Redstate

He is a blowhard and earned his stripes back when the spoils always went to the majority party in Congress.

I don't know what's going on here, either. But here's my reading of it:

There is more Big Stuff posted on the Internet every day. Big Stuff is defined to mean mp3's, videos, humongous Powerpoints, 300-page pdf's, and the like. All this Big Stuff being out there creates an increased load on the local ISPs as their customers download more and more Big Stuff.

The issue is who is going to pay for the upgrades at the ISPs that will be necessary to meet this demand for more and more Big Stuff. There are also investments required at the backbone level, and so far we're ignoring that. But it's there.

The ISPs have two places they can go to get this money. They can hit up their customers for it, or they can try to extract money from the people who run the web sites that their customers are visiting.

It is a long-established principle in our society, made popular by devices such as the "corporate income tax," that we hide the cost of doing things from the public by burying the costs in the prices of other things. For some reason this makes people happy. They are still paying the costs (now in the form of higher prices), but they think they are pulling a fast one by Sticking It To The Man. The government uses this principle very effectively to hide a substantial portion of the tax burden in the prices of goods and services.

Hence the proposal by ISPs to Stick It To The Web Sites. This hides the cost of upgrading the ISP's plant and equipment in the prices of things like Amazon's books, eBay's transaction fees, and so on.

One can argue that this is even fair, because Amazon and eBay are operating "attractive nuisances" that increase costs for the ISPs, and they are making a ton of money doing it.

However, my take is that the real problem is that there is a subset of ISP users who — using the 80-20 rule for simplicity — generate 80% of the bandwidth demand while paying only 20% of the bills. These are the folks downloading movies, running BitTorrents, "sharing" their music libraries, and so on. It seems to me that these are the folks causing the problem, and they should be the ones that have to pay for upgrading the pipes.

The average eBay web page is a nit (bandwidth-wise) compared to a single mp3 file. The only argument for sticking it to eBay is that eBay is a deep pocket. The ISPs don't want to confront their high-bandwidth-using customers and raise their rates, so instead they want to charge the customers of Amazon and eBay and eTrade for the sins of the P2P file sharers. Well, bunk.

But now we come down to whether we really want to regulate this. It seems to me that if your scenario pans out (that cash-poor web sites like RedState end up getting the bandwidth dregs), then there becomes a competitive niche for an ISP who charges the movie downloaders what they cost, and leaves everything else alone.

Watch what happens: the ISP who charges the flat rate attracts all the movie downloaders, and the ISP who socks it to the downloaders of Big Stuff, but treats all the web sites the same, gets everybody else.

So this should eventually all shake out the way it's supposed to, without any regulation. The only requirement is that some other regulation has to go away. That's the regulation done (usually at the municipal level) that awards a local monopoly to a cable provider or a phone company. So long as that obtains, the market cannot segment into a flat-rate segment and a pay-for-your-bits segment... which is necessary for the system to shake out properly.

My understanding of what got passed is that these things are addressed. There's no requirement that all sites be treated the same, but they are making it easier for competitors to come in and zap the guys who favor the top 100-or-so money-making web sites over everything else out there. None of this is meant to imply that everything will end up perfect; after all, AOL still exists. But most people will figure out what the best deal for them is, and all these screams will go away.

For a while there I thought you were referring to the House bill that I keep bringing up in these threads, heh.

Will someone PLEASE knock off that Porker Senator in a primary?

Net Neutrality, which ensures everyone equal access. The bill Stevens is pushing forward, which is opposed from right wing groups like the NRA to left wingers like the Kos, would force every site to pay for service. If a site like Red State couldn't afford the cost of first tier service, we all would suffer, as we would have to get in line to access the site and potentially wait 10-15 minutes to get in.

Now I have no problem with a company charging more to the 20% using 80% of the bandwidth, however Stevens bill is not the answer. This is a terrible, terrible bill that is bad for everyone!

I also understand that if the bill were to pass, ISP's could regulate the content posted under there control. No more free internet. What if a left winger controlled the ISP, and wanted to censor Red State?

The bill is just a kickback to the Telcos. It does us, the average American no good. My guess is that websites would have to significantly increase the cost of Web Advertising as well to adjust to having to pay to play.

I'd also point out, that just about every other first world nation has laws protecting net neutrality. I'd hope we want to continue to be seen as a leader in the technological revolution, and not pass some archaic bill fronted by an 85 year old man that calls email, sending an internets. Unreal.

