“The U.S. House of Representatives definitively rejected the concept of Net neutrality on Thursday, dealing a bitter blow to Internet companies like Amazon.com, eBay and Google that had engaged in a last-minute lobbying campaign to support it. By a 269-152 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband providers from treating some Internet sites differently from others,” Declan McCullagh reports for CNET News. “Of the 421 House members who participated in the vote that took place around 6:30 p.m. PT, the vast majority of Net neutrality supporters were Democrats. Republicans represented most of the opposition.”
“At issue is a lengthy measure called the Communications Opportunity, Promotion, and Enhancement (COPE) Act, which a House committee approved in April. Its Republican backers, along with broadband providers such as Verizon and AT&T, say it has sufficient Net neutrality protections for consumers, and more extensive rules would discourage investment in wiring American homes with higher-speed connections,” McCullagh reports. “Defenders of the COPE Act, largely Republicans, dismissed worries about Net neutrality as fear mongering. ‘I want a vibrant Internet just like they do,’ said Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican. ‘Our disagreement is about how to achieve that. They say let the government dictate it…I urge my colleagues to reject government regulation of the Internet.'”
“While the debate over Net neutrality started over whether broadband providers could block certain Web sites, it has moved on to whether they should be permitted to create a ‘fast lane’ that could be reserved for video or other specialized content,” McCullagh reports.
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: We don’t presume to know the best way to get there, but we support the concept of “Net Neutrality” especially as it pertains to preventing the idea of ISP’s blocking or otherwise impeding sites that don’t pay the ISP to ensure equal access. That said, we usually prefer the government to be hands-off wherever possible, Laissez-faire, except in cases where the free market obviously cannot adequately self-regulate (antitrust, for just one example). Regulations are static and the marketplace is fluid, so extensive regulations can have unintended, unforeseen results down the road. We sincerely hope that there are enough forces in place and/or that the balances adjust in such a manner as to keep the ‘Net neutral. What do you think?
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Related articles:
Google posts call to action on ‘net neutrality’ – June 09, 2006
Republican morons need to research before they put words on the internet.
If you people only knew what you were talking about, or had any intelligence… God can only imagine. You only showing how high your I.Q. is and how much s%$t for brains you have. Jerks.
From: “Net Neutrality” SUCKS!
Jun 09, 06 – 02:17 pm
“Net neutrality” is a retarded, ANTI-consumer initiative by some major corporations (i.e., Google, Amazon, etc.) interested in fleecing other major corporations (i.e., telcos, etc.), to the detriment of consumers. Telcos have every right to charge whatever they want to whoever they want for services they offer through their pipes. As it turns out, that position is also PRO-consumer. Allowing broadband providers to recoup their investment as they see fit will result in more broadband investment and thus, better–and ultimately cheaper–broadband. The feds could do one thing to help though–eliminate busybody local “community” regulators from the process, preventing the locals from granting monopoly licenses to their favorite cable providers or telephone companies. Other than that, the federal government is the problem on this issue, not the solution. Frankly, it is amazing how naive most MDN readers are, how easily so-called “idealists” are manipulated into supporting some greedy corporations’ agenda and shooting themselves (i.e., consumers) in the foot in the bargain.
More Econ 101 for the masses, and let’s make it mandatory!
Kate
P.S. Time to sit back and celebrate this sweet victory with a salty margarita on the rocks….mmm, yum!
Ashan,
“Republican morons need to research before they put words on the Internet.”
ALL MORONS (including you and me) should be quick to listen and slow to speak… regardless of party affiliation.
What do I think? I think the Republicans would sell their own mothers to the highest bidder.
No one asked you what you think.
Now, run away before I have the INS check your papers.
XOXOXO,
Kate
Would any of you tolerate the USPS or UPS or FedEx charging both the sender AND the recipient? What if I paid for express delivery at the receiving end, but could get only 7-day delivery if that’s all the sender paid for, or vice versa? We’d be screaming bloody murder. Well, this is exactly the kind of scam the telcos and cable companies are trying to put over on us. It’s goddamned unchecked corporate greed at its worst, and the fallout is going to be ugly indeed if they succeed.
