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Kai
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Unread postby Kai » Tue Apr 15, 2008 7:54 pm

A friend reminded me of something I've been intending to post about for a while.

Net Neutrality: A Tale of Two Internets

Would you pay extra for a guaranteed instant e-mail service? What about faster downloads, clearer internet phone calls and uninterrupted web-streamed broadcasts? Or, do you believe such services should be covered by the £20 per month you pay your ISP as a type of "minimum services guarantee"?

Welcome to the net neutrality debate, a squabble that could forever change our leisurely surfing habits. The idea is that with so much junk shovelled onto the internet every day, there should be a clutter-free VIP pipe that ensures faster downloads and clearer voice over IP calls. The concept has its appeals - for those who can afford it. And if America's phone companies have their way, it could be written into telecoms reforms there to establish essentially two internets - a premium network for the well-off, fabulous and beautiful - and the ordinary net for the rest of us who will presumably have to queue up to access our e-mail and Google.


Virgin Media CEO Says Net Neutrality is “A Load of Bollocks”

Net neutrality really is the hot topic at the moment. Ignited by the Comcast fiasco, the concept of net neutrality has certainly been brought into the mainstream. Most ISPs are never quite forthcoming about their throttling, capping and otherwise interfering behavior, but that crowd certainly doesn’t include the CEO of Virgin Media, the UK’s second largest ISP.

In an interview with the Royal Television Society’s Television magazine, far from covering up their intentions, Virgin Media’s new incoming CEO Neil Berkett - who joined the Virgin Media Board just a few days ago - has launched an attack on the ideas and principles behind net neutrality.

“This net neutrality thing is a load of bollocks,” he said, adding that Virgin is already in the process of doing deals to speed up the traffic of certain media providers.


There are groups out there that are claiming giving ISPs the right to regulate which sites their customers can view is a GOOD thing. Does that make any damned sense to you? It shouldn't. Because it doesn't. All it does is disenfranchise bloggers, filesharers, and basically anybody who can't afford to simultaneously pay for webspace AND bribe all the ISPs to ensure their content is let through at an equal rate.

I know that most of the people reading this probably aren't used to the idea that they can do anything politically, but if not you... then who? There is ONLY you. However, this isn't the first time this has happened. Internet users have stopped it before, and we have to do it again. If this kind of crap is allowed a toehold, every provider will start doing it, and the internet as we know it (a place where everyone can share information as equals) will be destroyed. But they can be stopped.

Savetheinternet.com has plenty of information. This is from 4 Things You Need to Know on their site.

1. An Open Internet Is Vital to America.
High-speed Internet access is no longer a luxury; it’s a lifeline for every American. The Internet has fueled economic growth and engaged millions in our democracy. No other tool in history has held such promise. When we block citizens from getting online or accessing the content or applications of their choice, we undermine the Internet’s vital democratic potential. We must make sure that every American can benefit from access to a fast, open and affordable Internet. We all should be free to connect to others without censorship or discrimination.

2. Consumers Don’t Have Real Broadband Choice.
The cable and phone duopoly now controls more than 95 percent of the residential broadband market in America. Moreover, a significant portion of the country has only one broadband provider to choose from — or none at all. As a result, America has fallen behind other developed nations in high-speed Internet services. A recent survey by the International Telecommunications Union shows the United States slipping to 16th in the world in broadband penetration (down from fourth in 2001). American consumers now pay far more for slower speeds than consumers in Japan, France, Denmark, South Korea and other countries. Americans must no longer be held captive by a lack of choice.

3. Phone and Cable Companies Plan to Block, Degrade and Filter Web Content.
The top executives of nearly every major telecom company have stated that they intend to start manipu-lating content on the Internet. Some are already carrying out these plans: In 2007, Comcast blocked competing content-sharing applications; Verizon blocked text messages sent by NARAL Pro-Choice America to its own members; and AT&T launched plans to filter all Web traffic for possible copyright infringements. For years, Net Neutrality prevented network operators from interfering with and discriminating against Web traffic in this way. But a 2005 FCC decision — pushed by industry lobbyists — stripped away this protection. Now it’s up to citizens to confront this rising threat and safeguard a free-flowing Internet.

4. You Can Make a Difference.
In 2006, more than 1.5 million Americans urged Congress to take a stand against Internet gatekeepers, stopping legislation that would have gutted Net Neutrality protections. Now, Reps. Ed Markey and Chip Pickering have introduced the bipartisan “Internet Freedom Preservation Act” (HR 5353), a major step toward a forward-thinking communications policy. It ensures that Net Neutrality protections apply to new broadband services. It guarantees that economic innovation and free speech will continue to flourish on the Internet by stopping would-be gatekeepers from discriminatory blocking or interfering. It also calls for a nationwide series of public hearings. By taking the debate beyond the Beltway, we have a rare opportunity to make certain that phone and cable lobbyists no longer set the agenda. Support this important bill by visiting SavetheInternet.com.


