Many have tried to explain this, but I’ll give it a shot as well. If the internet isn’t regulated by the government, ISP’s will have the ability to treat content from opposing companies different than their own. This will almost certainly lead to less companies able to create new services and will stifle innovation… at first.
What we will see as soon is that happens will be the quickest technological revolution the United States has ever seen. The internet is the most important thing to happen to civilization, and the people will reject anything that makes it less useful. Many people don’t have a choice of service provider, but that will change drastically when a market opens up for a different kind of ISP. I could easily see wireless technology exploding, perhaps even a decentralization of wireless infrastructure in populated areas, where everyone possesses a transmitter/repeater. Maybe a torrent style of wireless distribution between peers to transmit information across this network based on open standards. That’s just one thought, and it may not even be possible, but it certainly will not happen if regulations are passed that maintain the status quo like net neutrality will do.
I think it is short-sighted to regulate against problems without considering if they might be solved by themselves.
I love the fact you got astroturfed on this issue. I for one hope that all the astroturfers have their ISP taken over by a media company ideologically opposed to their own and that media company decides to be “non-neutral” with regards to access to their favorite watering holes.
The howls should change then, especially when the learn what their “alternative ISPs” really are like in terms of performance.
In my case I can get a 50 Mbps cable company (that I use, actual performance more like 25 Mbps) or a 1 Mbps DSL (assuming I’m willing to take a “bundle” of unwanted services) or a dish based provider at 512 kbps with a low download cap.
Of course net neutrality is important [if the legislation is worded correctly]. Look at it this way… do you want someone else telling you what you can look at on the net, controlling what you access?
Unless net neutrality is protected it will be destroyed. The Government wants regulation, because they are paid by the industry lobbyists to want it. The media companies and ISP’s want to be able to discriminate what you get to see, because then they can sell you a premium package ‘upgrade’ not to.
Basically, the net at the moment is like radio used to be, competition at source, while the user chooses what they want to listen to. The companies want to move more to a cable Tv like business model, and divide up the content so they can sell it to you more than once. In order to do that, they need to be able to control the delivery system.
A good next step after understanding the decentralized design of The Internet is to read Protocol, by Alexander Galloway. It is a cultural and technical criticizsm of protocols used over the internet, using RFCs as a critical text.
It does contain some obvious references to DNS and Paul Garrin’s decades long platform to free DNS from root authorities but the remainder is much more surprising and insightful.
To everyone saying “regulation destroys innovation” I say good riddance. I don’t want my ISP innovating new ways to get money from me. I want them to buy fatter pipes. Their one and only answer to all usage problems should be “More bandwidth!”. No innovation on their part is necessary or desired.
Not to trample on an ideology that I agree with on almost every issue, but clearly one answer (government == bad) is insufficient for all economic questions. It just does NOT hold up to reality, even if you define the “good” answer as the one resulting in the greatest economic growth!
The FASTEST growing major economy in the world (by an order of magnitude to the USA) is China, hardly a bastion of libertarianism. Economies with more banking regulations, like Canada, have huge leads in job and GDP growth over lax countries like the USA.
As someone who gets frustrated with government meddling on a near daily basis, I understand the point some commenters are making. However, the issue isn’t quite as cut and dried as they seem to imagine it to be and net neutrality may need to become regulation at some point in the future if industry does not “play nice”.
So why bother even discussing it now when it’s not even a problem? When was the last time the government did anything fast without messing it up even worse? Clearly we need to have this discussion and figure out the risks before it becomes an issue!
So you want a law that says “The owners of the Internet’s wires cannot discriminate.”
Yep, in the same way most public utilities don’t allow you to discriminate. I pay for my bits, and it shouldn’t matter where I’m sending them too and from. If you can’t provide the bandwidth you offered me, then that’s your problem, not mine. QOS should be handled at the local end, not in aggregate - just because I’m using torrents shouldn’t mean I lose out compared to all your Skypers out there.
Here is what a world without Net Neutrality looks like to me.
