Mozilla Offers FCC a Net Neutrality Plan With a Twist 123
An anonymous reader writes "The Mozilla Foundation is filing a petition asking the FCC to declare that ISPs are common carriers, with a twist. 'The FCC doesn't have to reclassify the Internet access ISPs offer consumers as a telecommunications service subject to common carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act, Mozilla says. Instead, the FCC should target the service ISPs offer to edge providers like Netflix and Dropbox, who need to send their bits over ISP networks to reach their customers. Classifying the ISP/edge provider relationship as a common carrier service will be a little cleaner since the FCC wouldn't have to undo several decade-old orders that classified broadband as an "information" service rather than telecommunications, Mozilla argues.'" Here's the Mozilla blog post and the 13-page petition.
Isn't this just "implement Squid"? (Score:1)
Squid seems buried in a lot of products these days... and the key concept here is that data that needs to go to many people is best placed close to the users. If you can send it once per city to the a hub in each city, when the users want it they get it much faster and better.
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Re:Isn't this just "implement Squid"? (Score:5, Informative)
Swing...and a miss (Score:5, Insightful)
since the FCC wouldn't have to undo several decade-old orders that classified broadband as an "information" service rather than telecommunications
But that's the problem. They are telecommunications services and not fixing that bad decision is just lipstick on a pig.
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There's no financial incentive to play fair (Score:1)
These ISP/Content Provider conglomerates only stand to lose from a neutral internet. They have the money to buy the laws they want.
The golden age of freely flowing information is over.
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how is that?
there are dozens of streaming services in the USA and they all worked fine the last 6 months, except for netflix
Re:There's no financial incentive to play fair (Score:5, Insightful)
First they came for Netflix...
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how did the bully them?
every one except for netflix paid for CDN's or for transit providers other than cogent. MLB and NBA use Level 3 to stream games and i've never heard complaints about those.
there are lots of streaming services who compete with pay TV and they run their business to provide good service. netflix is wants free internet access to get a competitive edge
Re:There's no financial incentive to play fair (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:There's no financial incentive to play fair (Score:5, Interesting)
they all said they had no problem with netflix on other CDN's
netflix refuses to pay any money to ISP's to host their CDN, unlike other CDN's
they are trying to get a better deal than their competition
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Netflix doesn't compete with Akamai, Limelight, et cetera. They are cutting out the middle-men. Everyone benefits except the middle-men CDNs, including the ISP in the form of reduced operating costs.
Re:There's no financial incentive to play fair (Score:5, Interesting)
"Level 3 has 51 peers that are interconnected in 45 cities through over 1,360 10 Gigabit Ethernet ports"
"The average utilization across all those interconnected ports is 36 percent."
"A port that is on average utilised at 90 percent will be saturated, dropping packets, for several hours a day. We have congested ports saturated to those levels with 12 of our 51 peers. Six of those 12 have a single congested port, and we are both (Level 3 and our peer) in the process of making upgrades – this is business as usual and happens occasionally as traffic swings around the Internet as customers change providers."
"the remaining six peers with congestion on almost all of the interconnect ports between us. Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity. They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers. They are not allowing us to fulfil the requests their customers make for content."
"Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe."
Five major US ISP's all deliberately refusing to upgrade their interconnect. How many "major" ISP's do you know of in the US?
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There are large US ISPs that are playing ball, setting up 10GE peering points and also deploying caching appliances. This includes the one I work for.
It's only the dickhead ISPs that are trying to 'monetize' their customers. Netflix gives you the caching appliance for free and it immediately reduces your backhaul/transit needs. It's literally a no brainer. You have to have negative values of brain to not do this.
Re:There's no financial incentive to play fair (Score:5, Insightful)
there are lots of streaming services who compete with pay TV
This is exactly the problem. When the ISP, i.e. Comcast/Verizon, has it's own streaming services, it's a conflict of interest for them to be 'competing' with Netflix. They can, and have, used their monopoly position as the ISP to prevent quality access to Netflix by the ISP customers.
