The division between wireless and wired seems really artificial to me. Yes, the current state of technology means a megabyte over air is a good margin more expensive than over wire, but I don't believe this is worth codifying into law.
Personally, I'd like to see a restriction on what can be called "Internet". An internet connection in my mind implies neutrality. If your network only provides a subset of the content on the internet, you shouldn't be able to call it "Internet", but instead call it something obviously lesser, much in the same spirit that requires Cheez Wiz be called "cheese product".
Pedantic note: Since 1973, Cheese Wiz or similar no longer requires the word "imitation" ..."Thanks to the FDA's willingness, post-1973, to let food makers freely alter the identity of "traditional foods that everyone knows" without having to call them imitations." Source: http://www.alternet.org/health/77330?page=entire
So what exactly does google do that justifies their our-shit-doesn't-stink reputation? It seems like they behave exactly like any other self-interested major corporation when the chips are down. They were for censorship in China before they were against it. They were for net neutrality until Verizon offered to cut them a deal. Are there any cases where "don't be evil" made a bit of difference on a non-trivial issue?
Add supporting Flash to the list. If both Apple and Google had took a hardline against Flash we'd be on the path to a better, more open, Internet. It might have been a little painful in the short term I admit. It seems to me they decided that it was a competitive advantage and that's all that really matters.
> They were for censorship in China before they were against it.
No. Google tolerated it, but was never "for" censorship.
> They were for net neutrality until Verizon offered to cut them a deal.
What? Google has always been against net neutrality. In fact, this new policy proposal helps net neutrality. The main thing people seem to be mad about is that it doesn't go far enough. So how exactly does that make them evil again?
What is the difference between taking part in the scheme and being 'for it', exactly? Google was perfectly free not to participate, but they made the call that the growth potential of China was worth being in partnership with a repressive regime.
As for your other point, Google was the most prominent company supporting net neutrality. Three years ago they were prepared to spend billions buying spectrum to prevent exactly the kind of deal they're pimping today.
Getting really tired of conspiritorial hand flapping posts from people who have no telecom / network engineering perspective.
I give both of these companies some credit for using their leadership positions to at least offer a framework to the industry and public at large - something the FCC and all the other carriers heretofore have been completely unable to do.
Of course that doesn't jive with the whole, "they're trying to destory the internet" meme.
I'm getting tired of people saying there is nothing to worry about here. The article mentions potential 3d video services as a possible business model on the Internet. 3d video requires 4x the frames as HD - you're going from 24 or 30 fps up to 120 fps. So, imagine Verizigoogle offers this fancy new 3d Youtube as a premium service, not subject to net neutrality at all, on it's own dedicated 100 megabit pipe.
You want to compete with that, but Verizigoogle only leaves 20 megabits for all other traffic. You're effectively shut down. The consumer has a 120 megabit pipe but 100 megabits is reserved for "premium content". This is exactly the opposite of net neutrality, yet it is exactly what Google and Verizon are proposing and expecting us all to swallow.
There's confusion here between services being offered over IP and services offered via/from the Internet. Your access connection from $ISP, especially if it's DOCSIS or fiber, typically has more capacity than the bandwidth of the Internet connectivity they're selling you. It probably wouldn't be viable to offer you and everyone else that bandwidth to the Internet for business and technical reasons, but there is enough capacity between your house and $ISP's network to offer other services. As long as this doesn't affect your Internet connection, it shouldn't be a problem.
Any impingement on your network connection then becomes a truth-in-advertising issue -- getting what you've paid for -- as has been taken up in the FCC's National Broadband Plan and elsewhere regarding companies that label their connections as "up to" N Mbps. Holding providers to their promises here seems like a more serious issue than being concerned about VZ offering crappy video-on-demand via a separate bandwidth pool.
I agree that it would be nice to have a big, dumb pipe to the Internet by which we can all choose the 3D video services we want, but that's going to require serious competition in access or some sort of public utility for access provision, neither of which seem likely in the US.
I realize that a DOCSIS cable modem has a ton of bandwidth available to it. Each 6 MHz cable channel can send around 27 Mbps to the subscriber. Upstream is more difficult. If there wasn't any regulation, what is stopping cable and fiber to the home ISPs from just dialing down the Internet portion of your package until the competition can't fit in it any more?
> The article mentions potential 3d video services as a possible business model on the Internet.
"The internet" is covered in the proposal. This mythical 3d video service would have to be outside of the internet - a completely new service.
If verizon wants to create this new service, and use up all their available bandwidth on it (and therefore reducing their available internet bandwidth) then that is their choice, but I imagine their customers would just switch to a different ISP that offers better speed.
How is this good for the Internet? Offering to cut deals with established players like Skype and Pandora who have the capital they've earned off the current free Internet? How can the little guy in his garage out innovate a Skype or Pandora and then bring his wireless Internet service to the masses? The masses dont care about the guy in the garage only what they are fed; their WISP (wireless ISP) is going to market the heck out of their partners(established players) whose service runs the best on Verizon because they ponied up.
I can't see how this good for the free Internet and the little guy starting.
