be usable at all.

The other upside is that the big providers can extort money from content providers. It is a legal protection racket. They pay their protection, and they can be assured there their user base won't encounter any accidental performance problems. This is strictly a bonus, however. The real point to all this is protecting their monopolies against VoIP and VoD.

The post office analogy is horrible and completely off-point. We already pay for varying levels of bandwidth. I pay $60 a month for residential wireless high speed service. I could pay anywhere between $40 and $100 depending on the level of service I want. Symmetrical connections (where upload speed is not severely limited) and higher speed connections cost more from my ISP. The content providers already pay for their bandwidth as well. The more bandwidth they want and the more redundancy they want, the more coin they have to shell out every month. Nobody is getting a free ride. This is not what net neutrality is about, anyway. This is what the telcos want you to believe it is about, though, to get you to defend their abusive and monopolistic business practices.

The telecoms aren't going to be building any new lanes.

like the "net neutrality" idea is splitting into two ideas.

One -- preventing companies from impacting my ability to access certain sites by downgrading performance

Two -- everyone should pay the same amount for their internet service (and/or get it free) and get it at the same speed

I'm willing to hear more about One.  I'm 100% against Two.

Do you REALLY trust the phone company any more than the government?

Spot on. Some of my worst consumer experiences have been with phone and cable companies.  I trust them the least to do the right thing.  

that Sen. Stevens is closely associated with Alaska Communications Services, a provider here for phone and wireless service, as will as Internet.

I'm sure he's insulated far enough to comply with ethics rules, but it is a very closely held company and many of the bigs in it have the same last name as the maiden name of Ms. Senator.

As you might have noticed, I'll vehemently defend him on some things, but I have no illusions about him.

...and about the Japanese and Koreans for that matter. One constantly hears that foreigners have better, faster and cheaper web service than we do.

1. Is this true?
   
2. To what do we attribute this to? Bad government regulation? Sluggish private sector monopolies?

I'm honestly confused about the whole issue, and find it very difficult to make up my mind about which position to support.

"I would abridge the 1st mendment to have a cleaner government" McCain More?

You trust Pelosi and Dean and Specter more?

No thx.  I'm on Bill Gates' side on this one.

But I do not think #2 has anything at all to do with the bill in congress. #2 would better be described as "commie net access" as opposed to "net neutrality."

Why do the proponents of a tiered internet always insist this is the best way to do it? The telecoms were given tax breaks to put in new cable, to increase bandwidth, instead they pocketed the money, so it seems to me the telecoms are just attempting to use legislation to avoid having to pay for what needs to be done.

As someone noted earlier, a lot of this has to do with VOIP, but it also has to do with them overselling bandwidth. Offering unlimited bandwidth for a residential customer, in the hopes that those customers wouldn't use much, was absolutely short-sighted stupidity. In an age of 250 GB hard drives, lots of fun media (video, audio, flash), and of course P2P networks, it makes no sense to give your customers unlimited bandwidth and expect it to not be used.

I see no reason why I or anybody else should have to pay for the telecoms' mistakes. At this point, as much as I get the willies with anything resembling socialism, maybe local governments should just start taking that cable, and renting it out to the telecoms. It's all there under eminent domain anyways.

Verizon is currently executing a Massive overhaul of their cables, adding and, in many cases, outright replacing with fiber-optics...

Of the Japanese and Koreans. But the geographyBut net neutrality isn't about all that. Neither supporting it nor opposing it will get you better, cheaper, and faster internet service.

I'm not even concerned about the cost of internet access. I get a whole lot more out of the $60 I pay for internet service than I do out of the $55 I pay for TV. I would pay $100 for broadband if I had to. What I am concerned about is having services I want to use blocked by my ISP because they have a competing service they want to force me to use instead.

Was supposed to say "But the geography is probably the biggest factor, there."

And Microsoft, are on the side of Net Neutrality, then again, I'm really not sure where you were going with that, just thought I'd clarify.

Shameless link whoring here but appropriate. Here is a "Primer for the Rightosphere":

http://www.onlyrepublican.com/orinsf/2006/04/net_neutrality__2.html

I will have some response to specifics above as soon as the boss leaves my office.

The editorial above is right. Even if you don't like the telcos, the gov't is way worse. The idea of neutrality is fine, but having the government try to define it and enforce it is a disaster. It is an attempt to make the Internet into a public utility. Yeek.

As best I can figure:

Google and similar companies are worried that access to their sites and services will be hampered by slower transmission speeds and other such issues as part of a grand conspiracy by the telecom companies to put them out of business and promote their own services.

So they want the Government to step in and protect them.

Thanks for pointing that one out to me, forgot about them. It seems like they're the only ones bothering to do what's needed, and they deserve credit for it.

Their customers as much as they want for that additional bandwidth, under net neutrality or not.

What i heard on the news yesterday, when i was introduced to this whole boondoggle was that they were against Google and Vonage who are apparently the main forces behind the "net neutrality" lobby.

Eh, it was the news, they get things wrong all the time.

Still, I do NOT stand beside regulation on this.

It's a close call ;-)

But didn't the FCC previously have regulations in place dealing with this issue? Where all packets are treated equally? I remember reading something about the rules being done away with, and that's what helped bring this issue to where it is today. As for the internet being a public utility, in some ways it always has been. It certainly started off as something akin to that. And remember, those cables that all your data travels along were able to be put in place through eminent domain. That does make it a sort of public utility, or at least it should, depending on where you stand on Kelo.

People keep arguing what the consequences of the actions are:

Status quo -- we know what this is, 1 big pipe everyone pays to connect to the pipe.

Telecom idea -- put up a partition in that pipe to isolate premium from inferior connections.

So lets look at the possibilities just to get a sense of things,

• if no one pays for this 'premium' service then we have the status quo still.




• if everyone pays for this 'premium' service then we have the status quo still, but more expensive.




• if some people use the 'premium' service, then the people paying for basic service get degraded service as a result, less product for same money.

Hmm, this seems like an odd happening, if we all do something then we get nothing, if we do nothing we get nothing, if some people do something the rest of us get hosed.  This sounds like a tie-lose-lose situation.  

Now I think the telecom's idea is a horrible idea, i.e. not good, not good at all, but still I don't think the government should regulate it.  I have never seen a technology advance as fast as have computers, and I haven't seen an industry less regulated than the computer industry.  I don't think this is an accident.

Mentioned here, here, and here. I'm sure I could find more, but I'm feeling really lazy.

I would like to think that he has his usually steely grip on at least what the bill itself says and that he will make the Right choice.

But I just don;t know enouh about AKs Telecom situation...

I think I did at least, has something to do with this document.

#1 is what this debate is about.

#2 is not what net neutrality advocates are calling for.

Idea 1.

Idea 2 is pretty silly.

I have heard 65 different definitions of net neutrality.  If it's what's described in comment #2 as people in this thread seem to agree on, then the telecos wouldn't be able to charge different prices for different services.  That would greatly diminish  the incentive to upgrade the infrastructure to fiber.

zuiko, I know you're probably already aware, but for everyone else, I am working with the Hands Off the Internet coalition and we are opposed to legislation mandating net neutrality.  

solution to this be, to charge users for bandwidth used? Just as we pay the electric co. for kwh's and the gas company for cubic feet of gas, internet users ought to pay by the MB, both upload and download.

As for the telcos', they seem to be in an awkward spot due to their status as quasi-state bodies. On the one hand they are publically traded companies and accountable to their stockholders. They also hold these assets (basically, the internet) which are potentially priceless but which they cannot fully leverage because of their public utility role. They need to beome either fully one or the other, either part of government or part of the free market.

The logical outcome of the current system is that MS buys Verizon, Google buys Qwest, etc. That seems to me like a worse outcome than allowing the telcos to make money off their service.

We can already buy or pay for different speeds. I have Cox cable and can pay for 1 mb, 2mb, 3 mb per second etc.  However the issue is if Cox offers Phone IP which they do.  Can I still use Vonage or Skype  phone over their net connection.  Some local ISP's have already been caught and slapped by the FCC for blocking use of Vonage or Skype over their local cable cause they offered their own service.  This is what the issue is really about.  CISCO wants to sell special Discrimination routers to the ATT and Verizons so they can purposely throttle CERTAIN bits.  They can "See" what the bits are you send.  They can send THEIR bits AHEAD of your bits etc.  They can also tell if they are Google bits and slow or speed them unless Google pay up.  This is what its about NOT just your access speed etc.  As long as the ACCESS providers such as the cableco and telcos controll ACCESS and CONTENT you will be screwed.  The best situation would have been to turn them all into common carriers utilco and then let us pick and SERVICE we want.  That would have only required ONE fiber cable to our home.  Now we are going to have Cableco 1 pulling cable, Telco 2 pulling cable etc to our home, along with any other that may come along. DSL etc.  But as long as each has its own separate cable and is contrlled by that provider you will likely have discrimination.  

Think if GM owned the interstate.  They could charge Fords more or throttle them to 50mph unless you paid more.  That is why the Interstate (think net here) should be open (thin net neutral here) You can by a 10,00 dollar car or a 200,000 dollar car but you dont get special lanes for you cause of it.  Yes you can use a toll road with either car.  But not be held back because of it.

but what if regular service gives you access only to VOIP from your broadband provider and blocks or degrades other VOIP solutions, while the premium service gives you access to any VOIP provider? if there is only one or no other choices for broadband access, what is a consumer to do?

this is what net neutrality is to me: bits is bits is bits. the service i'm using shouldn't matter when i've already paid you for the bandwidth. we wouldn't need that legislated if there was some decent competition in broadband. the problem isn't the unregulated computer market, its the idiotically regulated telco market.

There seems to be some misunderstanding here about what net neutrality is all about.

It only indirectly affects the end user, and, if it happens, there will be nothing the end user can do to counteract its effects.

What is about to happen, and what net neutrality wants to prevent, is that the providers of bandwidth want to start charging web publishers to have their content delivered more rapidly. If a website owner pays, his content goes in the fat pipe and gets there faster; if the website owner doesn't pay, it goes in the skinny pipe, and the end user gets to sit and wait for the page to load.

No one is proposing hitting the end user up for money, and there is nothing the end user can do if his or her favorite website doesn't pay up and so loads slowly.

Understanding what it actually is, there are some issues worth debating:

1. Is there a free market here to even talk about? The local phone companies who own the lines were historically monopolies, and still enjoy monopoly or duopoly status pretty much everywhere. The cable systems are in a similar situation - you only got to dig up the streets to lay cable if the local government chose you as the cable company of choice. These are quasi-public utilities who have enjoyed and will enjoy enormous subsidies from every level of government. In a purely competitive market, you can have new entrants if the ultimate customers don't like the service they receive. Here, even if folks came along with the tens of billions of dollars necessary to join the party, it's unlikely they would get the necessary governmental permissions. In such a case, whether you even can release the issue to the "free market" for resolution requires a step back from slogans and a bit more economic analysis. Maybe three or four players and enormous barriers to entry can give you a free market, but I'm not ready to accept "free markets" as an end of game argument until someone who understands economic analysis as well as the issues at stake explains it to me.
   
2. The public policy issue is whether charging publishers for preferred access will squeeze out new and diverse voices. Sites like this website, which are pretty far down the long tail (Alexa rank over 20,000) and don't seem to be tapping into the major ad dollars, are exactly the kinds of voices that might get squeezed out. You can assume that CBS, the New York Times, the Hollywood studios, and so on, will be willing and able to pay the surcharge. Even Kos, with an Alexa rank under 2,000, would be better able to step up and pay. If your favorite brilliant but lightly trafficked blogger suddenly starts loading as slowly on your maxed out broadband connection as if you were running a 1200 baud modem, you will have net neutrality to thank, and there will be nothing you can do about it.
   
