Just one more reason to vote out as many Republicans as we can this November

The problem with shooting all republicians, is the same with shooting all liberals, you'd only be able to blame yourself for everything wrong in this country.

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Texas Representative, Lamar Smith wrote:
"I want a vibrant Internet just like they do. They say let the government dictate it...I urge my colleagues to reject government regulation of the Internet."

I really hate this stupid, weak-assed, non-committal response. (And he's not the first to make it.)

There are 2 ways this can go. Either 1) rich companies will start paying for faster access than poorer companies OR 2) that practice will be outlawed by the government.

That's pretty much it. Two choices. Pick one.

To say you're against the regulation (choice 2) but to PRETEND like you're not in favor of choice #1 either is disingenuous at best and lying at worst. If you don't like choice #2 just come out and say that you actually like the first choice!

Don't give us this "just because we didn't pick one choice doesn't mean the other will happen" BS. Yes, it will happen and we all know it. You're an elected official and you've made a choice. At least have the guts to admit what you're voting for.

(And doesn't the fact that they're trying to hide their opinion tell you something about this bill?)

Just to be clear here, I can respect someone who voted against this bill. I just require that they advocate that choice and stand up for it. What I can't respect is someone who votes against it but still shares the opinioin of Mr. Smith here...pretending like you didn't actually make a choice on the issue when, in fact, you did.

Yes, it is. OLPC is just wasting money so Professor Negroponte can get off on the idea of millions of kids turning their cranks to use his laptop. It might have been a better idea and slightly less self-indulgent if he called it the Negroponte 100 and sold it for $200, the extra money going toward recharging stations that would be placed using the latest GPS and Google Maps so that no kid would have to walk more than 12 miles to get 9 hours of use.

But Net Neutrality is the dumber of the two ideas, because it would wreck the Internet. How, you ask, could it wreck the Internet if it's about non-discrimination and fairness and Google and Microsoft and Yahoo! are all for it and the eternally cute Meg Whitman wrote me to tell me what a danger an Internet fast lane would be?

The main reason is that "the Internet" as we know it is a layered stack of hardware, protocols, address space, naming, applications, and services. Each of these layers have been free to evolve and reconfigure their focii since the beginning of the Internet over 30 years ago. But even in the last 10 years, as the general public has joined the Internet, the stack has reconfigured itself immensely. We face a slew of problems, such a spam, phishing, bots, viruses, spyware, etc. that could be addressed at various levels of the stack by various players to various extents until the whole sytem finds a good solution. But with net neutrality, ISPs could not, for example, block port 25 by default to prevent computers connected to their network from spewing spam without getting regulatory approval. They could not identify users who are using disproportionate bandwidth (slowing everyone else down) and upgrade their connection and monthly fee to a more appropriate service for them.

The biggest problem with Net Neutrality is what it does not address. And that is a problem because it suggests exactly what Net Neutralty 2.0 could very well address! The application layer is left untouched. Software developers do not need to get regulatory approval for new communications protocols. Web sites do not need to offer advertisement space on a non-discriminatory basis. Let's say, for example, that I was a Mac software vendor who had done something to really offend the general Mac community. With Net Neutrality 2.0, I could still go to Backbeat Media (TMO's advertising coordinator) and demand a prime space at a non-discriminatory rate. And if I didn't feel I was getting that, I could take my beef to the regulator or to the courts. Wouldn't you expect a trusted website like TMO to have some standards in ads it accepts?

There are some here who will just say "regulate everything", that employees of the state can make the most optimal and fair decisions imaginable. Others like me, side with free markets, which are often messy, often blatantly unfair, occasionally downright cruel, but invariably optimal in the long run. And while Net Neutrality is aimed squarely at the Bells, which have a terrible history of government collusion and brought this debate on themselves with CEO speeches about tapping into the revenues which pass as bits through their wires, the long term solution is to make them compete. The short term solution is to use existing law, like antitrust law, to ensure that they don't hold the wires hostage when there aren't other competitors in the space. Net Neutrality 1.0 is bad because it will beget New Neutrality 2.0 (a version of which was proposed as a rider by Rep. Gonzalez of Texas, a Democrat for those keeping score). And that will kill the Internet.