How can the little guy in his garage out innovate a Skype or Pandora and then bring his wireless Internet service to the masses?
I can't believe that so many people have so little perspective. By far the most important tier in the proposal is called "the Internet". If history is any indication, "the little guy" is guaranteed to out innovate, time and time again. And as a result the service people will care about most will be called "the Internet".
Sure, Verizon is free to prioritize traffic so that telephone calls don't get dropped and people's TV works even when a DoS attack is going on. But neither Verizon nor any other provider can afford to make the internet suck, and as long as it doesn't suck the guy in the garage is free to deliver what we haven't dreamed of yet.
Don't forget, we've seen the tiered internet before. It is what broad access started with in the mid-90s where services like AOL and Juno had their nice little walled gardens and, on the side, offered access to the big scary internet. And guess what? The walled gardens weren't attractive to consumers then, and won't be now.
So if the utilities go along with this agreement then breathe a big sigh of relief, and get on with your lives. Because it gives them all the rope to hang themselves trying to do what won't work, and give you the guaranteed free space to innovate to your heart's content.
Ok so you what if Verizon, AT&T, SPrint and TMobile all follow suit. They see WoW Verizon is making millions/billions a year via their deal with Skype. Let's go out and find a Skype competitor with big pockets; one that connects to Skype and Yahoo, MSN, etc.
With all four WISPs following the money train who is left. Some random joe who is going to start building their own national WISP that provides as solid coverage as the biggies?
THis may or may not happen but if set it stone it allows WISPs to do just that. Also If im trying to create the next Skype (a wireless IP service) the service created in my garage is not going to be as reliable and run as well as Skype runs on Verizon. If Im a consumer which one am I going to use and adopt?
Skype itself, today, runs over the general Internet, and got to its current position competing against an entrenched dedicated network that literally had been optimized for decades. (Aka the telephone network.) Oh, and one that is prioritized over general internet traffic.
In the nightmare world that you describe, any new Skype competitor starts with access to a better Internet than Skype did. Their main worry should be that Skype itself already exists, but for some strange reason Skype is choosing to spend hundreds of millions to billions making Verizon happy. And at the same time our new upstart can deliver to the exact same customers at very little cost! (Certainly a lot less per customer than Skype is paying.) Were I that entrepreneur I'd be crying, "Woe is me, don't throw me into that brier patch!"
And by this agreement, Verizon et al can't shut off this upstart service because guaranteed customer access comes straight from the consumer protections they've all agreed to.
In effect it is, "We have net neutrality, but the ISPs and anyone they can convince are allowed to waste as much money as they want in producing services with premium access." Given the history of the Internet I have no doubt that much money will be so spent, most of it will be wasted, and innovation on the Internet will prove to have been well protected.
While Stacey (the author) isn't an engineer, she's probably talked to and gotten the perspectives of many more people in this space than most of us here.
I can't comment if that is probably is the case or not, because all I have is this post, and it's not cited here.
What I do see is fear mongering built almost exclusively on "what they didn't say," "what ifs," and worst-case conjecture.
And I can appreciate those fears, but I also know they conveniently get more pageviews than addressing QoS, or the reality that traffic prioritzation must happen on some level (by type, not source) to accomodate delivering all these services.
It strikes me that the alternative to two pretty "pro-user" companies proposing a framework to deal with an unresolved set of technical issues is to have less open, less "pro user" companies deal with it with their lobbyists behind closed legislative doors. At least initially, I'll trust the devil I know.
I'm really interested why you consider traffic prioritization a foregone conclusion.
I can imagine a scenario where FCC bans prioritization of any form, and the market rewards the company who actually builds out the highest capacity network, not the company who most effectively throttles traffic.
Is it prioritized to stop a DoS attack? How about to make SIP travel faster through the network than web traffic? What about things like DOCSIS, allowing quick bursts of fast speeds for your cable modem, so small downloads happen faster than sustained downloads?
Who determines what the priorities should be?
All of this angst is a result of lack of competition, which is the actual problem. It has almost nothing to do with prioritization of traffic. The fear, as best as I can tell, is that Comcast will one day so "No more Skype." and millions of people without another ISP choice will be stuck with it.
Fair enough, but we've complacently accepted "internet" as a service, like electricity or water. I think this is a bad model. We need to figure out why we don't have more providers, then we need to lower the barriers to entry, so that we can foster competition.
I'm a network engineer at a telecom. It's a very dangerous precedent to set for a variety of reasons. The big one that stands out to me is the wording of legal vs. illegal traffic. That's very concerning. It also raises some interesting questions for my industry (cable) If we move your cable modem out on the pole and shoot a wifi signal into your house are we not wireless providers? We can argue the same rules should apply to us. Now that the precedent is set that wireless is a special anti-competitive clubhouse I think we're going to see some major changes in future strategies. Why invest in wired infrastructure? It's a loser. Many of the big cable companies (Cox, TWC, Comcast) are dipping their toes into wireless already. This will just accelerate that trend. We'll expect the same deal from Google.
I may be wrong (I am not American and don't follow everything that goes over there). But I thought that the FCC was trying to push for some reform, and the reason why they got stuck was because of the massive backlash by the carriers (and others).
