It's surprising that these companies aren't openly supporting net neutrality (instead of "behind closed doors"). It seems like the only companies openly against it are telecoms and cable companies - generally the most hated companies in the country.
"It’s not surprising that these companies don’t want to talk openly about net neutrality. They have little to gain by alienating business partners such as Verizon, AT&T (T), and Comcast. Groups like the Telecommunications Users Committee exist to shield them from those conflicts, even as the companies quietly pursue policy goals in talks with the FCC."
I have been working with my employer to use our lobbying resources to push net neutrality. It took me months of work to even get it started. Getting the company to take a stance publicly would be years of work.
What they are doing right now is nothing short of monumental in a large corporate environment where the same telecoms you are opposing may be your customers, suppliers, or partners.
The problem w/ all of the proposals from Obama is that when you get into the details, they hinge around traffic that is "illegal". No Snowden disclosures, no wikileaks. If you distill the proposal to it's basics, it has very little to do with the kinds of functionality that people think they are fighting for.
There is nothing sinister about allowing illegal traffic to be blocked. Currently ISP routers often block massive DDoS attacks and without that exclusion they would have to let them through. Realistically, routers are the best place to deal with such attacks and not carving out that exclusion would open up a lot of valid criticism.
The fact that the president even recognizes it as a problem is the result of an incredible amount of work and millions of dollars in lobbying efforts.
I can tell you right now you're not going to get the libretarian paradise that everyone wants, but you're not going to get a Verizon 5% ecommerce tax either.
I'm missing something. The author writes: and all four deny advocating for net neutrality behind closed doors with the FCC. Okay, so does the author know about this?!
The article points outs that the FCC is required to disclose what was discussed at those meetings, and even has links to the slides of the presentation that the representatives made to the FCC while they were there. If you click on those links, you can view the PDFs that were presented, and they clearly outline strong support for net neutrality.
I am worried that the net neutrality rules the president is now pushing will eventually kill the free and open internet.
ISPs will be required to not block traffic that is lawful but what is the definition of lawful? Would wikileaks be considered lawful? What about the Snowden documents? What about encryption?
I'm in favor of Net Neutrality, but from what I've read and discussed, Title II sounds like a bad path to go down. Basically it would give the FCC all sorts of regulatory powers we'd just have to trust they wouldn't enforce. Yeah, I got no faith on that topic.
I guess the reason I'm not as worried about it as you is because I feel like it will be easier to get the FCC to bow to public pressure (eventually?) if they do something stupid, more than I trust any of the ISPs which IMO have been behaving stupidly for quite a while now.
So we give more power to an incompetent agency to solve what, exactly? To get what we pay for? Is the level of service going to improve, or will prices fall to match the current level of service? Or will service degrade and prices increase?
ISPs act the way they do because they've bought the right from the "publicly accountable" people we're expecting "bow to public pressure." I personally trust GoDaddy to bow to public pressure way before the FCC.
Comcast is the least popular company in the U.S. right now. I hate them and yet I still use them because the Internet options in my area are nonexistent. Why would a monopoly care at all about your public opinion?
At least president's proposal includes the forbearance restrictions, same which EFF proposed. I.e. FCC would get only limited scope power to regulate net neutrality issues, and not a wild card power to regulate Internet.
Recent Netflix problems were caused by ISPs behaviour that otherwise could be prohibited.
Other examples of ISPs violating net neutrality is charging different rates for different traffic on mobile networks. For instance, T-Mobile says your plan is unlimited as long as traffic goes to / from the primary device (such as your handset). But if you connect secondary device through it (for example through WiFi hotspot), your traffic will be treated differently and you'll have a monthly cap.
Discriminating traffic is exactly the problem that net neutrality rules are supposed to prevent.
Recent Netflix problems were caused by ISPs behaviour that otherwise could be prohibited.
Howso? It's a pretty broad reading of NN that would force Comcast to build beefier connections to Level 3 and Cogent in common data centers. I'd be very interested to hear the interpretation of any currently proposed NN policy that would have resolved that dispute in a positive way for Netflix.
