Musicians Demand the Internet Stay Neutral 203
eldavojohn writes "124 bands — including R.E.M., Sarah McLachlan, and Pearl Jam — and 24 music labels are sending a clear message to keep Net traffic neutral. The Rock the Net campaign wants all traffic to be equal instead of allowing providers to charge a fee for certain pages to load faster than others. These musicians are the latest to join the Save the Internet campaign, which has the chair of the House Subcommittee on Telecommunications and the Internet in its camp. Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., spoke at the campaign's kickoff. I think it's obvious that musicians (especially independents and small labels) will find themselves with the short end of the stick if they are asked to pay a fee to have their music streamed as fast as larger bands or even corporations."
Well then it's settled (Score:1, Insightful)
CNN.com... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:5, Insightful)
-Mohandas Gandhi
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:5, Insightful)
Remember; just because you're not stupid, doesn't mean the rest of the world isn't.
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course their opinions matter. They are well known people with large followings, they can help get the message out there. What matters more is that more and more people speak up.
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Well, if REM (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:CNN.com... (Score:5, Insightful)
Informed vs. Uninformed Opinions (Score:1, Insightful)
"They are well known people with large followings"
But large followings for doing _what_, exactly?
Why should I take medical advice from, say, the local mechanic or car repair advice from the local doctor? Or, for that matter, any advice from Paris Hilton?
Re:What would really help ... (Score:2, Insightful)
I have an idea: Why don't you go ahead and do that with your art and stop trying to tell everyone else what to do with theirs. Lead us by example.
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, if Slashdot (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Because spam and viruses must be allowed... (Score:5, Insightful)
Should someone sending spam be given equal priority to the 'net as someone trying to send emails to colleagues?
Oddly, if you QOS port 25 the spam goes through just as fast as the legit email. Incidentally, this is an argument for quarantining systems, not net neutrality.
Net Neutrality means throwing up our hands in the air and allowing the Internet to become a useless mess of spam and viruses since the power to handle them would be stripped from ISPs. It means giving up on streaming video and audio. It means giving up on VOIP.
Plus it's not giving up on video/audio and VOIP...it's giving up on third party streaming video and audio and VOIP. Why should Verizon allow Vonage's VOIP (yea, i know the patent issues, bear with me) to travel as fast as Verizon's VOIP solution? Without competition, Verizon has no reason to improve their service either.
Net neutrality = competition allowed to exist = better for consumers.
Re:What would really help ... (Score:2, Insightful)
Kinda stupid if you stop to think about it...
Re:Well then it's settled (Score:3, Insightful)
The RIAA counts... which is really way too bad.
Good grief the RIAA is for Net neutrality... I feel like I need to take a long shower and scrub really hard now..
BTW the record companies want to sell you music with DRM and music videos with DRM. They don't want to pay Verizon and or AT&T the extra fees they want to charge the content providers for using their tubes.
It is all about the money.
Re:Why the big fuss? (Score:4, Insightful)
Situation #1: providers oversell "priority access", leaving the "critical" applications fighting it out for bandwidth just like they do now (and the "non-critical" apps wishing they had their 56k back)
Situation #2: Providers ration "priority access", which keeps speeds high for "critical" applications but drives up the price of that access via the laws of supply and demand. Providers realize that therey have no incentive to use those higher profit margins to invest in better infrastructure, as the poorer the infrastructure, the more they can charge for "priority access". (Think Enron pulling plants offline to make electricity rates spike and California brownouts)
Situation #3: Government, quasi-gov't (ICAAN), or NGO control of access. Does ANYONE think this is a good idea?
Here's another thought - maybe telesurgery isn't that good an idea.
