“A US Senate committee on Wednesday, with a tie vote, rejected a proposal that would have required broadband providers to give their competitors the same speeds and quality of service as they give to themselves or their partners,” Grant Gross reports for Macworld UK.
“The Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee’s 11-11 vote means the net neutrality amendment will not be added to a wide-ranging broadband bill as it goes to the Senate floor. The amendment would have prevented broadband providers such as AT&T and Comcast from charging extra based on the type of content transmitted by internet-based companies,” Gross reports. “The amendment would bring new regulation to the internet, committee Republicans argued.”
Gross reports, “The committee’s rejection of the proposal means the fight for net neutrality rules could be stalled for the year. Earlier this month, the House of Representatives approved its own version of a broadband bill, but voted 269-152 to reject a net neutrality amendment.”
Full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Nothing new to add on this, so here’s a replay: 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 article:
House rejects H.R. 5252 Net neutrality amendment – June 09, 2006
Look on the bright side: Satellite, wireless, radio, and maybe even power-line based Internet networks may get a boost from this. The telco networks are less relevant there, although I suppose they are still involved in the up-stream. In a free market, you can (1) vote with your dollars for the cheapest service, (2) start your own cheaper service and get rich.
” width=”19″ height=”19″ alt=”grin” style=”border:0;” /> Unfortunately going for cheap gives us the Microsofts and Wal-Marts of the world….
Anyone know of any place on the web where there might be an intelligent, pros & cons discourse on this subject? I really want to know all the facts but I’m tired of trying to pick them out of the “George Bush Hates Computer Users!” and “Democrats Are Stinking Green Commies!” BS.
Thanks!
I just think it’s interesting that Macworld UK (not Macworld USA) reported this story. No mention of this story on http://www.Macworld.com on the home page, latest news, or news summary pages.
Peace.
In case some of you don’t understand: The federal government created the internet with tax-payer dollars. So federal regulation over a federal program… what’s not clicking with some of you?
Simplification: The PENTAGON built the internet. Not AT&T.
I have no problem paying for access but I want everything not what AT&T/Comcast etc. want me to see.
I agree with the dUDe. This equates to having a car, that you paid for, and then being told that you can’t go on certain roads because the company that built that road doesn’t want you there, or if you HAVE to, you’re limited on your top speed. I see all of this going badly, and it’s time to whip up some letters to the elected (payed off) heads of my state.
The end of net neutrality will be the end of the telecoms. If the porn-purveyors don’t pay comcast, comcast will block the porn, right? No porn, no customers. Nobody- I repeat- NOBODY, can control the internets. I hope the government does something as stupid as letting telecoms charge for content that is not theirs. This folly will be fun to watch as it all blows up in AT&T et al’s greedy faces.
From what I’ve read, the name “net neutrality” is a little vague and leads to people jumping to conclusions. It doesn’t necessarily affect any existing service (i.e., you won’t see a drop in speed, or suddenly find yourself unable to access content you could access before). Instead, it’s about new high speed systems that the telcos WANT to develop, but say they can’t unless they are able to charge a premium for those who want to use them (and in this case the charge would not be to you, the customer, at least not directly, but to the provider of the content). I’m not making a case for or against here, just saying maybe some people are not understanding correctly.
Over time, this will open up room for more ISPs. I can imagine that if porn sites get excluded, they will band together and offer the ultimate porn network.
Woo.
MDN word: privates. heh heh heh
by Jon Hannibal Stokes
The inventor of the WWW has a short, to-the-point post that explains exactly why supporting real, bona fide net neutrality is the Right Thing to Do. I absolutely encourage you to read the entire post, but really he sums up the whole argument for net neutrality in his opening sentence:
When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission.
If you think about it in terms of start-ups having to ask the permission of AT&T to innovate, then the whole net neutrality issue becomes less complicated.
Ma Bell may I?
