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A Simple Guide To Net Neutrality
superapecommando writes in with a neutral introduction to net neutrality from ComputerWorld UK. While it doesn't go into a lot of technical depth, it's rare to see anything written on the subject that isn't rabid on one side or the other. "Google's recently announced plan to set up trial fiber-optic networks in the US with ultra-high-speed Internet connections puts the long running national debate over Net Neutrality back into high gear. A hot topic of discussion and debate in government and telecom circles since at least 2003, Net Neutrality, actually involves a broad array of topics, technologies and players. Here's a primer for those looking to get up to speed fast."
The other companies are looking to get a slice of Google's profits.
Fuck them.
The day Google offers fiber in my neighborhood I am going to sign up with them.
Okay, a bit off topic, but is his name SuperApeCommando, or a play on the double R for Super Rape Commando?
... or even the most important thing to worry about. Watch for big cable-companies to impose bandwidth caps and raise the price of data transfer to protect their regional video monopolies at the expense of Internet-accessible video content. Bandwidth caps are outside of the purview of NN as it's traditionally defined.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
While this is true, consider that if the company imposes bandwidth caps on "internet" while allowing "cable plus" content from that provider to be delivered, one could conceivably make a NN claim on the "same pipes" logic. This is a stretch, I'm not going to lie, but consider that these things are related. Otherwise, the provider could just offer a "internet plus" with no caps and access to limited sites on the same pipes...you see where I'm going with this.
93rd rule of Slashdot: No matter how obvious my sarcasm is, my comment will be taken seriously by someone.
Thats just as horrible as electric utilities making you pay per Killowatt/hour of power.
Honestly.. I would prefer a $X per Giga or Megabyte over $x for unlimited*
*Where we define unlimited, who gets throttled when and can cut you off for exceeding any internal threshold that we will not tell you about.
Seriously.. If I am curious about my power usage, I can walk outside, look at the meter, and figure out pretty close to what I owe.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
One of the most common arguments that I hear out of net neutrality opponents is that competition will somehow keep most ISP's net neutral without any messy government regulation. But what happens if all the major ISP's start blocking certain sites (like Pirate Bay)? With most people (in the U.S. at least) having at most 1-3 broadband providers to choose from, exactly where are you supposed to you go when all the big ones agree on a blacklist? And how can you open up a competing provider when all the wire and fiber are in the hands of monopolies like AT&T, Time-Warner, etc.? It's not like you can just start up a Mom & Pop broadband provider and start laying hundreds of miles of cable. Even Google will have a hard time competing with the big telco's and cableco's with the relatively minor bit of fiber optic they own.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
IMO, I'm not a huge fan of strict network neutrality, there are cases where you want advanced traffic management techniques that would be non-neutral: EG, if you are dealing with wide-area wireless, banning P2P applications is probably a very good thing, as wireless bandwidth is vastly more expensive. Likewise, token-bucket hacks which improve interactive traffic could in some ways be considered "non neutral", as the start of a transfer is given preference, but the net result is it greatly improves user experience.
But what is important is network transparency : we need to know what is happening, since without knowing what's going on, you can't distinguish between reasonable management practices and unreasonable ones, such as wireline services blocking P2P, favoring some sites over others, or blocking applications.
Additionally, there are a lot of behaviors, such as DNS wildcarding, which are non-neutral but have been overlooked in the debate by focusing solely on application transport.
Thus I believe its important to develop tools (such as, obligatory plug to the research project I'm involved with, , Netalyzr) so that we ensure transparency. We need transparency, because we need to "Trust, but verify". Otherwise, even if network neutrality was legally enforced, how do we know we are getting what we expect?