Regulations have a nasty way of getting started for one reason, and then used later (after people have forgotten the original) for a different reason.

Bosco's post reminded me of this quote: http://www.telisphere.com/~cearley/sean/camps/first.html

My ISP already charges for "eks GB" of transfer each month. If I exceed that, they charge me more - a premium. If Google has a similar arrangement, they're already paying their premium, guaranteed. If they have some other arrangement, more power to them. But the government shouldn't bother with it.

The government should remove obstructions to our freedom, then get out of the way. The Apple Computer sitting in front of me does just that - gives me amazing tools, then gets out of the way.

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Small White Car wrote:
There are 2 ways this can go. Either 1) rich companies will start paying for faster access than poorer companies OR 2) that practice will be outlawed by the government.

I'm for option #1. That's usually how things work. Are we suddenly living in a communist country? Rich companies have their own switching stations while poor companies have DSL. Rich companies show up at the top of Google searches while poor companies do not. What's the problem? If you wanna be on the top-tier of the Internet then you have to make your company be the best. Why do you auotmatically deserve the same as someone who worked hard and/or had the know how to succeed? If it really did become such a huge problem, we do have anti-trust laws. But hey why use existing laws when we can make new ones! Rich democrats need to keep the PR machine running so they appear liberal to the public. So time for more meaningless laws! I need to the government to run every aspect of my life because I'm too stupid to do it myself.

There seems to be a misunderstanding about this bill. Net Neutrality is the situation now. Anyone can get their web site up on the internet and has an equal chance of being seen. If you get enough hits you'll appear on page 1 of a Google search, and even if it isn't popular people can still get there. That way little companies and big ones can compete on an equal footing. That way Fox, ABC, and UPI all compete on a level playing field with Truthout, DemocracyNow! and some guy who posts his own brand of conspiracy theory. It is up to the public to decide which is the better source, the better company, the better product, the better idea. The Internet is todays market square where all ideas, products, and news releases are out there for the citizenry to judge.

This bill would have prevented the destruction of Net Neutrality, not imposed it. Without the protections in this bill Microsoft can pay AT&T to route all of your requests containing the word "software" to it's site whether or not you want to go there. Dell can pay Verizon to prevent searches for Adobe or Apple from going through unless Adobe and Apple pay Verizon more to allow them. Without the protections in this bill your internet provider can chose to block political sites it doesn't happen to agree with. Without the protections in this bill "liberal" ideas like free speech and a marketplace of ideas will get trampled underfoot by those with the deepest pockets.

That's why anyone who uses the internet from the wildest liberal to the most uptight conservative should be very upset about the failure of this bill to protect their rights.

Yes, rich companies pay for faster delivery, more storage, all of that. However, right now isp's have to _deliver_ neutral access to the net. What the big corporations want to do, and have stated this openly several times, is make extortion legal by only offering decent access to those who pay. If you want to start your own web business, you will either have to pay AT&T large sums of money or your web pages will load slower than an old dial-up. As a consumer, you will only have quick, reliable access to web sites that pay Comcast, others will either take an hour to load or you're get "page not foun" errors. If you ignore the verbage being tossed around by the big money and their supporters, and actually read the legislation they want pushed through, you'll see this is really want they want. It's like Enron demanding unregulating power guidelines, and look where that got us.

As for calling net neutrality "useless laws," why not move to a country where big business concerns like this are almost totally unregulated and see how your quality of life compares? The fact is, you need laws like net neutrality to prevent abuses from the powerful.

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geoduck wrote:
Without the protections in this bill Microsoft can pay AT&T to route all of your requests containing the word "software" to it's site whether or not you want to go there. Dell can pay Verizon to prevent searches for Adobe or Apple from going through unless Adobe and Apple pay Verizon more to allow them.

Ugh! Talk about having no understanding of the Internet... Requests containing "software" fall either to naming or applications, not routing. ISPs do not control DNS. An ISP that altered DNS to redirect websites would (a) face wrath of public, (b) face anti-trust issues if it's a Bell or cable franchise. Even Verisign, which effectively controls DNS, can't mess with how DNS works without incurring the wrath of the Internet! As for applications, like search engines. ISPs don't control those. The search engine provider does. If for example, an ISP decided to alter HTTP requests made to a search engine (an egregious violation of net ethos), the search engine could implement Java or Flash tricks to route around it. An ISP flat out can't do that because it just controls the wires and network protocol (TCP/IP), not the application protocol (HTTP). If you can't make or don't get the distinction, you probably shouldn't be in the debate, because you have a profoundly uninformed opinion. Sorry.

