Last week the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia shot holes in the U.S. Federal Communications Commission’s version of net neutrality saying the Commission was wrong not in trying to regulate Internet Service Providers but in trying to regulate them as Common Carriers, that is as telephone utilities. The FCC can’t have it both ways, said the Court, and so the Feds get to try all over again. Or will they? I think events are moving so quickly that by the time this particular argument is worked out all the players will have changed and the whole argument may be moot.
If you read the court’s near-unanimous decision they leave the Commission with two choices: 1) declare ISPs to be Title 2 Common Carriers (phone companies) or; 2) find different language to achieve net neutrality goals within a Title 1 regulatory structure (information services), which might be hard to do.
Under Title 2, voice service is considered a basic consumer right and not to be messed with. That’s how net neutrality proponents would like to see Internet service, too. Instead it is currently classified under Title 1 as an information service such as SMS texting. Your phone company doesn’t have to even offer SMS, nor do they currently have to offer Internet service. See the distinction?
Some pundits are saying the answer is to switch Internet service from Title 1 to Title 2 regulation. This is not going to happen. Yes, the Court says that’s the way to do it, but in the real world of U.S. politics and government it won’t happen.
The time for it to have happened was when the current rules were made circa 2001. Back then an arbitrary decision was made to throw Internet service into Title 1 and I simply don’t recall much debate. The guy who made that decision was Michael Powell, then FCC chairman. Michael Powell (son of Colin Powell and not my favorite Mike Powell — owner of the world long jump record) is now president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), which is a trade association representing cable and telephone companies.
Michael Powell — the guy who put Internet service into Title 1 in the first place — says that his organization will do whatever it takes to keep the FCC from shifting Internet service to Title 2. That means lobbying and political donations but it could also mean going to court. That’s why net neutrality is dead. It was probably always dead thanks to Powell’s original decision more than a decade ago. We just didn’t know it.
Instead of mourning net neutrality, throwing a tantrum, or trying vainly to figure a way to make the FCC do what it is clearly not going to do, let’s look inside the whole issue of net neutrality to see if we really even need it. I’m not sure we do.
Net neutrality in the era of dial-up Internet was key because we were sipping our data through a very thin straw. V.92 modems could ostensibly download 56 kilobits-per-second while typical U.S. broadband service of today is 3-5 megabits-per-second — at least 60 times faster. Our straw today is a lot thicker. This is meaningless to ideologues but it has great practical meaning for actual users. The core technical issue — then and now — is packet prioritization. Under net neutrality no data packet is supposed to be better than any other which means Voice-over-IP and video streaming get no priority so Internet phone and TV services suffer, or ISPs fear they will.
Why should ISPs even care about such things? They don’t, actually, except as a way to make more money by selling packet priority to the highest bidder. The big ISPs, led by Verizon, want to goose their revenues by selling E-tickets to content providers.
It’s godly free enterprise against ungodly socialism, we’re told, when the reality is more like we might have a slightly less optimal porn experience.
But wait, there’s more! There are parallel battles taking place right now around what are similar, but not precisely identical, issues. On the one hand there is net neutrality and on the other bufferbloat, a technical issue I have written about many times. Net neutrality and bufferbloat are apples and oranges except that they both achieve similar aims. If we cure bufferbloat the effect of having lost net neutrality will go completely unfelt. We’ll get back such higher performance having defeated bufferbloat that whatever we lose to ISP greed won’t even be detectable.
Let me repeat that with slightly different words. Net neutrality is a policy problem. Bufferbloat is a technical problem. The people who are all upset about net neutrality typically have never even heard of bufferbloat. Yet once bufferbloat is solved the operational difficulties presented by the loss of net neutrality (whatever it is that I want to do online is affected by ISP’s selling packet prioritization) will probably become undetectable.
Bufferbloat is being solved. Network hardware vendors are aligning to fix the problem, each of them seeing in it a chance to sell us all new stuff. This will happen. It’s only a matter of time.
So maybe we shouldn’t care about net neutrality. I don’t care about it. But this appeals to me as a student of business tactics because that’s what we’re likely to see played out over the next year or so. The ISPs want to open-up a new product line to sell — packet prioritization. But in order to do that they have to first generate need for it.
That need has been provided so far in part by the very people seeking net neutrality. What these folks don’t realize is the ISPs have been using the threat of net neutrality as a marketing message for packet prioritization. To this point it has mainly been used to sell extra bandwidth — bandwidth that has been sold as a solution of sorts to the very real problems of sending streaming media over the Internet. Ironically more bandwidth doesn’t solve that problem at all, because the problem isn’t a lack of bandwidth, it’s bufferbloat.
So the ISPs, for all their fighting against net neutrality, have actually needed it to sell more bandwidth to content providers. And the bogeyman the ISPs have identified in net neutrality isn’t real at all — what’s real is bufferbloat.
Ideologues are fighting for net neutrality and ISPs have been fighting against it when they both should have been fighting against he real problem — bufferbloat.
The reason this hasn’t been made clear is because the ISPs have been making a lot of money off of bufferbloat and are determined to make a lot more before it is cured.
Here is where it gets really interesting for me. If you are a content provider (say Netflix) how much bandwidth do you need and how much bandwidth do you use? If you actually want to send four billion bits-per-second over the Internet, your backbone provider will recommend you buy 10 billion. Running at about 40 percent capacity is considered a good rule-of-thumb.