3. On an ironic note, I will note that some of the talking points above come straight from the files of Mike McCurry, former Clinton flack and current flack for the telcos on this issue. Politics and money make strange bedfellows sometimes.

In terms of full disclosure, I will note that I own some smaller websites, and could conceivably be affected by this. Mitigating that, it's not as if I need any financial contribution from those sites to pay my kids' private school tuition.

But

(1) I already said something like this;

(2) I don't worship the free market;

(3) There are other policy concerns at issue here; and

(4) I don't think we're communicating about the same things.

is that it assume that the telco's are public utilities. Which they are in a sense, but they are also private companies trying to make money for their stockholders.

If a private company owns I-95 then there is no particular reason why it should not charge different amounts of money for different types of traffic; more for big trucks, for instance.

Your argument basically is that the internet should be taken out of the hands of private industry and become part of government, like the roads are.

Yes, Powell's 4 principles are important, thanks for the link. Here is a proposed Internet bill of rights to be attached to Stevens' bill.

It is important to realize that cableco's have never been subject to neutrality regulations as far as I know. Several years ago they were deemed an information service, and thus are exempt.

I believe the telcos were given parity in that regard last year, which kicked off much of this kerfuffle.

I don't believe the FCC ever said "all packets equal" precisely, rather that ISPs could not deliberately degrade certain services. This is where it gets dangerous...

I believe ISPs should have every right to sell premium services, which means prioritizing packets (aka QoS). It is good for consumers both technologically and from a market choice perspective.

Unfortunately, neutrality proponents believe that prioritizing packets means degrading others. That is technologically incorrect (here).

The public policy issue is whether charging publishers for preferred access will squeeze out new and diverse voices. Sites like this website, which are pretty far down the long tail (Alexa rank over 20,000) and don't seem to be tapping into the major ad dollars, are exactly the kinds of voices that might get squeezed out. You can assume that CBS, the New York Times, the Hollywood studios, and so on, will be willing and able to pay the surcharge. Even Kos, with an Alexa rank under 2,000, would be better able to step up and pay. If your favorite brilliant but lightly trafficked blogger suddenly starts loading as slowly on your maxed out broadband connection as if you were running a 1200 baud modem, you will have net neutrality to thank, and there will be nothing you can do about it.

...is why I can't understand why conservative bloggers would ever be against net neutrality.  Many ndependent and unpopular voices will be hindered and possibly silenced if net neutrality isn't preserved. Its not only blogs who will be affected though. Local news sources, small businesses, church groups, etc. will all be edged out of the "premium access market".  

so no need for the disclaimer.

1. Clearly, great minds think alike.
   
2. Neither do I.
   
3. What are those other issues? Sorry if you have posted on this at length elsewhere.
   
4. I thought we were discussing the advisability of allowing the telco's to charge different rates for different traffic?

I can't disagree that the telcos (and cablecos to a lesser degree) are too closely aligned with government. The market should be freer.

That's the question -- do we regulate further? If the goal is better competition, let's put laws in place (or remove them) to encourage this.

Neutrality legislation adds bad laws on top of bad laws, and does not promote competition. It is a salve for the perceived lack of competition.

Competition is actually in decent shape, but of course could be better. The trends are generally in the right direction. Things like WiMax will open it up further.

In any case, the FCC has the power to police abuses, as does the FTC on antitrust grounds. We really don't need new laws.

I have no problem with the providers charging their direct-users -- their customers -- for different access levels. They do this already, it's been part of the game since the early 1990s, who cares. I have a problem with them then charging the content providers who are not their customers, but whom their customers are trying to reach, an access fee, because, first, you're attacking supply, not demand, and second, the consequences stand to be awful.

This won't affect, say, Wal-Mart, because their business model is offline, with minimal offline stuff (and a horrible online presence to boot). It will affect things we've started to take for granted, like Google, iTunes, and Amazon, because those folks will either have to raise prices or accept higher costs, which means they'll do less, which means we all suffer.

I'm totally fine, in other words, with Amazon's ISP charging them more for increased up- and download. I'm all over that. They do it already (well, you know what I mean). I'm fine with Verizon charging me at different rates for my use through my Verizon account. I'm not fine with being charged by someone with whom I'm not in privity for their own maintenance needs.

I came into this late but am somewhat shocked at what I am reading.  It sounds like people want a state-owned internet, rather than the one we have that was built with private equity and private innovation.  

The networks that deliver the internet to our homes and works are in almost all cases private infrastructure built with private funding.  There are exceptions to this (namely municipalities that have paid to build city owned networks for economic development reasons).  As a private asset the owners of those networks should be free to charge what they want for access to their infrastructure.. that is what capitalim depends on to work.

The Googles and Vonage's of the world do not own the pipes, they are relient on the pipes and they can and should be charged for access to those pipes just as I am charged to get access to those pipes on my home and work computer.  

If their volume is higher than my volume they should be charged more.  If they want to increase their access speed they should be charged more (or find another company to use).  

If they want they can build their own infrastrucure to get access to my house.  

Just because Google and Vonage's business model is flawed, and dependent on free access to an infrastructe they did not build does not mean we should change the laws, they should change their business plans.  

On the road analogy the internet is not the car you drive it is the road you drive on.  In this case a company (say Comcast) built a private highway with their own privataly raised capital.  Google is the trucking company that hauls goods on that road,  Google can most definetly be charged a toll by Comcast to drive on that private road.  

Neutrality legislation adds bad laws on top of bad laws, and does not promote competition. It is a salve for the perceived lack of competition.

It encourages competition in online services. The telcos and cable companies are opposed because they wish to extend and protect their monopoly by excluding competition and forcing people to use their services.

Just because Google and Vonage's business model is flawed, and dependent on free access to an infrastructe they did not build does not mean we should change the laws, they should change their business plans.  

Just what do you think Vonage and Google spend on connectivity every month? I'll give you a hint... it isn't zero. Not even close.

that the content provider currently pay nothing, but they are trying to avoid paying their share of the upgrade costs by using net neutrality as a shield.  Take a look at this article regarding the American Consumer Institute 's opposition to net neutrality legislation,

Institute Slams Net Neutrality Legislation

WASHINGTON--Saying that proposed changes to the telecom bill currently working its way through the U.S. Senate will hurt consumers, the American Consumer Institute has announced that it's pressing senators to leave any regulatory provisions out of their legislation.

The public policy group, which studies a wide range of consumer issues, presented an economic study by Dr. Larry Darby, a former chief economist for the FCC, that said that current proposals for regulating payment for the Internet would make consumers pay the whole cost of upgrading and operating the Internet, while the companies that benefit the most, such as Google and Microsoft, would be given what is essentially a free ride.

http://www.publish.com/article2/0,1895,1979598,00.asp

From your article:

"For a set of beneficiaries in a multisided market to say that only consumers should pay for it flies in the face of reality of the rest of how the economy actually price services," Darby said."

This does not describe the reality of the situation at all.

• Content providers pay for their bandwidth. They can only use the bandwidth they buy. If they want more bandwidth, they pay for it.
  
• Consumers pay for their bandwidth. They can only use the bandwidth they buy. If they want more bandwidth, they pay for it.
  

What's the problem? The problem is the telcos don't want to lose their POTS customers to Vonage. And the cable companies don't want to lose HBO subscribers to video on demand. They have a solution for that. Cut off access to it or throttle until it's unusable.

to what net neutrality advocates are arguing, not the current landscape.  Remember, Darby is representing an organization dedicated to promoting the best interests of consumers and he was formerly the chief economist for the FCC.  I'm sure he understands how the internet pricing structure works.

As I mentioned before there is a general confusion as to what exactly net neutrality is, but according the the ACI study,

"The proposal, dubbed net neutrality, would make it illegal for broadband companies to shift any portion of payments to high-tech businesses that use and would benefit from new broadband investments."

http://www.theamericanconsumer.org/release1.htm

Thus, if net neutrality legislation passed, ISPs couldn't seek compensation from content providers for their billions invested in infrastructure upgrades.  

This is all BS. This "shifting payments to high-tech businesses" is extortion. These aren't their customers. They have no business demanding payments from them. It would be more accurate to call these protection payments. If you give us enough money, we make sure nothing happens to your user's data. In the case of VoIP and VoD they'll just demand high enough payments that they'll be sure no one will pay them. Then you'll have no choice but to go with your monopoly service provider for voice and video. That is their goal.

Thanks JG, here's the real problem: Congress should not decide what the right business model is.

Of course Google et al are paying for service right now, but that does not entitle them to the same service moving forward. I have nothing against Google and nothing against a neutral net, so long as the market makes the call. All this second-guessing about the "right" way to charge...how do we know? Free markets allow us to try every granular possiblity.

Let 'em fight it out. Of course they can try to abuse their customers. Every industry has that freedom. The free market is the best corrective, not rule-making.

And, they are not monopolies. Here's a breakdown of market share. If we pass onerous neutrality legislation, we basically lock the incumbents in place, much like public utilities.

The VOIP and VOD companies can just build their own infrastructure?  Vertical integration is a very common practice, perhaps google could use some of their billions of dollars in market capitalization and buy and/or build their own pipe?

We have an internet for what purpose? Every content provider just has to run wires all the way out to every user! That sounds like a great new direction for the internet.

...should net-neutrality pass.

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051124.html

I'm not sure which is worse.

It is exactly what Time Warner did when they merged with AOL.

But, who is to say wires will matter in the next 10 years?  10 years ago the internet was barely even alive.  Innovation changes markets.  Right now we have satellites, WI-FI, WI-MAX and dozens of other delivery methods coming on-line all of which could change the marketplace that people seem so eager to lock into stone.  

"The proposal, dubbed net neutrality, would make it illegal for broadband companies to shift any portion of payments to high-tech businesses that use and would benefit from new broadband investments."

Web publishers already pay for bandwidth used. It can be a substantial cost. You pay both for the total bandwidth used in a month, and a surcharge if you want to be able to burst through more traffic at peak periods. You don't just pay $20 a month and serve as many pages as you want. Unless you design your site to minimize bandwidth usage (e.g., no or small images, no videos, etc.) it is pretty easy to get over $10,000 per month even with a medium traffic site (say, 10 million page views monthly).

What the opponenets of net neutrality want is not just to charge for access, but to put a surcharge on if you actually want your content delivered as quickly as the preferred vendors.

On the toll road analogy, it's like paying to get on a tollroad, and then noticing a superfast express lane that, as a practical matter, is offered only to those who are sending 10,000 vehicles a week down that same highway.

"The VOIP and VOD companies can just build their own infrastructure?"

That's one of the core points - they can't. Most cities aren't going to invoke state powered takings to allow someone to put a line across your yard, or dig up all the city streets to lay new fiber, for any wannabe telco or cable company that comes along.

Then there is the massive level of investment needed if you can get governmental support. Cost to build out a cable or telco network of any kind nationwide would be tens of billions of dollars.

These are called barriers to entry. If you took any economics in school, you might remember that such barriers to entry distort market forces.

It feels good to say leave it to the market, but if you are not a raging ideologue, you need to look at whether there is or can be a functioning market.

Reading all the insane pro-regulation comments here, it looks like Red State has been taken over by the Kosola Krowd.

What's going on here, fellow conservatives, have you guys been duped by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, and the Hollywood Establishment?

The regulations proposed by the Kosola Krowd make legitimate services illegal and do little or nothing to protect free speech on the Internet, not that it needs protecting.

And what's most interesting, their supporters are the very same people who produced the propaganda film Outfoxed: Bob McChesney, Jeff Chester, Moveon.org and the liberal consumer groups.

You guys are nuts to support their agenda, they're coming for our guns next.

Wake up.

But I'd have to say, I have no problem with a company ruling an open marketplace by virtue of the vast majority of customers choosing to use them for whatever reason. That applies to Microsoft, Apple (iPod), Google, Adobe, whoever.

I have a real problem doing business with a company where I have no choice in the matter, and then having them use that power to force me to buy more products and services from them.

