If you believe we should pick what the winning business model should look like and regulate to enforce it, then Jonathan's argument makes perfect sense.

But if you don't think that, if you think there is even a slight possibility that some people might be willing to put up with interference from their carrier in exchange for cheaper service or other compensating benefits, then this decision makes good sense.

Most people have little to no choice of wired carrier, and the barriers to entry in that market are practically insurmountable. (That's why all our wired service providers are companies that already had wires to houses before the internet revolution.) But nearly everywhere in the U.S. is served by 3-4 wireless carriers, and companies with resources like GOOG could set up their own competing networks if it became important enough to them. (Note that many wireless companies didn't exist before the cell phone revolution.) Let competition decide this one. (Yes, that means that your own prefered model might not win out.)

this isn't about business models or prices, it's is about all information being equal. when everything moves to wireless we will be stuck with (for example) newscorp sites loading faster than weekly newspaper sites, or rather weeklies being made to load slower than newscorp sites because they can't afford to pay at&t or whoever for preferred access.

you can argue that not all information is actually equal because some information is more urgent, but the internet already allows you to filter out what you decide is unimportant. information gets its value from those who seek it out. it shouldn't be left up to marketing executives and people with larger wallets to decide what information gets better access, if any access at all.

Right now pretty much everyone has been enjoying pure chocolate internet. Soon the market will be filled with "choclatey" internet, and "cocoaliscious" and "chocolate flavored" internet. A while back food connoisseurs fought via petition to preserve the definition of chocolate and won. Connoisseurs of the internet have been fighting to defend the definition of internet, and unless things change, will lose.

Here's the rub: the wireless market is by its very nature more competitive... at least in major metropolitan areas. Consider what shitty options you have for wired broadband right now: Comcast, Qwest DSL (slower), FiOS for a few lucky sons-of-bitches, and Broadstripe for a few especially unlucky sons of bitches. For the most part, you've got 2 options plus ClearWire (which apparently suffers from pretty bad latency, rendering Netflix streaming not an option; or so I'm told), and in most cases, those options are not equivalent.

On the other hand, I can choose from AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, and a host of smaller mobile companies. They may not all be compatible with the phone I want, but in terms of service, they are relatively competitive, and they're always trying to outdo each other. Comcast doesn't have to compete with Qwest, but AT&T has to keep trying to improve their coverage before the other guys descend.

Thus, Comcast has a lot more leeway to implement throttling or discriminatory pricing for traffic, because until it makes them worse than the other competitor, they can do what they want.

But as soon as AT&T starts charging me extra to access Facebook, I'm off to T-Mobile.

As for non-mobile wireless services like ClearWire, if the business model is sound, they can be similarly competitive. Yes, wireless services have to fit within certain radio bands, but that's a lot lower barrier of entry than having to rewire the city with fiber cables.

All in all, I'm not overly concerned with the description above. The non-competitive industry gets more regulation to prevent abuse and the competitive industry is allowed to work out its business models in the market.

#4

I have Clear wimax (home and mobile) and I watch Netflix movies all the time.

It performs flawlessly.

@1, it means nobody will win out except large media, because they are in bed with large bandwidth.

Bits are bits, not each site as a value-added service. It means goodbye to the internet as it exists, in favor of pay-walled gardens. It'll provide 95% of what 80% of the market wants. The cost barrier to jump out of the garden to get the rest of that content will make sure it eventually withers and dies, killing minority viewpoints and non-sanctioned content.

@5 Yeah, Clear works great until you watch too much Netflix and they throttle you.

#7

I watch a lot of streaming and don't get throttled. Netflix starts up right away, and the buffering can take from 0 to 2 seconds most times.

I don't think any FCC watchers over the last ten years or so are particularly surprised this would be the best they came up with. The only unalloyedly good news I can see is at this point is that with so much money at stake, there'll be plenty of willingness to fund lawsuits to hash this out.

@4: Mobile carriers "always trying to outdo each other"? Can you provide an example of such? I've used Sprint for about eight years. My service improved once: from something like 56 Kbps to something like 200 Kbps. I suppose they're trying to outdo each other on the colors of phones offered.

just another way to fuck us over thats all, pull out your wallets and get ready for a good old fashioned ass fucking america !