Considered by whom?
Now that’s a great question — by the people who are selling you the bandwidth of course.
This is, as my late mother would have said, bullshit.
If you need four gigabits you shouldn’t have to buy 10 gigabits.
Here’s where we need to distinguish between the people who want bandwidth and the people who pay for it. Get ready for a history lesson.
The Internet and the Arpanet were built around Ethernet which in those days relied on Code Division Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CDMA/CD). The network was a single data bus with all the workstations and servers connected together. In order to work efficiently these devices had to communicate one at a time. In order to do that they adopted a Collision Detection scheme. Think of this like an old telephone party line if you are old enough to remember those (I am).
A party line allowed several houses to share one phone line. You could, if you were nosy, actually listen to your neighbor’s calls if you put your hand over the mouthpiece to keep them from hearing you. When you wanted to make a party line call, then, you’d first listen to hear if someone was already on the line. If they weren’t then you could dial. With CDMA/CD over Ethernet you’d do the same thing — listening before dialing. If packets were detected the CDMA part would use a random number generator to determine when to listen again.
CDMA/CD did not allow 100 percent utilization of available bandwidth on the data bus. All that listening and waiting cut into the number of bits you could send. In truly practical terms the amount of data you could actually send over Ethernet was limited back then to about 40 percent of the rated bandwidth. That’s where we get the rule-of-thumb that we need to provision about 2.5-times as much bandwidth as we actually use.
Except we are no longer living in 1973. Ethernet is no longer coax. Networks are switched, not a common bus. The old rationale for provisioning bandwidth is meaningless today except as a way to justify selling or buying more than you actually need.
Now here’s an interesting point: if a byte falls in the forest and nobody is there to hear it does it make any noise? Joking aside, when a bandwidth provider suggests that you provision 10 gigabits for a four gigabit service, how many gigs are they actually selling you? Why four gigabits of course! You are paying 2.5 times as much as you should.
But this doesn’t mean our current switched networks are perfect by any means. It’s just that the solution of over-provisioning doesn’t actually solve the modern problem, which is bufferbloat.
Wait a minute! Didn’t I just say that bufferbloat was about to be solved? If that happens our networks are going to suddenly start working a lot better, our legitimate bandwidth budgets are going to drop, and as a result backbone providers and ISPs are going to see a drop in both revenue and profit.
That’s why Verizon and the others need to be able to sell packet prioritization as soon as possible. They need a new — hopefully even bigger — source of revenue before bufferbloat is solved and the Internet becomes a buyers’ market. Those who are fighting against the ISPs on this issue are actually working to help those ISPs make their selling case to content providers. The law seems to be favoring the ISPs, too.
I’m pretty sure the ISPs will prevail. Net neutrality will fail. Nobody’s service will be hurt as a result because bufferbloat will be going away. But content providers will by then be paying for packet priority they probably never needed.
Welcome to capitalism.
Great article. “Bufferbloat” is my new favorite tongue twister
You, Mr Cringley, are either a complete moron or an asshole. I’m a bit unsure which, but I’m leaning toward the latter. Congrats on your loving embrace of capitalism and I hope you will be earning enough to pay your $150 a month internet bill because under this system that’s where we’re headed. That’s saying nothing of the fact that all the little oddball sites we love and connect to will wither and die as commercialism is shoveled down our throat via our new system. It happened to cable tv and the very same providers have every intention of doing to the internet what they did to television – destroying any semblance of originality.
> I’m a bit unsure which
You must be new here, you can’t even spell the name right. Try reading, and understanding, before foaming at the mouth, it improves the experience.
One of the theories of capitalism is that competition will help keep the providers in check so that the consumers will largely control the market. This is just a theory, of course. There are many ways for the providers to overcome competition — bribes to government officials, secret agreements to set prices, misleading advertising and labeling, etc., etc.
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Capitalism is not a perfect system by any means. But it’s probably better than any alternatives that have been tried so far.
See, I just don’t buy that this is only about priority. It’s about creating walled gardens. Priority without outright censorship can look like making streaming video or audio from anyone but your preferred providers a terrible or unworkable experience.
The ISPs don’t want to be dumb pipes, they want to own content delivery, and a lack of net neutrality effectivly guarentees a future where what services are actually usable is entirely determined by how much the content provider is willing to do revenue sharing with the ISP.
Devon Jones, you get it, Bob Cringely doesn’t. Without net neutrality, America is going to have a throttled and tiered internet which will be more expensive and slower. Content providers already pay for their connection, end users already pay for their connection, now the ISPs are going to charge them both double. The ones do not pay are going to get very, very, very slow internet. Streaming companies will not fare well. Foreign companies will find working with American companies too costly and too slow. Without “regulations” there is nothing to stop ISPs from colluding to shut out competition. Some ISP might decide that they do not like this Bob Cringely website or his sister’s Portrait Quilt website and block it and there would be nothing Cringely could do about it. Some ISP could decide to substitute their own advertisers for the advertisers on the webpages that go through it, and there would be nothing anybody could do about it. Nonprofits and political activists probably will not fare well either.
Crony Capitalism at its finest!
Last Mile Tyranny
It will happen, but I think they’ll stop short of altering content. Advertising networks will be charged to display their sidebar images and SWFs faster, but I doubt you’ll see outright substitutions. On the other hand if Comcast wants to get into the ad business all they need to do is make all the others too expensive to run well. “As a service to our subscribers we’re charging all ad companies to bother you while you browse” or some nonsense, and then give ComcastMedia a hometown discount. Even if Google carries their Adwords content to the pole outside your window on their own wire, they are still stuck 100′ from happiness. It’s going to be a mess.
