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FCC To Rule On "Paid Prioritization" Deals By Internet Service Providers
An anonymous reader writes "After a record 3.7 million public comments on net neutrality, the FCC is deciding if the company that supplies your internet access should be allowed to make deals with online services to move their content faster. The FCC's chairman Tom Wheeler says financial arrangements between providers and content sites might be OK if the agreement is "commercially reasonable" and companies say publicly how they prioritize traffic. Many disagree, saying this sets up an internet for the highest bidder. "If Comcast and Time Warner – who already have a virtual monopoly on Internet service – have the ability to manage and manipulate Internet speeds and access to benefit their own bottom line, they will be able to filter content and alter the user experience," said Barbara Ann Luttrell, 26, of Atlanta, in a recent submission to the FCC."
Netflix will already put a caching server on an ISP's network.
They've been doing this for a long time.
This is about cable and telco ISPs extorting popular content providers to pay for bandwidth that the ISP's customers have already paid for.
What?
Me as a customer would like to use my monthly bandwidth quota to access Netflix?
Sorry, that's extra even though I already paid my ISP's monthly fee.
Especially if you compare it to the number of comments the FCC gets on other issues. I'd wager that most FCC comment periods net a few thousand comments at most. 3.7 million is a huge outlier.
Just to double-check, I looked at fcc.com/comments.
"Protecting and Promoting the Open Internet" (i.e. Network Neutrality) has 283,467 comments. (This doesn't count e-mailed comments.)
For contrast, "In the Matter of Connect America Fund A National Broadband Plan for Our Future High-Cost Universal Service Support" has 165 submitted comments.
This means that the Network Neutrality comment area received 1,717% more comments than the more normal "fund a national broadband plan" comment area.
No, 3.7 million might not be big compared to the entire voting public, but it's big compared to the usual FCC commenting group.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
In many cases, the ISP networks were built using taxpayer money. Sometimes, this money was given with the promise that everyone in the area would get high speed wired broadband. Then, in many cases, the promises were broken and nobody took the ISPs to task. (See Verizon and New Jersey.)
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
We did "vote for the a candidate who will push for net neutrality". Pre-election, Obama was for neutrality. The following quote says it has not changed, at least as of August 5, 2014.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
So, we did what you said. 3.7 million out of 211 million is not a significant gauge of public opinion, but it shouldn't matter, because we voted for the right guy.
Are you going to change your statement to emphasize the word "push", as if they have to actively work on the issue? And then further clarify a chain of command where people have to listen to the President's opinion? Your logic checks out, but facts are lacking.
Until ads that randomly play sound are removed!
Slashdot has started adding these ads that randomly play very loud sound. It violates sensible netiquette. Accidentally leaving a slashdot window open causes your computer to make a noise randomly at night, in a meeting, etc.
Unfortunately, this isn't going to change until it affects their revenue. Boycott slashdot until these ads are gone!!
My guess is we are fucked.
No. Being "fucked" implied some modicum of informed consent.
The proper term is "ass-raped without even the courtesy of a reach-around".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
This is about cable and telco ISPs extorting popular content providers to pay for bandwidth that the ISP's customers have already paid for.
No, that's where you're wrong. What they're doing is setting up a direct peering circuit to that provider, so that the traffic doesn't have to route out their existing internet edge points. Most of the time each company pays for their half of the direct connection, and everyone wins: it takes bandwidth off the regular internet edge points, reduces extra hops between networks, usually gets better latency, and is cheaper. The problem is when someone like Comcast uses their position to force a company like Netflix to pay for the access, which really isn't even a net neutrality concern as much as it's an anti-competitive/monopolistic/unfair business practice.
Net neutrality is more about how the traffic is treated within the ISP's network itself- it should all get tossed into the same best-effort 'bucket' and not throttled, blocked, etc.
Local caching servers don't really violate the idea of NN either- content requested by a lot of users is stored locally so that it doesn't have to get sent over a large chunk of the network multiple times, just the 'last mile'.
What?
Me as a customer would like to use my monthly bandwidth quota to access Netflix?
Bandwidth quotas are pure bullshit and ought to be outlawed. Bandwidth doesn't get 'used up' like a tank of gas does. There's either enough right now or there's not. If there's not, then everyone loses an equal percentage of what they're trying to stuff through at that moment.
Write-ins are only allowed for candidates who have already applied, had sufficient votes to qualify as a candidate, but did not have sufficient votes to actually get printed on the ballot.
One of the common fallacies that's been perpetuated is that you can write in any random candidate and if they got enough votes they'd be elected. What would actually happen in such an instance is the votes would be disqualified and best case there would be a second vote with said candidate excluded, but more likely they'd simple take the highest 'legitimate' candidate and shove them in as president and tell the rest of us to stfu.
Anybody who thinks the buerocracy isn't well established in ensuring the status quo doesn't really understand in how many ways the system has been rigged. That's not to say that an unexpected candidate couldn't win, just that it would have to be planned out years (at least 1-2 just to have the paperwork qualify) in advance of the election and provide enough exposure to get the candidate their needed votes for each level of qualification to make it on the ballot. And if they do make it that far, you can be sure either direct or indirect pressure will be applied to either have them negatively portrayed to the public, or simply forgotten due to lack of coverage, as happened last election with the dozen or so alternate candidates that WERE available. None of whom I might add even got the 10 percent of votes necessary to recieve federal funding this go-around.
This is why I've been a proponent of people voting with the expectation of their chosen candidate losing the upcoming election, but helping them get the requisite 10 percent. If we could get 6-8 candidates with 10 percent in the next election we could significantly erode the Democrat/Republican hold on our election process by spreading the funds around. With more voices at the presidency level we could in turn help dissolve the similiar electoral holds at the Congressional and State levels eventually requiring too many payoffs to ensure preferental political treatment, especially if some of the candidates either don't cave to financially sponsored political pressures, or actually live up to the claims sometimes put forth about not taking 'political contributions' at all.
Hope you all have a good laugh imagining the odds of such a shakeup happening :)