Net Neutrality Summit

Castar writes "BoingBoing has a post about an upcoming summit in San Francisco about the issue of Net Neutrality. The EFF and speakers on both sides of the issue are gathering to debate and spread awareness of Network Neutrality, which is an increasingly important topic. The FCC, of course, might have the final word."

Net Neutrality is a misnomer

[Billosaur]

When you think about it, "net neutrality" is hard to describe in terms of the current Internet, because it is based on commercial systems, not on some government-supported network. Government could theoretically legislate neutrality, but the government had spent the better part of the last three decades deregulating industries. There's only one reason the government would get involved: if they could tax it. If the "net neutrality" debate meant legislation that allowed the United States Government to somehow tax Internet traffic, you can bet you'd have it in a minute.

Re:make that 4

[MobyDisk]

Then it sounds like you've heard about the phony thing that the lobbyists are calling network neutrality. I find this to happen so often I wrote an article about the Myths of network neutrality [mobydisk.com].

Your second paragraph sums-up most of the myths quite well. AT&T etc. say that network neutrality proponents want a system where everyone pays the exact same amount, and nobody can pay for higher levels of service. That's not true at all. They are trying to redefine network neutrality to make it look bad. What they are basing that on is the fact that network neutrality propoonents want to make it illegal to artificially delay one person's network packets in favor of someone else's. Allow me to give a specific example:

Scenario 1:
I want 1MBps down/1MBps up. So I pay $10/month.
My neighbor wants 10Mbps down/1MBps per month. So he pays $40/month.
Google wants 1000MBps down/1000MBps up. So they pay $10,000/month.
This is totally fine and network neutral. Nobody has a problem with that. AT&T/Verizon/etc. want to make it out that network neutrality prevents that. It does not.

Scenario 2:
The pipe for my street is a 10MBps up/down pipe.
My neighbor wants 10 MBps down.
I want 10MBps down.
I call the phone company and say I'm only getting 5MBps most of the time. So they offer to make my packets higher priority over my neighbor. So my neighbor now gets 1MBps if I'm downloading a file at 9MBps. So he calls and complains, and gets the level 2 priority as well. So now we are both back to 5MBps. So I call and get level 3 priority, and so on and so forth. This is not network neutral. IF the phone company wants to change their TOS to say that the "PEAK" is 10MBps, and the total shared is 10MBPS that's fine. And if I call and say I want more bandwidth, they can say "oh, we can do that, but we have to upgrade the trunk like so that will cost you." That's totally fair and neutral.

This game isn't new. When caller ID came-out, they charged for a code that disabled caller id on outgoing calls. Then they charged for special caller-id units that displayed the caller information even if it was blocked. So then they sold stuff that blocks calls from non-caller-id phones. Then they sold codes that get around the blocks. etc. etc. They never provided any new services ever -- they just pitted their customers against each other and sld phony pseudo-services.

IMHO, the FTC should ban such a practice. All it will do is make the phone companies richer, and they won't have to upgrade their trunk service anymore, they can just re-sell the same bandwidth over and over again.

Great Timing

[PPH]

Its interssting to note that the summit will be held before the next administration can boot the current set of industry ( * ) kissers out.

Re:Net Neutrality is a misnomer

[PopeRatzo]

If the "net neutrality" debate meant legislation that allowed the United States Government to somehow tax Internet traffic, you can bet you'd have it in a minute.

Tell you what, I'm willing to pay more in taxes to have an internet where the bandwidth provider doesn't give any one packet priority over another. I don't want Google to be able to pay more to AT&T in order to have its pages load faster than Yahoo. Because then the next step is that News Corp pays AT&T to have its pages load faster than CNN, and Mitt Romney's site gets priority over Dennis Kucinich or Ron Paul's.

I want the bandwidth provider to be classified as a "utility". You pay for your bandwidth and then all packets are treated the same. And if that means that certain "technological breakthroughs" (usually ones that involve privacy violations and advertisement) are hampered, then so be it.

I happen to like the Internet the way it is. I definitely don't want any corporation or even a small group of corporations to own it. This is one of those cases (and there are more than you think) where the "free market" solutions aren't the best ones.

I like public schools, and socialized medicine and social security and an open and neutral internet. The misnamed "pro-growth/small government" policies that have been loose in the US since Ronald Reagan have done nothing but bust the balls of the middle and working class in this country. Even in a big city like Chicago, I'd rather deal with the bureaucracy of local government (or even federal government) than the bureaucracy of a big insurance company OR a big phone company. At least when it comes down to it, I can go downtown and find a government official to talk to face to face. With the phone company, it's just a bunch of pseudonymous guys with funny accents who I know don't live anywhere near me.