Slashdot Mirror
UK's Two Biggest ISPs Rip Up Net Neutrality
Barence writes "The UK's two biggest ISPs have openly admitted they'd give priority to certain internet apps or services if companies paid them to do so. Speaking at a Westminster eForum on net neutrality, senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said they would be happy to put selected apps into the fast lane, at the expense of their rivals. Asked specifically if TalkTalk would afford more bandwidth to YouTube than the BBC's iPlayer if Google was prepared to pay, the company's executive director of strategy and regulation, Andrew Heaney, argued it would be 'perfectly normal business practice to discriminate between them.' Meanwhile, BT's Simon Milner said: 'We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts,' although he added BT had never received such an approach."
You know, not every bit of software is an app...I'm getting really tired of that term becoming so ubiquitous. You would think someone in such a position within a tech-centered company would know this (actually, on second thought...)
Living With a Nerd
At least they're upfront and honest about this. No weasel words, no political doublespeak, just a flat out, "Yep, bigger payoffs, bigger pipes."
As a business whose sole existence is to make money and pay their shareholders, is anyone surprised at this? Hell, does any reasonable person expect otherwise? It makes perfect business sense to prioritize websites that pay you. This is why people should not expect businesses to promote net neutrality.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You know, not every bit of software is an app...I'm getting really tired of that term becoming so ubiquitous. You would think someone in such a position within a tech-centered company would know this (actually, on second thought...)
I suspect what he means is companies providing web-based SaaS solutions may wish to pay so that data relating to their service is prioritised, making their product faster.
And then they could accept payment to block certain "apps" or a least slow them down to crawl.
If the shoe fits, it's ugly.
If I want my service to be fast just about anywhere on the web, I guess I'll need to make this kind of deal with >9000 ISPs?
I guess I should do that as an individual as well, I'll pay so that all the traffic with my IP goes on the fast lane to the detriment of other customers in my area.
I can see the company's point. Why improve on the infrastructure of the network when you can get customers to pay an extra to get a better share of the limited connectivity?
Except that they're completely different services. The only real thing they have in common is that both have something to do with the Internet.
ISP's have long held this rather far fetched belief that both consumers and content providers should be paying to shift data between the two, I'm sure as soon as ISP's got 1 or 2 big players (youtube , facebook etc) they would use it as an excuse to shitlist any non-premium traffic to the extent that you either paid up, or stooped delivering content to that particular ISP's customers and said ISP would throw up it's hands and say "it's not our problem, facebook and youtube are using all our bandwidth and they have paid for priority"
I can see this being an especially attractive prospect considering the looming need for extensive network upgrades as people start to actually make use of their 10+ meg "unlimited" connections for HD content delivery, why upgrade your capacity when you can sell the same bandwidth twice and cut out anyone who's not prepared to pay.
Virgin media has already said it takes a dim view on net neutrality, and most other ISP's are beholden to BT to a greater or lesser extent, truely it is a dark day for British broadband.
What they're saying is that if Company A pays them, they'll make sure that Company B's users get less of the available bandwidth.
No, that's not what they're saying. What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
Karnal
That's how you make something's price go up. You make sure it remains scarce.
Defined as: (n) application, application program, applications programme (a program that gives a computer instructions that provide the user with tools to accomplish a task) "he has tried several different word processing applications"
If the customer cares about Bandwidth to a particular service that is discriminated against, then given the availability of competition the customer will move on. Heck, maybe a particular customer agrees with the discriminatory choices -- in this way, it is a gain and a feature for him. The issue for me is not with network neutrality, it's if companies don't tell you up-front about their practices, and if government allows no competition in the space.
If this ISP hosted the data, sure, that has always been the case, but if this ISP is saying that any data that passes over their wires can get prioritization by paying more, fuck you buddy
Wow - you're saying that being able to even be accessed is the same as being able to display your marketing material somewhere? And let's not kid ourselves - an incumbent with cash to burn will be able to relegate an upstart competitor to the equivalent of a geocities page if this becomes common practice.
