Net Neutrality
WTF you say? Me too, but The Agonist has a ton of links for us to learn about it. There is a FAQ here that explained it all to me and probably will to you as well. And, you can totally be Net Neutrality’s friend on MySpace. (You guys know I’m all about being a MySpace whore)
Save the Internet has a site where you can send an email to your senator and congressman.
I know most of you are still going, WTF? But after I spent about five minutes reading this stuff I went from “WTF is net neutrality?” to “Are you shitting me? This is real?”
Comments (3)
Well, learn something new every day! You FAQ link had a term I’ve never heard, perhaps because I live in a cave? “Astroturf groups,” meaning corporate-shill groups set up to look like grassroots activists. Love it.
Here is an issue where the blogosphere has gone a little haywire. For example, there has been much rhetoric about a handful of providers blocking or seeking to block rivals like Vonage. There has been far less discussion of the FCC’s fining such companies for doing it.
Despite the accusations, companies like AT&T and Verizon aren’t out to prevent anyone from accessing anything. And they’re not trying to create an Internet which segregates users’ ability to surf and download based on how much they’re willing to pay a premium for it.
Here’s what’s really going on. Let’s say that I’m Blockbuster video, and I let customers download full-length, high-def quality movies to their computers for about what it would cost to rent a DVD in one of my stores. These are huge files, taking gigabytes of bandwidth to download. Other than the equipment cost on my end (servers and such), it doesn’t cost me anything to push these files online. In other words, the actual transport of this data costs me nothing, like sending a letter without a stamp.
Let’s say that several people in a neighborhood are downloading a movie from Blockbuster at the same time. Only so much data can go through a broadband network (”pipe”) at once, and the more that goes through the pipe, the slower it becomes. So while three people are downloading movies, slowly, the rest of the neighborhood is having trouble reading email, surfing the web, shopping online, whatever.
There are three main solutions to this problem:
1. Prevent users from downloading such huge files.
2. Build a bigger pipe so more data can flow through it faster.
3. Do nothing and advise customers that their superfast always-on connection isn’t always going to be either.
Obviously, 1 and 3 aren’t very good solutions. One violates the basic principle that ‘Net users should be able to surf where they want to surf and download what they want to download. And Three is where we are headed if nothing is done, with ‘Net performance degraded to a point where broadband won’t mean what it does today.
So that leaves Two, and Two costs the network provider significantly. To date, it hasn’t cost the high-bandwidth-using content provider (like Blockbuster) anything. Network providers can recoup the costs of fatter pipes from two places: their customers, or content providers. If it’s the former, then a company like Verizon ends up charging higher prices to many users who will never need that much bandwidth, or it forces an end to the all-you-can-eat access model in effect today.
The network providers’ preferred solution is to charge companies like Blockbuster for the huge amount of bandwidth their content takes up, and then Blockbuster can either charge its customers or not. This places the cost of bigger pipes upon the entities (and customers) which create the need for bigger pipes, while sparing those who are getting along just fine with the smaller pipers from sharing in the cost.
Already today, peer-to-peer file sharing makes up about 80% of all web traffic on local broadband networks, according to the analysis firm CacheLogic. It’s simply a matter of time — and probably not much time — before today’s broadband networks will be unable to handle the demand placed upon them. How would you prefer this problem to be solved: more regulation, tiered pricing based on usage, banning applications, or incorporating the cost of transport into sales of bandwidth-intensive content? Or not at all?
Actually - read this if you really want to know the background on this bullcorn: http://www.newnetworks.com/broadbandscandals.htm
Network providers have already received billions to build “fatter pipes”.