Ironically, I think title I gets us there faster than title II because common carriers are protected from having to filter data, or care about the messages they carry. Can you imagine the outrage if people’s postal mail was read, inspected, sorted, and (de)prioritized against their wishes? With title I, because those are information services, they can come up with whatever novel business model they want. the original idea with title I in '96 was that all the baby bells would continue to co-exist but offering different value-add services. They planned a-la-carte cable TV services to gobble-up-whole the cable TV market (it wasn’t really catching on as a two-way medium then, though some rollouts in some places were ahead of their time).
that’s what information services meant. things like AOL. These telecom companies saw themselves as the natural and only option fo " online destinations. " – things that are today google, netflix, (major sites). So if they want to charge per byte? ok. Per page? ok. Flat rate? Sure. 1-900 video sex chats @ $10 per minute? Yep totally ok. the idea with the information service (title I) is that the telecom company is the destination. So common carrier stuff just doesn’t make sense in that scenario. Cool new business ideas could pop up too.
Well, given a choice of “the internet” and “aol” consumers voted with their wallet. And that was at a time where you really could vote with your wallet and your ISP and your phone line were separate companies and separate charges with nothing to do with one another.
The most insidious argument is that “google, netflix, etc” “control the internet” because a lot of people go there, go to those destinations, but ISPs dont… didn’t even register on my radar because it is such a non-sequtur. Would you abandon twitter tomorrow if tweets cost $1.99? Yep. Does twitter have to pay for their internet connection? Yep. Do you have to pay for yours? Yep. What does the ISP have to do with charging twitter, in this hypothetical situation, for access to you, as a subscriber?
In the case of netflix they say because netflix uses so much bandwidth. Who’s bandwidth? They pay their own ISP for a connection. You pay for yours. What other bandwidth is there in that equation?
Cable companies are kind of like, maybe, an information service. They offer TV channels as an information service and can sell it at whatever crazy business model they want. Is there any consumer on the planet that wouldn’t choose a-la-carte cable TV services? I don’t think so… Then why hasn’t the market brought that to consumers that want that? I think it’s because the consumers are a captive audience.
And now we get to the crux of the problem. With netflix, hulu, etc. They start to be less of a captive audience. Cable TV is being abandoned in droves. How can a cable company insert themselves in the equation again, while seeming reasonable about their insertion in a place where they don’t belong?
They see it as capitalistic because I’m willing to pay more for my bits that bring me star trek the next generation than I am willing to pay for bits that bring me spam. But a bit is a bit is a bit. They must create some sort of situation to exploit the fact I’m willing to pay more where (currently, ideally) none exists.
If the network were separate from services, it would be easy enough to solve the “protection” and “great firewall” problem because the government doesn’t operate at a high enough level in the network stack to do anything about it. In fact, with encryption, my packets can’t be inspected. It’s why the GFW of China has to basically hard core throttle anything with encryption because it can’t really be inspected.
Peer to peer mesh might solve that problem (think how the network has evolved in cuba, where the inside-cuba network is pretty fast, lots of sharing of stuff via sneakernet), or it might make it worse (a few choke points where the mesh joins the internet make it easy to filter --incidentally this natural business consolidation has already created the situation a decade ago for AT&T. Remember that nation wide ATT DSL outage last year? Yeah, misconfigured DHCP server. The infrastructure is so fragile a single chokepoint brought down the whole works. Check out wikipedia room 641A – that’d be where you’d insert “protection” if you were a malevolent state actor. We’re already in your worst case scenario then, eh? hahaha.
Stuff like that makes me think it would go more the cuban route where it is almost sneakernet and the connections to “the outside” is fundamentally broken. This has already been anticipated, and is called the balkanization of the internet. I believe the rationale inside China is that making non-China services really crappy strongly encourages Chinese citizens to use the local option.
Common carrier status should prevent the injection of packets in conversations (e.g. tcp packets that close the connection). Anyone that says it was “throttling” peer to peer doesn’t really understand what the admins were actually deliberately doing. You can easily throttle peer to peer without resorting to “mail tampering.” I was told by an insider this was done deliberately at management request in order to obscure the fact that the ISP was the one closing the connection… which the tech did in such a way as to not also include throttling, so it would be noticed, as a way of alerting the internet at large without (hopefully) putting their job at risk. idk if that’s true but it makes a bit of sense.
I would love to have an insider’s knowledge of what went down with Netflix and Comcast.
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