As khasim already set, bandwidth in the current set up is largely a zero-sum game. There isn't much headroom into which ISPs can put priority traffic.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Not in the results themselves. They can pay for ads which may appear near the results but are clearly separated from them. Google doesn't sell PageRank.
somebody made the extremely astute comment that to do the kind of thing they are saying they want to do, the ISP would have to slow down everyone else. because there is simply no such thing as speeding up only one website selectively, there is only artificially slowing everyone down (except for those who pay up). this isn't capitalism, this is monopolistic blackmail
everything on a network as TCP/IP currently works is being delivered according to factors that have nothing whatsoever to do with financial input. yes, you can use financial input to build network infrastructure or build more servers, but on an existing pipe, to make financial input a factor, you would need to do artificial things that would add to overhead and cost. you would have to
1. proactively examine the headers,
2. pick out the headers from companies that are paying you,
3. proactively block all other headers
ironically, the effort involved to do this proactive promotion of certain headers is an additional cost on the speed of your network
so in other words, in a world where traffic priority is determined by who pays up, you are artificially hobbling the entire network for the sake of who gets priority in order to make the scheme work, and furthermore, the sheer effort of prioritizing headers hobbles your network even further
its silly
if i were a company and i wanted my traffic to get to internet consumers faster than my competitors, i wouldn't pay the isp to do that. i'd simply build more servers and place them at more nodes. much bigger bang for your buck, and you aren't buying into a bullshit system that creates an artificial rigged marketplace by ruining the elegance of how the internet works best
in the real world, all these ISPs are doing is giving their ISP competitors a selling point: "we're faster, because we don't interfere". the ISPs would have collude against the consumer and the content providers to impose an artificial tax on the internet, that would also slow it down
monopolistic and oligopolistic anti-capitalist schemes are alive and well. we learned nothing from the gilded age of victorian times. bust the assholes up and sue them into oblivion if any of them tries this crap
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
This is like classic mafia-style "oops insurance". They aren't speeding anything up. It's basically saying "pay us more or your traffic will be slowed down".
No, there is no "-1 I'LL NEVER ADMIT BEING WRONG!!!" mod.
In any case, these businesses get "one nudge ahead" just like those ISP customers that pay. Right?
"We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts,"
What's that got to do with it? I could absolutely see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay Assassins to kill their competition. That shouldn't be legal either.
No, that's not what they're saying. What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
'Not necessarily' is what we are worried about. How much 'priority' are they willing to sell?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
I have a bridge you might be interested in...
If the shoe fits, it's ugly.
And I'm bloody outraged!
One of the purposes of the water/gas/internet providers is to, sure, earn a buck and get paid for their time. I get that. But another reason for their existence is to get me my effin water, gas, or internet. If they failed to do that or the quality was really piss poor, for whatever reason, there would be outrage. I And on a deeper, non-personal level, they are destroying the internet. I'm not one to really cozy up to tradition, and I'm aware that all is transient and change in inevitable, but I'm kind of a fan of this Internet thing. It's one of the very few things that I feel really strongly about, and I'll defend it the best that I can.
How much are you willing to pay them? There's your answer.
How exactly do you get "service above best efforts"? Isn't "best" the maximum by definition?
Support Right To Repair Legislation.
If it didn't have any impact, then what would be the point?
Let's say we have competitive services A and B. Their traffic travels over a connection with 10 units of bandwidth (the actual units are unimportant). For the sake of argument let's say that the services in equal demand, and both use 4 units of bandwidth so the connection is not saturated. If company A pays the telco money, what exactly do they get for their money? They're not going to get more bandwidth, because they could have used more before and their demand has not gone up.
Now let's say that service A and service B would each use, if available, 6 units of bandwidth. With only 10 available, the connection is now saturated. Treated equally, that means they each get 5 units. But then company A pays out money, their traffic gets prioritized, and now runs at 6 units of bandwidth. That only leaves 4 for company B.
If no bottleneck exists, then there's no point in companies paying for priority. If a bottleneck does exist, then someone's gotta lose when someone else gets priority.
Not seen this mentioned yet, but in the UK we have local loop unbundling, otherwise known as line sharing.
This means that any company is permitted to put their own equipment in the exchange and use the last mile as they choose. So in my house I have a choice between about 10-15 ISPs all of whom can have different policies.
