Slashdot Mirror
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."
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 That's a static decision, and static policy decisions can be inaccurate for any particular connection, out of date or simply ignorant of new protocols, and can/will be largely decided by politics not practicality.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
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".
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
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.