{"id":10147,"date":"2010-12-13T07:30:56","date_gmt":"2010-12-13T12:30:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=10147"},"modified":"2010-12-13T08:04:59","modified_gmt":"2010-12-13T13:04:59","slug":"drawn-to-knowledge-net-neutrality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=10147","title":{"rendered":"Drawn to Knowledge: Net Neutrality"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Here is my latest in the Drawn to Knowledge series.  I have also created a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/user\/drawntoknowledge\">YouTube channel<\/a>, just for this show.<\/p>\n<p><table class='nomargin' cellspacing='0' width='100%' cellpadding='0' align='center' border='0'><tr><td><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"1024\" height=\"576\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/zASHI9qdB0U\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen class=\"embed\"><\/iframe><br\/><small><a href='http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=zASHI9qdB0U'>Link (YouTube)<\/a><\/small><\/td><\/tr><\/table><\/p>\n<p>Share and enjoy.  Next time I&#8217;ll cover something a little less divisive. <\/p>\n<p>Going into more detail&#8230;<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->I really did try to represent the views of the two sides evenly. (There is a third side &#8211; that of the Tier 1 providers &#8211; but I made no effort to articulate their point of view. They can make their own dang video if they like. (Actually, I guess you could argue that the US government is a fourth side, but their position is basically, &#8220;What? An internet? Is that the thing that pays taxes? No? Why not?&#8221;)) This strays into politics, which I normally avoid here, but I&#8217;ll allow a bit of it if we can keep it on topic, and civil.<\/p>\n<p>Having said that, I really hate this debate.  Both sides are fighting for a free internet, they just disagree on whether corporations or governments are a bigger danger. They&#8217;re allies who disagree on methodology, not enemies with opposing goals. This is an important discussion about how the network should work in the future, but that&#8217;s pretty hard to tell from the rhetoric. <\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.savetheinternet.com\/\">pro-neutrality camp<\/a> is a mess of lazy sloganeering and irrelevant class-warfare stuff.  <em>Oh no! The industry fat-cats are getting rich and locking the poor out of the internet!<\/em>  This is a horrible way of framing the argument, because it implies that tampering with traffic flow would be okay if it didn&#8217;t lead to rich people making money. It&#8217;s an emotional stand, not a principled one. It drags the debate away from the core concepts, which has a needless polarizing effect.  They might see some converts from the other side if they framed this in terms of technology instead of rich vs. poor. <\/p>\n<p>The anti-net neutrality camp has two major points:<\/p>\n<p>1) Personal Liberty: The government is more dangerous to freedom than corporations.<\/p>\n<p>2) Private Property:  The government shouldn&#8217;t force these carriers to use their hardware in unprofitable ways or forbid them from selling their services as they see fit.<\/p>\n<p>Point #1 is where this debate should be taking place.  Governments would <em>love<\/em> to be able to monitor and control the flow of information. I&#8217;m on record with the position that <em>neither<\/em> companies or governments should be fiddling with looking at packets and sorting them according to anything beyond the TCP\/IP protocol. However, if denied that ideal I don&#8217;t blame people for leaning one way or another with regard to companies vs. governments.  Both offer some ugly scenarios. <\/p>\n<p>But point #2 is a response to the rhetoric of the pro-neutrality camp.  It&#8217;s basically a misunderstanding of the problem.  They argue (and I agree) that a government shouldn&#8217;t just point guns at a company and say &#8220;offer your services at price X&#8221;.  And it often sounds like this is what the pro side is advocating. But that&#8217;s not what we&#8217;re facing. What the Tier 1 providers are talking about doing is messing with the established routing logic of the internet to make packets go fast or slow based on something <em>besides<\/em> the size of your connection. If I was making my case to the anti-neutrality folks who were using point #2, I&#8217;d point out that the carriers own the hardware, not the data.  A mail carrier isn&#8217;t allowed to hold a sack of letters at ransom, threatening to deliver them a week late unless someone gives him money.  He&#8217;s also not allowed to throw away all the birthday cards, or love letters.  He just takes the mail from A to B, and any further messing with his payload &#8211; for ideology or profit &#8211; is an attack on the system. <\/p>\n<p>The carriers argue that with the rise of people mailing lots of phone books (net video) they have to charge more.  Fine, but they already do that because <em>they already charge by the pound<\/em>. (Or are free to do so, and can charge what they like for a load of mail.)  They are saying they want to root around in the mail, looking for stuff they don&#8217;t like so they can put it on the slow truck, or throw it out.  Again, that&#8217;s an attack in my book. <\/p>\n<p>The anti-neutrality folks might also make the point that by passing a preemptive law we could end up with the worst of both worlds: The Tier 1 providers sorting traffic for fun and profit, with a bunch of regulations that would hinder anyone <em>else<\/em> from entering the business and competing with them.  Ted &#8220;the internet is a series of tubes&#8221; Stevens isn&#8217;t some mutant among lawmakers. I&#8217;m betting he&#8217;s fairly representative. (I didn&#8217;t even notice that pun until I typed it. I am sorry.) When you have that much ignorance going into making a law, the number of ways things can go wrong goes up dramatically. We could end up with some sort of &#8220;Internet Reform Act&#8221; that only addresses half the problem, plus regulates a bunch of tangential stuff, plus introduces a smattering of new net taxes, plus delivers a bunch of completely unrelated stuff crammed in there (like school funding or somesuch) that will make it difficult to oppose or debate without sounding like you&#8217;re &#8220;against education&#8221;.  <\/p>\n<p>Sigh. What a mess.  No matter how this plays out, I don&#8217;t see any positive outcome for net users in general.  The best-case scenario is that things will stay as they are now, and even that is a long shot.<\/p>\n<p>Now before we have our big throwdown in the comments, I&#8217;d like to remind everyone to keep cool and keep it civil.  Very, very few people outside of the industry are actually <em>supporting<\/em> the regulation of traffic. We&#8217;re mostly on the same team, but differ on which scenario is the worst-case one.  I also feel sorry for people outside of the USA. In my video I made the &#8220;which country&#8221; idea sound like an open question, but in truth most of the users of the internet &#8211; basically everyone who isn&#8217;t a US citizen &#8211; will see this battle play out one way or the other, beyond the reach of their votes and voices. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Here is my latest in the Drawn to Knowledge series. I have also created a YouTube channel, just for this show. Link (YouTube) Share and enjoy. Next time I&#8217;ll cover something a little less divisive. Going into more detail&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10147","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dream-cast"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10147","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10147"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10147\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10147"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10147"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10147"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}