Google goes "evil"
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Maybe, just maybe, Google thinks that massive government regulation of the still-nascent wireless internet market will do more harm than good at this point, and that we should consider the question later once we have actual empirical data about what works and what doesn't? Is that really such an illogical position to adopt?
yes, because once giant corporations make a tiered wireless internet take hold there is absolutely no chance of untiering it.
When google says "don't be evil", I take that to mean they wouldn't promote an internet where the traffic from my site may be forced to take a backseat to the traffic from Giant Corporation because I can't give a big enough kickback to verizon.
Given google's "don't be evil" mantra it's illogical for them to promote a tiered internet since such a promotion is contrary to their mantra.
this is like saying that someone isn't promoting racism just yet, they are just against the government regulating businesses so that they can't deny service to someone based on race.
They may be two different means, but they come to the same end.
There are a number of historical precedence that provide some evidence that it could change.
In the early days of internet access companies like AOL charged different rates for access to their (non-internet) network and the real internet. That went away.
In non-US markets tiered access is quite common, but hasn't proved to be a massive problem. In Australia (where bandwidth caps are common), most ISPs provide "non-metered" access to some sites (gaming servers, download mirrors, the national broadcaster), and many mobile access providers run promotions for "free facebook" etc.
Generally, consumers find these things annoying to keep track of and switch over to a higher-cost plan where they don't need to worry about them. Some very price-conscious consumers (eg, students) benefit a lot from them at the cost of some convenience.
Gradually companies seem to be dropping the more complex of these plans because of the customer confusion it causes.
(I guess I should insert some witty reply about how my belief in this possibility precludes the possibility of me being intelligent. Unfortunately I'm going to have to rely on there being a question as to if my lack of intelligence is causal WRT my lack of witty response, or vice-versa. Sorry).
Take VOIP, for example. It won't be VOIP as a whole that receives priority access, but Skype VOIP - and in exchange, Skype will kick a portion of their revenue back to Verizon. Verizon gets a bit of juice and Skype doesn't have to worry about competing with other VOIP providers. It will be invisible to users.
A similar process happened in the video rental business when Blockbuster signed a deal with the movie studios to pay less upfront for videos, while kicking back some of their rental revenue to the studios. Whereas an independent rental store might pay $100 for a tape, Blockbuster paid almost nothing - the independents went out of business, and video rental became a Blockbuster-dominated monoculture.
Skype and Verizon are both only in business because users find the services worth their money. That can change. If users are getting ripped off by shitty service, then it has ceased to be invisible to the users.
Blockbuster is a horrible example. A lot of good that deal did them! This monopolized monoculture you describe has been crushed and blown to bits long ago by Netflix, Amazon, Apple and the rest of the internet.
These are conspiracy theories, not rational arguments.
Too bad Verizon hadn't thought about shaking down online video rental companies a few years ago. Blockbuster could have given them a sweet deal.
And there are many services that are ripoffs that are largely below the consciousness of consumers.
Of course I don't want things to be terrible for 15 years, but I haven't heard anything that would lead me to reasonably believe it would be. If wireless internet remains less-regulated than wired for 5-10 years, what do you expect will happen? Verizon and Google will team up, hike wireless prices, block torrents and censor content?
Maybe we should let events play out a little more before crying out that our internet freedoms are being trampled by faceless mega-corporations. Maybe Google, Verizon, FCC, and other agencies aren't sure yet how best to compromise on this complicated issue. Maybe demanding a non-negotiable "everything is free (as in freedom)" policy isn't the best response 1 day after a vague press release.
I'm certainly not one of those individuals who believe that any regulation is bad regulation, but there is a not-insignificant chance that regulating the nascent wireless space before it has truly matured will result in bad regulation. And once bad regulation is in place, it can be very difficult to change in a meaningful way.
It seems to me that there is danger in both approaches: an entrenched base of huge corporations pushing an unregulated tiered wireless internet is a bad future. Likewise, an improperly regulated wireless internet is an equally bad scenario.
As I understand it, this deal does not sacrifice a neutral wireless internet for a neutral wired one, it merely eschews applying neutrality rules to the wireless internet while proposing neutrality rules for the wired one. Which is very different from the assertion that this deal puts a tiered wireless internet in place.