Test your net with Netalyzr
Maybe I need to do more research on the topic to figure out what exactly it is that people mean when they talk about network neutrality, especially since it seems to mean different things to different people. However, I'm not sure that we really have network neutrality now, nor can we. Just thinking of protocols such as BGP, which basically makes the Internet work at all, and which makes all of its routing decisions based on admin/management policy and not based on any technical metrics, so that certain routes will always be favored, especially those through peers, makes me think that network neutrality in the sense of ensuring that there aren't transit fees and data tariffs to keep competing content second class is sort of impossible.
I'll freely admit that I'm not in possession of extremely in-depth knowledge of how major ISPs handle their business, having been a system admin at a web hosting company and now working a provider of niche networking hardware, but what's the difference between one AS #1 peering with AS #2 and allowing free transit of data, but meetering data sourced at AS #3 which has no peerage agreement and charging them for the use of their tubes? How can we continue to use BGP, which isn't designed with "fairness" of routes in mind (at least not to my understanding, as opposed to other routing protocols which build routes based on metrics such as hop count and bandwidth), but which is designed to allow one AS to favor another AS explicitly, and still have network neutrality?
Or are people really only concerned that ISPs providing end-user service don't shape traffic and limit bt use, for example, but don't care whether their ISP just refuses to directly exchange routing tables with their favorite media conglomerate and increase the lag in their video streaming?
If I'm off-base with this one, please feel free to let me know, though.
Am I the only one that read the submitter's username as Super Rape Commando?
Thats just as horrible as electric utilities making you pay per Killowatt/hour of power.
The difference is power distribution companies are not allowed to charge exorbitant fees to green power generation companies to transport that power to the end user. They have to charge the same price they charge their own coal fired power generation subsidiaries. Having a monopoly on power distribution, they are restricted from using that to gain an unfair advantage in another market, such as power generation. Claiming green power and coal power are different product even though they go over the same pipes in the same way is the same as claiming television service is different from any other data going over the cable network. You can't artificially raise the price of your competitors from a monopoly position.
I'm a comcast customer and their network is reasonably neutral, as based on actual measurements I've performed as well as looking at their network management policies. So yes, its reasonably neutral for me:
They do do DNS wildcarding (ick ick ICK), but actually have a workable opt-out (rare, most who wildcard don't).
They do block the windows ports outbound, and do dynamic blocking of spam-bots. (Not strictly neutral but arguably VERY good things)
They bias the network to allow the first X MB within a given timewindow to exceed the advertised speed, which again, is not strictly neutral but greatly improves interactive activity.
They impose a two-tier network-based QOS under congestion, measured on 15 minute timewindows, which means that light users are not generally impacted by congestion.
I haven't seen anything weird on routing: performance is usually limited by either my connection or the remote site, not the peering, so BGP issues are not coming up.
So its not strictly neutral, but the deviations are generally to my benefit as a customer (except for F@#)@#*( DNS wildcarding, but at least that has an opt-out I exercised immediately)
Test your net with Netalyzr
I'll take "The Rapists" for $200, Trebek.
That's "Therapists", Connery!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Sorry. Xfinity Cable is not the same as Xfinity Internet. You are using Xfinity Cable to watch On Demand programs, not Xfinity Internet. It doesn't matter that the same wire is being used to deliver both, and your Xfinity Telephone service too.
By the way, our new 100MBPS Xfinity Internet speeds allow you to reach your undefined unlimited bandwidth limit 10 times sooner, so enjoy watching Xfinity Cable for the remainder of the month after you hit your limit with Netflix on-demand on day 3 of each month ...
The big cable companies should be allowed to do whatever they want with their networks. They paid for the networks out of their own pocket, free from any tax-payer subsidies, right?
Wait. What's that? They didn't? Oh. My mistake!
At least we're not throwing 7 billion dollars of taxpayer money in their general direction in the form of "stimulus".
Really? We're doing that too? You're kidding?
What about the Fed building, owning and running fiber as a service? The states could get in it as well.
Charge a federal sales tax on all purchases made via the interweb to fund it. Or maybe just have a national system that does not aim at making a profit to compete against the companies.