When I pull my car onto a toll road, I have to declare where I'm going. Walmart? Well, then it's $1 and I can drive 100kph. Tim's General Store? Oh, he's not one of our Preferred Sponsors, so you'll have to pay $5 and can't drive more than 50kph. Are you sure you wouldn't rather go to Walmart instead?
I pick up my phone to make a call, and get a recording saying that there'll be a delay because their phone company isn't my phone company.
I call to complain that my lights are flickering, and get told that the company who owns the wires is throttling current to certain electricity providers.
I don’t think I’m asking for much - I pay for a connection, and it’s none of the ISPs business what I’m using it for.
Net neutrality means all bits are treated alike. Some people here argue that this is bad, because it has a negative impact on innovation. However, what shall I prioritize? If I prioritize everything, I’m back to no prioritization at all, so that is pointless. E.g. YouTube videos might need more bandwidth to play fluently, VoIP may need low latencies to work correctly and so on. And already here we have the conflict. Either I prioritize YouTube traffic (gets more bandwidth) or I prioritize VoIP traffic (gets better latencies); I cannot prioritize both. If I go for YouTube, videos will transfer quickly, but they will eat so much bandwidth, VoIP becomes impossible. If I go for VoIP, telephone calls will work nicely, but now videos may not be able to download in realtime any longer. It’s always bandwidth vs latency. And what about people that don’t care for either one? They never watch YouTube videos, they never do VoIP calls. However, they may use another service, e.g. video chat via Apple’s FaceTime. Every user of the Internet has other requirements and if I prioritize his services, he will probably be very happy, but if not, his Internet experience will suck. Assuming I am an Internet provider, who gives me the power to decide which services should run fine for my customers and which services should suck? Do I even know what for my customers are using the Internet and why they have bought a broadband access to it? Should I even care? ISPs are only against net neutrality for a single reason and it is not to bring innovation to anyone or improve anyone’s Internet experience, it is “making more money”. If you are allowed to discriminate traffic, you can blackmail (and IMHO it is just that, blackmailing) a company like Google, eBay or Facebook and tell them “If you don’t pay us $… per month, we will set your traffic to lowest priority; BWAHAHAHAHAH”. If the law says, traffic must be neutral, this kind of blackmailing is simply impossible. Traffic Neutrality does not mean that an ISP must treat every customer equally. Of course not every customer gets the same bandwidth, but only what s/he paid for and of course a customer wasting an excessive amount of traffic might get throttled if his contract with the ISP allows to the ISP to do so, but in every case, this happens for ALL traffic of this customer and not traffic for specific services.
As for all the “keep your gubbamint hands off mah internets” posts, here’s my thoughts.
Is Net Neutrality stifling innovation? If innovation means dropping my bittorrent packets and throttling my netflix, then you can keep your innovation, and I think you know where you can put it too.
Telling that most of the top Pro-ISP comments are from accounts just created the day the article showed up. I’m sure these people don’t have a vested monetary interest in this at all.
This article is horribly confused. The author attempts to use a tragic story of how a government-sanctioned telecom monopoly malevolently enforced government regulations against small private innovator as evidence that the government should have more of a role in crafting a national internet policy. Judging by the comments, I’m not the only one who sees this as lunacy.
It’s also telling that the author references an urgent call-to-arms from 2006 that went unheeded, but he can’t identify any actual negative event that’s taken place in these last five years in the absence of the desired government restrictions. This whole net neutrality thing seems like a fear of some potentially undesirable potential future that there’s no evidence to suggest is coming to pass.
“but he can’t identify any actual negative event that’s taken place in these last five years in the absence of the desired government restrictions”
I take it you haven’t paid attention to the Comcast lawsuits, eh? Where they were packet shaping and performing the exact behavior that Net Neutrality is designed to prevent?
I encourage the readers of Coding Horror to remember that part of their public relations policies of major ISPs are to pose as normal consumers, commenters, and bloggers in order to support the official positions of their companies on issues such as Net Neutrality.