What the opponents of net neutrality are pouring millions into lobbying for is a world where, when someone offers a new high-bandwidth service over the Internet, they have to go around to each of the last-mile providers and ask, “may I have permission to compete on a level playing field with the other services that go over your pipes?” And if entrepeneurs can’t come up with enough funding to appease the troll that guards that particular bridge, then they could effectively lose access to the customers at the other end.
To move the discussion away from the typical example of high-bandwidth video, let me turn to the example of a new email attachment service, called Pando, that was recently brought to my attention. From what I can tell, Pando is a P2P service for sending very large files through email. You attach to your email a .pando file, which is probably something like a .torrent file, and a user on the other end who has the Pando client can open that .pando file and use it to begin downloading the larger file that you want to send them.
Now, I have no idea how well this Pando thing works, or even if it works at all. I bring it up only because it seems like new, kind of slick start-up idea. But on a non-neutral Internet, Pando is a much less attractive as a small business. Why? Because if I’m on Comcast and you’re on AT&T, and I try to send you a .pando file, then both of our ISPs have to have agreed to let this new service’s packets through at a reasonable clip. If either Comcast or AT&T has decided to throttle Pando packets (maybe Pando is being used to send video files!), then Pando will work for me when emailing some folks but not others. In the face of such uneven and generally unpredictable results, most users will probably skip the service entirely, and the world would have one less small business.
At this point, I should insert a word on “throttling” vs. quality of service (QoS). The telcos are arguing that they don’t want to throttle anyone’s traffic—they just want the freedom to offer better transport (QoS) to services that pay up. This is a misleading way to frame the issue.
If three companies run competing video-on-demand services and only one has paid the piper, then the other two guys are effectively throttled as far as end users are concerned. This is especially true if the baseline level of transport service for streaming media on that ISP’s network is set painfully low. All Comcast would have to do is make a rule that all streaming video sites default to a relatively small amount of bandwidth, and they get more acceptable levels of bandwidth as they pay more. This amounts to throttling people who don’t pay, and I think the odds are greatly in favor of this kind of thing becoming rampant on a non-neutral Internet.
Even worse would be a situation where Comcast enters into some kind of exclusive deal with an online service provider, with the result that the cost of competing on a level playing field with that favored service are set prohibitively high. Of course, such a move would probably spark lawsuits from competitors, but do we really want to rely on very expensive tort law to enforce what simple regulation could do much more cheaply and rationally?
But I though regulation was bad for markets?
It’s on the topic of regulation that Berners-Lee lets loose with another great one-line takedown of all the anti-regulatory rhetoric that the telcos and their surrogates have been using:
For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can’t photocopy money.
The simple truth that you can’t have a free market without government regulation should be so obvious that it hurts, but after a few decades of some industries pushing a “regulation vs. free markets” dichotomy people need to be reminded that the sky is, in fact, blue.
Because markets rest on the rule of law, the relationship between markets and regulation is not a binary opposition but a continuum. Anarchy at one extreme and overregulation at the other are both antithetical to free markets. You have to have rules to play by, because the rules guarantee that the game is fair.
But enough of my preaching. Go read the Berners-Lee post, pass it around to your friends, and call your congressperson. You should also check out Danny Weitzner’s comprehensive essay on net neutrality, linked in the post.
Don’t let the telcos break the Internet.
Net Neutrality: This is serious
When I invented the Web, I didn’t have to ask anyone’s permission. Now, hundreds of millions of people are using it freely. I am worried that that is going end in the USA.
I blogged on net neutrality before, and so did a lot of other people. (see e.g. Danny Weitzner, SaveTheInternet.com, etc.) Since then, some telecommunications companies spent a lot of money on public relations and TV ads, and the US House seems to have wavered from the path of preserving net neutrality. There has been some misinformation spread about. So here are some clarifications. ( real video Mpegs to come)
Net neutrality is this:
If I pay to connect to the Net with a certain quality of service, and you pay to connect with that or greater quality of service, then we can communicate at that level.
That’s all. Its up to the ISPs to make sure they interoperate so that that happens.