You think that Netflix is getting 'free' internet access? They are simply responding to MY request to stream the content to me. Netflix pays they're ISP to get on the internet to provide content just as I pay my ISP to get on the internet to consume that content. Comcast/Verizon sold me a service at a certain speed/bandwidth and if they can't provide those speeds, it is their problem when people try to start using those advertized and sold speed/bandwidth.
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I don't see why this hasn't resulted in a class action law suit by the people buying internet fro Comcast. Unless they are buying "the internet except for Netflix", this should be actionable...
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They are probably bound by a clause in their ToS that says they can't sue Comcast and must instead submit to arbitration.
Which can be challenged in court - outside of arbitration - and most likely won't be upheld (IANAL, but that has occurred in other domains, e.g employment contracts).
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there are lots of streaming services with no relation to an ISP that work just fine
the others pay for CDN access for better performance
netflix paid for access and were oversold by cogent as well
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So maybe there needs to be legislation which requires these ISPs to operate a "Chinese Wall" between their content provider and customer connectivity operations.
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The incentive the FCC should be providing is to adopt the European model for the "last mile" [cable]. If Comcast/Verizon can't keep up, any ISP could come in [into the CO literally] and connect directly to the consumer. Thus, ISP's are incentivized to provide good service or somebody else will [and the incumbents lose the customer].
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The golden age of freely flowing information is over.
Why? Nothing is blocked, it is just slower. This sucks for streaming, but streaming is not the only way to share information. Speeds that will not work at all for Netflix work fine on The Pirate Bay... It just requires people to think differently and not stream everything but download it instead. And having a local copy is a good thing.
Re:There's no financial incentive to play fair (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Nothing is blocked, it is just slower. This sucks for streaming, but streaming is not the only way to share information. Speeds that will not work at all for Netflix work fine on The Pirate Bay... It just requires people to think differently and not stream everything but download it instead.
Why? Because now if you want to start an internet business (streaming or not) that becomes even modestly successfully, every ISP on the planet will start looking for a way to demand a chunk of your profits. "Yeah, sorry that that little 100ms latency spike is affecting 1 million customers of yours, Blizzard, but we'll be happy to form a collaborative network-tuning relationship with you for $250,000/mo."
Cumulatively, it means that ISP's can rent-seek off of internet businesses, cutting down on the quantity and competitiveness of such businesses while simultaneously forcing them to raise prices.
ISPs are Shady (Score:5, Insightful)
FTA:
I think the problem here is that the ISPs want to be big media but they are really only telecoms trying to step out of line and disrupt the flow of information to get more money. They are greedy pigs. We should nationalize them all and simply take over their operations. They are EXACTLY LIKE traffic lights to be quite honest.
Would you want your highway/city traffic information management operated by competing corporations?
Would you want your city and state police run by competing corporations?
We have tolerated ISPs for too long. Nationalize.
Please, imagine if you had to deal with Comcast to get from your house to work every day.
Those of us who work virtually this is EXACTLY what we are doing.
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just look at the NYC subway, takes them decades to meet increases in demand in parts of the system
same with electric and water. no one upgrades until they have a few years of increased demand and then it takes years of higher rates and blackouts until the system is updated
Re:ISPs are Shady (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ISPs are Shady (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds me of the "Oh yeah!? Well I bet you had to wait for it!" punchline from jokes about US vs. Canadian health care.
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Why should we nationalize ISPs? It seems like you are suggesting the same as emancipating a child because he misbehaves: the parents are not parenting properly, so release them of that responsibility.
In our case, the ISPs are not behaving properly because the regulations give too much and take only what the ISP does not care about. Try appropriate regulation.
Re:ISPs are Shady (Score:5, Informative)
Why should we nationalize ISPs? In our case, the ISPs are not behaving properly because the regulations give too much and take only what the ISP does not care about. Try appropriate regulation.
