Congress to Debate Net Neutrality 227
evw writes "The NYTimes is reporting that legislation was introduced in the Senate on Tuesday in support of Net Neutrality. It is bipartisan legislation introduced by Olympia Snowe, R-Maine and Byron Dorgan, D-N. Dakota, however the article notes that Senator Snowe is one of the few Republicans that supports it. "Senior lawmakers, emboldened by the recent restrictions on AT&T and the change in control of Congress, have begun drafting legislation that would prevent high-speed Internet companies from charging content providers for priority access." This isn't the first attempt. Last year a similar amendment was blocked. However, conditions placed on AT&T in its merger with SBC have emboldened supporters of the legislation."
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Way off topic (Score:3, Funny)
Feel free to mod me down.
Oh and to you it's a living language people, I know, but these bastardizations can in no way improve our ability to communicate.
Re:Way off topic (Score:5, Funny)
I don't know why (Score:3, Funny)
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However, the OED would tell you that embolden has a very long and rich history as a word, dating back to Milton and before. Incentivize only dates back to 1968, so it's somewhat close. Impactful comes nowhere near the OED.
1900s:telephones::2000s:internets (Score:2, Interesting)
This is a step to limit the internet companies from rippnig the money from my wallet, but letting AT&T regain itself from a century of being split was a mistake. The evil has respawned, and threatens my porn.
Re:1900s:telephones::2000s:internets (Score:4, Insightful)
If they truely learned from history, the Justice Department wouldn't allow AT&T to buy up its old subsidiaries that it took years of court battles to cleave apart.
and I'm SURE it wouldn't have anything to do with letting the intelligence agencies have unfettered access to the data flowing through the pipes in exhange for resurrecting Ma Bell with little fanfare.
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the Justice Department wouldn't allow AT&T to buy up its old subsidiaries
Isn't it more a case of
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Congress, counting its kickback and PAC money: "Huh... did someone say something? I thought I heard something... 1 million, 5 hundred, 30 thousand and 1... 1 million, 5 hundred, 30 thousand and 2...
We must always rely... (Score:2)
Libertarian stance? (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a confession to make, I haven't been following the net neutrality issue closely at all. The extent of my understanding is that its proponents are calling for federal legislation ensuring that the private companies who do some infrastrutural magic to make the net possible, aren't allowed to discriminate or otherwise let business decisions apply to how they treat network traffic.
As I see it, this should give rise to a philosophical point of contention:
Namely, how do you reconcile libertarian free-market capitalism with legislation that at the end of the day will still be restricting the free-market actions of private companies.
To distill the point, let's put it this way:
Any good answers to this? I promise there will be many +informatives/+insightfuls in it for you...
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Now, there is an actual argument for legislation that is pro-net nutraity, and does not clash (that much with our libertarian ways).
Most (if not all) of the infrastructre that supports the internet (all those miles of copper and fiber), was heavily subsidized (if not outright payed for)
Re:Libertarian stance? (Score:5, Insightful)
The cable companies/phone companies/etc. are not currently existing in a free market. All corporate utility providers are subject to lots of government rules, and for good reasons. Many of those reasons are purely practical. Running utility lines requires a lot of wires and pipes and whatnot to be strung through our cities, or under the ground, through many different pieces of public and private property. Not setting some regulations for how all of that work would create huge logistic, safety, and performance problems. I wouldn't want six different power companies all stringing lines through my neighborhood, even if it did bring prices down some.
So why would any businessman want to get involved in this? Because when a company agreed to provide utility services under those restrictions, they were usually given a monopoly in that market, without all the work of crushing their competitors.
Technology, forever moving forwards, has led to some interesting circumstances, where digital technology is allowing some of those formally separate utilities to start to dabble in each others' markets. It's all turning to 1's and 0's, and our computers don't really care how that information gets into our house. Even the power companies are exploring bringing data to us over their lines. Add in the development of wireless, and all of a sudden these long-time monopolies are experiencing competition.
