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."
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.
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I generally support a more libertarian (small 'l') view of government intervention - less is more. But the ideas of 'Net Neutrality, when it was being proposed, seemed to me to be one of those "necessary evil" things that government needs to do. Much of that has to do with the current landscape of Internet providers, where in most places it's a monopoly or near-monopoly of 1 or 2 providers. (What government policies, or lack there of, encouraged or allowed that situation to unfold is up for debate).
But t
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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!
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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.
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.
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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?
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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!
Wow, that's one heck of a tirade. Judging from your reaction alone my OP deserves a troll mod or 2, inadvertently as it my have been.
And yes, I was taking a stab at the libertards around here. Tongue in cheek and all that. And, as much as I hate to
"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.
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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:"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:4, Insightful)
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Caps work pretty well. I've said it before and I'll say it again.
I live in Australia now, and I've got a 10 GB monthly cap on a 24mb connection. It costs me about $AU50, I could get substantially more for not much more, though I don't need it so I don't. If I go over my cap I get shaped(down to 256k as I recall), but not charged extra, but I don't generally do that.
I know this idea sounds scary, but unlike nearly every ISP in the US, I get what I pay for. I get as much as my connection is capable of giving(
Re:"new regulations could hinder THE DEVELOPMENT.. (Score:2)
Of course, if you live in a place where there is only one internet carrier, then the prices might not be fair, but that is a separate problem.
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A universal price-pet-byte structure a la the 56k days has little, if anything, to do with net neutrality.
This is one of the things of portions of the net neutrality crowd I don't get. "Net neutrality" is -sometimes- used as a buzzword to mean "ISPs doing anything I don't like" due to people sloppily mixing up their agendas. Truthfully, a price-per-byte structure may not be a bad thing. The people that are the biggest problems for ISPs are those that max their connections 24/7. While I agree that ISPs sh
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
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.
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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.
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Of course if this goes to the extreme, those competitors will have to build their own backbones as AT&T could traffic shape their trunk connections.
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.
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I like the last mile proposal where you buy it and share it condominium style with your neighbors. Then ISPs plug into a shared community portal. http://www.newamerica.net/publications/policy/homes_tails [newamerica.net]
Who owns what part of the run from the central office or switch to the curb? One fiber for each person? Bundles of thousands of fibers would be expensive. And how would millions be handled? Where is the space for all that? And what if you don't want it?
I can see home owners owning the fiber from the cu
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.
Re:not fixing the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Well, that's the problem, isn't it? In almost every local area, the last-mile solutions (cable and phone lines) weren't built with public funds an
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
Well then if the Republicans... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not everything that corporations are against is good for the public. It is quite possible for government action to both make the situation worse for the public and be at odds with what the corps want. The real issue is whether or not that government action actually improves the situation.
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.
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You could easily make the argument that net neutrality is neccessary for protecting the privacy of users or that anti-net neutral policies are anti-competitive and thus fall under existing anti-trust legislation. There are corps on both sides of the fence; their stance on the issue is interesting but not in of itself a reason to support net neutrality.
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You could easily make the argument that net neutrality is neccessary for protecting the privacy of users or that anti-net neutral policies are anti-competitive and thus fall under existing anti-trust legislation. There are corps on both sides of the fence; their stance on the issue is interesting but not in of itself a reason to support net neutrality.
How does what you said serve any realistic proof to the topic WE are talking about here?
And, fyi, any reasonable person would not base their decision making as 'anything that is opposite of corporations' plans'... that's silly to even suggest.
Be realistic, please.
Must be right... (Score:2, Insightful)
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If a chunk of the GOP is against something from the start, it's probably the right thing to do.
Are you sure?? What does Limbaugh or Glenn Beck say about it?
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Glenn Beck says it's part of a Nazi Marxist plot [slashdot.org].
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.
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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.
I don't see how anti-trust laws aren't enough, already, to protect us from most of this. Apparently, anti-trust laws are only enforced as convenient... fackin politics keeping democracy and justice muted.
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Anti trust is hard to prove and expensive to pursue. It is a last resort in handling a market that is poorly managed. Regulating is easy and efficient.
We spent 30 years fighting commercial pollution using the court system and we got nowhere. As soon as set up regulations that fined the hell out of violators, we began to see progress. Cabinets get to implement administrative law that is enforceable with fines, otherwise the only recourse is a long drawn out court case.
Those jerks in the supreme court should be workin on this crap!
Thanks for the info; I was unaware at how ineffective our justice system is in regard to anti-trust. Still, I hold it to be neglected for political purposes.
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I'm a free market guy too, but...
It would only be a free market if the local government owned all the cable and phone lines, and simply leased access to them so that customers could chose from multiple companies to be their cable provider, phone company, or what have you. Instead, individual providers are given unfettered, perpetual monopolies on virtually all of the last-mile connections to the vast majority of the market's consumers. And this is something that can't be easily undone now. The shortest rout
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I wouldn't see anything morally wrong with the citizens confiscating this infrastructure
Confiscation leads to confrontation
Confrontation leads to weapons wielded in anger
Angry armed people means accidental gun fire
And then we all have to stand around looking embarrased as we all look at each other waiting for the technician to finish splicing the fiber some moron shot.
Translation (Score:2)
We have already spent man hours developing... features that would cripp... smothe... smooth out traffic flow, and you're about to regulate the (perceived) market away.
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.
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the "free market" has failed dismally in the health care and health insurance field.
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the "free market" has failed dismally in the health care and health insurance field.
There has been no free market in health care in the US since WWII.
Falcon
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
Traitors to Freedom (Score:2, Insightful)
"A group of 18 Republican US senators have also sent a letter to Genachowski raising concerns about net neutrality regulations."
