Tollbooths on the Internet Highway

Bob Hoffnar · From: Austin, Tx

This is from the NY Times today:

Tollbooths on the Internet Highway

When you use the Internet today, your browser glides from one Web site to another, accessing all destinations with equal ease. That could change dramatically, however, if Internet service providers are allowed to tilt the playing field, giving preference to sites that pay them extra and penalizing those that don't.

The Senate held hearings last week on "network neutrality," the principle that I.S.P.'s — the businesses like Verizon or Roadrunner that deliver the Internet to your computer — should not be able to stack the deck in this way. If the Internet is to remain free, and freely evolving, it is important that neutrality legislation be passed.

In its current form, Internet service operates in the same nondiscriminatory way as phone service. When someone calls your home, the telephone company puts through the call without regard to who is calling. In the same way, Internet service providers let Web sites operated by eBay, CNN or any other company send information to you on an equal footing. But perhaps not for long. It has occurred to the service providers that the Web sites their users visit could be a rich new revenue source. Why not charge eBay a fee for using the Internet connection to conduct its commerce, or ask Google to pay when customers download a video? A Verizon Communications executive recently sent a scare through cyberspace when he said at a telecommunications conference, as The Washington Post reported, that Google "is enjoying a free lunch" that ought to be going to providers like Verizon.

The solution, as far as the I.S.P.'s are concerned, could be what some critics are calling "access tiering," different levels of access for different sites, based on ability and willingness to pay. Giants like Walmart.com could get very fast connections, while little-guy sites might have to settle for the information superhighway equivalent of a one-lane, pothole-strewn road. Since many companies that own I.S.P.'s, like Time Warner, are also in the business of selling online content, they could give themselves an unfair advantage over their competition.

If access tiering takes hold, the Internet providers, rather than consumers, could become the driving force in how the Internet evolves. Those corporations' profit-driven choices, rather than users' choices, would determine which sites and methodologies succeed and fail. They also might be able to stifle promising innovations, like Internet telephony, that compete with their own business interests.

Most Americans have little or no choice of broadband I.S.P.'s, so they would have few options if those providers shifted away from neutrality. Congress should protect access to the Internet in its current form. Senator Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, says he intends to introduce an Internet neutrality bill, which would prohibit I.S.P.'s from favoring content providers that paid them fees, or from giving priority to their own content.

Some I.S.P.'s are phone and cable companies that make large campaign contributions, and are used to getting their way in Washington. But Americans feel strongly about an open and free Internet. Net neutrality is an issue where the public interest can and should trump the special interests.

Colm Chomicky · From: Kansas, (Prairie Village)

Do search engines already do the same thing? i.e., traffic folks away from certain sites. I have heard that Google favors sites that pay a fee to be ranked high.

In fact, I have a several websites for different hobbies, they used to always show up in the top 5 on Google when a relevant key word or two was aearched. Now they show up last out of 1000's (on the bottom of the last page of the Google search). Show up well after unrelated sites that don't have the slightest thing in common with the key words relevant to my sites. I suspect because the host service I use is black listed by Google because the host service is perhaps owned by a competing company?

These sites of mine (strictly non-commercial content) show up very highly ranked in some other search engines except Google.

erik · Posted 26 Feb 2006 4:09 pm

If internet traffic wears out switching equipment owned by phone companies then maybe they have something here. Did Sears or JCPenney pay more for phone service back when they were the top catalog distributers? Just a thought. Sometimes I think if the internet just went down in flames I might spend more time doing something worth while.

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-johnson

Ray Minich · From: Bradford, Pa. Frozen Tundra

When the hardware dudes either figure out how to squeeze a little more speed out of the current pipe, or come up with about a 10 fold increase in compression, the Internet is gonna be so clogged with downloaded realtime video content that it's gonna be a mudbath. The big boys want us to get our video entertaiment via the net, so that content can be fully protected. Bye Bye corner video store, unless the Sony/Toshiba battle keeps raising the bandwidth bar.