I find it interesting that the vast majority of the anti-NN comments on this blog entry are accounts that were created on the same day or a few days after the article was published and have no subsequent activity or profile information.
Just to get this out of the way, I wasn’t paid to write this and I’m not affiliated with any teleco or anything. This is the first comment I have left on this blog in my three years of readership because I am passionate about the issue. I find it almost insulting that people would try to de-legitimize their opponents’ arguments like this, and I hope we can debate on the merits of our positions rather than impugning each others’ motives. Anyway.
I take it you haven’t paid attention to the Comcast lawsuits, eh? Where they were packet shaping and performing the exact behavior that Net Neutrality is designed to prevent?
No, I’m well aware of it. I’m even a Comcast customer so it affects me every once in a while. The question is, why should I care? What’s so evil about these policies? I am an almighty data hog, and I admit it. I download a ton of stuff. So I don’t really see the catastrophic harm of them slowing down my connection from time to time when I’m consuming the most. I’m not actually prevented from doing anything; it’s just that every once in a while when I’m torrenting while watching netflix, I’ll have to turn off the torrent or the picture quality will decrease. Talk about a zero-th world problem!
Here’s the way I see it: we can’t have it both ways. Either we keep our “unlimited” plans and accept traffic shaping, or we move to metered internet so that people pay for exactly what they consume. Because as much as we’d like to believe it, nothing is truly unlimited, and if we behave as though it is, the fiction falls apart for those who consume the most. It was easy to maintain in the days before bittorrent and streaming video, but the capacity of end users to consume bandwidth has dramatically risen. I know we’d all like to believe that competition will solve this problem by providing fatter pipes, but to the extent that’s true, consumption will simply keep pace with the size of the pipe as new bandwidth-intensive activities become more possible. We’re going to have to accept some kind of usage-curtailment system, be it paying by the unit (as we do for water and electricity, the public utilities people often say the internet should be treated as), ISP-based traffic management, or government rationing (as with public-utility tap water in the American southwest).
So the options are really 1) paying proportionally to what your consume, 2) private resource rationing (traffic management), or 3) government resource rationing. I am personally much more keen on options 1 or two than option 3.
There’s nothing in NN that has the FCC rationing bandwidth. I’m sure you know that, I’m unsure why you brought it up.
If you actually were aware of the fullness of Comcast’s sins, you’d realise it wasn’t just about throttling. They were actually impersonating your pc in network transactions and sending drop packets, effectively blocked access to certain protocols. That’s more than a little insidious. I had to engage in onion routing and packet obfuscation to even be able to use the internet the way it was intended to be used.
Charging people more based on usage I’m sure is a great revenue idea, but it would never fly. People talk a lot about stifling innovation with regards to NN. You know what is pushing innovation forward? The obscene bandwidth demands of users like you and me. The infrastructure is forced to evolve and new technology emerges. Give companies a way to make more money by not innovating, and I guarantee that they take it.
Nate, I think you’re confusing what net neutrality means. Without net neutrality, switching off your torrent would NOT speed up your Netflix, because Comcast has decided the Netflix bits competes with their own offerings and limits how much you can download for that service in particular. They could decide to charge you extra to allow you to download faster from Netflix, or they could just limit it so you’re more likely to use their services.
WITHOUT Net Neutrality, it’s not about how much bandwidth you use (you’re already limited now), it’s about what you’re using your bandwidth for. The ISP decides how you use your bandwidth.
They were actually impersonating your pc in network transactions and sending drop packets, effectively blocked access to certain protocols.
Which protocols? If I were the victim of such behavior, how would I notice and/or be negatively affected?
The ISP decides how you use your bandwidth.
But… have they actually done anything like that? Again, what is the negative effect to me?
All of these things sound scary, but in the end, what I want to know is how are these allegedly insidious practices actually hurting me right now? The idea of Comcast making a big error message appear on my computer that says, “Comcast has determined that you much pay $20 more per month to view this content” is horrible to imagine but has anything like that actually happened yet? Or are we just worried that it may happen in the future? That’s why I’m skeptical. Nobody has been able to articulate how I’m being hurt by the status quo in a way that resonates with me.