They make it too easy to figure out who's in the pocket of big business.
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: (Score:2)
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Um.. He said who he works for:
As an employee of Motorola..
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There's a big surprise. (Score:2)
Translation: Major infrastructure vendors don't like new regulations that'll hurt the development of their bottom line. Nothing to see here folks.
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)
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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
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you make a very specific claim here, please provide some sort of example, this should be easy.
Any guesses as to... (Score:2)
... the identities of the major campaign contributors for those 18 senators? And how much those contributors would really like to see net neutrality go away? I'm sure they've, you know, casually reminded those senators how many jobs they've got in their states that could disappear should net neutrality be allowed to be FCC policy.
Lip service to free markets (Score:2)
Re:What's the catch? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
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.
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
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.
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Selling traffic shaping solutions, presumably.
There will always be a market for that, even under a completely neutral internet. My company is out in the boonies and can't get any other internet access besides satellite (high latency, transfer limits, shitty upload pipe) or a T-1 (expensive but reliable). We can't afford to get a bonded connection so we are stuck with a 1.5 mbit/s pipe to share among 60 employees (upwards of 40 of whom are working at any time).
That pipe has to accommodate web browsing, our e-mail and web servers, VPN access for emplo
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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
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You the customer and user shapes your traffic not your outside ISP
It would actually be more efficient to have my ISP do it but they wanted too much damn money for it. If they were shaping it I could take advantage of more of the pipe. Because they aren't I have to limit how much of our bandwidth we can utilize, else the packets start getting queued on their router and my shaping rules don't mean anything.
Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
Why is that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with the practice of local governments granting monopolies, would it?
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Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
Why is that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with the practice of local governments granting monopolies, would it?
The local, state, and national governments have granted monopolies. It's being disingenuous in pointing out that only local governments granted monopolies.
Falcon
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Too bad, the only choice you have is that provider or no provider.
Why is that I wonder? It wouldn't have anything to do with the practice of local governments granting monopolies, would it?
...which they do, because they are not willing to finance the infrastructure costs so that they own the pipes themselves and only lease space on them to the ISPs.
There are such things a municipal telephone companies in the U.S., but they are mostly concentrated in small population-dense areas. The best thing that could ever happen to telecommunications in the U.S. would be for the government to nationalize the infrastructure and then contract out maintenance and operation. There's a reason that Japan and
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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...
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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.
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Just because it doesn't work doesn't mean you can't sell it. If it's illegal that's a bit more of a problem.
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The only QoSing an internet router should be doing is using DoD-spec traffic class, qos bits, and the like to determine packet priorities.
We already have the capability to give VoIP the low-latency treatment it needs...it's called "RTFRFC", or "Read the fucking RFC".
Applications like VoIP are EXACTLY what those bits are for.
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Applications would quite likely abuse the QoS bits if they were actually implemented (I'm thinking that a certain browser, in particular, would use it to improve responsiveness).
Not to say that we shouldn't use the features which exist, just that we need to remember that people are going to try to game the system, sp some penalty for higher QoS packets would need to be applied.
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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
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In other news, manufacturers of loaded dice get good business from casino cheats.
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The fact is that many of them go beyond their constitutional rights and simply bribe congress. In other words they are crooks, thieves, goniffs. They must be stupid and brazen to get caught, yet they do.
Government, by definition, possesses power to attract those groups. The solution is to clean up congress and the only way to do that is to lay waste to the duopoly. Republican == Democrat == sellout.
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When government picks winners, groups that get called "lobbyists" and "special interests" exercise their Constitutional RIGHTS to petition the government and try to affect the outcome of the government rule making.
Corporations have no right to lobby government, only people do. And I don't recall ever getting any sort of ballot, petition, or questionnaire from a corporation I owned stocks in asking me what government policies I support and what I don't support.
Don't like it?
Don't give the government the pow
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Wrong! Your conclusion is totally flawed. The corporations would exist whether or not government existed. In fact, they would be even more powerful. All they have to do is consolidate, merge and buy themselves into a monopoly position. Apparently you seem to be completely ignorant about the fact that monopolies are in fact quite common and do happen with regularity. Even without a monopoly, corporations can still abuse consumers as with this net censorship. Without government there would be very little to s
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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
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Nonsense. The push to relax requirements for mortgages may not have been the wisest policy, but it was a minor part of the problem. The root of the problem was on Wall Street, not Main Street.
Scenario 1: Marginal borrowers default. Banks foreclose. Either qualified buyers purchase the property and the housing market shrugs it off, or the bank takes a hit and decides to reduce their risk or raise the rate to compensate for the risk.
Scenario 2: Wall Street packages mortgages into complex derivatives that no o
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fetishization of homeownership raised the default rate among the poorest buyers, who should have been renting
The poor should be renting and paying someone else's mortgage as well as paying them profits instead of paying their own mortgage? I can see renting when home prices are skyrocketing or if the renter is only going to be there a short period, but that's it. If you rent someone else is profiting off of you.
Are you seriously telling me that the mighty US financial industry lost hundreds of billions be
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it was the Clinton administrations wet dream that everyone no matter how poor should own their own house that is the root cause of the current situation
And Bush's ownership society had nothing to do with it? When Clinton left office the budget was almost balance but under Bush it ballooned into the largest deficit ever. Though I hate to admit it Clinton cut government and Bush expanded it.
Republican presidents expanded government and a democrat shrank it.
Falcon
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"renublicans?" I'm going to regret asking, but was that a typo or are you making some type of pun that I'm just not getting?
I might be giving you too much credit when I assume it's not just "nub" as in "n00b"
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I've always heard of 'nub' being an acronym for Non Useful Body.
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If you don't buy products from companies with DRM chances are you won't have a game console (Ok, you m