6438589
story
Comments: 239 +- Technology: Cisco, Motorola, and Other Companies Take Aim At Net Neutrality Rules on Thursday October 15, @07:08PM
Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday October 15, @07:08PM
from the perhaps-things-are-more-complicated-than-they-appear dept.
from the perhaps-things-are-more-complicated-than-they-appear dept.
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicinternet.gif); width:70px; height:73px;
internet
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicbusiness.gif); width:64px; height:54px;
business
background: url(//a.fsdn.com/sd/topics/topicus.gif); width:80px; height:61px;
usa
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."
Related Stories
Executive ability is prominent in your make-up.
All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2010 Geeknet, Inc.
According to Slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
Anything the government does is evil, restricts freedoms and is inefficient by definition.
So please, stop this evil FCC man in his tracks.
In other news, Google moves to Russia.
Re:According to Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything the government does is evil, restricts freedoms and is inefficient by definition.
Well I mean, it DOES restrict the freedom of telecos to make you pay more for sites that haven't paid their protection fees. I'm sure the RIAA would argue that this will make blocking illegal child-porn terrorist activities much more inefficient. And obviously the senators who have had sizeable campaign contributions from various concerned sources (the same two as above) would characterize net neutrality as evil. Some of them could post on slashdot. And even slashdotters who don't own telecos, work for the RIAA, or recieve bribes from them, there are probably a few who are so convinced their political fortune cookie knowledge applies absolutely to every situation that they could rationalize those guys' viewpoints.
Parent
Re: (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?
Re:According to Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
Anything the government does is evil, restricts freedoms and is inefficient by definition.
So please, stop this evil FCC man in his tracks.
Moderated funny, I don't think that was your intent.
And it's bullsh-7. Take your bullsh17 anti-gubbmint sentiment and cram it up your backside. Spreading this kind of toxic poison can only serve to get people hurt, and it's clearly starting to undermine the United State's ability to maintain it's position of power.
If "da gubbmint" sucked at everything, why is it important to have one? If "da gubbmint" wasn't necessary, then Rwanda (which effectively has no government) would be a fscking paradise. Yet, despite having no evil gubbmint holding down the people, there's hardly a better example of hell on Earth. Rapes and crime are so rampant, basic infrastructure like roads, water, and power are almost nonexistent. Starvation is the order of the day for those who haven't already been killed by the nearest tyrant.
Contrast that with YOUR privileged life: The glorious cell phone at your hip that work so well do so because of gubbmint regulations that standardize their broadcast signals, and make those frequencies available. FCC police keep it that way, too. Aircraft don't typically fall out of the sky because of stiff gubbmint regulations that require frequent mechanic reviews so well that an otherwise very dangerous activity has become one of the safest means of transportation... period.
And I can go on and on.
1) Roads that cost $1,000,000 per mile that are so extensive that you generally expect to go anywhere you like, anytime you want.
2) Public education available for nearly your entire childhood that made it possible for you to read this post,
3) Military that protects your interests very effectively.
4) Police that keep "bad guys" from robbing you, raping you, or killing you.
5) Fresh, pure, clean water so cheap that it's often not even measured. You walk to the sink. You jigger a handle and voila! A virtually endless supply of clean, cheap water so pure that you can pour it straight into your car.
6) Cars that are safe to drive! You'd think it was in the interests of the car companies to make safe cars, but paradoxically, they've bitterly opposed every single measure introduced by the "gubbmint" to improve either safety or fuel economy. You can get into a car crash at highway speeds and total the car, and even in these circumstances it's most likely that you'll live and suffer only minor to moderate injuries. You get 250 or more miles on a tank and it doesn't break the bank.
7) Food that's safe to eat. Go to China and you don't really quite know what's in your baby food. It might be good, protein-rich baby food, or it might be Melamine. How do you know? Well, it's the US "gubbmint" that identified the problem and stopped the flow of melamine-infested food before too many people got hurt. I buy my chicken at the local grocery store without having to worry about much more than the price because of strict "gubbmint" regulations on food handling. And China is a pretty good country - it's far worse elsewhere.
How much longer should I go on? Talking like gubbmint is somehow universally bad is just idiot talk. Sure, it's got it's problems, but the idea that it's somehow the definition of evil is... wrong!
Get lost, and come back when you have something intelligent to say!
Parent
Re:According to Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
Your points are valid, and we're not all dupes of the corporations and their bribed congress critters.
