Comments on: Slow Lingering Death of Net Neutrality?

By: Tom Lee

Tom Lee — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 12:47:01 +0000

I would think that in the next 10 years there will be a handful of company that “owns” the internet, if you don’t eat from their hands you don’t eat at all!

By: Eye For The Obvious

Eye For The Obvious — Tue, 28 Aug 2007 03:27:23 +0000

It is glaring that the bottm line here is arrogance blended with greed. As stated earlier . . . consumers pay for access. Now these arrogant corporations want to take your money and dictate to what you will have access. I wish that they were as concerned with giving me better reliability on my service and finding ways to reduce costs. Instead they act like the damned government . . . take more money from the people and spend it like fools, have the mindset that they come first and know what is best for you. Oh how I despise them!

By: The Monash Report»Blog Archive » My Network World column and outside links on network neutrality

Fri, 27 Apr 2007 22:53:44 +0000

[...] Malik made an early attempt to cover all sides of the issue, albeit with a pro-neutrality [...]

By: Martin Geddes

Martin Geddes — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 20:06:07 +0000

I think you'll find that ad-hominem attack on Andrew rather misdirected. He left AT&T a long time ago, and has written a long string of the best researched and most insightful papers on Internet economics. (Perhaps you think anyone and anything from Bell Labs needs is suspect. Hope you enjoy living in a pre-digital world…) His Paris Metro Pricing ideas (i.e. tiered service) are probably strongly in the public interest, as they preserve the end-to-end nature of the network whilst also enabling "stupid QoS" for the dumb pipe.

If you have any substantive argument against this particular form of tiering, we're all ears … assuming you were even aware that there are competing models of QoS and tiering.

Miaow.

By: Mange

Mange — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 10:15:47 +0000

As far as Odlyzko and his arguing for a tiered Internet goes,
take a look at US patent number: 6,295,294 (link)

“Inventors: Odlyzko; Andrew M. (Berkeley Heights, NJ)
Assignee: AT&T Corp. (New York, NY)”
…..
“The network is partitioned into logical channels and a user incurs a cost for use of each of the logical channels. The logical channels differ primarily with respect to the cost to the user. ”

So he’s an AT&T employee that filed the patent for the tiered Internet. No wonder he’s all for it. And uses any form of sophistry available to make his non existent case.

By: Moogle1 » Blog Archive » The Internet Commodity - Article Review

Moogle1 » Blog Archive » The Internet Commodity - Article Review — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 18:16:05 +0000

[...] Chester’s article discusses both the changes in FCC policies that allow carriers to discriminate against the type, source, and destination of traffic and political moves to profile internet traffic and stop the construction of community wi-fi networks - without speculating to deeply on the effects such carrier-control will have. It is far more informative and less alarmist than many similar posts since Om Malik’s original note Slow Lingering Death of Net Neutrality?. [...]

By: Om Malik on Broadband : » Just Say No(thing)

Om Malik on Broadband : » Just Say No(thing) — Thu, 02 Feb 2006 08:11:54 +0000

[...] Months after he sparked off a debate over network neutrality, SBC/AT&T chairman and chief executive, Ed Whitacre, is again making threatening (and very confusing) noises. In a chat with the Financial Times he said: “I think the content providers should be paying for the use of the network – obviously not the piece from the customer to the network, which has already been paid for by the customer in Internet access fees – but for accessing the so-called Internet cloud.”This is a different tact from the first time around. He had originally complained that folks like Google and Yahoo were getting a free ride on their pipes, and should pay them. Well, consumers had paid for their DSL connections, many pointed out, a big brouhaha ensued. Techdirt weighs in on FT comments, He’s actually suggesting that when we buy bandwidth, we’re just buying the bandwidth from the end-point to the backbone… and everything else is just free.His latest comments however have me confused. So essentially what he is saying, no no not charge for the content that travels on the last mile, but charge on the long-haul and metro network. Given the pricing trends in that market, that’s not too much money. As a very smart man on a private mailing list points out, the Internet has pushed the cost to the edge, so how much money there is to be made by charging content providers for QoS? I bet these issues (and comments) are going to become fodder for US Congress which is going to start taking a closer look at the Network Neutrality in coming months. The interesting part of the equation is that even businesses are feeling a little threatened by the RBOC posturing. James Blaszak, whose law firm, Levine, Blaszak, Block & Boothby, who works for large companies on telecom issues recently told eWeek: “If I pay for the loop that gets me access to the network, why is it that someone who wants to send me something should also pay? What if they say, to get to your customers for you to sell your wares, we want a share of your revenues? Once you buy into the notion that the telephone companies should be able to charge entities other than those that are buying access to the Internet, I don’t know where you stop.” [...]