Damn fools.
We created the Internet. We, alone, shall control it the way we see fit.
You will obey us.
The Illuminati
Novus Ordo Seclorum (New World Order)
Kate –
Go diddle yourself. MDN asked what I think. Read the last line of MDN’s take.
I think it ironically appropriate that a pinhead like you would fall back on threatening to sick the government on me. Wanna explain now how you’re in favor of small government?
The bandwidth providers are in the business of providing content. They should not be in the business of regulating content via imposition of private taxes. People like you are against government interference in private affairs, but you’re perfectly happy to hand over the power to interfere in private affairs to profit-motivated, unelected, and unaccountable corporate oligopolies who and entirely free from either public oversight or competitive pressure because THERE IS NO FREE MARKET. I can choose between Verizon and Comcast. You call that a free market? Take Economics 101 and then come back.
Correction:
“The bandwidth providers are in the business of providing content” should have read,
“The bandwidth providers are in the business of providing BANDWIDTH.”
Another correction:
…who ARE entirely free…
Damn you Kate. Now I’m so terrified of a visit from INS that I can’t even type properly.
Kate –
“Telcos have every right to charge whatever they want to whoever they want for services they offer through their pipes.”
Given that they have oligopolies, and in many markets monopolies, this is patently wrong. You’d be screaming bloody murder if your local water board were privatized and implemented a tiered pricing scheme along the lines of:
Drip, drip, drip plan – $50/mo.
Dribble, dribble plan – $75/mo.
Just enough pressure to wash the dishes plan – $100/mo.
Steaming hot shower plan – $200/mo.
(Additional per-gallon usage fee of $1/gallon applies.)
Clearly, all you understand about economics is what Dubya has said about it on TV, which is precious little. In public infrastructure, there can never be a free market with numerous suppliers and low barriers to entry because duplication is financially impossible. That being the case, it is the government’s job to balance private and public interests. Now, though, private interests have bought the government, and the public is getting screwed.
If I pay for high-speed access, and the content providers pay for high-speed access, how are additional charges, other than accross-the-board per-megabyte charges based on cost and applied equally to all users, justified? They’re not. And, you’re just a willing dupe for greedheads who don’t even have the decency to pay you for your puppy-like subservience.
Or, do they?
heh, heh, heh…
I love to see reactionaries get worked up and start sloganeering. Free the net! Net neutrality! The telcom billionaires are evil! The Google and eBay billionaires are altruistic gods! Neocons! Liberals! Capitalists!
I’m so glad, btw, that Google finally found its ethical voice (oddly enough, when its wallet was endangered) after enthusiastically bending over and lubing up for the PRC.
The net, folks is not neutral now. Never has been. At least, if completely privatized, it will be non-neutral, efficient, and low-cost.
This whole silliness is a tempest in a teacup the will dissipate when the cables are obsolete. But it sure is fun to watch everyone get worked up in the meantime! This is what happens in affluent societies – everything gets blown out of proportion by people who need a little strife every day.
Okay, dude. Everybody knows you’re gay. You’ve worked it into every conceivable topic on these boards, and now you’ve managed to shoehorn your sex life into a discussion of telcom franchise rights.
suggestion – just change your screen name to “Mike Buonarroti is GAY!” – that way you can just comment on the topic at hand without having to try and steer the topic towards your sexual preferences –
Like davida, I’m going to para-post something from last time around. Kate’s bloviations kind of demand it.
Kate:
The net exists because of a government initiative – popularly known as DARPA-funded ARPANET. The ever-hated Al Gore took the lead in 1988 funding the high speed nodes that became the precursors to what we use to day, as well as later allowing private, commerical interests on it, and keeping it largely unregulated so as to help them make a buck from the opportunities it afforded. Later, the telecos (who inherited almost the entire setup from the the British JANET & U.S. NSFNET programs) got plenty of tax breaks in this country to upgrade their ‘pipes’.
