Net Neutrality
-
Yes, that's a free market and capitalism. But it's not always that simple. We (in the U.S.) have state laws that prevent gasoline from being sold too cheaply so other mom-and-pop stations can compete with the big boys. In many states it's illegal to sell items below cost in stores. This effectively prevents Wal-Mart from undercutting everyone in town until they are the only ones left. We see lawsuits against price fixing in books taken against Apple. There are dozens of examples like this. My point is that state and federal governments have many rules in place on what type of services can be provided, what must be included in those services, and also the price those services can cost. I see no reason they should not do the same to the Internet providers. That's just my $0.02.
-
Sounds like your market isn't free. Here in the UK it's somewhat different; up until the 1980's the landline network was guberment owned, but when they privatised it, they enforced a policy of allowing other companies to use the hardware. A better example would be mobile. Mobile started in the 80's without legacy regulation pretty much. We ended up with at least 5 independent hardware bases, offering actual competition everywhere. Things slowed up a little after the 3G band auction, due to the large amounts bid, but now they're racing each other to provide 4G. Locally, I only get 2G or Edge, but I don't have to pay anything towards 4G unless it reaches me and I upgrade. How is this harming me? It isn't. I 'have' a 3G contract, but by mixing and matching rural land-based hotspots, I can get around 3G scarcity by factoring in no-cost WiFi links. This is for all mobile devices. Fixed internet is going to become very much a supporting technology in the next few years, as conventional ISP's who attempt to control the flow will be totally outflanked by mobile.
Your analogies are poor. And your comment about mobile is flat out wrong. First mobile will never be as fast. Nor does it have the bandwidth. Second, and more importantly, you are ignoring entirely how your mobile traffic actually flows. Despite marketing claims mobile traffic, moves over the same hardware as land lines. It isn't magic.
-
And I guess the root of that issue is whether or not ISPs and underlying infrastructure are considered a public service company or just a regular for-profit concern.
Christopher Duncan Author of Unite the Tribes: Leadership Skills for Technology Managers Have Fun, Get Paid: How to Make a Living with Your Creativity The Career Programmer
Christopher Duncan wrote:
And I guess the root of that issue is whether or not ISPs and underlying infrastructure are considered a public service company
Someone certainly thinks that it is a basic commodity. http://www.denverpost.com/ci_23169208/colorado-looks-regulate-broadband-like-phone-service-rural[^]
-
One of the stories clogging my RSS feeds this morning was the court overturning the FCC's net neutrality stance. Let me first say that I have not studied this matter and don't know what the facts are on either side of the street. What I do know is that it caused the Internet to gnaw on its own ankle for the better part of the morning. So here's my question. Although I'm in favor of net neutrality conceptually, from a more pragmatic perspective it seems to me that the wires I get to use in order to interact with the Internet, at least in America, belong to companies. I get to use them because I pay them for the service, but it's their choice what service to provide and how much to charge. They bought the materials and paid to have them installed. Unless the government decides to take over an industry and seize the companies' assets, does it really have the right to tell a given company what it can do with the wires that it owns? Sure, it would be nice if we lived in a world where everyone played fair, and I'm in favor of such an idealized landscape. That said, telling a company how to run its business strikes me as unfair to the company. It's a complex issue with many points of view (and I have no interest in discussing partisan politics of any kind), but I was thinking about that this morning. The Internet howls that this is a travesty, but it seems to me that it's not really that simple. Was just wondering if I'm alone in considering how sovereign the property of a company is, as well as its business practices (providing it doesn't break any laws).
Christopher Duncan Author of Unite the Tribes: Leadership Skills for Technology Managers Have Fun, Get Paid: How to Make a Living with Your Creativity The Career Programmer
This guy explains it all: Ask a Ninja about Net Neutrality
-
Squeezed out? How? If I drive at 90 mph on the motorway, does that mean you are being squeezed out when you (continue) to drive at 60? Is anybody honestly claiming that if I burn the fuel to drive at 90, I should also pay for everybody else to go that fast too? The internet is not a zero-sum game. Extra speed leads to extra routes/roads/lanes, paid for by the money these 'privileged' customers pay. Look, my boss has a Lamborghini and a £30 million house, because he built the company from nothing. Does anybody think I should automatically get a Lamborghini upgrade at zero cost, plus a mansion, simply because I drive on the same roads and live in the same county?
