The bill for "Net Neutrality."

Ask your Senators to support Net Neutrality, which is in the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, S.2917.

Prevent ISPs from discriminating between websites (they don't right now). Customers of AT&T shouldn't find someday that "Democratic Underground" is blocked, or running slower for an unknown reason.

Most Senators have email forms at their websites. You can find their websites by typing their names into a seach engine, or by clicking here. You can also call their offices during business hours.

Internet Freedom Preservation Act, S.2917.

that as you note the ISPs currently don't discriminate between websites and have no plan of doing so in the future. They want the ability and incentive to build a faster tier of the internet capable of handling the exponentially growing demand as video downloads increase and eventually television service becomes available online.

I work with Hands Off the Internet in opposing legislation that would mandate net neutrality, a solution to a problem that doesn't exist and a move that would stifle investment in the next generation of the internet.

Last week, the Chairman of the FCC, Kevin Martin noted that it would be premature to issue rules on net neutrality.

"Consumers need to be able to access all the content that's available over the Internet without being impeded by the access provider," Martin said. "But at the same time, we recognized that the people that are deploying these networks may offer differentiated speeds and differentiated products to the consumer.

"And if you offer different tiers of speeds, a consumer chooses the lowest tier, and he wants to access content that would require higher speeds than he has purchased, he's not being blocked from access. He just hasn't purchased the speed that's necessary."

Martin added that the commission has demonstrated its willingness to step in and take action if it sees, for example, a large cable or phone company discriminating against certain content providers. However, he said: "We're not seeing widespread examples of abuses in the marketplace that would justify us trying to adopt rules at this time."

http://www.marketwatch.com/News/Story/Story.aspx?dist=newsfinder&siteid=google&guid=%7BD093217B-CCE6-42DE-947F-12395F413280%7D&keyword=

This part doesn't make sense to me:
They want the ability and incentive to build a faster tier of the internet capable of handling the exponentially growing demand as video downloads increase and eventually television service becomes available online.

OK, first, video in particular is ALREADY limited by what "tier" you buy to access the net, its called broadband or dialup. Yeah, a person on Dialup or low-end DSL could try to stream a broadband Realmedia stream, and get a slideshow, or they could click the link that says DIALUP on it. Same on the other end, if I decided to host my homemade movies on a site, at let's say DVD quality, then most of my customers WILL be broadband customers, by default, because, unless my movies are bestsellers, no one will take a week to download the damned thing on dialup. This doesn't even cost me extra in bandwidth per month, because the ones who paid for the higher end cable, DSL, T1 or greater access will use a HELL of a lot more bandwidth than someone downloading at 53k baud.

I don't understand the need, all of the sudden, for a "Tiered" Internet at all, all these are are technological problems, not economic ones. People's experience on the net is ALREADY limited to what type of connection they have. A person on dialup will NOT download DVD quality movies, they can't, for all practical purposes, unless they are REALLY patient. Hell, even lower quality downloads, low resolution, limited colors, compressed stuff, is still HUGE to dialup customers. As far as the backbone of the internet is concerned, that is already paid for by my tax dollars, in addition to my paying for broadband, and other companies paying to jack into high bandwidth connections. This sounds like an attempt at double or triple dipping, nothing more or less. Not to mention that, regardless of how you or anyone else feels about it, that decentralized and distributed technologies like Bittorrent makes the question moot anyways. The "market" decides how fast a particular product is delivered to you in this case, and it reduces total server load.

I probably could have been more eloquent with the sentence you highlighted. Take a look at the Pew center study on the spread of broadband.

http://pewresearch.org/reports/?ReportID=25

"The number of Americans who have broadband internet connections at home has jumped from 60 million in March 2005 to 84 million in March 2006 - a leap of 40%."

This relates to the exponential growth I mentioned. People will increase their bandwidth usage as the study shows and as more technology requiring a certain high level of QoS are made available. This will require an updated backbone, not the copper one we have today, but fiber. Once we have more people using VOIP, internet TV, and downloading HD movies, there will be interruptions in service. To ensure that there is an efficient and uninterrupted delivery of services we need to improve the infrastructure.

I don't understand the need, all of the sudden, for a "Tiered" Internet at all, all these are are technological problems, not economic ones.

So, we have established that there already is a tiered Internet. And there are existing technological solutions for the technological problems. The economic problems are those of who is going to pay for the next generation internet, the faster pipes, the new technology? The companies or the consumer? If net neutrality regulations are passed and if Google can't be charged more for putting video on the pipes, then the consumer will have to. And it will be cost prohibitive – so all this new info really will be blocked. If consumers can’t access it, Wall Street wont invest in it and then companies wont make it.