NN supporters talk about all these terrible events in the future yet call for regulation now; if the regulations are expected to be effective, then couldn’t they be enacted once the predicted problems actually materialize?
Net neutrality and its legislation are obviously two separate things. Right now we have net neutrality for the most part so we don’t need the legislation. What some people suggest is that even if ISPs do start doing exactly those “scary” things, there should be no legislation because net neutrality itself is bad.
I don’t expect you to go through all the comments and find my original one, but what I was arguing is that a well thought out plan for legislation should be debated and ready if ISPs do need to be regulated, and it should be put in place if needed.
Then again, I don’t think it’d be horrible if we preempted the ISPs and just legislated it now - if they’re already doing it, it won’t be a big deal and it’ll have less of an economic impact since the risk to companies dependent on net neutrality (i.e. everyone other than the ISPs) will be known. From a business owner’s perspective, the last thing I want is more volatility.
“Keep your regulations out of my Internet. Please.”
“Networks start out open and then rapidly swing closed as they are increasingly commercialized.” is a pile of BS. The reality is that:
“Networks start out open and then rapidly swing closed as they are increasingly regulated”. The internet is very commercialized. It’s also very open.
To see the other part of argument, let’s take, your OWN example, Jeff. AT&T is not a monopoly that arose and kept its monopoly as part of fair and square competition. Your example is a monopoly that used GOVERNMENT as a means of crushing its comptetors. Which is, of course, the real problem.
Net Neutrality is the way for monopolies to crush thier smaller competetion. Net Neutrality does not prohibit laying your own cable for your own traffic, nor should it. Google and microsoft do this, for example. Net Neutrality does not prohibit using edge caching like Akamai to speed up your traffic, nor should it. Both of those make the internet inherently faster. The big players can always pay money to speed up thier traffic. This is a fact that will not change. Net Neutrality does prohibits the medium/smaller players to talk directly with ISP for speeding up thier traffic, which is the same unfairness you claim to deplore.
On top of that, Net Neutrality makes connecting more devices to the net inherently difficult. If you can’t hookup a heart monitor and have it’s traffic preferred, it will be drowned in the sea of porn.
Pavel, the intentions of the internet and the guarantees provided by its fundamental architecture do not allow for the “heart monitor” use case you mentioned. You’d need to set up something much more reliable than internet protocol (IP) with latency and reliability guarantees for something life threatening and realtime. Connecting it to the public on the internet would make it dead simple for a hacker to literally DOS someone to death, especially with its traffic being prioritized straight to its servers.
IP only provides best effort delivery. If a company wants to provide a service with different characteristics, then they can certainly build that - having ISPs add layers to check where traffic is coming from so they can prioritize it for edge cases like this will just slow it down for everyone. The solution to quality of service issues is to lay more pipe - removing net neutrality is at best a temporary bandaid solution for a minority. Net neutrality results in a faster internet.
You also pointed out a solution to the companies that have cash and need more bandwidth. Google, Microsoft, or Startup-X need bandwidth to their servers - how does giving ISPs the ability to limit how end users use their bandwidth solve that issue?
Companies can already pay ISPs to get more bandwidth for their servers! If a user wants more bandwidth they can already pay for it! They can decide for themselves how to use it without paying an ISP for the privilege.
Net neutrality equates to the freedom for users to decide how to use their bandwidth, instead of ISPs deciding for them. If you need more bandwidth, you can still purchase more - that’s a separate issue.
There are also privacy concerns which I’m surprised people don’t talk about. Do you really want ISPs to know how you use your bandwidth? They’ll have to look at it so they can prioritize it.
Take away: Killing net neutrality means killing user freedom and privacy.
Pardon the hyperbole - seems the missinformation in the opposing arguments are pushing me further and further to the extreme.