Very poor analogy. More like the boss pays for the toll road which is paved and you have to drive on the gravel road 'cause you can't afford the toll. Like roads, the communications infrastructure is vital to everyone, and that is why there should be regulations in place so that those who haven't had the good luck to be in the right place at the right time to make lots of money are not the only ones to benefit from vital infrastructure...
-
The problem is that Internet carriers are very close to a monopoly in most places. In large cities, there may be two or even three carriers, but they are so large and so much in control of so many types of communications in so many places, that they will inevitably establish similar restrictive rules that gives the consumer or the start-up no real choice at all. The free market is not always free. And that is why regulations are needed.
Who, exactly, do you think creates the monopolistic situation to begin with? Governments are most frequently the unholy partner in alliance with business to create the situation in the first place. This precisely describes the situation that led to the Robber Baron's in the late 19th and early 20th century. Regulation, in and of itself is no barrier to monopolies and big business. Some laws are indeed required to keep the field fair.. but over-reliance on government (also made up of fallible/greedy people) is also not a good choice. Ideally you want a situation where barrier to entry in a marketplace is low so that competition is maintained. That is NOT what the internet is right now. Its still only a few really large carriers that own a ton of wire. I think that is to be expected given the frightful amount of capital required to build out a network (in this way the telecoms resemble the railroads I refer to above), but we should not lose sight of how government magnifies the problem where monopolies are concerned.
-
I think you got your facts wrong. A better analogy would be: Your electricity provider suddenly deciding to stop providing electricity to your freezer unless you pay a "freezer fee" because they struck a deal with the local fast food chain in delivering them more business. That's where the ruling stands, and enables verizon to do, and that's what net neutrality is trying to prevent - Unrestricted access to your desired content/destination .. over the subscribed service (at the bought speeds) As for speed, well so much for the free market here in the US. We've been paying providers premium fees for "high speed" connection which in fact are limited to cable speeds back in the 90s.. sure I might have 20Mbps down, BUT with only 700kbps for upload, this connection becomes useless for anything else than mild browsing and consuming video content. Backups are impossible for example, and online gaming becomes horrible, since you have to UPLOAD quite a lot of data to the other ends. And to why we don't have better? Well, a couple of years ago, verizon struck an exclusivity deal with the local county which bars other providers to run cooper for the next 20 years.. Even better, if you look at the NYC area, you will notice that verizon and comcast have a mutual love.. where you have verizon, comcast refuses to run cooper and vice verse.. Time Warner (the only other smaller provider) is going bankrupt for not having capacity to compete with the other two... And the others, jack up the prices as they see fit. In cases as such, government regulation is a must.
I think you got your facts wrong. If you pay for electricity for your freezer, they cannot turn off the power. That would be theft. Property isn't theft incidentally.
-
Your analogies are poor. And your comment about mobile is flat out wrong. First mobile will never be as fast. Nor does it have the bandwidth. Second, and more importantly, you are ignoring entirely how your mobile traffic actually flows. Despite marketing claims mobile traffic, moves over the same hardware as land lines. It isn't magic.
My analogies are great. And 4G is much, much faster than cable. Get your facts straight.
-
Very poor analogy. More like the boss pays for the toll road which is paved and you have to drive on the gravel road 'cause you can't afford the toll. Like roads, the communications infrastructure is vital to everyone, and that is why there should be regulations in place so that those who haven't had the good luck to be in the right place at the right time to make lots of money are not the only ones to benefit from vital infrastructure...
Luck? LUCK? Are you crazy? You think it's luck? And you think one boss is going to pay for an entire road and never rent it out? You don't get to be boss by being a terrible businessman. Unless the state intervenes.
-
Who, exactly, do you think creates the monopolistic situation to begin with? Governments are most frequently the unholy partner in alliance with business to create the situation in the first place. This precisely describes the situation that led to the Robber Baron's in the late 19th and early 20th century. Regulation, in and of itself is no barrier to monopolies and big business. Some laws are indeed required to keep the field fair.. but over-reliance on government (also made up of fallible/greedy people) is also not a good choice. Ideally you want a situation where barrier to entry in a marketplace is low so that competition is maintained. That is NOT what the internet is right now. Its still only a few really large carriers that own a ton of wire. I think that is to be expected given the frightful amount of capital required to build out a network (in this way the telecoms resemble the railroads I refer to above), but we should not lose sight of how government magnifies the problem where monopolies are concerned.
