Tech Companies, Google Sold You Out
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Personally, I'd like to see a restriction on what can be called "Internet". An internet connection in my mind implies neutrality. If your network only provides a subset of the content on the internet, you shouldn't be able to call it "Internet", but instead call it something obviously lesser, much in the same spirit that requires Cheez Wiz be called "cheese product".
And also Google felt like the underdog taking on the hated Microsoft.
Then one day we woke up and Google was massive, and doing just as much underhanded/questionable policies as the next guy.
No. Google tolerated it, but was never "for" censorship.
> They were for net neutrality until Verizon offered to cut them a deal.
What? Google has always been against net neutrality. In fact, this new policy proposal helps net neutrality. The main thing people seem to be mad about is that it doesn't go far enough. So how exactly does that make them evil again?
As for your other point, Google was the most prominent company supporting net neutrality. Three years ago they were prepared to spend billions buying spectrum to prevent exactly the kind of deal they're pimping today.
I give both of these companies some credit for using their leadership positions to at least offer a framework to the industry and public at large - something the FCC and all the other carriers heretofore have been completely unable to do.
Of course that doesn't jive with the whole, "they're trying to destory the internet" meme.
What I do see is fear mongering built almost exclusively on "what they didn't say," "what ifs," and worst-case conjecture.
And I can appreciate those fears, but I also know they conveniently get more pageviews than addressing QoS, or the reality that traffic prioritzation must happen on some level (by type, not source) to accomodate delivering all these services.
It strikes me that the alternative to two pretty "pro-user" companies proposing a framework to deal with an unresolved set of technical issues is to have less open, less "pro user" companies deal with it with their lobbyists behind closed legislative doors. At least initially, I'll trust the devil I know.
I can imagine a scenario where FCC bans prioritization of any form, and the market rewards the company who actually builds out the highest capacity network, not the company who most effectively throttles traffic.
Is it prioritized to stop a DoS attack? How about to make SIP travel faster through the network than web traffic? What about things like DOCSIS, allowing quick bursts of fast speeds for your cable modem, so small downloads happen faster than sustained downloads?
Who determines what the priorities should be?
All of this angst is a result of lack of competition, which is the actual problem. It has almost nothing to do with prioritization of traffic. The fear, as best as I can tell, is that Comcast will one day so "No more Skype." and millions of people without another ISP choice will be stuck with it.
> All of this angst is a result of lack of competition, which is the
> actual problem. It has almost nothing to do with prioritization of traffic
Can anyone confirm one way or the other? Thank you.
That's why all of our cell providers have a different band allocated to them, and why AT&T got the best GSM band while T-Mo gets worst.
It's also why we can't show boobies or say 'vulgar' words on over-the-air television.
Removing vulgarity creates the illusion that public interests are being protected. In my opinion, auctioning off radio frequencies and selectively enforcing regulations shows a more accurate picture.
In this particular case, I don't think the public cares much about net neutrality, while the corporations are clear in what they want. I see no reason why the FCC wouldn't side with the corporations instead of the indecisive (and not yet inconvenienced) public.
See http://articles.latimes.com/2010/apr/07/business/la-fi-fcc-c... for confirmation of the FCC's position.
I can't see how this good for the free Internet and the little guy starting.
I can't believe that so many people have so little perspective. By far the most important tier in the proposal is called "the Internet". If history is any indication, "the little guy" is guaranteed to out innovate, time and time again. And as a result the service people will care about most will be called "the Internet".
Sure, Verizon is free to prioritize traffic so that telephone calls don't get dropped and people's TV works even when a DoS attack is going on. But neither Verizon nor any other provider can afford to make the internet suck, and as long as it doesn't suck the guy in the garage is free to deliver what we haven't dreamed of yet.
Don't forget, we've seen the tiered internet before. It is what broad access started with in the mid-90s where services like AOL and Juno had their nice little walled gardens and, on the side, offered access to the big scary internet. And guess what? The walled gardens weren't attractive to consumers then, and won't be now.