Because they did it for non technical reasons, i.e. just because they could. They abused their monopolistic control in order to extort money from Netflix. Net neutrality should address such abuse, but the problem here is not so much in definition of such behavior as in its detection, since there is hardly any transparency in what is going on.
Do yourself a favor and google "bypass throttling", or better yet, VPN into a server with a real internet connection and try out Netflix or Youtube and be astounded by the difference, even with the encryption overhead.
The legality question is pretty much where we have always been: DMCA, FBI seizing of servers etc. etc. If it's illegal, the government can, has, and will continue to try to stop it.
The idea that government regulation enables freedom is no necessarily one that holds water. If that were the case, the government regulations protecting car companies wouldn't be denying Tesla access to certain markets, and the regulations that govern taxi companies wouldn't be denying Uber and Lyft access to their markets.
Admittedly, these aren't apples to apples comparisons, but it strikes me as somewhat ironic that after all of the hullabaloo with the NSA spying and such that we still hold the belief that the government is every trying to do the "right thing".
The parent comment is probably referring to wording that says that "lawful" or "legal" content should not be blocked. The argument seems to be that the definition of "lawful" or "legal" will be stretched as appropriate to make whatever ISPs or the government wants to block "unlawful" or "illegal", like, say, Wikileaks.
Couldn't these new rules be applied to the Chinese ISPs and have no affect on how that internet is run? What is filtered now would still be filtered and I don't think you can say that the Chinese have net neutrality.
Break up regional or national monopolies, especially those created by poor city franchise policies.
Otherwise let engineers, customers, and businesses figure things out for themselves competitively – as has worked just fine so far without involving the FCC's powers of censoring, taxing, delaying, price-fixing, wiretapping, and favoring-incumbents.
Let's start with ISPs can't manipulate any data in layers over IP. Seems like the majority already fails that very, very simple requirement to a communications provider.
The carriers are not permitted to perform any filtering. Legal or illegal content needs to be dealt with at the consumer and provider end. Like it is done now.
I don't want a Chinese firewall.
I though we already have legislation in place to define them as "Common Carreires" absolving them of any legal responsibility when illegal content crosses their pipes. However it requires them to not perform any filtering.
I have the feeling we are making a new law to permits ISP to filter and not be legally responsible if illegal content crosses their pipes.
Why can't we just define carrier's as common carriers?
What it seems people are asking for is that ISPs never filter any traffic at all for any reason and also never suffer any consequences for not filtering that traffic.
Giving Internet carriers "common carrier" status is likely to include laws that make them gather evidence and prosecute people involved in online gambling; child sexual exploitation; pyramid schemes; lottery tickets; credit card fraud; extreme pornography; etc. giving them common carrier status is likely to lead to more, not less, intrusive monitoring and filtering.
The kicker and worst part is that we HAD competitive market under the 1996 Telecommunications Act (and Title II) before it got killed off in 2004/2005. At one point, in a craphole suburb of north Texas, I had the choice of no fewer than 8 DSL providers (including SDSL 3Mbps bidirectional, which was amazing at the time) and 3 cable providers.
Now, in the smack middle of a major city with a large technology presence, I have 0 of the first kind and 1 of the second kind.
Like all questions of regulation, it comes down to who you trust more - the FCC, or the telecoms. One of those two is going to end up dictating policy, since the current ISPs are a de facto if not natural monopoly or, at best, oligopoly, depending on where you live.
No matter how cynical you want to be about the FCC, Comcast, Verizon, et al. have already proven themselves to be actively harmful. Anything restrictions the FCC creates can hardly be worse than the "fast lane" plans. The FCC is also answerable to elected officials, for better or for worse - even at worst, I think that's better than being answerable to no one but a pocketbook.
I "trust" the telecoms more, because it's illegal to start a competitor to the FCC if I don't like how they're doing their job.
That's not to say that the current batch of telecoms are trustworthy, but at least there is recourse in the form of competition (see: Google Fiber), while if the FCC goes off the deep end we're irrevocably pooched. And...we have immediate history demonstrating that the FCC is corruptible for external agendas. I don't know why people think they would suddenly become above reproach if net neutrality legislation were enacted.