I still think that net neutrality is a good thing, but if Google started to slow down, or the IPlayer then most people would simply switch to a new provider - in fact it would be likely that other ISPs would absolutely hammer them in marketing if they started to make other sites (like the iplayer) slower.
So they sell "priority" to Company A ... but Company A's packets go through with the exact same speed as Company B's packets.
UNDER IDEAL CIRCUMSTANCES THAT IS.
The only way for an ISP to make a profit is to over-sell their bandwidth. If the ISP is profitable, their lines WILL be saturated.
If they can degrade non "bribed" sites, they will. I doubt major ISPs are ever heavily saturated, to the point of which if they dont do QOS they would go offline. I have a hard time believing that most ISPs would be so badly managed. Most likely you are paying to have your competitors connection degraded. They might not word it in such a way, but if you read between the lines, that would be the most logical way to do it.
When was the last time your upstream provider ever got saturated? Your connection might, but unless there is some major temporary infrastructure fault (say forcing everyone over a slow link), the ISPS should have more than enough bandwidth. When was the last time you saw a "connection timeout" that wasnt becuase a server was slashdoted or something. Connectivity has been great for the last 10 years.
In short i dont buy your apologizing for the industry in this case. If it was really paying for saturated prioritization, which would be 99% of the time meaningless as links are very rarely saturated, then people wouldn't be so upset about net neutrality. The isps will use it to justify over selling their links and then offer you an "upgrade" to "fix" your favourite sites. Pure bullshit, and thats what they want to do. They want to make the internet like television channels, with paid apps so they can charge for every last connection. They want to charge both the provider and the subscriber.
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
It wouldn't have any impact on B's bandwidth, but it might well have a huge impact on latency!
So if your priority clients gets to the front of the line for every packet on this over allocated network, then your unpaying sites are going to start timing out. They are defeated. And then the ISP is going to start lying. The ISP is going to claim that there must be something wrong with the "unpaying site" because otherwise they would have to admit that they shoved the money in their pockets instead of buying more bandwidth.
Likely as much as it takes to get basic internet access, which is something that most people use frequently, if not need for many things.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
This is what Google does too. A business pays cash to get a chance at being displayed on Google's first page of search results. And nobody raises a finger...right?
I'm not paying Google to provide me with search results. They therefore have a right to do whatever the hell they want. I *am* paying my ISP, so they *will* carry my packets, with equal priority to their other customers' packets, or I *will* be terminating my contract and taking my money elsewhere. I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels like that.
They are basically saying that the company that pays will have better quality of service. They are saying nothing of hurting those that don't pay. The sites that don't pay get the same service they always have, the companies that do will be treated differently. They may make optimize routes in their equipment, or ensure that in the event of some form of downtime that the paying customers will be brought online first if possible while troubleshooting the overall problem. This does not hurt the internet, and will most likely, help it. Imagine if Hulu and Netflix pay for better QOS, then you can be sure that the video you play from their end will be of higher quality with less problems.
The director of BT said specifically that they would offer QOS above best efforts. Best efforts is what everyone has now, routes are what they are and if there are problems, everyone is brought back at the same time. Anyone not wishing to participate will have the same QOS they always had.
This is no different than a utility company. If a bad storm downs the grid, the first places brought back online are the ones that affect the most people, or, as the power company is concerned, the most money.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
If they're saying they are willing to do it, bet your bottom dollar they have already done it or are already doing it. And, if they're being public about it, then they want those with the big chequebooks to open their wallets.
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
until you reach saturation and that effect starts, surely there's no value in being prioritised.
i.e. no-one is going to pay for this unless they get some result out (better performance than others), so by definition someone else will be getting poorer performance, else there won't be a service to sell.
FGD 135
No, in the case of ISP's this could directly harm the "nudged" companies' competitors by reducing available bandwidth to them. In your example this would be similar to Google letting them buy actual search results that are displayed as such to the user.
"We absolutely could see a situation when content or app providers may want to pay BT for quality of service above best efforts."
What's better than best? Or are they acknowledging that they don't really make a best-effort at present?
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
This was so obvious, I'm sure even the famous british bookers didn't take any bets on it.
