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Two-Tier Internet & The End of Freedom of Speech
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed May 31, 2006 11:06 AM
from the keep-ringing-the-bell dept.
from the keep-ringing-the-bell dept.
Max Fomitchev writes "The proposed Two-Tier Internet bill threatens not only to raise prices on goods and services served online but also to seriously hamper free speech on Internet by allowing telecom providers choking user pages and blogs not associated with major content providers. What a perfect way of censorship..."
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U.S. House Rejects Net Neutrality 598 comments
tygerstripes writes "A recent vote in the U.S. House of Representatives has led to a rejection of the principle of Net Neutrality from the Communications Opportunity, Promotion and Enhancement Act (Cope Act), in spite of massive lobbying from prominent businesses. According to the BBC, the bill '...aims to make it easier for telecoms firms to offer video services around America by replacing 30,000 local franchise boards with a national system overseen by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'. However, according to House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, 'telecommunications and cable companies will be able to create toll lanes on the information superhighway... This strikes at the heart of the free and equal nature of the internet.'"
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Two-Tier Internet & The End of Freedom of Speech
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Backwards into time... (Score:5, Insightful)
"While Net Neutrality bill sounds like overkill, two-tier Internet bill is ought to be stopped too. If it passes freedom of speech would be seriously hampered, startups and small businesses will take a hit and we will pay higher prices for online advertising as well as goods and services delivered or sold over Internet. Do we really want that? I think not."
His conclusions in the article are dead on correct. Though I disagree with his opinion on net-neutrality.
The beauty of the internet, in my opinion, is it's ability to link people together while allowing an even playing field for small business. These have been the greatest social and economic impact points of the new technology era. Sadly, once it becomes tiered it also becomes discriminatory based on economic factors.
Sure, your blog can be seen, but if it get's too popular you'll have to pay more...
Sure, you can start a small business, but if it get's too busy you'll have to pay more...
The idea that no one "owns" the net itself should be inviolate. I already am charged for the bandwidth that comes off my servers because of the cost incurred by my ISP for upstream bandwidth.
A tiered internet would be the same as keeping the peasants out of libraries. It's a huge step *backwards*.
Re:Backwards into time... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Backwards into time... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.lpcollier.net/vitalsigns)
Read the article. The proposal is that the big ISPs will have two tiers/channels/whatever, one that is high speed and only available to paying customers, and the other for everybody else. Note that the paying customers not only pay for their hosting and bandwidth, but also pay the ISP serving the broadband/cable/cell connection to the end user for the right to have their content served over the faster channel.
Presumably the idea of getting 'too popular' is that the ISPs would not only have the option of limiting bandwidth in the last mile to each individual subscriber, but also ISPs may have limited bandwidth across the whole network allocated e.g. by IP block, effectively slowing access to that server down as it becomes more popular, which would obviously cause a drop in popularity/revenue for the online business providing content. At the moment the bottleneck would be with their own hosting, for which they would have to pay for more transfer (GB/month) and a faster pipe (GB/sec). If these proposals are successful they may also have to pay one or more ISPs to be put on the faster pipe through their network and at the subscriber end so that the end users can access the service at an acceptable speed.
The nasty side of this is that, again presumably, the ISPs would allocate a reasonable bandwidth to non-fasttrack traffic so that end users don't notice a slowdown in less popular, niche websites, otherwise customers would complain that 'the whole internet is slow'. The big players would naturally pay up immediately, so it's only the middle group who are too popular for their own good who would be stuck.
Re:Backwards into time... (Score:5, Informative)
That's the biggest thing that the two tiered internet folks are forgetting...
With all the different networks, owned and operated by different companies, sometime, somewhere, packets flow through at least 2, if not 3, 4 or more different networks, before it reaches you.
So, instead of paying for
#1 Connection (your's to the ISP)
#2 Content (in the way of service charge payable to provider)
#3 Payola1 (don't want those packets gettin' hurt while on our network)
#4 Payola2 (don't want those packets gettin' hurt while on our network)
#5 Payola3 (don't want those packets gettin' hurt while on our network)
#6 Payola4 (don't want those packets gettin' hurt while on our network)
etc....
Re:Backwards into time... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.lpcollier.net/vitalsigns)
We say "go eat dirt" (or something analagous) and find another ISP. Been there, done that.