There are plenty of examples of how monopolies tend to act in response to competition. They often involve using their current power to exert influence on other companies, and force unfair deals. These deals are seldom beneficial for the consumer. The Net Neutrality movement is an attempt to head off one kind of these dealings before they become a problem.
To distill the point, let's put it this way:
The government gave many of these companies their monopoly position. And now the government is trying to keep them from using that monopoly position to unfairly limit competition and new technologies.
I guess a 100% free market argument would be that their never should've been any regulations on these utilities in the past. I don't think the argument for that is particularly strong, but even if you could, it doesn't change what has already happened, and getting rid of all regulation and pretending like it never happened is not a good solution.
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Telecom companies haven't been out there committing genocide, but they are often monopolies and duopolies. They have power that the market doesn't control. They're in a position to limit other people's freedom and have announced plans to do so. Minarchist libertarians, as opposed to anarcho-capitalists, see a role for government in fighting other enemies of freedom.
Libertarians, b
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In California, we have a couple of toll roads, and a bunch of free ones. Most people choose the free ones and most of the time it works well enough that most people choose the freeways. However during periods of high congestion some people, who have extra cash, can route around the traffic and go through the toll roads.
I don't have a problem with this.
However, if the fictio
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Ok, I'll bite. You are correct in that this is pretty blatantly hypocritical.
I can't speak for anyone other than myself (obviously) but on this particular issue, I've weighed the possibilities as I understand them and I feel that governmental regulation is - for better or worse - more likely to produce a desira
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Namely, how do you reconcile libertarian free-market capitalism with legislation that at the end of the day will still be restricting the free-market actions of private companies.
If the market allowed for a real free market in Internet service, it wouldn't matter. People would prefer the ISP that gives them fast access to all of the content they want, rather than just the content providers who pay up. Or perhaps we'd end up with a choice between slightly cheaper Internet service that is partially content provider-supported, or more expensive service that is neutral. Letting the consumer choose between the options would be very much in harmony with Libertarian principles, and wo
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Free market capitalism (Score:4, Insightful)
The public highway system is most definitely better than not.
The USPS is fine for most peoples' needs.
Corporations can't fund an army.
The above government controlled systems are working pretty well. There's nothing wrong with the government legislating fair play. We need net neutrality.
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1) Telephone service and Internet service are not free markets, so the free market rules do not apply.
In the Libertarian philosphy, you would not need this regulation because, if the consumer prefers Network Neutrality, then they would pick an ISP who offers it. The problem is that consumers don't have that choice. #1: Most areas only allow for 1 or 2 ISPs. #2: A given packet may travel throug a dozen different networks. I can choose who I subs
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A "free market" will result in a monopoly in many circumstances. Then, the monopoly abuses its standing to maximize profits with non-competitive pricing (which can be done because with a monopoly, there is not competition). These abuses have been repeated throughout the history of the US and the world. When one or two companie
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embolden (Score:2)
The real problem: ISP blocking of ports (Score:5, Insightful)
THAT is where the free speech comes from: the people. The NN debate seems to be rather focused on the ability to choose between large companies that want to profit through our expression. Even though there may be more options it still represents a consolidation of content. If we want information we must get it from these providers; the only way for individuals to express themselves is to partner with some provider.
It doesn't have to be this way. If ISPs would let us use even our measly aDSL uplinks (that we pay for) to legally serve our own content people would be able to self publish. Software would be created to deal with the technical challenges that would arise, perhaps with legitimate P2P providing interesting solutions to some of these problems. In any case, that small change in policy has the potential to really change the way people view and use the Internet.
Network Neutrality proponents love to talk about a level playing field... lets level the playing field between the consumers and the providers as a whole.
Congress Solves the Problem! (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, first Congress solved the spam problem, and now they're going to address net neutrality!
Why don't I feel comforted?
