Net Neutrality Resolution of Disapproval Senate vote on 9 May 2018

There is a “Resolution of Disapproval” vote in the US Senate on May 9th, 2018 to disapprove the Net Neutrality repeal from back in January. The Democrats have enough votes to force consideration in the Senate.

This is basically a vote to repeal the repeal of Net Neutrality which occurred earlier this year.

I urge DMS members to write their Senators and let them know your thoughts on this vote in advance of May 9th. Assuming the Senate resolution passes, there is still an uphill battle to also get it passed in the House.

Background information on Senator Markey’s Resolution is available here: https://www.masslive.com/politics/index.ssf/2018/04/us_sen_ed_markey_advocates_say.html

Net Neutrality allowed me to invent the web without having to ask for permission. Let’s keep the Internet open!        - Tim Berners-Lee

 
 
 

Here’s how to contact your senators:
Senator Cruz (up for reelection in 2018)
https://www.cruz.senate.gov/?p=email_senator

Senator Cornyn (up for reelection in 2020)
https://www.cornyn.senate.gov/contact

If you don’t live in TX you can find your senator here:
https://whoismyrepresentative.com/

4 Likes

Good post/topic. Are you aware of clear, unbiased, complete article or discussion online. I.E. one that presents just relevant facts and considerations, both pro and con? I can never find one where the writer doesn’t have a clear agenda or slant.

3 Likes

I’ve found that such analysis is hard to find. It seems to be about an 80/20 split between the netroots crowd and shameless industry astroturfing.

1 Like

Yep…there are clearly competing important and beneficial interests here: free markets vs. equitable access (or however it should best be framed). Both sides are generally persuasive to me, when argued well. The fact that the discussion involves both deployment of expensive infrastructure (it has to be paid for somehow), as well as access to what is essentially a public utility (information, data, bandwidth) ends up confusing me.

I realize this is something of a solved problem vis-a-vis generation and delivery of electricity, water, natural gas, but for some reason, probably having to do both with recent/fast genesis and “duuuuhhh…technology” aspects, the public utility paradigm was never considered or applied, and may not even be appropriate.

I share your sentiment @ESmith,

I also haven’t been able to find a sensible article summarizing the subject.

Here is a wiki article I haven’t read yet.

1 Like

If only…

I find NPR’s coverage pretty balanced. Here is a discussion from last December with comments from Ajit Pai ( the current FCC Chairman) and Tom Wheeler (Pai’s predecessor):

https://www.npr.org/2017/11/26/566634761/net-neutrality-the-long-view

The Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the World Wide Web) quote I mentioned in my OP sums up my views pretty well. I started an Internet company (netmechanic.com) back in 1996. As a privately-funded startup, there is no way my company would have been successful without a level playing field for Internet access.

NetMechanic was a tool for small business webmasters to validate their HTML, check for broken links, and many of those other maintenance issues which plagued webmasters before the widespread use of HTML-validating editors, website CMS systems, and authoring systems like WordPress. We walked websites and performed automated analysis of those web pages (NetMechanic predated Microsoft FrontPage). If we’d had to negotiate access to each network (or suffered under substandard throughput quotas) the site would not have worked as well as it did.

As a result, I am a strong advocate for Net Neutrality, both as a necessary regulation for the small Internet company a as a watchdog for individual’s access to the 'web. The rollback basically repeals regulations preventing Internet Network Carriers from providing different tiers of Internet speed (a higher-cost fast lane for preferred customers). In it’s place, the new regulations allows different classes of speed, but requires that broadband companies disclose how they handle web traffic.

My concern is that, as a small consumer, one might be aware of how the traffic is being throttled, but would still be too small to influence the speed of service one could get. Big companies with deep pockets get the fast lane, while individual consumers and small companies have to suffer.

2 Likes

Wired ISP’s (i.e. the local phone or cable company) have what is generally conceded to be a natural monopoly - deploying competing parallel infrastructure is sufficiently expensive and burdensome that almost no one other than the aforementioned incumbents does it for residential markets. Compounding this, the payback time is far far longer than the modern investor cares for. Google made a might go of it with their Google Fiber offering in a few large cities, but their management and/or investors seem to have tired of it.

