Net Neutrality out the window?

[ArneHD]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6983375.stm

US backing for two-tier internet
Lady using a laptop in an airport
There are fears that ISPs could become the web's gatekeepers
The US Justice Department has said that internet service providers should be allowed to charge for priority traffic.

The agency said it was opposed to "network neutrality", the idea that all data on the net is treated equally.

The comments put the agency at odds with companies such as Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to guarantee equal access to the net.

The agency submitted its comments to the Federal Communications Commission, which is investigating net access.

Several US internet service providers (ISPs), including AT&T and Verizon, have previously said that they want to charge some users more money for certain content.

This has particularly become an issue with the rise of TV and film download services.

A similar debate is ongoing in the UK.

One web

The Justice Department said imposing net neutrality regulations could hinder development of the internet and prevent ISPs from upgrading networks.

The agency said it could also shift the "entire burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto consumers".

"Regulators should be careful not to impose regulations that could limit consumer choice and investment in broadband facilities," said Thomas Barnett, the department's antitrust chief.

The agency's stance is contrary to much of the internet community that believes in an open model for the internet.

Net neutrality advocates argue that a two-tier internet would allow broadband providers to become gatekeepers to the web's content.

Providers that can pay will be able to get a commercial advantage over those that cannot, they say.

In particular, there is a fear that institutions like universities and charities would suffer.

Last year, Sir Tim Berners-Lee the inventor of the web rallied against the idea of a two-tier internet.

"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said.

"Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."

How to sum it up? Disastrous comes to mind.

 

[Mr. Dictator]

******** old people trying to police technology is never good.

can't wait till they're all in nursing homes, that way they can't legislate things they don't understand.

 

[JohnRM]

I predicted this years ago. I repeated my prediction, to no avail, when people were asking "what's next for the net?"

The advent of "priority traffic" is meant to stifle free thought and transmission of unpopular, non-profit ideas.

 

[bhsup]

I support this, I think. Why shouldn't companies be allowed to pay more to ensure their traffic gets more bandwidth? You know, just because someone writes a book, it doesn't mean a publisher is obligated to do a 1 million print run of it just to keep it up with the NYT bestsellers.

 

[{|}$~\]

Because if you have a two-tier internet, the lower tier will never be upgraded. Someone viewing a website produced by and promoting the beliefs of a major corporation will find that it loads quickly, while a site operated by an ordinary citizen will load very slowly. The greatest thing about the Internet is that it democratises the press. The words of an ordinary individual are as easy to access as the words of a giant mega-conglomerate; in other media, the richer the speaker, the easier it is for people to listen. A tiered Internet would destroy this; it would be easy to access the issuances of corporate mouthpieces, whereas the beliefs of the common citizen would be difficult to reach. Stories that the corporate elite found inconvenient would go unheard.

 

[bhsup]

But why should large corporations OR wealthy individuals have to subsidize joe blow (me or you or anyone else here)?

 

[JohnRM]

Meh, the day that this happens is the day that I no longer subscribe for internet access.

 

[SG-17]

Despite my political views, I think the internet should be like a communist nation, with everything equal, but without the rabid corruption and inevitable collapse.

EDIT: Which would be the way it is now.

 

[warpus]

Hmm hopefully other countries don't go along with this BS.

 

[JohnRM]

The internet is perfectly fine the way it is. There is NO reason to change it.

 

[CIVPhilzilla]

I like the internet the way it is now, a level playing ground for everybody. While that would be impossible to implement in many aspects of society, the internet allows this relatively easily.

 

[mdwh]

I support this, I think. Why shouldn't companies be allowed to pay more to ensure their traffic gets more bandwidth?

Because I as a paying customer of the ISP want equal access to whatever sites I choose to view.

You know, just because someone writes a book, it doesn't mean a publisher is obligated to do a 1 million print run of it just to keep it up with the NYT bestsellers.

But the publisher would be analogous to the website's own ISP. Sure, it's perfectly fine for an ISP to charge more _to its own customers_ to give more bandwidth to those who pay more. The problem is that ISPs want to restrict access for its own customers, to other sites which aren't customers, depending on if these other customers give them money.

Real world analogies are difficult, but I believe it'd be more like a taxi driver telling me the journey's going to take twice as long, because the hotel I'm paying him to take me to hasn't paid him money.

The question is, what sort of thing is the Internet? A network allowing people to communicate together? Or something more like TV, where content is controlled by the ISPs, and we the users pay to receive content from what the ISPs choose?

Which would you prefer?

