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New White House Petition For Net Neutrality
Bob9113 (14996) writes "On the heels of yesterday's FCC bombshell, there is a new petition on the White House petition site titled, 'Maintain true net neutrality to protect the freedom of information in the United States.' The body reads: 'True net neutrality means the free exchange of information between people and organizations. Information is key to a society's well being. One of the most effective tactics of an invading military is to inhibit the flow of information in a population; this includes which information is shared and by who. Today we see this war being waged on American citizens. Recently the FCC has moved to redefine "net neutrality" to mean that corporations and organizations can pay to have their information heard, or worse, the message of their competitors silenced. We as a nation must settle for nothing less than complete neutrality in our communication channels. This is not a request, but a demand by the citizens of this nation. No bandwidth modifications of information based on content or its source.'"
So say we all.
Too bad we failed to elect Obama. Bush is just letting the corporates take everything they want!
Because this time, the Government will listen to a petition of the people posted on a website.
I had just searched this out and signed it based on the FCC news. Good to see that my mind and the hive mind are linked.
What about QoS for VOIP?
Obama ran on a policy of net neutrality support and staffed the FCC board with members with the intent of establishing net neutrality.
Now the FCC (which the Obama administration controls) is doing a 180.
Is this being done because Obama and the DNC doesn't want it or because Comcast is throwing money around?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/re...
http://thehill.com/blogs/hilli...
Just sign it.
Serious question. These petitions are clearly not only completely absent any actual legal or procedural relevance; they are routinely ignored by the white house, often complete with redicule and mocking, that is if any attention is paid to them whatsoever.
These things are at best a token 'feel good' nod toward public relations and more realistically, these things are just flat out time wasters for all involved.
So why is so much attention paid to them?
Isn't it better to use your time and money towards things that could result in some real policy or legislative changes in government, such as supporting or working to defeat politicians, supporitng lobbying efforts, or other more traditional methods of interacting with the state?
Oh and by the way, president Obama has made his 'transparency' campaign lie completely 'transparent' by now, you all should know that he will follow through on no promise that he doesn't already want to act on (which is most of them) and in the end is happy to lie right to the face of the voter and then go off into a back room and do exactly the opposite of what he states he will do, towards whatever end he pleases. So given that (Gitmo? allowing bills to be reviewed before signing them? eliminating lobbyists from the white house etc.) why would you guys spend any effort at all in trying to influence his decicions or actions? You *know* they could not possibly care less what you proles think.
Real question; what are you guys thinking here? No one cares!
...they can bend it all they want.
Tom Wheeler is a crotchety old sleazebag who has been bought and paid for by Big Telecom. Unfortunately he's probably also foolish enough to think he's doing right by the American public. That's the most dangerous kind.
RIP Internet
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
We pay for our bandwidth and now the greedy ISPs are wanting to get paid by the content providers (Netflix, Hulu, etc). Do you really think they are going to absorb the additional costs if this continues? Of course not, they will raise their prices.
ISPs rarely deliver what you pay for so them crying that its the content providers fault is BS. The problem is lack of real competition in the ISP market. Most folks have a choice between cable and DSL. Two isn't enough to be very competitive.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Sorry, but just about every one of these I've seen have been coming back from the office of Mr. "YES! YOU CAN!" has been "NO! YOU CAN'T!"
Online petitions are worth exactly the amount of energy it takes to ignore them completely.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
That might be more of a valid analogy and less of an obvious shill if the "recipient" of overnight delivery was already paying for it.
would ask that ISPs be classified as common carriers. Then there could be nothing they can do.
Nice shill post but your assumptions aren't correct. ISPs can and do support massive streaming to large portions of their customers. They simply want to avoid paying for infrastructure upgrades while at the same time milking both ends of the wire for all the money they can.
Would you give up Netflix to protect Comcast's bottom line? How about innovators like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Google? Without Net Neutrality, they wouldn't exist. Go back to using AOL and Compuserve, see how much you like networks with no competition, fool.
"Here Lies Philip J. Fry, named for his uncle, to carry on his spirit"
Yes, it may cause Disney or Netflix to raise prices to their customers to pay for the Fast Lane they're getting, but it does not block access to other sources of content and silences nothing. Car pool lanes don't keep other cars from using the normal lanes. In fact, the analogy is flawed only because that uncongested carpool lane cannot be used by non-carpool users while the increased border gateway router bandwidth being paid for by Netflix users will be used by other users when it is otherwise unused. The closest the NYT could come to "silencing" is this:
Which means that if a gamer gets only the same speed tomorrow that he's getting today he might get bored and go elsewhere. I.e., if there are no Fast Lanes the gamer gets X bandwidth and that's good enough, apparently. Tomorrow with Fast Lanes for other services he gets X and suddenly that's not good enough.
I appreciate the fact that my costs for service won't be forced up by my having to pay for bandwidth that I'm not asking for, and that the cost for high-bandwidth streaming services will be paid for more by the customers of those services. And if a new "Twitter" requires huge amounts of near-realtime bandwidth on day one then something is very wrong with their concept of operation.