Appropriate regulation would be to restrict ISPs to only providing connectivity services to the end-user. No ownership of content or other services of any kind. Much like electricity providers cannot also run the grid unless they're a monopoly. No one can realistically compete with them since if the generation costs for the competition are undercutting the grid provider's price, they can merely up the access fees. Regulate them there, you say? There's far too many shenanigans going on with GAAP to have that come out any differently under regulation, and far more opportunity for corruption and fleecing.
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Begging the question.
Your entire premise sets on an ideal of "appropriate regulation". Besides the basic question (why is this appropriate?), your entire argument procedural flaws: How do other services or owned content impact the ISP's behavior?
You suggest regulation to restrict ISPs to benefit by throttling certain traffic, i.e. that from Netflix and Hulu.
conflict of interest (Score:5, Informative)
There is a conflict of intersest between what the customer expects of an ISP (equal access to competing services on the Internet) and the ISP hosting their own service in competition with "external" services. This could be voice, streaming video, videoconferencing, etc.
Any time the ISP offers services beyond being a dumb pipe, there is a natural temptation for the ISP to prioritize the traffic belonging to their own services above the traffic coming from competing "external" services. This can show up in many ways, the simplest being to not upgrade their external connectivity as much as they could--which has the natural effect of making their own services more attractive due to better bandwidth, latency, etc.
By making ISPs dumb pipes and preventing them from shaping traffic due to any reason other than rated subscriber bandwidth, we could ensure fair treatement across all services.
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Yes, but we can do that without restricting them from providing other services.
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By "failed", you mean "been lobbied against", "been bribed".
It's quite simple: you supply the same carry service to everyone, end of story. Your own service is carried? Fine. If it degrades service, it degrades everything: your whole ISP business becomes slow because your in-house Hulu has too much traffic, so people start switching out of your ISP, and then they find you're as slow as NetFlix on the next guy over so they use NetFlix.
Since you're not artificially slowing *anything* down, it turns
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By "failed", you mean "been lobbied against", "been bribed".
By "failed" I mean failed to achieve their goal of a competitive market.
It's quite simple: you supply the same carry service to everyone, end of story. Your own service is carried? Fine. If it degrades service, it degrades everything: your whole ISP business becomes slow because your in-house Hulu has too much traffic, so people start switching out of your ISP, and then they find you're as slow as NetFlix on the next guy over so they use NetFlix.
Hmm, the next guy over. I'm still looking yup, still looking damn, it's a 51K modem line.
Remember: the problem is Comcast throttling or charging Netflix specifically, or Hulu specifically, or Google specifically; it's not that their entire ISP business is non-viable and thus people are flocking to Cox. Remove this middle ground: either their shit works or it doesn't.
No, the problem is Comcast extorting money so that even if their own crappy services don't make them money in the content arena, other people's better services will. It's Comcast applying the troll under the bridge tax. What's worse is they're doing it on taxpayer subsidized cabling.
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Yes, but we can do that without restricting them from providing other services.
Why not? It seems to work for the landline and mobile telecom companies. Basically you can dial any number from any phone, including one which connects to a competitors service. The way they handle it is in the charging structure. If they provide service X then access to this is included in the basic charge. If you want to connect to service X provided by a competitor then you will have to pay the call charges. Translating this to ISPs would mean that access to the service provided by the ISP would either n
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Eh, seriously, we can't. Look up regulatory capture for part of why. This rarely works at all and never works well for long.
The cleanest solution is simply to acknowledge that internet service is a natural monopoly and treat it as such. If the existing players do not want to be ISPs (which is clearly the case for several of them) then they should spin those assets off into an ISP and keep doing whatever business they prefer.
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If we as a species weren't so emotionally weak, that would definitely be the most obvious solution to juvenile crime.
