Report: Net neutrality could kill 'e-health' plans

For years, we've been hearing about the need for a tech-savvier American health care system that could make paper health records, prescriptions, X-rays and even in-person checkups into relics. But all of that could be derailed unless U.S. policymakers reject calls for so-called Net neutrality regulations, a new report warns.

That's the position of the U.S. Internet Industry Association (USIIA), a 13-year-old trade association that represents "companies engaged in Internet commerce, content and connectivity." Verizon is the biggest name represented on its board of directors, which also includes representatives from ServInt, a maker of "virtual private servers;" and Internet Colorado, a small ISP. (I requested a complete listing of its members, but USIIA did not respond to my request by press time. Update 10:45 a.m. PDT: A USIIA representative said the group has a "non-disclosure policy" for those names.)

"American consumers should not be forced to accept a 'one-size-fits-all' broadband service that places critical medical monitoring and health care on the same footing as music and video downloads or noncritical communications," says USIIA president David McClure in a report titled "e-Health and America's Broadband Networks" (PDF) released Tuesday.

McClure is referring to regulations sought by Google, Amazon.com and public-interest groups that would prohibit network operators like AT&T and Comcast from charging premium fees to content providers for priority placement of their content. Some legislative proposals on the table have called for allowing prioritization of network traffic within particular classes of data, but extra fees would be banned. That would seem to mean that a company like Verizon could choose to set aside a dedicated pipe for all user-generated video content, but it would have to make that pipe available to all user-generated video Web sites in existences, and without extra charges.

In their fight against Net neutrality laws, telecommunications and cable companies have mainly argued they need the freedom to explore new business models to offset costs associated with building the latest, greatest broadband infrastructure. But the health care argument isn't exactly new, either.

One of the things that broadband providers like Verizon have said they hope to offer to hospitals and health-care providers in greater quantities is "virtual private networks" dedicated to potentially high-bandwidth operations like sharing health records and monitoring patients from afar. They claim Net neutrality regulations would essentially outlaw those plans.

So what about carving out an exception to those rules for Internet traffic related to critical health information? On a conference call with reporters Tuesday morning, McClure said that just wouldn't make sense.

"Where do we stop?" he asked. "How many carve-outs do we have to have? A carve-out for 911 telephone calls over VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol)? Do we do another carve-out for government services which can be considered critical and emergency services?"

Advocates for Net neutrality mandates were quick to pounce on USIIA's stance, though Paul Misener, Amazon.com's vice president for global public policy, acknowledged there are "legitimate reasons for prioritizing critical applications."

"We just don't want network operators like Verizon (USIIA's principal sponsor) to prioritize consumer communications with some health care providers over others, depending on which pays them the most money," he said in an e-mail interview. "Network neutrality is about prohibiting discrimination, preserving consumer choice and, in this example, keeping the network operators from becoming virtual HMOs that determine which doctor, which hospital, or which clinic gets favored treatment."

[umbrae]

Bogus...

This is just belly-aching. Having free pipes will not limit any e-health type services. Yes, if you are remote-controlling a robot over the internet doing a virtual surgery it will be an issue. However, you would NEVER want this on the "internet". Net Neutrality would not affect "private, closed, point to point" connections, which would be used for this.

[horse7]

Greed....

A potential compromise solution is to require that any provider desiring to charge different rates for priority service, make infrastructure available to all customers such that every customer has potential access to the fastest tier.

The intent is to encourage providers to build out infrastructure to the numerous severely underserved areas-- even in populous areas, there are many pockets of poor broadband coverage.

[allen b--2008]

Guaranteed Bandwidth

Umm, when I was purchasing internet bandwidth, for a company that I used to work for, I had an option to have Guaranteed Bandwidth. This meant that if I guaranteed 3Mb, I would have no less then 3Mb, as long as the data stayed on the providers network. The downside was that if I was accessing something that had an endpoint on another providers network, then my guarantee went out the window, and with all the different providers out there, that was quite often.

Now most providers are offering MPLS to their customers. This provides them with dedicated bandwidth on a semi-private point to point. This allows you to have the guaranteed bandwidth that a P2P allows, at a fraction of the cost. It also allows for a higher peak bandwidth. These MPLS P2P networks are where companies like the medical industry will spend their money.

They talk about monitoring devices. Umm, these are just doing serial data dumps. It's not like they are sending video. If a patient is so critical that taking 5 seconds to receive the signal that their **insert ailment here** is acting up will kill them, then I doubt they are outside a hospital.

All of this is just a way for the providers to try and make money off of the one place that remains free. The internet. Providers are tired of letting people download/view/etc. high end content without being able to make everyone pay more for it. The biggest problem is that they have cut prices enough, and sold larger chunks of bandwidth to end users and companies, that now they can't make as big of a profit.

If they are struggling that badly, why don't they try to charge more for their internet access packages. Oh wait, that would be because people wouldn't buy it. Welcome to the economics of supply and demand.

