If the internet were as fragile as the neutrality-activists thought, it would have never gotten where it is today. Compuserve, Prodigy, and AOL would have won.

And the neut-advocates very worst nightmare scenarios -- rampant blocking and throttling by the last-mile incumbents -- would quickly provoke a necessary next-step emergence of new competitors and route-around technologies.

That is, if the nightmare scenarios ever happened. Which they won't, because even in a local duopoly, being known as the option which gives you less of the internet will be profit-destroying.

The alternative neut-advocates offer -- the FCC riding in as a white knight with new rules to save us -- is a dangerous child's fantasy. Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC -- just like the Google-Verizon talks, hosted by the FCC!

Any rulemaking by the feds will generate stacks of hard-to-interpret regulations that inconvenience everyone -- but hinder novel services and upstarts that are hard-to-classify the most, so the giant incumbents won't mind them so much.

That is, neutrality rules would freeze into slow-changing, confusingly-enforced law a currently-fashionable, romanticized notion of the internet that manages to make big companies and the political establishment comfortable.

It only 'saves' the internet in the same way you could 'save' a wild animal by putting it in a cage. Don't let the FCC neuter my internet!

The internet providers fucked up the internet already, you just don't realize it. Neither does a lot of people here, cheering about "the cloud". Instead we could live in a p2p wonderland, where each node would be responsible for it's own data. It would be much more efficient money and energy-wise, and it would totally brush the privacy concerns away. What makes it impossible ? Asymmetric bandwidth rates which are 10 times greater for download than for upload.

Moreover, as someone stated elsewhere, it is preferable to have no rules but internet providers that fear sanctions would they discriminate traffic, than to have rules that explicitly allow discrimination.

What does this mean? How would I, for instance, retrieve a Wikipedia page?

We find this principle to be self evident, that all internet traffic is to be treated as equal.

That is it. No complex case law, no little print, no arcane law language.

"Any rulemaking by the feds will involve backroom deals between companies large enough to send lawyers to DC "

Are you saying that you are scared of big companies, therefore what we should do is surrender and let, possibly one of the most defining aspect of the internet, be done with by the big guys, who have suitcases and suits?

You might say you are being pragmatic and that is the reality, but only if the "bunch of people" keep silent and let the big guys get on without noise, you know, a bit like the "bunch of people" did with the War in Iraq. The corporations might have the money, but the "bunch of people" still have the political system and the power to set the debate. No politician would like to loose his job, and if some do then they will think twice in face of vocal public pressure.

As for your other points they are a matter of speculation. I would need to employ my imagination. I am sure there are many smart people on here who might be able to get around the internet prioritization with some code, who have all sort of programming abilities to overcome any technology obstacle. Maybe even if such tiered system would come to pass, some clever guy would come with some code which would make the ISP think that a certain site should be prioritized. The vast majority of people however might perhaps have to live with the reality of the way things are. In China for example, some people might use route-around technologies, but, the vast majority live with a censored internet.

As for AOL and all the rest, the internet, at least in popularity, is hardly even 20 years old, if we take the year that it took off to be 1995 when people started hearing about it in vast numbers. So AOL is really a baby learning how to crawl in the grand scheme of things. Only very recently, if not only now, has the internet become a serious medium with vast power of empowerment and, we must assume, vast powers of control.

So you can hardly compare the past to the future. You hardly can say well even if we live in a dictatorship someone will still write a pamphlet although he might be imprisoned for it.

You can argue about the substance of the matter. Dismissing the entire debate as something childish however and entirely misguided without providing any reasons but rhetoric is hardly reasonable.

I might be wrong, I might be very wrong, but personally I think we should fight and if in the end we lose, then we do so with dignity, not in 40 years or so tell our children of that thing called the internet and then feel sad of how all the baddies turned it into a one way communication platform.

That wording is neither enactable by any federal body, nor enforceable by federal prosecutors, without a ton more detail.

And, its simpleminded application would prohibit services I'd actually like to buy. I would prefer an ISP which privileged web browsing and VOIP over BitTorrent and bulk email/video/software downloads. I would like it if traffic that attempts to compromise my privacy or exploit unpatched software on my home network was blocked by default.