On
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Fallacy of whole-body analogy: two things with analogical properties are not identical in the whole body.
By your own argument, aside from being fallacious, we see a similar problem with parenthood: we *could* take all kids away from bad parents, and we'd have to put a lot of kids the care of the government. Obviously we don't have a problem with misbehaved kids; we have a problem with misbehaved parents.
We don't have a problem with misbehaved ISPs; we have a problem with a misbehaving government. T
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It seems like you are suggesting the same as emancipating a child because he misbehaves: the parents are not parenting properly,
It's more like saying that if the parents don't do their job well enough, the children are made wards of the state. Which is EXACTLY what happens today.
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Clearly, in this case the business is the parent given stewardship over the net. They are abusive parents, so need to lose custody FAST.
Or, if you prefer, the businesses are children who refuse to play nice with their toys, so they will be taken away. It's not a bad analogy, the toy in question came from the parent in the first place (DARPA).
Or we can go with the businesses are children and government is Cosby's dad: "I brought you into this world and I can take you out! Doesn't matter to me, I can make ano
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We have tolerated ISPs for too long. Nationalize.
What do we want?
MINITEL [wikipedia.org]!
When do we want it?
Well actually we retired that in favor of the current model!
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Wrong on all fronts.
1.) Minitel technology was retired in favor of the current technology. Not the same thing as their ownership/business model.
2.) Minitel was only government-owned before France's state telecom was privatized. Since the early '90s the entire system was run by a single corporation, making it more like Facebook than a nationalized Internet, ownership-wise.
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Well actually we retired that in favor of the current model!
That's ridiculous. Nationalize the pipes, and let private entites compete to provide access and as customer endpoints. This was NOT the minitel model. In fact, this is pretty much what was eliminated in 2001 when the pipe owners (AT&T, Excite/Comcast, Verizon, etc) were allowed to offer seperate pricing to the virtual ISPs (which made it impossible to compete with the pipe owners). One of the first "screw-job" attacks against the Internet enabled by the Bush administration.
Re:ISPs are Shady (Score:5, Insightful)
The solution is not nationalization, it is a ban on corporate lobbying, competition and strict rules that protect the consumer. Businesses do well when they are forced to compete and they rarely misbehave if the penalties outweigh the benefits. If companies want some legislation passed, they should be forced to lobby the people. If their desire is beneficial for all and makes sense, then let the people lobby their representatives. The entire lobby industry the way it is now is just inherently corrupt.
Re:ISPs are Shady (Score:4, Informative)
Too bad you posted AC. This. Corporate lobbying (and for that matter union lobbying) is poisonous to democracy and leads to just this sort of thing.
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Organizing and acting in concert for ostensibly common interests (unionizing) is orthogonal to bribing lawmakers (lobbying).
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I didn't say that unions should be banned - I said they, along with corporations, should be banned from lobbying. I want equal treatment for corporations and for unions.
telecoms is a natural monopoly (Score:3)
Unless you have a government utility owning the last mile, there are going to be very high barriers to entry. Nobody wants a patchwork of random cable/phone companies trenching all over the place.
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Doesn't your point prevent itself?
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Re:ISPs are Shady (Score:4, Insightful)
Well what is there to lose? Right now both the government and corporations are having their way with the Internet. If it were nationalized, that cuts the number of assailants by half. They're not in competition. They're both just taking what they like at the same time.
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Your point is well taken. The NSA is America. Snooping is not a black & white issue, however. This is the effect of an oligarchy. Democracy is not working nor has it ever worked. Communism never worked.
What is required is a Technocracy [wikipedia.org] and the only way to get there is through nationalization programs of tech and other things related to the eventual abolishment of money.
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Yes
Yes.
Yesterday, my son and I spent an hour dragging a box blade over 2 miles of dirt road with our tractor, in order to fix deep ruts in the road surface that were scraping on the bottom of my car the last time I tried driving that route.