For those of you who live in America, here is a letter to send to your members of Congress. All you have to do is fill in your information and Savetheinternet.com will send it for you. I strongly suggest you sign it.

For those of you in Europe, your first task is easy: stop giving Virgin money. Luckily the EU is in favor of Net Neutrality, so let's hope that America doesn't set a precedent that gives assholes like Berkett the room to give you inferior service.

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PriamNevhausten
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Unread postby PriamNevhausten » Tue Apr 15, 2008 8:49 pm

As any good Mensan ought, I am of three minds of this.

Mind the first wants to write a spoof of Kai's opening post, comparing the situation with internet access speed to, say, automotive capacity. GM wants to keep us at a lower horsepower by selling their high-horsepower machines at a price that is prohibitive to lower and middle-class citizens! Cars have allowed for unprecedented growth in American industry, and have become lifelines for the American way of life. ROAD NEUTRALITY MUST REIGN

For you see, I don't actually see that as a problem. Before the almighty Cable modem was available to the populace at large, I was on...gasp!...dialup. If I wanted to stay online more than 8 hours at a time, I had to pay my ISP for a dedicated connection. Nobody gave a shit then, but now? Super big deal.

If I wanted to go faster than dialup, and not just longer on dialup, then I had to order a special DSL line, which was pricey. Did anybody say anything about how The Man was trying to keep us down, away from our business communications and online productivity? No, not really.

Granted, though, that we use the internet a lot more today than those ten years ago, the principle is comparable. People pay more for better stuff. This is how a market economy works. Welcome to America. Hope you stick around.

Part number two is that, while the idea of You Get What You Pay For is fine, the idea of them actively restricting data they don't like from access is full of shit. I mean, we can't really prevent them since, you know, private companies and whathaveyou, but it's not exactly ethical business practice. At that point we start thinking about antitrust suits, and ways to get more than one provider to an area.

Part three is that, part two notwithstanding, everybody will be REALLY upset if their internet connections get WORSE for the same price because of a speedy-pipe alternate system. If everyone's connection speed for the price they pay now remains the same, that's kosher and fine--just adding a higher-high-speed connection option is a 'bonus' optional feature. But we'd better not get a serious drop in our bandwidth and bitrate when their dedicated rich-people (how rich are we talking, anyway?) lines go up. Again, not something we can really stop, because, you know, private enterprise, but the market would cause a need for another provider to swoop in and provide better, more ethically consistent service.
"You haven't told me what I'm looking for."
"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
--Colin Laney and Kathy Torrance, William Gibson's Idoru

Idran1701
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Unread postby Idran1701 » Tue Apr 15, 2008 9:26 pm

PriamNevhausten wrote:As any good Mensan ought, I am of three minds of this.

Mind the first wants to write a spoof of Kai's opening post, comparing the situation with internet access speed to, say, automotive capacity. GM wants to keep us at a lower horsepower by selling their high-horsepower machines at a price that is prohibitive to lower and middle-class citizens! Cars have allowed for unprecedented growth in American industry, and have become lifelines for the American way of life. ROAD NEUTRALITY MUST REIGN

For you see, I don't actually see that as a problem. Before the almighty Cable modem was available to the populace at large, I was on...gasp!...dialup. If I wanted to stay online more than 8 hours at a time, I had to pay my ISP for a dedicated connection. Nobody gave a shit then, but now? Super big deal.

If I wanted to go faster than dialup, and not just longer on dialup, then I had to order a special DSL line, which was pricey. Did anybody say anything about how The Man was trying to keep us down, away from our business communications and online productivity? No, not really.


This analogy doesn't hold at all. As much as I appreciate Kai's post, it misrepresents the issue of net neutrality slightly. It isn't talking purely about what's available to the consumer. It's talking about organizations paying ISPs to give their websites faster access compared to competitors. For example, were net neutrality abolished, Yahoo could pay Verizon to give connections to their websites a greater speed than connections to Google.

While the issue of access to consumers is part of it, net neutrality is something that spans both sides of the internet. And while we are in a market economy, would that make it right for GM to pay toll stations to charge GM cars a lower fee than Honda?

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PriamNevhausten
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Unread postby PriamNevhausten » Tue Apr 15, 2008 9:44 pm

I wonder if 'rightness' has a place in this discussion? Rather than legality, I mean. Ideally, sure, moral 'right' and legal permissibility go hand in hand, but morals are fluctuational from person to person, and even between short spans of time in the same person.

Even discounting that, there are still a number of things people can do that are stupid and/or wrong, but perfectly legal. But then we get the community at work: People tend to dislike assholes, and give negative reinforcement towards acting like a decent human being. Similarly, in the market, if a company does something shitty, then frequently people cease to engage in business with them, negatively reinforcing ethical business practices. And we get back to my argument earlier about a new force in the market coming up to take the place of those who distribute their service irresponsibly.

