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

[Brian Gallagher]

Fiber to Premises seems to have been usurped, by disruptive technologies 
like WIFI, but I can see a value in having FTP.  I wonder if we will see 
FTP in the next decade and who will be able to afford it?

larry price wrote:
> 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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