What the hey…the good guys won on Net Neutrality? Just like that?
Senior Republicans conceded on Tuesday that the grueling fight with President Obama over the regulation of Internet service appears over, with the president and an army of Internet activists victorious.
The Federal Communications Commission is expected on Thursday to approve regulating Internet service like a public utility, prohibiting companies from paying for faster lanes on the Internet. While the two Democratic commissioners are negotiating over technical details, they are widely expected to side with the Democratic chairman, Tom Wheeler, against the two Republican commissioners.
But if happy news isn’t enough for you — you also need the bite of some piquant schadenfreude — the ex-operator of a revenge porn site is unhappy that Google links to his name now all declare him a sleazy scumbag, and he’s suing Google to have them removed.
Heh.
Let’s all give him some more attention as a bucket of slime!
Craig Brittain—the former operator of revenge porn site IsAnybodyDown.com—is invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in a bid to remove 23 links in all—an irony-filled DMCA takedown request that Google is ignoring. One of the links renders the FTC’s press release in January about its enforcement against Brittain. Another is a link to Ars’ story about the FTC’s move: “Sleazy ‘revenge porn’ site is banished to settle federal charges.”
I’d be happy to help him remove those links for a reasonable fee. But give me few minutes to set up a sleaze bag revenge site first.
Meanwhile, voices from the ragged fringes of the rightwing are certain that Net Neutrality undermines the First Amendment.
Link
Hooray for good-governance!
However, as a computer science professional, I hate the way that this is being discussed in the media. Ex:
I hope that’s wrong. That’s not the net neutrality we should be fighting for.
I already wrote up something on Mano’s blog here:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2015/02/05/fcc-chair-comes-out-strong-for-net-neutrality/#comment-4298517
Not sure if I should copy-paste.
According to this http://www.vice.com/read/ftc-bans-craig-brittain-from-ever-operating-a-revenge-porn-site-again-999
he felt so bad about victimizing women he decided to contribute his talents to gamergate.
AFA doesn’t ever use facts. They just use their paranoia, of what they would do to others, to imagufacture pseudofacts, that meets their agenda.
Oh, my#5 refers to Lynna #2.
Good for now, but there were stories today that Sen. Thune was still working on alternatives for the future. It ain’t never over.
EnlightenmentLiberal:
,blockquote>Hooray for good-governance!
However, as a computer science professional, I hate the way that this is being discussed in the media. Ex:
I hope that’s wrong. That’s not the net neutrality we should be fighting for.
It’s phrased a bit oddly, but yes it is. What that’s talking about is ISPs creating ‘fast lanes’ by placing an artificial cap on all their customers connection speeds, then asking other companies to pay a premium to have their content exempted from that cap. With net neutrality, this is impossible – the only time content hits an artificial speed cap is when the customer is paying for a slower service than their line is capable of, in which case, all content is slowed, regardless of source.
And a blockquote fail. Only the last paragraph above is me, the rest should be a blockquote of EnlightenmentLiberal.
@zmidponk
Yes, the two values of net neutrality you identified are: neutrality w.r.t. to content, and any service offer must be available to all.
However, the pithy summary “prohibiting companies from paying for faster lanes on the Internet” is just plain wrong. ISPs can and should be allowed to charge by the bit. ISPs should be allowed to offer services with different up-time guarantees, different latency guarantees, different bandwidth caps, etc. Of course a company should be able to pay more for better service. Again, all subject to the rules of net neutrality, which include: ISP services must be neutral w.r.t. content (but not size of content), and all ISP services must be made available at the same cost rate to all potential customers. E.G. what it means to be a common courier as I understand it.
I go into further details in my rant in the above link.
@EnlightenmentLiberal:
You have misunderstood what that description is about: The companies in question aren’t the customers, most of the companies having to deal with this so far are big enough that they don’t get their service from ISPs at all but rather from NAPs, (if they aren’t linking in as a peer in their own right).
What happens is that some guy at home has internet service from some ISP, his service is, let’s say 2MiB/s. However, since RandomVideoService, (which gets its network access from a completely different company), hasn’t coughed up the protection money, any time our guy at home goes to watch a video from them he only gets it at 1MiB/s.
@Rick Pikul
I tried to make it short, but I lost something in the translation from long to short. I’m fully aware of what you speak. I stand by my full comment here:
http://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2015/02/05/fcc-chair-comes-out-strong-for-net-neutrality/#comment-4298517
I stand by my assertion that framing this as a “fast lane vs slow lane” completely misses the point, and is actually factually incorrect.
Let’s talk about your specific example.
I think the following blog posts by Level 3 spokesperson are informative:
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/chicken-game-played-child-isps-internet/
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/observations-internet-middleman/
What we have are several well known and hated residential ISP companies who own lots of content providers and who purposefully sabotage the internet traffic of rival content providers. This has absolutely nothing to do with a “fast lane” or “slow lane”. This is simply an anti-competitive business practice because network maintainers should be regulated as common carriers.
