The U.S. Justice Department has taken a step toward you getting more charges from your ISP. In comments to the FCC today, the Department said imposing Net neutrality regulations could “could deter broadband Internet providers from upgrading and expanding their networks to reach more Americans.”
Chief amongst their examples was that the one of the oldest data delivery systems, the U.S. Postal Service, charges customers differently based on guarantees and speeds of delivery, ranging from bulk mail to overnight. Similarly, the Department believes ISPs who deliver data packages, should be able to offer different levels of service to spread the costs of improving networks.
Net Neutrality proponents counter with a different analogy, pointing out telephone networks have always been neutral to the data transmitted across their wires.
This is good news for telecoms, like by AT&T Inc., Verizon and Comcast, who argue that high-volume uploaders should pay for part of the cost of upgrading internet infrastructure to handle the new load. It’s bad news for the internet companies (Google, eBay, Yahoo ,Microsoft) ISPs have seen get rich off their networks.
However, Telcos caution that they don’t want to charge for access to public sites, but want to offer private Internet-based services with faster speeds for uses such as downloading movies.
in keeping with their clever analogy, I propose that ISPs set up their billing system based on a data packet’s weight – i mean, that’s how the post office does it, right? oops there goes that analogy.
that’s already how it works anyway, you want a bigger pipe, you gotta pay more to your ISP. case closed, bitches!
Hopefully Google will win one or more spectrum auctions next year and put an end to this corrupt extortion racket.
The telecom companies should apply their amazing logic to telecom infrastructure too. Companies who pay more will get their calls prioritized etc.
Yikes, yikes, yikes.
Isn’t it bad news for us the web surfers, users and entrepreneurs as well. At least the Micro-Goo-hoo’s are getting rich, the end users will only end up losing more money…right?
ahem..are they on crack. ISPs are not a pseudo-governmental agency subsidized w/tax payer dollars..or am i missing something?
So you pay them for access when you get hosting, and you’ll have to pay them again to allow downloading?
Genius, of course
ISPs already charge like the post office. The sender of the parcel doesn’t pay more if the receiver’s mailbox is full. If the receiver is getting a lot of mail, he pays for a bigger box or has to spend time going to the post office to pick up his packages. Everyone pays for their endpoint access, and everything gets to where it’s going. The Justice Department should make better analogies than just what’s on the surface; it’s the essence of these services that should be compared.
To the ISPs it’s must be like looking down into a river of money and wearing a straightjacket.
It’s moving dangerously close to the point where the telcos are double dipping. Ie. someone pays to download some information, and at the same time someone else pays to upload it.
It’ll make them a fortune naturally.
I wonder what would happen if they followed the phone companies and made you pay more for data that traveled a longer distance. That would see a surge in ‘local’ websites etc
The analogy itself isn’t totally wrong, they’re just looking at it from the wrong end (or rather just one end). If I order a book from Amazon, I can chose what what shipping ‘quality/speed’ I want, and I, ‘The End Consumer’ pay for it.
The phone companies however, are trying to double dip, they want BOTH the buyer AND seller to pay. It would be like charging both Amazon AND me, to ship a package!
As a consumer, I wouldn’t mind if they shifted the burden to companies … and gave me my broadband connection for free. However, I don’t see any phone companies proposing this, they want to charge at both ends.
More importantly, from an Economic policy perspective, shifting the burden of payment (or even creating a ’shared’ burden) would be EXTREMELY harmful to the development of new net based companies.
the market will sort itself out. If one company implemets this crap all people will jump on a different network. If all of them do it, you will just sue them for price fixing.
We do not need government to say anything one way or another…because it would send the message that the gov’t can control the internet. And then its slippery slope. There is a reason the main people who are for net-neutrality in the gov’t are the same people who want to tax the internet.
I love it. It’s my decision on which service provider to choose, and getting rid of a ‘one-size-fits-all’ mentality gets me more options, makes more types of services possible, and increases the speed of innovation.
For those that don’t, there will be services that will get you your ‘neutrality’, but fortunately I won’t have to pay for some amalgamated-average-user’s preferences, I can choose for myself.
This is great news for everyone.
I am more worried for online communication tools like Skype.
If telcos are going to start downgrading p2p voice calls on their network, the whole revolution of free calls could come to an end… People who love these services today, could start abandoning it because the call quality goes down or is never stable.
but some folks only think about their own pockets…
having a neutral network is vital for us all.
Imagine living in a world where you get poor water from the tap, low voltage electricity, poor TV screen quality, poor landline calls, …. unless you pay extra. I hope not…
Stupid government, we already pay based on the amount of information we require to transfer, that is why there are tiered ISP plan options. What should be a complaint is that the ISP doesn’t deliver on the entirety of bandwidth we purchase, and that the ISP arbitrarily caps upload speed to very poor levels.
“The median download speed for the 50 states and the District of Columbia is 1.9 megabits per second (mbps). In Japan, the median download speed is 61 mbps, or 30 times faster than the US. South Korea — 45 mbps, Finland — 21 mbps, Sweden — 18 mbps, and Canada — 7.6 mbps. ”
So we are sub par other countries, yet there *must* be more money charged. We must be in America.
