On today’s Internet, sending and receiving data has already been paid for and what the ISPs that are resisting net neutrality are calling for is the ability to charge content providers a second time for access to their customers. An apt analogy would be the phone company attempting to take a percentage of any transaction that was done over the phone. The calling party has already paid for the phone call, the receiving party has either paid for the phone call (metered services or cell phone) or has paid for unlimited inbound calling through a subscription. However, the phone company sees that there is money being made by others transacting business over their phone lines and decides they deserve a cut.If telcos want to provide their own value added services, as they have long done, that’s one thing. If they want to charge somebody else for providing value added services on top of the telco’s carriage, that’s another thing entirely. Gaige also addresses consumer control, content delivery networks, differential utlization, and why net neutrality is a regulatory issue; well worth a read.Network neutrality is about control Gaige Paulsen, Monday, June 26 2006 @ 10:34 am EDT
-jsq
Honestly, I think that comparison is rather flawed.
A much better analogy would be that of a toll road. I don’t know how familiar you are with the Houston area, but I grew up down there, so I’ll use it as an example.
Traffic in Houston has reached the point of being miserable. If you attempt to get onto I-10 at any time of the day, you will hit traffic, construction delays, and stand a good chance of taking an hour longer to get anywhere you want to go than it should simply due to congestion.
Same goes for many of the highways in the area.
Fortunately, there is an alternative. Depending on which direction you’re travelling in, there are a few toll roads to choose from. You can get off I-10, hop onto the virtually empty toll road, pay a few quarters out of the pile of change in your console, and get where you’re going on time.
In other words, individuals who want even higher bandwidth to do things like stream HD video, use VOIP services, download gigabytes upon gigabytes of files, etc, can pay a little extra to do all of that without problem, while their neighbor who only uses the internet to check email and read a few blogs can opt for the cheaper option and never notice the difference.
Having lived in Austin (where TX 130 is building), Boston, and the S.F. Bay Area, I’m familiar with tolls of various kinds.
I also remember that UUNET started as a way to address the problem you describe, except for USENET news feeds. Especially in highly populated areas such as S.F. Bay, the old methods of connecting were no longer adequate. So UUNET started selling access to USENET, later adding a mail gateway to the ARPANET, and later becoming one of the two first geographically distributed commercial ISPs. Users thus had two ways to get USENET news (and later other Internet services): the old, inexpensive way, which was slow and ncreasingly hard to get, or the new, somewhat more expensive, fast, and much more reliable way.
Still later, UUNET started selling fractional T-1 connections, with different speeds for different prices. Anybody who wanted to pay the price could get the speed they wanted. This principle was backed by the other first commercial ISP, PSINet, and by the other commercial ISPs. This is where net neutrality as we know it came from.
In other words, what you’ve described is the status quo with net neutrality. Some people still have dialuips; others pay for DSL or cable Internet connections.
Breaching net neutrality would mean the incumbent telcos (who are the big ISPs now) could pick and choose which applications, which content, and which providers to charge which prices, and which of them which users could get. That’s not the same thing as charging by bandwidth. It’s double dipping and it’s control over content.
Then there’s the problem of breaching net neutrality possibly leading to abrogating peering among the big providers in favor of settlements, which is the way telcos have always preferred. That way lies volume charging, and great difficulty for new applications to develop.
-jsq