How about making the damn providers compete? In the US, telcos DO NOT COMPETE in any meaningful way. Maybe lifting the laws that prevent competition would help. Prices are going up instead of down or staying flat, while service seems stagnant.
The net isn't just for porn and games, it's a major channel for business and communication (speech). i think it's wrong to trust that to executives of massive companies.
Utilizing the synergization of benchmark e-solutions to pre-workaround action items!
Problem is, the other baskets are Comcast, Verizon, and AT&T.
They all rotate into the limelight with something awful.
Google is a really tricky company. I think they do a decent job of scaring everyone into line.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
I have a simple question: Why?
Why is it that, the largely unregulated internet has gone on in mainstream for over a decade now, with no major problems, and we want to heap on regulations. Why? what's so wrong with the internet as it currently stands that you think needs protection? verizon banned 4chan, which is such an important website, and that got a lot of attention. and you're worried about what?
To me this is just more of the same, perhaps, well intended regulations, that will end up making things worse for everyone, including the proponents of net neutrality. It's doing fine, so let's heap on redtape! hurrah! i wonder if wikipedia would have took off, if there was a lot of regulation in place? or youtube? maybe they would, but if you think about all the steps that this will eventually require, and the lawyers, and the general mess that will come because of this, we will miss out on things that might have been. And what happens when the, 'think of the children' type get into regulating the internet (which they will)? they will be relentless. and they will eventually force some stupid crap down through the usual think of the children bullshit that /. loathes so much. the road to hell is paved with good intentions. and this is just another one of those well intended pieces of legislation that will end up costing us a lot more than it prevented.
The net neutrality argument is one that should never have been.
The baby bells in the US were required to carry competitors traffic over their networks and this is the way it should have been for all utilities.
Then there is the question of what exactly to carriers own anyway.
The Internet was paid for by tax payers so why should they get the right to profit off of what the public has paid for?
Why do you lie so brazenly? AT&T happened DESPITE government, not because of it. Same for Standard Oil back in the day. But I guess that either you were never told the truth (and are happy because the truth is unwelcome) or you don't care about the truth at all and ignore it.
Right now they arent legally considered common carrier. They get all the benefits of being a common carrier. Legally force them to be a common carrier and all these problems go away.
Only reason for them to restrict what is being transmitted.
1. illegal: child porn or ddos/spam; only with applicable legal implications of getting the law involved.
2. Act of the flying spaghetti monster destroyed the packet.
3. The transmitter sent a fragmented or broken packet.
4. Their network is being attacked.
Otherwise they are liable for the cost of the damage.
Japan has done this. Surprise surprise they have reasonable and good quality internet access there. $45 will get you 45mbit/5mbit unlimited. or $75 for 100mbit/100mbit unlimited.
How soon kids forget the history. It is currently enforced that Net Neutrality happens. Those laws had a sunset clause. The ISP's and cableco's don't want any replacement laws.
So, despite your the "largely unregulated internet has gone on in mainstream for over a decade now, with no major problems," has been BECAUSE of the net neutrality laws in place for those decades, YOU come along and ask "why do we net netrality laws now?".
The answer, bub, is that the current net neutrality laws are ending. THAT is why you need them now.
Thats just as horrible as electric utilities making you pay per Killowatt/hour of power.
Power is finite and needs to be generated on-demand from (usually) consumable resources. Bandwidth doesn't fall in the the same category.
For fibre, if you have something that's sitting around idle, you're "wasting" (say) 1 Gb/s of bandwidth each second that it's not lit up. It could be used to transfer information for someone, but if you've capped people and so they're not using it because they're over their caps, you have all this telco equipment doing absolutely nothing.
On the other hand, if you're not using power, that means the generation companies aren't burning coal/gas/uranium. You don't use, they don't use. But an ISP, if you don't use... their plant is still running. Now there's certainly an incremental cost in power optical lasers and such, but it's tiny IMHO.
