NY Times Gets Net Neutrality Right, Again
May 29th, 2006 by tkarrIn their second editorial in less than a month, the New York Times gets it right on Net Neutrality. They join the ranks of other major US dailies — including the San Jose Mercury News, San Francisco Chronicle, Seattle Times and Houston Chronicle — that have come out in support of Internet freedom.
“The World Wide Web is the most democratic mass medium there has ever been,” writes Adam Cohen in today’s Times:
Freedom of the press, as the saying goes, belongs only to those who own one. Radio and television are controlled by those rich enough to buy a broadcast license. But anyone with an Internet-connected computer can reach out to a potential audience of billions.
Cohen writes that the Web was invented using open, decentralized architecture in a way “that allowed anyone with a computer to connect to it and begin receiving and sending information.” This network neutrality allows for the extraordinary growth of Internet commerce and communication. According to Cohen, the blogging phenomenon is possible because individuals can create Web sites that can be seen by anyone with Internet access. He adds:
The companies fighting net neutrality have been waging a misleading campaign, with the slogan “hands off the Internet,” that tries to look like a grass-roots effort to protect the Internet in its current form. What they actually favor is stopping the government from protecting the Internet, so they can get their own hands on it.
Today’s Times’ commentary echoes an earlier editorial, which stated that the democratic Internet “would be in danger if the companies that deliver Internet service changed the rules so that Web sites that pay them money would be easily accessible, while little-guy sites would be harder to access, and slower to navigate.”
Our Net Neutrality forces have been gaining strength to fight this extortion:
One group, Savetheinternet.com, says it has collected more than 700,000 signatures on a petition. Last week, a bipartisan bill favoring net neutrality, sponsored by James Sensenbrenner, Republican of Wisconsin, and John Conyers Jr., Democrat of Michigan, won a surprisingly lopsided vote in the House Judiciary Committee.
Sir Tim [Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web] argues that service providers may be hurting themselves by pushing for tiered pricing. The Internet’s extraordinary growth has been fueled by the limitless vistas the Web offers surfers, bloggers and downloaders. Customers who are used to the robust, democratic Web may not pay for one that is restricted to wealthy corporate content providers.
“That’s not what we call Internet at all,” says Sir Tim. “That’s what we call cable TV.”
And that’s why AT&T, Verizon, BellSouth and their front groups want to seize control of the Web — to gross billions of dollars as the new video czars, at the expense of everyone else.
Also noted: here’s another editorial today, supporting Net Neutrality from an educator’s perspective.
May 30th, 2006 at 9:00 pm
In communications history, this is pricely what happened when broadcasting was the new technology and RCA and NBC killed point-to-point communications. Radio sets originally both broadcast and received, so everyone could talk with everyone else; RCA decided it wanted to sell advertising through its NBC subsidiary and make money by providing radio sets through RCA that only received, not broadcast. They were instrumental in passing the Communications Act of 1934, still the law today, which mandates that only those with a government-issued license can broadcast over the major wavelengths, and those without licenses can only receive broadcasting over receivers. We must avoid another Comm. Act of 1934 being perpretrated on the Internet.
May 31st, 2006 at 10:34 am
“Sir Tim [Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web] argues that service providers may be hurting themselves by pushing for tiered pricing. The Internet’s extraordinary growth has been fueled by the limitless vistas the Web offers surfers, bloggers and downloaders. Customers who are used to the robust, democratic Web may not pay for one that is restricted to wealthy corporate content providers.”
Precisely. That’s why we don’t need the government to regulate this. If we don’t like it we won’t pay for it. That’s all there really is to it.
May 31st, 2006 at 1:00 pm
There’s nothing new about the regulations underlying Net Neutrality. They’re not new or dramatic or restrictive as the Net Neutrality opponents would want you to think.
They have been a fundamental part of the Internet since its inception. As the “common carriage” tenet of communications policy, they go back some 70 years.
Only last year did the Supreme Court uphold a bad decision by the Federal Communications Commission to do away with the rules that forced cable and phone companies to open up their networks to competitors.
Those rules protected Internet freedom by ensuring lots of competition (think of all the choices you’ve had for long distance service or dial-up Web access). In fact, Net Neutrality rules still protect the Internet under a temporary FCC ruling.
