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Pulitzer
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Pulitzer
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Anyone heard of/know anything about Network Neutrality ? I saw something about it in a friend's blog, but hadn't heard of it before. Seems like it's a hot-button topic in certain areas, though. Basically, the idea is that all websites should be treated equally; your (broadband) ISP shouldn't be allowed to give bandwidth priority to (or withhold it from) certain sites. Bandwidth priority is a huge deal. If a site loads too slowly, it'll lose a lot of visitors. There seem to be a number of variations when you get down to details. One of th main worries is that ISPs could take money to alter bandwidth priority. One company could pay to have its pages load faster than those of its competitors. This would severely impact, for example, small businesses and local charities who couldn't afford to pay enough to keep up. Another worry is politics. ISPs could effectively block sites with adjendas they don't agree with. If they decide, for example, that it's in the company's interest to have a certain law passed, they could give priority to sites promoting the law and take it from sites which argue against it. Basically, we're talking about the ability to affect free speech and open commerce. Websites, perhaps entire movements, could rise and fall at the will of AOL. There's also the possibility that sites like this one would end up suffering... If everyone else starts paying for priority, there will be a lot less bandwidth left over for personal sites, fan pages, etc. Congress is, I've heard, debating a law that would require neutrality. It would make it illegal to prioritize bandwidth (or, at the least, to prioritize it in certain ways or for certain reasons... like I said, there seem to be a number of variations). As you'd expect, the big ISPs are against it, saying they can police themselves well enough. Others, like Amazon, Google, and various activist groups, are, of course, for the law. Even Microsoft signed this petition . Anyone know what the latest is? Any thoughts on the issue? Paul
When in doubt, think about penguins. It probably won't help, but at least it'll be fun.
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Pulitzer
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Pulitzer
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Interesting issue -- I hadn't heard about it before. I'd have to read up before making up my mind, though I'm kind of instinctively against it, on the theory that competition would be a better guard against abusive behavior than regulation would. If AOL won't let you host what you want, you go find a server that will; if people leave AOL, that will decrease AOL's profitability and/or influence, and they'll have to decide what sort of trade-off they want to live with. Of course, that's assuming that there will be alternate ISPs to go to, but I think a lot of our FOLC sites are run by Annette in Pennsylvania, using a server in California. So if her local ISP decided to squeeze out fan sites, who cares? Heck, the old LOISCLA mailing list was hosted by a server in Turkey! If there's a market, there will be someone selling to it, sooner or later. Local example -- a lot of schools in our district have been switched from a traditional schedule to year-round. Which means, instead of three months off in the summer, my kids get three weeks at a time in November, February, May, and August. When this started, of course parents worried about what to do with their kids during those "track-outs." But it didn't take long before local child-care providers introduced "track-out camps" to meet that need. To the best of my knowlege, there weren't any laws forcing them to do so, but they saw a market. Then, too, regulations can also be abused. Any movement large enough to co-ordinate action between umpteen-zillion ISPs would also be large enough to influence the goverment. Actually, it would probably take a much larger group to co-ordinate major ISPs; small and noisy groups can have disproportionate impact on governments. But I will have to read up on it. There are always complications  [edit: Okay, after some reading I've decided it's definitely complicated  And one of the things I forgot about before was that telecommunication companies are already regulated quite a lot, so... I dunno.] PJ
"You told me you weren't like other men," she said, shaking her head at him when the storm of laughter had passed.
He grinned at her - a goofy, Clark Kent kind of a grin. "I have a gift for understatement."
"You can say that again," she told him.
"I have a...."
"Oh, shut up."
--Stardust, Caroline K
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Pulitzer
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Pulitzer
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It's not hosting that we're talking about. It's the other side of things. Loading the pages.
Let's say you've got AOL as your ISP. That means you're paying them to let you use their computers to access the internet.
Now, if they decide to give bandwidth priority to Site #1, then when you're sitting at home browsing the web and you decide to see what's on Site #1, it'll pop up on your screen really quickly.
OTOH, if they've taken bandwidth priority away from Site #2 (or given priority to enough other sites that there's significantly less remaining, which would have the same effect), then Site #2 will load slowly.
If you've got both open, you might be able to browse through Site #2, visiting several pages, while still waiting for Site #1 to finish loading. (I don't know how big a difference we're talking about here. I expect it'd vary.)
This doesn't quite ammount to blocking you from viewing the site, but it still makes a difference. If you noticed that Site #2 was loading so much more slowly, you might stop visiting it regularly.
And competition assumes that you know what's going on. Odds are that you wouldn't. You'd just think that Site #2's server was busy or something, and that they needed to upgrade things on their end. Certainly, AOL wouldn't tell you that they'd decided to block it.