Of course a for-profit ISP will gladly take money to slow down the opposition (there's no such thing as speeding up "selected services" if you assume that they are currently delivering packets as quickly as they can). Who would not love a business model that consists of being the middle man in an exchange where you get money from both sides?
However, most of us here know enough about networking that we realize that no matter what any kind of "priorisation" will come at the expense of everyone else. Even if you don't have saturation, your discrimination protocol is running and taking up router CPU time, adding to the latency, etc.
As someone else pointed out last time we had the topic, "let the market sort it out" is (once again) not a valid solution. You can switch your ISP, but you can't choose what route your packets travel and you have no choice in the backbone providers it may travel through. So there simply is no way to vote with your dollars/euros.
We need a law. One that says in no uncertain terms that network neutrality is the law and if you violate it as an ISP you lose your license to operate. Any less and they will tell their lawyers to go find the loopholes.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
It's not "someone" getting poorer performance, it's everyone who didn't pay. The bottom of the slippery slope is that if you don't pay the extortion money, your packets don't get through at all.
The ISPs say they've never been approached by a content provider with a request to pay for priority transmission... Presumably the content providers have thought about it. Maybe it's just not worth spending the money on?
This would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
... which is most of the time. There are very few ISPs who do not have a significantly over-subscribed backbone at peak times (BT and TalkTalk both being quite bad at times according to people I know who have used them recently) and some are even over-subscribe at most times (all but the middle of the night).
Switching ISPs is easily done as long as your kept informed with changes that could affect services but do it underhand and I'll start asking the price of your 12oz Soda
"although he added BT had never received such an approach."
Maybe the few companies interested in doing so though they would be told to get lost and didn't want to risk having their name found out for making the request if they got nothing out of said request. I can't be the only one who sees this statement from the ISPs as an invitation for providers to start making offers for priority over their competitors.
So because you are paying for something that means no-one else is allowed to pay more for better service? So FedEx should not be allowed to sell 'Custom Critical' services because it may interfere with your 'Ground' delivery? Airlines should not be allowed to sell first class seats because those seats take away from your standby-coach leg room?
The only thing you can reasonably expect is that you get the same priority as everyone else paying the same price. Saying a business should not treat customers differently based on how much they spend is just silly.
They are saying nothing of hurting those that don't pay.
It's simple network management. If you prioritize one source of packets and the network reaches a saturation point, the mere fact that you've prioritized one means you have to de-prioritize others. There's limited resources, if you always send Company A's packets before you send Company B's, then Company B will have degraded service.
Also, TFA said so:
... senior executives from BT and TalkTalk said they would be happy to put selected apps into the fast lane, at the expense of their rivals.
Hmm, I wonder what 'expense of their rivals' means....
Having actually been in charge of bandwidth allocation for an ISP I can tell you that no sites for any company have an unlimited fat pipe of bandwidth at their disposal. Even the big boys buy from someone else, and what they buy is closely regulated based on current usage and future potential over a pre-determined period of time (factoring in local growth and competition). The price of bandwidth changes based on the location of the demarc and the quantity purchased, so the higher your population density the more bandwidth you need, but you can buy it cheaper because you can spread that price across more people. Saturation levels of 90% or more are regular during peak hours (6pm-2am) for an ISP (at least one that doesn't lose customers hand over fist) because they run as cheap as possible for as long as possible in order to please management and see better profit numbers. Even when saturation hits 100% you still won't normally 'time out' of anything unless there are very serious issues, but you will likely see higher latency times (which you likely do see regularly during these hours anyway because of saturation). Prioritization of data will cause latency for other things to become higher, sites will seem slower, and it is wrong to do that to customers. If you were right and there was no limit to bandwidth then it wouldn't be wrong at all to use QoS-for-pay (QfP?) but that is definitely not the case. Companies purposely create a scarcity from the top down when it comes to bandwidth in order to give it an artificial value which is then passed on to big ISPs, then to medium ISPs, then to small ones and then to us. The price just gets bigger the farther down the food chain you go.
Exactly. Which is NOT what would happen in the scenario posed in TFA. If I want to watch iPlayer, and some other customer paying the same price wants to watch YouTube, then we should get the same service; my ISP should not deliberately downgrade my service just because the BBC hasn't bribed them not to.