“Advertising networks will be charged to display their sidebar images and SWFs faster, but I doubt you’ll see outright substitutions.”
And why do you think that? They already do outright substitutions on cable and satellite TV. If you pay attention, you can sometimes see the last fraction of a second of the replaced ad. Usually right as they “return to our regularly scheduled programming.”
Is it time for a post updating us on the status of bufferbloat? I’ve read your posts on this a few times over the years without realizing it was anywhere near a solution. Is there anything consumers can do now to mitigate it? Buy certain routers, for example? Thanks!
@Charles Moorehead – I think most of the country is in the same situation I am. Two providers, the Telco and the cable company, both offering similar service for a similar price. It’s an oligopoly, and if I want something better, I’m out of luck. Neither provider has any incentive to improve since there’s no competition forcing them – switching from the phone company to the cable company would cost me an extra $10 a month, but that would be the only difference I’d see.
DaveN,
I have the same problem. But I don’t blame capitalism or a lack of competition. Maybe the existing companies aren’t making that much money. If they were rolling in cash, there is always a possibility of a new player arriving on the scene. I see what is available in the marketplace and decide how to spend my limited funds. I always have a choice of how to spend my money. I remember when the only choice was a few radio stations.
My phone company might not be setting the world on fire (Frontier), but my understanding is that TWC is making money by the bucketful. IMO the reason there’s no competition is that no startup can afford to get the infrastructure in place. Frontier and TWC got massive government assistance in the form of right-of-way concessions, favorable regulations, etc. that might not be enjoyed by a newcomer (and would be fought like crazy by the incumbents). And, although justifiably hated, TWC isn’t so bad that a startup could expect to pick up a mass exodus of TWC customers.
We’ve got a mom and pop startup taking advantage of excess fiber capacity to put in super fast, reasonably priced connections. But the financial situation means they can only go into neighborhoods where they’re likely to pick up a great number of subscribers in a hurry – high-end apartment complexes, for example.
In the case of Ethernet, CDMA means “Carrier Detect Multiple Access.” The Code Division type of CDMA is a cell phone technology.
Actually I think he meant CSMA/CD (Carrier Sense Multiple Access With Collision Detection)
I’m confuzzled. I thought the issue wasn’t so much the IPs selling optimum packet passage to content providers … it was selling it to us, the consumers.
In other words, we don’t get Netflix AT ALL unless we sign up for the higher priced Netflix-enabled service tier, whether our buffers are bloated or not.
Hasn’t this ruling opened the doors for this to happen, or am I misunderstanding?
I don’t think you’re misunderstanding, the ruling does “open the doors” for this. However, even many neutrality advocates/ISP-distrusting folks have said that this isn’t the likely scenario as compared to charges to content providers. Of course, charges to content providers do two big things, force the costs to ultimately get redistributed in some fashion to those consumers as well as stifle newer content providers who cannot afford preferred rates. But so far the indications seem to many people that the ISPs realize that directly charging consumers simply will result in objections and bad PR which can be easily avoided and the same goals met by charging content providers.
It’s quite simple… The ISPs want to charge both the home and the provider – they want their cut both coming and going.
The fundamental problem is that there is no ISP competition. For many households there are exactly two practical choices – an incumbent cable operator and an incumbent land line operator. (Some aren’t even that lucky.)
What I am in favour of is net neutrality type controls in an area unless it can be demonstrated there is meaningful competition. When there is meaningful competition then let the market flourish and find good tradeoffs between service and pricing. If the existing companies think they are doing the right thing then they can help ensure there is competition and demonstrate the virtue of their offerings.
Net neutrality is important for society because we should not have incumbent companies with no competition (and hence market correction available) picking winners and losers.
This is bizarre. Lets take politics out for a second and ask the root question (to me) which is: how is bandwidth different from every other (heavily regulated, price controlled) utility? I didn’t buy FIOS for their content. And if they offered it they should simply price it as any other content provider in the market. It should be considered above and beyond the basic fee.
Without net neutrality, all of the content providers will start charging me to cover the usury rates the providers will charge them. In other words, my already painful bill is about to go through the roof in the form of an extra $2 dolars to net flix and you tube and HBO and DirectTV and …
Here’s another question. Who gets to decide the cost here? On what basis? Is this negotiated on a case by case basis? Tiers of service you say? My ass. These greedy bastards are going to try to milk every penny out of this cow they can which means finding every complicated pricing structure imaginable. I mean, have you looked at your phone bill lately?
I don’t see any justification for this obvious money grab that makes any sense at all and throwing up our hands and saying “oh well, it was bound to happen anyway” is a slippery slope to you know where.
I love you Bob, but on this one I just don’t see your side. This one is worth fighting for.
Once net neutrality is gone, what’s to keep the ISPs and carriers from holding our bits hostage? If you aren’t paying a premium, they can arbitrarily delay your bits, claiming that higher priority traffic delayed them. We only found out about “traffic shaping” because clever people could compare “shaped traffic” against normal traffic. If everything is “shaped”, there’s no way to prove your bits are being held hostage. Capitalism doesn’t apply because the vast majority of people don’t really have a choice of ISP.
