Comments on: Change or no change?

By: Martin

Martin — Sun, 16 Jul 2006 21:13:52 +0000

No matter what anyone says, regulation is regulation. More laws do not enable the creation of new markets to serve the needs of customers. Laws designed by any group are created to protect that group’s interests. The best approach would be the removal of all barriers in this market. Let information providers, infrastructure providers and consumers sort out the winners. The only reason the telcos are in the middle of this thing is because of their legacy infrastructure. Let innovation determine the best option for completing the economic transaction of meeting my needs as a consumer. If Google wants to run fiber optic to my house and charge me $5/mo for unlimited usage, then you better stay out of my way.

Check out this article on Somalia.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4020259.stm

They don’t even have a functioning government yet have lower phone bills and in many cases better service than I have in the US with our seemingly endless layers of regulation designed to protect someone who is obviously not the consumer.

By: More on Neutrality at Burrowowl

More on Neutrality at Burrowowl — Tue, 04 Jul 2006 03:36:49 +0000

[...] Lest my posting of a certain ninja’s take on the subject lead anybody astray, I’m not a big proponent of “net neutrality” as the phrase is currently understood. I don’t agree with Mr. Ninja’s stance, seeing it as humorous hyperbole. The problem is that most of the discussion about freeing the Internet from the evil telcos (or freeing the Internet from the threat of innovation-strangling regulation) is non-humorous hyperbole. Richard Bennett summarized the ongoing “neutrality” debate rather succinctly in a recent post. [...]

By: max

max — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 16:52:47 +0000

Caching encrypted content for the purpose of optimizing Internet flow isn’t illegal since there is no way to tell what you’re caching anyways. All the ISP is doing is optimizing the pipe.

I know where you’re coming from, but it is kind of a gray area, which explains why ISPs aren’t really eager to adopt the technology. The overwhelming percentage p2p traffic is arguably pirated material, unlike HTTP, and the caching systems haven’t been developed for the encrypted versions of bittorrent, much like SSL content is not cached today.

Beyond that, placing such a device on network would allow for a single point of transactional logging for the p2p traffic, providing a single source of logging information that doesn’t exist right now. Such logs would be of great interest to the RIAA and MPAA, and I’m sure most ISPs already get enough subpoenas to keep them busy. You, as the ISP may not be liable, but it gives these organizations the ability to more easily go after your customers, which can be just as bad.

What is really interesting is how Big Content is adopting the technology to lower their bandwidth bills, and how this tactic doesn’t really get mentioned in the context of the NN debate, but it really should.

P2P has a lot of potential for large content providers, it reduces bandwidth costs by offloading the filetransfer to the end users. Disney already uses it, or is thinking about it, and I think a couple of the other networks are starting to use the system to distribute episodes of “Lost.”

However, P2p has some drawbacks.. It’s slow, there are security problems, etc.

In order to fix these problems, you’ll need to QoS or p2p caching systems. Obviously, content providers don’t want to pay for these, it defeats the entire point of switching to p2p delivery mechanisms in the first place… better to legally mandate that you get the service for free by passing garbage like the Markely and Snowe(job)-Dorgan amendments.

By: George Ou

George Ou — Sun, 02 Jul 2006 08:53:35 +0000

Adam V says:
“So true. My Dad uses a VOIP phone, and the first part of a conversation is usually ‘let me go pause BitTorrent’.”

You need a router that supports QoS and prioritization. They even have hacks for the Linksys WRT54 that will prioritize certain data stream types. Skype of course is a lot harder to identify. This way you don’t need to stop BitTorrent but its upstream will just get a lot slower. A simple solution is to just cap your BitTorrent’s upstream and downstream to leave some room but you still want QoS on your own router’s outbound stream.

Max says:
“Obviously, caching is not a good idea as most BitTorrent traffic content is illegal, and caching would either make the ISP liable or make it easier for content providers to identify all the pirates”

BitTorrent supports encryption for the purpose of avoiding bandwidth caps and blockage. If the ISP would cache BitTorrent deep inside the cloud, it would certainly lessen the strain on the leaves of the Internet. Caching encrypted content for the purpose of optimizing Internet flow isn’t illegal since there is no way to tell what you’re caching anyways. All the ISP is doing is optimizing the pipe.

By: me

me — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 19:52:14 +0000

Nobody has ever said they would block or degrade google; in fact they have said the opposite all along.

The biggest beneficiaries of the non-net-neutrality are the users, not the telcos. For example, if you are an at&t customer, you’ll be able to pay $15 for your 1.5 dsl, but you’ll be able to download a movie to watch on your tv through your set top box in a manner of minutes, instead of have to wait over night. That is because 3rd party providers will pay at&t to increase your bandwidth to them for the download. That benefits everyone- the content provider, at&t, and most of all, you.