roll call here.

it’s nice to see the republican controlled congress – that cabal of corrupt power – for once reject “progressive” legislation and actually do something that resembles a conservative agenda.

at the same time, it is embarassing for us mice to be on the same side of any issue that this republican party.

and your point is?

I challenge anyone opposing net neutrality on the basis that “the free market will provide competition” to also oppose such regulatory structures as “limited liability” and “coporate personhood”. After all, those are regulations as well.

That’s not likely. When QoS tiers become commonplace, they’ll be parts of the tiering agreements between NSPs. So you buy QoS tier from your ISP, and they buy it from their NSP, and they trade with the other guy’s ISP, and he pays for QoS from his ISP. That’s not going to complicate your life at all. In comparison, the local sales tax ordinances that e-retailers have to conform to are much, much more complicated. The interesting twist – and the part that potentially affects Googoo’s video-on-demand hopes – is what happens of you make a QoS-dependent purchase and you didn’t buy QoS from your ISP. In that case, Googoo can charge you extra and negotiate for-fee QoS from your ISP in real time, through a QoS-on-demand protocol. That’s hardly going to rock your world either. It’s like the choice between making a station call or a collect call when going long-distance. I assume Googoo will get the equivalent of 800 numbers for QoS.

QoS isn’t fundamentally about dropping packets, it’s about re-ordering queues, and we’ve been doing that on the Internet – as well as selective dropping – since 1984.

You should try approaching these issues from a sober and analytical perspective instead of being so emotional. Computers handle complexity quite well, and can make even the most complex issues appear simple to the end user. That’s why there are a billion PCs in a world that only has a million or so smart people.

And I can’t say I disagree with you with regard to the old laws. Unfortunately since the smaller ISPs don’t seem to have as much lobbying clout as AT&T and the cable companies I don’t know how successful a campaign for that could be presently. Something needs to be done to get the money out of Washington; it’s gone so far past ridiculous that there aren’t even words capable of describing it.

Richard Bennett — that’s a nice bit of rhetoric there.

Part of the problem here is one of complexity. In the normal arrangement you buy a connection fast enough to transfer the data you want to transfer, so does the party you’re communicating with, and how the network in between gets it there — or who the other party is — doesn’t really matter. The problem with the “new” model is that if I want to provide some service, I can’t just get myself a fast connection and let the party at the other end worry about their end. Now I need to know who I’m communicating with. I need to strike a deal with each and every one of their ISPs to prioritize my traffic so that all the packets don’t get dropped in favor of my competitors’ traffic. This is quite feasible for Google or Yahoo or Microsoft (though they don’t like it), but what about small businesses? Who pays to prioritize open source P2P software that needs low packet loss?

I’m not against the concept of QoS, I just think that the person who is actually paying for the connection should be the one who decides which traffic is more important, rather than making it a bidding war between service providers that naturally favors the party with the deepest pockets.

Either I’m missing something, or all the lunatics calling for higher end user prices on data services are. You all seem to have forgotten Google got where it is by offering sponsored data services; the bells got where they are by charging end users fees on a service that (was) inherently p2p, at least in the larger scheme of things (the phones were p2p at least as much as the rest of the p2p services are, as they all ely on substantial back end infrastructure to do what they do – it’s not just my computer calling your computer directly).

If the bells (or any other backbone or last mile service) adds tariffs to Google and Yahoo and the other “fat data” services it doesn’t inherently add cost to the end users, who are already paying ridiculously high rates in the US compared to much of the rest of the wired world. The scheme you and others propose would do exactly that – put even more money in the pockets of the telcos at the expense of those least able to afford them. If I were a more pessimistic person I might ask if you perhaps work for the phone company.

So far as VOIP, I addressed that before here: why? I now pay about $35 just to have the stinking phone line, which I need for DSL. I pay another $60 a month to my ISP, who in turn tithes a good bit of that money (most of it by their telling, but I’m pretty sure it’s really only about half) to the phone company. On top of that I pay another flat $25 fee to the phone company for flat rate nationwide calling, which provides me vastly more reliable and high quality service than VOIP, which attempts to cram realtime streaming traffic over lines not made for it. That’s a total of about $90 a month to the damn phone company, but VOIP wouldn’t make my bill much cheaper at all – even amortized over a year or five.