In fact, I run a traffic-shaping router/firewall for these and other purposes, including preferencing my own traffic over that of neighbors and visitors who use my guest wifi node. Would that make me a net-neutrality-scofflaw? Oh, I hope so.

I have the technical acumen to do this myself, but if my ISP wants to implement similar policies the next few hops up, that also provides me with positive value. And of course most customers can't set this up for themselves, so they can only get positive value from having an expert -- like their ISP -- enact upstream preferencing and blocking for them.

Why make providing a service some people will prefer a federal crime?

We've made it almost 20 years without FCC rules to protect the internet. The internet is faster and freer each year, without any help from the FCC. (Thankfully, the FCC can keep busy fining broadcasters for dirty words.)

It is not true that "we must assume... vast powers of control" are about to spring some trap. We can wait until actual harms are demonstrated -- if ever. We can wait even further, until such harms persist after enough time for competitors to adapt, before freezing into federal law starry-eyed notions of how the network should work.

Network neutrality regulations: YAGNI.

I agree that things are too complex for a one line law. At the end of the pipe, consumers should be given the bandwidth they pay for regardless of the data type/port. And traffic should be treated equally upstream.

The majority of people in the U.S. are getting a very poor deal on "broadband" compared to a number of other nations.

Much good came from the breakup of AT&T way back when. But through corrupt regulators the cancer has grown back.

We've got many problems. Some are the result of our rights being sold off. The U.S. public lost a huge chunk of the UHF t.v. spectrum with the digital change over. We could have had a bunch of bandwidth for free community based networking. But almost all of it has gone to the major players.

If you don't think the wprocess was corrupted, look at the lack of diversity in ownership (and lack of local ownership) of broadcast stations. Besides functioning as leeches to suck money out of local economies, the narrowing of diversity in the selecting/gathering of music and news is very unhealthy. It's gone past having large players like Clear Channel owning huge numbers of stations. Now it's venture capital groups. The role of broadcasters as trustees of the public interest (and each broadcaster has a LOCAL public to serve) is not filled well.

Entry of specifics into statute is not helpful - a lot of work was needed to alter laws (in UK) which included prescription of snail-mailing various forms or information so that the laws could be used with fax, then with email.

Hence, the specific protocol should not be used to limit only as an example (admittedly this was probably your thinking too) - "there shall be no prejudice held against network traffic sent using end-to-end encryption regardless of origin except in the following cases ..." or some such. The specific encryption can be mentioned in headers or in associated rules or in a definitions section.

It is not the prosecution who would enforce it. It is civil law. I would take the ISP to court if they discriminate against me, not the prosecution.

Art. 10 of the European Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms is one line also. It states:

"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. this right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers."

That is very much enforceable. You can take the government to court if they do not uphold this "romantic, childlike, wishcraft-dominated thinking"

Of course, the law being the law, there will be exceptions. These exceptions however in our common law system are created on a case by case basis when the facts are so as to merit an exception. Not to mention that freedom of speech is a much bigger area than the simple matter of internet traffic. Yet, we all know where we stand in regards to what we can say.

"I would prefer an ISP which privileged web browsing and VOIP over BitTorrent and bulk email/video/software downloads." - That is a debate to be had. I would not want web browsing to be preferred over e-mail, which can be web browsing, video, or software or even BitTorrent though I do not use it.

You can not however argue, just because you preferred it, by rhetorically asking "Why make providing a service some people will prefer a federal crime?" I am sure some people would prefer contracting a serial killer, stealing rather than working, or more close to home, smoking weed to be legal.

"We've made it almost 20 years without FCC rules to protect the internet."

My point earlier was that the internet was in its infancy. There were spots to be filled, small ventures to rise to big corporations, little guys to be made giants, the whole thing was very new and chaotic, everyone fighting to get a piece of the pie. Now the ISPs are sort of established, have their market shares, and perhaps just want to secure themselves. So too with big corporations. Sure they can be thrown out easier than in the real world, but the internet reflects the real world much more today than in the past 20 years.

In my personal opinion, the FCC would not be involved in the matter. The law would give rights to citizens. The internet is not like the telly where a few people control what we see, the internet is like the streets and just as I can sue my local council if I had an accident due to their negligence, so too I should be able to sue the ISP if they discriminate against my traffic.

"It is not true that "we must assume... vast powers of control" are about to spring some trap. We can wait until actual harms are demonstrated -- if ever. We can wait even further, until such harms persist after enough time "

First, they came for the communists...

Healthy scepticism is good. I think that currently we all know the telecos want to prioritise traffic to make a lot of profit for themselves, we also know that this would create a tiered system of haves and have nots. We know that a level playing field is better. We know that traffic prioritisation would only benefit the telecos and big companies and screw the little guys. I would rather such things did not happen in the first place and the competition focused on improving the infrastructure and innovation, rather than bang their heads against iron doors.

What about botnets? worms? DOS attacks?

"All user requested internet traffic is to be treated as equal"

I do not know much about servers, but as I understand it Google runs a server and they doing so I do not think affects the traffic of my website. If however Google running a server would mean that my website would run more slowly, except for perhaps the distinction that it adds real capacity, I do not see how that is more different than paying the ISP to prioritize your traffic. Though I might need some enlightening.

Also, Google has its own fiber which carries only Google packets. Not exactly net neutral there. And Google's control over site ranking in search results affects traffic prioritization on just as large and deterministic a scale as AT&T's hypothetical packet ranking.

The issue is way more complicated than people realize.

In a networked economy sometimes coordination between different companies is deeper than two offices of the same company. Why should a company be allowed to have dedicated lines between its own arms, and not to important partners?

Once you agree that total equality isn't actually possibly, we are now arguing about exactly which non-neutral policy to apply. Very similar to the anecdotal story about Winston Churchill that ends with "Now we are haggling about the price."

That's all 'net neutrality' means, or should mean.

A broadband Internet access service provider would be prohibited from preventing users of its broadband Internet access service from--

(1) sending and receiving lawful content of their choice;

(2) running lawful applications and using lawful services of their choice; and

(3) connecting their choice of legal devices that do not harm the network or service, facilitate theft of service, or harm other users of the service

Discriminating against torrent traffic can be like racial profiling. A protocol is not an intent.

If you do want profiling, perhaps consumers running Windows should pay a higher fees and be given less bandwidth since those customers have higher support costs and have the machines most used for DDOS attacks, sending spam/scam and other foul behavior.

Windows machines harm the network. If a customer wishes to configure his router to share the bandwidth he's paid for, that's not theft of service. (Also read the F.C.C. notices included with U.S. routers - they don't own spectrum)

http://www.laquadrature.net/acta

"Free Press is concerned that Google's deal with Verizon to secure special internet privileges on its broadband will lead to other internet providers brokering deals with major companies. First Verizon and Google strike a deal, then AT&T and Microsoft have a deal ... here comes Comcast who cuts a deal with Yahoo"

There was no "deal". It is only proposal. And it would grant no special privileges to either party.

That being said, it is good people are beginning to reorganize in favor of net neutrality and hopefully will make their views known to their Congresspeople.

I actually don't think it's unfair to call the proposal a deal, since Google themselves describe it as a compromise. This is very much a deal between Google and Verizon over what position they could jointly support. The tricky thing is that this is a political deal, not a formal business deal, which is what you typically expect a "deal" between two companies to mean. The person you've quoted, Craig Aaron, may actually recognize the distinction (e.g., the first sentence is about the political deal, the second about subsequent business deals), but using the same word for two distinct meanings can easily give the opposite impression.

Regardless, this sentence is entirely false.

But it can turn on you in an instant, as we're seeing with Google's "Don't be evil" slogan.

As far as I can tell Google are trying something nuanced, to impose some rules, where before we had an uneasy Mexican standoff. And they are getting crucified for it.

If all of us care about the Internet and are appalled at this proposal then for this type of protesting/campaigning to be effective it needs to be better sold(marketed) to the majority. More so then 50 to 100 people standing outside Google protesting.

Back in the days of Alta Vista, Google offered better search. Today, search is a solved problem and easy for many companies to clone. I'd estimate that 80% of internet users would fail to distinguish between the search quality of Google search and a pagerank-based index of the top 20 websites (which could be hosted on a laptop).

