Say Anything Blog

Move_Zig posted on Net Neutrality earlier today and linked to this article from The Nation:

And so, unless there’s some effective opposition, the several-headed vendor that now sells us nearly all our movies, TV, radio, magazines, books, music and web services will soon be selling us our daily papers, too--for the major dailies have, collectively, been lobbying energetically for that big waiver, which stands to make their owners even richer (an expectation that has no doubt had a sweetening effect on coverage of the Bush Administration). Thus the largest US newspaper conglomerates--the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gannett, Knight-Ridder and the Tribune Co.--will soon be formal partners with, say, GE, Murdoch, Disney and/or AT&T; and then the lesser nationwide chains (and the last few independents) will be ingested, too, going the way of most US radio stations. America’s cities could turn into informational “company towns,” with one behemoth owning all the local print organs--daily paper(s), alternative weekly, city magazine--as well as the TV and radio stations, the multiplexes and the cable system. (Recently a federal appeals court told the FCC to drop its rule preventing any one company from serving more than 30 percent of US cable subscribers; and in December, the Supreme Court refused to hear the case.) While such a setup may make economic sense, as anticompetitive arrangements tend to do, it has no place in a democracy, where the people have to know more than their masters want to tell them.

So let’s look at the single biggest beef that prompted the Net Neutrality movement in more detail. 

This article lays out the problems that cable customers are having with their data downloads:

Markey filed a bill along with U.S. Rep. Charles Pickering (R- Miss.) in support of Net neutrality, the idea that network providers shouldn’t discriminate against Web sites or various types of traffic. The FCC is investigating complaints that Comcast Corp. has interfered with peer-to-peer traffic associated with file-sharing sites…

“Respect for the free flow of information was bred into our country from its founding,” said Commissioner Jonathan S. Adelstein. “We must preserve the open and neutral character of the Internet, which has been its hallmark from the very beginning. It is clear consumers don’t want the Internet to be a another version of old media dominated by a number of giants.”

Gilles BianRosa, CEO of Vuze Inc., a video service that uses peer-to-peer technology, said that while his company competes with Comcast in the delivery of content, the latter company holds an unfair advantage. “What we have here is a horse race, and Comcast owns the racetrack,” he said. “I agree the market should decide which services win ... but there is no market without basic ground rules and transparency. ... We believe corporate assurances of good faith are not enough.”…

“This hearing is not about technical details of managing networks; it’s about the future of online TV and the Internet,” Ammori said. “By targeting P2P, Comcast is disrupting investment and innovation in its online competition.”…

“Comcast does not block any Web site, application or protocol, including P2P. Period,” he said. He said that the company “manages” protocols, such as P2P, during limited periods of heavy traffic; does so in limited geographic areas; only manages uploads, not downloads; and delays, but does not block requests for uploads.

Comcast isn’t some standalone company.  It is part of a mega-corporate holding company with AT&T:

Comcast was first incorporated in the state of Pennsylvania in 1969. On November 18, 2002, Comcast and AT&T Broadband combined to form the new Comcast Corporation.

Now, let’s put this in perspective.  What if DirecTV was owned by Viacom and Viacom decided that it wanted to promote its networks on its own system.  In order to do that, they refused to carry HD Feeds of other networks.  Therefore, those other networks were of inferior quality.  And they went one step further, they purposely degraded the signal of their competitors.  Suddenly viewership for CBS and CBS News increased while NBC, ABC and so on suffered because CBS was higher quality.

That is what Comcast is doing.  They are effectively degrading peer to peer communications and other communications on their network so that they free up the bandwidth for their own multimedia services.  They are pushing their content onto consumers by ensuring that their content is of higher quality than the competition.

The idea of net neutrality is that of packet neutrality.  Packets from one source get treated the same as other packets.  Peer to peer packets get treated the same as packets intended for Amazon or Comcast or E-Bay or Sayanythingblog.com.  Net neutrality prevents ISPs from degrading services for sites or protocol in favor of their preferred protocols.

Considering that AOL-Time Warner is one of the largest cable internet providers, how would you like it if AOL-TW degraded users’ connections when they tried to access content from Viacom and vice versa?  Do you want AOL-Time Warner or Comcast or any other ISP discriminating against packets that they don’t like?

Move_Zig was really off the mark to compare this to the Fairness Doctrine or Hillary’s previous remarks.