Most of the story can be found here:
http://www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml
And yet now you think these same beneficiaries of the public teat should be able to make the internet their own private pay-to-playground? Our taxes made the net, not Verizon or AT&T et al … therefore the government has every right – in fact, a duty – to make sure we don’t get fleeced for helping these companies become the communications powerhouses they are today.
I absolutely loved this statement from your last post on this subject: “The feds could do one thing to help though–eliminate busybody local “community” regulators from the process, preventing the locals from granting monopoly licenses to their favorite cable providers or telephone companies.”
Kind of off topic, but it does show you really are a special kind of fool. For your edification, it’s the cable providers and telecos – your freemarket champions – that spend millions to lobby the government, at all levels, to ENSURE their anti-free market monopolies stay intact. The federal government had a few bills in pending in Congress in the 90s that were intended to break those monopolies. I’ll give you 3 guesses which party scuttled the project, and the first two don’t have to count.
As an Independent (perhaps another kind of fool), basically I believe in gun ownership, progressive taxation, & free markets for consumer goods. However, I also realize that a sizable portion of those who run the larger for-profit conglomerates would sell their own mothers into slavery if it meant making a buck – because that’s just what they do, nothing personal. Pardon me for not wanting to be inadvertantly victimized by the mentality fostered by that quirk of the system though. You see, no matter how great it is at making refrigerators affordable, if any economic system at some point doesn’t serve the humans who invented it, I feel it needs to be checked at that point. Call me crazy.
Speaking of crazy, what I find most amusing are you neo-capitalist groupies, all praying for the day you’ll be so rich as to not have to concern yourselves with your fellow man in the least. Who, quite ironically, hate the government with all the righteous passion you can muster, but who couldn’t survive a day in a world without it, because you’re nowhere near as rugged as you think you are. And who have never & would never turn down your own chance at the public trough, whatever form that might take.
Obviously you’re intelligent. But your position here, at least, just goes to prove that intelligence and wisdom are not at all the same thing.
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Nice response!!
Re: Net Neutrality Bill
Take 10 min and listen to this audio on the subject:
<http://blog.gildertech.com>
Be thankful that the amendment failed. But do listen to the podcast.
Dan
There is clearly a conflict of interest. If the net infrastructure providers also provide content and therefore can favor their own content over the content of eg. a competitor….. the looser is us the net users!
The bandwidth providers already get paid according to the bandwidth companies and consumers are willing to pay for.
This is simply a powergrab of the bandwidth providers to be able the MILK the net…. AT THE COST OF USERS!
A free market can regulate itself if there is competition, but in most areas THERE IS NO COMPETITION… GET IT?
Anyone who cannot undertsand this is plain STUPID!
@Dan Kurt – Listened to the podcast………Both interesting and thought provoking. Thanks for the link.
What do I think, MDN? I think there is no way to keep the net neutral when large telecom companies can buy and sell Congressmen to get whatever legislation they want. All this blather about a free market that simply does not exist in a country where corporate lobbyists run the show and feed at the public trough in a way that all the welfare recipients that ever lived could not out do. Ours is not a laissez faire system it is a system of corporate state capitalism that protects the entrenched and powerful. Much as I desire it, I do not expect to see a truly free market emerge in my lifetime.
About the gildertech podcast:
I didn’t intend this to be a blow-by-blow, but as I listened, I felt compelled to comment. Here it is, FWIW.
“Netcompetition.org is funded by a wide range of broadband telecomm, cable, and wireless companies.”
Kinda gives away the game, doesn’t it? Nice of them to disclose that up-front, though.
“We launched netcompetition.org to promote an open, vigorous and illuminating debate on the merits of net neutrality legislation.”
The way Bill O’Reilly promotes an open, vigorous and illuminating debate on the merits of the Food Stamps or Worker’s Compensation programs.
Gee, why do I get the feeling I already know where this is going?
Follow-up: These guys are clearly paid hacks.
“If the core of the network is not maintained and improved, the network will wither.”