What exactly are we charged for using when we're charged for transferring a bit of information? The fibre is still depreciating where I'm running a torrent or not; the Cisco/Juniper is getting out of date whether I'm hitting Youtube or not.
With electricity, I'm being charged for the consumption of coal/gas/uranium (plus some overhead for transport). What exactly am I being charged for consuming when I download a bit?
http://digg.com/tech_news/Your_ISP_if_Net_Neutrality_disappears_PIC
"Net Neutrality" sucks. Net Neutrality, as I understand it, is very nearly fundamental for economic growth.
Seriously, this is a geek site, and every time NN comes up people talk about different things.
I think we should talk about "common carrier" status. I know it doesn't legally apply to telcos in the US, but it should, and it's a reasonably well-understood term.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
>>>Bandwidth caps are outside of the purview of NN as it's traditionally defined.
Not really. Net neutrality bsically ays all pipes will be treated the same, so whether I watch my videos at MGM.com r comcastrentals.com,I should be treated the same (~10 cents per gigabyte transferred).
My MAIN concern is that Comcast/Cox/whoever doesn't block access, such as to sites like FOXnews.com or infowars.org.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
And since Comcast is a monopoly (or duopoly in some cases), they should be regulated by the State commission.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Even if the cable/isp companies did not receive one single dolar, the fact they were given a government-granted monopoly also means they have to obey the government's rules. Else said government will kick-out Comcast and put someone else there - like Google ISP
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Power is finite and needs to be generated on-demand from (usually) consumable resources. Bandwidth doesn't fall in the the same category.
Really? Bandwidth is finite and it requires the exact same power from those exact same consumable resources, plus the equipment to deliver the data. I agree it's not quite an apples to apples comparison but it's closer than you are making it out to be. The difference is that one is a direct cost and the other is an indirect cost. They're both real costs but one can be directly assigned to a cost center and the other cannot. This has enormous implications that I think you should study a little deeper. Charging per bit is a way to turn an indirect cost into something resembling a direct cost. Not perfect to be sure but there are good reasons to do it.
For fibre, if you have something that's sitting around idle, you're "wasting" (say) 1 Gb/s of bandwidth each second that it's not lit up. It could be used to transfer information for someone, but if you've capped people and so they're not using it because they're over their caps, you have all this telco equipment doing absolutely nothing.
Whether that is a valid argument depends entirely upon whether there is excess capacity to be had and how the costs are allocated. The "wasted" bandwidth is only wasted if someone wants it and can't get it. If there is no demand for it then you have a case of excess capacity and the costs for the equipment will be higher for everyone who pays to use it. If the bit can be delivered but at the cost of slowing down other customers there is an opportunity cost in play. ISPs do need to make sure that all their customers have access to bits, not just the customers who use the most bits. There also might be upstream costs since your ISP probably pays some rate per bit for data delivered outside their own network. If bandwidth is artificially limited when it could otherwise be delivered without interfering with other customers, then your argument may carry weight.
With electricity, I'm being charged for the consumption of coal/gas/uranium (plus some overhead for transport). What exactly am I being charged for consuming when I download a bit?
The cost of the equipment to deliver that bit, the electricity needed to power that equipment, the staff needed to manage that equipment, depreciation, insurance, upstream bandwidth costs from other suppliers and a number of other costs. Welcome to the wonderful world of direct versus indirect costs. This is what makes cost accounting such an important and difficult endeavor.
Disclosure: I'm a certified accountant.
For instance, take a peek at these two articles on Net Neutrality that have come up in the past year.
The first one about Senator Mc. Cain. http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2009/10/22/fcc-approves-proposed-net-neutrality-rules/ He states, "These new rules should rightly be viewed by consumers suspiciously as another government power grab over a private service provided by private companies in a competitive marketplace". He also states it will stifle innovation and kill jobs. He clearly does not have a coherent understanding of Net Neutrality as one of the goals is to increase innovation through the unrestricted, unfettered access to the internet. In this case, the government is providing deregulation to a market by disallowing private companies from restricting content.
