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Comments on news posted 2006-06-09 08:52:42: "By a 152-269 vote that fell largely along party lines, the House Republican leadership mustered enough votes to reject a Democrat-backed amendment that would have enshrined stiff Net neutrality regulations into federal law and prevented broadband pr.. ..
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rchandra
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| simple statement on neutrality It's not my fault that ISPs could not properly price their Internet access in the past. What they're basically saying is an Animal Farm-esque "your packets are more equal than these other packets." Assuming all the present billing models are flat rate per unit of time (e.g., month), why is it they don't think raising everyone's rates a very small amount is better than raising only a few big bandwith users' rates by a lot?
I thought the pricing model was for $x per month, we will move y bits per second to and from the Internet. It seems to me to be the same crappy argument as some ISPs that say they'll sell you an unlimited use connection for $x/mo., and then complain and cap and slow down and disconnect for "abuse" when we actually use the provided pipe. It's also not my fault when they promise to provide Internet access at a x/x or x/y rate, then they oversubscribe their interconnects so that they're unable to provide the speeds in the contract.
It wasn't that long ago that my former employer paid a certain 95th percentile fee, therefore if usage went up, the bill went up. It basically meant that bandwidth was the full T-1 rate, so a certain average usage was billed for, but it could always burst to full speed whenever needed. If that full speed were utilized constantly, the bill would be that much higher. Now it seems the connections are sold on strictly a $x/mo. fee, with no metering. With reasonable prices, I like this model. It lets me know my mythical business' costs up front, regardless of how much my connection is used. I hate the thought of having to pay on a bytes-moved basis, because so much of it could be traffic in which I have no interest in carrying (spam for example).
This seems to be nothing more than a poorly executed move from flat rate pricing back to the metered access of a few years ago. If the ISPs that want to charge more for these few dozen supposed bandwidth hogs, just change the billing model from flat rate back to metered, and be done with it. It would be perceived as a whole lot more fair than just saying we're going to gouge the bigger guys on the Net. Competition will determine who is and who is not willing to continue billing with a flat rate per unit of time pricing model.
Maybe without Net neutrality laws, ISPs could be sued for fraud or breach of contract instead.
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Bill
Light Up The Halo
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| Re: simple statement on neutrality Metered access is still used in business environments today. If you look for bandwidth inside a large data center, the prices are most likely going to be based on 95%. You may be able to find some providers still offering GB/TB plans, but most have moved to 95% to keep their billing simple and fair for their clients.
It'd be interesting if that model was implemented for residential internet connections. It would ensure those who abuse their connections 24/7 with P2P would be paying their fair share and not make the rest of us suffer with extremely low data transfer caps. It would also allow for the burst speeds to improve dramatically for end-users. We would still not see 100 Mbps connections since most ISP's networks can't handle several people bursting at those speeds, but it would be significantly higher than the 5 or 6 Mbps most providers are offering now.
Of course, the problem is the average Joe Blow can't figure out 95% billing and people will complain the price per Mbps is too high.
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| Daddio1949
join:2000-12-13
Rockville, MD
| Wall Street Journal commentary on Net Neutrality In today's Wall Street Journal
Ominous Neutrality
By STEVE FORBES
June 12, 2006; Page A12
If Washington followed Hollywood's lead and gave an academy award for the best political sound bite of the year, "Net Neutrality" would win in a walk for 2006.
Net Neutrality has everything a good sound-bite needs. It's short, alliterative, easy to remember and so elastic in meaning that anybody can define it according to their own agenda.
That's exactly what's happening in Congress right now, where well-financed lobbyists are pushing for Net Neutrality legislation. According to their benign-sounding definition of Net Neutrality, it simply means that Internet network operators like the phone and cable companies would have to give equal treatment to all traffic on their networks, without giving anybody's content preference in handling.
But scratch the surface of what the Net Neutrality crowd is really asking for and Net Neutrality shifts from benign to ominous. The Net Neutrality lobbyists want Congress to pass innovation-stifling restrictions on what companies like Verizon and AT&T can do with the new high-speed broadband networks that these companies haven't even finished building yet.
These networks are the superhighways for transporting Internet content and services. They will also permit Verizon and AT&T to offer Internet-based cable TV programming in competition with the cable companies, which are already competing in telecom services. Slapping these networks with premature, unnecessary regulations would be an inexcusable barrier to the tradition of innovation at the heart of the Internet.
Phone companies are investing billions of dollars in network innovation. They need to earn a return on their investment. One logical way is to use a tiered pricing system that charges a premium price for premium services -- which means super-high-speed services that gobble extra bandwidth on the network. Those who are happy with standard broadband speeds would continue to pay the same prices they pay now.
This is the same concept as mail service. If you want to send a letter from New York to Los Angeles and delivery in four days to a week is OK, you can do it for the price of a 39-cent postage stamp. But if you want the letter delivered without fail by 10 a.m. the next morning, you upgrade to FedEx and pay for the extra service you need.
Applying this principle to the Internet sounds like the free market at work to me. But the Net Neutralizers have responded with manufactured indignation, claiming that it's discrimination and somehow tramples on the egalitarian spirit of the Internet.
Surprisingly Google, E-Bay and other high-tech companies have become big supporters of this flavor of Net Neutrality; they supposedly fear discrimination from Internet providers. But they have no real evidence to back-up such fears. If problems do arise, then these can be dealt with specifically.
Passing Network Neutrality legislation would be a re-run of the disastrous Telecom Act of 1996 which forced telecom companies to provide network access to competitors at below market prices. That certainly put a chill on network innovation. After years of wasteful lawsuits and regulatory infighting, the network access monster has gone away. But it was a big factor in letting America slip into the high-tech Stone Age, with consumer broadband services lagging far behind what's available in countries like Japan or South Korea.
Members of Congress are on the verge of updating the Telecom Act to bring it into sync with a communications industry that's been transformed by Internet technology. As they do that, we can only hope they don't compromise the future of this vital industry by falling for the rhetoric of Net Neutrality. After all, what network operator would be silly enough to keep investing billions in network innovations if the fruits of its innovation had to be given away at below cost?
Mr. Forbes is president & CEO of Forbes, Inc. and editor-in-chief of Forbes magazine. | |
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morph3ous
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| ISC.org The other day when I was browsing »kernel.org, I saw that they were being donated bandwidth by »www.isc.org/ (Internet Systems Consortium).
Do you think that, if the telcos get out of hand, non-profits and those fighting for net rights could light up some of that dark fiber out there?
I know that what I am saying is a bit simplistic because the last mile is also so vitally important. To get past that problem would be a lot harder.
What are your thoughts, and do you think that it will eventually come to that?
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