Doesn't Congress understand? (Score:2)
Congress, don't clog the Intertubes!
Idiot. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Enron was the poster child of over-regulation -- everything Enron did was because it was allowed monopoly status in a market that was never deregulated. They tried to free wholesale prices from regulation but capped retail prices. That's like saying oil should be a free market for wholesalers, but don't sell it for more than $1 to consumers. The same thing would happen. Bad accounting practices doesn't come from corporations, it comes from impossible-to-understand
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Throwing Ken Lay and a few others
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Right, but whose fault is that? Ken Lay took the brunt of the blame. The Employees and other stakeholders are also to blame, because they weren't diligent enough during the
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There were thousands of years when all you needed to be, say, a shop keeper was a shop to keep. No business license or sales tax or liability insurance or health codes.
Socialism and a regulated market economy are inventions of the past 100 years. Maybe it's just a total coincidence that during this time a middle class emerged, but I really doubt that.
We did it your way for 10,000 years. Now it's tim
Re:Idiot. (Score:5, Interesting)
For most of human history, there was an upper class of elites, about 10% of the population, who ruled over the other 90% who grew food and served the elites. There are variations throughout the world, but this is the basic pattern. There was no free market or middle class or political freedom. Wikipedia says this [wikipedia.org] about free markets: "The consensus among economic historians is that the free market economy is a specific historic phenomenon, and that it emerged in late medieval and early-modern Europe". It gets a little convoluted in places like Europe and India, where what emerges is a system of classes or casts: the religious/priest group, the warrior/nobility, and the mercantile class. But don't think that there was a free market. Kings had absolute power; they could levy fines, confiscate assets, fix prices, etc. etc. What emerged out of the class struggles of Europe was the idea of liberty -- freedom -- where nobody, not a King, not a priest, could tell you want to do. Applied to economics, the conclusion is the free market. You don't need the church fixing the price of apples, claiming that changing prices was a challenge to Go'ds natural order. Applied to politics, we get the idea of political freedom and the rights of man.
Hunter gathers do/did live in a society with greater political and economic freedom, but technically, that's before history, since history is the recorded word. Furthermore, those societies are ruled by complex system of obligations to kin, so you can't really say that they have absolute freedom. As far as taxes, they have been part of business for as long as we have recorded history. The very first writings were receipts for business transactions. You needed these so that the King's tax collector wouldn't demand more than you owed, and the tax collector wanted to see that you weren't cheating him.
So basically you're taking this libertarian fantasy of a free market and applying it backwards into history where it never really existed.
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Hunter gathers do/did live in a society with greater political and economic freedom, but technically, that's before history, since history is the recorded word.
It's easy to live in a society with greater economic freedom when you're society doesn't have an economy. For a society to have an economy there has to be some form of trade, which in turn implies some form of division of labor. In a hunter gatherer society nearly everyone performs the same function to support themselves. Once agriculture enters the picture you begin to see these things, however you also begin to see the beginnings of governments that restrict and control trade.
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There is a division of labor. The first division of labor is between productive adults and the elderly/children, who cannot provide for themselves, and then between men and women. Human beings typically cannot fully provide for all their needs on th
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Perhaps you,ve heard of these things called facts (Score:2, Informative)
You're assertion that the whole of human history, up to recent times, has been the history of the free market is entirely false. For example, in feudal Europe and
Re:Perhaps you,ve heard of these things called fac (Score:2)
"And where exactly would you say that slaves fit into the free market?"
In the produce section?
Re:Perhaps you,ve heard of these things called fac (Score:2)
First, Socialism was not embraced as a form of government the same year that Marx published his theory. Second, Even if it happened that same year, it is 150 years. I'm OK with rounding. Especially when we're working on a timeline of many thousands of years. The pedantry you illustrated in that criticism is like a neon sign flashing "Don't listen to me. I'm just a useless dolt." (Hey, I didn't say it. The neon sign did).