Great article from Computer world on the topic...

http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&amp
;articleId=9001498&pageNumber=1

Net Providers can already charge me on how much of their network I use. They, for the most part, have chosen not to and it has nothing to do with net neutrality.

On the face of it, that's true. The impact on neutrality is not coming from any rational direction; it's coming from a kind of political expediency. Telling customers that you're going to charge Amazon and eBay (tax that man behind the tree) instead of charging them may make no sense, but it's a lot more popular: he who robs Peter to pay Paul can count on the support of Paul.

Those more sophisticated in the art can readily see the consequences, but most people can't. So as a politcal device it works great. It's a way to increase rates without explicitly raising rates... the increased charges show up as higher book prices. The municipal rate-regulators don't care about book prices; they only care what the local cable monopoly is charging directly.

I support customers being charged for what they do, because guess what: Internet hardware isn't net neutral.  Different links to different places cost the ISP different amounts.

... so long as you don't "joke" about spiking his creme brulee with rat poison.

Well that's the thing.  You don't know specifically what you want, so I can't tell you specifically what the side effects would be.

What I do know, though, is that thanks to the regulation already in place, too many American residences have too little competition for low-latency Internet access at speeds over 56kbps.

If we add more regulation, we run the risk of making it worse, and driving away investments in infrastructure, such as Verizon's FiOS efforts.

I could do without Senator Stevens OR Justice Stevens.

... has to do with slowed service.

How to do that specifically, in terms of legislation language, I don't know for sure. But net neutrality, as I understand it to be, prohibits telecoms from charging for ensured access, and that is what I want.

What do you see the side effects to be? Perhaps I am not seeing them myself.

What some of us are saying is that we WANT to pay more out of pocket, to our ISPs, if we're using enough of the service to warrant higher fees.

But anyway you're begging the question (it feels GOOD to use that expression correctly).  Yes, I know you want to keep things as they are, but how do you propose we DO that?

Because while it'd be fine and dandy to just say we want things to stay as they are, but when evaluating any proposed way to do that, we have to take into account any side effects of our proposed solution before we support it.

If the net providers want to charge me on how much of their network I use I have no problem with this. Let them state a price and then I'll go to the open market and choose a provider that gives me the best cost for my usage.

What Net discrimination wants is for me to be charged different rates not on how much of the network I use but on what I use it for.

It's like driving on a toll road and being charged not on how far you travel but on what you plan to do once you arrive.

Is that something you support?

Then we're keeping it simple.

For the most part the costs the costs you detailed have nothing to do with net neutrality.

Net discrimination would allow for different charges in spite of the same costs to the ISP.

Let's say I buy a book from amazon.com and then I buy another book from barnesandnoble.com and use the exact same about of bandwidth and the cost to my ISP is exactly the same (assume both Amazon and B&N have the same hosting company)

Do you think I should have to pay more to my ISP to buy a book from B&N, and receive the same level service, than I would to buy a book from Amazon?

We're not talking about tiered service based on how much of the network I use but based on a preferred company list that has nothing to do with the costs of providing service.

a) Cost of building and maintaining company-owned infrastructure

b) Cost of connecting to upstream third-party infrastructure

The difference between a) and b) is the a big part of why customer-side tiering is inevitable.

As for your, it's happening in other parts of the world argument, so it ethnic cleansing. So what's your point?

Great article here from one of the founders of the Net (no, not Al Gore)...

http://networks.silicon.com/webwatch/0,39024667,39159071,00.htm

Additionaly, my sister is a lawyer for the city of New York, specifically working w/ the Telco's. Here was her take, which I thought very insightful -

"This law will also decimate local municipalities ability to oversee cable consumer protection and to levy fees when cable companies dig in

the ground.  It's all in the name of increasing "competition" - i.e. letting the ILECs like Verizon string new fiber that enables them to provide cable-like services.  The ILECs are whining that it's so hard to get cable franchises all across the country.  Meanwhile the "competitive" rates that they charge for cable/phone service is the same as what the cable companies are charging.  

This would also destroy many City budgets."

I don't get the fascination with flat-rate pricing by the ISPs. We don't pay "one size fits all" rates for any other utility. Electricty, gas, water... all those things are metered and we pay by the unit.

I agree with this and the thrust of your post. Like electricity we should be charged on how much we use not what we use it for.

If I use X amount of electricity and my electric Co. wants to charge me Y, no problem. If they want to charge me different rates depending what I use X amount of electricity for then I have an issue.

The latter is what the end of net neutrality would cause.

