[Eug-lug] Mr Smith goes to Washington to address net neutrality

[larry price]

Network Neutrality has several different definitions, the engineering
definition is that the network doesn't care or know what the contents
of a datagram are, just it's destination; by that definition the
internet today IS NOT NEUTRAL, spam filters, firewalls and packet
shapers all break the neutrality of the network, for good reasons.

The competing political definitions of Net Neutrality are mostly
concerned with legalising anti-competitive behaviour so that the
incumbent telcos can keep making money off their copper cable plant
rather than competing on building out FTP (Fiber To Premises) networks
(as they mostly received billions in public subsidy to do) . The thing
is that legislation is probably the worst solution at this time, it's
hard to write something that would be effective at achieving the
desirable goals (competition on bandwidth and network quality metrics)
without killing one or another industry segment (Akamai would be an
illegal business under several of the proposals).

On 8/3/06, Quentin Hartman <qhartman at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 8/3/06, Brian Gallagher <baggab at pacinfo.com> wrote:
> > I actually heard back from Senator Smith, in writing, in response to the
> > e-mail I was persuaded to send to his office about net neutrality.  I
> > feel that the response was subtly worded to promote the aims of the big
> > players in this debate.  I don't have the time to investigate the
> > subtleties of the legislation and I was wondering if someone had a
> > comment.  I wanted to know if he turned the argument in on itself, but,
> > I don't want to slight him if he did not.
>

Gordon Smith is in favour of the telcos, he also wants to break your television
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004340.php

> I'd liek to look at it, though I'd hardly consider myself an expert,
> this is one of my pet subject areas.
>
> > excerpt: "Some companies who plan to provide these [broadband] services
> > want Congress to create Internet regulations know as "net neutrality" to
> > protect them from paying more for increased bandwidth."
> >
> > I thought it was more like the creation of a two tiered bandwidth
> > delivery system that would allow moneyed players to leverage business
> > advantage that inherently establish monopolies.
>
> Your understadning is one possible outcome. All of this has come up
> because the FCC lifted some regulations recently that basically
> allowed "common carrier" status to extend to data networks. This has
> opened the door to the data carriers, allowing them to look at and
> classify the traffic, and then charge different rates for different
> kinds of traffic, or traffic with different destinations.
>
> So, if they do this, the potential exists for all sorts of
> fragmentation within the internet because of how the data network
> providers have decided to treat different kinds of traffic.
>
> At least, that's my understanding of it. This is a highly
> controversial and mis-understood subject, and I've found getting to
> the heart of the matter to be difficult. Espeically with all the FUD
> and atro-turfing both sides of the argument are doing.
>
> Leave it to the FCC to overregulate some areas and under-regulate
> others. It saddens me that the FCC's goals no longer have anything to
> do with the public, and instead are all about making things as easy as
> possible for the big corporate players. Normally I favor less
> regulation over more, but in the case where the entities being
> regulated have proven over and over that they can't be trusted to act
> ethically, it's neccesary. But that's another discussion entirely....
>
> --
> -Regards-
>
> -Quentin Hartman-
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