It’s not priority that concerns me most, as that is technically solvable. It’s destination, connection type, or protocol that’s the worry.
Base plan, all the http web traffic you want.
Want to stream Netfix that’s extra at any speed or quantity.
Want to use a VPN to your office, you need the business plan add on. I’m sure you can expense it.
Want to use the next big connection type that we don’t even know about yet, that’s extra too.
We could see a return to connection protocols that aren’t just using port 80 to pass outbound firewalls, but also trying to force stuff to look like HTTP just to pass packet inspection and work on restricted connections.
It’ll be nice and fast thanks to the technical solutions, just super expensive as each new use gets its own rate.
This all sounds fine, Bob, except that you divide ISP’s and content providers into two competing groups when, in fact, many of the big ISP’s (AT&T, Verizon, Comcast) are also fully in the business of content. Competition as you state the case, is pretty minimal. And then, you have issues like Comcast breaking Netflix’s (a content competitor) kneecaps by forcing network traffic through congested ports.
We already paid for the internet with our taxes. The content providers and their customers already paid for their access. Look into any subsidies and tax breaks the gov gives to ISPs. Look into how much lobbying money is greasing the wheels and sticky fingers of the beltway insiders. Right wing radio and media pundits have been calling net neutrality some kind of commie plot, watch them turn up their rhetoric.
This is the public’s internet. We made it, we developed it, we paid for it, we made it what it is. It belongs to us, not the phone company, not the cable company. Those ISPs can make money selling access to it because we allow them.
Anyone who has had trouble with a phone company or cable company is going to understand what we’re in for.
The problem is that the net neutrality debated is framed in terms of the idea that networks are just like railroads which misses the point of the Internet. The Internet is more like a social network — it is a way we use available resource to talk among ourselves rather than being confined to Shannon’s channels.
To much to explain here — more at http://rmf.vc/IEEERefactoringCE and other essays.
How is bufferbloat being solved? That wasn’t clear from the article.
Bob, You have explained one way this plays out giving the ISPs another rational for selling more bandwidth after the buffer bloat issue gradually gets resolved. But what do you have to say about some of the other comments such as Parkers about the telecom oligopoly imposing an expensive throttled and tiered internet?
In a year’s time will my netflix account be $30/month instead of $8? will be see something like this: http://offthegrid-pr.com/storage/blog-images/net-neutrality/Reddit%20what%20if%20net%20neutrality%20dies%20snippet.JPG?
Bob said: Code Division Multiple Access with Collision Detection (CDMA/CD).
I confirm the earlier commenter. Ethernet actually uses Carrier Sense Multiple Access / Collision Detection – CSMA/CD.
Net Neutrality failing is the worst thing that could possibly happen. Corporations that love wars now dictate the Internet. Any peace achieved in Iran is over. Israeli company Allot is already trying to sell equipment to Verizon to censor the Internet for their interests. America was just getting straightened and turned around. This ruins everything.
Bob,
You’re way off the mark with your comment “Ethernet was limited back then to about 40 percent of the rated bandwidth.”
That’s one of those urban legends that would get people to upgrade their networks.
Take a look here for some reasons why that number came about, and what reality is (or was with shared ethernet): https://www.hpl.hp.com/techreports/Compaq-DEC/WRL-88-4.pdf
When each station acquires the channel with a probability p, the probability of channel acquisition drops to 1/e for large number of stations, that is, about (asymptote) 36% when the number of stations becomes large(r than 5). If you plot this then it seems like Ethernet (i.e. contention protocols) only provides a station 40% of the available channel capacity when there are several (5 or more) stations competing for the same channel.
Changes in packet sizes and varying the probability of channel acquisition per station affect this outcome, but the basic formula shows about 36% acquisition probability which looks like 40% in graphs.
Good link, thanks for posting. I have a strong memory from undergrad of learning that an ethernet bandwidth utilization goes to 70% as the load increases. That report shows that its not that simple…
All other points aside, won’t fixing bufferbloat require the ISP’s to install and use the new “buffershrunk” equipment? I would think they will find a way to make that available mostly or only to the premium payers, and the rest of us will be on the older gear with all that bogging down bufferitis….
This is not capitalism. The incumbent ISP’s have regulatory capture and are writing the rules. They have a perverse incentive to create poor performance because they can then vertically integrate streaming services or collect fees for those services, or at least delay the death of cable. If there isn’t buffer bloat, they have an incentive to create other bottlenecks. The technical will be made to serve the corporate master.
It was in the past reasonable to regulate how many cables are on telephone poles and in the streets to prevent an unsafe chaos. But having prevented competition, it is insane for us to fail to regulate behavior of the lucky corporations that get to own those cables.
Alternatively, rethink delivery. What is to prevent fiber from 5 or 10 companies from arriving in one cable? If choice were a matter of switching a fiber, how would the market change? Preventing changes like that is why these companies lobby the state capitals too.
This may be about many things, but capitalism is not one of them. Unless, that is, you have a definition of capitalism that is even more flexible than the Chinese definition of communism. So flexible you have made the word meaningless.
Bob, I often agree with you, but I think you’ve missed the mark on this one. I’m about as free market as they come, but regulation has a place, particularly when there is little competition or consumers can’t tell what’s going on. After all, we have regulations that require food products to have a correct list of ingredients. Why? Because consumers can’t tell what’s in them!