Today, I use
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T... [wikipedia.org]
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I'm well aware of the term. I'm unsure why it is the entirety of your response.
Do you think _you_ advocate a technocratic approach, or that I do, or that we currently have one, or something else entirely?
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In many cases, you'll find that Comcast has been granted a local monopoly by local governments. Ooops.
Then your beef is with your local government, not Comcast. Comcast works just fine without an exclusive franchise and your local government was wrong to grant one. When it comes time to renew, get your government to do what you want them to and renew non-exclusively.
Nowhere I've lived or gotten cable service from has had an exclusive franchise agreement. Nowhere I've lived has had multiple cable companies providing service. There must be something beside a government-granted monopoly that stops that kind
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Oh, I already knew my beef was with government :)
As far as what doesn't happen in your area: what you say may be true of Comcast in your area, but certainly isn't of telephone companies.
The latter have a bizarre territory system that all of us are subject to.
I just recently called the ILEC of the neighboring town, only 4 miles away, that provides DSL service in that town. I am in a different ILEC service area (CenturyLink). CL can't even give me an analog phone that doesn't buzz, much less DSL -- even tho
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what you say may be true of Comcast in your area, but certainly isn't of telephone companies.
Ummm, I was replying pretty specifically to what you said about Comcast and its government monopoly.
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Would you want your highway/city traffic information management operated by competing corporations?
Would you want your city and state police run by competing corporations?
If you talk to many conservatives (at least the ones that comment on stories like this), this is exactly what they want. It fucking baffles me.
They want to privatize garbage collection, water, sewer, fire departments, police services, prisons, roads, etc., etc. ad fucking naseum. They want to have competing corporations vie to put out your house fire, remove your shit, etc.
House fire?! We got you covered. Just go to myfuckinghouseisonfire.com to shop and compare fire fighting rates, response times, and cus
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.
We already have to deal with Comcast/Charter/AT&T to get to work daily. And they will keep on giving poorer service for higher prices and telling you that pig with lipstick is Holly Berry as long as we are willing to take it as customers.
.
Is Mozilla right? They aren't as wrong as leaving things to the big ISPs to decide for us. There could be a 'more co
Not really (Score:2)
If Comcast doesnt charge content providers...they dont have to worry about it. However if they charge a content provider they have to charge them all the same rates including their own content providers.
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Lawyers will have a field day, ergo this clearly ends well for someone.
Half a fix? (Score:4, Insightful)
Seems like half of a fix to me. Should all be common carrier status. Why settle for half a fix?
You just know ISPs gunna find loopholes in half a fix.
Re:Half a fix? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm guessing because half is better than none and that this fix addresses the evil that the big ISPs are doing right now.
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I'm guessing because half is better than none and that this fix addresses the evil that the big ISPs are doing right now.
Yeah, and those companies are going to fight this tooth and nail through lobbying, and we get half a fix if anything at all, may as well go for broke, cuz they're going to fight just as hard if it's half or all in.
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The perfect is the enemy of the good.
Oddly enough (Score:4, Insightful)
the cable companies did it to themselves...by charging netflix to carry their programming they became a common carrier.
In other words they can offer speed ups to paying customers but they have to be under RAND terms including to their own
services their own services would have to pay for the same rate for the same bandwidth.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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I would be fine with this. I would even be fine as a consumer with paying different rates for different priorities of traffic
as long as they aren't allowed to dictate the content of the traffic. Downloading a large file at 2am at a slow rate
doesn't cost anyone anything. streaming realtime video at peak traffic is what is costly. If they charged accordingly
you would see places like netflix compensate by allowing you to do things like download a movie the night before.
Stupid suggestion (Score:3, Insightful)
That's a downright stupid suggestion. If ISPs can't charge service providers and get their millions, under this proposal, they'll charge users ("Want to access Dropbox at acceptable speeds? You need to sign up to our Cloud Package for an extra $20 a month!"). They won't throttle the service, they'll throttle the user. It amounts to the exact same problem.
