Democrats unveil legislation forcing the FCC to ban Internet fast lanes

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/06/17/this-new-bill-would-force-the-fcc-to-ban-internet-fast-lanes/

by spenvo • 12 years ago

161 104 12 years ago

washingtonpost.com

dkhenry2• 12 years ago

So it sounds like this is less of a law restricting tiering and more of direction to have the FCC make regulations to restrict tiering. Also not having seen the bill I can't say for sure but the language "between the customer and ISP" is a little shaky since someone like Comcast is both a customer ISP and backhaul provider so can they claim they are operating as a backhaul company when they change money to Netflix .

eli2• 12 years ago

To be fair, that is typically how it's done. Congress passes a law that directs the relevant agency to figure out the minutia of implementing it.

dkhenry2• 12 years ago

The issue I have with the model ( which is true across the board on issues ) is that with so many things by leaving it up to regulators you are putting governance in the hands of unelected career beurocrats with minimal oversight over what is actually being done. That is why the next phase in governance is always legal wrangling over regulations since the legislation has given such wiggle room to regulators to implement policy.

TheBiv• 12 years ago

>"It wouldn't give the commission new powers, but the bill — known as the Online Competition and Consumer Choice Act — would give the FCC crucial political cover to prohibit what consumer advocates say would harm startup companies and Internet services by requiring them to pay extra fees to ISPs."

The title seems a bit off. Wouldn't Congress only be the ones that could ban internet slow lanes? Not the FCC.

ethbro• 12 years ago

The debate is three part:

Part A) Whether the FCC should use the existing powers Congress granted it to push network neutrality

Part B) Whether Congress should force the FCC to use its existing powers to push for network neutrality

Part C) Whether Congress should grant the FCC new powers to push for network neutrality (the FCC reclassifying broadband as a utility probably falls in here as well, given its impact)

adestefan• 12 years ago

The Supreme Court has already weighed in on A.

deciplex• 12 years ago

I wonder which lobbying group will kill this at the eleventh hour this time? Will it be the trial lawyers again? Hollywood? Hollywood lawyers? Will it be the NSA, who claim they can not comply with the directive?

Whatever the outcome, rest assured that this Congress is at its most creative when finding a reason to kill any bill that has the support of the American people.

kiba• 12 years ago

Whatever the outcome, rest assured that this Congress is at its most creative when finding a reason to kill any bill that has the support of the American people.

Phone call works, but we are too distracted to care or that we don't care in the first place.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

Cynic here, more likely a move by Congressmen who do not feel they are being appreciated enough by lobbyist for the telecoms.

I did notice it was a last mile restriction, so they are still free to muddle up the lines getting from the provider to the ISP.

protomyth2• 12 years ago

"will unveil a piece of bicameral legislation Tuesday"

Is the text of the actual bill up yet? I cannot find it.

protomyth2• 12 years ago

I guess this is the text: http://www.leahy.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/The%20Online%20Com...

PaulHoule4• 12 years ago

The trouble with all this is that it is reactive rather than proactive.

There is a simple solution that would put an end to all this BS, and this is to separate the last mile from the middle mile the same way that the old AT&T was broken up to split local from long distance service. (This is how they do it in the UK and UK people are very happy with their internet service.)

In this case you get a choice of different middle miles and different television services from different providers. If work got around that "the Verizon network is congested" people would just switch, and I think you would find network connectivity problems get fixed in days rather than years.

vidarh• 12 years ago

UK people are very happy with their internet service.

I wouldn't go quite that far. There's still lots of grumbling over the speed of fibre rollout. And quality. Despite fibre to the cabinet, I'm limited to 40Mbps due to line quality, for example. This is largely down to OpenReach (the company managing the last mile). But within the constraints of line quality, there's decent room for competition.

SteveMoody73• 12 years ago

I would love to get anything near 40Mbps.