If Netflix isn’t performing well, can consumers tell whether the Netflix service sucks or whether your cable provider is dropping a few packets to make you use their service instead? If Skype sounds awful, is it because Skype’s no good, or because your phone company wants you to buy their phone service? And even if they tell you that they’re doing these things, often your choice is to either live with it or do without Internet service, because most areas have only one, or at most two broadband providers.
If it were a competitive market where consumers had enough information to choose what was best for them, I would agree that no regulation is required. We don’t live in that world.
Some background on concepts of freedom and fairness (I teach some of this stuff).
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In jurisprudence, you have two main principles: fairness/justice and freedom/liberty.
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Of those two, the priority must go to fairness. Why? Because freedom without fairness leads to tyranny of might makes right. (Simon Wiesenthaler: “without justice there is only tyranny”, etc…)
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Historically, English Common Law invented the concept of “freedom [couched] inside of fairness”. This took centuries of judicial opinions to evolve. Prior to the emergence of this freedom was never an issue because it was another word for anarchy, might makes right, the dark ages when/where there was no law.
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The common law judges developed a bias towards fairness (1st priority) and freedom (2nd priority) over time because the judges worked for the king. So what ever decision the judge renders, the king must enforce. Coercive force is expensive and the Kings were cheap.
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For the first 500 years of Common Law system, the Kings of England spent most of their time and their coercive force and correspondingly their treasure trying to expand or defend their land holdings in France, an when they weren’t doing this, they were fighting Scots and Irish and for a time Welsh. They didn’t want to waist money on enforcement of judges decisions if they didn’t have to.
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So over time the judges developed a bias towards fairness and freedom simply because decisions rendered along those lines tended to be self enforcing, and therefor made the least demands upon the kings purse.
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I tell my students, if they want to understand the Common Law system they should start with the assumption that the Kings were cheap and the judges were lazy and everything falls out from there. From such auspicious premise, they ended up with the greatest invention in history of civics, the idea of freedom prescribe by law, freedom within the law, freedom as a subset of fairness.
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So, free markets, yeah, as much as we can, but not so much that it is unfair, or becomes might makes right type of thing.
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People are always shouting about the value of freedom, but if it is not constrained by fairness and justice, its nothing more than might makes right. So, level the playing field, and let the players run around where they will, but keep the playing field level. And so forth and etc…
thanks for that comment. Never really considered this delicate balance between freedom and fairness . will do some more research. food for thought
” is now president of the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA), which is a trade association representing cable and telephone companies.”
Sounds like “The World According to Monsanto”
“consumers can’t tell what’s going on. After all, we have regulations that require food products to have a correct list of ingredients. Why? Because consumers can’t tell what’s in them!”
GMO labeling statutes are vulnerable to legal challenges – violating the First Amendment:
https://www.organicconsumers.org/articles/article_29132.cfm
I wonder what any of that has to do with the first Amendment: “The First Amendment (Amendment I) to the United States Constitution prohibits the making of any law respecting an establishment of religion, impeding the free exercise of religion, abridging the freedom of speech, infringing on the freedom of the press, interfering with the right to peaceably assemble or prohibiting the petitioning for a governmental redress of grievances. It was adopted on December 15, 1791, as one of the ten amendments that comprise the Bill of Rights.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
But I did enjoy the preface to the GMO article: “Editor’s note: This document was prepared by the Grocery Manufacturers Association for use by industry lobbyists. It contains factually incorrect and misleading information, intended to persuade state lawmakers to reject GMO labeling laws in their states. “
Michael Powell, then FCC chairman, is now president of the National Cable Association.
Sorry…Sounds like the revolving door that is described in “The World According to Monsanto”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6VEZYQF9WlE
[…] ← Net neutrality is dead, but it probably doesn’t matter […]
I can see this evolving like the phone service when we moved to our new house. Verizon’s default (no plan) rates were outrageous for both “local long-distance” and “long-distance” calling. Only with a monthly plan (that you paid for whether you made long distance calls or not), could you secure better pricing. I ended up subscribing to other companies for long-distance, but it took some doing to switch over, Verizon was not helpful, and I still had to go through them for basic servce… I don’t share your optimistic outlook for consumers on this one, Bob. I could see them charging a premium for any type of service they decide, whether it’s Skype or NetFlix – I see a toll-road version of the internet ahead.
IMO the issue is NOT Net Neutrality, the issue is NO COMPEITION among ISP’s. When every home or business is FORCED to select one from only two (or in rare cases three) ISP providers, it’s easy for them to collude and “ransom” bandwidth for given content provides because the content provider has nowhere else to go for a given home/business address to whom it wants to provide its content.
IMO we don’t need the government to add additional regulation into how ISP’s can operate (“we order you to remain neutral!”), we need them to REMOVE monopoly regulation that forces every internet user in this country to have only one or two choices from who they can purchase their internet access from…. and instead let the marketplace and compeition take over. The government’s outdated monopoly laws of ISP’s is what allows the ISP’s to be able to practice lack of neutrality in the first place!
IMO the allowing of monopolies is a long-outdated relic of the 1980’s…..back when what the “phone companies” offered was…..phone service. Only. And when the cable TV companies offerred….cable TV. Only. Those days are long long gone yet they continue to bernefit (and the consumer suffers) from a monopoly structure put in place to deal with a far different enviroment than we have today.
Yeah, the probem is that it’s a textbook natural monopoly due to all of the infrastructure.