They're not talking about prioritizing by what costumers pay, they're talking about prioritizing by what service providers pay. Which means my neighbor who pays the same as me for his connection but happens to like Netflix, which pays the ISP for priority, will have a better service than me, because I happen to prefer archive.org, which can't afford to bribe every ISP.
Paying the same, getting different quality service because I like different websites. Fuck them.
Dilbert RSS feed
The customer pays for "internet". Not AOLnet, Ynet, or any other subset including the ISPs.
They are saying they would be willing to rip off the customer in order to double dip. Company A nor B has "bandwidth" once it reaches the ISP, it is the customers, to be used as they see fit. Not the ISP, who sold it to the customer already.
"There's no reason for society to allow you to bloviate on the Internet, either, yet we allow it. And I'm completely serious - what do we, the "Society Hive" you seem to value so highly, gain by allowing half the shit we do?"
it's called free will. yes, there is no money to be made off of it. this offends you, and a number of other people, who don't believe in capitalism. you believe in turning everything into a marketplace. for what purpose? for making cash. not because it is right, nor if it wrong, but just because in your value system, the only thing that matters is that someone somewhere is making money off of it. that's the only thing that matters, against which all other meaning is judged
you are what is called a free market fundamentalist. this is the basis of your belief system. if you were trying to sell bottled water in front of a crystal clear lake, you'd poison the lake. if you were trying to sell canisters of air, you'd pollute the atmosphere
where there is no scarcity (the only REAL WORLD foundation for a marketplace) you will create a false scarcity
the internet, such as with media distributors, has turned what was a scarcity with cost into a zero cost ubiquity. their entire foundation for thought has been shaken. they don't know how to deal with it. they honestly believe that the economics of scarcity should and forever more apply to their business, and if technology has changed and destroyed their marketplace by removing the scarcity, well by golly, they'll enforce an artificial one
that way is the way of destruction and enslavement. and i'm sorry sir, but you who wish to monetize everything will not prevail, as long as there is a shred of decency and humanity in this world
some things are free, not because i said so, but because they are not scarce. this is not about power, this is about the reality and the definition of a natural marketplace. something is not a marketplace because someone on a throne or with a gun said so, but because people want something that has a cost involved. if there is no cost, THERE IS NO MARKET. you don't make something scarce just because you wish to make a buck
so go study your economics 101, reacquaint yourself with your conscience, and fuck off, asshole
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Well, it can function in another way (or two). Suppose the bandwidth relative to the ISP isn't maxed out, but to the consumer is. So if Google pays for it, then consumer requests for Youtube could take priority over Hulu or whatever to that consumer.
But it can be dragged out even more. Suppose the customer is limited to a basic 1.5 meg connection and he has it maxed out syncing to some CVS or something while his kid is playing an online game.. Now the consumer's wife or anyone else in the household wants to visit youtube and view movie clips of her aunt's birthday party or something. The ISP can increase the bandwidth on demand to the connection to prioritize the packets and instead of a 1.5 meg connection, they temporarily have a 2 meg connection as long as the paid transmissions/communications are active.
In both situations, it would be consumer requested preferences and not solely the ISP's deal with Google. Granted, it would be possible only because of a payment from Google, yet it would be consumer initiated and not to their detriment.
no, I said that unless what they're doing creates winners and losers, it won't have anyone willing to pay for it. Ergo, if they manage to sell this service it will be precisely because it is creating winners and, more importantly, losers.
I can't entirely follow what you're saying, but I think we agree with each other.
FGD 135
OK, let's say you purchase something online from store A. Your neighbor purchases the same thing from store B. You both pay the same price, including shipping charges (for basic delivery). Your store ships the item basic delivery, just like you agreed to. The other store ponies up some money of it's own and bumps the shipping to '2-day' delivery. Has the shipping company done something wrong by delivering your neighbors package several days sooner?
Basically the service providers are paying on their customers behalf. What is wrong with that? It's called competition.