Can anyone confirm one way or the other? Thank you.
As an American, my observation is that the FCC always sells out to the highest bidder or the loudest complainer.
That's why all of our cell providers have a different band allocated to them, and why AT&T got the best GSM band while T-Mo gets worst.
It's also why we can't show boobies or say 'vulgar' words on over-the-air television.
Removing vulgarity creates the illusion that public interests are being protected. In my opinion, auctioning off radio frequencies and selectively enforcing regulations shows a more accurate picture.
In this particular case, I don't think the public cares much about net neutrality, while the corporations are clear in what they want. I see no reason why the FCC wouldn't side with the corporations instead of the indecisive (and not yet inconvenienced) public.
The problem is that the FCC tried to just dictate net neutrality, carriers took it to court, and the court said that the FCC had overstepped its authority. So the FCC wants to get the authority to impose whatever rules it wants, but doesn't have it yet. The Google-Verizon deal could preempt legislative efforts to give the FCC that broad authority, and instead prompt efforts to get something like this deal either embedded in legislation or agreed to voluntarily by the major players.
It doesn't sit well with me that this discussion is seemingly being led by corporate, rather than public, interests. I would like to see Julius Genachoski reign the debate in and push a policy through.
It also should be pointed out that Google's proposal is a _proposal_ and not yet written policy.
Is a federal agent with no skin in the game and appointed by Congress really so much more trustworthy than publicly-traded corporations with customers and shareholders?
I just don't see why you assume that Google and Verizon are acting counter to the interests of the public, but you trust Genachowski.
Notice that I chose the phrase "reign in the debate". And I would say that the FCC has sufficient "skin in the game".
Google/Verizon, to their credit, have put out at least some of their proposal for public consumption. I just don't see how a policy put forward by a corporate entity (or alliance in this case) could be anything but biased to that entity.
Just because it benefits them doesn't mean it's going to hurt me. Google + Verizon employ over a quarter million people (not even counting other shareholders and customers). Any internet policy that benefits them will probably benefit me.
Uh, you stated the answer yourself. Corporations are accountable to their shareholders. They maximize profit, that is the only thing they do, and that is in fact a legal obligation that public company boards can be sued for breaching. You call them "publicly-owned" corporations but that is incorrect, they are in fact PRIVATELY OWNED.
The government including regulatory agencies like the FCC have a responsibility to take public interest into account - yes it is never done perfectly - but the FACT is that the decision-making process for governmental entities is entirely different than it is for private corporations.
The corporation does whatever the board of directors want it to do, within the bounds of the law and what the other shareholders will let them get away with before firing them. Money is a big deal, but as Google's actions in China have shown, money is not their only motivation. I'm not saying they're altruistic or anything, but I don't think they're scheming in public a way to screw over the internet for money.
Yeah but come on, the decision-making is not "public". The average shareholder, if he even holds shares directly, really has no way to seriously influence corporate strategy other than to sell the stock. In any case, the whole premise of a democracy is that citizens are able to have equal or near-equal influence. That's why we have one person, one vote. In shareholder capitalism, the more you own, the more votes you have. Those two principles are directly in opposition, making the suggestion that it's a tossup whether corporate or government decisions are equally influenced by public interest categorically false.
Doesn't seem like it - managed services will be handled different ways by different ISPs - which I would argue would allow (eventually) for smaller ISPs to say "well yeah, we offer x, y, and z and AT&T doesn't do that" and have a decent market share if x, y, and z are widely demanded.
Even the article's writer says that "after the conference call and reading the agreement, I’m not sure there’s much to say beyond the fact that this agreement basically keeps the network neutrality situation the same."
I feel like you're trivializing the barriers to first match basic services provided by ISP giants and then provide competitive differences on top of that. One of the reasons people are clamoring for net neutrality legislation is that the relevant markets don't have significant competition to make neutrality happen naturally.
We have two options for high speed internet here. AT&T and Comcast. Comcast is the only option that gets me above 10Mbps.
The only alternative on the horizon? AT&T's new service. At least that'll be a viable alternative to Comcast, but it's still hardly what one could call variety.
Where do I live? Atlanta, in the city limits, less than three miles from the heart of the city.
I've heard conflicting reports of reception and/or speed with Clear. Clear apparently isn't good for things like gaming (horrible latency) and/or large file transfers.
An internet connection with horrible latency is like a car that won't drive up hills. I seriously couldn't work on a connection where my terminal sessions lag too far behind my typing.
Understandable, but the point I was trying to make more than anything was simply that Google "wasn't" actually trying to hate us, not really. The title biasied before I even hopped.
Tech companies? what exactly did those tech companies do during this whole debate, nothing, they stood idly by and let Google try to do something, they have only themselves to blame not Google.
Personally, I'd like to see a restriction on what can be called "Internet". An internet connection in my mind implies neutrality. If your network only provides a subset of the content on the internet, you shouldn't be able to call it "Internet", but instead call it something obviously lesser, much in the same spirit that requires Cheez Wiz be called "cheese product".