So if the utilities go along with this agreement then breathe a big sigh of relief, and get on with your lives. Because it gives them all the rope to hang themselves trying to do what won't work, and give you the guaranteed free space to innovate to your heart's content.
With all four WISPs following the money train who is left. Some random joe who is going to start building their own national WISP that provides as solid coverage as the biggies?
THis may or may not happen but if set it stone it allows WISPs to do just that. Also If im trying to create the next Skype (a wireless IP service) the service created in my garage is not going to be as reliable and run as well as Skype runs on Verizon. If Im a consumer which one am I going to use and adopt?
Skype itself, today, runs over the general Internet, and got to its current position competing against an entrenched dedicated network that literally had been optimized for decades. (Aka the telephone network.) Oh, and one that is prioritized over general internet traffic.
In the nightmare world that you describe, any new Skype competitor starts with access to a better Internet than Skype did. Their main worry should be that Skype itself already exists, but for some strange reason Skype is choosing to spend hundreds of millions to billions making Verizon happy. And at the same time our new upstart can deliver to the exact same customers at very little cost! (Certainly a lot less per customer than Skype is paying.) Were I that entrepreneur I'd be crying, "Woe is me, don't throw me into that brier patch!"
And by this agreement, Verizon et al can't shut off this upstart service because guaranteed customer access comes straight from the consumer protections they've all agreed to.
In effect it is, "We have net neutrality, but the ISPs and anyone they can convince are allowed to waste as much money as they want in producing services with premium access." Given the history of the Internet I have no doubt that much money will be so spent, most of it will be wasted, and innovation on the Internet will prove to have been well protected.
You want to compete with that, but Verizigoogle only leaves 20 megabits for all other traffic. You're effectively shut down. The consumer has a 120 megabit pipe but 100 megabits is reserved for "premium content". This is exactly the opposite of net neutrality, yet it is exactly what Google and Verizon are proposing and expecting us all to swallow.
"The internet" is covered in the proposal. This mythical 3d video service would have to be outside of the internet - a completely new service.
If verizon wants to create this new service, and use up all their available bandwidth on it (and therefore reducing their available internet bandwidth) then that is their choice, but I imagine their customers would just switch to a different ISP that offers better speed.
Any impingement on your network connection then becomes a truth-in-advertising issue -- getting what you've paid for -- as has been taken up in the FCC's National Broadband Plan and elsewhere regarding companies that label their connections as "up to" N Mbps. Holding providers to their promises here seems like a more serious issue than being concerned about VZ offering crappy video-on-demand via a separate bandwidth pool.
I agree that it would be nice to have a big, dumb pipe to the Internet by which we can all choose the 3D video services we want, but that's going to require serious competition in access or some sort of public utility for access provision, neither of which seem likely in the US.
It also should be pointed out that Google's proposal is a _proposal_ and not yet written policy.
I just don't see why you assume that Google and Verizon are acting counter to the interests of the public, but you trust Genachowski.
Edit: publicly-owned -> publicly-traded
Google/Verizon, to their credit, have put out at least some of their proposal for public consumption. I just don't see how a policy put forward by a corporate entity (or alliance in this case) could be anything but biased to that entity.
The government including regulatory agencies like the FCC have a responsibility to take public interest into account - yes it is never done perfectly - but the FACT is that the decision-making process for governmental entities is entirely different than it is for private corporations.
Even the article's writer says that "after the conference call and reading the agreement, I’m not sure there’s much to say beyond the fact that this agreement basically keeps the network neutrality situation the same."
We have two options for high speed internet here. AT&T and Comcast. Comcast is the only option that gets me above 10Mbps.
The only alternative on the horizon? AT&T's new service. At least that'll be a viable alternative to Comcast, but it's still hardly what one could call variety.
Where do I live? Atlanta, in the city limits, less than three miles from the heart of the city.
Latency is horrible. I consider this a plus -- no temptation.
It may be possible to use technical measures (QoS etc) to reduce the latency problems on wireless for applications that need low latency (eg Voip).
Do we really want to regulate now to rule this out? I have very mixed feelings on this.