Posted on 10/19/2009 8:28:10 AM PDT by Shout Bits
If I'm paying a company for 7 Gb/s, 24/7, I reserve the right to use 7 Gb/s, 24/7. If the company cannot handle that, then it needs to rethink its rate structure. It should not penalize or demonize me for *gasp* actually using what I paid for.
You'd think those who support contracts and truthful advertising would understand that simple concept.
The dirty secret is that although the ISPs advertise those high bandwidths, they don't have the infrastructure to actually handle everybody using that bandwidth. In short, they overpromised. Think of the cable company saying, "You can't watch TV right now because we didn't consider that everybody would be watching TV at the same time."
Google wants a free media through which it can provide its high value content.
Wrong. Google already pays dearly for its bandwidth. I could live well for the rest of my life on what they pay for a week's bandwidth. Plus, Google has itself invested millions in telecommunications infrastructure.
As far as the last mile into the home, consumers already pay tens of billions in ISP fees per year. The ISPs are getting paid.
That is a slippery slope to regulation of all types of content, including videos of ACORN stings and Presidents screwing up their lines without teleprompters.
Actually, part of Net Neutrality is to keep the leftist-run companies from censoring this content.
They'd have to improve overall service instead of just blaming those who use what they pay for when things slow down.
There are various aspects to Net Neutrality, mostly interrelated. Instead of going technical, I’ll just list a possible scenario.
Let’s say Sprint doesn’t like you using Skype because Sprint wants to push its own VOIP solution. Sprint degrades Skype connections, but offers to stop doing it if Skype will pay them money. They say Skype is “getting bandwidth for free” but that’s wrong. Skype pays for bandwidth, and each user already pays for bandwidth to his ISP. Sprint just wants to get paid no matter what VOIP solution is used.
In addition, this puts up an artificial barrier to entry in the VOIP market. Skype might be able to afford to pay, but any startup is going to be screwed. In the end, the VOIP that anyone used to be able to set up is now reserved to a few large companies.
Net Neutrality wants all content to be transmitted without regard to origin, just like your old phone company didn’t care about what you said or who you talked to over the phone. Now, some traffic shaping is a good thing in routing this traffic. You want low latency for VOIP, but not high bandwidth. You want high bandwidth for video, but not necessarily low latency. You really don’t care about bandwidth or latency for email. Why push an email through with the same priority low latency as a phone call? It would be a waste of resources. Traffic shaping makes sure all this happens well.
The problem is that the same tools and techniques for traffic shaping can be used for anti-competitive ends, such as giving a higher latency to your competitor’s VOIP offering. Net Neutrality wants to disallow that.
Now that you’ve digested all that, translate the concept to other services. Microsoft has to pay for 360 gamers to get good latency for online play, Netflix has to pay for its movies to get through, Apple has to pay for iTunes to work well, Free Republic has to pay for us to be reading this.
So all of these services will get more expensive for us, and all the money ends up in the pockets of the ISPs — in addition to the money we already pay them for our Internet connections.
Speaking of that, this whole issue of some people using too much bandwidth is a red herring. It is only a problem with the pricing structure the ISPs use. Thinking rationally, if someone’s using more of your resources, then charge them more. But they want to offer this massive 24/7 bandwidth at a fixed rate across the board without regard to amount transferred, and then complain when some people actually use it. The simple solution is to change the rate structure rather than complaining.
Please forgive an ignorant question, but is there any realistic way to just untangle the government from this entire mess? It seems like that would be a better solution as opposed to piling one instance of government interference on top of another.
It’s okay. I was just teasing. But it seems the Mods have fixed it now.
At a minimum, it would require abolishing all incumbent monopoly cable/phone line franchises. Even then, the enormous intertia created by decades of government-granted monopolies would probably take decades to untangle.
Realistic? No. First you'd have to remove the government monopolies for telcos and ISPs that give them so much leverage over their customers.
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