If it brings prices down.
Let me put this out there: if they don't want net neutrality, mark my words, all the petitions in the world won't make a whit of difference.
Let's review this topic in two years and see whether I'm right.
*** Don't be dull.***
One definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, and expecting different results.
-Styopa
The trouble is that the ISPs want to promise high speed and unlimited usage but not deliver it. They want to put the blame on the streaming companies. ISPs have gotten away with false promises for years because the content wasn't demanding enough to prove them wrong. Now, rather than raise their own prices or put in caps and limit usage during prime time etc. they want to put the blame on Netflix etc. They make Netflix etc. pay them more money for the same bandwidth they are already charging customers for. Then when Netflix (or whoever) raises their prices to compensate, Netflix takes the blame instead of the ISP. The end user and Netflix (etc) have already paid for bandwidth. The ISP wants to get paid twice because their business model didn't allow for the user actually using the purchased bandwidth.
its time we see to it the the corporate influence on the net abolished they ruin every thing they touch the internet is no exception the f.c.c. has lost there minds it time we tell them ether they rule in the favor of the people and the people alone or we find a way to faze them out. im sick of hearing how the internet is under attack and corporate influence is the cause they don't make laws we do when is that ever going to be expressed. they need to be told once and for all to shut up and go away the internet belongs to the people not them they just don't deserve a vote. they ruined the main steam media let them feed from that filthy troff until it runs dry then they can starve to death as it is a deserving fate.tell them to take their collectivist ideas and jam them where the sun don't shine. it time we let them rot on the vine.we don't need them we have the internet for now.
So I guess this page on the FCC website doesn't actually mean anything then. I guess the bribes finally became large enough.
Gamers don't need much bandwidth, they need quick RTT and low (read: no) packet loss. That would be another ideal class of service for a "fast lane".
Yes, it may cause Disney or Netflix to raise prices to their customers to pay for the Fast Lane they're getting,
You can go ahead and change "may" to "already did."
but it does not block access to other sources of content and silences nothing. Car pool lanes don't keep other cars from using the normal lanes
You obviously don't live in any densely populated enough area (say, Southern California) where there in fact are any car-pool lanes, do you? Where do you think that extra lane came from? The meta-plane of elemental freeway lanes? No, they blocked a regular lane to turn it into a carpool lane and now, one-by-one, they're beginning to systematically charge you extra to use them .
One that has the same sentiment but doesn't sound like a 14-year old wrote it.
Comcast should be fined for extorting Netflix so they don't throttle their bandwith. The problem is that Comcast buys out politicians so the government no longer regulates monopolies, monopolies regulate the government.
God spoke to me
Where do you think that extra lane came from?
In some places they are built in the existing median, with controls to allow them to be used for "inbound" traffic in the morning and "outbound" traffic in the afternoon. I've apparently been to the big city enough times to have seen such wonders and marvels.
No, they blocked a regular lane to turn it into a carpool lane
Ok. So the analogy fails in that the Fast Lane is added bandwidth. But still, nobody is prevented from using the normal lanes and they are still there.
they're beginning to systematically charge you extra to use them .
And you can avoid that extra charge by not driving in the carpool lanes. I understand that you're unhappy with the roads in SoCal and I certainly would not choose to live there (traffic being just one of several reasons) but the carpool lane analogy the NYT used was only an analogy, not a congruency. There will be some differences between the two. One being them difference in damage created by a "packet" collision, of course.
As I see it, an ISP should first of all do QoS on their traffic based on *subscriber*...what their plan is, whether they have any SLAs in place, etc. At this stage the *type* of traffic should not be considered.
As a second optional stage, *if a subscriber asks them to do so* then they could do type/source/whatever-based QoS, but that would *only affect packets belonging to that subscriber*.
That way, your traffic can't affect mine, and mine can't affect yours. If I want, I can do my own QoS, or I can let the ISP do it for me. It is *not* the ISP's job to prioritize your VoIP packets ahead of my bittorrent packets. They should be equal. If you want them to prioritize your VoIP packets ahead of _your_ bittorrent packets, then that's fine.
As a veteran of the early days of the Internet, I wish people would just chill out from trying to get the Federal government to put more regulations on the Internet. The lack of regulation is what enabled the Internet to be what it is today.
Someone has to pay to put bits into a network, someone has to pay to move bits in a network, and someone needs to pay to move bits out of a network.
Leave it to the content providers and ISPs to figure out how to slice up the pie.
If you want more competition in local ISP access, work on that instead. Go start one! You could even offer 1 Gbps non-oversubscribed bandwidth. I'm sure you won't run into any regulation causing a barrier to entry...