My broadband speed recently dropped from 2.2Mbps down to 1.6Mbps and BT basically said that it was still an acceptable speed for my area and only way I could get a faster speed was switch to fibre. They won't even look into it as the line is working so it can't be logged as a fault!

Apparently there will be fibre in my area in December, but given track record on rolling these services out where I live I won't bet money on it happening that soon.

netcan• 12 years ago

Seems like a much more 'market oriented' solution. The problem with getting specific is that it ties you in to a specific solution.

pyk• 12 years ago

The problem with getting specific is that it ties you in to a specific solution.

Agreed -- would Google have the same incentive to roll out Google Fiber if they could just use (slower) existing coax/cable lines as a middleman? It could limit innovation from that perspective, although it depends if a company like Google has alternative reasons for rolling out their own last-mile fiber (not just data collection en masse).

mkohlmyr• 12 years ago

UK people are very happy with their internet service

Heh. I'm sure its a lot better than what you're working with but personally coming from Sweden I feel like in the U.K. I'm getting worse service (offers, speeds, customer service and support, waiting for and dealing with BT Openreach engineers, hardware not working, getting the run-around between Openreach and utility providers, ..) for more money than we did back home.

That being said I'm sure dealing with Comcast, Time Warner and AT&T is a million times worse.

lukasm2• 12 years ago

I second that. I move from Poland to UK and the service is a lot worse in every way.

doxcf434• 12 years ago

Spent nearly 5hrs on the phone with Comcast last week to get them to un-screwup my account and provide the service they agreed to provide. It's working now, but now they're billing me for someone else's account as well. Comcast has fully accomplished being the worst company in america.

rayiner12• 12 years ago

There is a simple solution that would put an end to all this BS, and this is to separate the last mile from the middle mile the same way that the old AT&T was broken up to split local from long distance service

It would be extremely challenging, legally. If we're talking about cable rather than copper, the last mile was built by private companies with private money. BT, in contrast, started out as a government-owned corporation, and when it was privatized, the terms of the separation were written into the prospectus.

(This is how they do it in the UK and UK people are very happy with their internet service.)

Yet U.K. internet really isn't faster than U.S. internet in areas with comparable density. According to Ookla's Net Index, average broadband speeds in say Pennsylvania, a state with less than half the population density of the U.K. is about the same as in the U.K. (28.3 mbps versus 28.6 mbps). Akamai's data shows the U.S. ahead of the U.K. in average connection speeds.

Spooky232• 12 years ago

Sure they can. It was done in the 1990's in the US. Regional Bell Operating Companies were forced to allow other telcos to provision service on their infrastructure. At one point, I had home phone, long distance, isdn and mobile on one bill from Sprint.

Retric3• 12 years ago

There where multi-billion dollar subsidies to build the last mile. More importantly, there is no legal protection from a monopoly being broken up. And local ISP's clearly qualify as monopoly's.

Avenger42• 12 years ago

It would be extremely challenging, legally. If we're talking about cable rather than copper, the last mile was built by private companies with private money.

What about the government claiming the cable under eminent domain? You can pay the companies "market rate", and when you're done you can lease the lines to anyone, including the original company?

danudey2• 12 years ago

If we're talking about cable rather than copper, the last mile was built by private companies with private money.

A significant amount of this infrastructure was built with government subsidies and stimulus money by local monopolies with no competition.

Yet U.K. internet really isn't faster than U.S. internet in areas with comparable density.

It's not so much about denser urban areas so much as the typical case. I still know people in the US who can barely get 3 megabits on their connections no matter what speed they pay for, and they live in proper cities and not tiny communities.

I tried to get a proper example, but Verizon's website[1] is somewhat inscrutable, and tells me that my friend in Seattle can't get DSL service. Still, their DSL plans they list go 'up to' 15 megabits down and 1 megabit up; in Vancouver, they go up to 50/10, but my plan is 25/5 for $65/mo on its own (no contract). I would be surprised to see that in the US.

