Submitted by “A divided Federal Communications Commission has approved new rules meant to prohibit broadband companies from interfering with Internet traffic flowing to their customers. The 3-2 vote Tuesday marks a major victory for FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski, who has spent more than a year trying to craft a compromise. The FCC’s three Democrats voted to pass the rules, while the two Republicans opposed them, calling them unnecessary regulation. The new rules are likely to face intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill once Republicans take over the House. Meanwhile, public interest groups decried the regulations as too weak, particularly for wireless systems.”
The law was just “ok” for the most part, but it is very troubling the fact that they allowed wireless companies to filter and throttle. Now, there IS a legitimate reason to allow this, because there are some badly written third party mobile apps that eat lots of bandwidth for no good reason, and in some cases they even bring down towers. I have heard of few of such stories happening (remember the T-Mobile debacle a few months ago in the news?). Wireless companies don’t have the same infrastructure as wired ISPs, so they have to be careful with their bandwidth. So I don’t dispute the need for this.
Where this deal falls through though, is that they should have allowed wireless throttle/filtering ONLY for such abusive cases, and ONLY for up to 5 years or so (until new higher bandwidth technologies are deployed that can deal better with such problems). But I don’t think the current law was as specific.
I think they shouldn’t have any special rules.
They should have just reinforced what has always been the case in most networks:
If there is a technical reason to temporarily throttle or block something then do so.
Like a (D)DOS or spammers, etc. if an application is misbehaving then that is a valid technical reason.
Some networks have priorities for things like VoIP. This is because such traffic is latency sensitive.
And that is also a valid technical reason. If you do it for all VoIP-providers, based on portnumber for example.
I’ve never understood why Google/Verizon came up with the idea of having different rules for wireless.
I do know many wireless networks atleast in the US are build the wrong way. They sent all the traffic to a few central locations in the US instead of keeping local traffic local.
This is because for simple phone calls that still worked.
T-Mobile in the US supposedly does keep local traffic local.
Such a centralized network in the US seems conducive to the amount of domestic spying that takes place.
I’m not sure why this is, but I think it might be because old telecom networks used to be build that way.
summarizing: I think it is just for technical or historical reason.
Edited 2010-12-23 00:08 UTC
It may escape some of the non-US readers, but in addition to the content of the regulation, there is a important debate about the process.
The FCC is not supposed to pass “laws” as the exclusive legislative authority in our government is trusted to Congress.
Congress passed no net-neutrality law, and after a few false starts earlier, had no intention of passing one in the near future.
That frustrated the (unelected) regulators at the FCC, who then simply declared that they already possessed all the authority they needed–which would make Congress passing a law superfluous–and proceeded anyway.
That was rejected by the courts, and the FCC was ordered to stop.
After waiting a few months, they simply declared once again that they already possessed all the legal authority they needed, and issued sweeping regulations that will literally affect every person in the country. All decided by three unelected officials that I doubt one person in 100,000 could name.
To a large extent, I wouldn’t care if the regulation were perfection itself. The FCC usurped the authority of the legislative branch by granting itself powers out of thin air — powers that the Congress could have granted it if they had chosen to do so–had in fact considered granting it, but then did not grant it–and then defied the courts that had already ruled that it did not possess the legal authority it claimed.
Good regulations or bad regulations, it still matters how things are done. In truth, in the long term it matters even more than the text of any single regulation. This is not the way our system is supposed to work.
I agree about the abusive case clause, but about the 5 years limit… AFAIK, there are two problems with this :
1/Will 5 years be enough to get really wide coverage ? I mean, there are a lot of areas in the middle of Paris which are not even covered by basic UMTS yet !
2/Give a phone user more bandwidth, and he’ll find a way to use it. No one could have imagined people congesting a 3G network before the iPhone became popular, the same way as people from the 80s would have laughed if we told them that in 2010 computers require 2GB of RAM to work smoothly.
Edited 2010-12-22 07:41 UTC
I somehow think the FCC essentially controlling the internet is opening a pandoras box that cannot be closed….. I see more and more regulation coming over time untill we cannot even recognize the net anymore.
That is what I’m afraid of too. But we’ll have to see what will happen. They still have to get the law/rules past the next step.
Yup…I think this is going to be a bad thing.
Pick your poison. As it is, a handful of businesses can do whatever they want to the internet. It is their internet because they own the wires and the servers.
Meanwhile the FCC acts for the President, who was elected by the people.
Someone is going to control the internet. Who do you think it should be?
Us. The people. Direct ownership.
Meeh… the net is ours. The users own the net. The companies are merely service providers and they get to provide the service the owners demand. So net neutrality it is. We need to do with the net as we have done with railroads. Split operating companies (or service providers) from the companies/entities owning the infrastructure. And make sure the owners of the infrastructure is the People.
Mystery solved.
That’s not true. The Internet has private-sector standards bodies and all ISP’s. Also all ISP’s are subject to market forces and can’t do ‘anything’ they want to.