Consider this scenario: The Post Office is privately owned, and that company also owns a Netflix-like service which ships DVDs of TV shows through the mail, and the Post Office as a matter of course regularly purposefully loses packages that belong to a rival Netflix-like company. That’s the accurate parallel. It has nothing to do with whether this hypothetical Post Office offers overnight service for a higher fee. It has everything to do with the hypothetical Post Office violates the rules of being a common carrier, such as purposefully penalizing the service of a particular customer, or offering a special deal to a particular customer.
For a nice old example of the sort of thinking that triggered the net neutrality arguments in the first place, see this interview with a gentleman by the name of Edward Whitacre who was responsible for undoing all of the hard work of the people who dismantled the old Bell monopoly.
http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/stories/2005-11-06/online-extra-at-sbc-its-all-about-scale-and-scope
It isn’t about fast and slow lanes so much as hydraulic despotism. What Mr. Whitacre decided was that even though the customer was paying for their internet connection, and all the internet companies have to pay for transit (or set up peering agreements) from their datacentres, it isn’t enough. Somebody has to pay an additional fee on top of all that if they want their traffic to flow over “his” pipes, and because there’s no other route to “his” customers, he gets to write the rules.
(and obviously, the whole issue of net neutrality in the US is just a distraction from the underlying problem… if most people actually had a realistic choice of ISP a lot of these issues would never have arisen in the first place, but the FCC is all about granting and supporting monopolies and that’s not going to go away as a result of this decision)
Mr Brittain had better be careful. Using the DMCA to have content taken down can be dangerous if, for example, he doesn’t own the copyright of that content.
I seem to remember that you have to claim that you own the content and if you actually don’t you can be charged with perjury.
@anym #13
I LOL’d. Darn tootin’ upstart peepsqueek internetters!
Yeah, it seems a strange sort of description even in the dark ages of 2005, as google was already valued at over 80 billion dollars.
Lynna, well since Citizens United demonstrates that the right, particularly the corporate right, considers money speech, I am not surprised they consider maintaining net neutrality a free speech violation.
@EnlightenmentLiberal and related upstream discussion:
I spent a chunk of my career in the equipment-provider end of the network biz, and while I know very little about how tariffs and usage rights are actually negotiated, technically we already have (and have long had, and routinely use) exactly what you want. It’s called “Class (or Quality) of Service”, and it’s expressed in terms of bit rate and traffic characteristics like constant vs. bursty, tolerance for propagation delay and jitter, etc.
So yes, if Netflix wants a video-streaming-capable channel to my TV, then they should pay for the appropriate CoS (which will be charged back to me in the subscription). And the intervening carriers will get a cut of that — but my ISP (say, Bell, who also have a movies-on-demand service) has no business fucking with that stream just because it’s Netflix, and they want me to sign up for Fibe.
And the American politicians bloviating about this are demonstrating the same damned ignorance they routinely demonstrate on evolution, gynecology & obstetrics, and every other subject.
Yes, conspiracy theories are sprouting all over the place. Senator Thune’s is … um … creative.
Link
More details on Thune’s theory in the National Journal.
Appreciation for Strewth’s summary in #18 that money is speech, according to the corporate rightwing.
Enlightenment Liberal @ # 12: Consider this scenario: The Post Office is privately owned, and that company also owns a Netflix-like service which ships DVDs of TV shows through the mail, and the Post Office as a matter of course regularly purposefully loses packages that belong to a rival Netflix-like company.
We need not make up hypothetical scenarios for this situation, we have them from history. Back when Benjamin Franklin ran the Post Office, his magazine, the Saturday Evening Post, tended to get the fastest delivery, and other publications had noticeably slower transits before reaching their subscribers’ boxes.
@Enlightenment Liberal
Where your analogy falls down is in how it is treating the content provider as if it were the ISP’s customer. With ISPs, it’s the recipient who is the customer, not the sender. The parallel would be having someone who is paying for having everything sent to him via overnight, but anything from the rival ends up taking two days unless the rival, (who, as I pointed out, is not a customer of the ISP _AT ALL_), is making extra payments.
@Rick Pikul
IIRC, aren’t there ways to ship parcels by snail-mail where the sender pays nothing, and the receiver has to pay for the parcel upon receipt? A quick google search later and I found this:
http://pe.usps.gov/text/dmm/s921.htm
I fail to see why we should enforce by law that the person who sends the parcel should pay and the person who receives the parcel should never pay.