Another Politician, Senator. Feinstein believes we should allow ISPs to restrict access to the internet to abate the spread of child pornography. In her words, changing the Broadband Technology Opportunities Program "allows for reasonable network management practices such as deterring unlawful activity, including child pornography and copyright infringement." While removing child pornography from the internet is a noble goal, she doesn't understand how much more harm will come of this through abuse of the policy. Halting the spread of child pornography can be combated through our legal system instead of giving ISPs complete control over what we can view. The article can be viewed here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/02/11/feinstein_stimulus_amendment/
While allowing ISPs to restrict our internet access would stop the spread of child pornography and could be construed as a government intrusion of a private sector that doesn't need it, consider China and Iran. The governments of these countries are completely against Net Neutrality in every way so they may control their populations by restricting anything that collides with their views. While our private ISPs might not have the kind of power these governments do, would you want our ISPs to be allowed that power?
Thats just as horrible as electric utilities making you pay per Killowatt/hour of power.
What's wrong with that?
Any competitor which doesn't block it will get more business.
Only if there is a competitive market. As it stands the major ISPs (telephone and cable companies) are really an oligopoly and there is little or no way for new competitors to easily enter the marketplace.
The problem there is that the government funded their cabling, yet the companies turned around and monopolized it.
The government did NOT fund their cabling. They granted AT&T and later the cable companies monopolies but generally speaking the networks were built with private funds. AT&T was wildly profitable for decades and there was no need for the government to give them any money. Furthermore there were good reasons to allow the monopoly to exist as it made the telecom system highly consistent everywhere with the attendant network effects benefiting everyone.
Currently their "low" rates are effectively subsidized, thus making competition difficult because a new competitor wouldn't be subsidized.
Again, wrong. They have the advantage of an existing network with it's attendant network effects. Building a cable network is hugely expensive - massive fixed costs. For the phone and cable companies, this cost has already been paid long ago. It is extraordinarily difficult to make an economic case to build a new network to compete with them. Utilities and telephone companies tend to form what is called a natural monopoly because the economies of scale required to provide the lowest cost service naturally tends to result in one or very few companies in the marketplace.
As you can see, it's not a free market in the first place.
Exactly my point. You can't argue it both ways. Either it is a competitive marketplace or it isn't. Given that it really isn't, I would not expect market forces to be especially useful in keeping the net "neutral" - only regulation can do that at the moment.
Kilowatt/hour of power
-> kilowatt-hour of energy
Just sayin'...
Double-dipping and extortion is not innovation.
The ISPs are still allowed to do prioritization based on packet type. They just have to treat all of the same type of packets equally regardless of source/destination (within bandwidth limits, of course).
You didn't explain how bandwidth caps are "not really" outside the purview of network neutrality.
Yes, the ISP must treat your packet to site A and site B equally, but once you reach X Gb of transfer for the month, they can block any and all of your traffic under the poorly defined category of "reasonable network management".
According to the FCCs proposal, the definition for reasonable network management includes the clause of "(b) other reasonable network management practices"... uh...
The only proposed rule that would cover bandwidth caps would be the transparency proposal. It'd require the ISP to at least be upfront about their caps so you can make an educated decision. Transparency: "Subject to reasonable network management, a provider of broadband Internet access service must disclose such information concerning network management and other practices as is reasonably required for users and content, application, and service providers to enjoy the protections specified in this part."
-John
Power is finite and needs to be generated on-demand from (usually) consumable resources. Bandwidth doesn't fall in the the same category.
For fibre, if you have something that's sitting around idle, you're "wasting" (say) 1 Gb/s of bandwidth each second that it's not lit up.
Same could be said for my 200AMP service, when I'm only using 50 amps.