Which, given its nascent status, seems like the most prudent approach.
I also fail to see how packet parity can be bad.
I think the most salient factor here is that regulation requires good information on how that industry/space works. I don't think its questionable that we are not sure what future the wireless/mobile internet holds, only that it big. Regulating it properly right now seems like a dubious proposition-- either through the traditional kind of government regulation or through the "self-regulation" of large corporations, who will naturally shape such self-regulation to their own advantage.
Given this limitation I think we should be very careful in saying that a given solution should not be allowed. I can imagine scenarios where tiered pricing models would be very beneficial to most people.
For example, imagine a business setting up wireless security video cams. Thoughtlessly, they set them up to record and send video in HD. A few of those pointed at a rapidly changing scene (eg, a road) can chew though a lot of bandwidth. The owner of those cams doesn't care - why should they? They just pay a flat rate and the fact that everyone else's access is bad isn't their problem.
If an access provider could charge extra for that traffic then it would give the cam owner motivation to fix the problem.
(Yes, there are other solutions - a price per Gb of traffic is an obvious one. But my point is that I'm not convinced other options should be outlawed yet)
The question is whether Verizon can charge a separate fee to prioritize one company's traffic over another. My understanding is that this recommendation partially closes that door for wired traffic but leaves it wide open for wireless traffic. Now fledgling startup security video hooks up their cameras to the web and find their bandwidth artificially restricted compared to the entrenched competition because they aren't paying for the super deluxe plan, or because Verizon has an exclusivity agreement with the entrenched player, or whatever. That is what seems to be left possible in wireless land with this recommendation, and that is frightening.
My point is that it may make sense - and be good for consumers - to deprioritize and/or discourage some kinds of usage over wireless. http://danweinreb.org/blog/google-and-verizon-a-new-hope references the story http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Government-IT/The-Truth-About-Googl.... I hadn't read this when I made my original post, but it makes a much more compelling argument based on the same ideas.
It makes the point that for VOIP to work properly over wireless you can't have jittery delivery. One way to solve that it to use QOS to increase the priority of that in comparison to video. That isn't "neutral" access, but it is good consumers.
If ISPs are allowed to discriminate significantly based on the protocol, then what's to stop them from inventing a new proprietary video transmission protocol and prioritizing that over any protocol used by YouTube, effectively reimplementing discrimination on the source or destination of traffic (which is the most obvious justification for net neutrality)?
Eg: just because one person can potentially get 20Mbps out of a 4G connection does not mean that there is enough spectrum that 1 million people can all do it at once in down town San Francisco.
Wired connections scale linearly with the number of wires you lay (almost unlimited, although it is expensive). Wireless quickly hits the limits of physics (for any given amount of spectrum there is a theoretical hard limit to the amount of data you can send over it for a given power budget no matter what technology you employ - and spectrum itself is intrinsically limited).
I suspect Google has faith in the ability of previously unknown players to create compelling new content in the common. And once you have compelling new content in the common, no ISP can long succeed that fails to provide decent access to said common.
The worst outcome from the wireless question mark is a revisiting of the net neutrality debate, with the successful example of the wired variant to spur the debate.
there is absolutely no chance of untiering it
It does not suggest that massive government regulation (or in fact any regulation: no need to turn it into a dichotomy) will do more harm than good. Their point is that it's unnecessary.
All the articles that speak out against this agreement are mostly just laundry lists of no-network-neutrality doomsday scenarios, and are not even attempting an unbiased discussion of what this proposal is actually saying.
The proposal explicitly solidifies network neutrality for wired services, which is good. But it's true, this proposal does not cover wireless service: "Because of the unique technical and operational characteristics of wireless networks, and the competitive and still-developing nature of wireless broadband services, only the transparency principle would apply to wireless broadband at this time." Those last three words are important. This proposal is not advocating for wireless service network neutrality, but it also is not advocating against it. And perhaps most importantly, this proposal explicitly leaves the door open for discussing wireless service network neutrality in the future. So I think we should be able to accept this as a first step, then afterwards continue to advocate for similar practices to be implemented for wireless service as well.
