[RichardBronosky]

In reply to:

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I advocate that oversight of the Internet lie in the hands of a multi-national body which has no economic vested interest in it nor any monolithic political agenda, (because of its multi-national composition)

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I'm sorry, but you cannot organize and "multi-anything body" that would not have a vested economic interest in the decisions they make. There will be corporate influence. There will be corruption. And the political agenda will be socialism and vicarious income redistribution. "Those people over there are so rich, let's take more money from them to pay for our organization and spend their money to advance this other group's infrastructure while the infrastructure of the person who pays the most stagnates."
All you will have achieved is taking the power away from the people who can vote at the ballot box and with service subscriptions.
Oh, and you will have hurt the evil "haves" in the imperialistic American dictatorship. (Which I believe was the real goal anyway.)

[RichardBronosky]

In reply to:

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Have you already forgotten that less than a year ago a spat between a couple corporations resulted in denying to huge blocks of people access to certain web sites?

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Are you talking about this one?
Or are you talking about the case were ISP X had a user spamming users on ISP Y. ISP Y wanted ISP X to stop transmitting the spam. ISP X said that spam filtering is ISP Y's responsibility. ISP Y placed a generic filter on all traffic from ISP X.
These cases deal with rogue individuals (who would probably be defended by the ACLU) and not corporate greed.
And if you want to know what I have against the ACLU... NAMBLA.

[spiderbat]

In reply to:

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'd say that, at least in principle, compelling the companies that actually manage internet not to discriminate among packets on the basis of their origin and contents is more like enforcing laws against racial discrimination than advocating over-regulation.
That's hyperbole

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It was meant to be.
Anyway, the matter is rather complex: of course, if you subscribe with some content provider (cable tv, or whatever else) you know in advance which channels you'll be able to receive and you can choose the service that better suits you. On the other hand, if you subscribe for a generic internet access and pay for a given BW, you'll be at least disappointed if the provider would start to privilege the transmission of contents you're not interested in.
I agree completely with you that the fundamental needs are
1) transparency: the final user must be able to know what [s]he's paying for
2) adequate choice and the ability to switch provider without unduly inconveniences and delays.
I think, or, at least, I hope this is the situation in U.S.. Unfortunately, things are rather worse in Italy.
99% of the telecommunication HW is still owned and managed by a single company, the heir of the former state telephon company. While this fact seems not to impede commercial competition for what concerns telephony, things are quite different for ADSL (presently, the only practical mean of gaining net access here): both from the experiences of people I know and what one can find on the net, it seems clear to me that the major company is exploiting its HW monopoly to acquire and keep customers. Whit the present shift of interest towards the broadcasting of paid content, I'm really concerned, and I'm not alone here. On the other hand, it must be said that whenever the italian government has meddled into private affairs, the situation has always worsened... /forums/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif

[jmincey]

"Many DSL providers offer 4 or more tiers. It is viewed by the customers as a feature!"
You need to study this issue more carefully. It has nothing to do with offering levels of bandwidth to customers. It really has nothing to do with ISPs per se. It has to do with telecom companies, (some of which serve as ISPs also), and the policy of providing faster access to certain web sites (whose owners pay a higher rate) while providing a slower access to all other web sites.
So irrespective of whether your personal bandwidth is via cable or DSL, irrespective of whether it is at 768K or up to 7 Mbps, if such a plan is allowed to proceed, then some web sites will be more accessible to you than others and the internet will no longer be an equal playing field for all web sites.

[jmincey]

"Are you talking about this one? Or are you talking about the case were ISP X had a user spamming users on ISP Y."

No. Neither. This isn't about petty tiffs between spammers, spoiled brats, and ISPs. I mean no offense but you and Tallscot are really naive and uninformed about this issue -- so perhaps I can help:

I'm speaking of corporate misbehavior as a result of the abuse of power they have when they control the very backbone of the internet and their only interest is their own immediate profit picture.