As bad-taste as it is to post another submitted story in a front-page story, here is another whitehouse.gov petition story that addresses net neutrality from an angle that is actually winnable:
http://slashdot.org/submission/3512823/whitehousegov-net-neutrality-petition
That links to this: http://wh.gov/lfOKl
In order to win this fight, we need to make people understand that net neutrality is a services-paid-for issue. They paid for something, but they are being robbed out of getting what they purchased. To win net neutrality, you MUST sell that point to people.
No, they didn't cut prices and they didn't pocket the money - they spent it. You know, on the extra equipment that was needed to improve performance for Netflix customers?
sign this petition if you agree: http://wh.gov/lwhr8
yes, the usefulness of these petitions are questionnable. but if enough *voters* make a fuss, people notice. cynicism and total inaction never changes anything.
No, the problem is that people don't understand what they've paid for. If you'd really paid for both ends of the traffic, with unlimited bandwidth, the prices would have been much higher than they are.
Why should Comcast customers who don't use Netflix subsidize those that do?
You obviously don't live in any densely populated enough area (say, Southern California) where there in fact are any car-pool lanes, do you? Where do you think that extra lane came from? The meta-plane of elemental freeway lanes? No, they blocked a regular lane to turn it into a carpool lane and now, one-by-one, they're beginning to systematically charge you extra to use them .
Actually, CalTrans is not allowed to convert an existing lane to an HOV lane, only "new" lanes can become HOV lanes:
http://www.dot.ca.gov/hq/paffa...
Regular "mixed-flow" lanes are never converted to HOV lanes. Rather, HOV lanes are always added to existing facilities.
Are you against overnight delivery options? This is propaganda against the same thing, except for bandwidth.
Companies offer expedited delivery because it increases the amount of business they can do. If it cost them customers to offer tiered services, they wouldn't do it. The internet will be larger and offer more options, not fewer, if Net Neutrality is kept out of the ISP industry.
The righteous indignation against internet freedom in this case is surprising for the community that wants so much choice in software.
Fedex doesn't pay more money to use the roads to deliver an overnight package than to deliver a 5 day ground package.
A more apt analogy to express delivery is that Netflix could opt for a slower service where you choose the movie you want to watch the day before, and they download it to you overnight, reducing their need for peak bandwidth. But that is not the same as paying the carriers more money to get the bits to you.
"[...] to mean that corporations and organizations can pay to have [...] the message of their competitors silenced."
The new rules, as described in the previous article, allow a content provider to pay an ISP to install extra equipment to increase the bandwidth they have to their customers. They do not allow a content provider to pay to have an ISP block or degrade access to another content provider.
The new rules are just common sense. ISPs should not be permitted to sell content providers exclusive access to the bandwidth their customers already paid for - but why shouldn't they be permitted to install extra bandwidth for a content provider at that provider's expense?
again ad hominem
It's not ad hominem if there's no "hominem" -- sign in to an account if you want someone to argue the merits of your argument. When you post as an AC, you're just one of many anonymous voices shouting from the back of the auditorium.
Netflix is not paying for the bandwidth the customers are already paying for. Netflix is paying for *extra* bandwidth.
Data caps would solve the problem, but US consumers have been very reluctant (to say the least) to accept them. I don't think that's Comcast's fault. In any case, does it really matter whether Netflix customers are paying the extra costs to Netflix or to Comcast? I mean, enough to make it worth putting up with the hassles of a data cap?
Fewer people use high priority mailing. The costs don't scale as much. More empty space is on the planes that carry more of the priority packages. It costs more to deliver things faster.
Fewer people need fiber bandwidth at peak hours. It costs more per mile of cable to serve those people.
There's a scarce amount of things, and the price will have to go up in order for demand to shrink down.
I'm already paying taxes that cover the roads that Fedex uses to deliver my packages, why does Fedex have to pay more money to drive a priority package to my house when they've already flown the package (at their own cost) to within 20 miles of my house?
I've already paid Comcast for 20mbit of bandwidth, why does Netflix have to pay them money to send me data over a pipe that I've already paid for when Netflix is willing to drop that data off at Comcast's front door? If Comcast can't provide 20mbit of bandwidth at the price they sold it to me for, then it sounds like they've overpromised and underdelivered and they should adjust rates accordingly.
So 1600213 is an identifier and 46836941 is not.
They are both identifiers, one identifies a person, one identifies a post.
Why does anything besides the content of a post matter in the merit of an argument?
Because it's impossible to conduct any reasonable discussion with an AC since that "one" AC may be many different people with differing arguments.
TBH I would sign in but I've been effectively banned for arguing on a side that the mobs disagreed with. Not sure why I would log in anymore.
And now I have to wait how long - who knows? - to post again. Some open community!
I didn't even know Slashdot banned anyone except outright trolls and spammers. You can always sign in again if are going to complain about Ad Hominen attacks when you aren't even a Hominem, it's not like it's hard to use create Slashdot accounts. Quoting the point you're arguing against wouldn't hurt either.