It also suggests that ISPs be able to have content and services specific to their subscribers, as long as it does not "threaten the meaningful availability of broadband Internet access services or have been devised or promoted in a manner designed to evade these consumer protections." I suppose people can be up-in-arms about that, but I think that's a reasonable target: ISPs can do what they want as long general internet access is not compromised.
Lol?
Standard Oil + More Volume = Cheaper Shipping / Unfair Advantage
Competitors + Less Volume = More expensive Shipping
Google + More Volume = More Expensive Delivery
Competitors + Less Volume = More Expensive Delivery if want higher tier, no change otherwise.
I don't understand your position.
if anyone is going to negotiate the formal policies of network neutrality, i can't think of a better company to do it than google. the formalization has to happen one way or the other, we've already seen that the fcc's power is questionable at best right now.
engadget wrote the best explanation of the tradeoffs here: http://i.engadget.com/2010/08/09/google-and-verizons-net-neu...
"it's hard to reconcile the stated need for net neutrality in this agreement with a giant exception for wireless networks, which are quickly becoming the most important networks of all"
Except Google makes most of its profit on wireline broadband...
Maybe someone can correct me on this, but as far as I've been able to determine, Verizon's been the one pushing FTTH more than any other company with FiOS. Google might have this pet project, but Verizon has put quite a lot of money into laying new fiber.
The reaction against this deal is emotional. How many people have studied the details? I haven't. It doesn't matter because people have such strong feelings about net neutrality and -- on the whole -- rightly so. These feelings may be limited to the small tech community but that community's importance is greater than its numbers and includes a lot of people inside Google itself. If this doesn't die down in a couple days, expect some sort of adjustment from Google.
If A has a good reputation and B has a bad reputation, and A and B come to a compromise, it makes the reputation of A worse, and doesn't make the reputation of B any better, regardless of what the compromise actually is.
Verizon is so toxic that them just being a party to this taints it for everyone it seems. If this agreement were something that Google was _demanding_ of Verizon rather than something they agreed to with Verizon, everyone would be praising it.
Limited bandwidth? But why does limited bandwidth mean it's ok to prejudice services? Why does that make it ok that YouTube can purchase prioritized service over GlueTube? Doesn't having a limited resource make it more important to share that resource around rather than less important? Isn't that the way it works everywhere else (eg: limited water supplies usually mean we regulate the price and ensure Grandma doesn't have to pay way more than BigCompany or we know that Grandma is getting no water).
The "still-developing nature" of the service? I still don't get it. If anything the immature nature of the services mean that the nascent network needs more protection, not less. We just don't know how it is going to evolve - ok fine - but doesn't uncertainty counsel more caution rather than lack of caution? We can always relax rules later if they are determined to be harmful. It will be very hard to wind back a non-network-neutrality situation once that has emerged and established itself if we determine it is harmful.
Perhaps I can buy these arguments if they are made sufficiently, but there just isn't enough detail here to make a sound logical link. I'm not going to say they are evil, but I do think Google has got some explaining to do.
Net Neutrality is government enforcing non-control of the internet, over everybody. It says that no one, including the government, can make the internet a non-level playing field. Like national parks, it's a Good Thing™.
Google and Apple are now unquestionably large. And they are crushing things that stand in their way.
Just remember, "Don't be evil" as a motto to make money. Until you can no longer make sufficient money with the motto. Then being evil is almost certainly the only way.
However, it is also important to realize that all organizations, not just corporations, wishes to grow to sustain its members. They will grow and change. They will continue to exists even long after their purpose is accomplished. Sometime, organizations get cancers that rotten them to the core, much like the RIAA, the MPAA, and California. Sometime that's due to the rules being modified or being poor in the first place.
Giants guy hate cannibalizing their business. They're so big that they move very slowly. They may get economy of scale, but they also got dis-economy of scale. New guys are not constrained by traditions or size inefficiency. So they will be able to seize opportunities left or cannot be reached by giant people. So giant guys don't always have the advantage. There is a place for the small mammals in the world of dinosaurs.
Trying to crush those that oppose you is pretty evil, all things considered. Particularly for a cause as banal as trying to make more money (usually when you do not even need to) rather than, say, fighting space aliens.