Electricity “deregulation” seems to have mostly created opportunities for marketing firms to scoop up money on the spread between what they can bill their customers and what it costs them to pay for generation and distribution. There’s some mechanism to channel money to and from generators of choice - ala “green” plans that buy power from wind farms - and effect the generation landscape long-term, but ultimately your electricity is an amalgamation of all generators feeding the grid at that moment.

Water is typically a governmental affair. Given what people willingly pay for bottled water, what comes out of the tap is orders of magnitude cheaper.

Natural gas isn’t competitive at all last I checked. They might be stiffly regulated, but there’s the one monolithic provider in your area and that’s that.

A model that’s often proposed for competitive internet access is that of divestiture. Separate the local loop from internet access. This is a model used by a number of municipal broadband providers - the municipality funds the buildout of local loop (aka “last mile”) and allows any carrier willing to interconnect to sell access to subscribers from their point of presence to the larger internet.

Something similar to the divestiture model I mention above. was used in the late 90s through the early 00s with DSL subscribers - even if you subscribed to Verizon service they had a legal separation between the local loop and ISP within their organization. This facilitated competitive 3rd party ISPs buying access to the local loop.

There are all kinds of way that this “fast lane” concept can be implemented in the real world - some good, some bad.

I believe that then entire impetus for the 2015 rule was Netflix’s long-running spat with ISPs and the resulting concept of paid prioritization coming into the fore. There are numerous ways to implement paid prioritization, but for argument’s sake we’ll focus on two, which we’ll call honest and dishonest.

  • Honest prioritization builds out new capacity from the exchange point (where the ISP’s traffic meets the broader internet) to points in the ISP’s internal network close to their customers, dedicated to a type of traffic and engineered to provide specific performance better than the best effort service level for general internet access
  • Dishonest prioritization essentially divides up existing capacity into fast and slow categories based on your willingness to pay for better access to the ISP’s customers

So what happened with Netflix and the ISPs prior to the 2015 Net Neutrality decree? A mixture of both - and their backbone providers making promises they had no chances of keeping - but to hear the netroots narrative, it was 110% rentseeking by the ISPs via the dishonest approach.


Another possible application of “fast lanes” involves optimizing performance for individual users using a technology known as DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) that can characterize traffic in realtime. Subscribers with internet usage that’s not too demanding might be able to get a discount on their monthly subscription in exchange for slight, barely-noticeable de-prioritization of their packets on protocols not particularly sensitive to some added milliseconds of delay; conversely subscribers with extremely demanding requirements could pay a premium to prioritize delay-sensitive protocols. There are some ISPs in Europe that have these sorts of arrangements and their customers seem to appreciate it.

Of course, DPI can be abused as well. It can supplement dishonest paid prioritization by identifying traffic to/from 3rd party companies the ISP is shaking down for money, render over-the-top services (such as IPTV or VoIP) competing with their own services useless, and be used for other chicanery. It can also arbitrarily shut down protocols the ISP disapproves of.


Working in the industry, I can say with some degree of confidence that my employer - Frontier Communications - for all its faults has no pending plans for paywalls and fast/slow lanes. We lack the negotiating leverage and vertical integration of larger players to pull off such plays … to say nothing of the capital to implement such projects.

That being said, before Verizon sold my division to Frontier, I heard rumblings about such shenanigans. Something like net neutrality is a good thing, but I fee like the narrative leading to the 2015 order stopped a few things that could help improve residential internet access in this country.

2 Likes

Eric, thanks for usual valuable insights; I am aware that this is somewhat parallel to your specific industry of expertise.

I am generally/basically aware of a lot of this, e.g. deep packet inspection, having read many articles on the subject over last several years. The hard part is understanding the public policy and free market implications so as to come to a better understanding of what’s best for everyone without violating basic principles. You brought up one of the many subtleties when you pointed out there are honest ways to charge more for better speed and dishonest ways.

Also, thanks for the link @HankCowdog; if you recommend reading it, I am sure it is worthwhile.

