Here is a link to the proposal: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017/db1122/DOC-347927A1.pdf
Here’s a link to Congressman Burgess:
https://www.house.gov/burgess
Here’s a link to some of the leadership of the FCC:
https://www.fcc.gov/about/contact
Alternative link that works for Michael Burgess: https://burgess.house.gov/
Might as well add:
Ajit Pai, Chairman
[email protected]
As someone that works in the industry I have a mixed view of net neutrality.
The term go thrust into the fore back when Netflix was having performance troubles roughly 3 years ago during the bruhahah over paid prioritization. The press made the practice out to be a nefarious protection racket where the ISP’s would de-prioritize Netflix’s incoming traffic unless Netflix paid. In reality, the ISPs were willing to install additional ports and capacity at points of presence closer to subscribers so long as Netflix was willing to share the cost of adding said capacity. Netflix balked, but ultimately ponied up to some major ISPs - realizing prompt improvements in performance. The tech press pretty much only told Netflix’s story (i.e. ignoring the fact that their CDNs had written check they were in no position to cash), and the FCC ultimately issued the Open Internet Order that invalidated the paid prioritization agreements. Funny thing though - not too long afterwards, Netflix issued a SEC filing where they disclosed that much-despised paid prioritization agreements had a negligible effect on their bottom line while simultaneously boosting performance.
The issue is about so much more than Stranger Things 2 buffering or dropping frames, of course. It’s about the 1-2 options that the average internet user has for wired broadband and the 1-3 options they have for lower-performing - and typically more expensive - wireless broadband. It’s about the potential for anti-competitive behavior and limiting access to legal content. This potential is real and has happened in the past.
Imagine that your ISP - be they a cable company or telco - offers video and voice services. Odds are they price their offerings so as to make the more-expensive triple play package the most appealing. But you really only want data from the ISP so you use a VoIP service as a substitute for the landline and stream video via an IPTV streaming service - both Over The Top (OTT) services since they ride along with other internet traffic. Under the concept of net neutrality, your ISP cannot interfere with your ability to use OTT services - neither via outright blocking, degradation of quality, nor charging you a fee.
Without net neutrality, your ISP can put their thumb down on the scale about as hard as they want to in order to squeeze you for more money or arbitrarily block access to swaths of the internet Because Reasons™. Historically speaking, this has happened quite rarely, but it has happened - usually because ISPs hqate VoIP and IPTV competing with their voice and video offerings and occasionally because someone decides that some domain or IP range shouldn’t be accessible out of simple fiat. If you were on dialup in the DFW area in the 90s you probably remember flashnet - it would have been laughable back then for flashnet to restrict what you could do for anything other than technical reasons or abuse of their (meager) systems; the only “differentiated” offering they had was an @flash.net email address and perhaps some lame members-only web portal - thus the abuses more than ~10 years ago were vanishingly rare. It’s only in the past decade or so that vertical integration has created the conditions where large ISPs have become the masters of access, distribution, and core layers of the internet alongside acquiring vast providers content that ride said layers and they have the incentive to start putting a thumb down on the scale.
I’m hoping the major ISPs immediately throttle access to sites like Breitbart, FoxNews, & InfoWars, unless users cough up more cash. Or maybe some deep-pocketed Librul like Soros will pay AT&T, Comcast, and Spectrum to block them entirely. Maybe then people would understand what this really means.
Practical Politics 101: Call your representative at their local office, not DC.
As I alluded to in my previous post, competition in broadband is limited. In any given urban/suburban area, there are apt to be two providers of wired access - a phone company and a cable company. Wired providers are generally preferable because they can typically offer superior link stability, lower latency, are the least likely to meter access, and typically have lower prices.
Additionally, there are varying wireless options:
… but as wireless options they all suffer from the variables of sending signals through the aether: atmospheric conditions, shared medium, and invariably high signal loss. They’re also likely to come with quotas (surprise bills and/or throttling for exceeding them) and cost more per unit of capability than wired options. As such they’re typically not the first choice if decent wired options are available.
