I have been having nightmares with Comcast and a wire they have left hanging next to my Ann Arbor driveway for 30 days (which they would like me to pay to deal with).

You can be sure that this attitude won’t exist once there is viable competition in the cable services market.

Carol Shepherd
Arborlaw PLC

unfortunately, the FCC, which is charged with regulating telecoms, labels cable and DSL as information services, not telecom services, which exempts them from the “common carrier” requirement to provide open access.

changing the FCC’s attitude is something only congress can do (by revising the telecommunications act of 1996). but it would merely benefit consumers and innovators, so there is no effective voice or lobby for change.

I am in general agreement with Peter’s comments regarding Net Neutrality. I would add that for me as a system owner and administrator the issue is: who controls my router policy? Is it me, or is it the government?

As far as I am concerned the Net by its historical process should be governed by “rough consensus and working code”.

RFCs (”Requests for Comments”, which are internet administrative documents) such as (more or less at random) RFC 2676 and RFC 2815 provide for quality of service and other preferential routing.

As a system and network owner/administrator, on the one hand, I want to be able to offer highest quality service to say, medical service providers who may need real time telemetry and video on a priority basis. On the other hand, I want to be able to give spammers or any large organizations which are backhauling their own IP traffic across my network, an arbitrarily low priority.

Any law about Net Neutrality is likely to be worded such that it will permit interpretations which will criminalize system administrators who are doing perfectly normal things in accordance with the RFC’s.

We should ask for “end-to-end” neutrality — that the QoS (Quality of Service) bits set by a user on one end of a transaction be transmitted intact to a willing receiver. How they are routed along the way is up to the people along the way… not just “a service provider” but sometimes 10 or more hops “in-between”. The whole internet depends on voluntary cooperation without government coercion or proscriptive enforcement and it should stay that way.

Here’s a link showing some of the RFC’s relating to Quality of Service routing issues which could be contradicted by or made problematic by a short-sighted US “Net Neutrality” legislation: http://www-lor.int-evry.fr/~pascal/RFC/S.qos.html

Not to mention other routing issues which would become involved in a government-mandated “neutrality” scheme, such as how routes are announced over BGP, or aggregated via CIDR.

In short, “net neutrality” is a slogan for having the government take over and begin prescribing and proscribing how we can set up our own routers and networking protocols. I think this is a Very Bad Idea, and something that Jon Postel fought against.

We shouldn’t be talking about this astroturfing term “net neutrality” we should be talking about “common carrier” status.

The operators of the big network exchanges such as PAIX, MAE-East and MAE-West, are essentially “natural monopolies”. They should be granted both the privileges, such as immunity, and the responsibilities of other historic types of common carriers, such as to carry all traffic without discrimination. This however doesn’t mean without routing policies, simply that those policies as much as possible should be “Content-Neutral”.

So best effort, everyone work together, and if you can’t build it again from scratch, leave it alone. Hands off my router! BAD GOVERNMENT! LOL.

–HH.

Network Neutrality (wikipedia)
John Postel (wikipedia)
MAE-East and MAE-West
PAIX
Common carrier (wikipedia)

I am putting this comment and link back to this thread onto Scanlyze, my public blog at http://scanlyze.wordpress.com/ .

Copyright © 2007 Henry Edward Hardy

that market is not a monopoly — it is competitive, albeit imperfect — and appears to be growing more competitive with new technological innovations.

but net neutrality regulation threatens to make the transport marketplace less competitive, not more competitive, as pricing restrictions limit profitability and discourage new competitors.

given your (what i take to be misplaced) concern about monopoly power in that market, i guess that is the opposite of what you want. i don’t see how limiting competition in the transport marketplace helps consumers.

However, I think net neutrality is very desirable to avoid potential abuse by those that have a monopoly or near monopoly over the transmission system of the web. It is the Internet equivalent of the anti-trust legislation. The anti-trust legislation is not an unnecessary burden on normal business. Rather, it just penalizes those that would try to prevent free competition.

youtube was founded by millionaires (three early paypal employees) with huge amounts of funding poured in by high-flying silicon valley venture capitalists. if you think the american dream is to turn millionaires into billionaires, you must be from texas.

dire warnings that differential pricing threatens the american dream or access to the internet by nonprofits is what geeks like me call FUD. it ignores technological and economic realities and seems to have no basis in logic or facts.

back in the real world, i am guessing that consumers are the ones who will pay the price of internet regulation, just as they did when airlines were regulated. in my opinion, based on 25 years of experience as an internet researcher and developer (and enthusiast), the internet is thriving precisely because it is free from government regulation.

Net Neutrality, besides helping non-profits and others who may never make a fortune, also helps innovators like the You Tube founders to leverage their creativity to make a fortune. Isn’t this the “American Dream?” There are countless web sites that I use, which would have never stayed afloat or even gotten started in the world that Comcast and AT&T would like to have.

the argument that net neutrality is necessary to keep monopoly transport providers from gouging consumers seems misdirected. although competition for the “last mile” is imperfect, competing technologies — cable and DSL — limit market power. and i expect emerging wireless technologies to make the last mile more competitive.

anyway, that argument ignores the real money on the table: the value of consumers’ eyeballs. at the end of the day, that money comes from consumers’ wallets in the form of higher prices for goods to recover (1) the cost of advertising fees paid to content providers (like youtube), and (2) the profits of companies selling ad space (like google).

the cost to consumers is indirect, so it is easy to overlook, but that is the big money. in my opinion, the net neutrality issue revolves around carving up that pie.

today, advertising companies — especially google — have a lock on the value of consumers’ eyeballs. some of that value is siphoned off to pay the content providers. the transport providers are looking at differential pricing as a way to get a piece of that action. google and the content providers are fighting back with this populist movement called net neutrality.

so to me, net neutrality looks for all the world like a political maneuver to regulate transport providers in order to maintain the profitability of content providers and advertising companies.

in general, i take a dim view of regulation. for one thing, it seems always to enrich lawyers and lobbyists. moreover, in the fast-paced technical arena, freezing the status quo is synonymous with freezing innovation.

i don’t know what the future might hold in an internet w/o net neutrality — and i view with great skepticism anyone’s claim to know — but one thing i don’t see is how net neutrality lowers prices for consumers. e.g., maybe net neutrality increases the cost of advertising (and thus of goods). or maybe net neutrality makes the transport business less viable, discouraging new players from entering the transport provider market. who can say? i can’t.

in short, the way i see it, net neutrality seeks to constrain some companies (at&t, comcast, etc.) in order to enrich others (google, youtube, etc). i am not in favor of that. i prefer to let market forces in an unregulated net determine how to divvy up the value of consumers’ eyeballs between transport providers, content providers, and advertising companies.