You guys are nuts to support their agenda, they're coming for our guns next.

Who knew that the telcos and cable companies were working to protect my 2nd Amendment rights? That would almost make it worth being forced to buy all my services from them.

"Remember, Darby is representing an organization dedicated to promoting the best interests of consumers and he was formerly the chief economist for the FCC."

Well, if he worked for the government, he must know best, I suppose the argument goes. Forgive me if I don't view government service that way. That's doubly true for the FCC, where a mix of true believers in various ideologies and folks on revolving door loans from various interest groups have distorted fact based analysis pretty badly in recent years.

And does anyone here know what the American Consumer Institute is? Did they exist before net neutrality? Are they a bona fide consumer oriented organization? Who funds them? Are we sure that they are not some astroturf group pretending to advance neutral viewpoints but really just serving as an extension of the K Street lobbying shops? It seems just a little pat to me when you refer to this organization as an "organization dedicated to promoting the best interest of consumers." I don't take it at face value when Ralph Nader or Common Cause make that claim, and I don't take it at face value when you make that claim on Darby's behalf.

By a member of the Penn State IT department:

The Importance of Net Neutrality.

 Our experience working with advanced networks has taught us that the Internet works best if the user - not the network owner or operator - determines what information is transmitted over the network. Users should be able to decide how much bandwidth to buy from the network operators - a little or a lot. Once the user has paid for his or her bandwidth, the user should be able to go to any web page, use any lawful application, equipment or service, and send any lawful content.

Allowing the network owner to block or degrade content, equipment or applications fundamentally alters the Internet experience. Indeed, allowing a gatekeeper to monitor, screen, manipulate traffic would ruin the Internet as we know it. Instead of the open, free-wheeling, forum for discourse and commerce that we enjoy today, the Internet would become the private playground of a few network owners - which face little competition and thus have significant market power -- whose incentive will be to steer users to the products and services that they own.

The debate over net neutrality is sometimes distorted by those who oppose legislation. They maintain that everyone has a different definition of net neutrality, or that this is a solution in search of a problem. While these pithy phrases might be easy to toss around in casual conversation, they are dead wrong. This issue is not nearly as complicated as the opponents would have you believe. Let me state a few points very clearly.

First, now that the FCC has eliminated the net neutrality requirements for broadband providers, network owners can block traffic at will. A cable or phone company could block access to a Senator's web site or an on-line journal simply because they disagree with the viewpoint being expressed. The network owner could block or degrade a competitor's VOIP offering, simply because it competes with the telco's own VOIP service. There is absolutely no legal requirement to maintain an open network today. At a minimum, Congress must act to prohibit blocking or intentional degradation of Internet traffic.

Second, there is one central principle that underlies the entire net neutrality debate - nondiscrimination. Network owners should not be able to give preference to their own services over those of their competitors. Network operators should truly be "neutral"; their job should be to carry traffic on a nondiscriminatory basis. To be sure, there are lots of ways of writing this principle into statutory law, but the variety of language does not mean that there are a variety of meanings to net neutrality. All the advocates of net neutrality with which EDUCAUSE and Internet2 are aligned share this common goal of ensuring an open, nondiscriminatory, neutral Internet.

Third, the telephone and cable companies maintain that legislating on net neutrality would prevent them from managing their networks, but this is a misconception. Network management is not a barrier to net neutrality. As network managers ourselves, we understand the need to be concerned with security attacks, spam, and overall congestion - but these should not be used as excuses to discriminate. In short, network management and net neutrality are not in conflict, they are perfectly consistent. In fact, telephone companies today engage in network management of their narrowband networks under a net neutrality regime without difficulty.

Fourth, giving preferential treatment to certain Internet traffic (as the telephone and cable companies desire) is not only unfair, it inherently degrades the quality of service provided to others. If a network operator starts to give preference to packets from one source (that perhaps pays the operator for preference), what happens to all of the other, ordinary packets? We know that when an ambulance or fire truck comes down a congested highway, everybody else has to pull over and stop. For emergencies, and for public safety, that is accepted, but what if UPS trucks had the same preference? Giving a preference to the packets of some will degrade the transport for everyone else.

Fifth, allowing the network operators to charge users to deliver traffic on the Internet will inherently inhibit non-profit organizations from using the Internet for social good. If economic toll booths are allowed for content and applications to access the Internet, then soon only the richest content providers will be able to make their material available. What happens to the small college or university, the little guy, the start-up, the entrepreneur? If charging content providers to carry their bits to local customers had existed ten years ago, we would never have seen universities using the Internet for distance learning and telemedicine applications that are widely available today. Universities and colleges simply could not compete with the large on-line merchants for priority access to the network.

Just to cite some examples, MIT is pioneering a move to put all of its course content - written materials, multi-media, videos of lectures and more - onto the Internet for free distribution to the world. It is an experiment, but a bold one that could have transformative impact upon those who might never be able to see the inside of a college classroom. Stanford University is making the audio from class lectures available on the Web. The Library of Congress is working on projects to make rare materials available over the Internet. Should MIT or Stanford or the Library of Congress now have to pay Verizon and AT&T, Comcast and Cox, and all of the other local network providers to allow Americans access to this material? Other nations are not putting up toll booths, why should we?

as they continue to spout doomsday scenarios about the ISPs blocking content if net neutrality legislation doesn't pass they are refusing to run ads opposing net neutrality on their site.  

I realize there is a difference between a website and the internet, but this seems to be a bit hypocritical.  

Has everyone forgotten that Al Gore intends His Internet for governmental data research exchange? Yes it's BECOME a business, but it's only a hardware service business.  It shouldn't be in the demoting-nonprofitable-content business, but neither should the laws to invoke "neutrality" be longer than a single typed page.

There are literally millions of miles of dark fiber already buried in those city streets ready to be bought, or leased.  If anything there is an overubandunce of unused fiber in this country, not too little.  

Or again I give you Wi-Max or any of a variety of ways to get around whatever barriers you may see.  

And how much do you think Comcast or Verizon or Sprint or Qwest spent to build what they have today?  

I just peaked at the markets and Google's current market capitalization is $121.22 billion. That is 45% greater than Comcast's market cap of $67 Billion and 22% greater than Verizon's market cap of $96 billion.  

I don't think expense should limit their entry too much.  

This overly-long essay is a load of crap that spins the issues. The regulations prohibit Quality of Service for a fee, and that's a vital part of the new streaming media and voice applications we want to deploy in the Internet.

This is a debate over engineering and regulation, not over free speech and religion.

If you come across a nice essay, pull out the best paragraph or two and post a link.

Don't spam.

"What's going on here, fellow conservatives, have you guys been duped by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, Amazon, and the Hollywood Establishment?"

Setting aside Barbra Streisand, I think you will find the major studios all in favor of killing net neutrality in its cradle. It's Time Warner, after all, that wants to be able to charge a premim if a competing content provider wants to send content down their cable company subsidiary pipes.

And it's Bill Clinton's press secretary leading the PR charge against net neutrality - not exactly a conservative icon there.

Personally, I found that a helpful post that was no longer than it needed to be to say what it said. You may disagree, and I respect your right to do so, but that doesn't make it spam.

Show me one paragraph in that pompous essay that actually relates to the pending legislation.

Astroturf is a term for a fake grass roots or public interest group that really is just synthetically constructed front for a political or financial interest group in a public debate.

I'm not saying this group is, because I don't know. I just don't know who they are, so I'm wondering.

it may make it a copyright infringement

There is no such thing as net neutrality in past or present Internet regulation; it's a myth.

Hollywood's business community hasn't taken a stand on Internet regulation, but Alyssa Milano. Arianna Huffinton, and Moby sure have.

To the actual freakin' bill in question? There has been so much misrepresentation on this issue in all these summaries and blog postings, who knows what the thing actually says any more.

but what if regular service gives you access only to VOIP from your broadband provider and blocks or degrades other VOIP solutions,

I would say that the company doing this is begging to have competion introduced into the area.(not as easy as this currently, I know)

Now I know I live in a populated area, but the second cox implements something asanine like this I'll switch to qwest, or something else.

I don't think the solution to years of over-regulating the telecoms is to introduce more regulation.

My post isn't much longer than the others on this thread.

I fear the day when telcos start deciding what is and is not "offensive" or "appropriate" for their "diverse users".  Perhaps comcast deems it safer to reduce the bandwidth to sites that attack affirmative action, or sites that support a question a popular celebrity or politician (perhaps a politician that voted "their way" recently). All of us politicos should fear a world without net-neutrality.  The direction of the internet will no longer be decided by content providers, but by the networks that carry that content.  I suppose that is the outcome of an unregulated internet.  Perhaps that is the right "conservative" stance to take, but it leaves the internet as we know it, in shambles.

I am a network architect.  I have avoided this subject because I feel I would have a difficult time explaining to the average person what it is really about.  This is about allowing certain data streams to have priority through your network for a fee, as you state.

If I am AT&T and CBS wants to stream college basketball playoffs to people and they want their traffic to get higher priority in my network, they would pay me money and I would set a bit on their packets that treats their traffic a little differently.  That's it.  In other words, someone watching their stream might be a little less likely to see the video stream freeze and restart ... they would get a bette viewing experiance than if the packets were sent with the default priority.  And there isn't even a guarantee of THAT happening.   If my network has ample capacity, it isn't even going to matter since it is going to be able to handle all traffic and won't need to care about the QOS bits.

Basically what happens is a network might have several paths.  One path might be very good but very expensive.  Another path might be very cheap but not as good.  If someone is paying me money, I might put their traffic on the expensive link.

Or, if I have a path that is congested and traffic is queueing up in the router, I might drop a packet from a "routine" traffic stream before I drop a packet from a "premium" or high-priority traffic stream.

In fact, the entire thing will probably be completely transparent to the user.  This is really an engineering issue that someone has attempted to spin into a political issue.  Overall, allowing networks to prioritize traffic for a fee will probably result in BETTER performance for the end users.  I as a network operator might be more likely to buy an expensive, high-performance link if I can sell access to that link at a higher fee.  

As I understand it, this is not about CUSTOMERS paying more, it is about CONTENT PROVIDERS paying more to use higher cost infrastructure of transport providers.

The only problem I have with it is a technical one.  It could encourage providers to allow congestion so they could charge extra fees to allow providers to "cut through" the congestion. But overall, I believe it will result in providers purchasing better connectivity and passing the costs to the CONTENT PROVIDER rather than to the CUSTOMER.

In other words, if you want all traffic to be the same, you are saying you want all costs associated with network upgrades to be passed to the consumer.  If you allow content providers to pay a premium for better access, they end up paying for network upgrades in the form of these access fees.

Good question. In the case of Japan and Korea, their population densisites are 10x ours, so the ROI on building networks is (back-of-the-envelope) 10x higher. Very different economics. Also, they were driven by a consumer killer-app in gaming.

France also claims to have a broadband miracle, where users pay something like $20/mo for 25 Mb/s. And they do, but this is because it is sitting on top of the very expensive France Telecom infrastructure. If you factor in things like real estate and pensions, they are paying a lot for the privilege. It's a metaphor for their greater problems, actually...

So who is funding Hands Off The Internet? I noticed a reference to a Mercury Group in the WHOIS. Is this the Mercury Group that provides PR services or someone else? Are they providing, perchance, PR services for Williams, one of the major owners of legacy fiber optic networks? Just wondering.

The entire net neutrality argument is bogged down in so much misinformation that productive discourse on the subject has become nearly impossible.

Proponents of net neutrality want the government to require that ISPs guarantee equal service to all data packets. Aside from the inevitable regulatory clusterflock that this will entail, the simple fact of the matter is that not all packets are created equal.