Net Neutrality is NOT asking for the internet for free.
Net Neutrality is NOT saying that one shouldn’t pay more money for high quality of service. We always have, and we always will.
There have been suggestions that we don’t need legislation because we haven’t had it. These are nonsense, because in fact we have had net neutrality in the past — it is only recently that real explicit threats have occurred.
Control of information is hugely powerful. In the US, the threat is that companies control what I can access for commercial reasons. (In China, control is by the government for political reasons.) There is a very strong short-term incentive for a company to grab control of TV distribution over the Internet even though it is against the long-term interests of the industry.
Yes, regulation to keep the Internet open is regulation. And mostly, the Internet thrives on lack of regulation. But some basic values have to be preserved. For example, the market system depends on the rule that you can’t photocopy money. Democracy depends on freedom of speech. Freedom of connection, with any application, to any party, is the fundamental social basis of the Internet, and, now, the society based on it.
Let’s see whether the United States is capable as acting according to its important values, or whether it is, as so many people are saying, run by the misguided short-term interested of large corporations.
I hope that Congress can protect net neutrality, so I can continue to innovate in the internet space. I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.
But then we quickly turn around when the market forces are working and want the Government to step in like we live in a Socialist society to “to protect us from those greddy corporate b@st@rds!”
These aren’t “market forces” at work. These are legalized monopolies, the telcos, demanding to be paid twice for the same service.
If I pay for internet access, to get to Google, Google should not have to pay MY ISP TOO so I can get there. All Google should have to pay for is their ISP, for internet access.
This is the same thing as if the telcos demanded a cut of the profits on all network or phone-based sales, because it’s their network? A cut of all credit-card transactions, of all bank transactions?
Using this rationale, the telcos could become, in essence, a giant ATT tax on all business, because no sane businesss can operate without phones these days.
MDN is right on the money on this. If broadband providers get their way it will totally screw up the internet. This is one of the very few cases the government should get involved.
More food for thought:
I understand the knee-jerk reaction to this, but you need to get all the facts. Net Neutrality will stifle innovation and become a lawyer fest. The ‘net is currently regulated differently in all 50 states. Time to deregulate. The U.S. is currently 16th in the world in broadband penetration. We have 1/50th the bandwidth per capita as Korea! Wall Street will be saying yes or no to broadband expansion as venture capitalists invest billions on updating and expanding the infrastructure. If they see no reason to invest (read: ROI), then the Internet will remain stagnant and the innovations YOU want are not going to come to fruition.
Don’t let your first reaction blind you. Get as much FACTUAL information as you can and make an informed decision. Go here:
http://blog.gildertech.com/
Scroll down to: Friday, June 9. 2006 Net Neutrality Laws Create Un-neutral Net. Listen to the podcast (20min). George Gilder is a preeminent expert in this particular field and his words are not to be taken lightly (IMO). The second half is particularly important.
Also, when you get some time read this PDF:
http://www.theamericanconsumer.org/Net Neutrality Study.pdf
Tim Berners-Lee“I want to see the explosion of innovations happening out there on the Web, so diverse and so exciting, continue unabated.”
With all due respect, this will not happen if there is no movtive (read: ROI) to improve the <u>infrasructure</u> of the ‘net itself. Fiber costs money, and *nobody* is going to be laying it for free. If Net Neutrality becomes law, the ‘net will stay exactly as it is now – You won’t be getting more bandwidth, you won’t be downloading HD movies and content (at least not at any acceptable speed), and who knows what other innovations that require large pipes. If there is no profit motive, Wall Street will simply say no and the expansion of the ‘net will hit a brick wall.
I respect people’s right to support Net Neutrality, in fact I was 100% for it about a month ago. That single podcast changed my mind entirely. Check it out and listen to it twice (I needed to). If you still support neutrality, then fine. Personally, I am against it for the exact reasons pointed out in that podcast.