If the government had not broken up one particular monopoly, you would still be coding in COBOL on punched cards. Government is a problem when the monopolies take it over, as they have done in the United States. In order to stop such behavior, we don't really have any recourse, except individual purchasing "power", and sometimes even that is under control. So where do you go?
-
I think you got your facts wrong. If you pay for electricity for your freezer, they cannot turn off the power. That would be theft. Property isn't theft incidentally.
Same thing for internet connections.. If I pay for an internet service, they should not be able to tell me what websites to visit or not, or to ask more money off of me to let me do that, but the court decided otherwise. There was never about property theft. It's about a company obtaining the power to tell you how to use their service for the sole purpose of squeezing more money off of you, hence the example of the freezer, what if your local electricity provider decided to change policies and tax you for your freezer, despite the fact you already pay for service? It would if it weren't regulated by the gov. And as a side note, I am also against data caps. Bites are a virtual resource that doesn't run out. My monthly bill covers the service with the maximum speeds for both download and upload, which the ISP should be able to provide me, regardless if I use the service to 100% all the time or not, cause that's what I pay for. They know it and they still don't do it. They know that most people do not use their service to 100% not even for 2 hours straight, and thus instead of investing in infrastructure to achieve the quality of service, they overload the network segments with way to many contracts, which result in a crappy experience for everyone. And then, when people complain, they blame it on bittorrent or other streaming p2p protocols saying that those kill the network, without providing any evidence for it whatsoever. And even if people use bittorrent, so what? Isn't your over all connection limited to what your contract says? You can't go faster than that, cause it's a hard cap on your modem, regardless of what you download or upload. And even so, isn't the service meant to be used as that.. for data transfers.. cause, go figure.. it's an internet service contract? Why shouldn't I be able to use it to 100% all the time, but only slightly.. not to make the ISP uncomfortable.. On this front, no one gets a Ferrari.. We all get crappy fiats painted red and advertised as Ferraris, and even with those, if you go too fast, or too far, you have the Internet Service Police cutting you down, for "abusing" your "unlimited" contract..
-
If the government had not broken up one particular monopoly, you would still be coding in COBOL on punched cards. Government is a problem when the monopolies take it over, as they have done in the United States. In order to stop such behavior, we don't really have any recourse, except individual purchasing "power", and sometimes even that is under control. So where do you go?
The right answer is not regulations.. its law. Regulations are rules that have the force of law but created by a bureaucrat. When that happens, the public has no chance to respond other than during a lawsuit, which is WAY too late to stop bad regulations. When regulations are created, no one in Congress ends up risking their re-election by creating the regulation. We need to get the bureaucracy OUT of the business of creating regulations, and leave that to lawmakers in Congress so that they are risking their rear-ends when creating laws that might be bad. The original restrictions in place in the Constitution were good ones. We need to get back to that. We'll never completely rid ourselves of the necessity to consider that big government can be as big a problem as big business.. but if we keep only the lawmakers making laws, we have a better chance of keeping their own desire to grab power in check.
-
The right answer is not regulations.. its law. Regulations are rules that have the force of law but created by a bureaucrat. When that happens, the public has no chance to respond other than during a lawsuit, which is WAY too late to stop bad regulations. When regulations are created, no one in Congress ends up risking their re-election by creating the regulation. We need to get the bureaucracy OUT of the business of creating regulations, and leave that to lawmakers in Congress so that they are risking their rear-ends when creating laws that might be bad. The original restrictions in place in the Constitution were good ones. We need to get back to that. We'll never completely rid ourselves of the necessity to consider that big government can be as big a problem as big business.. but if we keep only the lawmakers making laws, we have a better chance of keeping their own desire to grab power in check.
OK, I get your point. Good luck at finding and electing lawmakers with what it takes to understand and write their own regulations properly.
-
OK, I get your point. Good luck at finding and electing lawmakers with what it takes to understand and write their own regulations properly.