Opponents of net neutrality -- largely cable companies and telcos -- want the government to enable them to disfavor traffic across their networks, not because they want to charge more for iTunes and YouTube and BitTorrent, but because they're desperately afraid of the competitive challenge represented by the Vonages and Skypes of the world. Aside from the inevitable regulatory clusterflock that this will entail, the simple fact of the matter is that they're asking government to protect them from competition from VoIP.

No one is on the side of angels, here.

S.2686, Senate bill (prior to today's Commerce committee markup)

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/thomas

House passed COPE Act, HR5252

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/D?c109:4:./temp/~c109kat3uY::

Is this it?

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.5273:

"Hollywood's business community hasn't taken a stand on Internet regulation"

Well, I'm not so sure that's true. The cable companies certainly have, and the big studios and the big cable companies overlap overwhelmingly.

And, with all due respect, none of the names you cite are exactly A list celebrities. Does anyone know where Tom Cruise and Britney Spears stand on this? I feel unenlightened without their contributions to the debate.

News.com has coverage of today's bill here, and an index of their past coverage is here. If you are willing to click around, their coverage is fairly detailed.

We used to have such a thing, it was called Ma Bell (ATT)a governement allowed monopoly. Not a govnmt RUN but a single entity whose sole purpose would be to manage, update, build new fiber etc. A maintenance type company.  ATT was given a monopoly to build the original system so they would all work together and would cover the entire US, and were guaranteed a certain amount of profit to accomplish upgrades etc, but they also provided a service  ie phone, you had  no choice of content or service provider.  

NO content would be allowed to be provided by the access provider.  We would pay this company an access fee and we could get the speed of service we wanted to pay for.  

Whomever won the right to be the "Maintenance" type company could also be offered a certain amount of profit to upgrade etc.  Having access is to important to allow control by both an access and service provider.  That is why I suggested the utility type concept.  Ma Bell used to be guaranteed a certain return due to it being designated an important issue to be provided almost like a utility.  Yes, I know its semi utopian but we are not a true democracy or pure capitalist either.  

Then we could get phone from Verizon, ATT, Bell South OR any NEW company coming along, vonage, skype etc.  We could get a couple of shows from Time Warner, a couple from Cox and some from Comcast....OR DIRECTLY from the CBS or NBC or Viacom or movies directly.  But the ACCESS provider could not mess with ANYTHING we wanted over our fiber.  Let them compete over their SERVICE or their other PRODUCT. Not solely bacause they OWNED to road to my house and had me as a captive audience.  I will never have cable competition, I will have competition from another TYPE of provider but will never see the ability to get competition from 2-3 or 4 cable companies due to the cost of EACH one having to pull cable.  I wouldnt want a Ford Hiway and a GM hiway running to my home.  

"Right now we have satellites, WI-FI, WI-MAX and dozens of other delivery methods coming on-line all of which could change the marketplace that people seem so eager to lock into stone."

What do satellites or wi-fi conceivably have to do with the network issues at stake here? Is this just the old let the telco monopolies charge what they want because technology will save us all argument?

as it is the fact that it is a direct cut and paste of a whole article. Besides the possible copyright infringement, if it is someone else's words you should grab a pertinent paragraph or so and provide a link.

The issue isn't with passing on costs to the consumer.  My issue would be this. Using your analogy of AT&T, say another company wanted to stream their political documentary about successes in Iraq at a higher bandwidth.  Say, AT&T decides that this video is "offensive" or "not in line with company policy" and says no.  Could the company with the documentary sue to get AT&T to give them better access?  AT&T own the bandwidth and the fiber, and they can do as they please, right?  

This is the problem. AT&T gets to decide what information is easy to access, and what information is more difficult/impossible to access. This is all well and good, as long as you trust AT&T. If you don't I guess you could switch ISPs, but chances are, they have a state sponsored monopoly on broadband like Comcast does here in Baltimore.  

Were traditionally state monopolies, and everything in Europe is run through much more of a socialist filter before it goes live. I wouldn't look to Europe for guidance, because their basic approach starts from a bad premise of pervasive governmental control.

In terms of price, you can get combined phone with national long distance and high bandwidth DSL in Europe for about 25 euros a month, which is about $33.

This does nothing to forbid tiered service. It does not ban offering QoS service.

I think the days of buying cheap dark fiber are long gone. There's a lot of stuff you could have bought cheap in 2001 or 2002 that's not available cheap today.

I don't get where Wimax fits in here, other than as a supposed miracle new techology that can be used to justify the telcos and cable cos doing whatever they want. Maybe you can explain it to me.

it has actually already happened. several smaller ISPs in small markets have degraded voip service to the point of unusability while selling their own service, and it was only the intervention by the FCC that stopped this. recent rule changes will now preclude the fcc from doing so.

i'll dig up the links...

It wouldn't be done "per item".  I am some content provider.  I work out a deal with, say, AT&T for a premium path for ALL of my traffic, period.  In other words, I pay a surcharge for special treatment.  And that only works when my packets are on AT&T's net. See, and this is the hard part to get across to people, there is no such thing as "The Internet".  There are hundreds of private networks that cooperate to creat this interoperation we call "The Internet". Once my packet leaves AT&T's network, the QoS gets set back to "routine".  So if AT&T is my direct upstream provider, I pay a premium to have AT&T treat my packets first class. But if the person watching my traffic is on Verizon's network, my packets DONT get special treatment on that net unless I also pay THAT provider a surcharge.

In other words, what is likely to happen is that a major content provider might pay the handful of major networks a premium for certain traffic.  Maybe VIOP and streaming multimedia.

Your analogy with the "offensive" video also makes no sense.  Just because the packets are treated differently, it doesn't make me more likely to watch them or less likely to watch something else.  It just means that when AT&T has enough demand by content providers for premium service, they will go out and install premium service.

Now the other thing is that network providers tend to pay for a fiber at a flat rate, not according to it's bandwidth usage.  For example, I have 5 circuits I manage that are a "wavelength" or a little over a gig each.  I pay a flat rate on those circuits whether I use 100 meg or 1 gig.  Point is when I don't have enough "premium" traffic to fill that pipe, I am going to go ahead and fill it the rest of the way with lesser priortiy traffic.  I want to keep that pipe as full as I can get it to minimize my overall cost.

I am going to leave this topic now because 99% of the people I have seen discussing it have no idea what the heck they are talking about, they have emotional positions not based on reality, and there is no sense in discussing with most people because it is a highly technical issue

So now Verizon, AT&T and Bell South are "Hollywood?"

Dude, you're a moron.

This debate isn't about some ISP preferring one TV show over another, it's about the service options they're allowed to sell their customers.

Are you people completely insane?

Tossing out the insults on your first day might not be a smart move if you plan to stick around.

Is actually a member of the coalition supporting net nuetrality so he's not really siding with you on this one like you falsely imply. To quote Glenn Reynolds:

I think that Net neutrality has gotten us this far, and I don't see any reason to get rid of it. What's more, I suspect the motives, and motivations, of those who are buying into this.

source

Anyway, if you thought Glenn was on your side and it added some credence to your arguement, you were wrong.

The best analogy I can think of is a shipping company like UPS.  A shipping company is the best analogy because that is what a network company does ... ship packets from point A to point B.

Now imagine I have a better class of service, say overnight air.  If a package provider wants premium service for their product, they pay extra and ship overnight air and the customer has the product the next day.  Otherwise they pay standard rate and the package arrives as fast as they can get it there with available capacity.  What happened is that many shippers of products wanted the faster service, more air routes were added, premium service got cheaper and more available and the consumer benefitted from better service.

What is being proposed is that the networks want to allow "overnight air" for providers that want premium service and they would pay for it.  

Some people seem to want only one class of service.  If that comes to pass, then networks will have no incentive to boost service beyond "acceptable".  There would be little profit in deploying high capacity (say multi-gig long haul fiber) circuits because there is nothing to be gained from it.  In the end, it is like having UPS with only one quality of service and you get what you get.

I'm not going to get dragged into a flame war. I will only note one thing. I was talking about cable companies, and last I checked Verizon, Bell South and AT&T are telcos, not cable companies. There is a difference, you know.

There is a market for better performance. With their customers. You know, the people who actually signed up for service with them. We have tiered service right now. Net neutrality doesn't do anything to change that. They can still package it up however they want and offer any number of doodads as additional cost options.

I don't have any problem with more than one class of service. If I, as an end user, want a better connection, I should be able to pay for it. I do have a problem with ISPs sabotaging traffic to their competitors just so they can sell you their own version of the same service.

As for the analogy... sure, shippers can choose to pay extra for better service. But the shippers are analogous to the end users, not the content providers. The shippers are the ones that have the relationship with UPS. They are the ones that decide what service to use and what delivery options to purchase. UPS doesn't go around demanding recipients pay them protection if they don't want something to happen to their packages. Maybe they'll get delayed. Maybe they'll just got lost. Maybe we'll leave them at the end of the driveway. Hey, bad stuff can happen if you don't give us our cut. (And don't forget FedEx's cut, USPS's cut, and everybody else's cut).

Wi-max is a competitor to telco's and cable.  It does not use their infrastucture at all.  Pretty simple really, it's called competition. Wi-max is cheaper to buildout than fiber so quicker to expand, and like a lot of public wi-fi networks accessble to end users for free.  

All those technologies are the competitors to traditional fiber networks.  They are the reason that we currently do not have a monopoly and why will not have a monopoly at any time in the foreseable future.  

They're all part of the evil Corporation Council of Evil for Evil Corporations.

Are we talking science fiction or mid-term market realities? None of those technologies are practical alternatives today, and near as I can tell no one with any technical expertise expects any of them to become competitors. Wifi is great around the house or at your local coffee shop, for example, but it's not the stuff of an internet backbone.

I was hoping that you would get substantive here. I understand what you hope might prove true. What I was looking for was some actual, hard information suggesting it was more than blind hope.

Now that point of view really does belong at Kos or Huffington.

The internet should be a government run operation, which I think is what you said, with its maintanence farmed out to private companies.

But thats not where we are at present. At present, GM does own the road to your house, as you put it. And as a for-profit company its natural and appropriate for it to try to make money off of it. But people want the Congress to tell it not to.

The providers, who cannot make money off of what is by rights a valuable service, are going to end up being bought out by the content providers as things stand.

Verizon, Bell South, and AT & T are the companies who want the video franchising reform that the Kossacks say is going to kill Net Neutrality. The Cable companies haven't been real vocal about it.

Have you read anything about this issue that wasn't filtered by Moveon.org?

Actually, the debate is about whether ISPs should be able to charge content providers a premium for quality of service. It has absolutely nothing to do with end users, except insofar as they're the ones left holding the bag when Vonage has to pass along the additional costs of data transmission on, say, AT&T's infrastructure.

You do not have an earthly clue what you're talking about.

By most people don't understand the problem.

Let's say your cable company is your network provider as an end user.  Sure, you could pay a premium to get, say, google content at higher priority, but your network provider could only offer this premium on their own network.  If the traffic originates on a different network, your provider can not dictate how the other network handles the traffic.

Let me modify the shipping example to make it look more like the internet.  Lets say there are 100 shipping companies (network proviers).  A shipper contracts to one of them to send all his packages.  The end user only gets deliveries from a different shipping company.  Let's call them UPS and FedEx, respectively.  So lets say the shipper pays FedEx to ship by air ... so FedEx airlifts the package to UPS.  UPS then delivers it by ground to the user.  This is because the provider and the user are not on the same "network".

So now lets imagine that the shipper has made an agreement with both UPS and FedEx to ship packages by air.  Now it goes by air the whole way.

But what you don't understand is that the customer WILL ALWAYS PAY anyway.  Here is how it will work.  You will go to CBS to see basketball.  There will be two feeds offered. One, for free, is a "best effort" feed ... pretty much what they already have.  For a FEE you can watch the higher quality feed (ground shipping free, overnight available if you pay for it).  CBS will have made agreements with all the major network providers to give this feed special treatment.  So you can see a higher bandwidth version with fewer "glitches".