I suppose it’s possible content providers could retaliate against ISPs the way that they currently retaliate against cable companies. What happens if Netflix blocks their traffic from going to Time-Warner or Comcast? The providers aren’t completely powerless.
It’s all about truth in advertising. If ISPs prioritize, delay, filter or otherwise mess with traffic on the basis of its source, destination or content, then they are not providing an internet service. In that case, they are not allowed to call themselves ISPs, and their product cannot be called internet. However, they can call themselves, say, An Online Lemon, providing Customer Or Maybe Poor Utility Slow Electronic Random Vexing Experience.
Back to the topic. If my home is trying to use 60% of its bandwidth for Netflix, and 60% of its capacity for bittorrents, then I don’t have a problem with Netflix paying to get its 60%, resulting in torrents being reduced to 40%. However, if the ISP throttles torrents to 30%, then we have a problem.
What if my usage is capped at 5 GB/month, but Netflix pays the “ISP” to be exempt from this total? I think this is where we are headed.
On the plus side – cringely.com won’t be paying for bandwith since they don’t believe in net neutrality and in a few years will drop from Internet 3.0 where content providers have to pay to be accessible before the browser times out.
A few lonely echos about ‘bufferbloat’ and that’s all that remains…
Bob, I hope you were just playing devils advocate to draw from us what you really believe but are now afraid to take credit for.
I appreciate Bob’s perspective that net neutrality is a policy issue while blufferboat is a technical one. However, I disagree with his conclusion: the latter isn’t going to make the former go away. Do not forget that if ISPs succeed in implementing a packet prioritization payment policy (say that 3 times fast), the content providers will certainly get hit with increased costs, which will, as a number of posters have already noted, be passed along to us consumers. So while my service may not be affected, my pocketbook will. I can definitely see ISPs offering different pricing strategies to content providers – that’s what’s done in the delivery industry (UPS, FedEx, even the US Postal Service offer their large customers a complex variety of rates and plans).
Also, looking long term, who’s to say that future IP protocols (used by, say, a Holodeck in my living room, carried over Verizon’s network), aren’t going to need an order of magnitude more of bandwidth than what we use now? When that happens (and it will), we’ll be having the same argument all over again whether ISPs should be allowed to prioritize traffic. Only by then, the ISPs will have precedent (and bureaucratic inertia) on their side. Blufferboat is a short term issue; the issue of net neutrality lasts forever.
“Blufferboat is a short term issue; the issue of net neutrality lasts forever.” What a great way to counter Bob’s argument. I had the same thought when reading the column: fixing bufferbloat may make net neutrality unnecessary initially, but what happens when 200 million Americans are watching 4K or 16K TV via the Internet?
The Register that had an article about this as a non-event as well. Their reasoning was that this was actually a pro-consumer decision and that in a free market the consumer can always go to the competition and did not need protecting. Ironic, this from the UK…
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That said, I don’t see the checks and balances in place to stop net balkinization with the probable, or inevitable, marginalization of minority interests should net-neutrality disappear. That is said with a certain amount of cynical observation on the competing interests of Business and the Public Good. I don’t see how increasing the throughput of my bandwidth will make the idea that I should be watching/arriving at preferred sites and content less attractive to Business. It may only mean that I can consume more throughput, translated into more advertising sales, product placement, and real sales of goods and services.
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And with Business holding the reins, trusting them to not shape traffic to lead, and eventually all but force, me to their preferred sites and content seems a bit naive. Why would they not want to devolve the net into channels if it is in their best interest? And is it not in their best interest to do so? Before there were rules about that sort of thing. Now, not so much… Openess through competition will not work if it is in the best interest of all vendors to sell the same closed thing. Is it time for AOL-like walled gardens to be reborn? The Business case for that post net-neutrality is more compelling but is there a Public Good case for that to make it compete with an open net? Again, now, not so much…
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In other parts of the world you see net access being shaped, or even shutdown, based on the political agendas of governments. It will be a certain kind of irony if that in the U.S. we find our net access censored instead by Business to only allow us access to those things that make money. Maybe that will work out better for our government, they could start charging use fees to Business, not that we will ever see any of it, and in return Business will promote certain government agendas. That would be a nice workaround for government censorship and the level of scrutiny that it must stand. Consider the fist in glove relationship the NSA already has with some sections of Business now.
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The net is not a utility like gas, electricity, water or probably even phone. It is more like an infrastructure resource, think roads, rivers and seas. By not protecting those things, by allowing through abdication the access and destination of those things to be reshaped, we allow them to redefine our lives and our future. The net should be protected from any regulation, except and ironically, non-regulation. It should be a pipe of access to all things internet, equally and without restriction other than what you put on it at your end. Anything less is, well, less, and why should we accept it? Access to the Public is not a right, it is a privilege afforded by the Public to Business and allegely protected by laws that define how the Public can best be served. I don’t see how it is in our, the Public’s, best interest to have anyone controlling or shaping our access to all the internet other than to make sure we have it. Meaning that removing laws/regulations that protect that access can be as damaging as laws that restrict it.
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This one needs to be rethunk.
Sorry, but I have to disagree with Bob on this. Bob is convinced that technology and capitalism will save the day as regards the net. No matter how you slice it, the net is a tele-com network. As such, it is a utility, and utilities are natural monopolies. Deregulating a natural monopoly, and allowing “free market” forces to rule, will lead to nothing except abuse of the consumer.
