Another Inventor of the Internet Wants To Gag It

MojoKid writes "Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title: 'Inventor of the Internet' in news articles. According to Wikipedia, he's the father of networking through data packets. And he's turned his attention to everyone's favorite data packet topic: Peer-to-Peer file sharing. He's established a company called Anagran, and says their devices can sort out which file transfers on the tubes are P2P, and — you guessed it — can throttle them in favor of other, more 'high-priority' traffic."

Comments

Re:so what

[blankinthefill]

Yes, but who decides what's "high priority" going from the consumer to the cloud? I pay for a 6mbit line every month, and I expect to be able to use it the way I see fit. What makes your 6mbit line so special that your traffic gets precedence over mine? We're paying the same amount, shouldn't we get the same service, no matter WHAT we're transferring?

Mod Article Down

[the eric conspiracy]

This has to be the most ridiculous article in the history of slashdot.

"Lawrence Roberts is just another guy with the title: 'Inventor of the Internet' in news articles."

That's right, just another guy. Who just happened to be the Program Manager and principle architect for the initial design and construction of ARPAnet.

Re:P2P has legit uses.

[AllIGotWasThisNick]

I think the bulk of network "management" from ISPs today is not about "prioritizing" anything. It's about preventing the Internet from competing with the ISP's other services (cable, telephone) by targeting specific applications with throttling or eg. Comcast's packet fraud. If HTTP actually received priority, then connections with other protocols would be slower, but neither stopped or violated.

Re:so what

[rhyno46]

That sounds like something a scaremonger might say.

Re:so what

[oogoliegoogolie]

Your analogy isn't accurate; here, I'll fix it for you!

First of all, the sports cars are to be limited to 50kph on certain sections of the road whereas the other drivers would still enjoy the full 100kph speed limit in the same section.

Secondly, driving to certain locations such as a beach, movie theater, or concert would be limited to 30kph the entire trip even on the freeway no matter what car you drive.

Thirdly, the providers of the freeway would justify the speed limits on sport cars by claiming that there are just too many sport cars and they are interfering with the other drivers, even though 95% of the freeway is empty at any given time, and none of the non-sport car drivers have ever complained or been affected by the super-fast sport cars.

Fourthly, the freeway providers limit speeds because they have their own plans to introduce their own sport cars that have no speed restrictions, yet have less features, cost more and don't go as fast as the other sport cars.

Fifthly, the providers of the smaller freeways that want to provide faster speed limits at lower prices would have their traffic limited, or shaped, by the larger freeway providers.

There, that's better.

Sold as "unlimited" and users expect that? Gasp!

[Dogtanian]

If the government told you that you can go as fast as you want

Roads without speed limit signs (and there are a lot of them, at least here in NY) are limited to the state speed limit (55 in our case).

He didn't say or even imply otherwise. He came up with a hypothetical analogy which said " if [my emphasis] the government told you that you can go as fast as you want".

You can argue that this is or isn't a good analogy, but that's beside the point.

You'll complain that 99% of people don't get "ticketed" but that still doesn't change the fact that you were abusing the service. That 6 mbit or 10 mbit pipe isn't designed to be used at full capacity 24/7 by each subscriber, it's designed [etc]

You can argue all you like that their system isn't designed to be used like that. I'll mostly agree with you- we all know that most consumer broadband services couldn't deliver if they were used to their true "unlimited" capacity.

But again, this is beside the point- you *can't* accuse people of "abusing the service" if it was sold as "unlimited". Even- no, *especially*- if the limitations were stated via some obscure, vaguely-worded small-print in the contract, or some handwaving reference to a "see elsewhere" weasel-worded "fair use" policy.

Many ISPs promoted their services as "unlimited" because it sounded better, even though this relied upon most people not using anything like the full capacity they were given. If this situation changes, it's *their* problem for overselling something they can't deliver, not the customers' for "abusing the system". I'm not going to come up with another trite analogy to illustrate that :)

Frankly, I've nothing against the principle that (much) heavier users should pay for what they use and not expect to be subsidised. I'm not even entirely opposed to QoS being used so long as it's applied in a relatively neutral and fair manner, and doesn't lead to "second-class citizen" Internet access. I'm only opposed to it when used as some BS excuse to coerce user behaviour, favour the ISPs' vested interests and/or cover-up and weasel out of the limitations of an oversold Internet service, as it is at present.