The content providers are not customers of your residential ISP. (Mostly.) Instead, content providers are customers of other network providers, such as Level 3. Level 3 and other providers connect to data centers. Some data centers lease out their services. Other data centers are actually owned by certain content providers. For example, I recall a story about Yahoo and how they own a whole data center, and they own their own (electrical) power plant just to power their data center. IIRC, like 250 MW too. And it’s one of several.
These network providers, not the residential ISP providers, connect to each other through peering arrangements. As explained by the Level 3 blog post above, oftentimes the interconnects are just made without a cost on either side. Sometimes there is a payment schedule.
So, if you use Comcast internet at your house, you are right that Netflix is not a customer of Comcast. However, Netflix is a customer of another network provider, such as Level 3, and Level 3 connects to residential ISPs like Comcast.
So, the question then becomes how to negotiate the interconnect between network providers such as Level 3 and Comcast. Should these interconnects be free? Should all network providers be forced to connect to any other shmoe’s network for free? That’s not reasonable. Again, for example, some interconnects with Level 3 involve regular payment – one way or the other – and these interconnects are not bogged down and killing the performance of your home internet experience. Rather, it’s free interconnects with companies like Comcast who refuse to upgrade their interconnect equipment until they extort sufficient money from customers (ex: Netflix) of the other network provider (ex: Level 3).
The interconnects is where IMHO the complex and hard problems of net neutrality lie. I consider myself not sufficiently educated to give specific solutions.
I understand the problem well enough to describe it though, and it has absolutely nothing to do with fast lanes or slow lanes. It has everything to do with ensuring that network providers, both providers like Level 3 and providers like Comcast, are treated as common carriers, and that they cannot and will not give preferential treatment to one kind of content (but discriminating on mere volume is ok), and definitely no special treatment to data based on mere destination or source. To do so is an anti-competitive business practice, and that is why they should be regulated as common carriers.
What is needed is regulation on interconnects – how much you can charge, rules for enforcing proper capacity upgrades, stuff like that.
To continue, in an “ideal free market world”, the problem would be sorted out because customers of Comcast would just leave to another ISP because Comcast is playing these games. However, in the real world, Comcast and the other network providers (not just residential ISPs) are a utility, just like roads, phone wires, and electricity wires, and they should be regulated as such.
PS: This is further compounded by further anticompetitive business practices I’ve read about where companies like Comcast will make special deals with local towns to put in cable, and the deal includes the town forbidding any other company from putting down cable. Complete bullshit.
Oh, and of course plus regulation on the network providers themselves (including ISPs). Such regulation should that they may only sell a “all or nothing” access to their network and connected networks. No bullshit where they sell access to sections of their network, or offer deals that give better access to part of their network over another part. E.G. cannot require special deals to access Netflix. Or something like that least.
Again, I know I am too ignorant to actually spell out specific policy proposals. I know the general shape of what they should look like (see else-thread) but not the specifics. Still, the pithy summary of “fast lanes vs slow lanes” has very little to do with the actual problems. The actual problems can best be summed up as “the ISPs and network providers don’t want to be regulated as common carriers”.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
First of all, COD is not simply about paying for the shipping. When you send something COD, the post office is acting as your accounts receivable office. What you are thinking of is the old practice of sending something postage due. Note also that if the payment isn’t made, the recipient doesn’t actually get the package. Not that I said anything about enforcing a ‘sender pays’ model for physical shipping, instead I was pointing out that your analogy didn’t work because it involved an assumption of the sender being the one who pays for the transmission.
Remember that someone _HAS_ paid for the traffic to be sent at full speed by the ISP, that’s what your monthly bill from Bell/Rogers/Comcast/Verizon/whoever is for.
It’s also not an issue of refusing to upgrade: If it were about holding off on upgrades the speeds wouldn’t come up literally overnight once the protection money is paid. It’s an issue of imposing artificial speed caps to extort payment from non-customers. That it involves speed caps being imposed based on where the ISP’s users are getting their traffic from is why it is described as ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ lanes.
@Rick Pikul
I am still confused. Are you talking about a legally enforceable contract between you and your ISP? Or are you talking about some new regulation to enforce this particular payment model?
For many cases, it is. Please educate yourself on the topic. You seem to have a very naive view of how the internet actually works, including the above point about how “someone has paid”, and this topic too. I included several very informative blog posts by Level 3 above.
For this point about “not just an upgrade issue”, I should have included this blog post earlier. It explains the issue in terms that a layman can understand.
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/verizons-accidental-mea-culpa/
(Bolding added)
It is a simple matter of a natural monopoly using its natural monopoly to do anti-competitive business practices. Stopping that is AFAIK basically the goal of the movement called “net neutrality”.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_monopoly
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive_practices
Specifically
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tying_%28commerce%29
(For example: Tying together internet service and service to the content providers of Verizon, without tying together the service of the content provider of Netflix.)
The problems here are well known problems of monopoly regulation. AFAIK, nothing about net neutrality is novel. The particulars of the internet business are novel, but the needed regulations are mostly not AFAIK. (Again, the peering arrangements are a little novel, and the regulation of those is where the large difficulty lies IMHO.)
Also see this post:
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/heads-isps-win-tails-you-lose/
for a brief introduction to how the internet actually works, what’s going on, and some brief suggestions for how to fix it. I’m not sold on the fixes, but that’s because I don’t think I have enough knowledge about the particulars, what constitutes a fair pricing scheme, etc.
Also this:
http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/not-neutrality/
@EnlightenmentLiberal
The very material you quote is describing it as an intentional slowdown of traffic from particular sources: i.e. A “slow lane”. That one of the goals of having ‘fast’ and ‘slow’ lanes is to increase the costs to competitors does not change the fact that ISPs are demanding payment by third parties to have content delivered at the speeds that the ISPs’ customers are paying for.
Also note that those blog entries were talking about the rules being proposed six months ago not the more general ones that ended up being adopted.
@Rick Pikul
Are you suggesting it should be illegal for ISPs to offer both DSL and cable residential internet services? I mean, that’s a slow lane and a fast lane. Are you suggesting it should be illegal for other network providers, like Level 3, to charge its customers based on how much traffic they actually send/receive? Again, that’s many different lanes of many different “speeds”.
You don’t know what you’re talking about. This is coming from an actual expert with a respected college degree in the field. Shut up and listen. Do some more reading.
Argument from authority is a fallacy. You are clearly not communicating the superior information and perspective you claim to possess.
Actually, you appear to have latched onto an artificially Shit-Stupid-Literal interpretation of colloquial phrasing and are now petulantly trying to hold everyone else to it. I find that difficult to reconcile with claims of understanding the subject. Knowing some facts about it, maybe….
No one is this stupid, let alone a “respected expert.”
WE ARE STATING THAT IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL TO ALTER THE SPEED AT WHICH A GIVEN CUSTOMER, PAYING FOR A GIVEN QUALITY OF SERVICE, IS ALLOWED TO RECEIVE CONTENT SENT FROM A GIVEN SERVER, BASED ON WHO OWNS THE SERVER AND WHETHER THEY’VE GREASED THE CUSTOMER’S ISP’S PALM.
Jesus Blue-Balled Christ. Do some reading for comprehension. Not “more.” Any at all.
…actually, given who and what I’m apparently talking to, make that:
@Azkyroth
I’m sorry. I don’t recall seeing you in the conversation before.
I was talking mostly to Rick Pikul, who made several clearly wrong points, such as:
And several points which at best are confusing, such as:
Because I am an expert, and because it’s a pet peeve of mine, I’ve been trying to educate readers as to what net neutrality is all about.
When you say:
I agree that people informed on what is going on do not hold such positions. However, the very naive and pithy description is how it’s being constantly described in the media. Further, I’m still not quite sure if Rick is defending that naive view. It is unclear IMHO. I am not a mind reader, and further I want to educate the public on this issue. To say “it’s about fast lanes and slow lanes” is so overly simplistic as to be completely wrong. Again, it’s about ensuring that any fast lanes and slow lanes are made equally available to every content provider plus every ISP customer, e.g. ensuring that ISPs and other network providers are treated as common carriers.
PS:
Appeal to authority is not always fallacious. Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn’t. Example: It is not fallacious to cite in an argument the fact that 99%+ of climate scientists agree that global warming is real.
I suspect that net neutrality only passed because corporations realized it wouldn’t be profitable. People would surf less, or just as likely, make themselves less dependent on speed (e.g. downloading sites or videos with WGET and watching offline or by caching.).
Remember the last time companies dominated unregulated utilities in certain US states (e.g. Enron)? Now just imagine that situation nationwide with internet and ISPs. The whole system could collapse and companies go bankrupt or abandoning the market. States might end up taking over and restarting,charging much less than the companies ever did with better service.
@EnlightenmentLiberal
Are you dishonestly ignoring the context of the discussion?
Why yes, yes you are. I accept your concession.
@Rick Pikul
Do you agree that offering cable and DSL for different rates to residential users is “fast lanes” and “slow lanes” at different costs?
Do you agree that other network providers such as Level 3 a variety of deals to various companies, like Netflix, which vary on cost, bandwidth, etc.?
Do you thus agree that it’s woefully incorrect to talk about net neutrality by describing the concept as outlawing fast lanes and slow lanes?
….Yeshua Pedantic Fuck, was that all?
Another thread where people have reading problems, and people are surprised that I’m defending a point I made very clear in my very first post in the thread. The lack of intellectual honesty is getting annoying. Quoting my first post: (Bolding added)
This thread exploded because someone (several people) can’t read, not because I’m being a dishonest pedantic fuck.