FCC Commissioner Blasts Verizon On Net Neutrality 157
destinyland writes "FCC chairman Julius Genachowski says that net neutrality rules 'will happen,' promising the FCC 'will make sure that we get the rules right... to make sure that what we do maximizes innovation and investment across the ecosystem.' But the same week, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps announced that the public should not stand for deals 'that exchange Internet freedom for bloated profits,' mocking the tiered-data plans of the 'Verizon-Google gaggle' and accusing them of wanting 'gated communities for the affluent.' Speaking at a New Mexico hearing, the commissioner warned the audience against proposals that would 'vastly diminish' the Internet's importance, blasting 'special interests and gatekeepers and toll-booth collectors who will short-circuit what this great new technology can do for our country.' (The text of his speech is available as a PDF file at FCC.gov.) He concludes by acknowledging that 'you can't blame companies for seeking to protect their own interests. But you can blame policy-makers if we let them get away with it!'"
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
no solution (Score:3, Interesting)
"How dare those popular internet companies be popular? They're making our customers use more data! Charge them money!"
Unfair price models are the problem driving that. X per month is simple and a good idea for most customers, X per gigabyte is simple and a good idea for most ISPs. Neither is exactly fair in every circumstance, and choosing between them is essentially the same as choosing who to give the benefit of the complex situation. Their only advantage is that they can be explained in under 5 words.
I'm not sure it's possible to come up with an alternative pricing system that doesn't end up as an even more unfair black box model where you only find out how much you've spent when the bill comes.
Re:Would those rules be complex? (Score:3, Interesting)
This would imply that net neutrality can be easily defined in simple terms; what, according to you, are those terms exactly?
Re:Would those rules be complex? (Score:5, Interesting)
Your question makes no sense. The answer is obvious: You would handle all packets identically regardless of content.
If the "pipes" start to get full, install new faster pipes to relieve congestion. If that's not practical impose ~250GB limits + 5 cents/extra GB so people will limit themselves (in the same way they limit how much electricity or water they use).
Re:Oh boy (Score:1, Interesting)
IMHO rather discuss net neutrality, the FCC should just impose the same Common carrier rules the phone company must follow, where they are required to handle all calls equally regardless of content.
The FCC doesn't need to "impose" anything. They just need to make sure that the DMCA "safe harbor" provision only applies to common carriers, with the "common" part meaning "non-discriminatory".
Re:no solution (Score:3, Interesting)
ISPs like "x-per-month" because they can claim to sell you 100gb knowing you will only use 10gb. On a per-gig charge you would only pay for what you use.
Bandwidth should be charged more like electricity: you pay for what you use when you use it. It's not like the unused time can be saved for the busy period.
Of course, all of this is predicated on actual competition to keep the 'per-gig' charge from being obscene...
Ultimately the 'last-mile' should be socialised (like roads) and then you have choice of providers to connect to. As with roads there is a natural monopoly (or at best oligopoly) in laying wires to homes and businesses. We will never have true competition as long as the retailers own the last mile.
The true cost of moving bits on the 'net has dropped dramatically over the last decade. It should cost pennies per gig, and in a pay-per-gig model that reflected the true cost of this service it wouldn't matter much if you used 100gig or 200gig. Furthermore, there is no reason why you could not track your usage in real-time for people who wanted to know where they were at. Finally you could limit your maximum possible cost by limiting your speed.
I suspect... (Score:5, Interesting)
For one, American political discourse tends to shy away from anything that can even be remotely described as "class warfare". His comment doesn't really qualify; but once boiled into a contextless soundbite and replayed a few bazillion times on the news channels of the same cable companies on whose toes he is stepping, it sure will sound like it.
Second, it seems most likely that the rent-seeking model of tiered internet providers will be much closer to that of cable TV or old-school telco providers: that is, massive rent seeking; but much broader availability than "gated community" would imply. Everyone pays too much for cable, and everyone used to pay too much for long distance; but the companies realized that gouging everyone a bit was much more profitable than gouging half of the top quintile a lot. It may well end up being the case that only the affluent(and specifically the techy affluent) will be able to afford access to the real internet, as opposed to the "facebook and youtube over IP channel"; but that is too subtle a point to play in soundbites.
Third, and perhaps most serious, Telcos and Cable companies are actually superbly positioned to make a (dishonest; but superficially convincing) "friend of the common man" play. They are, in fact, bloated rent-seeking conglomerates; but, by the simple necessities of operating an infrastructure business, bloated rent-seeking conglomerates with very, very broad-based operations.