Google Fiber - and any competition, for that matter - do not exist in the vast majority of the country. My point is the FCC regime is not guaranteed to be better in the long run, but it can hardly be worse, and has the potential to be excellent.
I'd check that assumption. There's plenty of evidence to show that government does a poor job regulating companies. Often times it's the companies that control the regulations.
Lack of Title II regulation is what produced the current cell phone and cable market. Cable companies and cellular phone companies are explicitly not regulated as Title II utilities. That's how they're able to get away with traffic discrimination - they're free to treat different classes of traffic (e.g. traffic from Netflix) differently.
With Title II regulation, they would be classified as a common carrier and would have many more restrictions in how they could discriminate among the various kinds of traffic that passes through their network.
From what I've read, the regulation prohibits ISPs from blocking lawful traffic, but it doesn't require them to block unlawful traffic, or give them any greater ability to block unlawful traffic than they already have.
If they want Title II they should promise Wheeler a job that pays more than head Comcast lobbyist. That's the cheapest and easiest way to get net neutrality.
I think that's why the Mafia used to just threaten them. When you've got pictures of a guy sleeping with prostitutes and they got elected on "family focus" and do photo ops outside church with their wife of 14 years and fives kids, it suddenly becomes easy to "buy" politicians. Or, the old balls and the literal vice.
I wonder if this approach is more common than we think. It seems to me that it's relatively easy to 1) find dirt on someone, especially a public figure who has more to lose for relatively small 'crimes', 2) blackmail said politician and ask him to do something relatively small, 3) ask for ever bigger 'favors', using the earlier favors as further material to use for blackmail-purposes.
If it's really that easy, I can't see why it's not common and relatively rarely uncovered or discovered...
Businesses will push for anything that can make them profit. For these companies Net Neutrality happen to fall into their profit domain so they push for it. But fundamental rights and values should not be up for anyone to debate or lobby. Net Neutrality should be part of the constitution.
>Businesses will push for anything that can make them profit
That's kind of a simplification. The pushing is controlled by the CEO and similar people at the companies and they can in practice push for pretty much what they like using the companies money. While they are kind of supposed to maximise shareholders interests they don't always do so in practice (see excessive company jets, vanity takeovers). I doubt Ford and BoA are pushing neutrality because they think it will increase their profits, they are probably just pushing it because the boss likes the idea.
Not exactly; just considering the trade-off of sacred cow vs. tasty burger. I'm not opposed to property or possessions, but I do think the burden of proof is on the believer rather than the skeptic, and our society seems to put a higher sanctity on property than on community or commons, as though it were an immutable axiom of the universe. (I'd also really like to hear a First Principle on the subject that doesn't contain "Because USSR".)
> Net Neutrality should be part of the constitution.
I think comcast and verizon are villainous scum that should be crushed like bugs, and still I am uncomfortable with legislating for net neutrality at this point, and especially uncomfortable with the idea of putting it in the constitution (even presuming that that's a bit of hyperbole on your part).
My problem is that NN is a "I know it when I see it" issue. But do I? When I first saw bitterness I thought it was a bad actor at the TCP/IP level (it isn't!). Streaming live events over the network? Madness -- my first impression was that we have several other broadcast media for that already! (now I realize: "so what?"). My understanding evolves over time.
Consider: differentiated carriage is clearly of interest to me -- I'd be happy to pay (as long as it's me making the decision, not my carrier) for differentiated QoS to make sure my call or game traffic were isochronous, that that big file I want now came quickly, but that my background app & OS updates, or disk pickup transmissions, were deprioritized, or even especially scheduled for periods of low contention. I'm delighted if my ISP has a cache so that common pages many people in my topological area may preload pages I want to see two, improving my access. Oh and I do with that that DDOS attack aimed at you doesn't catch me in the crossfire.