This is completely insane and an idea that should have been thrown out when it first came up.
The US gave Telco’s money in the 80’s to upgrade their networks with Fiber Optic cable, which most of them did. But sadly when they needed money and the lines were not in use they sold them off for the money. Google was a big player in most if not all of these purchases. Now everyone in the Country wants access to super fast broadband connections, but because they were dumb enough to sell it all off, they want us to pay them to upgrade and add more fiber.
So we pay for it with our Taxes back in the 80s, they then sell the fiber off to the highest bidder because they dont think they will need it. Now that they do, they want to charge us again to rebuild the network that they sold off like a bunch of money hunry @**holes.
And how is it that my new Web 2.0 app is going to get popular when AT&T has throttled me down to a low speed connection where the performance my users receive is crappy? This stuff about the bandwidth hungry users paying for the more of the network is a nice cover up to give the rich and powerful more $$$ and power. Why do I want someone else in control of what I am doing anymore than it already is? I hope the idiots in Washington as well as the rest of the world, will support Net Neutrality.
Note to big hungry telcos and cable operators: You’re expected to upgrade your networks to keep pace with the rest of the world and build the costs into your overall business model without invoice modifications to your customers being your first option of how to pay for it. Unless you’re going to provide an earth shattering new service (example: you create a whole new Internet) we don’t expect to pay more for what we can already do now. You’re expected (by your customers) to provide blazing fast connections at reasonable rates without an up/down throttle or tiered connection results. Your swagger and bombastic bravado does not sit well with your customers. This is where franchised service areas for telco and cable are preventative and unfriendly to the end user.
Agree with #12 Andrew. Let the markets sort it out. Government involvement should be the kind that helps unleash, rather than restrict.
I’m not sure if you guys already do this, but in Europe, you do essentially pay for how much bandwidth you use.
Low users can buy low packages, with say 2GB allowance, then there are medium users say 40GB, then “unlimited” (FUP controlled) … the people who use more naturally pay more and subsidize investment a lot more.
It is kind of unfair that a 70 year old granny be left footing the bill for a new “pipe” because some young whippersnappers are downloading movies and porn.
Michel, you do get poor TV quality if you pay less – its called HDTV and regular TV!
With water, the more you use – the more you pay, same with eletricity and everything else.
Does this really effect us, though?
How much bandwidth does the average person actually use?
The metered model is simply not going to work. This is what we had with dial-up. If this is such an issue for telcos, then they should stop offering consumers “unlimited” broadband packages and reducing prices to businesses for T1, T3, OC3, OC12, OC48 and OC192 pipes.
Why doesnt ATT, Level 3, Quest, Verizon… just go make these changes? In the end this is about a telcos looking for a government authorized model that the current FREE MARKET does not support.
Net Neutrality = Free Speech
It’s not about competition and an open marketplace and all that other crap. The Telcos whine about the cost of infrastructure while they pocket huge profits and fail to live up to their obligations. The U.S. has fallen behind the rest of the world in broadband capacity because the Telcos want to control the flow of information and they’re sitting on it until they get their way. These are the same tards who are conducting warrantless spying on behalf of this administration.
Charge for more bandwidth usage? Sure! But that’s not what this is about. It’s about access and ensuring the voices of citizens are not suppressed. The Telcos want the net to be a one-way communication structure – like TV.
The DoJ shouldn’t be making political and policy statements like this. The FCC shouldn’t listen to them. And citizens should be demanding that whatever rules are put in place protect their First Amendment rights.
Net Neutrality = Free Speech
Fight for it.
#12 & #20 should read #17.
You want to ‘let the market sort it out’ after the US tax payer subsidized a build out; the government treats MA Bells as monopolies, and most consumers live in a place with only 1 or 2 broadband options (oligopoly).
Sure, we could let the market sort this out, if the government hadn’t put so many barriers to entry up in the fist place!
Don’t kid yourself, there’s nothing free about the current telco market.
There are a lot of other things than need to be said about this, but the most glaring question to me at the moment is, “Why is the justice department even commenting on this?”. Is the FCC going to start making public comments on criminal cases? I don’t get it.
I’m not sure its too much regulation to stipulate an open network, I know here that Rupert Murdoch’s BSkyB is forced by media regulators to allow any TV station that has the right money on to his satellite TV platform … cable isn’t under such rules and is less popular.
I’m not sure a new law is needed though, wouldn’t blocking a competitors service be anti-competitive anyway?
Cool, I like the idea of ISPs being The Post Office – so I expect no more logging of traffic and IPs…
Thanks Andrew (#12) for adding sanity to this discussion. ISPs are businesses that rely on customers… and there is plenty of competition in this market. They need LESS regulation, not more, and in the end this market freedom will benefit us all.
In post #25 Robbo got it mostly right – this is NOT about profits, this is about CONTROL!!! The flow of information must be controlled by a few. Equal access to information and open discussion must be curtailed in order to maintain our current global system of oppression over the many by the few. Tiered pricing is simply one strategy to limit access to the many. Unfortunately, the DOJ and FCC are nothing more than tools of the few, as they operate EXCLUSIVELY in the fews’ interests. All of the nuances of this discussion are nothing more than noise and diversions….don’t fall into the trap.