(Sony's got the Blu-Ray DVD coming out at 15 gB capacity, and Toshiba has their new DVD coming out at 24 gB capacity, and the benefit will be for the distribution of widescreen video content at high resolution. Current DVD's are 4.7 gB (or twice that for double sided)

We've only gotten this far by the generosity of Congress to play hands off of this potential revenue source, until some level of maturity is demonstrated. Once it goes from a novelty in the household, to a standard requirement, (like the telephone), access charges will come.

Do most Americans know that our British Brethren have to pay an annual tax on their TV's? At least that's what one of my fellow British engineers told me when we were working on a project together in 1985. I was floored. A tax on your TV? Wow...

Anyone ever see a payphone around any more at all? You can probably watch the emergence of pay internet parallel the extinction of the pay phone.

Jeff Agnew · From: Dallas, TX

Blu-Ray's standard capacity is 25GB, with 50GB for a dual-layer disc. HD is 15GB standard and 30GB dual-layer. But these figures change frequently as the two formats play leapfrog.

Pioneer has announced a 100GB Blu-Ray, which will be available later this year, with 200GB on the horizon as they add even more layers.

And you thought VHS vs. Beta was bad.

Ray Minich · From: Bradford, Pa. Frozen Tundra

Oops, I got it backwards, sorry...

Pat Kelly · From: Wentworthville, New South Wales, Australia

There has always been a TV "licence" in Britain. As far as I know the loot goes wholly to fund the BBC. This is not a bad idea for funding an independent public brosdcaster. Beats the pants off the funding method for our public broadcaster which has to continually look over its shoulder to see if its upsetting politicians and so jeopardising its funding.

Of course the way to avoid abuse of ISP infra structure is to have Public Utilities in Public Hands. Our Phone Co was a public owned enterprise until recently. Unfortunately modern governments seem to be slaves to the "modern" obsession with Ricardo/Smith economics fashions and are busy selling off everything.

Wiz Feinberg · From: Mid-Michigan, USA

This is not going away. Read this on the Christian Science Monitor: Tolls may slow Web traffic

Extract from article:

The firestorm was ignited last November when AT&T chief Edward Whitacre told BusinessWeek Online that AT&T's broadband network was not going to be exploited by Google and others without due compensation. "How do you think they're going to get to customers?" he said. "Through a broadband pipe. Cable companies have them. We have them. Now what they would like to do is use my pipes free, but I ain't going to let them do that because we have spent this capital and we have to have a return on it.... [F]or a Google or Yahoo or Vonage or anybody to expect to use these pipes [for] free is nuts!"

The Internet has "morphed" into something it wasn't 10 years ago, adds AT&T spokeswoman Claudia Jones. It has moved away from just e-mail to video and voice. "You need to build an infrastructure to handle the traffic," she says, and that costs money. While AT&T has not introduced "two-tiered" or "premium" prices for those who send large amounts of data over the Web, it reserves the right to do so. "Companies like AT&T who are making significant investments to build a private backbone" to the Internet, she says, "should have some leeway in the services we are offering on that backbone."

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Bob "Wiz" Feinberg
Moderator of the SGF Computers Forum
Visit my Wiztunes Steel Guitar website at: http://www.wiztunes.com/
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[This message was edited by Wiz Feinberg on 25 March 2006 at 12:50 PM.]

Bob Hoffnar · From: Austin, Tx

There is no reason for the big cable companies, AT&T and all to have a lock on access to the net. Durring the Clinton administration my sister was working very high up in the FCC organizing the running of fiber optic cable along with every new power line that was put in. The idea was to put free high speed access in every public school in the country. It was crazy cheap to do and works great. The problem was that it bypassed the cable companies bottleneck on the pipeline. So when Powell took over at the FCC he stopped the program. The bussiness model of the cable companies does not have room for a cheap alternative to there infrastucture system. So in order to protect stock holder interest they do whatever they need to do to destroy competition.

It would be very foolish and short sighted of us to let this happen.

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Bob
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