Also, I'm not sure about the legality of, for example, GM offering turnpike stipends to their customers. So I feel ill equipped to tackle that argument, although on the surface I see little wrong with it, as it looks to me rather like the thing we call 'coupons.' As long as we're not talking antitrust-caliber deals, then I'd need more information before I start to really care.

What I'm finding hard to judge as wrong is that, in your example, an entity is causing their clients' purchase prices of other stuff to be lower. It would be another issue completely if instead they were causing non-clients' purchase prices to be higher.
"You haven't told me what I'm looking for."
"Anything that might be of interest to Slitscan. Which is to say, anything that might be of interest to Slitscan's audience. Which is best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth, Laney, no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections."
--Colin Laney and Kathy Torrance, William Gibson's Idoru

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Besyanteo
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Unread postby Besyanteo » Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:46 pm

Even discounting that, there are still a number of things people can do that are stupid and/or wrong, but perfectly legal. But then we get the community at work: People tend to dislike assholes, and give negative reinforcement towards acting like a decent human being. Similarly, in the market, if a company does something shitty, then frequently people cease to engage in business with them, negatively reinforcing ethical business practices. And we get back to my argument earlier about a new force in the market coming up to take the place of those who distribute their service irresponsibly.


I feel this point ignores an important point in Ashley's opening post, one I can most definitely identify with:

2. Consumers Don’t Have Real Broadband Choice.
The cable and phone duopoly now controls more than 95 percent of the residential broadband market in America. Moreover, a significant portion of the country has only one broadband provider to choose from — or none at all. As a result, America has fallen behind other developed nations in high-speed Internet services. A recent survey by the International Telecommunications Union shows the United States slipping to 16th in the world in broadband penetration (down from fourth in 2001). American consumers now pay far more for slower speeds than consumers in Japan, France, Denmark, South Korea and other countries. Americans must no longer be held captive by a lack of choice.


For a very long time, there was a single provider of broadband internet access in my area, "Adelphia Cable." Adelphia was bought out by Comcast a few years ago, and it's customer base transfered over to Comcast service. So then Comcast was our only provider, and still is. Verizon has been promising for something like 7 years to put up Fiber Optics lines in this part of Virginia, and only just in the spring of 2008 began to lay the cables for that. The service still isn't available because it's not fully installed into the ground yet.

Now let us suppose that the Net Neutrality Pact didn't exist, and Comcast was still altering and editting content viewable by their customers. Maybe they want to have their own exclusive pay for instant messenging services? Well, it would be hard to get off the ground, what with all the free to download and use messenging services currently in existence. Unless of course they cut it off. Then they could charge me, say, a reasonable sounding $0.50 a month to add Instant Messaging to my service, and be able to talk to people on AIM and Yahoo and MSN and whatever.

Well, I could change to dial up. The phone line is there, and it was good enough for me and the family in 1996. Except in 1996, it wasn't often you needed to download or receive a 50 Meg file, tying up the phone for a few hours. Time during which, say, emergency services might be trying to contact us about my brother in Oregon. Sorry, James. We were taking two hours to get a bugfix for Linux or XP. We had to leave the net up and the phone off for an hour so that we could get our taxes in on time. Steam Games Update was running, and 200 megs takes a while on 56k. Sure, we could get a second phone line, we can afford that. But not everyone can, and the point stands.

Dial up is becoming a less and less feasible option as data becomes larger, and we wouldn't be using Comcast's overpriced service here right now if we had an alternative. So if Comcast engaged in business practices we found distasteful, what could we do about it?

Again, not something we can really stop, because, you know, private enterprise, but the market would cause a need for another provider to swoop in and provide better, more ethically consistent service.


Verizon has been 7 years in getting it's act together. I don't know about other companies, but that kind of swooping in isn't very practical when a problem arises.

Idran1701
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Unread postby Idran1701 » Tue Apr 15, 2008 10:52 pm

The point it that net neutrality would remove the capability of choice from the consumer. It would reduce the ability of the consumer to make a choice given that the accessibility is limited by the companies involved paying off the ISP to reduce the level of service to a competitor. It is equivalent to a broadcast network paying a local affiliate to put static in a competitor's network. Or, to give a specific historical legal example, to pay a radio station to promote their song as if it was random choice by the DJ. And accepting these payments by the companies would be far more profitable for the ISPs than supporting consumers that don't want it. There would be no reason for every ISP to not do this, considering that the few ISPs not to would only receive informed consumers, they would likely not be able to provide the level of service given by the biggest names the companies would be most likely to pay, and the amount of lost revenue would not compare to the payment being given to the ISPs by those companies wanting priority given to their websites.

This is an antitrust issue. And considering only legality is, quite frankly, a ridiculous view to hold when we're discussing whether or not a law should be passed or repealed, considering that viewing it from a current legal view would say to keep the law as it is regardless of the situation. You have to consider some sort of extralegal evaluation system when you're talking about how the law should be changed.


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