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FCC Declares Intention To Enforce Net Neutrality
Unequivocal writes "The FCC chairman, Julius Genachowski, told Congress today that the 'Federal Communications Commission plans to keep the Internet free of increased user fees based on heavy Web traffic and slow downloads. ...Genachowski... told The Hill that his agency will support "net neutrality" and go after anyone who violates its tenets. "One thing I would say so that there is no confusion out there is that this FCC will support net neutrality and will enforce any violation of net neutrality principles," Genachowski said when asked what he could do in his position to keep the Internet fair, free and open to all Americans. The statement by Genachowski comes as the commission remains locked in litigation with Comcast. The cable provider is appealing a court decision by challenging the FCC's authority to penalize the company for limiting Web traffic to its consumers.' It looks like the good guys are winning, unless the appeals court rules against the FCC."
Assuming they aren't already. You know Rogers and the other providers are going to be watching very closely how this develops.
If "Net Neutrality"= "treat traffic the same regardless of protocol", then BAD.
Not in my opinion. I see no reason at all to have policies based on protocol. That's a static decision, and static policy decisions can be inaccurate for any particular connection, out of date or simply ignorant of new protocols, and can/will be largely decided by politics not practicality. I.e. bittorent bad, equally bandwidth heavy streaming protocols from ISP-approved media sites good.
You can get QoS while remaining protocol agnostic. You simply base the priority for any connection based on the amount of bandwidth it uses. Lower bandwidth, higher priority. Low-bandwidth latency-sensitive apps like VOIP work perfectly without having their protocol recognized, bulk data transfers are deprioritized but still get plenty of bandwidth (because the higher priority connections are by definition not using much) again without the protocol mattering. If you try to game the system by sending bulk data transfers though VOIP protocols, then you still get downgraded, while a static system would fail.
The only cases it doesn't work for are cases where there's not much you can do anyway -- like live (as in no buffering) streaming video.
What I don't know is if there is any routers out there that do this, or if it's still considered too much memory to keep the connection state info around for packets that are just passing through.
The enemies of Democracy are
I'd be happier if they vowed to enforce the principles, rather than their violation.
What I'd like to know is on what grounds do they think they can mandate how traffic is managed on ISP networks. There are no net neutrality laws. "Principle" means jack squat legally. I don't think there are even any internal FCC regulations on the books regarding NN, let alone laws passed by Congress. This leaves a huge hole for ISP's to take the FCC to court for what is essentially a privately delivered service.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
of course the government would never have had any part in creating these massive corporate horrors like say local monopolies would they?... /sarcasm
Are you suggesting that the Federal Communications Commission should tell the States what monopolies can and cannot be setup within their borders?
I agree with your conclusion that more competition would drive out those who seek to limit services, but I seriously question your method.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Most of the types who have traffic shaping explained to them - which is what usually happens when politicians are the ones pushing the cause - still don't understand the concept of port blocking.
When I pay for "Internet Access" I don't expect my service provider to be able to dictate what I can and can't do with my internet connection. This includes hosting my own mail, FTP, and HTTP servers! What business of it is theirs if I post an image on Fark and host it myself?
As long as you're not spamming and/or doing illegal things they need to back the hell off.
As far as I'm concerned, if I'm having select ports blocked I am NOT getting "Internet Access".
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You can still game the system: Open many parallel connections.
I just can't understand how ISPs make this a difficult problem. Obviously there are some users that use a lot of bandwidth, there are others that don't. They have tried to discriminate based on "type" of traffic for a while, but why not just on the users total traffic for the month? It is super simple, keep track of the volume of data for all customers. From this data generate a QoS ordering for every customer (quantized based on QoS technical limits) daily or every so often. Now people that don't use bandwidth get served first and others get their packets dropped when bandwidth is at capacity(which I imagine isn't 100% of the time). Essentially high bandwidth users get all the extra bandwidth left over after the low bandwidth people get as much as they want. Then there is none of this packet filters, port blocking, man in the middle TCP reset junk that they are doing now. If you really want you can guarantee a minimum bandwidth for each customer and make reservations for that in the system.
Many Republicans and conservative organizations have supported net neutrality. Savetheinternet.com for example includes the Christian Coalition of America and Gun Owners of America. While it is true that Democrats have generally been more supportive of net neutrality, (McCain was awful on net neutrality), it isn't helpful to simply assume that Republicans must all have one view of this and Democrats all the other. This doesn't reflect a much more complicated reality. It is common human behavior to assume that because one disagrees with another group on some collection of issues they will disagree with you on everything but that's not always the case. Thinking that way really isn't helpful.
Well that's a lie. Just as in most countries the FCC and it's equivalents around the world, have responsibility over telecommunications, that's phones for the not so bright. It is pretty obvious with the transition from an analogue systems to digital systems, the internet is a direct extension of phone of phone calls and should cover that extension and provide private communications between subscribers.
So telecommunications aren't allowed to listen in to what is going on in your home when your not using your phone (it can quite readily be done), they are not allowed to listen in to your phone calls (except for strictly controlled quality of service and you should be notified), they are not allowed to prevent you from calling people or prevent people from calling you, they are not allowed to disconnect you at random and, they are bound to quality of service provisions ie. they are not allowed to purposefully interfere with the quality of your service.
Now for the endless telecommunications liars out there, that is the basis upon which the companies entered that market, that is the basis upon which those companies has been valued for decades and for once and for all that is the basis upon which they can retain their telecommunications licences. Now if the no longer want to operate under the laws that governs their operators licence, they can quite simply pull out of the market, sell off their infrastructure and f**k o*f 'er' go away ;P.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen