Yeah, I work for an ISP. I'm 100 percent in favor if net neutrality if you're talking about treating all similar sites equally, but realistically, some types of services, if they are to work at all (voip) need to get higher priority than others.Voip requires hardly any bandwidth at all, and anyway, how exactly will your ISP know if the packet is carrying voice or not? The only way you could 'prioritize' voip is by "blessing" certain applications, or whatever. Meanwhile things like, say, voice chat in video games, or audio/video chat in instant message programs would be prioritized.
If it ain't broke don't fix it. Too bad championing "net neutrality" is such a lost cause. It was dead about as soon as they gave it a name. In the beginning, things were good, but there's no going back. Same old story.What, are you talking about? Are you under the impression that net neutrality would have been kept in place if no one said anything? Because, uh, it was already going to go away. It's only because of the uproar that it stayed, and the FCC still supports it, but recently a judge has ruled that the FCC doesn't have the authority to require it. Up until now, Net Neutrality has existed due to FCC regulations.
What, the utter destruction of professional journalism didn't clue you in? Google is pretty damn evil. They ripped away the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of reporters, editors and designers, and the services they provided to the public, and replaced them with amateurs without the resources or desire to really get their reporting right.Are you out of your mind? Are you blaming Google for the entire internet? Or just the fact they made it searchable?
There's no difference for the ISP in terms of moving the bytes around, it costs them just as much in infrastructure. If I spend all day watching 1080p video on loop over the internet they have to put up with all that bandwidth. The only difference is that I have to pay for the content, the delivery of the content, and the pipe that delivers it rather than just the pipe and the content.Uh, I'm not sure exactly how you're disagreeing with me here. You can say that they are speeding up partner sites, or you can say they are slowing down everything except partner sites. The two statements are equivalent.
You can phrase it as your ISP giving you super-fast speeds to some places if you want but it's nonsense and exactly the PR trick the ISPs and content providers are trying to pull. It's actually just slowing down all the other traffic.
We have the technology. At least assuming you stick to certain standard protocols like SIP. If you decide to go off-piste and cram random bits of audio into packets on your own for some reason, well, that's your own fault.Yeah I was going to say, if you use Secure Sockets Layer, then you can't tell what protocol is being used. I don't know why anyone would want to leave their voice phone calls unencrypted.
Of course if you want to encrypt any of this you are pretty much boned.
The NYT article regarding conversations between Google and Verizon is mistaken. It fundamentally misunderstands our purpose. As we said in our earlier FCC filing, our goal is an Internet policy framework that ensures openness and accountability, and incorporates specific FCC authority, while maintaining investment and innovation. To suggest this is a business arrangement between our companies is entirely incorrect."PC World: Net Neutrality Deal May Not See Wider Support
A Google spokeswoman declined to comment on talks between her company and Verizon, but she denied a New York Times report that said the two companies were negotiating a tiered service agreement that would give Google services faster network speeds than some competitors. That story "is quite simply wrong," said Mistique Cano, manager of global communications and public affairs at Google. "We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open Internet."posted by krinklyfig at 9:54 AM on August 5, 2010
People close to the negotiations who were not authorized to speak publicly about them said an agreement could be reached as soon as next week.A couple of things strike me as interesting about this particular characterization of the sources of the story.
Google: "The NYT is quite simply wrong. We have not had any conversations with Verizon about paying for carriage of Google or YouTube traffic. We remain as committed as we always have been to an open Internet."posted by saulgoodman at 10:42 AM on August 5, 2010
We have been talking to Verizon for a long time about trying to get an agreement on the definition of what net neutrality is. We’re trying to find solutions that bridge between the hardcore net neutrality view and the telecom view. I want to be clear what we mean by net neutrality. What we mean is if you have one data type like video, you don’t discriminate against one person’s video in favor of another. But it’s OK to discriminate across different types, so you could prioritize voice over video, and there is general agreement with Verizon and Google on that issue. The issues of wireless vs. wireline get very messy because of the issue of Type I vs Type II regulation and that is an FCC issue not a Google issue.--Eric Schmidt
Not in the context of how the internet actually works at a macro level. Speeding up partner sites would require some sort of dedicated peering arrangement, which is already entirely possible and done by lots of people.I don't think you're thinking clearly about this at all. There's no difference between "speeding up partner sites" or "slowing down non-partner sites". The effect is exactly the same.
…about any of this. Be thankful, be very fucking thankful it's a couple of Stanford eggheads that are up to bat for the rest of us, and not some asshole MBAs / asshole lawyers / asshole entitled rich kids.No offense, but are you out of your mind? What makes you think these "Stanford egghead" CEOs are going to be any better then "Entitled rich kid MBA Lawyer" CEOs? The problem isn't the worldview of people negotiating, it's their incentives. Google CEOs get rewarded for making as much money for Google as possible. Not for keeping the Internet free and open. Except for extreme cases, almost everyone is going to go for the bucks, especially people who have been as successful as the people running Google.
I can't speak for Verizon since I work for a regional CLEC that has a rather contentious relationship with them, but I can tell you that we have absolutely 0 interest in policing traffic or selling preferential access to websites or anything like that. We just want to make the internet work as best we can for the customers we have given the amount of bandwidth we have available, and we're generally thinking in terms of prioritizing categories of traffic, not consumers or producers of content.Well, that's nice. It isn't yet known how much money there is in partnering agreements, so it might not even be worthwhile for a smaller ISP to make the technical investments needed. But if this works out for companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Comcast, the technology to do it will become more standardized and simple to implement. And despite what you think of your company, few of them are just going to leave free money on the table here.
Almost no one uses encrypted voip. Even embassies.No one uses Skype?
You're right that this isn't Google's fault, per se, but have you ever thought about the relatively quality of Associated Content and the Associated Press? Or Examiner.com and pretty much every mid-size city paper pre-web?Right... but what does any of that have to do with Google? They didn't create the web, they just indexed it. They happened to have a particularly good index. People make the argument that the Internet has ruined journalism. That's not an argument that I agree with. But however you feel about it, it's not Google's fault. Some people in the media just seem to want a single, sueable entity to blame.
In your definition, everyone here is an 'information middleman', but it's ludicrous to say that each of those examples provides similar quality service.
Really? How many sites are there in the world? Where are you going to check this list? How often? How do you update it?Sites like Alexa and quantcast have "lists" of millions of sites, with detailed traffic stats for all of them. In any event, you would only need to do this for the top few bandwidth sucking sites -- based on IP address, obviously, and everyone else would be be in the slow lane.
We have been talking to Verizon for a long time about trying to get an agreement on the definition of what net neutrality is. We’re trying to find solutions that bridge between the hardcore net neutrality view and the telecom view. I want to be clear what we mean by net neutrality.That's all well and good, but the question is who decided that these two massive, self-interested corporations get to sit around in secret and "agree" about the definition of net neutrality? It really should be an open process.
After taking great offense at reports that they were working on a net neutrality proposal, and unsuccessfully pretending to deny those reports, Google and Verizon have announced their net neutrality proposal.posted by alms at 6:57 AM on August 10, 2010
« Older The Rap Guide To Human Nature is an album explorin... | "...Connie set a land spe... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
Uh oh.
posted by public at 3:33 AM on August 5, 2010