This is why Google attempted to innovate via legislation by trying to get net neutrality passed to prevent its competitors from taking market share via deals that shared profits with ISPs.

Google has failed to stop it, so it must now engage in its own dealmaking to block its competitors from "taking" search traffic (and ad revenue) via non-neutrality ISP deals.

The biggest threat to Google would be a deal between Apple or Microsoft and Comcast or Verizon.

Google's deal with Verizon is an attempt to scuttle any such deal. I'm surprised Verizon found a win in it, but who knows. We will soon see what sort of QoS Verizon gives FaceTime on iPhone 4.

Whether you think of them as evil or not, corporations rarely act out of one motivation. There are usually many many desires that get advanced or thwarted in the course of a particular act.

A company may buy a startup out of a desire for the tech or team, to work out the bugs its M&A pipeline on a relatively unimportant acquisition, to encourage other startups to focus on the acquirer's platform, to deny a competitor use of the tech or team, and to give a department within the parent a unsubtle hint that they are not doing their jobs. All at once.

Could Apple, Microsoft, Comcast, or Verizon create an advertising platform as functional as Google Adwords?

That is where the money comes from. It is in Verizon's best interest to replace all Adwords advertisements with content from it's own ad network, and same with Comcast.

Cable television replaces nationally broadcasted commercials with local versions. Why couldn't last-mile ISPs do this as well?

Also, this is so US-centric. Any other country that adopts a net neutrality policy will have an advantage over the United States, not a disadvantage.

I agree with your take on the strategy for last mile ISPs.

But I don't see how it amounts to much of an advantage or disadvantage.

That is no point at all. Users are not familiar enough with the problem space to be able to care (or not).

Obviously, if something arcane like QoS became a problem for users, then an ISP would have a more difficult cost/benefit decision to make about how neutral it wished to be.

I suppose it does, but for the longest time I understood the two sides of the issue, but I didn't know which was pro-net neutrality, and which was anti-net neutrality. Internet freedom is my idea of a better term (although ISPs wouldn't have the freedom to filter/prioritize their traffic, so my term has problems, too)

"...we urge you to take your views directly to your Senators and Representatives in Washington."

(http://googlepublicpolicy.blogspot.com/2010/08/facts-about-o...)

I felt like they were saying, "Help us out here folks. It was hard enough to get to this watered down policy."

Again, I'm not defending their end proposal, but we do need to spend equal energy presenting our case our representatives as we to Google (when it comes to policy).

When the bailout was up for a vote, there was a massive letter-writing campaign, and it was defeated. The first time. Then we got distracted, it came up for a vote again, and it passed. Imagine what we could accomplish if all of the American populace was able to divert as much attention to influencing Washington as a professional lobbyist is. In other words, what if we all wrote our senators all day long instead of playing Farmville all day long?

Come to think of it, that might be an interesting hack. "Congressville". Instead of managing a virtual farm, you manage a virtual legislature by planting, growing and harvesting legislature. And you "play" with real letters to your real representatives.

Is the rate of growth of wireless bandwidth so much higher than the rate of growth of fiber bandwidth that we will switch to a very wireless centric internet?? Or will we use fiber till the wifi router in the future?

That said I'd be slightly tempted to go protest outside Google's Santa Monica office (the one near me).

No they're not.

The #1 threat to ISPs is for their network to be commoditized-- there's little profit in dumb pipes.

ISPs see a way out. They see billions of dollars of commerce happening on their networks and they want a cut.

But that might not be what's good for society. Startups, at least, want dumb pipes, i.e. equal access to customers without a shakedown by last-mile network owners.

No they can't.

Note I wrote "can be", not "will be." This looks like a slippery slope for fair use and content independence.Perhaps the EU and/or other big groups outside Washington/USA can stop the telcos/ISPs.

You assert your opinion without giving an explanation and without taking into account things will change (for good or bad.)