After a 5-year long campaign by European and U.S. digital rights NGOs, today the European Parliament turned a dubious Commission proposal on its head to safeguard the principle of net neutrality. It’s a historic win, and all over the news. It also shows how digital rights advocacy is maturing.
I'm all for network neutrality as a CONCEPT. As someone who has been running servers for decades I don't see how Washington can make a LAW requiring network neutrality that doesn't blow up in our faces.
An ISP gets hundreds of thousands of connection attempts from known email spammers every day. The volume of other attacks can be measured in how many hit you per minute. You absolutely MUST block and prioritize traffic based on its origin in order to have any hope of running a usable network. If Washington says you can't block or slow traffic based on the source and other attributes, email pretty much stops working. Worms will spread much faster. It becomes illegal to protect yourself or your customers from even the simplest of DOS attacks. In general, things would just get real nasty real fast. I'd need to see a proposal that looks like it might possibly work before I could support a law on the issue.
Though I know what some of the unintended consequences would be, there are always others that we don't foresee - every law causes some problem, so we should be careful about passing new federal laws.
Secondly, what is the motivation for this? We're afraid of something that COULD happen. We come up with hypothetical scenarios, but none of this is real - it hasn't happened. If it does happen, do we not already have laws about "unfair competition", "tortious interference", etc? Doesn't it make more sense to be alert, be watchful for any real problems, and see if our existing laws about unfair competition and such work as needed?
Why such a rush to pass laws that we know will cause problems, to stop a possible problem that doesn't yet exist?
Buy a bandwidth plan that supports your needs & you aren't paying for upgrades/bandwidth needed by others. How could you POSSIBLY think otherwise. If you don't do streaming media than don't buy a plan with bandwidth that needs it.
I still want the internet to be as fast as possible when I *am* using it. It's the average bandwidth used, not the maximum, that is relevant here.
There are costs besides roads. Trucks have costs associated with them, mostly by mileage. There are gas, oil, repairs to pay for. Drivers to pay.
They have to pay more for a truck that's less full. Fewer people will use priority mail, so the vehicles that have priority packages are more likely to be less full. Being less full is less efficient, and has higher costs associated with it.
Sure, and that's all borne by the carrier that's driving on the roads to deliver the package to my door -- I pay that carrier just like I pay Netflix, but I don't expect my city to charge Fedex Priority truck a surchage when they let Fedex Ground trucks drive for free.
The problem with analogies is that they don't always translate well to the real world problem.
You didn't pay for bandwidth, you paid for 'up to' that amount - unless you have an ISP that wants to be sued for fraud (and more power to you if they did). I don't know of anyone that actually buys data transfer, except on their phone. And that's on top of a flat connection bill
Let's see what Comcast says on their High Speed internet page:
Get download speeds up to 25 Mbps – Share photos, book travel, and watch the latest viral video craze – at super-fast speeds.
Get download speeds up to 50 Mbps – so you can game in real-time, download HD movies, and connect all the devices in your home simultaneously – at incredible speeds.
Connect your devices and do more of what you love online with reliable Internet speeds for your home.
Gee, I don't see anything there or their terms of use that says "Note: High speed internet applies only to providers that pay us to deliver their data to you".
.
An ISP that owns cables is paying off the cost of building them. An ISP that borrows cables is paying off the bulk cost of renting. When a cable is made to serve customers that use it less efficiently, such as mostly at peak hours, or otherwise concentrated in large transfers, then it costs more to accommodate them.
If a business is not allowed to find the efficient means of paying these costs, then that business will fail. Everyone will lose, especially the customer, who will have fewer and worse options.
I don't know why you think I don't want Comcast to be able to recover their costs of providing service -- they already have an efficient means to pay those costs -- they send me a bill each month, and if that bill isn't paying their costs, they can increase the rates I pay. That way I can fairly compare prices among different ISP's (luckily I'm in an area where I can choose from a few). When Netflix subsidizes Comcast, that makes the true cost of my internet service hidden since part of the cost is hidden in my Netflix bill (and eventually Amazon, Google, Facebook, etc will all have to pay). The largest ISP's shouldn't be allowed to use their near monopoly market penetration to extract fees from content providers when they are already charging customers for internet access.
Now, we have data caps, and that solves the problem. Sort of. Of course it's more than a little inconvenient, so should really be considered a last resort if ISPs and content providers can't sort things out any other way. (I say it "sort of" solves the problem because it generally means you can't afford to use internet TV unless the content provider has a deal with your ISP to exclude it from the data cap - which is pretty much the same solution that Comcast and Netflix came up with. Only the details are different.)
Go shill for Comcast somewhere else. Netflix is perfectly willing to pay for its own bandwidth needs as am I. When I pay for 10 Mb/s I expect to get that to each and EVERY content provider I browse to or use on the internet. When I pay for an 'unlimited long distance' plan I do NOT expect to have to pay more to call my mom than I do to call my bank (or vice-versa).
