OK Go on net neutrality: A lesson from the music industry

[and-justice-for-all]

Published in The Washington Post

Damian Kulash | August 29, 2010

On the Internet, when I send my ones and zeros somewhere, they shouldn't have to wait in line behind the ones and zeros of wealthier people or corporations. That's the way the Net was designed, and it's central to a concept called "net neutrality," which ensures that Internet service providers can't pick favorites.

Recently, though, big telecommunications companies have argued that their investment in the Net's infrastructure should allow them more control over how it's used. The concerned nerds of the world are up in arms, and there's been a long, loud public debate, during which the Federal Communications Commission appeared to develop a plan to preserve net neutrality.

more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08/27/AR2010082702131.html

[msongs]

1. internet should be a public utlity nt

[skids]

2. People have no concept how complex an issue this is.

...and while I think distrust of big business is merited, some of the chicken-little hyped headlines about secret conspiracies are over the top.

For example, if you are a serious voice over IP provider, and you need to buy dedicated bandwidth or you cannot do business, you'd be out of business if we did not allow some sort of payed premium quality of service, as some people understand "net neutrality" to mean. So your customers would not be able to buy service from you. So the big phone companies keep their monopolies and they win in the end.

It's just not as simple as saying "throw the pipes wide open." Some technologies just do not work on wide open pipes no matter how big they are.

The solution we should be demanding is that anyone buying premium service must expand the basic level service by some percentage of the amount of bandwidth you are purchasing. That would guarantee that there is always spare bandwidth for unprivileged best-effort services, but still allow the Internet to be useful for QoS-sensitive private ventures.

So if you need a dedicated 100 megabit link from point A to point B, the company that sells it to you has to add, say, 25 megabits of baseline service from point A to point B when they sell it to you. (Tune that number such that it works to keep the basic service perfectly usable.)

Anything more complex than that would have every network engineer working with a cadre of lawyers looking over his shoulder, and then the lawyers would be the only winners.

People are going to have to be patient with the legislators here -- they have to talk to the telcos to draft legislation that makes sense, because the telcos have needed information, and some of it may have to be confidential. So we shouldn't call any meeting they have with them a back room deal. Moreover, we shouldn't complain if the final product is 2000 pages long, because to close every imaginable loophole that could happen here, that might be required.

[TheKentuckian]

3. How bout oh hell no we don't have to be patient with meetings with telcos and "premium service"

That is not the result we have been struggling for.

You worry about profits and I'll worry about protecting an open internet.

You see boss, I am not a legislator and neither are you. It isn't our job to come to the table with compromises or to be understanding of jack shit.
That worldview had a track record of giving the corporations exactly what they want to the detriment of the citizen.

My desk at a provider was right outside the offices of the President and the CEO, I am aware of their perspective and I'm confident of what such people would like to do as far as traffic shaping and if you think it is pretty or reasonable then you are far to naive.

No, we don't have to trust, be patient, or accept anybody or anything and by doing so you are siding with the corporations against the people. This process is extremely adversarial and people like you are trying to find some way to bend over with a white flag stuck up our collective asses.

[skids]

4. I can appreciate that sentiment...

However, I just think that it's been a political disaster so far to oversimplify an issue for the purpose of advertising it to supporters, because when reality takes away the oversimplified "prize" you have set in everyone's mind as the objective, they consider it to have been a failure, not a victory, blame people who they probably shouldn't, and get discouraged.

BTW, I could not give a rats ass about IT profits, as long as people have service and the workers who provide the service are adequately paid for doing so. The oversimplified view of "net neutrality" that some advocates propose would make a lot of services which the public currently enjoys essentially illegal.

[cprise]

5. I wouldn't say its being oversimplified

Since companies can purchase their own dedicated long-haul fibre from backbone providers like Google, what the debate is mainly about is last-mile prioritization. That's why ISPs like Comcast-Xfinity figured large early-on in the debate.

Its the last mile that's very difficult to lay down new infrastructure for, and that is the scarcer resource for which a fight has started.

Again, companies desiring long-haul capacity needn't worry about being mixed in with the Internet... there is plenty of capacity in that market.

So what this amounts to is cable TV providers (including Verizon now) trying to turn some of their Internet capacity into something that resembles their TV business/propaganda model. The old mode of plain cable TV is fading away in terms of viewership, the new generation prefers the Internet, so they want to structure Internet revenue more like TV -- Content providers like Facebook and Hulu would be like TV networks signing up advertisers to hop on board before being piped down to the end user/viewer with added detail/bluster/speed/etc. Small-time Internet startups would be SOL, unable to muster the eye-popping whiz bang or throughput (even to their small list of users) of the established sites that can pay the priority fees to Comcast et al.