I also hear talk about AOL using their spam filters to bounce/block petitions and such. Don't know too much about it, but it's a scary thought.
There are some pretty insidious possibilities.
Regulations can be abused, sure, but so can anarchy. There are advanatages to having someone policing the big companies. And I'd trust AOL to watch for and defend itself against abuses more than I'd trust them to refrain from subtly abusing their customers.
Paul
When in doubt, think about penguins. It probably won't help, but at least it'll be fun.
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Pulitzer
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Pulitzer
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Just ran across an ad about this issue... so I thought, what the heck, the discussion is only a couple of weeks old, I can still reply... http://www.dontregulate.org/ I've still not made up my mind, but I would lean in that direction, obviously. Paul, I see the points you're making. The trouble is, I'm not sure I trust government any more than I would AOL. Quite possibly less... no matter which party in power. PJ
"You told me you weren't like other men," she said, shaking her head at him when the storm of laughter had passed.
He grinned at her - a goofy, Clark Kent kind of a grin. "I have a gift for understatement."
"You can say that again," she told him.
"I have a...."
"Oh, shut up."
--Stardust, Caroline K
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Hack from Nowheresville
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Hack from Nowheresville
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Somewhat more key in this debate is the idea of prioritizing types of traffic and not just particular sites. A lot of ISPs are phone companies -- Verizon, Qwest, etc. Even the cable companies now provide phone service over cable.
Now let's say you've chosen to go with Voice over IP -- you have your phone delivered over the Internet line rather than the Internet delivered over the phone line. If the ISP is also a phone company, they may deprioritize VoIP traffic in order to encourage you to drop VoIP and get their phone service instead.
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Kerth
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Kerth
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This cartoon suggests one of the less desirable consequences of a non-neutral net.
Marcus L. Rowland
Forgotten Futures, The Scientific Romance Role Playing Game
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Boards Chief Administrator Emeritus Nobel Peace Prize Winner
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Boards Chief Administrator Emeritus Nobel Peace Prize Winner
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Well, the BBC seems to have caught up, belatedly: Web Inventor Warns of 'Dark' Net
The web should remain neutral and resist attempts to fragment it into different services, web inventor Sir Tim Berners-Lee has said.
Recent attempts in the US to try to charge for different levels of online access web were not "part of the internet model," he said in Edinburgh.
He warned that if the US decided to go ahead with a two-tier internet, the network would enter "a dark period".
Sir Tim was speaking at the start of a conference on the future of the web.
"What's very important from my point of view is that there is one web," he said.
"Anyone that tries to chop it into two will find that their piece looks very boring."
The British scientist developed the web in 1989 as an academic tool to allow scientists to share data. Since then it has exploded into every area of life.
However, as it has grown, there have been increasingly diverse opinions on how it should evolve.
The World Wide Web Consortium, of which Sir Tim is the director, believes in an open model.
This is based on the concept of network neutrality, where everyone has the same level of access to the web and that all data moving around the web is treated equally.
This view is backed by companies like Microsoft and Google, who have called for legislation to be introduced to guarantee net neutrality.
The first steps towards this were taken last week when members of the US House of Representatives introduced a net neutrality bill.
But telecoms companies in the US do not agree. They would like to implement a two-tier system, where data from companies or institutions that can pay are given priority over those that cannot.
This has particularly become an issue with the transmission of TV shows over the internet, with some broadband providers wanting to charge content providers to carry the data.
The internet community believes this threatens the open model of the internet as broadband providers will become gatekeepers to the web's content.
Providers that can pay will be able to get a commercial advantage over those that cannot.
There is a fear that institutions like universities and charities would also suffer.
The web community is also worried that any charges would be passed on to the consumer.
Sir Tim said this was "not the internet model". The "right" model, as exists at the moment, was that any content provider could pay for a connection to the internet and could then put any content on to the web with no discrimination.
Speaking to reporters in Edinburgh at the WWW2006 conference, he argued this was where the great benefit of the internet lay.
"You get this tremendous serendipity where I can search the internet and come across a site that I did not set out to look for," he said.
A two-tier system would mean that people would only have full access to those portions of the internet that they paid for and that some companies would be given priority over others.
But Sir Tim was optimistic that the internet would resist attempts to fragment.
"I think it is one and will remain as one," he said.
The WWW2006 conference will run until Friday at the International Conference Centre in Edinburgh. I'm definitely for non-regulation, having read this.  It seems to me to undermine the whole point of the net - a freeflowing access to information, available to all. LabRat
Athos: If you'd told us what you were doing, we might have been able to plan this properly.
Aramis: Yes, sorry.
Athos: No, no, by all means, let's keep things suicidal.
