[governance] [lack of] Net Neutrality for Mobile Internet in different shapes and forms?

[Lee W McKnight]

To wade back in for a second..did I miss something?

The last thing the Internet needs is termination fees...that would be the complete triumph of the 19th century over the 21st.  

Second, Content Delivery Networks exist...to get content from the cloud to end users, reliably.  Pretending they don't...or wishing they would go away....I don't see the point of that.  They are paid by the people who care, ie the content owners, whether that content is a movie; or an ad. 

As I have said before, the reason the Net Neutrality debate is confusing is...because the term itself is an intentional obfuscation from its first utterance; pushed by Google for its own purposes; and then abandoned by Google when its business interests changed (ie its deal with Verizon last summer.)

That the rest of us are still struggling to make sense of it...just shows how clever the original obfuscation was.

If, on other hand, we actually focused on 'what is an open Internet' - as the FCC to its credit did last December (ok, before being taken to court by Google's new best pal Verizon, and original bad boy of net neutrality Comcast (for throttling p2p and specifically BitTorrent, without any transparency as to what it was doing) - maybe, just maybe, we could stop proposing reviving 19th Century notions for our current century.

Or is that too much to hope for? The Internet economy is indeed, complicated and involves all sorts of transactions and 'free' services.....keeping the thing open and transparent as Jeanette longs for is more the point than trying to manage a command and control regulatory system which neither fits the technology, nor the incredibly dynamic users/creators ie all of us. imho.

Lee
________________________________________
From: governance-request at lists.cpsr.org [governance-request at lists.cpsr.org] On Behalf Of Jeanette Hofmann [jeanette at wzb.eu]
Sent: Friday, March 18, 2011 11:51 AM
To: governance at lists.cpsr.org; Roland Perry
Subject: Re: [governance] [lack of] Net Neutrality for Mobile Internet in different shapes and forms?

The magic you are referring to consists of the fees paid by the
subscribers. The subcribers pay what they are charged. I would have
loved to pay more if more bandwidth had been available in the area of
London where I used to live. Alas, that option did not and still does
not exist.

The big telcos which immediately complain when the regulators considers
minimum standards of bandwidth or modest rules of transparency also
complain about the market because competition is so fierce. What exactly
do they want? Return to the comfortable times of monopoly where they
controlled both service standards and prices?

The idea that termination fees would enable ISPs to control content,
suppliers and innovation scares me. Don't you find that a problem as well?

jeanette

On 18.03.2011 16:12, Roland Perry wrote:
> In message <4D83708D.9030803 at wzb.eu>, at 15:47:41 on Fri, 18 Mar 2011,
> Jeanette Hofmann <jeanette at wzb.eu> writes
>
>>> But the money has to come from somewhere, and in the UK that's the end
>>> users paying their monthly subscriptions to their ISPs. Unfortunately,
>>> the majority aren't paying enough money to provision the network
>>> sufficiently to deliver *everything* they demand *simultaneously*.
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> I am surprised you frame things that way. This sounds like the typical
>> telco point of view. Content providers do also pay for the bandwidth
>> they are using don't they?
>
> Even in the most content-provider friendly scenario, they only pay for
> the bandwidth from their server to the "cloud". They then expect it to
> reach its destination by magic.
>
> If all ISPs had a good balance of high-volume content providers, and a
> large number of subscriber eyeballs, it might just even out. But real
> life's not like that.
>
>> If all of that is not enough money for expanding the infrastructure,
>> the ISPs should perhaps raise the monthly fees we pay for our internet
>> connection?
>
> They try, but consumers are too keen on being part of a "race to the
> bottom", where they'll buy the cheapest service on offer, and them
> complain it doesn't give them the highest performance possible.
>
> I know that this makes me sound jaded, but I've been in the industry too
> long (since the early 90's as a connectivity provider) and it's simply
> the way the market works.
>
>> Charging content providers for delivery to end users is suspected to
>> create all sorts of unpleasant side-effects we cannot possibly want.
>
> The original model was that an ISP with most of the local market would
> be getting a few large payments from content providers and a lot of
> small payments from eyeballs. Which meant that each was making a
> contribution to the overall cost.
>
> This breaks down, because the market goes global, and ISPs specialise in
> servers or eyeballs.
>
> Add in IXPs (which I think are a very good idea) and you get the current
> standoff between content that says "you can't afford not to deliver me
> to your end user customers, they will walk to another provider
> otherwise", and eyeballs who say "you can't afford not to be available
> to me for free, without me you have no business".
>
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