Extending that, what’s to stop the phone companies, when the googles and yahoos make it worth their while, from using those same switched services that are designed to efficiently stream data in real time, to route “fat data?” The end user gets a higher quality service, the phone company gets the incentive to upgrade their backbones, and all it costs is the yahoos and googles – whose bottom lines, frankly, I couldn’t care less about protecting; if they can’t make it work, someone else will.

This nonsense about google and yahoo and amazon.com being “shut out” of the internet (along with those lesser voices providing “legal” content as mandated by big brother) is specious; no ISP is going to shut out the most popular services altogether, because they’d lose customers. And if they degrade the services too seriously, they’ll also lose customers – that is, so long as they cannot effectively shut out all the competitors by making their higher quality services so expensive only healthy businesses or upper middle class homes can afford them.

We don’t need more legislation allowing big brother to dictate what is “neutral net” – what we need is a return, at least for a time, to the old laws that ensured competing ISPs could not be priced out of the only last mile connection available to them.

So what? They can be another ISP offering a competing voice to teh bells; they can play the open game all they like and put their money and infrastructure where their very cavernous corporate mouth is…

Is that what FedEx does by charging more for overnight delivery than for three-day mail? I never knew they were a criminal enterprise, thanks for opening my eyes. I’m going to write a book about the damage FedEx does to Free Culture and My Democracy by charging more for overnight delivery with this “priority tax” they put on overnight delivery. Doesn’t an overnight letter use the same airplane as a three-day letter? How in the world can they justify bumping three-day letters off that plane, don’t they have the same “right” to travel as the overnights? It’s damn shame that the privileged few can ship overnight and the rest of us, in our garages, have to wait three stinking days for our letters.

They can ship all the letters overnight if they just get more airplanes and more trucks and more people to run them, so why don’t they? I’ll tell you, it’s because these greedy corporations are blood-sucking capitalists who only care about their bottom line.

People before profits, Dude! Save the overnight letter!

(And save the whales while you’re at it! And bring back Buffy, dammit!)

That would be great if it was only Google. They could build their own last mile presence, but not everyone can. The Google of a decade ago couldn’t, just as the Google of a decade from now can’t. There are plenty of other problems too. For instance: Suppose that in a few years time all phone traffic is VoIP. Everyone buys data service on their “phone” from one provider and VoIP service from someone else (or possibly the same provider who charges extra for it). Once everyone is using VoIP there is no longer a need for a service provider — your IP address (or FQDN) becomes your phone number and all it takes is for someone to write some free VoIP software. However, then there is no longer any company to pay the VoIP prioritization tax, which means that the free service will never catch on because the ISPs are dropping its packets during peak hours. Suddenly everyone is paying a useless tax to various companies who do nothing productive while chopping off a portion of their fee as profit only to feed the rest to all the ISPs for prioritization. Why not just raise the price of the data service by the prioritization cost and be done with it? And this applies not only to VoIP but to any sort of P2P (or non “big business-to-you”) traffic that requires low latency or low packet loss.

Realistically a much better solution would be to have the ISP work with the user to enable QoS. Whenever a pipe gets full, the ISP will drop some of the packets of the current heaviest user (until the point that some other user becomes the heaviest user) and will respect the priority that this user has set for the traffic. For example, if the current heaviest user is downloading something and is also talking on the phone via VoIP, the ISP would drop the packets for the download and leave the VoIP traffic alone because the user has VoIP configured as high priority. This way the user decides which traffic is more important rather than the ISP, but at the same time no user can set all their traffic to be high priority and then flood the network, because part of the heaviest user’s traffic is getting dropped no matter what — the priority the user sets only determines what part.

Compare that to the extortion game where ISPs tax anyone who provides a time-sensitive service lest it be unusable during peak hours. Who would want that rather than just letting users (and good defaults) decide what part of their traffic is the most important?