No editorial bias here!:yum:

When backbone providers are also content providers, it is in their best interests to degrade competitors’ service (or make them pay more). Even without direct competiton for content, backbone providers can degrade service as a negotiation tactic during contract renewals.

There were several documented incidents like this prior to the initial policies being implemented.

IMHO, Backbone providers publishing their rate policies amounts to them saying “we are reducing our hours in order to serve you better.” I don’t trust that they’ll do what’s right for the consumer - they’ll be focused on the bottom line and their investors.

1 Like

Only tangentially related, but probably close enough to warrant inclusion in this thread:

3 Likes

“Treat ISPs like utilities” is often mentioned as a fix, with the implication being that this applies to the access layer. Since deploying last-mile infrastructure is expensive and - Google’s Fiber experiment notwithstanding - there’s little incentive to deploy competing infrastructure in parallel to incumbent telco and/or cableco, the paradigm is that of open access.

Phone companies had open-access requirements for some 30 years in the form of (CLECs) in the phone service arena and later on their DSL networks. CLECs remain a viable business entity however I believe that open access to DSL networks was a <10 year experiment that has since been terminated. I don’t know the history of 3rd-party DSL ISPs, however I know from past Verizon experience that they were roundly despised.

To the best of my knowledge, cable companies claimed exemption from open-access using a “new technology” exemption in FCC rules and thus were never required to deal with 3rd party carriers on their networks. Verizon was pleased to use that same exemption on their fiber networks, thus only tolerated 3rd party ISPs on their terms.

So back to divestiture … we’ve been here before.

And then this guy had a thing to say about local loop unbundling:

It’s not in my immediate personal interest to say this, but I’m generally in favor of local loop unbundling or separation of the access layer from distribution and core layers. Since the for-profit ISPs now all but refuse to invest in last-mile (i.e. Verizon effectively stopped laying fiber circa 2010; Frontier is doing no bettrer) due to abysmally low returns, perhaps municipalities need to take this over. But just because you’ve cut the vertically-integrated ISPs out of the access layer doesn’t mean you’ve solved the problem: there are only so many providers out there for distribution and core transport and many of them are … the ISPs (i.e. Verizon owns MCI who owned UUnet - one of the premier Tier 1 transport networks). Multi-homing will help with this, but with so few players attempting to wring maximum financial performance from their assets I believe such a change will only delay the problem for another decade or so.

EDIT
Short version: if you want better internet than what your local cable/phone company is planning on offering, get your municipality to deploy a fiber network. If only that weren’t illegal in Texas.

Sec. 54.202.  PROHIBITED MUNICIPAL SERVICES.  
(a)  A municipality or municipal electric system may not offer for sale to the public:

 (1)  a service for which a certificate of convenience and necessity, a certificate of operating authority, or a service provider certificate of operating authority is required;  or

 (2)  a nonswitched telecommunications service used to connect a customer's premises with:

  (A)  another customer's premises within the exchange;  or

  (B)  a long distance provider that serves the exchange.

(b)  Subsection (a) applies to a service offered either directly or indirectly through a telecommunications provider.

(c)  This section may not be construed to prevent a municipally owned utility from providing to its energy customers, either directly or indirectly, any energy related service involving the transfer or receipt of information or data concerning the use, measurement, monitoring, or management of energy utility services provided by the municipally owned utility, including services such as load management or automated meter reading.

Acts 1997, 75th Leg., ch. 166, Sec. 1, eff. Sept. 1, 1997.
Amended by: 
Acts 2005, 79th Leg., 2nd C.S., Ch. 2 (S.B. 5), Sec. 5, eff. September 7, 2005.

That bit about a nonswitched telecommunications service in (2) is essentially “internet service”. There are exceptions, but they’re incredibly narrow. Link to the code if you’re legalese-inclined.

I did my level best to present a nuanced view. My employer surely isn’t encouraging me to have opinions on the subject.

2 Likes

Ugghhh…not that guy again. He never shuts up! :wink:

2 Likes

I was referring to word choice - not the position, shameless industry astroturfing.