Where is it written that experts in some non-law field can't be consulted regarding the making of a law? I just want the legislative power where its supposed to be.. so that the public can make their voice known before a law is passed.. rather than silently having it foisted on us by a bureaucracy that answers to no one?
-
One of the stories clogging my RSS feeds this morning was the court overturning the FCC's net neutrality stance. Let me first say that I have not studied this matter and don't know what the facts are on either side of the street. What I do know is that it caused the Internet to gnaw on its own ankle for the better part of the morning. So here's my question. Although I'm in favor of net neutrality conceptually, from a more pragmatic perspective it seems to me that the wires I get to use in order to interact with the Internet, at least in America, belong to companies. I get to use them because I pay them for the service, but it's their choice what service to provide and how much to charge. They bought the materials and paid to have them installed. Unless the government decides to take over an industry and seize the companies' assets, does it really have the right to tell a given company what it can do with the wires that it owns? Sure, it would be nice if we lived in a world where everyone played fair, and I'm in favor of such an idealized landscape. That said, telling a company how to run its business strikes me as unfair to the company. It's a complex issue with many points of view (and I have no interest in discussing partisan politics of any kind), but I was thinking about that this morning. The Internet howls that this is a travesty, but it seems to me that it's not really that simple. Was just wondering if I'm alone in considering how sovereign the property of a company is, as well as its business practices (providing it doesn't break any laws).
Christopher Duncan Author of Unite the Tribes: Leadership Skills for Technology Managers Have Fun, Get Paid: How to Make a Living with Your Creativity The Career Programmer
I've been following this more closely; you have the right idea. Companies should be allowed to run themselves as necessary, within limits. I don't think Joe User should feel they have the right to choke all of an ISP's bandwidth. So long as more than 1 ISP exists competition should serve to balance between providing user's needs and gouging them. Where only 1 ISP exists though, things could get ugly. But we do have laws on the books to deal with that and don't need another government body policing this.
-
Christopher Duncan wrote:
Unless the government decides to take over an industry and seize the companies' assets, does it really have the right to tell a given company what it can do with the wires that it owns?
What happens if you want to create your own search engine. And google has contracted with every single provider in the country to allow cheaper access to google. So for anyone to use your search engine they will have to pay a fee every time they use it. Is that fair to the start up? Is that fair to the consumer?
No, it's not fair to the startup. It's also a violation of antitrust laws; we don't need more laws to prevent a situation like this.
-
No, it's not fair to the startup. It's also a violation of antitrust laws; we don't need more laws to prevent a situation like this.
Patrick Fox wrote:
It's also a violation of antitrust laws
Perhaps. But that would only be decided by the Justice Department and would be meaningless to a small start up since it would post their demise. It would also be decided on a case by case basis. And wouldn't apply to the providers. Net neutrality would prevent the possibility in the first place.
-
My analogies are great. And 4G is much, much faster than cable. Get your facts straight.
Simon O'Riordan from UK wrote:
And 4G is much, much faster than cable.
My cheap home cable has 50 meg down and 10 meg up. And I could pay more and get more. How much speed exactly do you think "4G" has? Do you think you have an option to get more bandwidth? How much bandwidth do you think a google farm has?
-
Patrick Fox wrote:
It's also a violation of antitrust laws
Perhaps. But that would only be decided by the Justice Department and would be meaningless to a small start up since it would post their demise. It would also be decided on a case by case basis. And wouldn't apply to the providers. Net neutrality would prevent the possibility in the first place.
What makes the fcc more capable of making such a decision than the justice department? And why do you think the fcc would always side with startups whereas the justice department wouldn't?
-
What makes the fcc more capable of making such a decision than the justice department? And why do you think the fcc would always side with startups whereas the justice department wouldn't?
Patrick Fox wrote:
What makes the fcc more capable of making such a decision than the justice department
First I didn't claim that the FCC was the only possibility. Second the FCC rule was placed on the providers and for all business. A anti-trust agreement would be unlikely to apply to providers nor all businesses.
Patrick Fox wrote:
And why do you think the fcc would always side with startups whereas the justice department wouldn't?
That statement has nothing to do with what I said and also has nothing to do with the FCC rule that was just struck down.