No...no... listen:- You're running a relatively popular website, say an e-commerce site, not up there with the big boys like Amazon but you're making money and you've given up your day job. The ISP providing connectivity for millions of users (say AOL) says "we're going to a two-tier network and we're going to give you the option to get a better tier." You can't find another ISP because it's not your ISP - it's your customer's ISP who's allocated so much bandwidth to your block of IPs and you won't get anymore unless you pay up.
Your options will be to pay up, or put up with the fact that millions of your customers find your website is ridiculously slow. As less people use your website it will speed up again, but your customers and potential customers have gone back to Amazon and have taken your site of their bookmarks list. Getting a better rack server or changing ISPs won't help because the artificial bottleneck is elsewhere and outside of your control unless you pay to move onto the priority tier.
Re:Backwards into time... (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.ringdev.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday May 08 2007, @01:50PM)
Sure, you can start a small business, but if it get's too busy you'll have to pay more..."
Incorrect, that is how it works now. With tiered services it would be:
Sure, your blog can be seen, but at a slower rate. If you want it to continue to perform at it's current rate or better, you need to pay more...
Sure, you can start a small business, but your services will be slower. If you want a better QoS you need to pay more...
The problem with teiring is that it doesn't actually fix any problem. If every company in the world signed up with every teiring opperator, we would still have the same limitations we have right now with a higher price tag for content providers and consumers. The other problem is that ANY non-teired provider will kill your higher teired service. So theoretically, not only will you have to pay the extortion fee to AT&T/SBC and the other back bone providers, you'll also need to pay the fee to all the local ISPs, dial ups, cable/DSL services, WiFi providers etc...
-Rick
Re:The devil's advocate case for the two-tier net (Score:5, Insightful)
You ARE paying your ISP for the bandwidth already. That's that monthly "unlimited access" fee you pay to your ISP. Skype is paying their ISP, and the person on the other end is paying their ISP, if it's an IP to IP call. Everyone is already being paid for moving IP packets. If you are moving too many packets over your ISP, they should charge you, not Skype. Your ISP knows you want to use Skype, but will leave and go to another ISP if they raise your rates, so they extort money from Skype to be allowed to provide you a service you are already paying your ISP for, moving IP packets from your address to another and vice versa.
Re:The devil's advocate case for the two-tier net (Score:5, Insightful)
It's unfair because I already paid for a certain quality of service on my end, and for all the bandwidth I use. If the telcos are having problems filling their end of the contract, they should raise prices to meet their actual costs, not try to extort money from the people on the other end of the connection. When I signed up for an account, I did so with the assumption that I was paying more than enough to cover the bandwidth they promised me, and that I would receive any and all data I chose to request at equal speed (at least as far as they can control). They are now trying to break that contract by delivering data that I request at less bandwidth than I am paying them for, unless the guy on the other end pays protection money.
REDACTED (Score:5, Funny)
(http://ofteninspired.com/ | Last Journal: Sunday April 01 2007, @05:49PM)
This content is not on your Premium Plan.
Re:REDACTED (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.crc.id.au/)
This makes me think that there is already a two-tier internet - as this case obviously demonstrates. It seems that their wholesale traffic/customers aren't as important as its own. Nice way to wipe out tens of thousands of users off a network.
Food for thought.
Enough of the Editorializing Already (Score:5, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Saturday February 03 2007, @01:16PM)
Only the government can "censor" anyone. ISPs routinely "censor" content, and have no restrictions on doing so.
Remember: Your right to "free speech" does NOT come with a corresponding right to be heard.
Else why don't I have my own late-night talk show on a major network?
Re:Enough of the Editorializing Already (Score:5, Insightful)
The very concept of the two-tiered Internet destroys what the Internet has been for years, which is a tool for global collaboration. With a two-tiered Internet, the entire multi-billion-dollar network basically just becomes a vehicle to serve corporate advertising to the plebes, as the "lower tier" sites become slow and unreliable.
This is nothing but a money grab by access providers that will blow up in their faces. Most people use the Internet for social networking these days, and if those sites either essentially get shut down (by being part of the crappy lower tier) or are forced to charge users (because they have to pay exorbitant access charges to get on the upper tier), many people will simply drop offline, which will end up hurting these access providers in the long run.
Content neutrality among backbone providers must be maintained in order for the Internet to continue to be useful to the public. Segmentation will kill the Internet.