In the end, costs are always borne by the consumer  no matter what.

If you are for "net neutrality" then chances are you don't have the slightest clue what you are really for and have bought into some bullcrap someone has fed you.  You are going to have to suffer poorer service with fewer choices for premium content.  It basically kills the idea of being able to pay more for a higher quality product even if you want it.

I can't believe you're putting me in a position where I have to defend Kos, even just a little.

A privately owned website is under no obligation to accept political advertising the owner doesn't agree with.  Using your logic, Red State would have been wrong for not running Kerry for President ads.

I realize you have an agenda and all, but come on.  If these are the arguments opponents of net neutrailty are reduced to making, I'm glad I'm on the other side of the issue.

I don't turn to law professors to explain to me how the Internet works yesterday or today, I read the engineering documents and talk to people who make the routers.

The Internet is not neutral and never has been. The more you pay for Internet service, the more you get. That's the real law of the jungle, and always has been.

You can't "abandon" a principle that never existed.

Excessive latency in VoIP and VoD makes these things functionally useless. The "poor man's feed" is not a viable alternative.

So either you pay for the premium feed, or you may as well pick up the phone or turn on the television. Which is exactly what the ISPs -- mostly telcos and cable companies -- want. They do not want to have to compete with VoIP and VoD on equal footing.

Here's where you'll complain that the ISPs own the infrastructure, so why shouldn't they be able to charge VoIP and VoD providers what the market will bear? Excellent question. And I have an excellent answer: because the ISPs -- again, mostly telcos and cable companies -- have received generous public subsidy, if nothing else in the form of a government-sanctioned monopoly or duopoly in most municipalities. This isn't a free market, so we ought to stop pretending that free market principles are in any way relevant to the discussion.

Arguments against net neutrality are simply arguments for protectionism.

I don't do MoveOn.org, so unless they are cunningly manipulating a broad swath of news organizations to get to me any errors I am making don't lie with them.

Besides that, I think a quick Google search will show that, indeed, the American Cable Association is right in the middle of this debate. I don't know what you call vocal, but I would call what they are doing vocal enough.

Having said that, I will be the first to admit that there's a lot I don't understand about this issue. There is so much booshwah floating around that you have cut through to get to the real issues (you see a bunch of it in the comments to this article - confusing the issue with being able to pay for higher bandwidth at hour home, misleading claims that the free market will cure all, pretending that wifi is the coming technical solution to all this, paid lobbyists perhaps pretending to just be concerned citizens, and so on). I haven't cut through all the static. If I were a conspiracy theorist, I might think that was the plan.

In terms of some of the more obscured issues, I am fascinated, for example, that the debate only seems to involve the last mile. It would seem to me that if you were going to do anything positive with preferential service - as opposed to simply blocking out people you don't like when they get to the last mile - you would have to have a system in place where that priority delivery would go from the data center, down the internet backbone and through the last mile. It seems like that is not necessarily technically easy, and is certainly not part of the current policy debate. Based on what I see, you can block someone from arriving on time if you control the last mile, but you can't really guarantee fast delivery if that's all you control. I'm having a hard time finding dispassionate explanations of this issue.

I should say that arguments against net neutrality in principle are simply arguments for protectionism. There are certainly legitimate arguments to be made against the various proposals for how net neutrality ought to be implemented, and I am hardly blind to the dangers inherent in any sort of government regulation.

Let's say the owner of your ISP is a liberal democrat.  He doesn't like Red state so he slows the upload speeds of all his users when they try to read Red State.

He is just as free to hamper Red State as he is Vonage.  Do we really want to give this much power to our ISP?

Imagine if your phone company caused a bunch of static on the line every time you called a republican... unless they paid your phone company to get good reception on your line... sounds like a good racket to me.

shows me that you really have no clue at all about this particular issue. Which is I'm sure what the providers want, confusion and distortion.

the writer of this post cares, since he cited him and implies that he is against net neutrality.

from Verizon  -- as well as VOIP; he just signed up.  The reality is the big telcos are cable companies, just as the big cable companies provide telephone service. A fundamental element of this whole debate is the convergance of communications products and providers.

With your home internet connection.  It has to do with how packets are treated as they go around the world from network to network BEFORE they even get to where your wire ends up.  It has more to do with backbone engineering than "edge" connectiviity.  Since there is only one path into your home from your ISP, the traffic can't take a "better path" into your house.  The only thing that can be done is in the case of congestion.

The way a router often handles congestion (your pipe is full) is to drop a packet at random.  When a TCP/IP stream experiances a dropped packet, it throttles back it's data rate and then slowly ramps back up again.  What a provider can do is put traffic into queues in the router and weight them according to priority and drop packets from the lowest priority streams first.  In other words, this whole thing has NO EFFECT on your pipe unless your pipe is ALREADY FULL.  What will happen now is that instead of all applications getting "jerky", one or more of them might continue to operate normally through the congestion.  Like a phone call or a streaming video.

It has no role in what you have access to, what you have better or less access to, all it does is changes how something is delivered.

Is this right? I thought the legislation and the debate were limited to the last mile. That's one of the things that makes it a bit hard for me to unpack the implications of what is going on here.

It will affect things we've started to take for granted, like Google, iTunes, and Amazon, because those folks will either have to raise prices or accept higher costs, which means they'll do less, which means we all suffer.

But Thomas, isn't it possible we're suffering now?

What I mean is, if Verizon isn't allowed to charge  the Googles and Amazons of the world the highest price they can obtain from these folks (in other words, if they're not allowed to charge what the market will bear), then in essence the law is already giving Amazon and Google a subsidy. Since all the best economists have been saying for years there's no such thing as a free lunch, I can only assume somebody bears the cost of this subsidy. That cost may manifest itself in the form of a) higher average internet access fees for consumers and businesses; and, b) less innovation from the ISPs; or, c) some combination of these two. I would't be shocked to learn the US is currently suffering from "c", given all I've been hearing about how much better web consumers have it overseas.

True net neutrality, in other words, may consist of allowing the ISPs to charge content providers access fees, and letting the market decide how it will all work out. Perhaps the way the market would ultimately decide things is that Apple ends up charging more for songs, Google charges more for Ads, Verizon makes more money for its stockholders, and the greater profitability of the latter allows it to bring us some of the goodies the Koreans and Dutch apparently enjoy. I'm still waiting for somebody to put Every Movie Ever Made on the web or via a smart top box for my (easy) downloading pleasure.

Full disclosure: I'm totally agnostic on this issue. Because I'm totally (at this point at least) incapable of getting through the smokescreen of competing claims. Perhaps more threads like this will change that for me. What I'd really like to see is some exhaustive study undertaken to look at web service in the US, determine if it truly is second rate compared to other rich countries, and find out what the other countries are doing right and we're doing wrong.

At this point, I'm open to anything from a complete, no-holds barred laissez-faire approach to pure, unadulterated socialism (ie, municipally-owned ISPs) on the web.

I should have known from your handle that ideology comes first, and facts at best second. Wimax is a promising technology, but it's a long way away from delivering the kind of bandwidth to enough people to compete in the delivery of streamed movies or doing VOIP. It certainly takes the work out of thinking through the tough policy issues if you always have miracle cure tucked away, or a deux ex machina ready to be triggered.

We currently rank 16th in the world in broadband deployment.

OK, it's clear that the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy hasn't done its homework on Internet regulation or they wouldn't be spouting Moveon.org's talking points, so let's do something really revolutionary and actually read the bills.

Here's the relevant part of the Markey Amendment:

If a broadband network provider prioritizes or offers enhanced quality of service to data of a particular type, it must prioritize or offer enhanced quality of service to all data of that type (regardless of the origin or ownership of such data) without imposing a surcharge or other consideration for such prioritization or enhanced quality of service.

And here's the relevant part of Snowe-Dorgan.

   (5) only prioritize content, applications, or services accessed by a user that is made available via the Internet within the network of such broadband service provider based on the type of content, applications, or services and the level of service purchased by the user, without charge for such prioritization;

Full text of all this stuff is on thomas.loc.gov, of course.

Now you should be able to see that this has nothing to do with some big liberal meanie telling you you can't watch Jack and Rexella or the 700 club on your IPTV. It's a stupid, intrusive, and retarded regulation of business practices and engineering tools need for running the modern Internet.

Don't be such saps.

Just sitting here reading through all the comments. Yours are so bereft of rhetoric, so factual and matter-of-fact and so, well, convincing.

Thanks for bringing reason and information to this debate. I learned more about the topic from reading your stuff. I think that's the way this is supposed to work.

I wasn't sure where Glenn Reynolds is on this issue. I cited him for the proposition -- in his book -- that the 'net blossomed because it was driven by the private sector, not gov't.

Regardless of where he stands on net regulation, that point still stands.

Thanks.

The major proponents of net neutrality regulation are Microsoft, Amazon.com, eBay, Yahoo and a few other content providers.  (Bill Gates, I've read, is personally ambivalent about it, but never having met him, I can't vouch for that.)

Also -- don't forget the (mostly leftish) non-profit group behind this as well -- moveon.org, Common Cause, et al.  Note that this group CLAIMS to be a left-right coalition.  But look at their membership, and outside of the Christian Coalition and the Gun Owners of America, their "right-side" membership is pretty thin...

Not to nitpick, but actually most of the broadband networks are expanding, not just Verizon (with FIOS) but also AT&T with its Project Lightspeed.  And, with the expected (or hoped for?) expansion of Internet traffic over the next few years, all of them SHOULD be doing this.  That's why I've rules limiting that investment incentive aren't a particularly good idea.  (I touch on some of the investment and growth figures in my paper for Heritage, which Pat was kind enough to link at the beginning of all this.  Here it is once more (not that its perfect, but it may provide some useful background):  http://www.heritage.org/Research/Regulation/bg1941.cfm

As I pointed out in my recent diary calling out MyDD, there are really two kinds of Net Neutrality here.

The first, original kind is a sort of inside baseball thing where trends in telecommunications were extrapolated, and the dangers of local monopolies being leveraged were foreseen, so people wanted to react now to keep them from happening.  That's the kind of net neutrality law I support: preventing local franchise laws and other regulatory-created restrictions in competition from distorting the global Internet.

The second, silly kind is a response to fears on the left that the Internet won't be an egalitarian, big-business-subsidized utopia (anymore?), and you'll have to pay your share to get the access you want.  Prevalent here are technically-inclined lefties who for years have pushed the limits of their internet access, without having to pay more because their high stress connections were subsidized by the masses using email and AIM.

What we probably need is new terminology to separate the two.

"I mean we already pay for bandwidth via our DSL/cable bill - what else are they wanting to charge us with? What else is there?"

This has nothing to do with charging consumers anything.  Its about content providers paying more (IF they want priority service).  That revenue helps expand the network -- if it doesn't come from content providers, it would be sure to come from you (or alternatively, needed expansion wouldn't come at all.

You mention that someone needs to do a FAQ.  There is lots of material out there (maybe too much!)  In the Heritage Foundation paper of mine that Pat Cleary mentioned in the original post I tried to explain a lot of this as best  I could.  For more I'd suggest taking a look at the Progress and Freedom Foundation's site (PFF.org) -- they recently published a guide to neutrality regulation.  For continuing coverage, you might also want to check the Technology Liberation Front (techliberation.org), where a lot of free-market tech policy types (including me) post.  You may not agree with everything we write (heck, even I don't!) but we do have a lot there on the issue.

" The telecoms were given tax breaks to put in new cable, to increase bandwidth"

Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't think of any tax  breaks for broadband that were enacted.  There were and are lots of bills pending, but none passed (a good thing, I believe).

On the other hand, there are lots of special taxes on telecom (and cable too).  Only recently did we get rid of the 3% excise tax on telecom (which was originally meant to pay for the Spanish-American Wars.  

The telcos are a lot of things, but they are not undertaxed...