All a Net Neutrality law would do is maintain the even playing field we’ve always enjoyed — by preventing big cable and telephone corporations from taking over as gatekeepers. Its sound public policy that fosters REAL market competition and preserves the Internet as the most democratic of all media.
May 31st, 2006 at 4:29 pm
There’s nothing new about the regulations underlying Net Neutrality.
No matter how many times you repeat this, it’s still a lie. The Lofgren bill bans Quality of Service for a fee. There has never been such a regulation in the Internet in any place at any time. And this is unprecedented in Common Carrier law: Fedex is not prohibited from offering different delivery classes for a fee to its customers and neither is any other common carrier.
The Internet is not a level playing field today, as the guy with the fattest pipe controls the game. Lofgren’s bill doesn’t make the net more neutral, it makes it less neutral.
June 1st, 2006 at 2:11 am
Hey. . . has anyone thought of sending out a news letter to people who are already interested and asking those of us who GET our internet from Comcast, Versizon or AOL/Timewarner to contact our ISPs and threatan to drop the services if they go forward with this tierd system?
June 1st, 2006 at 2:47 am
Richard is again confusing the issue. The issue is network discrimination: the ability of an ISP to tilt the Internet to favor Web content coming from companies that pay them more money and against those who don’t.
This turns the Internet upside down — into an experience not controlled by end users — like you and me — but by those who control the infrastructure (AT&T, Verizon and Comcast) and the large media corporations that pay them the most. They want to create an experience more akin to cable TV, and not the open-to-all Internet we’ve come to expect today — as Sir Tim Berners-Lee says above.
AT&T, Verizon and their ilk want to discriminate by selling QoS guarantees to create a “tiered Internet.” This will severely curtail consumer choice, giving over consumer control over the Internet to the network owners. The idea of a discriminatory or “tiered” Internet is based on a simple concept: the network owner intervenes between the consumer and the content provider to charge fees for delivery.
Under the old neutrality rules, the network owners could charge the customer for communications services, and any application or content that would work within that level of service had to be allowed to flow — no questions (or additional fees) asked.
This consumer protection existed because of a regulatory structure that the telcos now hope to obliterate. It’s no happy accident that the Internet has become a great engine of economic growth and democratic communication. It happened with the help of sound public policies grounded in Network Neutrality. (read this)
Consumers take it for granted that every Web site and application on the Internet is treated equally. That’s because it has always been that way. We’ve had fundamental protections in the law that guarantee nondiscrimination since the birth of the Internet. Nondiscrimination is a basic obligation of all network operators under Title II of the Communications Act.
Almost 40 years ago, the Federal Communications Commission was confronted with the question of how to handle the transmission of data over the telephone network. In a series of proceedings beginning in 1968 known as the Computer Inquiries, the FCC decided that the companies providing communications services would not be allowed to interfere with or discriminate against information services.
When a federal court broke up Ma Bell in 1982, it required the Baby Bells to provide nondiscriminatory interconnection and access to their networks. These decisions to require the communications network to treat information service in a nondiscriminatory manner established one of the key building blocks of the Internet.
The idea is simple. Under the law, the physical wires over which data and information flow are treated differently than the data and information themselves. The number of physical networks to transmit data and information is very small and non-competitive (at best, most consumers have a choice of only cable or DSL). Public policy keeps the owners of these networks from using their monopoly (or duopoly) market power over the wires to discriminate against the information providers on their networks.
If the network owners can’t mess with the content, the content market remains free and vigorously competitive. The separation of the physical communications layer from the content and applications layers is a cornerstone of telecommunications law. It established an “end-to-end” network, putting control of the Internet in the hands of the users at the edges.
But in the summer of 2005, the FCC removed the cornerstone. This decision was the culmination of several years of litigation. After years of bombardment by lobbyists and lawyers from the cable and telephone giants, the FCC first tried to take away nondiscrimination protections in 2002. The courts reversed them. But the cable companies and the FCC kept appealing, and eventually the Supreme Court heard the matter in July 2005. In the case of NCTA v. Brand X, the Court ruled simply that the FCC had the authority to make the decision, good or bad. They did not rule on the merits. So it happened that last August, in the midst of the Internet revolution, the FCC handed total control over to the telephone and cable companies to do as they please.