We'll have to hope that the tech guerrillas out there will come up with ways to circumvent the barriers that will be put in place on our mobile devices. Though to access such information would apparently require that we do so at our home (wired) PCs.

To those that say "competition" or "the market" will answer this problem since I get to choose whether I use, let's say, Verizon where Fox news site comes up quickly, or AT&T where MSNBC's site comes up quickly "the market" will only help if I know what they're doing. It would be all but impossible for your average user to identify what your provider is throttling vs what's just a little slow today. Allowing wireless providers to pick their preferred winners hurts us all. In the future Verizon doesn't even have to make a contribution to a political candidate, they can just make access to the opposition parties website all but impossible to get to.

Golob,
OK, you've made your point, this is bad, what do we do about it?

@12 there is no tech to get around this. Think of it like this flow chart:

A -> B -> C -> D -> E

A=your phone or laptop
B=your wireless provider (ISP), let's say Clearwire
C=the ISP of your ISP. Clearwire gets their connection from someone too.
D=the ISP of Facebook
E=Facebook

Your phone says to B, I want Facebook. B says to C, where facebook? C says to D, where Facebook? D gets it from E, which is the magic Facebook server somewhere. E back to D, and D says to C: "Here you are." But on either the B or C level -- probably the C level, at Clearwire/B's request--the information slowwwwwwwwwwws down. Because for every time you ask for Facebook on your phone or laptop, a tiny charge has to be paid by your ISP to their own ISP.

They want to increase that profit and reduce that cost. So unless you--on the A level--or Facebook, on the E level--paid B more money, you get throttled and slowed down on B or C.

There is nothing you can do from your phone to get around this. It's completely impossible. To do so would be like driving on today's viaduct during heavy traffic downtown, and declaring, "Someone needs to invent a way to increase capacity on this viaduct or allow me to get off of it RIGHT now!" Good luck with that.

@13 most people are completely unaware of what this means because most tech advocates are complete idiots in how to dumb down explaining complex concepts and their implications to regular people. Even what I wrote @14 is probably 90% too complex for most people, because the Internet is really a very complex machine and series of tubes.

Then you get attention whores like Drudge with his 50,000,000 daily or whatever setting up the whole net neutrality fight as a "Julius Caeser wants to take YOUR Freedoms online with the Fed!!" nevermind it's the EXACT opposite, and Julius is trying to do the exact fucking opposite. But no--he would certainly limit the freedoms of companies.

In twenty years when we're huddled around fires wondering who to cannibalize for dinner next, we'll laugh at when we worried about how quickly we could download pr0n onto 'computers'.

This whole post is stupid. Does this guy know what he's talking about?

The vast majority of wireless that doesn't suck is local wifi access points connected to the magical wired internet.

3G is laughable for your main connection, so is WiMax/4G/LTE/whatever they are calling it these days (the technology is well over a decade old). Clearwire has occasional success, especially around here... where they are founded/based out of.

Broadband in the US is far from "dismal". What are you talking about?

Depending on your phone lines, ADSL is probably more reliable than cable, has better routing (more choice of ISP and possibly even CLEC), and SDSL is likely the best reliability/cost ratio you can get as an average consumer.

FiOS was never alive so it's hard to call it dead. There are other mass-fiber projects. Utopia in Utah comes to mind (and certainly has its own issues).

Actually wired internet can do that because you don't need 100% on. You need 90-95% on but really fast when it's on and really smart/quiet/quick about syncing your local copies to your cloud copies. The obvious argument is that local copies will go away completely, but hard drive space is dirt cheap and super reliable (especially as SSDs grow up). Successful cloud-computing projects like Dropbox and LiveMesh already store local copies of everything and it's a Good Thing.

Please leave the computer writing to people who aren't trying too hard to sensationalize and actually know/use the technologies being discussed.

Obviously, as a nerd, I am for total net-neutrality, and this is disappointing overall, but what is more disappointing is the Slog post on it.

Having an informed opinion here means having negotiated or at least read the terms of a few actual peering agreements. There is no substitute for knowing how and why carriers and content providers already choose to exchange traffic.