If Comcast or AT&T or any other 'ISP' didn't want to sell 'unlimited data plans' they didn't have to, nobody forced them to do it. I don't pay for the amount of data I receive or send per day I pay for 10 Mb/s as much as I can use at all times. I will not & should not have to than pay more to Comcast or a content provider because the FCC 'allows' Comcast to be both a monopoly AND to than screw Netflix as well. Certainly Netflix should pay more as their bandwidth needs go up just as I'd willingly pay more if I could get 100 Mb/s or 1 Gb/s bandwidth, but they shouldn't ALSO pay more just because they are Netflix nor should I pay more just because I use Netflix.
Have you seen the receipts? I see no evidence that they did anything but change a configuration.
The ISPs make a big deal about how usage has gone up since the '90s, but I have seen how the cost of the hardware has plummeted since the '90s. Back then, a SMALL GigE switch cost over $1000/port. If you needed to switch a lot of connections, you would have to build a Clos network of switches and that would seriously push the price up.
These days, the same capability is going for about $10/port (or $50/port with greatly improved management). Meanwhile, on the long haul side, improvements in the hardware allow you to push 10 times the data through the old fiber for the same cost. Just a normal upgrade cycle would bring these improvements into the ISP's infrastructure. On top of that, they have received billions in subsidies to improve connectivity to everyone and have fulfilled none of their promises.
So given all of that, it's a better bet that they pocketed it.
He is the one who proposed the current chairman for approval or rejection by the senate, following pressure from his party.
FTFY.
Also, chairman != dictator.
Also, some say that Obama did this to regain some political capital with powerful people he rubbed the wrong way earlier. Be that as it may, I'm not claiming he's free from blame. It gets somewhat harder to do the right thing when everything around you is rotten, but that's no excuse, merely a mitigating factor.
There's little difference between converting an existing lane and deciding that the new lane you're adding is an HOV lane.
It seems that the difference is that it's *not* the same as "they blocked a regular lane to turn it into a carpool lane" as the grandparent poster was claiming.
Go shill for Netflix somewhere else!
"Netflix is perfectly willing to pay for its own bandwidth needs" ... yeah, right. That's why they chose the cheapest option, and when it proved inadequate, demanded that Comcast provide them with extra bandwidth free of charge.
"When I pay for 10 Mb/s I expect to get that to each and EVERY content provider I browse to or use on the internet." ... then you're an idiot. That's not how the internet works.
Go ahead and build your own congestion-free internet if you like. Don't expect anyone to want to pay enough to cover your costs, though.
I think Netflix would have noticed if they didn't get the peering points they paid for.
Charging very different users the same is obviously not as efficient as tiered services - otherwise there would no such thing as tiered service, anywhere. By forcing them not to use a legitimate business model you are telling them that they may not recover costs as efficiently.
They already charge different users differently -- I pay more money for a faster connection since I use Netflix heavily. If I didn't watch streaming video, instead of a 25mbit connection, I'd buy their cheap 6mbit connection (or would use an ADSL provider). If they find charging for bandwidth alone to be unsustainable, then they can charge for data too -- charge $20 for each 100GB, or whatever covers their costs. They have lots of flexibility in their pricing structure. They can add peak surcharges or whatever else they need to do to pay for their network.
The type of business that will be more likely to fail in this situation is the start-up or the small scale business.
How can a startup expect to charge money to large users like Netflix, Amazon, etc? If Joe's House of Internet tried to force Netflix to pay up, Netflix would tell them to shove off and wouldn't worry about losing a few customers. But when Comcast (with over 15 million internet customers) tells them to pay up, they have little choice, since they can't afford to lose millions of customers.
Sure, allow more competition. I'm all for a freer market.
But don't reduce competition by telling Comcast that they can't incur costs on Netflix, when Netflix is incurring costs on Comcast.
Netflix isn't incurring costs on Comcast, I (as a Comcast customer) am incurring the cost by requesting the data from Netflix, so I should be paying for that -- Netflix isn't forcing me to accept their data, I am requesting it.
Why is it worse to have hidden costs in your monopoly bill than your more competitive Netflix bill?
Because, it's a hidden cost and I can't see the true cost of my Comcast connection. If I pay $50/month to Comcast, and have a hidden $5 for Netflix, $3 for Amazon, $5 for Youtube, $1 for Facebook, etc, the true cost of my bill might really be over $100, and if I knew that, I might find another ISP more cost effective. And more importantly, if Comcast charged their true cost of delivering service and that ended up being $100/month, that might be a level that makes it profitable for another provider to come in, while if the content provider subsidies kept Comcast rates artificially low, then there would be less incentive for a competitor to enter the market since he wouldn't get the same subsidies yet he'd be competing against Comcast's subsidized rates.
You mean the ports that had to be reconfigured with 'no shut'?
Do you actually know that no new equipment was needed or are you just guessing?