[1] http://www.verizon.com/home/highspeedinternet/

Vvector• 12 years ago

If we're talking about cable rather than copper, the last mile was built by private companies with private money.

...built on public easements.

autokad2• 12 years ago

someone correct me if I am wrong, but the "the Verizon network is congested" was not an indication of the slowness of the overall Verison users, but rather the pipe between Verison and Netflix was congested.

bnastic• 12 years ago

Just as a counterweight to inevitable moaning about UK broadband - I am very happy with what I'm getting from Virgin Media. Rock solid, no traffic shaping, 120Mbit line for not much money is not bad at all. I was happy before as well, with a DSL line. There is competition in the market and it seems to drive the tech and prices in the right direction (unless you live in a rural area...)

Some of my friends leave in Hyperoptic-enabled area of London where they get a stable Gigabit service.

NoMoreNicksLeft• 12 years ago

Those of us old enough to remember how awful the local/long-distance split was don't necessarily want to return to it.

The problem isn't that companies are allowed to offer different levels of service for different prices... it's that the existing ISPs have switched to a rent-seeking business model. Once a company does that, corporate culture makes it impossible for them to switch back to the more benign good-service-for-fair-price model.

The existing companies just need to die and be wiped from existence. There are other companies that aren't doing the rent-seeking thing, and we all love them Sonic, Google Fiber, etc.

Sure, let municipal fiber bloom in those places that can manage the trick, but don't mandate it top-down for the entire fucking country.

c0g• 12 years ago

If you live near enough to an exchange for ADSL over BTWholesale's elderly copper wires to be fast or in a big enough town for Virgin/BT to have laid cable/fibre, your net service is pretty good in the UK - from what I hear better than in the US.

If you live further away so Wholesale has no competition from Virgin they don't lay fibre or maintain the last mile and non-town service is (again, purely anecdotally here) worse. Non-town is not rural, it's maybe 3 miles away from an exchange.

London ain't the UK, basically.

api• 12 years ago

This is legally problematic, as others have posted already. It would amount to nationalization of private infrastructure.

I personally favor a different solution: liberalize frequency allocation and open up quite a bit more of the radio band for last-mile local/regional wireless.

The cost of building out infrastructure rises exponentially as you approach the last mile, for obvious reasons. Allowing the last mile to be wireless opens the field for quite a bit more competition. You'd have a whole raft of local and regional Internet service startups.

insertion• 12 years ago

Let’s spend a minute to think about political language. Do we want to “ban Internet fast lanes” or “ban Internet slow lanes?” I suspect that most would favor the latter.

pornel• 12 years ago

It is indeed a poor term. I suggest calling it "bandwidth racketeering" ("Nice streaming service you have here, it'd be shame if some traffic shaping happened to it...")

throwaway420• 12 years ago

I really think this is a bad idea. If you're a business and depend on a certain type of traffic (say Skype, or maybe email) why wouldn't you consider the option of trying to ensure faster and more reliable delivery of some type of data that is absolutely critical? Maybe as a business, you actually want something like Netflix throttled to some extent so that Skype chats that you depend on are 100% rock solid. Why restrict the possibility for new types of services to emerge from actual needs?

The real issue with this isn't the lack of network neutrality, but all kinds of local and other types of regulations that make it extremely difficult for all but a few connected big companies to take part in. This is why each region has maybe 1 or 2 really shitty ISPs rather than a decent array of choices.

bitJericho8• 12 years ago

You throttle content (QoS) at the local lan level. If you're paying for service, you should have equal service with all other customers on the same network outside of the lan.

mpnordland2• 12 years ago

You can do that with QoS on your own network. Even entry level routers can do that. The default verizon one, for example, can do it. You don't need to damage the internet for this.

Karunamon7• 12 years ago

What you're describing is QoS. Packet discrimination by kind. Bulk file transfer vs streaming video vs VoIP. Necessary because because the impact if your torrent downloads go a bit slow is your torrent downloads a bit slow. If video or VoIP get congested, the effect is the service becomes unusable.