"The cable systems are in a similar situation - you only got to dig up the streets to lay cable if the local government chose you as the cable company of choice"

Actually, local gov'ts have been formally banned from granting monnopoly franchises since 1992.  Of course, they HAVE still made it difficult for new entrants.  But, the bill going through Congress now (the one that net neutrality regulation would be added to) takes this authority out of the local gov'ts hands, making it much easier for competing firms to get in.   This simply isn't a monopoly (nor is the telecom market, but that's a whole other post).

The government can't GUARANTEE a monopoly, but it can make the barriers to entry so high that there exist lots of local monopolies.

But yes, I share your hope that the House idea, smashing the local fiefdoms that could add up to damage the global Internet, will solve the problem before it starts.

But what do the neutrality bills actually say? Here's the relevant part of Snowe-Dorgan:

"(5) only prioritize content, applications, or services accessed by a user that is made available via the Internet within the network of such broadband service provider based on the type of content, applications, or services and the level of service purchased by the user, without charge for such prioritization;"

And the relevant part of the Markey Amendment:

"If a broadband network provider prioritizes or offers enhanced quality of service to data of a particular type, it must prioritize or offer enhanced quality of service to all data of that type (regardless of the origin or ownership of such data) without imposing a surcharge or other consideration for such prioritization or enhanced quality of service."

You're clearly wrong - they apply to consumers.

If your pipe is not congested, all flows move at full speed unimpeeded.  Changing priority doesn't change the data rate to your computer one iota.  It doesn't change your experiance.

In the event your connection becomes congested (you have reached your bandwidth limit), some decisions need to be made on which packets to drop.  If QoS is provided, traffic will be dropped on lower priority streams first.  In other words, if you are making a VIOP phone call and your kid pops some download and fills your pipe, his download would slow down but your phone call would continue without interruption.

In other words, as for the end users consideration, "premium" means nothing until the pipe is full.  They aren't going to IMPEDE routine traffic, they are simply going to give some traffic priority when a choice needs to be made.

Now inside a network there might be lots of choices that can be made based on QoS such as which path to take (use that new coast-to-coast fiber link instead of the old multihop topology, for example)but that is pretty much transparent to the user when you are probably going to be limited by a thin pipe.

Most of the problem is that the people WRITING these bills have no idea what the hell they are doing.

This does NOT belong at the federal government level.  It is stupid and making an issue out of nothing.

Network equipment providers have for a very long time provided features in routers and switches to prioritize traffic.  This is most commonly used in private networks where, for example, traffic for the nightly backups might be at a different priority than someone in the office browsing the web.

Commercial internet providers realized they have this feature in their gear and aren't using it. They are paying for it when they buy the gear and aren't using it. In ISP networks, all traffic is treated pretty much the same (with a few exceptions).

Someone got the brilliant idea that they could "monetize" that feature of their network gear by offering higher grades of service. So one of the executives of one of the network providers said hey, if service providers want to launch services (such as VOIP and streaming multimedia) that require a high level of service (nobody likes telephone conversations or video presentations that are laggy or jerky) then they can certainly pay for that.

This got all the content providers in a tizzy.  The vision of a competitor buying priority handling for their traffic would mean they would want to buy that too. This would cut into their profits.  Some of these content providers have the ability to make some HUGE campaign donations.

Now left on its own, what would REALLY happen is that either everyone would buy the "premium" service making it useless since now everyone is at equal priority again and they are all competing equally for a limited resource ... or nobody would buy it, causing exactly the same situation.

But this suggested regulation is bad.  It is bad because what it does is force QoS by traffic type.  So lets say I am Level3 communications and I provide VOIP service.  Under this proposed regulation I increase the priority of all VIOP traffic across the board and change anyone else using my network more for passing VOIP traffic ... except for my customers because I am not going to charge myself for my own traffic.  What it amounts to is a way for a network provider to descriminate against competitors using their network when they offer a competing service.

I say the best approach is to leave this regulation alone and allow the market to sort it out.  Whenever the government attempts to regulate a market, they screw it up for everyone.

is that it is incomplete.  What if the federal government had subsidized the

buildout along with agreements on its use?  Basically this is a money grab by

the remaining telcos who got great deals from the government with wink wink nod

nod agreement of how they would keep said infrastructure open.  

Further - what is next? I can pay more to make sure my long distance call goes

through immediately or less if I'm willing to wait up to 15 seconds fo a

connection and then have it sound like a 1960s call with crackles and delay?

I would say it has been a mixture of both. The government started it after all.

clearly contradicts what you claim he is saying

the way i worded that implies you are lying...did not mean to. clearly he contradicts himself in a way. I think he is calling for a maintaining of the status quo clearly, as he sees it as large factor in the internet;'s formation.

Valid points all, we can learn something from how others do it. But let's not panic because we are 16th or whatever.

As I mention above, the Korean, Japanese and French approaches are very different and incompatible with ours, IMHO. Population density and true economic costs make them somewhat less miraculous.

If we look at places where competition is allowed to flourish, great things are happening. Cablevision and Verizon are falling over themselves to offer 30Mb plans here.

Martin Geddes has written on this for a while and says don't panic. Sorry for the extended excerpt, but relevant:

If we separately ranked US states, or divided the UK up into regions, the picture would change radically. London and southeast England would look great. So would a few US states like Virginia.

Some of those little regions with greater connectivity have familiar name tags. Like `Norway', and `Luxembourg'. Yes, they're real countries. (My wife comes from a small, real country, with a real language and real culture, so I know how sensitive people are. Don't worry, if size matters, it's only to statisticians. Mine is only bigger than yours when viewed through a spreadsheet.) Yet their position in the rankings is an artificial by-product of how we divide up the statistics. It means nothing to the median European or North American.

If North and South Korea had a massive reconcilliation tomorrow, and thus the Unified Korean Republic plummeted to #102 in the world, do you think things are getting better, or worse? (Hint: begins with `b'.)

No doubt that there are things we can do to improve market conditions here, but simply following their examples would be folly.

He's been good about linking to neutrality arguments, pro and con.

We exchanged email and I asked him if he supported neutrality as a concept or neutrality as legislation. That's the key distinction -- if we like neutrality, fine, but to have Congress try to enforce it, disaster. That difference is getting lost, but is fundamental.

Anyway, he said he'd have to see the legislation, which is the right answer. He's a lot smarter than the savetheinternet folks, I think he's sort of laissez-faire in letting them use his name.

I'm with Pat, you did more to help me understand this issue than all the others combined.

Well, it is the area where I earn my living and I have doing it for nearly 20 years, before "regular people" were allowed on the internet.  Since it is second nature to me, I find if difficult to put it into terms people understand that don't work in the field, I slip into industry jargon and people's eyes glaze over.

This is really the government meddling in a very technical issue that I don't think the people writing the regulations really understand.  They have been lobbied by people who would portray the issue in one way or another but to really understand it, you have to know how networks work and how things such as Quality of Service are applied in the practical sense by networks and network equipment.

The points that I wish people really understood better are that there is no such thing as "the internet".  There are dozens of private networks that agree to exchange traffic on various terms with each other so, say, data originating on Cox Cable's network can reach someone on SpeakEasy's network.  They are each private networks, there is no publically owned infrastructure over which the traffic flows.  

When the government starts to dictate how a network configures their equipment (because ultimately, that is what this regulation does, it specifies how routers are to be configured) they risk breaking that interoperability.  The network depends on cooperation and the model has worked very well without the government dictating how traffic is handled.  Networks will respond to customer demands.  

This entire thing was started by some executive spouting off at the mouth because some marketing "genius" buttonholed him at an offsite meeting before talking to engineering.

This issue is an overreaction to something that probably wouldn't happen.  BUT the proposed regulation has the potential to cause real damage because it would MANDATE a condition where a network provider could price competitors out of their markets.  The result would be that a user on, say, Sprint's new Embarq network could buy VOIP from Sprint for $10 but Sprint could put a surcharge on VOIP traffic in their net so a competitor must charge more than that just to break even. So if you had Sprint but want Skype, Skype can't compete.

The same situation is coming down the pike with a thing called IPTV where your cable TV will come in over the same pipe with your phone and internet traffic.  This regulation will allow a provider to jack up the price for all IPTV traffic in its network except its own (it can't charge itself) so again, the provider prices out the competition.

I would expect QoS then, under this proposed regulation, to only be deployed where a provider offers a particular service and uses QoS to raise the barrier of entry to prevent competitors from reaching their customers.  End result ... less competition, higher prices for the end user, no better service, and fewer choices for you and me.

If the above isn't clear I will offer one more walk through:

Say I own an ISP with thousands of customers and I also offer VOIP service to them in addition to Internet access.  I institute QoS configurations in my network gear to give all VOIP traffic higher priority.  I charge all competing networks a premium to use my network for VOIP traffic.  Charging myself a premium to use my own network is silly and it washes anyway.  So now I can offer my customers VOIP for less money than a competitor can because the competitor must pay me the VOIP premium to use my network. Since I don't have to compete and since I can impose a surcharge on all my competition's traffic, my customer ends up paying more for VOIP service than they would have and the other competitors eventually stop trying to sell to my customers so their choices become more limited.

Eventually, this regulation allows me to "lock in" my customers to my service.  But then the problem gets even worse.  Lets say my customer want's to call someone on Verizon's net.  Verizon socks me with a surcharge in retliation for the surcharge I am socking them with.  So now making "off net" calls is much higher than making "on net" calls.  Again, the end user's costs go up because I am going to pass that cost to the customer.

What would happen without any regulation is that the above scenario would happen at first. Then some "network neutral" provider would offer good VOIP QoS and not charge a surcharge, providers and users will flock there because they have lots of choices and low cost, the other networks drop their surcharges and the market takes care of the problem.

QoS is a good thing to have for data streams that can not tolerate interruption well. A phone call is a good example.  I don't care of a background download stalls for a few seconds but a phone call stalling for a few seconds can be downright irritating.  It is a TECHNICAL issue, not a poltical issue.

I also thank you for helping to explain some of the technical issues.

I don't understand this, however:

"What would happen without any regulation is that the above scenario would happen at first. Then some "network neutral" provider would offer good VOIP QoS and not charge a surcharge, providers and users will flock there because they have lots of choices and low cost, the other networks drop their surcharges and the market takes care of the problem."

I see why the scenario would happen at first. I don't see why the second phase, where good VOIP at no surcharge, starts happening. If everyone with a network is collecting premium fees with the surcharge while simultaneously protecting their legacy businesses, why start dropping the surcharges? They certainly wouldn't want to, and my guess is that the market will not force them to.

Markets don't always work the way you project. If what you project really happened in the real world, there would be a credit card vendor out there, somewhere, that would not be ripping off its customers with a million petty back end charges, and there would be banks that would offer both good quality of service and low, flat, predictable fees. It doesn't happen that way, because most people don't make their buying decisions based on the back end factors where the charges are hidden.

The marketing guys may not be as smart as the network engineers, but they do often have a pretty good handle on where a little more blood can be squeezed from the carcass without losing customers. In the companies I've been around, they  and the beancounters are the ones setting the business strategy, and I'm not seeing why they would want to give up this revenue stream once they have it.

Zuiko,

I'm a bit surprised that you are coming down on this side of the argument. I will admit that I probably know a lot less about it than you but I would have assumed that you would be skeptical of any new government intrusion into the private sector.

My guess is that you (as most people do) have a great distaste for the phone and cable companies monopoly over the situation. Is this true? Would your view be different if the means of communication were wireless and any shlub could join in the arena and compete?

While I admit that it does allow for tiered service and doesnt look horrible on the face of it, some of the language reminds me of the lawsuit against Microsoft for offering Explorer for free in its OS and not Netscape. Gates had a good comment: "You wouldnt tell Coke to put one can of Pepsi in every sixpack it sells.

