Topic: Net Neutrality

NEStalgia wrote:

So a little background here (plus you're in Canada? Doesn't this not involve you?) Anyway, remember the old days of the internet before "Internet 2.0" turned it into a corporate billboard of central control in the '00s?

First things first: The internet was designed to be a peer to peer network. The nature of the freedom the internet was supposed to provide, and for a brief time did provide, was that everyone, everywhere was of equal footing on the internet. I could be a server, you could be a server, servers, content, etc were distributed, they were everywhere and nowhere. Briefly in the 90's it moved to a simple client-server model. But with "Web 2.0" as the marketeers called it we have moved closer and closer to a regression to 1970's mainframe computing where "the internet" is a handful of "cloud providers" (mainframes) and everything else is merely a dumb terminal. "The Internet" has been badly damaged and regressive for almost 15 years. Worrying about "breaking the internet" now is like worrying about what would happen if you dumped a canister of uranium in the middle of Fukushima. That ship sailed a long, long time ago. What you call the internet now is an access terminal to oligarchic mainframes, and worse, a nest of tracking devices that log every thing you do, everywhere you go, even what you have interest in and report to a handful of tracking services that either want to exploit you for commercial gain, or sit on the history just in case you are ever a "person of interest".....be it a fugitive suspect to a crime, or a popular candidate for political or corporate disruption. "The Internet" broke by 2005.

Second, and maybe less importantly, Net Neutrality is as beautiful an Ingsoc quack-talk as anything Orwell could have imagined. There's nothing "neutral" about it. As with all things in US politics, follow the money. Who wants Net Neutrality? Who promotes it? Who funds, organizes, and promotes those protests you speak of? Google, AOL Time Warner, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix. Large content delivery providers. Why do they want it? It grants them effective control over how networks are used while the network operator gets no say over it. "The internet" was not built for watching video libraries in 4k, downloading 100GB video games, or other general media content. These companies that distribute this content wish to use the internet for that purpose. They forced it onto the networks and clogged them. That caused network operators to need to massively upgrade equipment. So far everything is fine. But at some point the network operators analyzing their business realized that so much of their costs were coming from a handful of content types. And upon catching wind that the network operators wanted to charge differently for the type of content that's consuming most of their resources, the oligarchs of silicon valley decided to fall back to their standard: Wield government as a weapon through their extensive lobby power to force their supply chain partners to accept their terms, and take on all related expenses themselves.

If we move from digital to physical for example where the concept is a little more tangible, imagine you invent a new business of building monolithic prefab houses.....delivered all as a single unit rather than assembled on site. In order to deliver them, you need a trucking company as a vendor, and you need roads as a vendor. At first it goes ok, but your customers are limited to ones nearby....only the local roads can handle what you need. But your service gets popular....you decide you intend to take your business national. As you and your new direct competitor copying your business start ramping up competition, the trucking company, and the governments running the roads decide that your houses are taking a very massive toll on the roads, the roads need to be enlarged to sustain this new business, and a new fleet of trucks will need to be purchased just for the orders from your company and your competitor. In normal business, you work out a profitable way to pay the trucking company and government road contracts in a way that you can still profit. Imagine instead if you could just use your extensive lobby network in D.C. to force both the trucking company AND the state governments handling roads to simply absorb the costs.....they will continue charging you no more than they charge the guy with a Prius. Because why should you pay for what is needed to deliver your service, when you have the power to force someone else to pay for it? Meanwhile when they have to raise their prices 4x on the Prius guy to pay for what you want.....Prius guy gets angry....so they try to keep it as lean as possible. They build a road JUUUUST wide enough to get your trucks through. Except of it's really hot and the barriers swell....then you might not fit....and you might have to stop and start periodically. Better to do it in the middle of the night when no one else is using the road.