Here's the simple solution - internet access, in today's day and age, is as vital as a landline phone service was back in the day. Be it banking, filing taxes, signing up to health services, or whatever you want to consider, internet access is not "vital" in the sense that it is increasingly difficult to live a normal life without it. Thus, all internet access should be protected by common carrier regulations.
All.
Service providers through to users.
The only people who oppose reclassifying ISPs as common carriers are people who are deeply, profoundly opposed to the government in any and every way or shills of ISPs who want to protect their ability to gouge customers and rake in obscene profits.
They are common carriers providing vital communication services.
Maybe (Score:2)
but they will have to throttle their own services the same was they throttle dropbox. Sort of counter-productive.
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No, they only have to say they're throttling their own services the same way they throttle dropbox.
Just like they say they're spending all those government fees they've taken in to improve their service, when they're really just pocketing them.
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Or they should be government owned.
Even easier solution (Score:5, Insightful)
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Obama does not lack courage. Obama lacks loyalty. Specifically loyalty to the people that voted for him.
But that is the way all politicians are these days. I wonder who's fault that is.
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you mean there is a better candidate then Mr. Wheeler!!?
Re:Even easier solution (Score:4, Insightful)
Obama was the one who appointed a former telecom CEO/Lobbyist as chairman of the FCC. It's safe to say he's not particularly interested in keeping net neutrality.
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Replacing them would require congressional approval and we've all witnessed that the Republicans would rather see this country burn to the ground than give Obama anything.
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Obama should grow a pair. Instruct the FCC commissioners to reclassify, or be dismissed.
This would assume that what is happening is not exactly what he wants to have happen in order for his party to do well in the upcoming midterms. Politics == money in this society at this time. Full stop. Also, in any political appointment, you may assume the true reason for the person being in that role is that he can do what is necessary to help the President's party do well in the upcoming midterms. In the case of FCC
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That being said, I have been very disappointed with his relationship with Big Media (and corporations, in general). I predict he will always come down on their side, and against the consumer.
The other issue I have with him is his support of the security services over the rights of Americans to be left alone. I would have expected him to have called for the total repeal of the PATRIOT Act long ago. So,on these two issues, I will join in the chor
Just let the FTC handle it (Score:1)
get Obama and the Administration to Pay Attention (Score:4, Interesting)
My head hurts (Score:2)
Although I understood in the end, a few more commas and the word "that" could have helped smoothe the summary:
[Mozilla says that] the FCC doesn't have to reclassify the Internet access [that] ISPs offer consumers as a telecommunications service, subject to common carrier regulations under Title II of the Communications Act. Instead, the FCC should target the service [that] ISPs offer to edge providers, like Netflix and Dropbox, who need to send their bits over ISP networks to reach their customers.
Send the FCC Your Own Comments (Score:5, Informative)
Send your opinions and desires about the issue of net neutrality to the FCC now using the following link: https://www.fcc.gov/comments [fcc.gov]
attach your comments to the Proceeding # 14-28, which is at the top of the list, it is entitled "Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet"
Leave a few paragraphs, tell them what you want.
You might not get what you want, but at least you'll have given them a hint of public opinion. Be nice.
again the link is https://www.fcc.gov/comments [fcc.gov] proceeding #14-28 .. make it happen. it only takes a minute or two.. as long as it took you to comment here on slashdot.
they are asking for comments, give them some.
Conveniently skips over ... (Score:2)
Piffle (Score:1)
Common Carrier or GTFO, and Mozilla is showing its true colors now.
They *used* to be legally common carriers (Score:2)
Up into the oughts, ISPs were legally common carriers, not liable for the contents of what you put up/sent. This would just be a return to that status... and would be a hell of a lot better for 'Net freedom.
mark
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I don't know any such elected people. All of our legislators were purchased.