I am just concerned about some of the language that tells the private enterprise how it can compete. for example there is a line in there that says that it cant offer better service for its own customers, well, what if it just happens to have better and faster hubs and better software to expedite transfer, or soemthing like that. Although they are not "slowing down" the competition, I could see this language making a true competitive advantage illegal. I also think some spammers will love this because it has basically made popup blockers and email blockers illegal. Mind you I mean spammers who work within the law (and realize it may not actually be "spam") but now the provider cant create software that blocks any unsolicited, yet legal, correspondence, even if the customer wants it.

I just worry that this will open the floodgates to more and more regulation, boiled frog and all. I know this, even this legislation will raise everyones rates because of all the new legal hoops.

I prefer being punched.

What I mean is, if Verizon isn't allowed to charge  the Googles and Amazons of the world the highest price they can obtain from these folks (in other words, if they're not allowed to charge what the market will bear), then in essence the law is already giving Amazon and Google a subsidy.

Er, no. Because Verizon is already aware of the cost of these folks moving across their bandwidth, and they're charging their customers accordingly (well, more accurately, they're charging their customers on a lag). What Verizon, et al., are doing, aside from protecting themselves from Vonage and VoD, is attempting a combination of getting additional rents on top of the ordinary bandwidth costs, and to avoid having to deal with real competition where it can exist, i.e., among their customers. It's rational, but it's destructive.

And can I say, for the record, that this whole "let the market work" line is silly? These providers are in monopoly or quasi-monopoly situations, and control the primary or only pipelines for the data. The market is already distorted. Pretending that the opponents of Net Neutrality are protecting the free market here is silly; they're trying to distort the market a different way.

Since all the best economists have been saying for years there's no such thing as a free lunch, I can only assume somebody bears the cost of this subsidy. That cost may manifest itself in the form of a) higher average internet access fees for consumers and businesses; and, b) less innovation from the ISPs; or, c) some combination of these two. I would't be shocked to learn the US is currently suffering from "c", given all I've been hearing about how much better web consumers have it overseas.

I want to stress this, because you seem to have adopted a strawman here: I don't mind the ISPs charging someone more. In fact, I'd rather they do the honest thing and charge the people with whom they're in privity, i.e., their customers, more. You don't need 300 MB/s download speed with unlimited data load, or at least, most people don't. If you want it, pay for it. If they want to give it, charge it.

My problem is basically the telcos seeking rents from third parties because they're scared of competition where competition matters, and in the process, destroying or at least severely damaging the internet as we've come to know it. Costs will go up and life will, let us be frank, suck a little more.

True net neutrality, in other words, may consist of allowing the ISPs to charge content providers access fees, and letting the market decide how it will all work out. Perhaps the way the market would ultimately decide things is that Apple ends up charging more for songs, Google charges more for Ads, Verizon makes more money for its stockholders, and the greater profitability of the latter allows it to bring us some of the goodies the Koreans and Dutch apparently enjoy. I'm still waiting for somebody to put Every Movie Ever Made on the web or via a smart top box for my (easy) downloading pleasure.

This is kinda what I'm getting at. Verizon is not really a market participant. They are a utility qualsi-monopolist or ologopolist looking to improve their profit area under the curve. The idea that a non-market participant will act like a market participant if allowed to act like a market participant without the pressures of market participants is, simply, only at odds with common sense, microeconomic theory, and real life experience.

In other words, I have no idea why allowing them to charge more (of both their consumers and their network users, which they will do) will drive them to innovate. I'm actually rather curious as to how you conclude it will.

I don't blame you for this, but I wish the people shilling for, say, BellSouth, would simply be honest and admit that the market isn't really in it now, and all the agitprop about the free market is really a lure to get conservatives and independents on board.

I figured that I had some information wrong, and these posts have really helped me get a better idea of reality of the net-neutrality debate.  The debate is presented in a very confusing manner and with a lot of doom and gloom coming from the left side.  Hopefully, congress will bring in some experts on boths sides to educate themselves and not make this situation any worse.

The regulatory facts:

Congress in 1993 passed a law that ruled that wireless would not be subject to economic regulation (section 332). that means the 200 million american cell phone users have not had NN for 13 years and wireless is used now more than the old wireline monopoly in terms of lines and minutes of use.

Cable's ~30 million cable modem user have never been subject to NN.

And the 1996 Telecom Act set forth a transition from monopoly to competition that is why NN has been phased out as competition replaced the need for economic regulation.

NN is obsolete! replaced by competition.

And can I say, for the record, that this whole "let the market work" line is silly? These providers are in monopoly or quasi-monopoly situations, and control the primary or only pipelines for the data.

Horsecrap.  Let's see, I probably have a dozen different providers I can chose from to my house. These providers have probably a dozen upstream providers to also choose from.  There is no monopoly or even quasi monopoly on data transport.  

This is EXACTLY the kind of thing that happens when people have no clue what they are talking about.

The customer ALWAYS pays. If the cost is passed to the content provider, the content provider will simply make registration fees higher, offer fewer features, whatever it takes.  In the end, the end consumer ALWAYS pays for EVERYTHING.

This regulation is STUPID.

This is kinda what I'm getting at. Verizon is not really a market participant. They are a utility qualsi-monopolist or ologopolist looking to improve their profit area under the curve.

More horsecrap.  Please stop making stuff up. I could shut my PacBell service off right this minute and switch to Comcast if I want to.  Or maybe I would go to SpeakEasy.  Or maybe any of a number of different providers in my area.

There might be some rural areas where choices are more limited but the markets that matter, the ones where all the people in this country live, are well served with an array of providers with an array of upstream network providers.

If a broadband network provider prioritizes or offers enhanced quality of service to data of a particular type

It is impossible to prioritize data by "type" depending on how you define "type".  Streaming video for example.  When a packet enteres my network, how do I tell it is a "streaming video" packet?  I can't. So lets say I make an agreement with Yahoo to give priority to traffic originating from a specific range of IP addresses on a specific TCP/IP port. Now I can set up QoS to prioritize those packets.

In other words, the regulations SOUND great but there is no practical way of doing it because there is no mechanism in TCP/IP to identify a traffic TYPE that is inside a packet.  Priority is assigned on a packet by packet basis.

For example, if a farm is streaming data from a web server, it is probably originating from port 80.  There is no way I can, by simply looking at a packet, to tell if it is part of a streaming video, a binary image, an audio file, or a compressed file download.  But if I make an agreement with a particular provider and they tell me that their video streams from port 80 of a particular server farm, I can than match IP address and port number and set the priority.

In other words, the language used in the regulations is impossible to implement as intended.  This is because the people writing the regulations don't understand how networks work, how TCP/IP works, how routers work, and how priority is applied.

This is how it will end up no matter what is done with the regulation ... write this down so you don't forget:

Network providers will assign all traffic by default to TOP priority and will then offer DISCOUNTS for lower priority.  The result will be exactly the same and it will comply with the regulation.

The regulations were written by Telecom Policy wonks who haven't the first clue about the Internet.

Second, try to keep up.

Let's see, I probably have a dozen different providers I can chose from to my house. These providers have probably a dozen upstream providers to also choose from.  There is no monopoly or even quasi monopoly on data transport.  

This is EXACTLY the kind of thing that happens when people have no clue what they are talking about.

I see. Who owns your cable lines? Who owns your phone lines? Who owns the infrastructure?

Then get back to me.

The customer ALWAYS pays. If the cost is passed to the content provider, the content provider will simply make registration fees higher, offer fewer features, whatever it takes.  In the end, the end consumer ALWAYS pays for EVERYTHING.

If you had brain cell one -- which you clearly do not -- you'd note that I said precisely this above. You'd even note that I advocated passing on the cost to the consumer. You'd even see that I explained why.

Have Daddy read this post to you more slowly this time.

More horsecrap.  Please stop making stuff up. I could shut my PacBell service off right this minute and switch to Comcast if I want to.  Or maybe I would go to SpeakEasy.  Or maybe any of a number of different providers in my area.

There might be some rural areas where choices are more limited but the markets that matter, the ones where all the people in this country live, are well served with an array of providers with an array of upstream network providers.

I hate to share this with you, but "all the people in this country" do not live in California. As hard as that is to believe. And -- surprise! -- not everyone is overflowing with content providers who have magically laid enormous amounts of redundant infrastructure.

Grow up, go back and read what I actually said, then come back and we can talk, cretin. In the alternative, go back to your crib.

This is exactly why I didn't want to get involved in this discussion ... people with emotional positions that have no idea what they are talking about.

I see. Who owns your cable lines? Who owns your phone lines? Who owns the infrastructure?

And that is pertinent to this discussion how?  The telephone line portion of the company is a regulated public utility, the INTERNET provider portion isn't.  I can contract with any number of internet companies to use that phone line.  In the case of the cable company, yeah, they have a monopoly because they don't have to let anyone else use their cable.  But they still compete with the all the other providers that I can obtain through the other path.

I hate to share this with you, but "all the people in this country" do not live in California. As hard as that is to believe. And -- surprise! -- not everyone is overflowing with content providers who have magically laid enormous amounts of redundant infrastructure.

But MOST of the people in this country live in fairly large metro areas.  If you add up the metropolitain areas you have most of the population.  I can't think of a major US metro that doesn't have several alternatives available.

But even so your entire argument is flawed because the concept of QoS and networks charging content providers for premium access has nothing to do with the end user.  It is more about backbone resources.  For example ... Level3 communications doesn't, as far as I know, sell retail broadband access.  But they ARE the upstream provider for a lot of people who do.  Cogent and Savvis are too.  If you are a cable internet subscriber in Canada, for example, your data probably goes right to Cogent as the next hop out of your provider's net.  If you are on Cox Cable, Level3 is probably the next network you hit no matter where the next destination.

The "last mile" provider or "edge" provider (as in the "edge of the internet" ... where the end user is) is actually the place where QoS becomes a completely different issue.  It ONLY comes into play when your pipe is full.  This is because when your pipe ISNT full, there are no choices to make.  There is only one path in your home so I can't send one stream over a "better" path and there are no packets needing to be dropped because the pipe isn't full.  In other words, 99% of the time for the end user any prioritizing won't come into play anyway.  And when it does, all it will do is make some traffic ... if you happen to have a stream of that kind of traffic active at that moment ... perform a little better than the other traffic streams that might be happening.

The biggest impact is in backbone networks that aren't affected by this regulation because they don't offer broadband service to the public.  But they DO handle the traffic from the providers.

I thought that's what  DSCP (Differentiated Services Code Point) is for. I'm not an expert, but I've read some articles on it.  If I understand correctly the header of the packet will include it's "class" and can be treated differently by the routers. So the originator of the stream would have to set the "class". This can be configured in network routers that support it.

Prioritizing traffic doesn't give you access to more things or deny access to anything.  All it does is if you have, say a music download, a web page loading, and a telephone call all going at the same time and your pipe gets full, the download might back off and your phone call will go uninterrupted.  Without QoS, it will be at random as to which one gets interrupted.

Now for BACKBONE providers it is a big difference.  I can choose to send certain traffic by a direct coast to coast pipe, for example, instead of taking 6 hops from Seattle to New York by way of Dallas if I set the router up to route different priority traffic in different ways.  Again, it doesn't deny the user anything.  All it does is allows the network provider to charge more money to use more expensive paths.

What this idea does is STUPID.  It would be the same as forcing FedEx to charge exactly the same for overnight delivery as for ground.  The result would be that ground delivery will go up in price.  Same thing will happen here.  If a network can not charge a premium for use of more expensive infrastructure, they will charge EVERYONE more to pay for it.

So what that means is when Verizon installs a new fiber circuit, rather than charging yahoo a premium to use it, they are going to charge you more for the opportunity to maybe use it.  Instead of people paying for what they actually use, the regulation passes forces the network to either not install the new circuit becuse it isn't profitable or to raise prices to the end user to pay for it.

