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Best Way To Describe Net Neutrality

Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist, describes the issue perfectly:

Most Americans believe that if you play fair and work hard, you'll get ahead. But this notion is threatened by legislation passed Thursday night by the U.S. House of Representatives that would allow Internet service providers to play favorites among different Web sites.

Here's a real world example that shows how this would work. Let's say you call Joe's Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you'll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away. That's not fair, right? You called Joe's and want some Joe's pizza. Well, that's how some telecommunications executives want the Internet to operate, with some Web sites easier to access than others. For them, this would be a money-making regime.

Thanks kottke for the link.

Posted by Jake on 03/29/07 @ 08:40 PM
Posted in Interesting | 6 Comments | Permalink
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6 Comments

stratboy said on 03/30/07 @ 10:02 AM:
So...if this happens...maybe enough of "ethical" hackers could organize to cripple everything...until they change it back.

I have no hacking skills, but will go out of my way to vote against anyone that helps enact this. How about a challenge to all webmasters to post a "page of shame" on their sites listing the elected officials that sold us out.....

Sometimes I really think that money sucks....then it dawns on me that greed is the problem. So basically, greedy people suck.

Blah.

Aaron Wormus said on 03/31/07 @ 12:56 AM:
That analogy is really lame... and not how it will work.

A better analogy is this:

I call US Airways and get put on hold for an hour because they are too cheap to spend the money to have sufficient staff on hand.

I hang up and call United, who get my business because I can talk to a customer service rep after a minute or so.

The internet business model has changed. The ISPs were not built to handle the type of bandwidth we are looking at. And with companies offering services which require Huge amounts of low latency bandwidth, ISPs can't be expected to provide them with extra service (latency) at no cost.

If you are going to start a airline company you will need to calculate the costs of enough customer service reps to answer your phones or else you will go out of business.

Aaron Wormus said on 04/01/07 @ 02:04 AM:
http://www.wormus.com/aaron/stories/2007/04/01/in-defense-of-the-internet-network-neutrality.html

stratboy said on 04/04/07 @ 08:44 AM:
Aaron - good call on the analogy. Good comments in your article.

Jake - start saving your pennies so that you can "buy" the fattest pipe possible when this comes down. I want my UtterlyBoring goodies popping up in microseconds when I click the bookmark.....

;-)

Jake said on 04/04/07 @ 10:30 AM:
Stratboy: I'm going to have to get a LOT more clicks on the ads on this site before I would be able to afford premium bandwidth, that's fer shur.

Jesse Thompson said on 04/04/07 @ 11:28 PM:
I have posted this on Aaron's blog too, by the way.

Sorry Aaron, I don't think any analogy can map positively to ISP's charging providers of online services to be able to serve data efficiently to the ISP's customers — who are already paying the ISP for that very thing.

Customers pay ISP's for bandwidth. Customers should be able to use the bandwidth that they pay for. No matter what kinds of streaming video or MMORPGs customers play, they are merely making use of the bandwidth and QoS that they paid for.

It makes no impact on the ISP if I am streaming video from Google or from my remote desktop at work. So, while Google may have deep pockets, I don't. And I can't outbid Google for the privilage of connecting to my work desktop.

Should I have to? I pay my ISP for my connection. My work is paying for the other end of the connection. Do we have to also pay a "not consuming big media" tax on top of it?

Let's go back to the telephone analogy. Of course a large business must invest in building a customer service center. Of course they must invest in telephony and lines to service all the simultaneous calls coming in. They pay *their* telephone provider for *their* connection to the telephone network: which is certainly substantial.

Now, on top of that, must they pay *your* telephone provider in a bid-war against everyone else you could be calling, as a ransom for the privilege of being connected to you? That is absurd. It gets even more absurd if it means everyone who you speak with on the phone has to play in this bid war to get you on the line. Can your Grandmother outbid the telemarketers?

The problem in your Gpizza/Ypizza analogy is you have a pizza stand charging a flat fee and then offering increasingly costly and extravagant delivery methods to customers. Your analogy says the flat fee allows the light users to subsidize the heavy users. So be it, when costs go up The pizza shop should either increase the flat fee or go back to per-pizza. Or merely charge a different fee for extravagant deliveries. Keep in mind the customer is still the one ordering these pizzas and benefiting from the circus.

The analog in the internet world is that people who want 24/7 access to the internet saturated at 10mbit/s pay more than a 128k dsl customer does. The dsl customer would get an extravagant pizza delivery cold. boo hoo.

We all know that the real motive behind this legislation is that Verizon broadband wants to redirect all web requests for Tmobile Wireless' website to an advertisement for Verizon Wireless instead.

Anyone who doesn't believe me, simply point an MS IE7 web browser to Firefox's website. Notice how the huge "download now" button is simply missing? That is the direction this is headed.

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