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On Entangling and Testing Net Neutrality
P3titPrince writes "In an NYT op-ed today, Timothy B. Lee argues that legislation specifically guaranteeing Net Neutrality would in fact be less effective than just allowing the status quo." From the article: "It's tempting to believe that government regulation of the Internet would be more consumer-friendly; history and economics suggest otherwise. The reason is simple: a regulated industry has a far larger stake in regulatory decisions than any other group in society. As a result, regulated companies spend lavishly on lobbyists and lawyers and, over time, turn the regulatory process to their advantage. Economists have dubbed this process 'regulatory capture,' and they can point to plenty of examples. The airline industry was a cozy cartel before being deregulated in the 1970's. Today, government regulation of cable television is the primary obstacle to competition." Relatedly, winnabago writes "Computerworld reports on a potential method for testing a net connection for neutrality. Somewhat similar to Traceroute, the software uses spoof packets that appear to be from a potentially throttled source and compares the transmission time to that of neutral traffic."
Why has Google bought all the dark fibre that they can? Easy! When telcos start clamping down on 'Net connections, we'll all be on the GoogleNet.
Net Neutrality problems solved, at least for Google.
= Grow a brain...
None. In fact it will become VERY BIG if net neutrality goes bad, unstoppable and undetectable by any legal or technical means.
We will see new "portals". Not the web portals that you think of now, but point to point gateways between
parts of the globe which are tunnelled through adaptive multi route connections. The adaptive part is the key to this
and the mentioned software is a vital component. Internet proxies will spring up where traffic basically disappears into them
to emerge elsewhere. Sure you will have higher pings / slower delivery times, but the bandwidth / throughput will be immense.
Although superficially similar to TOR these new gateways are not intended to provide security or anonymity, they are designed to obfuscate the traffic from the carrier. No amount of legal mumbo jumbo is going to be able to do jack about this, it is an inevitable future if the carriers start to be selective on traffic. Unless they *physically* disconnect their networks and isolate themselves there is nothing the carriers can do about it. The days of traditional routing are probably numbered.
The internet (in the original ARPA concept) was designed to route around problems. It is by design an adaptive system. If the carriers become a problem they will be routed around. It's that simple. Net neutrality can only ever be a short term problem, until the system adapts to counter it.
Thanks to the greed of the telcos the net will evolve one step further and we will have them to thank for an even more robust and reliable network topology that can detect and adpat to threats to its connections.