Finally, we know that when legislation is made, especially by people who lack the domain knowledge, all sorts of corner cases get screwed up both maliciously or though ignorance. What's network management vs rentier opportunism vs disadvantaging the poor vs a mistake can be twisted by someone with a buck to make, and the old carriers are past masters at such games. And they will surely swap the right to stop spam and layer 3 attacks for the right to monitor and censor.
If you do want a constitutional amendment, make it a general one about right of carriage and passage. I.e. it should apply equally to trucks driving down the road (which still have to meet some technical constraints for safety) to sending parcels, transmitting bits and the like. So that it can still be applicable when we consider packet switching as obsolete as the carrier pigeon.
Thing about QOS is that if I buy a level of service from my ISP and you buy an equivalent or greater level of service from your ISP, you and I should be able to communicate at that level of service. The which bits we decide to send to each other should be completely up to us.
QOS should happen at the edges of the network, certainly not in the middle because the middle has no clue what bits count to me.
Common Carrier law is exactly what Title II is, and what currently applies to trucks driving down the roads (can't buy a faster speed limit), electricity, shipping, oil pipelines, landline telephony, postage, etc.
Oh I completely agree in regards to QoS! That was not my point.
My point is that the technology is still immature. We haven't really considered what our true criteria are, what layer they live at etc. There are still many innovations ahead. And don't think the carriers aren't well versed in how to game the system!
You say, correctly, that Title II is common carriage. But consider what came along with that. Note that I think CC has mostly worked with busses (you can't discriminate by race, at least) and the roads. It's worked well with trains. In other areas it hasn't got such a good record (and my politics are what is called in America "liberal").
In the case of telephony, title II unarguably held back technological development. All the development was done at the center. AT&T and Bell Labs did a really astounding job of development in the core (FDM in the 1930's for chrissake, and direct dialing with routing tables on punched metal cards in the 1940s). Not to mention SS7, the transistor and fibre optics. But all that came at a huge cost: phone calls were expensive, long distance was a limited service, and all innovation at the edge was explicitly, and by legal force, suppressed. You probably don't remember how horrible it was to use a Bell 103 modem, or the crappy approved phones. Mobile telephony was expensive and essentially useless. The communication infrastructure of today would be unrecognizable to a telephone engineer of 1990, while the communication infrastructure of 1990 would have been be easily comprehensible to a telephone engineer of 1925.
My point is: that it worked at all was because we had a useful metric: 99% of all calls had to be completed, even if it meant overbuilding to guarantee that on Mother's day. On the other hand we don't even have an equivalent of an Erlang [1] in the internet domain. I don't believe NN can legitimately be legislated in 2014, and any attempt will screw us at LEAST as much as ATT/comcast/verizon etc al are screwing us today.
What worries me is, how do you define what the internet is? If I fork the IP stack and call it IP2, and it is different in some significant way, does that still fall under Title II?
It's quite simple: If you sell carriage of data between two parties, are responsible for the loss of said data, and sell to the general public, then yes, you should be considered a common carrier of data.
“Every retailer with an online catalogue, every manufacturer with online product specifications, every insurance company with online claims processing, every bank offering online account management, every company with a website–every business in America interacting with its customers online is dependent upon an open Internet.”
78 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 161 ms ] thread"It’s not surprising that these companies don’t want to talk openly about net neutrality. They have little to gain by alienating business partners such as Verizon, AT&T (T), and Comcast. Groups like the Telecommunications Users Committee exist to shield them from those conflicts, even as the companies quietly pursue policy goals in talks with the FCC."
What they are doing right now is nothing short of monumental in a large corporate environment where the same telecoms you are opposing may be your customers, suppliers, or partners.
The problem w/ all of the proposals from Obama is that when you get into the details, they hinge around traffic that is "illegal". No Snowden disclosures, no wikileaks. If you distill the proposal to it's basics, it has very little to do with the kinds of functionality that people think they are fighting for.
Isn't this what China says?
I can tell you right now you're not going to get the libretarian paradise that everyone wants, but you're not going to get a Verizon 5% ecommerce tax either.
