New 'Net Neutrality' Bill Introduced

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Reps Ed Markey (D-MA) and Chip Pickering (R-MS) introduced the 'Internet Freedom Preservation Act of 2008' (HR 5353) this week. The proposed legislation [PDF] would not legislate what is and is not 'neutral'. Instead, it would add a section to the 'Broadband Policy' section of the Communications Act which spells out principles the FCC is expected to uphold, in addition to having them hold summits which would 'assess competition, consumer protection, and consumer choice issues related to broadband Internet access services' and make it easy for citizens to submit comments or complaints online."

Enforce the laws we have?

[MacDork]

What good are new laws or guidelines if they go unenforced? Man in the middle attacks are already illegal, but Comcast [slashdot.org] continues unabated. It's like having a Constitution that law makers ignore. Until someone goes to prison for ignoring it, its value becomes symbolic at best.

This is a good thing

[91degrees]

Since there isn't yet a problem for Net Neutrality laws to fix, it seems a little early to define what is and isn't net neutrality. Such a law is quite likely to permit bad behaviour, and have undesirable side effects. Both problems that would take several years to fix legislatively.

By extending the scope of the FCC, changes can be made much more quickly. Bad rules can be repealled quickly. New guidelines issued. Explicit behaviour prevented as soon as it starts.

Re:We need a new internet also

[multiplatformgeek]

There's no way to win the bandwidth race at this point. The moment you start talking about "video", you move to a requirement that really is unrealistic.

To have the "Internet" (open access, bidirectional services and bandwidth, all-you-can eat buffet style bandwidth, unicast (or multicast)) with "Video" (continuous, "large" bandwidth streams), you have a problem.

OC-192's are the defacto standard in the Telecom industry. Even if you run multiple bonded OC-192, or have a faster standard, or any of the currently available technologies, you simply can't architect a network that could do what you suggest is so easy to do. Well, telepathy might work, but a workable implementation of mind-to-mind communications hasn't been demonstrated yet.

Now, saying that, the Telecom's are coping out with there current "traffic management", it's a pathetic implementation, and any real network engineer with more than a handful of years experience could create something better than manipulating TCP headers/windows/sessions (the minimum standard for MSS is 536 AT&T, or did you miss NewReno-IETF Standards 101 class?) or doing a DOS man in the middle attack on their customers. It's called Network Calculus, or Queueing theory, do a Google search and look it up, if you haven't blocked yourself from doing Google searches.

A simple queueing system that has a deficit round robin scheduler based on only src or dst IP address would do exactly what they are looking for (think WFQ, but only src or dst address based). With FQ, Cisco has been doing this for at least as long as I've been into networking, all that really needs to be done is for Cisco do change fair queueing to only include one parameter, the src or dst IP address. Problem solved. Customers happy. Multiflow file transfer applications running fine and not hogging the network. People browsing the web getting great performance. No lawsuits. Everybody wins.

It's so freakin' simple. Sometimes, the ISP's should just be slapped. All the Executives, managers, and engineers who go along with their BS. All in one big Three Stooges style line slap.

Oh... But you'll never truly get "Video" and the "Internet" to mix. If you think you can, I'd be glad for you to provide a potential architecture in this forum and prove me wrong.

multiplatformgeekbutmainlyjustnetworks

just a hypothetical...

[darthfracas]

the economist in me is wondering something... what would happen to broadband competition if instead of leaving the infrastructure in the hands of the telcos, it was put under the charge of a third party, who in turn sold bandwidth to ISPs, similar to how DSL providers were able to operate before Verizon and AT&T switched to fiber optics?

the way i'm seeing things right now, more choice would lower costs to consumers (which naturally the telcos would oppose), but if an ISP was caught doing something shaky (traffic shaping, etc), consumers would have other choices than their cable or phone company. having competing infrastructures strikes me as having to choice which company's sewers i flush my toilet into. it would make things simpler to have the one infrastructure.

Re:Freedom this, freedom that...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: your suggestion, at first I thought people would just start referring to laws by nickname, and nothing would change de facto. But on second thought, in my state there's names for bills like "Proposition 23," and they don't get the nickname treatment, as far as I've seen. So maybe your idea would help somewhat.

Re:Non news

[Veggiesama]

I used to believe that my single vote couldn't possibly make a difference. Yet every couple months, I still hauled my ass over to the voting booths to vote on local issues, local representation, and a national leader, purely out of an interest in current events, rather than out of a desire to change how things worked or to right a wrong.

Every year, I would vote for the local school district levy, and every year it would fail. Ever since I first entered high school, I recognized how poorly the local public schools were doing: the books were falling apart, teachers were being laid off, extracurricular activities were being canceled, less teachers for classes meant more useless study hall periods, etc. For over ten years, the levies consistently failed, so the school failed to receive funding to support many of its most basic services.

During my senior year, I remember my homeroom adviser telling the class how the levy failed by a margin of only ~20-30 votes (I think it was). Since we were all of voting age, she said that if a single classroom of students would have just got off their asses and voted for the levy, it would have succeeded. That's a real, quantifiable number of people who could have made a change in a sea of tens of thousands of other voters.

Then the unthinkable happened. Last year, the levy passed by a margin of three votes. It was incredible, but then they issued a recount. After the recount, it still managed to pass by a margin of only TWO votes [enquirer.com].

Of course, there were only tens of thousands voting, rather than tens of millions. And yes, one vote didn't really matter--two did. I wasn't necessarily one of those two votes, nor possibly anyone in my family.

But that didn't stop my younger brother from marching into class the next day, staring at his history teacher from across the room, and boldly proclaiming, "You have MY family to thank for your pay-raise. We accept cash only."