Net Neutrality is about packet discrimination by source and destination.

It's not a problem if VoIP gets higher priority over web surfing and arbitrary file downloads. It's a huge problem if the ISP's VoIP service has higher priority than Skype, despite them being identical traffic.

danielweber6• 12 years ago

Net Neutrality is about packet discrimination by source and destination.

Net Neutrality seems to be a No True Scotsman where if you ask 10 people on HN what it really means, you get a dozen different answers.

There are some kinds of NN I support, and some I don't. I would sign up for the definition in your comment.

bitJericho8• 12 years ago

Except how does one tell the difference between Skype and Voip? You don't without deep level packet inspection. Simple QoS based on port could easily piss off a customer, for example, if they want Skype traffic on port 80. The simplest way to deal with this is to treat all traffic equally but serve the bandwidth that you promise your customers.

danudey2• 12 years ago

I really think this is a bad idea. If you're a business and depend on a certain type of traffic (say Skype, or maybe email) why wouldn't you consider the option of trying to ensure faster and more reliable delivery of some type of data that is absolutely critical?

Because these 'fast lanes' won't be faster lanes; they'll be the performance we have normally, and other traffic will be degraded.

The solution to the issue that you propose already exists, and it's called Quality of Service; by having your router aware of your upstream/downstream bandwidth and setting simple rules you can prioritize traffic already. You don't need your ISP to charge you extra to do this.

ISPs providing 'fast lanes' would be fine if American broadband issues weren't because of companies with multi-billion-dollar profits not bothering to upgrade their infrastructure to support their customers, or if they hadn't been paid billions by the government to provide universal broadband and then simply not bothered to do so.

History has shown that American ISPs operate as monopolies[1], crush any attempt at competition[2], promise improvements and never deliver[3], and generally take advantage of their customers whenever possible, all the while complaining that the problem keeping them from providing good service is the few regulations under which they operate.

Now they're claiming that their networks can't handle a large proportion of their users using their connections at once, and it's all Netflix's fault (and not theirs for oversubscribing).

So yeah, I think this is a good idea. Force ISPs to deliver the service that people are supposedly paying for, and not pay extra for it.

[1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/10/01... [2] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/01/who-wants-competi... [3] http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/06/att-makes-the-same-p...

JoshTriplett• 12 years ago

Because these 'fast lanes' won't be faster lanes; they'll be the performance we have normally, and other traffic will be degraded.

That's not necessarily true. Consider the possibility of building out new infrastructure and capacity, and specifically using it for that purpose. No degradation of the existing service.

lotharbot• 12 years ago

Just an example:

I play a 20-year-old video game [0] with the best players in the world. A 1v1 game requires less than 56k (that is, 0.055 megabits) of bandwidth. Yet there are a handful of players who can't play at certain times of day because their 30 megabit broadband connections end up having extreme latency/loss, because everyone on the ISP is streaming Netflix or playing WoW or downloading porn or whatever and the ISP degrades service equally for everyone.

I would love to be able to buy internet service with an option for a "fast lane" guarantee for certain types of traffic where latency and loss actually matter. (How that ties in to "net neutrality" is, as danielweber says in a nearby comment, a bit vague since NN seems to have dozens of different definitions.)

[0] remember Descent? Here's how to get up and running: http://descentchampions.org/new_player.php

mpnordland2• 12 years ago

What I don't get is why the FCC can't simply tell ISPs to provide the service their customers pay them to. Seriously. By paying for internet access, the customer pays the ISP to deliver any packets sent from or to their machine. This is nothing less that a protection racket in order to get paid twice. "Dat's a nice video streamin' site you got there, be a real pity if you couldn' get any customers".

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

What I don't get is why the FCC can't simply tell ISPs to provide the service their customers pay them to.

Contract law already does that. The transparency provisions of the previous and proposed Open Internet orders aim to solve the main particular problem of that in the ISP world, which is ambiguity on what exactly the service being paid for is.

