- Sat Dec 18, 2010 10:21 am
#334944
There are actually a couple of related things going on here. Net neutrality keeps service providers from blocking or crippling competitor's services. For example, Comcast offers a phone service for which they charge money. In their case, the extra bandwidth is for a service for which they are paid. Vonage also offers phone service over the 'net for which they charge money, but Comcast does not get a slice of that - they only get what customers pay for internet service, but they bear the burden of the extra traffic. Same situation with Verizon, SBC, and others. The thing is, they offer "unlimited" bandwidth (up to a point, then you get a nasty letter followed by termination of service) for fixed price, so why should they care what you use it for? It just grinds their gears that enterprising companies have found ways to monetize their services where they have not been as successful. They have two ways to try to wring more money out of their network: go back to customers and raise prices (not a good option in an increasingly competitive marketplace), or find a way to make their competitors' services less cost effective or usable than their own (they could, of course, just make their services better, but on a level playing field there is little chance of that). They would do this by throttling the bandwidth of their competitors' data streams coming into Comcast networks until the service becomes marginal. Now they can charge a "toll" to their competitors to relax the throttling. If the competitor refuses, the services become less attractive to Comcast customers (if they agree, then I have to pay more for the services because the tolls are passed along to me in the price of the service, so in the end I pay more either way). The problem with this is that my service provider, whom I pay for my service, gets to decide what traffic and services I can access, and they can go back and apply leverage against anyone whose services I consume, raising the prices of those services (even if they don't offer a competing service). It also allows them to pro-actively throttle traffic for services that compete with a service offering they intend to make in the future, so that their competitors essentially fund the development and marketing of Comcast's service. If the anti-NN legislation is passed, we will all have to pay more for most of the services we consume on the internet, and it will all go into the pockets of ISPs, who are already making out pretty well. This is sweetheart legislation at its worst.
When you combine this with the metered usage legislation, we are looking at a future in which internet access and services will cost a lot more money.
Another piece of legislation that is bouncing around the marble halls is one that would allow the government to create an internet blacklist - a registry of sites that all U.S. ISPs must block because they have been determined to be obscene, copyright-infringing, illegal, or in some other way harmful to the U.S.'s interests (like offshore gambling sites, for example). I think the danger of this legislation is pretty obvious. This is basically what France just did.
President of the Aston Kook Tweakers Club