By: danryan

danryan — Fri, 20 Jan 2006 06:24:20 +0000

When Google goes back to being a free altruistic company and not selling shares at over $450 each, they can complain about the networks they now ride basically for free. Until then, it’s time for them to pay up and shut up.

By: Om Malik on Broadband : » BellSouth to Internet: Show Me The Money

Om Malik on Broadband : » BellSouth to Internet: Show Me The Money — Tue, 17 Jan 2006 05:25:29 +0000

[...] Smith points out that Apple maybe asked to pay a nickel or a dime to deliver the song. Yahoo will have to do the same for its reality TV streams. I wonder what is the ramification of this? Will it mean increased price of songs on the iTunes store, hence slower sales of iPod, and hence the slowdown of that ecosystem. As I said earlier, if there is no money out of consumer pocket, fine. Silicon Valley is still going to pay the price! Not that Washington is paying any attention! [...]

By: robhyndman.com

robhyndman.com — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 18:21:19 +0000

[...] And finally, he alludes to the ghettoizing influence of two tiers - a problem I wrote about in a comment to Om a while ago: I have some concerns that we might see the emergence of two Internets - one an ever-evolving and progressing privately-controlled Internet, and the other an increasingly dilapidated publicly-accessible Internet with minimal quality and capacity. Will the emergence of a government supported Internet onramp ensure a quality public Internet or undermine the efforts of private enterprise? Will the public Internet be a dirt road (albeit free), while the privately-controlled Internet will be of top-quality but will not allow users access to the full-range of content and applications that the Internet could offer? [...]

By: d.l.

d.l. — Mon, 09 Jan 2006 18:46:33 +0000

There’s no real reason for the interests of access providers and application/content providers to conflict. The problem is that the access providers are used to making money on services (voice or video) that they probably won’t be providing much in the future.

The access providers’ business model needs to change. All revenue from access services — speed, usage, bandwidth allocation, etc. The biggest change needed is probably elimination of unlimited usage broadband. A very small percentage of users are driving (and not paying for) network investment. Everyone else is paying more than they should have to. Pricing similar to wireless would go a long way to fixing this. And would get rid of all this ridiculous talk about charging application providers without their consent.

By: Fractals of Change

Fractals of Change — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 23:52:47 +0000

It’s Time to Worry About RBOCs

It’s time to worry that the remaining strong Baby Bells, having devoured their parents, will manage to further slow Internet usefulness in the United States. Both our economic competitiveness in a quickly flattening world AND our future ability to ac...

By: Christophe

Christophe — Sun, 08 Jan 2006 19:29:33 +0000

Andrew Odlyzko’s “Content is King” is ridiculous with his continual correlaions to the U.S. postal service of the 1800’s to the Internet of the 21st century and drawing inference between the broad communications industry (internet, LD, telephone service, etc.) to the narrow movie industry (what about television, radio, entertainment (sports, etc.) and music) are weak at best. Andrew Odlyzko should stick to cryptography.

By: Markus

Markus — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 19:48:59 +0000

Last time i looked, most of these companies where making billions in profit already. Trying to break up the internet is nothing but pure greed.

By: Cynical

Cynical — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 12:51:04 +0000

Forgive me but I just dont get this outrage. If net neutrality means that equal priorities should be given to any packet then I can see the Cable and phone companies argument - as we start stuffing the pipe with video etc. sending voice packets over the same pipe wont work i.e. we would have to resolve QOS issues which essentially means voice packets would have to get priority. Why shouldnt the phone and cable companies charge more for that? The point is users/providers have a choice they can get equal priority for all packets and see their voip phones suck or pay to get prioritization of packets. Doesnt this mean that net neutrality gets in the way of making voice work as an app?

By: Stan

Stan — Sat, 07 Jan 2006 04:41:06 +0000

There’s an economic point here that consumer advocates overlook…

When the broadband ISP’s began offering service, they offered ‘unlimited’ bits at a fixed price per month. However, the average user today is consuming < 1GBytes of downstream data per month. Their economic model and pricing counts on that usage level. However, now video comes to the web. Downloading one 1-hour SD video is 1GB per month. So, if 20% of users begin consuming just 5 hours of video per month, the total bytes consumed on the entire network doubles from pre-video levels. The ISP’s have to bear the cost of doubling the size of their infrastructure - not Google, Disney, AOL or anyone who’s charging for the video. How are the ISP’s supposed to pay the billions for doubling the size of their infrastructure unless there’s a subsidy or they raise prices? We’re all looking for a free ride.