The Net Neutrality Thread

[Vintage television]

The vast and overwhelming majority of people use the Internet for entirely crap purposes... Myself included.

Truth be told we would all be better off going to a park perhaps to walk a dog, buy a child an ice cream or even just flying a kite. Again for the majority of the Internet using population there's nothing on the net we couldn't live without. So personally I don't give a damn about net neutrality or any of the other issues. In reality we would probably be a lot better off if we just unplugged the ethernet cable and went outside and planted a garden instead or visit some lonely old person that lives down the street.

[joew771]

Truth be told we would all be better off going to a park perhaps to walk a dog, buy a child an ice cream or even just flying a kite.

Bullshit.

The internet is fucking amazing. I can learn more from it in 5 minutes than I ever could flying a kite. Kites are boring.

I forgot what we were talking about.

[Vintage television]

Truth be told we would all be better off going to a park perhaps to walk a dog, buy a child an ice cream or even just flying a kite.

Bullshit.

The internet is fucking amazing. I can learn more from it in 5 minutes than I ever could flying a kite. Kites are boring.

I forgot what we were talking about.

Forgot what we're talking about LOL.

Seriously if you want to talk boring... I go to the library a lot!

You would be blown away by what you can learn at the library. Including picking up old books that clearly show where some corporate or government power has used the Internet to change history and/or the facts to suit their agenda. It's amazing how often the Net is a tool of propoganda without anyone knowing. Just as George Orwell said... ignorance is strength.

[joew771]

I went to the library just today as a matter of fact. True story. Books are the shit, but that doesn't mean that every book is real or true. Just like everything else, they can be good or bad, true or untrue, shit or not shit.

And George Orwell wasn't his real name. How messed up is that? The author of one of the most influential books of secrecy and subterfuge and misrepresentation, is using a fake name. lol.

The book is great. Though I think Animal Farm is almost better.

And what were we talking about again?

[Vintage television]

I went to the library just today as a matter of fact. True story. Books are the shit, but that doesn't mean that every book is real or true. Just like everything else, they can be good or bad, true or untrue, shit or not shit.

And George Orwell wasn't his real name. How messed up is that? The author of one of the most influential books of secrecy and subterfuge and misrepresentation, is using a fake name. lol.

The book is great. Though I think Animal Farm is almost better.

And what were we talking about again?

I've got no clue what we're talking about but for the first time in a very long time I'm actually somewhat enjoying an online diatribe.

There's no doubt that books rock! And I think that on the average books are far more accurate and factual than anything on the Internet could ever hope to be. Especailly when you compare it to garbage like Wikipedia.

The Internet is pop culture and popular opinions. It's dominated by the United States and many die hard adherents to the dichotomy of "the net will save us from the coming apocalypse" are simply functionally illiterate slobs. It's a sad commentary that I'm voicing but it's an obvious fact that most appear to live happily in denial of.

Now obviously I'm not saying the Internet is useless. But I am saying there's a world of other resources available and in the grand scheme it's relatively expendable. And it's very often 2 dimensional and lacking in the proverbial spice of life that makes living worthwhile. (((((( A good example is that I have a complete copy of "It Came From Outer Space" in 3D on Film.... The most expernsive and best HD is NOTHING compared to how much fun and pleasurable it is to sit with friends watching this movie.)))))

[NIK]

Figure out what we're talking about--all it takes is reading the opening post--and stick to it. Or start another fucking thread. Neither is really difficult.

/Mod

[snowmonkey]

These are the good ol days of the wild west internet.

Net neutrality is a quaint concept to the multinational corporations who see people as little more than a debt cow to be filled with the latest shiny junk and milked for the interest on the forever payment plan. They discover the counter culture's symbols and methods for interaction, then co-opt and co-modify them to generate conformity and as their own reinvention of economic selfishness masquerading as an idea. Idealism and the energy to sustain it are the stake and silver bullet that can slay the capitalist vampires money system. A culture where the only goal is to make money is morally bankrupt. Money needs a purpose.

[Mike]

Each day, the open internet/net neutrality battle gets a bit more interesting. We just covered Tim Lee's excellent look at how Comcast and other big telcos were effectively using interconnection disputes to get the same result as violating net neutrality, without technically violating the basic concept of what most people believe is net neutrality. And he's back with an even more important explanation of how Comcast's ultimate goal is to effectively make the internet more like the old phone system, post AT&T breakup, in which everyone had to pay to access the end points of the network. Ironically, they're trying to recreate the internet in the form of the old telephone network, while at the same time doing everything to resist being classified as a telephone network by the FCC.

The short version is that, after AT&T was broken up into the baby bells, and you had some amount of long distance competition, the real bottlenecks were the baby bells who had a terminating monopoly. Anyone who wanted to call someone long distance had to pay the terminating baby bell to reach those people, and since they were monopolies, they drove up the prices quite a bit. This is what happens under a sender-party pays system with monopolies on the last mile/termination points. The internet, on the other hand, was built under a very different system, what's known as "bill and keep", where by the end users pay for their own bandwidth, and ISPs are expected to work out the transit and interconnections on their own -- often with no money changing hands, thanks to what had been mostly informal (and later more formal) peering agreements.

In short: under the old baby bell model, payment mainly went from the "sender/caller" to the terminating provider for access to that end node. Under the internet model, the end nodes paid for access to "the internet" recognizing that part of the deal was that they were getting equal access to everyone else. The shift that Comcast (and now others) have been making, is to try to take their dominant position to recreate the old system, seeking to charge for access to those end nodes as well (effectively, as we've been saying for years, double charging for the internet). That is, they're seeking to have you both pay for your bandwidth and having internet companies pay again to get to you on the bandwidth you already paid for.