No they didn't make any agreement. They made a proposal. Google has been advocating pure net neutrality on landline and wireless for the last 10 years. They've been rejected by the FCC, the telcos and the governement. After 10 years of getting nowhere, they are trying to get net neutrality on landline at least because right now there are no laws at all protecting net neutrality, wireless or not. No one has pushed as hard as Google for pure net neutrality, but after 10 years, Google needed to get real and face reality, no laws are going to get passed on pure/absolute net neutraliy, so they went for this proposal instead. Call them evil if you want...

> You assert your opinion without giving an explanation

So do you.

  >> they made a mutually beneficial agreement
  > No they didn't make any agreement.

The context is very relevant: Verizon and Google are selling android phones at an unprecedented scale (save iPhones.) Google was the #1 lobbyist of Net Neutrality and Verizon is the second largest telco, lobbying against. Googles "facts" press release was signed by a former MCI attorney (Verizon subsidiary.)

I seriously doubt the telcos will stop at this. Just one example, why would Google care to defend against P2P throttling? (Say, P2P video like Skype calls, the same kind of competitor they are already throttling or blocking.)

In what way not having net neutrality on wireless is beneficial to Google?

> why would Google care to defend against P2P throttling?

They do care on landline, on wireless there is not much they can do. They tried hard for the last 10 years but failed as nobody supported them (FCC, telcos and gov). So they are trying to at least get net neutrality on landline. Again, after ten years of battling for net neutrality, what do we have today? Nothing, not a single law to defend it. Google realized that it was not going to happen after lobying for it for years, so they at least are trying to get it on landline while putting wireless on hold (temporarily as the proposal says).

What have you done to defend net neutrality?

- Apple releases iWeb, a google search clone, signs deal with Verizon to make iWeb the mandatory search engine for all Verizon ISP users.

- Apple sells 25M Verizon 4G iPads for $99 each with 2 year service contract ($20 per month)

- Apple announces record profits from search advertising.

* Google's core search business is easily cloned in 2 years. How to get market share? A deal with large ISPs. Most of Google's profits come from search advertising, and Apple now has a cutting edge mobile ad platform which is stronger than Google's. It's time to act. Search is not hard anymore.

Suppose Apple did this deal with Verizon and possibly Comcast. Google's share of search advertising would fall significantly.

Google's floundering with Android (try a device before you dispute this) has emboldened Apple to act fast to hit Google where it hurts, right in the core search business. As Apple moves to the cloud and Google builds devices, Apple and Google are converging rapidly into competitors.

google.com?q=snookie => bing.com?q=snookie

Bing could offer the ISP a percentage of ad revenue, and if users didn't complain then (without net neutrality) there'd be nothing to stop it.

(I'd guess that most HN users wouldn't be able to tell the difference between Google and Bing results if the styling were identical and they didn't notice the domain name)

And even the hoi polloi loves themselves their 'Google'; it wouldn't take much to generate a consumer backlash against such a practice.

To the extent an ISP's heavy promotion or nudging might encourage people to try another search engine they might like as much or more than Google, that's a good thing. We need more search competition; a new entrant ought to be able to buy enough attention to get a fair look.

The example I used may be contrived, however I think the essence is true that an ISP could meddle with Google's traffic and send search traffic to a competitor.

The variety of opinions and reasonings for the positions that people take in this debate are beyond me. Completely freakin beyond me.

Of course I'd prefer not to have it, and I'd probably pay my ISP extra for a "neutral" net access plan, but I don't have a problem with ISPs trying creative packaging/pricing by capturing revenue via non-neutral business deals.

Maybe Comcast would offer 50GB for $30/month if it was getting 30% of the ad revenue Google gets from consumer broadband ad clicks.

Thought experiment: How much would you have to be paid to give up your right to vote for one year? How much to give up your ability to use Google search?

But I don't want those services to be tiered. It enables Google and Verizon to negotiate for that streaming video/audio/voice space, if they decide it's not part of the "public internet".

It could become very ugly, and net neutrality is definitely the simplest and cleanest approach, but there might be a win for consumers with less neutrality too.

Most of GOOG's profits come from simple search ads, and search is not protected by any secret sauce or insurmountable barriers to entry, which is why Google tried to innovate via legislation with its net neutrality push.

Doesn't this mean you think it is more likely to happen than not?

I suppose it's more of a hypothetical prediction... one that Google ought to be fairly concerned with.