[fgoldstein]

More astroturf

USIIA is Verizon's sock puppet; Dave McClure is their shill. The only "ISP" he really gives a hoot about is Verizon.net. Their interests are diametrically opposed to those of most other ISPs. If three small CLECs started the "American Telephone Company Association", would they be quoted by the press as representing Verizon? Hmmm, worth a try.

In any case, only a handful of neutrality extremists (I call them the "Trotskyites", revolutionaries with ideals detached from achievability) believe that the Internet must be One Size Fits All. A neutral service can still allow different types of service AT THE CUSTOMER'S REQUEST. You want better, you pay for it. You want lower loss or latency, fine; anyone can have it for a stated fee. That's still neutral in any meaningful sense, just not the straw man sense that McClure is bleating about.

That's not the telco's dream model, though. They want to discriminate, make deals with favored partners, block or degrade access to competitors, and wiretap content ("deep packet inspection") in order to bill users for the perceived value of the payload. That type of behavior should be banned.

[Had_to_be_said]

What a LOAD...

This is about creating a way to charge more for the same service (transporting packets), and artificially-creating ever greater market-control... nothing else. And, those that are opposing "net-neutrality", the hardest, are using every under-handed, rhetorical, scare-mongering, trick in the book to accomplish their, entirely-selfish (and, inevitably, harmful to the consumer), goal.

...Hence, this latest bit of utter nonsense.

Thanks to newer technologies (and thanks to the, existing, intentionally -open- and fundamentally -equal- network-structure creating a basically "level" competitive "playing-field")... "capacity" has, and will continue to, increase.

Frankly the next level of Internet-technologies (which are currently being tested) are actually already on the way... And, they DO NOT require charging different "additional fees" for different "packet-content", or greater "sender/receiver" monitoring and control.

So... this is actually about falsely-extracting greater revenue, and artificially leveraging market-control... it is not based upon any, real, technological-needs.

In short, this is a SCAM. Still, it will be interesting to see how many, allegedly, "independent" commenters suddenly appear... utterly decrying "Net-Neutrality" as the end of "the Internet", "Business", "Capitalism", and even, "Western Civilization"... as we know it.

[mikeburek]

Internet like other industries

The internet "tubes" are like the phone lines. No one gets priority. If all the lines are busy, then you try to make a call, it fails. It's worked for the last 100+ years. If you want to avoid that, you get a cell phone, or a satelite phone, or a walkie-talkie. But even the rich side of town doesn't get preference if all the poor people are calling and a rich person wants to get on.

Opening the internet to tiered pricing might be a good concept, but human greed will kill it. Allowing tiered pricing would be like the college tuition deregulation (maybe that was just Texas). But all the Texas colleges said that tuition would be cheaper, or if it grew, it would be like 50 cents. So they got the government to deregulate college tuition. Guess what happened? It's close to double in 3 years. (ok, maybe that figure is a bit off, but it really did shoot up significantly very fast.) It went up high enough fast enough that the Texas Congress, on it's own, publicly said "Oops, that's not what was supposed to happen." Of course it hasn't been fixed (What, the colleges paying the legislators, noooo...), but how often does a politician publicly on his own say "Oops"?

So as someone pointed out, if you wanted a guaranteed fast network connection, you buy that dedicated special service, or you add a backup network access plan.

And if the pricing is free to be changed, all the sudden, people will find some other way to access the internet and the cable/isp companies will be sitting there with empty tubes.

Hmm, if putting a financial crunch on the internet really put it into a stall, it would be like a terrorist took out the internet. Man, the Taliban would be laughing so hard if American brought itself to it's own knees. And I bet the Taliban would get lots of converts since they just witnessed the "devil" killing itself. And I thought all those strip searches at the airport were going to keep us safe...

[directorblue]

Yeah, right. Because nothing critical runs on the Internet today...

What a bunch of hogwash.

Here's a more realistic news story from the future in a world without network neutrality.

http://directorblue.blogspot.com/2006/05/news-story-from-future-world-without.html

[vcerf]

Lack of net neutrality coiuld kill e-health

I come to the inverse conclusion from the author of this article. The absence of an open platform will inhibit exploration of a wide range of applications related to health care. I agree with the other commentators who note that for some special cases, dedicated networks may be required, but an open Internet will enable rapid exploration of e-health initiatives and ideas.

[vcio2006]

USIIA, VZ and NN

Dave McClure once again fronting for his backers. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with VPN, Private Line or MPLS circuits. NN is about having open access on your internet connection. It's about truth in advertising. If Verizon (VZ) sells me an internet connection then I should have equal access to any website connected to the Internet. Unlike the "web access" on some cellular services. It's about a walled garden that resembles the Internet but is in fact a limited version of it. AT&T's recent censoring of the Paerl jam concert is a perfect example of what lies ahead. The whole NN depend derived from comments made by VZ's Ivan and AT&T's Ed.
And BTW VZ already offers some Heathcare and Human Resources software as an ASP model.