NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: Comments on NNSquad Purpose
A common misunderstanding drives a lot of what's written about net neutrality. When Ed Whiteacre made his famous remark to the effect that "Google wasn't going to use his pipes for free," the subject under discussion was HDTV. Like Verizon, AT&T has made an investment in its infrastructure, upgrading it so that they could deliver a TV product that could compete on favorable terms with Cable (Verizon made a serious investment, AT&T not so much.) The "pipes" Whiteacre was talking about were the IPTV pipes, but the confusion between IPTV and the Internet permitted a wild controversy to be created around Whiteacre's remark. A more direct statement was made by the former CEO of the former Bell South about offering some sort of mystically accelerated delivery which would, if taken seriously, be especially threatening to companies who've invested very heavily in massive server farms or Akamai-like relationships in order to reduce response times. The Bell South remark is typically attributed to AT&T by urban legend. This is a round-about way of agreeing that the term net neutrality means so many things to so many people that it's not really useful. Rationalizing service contracts with FCC principles is a concrete and achievable goal; enforcing some vague notion of "neutrality" is not. RB Robert Oliver wrote: > Well -- let's be careful here. Specifically, let's be careful about who > is paying for the better performance. Follow the money. > > The common references to "net neutrality" have been focused on the idea > of paying money for "higher performance" -- but this money was not to be > paid by the end user. The issue was that the ISPs were toying with the > idea of charging "content providers," (e.g., YouTube), a premium to > ensure that their traffic receives sufficient priority so as to be "good > quality" for the end users. If YouTube didn't pay the fee, their traffic > might have such a slow throughput or drop enough packets that end users > wouldn't want to watch. Meanwhile, the ISP might themselves have a video > site sister company that receives the high priority. This was the > initial jumping-off point for the net-neutrality concerns.