Re:Enough of the Editorializing Already (Score:4, Funny)
Yes it does -- every human being on the planet has a right to be heard every time they speak. Not just Americans! Every human being on the planet has this right.
NSA is out there, burning billions of dollars and quadrillions of exaflops of computing power, all in a valiant effort to defend your right to be heard. And you just knock 'em off like that. Such ingratitude!
Corporate Censorship (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://slashdot.org/~Shadow%20Wrought/journal | Last Journal: Wednesday November 07, @02:46PM)
Two steps to anarchy (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.infiltrated.net/)
I wonder what idiotic government officials while having their pockets greased will do their emails no longer come in but instead they receive a hostage notification from their provider: Dear Mr. President, under subsection 1(a)(b)(c)(d)(e) of the Draconian Telecommunications Act, we cannot deliver today's messages. Please pay the sum of a) bandwidth b) tax fees c) attorney fees d) greaser fees in order to release your messages.
To Network Neutrality Opponents: (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.unity08.com/)
So let's all drop this nonsense about claiming that the government shouldn't be intervening in how the Internet works, and get back to the core of the matter - which is whether the telecommunications industry should be allowed to leverage its oligopoly position in the broadband ISP market to extract profit from content providers that don't even connect to them directly, and whether the industry should be allowed to discriminate based on traffic type and content, rather than pricing by bandwidth consumption alone.
U.S. PEOPLE ! BLOW YOUR CONGRESSMANS' EAR OFF !! (Score:3)
(http://www.webgeekworld.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 27 2006, @07:47AM)
Two Questions (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Does this form of content limitation take away any of the rights you had before the dawn of email? Back in the day, we wrote pen & paper letters because it was the only option. Today, although letters are (probably) more secure, because they are not subject to the kind of keyword data mining that can be conducted on electronic communications, we seem stuck on email. Do we need to be?
What about international users? (Score:5, Insightful)
who owns the internet? (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://briancnorton.info/)
Net Neutrality Law = Unneccesary & Bad Idea (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't know about you, but I am HIGHLY suspicious of the government's ability to do anything sensical when it comes to technology, and I can think of nothing worse than a law being passed to correct some theoretical problem that DOESN'T CURRENTLY EXIST and might never exist.
What would happen if Congress tried to pass some Net Neutrality Law? Since there isn't any kind of ACTUAL problem now, I'm sure the bill would undoubtedly screw stuff up through the law of unintended consequences.
Congress would insert all kinds of special provisions that would benefit some group at the expense of others, all kinds of new technology would become illegal, and lawsuits would proliferate. Who knows what would happen, the point is that when congress acts on technology (eg. the DMCA) they are likely to create a huge mess and things better be PRETTY DAMN bad before Congress can do more good than harm.
I look forward to killing you. (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Monday November 12, @01:57AM)
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
Charging content providers twice (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.nhplace.com/kent/ | Last Journal: Monday October 29, @11:11PM)
I've got to say, I have trouble with charging content providers even once, so I completely agree with this criticism of the proposed "revenue enhancing" technologys for the megacorps.
I used to post commentary to Salon's TableTalk [salon.com] until they changed their revenue policy to charge people who posted stuff for the right to post. People who posted stuff? They're a magazine. It seems absurd to charge writers but not subscribers. So I left. Obviously it didn't bring the empire down, but my point was to say "look, I'm not going to pay two ways: one by providing content and another by providing money to have that content delivered". People come to the site to read posts, and they charge advertisers for that. Getting readers is enough payment for me.
Similarly here, I think it's amazing that if you have a web site that is full of content, the internet has no mechanism to make sure you are economically rewarded. The promise of micropayments for having put up very elaborate sites full of information was never carried through because the big portal sites realized they could just take all that money for themselves--why pass it through? No one cares that it's my or your commentary that people are getting out of their browser. They just thank AOL or MSN or Google for finding it for them. And we who provide the myriad little details, blogs, maps, lists, and other things that make up the real fabric of the internet are not only not rewarded but are charged.
So when you talk about double-charging for that privilege, not single-charging, at some point I have to say everyone should go read Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged [wikipedia.org], in which something very similar occurs, and what amount to "content providers" eventually say "enough is enough". Ayn Rand is controversial for her overall broad philosophy of Objectivism, which lots of people don't buy into wholesale. But I'm not advancing Objectivism here. I'm just saying the basic premise of the book, that sometimes enough is enough, is worth considering. The book is an interesting read regardless of your position on her larger scale philosophies.