And the only reason they can do this is because they have tremendous market power. Comcast pretends that it's doing this because of differing traffic ratios between peering partners, but as Lee notes, that's not right:

But that's not how the internet works. Consumer-facing ISPs have always received more traffic than they send out. Comcast itself sells "unbalanced" internet service to its customers, with download speeds much faster than upload speeds. That makes it inevitable that ISPs like Comcast will receive more data than they send. But in the bill-and-keep model, ISPs generally pay transit providers for connectivity, regardless of traffic ratios.

The traffic ratio rule Comcast advocated in 2010 was a variation on the sender-pays rule. It will create the same kind of terminating monopoly problem that plagued the long distance telephone market. But that might not seem like a bad thing if you own the monopoly.

Again, what's really happening is that Comcast is trying to quietly recreate the baby bell system of old, in which it has enough power as a terminating monopoly to charge monopoly rents for "access" in a system that was built off of the idea that no one needs to pay to access another end point, you're just paying for your own connection to the network.

And the simple fact is that the other large ISPs (including AT&T and Verizon -- who understand this deeply, given their own histories) have caught onto what's happening and are doing the same thing. That's why the transit players are pointing out that the five biggest US ISPs have all been effectively clogging up the internet in order to effectively hold end internet sites hostage, to get them to pay for access, and to remake the internet's more open system into something that much more resembles the old telco system with monopoly rents.

And this is also why Comcast is being dreadfully misleading in arguing that its merger with Time Warner Cable won't impact anything, because the two are not in competitive markets. As Lee notes, Comcast is (purposefully) mis-identifying the market that's actually important here:

Defenders of the merger have argued that it won't reduce competition because Comcast and Time Warner don't serve the same customers. That's true, but it ignores how the merger would affect the interconnection market. A merged cable giant would have even more leverage to demand monopoly rents from companies across the internet.

A century ago, the Wilson administration decided not to press its antitrust case against AT&T, allowing the firm to continue the acquisition spree that made it a monopoly. In retrospect, that decision looks like a mistake. Wilson's decision not to intervene in the market led to a telephone monopoly, which in turn led to 70 years of regulation and a messy, 10-year antitrust case.

Obviously, the combination of Comcast and Time Warner would not dominate the internet the way AT&T dominated the telephone industry. But recent events suggest that Comcast is already large enough to threaten competition on the internet. Preventing the company from getting even larger might avoid the need for a lot more regulation in the years ahead.

The interconnection market is where Comcast has tremendous leverage, and Time Warner Cable will only give them much more leverage. And they're using it to reshape the internet in a very dangerous way, which will make internet connections more expensive, with no direct benefit. On top of that, it will slow down the ability for startups to create new innovations by increasing the cost (potentially massively) to innovate on the network by creating access tolls.

Oh, and the major problem is that the FCC still doesn't even seem to realize this is the issue, with Tom Wheeler arguing that the interconnection issue isn't really an issue at all, despite it likely being the issue here. As Lee explains concerning telco regulations around a terminating monopoly system: Unfortunately, while all-knowing perfectly benevolent regulators could make this work, in practice regulators tend to be neither all-knowing nor benevolent.

So imagine what kind of internet we'll have when you recreate the terminating monopoly tollbooths, combined with regulators who still don't seem to even realize what's going on.


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[Mike]

If you've been following the whole net neutrality fight for a while, the following graphic may be familiar to you -- showing what a potential "cable-ized" world the internet would become without strong protections for net neutrality:

At some point, someone created a similar version, that was specific to AT&T:

A little while ago, however, someone took the joke even further, and set up a website for a fake broadband provider, asking people to Join the Fastlane!, and it was pretty dead on in terms of what such a site might look like:

I particularly like this bit:

It's now come out that this campaign (along with some associated billboards) has been put together by BitTorrent Inc., not all that different than the company's billboard campaign against the NSA. Along with this, BitTorrent has put out a blog post explaining, in part, how we got here, but more importantly how we need to start thinking about a better way to handle internet traffic to avoid the kind of future described above.

The key issue: building a more decentralized internet:

Many smart researchers are already thinking about this problem. Broadly speaking, this re-imagined Internet is often called Content Centric Networking. The closest working example we have to a Content Centric Network today is BitTorrent. What if heavy bandwidth users, say, Netflix, for example, worked more like BitTorrent?

If they did, each stream — each piece of content — would have a unique address, and would be streamed peer-to-peer. That means that Netflix traffic would no longer be coming from one or two places that are easy to block. Instead, it would be coming from everywhere, all at once; from addresses that were not easily identified as Netflix addresses — from addresses all across the Internet.

To the ISP, they are simply zeroes and ones.

All equal.

There's obviously a lot more to this, but it's good to see more and more people realizing that one of the fundamental problems that got us here is the fact that so much of the internet has become centralized -- and, as such, can be easily targeted for discrimination. Making the internet much more decentralized is a big step in making it so that discrimination and breaking net neutrality aren't even on the table.

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[Mike]

For years, people have wondered if one of the best tools to prevent ISPs from behaving too badly in breaking net neutrality would just be public shaming. Netflix has long released data on ISP performance, and then got into some hot water last month when it started directly blaming ISPs for network congestion, leading Verizon to send a cease-and-desist letter. Quartz is reporting that YouTube has been doing something similar, though it's not quite as in-your-face as the Netflix example. If the connection is weak, YouTube displays a blue bar beneath the video, with the words "Experiencing Interruptions?" in white:

Click on the "Find out why" link and you get taken to Google's "Video Quality Report" which tells you some information about your ISP and how congested the network is (or, at least sometimes -- in my case, it tells me it doesn't have enough information about my provider, which happens to be Sonic.net, to determine any results).

Of course, all the public shaming in the world isn't going to matter much if ISPs are free to clog up interconnection points and you have no real competition to go to.


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