When are people going to give up this notion that companies are evil or good?
But when she calls for transparency in government and bringing a new broom to the legislature, you have every right to be outraged when she's discovered steering fat consulting contracts to her college buddies.
It's not an issue of whether Google is evil. It's an issue of whether Google is Hypocritical.
"companies are living, complex organisms and not profit machines. The profit should therefore not be the object of a company, but rather a result of good work. Just like a person can't survive for long without food and water, a company can't survive without profits. Not that I would ever reduce the purpose of a human to that, as eating and drinking are the only prerequisites for a meaningful life."
"When we search for organizations that have the capacity and ability to improve our world, global companies are at the top of the list. In particular integrated global corporations are in an ideal position to support developing countries to close the gap to leading national economies." http://www.dalailama.com/news/post/362-exclusive-interview--...
If you truly care don't just support network neutrality, support projects like GNUnet (https://ng.gnunet.org/) or FreeNet that actually enable people to use the internet anonymously and securely.
Service provider routers with deep packet inspection and similar technology will simply turn a little dial until bandwidth for GNUnet et. al. slows to a trickle.
That's why this is such a touchy issue.
Any attempt on the part of Google/Verizon to not come out directly in favor and clearly stating support of Network Neutrality, is in fact a PC way of saying that they don't support it.
I would imagine that coming out and clearly supporting it would be a difficult PR move to swallow. The extreme of net neutrality ensures that the internet remains open regardless of what is being transmitted; this includes everything from illegal content, socially taboo content, legal content, and liberal expression of thought/idea/opinion. While many critical thinkers would correctly say that "supporting an open internet maintains innovation and the free exchange of ideas and that it is often a self-regulating entity that should not be stifled" they also forget that many many people do not see it that way. There is quite a bit of archaic thinking that qualifies an "open internet" as a harmful medium because that openness allows for the unregulated transmission of thought dangerous to the state, child pornography, and other illicit materials and subjects. Those same people that believe it must be regulated are locked in a state of believing it is people they must control rather than themselves (I know that sounds unnecessarily philosophical, but, it really is the truth).
Is this worth fighting? Are we making headway? Maybe a little. But the establishment is established while the progressive roots of free thinkers is protean (it is necessarily so, otherwise we wouldn't be progressive). The goal should be to keep pushing, slowly, persistently, and steadily while exploring mediums and clever ways of circumventing the silliness of people that believe regulating something as transformative as the internet will actually work.
Hell, it's all a bunch of old people coming up with these policies! In 20 or 30 years, people in political power will be those young people that were born with the internet and were witness to it - the internet already made its impact and the momentum is far too great for anyone power to stop it. It may be muffled for a bit (if even that), but it won't be stopped.
Cellular internet is a long way from offering the speed and convenience of broadband. And even then, the cost of landline internet is just so much lower that we'll see wi-fi continue to proliferate.
And the cost of wireless internet is cheaper. I pay $30/month for my unlimited data plan with T-Mobile, and I pay $60/month for my FIOS.
Also you only pay less for your wireless internet because the average consumer uses WAY less of it than wired. Per megabyte we're spending far more on those wireless data plans, and as soon as the rate of use grows I think we'll see them start becoming metered.
I've read some stuff from people who say that wireless net is a long way from being able to sustain the sort of activity people use on desktops without serious improvements given the amount of spectrum it has available now. However I wouldn't be surprised if metering solves that problem.
Overall I am not worried, because there should be enough people who would want a free connection. Competition should do the rest.
I have my own opinions on that statement, but if I were Verizon's PR dept, I'd be drinking.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/05/google-verizon-net-neutrali...
Would someone care to point me to the evil in those 7 points? To me it sounds like "we want the internet more open and transparent for the customers". That's good for american customers, isn't it? Why evil?
Will this decrease bandwidth for all the smaller sites? I don't see any reason why it would, unless ISPs go over capacity. In which case if they do, then everyone would suffer... and paying some money to suffer less does not seem so unfair to me.
We already have tiered internet on the consumer side, ie, DSL vs Cable vs Dial-up vs FiOS. I don't see what difference it makes if there are also tiers on the content provider side.