It doesn't really matter, though - if it so happens that the Netflix peering could be accomplished using existing equipment, it is still taking up space on that equipment. One day, said equipment will run out of space and new equipment will need to be purchased. The Netflix peering means that will happen sooner than it otherwise would. In the long run, it all works out the same either way.
Would you demand that a retailer give you a free TV because "look, you've already got them on the shelves - so it won't cost you anything to give one to me" ?
These two companies are huge donors to Obama, Look how they are willing to approve mergers. The previous net neutrality push was only to turn out the base, now it is time for the payback. What I am at a loss for, what about the turning over of the internet to international government bodies means for this policy change.
Just a thought, but it seems that many of the objections here seem to be premised on the assumption that ISPs (and Comcast in particular) is taking too big of a profit margin. (Some people seem to think that running an ISP costs almost nothing and that Comcast are clearly pocketing almost all of their income.)
So, perhaps rather than asking for regulatory changes that would break the internet, it would be more sensible to ask that ISPs - at least those with monopoly positions - be required to publicly release detailed income and expenditure figures? If there's any real profiteering, I don't see that you can do all that much about it without first knowing where it is and isn't happening.
I'm basing it on the typical conditions I see in an interchange or meet-me. Have you ever done any networking beyond the workgroup/office level?
It's fairly clear in the history that Comcast deliberately damaged throughput to force a 'peering' that wouldn't actually cost them anything.
The very concept of 'peering' with someone who doesn't own a network is odd. Especially so when Netflix already offers a cache box for any ISP that wants to reduce the upstream cost of serving Netflix to their customers.
I'd never signed up for the Whitehouse.gov petition site, thanks for making us aware there was a petition for this very important topic for the future of the Internet.
I can't believe there's only 5k signatures so far. I expected whitehouse.gov to get slashdotted.
Netflix aren't paying for extra bandwidth. They are being extorted to pay more money in order to not be throttled down to the point where their customers give up and move on. Remember, Comcast competes with Netflix too. Cable internet providers have no interest in you spending $8 per month to watch everything on Netflix over their bandwidth rather than paying $100/mo to watch cable and movie channels. Comcast are abusing the monopoly they were given as a "utility" by telling their own customers they have unlimited downloads at a stated bandwidth and then telling Netflix they are strapped for throughput and Netflix better pay up to keep the bits flowing.
We've been handing the entire country over to corporations for 40 !bleepin'! years. For God's sake, cut the man some slack. Has he compromised some principles? Yeah. But in the real world that's what you do to get things done. A General goes to war with the army he's given.
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Third party candidates have no chance of winning because every possible candidate is vetted for suitability by the ultra rich. It's even got a name now, it's called the Sheldon Primary
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as great as this is, the blood worthless white house web site refuses to accept me creating an account via either Chrome, or Safari, so fuck the federal government and Obama with the horse he road in on.
worlds worst speller
Look like I'm a little late to the party, but I also started a petition here. I like mine better, I'm not sure I understand where he's going with the military bit in this one, but there's no reason why you can't sign both.
I also did a petition with some different wording: here. I don't get why he's bringing up the military either, but the petition objective is still good. There's no reason why you can't sign both.
Although I am for free speech I am also in favor of surveillance. That leaves me in a bad position as free speech ends when spying and potential penalties may be applied for unapproved speech. So we can admit that speech in America is a bit less than free. If we stack on top of that a further issue of corporations having more access to bandwidth than regular folks it is simply another blow against free speech. At this time I'm not so certain that American society can take that kind of hit without some serious rebellions cropping up. Many people simply do not trust our government enough as it is. Endless wars as well as a House of Representatives dedicated to inaction and the legacy of the Nixon mess has turned people away from our government.
1. You have no idea how spam prevention works, denying something at the application level has nothing to do with net neutrality.
2. Blocking malicious traffic does not violate net neutrality, the only criteria that net neutrality forbids is giving traffic priority in exchange for money.
3. Blocking web sites means having a proxy which again, removes malicious or unsuitable content at the application level AT THE REQUEST OF THE END USER.
You're either ignorant or a shill.
Neither reflects well on you.
He tried to kill me with a forklift!
How about reining in your lapdogs instead of a half hearted face saving attempt.
Politicians are so transparent it's not funny, a single call from the president to the FCC director will change thins instantly.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
You are just drooling at the idea of charging companies and your customers for access to each other. if you were a REAL ISP you would know that blocking malicious content has always been allowed in every net neutrality bill.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Cost of bandwith has also plummeted. It's all geed, pure greed on the ISP part.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
If there were any evidence of that, Netflix would have sued. To be honest, I think you're being paranoid.
Cocmast deliberately damages VoIP traffic, they increase the dwell time in the cable modems to completely degrade VoIP that is not theirs... adding a DSL line and VoIP reliability went up drastically, so now we have DSL just for the VoIP phone system, we get more for less money than the crap Comcast offers for their crud-tastic phone service.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
References, please. Everything I've read on the subject - including the PR material Netflix put out - says you're wrong.