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/document/view?id=60000979857
edit: added a link to the PDF of slides
ISPs will be required to not block traffic that is lawful but what is the definition of lawful? Would wikileaks be considered lawful? What about the Snowden documents? What about encryption?
This is a dangerous road we are going down.
I guess the reason I'm not as worried about it as you is because I feel like it will be easier to get the FCC to bow to public pressure (eventually?) if they do something stupid, more than I trust any of the ISPs which IMO have been behaving stupidly for quite a while now.
Edit: typo
Other examples of ISPs violating net neutrality is charging different rates for different traffic on mobile networks. For instance, T-Mobile says your plan is unlimited as long as traffic goes to / from the primary device (such as your handset). But if you connect secondary device through it (for example through WiFi hotspot), your traffic will be treated differently and you'll have a monthly cap.
Discriminating traffic is exactly the problem that net neutrality rules are supposed to prevent.
Howso? It's a pretty broad reading of NN that would force Comcast to build beefier connections to Level 3 and Cogent in common data centers. I'd be very interested to hear the interpretation of any currently proposed NN policy that would have resolved that dispute in a positive way for Netflix.
Because they did it for non technical reasons, i.e. just because they could. They abused their monopolistic control in order to extort money from Netflix. Net neutrality should address such abuse, but the problem here is not so much in definition of such behavior as in its detection, since there is hardly any transparency in what is going on.
http://lifehacker.com/use-a-vpn-to-bypass-your-isps-throttli...
For instance afaik the FCC - not Congress - defines "profanity."
Admittedly, these aren't apples to apples comparisons, but it strikes me as somewhat ironic that after all of the hullabaloo with the NSA spying and such that we still hold the belief that the government is every trying to do the "right thing".
Or am I missing something?
Otherwise let engineers, customers, and businesses figure things out for themselves competitively – as has worked just fine so far without involving the FCC's powers of censoring, taxing, delaying, price-fixing, wiretapping, and favoring-incumbents.
I don't want a Chinese firewall.
I though we already have legislation in place to define them as "Common Carreires" absolving them of any legal responsibility when illegal content crosses their pipes. However it requires them to not perform any filtering.
I have the feeling we are making a new law to permits ISP to filter and not be legally responsible if illegal content crosses their pipes.
Why can't we just define carrier's as common carriers?
USPS has a whole bunch of law saying what can or can't he sent via postal mail. They absolutely do filter the post - not very well but it happens. https://postalinspectors.uspis.gov/aboutus/laws.aspx
What it seems people are asking for is that ISPs never filter any traffic at all for any reason and also never suffer any consequences for not filtering that traffic.
Giving Internet carriers "common carrier" status is likely to include laws that make them gather evidence and prosecute people involved in online gambling; child sexual exploitation; pyramid schemes; lottery tickets; credit card fraud; extreme pornography; etc. giving them common carrier status is likely to lead to more, not less, intrusive monitoring and filtering.
Now, in the smack middle of a major city with a large technology presence, I have 0 of the first kind and 1 of the second kind.
This is _not_ progress.
Logically, this does not imply that ISPs have to start filtering for illegal content, but that is nevertheless what people started worrying about.
No matter how cynical you want to be about the FCC, Comcast, Verizon, et al. have already proven themselves to be actively harmful. Anything restrictions the FCC creates can hardly be worse than the "fast lane" plans. The FCC is also answerable to elected officials, for better or for worse - even at worst, I think that's better than being answerable to no one but a pocketbook.
That's not to say that the current batch of telecoms are trustworthy, but at least there is recourse in the form of competition (see: Google Fiber), while if the FCC goes off the deep end we're irrevocably pooched. And...we have immediate history demonstrating that the FCC is corruptible for external agendas. I don't know why people think they would suddenly become above reproach if net neutrality legislation were enacted.
I'd check that assumption. There's plenty of evidence to show that government does a poor job regulating companies. Often times it's the companies that control the regulations.
Have you ever used a telco or cable company in the US? It's not exactly 'free and open'
With Title II regulation, they would be classified as a common carrier and would have many more restrictions in how they could discriminate among the various kinds of traffic that passes through their network.