To your last point Net Providers can already charge me on how much of their network I use. They, for the most part, have chosen not to and it has nothing to do with net neutrality.

Can you enumerate the network costs involved?

I don't know if you're aware but in certain parts of the world, connecting to some Internet sites already will cost you more money than others.

Those transoceanic Internet links aren't free, and have been creating a non-neutral, tiered Internet for years.

I don't get the fascination with flat-rate pricing by the ISPs. We don't pay "one size fits all" rates for any other utility. Electricty, gas, water... all those things are metered and we pay by the unit.

If the ISPs did that, the P2P folks would either pay what they cost, or stop doing that. Either solution is OK with me.

The reason the ISPs are in a box is that they won't load the whole cost of doing business onto their customers. And the reason they won't do that is that any flat rate that covered all the costs would be too high for the average user who doesn't move movie-sized buckets around.

The electric companies have figured out how to bill every customer a different amount. The technology exists. Surely the ISPs can get their hands on it.

... this is what Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) said about net neutrality in his long speech about "how the internet works."

"My biggest fear about this debate is that we don't know about the consequences to turn the Internet into a two-tiered system, which is exactly what those who are pleading for Net Neutrality would do."

When a piece of legislation is in a deadlocked tie, this is not the guy you want (a) with a vote; or (b) sitting as the committee's chair.

He has no idea what he is talking about.

The bandwidth problem doesn't stem from youtube, Amazon, blogs, or any of those nifty flash games sites. Most of the bandwidth is being used by peer-to-peer applications such as bit torrent.

According to this Cringely column (LINK) about 1/3 of the net traffic is peer-to-peer and ending net neutrality (the status quo) will only exacerbate bandwidth issues.

To put it simply the Internet has sophisticated error checking procedures that ensure that all transmitted information arrives at its destination. This error checking is bandwidth overhead and doesn't contribute to the file's content. If you slow down the speed at which this file is transmitted, aka increase the latency between the peers, then you'll need more error checks. More error checks mean more transmitted packets and more packets mean more bandwidth used.

The end result of net neutrality's demise will be an effective tax on content providers and slower Internet speeds for consumers.

If you want to pay more for less then end net neutrality. If you want to grow the Internet then support content creation and oppose this ill considered bill.

I hope the link provided helps.

---

Oh and if you're about to suggest lowering the bandwidth for torrents don't bother, sophisticated programmers will just encrypt the torrent packets to hide their nature.

every Red State reader to call your Senator and tell them to vote NO on Stevens bill as long as it end Net Neutrality. There are a few Repubs already on board, but this is too big an issue to ignore.

These people are used to being the 20% who does 80% of the use, and thus getting their downloads subsidized by the other 80%.

The people who are labelling any attempt to end that situation 'the creation of a tiered Internet' are the ones who have muddied up this whole debate for everyone.

But that has nothing to do with charging me two different amounts when the cost to the ISP is the same.

My bandwidth takes a hit when I try to download something from Europe or Asia or play a game on a foreign server. I have no problem with this.

I have a problem with my ISP wanting to charge me different amounts for the same service that has the same cost to them based on a preferred vendor list.

Simply put I think the toll on the highway should be based on how far you drive not at which restaurant you eat at once you get there.

... to maintain the status quo of the internet.

The customers (you and me, using the internet) do not pay out of pocket if "net neutrality" is removed.

I read a lot of people's comments that seemed to suggest they thought they were going to have to pay more for their service. I wanted to correct that, because that would not be the case.

It would be the owners of RedState, MyDD, Google -- every website, blog, etc. on the internet -- that would be asked to pony up the money.

And the sites that did not pay, visitors using that ISP for that site would experience a slow down of service -- regardless of your internet speed.

So if RedState didn't pay AT&T, anybody using AT&T would get slow service to RedState. And that's just one ISP. There's a slew of other ISPs in this country, some smaller than others. Whether all of them would jump in on this, I don't know, but then again, I don't see why not.

I have family members that operate a small business completely online. I doubt they would be able to pay a fee to ISPs to guaranteed quick service. (Something they already get now.)

I just wanted to clarify that misconception with some RedStaters because reading those comments, I did not get the sense that people fully understood what the situation is, who would way, what would happen, etc. I wanted to throw my two cents in and see what happens.

As I suggested in my other reply to you, your understanding of the real problem seems way ahead of many of your fellow leftists.

But what, exactly, is the 'this' that you propose we get behind?  What are you proposing be done, and why isn't the House bill (national regulation of local franchise negotiations) sufficient to solve this?