In the months since then, these network owners have openly declared that they intend to build a business model based on discrimination, extorting money from every online content and applications provider. This plan violates the fundamental principle of nondiscrimination that has been law for generations and which gave us the Internet. It would have been illegal less than a year ago. It threatens to end the Internet as we know it.
Advocates of Network Neutrality are not promoting new regulations. We are preserving tried and tested consumer protections and network operating principles that ensure Internet freedom.
June 1st, 2006 at 6:17 am
Once again, tkarr, no matter how many times you repeat this, it’s still a lie: network neutrality has never been the law of the Internet, it’s always been governed by the principle that control rests in the hands of the owner of the fattest pipe. Go read the article in Wired News, “Neutral Net, Are You Kidding?”
The Lofgren bill bans Quality of Service for a fee. There has never been such a regulation in the Internet in any place at any time. And this is unprecedented in Common Carrier law: Fedex is not prohibited from offering different delivery classes for a fee to its customers and neither is any other common carrier.
QoS guarantees are available on the Internet today to business users, and they haven’t killed the network. Giving consumers the choice between three TV delivery networks instead of two doesn’t restrict consumer choice, it expands it. And giving the consumer the choice of three broadband hookups instead of two doesn’t restrict consumer choice, it expands it. And giving the consumer the choice of three service plans instead of one doesn’t restrict consumer choice, it expands it.
You also say: Under the old neutrality rules, the network owners could charge the customer for communications services, and any application or content that would work within that level of service had to be allowed to flow — no questions (or additional fees) asked.
What neutrality rules are you talking about? If you mean the unbundling of DSL, it had nothing to do with content. If you mean the “Four Freedoms” of Internet access, they’re part of the COPE bill so there’s no change. ISPs have frequently made special deals with suppliers of generic services such as search, and that hasn’t killed the Internet.
Your thoughts about telephone network regulation may be very interesting to some, but they don’t have anything to do with the Internet, the vast bulk of which has never been regulated — by that I mean the Tier 1 and Tier 2 NSPs, the ISPs, and the cable access network. The regulated parts of the “Internet”, which are actually the telephone network, have certainly been heavily regulated, which is the main reason they suck.
So the choice is pretty clear, you can have something like the cable TV network with triple play TV, phone, and high-speed Internet, or you can have something like dial-up and DSL. We’ve been playing this regulation game long enough to know the Easter Bunny isn’t going to suddenly give everybody a free hookup, so you get what you pay for.
Go read the report on Tech Lib about the Verizon system. It’s not what you say it is.
June 1st, 2006 at 6:35 am
There are several factual errors or misleading statements in the Wired article that you cite:
1-It is true that the “backbone” of the Internet, the network of interconnected long-haul networks is not regulated under the network neutrality rules. Why? Because (at least up until the recent wave of mergers), there was plenty of competition in that market to produce a practical form of nondiscrimination. I think this article dramatically overstates the discriminatory inequality in the backbone, and this author attributes his sweeping generalization to “insiders,” which is not exactly a hard and fast source that I can rebut.
The network neutrality rules, as they were applied up until August of 2005, were directed specifically at the last mile wires, i.e. the connection from the monopoly telephone company’s wire center down into your house. These are the wires that have no competition (outside of cable), and which have been held to nondiscrimination protections. So, all the talk about the non-neutrality in the backbone of the Internet doesn’t change the facts about the last-mile.
2-The article points to the Madison River case in order to argue that the FCC already has the authority to stop net neutrality violators. This is a factual error. The Madison River case was settled prior to the elimination of neutrality rules in August 2005. In the Madison River ruling, the FCC explicitly cites its authority under Title II of the Communications Act, the very authority that it stripped away in August of 2005. In short, the laws that protected in the Madison River case are gone.
3-The article says that the world wide web was always deeply unequal. That is very misleading. It is true that the more money you have, the more bandwidth you can buy on the backbone of the Internet. But the key for neutrality proponents is that the sale of that bandwidth is nondiscriminatory. That is, one terabit of bandwidth costs the same for all comers. The network owners don’t get to raise and lower the price for the same service based on who you are or how much they like you. It is true that “peering” agreements are the standard among the backbone providers. But they are usually “bill and keep’ systems. That is, you receive the same amount of data as you transmit to the next network over. That’s a pretty nondiscriminatory framework.
