Cisco, Motorola, and Other Companies Take Aim At Net Neutrality Rules 239
angry tapir writes "FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski announced last month that he would seek to develop formal rules prohibiting Internet service providers from selectively blocking or slowing Web content and applications. However, 44 companies — including Cisco Systems, Alcatel-Lucent, Corning, Ericsson, Motorola and Nokia — have sent a letter to the FCC saying new regulations could hinder the development of the Internet. A group of 18 Republican US senators have also sent a letter to Genachowski raising concerns about net neutrality regulations."
Unsurprising (Score:1, Interesting)
Given how the Telcos are the largest customers of those companies, it's not particularly surprising which side they support.
Re:"new regulations could hinder THE DEVELOPMENT.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Right now they throttle people who actually use their connection to its fullest because there's little monetary incentive for the ISPs not to do this. They are for profit corporations, if it is profitable to throttle people, that is exactly what they will do. The system needs to be set up in such a way as to make it profitable for them not to throttle or otherwise restrict people's connections not just a simple legislative band-aid but actively attack the root causes of the throttling and general anti-net neutral policies.
Re:"new regulations could hinder THE DEVELOPMENT.. (Score:2, Interesting)
The thing is, they can't price gouge on text with net neutrality legislation in place.
Furthermore, they want to make sure that they encourage the Republican party to draw the line in the sand and say that anything the FCC wants to do to encourage competition will cause the Internet to meltdown, so that the FCC has a partisan minefield to wade through if they want to get anything done.
Re:So be it (Score:1, Interesting)
I think that it's especially poignant, to say that corporations only want capitalism when they can act like robber barons, but otherwise want socialism to protect them from competition they can't freely stifle and mistakes they won't correct or prevent.
That said, if net neutrality isn't entered into law, we should withdraw every subsidy, every land grant, and every sweetheart deal that we give the telcos. If they want our money and our land but don't want to play by our rules, they can fend for their fucking selves. A little known fact outside of this site is that American tax dollars and land grants valued in the hundreds of billions built this infrastructure just as much as the magic of the marketplace did.
We practically own every wire and every fiber ever laid in this land, thanks to that, and it's been that way since the telegraph days. I doubt this jives with any 'conservative' standpoint, but on those grounds alone I wouldn't see anything morally wrong with the citizens confiscating this infrastructure for themselves, considering it may as well be their property to begin with.
Re:Hinder development? Riiiiight.... (Score:3, Interesting)
At best, fetishization of homeownership raised the default rate among the poorest buyers, who should have been renting, by a modest amount. Are you seriously telling me that the mighty US financial industry lost hundreds of billions because of a modest, and highly predictable, increase in default rates of relatively small loans, often government backed, to known credit risks? Was that all it took?
And that same thing somehow drove banks to be so eager for mortgages that they pushed brokers to overlook obvious falsifications in loan applications, just so they'd have more mortgages to securitize? Or fueled a speculative real estate boom, massive building of high priced suburban housing developments, and a historic housing price/per capita wage ratio? All that, just a squalid bunch of poor people with mortgages made of government cheese?
The only reason that a modest bump in defaults(that, if it were actually a product of state action) should have been largely focused on known-bad credit risks, with smallish mortgages partially state backed, could have upset the whole system was that it was already a grotesque speculative casino. Any properly constructed financial system could have shrugged that off.
Motorola's take... (Score:5, Interesting)
According to Motorola CEO Greg Brown, Net Neutrality [fiercewireless.com] is, in principle, a good thing.
So I was surprised to see them in the list of supporters of this letter. It makes no sense for Motorola to allow the carriers to arbitrarily exclude devices from their networks. For those who don't know, Motorola has a love-hate relationship with the carriers. We can't just sell phones to a given carrier's customers - we must first sell it to the carrier, who then decides key things:
As an employee of Motorola, it constantly frustrates me that the carriers have the ability to make or break a phone, regardless of it's technical merits or feature set. If the carrier doesn't want a compelling feature to work on their network, it doesn't. It makes no difference if we make the best camera phone in the business if the carrier decides the user has to pay [uscellular.com] for each picture taken with the phone. It makes no difference if we have the best phone games on the market if the carrier decides those games won't ship on phones bought by their customers. You get the point - the carriers get in the way of Motorola's business model.
I hate posting anonymously, but I'm paranoid about the repercussions this might cause at work.
Re:What's the catch? (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't understand the position of the equipment makers in this objection
They helped set up the Great Firewall [wikipedia.org] by selling equipment to China now they want to sell the equipment to US ISPs as well. It's nothing more than the Corporate Aristocracy Thomas Jefferson warned of.
Falcon
Re:not fixing the real problem (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What's the catch? (Score:3, Interesting)
In the (almost entirely hypothetical, at least at the retail level) neutral and highly competitive internet access market, demand for bandwidth is very high, because bandwidth is cheap and useful for almost anything. ... ISP margins are razor thin, and ISPs demand heavily commodified network gear, distinguished largely by price and simple packet passing capacity.
Welcome to a perfectly competitive world.
Any time a company is making billions in profits on something commodifiable, you have a market inefficiency.
And that reality is one of the disconnects that exists in the mind of "free market" conservatives.
Re:According to Slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
Odd. HR3458 seems pretty straightforward to me. By my reading, it grants the FCC the right to rulemaking that governs ISPs regarding network neutrality and specifies a series of basic principals on which those regulations should be based. I'm not seeing anything else in the full text of the bill. What am I missing?