On the other hand, if you're not using power, that means the generation companies aren't burning coal/gas/uranium. You don't use, they don't use. But an ISP, if you don't use... their plant is still running.
How often do they power down dams and nuclear reactors near you? Those, along with coal, are base-load, and almost always run.
Basically, what you are alluding to, I think, is that with electricity, the power is finite, and the delivery mechanism is the cheap part.
My argument is that bandwidth is the same, but backwards, the bandwidth is relatively infinite, but the delivery mechanism is the expensive part. (fiber to your house or node, uplink bandwidth, etc) Your electric system (or at least many) even allow you to choose the "source" for the other side of the connection, even if its not really those same currents coming directly to your door. Why do we continue to purchase these in bundles? I would pay less, even when I watch things like Hulu.com, then my neighbor, who has kids who love to torrent every TV show, ever made. I am also taxing the system less as well.
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
EEEK.. here, clip a corner from my Geek Card.. thanks!
What are we going to do tonight Brain?
Metered bandwidth would be an even bigger blow to innovation on the Internet than lack of net neutrality. If all Internet users were forced onto metered bandwidth plans, these things would all be dead:
That last one is the real kicker. The Internet basically runs on advertising. When Internet access is billed by the byte, everyone is going to look to cut their costs by installing ad blocking software. Google and Yahoo would fold overnight. Facebook would become the exclusive realm of the well-to-do. The "printed" news industry would fall into an even deeper hole than its already in. I could list examples all day, but the key thing to take away here is that the Internet as we know it would cease to exist.
Now also think about who have thus far been the major proponents of metered bandwidth: Cable and phone companies. They have an interest in restricting how their customers use the Internet, because they believe it competes with their other services. And they would be right. They can see a future where Hulu is just the beginning of streaming content distribution on the Internet. Eventually, services will come along that offer a cable-TV-like experience for a fraction of the price. All the customer needs is an Internet connection and a little set-top box. Companies like Comcast and AT&T will simply become ISPs, which is the exact opposite direction that they want to go: they want direct control and supervision over their customers' experience because that's where the money is. Any whining noises they make about peer-to-peer killing their networking infrastructure is bullshit, they just don't want to be cut out of a direct content relationship with their customers.
Power and gas are utilities. They are easy to quantify and are used for specific obvious purposes, so it makes sense to bill based on how much is consumed. The Internet, however, is a communications medium. Apples and oranges, my friend.
Most of the arguments about net neutrality seem to center around how lacking it would screw over you, the end user. What's discussed a lot less is that allowing for tiered internet plans would also screw over the ISPs.
There's a huge amount of market demand for using the 'bottom-tier' services currently available, most notably file sharing and porn. Every attempt to date by an ISP to block a service based on port, protocol, or traffic analysis has caused users to massively adopt services that do the same thing as their previous service, but aren't blocked by the ISP. A good example is Apple's current woes with jail-broken Iphones; they intended to keep their phones locked to a specific protocol, clever people broke the lock, and now there are so many people using jail-broken Iphones that Apple is forced to support those people. If Apple blocked users with jail-broken phones from the Iphone store, all they'd do would be to lose a huge percentage of their user base (and indirectly support the creation of a bunch of other third-party Iphone stores that provided apps for jail-broken phones). Or, again, look at AOL's issues keeping reverse-engineered third-party apps out of their OSCAR protocol; fundamentally, it simply didn't work.
My point is that, if ISPs started requiring a certain set of applications or blocking certain protocols, users will simply adapt to work around the restrictions. People are going to keep on sharing files and viewing porn, regardless of the ISPs restrictions. An ISP which doesn't implement net neutrality will inevitably create a demand for hacked security, weird tunneling protocols, and programs that masquerade as licensed, top-tier programs. Think your ISP is having QOS problems now because they've got 50K users using BitTorrent? Wait until there's 50K users tunneling BitTorrent through DNS, and see what that does to the QOS. Want to create a business model that relies on partnership deals with big software companies? Wait until your partners realize that your users reverse-engineered their software and are using it to distribute pornography. While I think that net neutrality is important and good for end-users, they can and will continue doing what they're doing regardless of whether net neutrality is implemented or not. For ISPs, though, implementing net neutrality would be a huge mistake; all it will accomplish is to drive users to actively compromise the systems that the ISP relies on.
