Transterrestrial Musings

Comments

Rather proves he's no expert by his own statement..."If someone's going to have high-speed, than everybody should have access to high speed."

Most everybody DOES have access to a high-speed connection....just a lot of us can't afford it, but we have access to it.

Posted by Mac at March 14, 2007 12:51 PM

I hope that these idiots don't accidently outlaw QoS.

Posted by Adrasteia at March 14, 2007 12:54 PM

I'm not an expert, but I believe in equality all the way around.

I'm still on dialup. Therefore, I should be made a TV newsreader. And be paid millions. Equality, all the way around.

Posted by D Anghelone at March 14, 2007 01:04 PM

The discussion is a complete red herring because Dan Rather did not propose outlawing anything. He also did not say that it was bad for the rich to enjoy a new privilege "first"; he did not use the word "first" at all. All he said was that the privileges of the rich should spread to the rest of society. This is very often used as a defense of income inequality in hindsight. This plutocratic argument goes, "you may feel poor today in comparison to some people, but look at how much you take for granted that only the rich had before." So Rather is saying, let's please do spread this privilege of the affluent, broadband, to everyone.

Even taking Rather at his word that he's not an expert, he happens to be correct. Commonplace broadband, say at 1mbps, would be cheaper if it weren't chopped up into subscriptions. The fraction of Americans who have broadband at this speed are probably paying more for it than it would cost to give it to everyone, without subscriptions. In other words, it would be cheaper as a municipal service, just like city pools and trash pickups.

Besides, this contention was only one paragraph in an interview in which Rather was quite magnanimous towards the blogosphere. At least in this interview, he was the complete opposite of the touchy old-media type who disses blogs. Given what the blogs said about him, he is really turning the other cheek. I am no fan of Dan Rather --- frankly I think that CBS News is schlock --- but at the moment he is a better person than, for example, Rand Simberg.

Posted by at March 14, 2007 01:15 PM

"All he said was that the privileges of the rich should spread to the rest of society"

Well shoot, I think anyone would agree with that sentiment, I know I do. But somehow I don't think Dan's means of making it happen are the same as mine. I think he would lean heavily toward government subsidization in order to accomplish the goal of broadband for all whereas I would prefer the market to force the price of broadband down to where it is affordable to most everyone to pay for on their own.

Posted by Cecil Trotter at March 14, 2007 01:25 PM

In other words, it would be cheaper as a municipal service, just like city pools and trash pickups.

Cheaper? NYC has a budget going over 50 billion dollars and services like garbage pickup have been severely cut back over the years.

City pools? Not the most pleasant places.

It was a riot years ago when Donald Trump quickly repaired the Wollman Rink (municipal ice skating) after the city had for years failed in several attempts to do so. I don't like Trump but that's a whole nuther thing.

Posted by D Anghelone at March 14, 2007 01:37 PM

"I am no fan of Dan Rather --- frankly I think that CBS News is schlock --- but at the moment he is a better person than, for example, Rand Simberg."

All that writing for that lame attack? Oh my, how pathetic.

Posted by J. Craig Beasley at March 14, 2007 01:41 PM

Here in much of the Phoenix area the trash companies are private, and compete for ones business. The ones that are badly run are the ones run by the municipalities.

Posted by Mark in AZ at March 14, 2007 02:18 PM

But somehow I don't think Dan's means of making it happen are the same as mine.

The polite approach would be to wait until he speaks on that point before criticizing him for it.

Here in much of the Phoenix area the trash companies are private, and compete for ones business. The ones that are badly run are the ones run by the municipalities.

There is no question that city services are often badly run. But many city services are low-quality precisely because they are a lot cheaper. There are some entirely private towns in America such as Leisure World --- there is one in Arizona. While their services may well be first rate, they assessments are much higher than taxes in incorporate cities of the same size.

I have nothing against private trash collection or private broadband. (Even public broadband might well involve private contractors, as trash collection often does.) The point is that there are reasons to have a public version. In the case of trash, the city has a choice at the low-income end between collecting the trash and arresting people for disastrous littering.

In the case of broadband Internet, a lot of low-income people don't know what they are missing and it's just not all that expensive to bring them into the on-line world. Sometimes it's outright cheaper than subscription models. It could be a valid way to improve literacy, improve the economy, and reduce crime.

Posted by at March 14, 2007 02:35 PM

The even better part about what Dan Rather said, and what Anonymous Rand Attacker and others are talking about here, is that NONE of it is related to Net Neutrality.

Net Neutrality isn't about providing broadband to the masses, it's about whether or not a provider can prioritize certain traffic over other traffic (VoIP prioritized over Peer-to-peer file sharing, etc), and whether or not such prioritisations would lead to outright blocking of certain services by competitors in the ISP world.

If you don't have any sort of high-speed internet connection, it won't matter to you if VoIP traffic gets priority over P2P, because you won't be using either service. And that has NOTHING to do with egalitarian ideals about "getting broadband to the masses".