If they'd accept money to favor one site's traffic over a competitor, would they also accept money to outright block traffic to the competitor?
additionally, i quoted him where he never mentioned libertarianism, and i reacted to that
so... what is your problem again?
oh and fuck that putz noam chomsky
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I dont know what the landscape is like over there but if my ISP here in Australia tried a stunt like this, I would have no hesitation venting my spleen (both in public and to the company) and then changing to another ISP.
If enough people stand up to ISPs that want to pull these tricks, ISPs will stop doing it.
Any ISP that doesnt listen to its customers is not an ISP you should be supporting anyway (too many companies in this modern world have adopted a "screw the customer, its all about the money" mentality. GOOD companies realize that the way to make more money is to keep the customers happy so they remain customers)
What they're saying is that they'll give Company A's packets "priority" - this would not necessarily have to have any impact over Company B's available bandwidth, until a saturation point is reached.
BT's network reached saturation point years ago.
One of these is BT ... They are the Telephone company, they do not buy from anyone else, the own the Fat Pipes .... ....But they are still not able to have all the bandwidth they sell ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
There is clearly a conflict of interest here. Two groups of people are paying these companies.
Their customers are paying for net access and don't want someone else getting more bandwidth than they are because of their choice of websites / software.
But then others come along and say we'll pay you to prioritise our traffic.
These ISPs should decide who their customers are.
The months are just too short. I can count the number of days on one hand.
This would never work.
Do you think Gradma who uses the internets for facebook, youtube and emailing her cookery classmates cares about this?
Do you think anyone except nerds will care about this?
And do you honestly believe that if ISPS want to dress this up nicely "Now with 50% more speed on facebook!" - that your voice is going to be heard ?
This of course is assuming that this change happens at the endpoints, and not at the infrastructure level - which wil give you no choice whatsoever.
I think it's all theoretical.
OFCOM said some time ago that ISPs are free to prioritise protocols and such, but if they go so far as giving one company priority over another, they'll step in. They can deprioritise BitTorrent for example, but if they deprioritised BitTorrent for World of Warcraft's updates in favour of some theoretical competitor then they'd fall foul of what OFCOM has declared legitimate for them to do.
I'm not sure the BT execs saying this really know what they're saying, because it puts them in breach of OFCOM's viewpoint on the issue which could see them stuck in an expensive face-off against the industry regulator and I doubt they'd knowingly do that. I think they're just stating what they'd like to do if the opportunity arose, not what they actually do or are actually able to do for the above mentioned reason- it'd get them in shit, unless OFCOM has changed it's stance, but I do not believe it has.
Yes, just like paying someone to burn down your competitors' offices.
I'd argue that it's in fact anti-competitive behavior. One of the things that keeps the Web under a fast development pace is the low barriers on entry, which is comprised of time, a couple hundred bucks for a small server & domain, and the (usually) low cost of switching for the user.
By adding this new layer, you're basically adding a huge artificial barrier on entry that will promote monopolies and reduce quality overall, because established players will have the ability to cripple newcomers, instead of competing on quality.
Dilbert RSS feed
The difference is that Google isn't screwing its users. They have paid ads but the search results remain neutral and useful.
BT seem to think that they can sell better access to their customer base to other companies. Problem is that their customers will find that YouTube doesn't work at peek times any more and leave. It is already happening with iPlayer. BT blocks access to the HD streams during peek times. Nothing to do with the BBC, it is BT throttling them.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They are saying nothing of hurting those that don't pay
Of course they are saying nothing of that.
Imagine if Hulu and Netflix pay for better QOS
My ISP becomes a Hulu and Netflix Service Provider that graciously allows internet traffic to use the leftovers.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
and you are against free expression
fuck you you twatstain
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
at stake, that says to me that you are not quite bright and/ or not very perceptive
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I agree completely. I did not say they are currently doing it, only that they outright said they would like to.
I guess the next time someone says that Net Neutrality is a solution without a problem we can point to these guys =P
Hiya.
Oh-yeah they want to trash "common carrier" status so that they can play the whole suite of nasty business tricks. But they'll find a way to whine about "not being responsible" or something that normally comes as part of being common. I like to call these kinds of ploys "division by zero style tactics". In other words, if you allow a formal logic error in your argument, after it's dressed up you can pseudo-prove anything.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine