FCC Commissioner Urges, Don't Regulate the Internet 343
Brett Glass writes "In an op-ed in today's Washington Post, FCC Commissioner Robert McDowell makes a case against government regulation of the Internet, opining that 'engineers, not politicians or bureaucrats, should solve engineering problems.' With state governments pressuring ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet, and a proposal now in play for a censored public Internet, McDowell may have a very good point." McDowell is one of the two FCC commissioners who did not vote with the majority to punish Comcast for their BitTorrent throttling.
Who's doing what? (Score:5, Informative)
With state governments pressuring ISPs to pull the plug on Usenet
Wrong. Lets get this clear - The recent push to shut down usenet access is being led almost solely by Andrew Cuomo - the Attorney General from NY - some guy who you probably never voted for. In fact, you've probably never even seen his name on a ballot.
Isn't it cool how some douchebag elected in a different state gets to dictate national policy?
Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy.
Re:Net Neutrality: anti-regulation regulation.. (Score:5, Informative)
Just saying someone is "willfully corrupt" does not make it true. The telcoms have a legitimate right to do whatever they want with their backbones. They payed and continue to pay for them.
no they didnt. They were given heavy taxpayer grants which heavily subsidized their lines, and they also failed to deliver the capacity and market coverage they promised (e.g. rural areas are still dark).
Insisiting the telcos "paid" for those lines is like insisting the transcontinental railroad was privately funded, when in fact it would not exist if the government didnt give away wide tracts of land on either side of the tracks across the entire country.
Re:It's a right. The chairman is a regulator. (Score:1, Informative)
Hey twitter... this is what the submitter believes [brettglass.com]. And he's a shill for McDowell. [slashdot.org]
Sic 'em.
Re:Metering by the bit (Score:3, Informative)
What if most people don't share your preferences as consumers?
In a free market, that would mean they get a flat rate, or some more complex plan.
Sure, most Slashdotters are fine with pay-per-bit, if it means no application discrimination.
Really? Given that most Slashdotters are heavy bandwidth users, I'd imagine most of us would rather our bandwidth bills be subsidized by people whose heaviest usage is YouTube -- or better, people who only bought broadband so their Yahoo Mail will come up faster.
But I prefer a low-cost ISP that doesn't impose a unit cost on bandwidth use, even if it means some of my Bittorrent TCP streams are reset.
Why?
What right does the FCC have to dictate that no company can provide it to me?
Well, all things equal, you are saying that you don't particularly care about your TCP streams being reset. Some of us do.
Net neutrality with sufficient bandwidth is pretty much the only way to make all users happy -- if we really need our torrents to not interrupt our Skype calls, we can apply our own QoS on Linksys routers and the like.
The pricing is a separate issue entirely.
If you can't throttle, you've got to price per bit--otherwise, everybody pays more because the ISPs have to upgrade to satiate extreme users.
I don't think anyone is saying you can't throttle.
What we are saying is, don't throttle based on such inanities as number of open TCP sockets or port number, and certainly not on things like deep packet inspection. Throttle on raw bandwidth alone.
Which means, either price per bit, or daily/weekly/monthly caps, or some combination thereof -- as long as it's explicitly and fairly agreed upon in the first place.
And believe me, there are people out there (like myself) who'd gladly pull in terabytes were it not for monthly usage caps.
So install software on your router to cap your monthly usage, if it starts to hurt your wallet.
Or are you saying you're like those Slashdotters I'm talking about above, where you'd rather Grandma pay for your bandwidth bill?
ISPs should duke it out and battle for customers by experimenting with varying methods of managing congestion.
Wonderful -- "managing congestion".
You do realize it's not just about dropping some torrent connections, right? Here, borrow my tinfoil hat for a moment...
Suppose Comcast notices that a huge amount of bandwidth is being used by YouTube, and that people are watching less cable TV. So, they drop the occasional YouTube connection, artificially alter a few others, maybe even intercept the stream and recompress it down, making it look artificially worse, in an effort to drive people back to cable TV -- which costs the users more money, and is cheaper for Comcast.
That is one of many scenarios that net neutrality prevents.
banning protocol discrimination because it violates some sacred principle means fewer choices in the end.
I would call the loss of YouTube "fewer choices" indeed. And that matters more to me -- I'd much rather be able to choose between two providers who can show me YouTube, or Vuze, or some newer, more disruptive technology, than fifty who will only show me Fox News through their own, proprietary IPTV system.
That's not what he said at all (Score:2, Informative)
See http://www.itif.org/index.php?id=162 [itif.org] and http://www.formortals.com/Home/tabid/36/EntryID/88/Default.aspx [formortals.com]
The problem with the FCC majority decision is that they're trying to enforce something that they said was never intended to be enforceable and they never went through any formal rule making process.
Re:Hmmm (Score:3, Informative)
I thought it was clear from my comment that I was not talking about the Constitution. I was talking about the parent comment's apparent fixed idea of what a right is.
Re:Hmmm (Score:1, Informative)
You're not thinking of all the possible methods of competition; you're assuming that to provide the service the company must own the local infrastructure/cabling, which is not the case. Here in the UK, not only are service providers able to create there own networks and lay physical infrastructure direct to the clients, they very often use existing infrastructure purchased from the owning company. The government enforces competition by ensuring that the owning company (BT) must provide access to its infrastructure, and limits the rates it can charge so that it cannot throttle competition by charging more than a set rate for the access.
Regulation by the government IS one way to increase competition and standards, if they intervene in the right way. Because of this regulation I can chose from dozens of different ISPs offering competitive rates.
Re:Hmmm (Score:2, Informative)