Posted by John Breen III at March 14, 2007 02:47 PM

OK, I am an expert on the Internet. "Net neutrality" is code language. What is really means is that people who sell you the pipe will charge you the same for the pipe as they charge other people for the same-sized pipe in the same locale, and that whatever you bring down the pipe will be treated neutrally; that is, will not be charged at a higher rate based on where the data is coming from. It is a position taken against the position of the phone and cable companies, whose desire is to charge G00gle not just for the bandwidth G00gle purchases from them directly, but for a portion of G00gle's customers' bandwidth as well.

That sounds a little confusing, so let me explain what the service providers like Sprint or Verizon want to do. Imagine that you have paid for a DSL line, and so has your neighbor. You spend 80% of your time on YouTube or using Vonage, and your neighbor spend 80% of his time on text-based MUDs. What the service providers want to do is to charge YouTube or Vonage for part of your connection, or to limit how much of their traffic comes to you.

So if the network isn't neutral, either large and popular sites pay protection money to service providers, or their (the large sites') customers get poorer service from those sites. It is, pure and simple, extortion: pay us more or we discriminate against you and your customers blame you, not us, for the slow-downs, driving business to your much faster competitors. Which, by the way, would of course include the service providers, who would have finally found a way to make their crappy services attractive, if artificially so.

PS - Who would have guessed that "G00gle" is "questionable content"?

Posted by Jeff Medcalf at March 14, 2007 02:55 PM

The even better part about what Dan Rather said, and what Anonymous Rand Attacker and others are talking about here, is that NONE of it is related to Net Neutrality.

I didn't address net neutrality in my response, and neither did Rand for that matter, but it certainly is related.

People are legitimately worried about insidious differentiation of Internet service, so that you may not even know why your Internet connection is degraded unless you pay a consultant to find out. This is already a highly developed form of unfree-market competition in medical coverage: you don't even know what medical care you have or haven't prepaid unless you are wealthy enough to hire a cadre of consultants. No one other than a rapacious service provider would want an Internet like this, although if it did arise, the tip-top of the aristocracy might not mind it.

Posted by at March 14, 2007 03:02 PM

That has NOTHING to do with egalitarian ideals about "getting broadband to the masses".

I also have to go back to the other point, which is that Rand picked the one thing in a completely magnanimous interview that he thought proves once again that Dan Rather is a leftist idiot. (The evidence in question turned on the concept of broadband for everyone, which in fact is related to net neutrality as Jeff Medcalf describes it, even if it isn't exactly the same thing.)

Even if Rand were right, the attitude would still be that if you can't think of anything nasty to say about Dan Rather, don't say anything at all. Again, I think that some of Dan Rather's later career work was pathetic; but we could all learn from his willingness to turn the other cheek.

Posted by at March 14, 2007 03:11 PM

Thanks, Jeff.

Net neutrality is something the founders of Daily Kos (Marcus) and Red State (Krempansky) joined forces on, signing a joint letter to Congress.

Posted by Bill White at March 14, 2007 03:33 PM

...Rand picked the one thing in a completely magnanimous interview that he thought proves once again that Dan Rather is a leftist idiot.

I'm not sure why Rand or anyone else needs PROOF that Rather is a leftist idiot. Rather's own words and actions for the last 30 plus years speak for themselves.

And "magnanimous" isn't the word I'd use either. This guy was a dyed in the wool RatherLover. The writers nose is so far up Rather's butt, he's getting fresh air.

The longtime news anchor had his career prematurely shortened after bloggers drew attention to an erroneous document used by CBS as the basis of a report on President Bush's National Guard service.

You can't have this both ways. Rather STILL stands by that document and it's getting used. So it's use wasn't "erroneous". It was a calculated use, meant to undermine GWB. And according to Rather the document still has weight.

Posted by Steve at March 14, 2007 04:42 PM

This is a test message. My other message on a different thread haven't been posted. Perhaps I'm a victim of some sort of deviation from true net neutrality. I pout now, thus: *pouts*

Okay, done.

Posted by Jane Bernstein at March 14, 2007 06:15 PM

Good pout, Jane. No idea what happened to your other post, but welcome back. As should be obvious from the ongoing lunacy of Swiderski and Anonymous Moron, I don't moderate here...

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 14, 2007 06:23 PM

Rand it was a comment on the Bluetooth thing. I got a Moveable type server error of some sort. I said an unladylike word and moved on.

Posted by Jane Bernstein at March 14, 2007 07:40 PM

There are two issues in Net Neurtrality.

Source Neutrality and Content Neutrality.

Content Neutrality should not exist, QoS is needed to prioritize
real time video, Audio at different reliabity from Email and web.
QoS has it's Orthogonal referant, Data Integrity.
Web and Email must be very free from error, but can wait,
while Audio can have drop out, but needs to move fast.

Source Neutrality is the big issue.
Go0gle should not be able to be threatened by Verizon
or Comcast. Comcast may cut a deal with ITunes and then
start turning down feed speeds from Real Networks.
If An ISP provides QoS, they should treat all equivalent
service levels exactly the same that come in from outside their
network.

