FCC Public Comment Period For Net Neutrality Ends Tomorrow, July 15

samzenpus (5) writes "The deadline for the FCC's public comment period on their proposed net neutrality rule is coming up fast. The final day to let the FCC know what you think is tomorrow, July 15. A total of 647,000 comments have already been sent. Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and other tech companies are making a final push for net neutrality saying that the FCC decision, "shifts the balance from the consumers' freedom of choice to the broadband Internet access providers' gatekeeping decisions." The Consumerist has a guide to help you through the comment process, so make sure your voice is heard."

Comments

Next up:

[Anonymous Coward]

FCC private bribery period against net neutrality to begin July 16th.

Re:Next up:

[frovingslosh]

It is important to get in your comments before the former telecommunication lobbyists at the FCC go ahead and do what they have announced they intend to do, give the telecommunication companies the right to charge the Internet companies that you already pay a monthly fee to gain access to . That way they can pretend that they considered all sides of the issue before they let the telecommunication monopolies gouge the suppliers (and indirectly, you)

Don't forget to comment

[AndrewBuck]

One of those comments was mine and I encourage others to do the same. The FCC may very well ignore the comments, but the more that there are the more it will show people how corrupt they are. Ignoring 50 comments is one thing, ignoring 650,000 comments is another thing entirely, especially when almost every single one of those comments is opposed to the policy they are proposing.

Make your voice heard, and even if not heard by the FCC, then let it be heard by your fellow citizens that the FCC won't listen to us anymore. Our government is corrupt but most people don't realize the extent to which it is corrupt. This is a good way to show them.

-AndrewBuck

Re:Don't forget to comment

[Mr.123]

Also commented a few weeks ago. My senator (NY) sent me a couple of follow up emails since. They're canned emails, but at least someone is reading them.

Re:Don't forget to comment

[Kelbear]

That's a very important point to make, people give up on writing to their politicians because they always get canned responses, but those canned responses (at least in NJ) are relevant to the point of my letters, which meant that a staffer read the letter, understood my position, and had to pull up the relevant response template.

In the process of doing so, the staffer adds my position to the politician's mail summary to get a sense of where their voter base stands (as only a few voters bother to even write). This doesn't necessarily mean the politician will do what I want, but in their own self-interest they'll weigh the cost of votes from going against their base, against the lobbyist's campaign contribution buying access to substitute votes, thus their mental calculation is still impacted by my letter.

Re:Win or lose the government will find a way

[AndrewBuck]

Way to repeat the industry propaganda. Net neutrality does not say anything at all about the upgrades you carry out, all it says is that whether or not the upgrades are done, you can't priveledge one customer over another because that person paid you to speed their traffic and slow others.

-AndrewBuck

Re:Win or lose the government will find a way

[petrus4]

Better that, than what the likes of Verizon want. While they are not always, in this particular debate, the Randian demographic are my enemies. This is one case where the corporations have to be stopped, and I am entirely willing to see government or any other available means employed in order to do so.

Misrepresentation

[Anonymous Coward]

The fundamental problem is that TCP has a notion of "fairness" that is broken and exploitable. Fix that, and most of the pain (and corporate opportunity for tiered gain) goes away. For those interested, try and wrap your head around Flow Rate Fairness. If you want to do more than add some more noise to the Aye vs. Nay shouting, read up and say something sensible, or at least mention the paper to the FCC.

Re:Dumb question...

[Anonymous Coward]

The FCC can force this on internet companies by reclassifying their status. The courts agreed with Verizon because internet service providers are classed as information services, which doesn't allow the FCC to regulate them the same way they do other things. It's really a question of whether ISPs are "information services" or if companies like Google and sites like Slashdot are the information services, and Verizon, AT&T, etc are utilities for access to such. It's like asking whether the electric company provides light in your home.

Political Absurdism

[bill_mcgonigle]

Quick, do you vote "yes" or "no" on the Jabberwocky?

This is the most lucid summary I've seen of the current "debate". Quoting:

The things that bug me most about the net neutrality debate are:

0) The whole slow lane/fast lane conception is just wrong. Internet traffic looks nothing like vehicle traffic. On roads, you have only a few lanes to put cars in. On the internet, it's more like you break up the cars and trucks into atoms (packets), mix them all together, pour them through various choke points and reassemble them at their destination no matter in what order they arrive.

Traffic management at these levels IS needed, and managed at a e2e level by a TCP-friendly protocol (generally), and at a router level by queue management schemes like "Drop Tail". Massive improvements to drop tail, fixing what is known as "bufferbloat" with better "active queue management" (AQM) and packet scheduling schemes (FQ) such as codel, fq_codel, RED, and PIE are being considered by the IETF to better manage congestion, and the net result of these techniques is vastly reduced latency across the chokepoints, vastly improved levels of service for latency sensitive services (such as voice, gaming, and videoconferencing), with only the fattest flows losing some packets and thus slowing down - regardless of who is sending them. Politics doesn't enter into it. Any individual can make their own links better, as can any isp, and vendor.

Some links:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra...
https://datatracker.ietf.org/d...
http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra...
http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra...

Furthermore individual packets can be marked by the endpoints to indicate their relative needs. This is called QoS, and the primary technique is "diffserv".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

There are plenty of problems with diffserv in general, but they are very different from thinking about "fast or slow" lanes, which are rather difficult to implement compared to any of the techniques noted above. You have to have a database of every ip address you wish to manipulate accessed in real time, on every packet, in order to implement the lanes.

IF ONLY I could see in the typical network neutrality debater a sane understanding and discussion of simple AQM, packet scheduling, and QoS techniques, I would be extremely comforted in the idea that sane legislation would emerge. But I've been waiting 10 years for that to happen.

We have tested, and have deployed these algorithms to dramatic reductions in latency and increased throughput on consumer grade hardware, various isps and manufacturers have standardized on various versions, (docsis 3.1 is pie, free.fr uses fq_codel, as does streamboost, as do nearly all the open source routing projects such as openwrt)

I really wish those debating net neutrality actually try - or at least be aware of - these technical solutions to the congestion problems they seek to solve with legislation. I wouldn't mind at all legal mandates to have aqm on, by default. :)

It makes a huge difference, on all technologies available today:

https://www.bufferbloat.net/pr...

See also the bufferbloat mailing lists.

1) if we want true neutrality, restrictive rules by the ISPs regarding their customers hosting services of their own have to go - and nobody's been making THAT point, which irks me significantly. In an age where you have, say, gbit fiber to your business, it makes quite a lot of sense from a security

Re:Political Absurdism

[Charliemopps]

I've read that and its total hosrseshit written by a guy that knows nothing of how enterprise networking operates. I know he's saying stuff that you want to believe is true and accurate but the fact of the matter is, he doesn't even know what the real problem is!

Netflix IS a real problem. Something needs to be done, but Netflix has successfully turned this into a "Net Neutrality" debate... and unfortunately for us all, LOST. There are a dozen different ways of fixing the Netflix problem... most of which would cost Netflix money, so they oppose them. Keep in mind, Netflix doesn't give a damned about Net Neutrality, they care about money, just like any other corporation on earth. They could change their business model tomorrow to one that wasn't crushing the ISP's infrastructure but they have time and again refused to do so.

Re:Political Absurdism

[interkin3tic]

Along those same lines my second grader's report on the civil war was just fucking garbage. I mean, it barely mentioned the manifold reasons behind the civil war. It focused on slavery and BARELY hinted at federalism at all, or the cultural divide. It was only one page long too!

In seriousness, the point of a metaphor in politics is to dumb something down to a point where people who are ignorant on the issue can be motivated to act in a certain way. "Ignorant" here including myself, I don't really understand QoS (without looking it up on wiki that is). To expect a public discussion to be accurate on anything remotely technical is asking for dissapointment. Or is an attempt to confuse voters into apathy.

Wrong

[bussdriver]

Like most every political issue in the dysfunctional USA discourse, we have multiple off topic debates created as distractions from the real issues. Some of it promoted intentionally. I wouldn't expect comcast to stop at merely paying bums off the street to fill up public comment time at the FCC (as they have done, proving they have no respect for democracy.)

This is not about technical packet routing but the policies beyond the technical issues. Comcast purposely screwing up NetFlix in order to make them pay and then pass that onto their customers as a Comcast tax. You pay for bandwidth, NetFlix pays for bandwidth. If both of you use the full amount of bandwidth you are promised and PAY FOR and the ISPs can't deliver on their marketed promises... then that is a legal issue for the ISPs making the false claims.