I disagree. Netflix created the problem. Everything was fine when Netflix were with their previous ISP.
Have you read any of the bills, or are you just guessing? The bills are only 5-10 pages each , so you CAN read them and get a clue.
S215, for example, specifically requires ISPs to accept and process spam. Most spam comes from a fairly small number of sources, people who send out thousands of spam messages per minute. As they move around a little bit, competent admins block those sources. There's no reason to accept connections from these spam factories - they have gigabit connections pumping out spam and nothing but spam. Under S215, ISPs would have to accept that spam because it says spam filters must be per-recipient. It requires that the ISP accept the connections, process the email to see what the rcpt address is, look to see if the user exists (a one in a million chance for some spammers who generate random addresses like 74jdbk84hfdh6@domain.com), etc.
Others require that the ISP pass all legal content. If you're at all familiar with CAN-SPAM, you may know that's ridiculous - 90+% of spam is legal.
If you'll recall, it was discussed right here on /., complete with the evidence. See this..
We don't censor any comments. I ran a quick search -- is this the comment you're referring to? Usually if you don't see a comment right away, it's because either the threshold settings are set to exclude it, or not all the comments on the page have loaded yet.
I pay that carrier just like I pay Netflix,
I see where you're confused.
Netflix is not the carrier. You're not paying Netflix to deliver the data into your house, but for some reason you think that's the case. I don't know how you got this notion.
I see where you're confused, Comcast is the carrier, and I am paying *Comcast* to deliver the data to my house. That's the entire reason I pay Comcast for internet, if I wasn't watching Netflix I'd use a much cheaper ADSL provider that can only give me 3mbit of bandwidth.
I've already paid Comcast for 20mbit of bandwidth, why does Netflix have to pay them money to send me data over a pipe that I've already paid for when Netflix is willing to drop that data off at Comcast's front door?
Netflix is not willing to drop that data off at "Comcast's front door".
Sure they are -- Netflix's CDN will deliver the data directly to Comcast's network. Or Comcast can set up some content caching servers to further reduce bandwidth demands.
And "you've paid Comcast for 20mbit of bandwidth", to where? Everywhere on earth? The moon? Gee, maybe you think you're paying for 20mbit of bandwidth to Comcast's network, under the expectation that they have decent connectivity to other major networks.
Yes, that's exactly what I'm paying for. I don't expect 20mbit to every place in the world, but I'd expect 20mbit to well connected sites.
How is Comcast going to deliver 20Mbit from me in NZ, should you so choose, when my ADSL upstream is not even that fast? Do you expect them to jump on a jet and install for free, a fat pipe into my house to satisfy your desires. Talk about a false sense of entitlement.
That's a strawman argument, that's not what I said and you know it.
How did it become Comcast's fault that Netflix is too cheap and stingy to pay for peering with Comcast or one of Comcast's many fast transit providers? I'm sure if Netflix was using a quality carrier like Layer3, they wouldn't have any problems, but they choose to shop around for the most bargain basement transit provider, and then blame their customers ISP (who are infact blameless in this whole shenanigans), when their bottom rung transit provider doesn't deliver.
Comcast can peer with Netflix's CDN just like other large ISP's do (like Google Fiber) -- it's Comcast's customers that are demanding Netflix traffic, Netflix isn't forcing it on anyone.
The FCC ruling and the administration's response may be reactions to the cat already having got out of the bog, meaning the idea of Net Neutrality have have become moot on a variety of levels. ISPs are already throttling bandwidth for business gain, and how could regulators stop that as long as they allow major ISPs, Comcast, AT&T, etc. to have de facto monopolies, and bias search results and bandwidth? Google search is at least as non-net-neutral in a different way by biasing what you see first.
Couple that with the NSA spying and Internet security attacks, and we may be seeing the end of the Internet and the emergence of its alternatives including those that trade freedom from spying and spam for less than instant gratification. The incentives are to make the Internet moot. Maybe our networks don't need to be always on and connectionless, maybe they can be more latent and secure and yet serve us nearly as well and maybe better with fewer bottlenecks and single failure points and fewer big corporations and governments controlling what we can see and do.
If you want to support Net Neutrality, then you have to post a comment on the FCC website. The FCC has to formally consider every single comment it receives on its website, through its comment/complaint process.
You can say anything you want, but constructive, helpful comments are more important than personal comments.
The FCC doesn't make it easy to post your comment on this particular proceeding. Here is the link you need to follow. In the 'proceeding' text field at the top of the form, type the number '14-28.'
http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/uploa...
So, if you change the traffic route so as to bypass the bottleneck, you get better service? That doesn't prove anything about the nature of the bottleneck.
The home connection (with the slowdown) and the office connection (without) hung off of the same router deep inside Comcast's network. Meanwhile, a peering happens way on the other side of the operation.
Pulling that stream from a vpn to the office back through that same router again meant that the well performing stream required double the resources than the direct stream, yet performed better because it evaded a deliberately configured slowdown for residential customers (by using a business connection and an encrypted stream whose nature couldn't be detected).
