Net-Neutrality? Throttleing? Mashup?
Since the [first wave of the] “Web 2.0″ craze is almost over, now everyone is either jumping on, or jumping off the Net Neutrality bandwagon.
The Premise, The Dark Cabal that Controls Everything is working with ISPs so they can have the ability to throttle certain domains, thus encouraging their readers to go to more “preferred” websites.
It has a lot of people up in arms: Save-The-Internet
And then our favorite ninja also chimes in:
Anyways, I think its safe to say there is a lot of misinformation going around about this issue. So The Editors of Jeremy-Gilby-dot-com waited until the signal-to-noise ratio was a litte more stable. And it appears that it is:
Enter The Register and their Article:
How ‘Saving The Net’ may kill it – The engineer’s case against Net Neutrality
The last two paragraphs of the article spoke volumes to me: (Emphasis Mine)
If we’re honest, we don’t know how to regulate the internet at a technical level. But we should stop pretending it’s a telephone network, and see how it handles packets. The ‘net neutrality’ lobby is saying all packets are equal – but that’s unsound and even inconsistent with common carrier law. There’s nothing to stop a transport offering different service levels for different prices.
They all seem to be worried that ISPs have secret plan to sell top rank – to pick a search engine that loads faster than anyone else’s. But it’s not clear that a), anyone has done that; b), that it’s technically achievable; or c) that it is necessarily abusive; or d) that their customers would stand for it.
D) was my point in this argument. Why would I continue to be a customer of a throttling service?
Even if the Register is incorrect, if what I’m observing from the Net Neutrality people were something happening in my cubicle jungle, I would call this an EchoFlare. Which is why I don’t trust everything I’m hearing.
I think what we have is a bunch of non-technical people, who are finally getting on board with this thing call the internets. And now they hear they are going to lose functionality? ALARM!
Hattip to The Pirate King for the Register Article.
Jeremy, I wouldn’t call Vint Cerf or Tim Berners-Lee “non-technical people, who are finally getting on board wit hthis thing call the internets”.
Part of the net neutrality argument is that they’ll charge content providers differential rates. Huh? I’m a content provider [as a lessor of a server], and I pay a cost [the substantial part of my lease fee] to have a certain quality of service of bandwidth. The anti-NN folks on the ISP side have rhetoric that pretends that Google, Yahoo!, and mom-and-pop content providers don’t pay for bandwidth, which is absolute bullshit.
I think that you need to take your “I hate liberals” glasses off and look to the technical folks on this subject. :)
Comment by Geof F. Morris — July 21, 2006 @ 2:29:14 PM
The ninja gets on a soap box, woah.
All this time, I had no idea I was part of “The Man”. Looks like I’ve been trying to stick it to myself all these years…
Comment by Chan — July 21, 2006 @ 10:18:57 PM
Well, I would not call this a liberal vs. conservative argument, because I really don’t see any politics around it, yet. But then again, there is still a lot of noise out there, and not much signal.
Would you not agree that there is a lot of disinformation going on about this issue?
Most of the people I see really trumpeting this are, in essence, Rookies.
I’ve not seen the Tim Berners-Lee arguments (but then again, I’ve not been really thrilled with his arguments as of late, but I cannot say I’m an expert in anything, so really what does it matter in what I say.)
I’ve just seen this kind of panic behavior before, and in almost every case, the panic is worse than what the panic is about, which is why I’m thinking this is nothing but an EchoFlare; and what strikes me more is that people who stop and really look at what is going on are telling a completely different story.
Comment by Jeremy — July 23, 2006 @ 2:20:50 PM
Well, sure. And you bet there’s politics all around this: the telcos are big political contributors, so their money is certainly talking.
I strongly disagree. This isn’t just much ado about nothing. It’s designed to keep everyone treating the Internet as public infrastructure rather than private playground.
Comment by Geof F. Morris — July 23, 2006 @ 6:38:37 PM
But is it a technology issue, as the Register suggests, or is it an economics issues, as the Net Neutrality people suggest?
Comment by Jeremy — July 23, 2006 @ 6:58:24 PM
It’s both!
Comment by Geof F. Morris — July 23, 2006 @ 7:34:00 PM
The problem with this article is that the author makes the assumption that QoS is the ONLY solution to the problem of network congestion. While getting voice packets thru now may be difficult, it is a problem that will solve itself in the future. Bandwith both to the home and on the backbones of the Internet increases each year. Google owns many miles of dark fiber. When the scale of bandwith changes (and it will) voice will not even be a problem anymore. The alternative though is for this tiers of QoS idea to go through. All that will do is cause ISP’s and the owners of the backbone to become complacent. You see, that makes the scarcity of bandwith worth so much more so now they have no incentive to bring more dark fiber online. Instead they charge more. If that happens the Internet will stagnate and eventually it will suck. We need Net Neutrality now. I’m not saying the current legislation is the answer but we need some sort of regulation or the greedy telcos are going to screw everything up.
Comment by Bryan — August 1, 2006 @ 12:07:39 PM