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.'"
riiiight (Score:5, Insightful)
bullshit!
Incentive to not carry data as well (Score:5, Insightful)
"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)."
Thus it would be a disincentive to carry any data where they could not do any double billing for the bandwidth revenue. Is Berin Szoka an industry shill?
Misses the point (Score:5, Insightful)
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
So big content providers (the "real heavyweights") can lean on ISPs to exclude access to small content providers (or at least to get better access than small content providers). That's what network neautrality is intended to stop.
Common Carrier issue (Score:5, Insightful)
When ISPs where Mom and Pops shops doing things for the neighborhood, they got some special protection and the FCC kept their hands off.
Now ISPs are huge companies and SHOULD be considered common carriers. If they start inspecting packets to see where they come from, to assign priority, they will lose the shield of common carrier. They will be expected to know more about the contents of the packets that get sent. So that Bin Laden or kiddie pron video will be on THEIR network. Do you want them to know more about the contents of what you put on the web?
Re:riiiight (Score:5, Insightful)
Yea, ohter things could be good for you too (Score:5, Insightful)
"What the internet was designed for" (Score:5, Insightful)
The internet is a dumb system of pipes with the intelligence at the edges, specifically so we can do things with it that non-techies don't think we can do.
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.
Re:Content owners may be the real heavyweights her (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Incentive to not carry data as well (Score:5, Insightful)
Thus it would be a disincentive to carry any data where they could not do any double billing for the bandwidth revenue. Is Berin Szoka an industry shill?
Yes. Not to mention the obvious fact that if content providers have to pay for that bandwidth those expenses will be passed on to the customers. The only people who'll benefit from this are ISPs that can double dip and price gouge while services become both less varied and more expensive. That the customer buys the bandwidth and is then free to use it on Netflix or YouTube or TPB or any other service he wants is exactly what has made the Internet so successful, obviously the ISPs would love to be the gatekeepers to their customers charging companies lots of money for the priviledge of communicating with them but we'd be total fools for letting them.
We've already paid for high speed infrastructure (Score:5, Insightful)
In the early 2000s, the federal government gave tax breaks to the then-leading communications giants to install an open high-speed data infrastructure throughout the country. The amount of taxes they didn't collect averaged $2,000 per household. Shortly after that, the companies began sales and mergers. TechDirt.com [techdirt.com] published an article detailing this scam as recently as 2013.
Re:riiiight (Score:3, Insightful)
Yep, since prioritization is an abuse of their market power. And since there is little competition due to the telcos/cable companies buying local monopolies, there's nothing anyone can do as theu continue to try strangle out smaller competitors. This seems to be nothing but a false dilemma argument.
have your cake and eat it (Score:2, Insightful)
Caution, this is a rant:
People want to be able to download as much as they want from anywhere they want for a flat rate. This is childish.
I believe completely in net neutrality. The ISPs are in fact common carriers and should be treated as such.
However net neutrality does not come cheap. People have to pay for what they use in bandwidth the same way they pay for what they use for electricity, water and fuel. Someone who uses 10GB a month should pay ten times as much as someone who uses 1GB a month and they should be able to use 100GB if they can afford it.
This is not a social issue. A poor child doing their homework doesn't need a gigantic feed. It's for people who have nothing better to do than watch netflix and play games.
sorry, but I feel better now...
Industry shill writes article. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not enough net capacity? Build more! (Score:5, Insightful)
The argument that the poor carriers are being bombarded by all this data (when our endpoint bandwidth is much less than other places in the world) is completely absurd. It's not because the internet wasn't "designed" for video, it's because competition hasn't spurred more development by the carriers. They've been living on capital rents.
This piece is naive in the extreme: it assumes implicitly that the only players are major content providers, carriers, and "consumers", and never speakers, telecoms, and citizens.
Re:riiiight (Score:5, Insightful)
Except for some interesting aspects that make net neutrality a real issue.
Most of our high speed internet companies, are also ones who offer us TV and/or Telephone service too, and are often with partnerships with other companies. That means they are offering a pipeline to their direct competitors. High bandwidth services such as VoIP and Streaming Media, are often in direct competition with the subsidiaries of your ISP. Being that they are indeed high bandwidth, give your ISP alternative reasons to throttle the site besides just because they don't want you to go there.
Re: riiiight (Score:5, Insightful)
That's because the entire argument is disingenuous. It's just an apology piece for Comcast. That anyone believes that Netflix is bullying companies many times their size is laughable. Especially when some of the very same companies are ones they license their content from.
Re:riiiight (Score:5, Insightful)
No, it has not always been this way! In fact when Akamai first started out ISP's were housing their cache boxes for free because it was cheaper to pay for the bit of power and AC for them then it was to pay for additional upstream bandwidth. Also Tier-1 ISP's have ALWAYS carried traffic in a neutral way and without charge to each other (you've been here long enough that you should know what tariff free peering is). These deals aren't about the costs, providing peering points for traffic is relatively cheap, this is about the last mile providers abusing their monopoly/duopoly positions to rent seek.
Re:riiiight (Score:4, Insightful)
Allowing Netflix et.al. to pay for their bandwidth is what gives these content providers real power. Now they don't have that much power - they're at the mercy of network providers building the infrastructure. However when the content provider starts to pay for (part of) that network, nothing is stopping them from adding clauses that stifles competition, such as requiring that the extra bandwidth is only for themselves, leaving the competition with less bandwidth and a lower quality service.
