Behind Closed Doors, Ford, UPS, and Visa Push for Net Neutrality
businessweek.com
businessweek.com
If it's really that easy, I can't see why it's not common and relatively rarely uncovered or discovered...
"It’s not surprising that these companies don’t want to talk openly about net neutrality. They have little to gain by alienating business partners such as Verizon, AT&T (T), and Comcast. Groups like the Telecommunications Users Committee exist to shield them from those conflicts, even as the companies quietly pursue policy goals in talks with the FCC."
What they are doing right now is nothing short of monumental in a large corporate environment where the same telecoms you are opposing may be your customers, suppliers, or partners.
The problem w/ all of the proposals from Obama is that when you get into the details, they hinge around traffic that is "illegal". No Snowden disclosures, no wikileaks. If you distill the proposal to it's basics, it has very little to do with the kinds of functionality that people think they are fighting for.
Isn't this what China says?
I can tell you right now you're not going to get the libretarian paradise that everyone wants, but you're not going to get a Verizon 5% ecommerce tax either.
ISPs will be required to not block traffic that is lawful but what is the definition of lawful? Would wikileaks be considered lawful? What about the Snowden documents? What about encryption?
This is a dangerous road we are going down.
I guess the reason I'm not as worried about it as you is because I feel like it will be easier to get the FCC to bow to public pressure (eventually?) if they do something stupid, more than I trust any of the ISPs which IMO have been behaving stupidly for quite a while now.
Edit: typo
Other examples of ISPs violating net neutrality is charging different rates for different traffic on mobile networks. For instance, T-Mobile says your plan is unlimited as long as traffic goes to / from the primary device (such as your handset). But if you connect secondary device through it (for example through WiFi hotspot), your traffic will be treated differently and you'll have a monthly cap.
Discriminating traffic is exactly the problem that net neutrality rules are supposed to prevent.
Howso? It's a pretty broad reading of NN that would force Comcast to build beefier connections to Level 3 and Cogent in common data centers. I'd be very interested to hear the interpretation of any currently proposed NN policy that would have resolved that dispute in a positive way for Netflix.
Because they did it for non technical reasons, i.e. just because they could. They abused their monopolistic control in order to extort money from Netflix. Net neutrality should address such abuse, but the problem here is not so much in definition of such behavior as in its detection, since there is hardly any transparency in what is going on.
http://lifehacker.com/use-a-vpn-to-bypass-your-isps-throttli...
For instance afaik the FCC - not Congress - defines "profanity."
Admittedly, these aren't apples to apples comparisons, but it strikes me as somewhat ironic that after all of the hullabaloo with the NSA spying and such that we still hold the belief that the government is every trying to do the "right thing".
Or am I missing something?
Otherwise let engineers, customers, and businesses figure things out for themselves competitively – as has worked just fine so far without involving the FCC's powers of censoring, taxing, delaying, price-fixing, wiretapping, and favoring-incumbents.
I don't want a Chinese firewall.
I though we already have legislation in place to define them as "Common Carreires" absolving them of any legal responsibility when illegal content crosses their pipes. However it requires them to not perform any filtering.
I have the feeling we are making a new law to permits ISP to filter and not be legally responsible if illegal content crosses their pipes.
Why can't we just define carrier's as common carriers?
USPS has a whole bunch of law saying what can or can't he sent via postal mail. They absolutely do filter the post - not very well but it happens. https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/aboutus/laws.aspx
What it seems people are asking for is that ISPs never filter any traffic at all for any reason and also never suffer any consequences for not filtering that traffic.
Giving Internet carriers "common carrier" status is likely to include laws that make them gather evidence and prosecute people involved in online gambling; child sexual exploitation; pyramid schemes; lottery tickets; credit card fraud; extreme pornography; etc. giving them common carrier status is likely to lead to more, not less, intrusive monitoring and filtering.
Now, in the smack middle of a major city with a large technology presence, I have 0 of the first kind and 1 of the second kind.
This is _not_ progress.
Logically, this does not imply that ISPs have to start filtering for illegal content, but that is nevertheless what people started worrying about.
No matter how cynical you want to be about the FCC, Comcast, Verizon, et al. have already proven themselves to be actively harmful. Anything restrictions the FCC creates can hardly be worse than the "fast lane" plans. The FCC is also answerable to elected officials, for better or for worse - even at worst, I think that's better than being answerable to no one but a pocketbook.