Quote from George Gilder:
“We’ll soon have to divert Net traffic through Seoul & Beijing to avoid lawyer spam
Intellectuals and politicians mistakenly think of telecom as a perpetual problem: a natural monopoly, an anti-trust peril, a free speech filter, and a forensic circus. Their bright idea of the moment, “net neutrality,”is a concept at once so vague and demanding that its penumbra could be litigated in fifty states and up-and-down the federal court system until all our Internet traffic has to be diverted through Seoul and Beijing merely to avoid lawyer spam. By any name, as Larry Darby points out in an important recent paper, “net neutrality” means price controls on some of the most complex many-sided markets in all industry and thus is sure to do for the rollout of broadband what Sarbox has done for IPOs.
Just information – process it as you please.
One other quick point from the podcast: For every $0.05 (yep, 5 cents) that the e-commerce, Google’s, Yahoo’s, Microsoft’s, and VoIP’s invest in the net – The broadband and infrastructure companies invest $1.00. FACT.
© –
Speaking of facts, here are a couple for ya:
1. The internet backbone in Korea was built by the government, not the “free” market. Citing the Korean example as an argument for deregulation is completely backwards.
2. The U.S. is more geographically spread out than the other 15 countries that have higher broadband penetration, which means that “last mile” coverage outside urban areas is far more expensive to implement here. The solution to this problem in building our railroad, highway, and electrical networks was government investment, and judging by the relatively modest taxes and fees that pay for this infrastructure, this was a very efficient solution that extended affordable access to almost everyone.
Also, I’ve heard the gildertech podcast and done a blow-by-blow critique on these forums. It’s hack garbage bought and paid for by a consortium of ISPs and telecomms companies. The guest is a paid spokesman for the industry.
As for the rest of your post, your insinuation that net neutrality is about getting something for nothing is disingenuous. I initially had 768k DSL. Now I pay more for 3meg DSL. We pay for our bandwidth. If we want more, we pay more. That’s the ISPs’ incentive to invest in infrastructure. Why should they be able to charge both the content provider and the consumer for the same bandwidth? Does UPS charge both the sender and recipient?
Your blather about profit motive, especially in an oligopolistic market, is completely twisted. The only profit motive we see at work here is the incentive for oligopolies to invest huge sums into persuading politicians to let them double-charge.
Facts don’t actually mean anything all by themselves. You have to understand them. You’re just cherry-picking a few (irrelevant) facts and misusing them to maintain your fantasy of free (hah!) and competitive (hah, again!) markets and justify abuse of oligopolistic power to control a public resource and extract maximum profits from the captive consumer.
Wake Up –
“having regulations that create another govt bureacracy that determines who gets what bandwidth is just BAD BAD BAD”
Ridiculous. No bureaucracy would determine who gets what bandwidth. Net neutrality is about ensuring that we actually get the bandwidth we pay for. It’s the telcos & cablecos who want to determine who gets what bandwidth, and they want to decide regardless of what bandwidth has already been paid for.
The content provider has paid for a T1 line? And the consumer has paid for 3meg DSL? Well, if the content provider is competing with the telco’s or cableco’s own content or service, screw that, the consumer’s getting 128k unless the content provider ponies up extra QoS fees.
You call that a recipe for free competition? ‘Cause I don’t.
I’m really sick of all the pinheads talking in ominous voices about that boogeyman, regulation. “Ooh, regulation, bad. Bureaucracy, bad. The big, bad government’s going to run your life.” Corporations are bureaucracies, too, that run our lives. And, you know what, I’d rather have the big, bad elected bureaucracy ensuring a level playing field than have big, bad, unaccountable, profit-motivated bureaucracies colluding to stifle competition and extract maximum fees from consumers who have no alternative options.
The profit motive is not a virtue. It is a force, and like all forces, it can be helpful or harmful depending on how it’s applied. When one side has all the power, the profit motive usually reduces the quality of life for the other side. Let your wife or girlfriend apply the profit motive to your sex life and see how that works out for you.
Basically, unless Net Neutrality is protected, the only sites and services that you will have access to will be the ones that pay the telcos the most–how’s that for “innovation”.
