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Abuses Show Need for Net Neutrality
The content of Americans' text messages and Web sites is no business of service providers.
Imagine if a telephone company tried to tell people what they could discuss over the company's lines. Not a cellphone company, mind you, but an old-fashioned, attached-to-the-wall, phone company.
It declares certain subjects off limits. Then it restricts whom people can call. Dial the wrong number, say someone on a competitor's lines, and static pollutes the connection.
No one would tolerate it. Yet that is exactly what telecommunications companies want to be able to do when it comes to cellphones and the Internet.
The Federal Communications Commission is considering rules that would discourage them. This is not a time for mere discouragement. If the FCC does not create so-called "net neutrality," Congress should.
The worry is that communications companies might play favorites, especially at a time when many of them provide not just the pipes for data but also the content. Suppose an Internet provider also dabbles in video or has a television arm. It might decide to slow connections to competing video companies to discourage customers from using them.
Likewise, companies could demand that some Web sites pay special fees for full-speed access to customers. If, say, Amazon.com does not pony up, the Internet provider could make surfing the bookseller's site unpleasant.
Already some telecommunications companies have abused the current system.
The FCC held a hearing recently into Comcast Corp.'s practice of throttling back some Internet data associated with multimedia. Some of its customers have been using BitTorrent technology to share files illegally, so the company shrank the pipe for everyone, even the ones using the software legally.
Comcast, which has customers in the Roanoke and New River valleys, should do what it can to discourage piracy and must take reasonable steps to manage its resources, but that does not include quietly and arbitrarily limiting some customers' services.
Another incident occurred last fall.
Verizon Wireless blocked Naral Pro-Choice America from sending text messages to cellphone users who signed up for them. Verizon wanted no messages about abortion or other controversial subjects on its network.
It ultimately backed down following public outcry, but it demonstrated that consumers cannot rely on the goodwill of telecommunications companies.
The FCC and Congress have the power to ensure companies provide the services they promise without any bias against legal content. If they do not act, Americans who use the Internet, cellphones and future communications technologies could face corporate censorship.
Copyright © 2008 The Roanoke Times
8 Comments so far
Show AllDon't expect net neutrality from the best FCC that money can buy, or from the best congress money can buy.
Look, it is not in the corporations' interests to allow net neutrality. How will they control the country is they can't control the message?
i suspect it will be very interesting to see how the rulers try to control internet content, and try they will: it is a huge threat to them, in ways which the people have just begun to explore.
If Comcast does not pay a price for its sneaky constriction of peer to peer networking, it will open the floodgates to all the large providers to create bandwidth formulas that cater to their particular corporate media portfolios.
It would be like putting a band-aid on a compound fracture.
Thats not to say that it wouldn't help but with all
of the spying, scanning and data mining thats going on,
will it make any real difference?
It's also a Financial decision. Comcast advertising Promised better service than they can Deliver with their current network.
Delivering the level of service they Promised will require them to upgrade the network and cost them so much it would impact executive Bonuses.
By cutting back service and Not Delivering what they promised, they save large chunks of Money.
IOW, they could be prosecuted under False Advertising Laws...
The BitTorrent restrictions by Comcast are the worst possible example to use as an argument for net neutrality.
Customers downloading dozens of movies per month via BitTorrent consume an unfair proportion of total bandwidth. In some cases, BitTorrent and similar P2P multimedia exchanges amount to more than half the total bandwidth of the system.
The legality or illegality of the downloads is irrelevant. It's really a question of a few users hogging a common resource, and some form of regulation of consumption is inevitable, unless somebody invents a system with infinite bandwidth.
Abusive subsystems like BitTorrent can be regulated without the sort of content-based restrictions that advocates of net neutrality fear, and defending bandwidth hogs only gives ammunition to the corporate bosses who want total control.
"Customers downloading dozens of movies per month via BitTorrent consume an unfair proportion of total bandwidth. "
Actually, the Movie & Television industries hope that Every One of us will begin downloading dozens of movies each month.
So long as they can work out a method of being sure we Pay.
So, that argument fails because it is what Corporations hope will become the Normal way of using the internet.
They don't mind "bandwidth hogs". They just don't like bandwidth hogs that don't belong to Them.
What they Want is a set of rules that allows them to favor Their Bandwidth Hog over Your Bandwidth Hog.