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Network Neutrality Is Law In Chile
An anonymous reader writes "Chile is the first country of the world to guarantee by law the principle of network neutrality, according to the Teleccomunications Market Comission's Blog from Spain. The official newspaper of the Chilean Republic published yesterday a Law that guarantees that any Internet user will be able to use, send, receive or offer any content, applications or legal services over the Internet, without arbitrary or discriminatory blocking."
In Chile. If the servers are not in Chile then this law doesn't apply.
That was worded poorly. If the traffic doesn't originate in Chile then it is subject to arbitrary and/or discriminatory blocking or throttling before it gets to Chile.
Greed and monopoly. If competitors were permitted in cities, I bet you'd see a return to unrestricted access. Where I have my hosting, I get transfer for under $0.01/GB. A TB of transfer is less than $10. Bandwidth is no longer a major cost of doing the ISP business. So why can't I get that at home? Lack of competition. Cities get fat checks for restricting competition, and we all pay for it.
Be relentless!
All this to solve a problem that doesn't even exist. The only time we saw torrent throttling (not even blocking!!) in the U.S. was Comcast, and they got smacked down for it. The market worked, why do we need regulation when there is no problem?
REALLY?
You seem to forgotten that there was a lot of complaining and a lot of people finding no competition to turn to and then the FCC smacked Comcast for throttling torrents.
In other words, exactly the opposite of what you said.
He explained that suppliers must provide a service "which makes no distinction arbitrary content, applications or services based on the source of their origin or ownership."
In other words - no VOIP traffic prioritizing or in fact traffic shaping of any kind. Sorry Skype users, you'll have to stick with the big business telcos!
There's a set of bits in IP meant to adjust QoS, which is a non-arbitrary way of handling things. Thus, Bittorrent can claim itself to a minimal QoS, which is announcing to nearby routers that they're the first ones to go if there's a problem. Likewise, an RSS feed may declare it to be a low QoS, and defer to a normal QoS (such as from an HTTP browser), or a high QoS (such as real-time video conferencing or telephony.)
In this case, it's the applications themselves that volunteer to be dropped as issues arise from QoS, rather than being arbitrary.
The entity in charge of regulating this is probably the SUBTEL,(Subsecretaría de Telecomunicaciones, subsecretary of telecommunications perhaps is the translation?). I don't know if you have any idea about politics in Chile, but we have several political parties over there, not only two. Yeah, there are like 3 or 4 that are bigger and with more power than the others, but they don't get to bend government entities the same way political parties in the US do. So in a way, by being more political (more parties), they are less political (the power is more spread). I don't know if that makes sense, but it sounds pretty haha.
Chile doesn't have states like the US. The main divisions are regions. They have their own governmental entities but they're all controlled by the central ones in Santiago, the capital. So regions don't get to do whatever they want either, meaning that if the government creates a law, all the rest of the regions have to follow, and individual regions can't make their own laws.
I hope that helped somewhat to understand a bit how Chile works. Of course, the real question is if the SUBTEL is going to care enough to reinforce the law in all its extent. That's a completely different deal.
The diario oficial is not "the official newspaper". It is in fact the public journal of the country, where laws are published.