"The home connection (with the slowdown) and the office connection (without) hung off of the same router deep inside Comcast's network."
Huh? Where did you get that information?
Actually, even if true, it still doesn't prove anything unless you can show that Comcast routes their business traffic in the same way as their residential traffic, which seems unlikely.
Of course, to turn it around, I can't prove that Comcast *weren't* intentionally sabotaging Netflix. But if they were, then the changes in the FCC's position (at least those described here) aren't relevant; Comcast's alleged behaviour would presumably be just as illegal under the new proposals as under the old ones.
Google "Comcast throttling Netflix". It was all over the net recently, including right here on /.
Comcast does not run two separate networks. Different routing inside their network couldn't be fixed by a fatter peering connection on the outside.
Note though that I have Comcast and none of the traceroutes I have done suggest that a business account is routed differently. It appears to be more a matter of what limits they give the modem and how they figure your monthly balance.
And as I said, 'peering' with someone who doesn't own a network is just bizarre to the point that calling it peering is a stretch.
"Different routing inside their network [...]" ... actually I was thinking more of the backbone routing. They've got a big network, presumably they have multiple backbone exit points, and it seems entirely plausible that some have better connectivity to Netflix than others.
"none of the traceroutes I have done suggest that a business account is routed differently" ... odd. You wouldn't expect a business account to be competing with residential accounts for bandwidth. I suppose they could be using QoS over the same routes, though. (Or just cheating their business customers. Take your pick.) ... or perhaps we aren't even talking about the same thing? I'm talking about enterprise-level connections, for businesses with hundreds or thousands of machines, usually including servers. If you just meant small retail or home office connections, that's a different story. (But small retail and home office don't usually have VPN, so I don't think that's likely to be the situation described in the forum thread you linked to.)
"'peering' with someone who doesn't own a network is just bizarre" ... well, that's just nomenclature. Call it what you like, the end result is the same.
I still think the bottom line is that Netflix was trying to avoid paying their fair share of the costs. Did you see the part where they threatened to generate junk traffic from customer's machines, specifically in order to incur extra costs for the ISPs? That doesn't sound like someone negotiating in good faith to me.
Comcast doesn't do enterprise. Their business account is 100Mbps down and 20 up, a few static IPs. And yes, they use those magic words 'up to'.
As for VPN, probably not a dedicated box, but pretty much any server can support VPNs. I have used SSH on my phone with the socks proxy set up as an ad-hoc VPN.
The threat of junk traffic was likely just a debate tactic to shut Comcast up about 'unbalanced traffic'. I often use the same rhetoric when someone won't stop complaining about 'unbalanced traffic' along the lines of "well if that's the big problem, I can fix that right now". That would be because the people complaining about it generally are just trying to avoid the point that every byte of traffic was requested and paid for by their customers.
Sounds like you're trying to change the internet to a COD model, where you pay for traffic received rather than traffic sent. I'm not sure that's realistic. (For one thing, it would make DDoS attacks even more painful than they already are!)
Also note that Netflix customers using Comcast really aren't already paying for those bytes. To do that, Comcast would have to identify Netflix customers and charge them extra, and you can just imagine the howls that would cause. Oh, sure, they could charge by the gigabyte or implement data caps. But I don't think their customers would like those options either. Or they could just up their prices across the board, but then Netflix users would be being subsidized by everyone else, and I don't think that's fair. The best solution, IMO, is for Netflix to pay and pass the cost on to their customers, and that's exactly what's happened. AFAIK, there's nothing stopping them from charging Comcast users extra to cover it.
(In the thread you linked, it didn't sound like the OP was talking about an ad-hoc VPN to me; that also means that his office connection probably wasn't via Comcast, if Comcast don't do enterprise. Of course, that's all just speculation. OTOH, I still figure Netflix would have sued if they'd found any actual evidence of discriminatory throttling, which shouldn't have been hard to do.)
Actually, other than residential and business cable, it tends to be billed based on 95th percentile data rate (greater of outbound or inbound). That's because the rate is what drives the costs. Of course, they also have committed rates.
BTW, Comcast HAS implemented caps over and above the rate limit on the connection, so the customer DID already pay for those bytes.
You seem to be missing a LOT of information to have formed such a strong opinion.
Somehow that doesn't surprise me. I decided against VOIP from them since my neighbor got it and kept needing to use our phone to tell then it wasn't working again.
"Comcast HAS implemented caps" ... now, that's very odd. Why would anyone join Netflix in the first place if they've got a connection with data caps? Doesn't it make it pretty much useless? You'd burn through the cap in no time ... we run out of data (or nearly so) most months, and that's just from Youtube.
I don't know what makes you think I've got a particularly strong opinion - oh, on the general principle behind the FCC's reformulation of net neutrality, sure, but the details of this specific incident aren't directly relevant to it.