No kidding. Isn’t that why I pay $30/month for access whether I use it or not? Isn’t that also why I pay net hosting fees? For access to the network that is maintained and improved with the fees I and my site’s net hosting company and other consumers and content providers already pay?
So far, I’m not impressed. Gilder’s already forecasting doom and gloom despite the fact that we’ve come as far as we have on the basis of existing subscriber fees for consumers and content providers.
“We’re 16th or 17th in broadband penetration.”
This has a lot to do with the fact that the US is much more geographically spread out than most of the countries that are ahead of us. It’s the less densely populated areas that are most expensive to reach. Know what the solution was when we developed our highway, phone and electrical networks? Government programs that paid for the infrastructure investments with regulated fees and taxes that were kept to a minimum and were structured so that even the neediest among us could afford them and benefit from them. Ever heard of the Rural Electrification Program? Those government programs put us decades ahead of the rest of the world.
“It can be a carnival of lawyers.”
Or, it can be a simple government infrastructure investment based on cost and ability to pay rather than a for-profit boondoggle based on monopoly power, extortion, and greed unrestrained by competitive pressure. It is exactly those areas that most need investment in broadband infrastructure where competition will be weakest.
“Eliminate price controls.”
Oh, yeah, that’s a recipe for providing the most expensive “last mile” to rural areas at the same price as the rest of the country.
The guy’s a blowhard who loves to rail against “regulation” while ignoring the practicalities of cost and burden-sharing involved in extending broadband beyond the most profitable urban centers.
“The tech and ecommerce people are now wanting to compete by getting into communications… But they don’t want the communications companies to be able to vertically integrate or converge into content or ecommerce.”
Here, the interviewer has a good point. Telcos and cable companies should not be put in a structurally disadvantageous position in competing against new companies that want to offer the same services via infrastructure built and paid for by telco/cable. It should not be the case that VoIP vendors get a free ride by avoiding paying the same infrastructure costs borne by the Telcos.
However, what this argues for is the opposite of what’s being advocated. Content and infrastructure should be kept separate. As telecomm and internet infrastructure becomes one and the same thing, the business of maintaining and expanding the physical network should be separated from services, and would-be service providers (voice, video, simple net access) should be given equal access at to the infrastructure at standard, scaled fees. This would be true free competition. Since it’s impractical to have multiple companies building their own, redundant, networks, building and maintenance of infrastructure should be managed in the same way as that of other monolithic public infrastructure. The highways are built and maintained by the government, and the trucking companies have equal access to them and compete on cost and quality of service. The key is that access should be neutral – same terms, conditions and costs for everyone based on use. I’m not necessarily saying that the government should build the network, but that it should be made a single business, like power utilities, that’s managed for maximum public benefit in such a way that it generates a reasonable profit for the private companies that do the actual work.
What should not happen is a situation where the power company gets into the business of making and selling appliances and charges you more to operate appliances from its competitors or causes brownouts in your household when you do so. This is the situation we’ll be facing if the infrastructure managers are the same people competing in the services markets.
to be continued…
…continued
“It [network expansion] won’t happen if conditions are created where these investments won’t yield a profit.”
True, but that doesn’t mean we have to hold content hostage to capacity. The simple solution is to pay for network expansion and maintenance with simple cost-based per-unit fees for access. Which is exactly what we’ve had until now. This is all a red herring. There is no reason why infrastructure investments have to be paid for by discriminatory and inconsistent pricing that’s based not on cost but on whether the content or service provider is a competitor or partner for one of the capacity companies’ services. The proposal to capriciously grant faster or slower access based on factors other than fees for capacity usage is particularly anti-competitive.
“When you compare the capital investment dollars of the Bells and cable companies to the ecommerce and tech companies, they invest – ecommerce, tech – about a nickle for every dollar that the broadband providers do, because providing broadband is very capital-intensive.”
RED HERRING ALERT!