There tend to be a maximum of 2 wired providers in an area for reasons of history and cost. Historically, telco’s and later cable companies were required to serve ~100% of given geographic areas thus in most urban/suburban areas both exist. It’s also staggeringly expensive with long long Return On Investment (ROI) to run new last-mile wired infrastructure, thus no one is in a hurry to do it on a large scale. As such, one will often hear the term natural monopoly applied to incumbent wired providers.
At my home there’s pretty snappy fiber internet that Verizon (now Frontier locally) laid 10+ years ago, almost-as-good DOCSIS 3.x from the local cable company. Wireless there’s cell internet, and satellite. Based on the RF-looking modules on utility poles, I suspect the city might have some sort of guerrilla wifi setup for monitoring patrol car radio/camera feeds but that’s likely not available to residents. I doubt that there’s fixed wireless in such an otherwise well-served area.
If I get upset with Frontier (full disclosure: my employer) I can go to the cable company. If they anger me, I’m going to be bled by the cell companies. Unlike Verizon before it Frontier doesn’t have any media interests but they do have voice and TV services they might be incentivized to protect. The cable company likely has some sort of full vertical integration they’re inectivized to protect. One of the major wireless providers is Verizon Wireless - see above. Satellite internet is hot garbage to be used when there are no other choices.
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.
Blocking something generic such as a website is a fool’s errand of whack-a-mole.
Blocking a more specific service - particularly one with more strenuous performance requirements such as VoIP or telltales such as a video stream - is much easier with the availability of DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) which every ISP of any size has available at the distribution layer. You can pay a performance - and often cost - penalty of encrypting the payload or relays such as a VPN to try to work around service restrictions but that’s a whole lot of inconvenience that most users won’t bother with.
Off the shelf TOR boxes will be out there soon if they start messing with things too much.
That’s just the kind of challenge the hackers of the world like.
Be a mess while it’s getting started though.
If that were to actually happen it would solve the problem. How many actual ISP choices do you have? In our area the is Fios or Spectrum. There are Satellite services but latency kills using for business where I have to do video conferences.
Had Fios from the day they deployed in Lewisville, 8+ years. Left Fios because of massive incompetence with the billing department charging us for service we canceled and on top of that canceled the wrong services. After 4 months of trying to straighten out the bill we left.
Spectrum not really any better. Has shit routers were the Wifi Radios overheat and drop connections every 30 minutes. Replaced with our own router but cannot use for voice.
Essentially two competitors but they have no interest in providing real service.
“More competition” ignores the fact that the barrier to entry in this industry is too big to get in. Putting aside any regulations or pressure from existing actors, the sheer cost of the infrastructure to get data from one place to another quickly and reliably is enough to put out all but the largest companies. When the routers cost 6 figures each, and they’re the cheapest part of the equation, how are you going to get competition? It’s not like there are any laws preventing anyone from starting a new ISP. And yet you don’t see any new options appearing, even in spite of the massive displeasure most people cite with their ISP. My employer has a solid 10 figures invested in fiber runs just between its US datacenters, and we don’t even have last-mile considerations to worry about.
As was stated earlier in the thread, ISPs enjoy a natural monopoly. Because it’s so expensive and arduous to lay fiber and connect every house, and frankly it’s impractical to have 6 or 7 different hookups going to each house, there’s no return on investment to try it. Look at your water, gas, and electric. A number of providers might exist on the grid, but the part of the infrastructure that connects to your house can only really be owned by one of them. No practical way to inject competition into that. So we have rules that require all of the players in each of those utilities have to play nice and allow their stuff to go over a pipe they might not own.
Not to mention these companies have done everything they can to discourage competition. The whole Net Neutrality debate started because one ISP wanted to deprioritize traffic from a competing video content provider. Moreover, these companies have done that kind of thing on multiple occasions. And with mergers getting shot down by anti-trust rules, the trend is clear: regulation be damned, competition is not on the agenda.
As for VPN users, good luck. Blocking whole IP ranges, port groups, or packet types wouldn’t be a new phenomenon. Wanna use TOR? Too bad so sad when your ISP blocks ports 9001 and 9030 and you can’t connect to any Tor node using the default config.