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palenoue wrote:
As a consumer, you will only have quick, reliable access to web sites that pay Comcast, others will either take an hour to load or you're get "page not foun" errors.

Ugh. Another brilliant demonstration of knowledge of how the Internet (web specifically) actually work. No, you will not get a "page not found" error unless a connection can be made to the server, and the server cannot find teh requested page. For an ISP to cause this would require them hacking the HTTP communication between client and server. Perhaps you meant "server not found". Well, that would require the ISP to alter the DNS. And that would cause other problems, such as e-mail not being delivered or received. The ISP can no more tell if a DNS request is for a website or for e-mail or for ftp or for some P2P protocol. It's independent of the communication the client initiates with the server.

Payola seems to be the accepted practice these days in business and politics, as if it ever wasn't. We should stop trying to protect internet neutrality and let the big players squeeze out the little guys, bloggers, and fringe political groups.

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geoduck wrote:

This bill would have prevented the destruction of Net Neutrality, not imposed it. Without the protections in this bill Microsoft can pay AT&T to route all of your requests containing the word "software" to it's site whether or not you want to go there. Dell can pay Verizon to prevent searches for Adobe or Apple from going through unless Adobe and Apple pay Verizon more to allow them. Without the protections in this bill your internet provider can chose to block political sites it doesn't happen to agree with. Without the protections in this bill "liberal" ideas like free speech and a marketplace of ideas will get trampled underfoot by those with the deepest pockets.

So tell us, what ISP is going to take money from a big corporation to limit their customer's acces to the net? They'll lose customers to the ISPs that provide clear access. There isn't enough money in the coffers of M$ to pay AT&T to screw with the access their customers enjoy now.

And if an ISP does succumb to the temptation of soaking the big companies to route commercial traffic their way, it'll be fun to watch free market forces kill off that ISP.

The idea that ISP's will limit access is a boogie. even if all the largest ISPs agree to simultaneously install such a program, it will only take one minor player to expand and take all their business away because they provide full access that the others do not. It simply will not happen, and making a law to prevent it is a waste of time and effort on the part of a bunch of chicken-little anti-corporate dunderheads. May as well make a law against flapping your arms to fly to the moon.

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Bosco wrote:
Ugh! Talk about having no understanding of the Internet...

Actually I have a very good understanding of both how the Internet works and of this law. What you are saying is true AT THE MOMENT. Without clear protections of Net Neutrality all of the things you mention, can happen. ISPs WILL have the legal right to sell access to the highest bidder, to extort money from sites, and to prevent access to sites it does not like. They will not face anti trust or other sanctions because there are no rules against it, it's been assumed up till now. And the public will grumble and some will complain loudly but, unfortunately out of site is out of mind. After a while many will forget that these other sites were out there.

As far as this being impossible, it is exactly what China does now.

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zewazir wrote:
And if an ISP does succumb to the temptation of soaking the big companies to route commercial traffic their way, it'll be fun to watch free market forces kill off that ISP.

The question is not which ISPs will do this. The question is what choice will consumers have. In my area I have to go through Comcast for high speed access. They are the only cable provider in the area and we're too far for DSL. Even if AT&T does bring DSL into our area I suspect they will also filter for money. I think a lot of people will grumble but in the end there's not going to be a lot of choice for many people.

[quote="zewazir"So tell us, what ISP is going to take money from a big corporation to limit their customer's acces to the net? [/quote]

They will not limit access to the internet only easy access to internet sites that don't cough up the vig each month.

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zewazir wrote:

So tell us, what ISP is going to take money from a big corporation to limit their customer's acces to the net? They'll lose customers to the ISPs that provide clear access.

It will happen evntually, and they won't lose customers because everyone will be doing it. So who will you switch to?

For example...Perhaps my Cox connection loads Google in 2 secods but Yahoo in 10 seconds. So I switch to Verizon and find that Yahoo now loads in 2 seconds and Google loads in 10.

