I see your point and you are unusually well qualified to point out the legal slippery slope upon which reclassification would put the broadband industry, but I feel the need to point out that Universal Service Fund fees do not represent very large sums of money in practice. Personally I've never been bothered by paying a few $ a month for this (I think they total up to about $3/mo), even at times when I've struggled to pay the bills.
In general I prefer market solutions, but perfect competition isn't a good model for infrastructure, for a whole host of reasons.
I'm just using USF as an example of the unforeseen consequences, because that was the example in the article.
I'm not opposed to some regulation in this area, but I worry about driving investment out of wireline. Goldman is already saying Verizon should ditch its wireline business. Also, I think some level of traffic shaping (e.g. throttling Bittorrent and prioritizing HTTP) is necessary just from a network engineering point of view. I don't want my Netflix packets waiting behind some BT packets containing pirated movies.
Traffic shaping is unnecessary if ISPs provide reserved capacity per QoS tier, per customer. Every customer gets X mbits/s of high priority/low latency traffic, with the rest treated as best effort.
That way the customer can decide what they want their own priorities to be without interfering with other customers.
These concepts can be applied to both outbound and, to a limited extent, inbound traffic. Throttle the customer+QoS pair, not the technology.
1) That was when they were trying to get them to merge with Vodafone.
2) That was more about dumping the overhead that came with the union Verizon was dealing with, dumping pension liabilities, etc. and basically splitting the "high growth" business off from the slower growth business.
That isn't really the same thing. All utilities are going to be low growth businesses by their very nature.
Unless you are talking about a newer angle of attack from Goldman about it?
EDIT: I guess I'm trying to say it speaks more to Goldman's bias [splitting it up based on what looks to be growing faster so they can invest accordingly].
I use BTSync to sync some of my server content. Why should my BT traffic wait behind your stupid Netflix movie! I pay for 12Mbit connection, and I expect to get a 12Mbit connection regardless of weather the rest of the people in my neighborhood are watching Netflix, downloading BT, or playing online games. It would be ok if ISPs would advertise a high and low speed for a connection. That is, telling you that they will do their best to deliver say 50Mbit most of the time, but you are guaranteed at least a 10Mbit connection at all times.
It's like saying "I pay for a car that can go 100 miles per hour, and I expect to go 100 miles per hour regardless of whether the rest of the people in my neighborhood are on the road." Over-provisioning shared infrastructure so everyone can always go at full speed is extremely impractical.
No, not at all. My laptop has a 1Gbit network card, I paid for it, and yet I do not expect to connect to the internet at 1Gbit all the time. Car = equipment, road = ISP connection. This is also the reason why I stated that I, and I think most people, would be OK with ISPs advertising the maximum and minimum speeds. For instance, let's say the ISP has a 10Gbit fiber coming into a neighborhood of 1000 homes. Also, let's say that their modems can do maximum of 100Mbit. So, they can honestly advertise maximum speed of 100Mbit, and minimum speed of 10Mbit. No problem.
The problem is, if say Verizon was to honestly advertise their speed capabilities, they would have to advertise 100Kbit speeds on the minimum side. They are consistently, and purposefully lying about their networks capabilities.
If you pay for a road which is advertised as allowing you to go 100 miles per hour, complaining that it's full of traffic is quite legitimate.
But even that is not addressing the point. The point is that if two people are paying for the same connection and using the same amount of bandwidth, the fact that one is using it for BT Sync and the other is using it for Netflix should be of no concern to the ISP and the ISP should be making no distinction between the two.
But who's to say those bittorrent packets contain pirated movies? What if they're a Linux distro, a video game update patch, or something else. You can't. That's the whole point of not prioritizing or de-prioritizing any particular type of traffic.
Even if the bittorrent packets do contain a pirated movie, sure you have the moral highground because you paid for your movie, but in the end they're both essentially the same thing.
In general I prefer market solutions, but perfect competition isn't a good model for infrastructure, for a whole host of reasons.