The Musketeers
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Merriwether
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Merriwether
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Do you know the most surprising thing about divorce? It doesn't actually kill you, like a bullet to the heart or a head-on car wreck. It should. When someone you've promised to cherish till death do you part says, "I never loved you," it should kill you instantly.
- Under the Tuscan Sun
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Boards Chief Administrator Emeritus Nobel Peace Prize Winner
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Boards Chief Administrator Emeritus Nobel Peace Prize Winner
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It seems to me to undermine the whole point of the net - a freeflowing access to information, available to all. You know, I was thinking about this yesterday, and it suddenly struck me - isn't this what we have already? Yes, the net itself is information free to all. But only if you have the means to pay for the equipment to access it and the cost of server charges. So at the moment - don't we already have a system where some get access ahead of others, depending on the ability to pay? Just a thought. LabRat
Athos: If you'd told us what you were doing, we might have been able to plan this properly.
Aramis: Yes, sorry.
Athos: No, no, by all means, let's keep things suicidal.
The Musketeers
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Pulitzer
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Pulitzer
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From the user's end, yes. Most people can get some kind of access, even if it's limited time on a public computer in a library. More money gets you a better connection - faster speed, fewer time constraints, or both.
Ideally, everyone should have at least basic level, but that would take considerable resources. You'd have to issue a computer to everyone in the world and you'd have to expand the network so that it covered the entire globe. (Although it should be noted that this is the entire point of those $100 laptops they designed.)
But that's all about how users connect to the internet. Network Neutrality, OTOH, concerns the other side of things. It's about the flow of information from the ISPs and their servers to the users. Leaving that unrestricted doesn't cost anything. It requires no action on their part.
The debate is about whether or not they should be allowed to give priority to certain things over others, for a variety of reasons (being paid to do so, covering their own interests, etc).
Free market vs free speech, I guess. Do we limit how ISPs can run their servers (forbidding them from essentially establishing a new type of advertizing) or do we allow them to control what we do or don't see?
To me, it seems clear. The internet should be the great equalizer. You shouldn't have to pay to get your message across.
(Though, to some degree, you do already... You need to pay for web hosting, and more money will get you more bandwidth...)
The idea of ISPs having so much power about what messages do and don't get through, though... That scares me. Think how close the last couple of elections were here in the US. If the major ISPs got it into their collective heads that one party would be better for them, they could influence things enough to tip the scales.
Now, sure, gov't regulation isn't the greatest thing, either. There's quite a bit about the current administration that I simply don't like or trust.
There's something to be said, though, for separation of power. For shared responsibility. I trust ISPs with carte blanche even less than I do gov't regulatory committees. And you know the ISPs will raise a fuss if the power is being abused. They'll watch for it, and they'll be able to put up a fight.
Frankly, Time-Warner controls enough of the media as it is. We don't --
That is, I love Time-Warner, Inc. AOL is "da bomb," yo. I also love Superman (tm). Don't we all? Time-Warner, Inc., through its DC Comics, Inc. and Warner Home Video, Inc. divisions, owns the rights to Superman (tm) and the TV show "Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman" (tm). And Without Time Warner, Inc., us "FOLC"s would be nowhere. Let us all take a moment to thank Time Warner, Inc. for the bounty they provide us.
As for "network neutrality," surely, if they can be trusted with Superman, they can be trusted with other things.
This message written entirely by me,
Paul-Gabriel Wiener
When in doubt, think about penguins. It probably won't help, but at least it'll be fun.
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Pulitzer
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Pulitzer
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Actually... I had another thought.
We've got the FCC, right? A government agency designed to act as a third party, interested only in the public good. They make sure that all radio stations can be heard, that no one can block anyone else's signal, etc. They make sure that the broadcasts follow certain basic rules. For public stations, they even enforce "equal time" rules for political messages.
If they abuse or fail to use their power, they're publically and legally accountable for that.
Meantime, let's say a radio or TV manufacturer started making equipment that could control what you see. "If you don't pay us, your channel will come in with a lot of static. If you broadcast negative reviews of our equipment, that'll probably be pretty staticy, too. If we don't like what you're saying, well, maybe there'll be some more static." If that happened, the FCC would probably come down on them pretty hard.
(Okay, maybe that's not likely, but you get the idea. Besides, TiVo could probably do it if they wanted to.)
Without them, you'd be stuck. If there was no one watching to make sure of this stuff, you'd probably just assume that you're too far away from the station or that they had faulty equipment or something.
The FCC is there to watch out for that sort of thing. TV stations can (within the legal limits) broadcast whatever they want. You, as a viewer, are free to watch whatever channel you want (though you do have to pay for better reception and extra channels and such). But no one can interfere with the broadcast itself.
That's what network neutrality is, and the more I think about it, the more it seems like a good idea.
Paul
When in doubt, think about penguins. It probably won't help, but at least it'll be fun.
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