isen.blog

Here's a "spin." The voice of the Network Neutrality Guy cracks like a 14 year old boy in hormonally-driven rebellion. This contrasts with the announcer's voice, which sounds adult and authoritative. Such subliminal messages show real professional manipulation!

Here's a Lie. "We keep getting more choices." Yeah, right. That's why the CLEC sector fell flat on its face in 2001. And now, with the merging of old-AT&T and MCI, we have fewer choices yet.

Here's a Spin-Lie. "Pretty soon homes will be connected to fiber optics." Of the telco sponsors of this video, only BellSouth is building FTTH, and now that its merging with AT&T these plans are in doubt.
 

The "Net Neutrality" argument is really all about who will fund the build-out of truly high speed connections to peoples' homes--not about whose content will be available and whose won't.

By "really high speed" we mean "capable of delivering multiple streams of video at the same time in such a quality that they look good on an HDTV set." That's called IPTV, and nobody's broadband service is really capable of that today.

As with all network upgrades in the past, such as universal telephone service or rural electrifictation or the interstate highway system, the public has a few choices about how to accomplish this "universal broadbandification", if you will. First, they could under fund the whole thing out of the public coffers (as with the interstates) or they could mandate public contribution to universal service funds (as with telephone universal service) or they could try a combination of the two (as with rural electrification).

Unfortunately, in this era of "personal responsibility" and domination of the "corporate profit factor", the public has been convinced that such programs are just this side of Stalinism and to undertake such would signal the crumbling of Western Democracy as we know it. (Sigh!) So, public funding of universal broadbandification is probably out.

That leaves a second alternative: providing a market economy in which physical network operators can participate, whereby they can boost revenues to pay for these great new broadband networks, up to and including FTTH. This can only mean participating in the revenues generated by the content that pass through (i.e., Depend) on those networks.

Here is where the Googles and all the other proponents of "Net Neutrality" get their panties in a wad. You see, they don't want to give up their "we keep all the profits" business model. Yet, they covet the network upgrades. They really would have the consumer pay for the FTTH completely, something that all but the affluent in our society really could afford.

The "Net Neutrality" crowd misleads the public with its rhetoric. It claims that the network operators will block their content if they don't pay. What kind of morons do they think we are? Of course the network operators won't block their content; consumers want it and equate it with the services they buy. It will always be available, because that's the paradigm that's been established.

Part and parcel of that paradigm, too, is "best effort" delivery of internet traffic to the end user. That is, all the internet content that comes down the pipe is subject to the same rules for forwarding and routing. But, internet architects will readily admit that such "best effort" designs simply won't work for entertainment-quality video suitable for that desirable HDTV experience. New designs that provide preference for that traffic have to be put in place in addition to the aforementioned broadband pipes of much greater capacity.

Preferential traffic treatment, though, connotes tiers in service level. That is, it costs more to give traffic differential treatment. Fairness tells us that traffic needs to carry a "better than best effort" price tag. And, here is where the Net Neutrality crowd balks. They simply don't want to pay for their content to have a great experience by the consumer. They'd have us continue to "lean forward" rather than "lean back" when we watch their videos. That may be fine in the dorm room, but not in the living room.

And BTW, what the NN guys don't say is that if they don't pay for the special treatment, all their stuff will continue to be available at best effort. They just want to have their cake and eat it, too. If they really wanted to contribute to a meaningful dialogue about broadband in our society, then they'd quit lobbying Congress with the misleading cries for "Net Neutrality" and instead come to the table for mature negotiations about an economic model that fairly remunerates all participants in the content delivery value chain: content producer (studio), content aggregator (Google, etc.), and content deliverer (network operator). Only in this way will we achieve our societal goal of widespread, entertainment-grade broadband--short of outright public funding, that is.

As a side note, "Anonymous" is a little right and a little wrong in his assertion about FTTH. First of all, he's right in that it'll take a long time to get FTTH even in densely populated urban areas. But, he's wrong about BellSouth, which is (and has for the past decade) deploying FTTC, with an "Optical Network Unit" at the curb and no more than the last 500 feet traditional copper wires. Verizon is the telco that has undertaken an FTTH program that is now in its infancy.
 

I got a kick out of the fact that they try to make Canada be the poster boy for bad network ideas. Even though the courts slapped that down rather quickly. When did we become the new Red Menace?
 

Albert Whited said...
The "Net Neutrality" argument is really all about who will fund the build-out of truly high speed connections to peoples' homes--not about whose content will be available and whose won't.

What a surprise. A BellSouth guy is on here to repeat all the claims of the "underground" cartoon.
 

Am I missing something here? It seems to me that the answer to all the (spurious) claims of "we have to charge based on content so we can afford these upgrades" is simply to charge by the gigabyte. Download more and you pay more, no matter what the actual content is. It's how it works here in NZ, and although unlimited connections are preferable, both are preferable to a lack of net neutrality.