This is also an issue of corporations playing favoritism with those packets. It doesn't matter if your car is broken down into atoms and sent in one big data flow -- when the corporation IDs all the atoms for your car and does not like your destination then slows down only your atoms... it doesn't matter what technical router issues they can dream up as an excuse for intentional discrimination which is not based upon neutral technical issues (like SIP needing priority.) That is smokescreen for their real agenda... to turn internet into cable TV.

The FCC needs to classify ISP's as common carriers

[Presto Vivace]

for those who might be interested in a sample comment, my comment to the FCC.

Re:Win or lose the government will find a way

[AndrewBuck]

Again with the propaganda. Analogies are useful, but only to a point and your analogy has gone past the point. You are perfectly allowed to pay more to get a bigger pipe or lower latency today; that already exists, just go shopping for bandwidth and you will see many options. What you are not allowed to do is pay more to make sure your competitors have a smaller pipe, or higher latency.

To use your analogy, you are allowed to spend as much as you want and buy as big of an engine as you want, but you are not allowed to spend money to make sure the guy you are racing against has a smaller engine.

I really do wonder what the motivation for all these AC posts is. Are they just misunderstanding the issue and posting anon because they are afraid of being downmodded, or are they paid industry shills whose job is not to win the argument, just to muddy the water enough that people get confused?

-AndrewBuck

Re:The FCC needs to classify ISP's as common carri

[AndrewBuck]

Interesting idea sharing your actual comment. Here is mine (link is to a small pdf from the fcc site showing the text of the comment):

http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/docum...

Others are welcome to read the comment to get ideas for what to write but I don't recommend copy-pasting my comment as your own. Write it in your own words and say why it affects you personally. Getting 20 real, independantly written comments with personal stories matters more than getting 100 copy pasted comments. These orgs are used to getting hundreds of identical comments from groups like moveon.org and such which encourage people to "write their representatives, and to make it easy for you here is what to write..." and those are too easy to ignore.

-AndrewBuck

Re:Sick Joke

[AndrewBuck]

Wow, yet another industry shill posting as AC to spread propaganda. I think you are the 4th or 5th one in this thread.

In answer to your misinformation...

Net Neutrality originally meant: leave the internet alone, it's been working fine for years.

Yep, and it still does mean that. You can claim it means whatever you want, but the people areguing for common carrier status want exactly this, and nothing more.

Then corporations start to throttle back our bandwidth, and instead of the courts charing them with selling a fraud, or deceptive trade practices

I would be very happy to see them do this, unfortunately it would be a tough case to make because they always weasel language into the contract you sign with them saying they can "regulate speed for QOS reasons" and that your speed is "up to" some threshold, etc.

the FCC and Obama come in with a plan to give government control over the internet, and require the ISPs to log your internet activity and just give it to police whenever they ask for it. And of course Mr. Obama and the FCC call this plan "Net Neutrality".

This is just ludicrous. In what way is saying to ISPs "you can't discriminate based on who sends the traffic, you have to treat it all equally" equal to "governemnt control over the internet" in the pejorative sense you are intending for it to mean. I guess the government would have some control as all regulations are a form of control, but that is not what you meant. The people arguing for net neutrality want all players to have the same access to the public internet without large entites paying to prevent their data from getting through, so why would they want the government to do exactly the same thing. You were just trying to scare people into doing what the giant corps want, which is to let them screw their customers over by forcing them to pay for a connection and then pay again to make it not suck. Furthermore, your comment about logging on the internet is pretty funny in light of the Snowden leaks. Why would they need to pass a law to "log the internet" when they have been doing exactly that for years. Just more phony scaremongering to confuse people who are not well informed.

That's right, they gave it the same name, but it has a completely different meaning.

Nope, that was just the big ISPs and their paid shills who post AC on sites like slashdot. Go crawl back into the hole you came out of. To quote Woodie Guthrie "all you facists are bound to lose". You might win on this one and get the two tiered internet your paymasters want, but the people are slowly learning how badly they are being screwed over and eventually they will wake up and take action.

-AndrewBuck