Public subsidies helped to pay for the copper network, but for the new infrastructure someone will have to foot the bill. In addition, Not all sides pay the same price per bit today. Google pays wholesale and the consumer pays retail. Google and the other content providers are not paying a “fair share”. Why should the telecos invest tons of money if they can't get a return on their investment?

I'm curious, are you in favor of net neutrality legislation?

to the internet. They need a lot of servers and a T1 if the website is popular.

ISPs are seeking to double-bill.

Customers pay to connect to the internet. Website owners pay to connect their servers to the internet.

ISPs are seeking yet another charge, telling popular websites that they will speed up or slow down the connection between their subscribers and the website depending on whether they pay another fee.

I don't understand what you mean by wholesale and retail differences in bandwidth, as far as I'm aware of, there is no real difference. If you are talking about Google getting a discount for its massive bandwidth pipe, wereas I do not, I don't see any evidence for that, and besides, isn't it the perogative of whoever owns that bandwidth to charge Google as it sees fit?

We aren't charged per byte now, neither should we be, we are charged for the maximum bandwidth we choose to buy, in my case a 384k or so connection through my cable service. I could download gigabytes of data one week, and none the next, and the charge is the same per month, it neither increases nor decreases due to my load. No one on the Internet, unless they are piggybacking off of someone elses network, gets a free pass, so I don't see the complaint. As far as the cost of upgrading the backbone connections to the net, it will be upgraded just like always, with a combination of private and public funds to keep costs down. Think of it this way, with more people using broadband, while that increases loads on the net, it also increases the monetary base FOR upgrades.

Besides, one thing that is good about technology is that it gets cheap REALLY quick, whether its services, like ISPs, or hardware, like fibre and microchips. A decade ago, my broadband connection cost 3 figures or more a month, and only covered a small percentage of the net, and is usually what was used for commercial and government applications only, including universities. Now that cost is down to a more reasonable 30 bucks or so a month, actually about 32 bucks, rounding up from change, of course.

Your example of Google not getting charged more for putting video on the pipes, I assume you mean they hosting them on their own servers is erronious. Google DOES get charged more, they BUY more bandwidth to handle the higher load they get from hosting such videos. If they didn't do that, then their servers get overloaded, we customers get 404s, and Google loses money from advertising. Google pays for its bandwidth to get on the net, I pay for access to the Internet, my ISP pays through a peering agreement to AT&T to access the main pipe so I get access to Google's services, and then AT&T or whoever complains that one or the other is getting a "free pass"? Uh, I don't think so.

To draw a valid comparison, if I call someone long distance on my phone, I get charged the long distance call, the person recieving the call doesn't. The Internet works on the same principle, and it works just fine, people have been talking about the net collapsing because of the amount of people overloading it for about a decade now, and it hasn't happened yet. Its a largely decentralized structure, ensuring that if one server goes down, you still have access to others. I favor net neutrality legislation in RESPONSE to AT&T's and others pushing of legislation to allow for double dipping. They are getting too greedy, and need to be reeled in.

Consumers can already pay for numerous levels of speed for their intenet connection.

There is dial-up, high-speed dial-up, DSL, cable, satellite, and T1 lines.

The issue is whether AT&T should be allowed to intentionally make one website load faster than another for all its DSL subscribers, when AT&T doesn't even connect the server to the internet.

Regarding this bit:
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Martin added that the commission has demonstrated its willingness to step in and take action if it sees, for example, a large cable or phone company discriminating against certain content providers. However, he said: "We're not seeing widespread examples of abuses in the marketplace that would justify us trying to adopt rules at this time."
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AT&T and Verizon aren't discriminating between websites yet. But they've announced they're intention to do so soon. That is why we need a Net Neutrality law; to stop them.

It doesn't have anything to do with ISPs being able to offer different levels of user access. They already do so & that isn't what "tiered" means. The basic definition is that if I'm paying for a 56K connection, then I should have a 56K connection throughout the internet. In other words, once I've paid for a 56K connection, my ISP shouldn't be able to speed up or slow down that access depending on the content I'm viewing.

To be a bit more technical, this isn't really an ISP bill. It is a gift to the telecommunications industry because it allows them (the big guys) to collect fees/payments from certain web entities (Amazon, BN, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, etc.) to provide them a more unobstructed path by users. In other words, it allows telecommunications companies to place their hands on the flow valves regardless of what I, the consumer, has paid to receive.

A 'real life' equivalent would be state government providing paved roads and emergency services only to businesses who pay X amount above and beyond their regular taxes while leaving the businesses who do not pay such an extra fee to get by on their own with dirt and gravel.