Here’s my option; if one doesn’t like their internet and doesn’t care to fight for it??!?
Well then one can always get free dialup from netzero and access both email, web, chat, and files via any BBS.
Otherwise one can become their own ISP for about 3k/mo and make bank selling unblocked service to their community. Still too much? then vote in better local, state, and senate level politicians that actually represent your values not those of their corporate overlords.
I know I lost just about everyone at “free dialup” but still there’s a point in all this. When one will fight for what they want and has no options then only option is dialup, irc, BBSes, and Shell accounts PERIOD
Also, I’m wanting to build this at the space for any and all to use.
Hopefully also launch a geosynchronous satellite over DFW which repeats the signal though out the area.to smaller base stations ran around the dfw areas.
Oh and that article is using 3g I’m wanting to do 5G (https://www.open5gcore.org)
Note for later:
Project road map:
lol; you realize that the only reason dialup works is because the telco POTS lines are regulated under the telecom act? Kind of argues for what Obama’s FCC did. I’m not sure you meant that though.
I’ll chime in a bit here. As someone who has been directly involved in Telecom regulation, and operating larger IP networks for a lot of years, it is an issue I’m familiar with at many levels.
First, you need to understand that 99% of what you’ve read about “Network Neutrality” is red herring. AT&T has done a masterful job at steering public debate, and hiding the real issue, which has nothing to do with modem caps, etc. The press has completely missed the issue, and even finding discourse about it is hard.
Network Neutrality is really about peering and money.
Quoting Wikipedia:
In computer networking, peering is a voluntary interconnection of administratively separate Internet networks for the purpose of exchanging traffic between the users of each network. The pure definition of peering is settlement-free, also known as “bill-and-keep,” or “sender keeps all,” meaning that neither party pays the other in association with the exchange of traffic; instead, each derives and retains revenue from its own customers.
An agreement by two or more networks to peer is instantiated by a physical interconnection of the networks, an exchange of routing information through the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) routing protocol and, in some special cases, a formalized contractual document.[1]
Take special note of this phrase: “neither party pays the other in association with the exchange of traffic”. This is the definition of the “Free Internet”. Customers pay for access, not transit.
That’s what Network Neutrality is really about.
ATT and some of the other big backbone providers have, for years, bridled under this arrangement, and dreamed of a return to “Inter LATA” fees, which used to be their key money maker. An inter-lata fee is a fee for transhipment of voice or data across a given network segment. Think long distance phone call rates, and you’ll be getting right up next to it.
If you’re old enough to remember, long distance calls got more expensive the farther away you called - because you paid for every inter-lata boundary you crossed - paid the network owner, and was collected by your provider.
ATT visualizes this as charging data sources (Google, Amazon, Facebook) for sending data across their networks.
Quoting ATT CEO Ed Whitacre, in an interview ATT still desperately tries to hide:
“Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain’t going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it. So there’s going to have to be some mechanism for these people who use these pipes to pay for the portion they’re using,” he said, according to Business Week Online’s edited excerpts of the interview.
“Why should they be allowed to use my pipes? The Internet can’t be free in that sense, because we and the cable companies have made an investment and for a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes free is nuts,” he said.
In his view, ATT should be able to charge for access to its customers. You would pay for the connection, and then pay for the traffic you received (based on the peers it hopped to get to you).
That, is what Network Neutrality is about. Forget the rest of the bunk you’ve read, written by clueless reporters parroting press releases. It really is about the free internet, and it really is all about peering.
Thank you for your information. I had not thought about this issue of Inter-LATA previously, but it makes a lot of sense. It’s nice to get a peek behind the curtain.
That is quite the case but of course the common YouTube and minecrafter who only cares about getting more facebook likes or flirting on Instagram doesn’t understand anything more than its just there and works. Which is fine, not that in the beginning was anything ever promised to be “just there and works”, 'ell the internet is decentralize by design.
Of course your right it is all about peering but its also now become more, a lot more.
