Net Neutrality - what’s so hard to understand?
mitch @ 8:45 pm on March 12, 2007
Look, I’m not a fan of the government (just read my blog), and I’m definitely not a fan of more Government Regulation. However, Net Neutrality *IS* a good thing. Its purpose is to force the monopolistic powers that be, to play fair with their smaller and more innovative and dynamic competitors. Republicans are dead against it, (and why wouldn’t they be, the lobbyists that give them money/perks tell them to be) and then the far left Liberals are against it because they can’t see past this being more unnecessary government regulation. However, what they can’t seem to really understand is that the bill (S. 215) Internet Freedom Preservation Act doesn’t change much over what is currently going on (far as we/I know anyway). It calls for packets to be equally prioritized regardless of their destination. The exact verbage from the bill goes like this:
`(4) enable any content, application, or service made available via the Internet to be offered, provided, or posted on a basis that–
`(A) is reasonable and nondiscriminatory, including with respect to quality of service, access, speed, and bandwidth;
`(B) is at least equivalent to the access, speed, quality of service, and bandwidth that such broadband service provider offers to affiliated content, applications, or services made available via the public Internet into the network of such broadband service provider; and
`(C) does not impose a charge on the basis of the type of content, applications, or services made available via the Internet into the network of such broadband service provider;
Now, I’m not a Lawyer (INAL), but this is saying that if an Internat/Broadband Service Provider(ISP) were to also have a VoIP service (Like my provider, Comcast). This forbids them from giving their VoIP service preferential treatment to the VoIP service that could be offered by others (eg: Vonage[my provider], Packet8 and many others). This *DOES NOT* forbid them from performing Quality of Service (QoS) on VoIP traffic, but it *does forbid them from only performing QoS on their own VoIP service*. Now, this is exactly the type of agreement we can live with, as it treats all VoIP providers fairly. I also understand that ISP’s have been doing some forms of QoS on bittorrent traffic, as they say it would keep normal users from doing normal things if they didn’t. This is allowed under the proposed bill, as long as *ALL* bittorrent traffic is treated the same. However, I do believe these types of issues will become more important as time moves on. It will eventually become a selling point (or maybe a reason not to buy from one provider over another) depending on what type of traffic is or isn’t prioritized.
If anything this bill didn’t quite go far enough as I feel that ISP’s should have to properly and accurately make available to the public at large what type of prioritization they are doing. As then consumers could be fully informed as to what is going on behind the curtain and make their purchasing choices based on that. Not that they have alot of choices at the moment, but thats a whole other entry…. (see Utopia)