Third,
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Chances are you are sitting squarely inside that middle class, so forgive the humor I derive from your very parochial rant.
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Re:I find this funny (Score:4, Insightful)
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It isn't just about cheaper, it's about better. (Score:2)
1: If you spend less on cheaper goods, you have more to spend on other things, like family, friends, education, charities, whatever.
2: Things tend to get better, not just cheaper. I can call my girlfriend pretty much any time, anywhere in the world and instantly get hold of her on a mobile phone, I can see my niece on a video phone because I choose to pay for the things which matter to me, not to you.
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And as they say: you get what you pay for. Cheap goods are only desirable in a culture that views resources as disposable. Cheap labor only serves to create pseudo-slavery. I personally don't mind paying more for something if I know I'm getting quality for my money. That, however, is becoming rarer by the day.
Re:I find this funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's go easy on the rhetoric; net neutrality might lack merit, and it's proponents might on occasion make fraudulent claims* but "net neutrality" is not fraudulent. And while I agree that people too often use static thinking when talking about markets, I strongly suspect people will ALWAYS want to know when their access to something is being throttled because the provider has been bribed to make your access more difficult by someone who can't compete on a level field.
*though more often it happens the other way around. Ted Stevens and Professor Woo, I'm looking in your general direction. Except about the internet not being a truck. That part you got right.
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Prioritization only matters when the network connection is congested. When it's congested, packets must necessarily be dropped. You can either drop all packets equally (your data transfer slows and your HBO starts cutting out), such as with a "neutral" Internet like today's, or you can pr
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Except that the ISPs aren't throttling based on what the customers want, they want to throttle based on how much HBO pays them to not be throttled.
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And HBO decides how much to pay for that service based on how much their customers (the advertisers) are willing to pay to make sure HBO stays "on-air".
The advertisers, in turn, will decide how much they want HBO to stay on-air on the basis of how much they are willing to spend to ensure that HBO's viewers (to whom their advertisements are directed) keep wa
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The advertisers, in turn, will decide how much they want HBO to stay on-air on the basis of how much they are willing to spend to ensure that HBO's viewers (to whom their advertisements are directed) keep watching HBO, and thus their advertisements. This roughtly correlates with how much the viewers desire a clear, non-throttled transmission (though there ar
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No, the difference between this and the Broken Window fallacy [wikipedia.org] is that (a) no "windows" get broken, and (b) . . . what was your point again? This has nothing to do with the Broken Window fallacy at all, which addresses the hidden cost of employing aggresion to create more opportunities for trade. There is no aggression here, and no hidden cost. If the relations between ISP, broadcaster, advertisers, and viewers are as I have described (and I see no reason why they would be otherwise), then that arrangement i
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If the ISP moves to explicitly throttle HBO, then there is definitely an act of aggression, and the ISP will have expended resources (purchase of routers with the capability of throttling packets based on rules setup by a billing system that would be purchased to control who paid for which packets to go where) for the purpose of collecting money to not throttle the packets (just because it's a service, not a good, doesn't mean the principle behind the broken window fallacy can't a
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It's comments like these that suggest some of us are on a completely different wavelength from others. I'd really like to understand what this rift is, and whether it's something fundamental that I'm missing or that others are missing.
What "service" are you talking about here? The only way you're going to guarantee that all of the data sent over your network connection arrives without interruption is if you have
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The opportunity cost is the same either way -- the company obviously doesn't have to pay itself to use its own network, but it must still forego any payment it could have received from the competitor. That is only a winning proposition if the
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And that will probably work just fine until your connection is congest
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Yeah. That would be great, if only my ISP had some way of letting me do QoS, like a broadband router installed in my house that I could control.
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This also ignores the longest part of the packet's journey, as it travels over the p
Your energy provider agrees. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Your energy provider agrees. (Score:5, Insightful)
- Company A is the only utilities provider for the Towns, and is charging exorbitant prices.