4-This statement is a gross exaggeration.
“But don’t be fooled. In a broad sense, the commercialized world wide web evolved almost from the start as a bastion of inequality and favoritism in every way imaginable.”
Tim Berners-Lee, the INVENTOR of the world wide web, said this: “When, seventeen years ago, I designed the Web, I did not have to ask anyone’s permission. The new application rolled out over the existing Internet without modifying it. I tried then, and many people still work very hard still, to make the Web technology, in turn, a universal, neutral, platform. It must not discriminate against particular hardware, software, underlying network, language, culture, disability, or against particular types of data. The Internet is increasingly becoming the dominant medium binding us. The neutral communications medium is essential to our society. It is the basis of a fair competitive market economy.”
5-Cisco is presented as a neutral party to this debate. In fact, Cisco is one of the arms merchants for the Bells. They make the routers that the Bells will use to discriminate. Cisco makes routers that do deep-packet inspection which are capable of discriminating against “non-privileged” data. Asking them to comment objectively on this debate is similar to asking Lockheed Martin to give its unbiased opinion about the war in Iraq.
6-The article keeps calling net neutrality regulations “one size fits all.” That is inaccurate. The bills permit network operators to prioritize different types of data (such as voice, video, and text), but they must do so on a nondiscriminatory basis, and they cannot charge for that prioritization. In other words, network management to maximize bandwidth efficiency is permitted, but not outright discrimination.
It’s about stopping content discrimination. Why do you have a problem with that?
June 1st, 2006 at 1:53 pm
The bills permit network operators to prioritize different types of data (such as voice, video, and text), but they must do so on a nondiscriminatory basis, and they cannot charge for that prioritization.
There has never been such a law in America before. This goes well beyond any interpretation of “common carrier” and many of the lawmakers who voted for the Lofgren bill noted that they didn’t agree with this practice, but simply wanted to send a message.
And this provision undermines your entire claim that “we’ve always had net neutrality laws.” If this is what neutrality laws look like, no we have never had them, and yes, they will have destructive effects.
With net neutrality, the guy with the fattest pipe controls the net.
June 2nd, 2006 at 5:10 am
Again, how would you propose stopping network operators from discriminating against content? And don’t give me that “let the free market decide” argument. The duopoly controlled marketplace is anything but “free.”
Or are you for discrimination?
June 2nd, 2006 at 7:01 am
I’m for rational discrimination, such as the discrimination against spam, DOS attacks, worms, viruses, and fattest-pipe abusers. “Discrimination” isn’t a dirty word in network engineering, it’s the essence of what we do.
The Internet Protocol has a field in each packet called the “type discriminator” that’s used to specify the payload, with values like TCP, UDP, BootP, and ICMP. Are you against “type discrimination?”
The sensible approach to regulation, in this sphere or in others, is to draft broad principles, set up an enforcement regime, and let case law evolve. The FCC currently has the “Four Freedoms” which were drafted in response to the Madison River case, the only documented case of arbitrary service blocking in the USA. These principles are part of the COPE Act, which also gives the FCC the authority to levy fines up to $500,000 per infraction. The Stevens Senate bill directs the FCC to do a study of provider abuses and report back.
Once we see some actual abuse that isn’t covered by these provisions, Congress will still be in the business of drafting laws and we’ll be able to go ask for whatever approach is necessary to solve the real problems. What you people are proposing is pre-emptive legislation that will most likely do to the Internet what Bush’s pre-emptive war did to Iraq.
I appreciate your sentiments, and firmly believe that you have good intentions. But I’ve worked with legislative bodies before and have seen the unintended consequences that can flow from legislation that’s guided by too much emotion and not enough information.
There’s no immediate crisis here so the best thing course of action is to simply gather information. We all want a “neutral” network that enables innovation to flourish, and the fact that we’ve never really had one shouldn’t discourage us.
Networks are technical artifacts that improve with time, and even the Internet is not so perfect that we should freeze it.