Internet Neutrality

[dr_mabeuse]

Current law requires that your Internet Service Provider must give you equal access to all sites on the web. A vote is coming up in congress on this Internet Neutrality act. It might be rescinded.

What the ISP's and Communications giants want and are lobbying heavily for is to be able to charge sites for how easily and quickly they can be accessed by users. In other words, if Google forks over X millions of dollars, Comcast or whoever will make sure they download fast and easily. If they don't pay, they'll download like 10 times slower, with poorer resolution and quality.

In other words, Big Business will control access to the web.

The vote's coming up this year. What you can do is go here and tell them to butt the fuck out and keep the Internet Neutrality Act in effect.

--Zoot

 

[minsue]

I've signed the petitions and written to my legislators, but it's been a while. I shall certainly write again.

 

[rgraham666]

Some people think such a thing is perfectly all right.

I'm looking forward to them squealing when the vice closes on their gonads.

They're trying the same thing here in Canada. With the revolutionaries in power here they're likely to get away with it.

 

[Selena_Kitt]

Yep, did it a while ago... but can't hurt to write again.

 

[Joe Wordsworth]

*takes the plunge*

I don't mind it.

Given that there's going to be companies involved in supplying the alternative, if there is a market for unfettered internet access, it will survive. If people really do want no content restrictions, then there will be a company that provides it and markets itself in that manner.

If an ISP wants to market to parents as an internet service provider that blocks out all pornography, gross violence, and whatnot--they should be allowed to conduct business in that manner. We can say "well, there's software to block unwanted content", but what if someone wants something more secure and simple--as in a service that does it for them? Restricting them from doing so is preventing (1) the consumer from getting the product they want and (2) free enterprise from providing the product they want.

Personally, I'd be signing up for the broadband access that ws unfettered. The local junior high might not want to do that. A churchgroup in Anchorage might not want to do that.

I can understand the slippery slope fears of "but, they'll block X, Y, or Z", I really can. But, I can think of a dozen ways to make money off of this sort of freedom--I'm hard pressed to justify not doing so.

 

[vampiredust]

Current law requires that your Internet Service Provider must give you equal access to all sites on the web. A vote is coming up in congress on this Internet Neutrality act. It might be rescinded.

What the ISP's and Communications giants want and are lobbying heavily for is to be able to charge sites for how easily and quickly they can be accessed by users. In other words, if Google forks over X millions of dollars, Comcast or whoever will make sure they download fast and easily. If they don't pay, they'll download like 10 times slower, with poorer resolution and quality.

In other words, Big Business will control access to the web.

The vote's coming up this year. What you can do is go here and tell them to butt the fuck out and keep the Internet Neutrality Act in effect.

--Zoot

this sucks

 

[neonlyte]

The root of the problem is VOiP (Voice over Internet Protocol). It's mushroomed out of no where and major telecoms companies are facing massive revenue stream reduction as VOiP gains momentum.

I expect we are in for a rocky period as far as ISP's go, I also expect a rival VOiP net to emerge over the next decade, probably as a wireless service feeding off the Europa GP system around 2012. By then, land line telecoms will be reduced to a secure hardwired data transmission service, video on demand, conventional internet services, secure business communications. VOiP will be largely mobile telephony. ISP's are trying to position themselves ahead of the change, looking to protect their revenue streams, knowing they don't have the resources of the major telecoms to maintain and expand the existing infrastructure and build a new wireless VOiP net.

The alternative will be for the telecoms companies to buy up the ISP's, then we will be in trouble.

I don't think protesting will change anything, it's coming, the major players are in place and several have recently re-positioned themselves ahead of the vote recognising the change will happen.

 

[Liar]

*takes the plunge*

I don't mind it.

Given that there's going to be companies involved in supplying the alternative, if there is a market for unfettered internet access, it will survive. If people really do want no content restrictions, then there will be a company that provides it and markets itself in that manner.

I really hope you're right. And also, that there will still be a viable business model for merely access. If the big money turns out to be in letting Google pay for fast traffic, the ISPs might dump their prices, still add extra value services (phone, tv, what-have-you), and compete whoever runs unfettered access out of the market.

And will 'crippled' internet access still be marketed as "internet access", or will they at least have to have a clear content declaration? "We have fast Yahoo and Amazon, at the cost of slow Google and Ebay." In big honkin letters in the ads.

 

[rgraham666]

Paul Krugman wrote a column about this a few years ago.

Interesting reading by an economist I much admire.

 

[Zeb_Carter]

They are also talking about re-instituting the "Fairness Doctrine". Anyone have thoughts on that?

Don't mean to threadjack but I think the two kind of go hand in hand. Public airwaves, public webways, etc., etc.

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Be careful what you wish for

Before writing any letters carefully consider the substance of this article. I'm no expert so I can’t debate the specifics, but I do have a general warning, a prediction, and a recommendation:

Warning: Beware billion-dollar companies that affect to support "populist" policy preferences. That is, don't trust them for a heartbeat.