The solution (Score:5, Insightful)
This is what I think ISPs should be prohibited from doing:
1.Discriminating or throttling or blocking based on source/destination addresses (and that includes forcing companies like google to pay more if they want full speed over the ISPs network)
2.Applying any kind of throttling based on port number. QOS is fine (that is, giving VoIP packets priority over BitTorrent packets) but throttling is NOT. If a network link is 1.5MBps and no-one wants to send traffic other than BitTorrent traffic over that link, the BitTorrent traffic should be able to use the entire 1.5MBps link (obviously if someone starts sending VoIP packets, then the network link wont accept as many BitTorrent packets and the BitTorrent download will slow down). This would specifically prevent the (increasingly common) practice where ISPs give you 1.5MBps or whatever speed but no matter how perfect the network conditions, BitTorrent or Emule or whatever else is limited so it can never go over 128KBps or 256KBps or whatever. Write in an exemption for cases where there is a direct threat to the network or to another network (e.g. someone spewing out packets as part of a DDOS attack)
These measures would still allow ISPs to completely block ports used by malware as well as measures like blocking port 25 to cut off spam zombies. And it would allow ISPs to apply QOS so that your VoIP packets have higher priority than the BitTorrent packets. But it would prevent ISPs from deciding that if you access CNN.com you can have the full 1.5MBps speed (assuming the rest of the network can handle that) but if you access YouTube.com or download something over BitTorrent, you cannot ever get more than 256KBps unless you pay extra for it (or google pays extra for it in the case of YouTube)
Re:Well, if REM (Score:5, Insightful)
I remember the 80's radio scene. My local rock station was pretty much like this from 1981-85:
Van Halen, AC/DC, Led Zeppelin, Def Leppard, Motley Crue, Pink Floyd, The Who, The Rolling Stones, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aerosmith. There was no R.E.M. or U2 or INXS or Husker Du or The Cure any alternative band being played on mainstream radio.
While you may consider these guys corporate now, they were not corporate bands in the early to mid 80's. 1987 seemed to be the breakout year for U2, R.E.M., The Cure, and INXS and alternative music in general to get actual air play. Then Nirvana came along in 1991 and alternative became mainstream.
Re:This "threat" is nonsense. (Score:3, Insightful)
And then you have the people that only have a "choice" of 1, maybe 2 ISPs. If that one ISP, or both ISPs do the throttling, then the user doesn't have the ability to change service providers. That theory might work if one realistically had a choice of a multitude of service providers. It doesn't work in a monopoly or near-monopoly.
> And what would prevent musicians and their fans from using P2P techniques for distributed streaming?
The ISP throttles traffic on anything that isn't going through their web proxies. Default traffic gets capped unless you are going to a "blessed" site that the ISP has obtained $$$ from to make them blessed. So much for your P2P traffic.
Shut Up And Code (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Because spam and viruses must be allowed... (Score:5, Insightful)
To do a real-world analogy, let's say that you have an eight lane highway. Normally, any car can use any of the four lanes in either direction. Now, we're going to do the telco money-grab on the road. I'll pay for "high priority" service on the highway. If I'm traveling down a lane, you, as a non-payer, must get out of my way, no matter what the traffic congestion looks like. This will result in me getting to my destination faster, and it taking longer for you to get to yours. In other words, I would be effectively paying to slow down everyone else while allowing me to go faster.
I have a problem with this, since I pay for my Internet connection. I agreed that I wouldn't always get the full bandwidth I paid for, due to various circumstances beyond my ISP's control. I *did not* agree that the ISP could deliberately tamper with my traffic to make some things slow, and some things fast. I would imagine that my ISP did not agree to that with their upstream provider, and they with theirs. It is a radical change in the way the infrastructure works, and makes it a different beast.
If a company wants to charge more for a connection that tends towards lower latency (a T-3 instead of a cable modem), that's fine. If someone wants to charge more for 10Mb of upstream bandwidth than for 5Mb, then that's also fine. It is *not* fine to say "we're making other companies' traffic get precedence over your traffic, unless you pay us more".
Re:Good for REM (Score:3, Insightful)
No, that's what it meant to you. What it meant to record labels was MONEY. If it didn't look like it would make money, they wouldn't put it out there.
The only musical movement I can think of that died before it was commercialized was hardcore punk. It was a creation of youth and came from a point of ignorance which frankly was one of its strengths - punk didn't involve acceptance of what people told you that you couldn't do. And no one ever really made much money on hardcore.
Rock, however, came straight out of the studio. It was a commercial creation from the beginning.