As for Verizon, I have them for phone, net and cell. Yes, they have pretty good networks,,,,networks that are generally reliable, but, speaking from experience, Verizon’s business practices are vile. Just one example: Verizon internet used to provide me with a bit of personal web space include with my net service. I never used it to host a web page, but I did use it for hosting pictures that I could hotlink. Last month I was informed by Verizon that the web space was being discontinued, the price of the net service stays the same, however. Verizon Motto: Less service, more money.
As someone who lives in a monopoly ISP area, nothing good can come of this. For example, net neutrality prevented my monopoly ISP from blocking all VOIP providers other than their own. Now it would appear they can do just that and there is nothing I can do about it. My ISP has a web site that provides the news and entertainment that they want to provide. I never use that web site. My ISP can now block my access to all other sites that might compete with my ISP’s site and there is nothing I can do about it. My only choice is to move to another monopoly ISP area, unless I’m willing to give up my job, and my wife gives up her job, and move to some area that might have competition, but what’s to prevent a monopoly ISP provider from buying out the competitors, leaving me back in the same position I tried to escape?
Bob, for your theory to stand a chance customers will have to see the benefits of the bufferbloat solution before the telecoms are able to hide it with the demise of net neutrality.
I can’t see the demise of net neutrality turning out very well for small and medium tech companies much less consumers.
Sorry, Bob, you are wrong in saying that net neutrality doesn’t matter. With net neutrality gone, and with AT&T’s new idea to charge twice for the same bit — I’m talking about the “data priority” scheme they just announced — that means that data caps are here to stay. Indeed, user’s data caps will become more restrictive or more costly (probably both).
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If you think about it, it’s obvious. AT&T can now lower user’s caps or raise prices, which in turn will cause the average data cap purchased by users to trend downward, which in turn will put increasing pressure on content providers to pay the data priority fee. And of course those providers will turn around and charge advertisers more, which will make products and services cost more, which means that the user’s cost for those products or services goes up. In fact I’m sure AT&T is hard at work guestimating just how much they have to lower caps/raise fees to give content providers incentive to cough up the data fee in order to maximize AT&T’s profit.
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Your comments about speed are meaningless. No amount of speed does you any good if you reach your data cap (this of course assumes that no one in their right mind would routinely pay the exorbitant costs associated with going over your cap, which by the way will become even more exorbitant now that net neutrality is dead). Yes, if the content doesn’t count toward the user’s cap then the user can continue to receive that content. But if the user can ONLY receive provider paid data once they have exhausted their own data then that will force more providers to pay the new fee just to ensure that users can access their data. Therefore expect (hidden) costs to the user to go up in the long run. And it significantly raises the barrier to new content on the net. Taken to the extreme, it will eventually mean that nothing new will come from a start-up or amateur provider because they won’t be able to afford to get their content to the end user. The implications on free and unencumbered speech alone is mind boggling. You yourself will eventually feel the pinch (I’m speaking about this blog we’re all reading right now). Unless you can afford to pay AT&T’s new data fee so that your content doesn’t consume user’s data, you need to plan on the demise of this blog at some point in the near future.
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There’s no way the consumer can see an improving internet experience in this new scenario. The Internet in the US is destined to fall further behind the rest of the world as long as we perpetuate our current environment.
Hey Bob, any 2014 predictions for Fukushima?
Stuff not mentioned in Bob’s article: Eminent domain, passage through public and private right-of-way, rent-free usage of everyone’s private property for poles and buried cables, public necessity and convenience, utilities with quasi-governmental powers are not a free-enterprise business, etc.
Those things used to matter. Everyone made concessions on their property rights, and in return, the utilities agreed to certain stipulations to serve the public interest. Network neutrality would be the sort of thing that should be expected from utilities in return for the extraordinary privileges that our society grants them.
But those rules of fairness are fading away, and Bob has forgotten about the old social compact.
I don’t understand how this piece hangs together.
Content Delivery Networks have been saturating 10G interfaces to ISPs for years. The reason you might want to “overprovision” is that your peak traffic is higher than your typical traffic, and wouldn’t it be nice to let lots of users see video at the same time. If you really want to save money, instead of over-provisioning in LA, you could dump LA-bound traffic into the ISP network in New York. Same AS — we’re good to go.
The buffer-bloat issue is simply that many devices included large buffers to avoid dropping packets, and stacked several deep through a network these buffers can cause delays that have a larger impact on transport (particularly with poorly tuned TCP) than the dropped packets would have had. There is now much more guidance on how to size buffers, and more exposure for the issue.
The tenuous connection between buffer-bloat and net neutrality is that they both in some way affect Internet performance.
Absent Net Neutrality, ISPs would like to be able to turn the business model around, charge streaming services rather than viewers, host all of the content a couple of miles from the subscriber, not have to carry the same TV episodes 50 million times across their back-bones, and get new revenue without any marketing or customer touch or the public relations disaster of pushing caps. Ponies would be nice too.
Streaming services would like to offload as much of the bill as possible to ISPs and come off as folk heroes for defending Net Neutrality. It’s not crass self-interest, it’s enlightened public service!
The ISPs need Internet services to be relevant, and vice versa. Nobody wants to be stuck with the bill for that delicious reality pie. Whatever the arrangement, whoever “wins”, the users end up paying for the content, the delivery, the lobbying, the lawsuits, and the “optimizations”, because the users are what it’s all about.
