Decius wrote:
To be perfectly honest with you, I think this is bunch of fucking bullshit.

The internet is not neutral, and has never been neutral, and none of these people who are arguing about net neutrality are willing to acknowledge what that really means nor do they have any interest in it actually happening!

Around the turn of the decade I used to make (completely futile) arguments that we should have symmetric technologies like IDSL rather than things like cable modems in our homes. They would provide an infrastructure where consumers REALLY had the ability to serve content and peer to peer networks would work well. No one cared. There were no lawyers arguing that the phone companies ought to provide more upstream bandwidth. There was no "grass roots" effort to advocate that symmetric links be made available in the marketplace at consumer prices. I couldn't even convince people in the hacker scene that I was right. Literally, no one cared.

Now, because we built this asymmetric infrastructure, you can't effectively serve content from your home; you have to use a service provider, or you have to buy an artificially expensive symmetric link. You can't even get a static IP address from AT&T for a residential connection at any price! For some people, like me, that want to host a full website, this means we have to spend a lot of money on colocation in a place where static IP addresses and symmetric connections are available. I've spent enough on hosting MemeStreams over the years that I could have bought a car at this point. For others, with, well, more mainstream kinds of content that they want to host, there are services available, like YouTube, Blogger, and MySpace. Those services are making hundreds of millions of dollars selling advertising on the content that their users are creating! And NOW all of a sudden there are all these people who claim to care about "net neutrality."

It is those hundreds of millions of dollars that are funding this "grass roots" effort! All this emotion and advocacy is NOT actually defending network neutrality. Its defending the status quo architecture which is not neutral, to protect the exclusivity of that revenue stream. That video, in then end, leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Its overtly manipulative. Does Vint Cerf think Net Neutrality ought to mean that AT&T is required to sell me a static IP?

Furthermore, have online services like AOL and Compuserve ever been a problem? Are we suggesting that it ought to be ILLEGAL for them to offer a special closed garden specifically to their customers? If not, than what, specifically, are we suggesting? I don't understand the difference between that and most net neutrality proposals. No one can articulate exactly where they draw the line between these two things. The difference seems to be that AOL is OK because it started out that way, but services that currently only provide internet access cannot add closed gardens on to what they are currently offering, particularly if those gardens are constructed by third parties. That doesn't make any sense, but somehow these "grass roots" advocates have managed to convince a large number of people to be very emotional about it.

Can the phone companies do wrong? Yes, of course they can. Blocking or degrading service to existing customers who have already agreed to pay for "Internet" access should not be legal. But if they want to bring up a new low latency link to a particular online video provider I don't see what is different about that than that provider dropping a local copy of their content on the network via a service like Akamai. Are these net neutrality advocates saying that Akamai ought to be free? Why weren't they saying that 9 years ago when Akamai was being created?

I think you are mixing several issues into one here.

Net neutrality, the way it should be defined, is preventing access providers from doing two things: 1) tampering with or interfering with the normal communications transactions on the line (ie. a conversation) and 2) degrading performance arbitrarily for any application because the provider of that application is refusing to allow the access provider the ability to "double dip" on revenue by charging them extra for preferred performance.

Notice I did not say that an access provider can NOT charge for preferred performance for a particular application, but that should be to the end user consumer, not the application's provider. Even in that case, I'm against it because the telco access providers are notoriously savvy at removing large sums of cash from people's wallets through extortion and monopoly. I don't think a net neutrality law should be passed as much as a law that breaks the telecom monopoly (sigh... again) and prevents these access providers from having the ability to put everyone over a barrel and rape them.

What's really happening here is that last mile providers want to double dip. And they are essentially refusing to upgrade their services in an effort to add fuel to the fire that there needs to be traffic shaping and QoS. When people can't download pr0n fast enough, they will rise up and demand that their providers do something to improve performance. The providers are already posturing that they can do nothing but degrade performance for some applications to allow for better performance of others. This is bullshit because all that's really needed is to improve network headroom and that will solve the problem for quite some time. This is how telecoms act and they get away with it time after time after time because the FCC and other "checks & balances" in the regulation system are essentially bought. The customer gets screwed and shareholders profit (although my argument has always been that shareholders get screwed too because the should be profiting more than they have been given the stacked deck).

If you had real competition for the last mile, you wouldn't have this problem because the market dynamic wouldn't allow for it. Providers would have to compete on service and quality and this would force them to take the necessary steps to enhance application development and delivery for their customers to enjoy. Think of it as providing the absolute fastest and most efficient road travel no matter where you're going. But sadly, this won't happen unless a fundamental redrafting of the FCC and the regulation structure changes. I don't see that happening even with a big sweeping change in administration later this year.

RE: Save the Internet!