That's a convoluted but roughly reasonable physical world example. Basically the content companies invented a business model of using the internet instead of discs to deliver their content. They decided it was an excellent way to preserve their bottom line. But instead of charging their customers the real cost, and paying vendors the costs required to really deliver that content versus the costs of email, they decided to use government to declare that 4k video and email are the same thing and that network operators can't separate costs by content type. They decided to call this "Net Neturality" because "every bit is the same".......it's double speak. What it really is is a free ride for media companies by means of stripping another industry of the ability to control their product and sell it as other companies desire.

But it gets worse. Buried within "Net Neutrality" is a limitless set of central control. "Net Neutrality" that gives government power is little more than a glass door for Google/Amazon/Netflix/Facebook to have even greater control of the internet than they already have, via their revolving door puppets in the FCC and FTC.

As always, follow the money. These are the companies that want this. And they know they have "fans" (more like mindless sycophants) that will follow them and be "outraged" when told to be "outraged." Manipulating people to support/fight things they know little about beyond what the companies themselves have told them.....which is par for the course for those companies...that's their specialty.

Net Neturality is the opposite of Neutral. It realigns the structure to the benefit of certain industries, with most of the benefit going to the very companies promoting it, at the expense of other companies. This reflects nothing of the freedom the original P2P intention of the internet was to offer.

NOW.....

To play the other side a little here.....there are no heroes. The other side of the argument is the network operators, which themselves make up a powerful lobby as well. They seek to monitize their networks infinitely. Unlike the media companies, they have no interest in controlling your content or monitoring what you do, though some of them do actually monitize your DNS requests (that's a whole other problem.). However they have interest in charging you the maximum amount for the minimum provided bandwidth usage via whatever scheme they can come up with. The cable companies are infamous in their predatory billing, and the cellular companies are even worse.

Much of what we're watching in the back and forth is the media industry wanting an unfair advantage to deliver their product without paying for their supply chain versus the network operations industry wanting an unfair advantage to monetize the most valuable uses of its networks in a way that defeats what has (maybe wrongly) become common use of the internet.

Neither side should really be allowed to "win" because if either one "wins" we all lose. Without a third party with more reasonable interests (FSF and such don't really qualify as so much of their funding comes from the very companies that are pushing Net Neutrality for their own gains....FSF does a lot of good things, but it's sickening watching them agitate for this corporate cause....it's like watching an animal rights group pull the wings off a butterfly and burn ants with a magnifying glass) our only hope is to keep the two sides locked against each other and unable to budge the line.

That said, one of the real solutions does happen to be something that is ALSO a part of the full implementation of Net Neutrality, one that people such as yourself that advocate it tend not to notice: The end of the buffet model of internet. The end of "unlimited" for a flat fee. Yes, that's part of Net Neutrality....did you notice it? Instead, as a utility, the idea is to move to a metered connection where you pay for every gigabyte you use (rounding up to the next whole gig of course!), just as you pay for every watt of electricity and every gallon of water. So the guy streaming Netflix, or, shall I say, downloading 14GB of L.A. Noire, versus Skyrim which is entirely on the cartridge......is going to be paying more for internet than the guy checking only email and shopping on Amazon. And let's not forget the hours of Splatoon....those gigs will add up at the end of the month. But wait, what about gaming on Steam where downloading HUNDREDS of gig a month is normal?! That's going to be some internet bill next month! Those Steam sales might not be as appealing if your paying an extra $50-$100 that month on internet for it!

Why would Google and Netflix be ok with such a model? Because everyone will get mad at Comcast/Turner/Verizon at the end of the month, and nobody will be upset with little old Google and Netflix! After all.....they're just charging a lowly $19.99/mo.....it's that evil ISP charging all that extra money those greedy jerks! But somebody has to pay for the network capacity upgrades....and it's going to be the consumer. The battle is over which company the public will blame when the "cheaper" option than physical media turns out to be less control, no ownership, no resale value, and, ultimately, no cheaper.

Or did the protestors miss that that was part of Net Neutrality?