 

[woody60707]

The agency said it could also shift the "entire burden of implementing costly network expansions and improvements onto consumers".

huh, where else would they magically get money but from the paying consumer? Are they magically getting money now from some place else other then the money they are making from the paying consumer?

This sounded like nothing more then gibbish

 

[Kozmos]

I support this, I think. Why shouldn't companies be allowed to pay more to ensure their traffic gets more bandwidth? You know, just because someone writes a book, it doesn't mean a publisher is obligated to do a 1 million print run of it just to keep it up with the NYT bestsellers.

If the company wants more bandwidth all it has to do is pay more. Same if it wants to increase the speed of data transfer. It's all about the $$$.

 

[JohnRM]

I bet that the loss of net neutrality would cause a lot of protests.

 

[Stewbert 08]

Why shouldn't companies be allowed to pay more to ensure their traffic gets more bandwidth?

For the same reason that a guy from Burger King isn't allowed to stand in front of a nearby McDonald's and charge you a ten dollar "access fee" at the front door.

For the same reason that Congress is not allowed to set separate legal speed limits for UPS and FedEx trucks based on how much either one bribes the government.

Companies are allowed to charge however much they want for their CONTENT. That's called a paysite. Nobody is allowed to selectively charge the MEDIUM through which that content flows - whether that be roads, or a series of tubes - because that is profoundly ANTI-competitive in the same way that bribery is ANTI-democratic.

If Google is a superior search engine to Yahoo!, but Yahoo! is allowed to pay off all the ISPs to make access to Google slower (or nonexistent) compared to Yahoo!, then the company with the most money wins, not the company with the best product. And if that kind of thumb-in-the-scale behavior is allowed to pervade the market, startups are dead on arrival.

It's ok if you don't understand that free enterprise can only flourish with a level playing field, I mean what was the last Fortune 500 company to come out of frickin Missouri?

 

[Tee Kay]

******** old people trying to police technology is never good.

can't wait till they're all in nursing homes, that way they can't legislate things they don't understand.

QFT

 

[innonimatu]

Companies are allowed to charge however much they want for their CONTENT. That's called a paysite. Nobody is allowed to selectively charge the MEDIUM through which that content flows - whether that be roads, or a series of tubes - because that is profoundly ANTI-competitive in the same way that bribery is ANTI-democratic.

And it goes beyond even that: it's technically very hard (if not impossible) to differentiate traffic for billing. The Internet was build with redundancy in mind, and that feature is today as important as it was originally - perhaps more, as now the whole world depends immensely on the correct functioning of the Internet.
Redundancy requires that multiple paths for data transfer be possible. If an entity controlling a part of one path degrades a certain category of traffic, it will flow some other way. Deliberate attempts to do this can cause tremendous instability in the networks, and trying to value bandwidth in this situation would be an insanely complex problem – leading to continuous cost (and therefore price) variations and continuous changes in the networks.
The only technically sane way to differentiate traffic for billing purposed would be at the ISP level, just before the final client. And that would, as Stewbert 08 and many others have already explained, to ISPs ripping off their clients, no value added there.
Not to mention that people could simply establish VPNs to access any content deliberately degraded or denied, if they knew someone willing to cooperate – I guess we might end up seeing a propaganda campaign against VPNs like the present campaign against p2p apps.

 

[drachasor]

I support this, I think. Why shouldn't companies be allowed to pay more to ensure their traffic gets more bandwidth? You know, just because someone writes a book, it doesn't mean a publisher is obligated to do a 1 million print run of it just to keep it up with the NYT bestsellers.

We need equality on the net because exchanging ideas via the internet is going to become and more and more important part of our democratic process. Right now we see how corporate controlled media handles the exchange of viewpoints; you get garbage like crossfire (which is gone, but nothing decent has replaced it). The internet is the next, best hope for a more informed and educated citizenry, and we need that for democracy to work. Yes, this means that essentially we'll be overcoming market forces, but as anyone knows the best ideas can often fail on the market for a variety of reasons. We certainly don't need opinions to be things that are bought and sold and viewed as commodities by politicians. We instead need ideas competing on their own merit if we want to have a functional government (however big or small you think that government should be, the better ideas won't win, generally, if they can't compete on even ground with each other).

Net Neutrality, in short, is essential to have a brighter tomorrow. Anyone who believes in a well-functioning democracy should support it, no matter what other political beliefs you might have.

-Drachasor

 

[LightFang]

Wow, even Microsoft is backing 'Net Neutrality.

And yes, I did fill out one of those petition things.