JD on EP

Addendum: Apologies, I just re-found this link... one of the best summaries I found over the weekend was from Dale Franks, but this also puts the political campaign in terms of abstract goals rather than specific rules we're urged to support... the argument still seems at the "mom and apple pie" level, and I can't nail down to what end, specifically, this public pressure is being raised....

I'm with you on this one JD. Seems like some of these people run the risk of joining the tin foil hat brigade. From my reading it seems to come down to three things:

Public statements by some access providers that there ought to be tiered services for subscribers based on their bandwidth consumption.

A committee in Congress that decided not to take up a proposed bill that would prohibit any sort of tiered services based on fees that content providers might pay. (e.g. Google pays to have their pages load more quickly than Yahoo!)

and the coming demands of TV delivered via the web, and the demands that will place on the backbone.

Like you, I'm a little annoyed that what could be a real issue that bears watching is drowned by hyperbole. Chicken Little comes to mind.

The net neutrality debate is far from a chicken little situation. Telcos have shown, time and again, that they would rather have the government legislate away any chance for true competition in their space, rather than attempting to evolve and innovate with their business models. Think Muni-WiFi and VoIP. Their plans to create 'tiered' levels of service is a thinly veiled attempt to extort more money for providing the exact same service they always have.

I am relatively sure that they wouldn't be rolling out new, higher speed levels than currently exist, they would be throttling existing speeds. The real problem this creates though is that it basically hands large incumbents, in any online market space, the ability to crush new competition from smaller players. Imagine if, at the first sign of Google's rising popularity (before they had such huge mounds of cash), Microsoft had struck a deal with all the major telcos to give their traffic access to the 'premium tier'. Now all of a sudden it doesn't matter so much that Google's results are better because it takes 3 times as long for their page to load as does MSN Search's. These rules would eliminate the current system where online content's success or failure is (more or less) solely judged on its merits.

[jd sez: Thanks, Ben, but I'm still in the dark about what specific actions are recommended by all this conversation, other than pressuring our local politicians to vote in the future for things labeled "net neutrality". Kim's info about a prior bill which was not passed provides me a little more info... could explain why the deliverables are left so murky among all this bloggery.]

I think Ben's got pretty much the summary right there. There may or may not be one piece of legislation out there right now, but lobbiests for Verizon and the like write this stuff then hand it to the politicians to sign.

(btw, the "Internet's First Amendment" quote is a real beauty)

This unfortunately doesn't link directly to the bill it refers to, but it does indicate the existence of one.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2005/11/vint-cerf-speaks-out-on-net-neutrality.html

Thanks Ben... following the link you provided, I came to a US government website which apparently had some of the legislation in question:
http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Hearings/11092005hearing1706/hearing.htm

This hearing was held in November 2005. There is apparently an audio copy of the session available, even though the text transcript is still 'way behind its estimated delivery date.

That bit of evidence you added seems to corroborate Kim's understanding that it was a particular past incident at play. It looks like MoveOn is trying to gather support for the label "Network Neutrality", which can then be redefined in the future to put pressure behind yet-to-be-named potential legislation.

Looks like a blind end to me. But the fact that so many people could be suddenly talking, with such passion, about something which is not really connected to the world... this worries me greatly.

John, I must say I am pretty confused by your position that simply because there is not a bill up for vote in Congress at the moment that there is nothing to discuss and/or worry about. (If I have misinterpreted your stance I apologize). [jd sez: It's more like I'm trying to figure out exactly what all these people are talking about, first.]

The things we know are this: telcos have a long history of getting pretty much whatever they want from Congress. We also know that the executives from virtually every major telco have made statements in the recent past proclaiming the need to introduce 'tiered service'. At least one lobbyist went so far as to say that the current system amounts to regulatory theft. Another CEO made the absurd claim that people pay to be connected to 'the middle' of the net, not for an end to end connection. These people are clearly grasping at straws to (legislatively) protect their suffering business models.

Therefore, I think it makes perfect sense to let it be known, before an actual bill is introduced, that the effects of passing such legislation would be both anti-competitive and anti-consumer.

CNET has word that there's actually some committee meeting where a legislative package called COPE is coming up for a vote, and this is what unleashed the partisan mobilization.

(My philosophy: If something is unreadable, there's probably something wrong with it... most legislation tries to bamboozle people by its length, I 'spect.) Still seems like it boils down to an attempt to outlaw certain relationships between consenting adults... I'd feel more secure if it were easier for new players to break up old monopolies than to have ever more costly battles about this year's rules over prior politically-granted monopolies. Wacky that it was so hard to boil all that MoveOn talk down to some action items, though.

Hi JD,
Just surfing around a little on Net Neutrality..
Michael Geist says Net Neutrality means ISPs treat all data equally:

http://www.michaelgeist.ca/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1040

So I don't think it is a question of charging more if you use more bandwidth across your Internet gateway or just providing a bigger pipe for more money. It's more a concern that ISP's would favour their own applications by providing better access to their own content while clamping down on bandwidth used by external systems like Skype.

He points to an example where a Canadian ISP uses traffic shaping to prioritize and control the bandwidth allocated to things like BitTorrent and iTunes.

He says there are reports that "BellSouth and AT&T are now lobbying the U.S. Congress for the right to create a two-tiered Internet, where their own Internet services would be transmitted faster and more efficiently than those of their competitors."

For someone like Adobe - who obviously pays some ISP(s) for all the bandwidth you use to distribute the Flash player - it would mean that other ISPs who have to carry that traffic downstream might clamp down on traffic coming from Adobe unless you paid them extra.

Yours truly,
-Brian

Just an FYI. Some interesting reading here:
http://commerce.senate.gov/hearings/witnesslist.cfm?id=1705
Eventually you click through to full pdf transcripts.
Cheers,
-Brian