Things like Akamai are meant to enhance speed, and
akamai spends to make the Akamai cache servers work.
Akamai works hard to be inside the major PoPs of the
major ISP's, but, we are talking about sources
that need to cross the wide internet.

It's kind of Sad that Simberg doesn't understand the
issue.

Posted by anonymous at March 14, 2007 08:18 PM

I said an unladylike word

I can't imagine such a thing, Jane. The word that MT had a problem with was probably de-vice. For come reason it doesn't like it, to the point that it actually breaks the script. I discovered another one yesterday--it chokes on in-serted.

By the way, did you decide whether or not to go to Space Access?

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 15, 2007 04:08 AM

I find it hard to believe that Dan Blather's not an expert on the Internet.

I seem to remember he had one hell of a lesson about it not long ago....

Posted by Barbara Skolaut at March 15, 2007 09:06 AM

Jeff: Richard Bennett would tell you that what anti-neutrality people want is not "to charge protection money", but to make G-gle pay for the level of access it wants, just like customers do. The Snowe-Dorgan bill would make QoS'd service for whatever optimisation always the same price as plain internet access.

(See http://bennett.com/blog/index.php/archives/2006/08/01/subsidizing-g00gle/, but replace the 00 with oo. Thus no link in place. Stupid, STUPID spam filter.)

So who cares if VOIP or streaming video QoS bandwidth costs more to provide? Can't charge more! And this is called "neutrality".

It is not Virtuous And Noble G-gle Against Evil Telcos.

It's self-serving G-gle against self-serving Telcos - though the Telcos seem to be on the better side, this time. QoS links for VOIP and streaming video do cost more to provide, and there's no reason the law should intervene to pretend otherwise simply because that suits G-gle.

(Yes, why IS "g()()gle" questionable anyway?)

Posted by Sigivald at March 15, 2007 09:56 AM

why IS "g()()gle" questionable anyway?

Because some cretin was sending me hundreds of spams with that as a URL. Don't ask me why--they certainly don't need the page ranking...

I might be able to remove it now, though--it was a few weeks ago.

Posted by Rand Simberg at March 15, 2007 10:09 AM

Sigivald, the Internet is an abstraction, so let's peel that away and look at the lower layers. In the process, I think it will become apparent that Bennett is incorrect in his understanding of what would happen in practice.

I pay a certain amount of money to my local service provider in exchange for Internet access. It is more than most people pay, for two reasons: I have a very high speed connection, and I have static IP addresses (I run my own servers). What I am actually paying for is the following: lease of equipment, both the in-home cable modem and a fraction of the cable lines; maintenance as needed; access to and through my provider's network, limited to a certain amount of data per second (the bandwidth); correspondingly a portion of the fees my provider pays to their backbone providers for shipping data through their networks; for a portion of my service provider's generic services like mail and DNS, which I don't use; and for profit on all of that, plus taxes.

G00gle pays in much the same way, though given the amount of bandwidth they use, I suspect they pay in the millions per month, and at a discounted rate, and don't have to pay for the various services because they get direct T3's and higher rather than shared services like DSL or cable modems.

In either case, both I and G00gle have paid for the amount of data, in aggregate, that we can ship through our respective providers' networks. Those providers connect their networks to backbone providers' networks, which in turn connect to each other. All along the line, money changes hands for a fixed maximum amount of data shipped.

Where network neutrality, pace an earlier poster, source neutrality, comes into play is this: my local provider wants to charge G00gle for shipping content through their (the local provider's) network to me, even though I have already paid for that maximum amount of data, and G00gle cannot exceed that amount going to me. In other words, the provider wants to charge G00gle for what I have already paid, and punish me (by reducing my effective bandwidth to below the amount I am paying for, for that traffic coming from large sites) if they (G00gle) don't pay up.

Call it whatever you want — I call it extortion — but there's no way it should be legal. The network is a common carrier, and get certain benefits and protections from that. In exchange for those benefits and protections, one of the things that the service providers are obligated to do is to provide equal access to all data regardless of source.

Posted by Jeff Medcalf at March 15, 2007 10:29 AM

By the way, did you decide whether or not to go to Space Access?

Yes, it looks as if I'll be there. I won't be able to attend most of the Friday morning stuff, because of my CME conference, but the rest of the time will be open. How much goes on Thursday evening?

Posted by Jane Bernstein at March 15, 2007 10:35 PM

I've had this kind of argument a few times before, on Cosmic Log, and maybe on Usenet, wit those who can't get behind space tourism because it would be for 'the rich.'

They seem not to know the phrase 'early adopters.' I'm going to buy a hi-def LED-tv in the next few months, fully aware that a few years ago, it would have been unthinkable on my income.

And in any case, high-end goods and services that only the wealthy can afford, tend to *employ* middle-class people. Would the guy on a Cadillac assembly line be better off, if we shut it down because everybody can't have one?

Posted by Frank Glover at March 16, 2007 02:02 PM

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