Prediction: Given what this piece says about the likely litigation environment under "net neutrality" regulations, should they become law the event will be remembered in the future as the moment when the explosive-growth phase of the Internet ended and was replaced by much more modest expansion. Related to this, it will be the beginning of the end for small ISPs, because only giants will be able to absorb the litigation expense and risk.

Recommendation: Things are very fluid in the information transmission business right now. Big phone and cable companies are butting heads, data-through power lines may be near, Wi-Max may be coming, and who knows what else. This is no time to cool things down with a raft of new federal regulations, and a potential lawyers' feeding frenzy. Better to let it all shake out for a few years, see where we're at, and if needed, with as light a touch as possible, make changes to correct real abuses, not imagined or "potential" ones. I for one trust competition and competing interests much more than big brother and the "good intentions" of politicians.


Net Loser

Chances are that by now readers have heard the term "Net neutrality," even if they haven't figured out what all the fuss is about. This week, the controversy reached the Senate, with Net neutrality proponents attempting to write a whole new layer of Internet regulation into law.

A recent incident may illuminate the controversy for those wondering what both sides are after. Several weeks ago, users of Cox Communications' broadband Internet service found that they could no longer access Craigslist.org, the free classifieds site. Some bloggers immediately smelled a rat -- Cox's parent company also owns newspapers, which compete with Craigslist for classified ads. In a letter to the editor last week, Senator Ron Wyden (D., Oregon) cited the Cox incident as an example of why we need Net neutrality rules. Without them, supposedly, Verizon, Comcast, Cox and other Internet access companies would control users' Internet experience to the detriment of consumers.

Well, not quite. It turns out Cox had installed another company's security software to protect its users, and a bug in that software inadvertently cut users off from Craigslist. But don't take our word for it. Craigslist founder Craig Newmark, no enemy of Net neutrality, said this about the incident on his blog: "The whole thing was exacerbated by folks talking about Net neutrality," adding for good measure: "None of this was deliberate" by Cox.

Nevertheless, this is a teaching moment. Net neutrality advocates say we need new regulations for the Internet to make it illegal to do what Cox was supposedly doing. Of course, Cox is innocent in this case -- but this is precisely the point. There are all kinds of innocent or inadvertent ways that a user's access to a given site can be disrupted or slowed today. Under a Net neutrality regime, Cox could well have been subject to investigation, sanction and lawsuits for what amounted to a bug in someone else's software. This is so because most versions of Net neutrality would create a legal obligation for companies like Cox to manage their networks in a "nondiscriminatory" manner. This may sound simple, but it's not.

As it is, the big phone and cable companies, which also offer Internet service, try to ensure that a user's experience is "optimized." They have every business incentive to do so if they want to keep those customers. That this sometimes seems hard to believe (say, when there are delays in downloading a streaming music video) is testimony to how difficult a task that is. Exposing these companies to litigation or prosecution for not doing this to some Web site's satisfaction is not going to make the task easier.

Meanwhile, Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and other Net neutrality proponents seem to want it both ways. They insist both that this is pro-consumer legislation and that the best thing is for consumers to pay for things that Google and other content providers would rather not. Net neutrality only became a cause of these companies and of groups that favor more more regulation in general when some phone companies suggested they might want to charge Google or other content providers for priority access to their networks.

No way, shouted Google and its allies, many of which have fabulously rich stock prices. Far better to charge individual consumers. Well, the American Consumer Institute, a Washington think tank, actually asked an economist to look into whether this is true. In his 40-page paper, Larry Darby's answer is that pricing flexibility is good for consumers.

He cites the newspaper industry -- in which the costs of providing news are split between readers and advertisers -- as an example of the kind of "multisided market" that can develop when businesses are free to charge whoever is most willing to pay. Mr. Darby's conclusion is that barring network operators from charging for value-added services would be bad for consumers. "The practice of 'end users only paying' evolved in, and was suitable for, the world of . . . voice message only technology," Mr. Darby writes. "But, Congress should not lock that business model into a market for which it is ill-suited -- and certainly should not do so on grounds that consumer welfare is thereby enhanced."

 

[Roxanne Appleby]

Be careful what you wish for, part deux

The Coming Exaflood
By BRET SWANSON
January 20, 2007; Page A11

Today there is much praise for YouTube, MySpace, blogs and all the other democratic digital technologies that are allowing you and me to transform media and commerce. But these infant Internet applications are at risk, thanks to the regulatory implications of "network neutrality." Proponents of this concept -- including Reps. John Dingell and John Conyers, and Sen. Daniel Inouye, who have ascended to key committee chairs -- are obsessed with divvying up the existing network, but oblivious to the need to build more capacity.

To understand, let's take a step back. In 1999, Yahoo acquired Broadcast.com for $5 billion. Broadcast.com had little revenue, and although its intent was to stream sports and entertainment video to consumers over the Internet, two-thirds of its sales at the time came from hosting corporate video conferences. Yahoo absorbed the start-up -- and little more was heard of Broadcast.com or Yahoo's video ambitions.

Seven years later, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. Like Broadcast.com, YouTube so far has not enjoyed large revenues. But it is streaming massive amounts of video to all corners of the globe. The difference: Broadcast.com failed because there were almost no broadband connections to homes and businesses. Today, we have hundreds of millions of links world-wide capable of transmitting passable video clips.

. . . Why did that come about? Broadcast.com failed precisely because the FCC's "neutral" telecom price controls and sharing mandates effectively prohibited investments in broadband networks and crashed thousands of Silicon Valley business plans and dot-com dreams. Hoping to create "competition" out of thin air, the FCC forced telecom providers to lease their wires and switches at below-market rates. By guaranteeing a negative rate of return on infrastructure investments, the FCC destroyed incentives to build new broadband networks -- the kind that might have allowed Broadcast.com to flourish.

By 2000, the U.S. had fewer than five million consumer "broadband" links, averaging 500 kilobits per second. Over the past two years, the reverse has been true. As the FCC has relaxed or eliminated regulations, broadband investment and download speeds have surged -- we now enjoy almost 50 million broadband links, averaging some three megabits per second. Internet video succeeded in the form of YouTube. But that "explosion of innovation" at the "applications and content layer" was not feasible without tens of billions of dollars of optics, chips and disks deployed around the world. YouTube at the edge cannot happen without bandwidth in the core.

Messrs. Lessig, Dingell and Conyers, and Google, now want to repeat all the investment-killing mistakes of the late 1990s, in the form of new legislation and FCC regulation to ensure "net neutrality." This ignores the experience of the recent past -- and worse, the needs of the future.

Think of this. Each year the original content on the world's radio, cable and broadcast television channels adds up to about 75 petabytes of data -- or, 10 to the 15th power. If current estimates are correct, the two-year-old YouTube streams that much data in about three months. But a shift to high-definition video clips by YouTube users would flood the Internet with enough data to more than double the traffic of the entire cybersphere. And YouTube is just one company with one application that is itself only in its infancy. Given the growth of video cameras around the world, we could soon produce five exabytes of amateur video annually. Upgrades to high-definition will in time increase that number by another order of magnitude to some 50 exabytes or more, or 10 times the Internet's current yearly traffic.

We will increasingly share these videos with the world. And even if we do not share them, we will back them up at remote data storage facilities. I just began using a service called Mozy that each night at 3 a.m. automatically scans and backs up the gigabytes worth of documents and photos on my PCs. My home computers are now mirrored at a data center in Utah. One way or another, these videos will thus traverse the net at least once, and possibly, in the case of a YouTube hit, hundreds of thousands of times.

There's more. Advances in digital medical imaging will soon slice your brain 1,024 ways with resolution of less than half a millimeter and produce multigigabyte files. A technician puts your anatomy on a DVD and you send your body onto the Internet for analysis by a radiologist in Mumbai. You skip doctor visits, stay home and have him come to you with a remote video diagnosis. Add another 10 exabytes or more of Internet data traffic. Then there's what George Gilder calls the "global sensorium," the coming network of digital surveillance cameras, RFID tags and other sensors, sprawling across every home, highway, hybrid, high-rise, high-school, etc. All this data will be collected, analyzed and transmitted. Oh, and how about video conferencing? Each year we generate some 20 exabytes of data via telephone. As these audio conversations gradually shift to video, putting further severe strains on the network, we could multiply the 20 exabytes by a factor of 100 or more.

Today's networks are not remotely prepared to handle this exaflood.

Wall Street will finance new telco and cable fiber optic projects, but only with some reasonable hope of a profit. And that is what net neutrality could squelch. Google, for example, has guaranteed $900 million in advertising revenue to MySpace and paid Dell $1 billion to install Google search boxes on its computers; YouTube partnered with Verizon Wireless; MySpace signed its own content deal with Cingular. But these kinds of preferential partnerships, where content and conduit are integrated to varying degrees -- and which are ubiquitous in almost every industry -- could be outlawed under net neutrality.

Ironically, the condition that net neutrality seeks to ban -- discrimination or favoritism of content on the Internet -- is only necessary in narrowband networks. When resources are scarce, the highest bidder can exclude the others. But with real broadband networks, capacity is abundant and discrimination unnecessary. Net neutrality's rules, price controls and litigation would prevent broadband networks from being built, limit the amount of available bandwidth and thus encourage the zero-sum discrimination supposedly deplored.

Without many tens of billions of dollars worth of new fiber optic networks, thousands of new business plans in communications, medicine, education, security, remote sensing, computing, the military and every mundane task that could soon move to the Internet will be frustrated. All the innovations on the edge will die. Only an explosion of risky network investment and new network technology can accommodate these millions of ideas.

Mr. Swanson is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, and contributing editor at the Gilder Technology Report.