Killing Net Neutrality Could Be Good For You 361
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Berin Szoka and Brent Skorup write that everyone assumes that cable companies have all the market power, and so of course a bigger cable company means disaster. But content owners may be the real heavyweights here: It was Netflix that withheld high-quality streaming from Time Warner Cable customers last year, not vice versa and it was ESPN that first proposed to subsidize its mobile viewers' data usage last year. 'We need to move away from the fear-mongering and exaggerations about threats to the Internet as well as simplistic assumptions about how Internet traffic moves. The real problems online are far more complex and less scary. And it's not about net neutrality, but about net capacity.' The debate is really about who pays for — and who profits from — the increasingly elaborate infrastructure required to make the Internet do something it was never designed to do in the first place: stream high-speed video. 'While many were quick to assume that broadband providers were throttling Netflix traffic, the explanation could be far simpler: The company simply lacked the capacity to handle the "Super HD" video quality it began offering last year.' A two-sided market means broadband providers would have an incentive to help because they would receive revenue from two major sources: content providers (through sponsorship or ads), and consumers (through subscription fees). 'Unfortunately, this kind of market innovation is viewed as controversial or even harmful to consumers by some policy and Internet advocates. But these concerns are premature, unfounded, and arise mostly from status quo bias: Carriers and providers haven't priced like this before, so of course change will create some kind of harm,' conclude Szoka and Skorup. 'Bottom line: The FCC should stop trying to ban prioritization outright and focus only on actual abuses of market power.'"
Ignore the elephant in the room (Score:5, Informative)
"No, you shouldn't worry about prioritization, in fact it can help startups."
What? Wasn't that what everyone was worried about to begin with? That those with all the purse strings would be able to lock out these very startups you're claiming will benefit the most from this setup?
Content owners may be the real heavyweights here (Score:5, Informative)
Who are these people? (Score:5, Informative)
It appears to me like thay are paid shills of the Telecommunications Industry hiding behind "non-profit" "think tanks"
Berin Szoka used to work for the PFF: (from Wikipedia)
The Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) was an American market-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C. that studied the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. Its mission was to educate policymakers, opinion leaders and the public about issues associated with technological change, based on a philosophy of limited government, free markets and individual sovereignty.[1]
PFF was funded in part by the digital media and communication industry.[2]
Brent Skorup works for the Mercatus Center: (From Wikipedia)
Washington Post columnist Al Kamen has described Mercatus as a "staunchly anti-regulatory center funded largely by Koch Industries Inc."[3] Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, has called it "ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington.”[2] The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center "the most important think tank you've never heard of."[2]
The Mercatus Center was founded by Rich Fink as the Center for the Study of Market Processes at Rutgers University. After the Koch family provided more than thirty million dollars[2] to George Mason University, the Center moved to George Mason in the mid-1980s before assuming its current name in 1999.[2] The Mercatus Center is a 501(c)3 non-profit and does not receive support from George Mason University or any federal, state or local government, but rather is entirely funded through donations, including some from companies like Koch Industries[3] and ExxonMobil,[4] individual donors and foundations. As of 2011, the Center shows that 58% of its funding comes from foundations, 40% from individuals, and 2% from businesses.[1]
Re:"What the internet was designed for" (Score:4, Informative)
you can use multicast directely,
Well, in theory, but it's usually blocked by default on many/most routers. I'd be happy to wait a few minutes to start a show if it mean the end of buffering. DVR-like capabilities are just the logical extension of that.
But the thing I don't get is how Netflix can afford 'my' bandwidth for less than $9/mo but my ISP supposedly can't get a similar deal. Or is the ISP simply unwilling to allocate $9 out of the $90 they charge me for upstream costs?
Re:"What the internet was designed for" (Score:5, Informative)
Streaming video is easier than downloading large programs, as you only need to ship a certain amount per second, rather than ship it all and only be able to use it when the last byte has arrived. For real-time broadcast, which causes massive numbers of synchronized transfers, you can use multicast directely, as well as to "prime" a content delivery network node close to your particular edge.
Uh, no, it is not easier. I say that as somebody who has been developing audio and video delivery software. The requirements differ significantly. Most network gear out there is optimized to maximize throughput, which is *not* what you want for video. For video, you want deliver on-time. This affects the kind of buffering used in hard- and software. Given the many different sources of latency over a WAN, the real-time constraints of video playback cannot be met unless you use a big jitter buffer. How big? Well, here is where the difficulties start.
Multicast does not solve that problem. All it solves is scalability (which is nice). But not the real-time constraint. BTW, if you wish to distribute video over Wi-Fi, you might be surprised to find out that many unicasts streams are better than one multicast one, thanks to Wi-Fi specific issues.
(And yes, video playback is a case for real-time programming. Real-time simply means that a given task has to be finished before a specific deadline is passed, in this case, the next frame has to be shown on screen until its timeslice passed. It does not necessarily mean that it must be something that happens many times per second.)
I do think this case against net neutrality is bollocks though.
please spend 10 minutes on internet history 101 (Score:5, Informative)
> The only thing they designed it for in the beginning was simple http.
In the beginning, when the internet was designed, http wouldn't be invented for another 15 years. Http has only been around for half as long as the internet has.