If it's really that easy, I can't see why it's not common and relatively rarely uncovered or discovered...
That's kind of a simplification. The pushing is controlled by the CEO and similar people at the companies and they can in practice push for pretty much what they like using the companies money. While they are kind of supposed to maximise shareholders interests they don't always do so in practice (see excessive company jets, vanity takeovers). I doubt Ford and BoA are pushing neutrality because they think it will increase their profits, they are probably just pushing it because the boss likes the idea.
I think comcast and verizon are villainous scum that should be crushed like bugs, and still I am uncomfortable with legislating for net neutrality at this point, and especially uncomfortable with the idea of putting it in the constitution (even presuming that that's a bit of hyperbole on your part).
My problem is that NN is a "I know it when I see it" issue. But do I? When I first saw bitterness I thought it was a bad actor at the TCP/IP level (it isn't!). Streaming live events over the network? Madness -- my first impression was that we have several other broadcast media for that already! (now I realize: "so what?"). My understanding evolves over time.
Consider: differentiated carriage is clearly of interest to me -- I'd be happy to pay (as long as it's me making the decision, not my carrier) for differentiated QoS to make sure my call or game traffic were isochronous, that that big file I want now came quickly, but that my background app & OS updates, or disk pickup transmissions, were deprioritized, or even especially scheduled for periods of low contention. I'm delighted if my ISP has a cache so that common pages many people in my topological area may preload pages I want to see two, improving my access. Oh and I do with that that DDOS attack aimed at you doesn't catch me in the crossfire.
Finally, we know that when legislation is made, especially by people who lack the domain knowledge, all sorts of corner cases get screwed up both maliciously or though ignorance. What's network management vs rentier opportunism vs disadvantaging the poor vs a mistake can be twisted by someone with a buck to make, and the old carriers are past masters at such games. And they will surely swap the right to stop spam and layer 3 attacks for the right to monitor and censor.
If you do want a constitutional amendment, make it a general one about right of carriage and passage. I.e. it should apply equally to trucks driving down the road (which still have to meet some technical constraints for safety) to sending parcels, transmitting bits and the like. So that it can still be applicable when we consider packet switching as obsolete as the carrier pigeon.
QOS should happen at the edges of the network, certainly not in the middle because the middle has no clue what bits count to me.
Common Carrier law is exactly what Title II is, and what currently applies to trucks driving down the roads (can't buy a faster speed limit), electricity, shipping, oil pipelines, landline telephony, postage, etc.
My point is that the technology is still immature. We haven't really considered what our true criteria are, what layer they live at etc. There are still many innovations ahead. And don't think the carriers aren't well versed in how to game the system!
You say, correctly, that Title II is common carriage. But consider what came along with that. Note that I think CC has mostly worked with busses (you can't discriminate by race, at least) and the roads. It's worked well with trains. In other areas it hasn't got such a good record (and my politics are what is called in America "liberal").
In the case of telephony, title II unarguably held back technological development. All the development was done at the center. AT&T and Bell Labs did a really astounding job of development in the core (FDM in the 1930's for chrissake, and direct dialing with routing tables on punched metal cards in the 1940s). Not to mention SS7, the transistor and fibre optics. But all that came at a huge cost: phone calls were expensive, long distance was a limited service, and all innovation at the edge was explicitly, and by legal force, suppressed. You probably don't remember how horrible it was to use a Bell 103 modem, or the crappy approved phones. Mobile telephony was expensive and essentially useless. The communication infrastructure of today would be unrecognizable to a telephone engineer of 1990, while the communication infrastructure of 1990 would have been be easily comprehensible to a telephone engineer of 1925.
My point is: that it worked at all was because we had a useful metric: 99% of all calls had to be completed, even if it meant overbuilding to guarantee that on Mother's day. On the other hand we don't even have an equivalent of an Erlang [1] in the internet domain. I don't believe NN can legitimately be legislated in 2014, and any attempt will screw us at LEAST as much as ATT/comcast/verizon etc al are screwing us today.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erlang_(unit)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_carrier