Maybe that's what I wanted, but now I find that my Hotmail loads in 15 seconds so I switch back to Cox where it's only 3. But then I find that my favorite newspapers are very slow on Cox but fast on Verizon.

So as a customer, what do I do? Well, I pick the one I like better, and others pick other ones. They'll all stay in business because there's no single "good" company who simply takes all the customers away. Everyone's ISP choice will be a compromise.

It won't be a case of sites being blocked or re-directed. It will be a case of some sites getting faster while others get slower. If a page takes 10 seconds to load while another takes 2, that's a BIG difference on the internet. It's not blocking, but it will have huge effect on traffic.

I'm certainly not saying that THIS EXACT bill is the solution to all this...but to pretend that there's no problem and everything will just "fix itself" is kind of naive too.

EDIT: And add on to my earlier point, Biff and Bosco's posts are examples of arguments against the bill that I can respect. Simply saying that "regulation is bad" without anything else to back it up, on the other hand, is fairly dumb which is why I'm surprised to see so many politicians taking that position!

I'm not so sure this bill was right either, but there does need to be some guidance on all of this at some point.

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geoduck wrote:

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zewazir wrote:
And if an ISP does succumb to the temptation of soaking the big companies to route commercial traffic their way, it'll be fun to watch free market forces kill off that ISP.

The question is not which ISPs will do this. The question is what choice will consumers have. In my area I have to go through Comcast for high speed access. They are the only cable provider in the area and we're too far for DSL. Even if AT&T does bring DSL into our area I suspect they will also filter for money. I think a lot of people will grumble but in the end there's not going to be a lot of choice for many people.

Comcast may be the only cable provider in your area, but they get most of their revenue from customers in big cities where the customers DO have several choices. If Comcast (or AT&T, or Qwest or whomever) wants to compete in areas of wide competition, tehn they will have to provide the same levels of access. Those that provide the best access for the cheapest price will get customers. Those that limit access will lose customers, and end up going tango-uniform, or get abought out by the ISPs providing full access.

In short, Comcast won't limit your access, even though they are the only broadband in your area, because to do so would take away too much of their customer base from areas where Comcast DOES have competition. Ditto AT&T, Qwest, AOL, Etc. etc. etc.

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Ibn Rushd wrote:

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zewazir wrote:
So tell us, what ISP is going to take money from a big corporation to limit their customer's acces to the net?

They will not limit access to the internet only easy access to internet sites that don't cough up the vig each month.

An ISP cannot slow down one point in favor of another. Yahoo runs their servers, and pays for a certain bandwidth to connect them to. Google does the same. Cox cannot change those connection speeds. Nor can Verison. The only company that can change the bandwidth for Yahoo is the ISP Yahoo deals with. And eveyone pays according to the bandwidth they want. If you want dial up, you pay cheap. If you want DSL, you pay a little more. Cable is more yet, renting a dedicated T1 is even more, and a dedicated T3 is more than T1.

But once they are connected, that is their connection speed. If they are renting a T1 from AT&T, Cox cannot slow that down while maintaining full speed on Google. Nor can Verison slow Google down while maintaining speed on Yahoo. If they slow down your connection speed, it will affect all access, because it can only affect what YOU are paying for.

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zewazir wrote:
An ISP cannot slow down one point in favor of another.

NOW that's true. Without a codified net neutrality standard Comcast, Verizon etc. will be able to legally throttle access for money. And for most users there will be little choice because, I suspect, this is a revenue stream that all of the major players will get into as fast as their legal departments can complete the paperwork.

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geoduck wrote:
Without a codified net neutrality standard Comcast, Verizon etc. will be able to legally throttle access for money.

Let's try another thought experiment. Let's say that downloads from sites like Google video or YouTube, or perhaps a protocol like BitTorrent end up clogging total system bandwidth so that users who just want to get e-mail or view low bandwidth websites suffer performance decreases. Or let's say that Vonage usage by some makes e-mail usage by all slower. Under Net Neutrality, it would be illegal for an ISP to solve this problem by routing high bandwidth services on different networks than low bandwidth services. Or it would be illegal for an ISP to provide a guaranteed quality of service for an Internet connected medical device or an alarm system. Should Joey's download of a pirated movie the day before it hits theaters compete directly with monitoring potassium in grandpa's blood the month after he had a heart attack? Net neutrality codified as law says no. Count me as being in favor of grandpa not dying.