(The anti-blocking and anti-discrimination provisions, which are different in the old and new orders, go further and aim to align what the service being paid for is with a certain conception of what that service should be.)

danielweber6• 12 years ago

People "paid for" a shared network, with all the benefits and drawbacks of such. You can have a private pipe if you want to guarantee no congestion at all, but expect to pay significantly more for it.

brokenparser• 12 years ago

What are these so-called "fast lanes"?

ChikkaChiChi• 12 years ago

That title looks like it was written by a Telco Lobbyist. Immediately it's made partisan (Democrats are regulating!), dire (unveils has a negative connotation), overbearing (forcing the FCC oh noes!), and incorrect (no such thing as an Internet "fast lane").

A better title could read: "Lawmakers Introduce bill to halt ISPs crippling Netflix-type Internet Services"

It's no wonder we can't get anything done for good in Washington.

crazy1van• 12 years ago

"Leahy and Matsui's proposed ban on fast lanes would apply only to the connections between consumers and their ISPs"

I don't see how this will address the issue in a practical sense. When I'm having trouble streaming netflix on Verizon, my speed tests still return a solid 25mbps. The connection between Verizon and Netflix is the issue, not the connection between my house and Verizon.

autokad2• 12 years ago

this is why i find it strange people are basically saying netflix is sticking up for network neutrality, when in essence netflix is asking for special treatment because they are big.

cornholio• 12 years ago

Instead of limiting my ability to enter contracts and chose the Internet/streaming service I want, I would much rather they devise a methodology for measuring and enforcing connection performance.

For example, "broadband internet" means at least 50Mbit. "50 Mbit" means that 90% percent of the time, there is a sustained throughput of at least 5MB/s for a TCP connection to a server in any data-center across the continental US (assuming the data-center link itself is not congested). "Unmetered" means that per month, the user can transfer a volume of data of at least 10% of the volume corresponding to a saturation of the connection 24/7 (1300 GB for a 50 Mbit connection as defined above).

Under such a rule, Comcast's connections could only be sold as "Dial-up+". And if broadband is not available in an area it's fair game for the municipal or state authorities to provision it with public funds as a basic need for a modern citizen; since the incumbent private provider obviously can't get a return on it's investment (what OTHER reason for not developing your infrastructure could there be, right ?)

ldarby2• 12 years ago

I had to create this account just to correct this. "Broadband" means the data is modulated on to a wide spectrum signal, on the same copper as the POTS network. Anything from good old 512kbit/s upwards can be "broadband". I say "can be", because if it's not using a wide spectrum signal, e.g. fibre-optics, then that's not broadband.

tehwebguy• 12 years ago

It wasn't a statement of fact, it was a wish list that started with "For example"

w1ntermute• 12 years ago

"Broadband" is a well-defined technical term originating from physics. But "broadband internet" (what the OP was referring to) is a vaguely defined marketing term that is often used by ISPs to deceive consumers as to the speed of their connections. The OP is suggesting that that term be repurposed as a clearly (legally) defined one that improves internet access in America without introducing onerous regulations.

exabrial• 12 years ago

God Dangit. Don't make this a Red vs Blue Debate.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

Its been a red vs. blue debate for a long time. Why is it surprising that significant issues of government policy in which the opposing sides represent conflicts between the deeply-held interests of different groups also turn out to be issues of division between political parties. I mean, isn't that exactly what you'd expect?

beat• 12 years ago

I love how the very first paragraph implies that the problem is Netflix (as the example company) getting special, preferential treatment, when in fact, Netflix has been obviously punished for not paying ransom money, and has led the charge on the net neutrality movement that led to this bill.

But this is the Washington Post, the Pravda of the Beltway. What do you expect? Honesty?

jharig23• 12 years ago

Anyone have a link to the legislation?

Democrats unveil legislation forcing the FCC to ban Internet fast lanes

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