It is better to LEAVE THIS ISSUE alone and allow the market to sort it out.  Network providers have more customers than end users.  In fact, most networks LOSE money on end users, home internet service is a "loss leader".  They make their money off the content providers.  I know, I am a content provider and pay networks more each month than you probably make in a year.

You did all that without once engaging the pottymouth or the insults. I'm very proud of you -- and, bonus -- now actually have to deal with your arguments.

I'll get back to you shortly.

They don't tell you what is in the packet. They tell you how the person sending the packet requests that it be treated, or if you are setting the bits, how you want the packet treated.

So I could get several different types if traffic with the same bits set.  General rule of thumb is you reset all those bits to zero when the traffic enters your network and then you apply your own criteria.

On arriving traffic, those bits tell you how the PREVIOUS network TREATED the traffic, not what the traffic consists of or why they were treated that way.

LINK

That is an example for Cisco router configuration.  The bits only tell the router how to handle it, not what's in it.  The network it came from might give one of their customers better treatment in their network or give their own customers better treatment than "transit" traffic passing through their net that originated on other nets from other people's customers.  Those bits don't tell you much.  Those are the bits that tell the router what to do and to set them properly, you need to know quite a bit about the traffic stream.

In other words, DSCP is how QoS is implimented but you still need rules to set the DSCP bits.

Olympia Snowe, Byron Dorgan, and Ed Markey don't have an earthly clue about what the crux of net neutrality is, either. Hence why they're proposing these asinine bills that don't speak to the issue.

Do you work in the technology industry? Do you know anything -- anything at all -- about network topology and traffic shaping, and how these things relate to applications that consume a lot of bandwidth?

I don't blame you for this, but I wish the people shilling for, say, BellSouth, would simply be honest and admit that the market isn't really in it now, and all the agitprop about the free market is really a lure to get conservatives and independents on board.

I'm glad you don't "blame" me for this, because, as I mentioned above, I've yet to consider myself sufficiently educated on the subject to emerge from agnosticism. My sense though, is that the key to the debate really does lie in the relative freedom -- or lack thereof -- of the market for internet access.

Then you tell me why I'm wrong.

(By the way, and granted that I haven't had the time to pay attention to the service offerings lately, here in Tampa, your options for anything but dialup, as a residential user, are limited to Verizon, or whichever of the two cable companies services your area (in the city!). For the sake of argument, assume it's fully twice that; you still have an oligopoly, or at best, extraordinarily imperfect competition.)

If I'm not mistaken, here is the crux of the matter. I'm going to put these in short paragraphs for your ease of answer, and for that reason only:

The telcos want to charge content providers an additional fee for access to their networks.

As with pretty much any surcharge, tax, or fee, the content providers will pass this on to their customers or absorb it in their profit margin.

This means that the price of any good or service over the internet to the consumer goes up (as a registered and directly associated cost with the good or service), or it is less profitable for the content provider to provide the content.

Thus, Apple iTunes (a pay site) must charge some amount more per download or absorb the cost in its already-low margin, and Google (a "free" site) must either start charging for its service; charge its advertisers more; scale back its service; or some combination of the above.

Because consumers react to price signals rationally, and we presume in accordance with the laws of economics, and because virtually nothing over the internet has perfectly inelastic demand, they will purchase less of the products in question if the prices rise.

If the prices do not rise, then the providers will begin to cut back on innovation or wherever their profit went in the past, or will provide less of their service, or will stop providing the service altogether.

Either way, fewer of these companies will provide content; or they will provide less content, because they are being starved of money (even if only dieting).

This is a bad thing.

By contrast -- and I'm assuming, see below, that the telcos actually need to raise their prices somewhere -- end-use customers, such as residential and business users, could be charged a higher, or tiered, rate for data download and upload.

This would pass the cost on directly to the people in direct privity with the telecom.

This would also have an effect on those customers' ability to access and use all of that content, but it would be normative across all providers, and would have a direct impact on what data is brought into the network.

(I presume that, tech illiterate that I am, I at least understand this much: Apple does not shove its entire library of data down every network in the country, magically hold the data there, and allow consumers to access it. Instead, the data comes to the network on a request from the end-user, and comes only as much as "requested." Thus, what data enters the network is by and large a function of the demands made directly by the network customer. Correct me if I'm mistaken.)

Thus, if I want to download iTunes while running Vonage and having twenty Mozilla tabs open with Flash running in all of them, I can pay to make this a pleasant experience, or I can pay less and have a more tedious experience, or even, not have the experience at all.

I have less money overall to spend, and so the content providers will suffer, but (1) only indirectly, (2) on balance, more or less evenly, and (3) the ones who provide quality (or desirable) content will pretty much stay level as folks prioritize their online allocation accordingly.

This is a less-bad thing.

That's my outside-looking-in view of this. Tell me where I'm missing something.

In addition, respectfully, you need to get out more. I've mentioned Tampa, though granted I haven't seen the sun in the last six months, there may be new non-dialup service options for non-commercial users. (A quick call to the IT department suggests that there are about 10 commercial broadband providers.) A few friends live in Atlanta, and they tell me that your options are either BellSouth's DSL (Verizon swears they're coming soon), Comcast in the city, or Adelphia in the suburbs. That's it. I have no idea about commercial end-users.

But even assume that there are fully double what I've suggested; assume that in Tampa, you have access to seven residential and twenty commercial providers. I hate to tell you this, but that's still an oligopoly, or at least, is such awful competition that the word "imperfect" barely does it justice. It's far too easy to coordinate among those users, and elementary economic theory and human experience tell us they do and will. (It also tells us that some will "cheat" from time to time, even if they largely stay in line.)

What this means is that even if they charge more for their service, you cannot rationally expect them to use that extra charge in the most efficient way possible. They may improve things along the way, but there will be profit lost to the inefficiency part of the curve.

So what I'm driving at with that is this: The idea that we're protecting the "free market" is insane. We're favoring one or the other side of an imperfect market. It's a policy choice to start off with.

What this idea does is STUPID.  It would be the same as forcing FedEx to charge exactly the same for overnight delivery as for ground.  The result would be that ground delivery will go up in price.  Same thing will happen here.  If a network can not charge a premium for use of more expensive infrastructure, they will charge EVERYONE more to pay for it.

So what that means is when Verizon installs a new fiber circuit, rather than charging yahoo a premium to use it, they are going to charge you more for the opportunity to maybe use it.  Instead of people paying for what they actually use, the regulation passes forces the network to either not install the new circuit becuse it isn't profitable or to raise prices to the end user to pay for it.

I want to stress that I understand this, and have made clear in my postings that I do. I'm telling you that I prefer that you hike charges on the end user, because the social and economic costs are harsher in the alternative.

Respectfully, I think we're either talking past each other, or are each so emotionally invested here that we're missing what the other is saying. Convince me that I'm wrong. I'm serious.

The "Net Neutrality" blather is all about people wanting to retain the status quo, with its potential for the hardcore users and providers (double entrendre) to take bandwidth from those who just blog, or do light email, or whatever other casual use they have.

The second point is that your sig still links to redstate.org, which may or may not obscure your intent.

I'll let you decide which point matters :-).

If I have to take what the telecoms are pushing or status quo, I'm a freaking conservative, I'll take status quo. If I get my ideal solution, see above.

I appreciate the heads up.

That there is potential for unequal use, or that there is not and should be, for me, are not justification for regulation.  I see no justification for the a priori restraint of capitalism, for not allowing market forces to do what they are clamoring even now to do.

I appreciate wanting the status quo, if you do, but it seems to require more government intervention in the running of things than I think is desirable, or really even possible.

When we say "market forces," we are referring to specific events, stimuli, and a priori assumptions, all of which presume something close to perfect competition. In that kind of market, participants react to changes in input costs with an eye to their consumers, and to their competitors, because they know that if they deviate one bit off of what their competitors offer, they will get clobbered by their consumers. They are also forced to constantly improve and innovate in the hope of ever getting ahead of their competitors, and for fear that they'll get passed by their competitors.

That is not the situation with which we are presented. Instead, there are a relatively small number of participants who don't need to worry about their consumers going in any spectacular new directions; who can coordinate with their competitors (as they are doing here), because they have so few; and who are, simply, only weakly affected by market forces.

Saying "let the market work" in this context is literally absurd, because "the market" wasn't in this to start. What you're effectively saying is, "let the distorted ologopolistic market trend in the direction that its limited number of participants want." Now, if that's what you like, fine; but given that I don't even have to genuflect to the altar of the free market here, to my mind, I get to consider policy ramifications unfettered, and I do not like what's coming down the pipe if we go your way.

"When we say "market forces," we are referring to specific events, stimuli, and a priori assumptions, all of which presume something close to perfect competition".

I'll have to disagree with this.   Certainly, the broadband market does not have perfect competition (few markets do).  But regulation rarely is perfect either.  Identifying a market failure is only half the equation -- you also have to factor in regulatory failure.  The test then isn't whether market forces are perfect, but whether they work better than regulation would.  Given the spotted history of FCC regulation, I give the market an edge.  

(It all reminds me of the story of two hunters in the woods who saw a bear.  The first hunter took off running.  The second yelled out to him that running was pointless, since he'd never outrun the bear.  The first hunter replied "I don't have to outrun  the bear, I just have to outrun you."  I think that fits.  Its a good story anyway.)

Certainly, the broadband market does not have perfect competition (few markets do).

Most have better competition, though. And anyway, this is one of those instances where the discrepancy shows badly.

But regulation rarely is perfect either.

What does this have to do with my description of the market?

The test then isn't whether market forces are perfect, but whether they work better than regulation would. Given the spotted history of FCC regulation, I give the market an edge.

You're begging the question.

"You're begging the question."

I don't think so.  I agree that many other markets have more competition.  The question, at least in the broader string here, is whether to regulate.  To decide that, its not enough to say the market is flawed, you have to judge whether regulation would improve things.  I don't think it will.  I realize you may disagree, but it is a key question.

There are no "market forces" at work here; you're simply assuming there are. There are commercial forces at work, but those aren't identical to market forces.

To decide that, its not enough to say the market is flawed, you have to judge whether regulation would improve things.  I don't think it will.

This is also question-begging: The debate is not over whether to regulate; regulation is already there. It's whether to change the sort of regulation in place.

I'm leery of changing things for change's sake; but then again, I'm a conservative, so one would expect no less.

Full disclosure: I'm a liberal but I was reading through the comments to see what you guys thought of this and, believe me or not, a lot of you have it all wrong on net neutrality.

Essentially, the telecoms want to charge those who operate websites (RedState, other bloggers, small businesses, EVERYBODY) a fee to ensure speedy delivery of their website. (That is, at the fastest rate of the person trying to access it -- be it 56K or DSL.)

If you don't pay this fee -- and who knows how much that will be -- the ISP will slow down the service to the non-paying site.

So, for instance, if Google doesn't front the cash to the ISP, then Google will take much longer to load on that ISP's network. Therefore, to ensure they get quick access, Google would be paying a fee to every ISP, or just the big ones and take a hit in traffic by those smaller ISPs they ignore to save cash.

So imagine RedState having to pay a fee to as many ISPs as you guys see fit.

The fees, as I understand it, are meant to fund innovation for the future.

So -- why pay for something that you already get for free?

In my opinion, allowing telecoms to write out net neutrality by instituting fees on website owners, smaller sites, web-based small businesses, blogs that do not produce a lot of cash, etc. will basically go out of business because they are not getting speedy service to their website.

I would think this would be something liberal and conservative bloggers would want to get behind.

Also, I read a few months ago that people like AOL want to charge a tax on each e-mail you send, like a postage stamp, for every person you e-mail. So large bulk e-mails could become expensive. Where that is, or if that is part of the net neutrality bill is unknown to me.

When sites like MyDD get this badly wrong, then we have to argue against that.