That’s why I pay Verizon for access. They don’t provide any other service (aside for an email account and minimal “free” web hosting space). They just hook me up. I’m not paying for content or services – I’m just paying for access to the infrastructure. And, so are the ecommerce companies. I pay the ecommerce companies for their goods and services. Everyone gets paid for what they provide. It’s the infrastructure providers who are looking to leverage their monopolistic control over the network to put profitable services providers whose markets they want to enter at a competitive disadvantage. This smacks of anti-competitive abuse of monopoly power. And they’re asking the government to give them the green light to do it.
When Microsoft abused its control over the desktop to suppress consumer access to infrastructure-dependent products (Netscape, Java) in order to give put them at a competitive disadvantage and enter their market, Judge Jackson rightly slapped this down as an abuse of monopoly power. How is granting the telcos and cable companies the right to impose discriminatory pricing and substandard access on service and content providers whose markets they want to enter any different?
“What net neutrality is all about is essentially riding on the back of somebody else’s investment, isn’t that true?
“That’s exactly right.”
Wrong. Net neutrality is about equal access at equal pricing. Everyone pays the same for the same amount of bandwidth. End of story.
“These guys should pay a windfall fibers (finders?) tax.”
Now they want a percent of ecommerce sales?! Do the state highway departments get a cut of all shipments, making more per truckload of fur coats than per truckload of potato chips? What in Hell is he talking about?
I’m sorry, but the rest of the interview, about the last three minutes, is just incoherent drivel.
Aside from the points about free rides and equal access (which were turned on their heads), these guys just don’t make a lot of sense. Basically, they’re conjuring up bogeymen and spouting generalities.
Okay, who’s next?
Majikthize: Good post. Your point about the complaint of opponents to NN arguing for the opposite of what’s being advocated was particularly sharp.
I too have recognized that telcos (in particular, but not only) are in a singularly wierd position in competing against companies offering a lot the same services, with their infrastructure. Although that just shows what TRUE competiton will do – force a hidebound industry to respond or die when a better competitor comes along. Unfortunately, because of their gatekeeper status, the telecos’ response with these anti-nuetrality goals is to starngle the competition before it can hurt them. Not too good for the consumer, eh?
I also came to the same conclusion as you; content and infrastructure should be made as separate as possible. In our hybrid system that’s not easy. How do you seperate the business of maintaining and expanding the network from profitable services on same, within the same company? In Korea, the government created the backbone – a faster, more ubiquitous infrastructure than any a for-profit company would be willing to fund themselves. Everyone gets to use it wityhout prejudice. BTW – ironically the ‘anti-government’ podcast guest points to Korea as a country to emulate! (I wonder; are these people brain dead, or do they just asume no one is really listening?)
Anyway, there’s no way our Congress or president would ever allow the same thing in this political environment, no matter how good for business it would be. Concentrated vested interests stand to lose way too mauch money if something like that comes to pass, and they’re willing to spend whatever it takes via lobbying to keep it at bay. The only option is government regulation – nothing more radical than what we’ve been doing for decades – to keep the ‘pipes’ open for everyone at an equal rate.
The highways and the trucking companies example you give – with the latter having x-number of companies with equal access, competing on cost and quality – is a good analogy. I’d only clarify what you said a bit. The highways aren’t built and maintained by the government, but the government does pay private companies to do that work for them, and sets certain parameters in law for how they do it. Seems to work well enough – so too for the telecos IMO.
As for this podast, I was suspicious of it right from the start. The webpage has an article right below the pod-link railing on how the Enron guys were railroaded – if that’s not an indictation of a boardroom-friendly website, I don’t know what is. And when the introduction of the ‘guest expert’ began sounding like a paid advertisment for the business of the same … well, I knew there was going to be very little debate here (the interviewer did offer up a few softballs of what the ‘other side’ says, but he abandoned that pretty quickly). This was just a podcast position statement on why these two particular people think NN is bad, one of whom has an vested financial interest in getting rid of it, without any real counterpoint.
Nice try, but no points.
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Thanks, Odyssey. I was feeling kinda down about this thread until I saw your earlier post. I notice Kate hasn’t been around lately…
BTW, I found a really excellent article on the issue under “network neutrality” on wikipedia.org. A good intro to the technical, economic and political basics of the concept.