- Company B sees the opportunity to compete in the market with Company A, and invests billions of dollars in infrastructure necessary to compete as a utilities company, laying lines to the entire town and creating their power plant.
- Company A recognizes what company B is doing and lowers its rates in each area that Company B services to sell utilities at a loss, relying on their dominant market position and the capital that they have accrued while being the only shop in town.
- Company B tries to compete for customers with Company A, but with the new low rates company A is charging, Company B finds itself short of customers and with angry investors who would like to see a return on their investment this decade breathing down its neck.
- Company B files for bankruptcy after it is unable to recoup its massive intitial investment in laying down infrastructure to the town. Unfortunatley, as their assets are liquidated, they find that there are very few people willing to buy a backup power plant and backup power grid for an entire town, and their investors really take it in the shorts.
- Company A resumes charging its exorbitant rates.
- Repeat as often as there are investors dumb enough to try to get into the market.
The problem is the massive up front investment in assets that are worth very little outside the market.Natural Monopolies do exist (Score:2)
Producing products (or services) by a firm have two basic costs, the fixed cost, and the variable costs. The fixed costs are costs that are generally fixed over the "short term" (i.e. you can sell the factory in the long term, but in the short-term, you have to pay your property taxes). Variable costs are the costs of producing the units, and we generally look at "average variable costs," i.e. if we spend 1000 on making the units, and produced 100 units, the AVC is 10. Marginal cos
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You do not know what that term means. "Natural monopoly" is a specific term relating to an industry, not a company, where economies of scale make it impossible for a competitor to successfully compete. Electricity is the easiest example. Larger power plants are cheaper per unit output than smaller ones. So, if I have the lines laid, and I'm charging a reasonable price for the service, no one can compete unless they can take more than 50% of the market. For a
Indeed... unintended consequences (Score:2)
Take for example the massive subsidies that rail gets in the UK, this certainly holds the cost down to about half of the real cost for the small minority who use it, but it also makes it extremely difficult fo
hysterical hyperbole (Score:2)
Sure, Yahoo! and Google will have new offerings, but the small guy with a great idea is likely screwed. Without net neutrality, you'll make it next to impossible for a startup company offering online services, or someone competing with telecom and cable (like small ISPs or VOIP services) to compete because the big guys will always be able to make THEIR stuff superior.
This is simply hysterical hyperbole. If people find that their network connection is slow they'll switch providers.
Re:I find this funny (Score:5, Insightful)
"Net neutrality is bad idea -- just like most regulation of industry. How about revoking some of the pro-monopoly laws that exist, and allowing the market to go where the consumer wants it to? Voting with your dollars gives us cheaper goods in greater quantity. Setting regulations does the opposite."
You are working from an unsupported proposition - that all regulation is bad - and saying that since net nuetrality is regulation, it must also be bad. Your conclusion presupposes your conclusion. That's called begging the question.
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It means you cannot reasonably deliver IPTV services over the Internet. Most consumers do not want their HBO to start cutting out when their kids start playing a game online or starting a large data transfer. To prevent this, you need prioritization of data, and you can't do that over the public Internet. This means your ISP needs the ability to contract with content providers for dedicated network connections and someone needs t
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Of course, your Skype call will hiccup if your downloads are starving it for ba
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The "IPTV" services you talk about today aren't quite the same thing that you view on your TV. For one, the bitrates for these services are miniscule compared to that necessary for standard- or high-definition TV programming. Second, there's usually a multi-second lag between the time you request playback and the time playback starts. This lag time is used to buffer enough of the content that playback can appear seamless. Do you want your TV to behave this way?
Well, I use a TIVO... But at any rate, I have had the pleasure of using video on demand on a private network that implements QOS (Charter's video on demand datastream). Unsurprisingly, there is a multi second delay when you request a new stream while the cable box buffers. On a large packetized network, some amount of buffering is unavoidable unless you are the only user, unless you have engineered the network to always relay packets in order, even if not all packets traverse the same routes. The intern
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Fair enough, but TIVO would still experience the same data loss issues as you'd experience with live TV, if your data connection is congested and you have no way to prioritize traffic.