Perhaps it's time to press for a Bill of Responsibilities to accompany the Bill of Rights. Things like:
When the pursuit of profit conflicts with the good of the country, it will be considered treason.
I have other thoughts along this line, but I think this is enough to illustrate what I mean and what we the people need.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Rwanda (which effectively has no government) would be a fscking paradise. Yet, despite having no evil gubbmint holding down the people, there's hardly a better example of hell on Earth.
Rwanda has a relatively stable and democratically elected government.
You're probably thinking Somalia.
Re:According to Slashdot (Score:4, Informative)
I take it you're ignoring that little dust-up between the Hutus and Tutsis that got about a million people killed?
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
so that is then (Score:3, Insightful)
you are one of those morons who mods people down just because they express VALID points in their own style.
morons like you are causing a lot of good comments getting modded down because you spot a few 'foul' or 'hard' words among a whole bunch of text and then downmod it as 'troll'.
well, i have two words for that kind of attitide :
fuck that.
enjoy.
"new regulations could hinder THE DEVELOPMENT..." (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"new regulations could hinder THE DEVELOPMENT.. (Score:5, Insightful)
It's the whole ISP-level QOS "google please pay us extra for people browsing YouTube for it not to suck" deal that's tricky and takes fancy hardware.
Parent
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.
Parent
Re:"new regulations could hinder THE DEVELOPMENT.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
a price-per-byte structure may not be a bad thing. (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree charging by the amount of bandwidth used may, just may, be better but for years broadband providers sold unlimited service. The contract I signed with Time Warner for my cable, now it's Comcast, did not have any sort of limits. Now it did say the speed would be up to, I think though I don't recall for sure, 1.5MB. There wasn't anything about traffic shaping, blocking, or redirecting though. If ISPs oversold capacity it's not the fault of the users, it's the ISPs own fault. When I go to an all-you-can-eat buffet I refuse to accept the restaurant from preventing me or anyone else from eating all we can.
A price-per-byte structure, if properly implemented, could result in reduced monthly payments for grandma and a higher portion for the guy with the strange habit of downloading "Linux ISOs" all the time.
The problem with this is that incumbent broadband providers try to prevent any competition that will offer more bandwidth. How many tymes has news articles been summarized and linked to on slashdot because some incumbent provider tried to stop competition whether cable, fiber, wireless, or any other broadband? An example was in northeastern Utah a few years back. A group of communities got together to build their own Broadband Utopia [ieee.org]. Of course the incumbents did all they could to stop it and they were finally successful in having the state government pass a law barring local governments from selling access, instead they have to sell to other service providers. The 14 cities that make up the Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency built an infrastructure that will provide "100 megabits per second" to start with. That infrastructure can be used to deliver cable TV, net access, phone services, or whatever a person could think of. Because of it Comcast [dslreports.com] was "forced" to bundle "broadband, digital cable, and VoIP service for $90 a month in all of Utopia's footprint" and I doubt they are losing money. I say "forced" because they only had to do it if they wanted to continue to provide services in the area otherwise people would not have been willing to pay the higher costs.
perhaps content directly delivered by the ISP would fall under this category. But I don't see why that is -inherently- wrong.
You don't see what's wrong? Try this, say only Company X provides broadband in your area, so you have no other choice for broadband, and you want to search the web. So you head over to Google and if you can connect it is slow because Google didn't pay your ISP. Or your ISP supports one political party and blocks traffic from all other parties? Do you still not see a problem?
Falcon
Parent
Re:a price-per-byte structure may not be a bad thi (Score:4, Insightful)
and they were finally successful in having the state government pass a law barring local governments from selling access, instead they have to sell to other service providers.
It is no wonder the USians consider the government inefficient. It is so corrupt that it convicts its uncorrupted parts for the crime of performing a public service.
Parent
not fixing the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
When there's little choice in what providers are available in your area, there's very little reason for ISPs to provide better service. Internet users need to be able to move to viable alternatives when Comcast and friends implement anti-net neutrality measures. If you don't like your p2p being throttled, there should be somewhere else to take your money. Get rid of those local monopolies; they are more trouble than they are worth. There are a lot of changes to the current system that would improve the situation that involve little more than discouraging monopolies and stronger enforcement of current laws.
Re:not fixing the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
Re:not fixing the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The discussion is polar because either a market is dominated by a monopoly, or it isn't. Any monopoly that exists next to another business in the same market isn't a monopoly. Furthermore, once you get away from the concept of smart nodes and dumb pipes, you are right where ESPN360 plays: content tied to carriers.
