John Oram of IT Examiner does a fair write-up on the Innovation ’08 panel in IT Examiner:
Richard Bennett said he is opposed to Net Neutrality regulations because they shut down engineering options that are going to be needed for the Internet to become the one, true, general-purpose network. Today on his blog, Richard adds “Google has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in server farms to put its content, chiefly YouTube, in an Internet fast lane, and it fought for the first incarnation in order to protect its high-priority access to your ISP.â€
Richard continued: “Now that we’re in a second phase that’s all about empowering P2P, Google has been much less vocal, because it can only lose in this fight. Good P2P takes Google out of the video game, as there’s no way for them to insert advertising into P2P streams. So this is why they want P2P to suck. The new tools will simply try to convince consumers to stick with Google and leave that raunchy old P2P to the pirates.â€
It’s much more balanced and diligent coverage than the article in The Register.
Yea, it is a bit less hostile. And regarding its conclusions (of winners and losers), as you suggest, in the long-run if NN legislation is passed everyone will become a loser because of the various engineering techniques that will be prohibited.
The P2P kingdom is shooting itself in the foot over a highly politicized issue and only have themselves to blame for supporting the PACs and legislators that could handicap the interweb (as Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.”)
Also, thanks for the continued efforts at educating the public.
After all this hostility from Free Press and the FCC to not throttle anything and to “charge for what people use”, they’re about to get what they wish for and the consumer loses. First Time Warner goes to volume cap metered pricing and we may see this become more common with other ISPs.
That will pretty much shut down the 24×7 BitTorrent users because according to the Net Neutrality proponents, they shouldn’t be throttled and they should be given the opportunity to pay for what they use. I tried warning the public about this ad nausea and I was ignored. So I really don’t care any more.
Don’t give up, George, our democracy needs your insights.
I mean I don’t care about the metered Internet issue any more. Since people seem to be sick of hearing about it, I don’t really care any more. As I’ve always said, I don’t care what the free market chooses. It’s just that this latest movement towards a metered volume-cap Internet model was partially brought on by the pressure from the Net Neutrality movement and I find it very ironic that they will get what they ask for.
There are already big-time pundits out there saying that Metered Internet is the ISP’s way of “giving the FU to Net Neutrality”. I just want people to remember that it was the Net Neutrality movement that recommended and pressured the move.
The sad thing about metering by the bit is that it will create an anticompetitive environment. As I said in my remarks to the FCC at http://www.brettglass.com/FCC/remarks.html:
“Some parties claim that we should meter all connections by the bit. But this would be bad for consumers for several reasons. Firstly, users tell us overwhelmingly that they want charges to be predictable. They don’t want to worry about the meter running or about overage charges — one of the biggest causes of consumer complaints against cell phone companies. Secondly, users aren’t always in control of the number of bits they download. Should a user pay more because Microsoft decides to release a 2 gigabyte service pack for Windows Vista? Or because Intuit updates Quicken or Quickbooks? Or because a big virus checker update comes in automatically overnight? We don’t think so. And we don’t need to charge them more, so long as they are using their bandwidth just for themselves. It’s when third parties get hold of their machines, and turn them into resource-consuming servers on our network without compensating us for those resources, that there’s a problem. Thirdly charging by the bit doesn’t say anything about the quality of the service. You can offer a very low cost per bit on a connection that’s very unsteady and is therefore unsuitable for many things users want to do — such as voice over IP. And finally, a requirement to charge by the bit could spark a price war. You can just imagine the ads from the telephone company: $1 per gigabyte. And then the ads from the cable company: 90 cents per gigabyte. And then one or the other will start quoting in “gigabits” to make its price look lower, and so on and so forth. All Internet providers will compete on the basis of one number, even though there’s much more to Internet service than that.
“The problem is, small ISPs cannot win or even compete in this price war, especially when — as is true in most places — the monopolies backhaul their connections to the Internet and thus control their prices. Again, we wind up with duopoly.”