VZW and by extension ATT (because they just copy VZW these days) believe that its their sole reason if existence to tax the internet and be the only source of x digital content. I’m not just talking taxing consumers here but as you pointed out the companies too. They already pay a large access fee for all those pipelines going to thier data centers they need. But several in the telecom world still think that’s not enough and looking at their business model and actual profits I can understand why these guys think such folly.
The common thought in a industry that has a long history of shiting on its customers for every dollar they have becomes “all the Netflix’s and Xbox’s needs to pay up or the internet user gets crapped on until they do”.
When this becomes the common banter in the boardroom. We’re the ones that get seriously screwed over. After all we’re human beings that is apart of the world’s great social experiment the free and open exchange of ideas, research, and commerce, not a bloody commodity.
To quote one of the best thesis papers1 I’ve read since the hacker manifesto:
While the cyberlord class has become increasingly powerful, the source of its power is also the key to its weakness. This is the extremely low cost of reproducing information, which is the basis of the social nature of these goods. It is impossible to stop people from sharing information, regardless of the will of information producers and cyberlords. The more we freely share information that they want locked up under IPR, the weaker information monopolies will become.
disclaimer: While a few may already know this; Yes, I worked at the director level of a telecom, I’ve ran a bbs back doing the 90’s and smaller local ISP in the y2k days. Plus I’m a big supporter of 2600 and EFF. So I may have bias and a wee bit of recovering sysop syndrome
So did we win, or lose?
(yes that’s a trick question; nobody wins regardless of the flip or flop on this)
It’s not too late for Congress to do something about it.
Telecom positively loves complex billing. I see it often in the amazing amount of time and effort that goes into package changes at my own workplace. It must take a supercomputer hours of processing time generate those tables since the presence or absence of everything effects the price of everything else. There’s as much testing on the billing side as there is on the network side for new offerings … and we all know how consistent that telecom billing is for the end user. I don’t see the benefit myself and oftentimes wonder if the main constituencies are workgroups extracting rent rather than adding to the bottom line.
The funny thing about billing complexity, however, is that even sophisticated customers - i.e. businesses - shy away from it due to the uncertainty it generates. Despite long-distance plans being marketed in the 80s and 90s there was still immense uncertainty. Was it true long-distance (inter-LATA) or just the next town over (intra-LATA); the former was generally included in your long-distance plan while the latter was subject to whatever the ILEC wanted to roll you over a barrel for. Was it during plan hours? How many minutes did you have left this month anyway? Were you going to have to tap savings to pay for an international call?
These shenanigans greatly restricted demand - not because customers couldn’t afford it but because the potential for a nasty bill struck fear into consumers. The good times ended once the ILECs bought the long distance carriers and all but eliminated long-distance charges in order to slow cable companies from eating their lunch with digital phone service.
Cell phone providers would play the same trick on themselves in subsequent decades with minute quotas, SMS limits, nights and weekends minutes, rollover schemes, and then later ever-shifting schemes on limiting MB then GB of data per month. While there is a legitimate interest in rationing usage of wireless due to the unavoidable collision domain in aether, wireless companies clung to billing complexity for far too long. Witness the industry moving to unlimited-esque billing, with the rationing function shifting towards managing outlier users.
The AT&T of today is less the AT&T of old that my generation remembers principally as a long distance provider and more SBC (Southwestern Bell) that subsumed it in 2005. As an ILEC (Incumbent Local Exchange Carrier), SBC charged whatever nominal rate that federal, state, and local regulators tolerated for said class of customer while making a huge chunk of their revenue charging other providers - mostly long-distance carriers such as AT&T - access fees. I recall 60% as a common figure but don’t have any references.
While I have no doubt that SBC AT&T would love to extract rent from Facebook Netflix Amazon Google et al, I suspect their vision is more that of a modern incarnation of CompuServe where everything filters through their hands - content, money, distribution - and users are principally connected to all things AT&T who collects the lion’s share of the revenue and an overwhelming percentage of the profits. Wash rinse repeat for Verizon, Spectrum, Comcast.
Wouldn’t this effectively put the control of information in the hands of a few?