Feel free to pick a side. It’s what makes America great.
Why in the world should Internet be classified as Title 2? It is simply not comparable to phone service.
Solving Bufferbloat is not the reason lack of net neutrality will be inconsequential, economics is the reason. If ISP A starts charging me extra to get priority access for what I want on the internet I will switch to ISP B. The ISPs are in competition and by reverse induction any ISP that charges extra fees for packet priority will be outcompeted.
Of course the oligopoly environment and collusion may come into play but that is also up to the government to regulate.
You’ve got it a bit backwards.
ISP A charges Netflix for connecting all the way through to ISP A customers, and they have a good chance of getting it because they’re a government-endorsed monopoly with huge market share. ISP B practices network neutrality, and is too small to win fees from Netflix anyway.
ISP A is then able to offer discounts on their Internet connections, because Netflix is now paying both sides of the Internet connection. More customers sign up for ISP A, and ISP B is starved out of the market.
Two comments here.
1) You’re assuming you =have= an ISP B. Many people have only ISP A.
2) Why would ISP B offer a lower price than ISP A, if both of them were profiting from a mutually beneficial situation? You don’t have to have a face-to-face meeting to collude. There’s a reason why gasoline at stations diagonally paired at an intersection generally have prices within a penny or two of each other.
I believe it was Milton Freeman (I could be wrong) that said, “You can’t have a free market unless there are so many providers the loss of one of them would go unnoticed.” Therefore, the price of cotton is a free market. The price of bandwidth may very well not be for much longer.
Cringely is a bit off here.
Bufferbloat is difficult to track because it causes problems anywhere there is a bottleneck, and other than the home modem, the bottlenecks are transient. Investing in new equipment to solve the bufferbloat problem does allow the Netflixes and Youtubes of the Internet to get more timely congestion signals, so they can do their adaptive bandwidth thing more effectively, but if you have 500 customers streaming high-definition movies on a single 1G downlink, then that’s not good.
The big problem is that the major ISPs planned their investments assuming a certain amount of usage, so they could oversubscribe their networks. When customers change their behavior, start watching videos of cats instead of forwarding chain emails, their economic assumptions change. Then they have to oversubscribe their networks less, and that threatens their executive bonuses and dividends, and they whine. Oh, how they whine.
I especially love/loathe Ralph de la Vega, who actually in public called his customers “greedy” for using the Internet connections that he sold to them.
Bufferbloat is important to solve, and it allows you to use more of your bandwidth, but there is no substitute for more bandwidth.
One of the major problems with this ruling is that nowhere did VZ define if their premium pipe charge would stop at big tech companies, and knowing how big telecoms work, it probably won’t. Where does this leave smaller site operators that use the infrastructure, whether through datacenters or through hosting their own servers (which some ISPs here in Canada allow)? Most small-time operators wouldn’t be able to afford these fees, given that big business only thinks of big business when deciding what to charge.
All hail the Mighty Executives….
They don’t know how to engineer anything
They don’t know how to code anything
They don’t know how to FIX anything
They don’t know how to Build the LEAST thing.
All they can do in the end…is SELL the thing
and ride their golden parachutes to the next corporate victim…
[…] friend, Robert X. Cringley, wrote an excellent blog post on Net Neutrality which you can read here. I have a few thoughts I would like to share about this […]
[…] Net neutrality is dead, but it probably doesn’t matter […]
Not maintaining net neutrality via regulation is akin to opening Pandora’s box. So what if there are not short term repercussions? Once a money making business model is in place it is extremely hard to shut it down by passing new laws. That is just the reality of government and business. Shrugging our shoulders and thinking technology will level the playing field is not good policy.
The Isp’s are trying to double-dip. The only reason I buy Internet service is to access websites, Netflix, YouTube, etc. I am paying my Isp for the bandwidth to do that. Without those sites and content their Internet connection is worthless to me, devoid of any value. I’m already paying to haul those bits over to my laptop, why do the websites themselves also have to pay to send it to me?
How does web accelerator Akamai, or other paid-for CDNs, fit into the Net Neutrality debate? Or perhaps since Akamai predates the debate by more than a decade, how do we retroactively judge Akamai within this new debate? Akamai was always ‘good’, perhaps even ‘fantastic’. So now they’re Packet Prioritizing, money-grubbing scum?
Doesn’t make any sense.
Another point: What about FTTH Triple Play? My local telco / ISP recently invested millions and millions and millions to roll out their Fibre To The Home FibreOP service. The telephone and internet service is vastly improved over ADSL copper, for exactly the same monthly cost. (Of course we increased our bill by selecting the highest speed, 175 Mbps. An exception to the rule.) So why did they invest so much money for so little increase in income? TV!!!! The phone company can now offer ‘Cable’ TV, the gold mine of the Triple Play (phone, Internet, TV. Here’s where the Net Neutrality folks need to think about it. The telephone and TV services are carried over Internet Protocol packets, packets that are assigned dedicated bandwidth. One will get into extremely fine distinctions trying to craft wording to protect Net Neutrality while not stepping all over FTTH Triple Plays. I’m not sure it’s even possible.
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BTW, Cringely is right, roll out FTTH and adequate backbone infrastructure, and stop squabbling over prioritzation. Only the hungry fight over food scraps, perhaps Net Neutrality is actually an indictment of the economic conditions in the old USA. I’m guessing that there is no such debate in South Korea.