Get started at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peering or http://nanog.org. They won't be enough to have an strong opinion about policy - I've read about an appendectomy but it doesn't qualify me to set policy for them - but you'll be able to call BS on 99% of what's being said about net neutrality.

@18 Even if one buys your argument that wired services are far superior to wireless services (which I do), do you really believe that this will be the case forever...? Anyone who's watched the progress of wireless service over the last 10 years can easily tell you that's not going to be the case.

To the concerned folks: donate to EFF. They do good work fighting for open access & net neutrality.

http://www.eff.org/

@20 you know I asked myself that same question before and after posting that and I honestly can't say.

On one hand, the logic of "Moore's law" -- where things will always get better -- and thus wireless connections will eventually supercede wired. This is very hard to argue against.

On the other hand, the general fact that wireless sucks currently. Even cell phones are having issues (AT&T - "Rethink Possible" - it is now impossible to use your phone). Even people on wifi (the strongest of the consumer level wireless) in their house have problems staying connected to games and streams. I've seen it a dozen+ times. In some buildings, microwaves are still interfering with wifi. Put challenging geography and city-scapes like Manhattan in the picture (and the cost of real estate that comes with it), and I start to question if wireless will really outperform wired in my lifetime (or even the foreseeable future).

Did everyone already forget that McGinn actually had building a fiber network for Seattle in his mayoral platform? I remember writing him about it with the gist of "good idea but don't screw it up like Utah did with Utopia." Yeah, where's my fiber? Heh.

If there's a way to pervert any well-intentioned regulation of ISPs, rest assured that their attorneys and technicians will find it and exploit it to its fullest advantage. By definition, what is good for an ISP is inevitably bad for its unfortunate victims -- sorry, I meant "customers."

Comcast is right at the head of the pack for knowing precisely how to look like a friend while honing that knife they will use to stab you in the back. Comcast never does anything -- repeat: anything -- that is not specifically in their own best interest. Not being satisfied with that, they stack the deck in their favor, cheating their customers out of having a decent, affordable ISP.

Most ISP markets are severely constricted because companies like Comcast extract monopoly agreements from local governments in exchange for the privilege of screwing their victim-customers at every opportunity.

Public ISPs would be the best thing anyone could hope for: not investor-owned, managed for the benefit of their subscribers and provided at the lowest possible, non-profit cost. Look no further than Tacoma, Washington's excellent service for an example of how good this works.

@23:

Your last paragraph brings up a good point: in this day-and-age access to information should be treated, not as a commodity, but rather as a utility; something that has become so integral to our ability to live, work and function as a free society that we cannot allow any entity, whether government or corporate, to restrict that access.

I stand by every word I said: ISPs that are privately held are anathema to free, affordable web access. If we had been around when Westinghouse created power grids, Marconi invented radio or Bell created the telephone, we would have no idea how their existence could morph into something so vitally important to everyday life. After we realized their importance, we regulated them or turned them into public utilities.

Europe has ISPs that provide download/upload speeds as high as 1-gigabyte/second on their wired networks and charge about 25 Euros a month for this service. many of these entities are public utilities.

When I hear Republicans bleating about privatizing everything, I feel like puking. They have the reverse Midas touch: everything they touch turns to shit. Then they make shit sandwiches and charge us money when they force us to eat them. In the purest sense of the word, Republicans are fascists.

I hate my Shift-Key. It works sometimes...

This is all about greed and the fcc caving in to corporate interest. If one looks at the recent profits of most major broadband providers their profits are not suffering.
The end result of this faux 'net neutrality' is, they will be able to charge more and make more for the exact same service we already get.
Instead of a 'one price fits all' approach they wish to start charging more for people using more bandwidth.
In other words, welcome to Metered Internet!
Soon we will see monthly bandwidth caps with additional charges for those who exceed the cap. The 'all you can eat' internet will soon be 'all you can eat on one plate, additional plates available at a additional cost'.

PS: The big flaw in this approach: Those using less bandwidth are not going to pay less.
If this was a fair and unbiased approach, they would charging less to those who use less and more to those who use more. That is not the case at all.

@14, you left out the Backbone between C and D