Imagine if the government mandated every web site used standard HTML so that everyone had equal access. What a nightmare. How could we progress? What about freedom? What regulations will follow under such a guise of equal access?
False. They own their own properties, sure. But the Internet isn’t just physical hardware. No one owns the Internet so far, but the governments of the world are working to control it under the self-serving dogma of ‘equality and guaranteeing freedom.’
Our elections have been manipulated. Obama was noone four years ago. Now all of a sudden he’s president. He was deliberately advertised by the media, lied profusely during the campaign, and now services the globalists and the central bankers. He’s a corporatist.
No one. No government. Especially no government that has a worldwide empire, engages in never-ending wars based on lies, persecutes those who divulge the systematic lies, and terrorizes its own public under the guise of homeland defense.
It is my hope the Internet continues to be a place of voluntary participation, not government coercion and mandated equality.
Freedom is about choice, not equality. Net Neutrality is not about freedom, no. It is an entitlement. Net Neutrality is Marxist. Evil can dress itself up in such beautiful sounding words and that’s what I think Net Neutrality is. It sounds so wonderful and Utopian. The devil is in the details.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag8_23xgbu0
Watch this video to see how corporations use government regulation, just like Net Neutrality, to gain an advantage in the market. Big Content (ie Netflix,Google,Facebook and many others) want Net Neutrality laws and this is the truer intent behind why the government is supporting it. That’s just a part of the series, I suggest you watch the whole segment (can’t find it now on YT).
Edited 2010-12-22 07:51 UTC
You’re going a bit far by calling it Marxism (Marx theory was not exactly advertising Soviet Russia), but you’re right in that these days, we’re heading towards something close to the USSR.
Utopic communism and capitalism are based on the belief that mankind is able to self-organize itself in an optimal way and thus that states and regulations are unnecessary. That by giving individuals maximal freedom, the group benefits in the end.
Other, imo more reasonable theories, believe that without a strong body of laws, we’ll only face insecurity and individualism without a collective result (ie each one starts to cultivate potatoes in a field, people fight for a yard of cultivable field, and things like medicine and computers disappear). They also question the inertia of individualistic systems, where once someone got big enough, he can crush any form of dawning competition. Regulations are thus necessary, in their system, if we want mankind to prosper in an optimal way.
Today, what we have is a monster which uses laws to help individual interests, and not mankind as a whole. Banks are free to do what they want with people’s money, AND if they fail, as they deserve to, they know that the state is going to save them. The best of both worlds, isn’t it ?
Edited 2010-12-22 08:50 UTC
There is nothing Marxist about net neutrality. Marxism is rather the opposite of net neutrality. Net neutrality simply means the ISP’s are to keep their hands of the traffic and let the Individual control its own traffic. Quite the opposite of Marxism.
In theory and an oversimplification. The ISP’s can’t simply keep their “hands off” the traffic, they must deliver and manage it, and avoid stepping on legal landmines in the process. It will create another layer of bureaucracy for the companies that still have more engineers than lawyers.
Edited 2010-12-23 02:26 UTC
The problem is that the FCC has a very poor track record with almost everything it has done in the past…… The FCC runs things like the Gestapo.
Edited 2010-12-22 22:45 UTC
I have far more say with my ISP than I do with the federal government. I cast my votes for my ISP with my wallet, ever dollar I spend is a vote for how I want the world to be. My political votes are completely lost in a sea of idiots.
I understand I can’t call my ISP and get the CEO on the phone, but my odds of getting someone high enough that they are able to make a decision or having the person on the phone advocate for me are significantly higher than with the government.
What I believe should be permitted is the prioritization of data based, almost exclusively, on data types.
(Warning: gross simplification)
From highest priority to lowest:
https://*
text/*
image/*
application/*
audio/*
video/*
streaming protocols
peer-to-peer
This is simple network prioritization, NOT filtering. Filtering should be considered a breach of contract for “unlimited” internet accounts. ISPs may offer restricted access, that is their right, but I would, by law, require a reasonably priced unlimited access connection account offering for each and every ISP – permitting only prioritization in the aforementioned manner.
I would also require, by law, that the most restricted ( by content ) offerings cost the same or greater than the basic unlimited offerings in the same performance category ( +/- 10% ). The ISP must do more work, afterall.
Then, the ISPs can offer priority upgrades for certain content for certain users. For example: $5-15/month extra for video streaming protocols for sites such as YouTube, Hulu, Google Video, and Netflix, thereby raising priority on the local network, and intervening connections, for your video streaming traffic and providing funding to make the switches and upgrade the networks and create extra profit in the mid to long term.
My internet comes from a wireless tower, and I can tell when the people in the area are coming home from work and jumping on YouTube. A real hassle when I need to go pay my bills online ( https ) or try to snipe an auction on eBay ( also https ).
Oh well… when I rule the world…
–The loon