Agreed, but the devil is in the degree. If you control how your network is engineered, you can empirically determine the best buffering/responsiveness trade-off for your needs. Over the public Internet, you have no idea how your pac
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This does nothing to differentiate traffic as it travels over my DSL connection. The Internet path between my content provider and me is most tightly constrained as it travels over my telephone wire. If this is congested, it's usually because the router on my ISP's side has more data to send me than my connection is capable of handling. Consequently, packets get delayed or dropped.
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The problem is that in order to get QoS to work from end-to-end, you have to have QoS-aware network path from end to end. Since you can't do QoS over the Internet, this means your ISP must contract with the content provider to establish and maintain that link. Otherwise, the video/game traffic you want to prioritize will be travelling over a non-QoS-aware Internet along with every other bit of traffic, and your packets could be delayed or dropped anywhere in between. There's no w
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Looks like a syllogism to me.
It is possible for a fatuous argument to simultaneously be a syllogism and for it to beg the question. To wit, according to dictionary.com, a syllogism is:
An argument the conclusion of which is supported by two premises, of which one (major premise) contains the term (major term) that is the predicate of the conclusion, and the other (minor premise) contains the term (minor term) that is the subject of the conclusion; common to both premises is a term (middle term) that is excluded from the conclusion. A typical form is "All A is C; all B is A; therefore all B is C."
Indeed, you say (A regulation) is (C bad); (B net nuetraility) is (A regulation); therefore (B net nuetrality) is (C bad). So we have a syllogism.
According to wikipedia,
Begging the question occurs if and only if the conclusion is implicitly or explicitly a component of an immediate premise.
Without the proposition that all regulation is bad, your argument fails to posit that net nuetrali
Re:I find this funny (Score:5, Interesting)
The intense competition of the marketplace creates great incentive to cheat and deal with people unfairly in order to get ahead. A truly free market will be taken over by powerful monopolies who will work to *remove* competition. Corporations have no incentive to tell us the truth or to use less hazardous manufacturing methods if it makes them more money. They have no incentive to pay people decent wages if they could have child laborers working 80 hour weeks, or even serfs or slaves. The slaves were freed through government 'interference' in the marketplace. Children were taken out of factories and mines by government 'interference'. Workers were given 40-hour work weeks with overtime thereafter, lunch breaks, bathroom/coffee breaks, and retirement accounts by unionization and government 'interference' which allowed unions. Read some history about how labor organizers were beaten up and killed by private 'security' services employed by corporations.
The role of government is to keep the marketplace fair by creating the rules through law, and punishing cheaters. Otherwise a free market will simply reward cheaters and strongmen. Part of keeping the marketplace fair is ensuring competition. This involves breaking up monopolies. We are a democratic republic, and we have the rule of law. In order for the government to legitimately regulate the marketplace, law must be passed.
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I can see it now: instead of a series of telephone poles along my street with maybe ten cables and wires running along them, it'll be a solid wall of copper and fiber, one for each company providing a service.
Oh, wait - if everyone had to run their own cable on the poles, the expense would be so high that nobody would make any money (except whoever owns the poles). That must be why some companies pay other companies to use their cables. This soun
Re:I find this funny (Score:5, Insightful)
Net neutrality is _vital_ because no one knows what the market will want tomorrow.
If huge and stupid companies get to decide what internets go over their tubes(*), we won't get innovative new services coming out of nowhere. If the huge and stupid companies simply sell bandwidth for us and the innovators to use as we please, then tomorrow's applications can thrive.