And I'm all for creating reasonable fees on the Internet. I just don't think authors and other content providers should be charged for doing so. That's the very definition of not reasonable. Sort of like having kids charge their parents for raising them. Or charging teachers for the privilege of teaching. If no one reads the content someone provides, the cost of that content approaches zero since it's just a few bytes on an unused disk. If lots of people read them, then by definition the content contributes a lot to the world, and the world should contribute by each consumer chipping in, not by each consumer contributing to the content provider's eventual bankruptcy (or in less severe cases just negatively contributing to their financial success).
Also, I like Jesse Ventura's "government should do for people what they cannot do for themselves". The big portal companies are already capable of a great many sins; the mere presence of money enables that. What the law needs to protect are the individual content providers, who are not capable of protecting themselves because often they are denied (or made to work unreasonably hard for) any revenue stream from their efforts. If there's a need for a law, it's to protect the little guy, not to enable the big one.
Hyperbole (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://www.themanpages.net/ | Last Journal: Tuesday September 06 2005, @03:45PM)
Paying for better service, and fighting back (Score:3, Interesting)
(http://phorm.phormix.com/ | Last Journal: Monday May 19 2003, @12:08PM)
On your end, you have bandwidth and pipe limits imposed by your ISP. If you want more, you pay for the bigger package. Again, it depends on what service contract you choose.
What should not happen, is that the client's ISP will bill you (after the client is already paying for service) not to choke off your access. This also applies to the midpoints in the connection, and somebody has already footed the bill.
It's double-dipping, and it's extortion. It also strays far from the concept of an ISP being somewhat of a common carrier, and shows blatently that the can (and will abuse the ability to) monitor and/or restrict specific traffic.
If this passes it will be a dark day for the internet indeed... but if it does my hopes are that the first ones to try it will be hammered so mercilessly (lost customers, complaints, legislation, and banner ads everywhere proclaiming to existing customers that their ISP is evil) that the idea will quickly lose it's appeal.
That being said, perhaps we can create a master-pool of ISP's that use said service. In that case we could create something similiar to an anti-spam list wherein customers will get a memo stating "connections to this site will suffer extremely slowness and loss of quality because your ISP 'ASSHATINTERNETCO' is limiting your connection. Click here [link] for more information". I'd be happy to pop those up on my site, and it's easy enough with SHTML, etc.
Anyone in?
The New York Times has a version of this article (Score:3, Informative)
(http://192.168.1.1/ | Last Journal: Wednesday August 16 2006, @09:57PM)
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/opinion/28sun3.
IMO, the New York Times says it better, but, hey, that's just me.
It's a battle between businesses (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't love my ISP any more than the next guy, but let me make a brief counter to all the propaganda from Google and Ebay and MSN about the "greedy" ISPs (of course, Google etc. are just in business to extend love and butterflies and puppies throughout the world).
The way people pay for and get charged for the Internet has changed over time. It used to be that many of us had to pay by the minute, or even by the byte. That has mostly disappeared, but we still pay more for better service. Not everyone has the same options for Internet access, and even if they do have the same options not everyone can afford the same access. Internet access is a business, and a relatively new one. Business models are evolving and there is no guarantee that today's model is the perfectly optimal, best possible way that people could pay for Internet access.
It might be that if ISPs could get some money from content providers, they would charge their customers less. Of course, they would not do this out of the goodness of their hearts (they have no hearts!), but rather for the same business reasons that they stopped their per-minute and per-byte charges. ISPs exist in a competitive business environment like other companies and ultimately they need to satisfy their customers.
It might even be that in the future, Internet access could be free. It would effectively be subsidized by the big content companies, which ultimately get their income from ads. Free access to Internet content could be supported by advertising. It has worked with other media and it's possible it could work for the net too. But the only way it can happen is if ISPs, which bear the cost of end-user access, are able to get some of the revenues from the companies that are offering the ads.
That's really what this battle is all about. I don't know how it will come out, but I do know that when good ol' Meg from Ebay suddenly wants me to write my congresswoman about an issue that, coincidentally, would protect the huge profits Meg is earning, her motive is not to benefit me. Meg doesn't actually ask my opinion all that often. She's not on the phone wishing me happy birthday or asking how's the family. No, her interests are not mine. She is looking to protect her company's profits and she is trying to influence me and use me in this political battle against Comcast and other ISPs.