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Legislation Would Prohibit ISPs From Throttling Online Video Services
Dega704 sends this story from Ars:
"A Senate bill called the 'Consumer Choice in Online Video Act' (PDF) takes aim at many of the tactics Internet service providers can use to overcharge customers and degrade the quality of rival online video services. Submitted yesterday by U.S. Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), the 63-page bill provides a comprehensive look at the potential ways in which ISPs can limit consumer choice, and it boots the Federal Communications Commission's power to prevent bad outcomes. 'It shall be unlawful for a designated Internet service provider to engage in unfair methods of competition or unfair or deceptive acts or practices, the purpose or effect of which are to hinder significantly or to prevent an online video distributor from providing video programming to a consumer,' the bill states. A little more specifically, it would be illegal to 'block, degrade, or otherwise impair any content provided by an online video distributor' or 'provide benefits in the transmission of the video content of any company affiliated with the Internet service provider through specialized services or other means.' Those provisions overlap a bit with the FCC's authority under its own net neutrality law, the Open Internet Order, which already prevents the blockage of websites and services. However, Verizon is in court attempting to kill that law, and there is a real possibility that it could be limited in some way. The Consumer Choice in Online Video Act could provide a hedge against that possible outcome."
Should be illegal to 'block, degrade, or otherwise impair ANY content'
all i can think about is time warner and youtube. all youtube videos are throttled so horribly with time warner that i cant even watch 480p. time warner also cuts off the buffering after a certain amount of time, so you cant just leave it buffering all day either.
I also don't want Verizon intentionally de-prioritizing my Vonage VoIP traffic, for example. Or a cable company that's tied to CNN.com making MSNBC.com's images load slower to make the site seem less appealing to read from.
What we need is a very stiff, broader law that says, in a nutshell: ISPs provide bandwidth, period. In selling Internet Access, you're not allowed to block, degrade, or de-prioritize select traffic based on the type or source of said traffic. You're not allowed to effect the same by over-prioritizing preferred sources or types of traffic. Legitimate QoS for the purposes of improving overall customer experience is ok, but the QoS rules have to be (a) publicly details to your consumers, and (b) optional, with a zero-cost option to disable the QoS-prioritization of a given customer's in- or out- bound traffic.
all i can think about is time warner and youtube. all youtube videos are throttled so horribly with time warner
Here's how to fix it. A good friend suffers under TWC and applied that fix over a year ago (that site is not the only one to discuss, just the first one I clicked on in google), since then youtube has been great for him.
http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/time-warner-cable-sucks-for-youtube-twitchtv/
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
I don't think that's Time Warner. I'm with Rogers here in Canada, and I get the same experience. I've heard similar complaints from people with all kinds of ISPs. Basically the problem, as far as I know, is that Youtube is broken. Youtube tries to cut down on network usage, so they try to stream it to you just fast enough so that you only ever have a minimal amount in the buffer. The problem comes when the connection fails, or you sneeze, or it's tuesday, and the stream slows down just a bit. This causes your buffer to empty, which makes the video stop. There' also major problems with them reconnecting to the stream. Once the connection is dropped, or the buffer is empty, you pretty much have to reload the whole page before it can start streaming the video again. I spent 20 minutes trying to watch the last 10 minutes of a 1 hour video last weekend because this was happening continuously. I can watch videos all day every day with any other streaming service, but for some reason, Youtube just can't get it's act together.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.