That's not to say that the current batch of telecoms are trustworthy, but at least there is recourse in the form of competition (see: Google Fiber), while if the FCC goes off the deep end we're irrevocably pooched. And...we have immediate history demonstrating that the FCC is corruptible for external agendas. I don't know why people think they would suddenly become above reproach if net neutrality legislation were enacted.
I'd check that assumption. There's plenty of evidence to show that government does a poor job regulating companies. Often times it's the companies that control the regulations.
Have you ever used a telco or cable company in the US? It's not exactly 'free and open'
With Title II regulation, they would be classified as a common carrier and would have many more restrictions in how they could discriminate among the various kinds of traffic that passes through their network.
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=60000979857
edit: added a link to the PDF of slides
That's kind of a simplification. The pushing is controlled by the CEO and similar people at the companies and they can in practice push for pretty much what they like using the companies money. While they are kind of supposed to maximise shareholders interests they don't always do so in practice (see excessive company jets, vanity takeovers). I doubt Ford and BoA are pushing neutrality because they think it will increase their profits, they are probably just pushing it because the boss likes the idea.
I think comcast and verizon are villainous scum that should be crushed like bugs, and still I am uncomfortable with legislating for net neutrality at this point, and especially uncomfortable with the idea of putting it in the constitution (even presuming that that's a bit of hyperbole on your part).
My problem is that NN is a "I know it when I see it" issue. But do I? When I first saw bitterness I thought it was a bad actor at the TCP/IP level (it isn't!). Streaming live events over the network? Madness -- my first impression was that we have several other broadcast media for that already! (now I realize: "so what?"). My understanding evolves over time.
Consider: differentiated carriage is clearly of interest to me -- I'd be happy to pay (as long as it's me making the decision, not my carrier) for differentiated QoS to make sure my call or game traffic were isochronous, that that big file I want now came quickly, but that my background app & OS updates, or disk pickup transmissions, were deprioritized, or even especially scheduled for periods of low contention. I'm delighted if my ISP has a cache so that common pages many people in my topological area may preload pages I want to see two, improving my access. Oh and I do with that that DDOS attack aimed at you doesn't catch me in the crossfire.
Finally, we know that when legislation is made, especially by people who lack the domain knowledge, all sorts of corner cases get screwed up both maliciously or though ignorance. What's network management vs rentier opportunism vs disadvantaging the poor vs a mistake can be twisted by someone with a buck to make, and the old carriers are past masters at such games. And they will surely swap the right to stop spam and layer 3 attacks for the right to monitor and censor.
If you do want a constitutional amendment, make it a general one about right of carriage and passage. I.e. it should apply equally to trucks driving down the road (which still have to meet some technical constraints for safety) to sending parcels, transmitting bits and the like. So that it can still be applicable when we consider packet switching as obsolete as the carrier pigeon.
QOS should happen at the edges of the network, certainly not in the middle because the middle has no clue what bits count to me.
Common Carrier law is exactly what Title II is, and what currently applies to trucks driving down the roads (can't buy a faster speed limit), electricity, shipping, oil pipelines, landline telephony, postage, etc.
My point is that the technology is still immature. We haven't really considered what our true criteria are, what layer they live at etc. There are still many innovations ahead. And don't think the carriers aren't well versed in how to game the system!
You say, correctly, that Title II is common carriage. But consider what came along with that. Note that I think CC has mostly worked with busses (you can't discriminate by race, at least) and the roads. It's worked well with trains. In other areas it hasn't got such a good record (and my politics are what is called in America "liberal").
In the case of telephony, title II unarguably held back technological development. All the development was done at the center. AT&T and Bell Labs did a really astounding job of development in the core (FDM in the 1930's for chrissake, and direct dialing with routing tables on punched metal cards in the 1940s). Not to mention SS7, the transistor and fibre optics. But all that came at a huge cost: phone calls were expensive, long distance was a limited service, and all innovation at the edge was explicitly, and by legal force, suppressed. You probably don't remember how horrible it was to use a Bell 103 modem, or the crappy approved phones. Mobile telephony was expensive and essentially useless. The communication infrastructure of today would be unrecognizable to a telephone engineer of 1990, while the communication infrastructure of 1990 would have been be easily comprehensible to a telephone engineer of 1925.
My point is: that it worked at all was because we had a useful metric: 99% of all calls had to be completed, even if it meant overbuilding to guarantee that on Mother's day. On the other hand we don't even have an equivalent of an Erlang [1] in the internet domain. I don't believe NN can legitimately be legislated in 2014, and any attempt will screw us at LEAST as much as ATT/comcast/verizon etc al are screwing us today.