Re:Content owners may be the real heavyweights her (Score:5, Insightful)
That is where the real danger lies: stacks: the joint ownership of or collusion between content providers and transport providers.
Agreed. It's also not a new problem. Back in the 1940's there was a problem with movie studios owning theater chains, which of course only showed, or at least gave preference to, that studio's movies. Of course back then antitrust law was actually enforced (United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. [wikipedia.org]), which allowed for real competition. Nowadays corporate rent seeking is called the free market. While we're at it, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
Re:riiiight (Score:2, Insightful)
AT&T has been whining about charging both sides for years before HD video was an issue, because they see it as their "right". On their cell biz, they (and most or all carriers?) continue to charge both sides 1000x actual cost for SMS messages, while still offering the same crappy levels of service and coverage.
Re:Not enough net capacity? Build more! (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is this here? (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't news--this is an opinion piece, and it's a bad opinion piece at that. The bulk of it is not only wrong but eye-wateringly wrong and factually incorrect.
Whether or not ESPN wanted to monetize their viewers or not has nothing to do with Net Neutrality or a lack thereof. ESPN is an over-the-top provider in this case just like dozens or other companies. This argument is just thrown in to confuse people and pretend that there is precedent for the argument the morons are trying to make.
That quote deserves special contempt because it's not only bullshit but is also a shamefully ignorant statement to make. Not only was the Internet designed to route traffic without passing judgement, IPv6 (the protocol broadband would be moving to if they weren't so busy punting around) handles all sorts of data in special ways to facilitate these sorts of things. Furthermore, multicast, bitches. It was designed for doing things like streaming video something like twenty years ago.
As to this stuff about a "two-sided market"... it's simply a load of nonsense. Broadband providers don't need a special incentive to "help". What they need is actual competition so they'll stop goofing off, actually invest in upgrades like any healthy technology company should, and stop paying people to write shillery like this. The fact that they're already being paid by their customers at rates higher than almost everywhere else in the world, for notably slower connections should be a big red flag that they're negligent in this obligation.
We're not "assuming" broadband providers are throttling Netflix--we can prove it, because unlike paid shills, we can actually analyze and diagnose networking issues. Fifteen minutes of Googling will readily turn up multiple reports (from both skilled individuals and capable technical organiztions) demonstrating that the broadband ISPs are throttling the traffic.
If you want abuses of power, this article is one. It's nothing but a pack of lies designed to muddy the waters. Are we going to start seeing reposts of the stupid shit FOX News says now?
Re:Not enough net capacity? Build more! (Score:4, Insightful)
And we've seen where this sort of consolidation means for the average person; they have less and less of a voice in how their country is run.
One of the great things about the Internet is how easy it let people voice their opinions. Although prior to the arrival of the net, it was already cheap and easy enough that anybody could print their own newsletter or pamphlet, gaining an audience for said publication was a costly endeavour and usually required you to deal with the devil to get widespread exposure. With the Internet, your views were open to the entire world and - if enough people agreed with those view (or at least thought them worthy of attention), you could quickly gain a significant market. In other words, it was the message that was important, not how rich or connected you were.
Intentionally or not, without net neutrality, the carriers are pushing the genie back into the bottle so that only a favored few will have a voice again. This is contrary to the spirit of the nation, and it is sad to see that so many people are willing to allow such a powerful tool for democratization be tossed to the wayside.
Re:Ignore the elephant in the room (Score:4, Insightful)
"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?
Their comments fly in the face of logic and basic economics.
Once the ISPs can double-dip, charging twice for the same bandwidth, there will exist a tremendous disincentive to carrying any traffic they can't double-dip on. Worst case scenario, "startups" without enormous financial backing will simply be stuck on the Internet slow-lane.
"Help startups"? My ass!
Re:riiiight (Score:5, Insightful)
You can narrow this down to two categories:
- Carriers (be they wired or wireless)
- Customers
Carriers carry data. If its digital, the byte-stream needs to move up and down the tubes regardless if it decodes into a voice-call, a website, or a blockbuster movie.
Customers are everyone else. They either transmit data, or request it. It doesn't matter if this is an 4KB HTTP GET going up, or 3GB .AVI file going down. They pay the carriers for the privilege of accessing the network. It doesn't matter what sort of data they access or where they are requesting it from or sending it to. The volume of the data might affect the cost to access the network, but not the type or destination of the data.
And the two categories should never, ever be merged into one.
Re:Not enough net capacity? Build more! (Score:4, Insightful)
If Slashdot were created today, I wonder if it would be some kind of homogenized youtube channel or twitter account.
The barriers of entry have come down, but inevitably, so has the quality of content. The white noise isn't a conspiracy, it's a consequence of commoditization of publishing. It just turns out that most people don't have anything worthwhile to say.
Re:riiiight (Score:4, Insightful)
Also: the Time Warner / Comcast deal is a crock of shit [nytimes.com]. I believe I'm not the only one who feels that these companies provide terrible customer service and gouge us for shitty connection speeds [nytimes.com]. The cost of my connection has doubled since Time Warner bought Adelphia cable with no appreciable increase in speed. It's bullshit.