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Bosco wrote:
Should Joey's download of a pirated movie the day before it hits theaters compete directly with monitoring potassium in grandpa's blood the month after he had a heart attack? Net neutrality codified as law says no. Count me as being in favor of grandpa not dying.

Uhm, if I had to depend on the internet to save my life I'm afraid I'm probably f**ked no matter what. Are there actually services out there like this!? WHY!?

It sounds like a terrible idea. Who does this?

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Small White Car wrote:
Uhm, if I had to depend on the internet to save my life I'm afraid I'm probably f**ked no matter what. Are there actually services out there like this!? WHY!?

It sounds like a terrible idea. Who does this?

Yeah, it does sound like a pretty terrible idea to have Grandpa at home with a rented hospital bed and some medical monitors and people he loves when he could be in the hospital at several thousand dollars per day or a nursing home at several hundred per day. Perhaps if we all had health insurance that covered 5 years on continual hospitalization, with access to the best doctors on a moment's notice, we wouldn't have to resort to thinking about costs.

Mom and Dad might already have a cable modem that could be connected cheaply to monitoring devices rather than having a dedicated circuit using proprietary communication standards put in. The technician to hook that whole thing up ought to be available in the next two months. Perhaps when grandpa sleeps at night, a daylight worker in India might periodically check his vitals, rather than an expensive night worker here.

Terrible idea, indeed.

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Bosco wrote:

Terrible idea, indeed.

If grandpa dies the first time my net connection drops for an hour?

Then yes, terrible idea. That's bound to happen at least once over the next month, I'm sure.

Of course, I'm not sure why he'd die so quickly from a momentary lapse in someone "checking in on him" but that's clearly how you described it in your last post. What was it...Joey's download slowing down the network was what killed him?

If that's all it takes to kill someone, as you imply, I would not depend on such a system for myself.

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Small White Car wrote:
If that's all it takes to kill someone, as you imply, I would not depend on such a system for myself.

Isn't a problem if ISPs are free to charge for different quality of service levels. Of course, if you're for Network Neutrality, then you are against this.

Perhaps I'm being too subtle for this audience. I'm not accusing you of killing Grandpa by supporting Net Neutrality. I'm accusing you of bankrupting him. OK, wait, that's still probably too subtle. If you support Net Neutrality, then you are making it very difficult to roll out reliable services like the one I describe that also manage to leverage Internet standards and infrastructure so as to keep it affordable. Does that make sense?

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Bosco wrote:

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Small White Car wrote:
If that's all it takes to kill someone, as you imply, I would not depend on such a system for myself.

Isn't a problem if ISPs are free to charge for different quality of service levels. Of course, if you're for Network Neutrality, then you are against this.

Perhaps I'm being too subtle for this audience. I'm not accusing you of killing Grandpa by supporting Net Neutrality. I'm accusing you of bankrupting him.

But if they're free to charge then why wouldn't they charge more for critical services? If I ran a business I'd certainly charge more for things people HAVE to have compared to things they simply want.

Seems to me, grandpa is screwed either way.

All of the speculative scenarios aside it boils down to one simple question. What is the purpose of a corporation. Many people labor under the false assumption that the purpose of corporations is to make the customer happy. That is not the case. The purpose of corporations is to make money. Pleasing the customer is a means toward that end but it is a grave mistake to assume that your happiness is their top priority. If Verizon et. al. can make more money by accepting payments and slowing down access to those that don't pay then they will.

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geoduck wrote:
All of the speculative scenarios aside it boils down to one simple question. What is the purpose of a corporation. Many people labor under the false assumption that the purpose of corporations is to make the customer happy. That is not the case. The purpose of corporations is to make money. Pleasing the customer is a means toward that end but it is a grave mistake to assume that your happiness is their top priority. If Verizon et. al. can make more money by accepting payments and slowing down access to those that don't pay then they will.

If a company is not going to get my business unless they make me happy, then yes, my happiness (ie: customer satisfaction) is going to be of significant concern.

What you people are concerned about is not possible to accomplish. The technology does not allow for it.

If I were running a business, and I rent a T1 from AT&T, then that will be the bandwidth available to my business server. AT&T cannot slectively narrow that bandwidth according to who is trying to access my business server. So a ccustomer, using Qwest DSL, links to my server in order to read my catalog and order something. Qwest is providing their customer with DSL bandwidth. They cannot selectively narrow the bandwidth according to whom their customer is trying to contact.

So I pay for my T1, and that allows a certain number of people to access my server simultaneously without slowdown. If I have too many customers, then things slow down. If things get too slow so I start losing sales, I can consider paying more for more bandwidth. But I do not deserve more bandwidth just because it is needed. I have to pay more to get more, like any other service.

And when I do pay for more service, then I get more service. It is how things work, and there is no problem with it. You get what you pay for. No one can decrease my service selectively. AT&T cannot, because that would be violating my contract. (Of course, they can increase prices on a T3 line, but at the risk of T3 customers finding a less expensive ISP.) Qwest cannot decrease my bandwidth or availability selectively, that would be interfering with my contract with a different business. It would be the same as Verison telling an AlTel customer they needed to pay AlTel or they'll jam their phone calls to select numbers. There are already laws preventing one business from interfering with another business.

Bosco - you're starting to show your level of intelligence. The Bells did not want this passed because they *can* and will start to regulatet net traffic. It's their wires, and if anyone knows how to #@!$ it up, it's them.

zewazir - it doesn't fuckin matter how much you pay for whatever. if the telecoms want to control the nodes they will, and your business will unfortunately have customers from a specific demographic. China has already proved how it can effectively shut down the majority of net traffic as it so pleases. wake up. AND for your info, i'm in a metropolis, and still only have access to two choices for the net. sound like much choice? it's not.

i'm goin back to bed.

Where were you guys BEFORE they shot down this goddam bill?
I was sending emails to my Congressman.

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iJack wrote:
Where were you guys BEFORE they shot down this goddam bill?
I was sending emails to my Congressman.

My Congressman was Duke Cunningham (in jail for payola) so I have not had a representative until last week. However, I have been in communication with Senators Boxer and Feinstein on this and other matters.

Many of you guys have a very poor understanding of what is at issue here. Check out the following story for a very short example of what is at issue here:

http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/dec2005/tc20051215_141991.htm

Check out eff.org, for a much better analysis.

The article gives a great example of a real life story. A guy used Vonage. It suddenly stoped working. Apparently, his ISP offered a VOIP service and did not want to have to compete with the lowered price Vonage (I gathered this from other sources, not the story I provided). So his ISP simply decided not to deliver his communications from Vonage. Since the ISP was the only available option to the consumer, his ISP effectively prevented him from using Vonage. If his little old rinky dink ISP could do that, any ISP can easily block data from any source. For instance, a request by a ISP's customer to view Google, Ebay, or Yahoo.

In fact, this is exactly what ISPs want to implement on a large scale. Companies like ATT have publically said so. They have successfully lobbied for legistation that will allow them to do this. Democrats lobbied to have this latest bill counter the ISPs efforts.

It is a matter of pure greed. I already pay my ISP to deliever my communications. There is no reason why a website like Google should have to pay my ISP as well. Keep in mind Google already pays at its end to have its communications sent. What is at issue is at my end. The ISP wants to be paid twice. Once by me, and twice by the companies whose communications I seek.

PS

I will also add that ISPs are also fighting to not allow states to provide free and low cost wireless access to its citizens, as some local areas have already done. ISPs are afraid of this. They do not want to compete with low cost and free.

Yes, greed at its best.

The idea that ISP's will limit access is a boogie. even if all the largest ISPs agree to simultaneously install such a program, it will only take one minor player to expand and take all their business away because they provide full access that the others do not. It simply will not happen, and making a law to prevent it is a waste of time and effort on the part of a bunch of chicken-little anti-corporate dunderheads. May as well make a law against flapping your arms to fly to the moon.

Ah! That's why I have there are so many cable companies out there vying in a competitive atmosphere, offering me such a wide selection of choices at ever-competing rates!