Re:have your cake and eat it (Score:2, Informative)
>$0.50/GB
Wow. How about, no? That rate is worse than what I pay when I go over already (AT&T DSL 3.0, 150 GB + $10/50GB)
Maybe you should do some actual research before you open your dicksocket? Anyway, your entire premise is unfounded. I've a friend in Tromso, Norway (An Island in the arctic) that gets 70/20 for $30 (nominal exchange rate). It would be laughable to make the common claim about population density for Norway, so you can stop typing right now. The only reason we do not have comparable plans is lack of competition and the "greed is good" mentality.
Re:Some simple questions (Score:5, Informative)
I have been in the telecom industry for for many years. The issue that most people don't understand is that the infrastructure is "shared" amongst all subscribers and somebody has to pay for it.
One of the common questions I always got from Telco operators is "how many subscribers can your mobile system handle"? My snide answer is "100 billion"....as long as nobody makes any calls. The question they should be asking is "how many simultaneous calls can your system handle?". Then the answer becomes 100,000 peak busy hour calls. The Telco customer should know what their *expected calls per hour per subscriber* are and then they can calculate the number subscribers they can handle.
The "expected calls per hour per subscriber" (or expected bandwidth per subscriber in this case) changes the calculation significantly. Netflix and other content providers have been a game changer in recent years because they have drastically changed that number. The ISPs know they can't provide every subscriber peak bandwidth at the same time. When subscribers used their "promised bandwidth" in 2 second bursts to quickly load a WWW page, the ISPs had no problem providing it. But now that subscribers are demanding their "promised bandwidth" in 2 hour "bursts", the playing field changes dramatically. ISPs, of course, can engineer for that load, but then "somebody" needs to pay for it. That "somebody" is either the subscriber in the form of higher ISP subscription rates, or the content providers in the form of "throttling fees" which they will undoubtedly pass on to their customers or advertisers.
Net neutrality simply shifts who is paying for the cost of all that equipment for our access. One way the end user will end up paying for it directly, and the other way the end user pays for it indirectly through higher content fees, or goods and services that are more expensive due to higher advertising fees. In the end we all have to pay for it.
I tend to fall on the side of Net Neutrality (and consequently would be willing to pay the ISP more for access), because otherwise the big players (Netflix, Google, etc.) will become more entrenched as they are able to pay the throttling fees while some upstart with a great service can't afford it.
Re:"What the internet was designed for" (Score:4, Informative)
Upstream is not more expensive than downstream, it's entirely technical. Both cable (coax) and telephone (twisted pair) wires were never designed to carry data, and the only way to make this work is if it is highly asymmetrical. Rolling out proper UTP cables is expensive, which is why it's never done to households, only to businesses that need fast upstream. Households mostly download (or stream) where upstream is basically just for ACK packages and the occasional e-mail.
Everyone who's on glass fibre (fibre-to-the-home) has symmetrical connections already. I've had cheap, symmetrical broadband. 20M down, 20M up for years in my office. The building had optical connections available. The same company offers also tradition ADSL, and that is of course highly asymmetric.
Re:riiiight (Score:4, Informative)
High bandwidth services such as VoIP
VOIP is, by today's standards a very low bandwidth service.
Pick up an old-fashioned wired landline and marvel at the voice quality. That's generally 8 bit, mono, 8kHz u-law, which takes precisely 64kbit/s. That's why ISDN was that speed. It sent data down the same channel as phone audio was digitised too.
Of course, if you put on a lossy codec (or even lossless!) you'll get substantially lower bandwidth, even with a very low latency codec like opus.
I think opus goes down to about 6kbit/s for acceptable quality (factor of 10 for lossy compression is not unreasonable).
It is, however, a low latency service.
Best comment here: Proff of trolling (Score:5, Informative)
User bobstreo posted the best analysis yet [slashdot.org] of this so called "news" - reproduced below. Berin Szoka and Brent Skorup are almost defiantly industry shills:
It appears to me like thay are paid shills of the Telecommunications Industry hiding behind "non-profit" "think tanks"
Berin Szoka used to work for the PFF: (from Wikipedia)
The Progress & Freedom Foundation (PFF) was an American market-oriented think tank based in Washington, D.C. that studied the digital revolution and its implications for public policy. Its mission was to educate policymakers, opinion leaders and the public about issues associated with technological change, based on a philosophy of limited government, free markets and individual sovereignty.[1]
PFF was funded in part by the digital media and communication industry.[2]
Brent Skorup works for the Mercatus Center: (From Wikipedia)
Washington Post columnist Al Kamen has described Mercatus as a "staunchly anti-regulatory center funded largely by Koch Industries Inc."[3] Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, has called it "ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington.”[2] The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center "the most important think tank you've never heard of."[2]
The Mercatus Center was founded by Rich Fink as the Center for the Study of Market Processes at Rutgers University. After the Koch family provided more than thirty million dollars[2] to George Mason University, the Center moved to George Mason in the mid-1980s before assuming its current name in 1999.[2] The Mercatus Center is a 501(c)3 non-profit and does not receive support from George Mason University or any federal, state or local government, but rather is entirely funded through donations, including some from companies like Koch Industries[3] and ExxonMobil,[4] individual donors and foundations. As of 2011, the Center shows that 58% of its funding comes from foundations, 40% from individuals, and 2% from businesses.[1]
Re:riiiight (Score:5, Informative)
There is a difference between caching, and QoS by type, and QoS by source.
The first two are not a problem: possibility for abuse is very low, and they both benefit the consumer quite a bit. The third is the problem.