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You are here: MacNN Forums > News > Tech News > German Chancellor speaks out against net neutrality, wants fast lanes

German Chancellor speaks out against net neutrality, wants fast lanes
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NewsPoster
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Dec 7, 2014, 03:47 PM
 
While members of the European Union and the US fight net neutrality and Internet traffic equality battles, German Chancellor Angela Merkel waded in during a conference in Berlin to explain her outlook for the Internet. Instead of looking towards maintaining a neutral playing field for all, Merkel says that the Internet should be split into two tiers to accommodate special services.

During Digitising Europe -- an event put on by the Vodafone Institute for Society and Communication -- Merkel said that there are key Internet services that have more demands on connectivity, and therefore demand to be treated differently from other traffic, reports The Local. Merkel believes that the Internet as a service should be split in two, with one "lane" providing equal and unfettered access to websites, but with another "lane" for the special services with greater demand, such as Netflix or HD IP television. However, both services would run over the same Internet infrastructure.

"An innovation-friendly Internet means that there is a guaranteed reliability for special services," said Merkel. "These can only develop when predictable quality standards are available." While there is no briefing on how the plan would be regulated, she mentioned that the dedicated channel for special services could be for high-demand applications like driver-less cares or telemedicine.

In a logical point, Merkel says that these types of transmissions need to be "reliable and always secure." In talking about the building of secure and fast Internet "channels," Merkel adds that "we can't talk about net neutrality if the capacity to have it isn't available."

According to a report from Frankfurter Allgemeine, the German government is on-board with the plan, as it looks forward to enabling the two-tier structure. The government readied an economic proposal for the European Union that looks to explore the new structure, saying that the current Internet will be maintained while clearly defining what special services entail. If the proposal is ushered through the European Commission, it's likely to meet stiff resistance when presented to the European Parliament, since another two-tiered plan was shot down in April.

However, the idea of what a special service can be is still nebulous. In the proposal, video-on-demand services would be considered a service eligible for the dedicated, special channel. The only solace is the idea that businesses could not offer the lane for specialized services without first establishing capacity for smooth, non-discriminatory traffic for the open Internet.

Net neutrality supporters in Germany find the words concerning, as it's believed to further show the work of Merkel's political party, the Christian Democratic Union, working with telecommunication lobbyists. Netzpolitik founder Markus Bechedahl says the statement shows a position from telecommunication companies, one that moves closer to "a two-tier network where content becomes preferred based on who pays for it to make it so." A colleague of his, Professor Leonhard Dobusch of the Free University in Berlin agrees, adding that Merkel's statements "poke holes into net neutrality" by removing its democratic nature.
( Last edited by NewsPoster; Dec 8, 2014 at 07:25 AM. )
     
Haywire
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Dec 7, 2014, 05:13 PM
 
I was somewhat ambivalent about net neutrality. But lately I've been thinking about the money trail.

Politics begets donors with deep pockets. Donors require payback - the bigger the donation, the more the donors expect the government will do for them. Obvious, right?

So why do politicians want a network divided highway? They want existing bandwidth split such that high traffic corporations get the really fast lane with very little latency, while we poor souls get bit dribble.

To be sure competition will improve bandwidth for prolific users, but we lesser humans will not see the improvements.

The ISPs and other network interlopers should just crank up the bit rate as technology allows - the faster the overall bit rate, the faster everyone can get on and off the network as they intermittently move data.
     
Charles Martin
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Dec 7, 2014, 06:42 PM
 
I can see some of Merkel's point, but the flaw in the thinking is that it all has to be on the same infrastructure. What you'd really want is to build an entirely separate infrastructure so that emergency/mandatory services and high-capacity video *don't mix at all* with the open Internet, so as to ensure that both "lanes" get all the capacity they need. Without that, you essentially punish the rest of the Internet to slow speeds and poor service as companies chase profit in video and make the argument (with money) that their services need the "reserved" tier versus the "plebian" tier.

As I don't trust politicians or companies to make this work the way Merkel imagines, I remain personally pro-neutrality.
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ElectroTech
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Dec 7, 2014, 11:04 PM
 
Many of you don't remember the early internet when there were advocates trying to get users to not send too many emails and to keep them short and not to send photos so that the internet would be kept free and have enough bandwidth for all.

Technology has kept the bandwidth up and the world is richer for it. We need to keep developing bandwidth and using more and more of it for progress to be made. Two tiered internet is a bad idea and will halt progress.
     
climacs
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Dec 8, 2014, 10:00 AM
 
the excuse is 'special services' but if anybody thinks that will not be exploited by the ISPs in order to jack up their profits, I have a temporary tax I'd like to sell you.
     
