The crazy thing is they're debating on Sender-Pays:
FTA "The concept—known as “sender pays”—would radically alter today’s Internet economics. Some countries say their networks are groaning under video and other content provided in large part by U.S. companies such as Facebook, Netflix, and Google. These countries suggest that fees on content providers would help defray local infrastructure costs."
This is exactly why ITU and other agencies should stay out of the way. They have no clue how the internet works. Content providers do pay Bandwidth fees at their edges. If the networks are having a hard time with this content they should have not signed deals at the edges of their networks that put them in these positions. What they really want is to dig their hands into the deeper pockets of content providers and create a sort of "Tax" to improve their "groaning" networks. What would really happen is they would get the money and continue running their inefficient networks and magically the extra money would just disappear in a flash of "operating expenses".
More likely is that content providers would pull out of countries that implement "sender pays". The countries that want these taxes are, in general, marginal revenue streams (Africa, Middle East, etc).
Note: this may be the goal of the totalitarian regimes all along. They could not be accused of censorship when Twitter, Facebook & the like pull out.
Media - music, news, movies - from the West (Western Europe, US) is one of the many things that sparked discontent in Soviet-bloc countries. It countered much of the propaganda put out by the "workers paradises."
In more current times, putting out video, images, and information has shed light on atrocities that are going on around the world. Some of it drives people to action.
Anything the regimes can do to cut off communications is a win for them.
Fortunately technology is advancing far more rapidly than government attempts to stamp on it, and government (or non-government) attempts or not people will find the best deal they can. Such meddling and artificial market pressures may in fact spur innovation, but I wouldn't bet on it. The history of commercial codes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_code_%28communicatio... is an interesting one, though. Charging per length? Send compressed messages. Not compressed enough? Create the theory of compression and compress them even more. Print out shared code books to compress beyond the minimum for a raw message. What would Netflix do if the cost of paying for content transfer over wire suddenly exceeded the cost of other alternatives? They'd probably pursue those alternatives.
More interestingly, with WebRTC and P2P in the browser, it's really only a matter of time until they won't know who the original sender is anyways. Everyone will become a sender and these telcos worrying about too much content are right back where they were.
P2P basically nullifies the sender pays argument. If the sender pays economic model prevails and I were netflix, I would immediately invest in a netflix client that is P2P, so that I am only really paying more for less popular content and any sufficiently popular content is self-sustaining.
I'm generally all for any regulation that ends up spurring more P2P solution, but the problem we then end up with, and is a serious one, is that less popular (or simply not-yet-popular) content becomes too expense to be sustainable and we end up with less content to choose from. The long tail will either cost more or be discontinued.
No, the concept is that the 'sender' has to send less because the receiver takes some of the load. What ends up happening (for content with enough viewers) is that, on average, you transmit as much data as you receive, so the cost returns to being split evenly. Only now the actual usage is split evenly.
I think the "technology is advancing more rapidly than governments' attempts" works well when the technology allows people the communicate much easier with each other, and then it makes it easy for people to group and create extremely massive protests against such attempts.
I think this part works a lot better than what you must be thinking - that we'll keep escaping governments through technical stuff, such as building darknets and whatnot. The problem with that is that while we may succeed in creating such solutions, it still ends up ultimately worse for us. Because now everyone has to become more technical to use these darknets, or to become anonymous, or to share stuff with each other, which will all be much harder than it is now on the Internet.
This is why the solution should always be a political one, and not a technical one, because if we lose on the politics side, it means things will get worse for us from a user experience point of view, and it will only be a short-to-medium term solution anyway, until they come after that solution, too. So instead of trying to always be one step ahead through technical means, we should try and stand up for our rights from the beginning, when it's all starting, and make sure that the political solution lasts for decades until they try again.
Here's an example. Instead of letting them pass laws that allow for warrantless monitoring of e-mails, which would then mean we'd all have to learn to use encrypted anonymous e-mail messages (which sounds like a pain), we should protest to create a law that demands warrants for that. And that's pretty much what we've achieved with the new ECPA now. While not always possible, the political solution is so much better than the technical one, and we should always strive to solve these problems through politics first.
I remember watching a video from 4 Norwegian guys I think, who talked indepth about how "they" want to turn the Internet into a TV experience. It all sounded like a big conspiracy theory (although I found it pretty easy to believe it myself), and now it turns out they were right. They've been preparing to do this for a while now.
Amateurs have been running packet ax25 networks for years. Pirate packet radio might be the only viable form of net neutrality if these goons get their own way.
Bad idea. The radiocommunication satellites are also regulated by ITU: http://www.itu.int/en/about/Pages/whatwedo.aspx . (You don't want two satellites too close using a too similar band for the transmission, so someone has to do the bookkeeping and the dispute resolution. Internet is a totally different problem.)
Isn't the proximity problem only a real issue for geostationary satellites? But in general I agree it's not the best idea; besides a bunch of technical problems it could always get shot down (even if unlikely)... A more realistic scenario would probably be connecting wireless mesh networks and ethernet cable networks (and sometimes fiber cables).
Plan a) Use an anti-satellite missile to destroy your satellite.
Plan b) Use a standard missile to destroy your ground station.
I think that the anti-satellite weapons were tested only against decoys. I don't remember a case were there was a rogue satellite and someone destroy it or the owners, but it's very difficult to argue with missile owners.
To you. Not necessarily to various governments around the world or the telecom companies that provide services they would like to get paid more for.
The only reason there is no need to debate is that the ITU will make whatever decision it's members allow it to, giving feedback from outside the ITU is somewhat a pointless action.
While the P5 (US, UK, France, Russia, and the PRC) have veto power on the Security Council, they don't necessarily have veto power in the body discussed in the article. Theoretically, the Security Council could pass a resolution to stop the lower body from doing this, but that resolution would be subject to P5 veto power.
The fact that is most likely to prevent this from being an issue is that the decisions of this ITU body are probably not binding, and the content providers will just ignore them unless governments actually try to enforce this.
Interesting. I thought resolutions from the body at large had to be vetted by the security council before they became 'ratified' by the UN as a whole. Thanks for the clarification.
Not every resolution or action by the UN goes through the Security Council.
If it doesn't have a military angle to it the Security Council has nothing to do with it. This is an action by the ITU, the US's veto power in the Security Council means nothing here.
the ITU has absolutely nothing to do with the UN Security Council
edit: the comment below about 'lower body' in the UN (I believe he is referring to the General Assembly) also has nothing to do with the ITU
for the ITU to adopt a resolution it needs to be approved by a simple majority of present members (while meeting quorum, which is half of the 172 members).
This isn't the first time they have debated silly proposals. previous ideas that didn't pass include requiring all internet users to register, allowing governments to filter the internet and to be able to implement a 'kill switch'. none passed.
FTA "The concept—known as “sender pays”—would radically alter today’s Internet economics. Some countries say their networks are groaning under video and other content provided in large part by U.S. companies such as Facebook, Netflix, and Google. These countries suggest that fees on content providers would help defray local infrastructure costs."
This is exactly why ITU and other agencies should stay out of the way. They have no clue how the internet works. Content providers do pay Bandwidth fees at their edges. If the networks are having a hard time with this content they should have not signed deals at the edges of their networks that put them in these positions. What they really want is to dig their hands into the deeper pockets of content providers and create a sort of "Tax" to improve their "groaning" networks. What would really happen is they would get the money and continue running their inefficient networks and magically the extra money would just disappear in a flash of "operating expenses".