In what appears to be largely a partisan vote the House has rejected a Net Neutrality provision that would have prohibited carriers from giving special status to data for content providers who are willing to pay the extra fees.
The vote fell largely along party lines with Democarts voting in favor of Network Neutrality and Republicans voting agains it.
There is still some hope for the concept in a Senate bill that has more bi-partisan support, but this bill has weaker language in it. I guess we’ll see if this bill will get some strength both in language and in political support. Otherwise, the open Internet will quickly get turned in to a two-tiered Internet with the upper tier only available to major companies willing and able to pay the higer costs to get preferred treatment. The egalitarian nature of the Internet that has fostered so much bottom up content that could find an audience may be over.
Why? Simple. The upper tier of content (which will also be provided by the same carriers who are charging others) will get delivered at ever better speeds and priority. The lower tier will be delivered at degraded speeds and smoothness. Which content will most people want to consume?
If AT&T over voice over IP (VoIP) phone service do you think they will give equal packet priority to Skype users? Not likely.
That’s one perspective. The overall bill that gives telcos the opportunity to compete with cable companies to deliver video is a major component. There is a similar bill moving through the CA assembly. I may address this issue another time. It sounds good on surface, but it could hold soome serious dangers.
My post addressed the net neutrality issue specifically. While I don’t think the FCC is the greatest arbiter of this issue, the arguement that “The Internet should be free to grow, with minimal regulatory and tax interference” seems bogus and scaremongering. Of course we want minimal regulation. But it would be impossible to have the Internet at all without some regulation. Regulation prevents chaos. A reglulation that prevents monoplistic corporations from hoarding and parceling out bandwidth to the highest bidders sounds like one I could live with. And throwing the tax issue in there is a red herring. This has nothing to do with taxes.
Here’s an excerpt from an editorial in the Orange County Register I received today:
“The cost of cable TV could get cheaper if a bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives on Thursday becomes law. HR5252 would allow phone companies, such as Verizon, ‘to get television franchises by applying to the Federal Communications Commission rather than by negotiating them one by one with thousands of municipalities,’ reported the Washington Post. The phone companies then would compete directly with cable TV companies, such as Time Warner Cable, producing lower costs and better service for consumers.
“Most significantly, a so-called ‘net neutrality’ amendment to the bill was defeated. ‘Net neutrality’ would have given the FCC power to regulate extra charges that the phone and cable companies might charge content providers for faster service. . . . Bottom line: The Internet should be free to grow, with minimal regulatory and tax interference.”
– Orange County Register, 6/11/06
That doesn’t sound too good.
It’s not the end users that this issue addresses. People already pay different rates for different speeds. We’re talking about content providers like Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and you.
It’s almost more about packet priority, rather than speed. Although speed is part of the equation.
Say AT&T offered video. That’ one aspect of the new COPE bill that says telcos can enter the video content provider space. Whose video packets do you think they will give priority to? Their own, or Google’s, or yours? What they want to be able to do is charge money to anyone who wants their video to have the same priority over their part of the network as their own video. If you served video on your site, could you afford to compete with Google? No. This means Google’s video (if Google agrees to pay, and Google is in favor of Net Neutrality so it’s not clear they would) will get to the end user faster and with fewer glitches than your video. This makes it harder for the small guy to get noticed, to compete with the larger corporations.
What I’d like to know is what kind of speeds we’re talking about? Are the customers willing to pay extra going to be the only ones that can get broadband speeds and everyone else reduced to 56k, or some such? Or is there some way that customers that pay extra will get speeds above that of conventional broadband (is that even possible)?