Which business models will the FCC ban on the Internet?
The FCC’s Chief Technologist Jon Peha says that the FCC doesn’t know how the NPRM should be defined and they are seeking answers. This may help explain why these business models are critical to innovation.
Figure 1: Which “enhanced” Internet models will the FCC NPRM prohibit?
Categories: Policy
None of the models you mention.
In your diagram, you are saying that Net Neutrality is about the relationship between Content Application Service Providers and the Broadband Provider(ISP).
Technically, Net Neutrality rules are here to protect the responsibility the Broadband Provider has toward the “End Users”.
As you can see from your diagram, in areas where there is a single viable ISP, end users are being “chokepointed” by the ISP to reach the “Internet”. Net Neutrality would prevent ISPs from making choices for the end user about what applications the end users can use, or which “Content Application Service” the “End User” wants to reach, regardless if there is a peering agreement between the ISP and the CAS.
Here is an example:
Google and Microsoft Bing both wants to get search market share. Let’s say the ISP in this case is comcast. Microsoft can’t go to Comcast and say, “Hey, I will pay you for peering(Option 3 in your diagram), so that you will slow down the end users connection to Google”. If Google didn’t want to pay Comcast the fee for the paid peering model(Option 3), then inherently, the ISP is using its paid model to direct end users toward Bing. It is as simple as that.
Now, consider the game theory. If both Google and Bing paid for the prefered peering model, neither will get a relative speed up. If neither paid for the peering model, same thing would occur. But the ISP wants to take advantage of the human weakness, and charge both while not delivering any relative enhancement. That’s the true business model.
The Net Neutrality wants a clear choice for the end users to get the applications they want to use, and take the ISP’s paid preferential choice away. That’s the point. If the users paid for a 5mbps connection, the ISP would deliver 5mbps to any Application provider, regardless if the peering agreement is favorable or not.
The choice belongs to the end points, not the damn middlemen.
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2009/10/endortest.shtm
George, I do believe you and J.James have the intelligence to understand what I talked about. Give it a few months, you and Justin will be required by law to disclose any tangible or intangible payments you received from DigitalSociety to spread anti-Net Neturality messages.
That would affect the bloggosphere quite a bit going forward. Actually it probably would kill the majority of professional bloggers. We will see.
TS, stop being so obtuse.
Justin James has zero relationship to Digital Society nor has he reviewed or even linked to any content there. I don’t even know why you’re dragging his name into this.
I work for Digital Society and it’s been clearly disclosed here http://www.formortals.com/contributors/ for a while. I am also linking to my own article so it’s pretty obvious I’m associated with them. I don’t need to disclose that I have financial relationships with myself.
@TS
“Net Neutrality would prevent ISPs from making choices for the end user about what applications the end users can use, or which “Content Application Service” the “End User” wants to reach, regardless if there is a peering agreement between the ISP and the CAS.”
You clearly haven’t a clue what you are talking about and you clearly haven’t even read any of the proposed regulation or legislation. Nobody is against rules that would stop censorship, but that is not where the proposed regulation and legislation ends. The problem is that Net Neutrality regulation as it is currently drafted by the FCC is vague and open ended and it appears to ban many types of valuable services offered by ISPs to content providers that I mentioned in my article which I linked to.
If you are interested in my full list of disclosures, I maintain it here:
http://www.thesophist.com/index.php?id=75
To summarize it, though, the only profit or gain I have ever made in relation to my writing on this particular site is that a magazine asked me to write an article for them based on seeing something I wrote here.
I should update my contributor entry on this site to point to that page. Last week, I pointed the TechRepublic folks to that page too, so they can more easily update their little bio of me on each of their pages.
J.Ja
“You clearly haven’t a clue what you are talking about”
Ouch. Let’s see, that’s coming from someone who argues:
1. Longer duty cycle is a better connection.
2. CDN is an enhanced delivery model when it is just a proximity optimization.
3. That Jitter is the problem when the real problem is oversubscription and raw throughput.(A network engineer should have known that)
Look, I think I will stop now. You don’t refute the fact that you are paid by Digital Society to write those articles, and Digital Society is sponsored by the telecoms. So your opinion is biased, and non-authentic.
In the end, you fight for telecom’s attempt to preserve old way of unfair business practices. Net neutrality proponents fight for the common sense ethics and fairness. You think net neutrality is about paid peering agreements. The real battle is about end users’ freedom to choose whatever application they want to run without artificial traffic shaping and preferential treatment.
Every time I bring up a question you couldn’t answer, you come up with another article to pump the same crap, only at a different angle.
Answer those questions first before you want people to believe you know what you are talking about alright?
1. Bits are the same. Why you think ISPs should have the power to prioritize based on their interpretation of what the bits represent?
2. Both customers ordered a dinner at a restaurant. Do you think it is ethical for the waiter to charge an extra $5 for prioritized service at the expense of a previous customer who ordered first, assuming that the number of chefs in the kitchen remains the same? Do you think it is ethical to give priority to a customer who ordered a higher priced dish?
3. AT&T allows Skype and Vonage on the iPhone, yet rejects Google Voice. The whole net neutrality thing was kicked into high gear because of that. Explain the logicality of that rejection.
You are right, I don’t know what I am talking about. Until you give satisfactory answers to those 3 questions, you are even more clueless than I thought.
@TS
You admit CDN is an enhanced delivery model. Net Neutrality regulation from the FCC bans prioritized OR *ENHANCED* business models.
Statements like “That Jitter is the problem when the real problem is oversubscription and raw throughput” verify that you haven’t a clue what you’re talking about.
A. Over-subscription is how ALL networks are built. You have to be delusional to think otherwise.
B. Jitter is a product of packet switching and can occur even when there is no over-subscription and can occur during low traffic states. This is due to the fact that many applications (any file transfer operation) are designed to exceed the network capacity hundreds of times per second.
Don’t need to rehash why you’re so wrong on your second set of questions when I can link to this.
http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/11/debunking-the-myth-that-prioritized-networks-are-harmful/
And again, AT&T never rejected Google Voice. AT&T and Apple have both stated that Apple rejected the Google Voice *APPLICATION*. Note that Google Voice itself was never blocked and it functioned on the iPhone and other smart phones the entire time.
End thread.
TS, based on your history of abusive posts in which you troll endlessly, your subsequent comments in this thread have been and will be classified as spam. You get a few chances to have your say, but there’s a limit to the amount of trolling I’m going to allow on here.
Well, looking back in a few years, you will realize that it is better to have someone who argues with you rather than someone who kisses your ass.
Kicking someone off, or limiting someone’s freedom of speech isn’t the path to victory.
Good luck.
Is digitalsociety paid by any members of big telco/cable?
Your “article” seems more like a pitch in support of their best interests. In the end, I worry the customers will lose.
@ST
We have plenty of people on here who disagree with us or flat out call us wrong, and we have a record of posting everyone’s comment short of something vulgar. TS has a particular history of trolling on this site, and there’s only so much we can tolerate. TS has had his say on this subject, but he’s not going to get to troll on for 10 threads.
@Mike H.
Mike, see our public disclosures. It’s been up for a long time, and I’m not going to repeat it here over and over again. We don’t hide our funding like Free Press which lists the majority of their major donations as “person”.
Now instead of attacking our funding, why don’t you explain your positions on which of these business models you would ban if any. Be courageous and take a stance rather than just lashing out with mindless rhetoric.
If anything, your blind following of Net Neutrality is going to harm consumers by killing off Paid Peering http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/11/fcc-nprm-ban-on-paid-peering-harms-new-innovators/ and forcing smaller content providers to pay more money for lousier Transit bandwidth.