The real problem seems to be one of capacity; any issues is caused by a bandwidth scarcity, and that would have to be increased. What these people are discussing is just a way to allocate the remaining bandwidth, in which case 'fairness' is completely impossible. There's absolutely no way to determine who deserve the bandwidth more arbitrarily... Putting it on the market seems pretty reasonable!
Anyway, I hope new service provider startups come into being that will make the investments to improve infrastructure, though from what I understand that seems to be a completely thankless job...
Please don't vote me down just because you disagree, I actually do not understand many of these positions and this is a plea to be educated.
Thanks.
The problem is that there is a theoretical limit to how wireless infrastructure can be improved. Sure, new generations of wireless tech. are improving the bandwidth available every few years. But RF frequency bands are a limited resource and sooner or later Shannon-Hartley's theorem [1] will dictate that the only way to improve bandwidth will be to increase power levels received at user's antennae (either by increasing effective transmission power or clustering cells more densely). But doing this will deliver ever diminishing (logarithmic) gains and an increasing public health risk associated with increased RF levels.
Couple that with the fact that wireless is going to be the Internet in the coming decades (for many youngsters it already is) and you are faced with a problem of how to allocate things fairly.
Wired Internet resources on the other hand can be upgraded effectively forever. If the demand is there we can keep laying new fibre whilst maximising the existing lines with new modulation techniques etc. The same cannot be said of wireless technology.
It is precisely because of these major contention issues that wireless spectrum should be protected under net neutrality regulations, its need of regulation is in fact greater than that of wired Internet. When there is an approaching hard limit to bandwidth available why would we want to allow the parties with the biggest wallets dominate the traffic? It is precisely these sorts of situations that governments are for, without them monopolies will naturally form at the expense of the populace.
Imagine if governments around the world said, let's solve (or rather ignore) the problem of car traffic congestion by allowing employers to bid for priority access to the roads on behalf of their employees, and businesses to bid on behalf of their customers, even though everyone has already paid their own car tax, fuel etc.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shannon%E2%80%93Hartley_theorem
Google has loads of money so it can buy loads of bandwidth but the next google might not so the next google won't come to be.
Why is it so bad to simply not have net prioritization at all. I mean, I can access all sites conveniently and I am not really annoyed that they are slow right now. If bandwidth was prioritized however, whether over wireless or anything else, then some sites would be great, some sites would not, and eventually the internet would become like the telly where you need loads of money to establish yourself.
As demand increases for wireless bandwidth, prices may rise to reflect the supply shortfall. At points this will hit an equilibrium level and demand will cease to rise. At other points new technology will increase supply etc. At some point in the future we will likely hit a fairly final equilibrium. As long as governments maintain a level of competition in the market (something they are generally not doing very well right now I admit) we could avoid price fixing cartels between the carriers.
We just have to face it, wireless RF spectrum is a shared finite resource nothing we do will ever overcome this fundamental truth. No amount of financial manipulation of the market business models by the carriers will ever change this.
If I want to get priority access over others I should pay for it! Allowing content providers to bid for priority reduces consumers freedom to choose what they are able to access. Problem is, a lot of people these days will take free over paying a premium even when their freedom is removed.
Imagine say Verizon et al get their way and say for simplicity's sake 10 big content providers manage to achieve the overall bandwidth priority between them on most networks. People accessing other content will likely become frustrated with smaller services and migrate their usage to the services offered by these 'big 10'. Eventually most people use these prioritised services and small sites/startups just don't get a look in. However nothing has changed with regard to bandwidth, there is now the same contention just that a small number of providers have managed to dominate the market. The carriers are making loads of extra money for doing effectively nothing, all they have done is played the content providers off against each other and against the consumers (and pocketed lots of money in the process). It seems to effectively amount to extortion.
Allowing prioritising of traffic based on provider will not likely reduce prices for data contracts for consumers. The same issues of bandwidth contention will arise, except that this time the carriers are able to effectively blackmail content providers. The big content providers may see themselves as able to profit from this scenario, the smaller ones won't stand a chance.
In the long, long term lets hope quantum entanglement based communication allows us to leave RF behind!