It's a bipolar syndrome because we have both ends of the polar discussion being a reality: monopolies in the carrier area, and smart nodes on dump pipes. One of the two will have to give. It doesn't take a genius to figure out who is working for what.
Parent
I had a nice ISP... (Score:5, Insightful)
I had a nice ISP...
They were bought by EarthLink.
So I changed ISPs to another nice ISP.
They were bought by a different company.
That company was then bought by EarthLink.
I changed to a third ISP.
A while later, they were bought by EarthLink.
In any unregulated market, natural monopolies will arise as bigger players buy out the smaller players, and they will go after smaller and smaller players as their marginal ability to increase their business is eroded by their own success in controlling the market.
Unless you are suggesting regulating ownership of ISPs in a given area in the same way that newspaper and media ownership was regulated by market so that there was not a single monopoly news source, I don't see this changing in such a way that your "everyone should have a choice of providers" utopia will ever come about.
-- Terry
Parent
Re:not fixing the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
That is the crux of the problem... The last mile is the major reason why infrastructure such as this tends toward a natural monopoly. However, there are a few ways to address the problem. Utilize wifi instead of underground infrastructure, allow cities/localities to build the last mile themselves and lease the infrastructure at market rates to competitors.
Parent
Re:not fixing the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
No. Wireless is slow and expensive. The best way is to require competition by forcing the companies to lease their underground lines at cost. This is the only way you will get real competition. Even more so, municipalities should own the last mile, and you could subscribe to many ISPs that would offer service on that. On top of that, we should have net neutrality that would simply requires ISPs to pass all data from third parties through unmolested.
Parent
Well then if the Republicans... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Well then if the Republicans... (Score:4, Insightful)
Not everything that corporations are against is good for the public.
Be realistic; just because something is not absolute does not mean it isn't generally true. What was said was by no means at all a statement of ignorance or hasty generalization.
Parent
So be it (Score:5, Insightful)
Then let the "development" of the Internet it be "hindered". If IPTV takes another decade because new business models have be created to adapt to a neutral network, then so be it. I am happy to wait. If the capacity available to me grows more slowly because there are fewer deal making opportunities for ISPs and content producers then so be it. I've got enough bandwidth. Corrupting the relatively simple model of the existing network by letting Disney et al. carve it up into lucrative morsels to be passes among the elite is not appealing. Whichever content providers don't like it can just keep their stuff on cable until we drop our cable service as we've dropped our landlines. Their stuff just isn't that important to me.
The capitalist claims the market is agile. Adaptation is supposed to be swift. I believe this. I therefore believe we should permit the market to prove this by preventing the aforementioned companies from molding the Internet into models they are already comfortable with. Let them adapt to a neutral network. The Internet isn't broken and doesn't need to be fixed by Time Warner. The Internet will not fail if Ted Turner doesn't get a cut of my ISP's revenue.
There you go; an argument for Net Neutrality from the conservative perspective.
The inventor of the world wide web disagrees (Score:5, Informative)
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1036_3-6075472.html [cnet.com]
But he isn't a trusted expert on anything, right?
Re:The inventor of the world wide web disagrees (Score:5, Informative)
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1036_3-6075472.html [cnet.com]
But he isn't a trusted expert on anything, right?
Max Baucus is going to hold a private hearing to hear all the options available. The list of 3 trusted industry professionals is limited to representatives from: Comcast, SBC, and AT&T. They *are*, as we know, the most successful in the industry, of course only they should be trusted!
Sorry... I'm still P.O'd that 60-70% of Americans consistently poll to want Single Payer, yet it will not even be discussed or considered, thanks to political corruption.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
the "free market" has failed dismally in the health care and health insurance field.
Translation: "Develop" means ..... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being able to extract more cash from the user base without adding anything of value by using artificial scarcity.
They've already stolen $300B in the fiber optic debacle.
Now they need to do bandwidth shaping on an antiquated US Internet trunk so they can charge for fast tracking the fat cats and slow tracking the peasants, but at higher prices, of course, because all that shaping requires new, EXPENSIVE equipment which will require higher access fees to get an ROI on that expensive equipment.
It could indeed hinder development of the Internet (Score:4, Insightful)
Net Neutrality rules could hinder development of the Internet in directions that are harmful to the public. Unlike the parties mentioned above, I feel that hindering harmful business practices is actually a Good Thing.
broadband competition (Score:5, Insightful)
"When the government picks winners and losers in the marketplace, the incentive to invest disappears,"
By granting monopolies government has already picked winner and losers. There is no competition in broadband and the lucky few who have a choice in broadband providers has the choice between the cable company and the phone company. A duopoly isn't competition.