Inkling
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Dec 8, 2014, 10:33 AM
 
I fully agree with Merkel. I want my Internet service to be reliable and inexpensive. My current 20-meg service is all I need. And I resent high-demand users who want to force me and those like me to cover the costs of their service. If they want an Internet that's like a five-star restaurant, let them pay five-star prices. I'm perfectly happy dining and paying fast-food prices. Two tiers or even three or four are fine with me. In fact, I left my former broadband provider, Charter, because it refused to sell me any service slower that an expensive 60-meg one. Users need choices, not having one choice dictated to them by "net neutrality" activists.
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Makosuke
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Dec 8, 2014, 05:22 PM
 
Inkling: you and some other people who think you're in favor of a tiered internet are, I believe, only holding that position because you aren't clear on what the major ISPs are asking for when they ask to remove network neutrality.

I honestly believe that a lot of people against net neutrality are so simply because they do not actually understand what net neutrality is.

If removing net neutrality were, as you're saying, about people who use the internet more paying more--the bandwidth hogs in your neighborhood paying higher ISP fees--then there would be a very strong argument against net neutrality. Heck, I might be against it. The few people hogging all the bandwidth in your neighborhood and slowing the connection for all would pay more for that service.

But that's the thing--that's NOT what the ISPs are asking to do. What they want is to say that, for example, "Hulu paid us $x million, and therefore their traffic gets priority over EVERYTHING ELSE on the internet backbone. Netflix didn't pay us, so their traffic gets downgraded."

So what happens? You're sitting at home with your 20Mbit internet connection trying to watch Netflix. But the video keeps stalling. Why? Because the guy next door, who has exactly the same 20Mbit connection you do, and uses exactly the same amount of bandwidth per month you do, is watching Hulu, and his traffic gets priority.

Take it a step farther. Comcast has a 1/3 stake in Hulu. So maybe they don't even have to pay more to get priority, so long as you're using Comcast. Now you're sitting at home with a 30Mbit internet connection you pay twice as much as your neighbor for, but your Netflix keeps stalling because your neighbor is watching a free Hulu stream that Comcast decided they'd rather prioritize over your traffic. Or, if *you* switch to Hulu, it'll run fine for you too. Did you switch because Hulu is better? Or just because Netflix keeps stalling, and you want an uninterrupted video to watch?

Those are the arguments that the ISPs themselves are making, but the issue goes much deeper. Let's say that Comcast doesn't like the website "IHateComcast.com", because they keep posting stories from angry Comcast customers whose Netflix streams keep stalling while Hulu works perfectly, and pointing out that it's in Comcast's favor if people switch to Hulu. So they say "You know what, we'll just give IHateComcast.com absolute last-priority.

So now, if you go to ILoveComcast.com, the site loads almost instantly on your 20Mbit connection. But if you go to IHateComcast.com, it takes a really, really long time for it to load. Maybe you get tired of waiting and assume the server is down, so you don't even read the site.

Can you *prove* they're slowing that particular site down because they don't like it? Of course not. It's just "adjusting network bandwidth to balance traffic for services that have paid for priority. But they could easily do this.

Net neutrality prevents ISPs from favoring one TYPE of traffic over another. Not one user, but a service or specific type of data. It forces them to say "This is data going through my pipe. It doesn't matter whether it's Hulu or Netflix or IHateComcast.com, it all is just data we're responsible for moving because we are in charge of major network backbones."

That's what net neutrality is really about--preventing major ISPs from instituting subtle but powerful anticompetitive behaviors that are almost impossible to prove by the consumer, and "the market" can't work around, since there are only a handful of near-monopolistic ISPs and even if you're not with one of them the traffic probably passes through a backbone owned by one of them.
     
Makosuke
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Dec 8, 2014, 05:30 PM
 
I should have added that tiered customer-level internet is entirely compatible with net neutrality. Saying "You pay $30 for the first 100GB of traffic and $1 per GB after that" is fine--that's just user throttling, regardless of what those 100GB were sucked up doing. Likewise, they can set unlimited tiers and say "you get what you get" (like cable ISPs do).

Those behaviors may or may not be regulated, but they are unrelated to net neutrality; net neutrality is simply about treating all data going through the pipe identically, regardless of type, source, or destination. How ISPs deal with heavy users is up to them and the competitive market, as long as the ISPs treat all traffic the same.
     
Feathers
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Dec 20, 2014, 01:38 PM
 
If the bias within what is being discussed at high levels of government is not completely clear, I offer a simple analogy:

If we treat the internet like the water system where the resource is ostensibly infinite but the ability to deliver it is finite, what Merkel is advocating is a system that prioritises those who own swimming pools!

If this isn't a classic example of "feed the rich", I don't know what is?
     
   
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