(*) Poor Ted Stevens
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Re:IPTV (Score:5, Insightful)
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An important thing to remember here is that there aren't any more chokes than existed previously. If you stream video today and start a large data transfer, your data connection becomes congested and both transfers are "choked" equally. QoS and prioritization simply set up rules that allow some traffic to avoid being choked while other traffic is disproportionately affected, but if your dat
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QoS is only usable within a certain administrative domain. Within your ISP, they might use QoS, but any traffic to/from the public Internet is not QoS-managed. It can't be. If any Internet Joe had the capability of setting QoS flags on his packets, think of the abuse that would cause.
Further, ISPs can't simply set QoS flags on inbound traffic from certain providers and not others. Ignoring the legal/business iss
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Network Neutrality simply means that the ISP is either not allowed to set up that dedicated network connection to the content provider, or if they decide to do it, they have to eat the cost (and by "eat the cost", we mean, "pass the cost onto the consumer").
And since that would jack your IPTV bill up beyond reason, nobody will buy IPTV. Hmmm... You
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Not at all. I imagine the increases would be reasonable, but they'd be increases nevertheless. This is really secondary to the neutrality debate, though. If you want to prioritize traffic, somebody has to pay for it. You'll ultimately pay for it, but that question is really just about who has to be the bad guy hiking their rates.
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What the ISPs are selling you is not 100% dedicated 8Mb/256k ADSL. They are selling you perhaps 5% usage of that bandwidth, maybe less. It's called "bursting" and it enables them to sell a great number of customers something and most of them will never even reach the 5% utilization mark. At least is was that way in 2002.
Along comes content. Downloadable (legal) movies. Music. Streaming video. YouTube. And so on and so forth. This pretty much has pushed the utilization f
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Actually the ad-supported businesses aren't getting a free ride. They're paying for their Internet connection and their bandwidth usage just like consumers are, and paying through the nose. What they want is to only have to pay their ISP for their Internet connection and bandwidth usage. What the telcos want is the right to charge businesses a second time for the bandwidth, so the business has to pay their own ISP for the bandwidth and then pay the user's ISP (who the business has no contact with at all) fo
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Because that is what I am being sold, and what I am paying for.
The old days of restricted bandwidth didn't work. 5MB downloads per month or whatever proved to be worthless for most people. You obviously weren't around during the dark early days, when dialup was 28.8kbs, T1s were expensive, and the internet was a few web pages and email, and one could surf the most interesting parts of the internet in a few hou
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Because that's what I'm *paying* for? The telcos are already offering all-you-can-call plans for a modest amount.
The issue is less the bandwidth I'm paying for, but the bandwidth providers trying to squeeze the content providers (many of whom they're competing with anyway) for fees to access their customers. It's like the cell companies of those people you call trying to charge you for that right vs. t
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Ummm..... Technically they have since it started.
Does DARPA ring a bell?
And all Telco's and Cable Co's have been FCC regulated since day one. And if you have ever worked an ISP you'll know there is plenty of regulation on how DSL, Central Offices (the phone company ones), and DSLAMs work.
The only reason you can get Speak Easy and Earthlink DSL is because of current government regulation that forces telco's to le
Re:Progressive Libertarianism (Score:2)
Government Regulation that promotes monopolies is bad.
Government Regulation that promotes competition is good.
That is what real libertarianism is about. Government is a necessary evil (and I emphasize the evil part) but we need it so that non-government monopolies and despots do not enforce a will of their own the people and prevent free trade.
Re: (Score:2)
Because that was what they sold me? Because they stated in their contract that they would make a "best effort" attempt to carry traffic between the internet and my computer? I wonder at what point people decided that contracts were worthless and free to break at any time. I doubt that I'd receive any redress should I attempt to take AT&T to court over breach of that contract, they'd just claim it was retr
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Because I pay for it. If they aren't making money off it, they should change how they charge me, not make some backroom deal with some other company. I'm the one consuming the bandwidth. I'm the one requesting it from Google or wherever. So I should pay for my access, just like Google does. What "they" want is to still charge me $1 per month for "Internet access" so that no one else can come in with BBPL,