I wish the letter with the name of those 18 Republican senators had been linked to if nothing else, I bet these politicians don't believe in competition or free markets either.
Falcon
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.
That explains a lot (Score:3, Informative)
A group of 18 Republican US senators have also sent a letter to Genachowski raising concerns about net neutrality regulations.
That pretty much guarantees it's good for the public.
Is "net neutrality" really neutral? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
You have every reason to doubt the motives of vested interests and their influence on government. But the problem is this:
How else can you get Net Neutrality except by regulation?
Net Neutrality is in essence a set of basic rules that say, 'Play fair; however you treat them, treat everyone the same.' The role of government is to enforce these rules
Re:What's the catch? (Score:5, Insightful)
Parent
Re:What's the catch? (Score:5, Informative)
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. In the hypothetical non-neutral oligopolistic internet access market, demand for bandwidth is lower, because bandwidth is more expensive, and less useful(since uses contrary to the ISP's interests are throttled or blocked). However, in the first instance, ISP margins are razor thin, and ISPs demand heavily commodified network gear, distinguished largely by price and simple packet passing capacity. Network equipment vendors will have higher demand; but for lower margin products. In the second instance, ISP margins are substantially higher, and sophistication of network gear(along with continuous upgrades for playing cat-and-mouse with blocked applications) becomes a major competitive edge, which keeps bottom-feeding commodity gear away.
The first scenario means greater bulk of network hardware sales; but mostly bottom-feeding commodity packet passers to ISPs who are pinching their pennies until they bleed. The second scenario means selling less bulk switching capacity; but a lot more "integrated strategic traffic management solutions" and whatnot, to ISPs with real money.
Parent
Re:What's the catch? (Score:4, Informative)
Econ nitpick: SUPPLY of bandwidth is restricted because, as you say, margins are higher and expanding infrastructure costs money.
Quantity of bandwidth demanded would be higher at a lower price point, but demand for bandwidth is the same in both cases.
Because supply of bandwidth is constricted, costlier gear is needed for packet shaping, QoS and the like. This is another misallocation of resources - wasting silicon on expensive products to manage scarce bandwidth rather than simply adding more bandwidth.
I agree with the other 99% of your analysis.
Parent
Re: (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:What's the catch? (Score:5, Insightful)
No... If the Internet gets bigger, the legacy US hardware suppliers are more likely to lose.
Their real value-added stuff is corporate not carrier. Smart boxes that do more with less bandwidth... People need to get QOS and traffic conditioning just to make their VOIP work over internet connections without issues. If bandwidth is scarce, it becomes a valuable resource. Managing it becomes a market.
But the Chinese companies ( Huawei, ZTE etc ) are doing more and more in the high bandwidth area and it's cheap equipment, so you can afford to spend more on fiber rollouts. Some of that stuff is beginning to displace US manufacturers now.
And then when you have masses of un-restricted bandwidth and you don't need special routers anymore... Voip just works because you have lots of capacity and nearly no jitter. You don't need complex setups anymore - just cheap equipment.
So the legacy manufacturers lose out in both markets...
They could compete I'm sure, but that takes innovation and progress. It's much easier to deal with the status quo. Especially when you dumped all your best developers to concentrate on selling existing product a year ago... Damn that pesky R&D.
GrpA
Parent
Re:What's the catch? (Score:5, Informative)
I don't understand the position of the equipment makers in this objection
Selling traffic shaping solutions, presumably.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
You the customer and user shapes your traffic not your outside ISP. At least I hope your ISP doesn't. Without competition and net neutrality type regulations your ISP can do whatever it wants. Don't like it? Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
Falcon
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Simplify?
The meter-makers want a customer. Otherwise, the old stuff still works fine.
Re:What's the catch? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sure would be bad for business if potential customers (er, I mean, "the future health of the internet") didn't need sophisticated networking gear dedicated to price discrimination...
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
I just finished reading a paper by an ex-vp at Motorola about why QoS is never going to work from a technical perspective. From a legal/political one....hmmm, hey John, I'll have those notes for you sometime tomorrow.
Re: (Score:2)
If ISP's aren't allowed to mess with the traffic, then they won't need any new equipment that enables them to filter / shape / drop / eavesdrop / modify the data packets involved.
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
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (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 governm
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
If you don't buy products from companies with DRM chances are you won't have a game console (Ok, you m