[url=”http://www.canada.com/montrealgazette/story.html?id=e4b771fe-fec7-417a-bb4c-d1edcb988a0d&k=44164″]Coming soon: pay-as-you-play Net
[/url]
“net neutrality” is government regulation and intervention like having laws and protection against murder and robbery is government intervention. It is making businesses behave – and we have endless examples of how they don’t – if left to their own devices. Their job is to make money, not behave, and governments job is to make sure everyone plays within the accepted norms of the soceity.
having no-net neutrality may work in high population metro areas where there are a multitude of ISP choices where competition is high, but in single provider market monopolies (created by government consent, btw), the end-user has no options but PAY PAY PAY
give me broad choices and I will decide, but give me only one, I sure as sh*t don’t want the companies deciding. I can at least vote my gov reps out.
In related news, the Alcohol Lobby has convinced members of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that the Internet should be free as in “Free Beer” instead of free as in “Free Speech”. Capitalizing on this initial show of support from Congress, Internet advertizing giant DoubleClick, Sony, and Anheuser Busch have inked a deal to create an end-to-end solution that will track user advertising clicks and tie that to a hardware/software solution that will provide “micropayments” of Budweiser, Bud Light, or one of several other alcoholic beverages based on user preferences determined by an intrusive “demogrpahics” survey users will be required to fill out in order to receive the first Free Internet Beer delivery system. In the press conference announcing the deal, Sony demonstrated the ease in which the USB delivery device can be connected along with the software required to integrate the delivery hardware with Microsoft Internet Explorer. When pressed, the Anheuser-Busch spokesman acknowledged that it will take approximately 50,000 click-throughs on Free-BEAs (Free Beer-Enabled Ads) to accumulate enough beer micropayments equivalent to that of one twelve-ounce can. No details were released on whether the system will chill the beer to its optimal temperature nor whether the system has a means of keeping the beer from going flat.
Questions about support for browsers other than Microsoft Internet Explorer were dodged, for the most part. The Free-BEA Consortium has also retained the lawfirm of Dewey, Cheatham & Howe to prepare pre-emptive lawsuits against Linux users and the Open Source community in general in anticipation of “hacks” to the system. In retaliation, the rogue virus-writer “Ub3rd00d” has announced the upcoming release of the spigot-A virus, exploiting a security hole first identified in Internet Explorer 3 that will turn infected PCs into “Zom-BEAs” that will redirect their beer micropayments to Ub34d00d’s own delivery system he built out of parts picked up at a local computer trade show and and run entirely by a Perl-based liquid content management system. Given the number of possible infected PCs and the rate at which units of 50,000 Free-BEA clicks will be harvested, Ub3rd00d has also announced his intention to open the world’s first CyberBrewpub in New York City’s East Village, with plans to expand to London, Amsterdam, Bangalore and Tokyo as soon as spigot-A has had a chance to mutate into a few new variants to keep ahead of anti-virus companies to stamp it out.
While owners of Macintosh computers will not be able to receive Free-BEA payments (no Macintosh version has been announced), Mac users should remain unaffected by Ub3rd00d’s spigot-A virus and any subsequent variants. Calls on the floor of the lower house of the French Parliament demanding that Apple open its operating system to viruses met little support, but Apple is considering withdrawing the sale of all Apple products in France anyway: an Apple spokesperson gave the reason that “Macintosh owners prefer Simi and Napa Valley wines over French Wines anyway” as the primary motivation for Apple’s withdrawal from the French marketplace.
Shares of AAPL jumped 9.34% in after-hours trading upon news of Apple’s announcement.
finelinebob : HILARIOUS! I saved that post for future chuckles
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Majikthize –
First, hope you get back to this thread. I read your posts, and I appreciate and consider your points.
Unfortunately, MDN is not letting me post my full response even though I was able to respond to finelinebob. I’ll try later – if it won’t accept my comments at that point, then I will have to assume I am being censored for some unknown reason.