Even if they DID go metered they'd exempt their own bits from measuring.
Watch a gigabyte's worth of cable, it's free. Do so on your computer, they charge.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The difference is it that to make energy to how to put more energy in to get more out. You have to pay for the cost of the coal/gas/uranium you're burning. (traditionally, solar, tidal, and wind energy is a different business)
Every form of backbone in existence costs the same idling as it does running full tilt. Thats not true, this is a difference, its just so small that its really not worth mentioning as you probably can't detect that power difference (on the network infrastructure gear) in the facebook data center, let alone anyone smaller.
If you have 100 million cable modem subscribers using the Internet for an hour a day (at the same time) it costs the EXACT same as if none of them use it at all that day, or if they all use it constantly all day.
Both companies have to pay to install infrastructure, the cost is more or less identical between the two.
I pay more on a normal month for cable than power. I pay more for something that has no consumables than I do for the product that has a consumable, the power usage for providing the bandwidth doesn't count, its far too small to count. Power companies are also required to be fair and charge fair prices, they have to ask the government to make changes, and they government can and does say no.
Comparing bandwidth providers to power companies is roughly like comparing pirating an mp3 of brittney spears to kidnapping her and forcing her to sing at your daughters birthday party. Its a fucking retarded comparison to make.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
>>>You didn't explain how bandwidth caps are "not really" outside the purview of network neutrality.
Yes I did.
>>>once you reach X Gb of transfer for the month, they can block any and all of your traffic under the poorly defined category of "reasonable network management".
>>>
True but Comcast could also say, "You have reached your cap, but can still access all comcast.com sites for free." That would violate net neutrality because it gives these comcast.com sites an unfair advantage over Itunes.com or MGM.com or other sites that are limited to ~250 gig or less.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
Well, at least thats the only industry, WAIT ITS NOT! Oh, well at least this isn't all about profits WAIT IT IS! amidoinitrite?
Comcast is not legally a monopoly or a duopoly. There is no regulation prohibiting a second, third, or even fourth cable company from setting up shop. Most smart cable companies were very careful not to sign exclusive franchises anywhere.
In fact, Comcast faces stiff competition from satellite and telco providers.
The only competition Comcast doesn't face is from competing cable companies, and that is not because of regulation, it's a cost issue. Those same smart cable companies that signed non-exclusive franchises know there just isn't enough demand from potential customers to merit the cost of two supply chains. I.e., system buildout costs can't be recovered from sufficient customers. That's a defacto but not legal monopoly, but even then, wireless services are eating Comcast's lunch already.
Cable companies used to be subject to strong local regulation (I was a member of two such cable regulatory groups), but the FCC released them from that due to the increased competition from satellite and greater regionalization of companies (i.e., the first cable commission I was on regulated a local company, which eventually got bought out by a national one.)
All that said, I agree they ought to be regulated. Comcast in particular. Especially Comcast scum. But good luck with that. Even when they are shown federal law requiring them to do something, they ignore it, and the FCC has to date ignored it, as well.
7 billion dollars[...]in the form of "stimulus"
Peanuts. We already gave them $200 billion.
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2007/pulpit_20070810_002683.html
gewg_
You already have bandwidth caps - pay $X to get the Internet at 2mbits, pay $Y to get it at 6mbits. Transfer caps are when you get a quota of X gb/month.
Having transfer caps is fine, provided you have them instead of bandwidth caps, and not both at once. I pay to get 80Gb/month of Internet as fast as they can deliver it, and it's in my ISP interest to make my internet go faster because then I'll use more transfer.