Network neutrality : A tangled web

http://www.economist.com/node/17800141?story_id=17800141&fsrc=scn/tw/te/rss/pe

by muon • 16 years ago

14 5 16 years ago

ShabbyDoo• 16 years ago

Finally, someone else makes the argument that I've been making for awhile:

"These details are important, but the noise about them only makes the omission more startling: the failure in America to tackle the underlying lack of competition in the provision of internet access."

Americans seem to believe that, if a company is granted monopoly status by a government entity or if competition is severely limited, then those companies allowed to operate without free market competitive forces should be regulated. Monthly phone and cable bills are regulated by some combination of local, State, and Federal governments with the presumption that these payments from consumers are the companies' main revenue source resulting from this governmental grant of exclusivity. Now, these same companies are trying to invent another revenue source which will not fall under these guidelines, at least not at first. Great, my bill for "internet service" is still $29.99, but this "service" is now limited to watching high bandwidth video from just a few providers who opted to pay for access to my home. I would not mind so much if there was a neutral tier available with a government-regulated price and a "we sell you on the back-end" tier available in addition. It is that these telecoms are attempting to avoid regulation by changing their revenue model which is so bothersome.

Also, I would not mind if there was some method by which I could pick and choose QoS for my traffic and pay based on priority. Imagine some sort of open standard by which a "choose your priorities" app could communicate with my DSL provider's network. Perhaps Google could make watching YouTube more palatable by subsidizing prioritization of its traffic through a transparent back-end rate structure available to all content providers.

In a nutshell, I have no issue with tiered rate structures or traffic prioritization. My chief complaint is simply that the telecoms want to circumvent regulation and choose the winners and losers rather than achieving their purported goals in an open, transparent, and nondiscriminatory manner.

auxbuss• 16 years ago

I don't think of this as a difficult issue at all. What we have now is the Internet. Once you allow service discrimination, then it is a different service. It is no longer the Internet.

Thus, if a corporate wants to run a network with discriminatory services, then let them do it on their own network. Give us customers the option of another wire or both services on the same wire.

Then let the market decide.

Of course, no-one will want the discriminatory service, so what greedy corporate entities want to do is subvert the status quo. They want to steal the Internet.

charlesattlan2• 16 years ago

A good, if slightly out there, analogy would be Pepsi or some other company using its unfair financial position to use existing infrastructure to pipe its product instead of water. In this case the absurdity would be apparent, but when it comes to the internet there seems to be a lack of knowledge (especially in the aged political class) of how it should and does operate.

There is work being done on an alternative internet which would be free for all. Each home would be a node, with the capacity to be a cache, a destination or a bridge, achieved by leveraging wireless routers to create a mass mesh network. http://netsukuku.freaknet.org/?pag=home

charlesattlan2• 16 years ago

I see bits like any other resource that gets piped to your home. It would be disgusting if some could pay extra to siphon off water, electricity or gas at the expense of others. There would be riots if access to water was subject to how much you could pay.

The talk of "special services" is just a ruse: ultimately every service is the same, ie data. The only consideration should be the maximisation of bandwidth in a democratic way: equal access. The only people that would benefit from tiering would be the incumbents; those that generate the most traffic. This will further increase the centralisation of content and money more so that it is now. The only "innovation" needs to be laying cables and pushing the laws of physics.

A slight aside: I find it particularly galling to

warrenwilkinson• 16 years ago

I oppose network neutrality; regulation and oversight will halt or slow the creation of new ISPs and slow down technological adoption.

Walled gardens like AOL failed without regulation. People noticed when comcast forged TCP reset packets; they will notice a paywall.

Network neutrality : A tangled web

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