Most of the rents go right up the food chain to the big fish; but Verizon, Comcast, et al. have to have installers and linesmen, and technicians and whatnot in virtually every city and town. These guys aren't seeing much of those rents being collected, and are themselves paying too much for cable; but they know who their employers are. Also, since the marginal cost of adding an extra internet subscriber is nearly zero, doling out cheap/free internet access to schools, community centers, youth-centers-to-keep-at-risk-kids-off-the-street-after-school, etc. is very easy, very cheap, and good PR. All that adds up to a massive PR bonus in a broad based group of community groups, blue collar, semi-skilled and skilled tradesmen, and the like.(Obviously, it isn't as though a neutral internet wouldn't need linesmen, and a competitive internet would provide cheaper internet not as part of a cynical charity effort; but that isn't immediately visible...) This, along with a few modest, but strategic, monetary donations to the correct local charities, can be converted into a torrent of letters of support from various worthy local anti-poverty groups.
By contrast, tech companies tend to have fairly geographically narrow(or, even if geographically distributed, as with Google, Akamai, and friends, pretty lightly staffed, mostly with engineers and programmers and such) operations and human resources bases. Their customer bases are fairly broad, and they are often much more popular than the local Telcos and Cable outfits(only paranoid privacy geeks hate Google, while cable companies are about as popular as the IRS); but they have much less of the sort of presence that can translate into thousands of letters from the "grassroots". The tech guys do benefit a great many people; but most of them in smaller, subtler ways. Outside of areas that are virtually company towns, or highly-educated startup hotbeds, there is virtually no blue-ish collar bread-and-butter coming out of the tech industry(particularly since, for anything that can be shipped, hardware assembly is largely offshore). Internet competition and tech company services are likely to save everyone some dollars a month, in addition to the free speech and innovation benefits; but that isn't nearly as concrete as having a layer of people, coast to coast, whose checks you sign...
huh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Caching vs. throttling (Score:5, Interesting)
I would hope that such "positive" preferential treatment wouldn't be banned along with throttling, but I can certainly see an upshot, namely enforcement. How is your average customer supposed to know whether or not you are throttling or merely just caching competing content?
Truth in advertising. . . (Score:3, Interesting)
I've gone back and forth on this issue. I do think ISPs who have monopolies to run cable to the home do warrant some regulation from the FCC, because of their monopolies. On the other hand, I also realize that in the end, customers have to pay for their access and it might not be completely unreasonable to have 'tiers' of service. If someone can't afford a more 'premium' connection, it doesn't seem out of hand to do things like throttling that customers bandwidth, but then also striking deals with content providers to open up the bandwidth for their traffic to those limited customers. So, maybe I get the cheapo internet connection, but when I download content I pay for from places like Amazon, iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, etc, I get faster download and no cap on the traffic, because the content providers setup a deal with the ISP.
Now, I don't think it's reasonable for them to completely block any (legal) traffic, but I do think it reasonable to allow them to setup tiered service and tiered pricing. The key is that they should fully disclose in their advertising and customer agreements, just exactly what it is the customer is paying for. If a customer buys "10Mb/s UNLIMITED Internet", then they shouldn't throttle any traffic, because the customer was sold unlimited service at up to 10Mb/s. If the customer only wants to pay for 768Kb/s, but a content provider has worked out a deal to actually send their content at *faster* than that 768Kb/s, I could totally see something like that.
Of course, I realize that's not what the big ISPs are trying to do, but I'm just saying, as a general principle, as long as the customer gets what they payed for and what was advertised, I'm kind of ok with some allowance of tiered service and agreements with content providers to enable a better experience.
Re:huh? Look at the bigger picture.. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh boy (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Oh boy (Score:1, Interesting)
The Republicans are against any regulation of companies at all, so they'll never support it.
This is blatantly false. When you're used to heavy-handed government regulation, less regulation looks like none at all.
Yeah, kind of like removing regulation from the banking industry. Credit default swaps? Who cares about those? Let's not even make them report those commitments, or the fact that they could never cover more than a small fraction of them. Oh, yeah, they already did that back in 2000. That was really helpful.
Re:Oh boy (Score:4, Interesting)
And yes the DoJ does have the ability to go in and break it up. And really, the DoJ shouldn't have allowed it to happen in the first place.
Re:Please Read The Fucking Article (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Nothing is easy. (Score:3, Interesting)
Clever networks WILL intentionally route traffic they don't want over too congested a connection ...
There was a talk I saw at MIT many, many years ago that, in hindsight, was brilliant, although I don't think even the speaker knew why. He was proposing that every packet get routed first to a randomly selected node, and thence to its intended destination. The idea being that this ensures even distribution of load across the entire network at small cost of bandwidth (it was a small cost that surprisingly was well below a factor of 2, but I don't recall what it was, the talk having been probably 20 years ago now). In the current political-economic climate with all of the big companies chafing at the bit to charge to route certain packets preferably, enforcing the first-destination-is-random requirement would entirely eliminate the issue.
Too bad the idea wasn't adopted.