Tallscot keeps demanding "evidence" while he just sits idly on the sidelines (rather than to actively engage the issue). Very well, here's one article:

Cogent, Level 3 In Standoff Over Internet Access

Cogent Communications and Level 3 Communications are in a standoff after Level 3 pulled the plug on shared Internet traffic from Cogent on Wednesday.
Level 3, based in Broomfield, Co., cut off the peer-to-peer connection to Cogent, making tens of millions of IP addresses unreachable by Cogent customers, according to one partner affected by the outage.
Cogent, based in Washington, D.C., issued a statement Friday requesting that Level 3 turn back on the Internet backbone peering connection. "Once traffic is being exchanged between the two networks, Cogent will discuss the peering situation with Level 3, anytime, anywhere," the Cogent statement said.
A Level 3 representative said the company would issue its own statement sometime Friday.
[/list]I hope this will help to illustrate what is at stake here when profit interests are responsible for significant pieces of the internet -- as opposed to a nonpartisan body whose concern is the internet overall. In this one example alone, it's not just one or two web sites which were disrupted but rather tens of millions of IP addresses which a single corporation deliberately made unavailable to large blocks of people. (Indeed, a number of parties could not get access even to their own web sites -- such as one art museum in Boston.)
I should think the specter of such consequences would up the ante a bit for those who are on the fence or apathetic regarding the control of the internet in the hands of profit interests, (to say nothing about the issue of net neutrality).

[jmincey]

To those who question that this whole issue is much ado about nothing, let me ask you: Why do you think there has been a legislative push for "net neutrality" to begin with? It's not about giving the same bandwidth to all consumers; rather it has been provoked and motivated by the plans of communications and internet companies to parcel out to commercial interests "premium access" to the internet for an increased fee. To ask for "evidence" of this is absurd. The evidence can be inferred from the legislation itself.
Meanwhile, it's interesting how those who call for evidence are often least likely to provide it themselves in support of their own positions.

[tallscot]

This confirms what I suspected, that you don't have a grasp of the Internet and your fears are based on inaccurate information.
First off, Cogent has stated that that outage affected 5-10% of their customers.
Secondly, both Cogent and Level 3 have choosen to use direct connections to other networks (peering agreements) instead of using redundant transmission service. You seem to think that this can happen to everyone, that there are a handful of companies that "control the Internet". That isn't true.
Cogent and Level 3 agreed to use each other's networks and wired their service to go directly on the other's network versus being routed through the web that is the Internet in the traditional way. This lets customers of Cogent bring up Web sites on Level 3 faster, and vice versa. This is like two airlines agreeing to share gates at an airport and the two airlines got into a contract dispute and they temporarily closed off each other's gates to each other.
Cogent's customers couldn't access sites hosted by ISPs that used Level 3, and vice versa. Only 5-10% of Cogent's customers were affected by it because of redundant transmission and routing.
The point, Jeff, is that Cogent has no ability to force any company to be in a peer agreement with them. No company has the power to take the Internet hostage. It's a giant web and if one route gets shut down, you can go around it.
So if Cogent decides that they want to change their service to their customers, their customers can go to Level 3 or AT&T or Sprint or one of thousands of other companies. If Cognet blocks traffic from those companies, Cognet's customers, the ISPs, will change to another network (most use redundant).

[jmincey]

"You seem to think that this can happen to everyone, that there are a handful of companies that 'control the Internet'."
What I think is that the infrastructure of the internet -- which is a network of networks -- is under the control of the corporations which OWN those networks, and that when one corporation gets into a snit over something, millions of web sites can suddenly lose availability to a percentage of their market.
That's what I think, and nothing you say in your post above refutes that.

[Totally_lost]

jmincey writes: Yes, it's the trend
emerging whereby telecom companies, whether in the US, Italy, or
elsewhere, are seeking to establish two tiers of internet service at
different rates/fees.



Phew, awesome ... sounds better than the tiers of service we have now .... none, dialup, ISDN, wireless, DSL, cable, dedicated T1, dedicated fiber, peering point colocation, etc .... which two did you have in mind?

[Totally_lost]

jmincey writes: You
need to study this issue more carefully. It has nothing to do with
offering levels of bandwidth to customers. It really has nothing to do
with ISPs per se. It has to do with telecom companies, (some of which
serve as ISPs also), and the policy of providing faster access to
certain web sites (whose owners pay a higher rate) while providing a
slower access to all other web sites.



umm ... as far back as I can remembers, and that is pre-internet, there have been people running content sites on network connections as slow as dialup 110baud .... BBS.

Today we have content on sites still running ppp over 1200buad (that is NOT KBaud).

It's has always been a simple matter of how much the content owner was willing to pay to publish their content.

Any content owner willing to fork over enough dollars to purchase a port at a NAP and pay for peering access, has always been free to pay for the fastest connection they have wanted.

Nothing has changed, or was proposed to be changed .... it's ALWAYS been multi-tier based on what services could be afforded.

The only other thing that has not yet changed, is the bigots complaining about corporations, and manufacturing conspiracy theorys that are the foundation of class bigotry.