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Net Neutrality Is Complicated: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales (indiatimes.com)
In an interview, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales backed the principle of Net neutrality, but added that enabling poor people to access the Internet is equally important. Wales also defended Wikipedia Zero, a project that aims to provide select services free of cost on mobile devices in developing markets. He said :Wikipedia Zero follows a very strict set of principles such as no money is ever exchanged and so on. Net neutrality is such a complicated topic, it is something that I am extremely passionate about and I think is incredibly important. And at the same time I think getting access to knowledge for poorest people of world is also very important. Sometimes those two things can be in tension and we have to be really careful about it. I think fundamental thing is that we maintain and open and free Internet.
Exactly. Just think "dumb pipe". Traffic can be managed at the end points.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
[citation needed]
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
... getting poor people to access the Internet is equally important.
"Getting" or "enabling" ? The former sounds like it's for your benefit, the latter for theirs. Which is Jimmy - and Mark (Zuckerberg).
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Net neutrality is actually very simple. He just opposes it,
Net neutrality addresses first-world problems. He rightly points out that there are more important problems in the world, even the world of the internet.
And now I must go scrub myself with a Brillo pad to clean off the stain of defending Jimmy Wales.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Disagree. Let's say I'm AT&T and I notice that one of my backbone connections is much more saturated than another. To the point where traffic over that connection is effectively bandwidth throttled. I collect some stats and notice that a disproportionate amount of traffic over that pipe is, say, Netflix, but not all. This has happened "organically" without my trying to charge Netflix and/or intentionally give them the shaft. Does the principle of net neutrality obligate me to upgrade that pipe when I might otherwise choose not to do so? Etc.
No, what obligates them to "upgrade the pipe" is that the Netflix traffic represents users who are paying customers. Now, they might decide, "Fuck those Netflix users, we're not upgrading shit" but then those paying customers can decide, "Let's see what kind of deal I can get from Comcast".
Because a critical part of any Net Neutrality discussion is competition, and the implicit threat that broadband should be a public utility anyway.
You are welcome on my lawn.
I think what's most important for Jimmy Wales is that he receives enough suckers that he can guilt into believing that wikipedia just doesn't have enough funding and needs more of it, even though that's a load of crap and his nonprofit company spends somewhat lavishly.
Let's not even get into the fact that most wikipedia articles are biased towards a pan-European, North American, and Australian viewpoint, in spite of claiming that they have strict "NPOV" rules, or the fact that administrators will simply delete a wikipedia page that covers a notable subject whose very existence they disagree with.
You can set prices by the flow rate, not the amount or type of data of data. Content is nobody's business.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Wales saying, "there are more important problems in the world" is meaningless blabbering.
If my roof is leaking, I could say, "well, there are more pressing problems in the world", but that doesn't change the necessity to fix the fucking roof.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It is not supposed to matter to you as an ISP. You sell bandwidth. What your customer does with said bandwidth is none of your business.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Talk about a double talking weasel. Net neutrality(why don't we call it net neutering instead?) is great when it applies to somebody else, but fuck you if you want me to play by the same rules.
Fuck you guy, just fuck you.
So let's first solve world hunger and repressive regimes? While the corporations eliminate Net Neutrality?
Yes, there are other problems in the world too. Yay for multitasking!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I value the editors for moderating their opinions, and wish we all could do as well.
WHERE IS YOUR TONGUE? IS IT IN YOUR CHEEK?
It only matters how fast you want to flow that 10 gig video. Instead of showing it live, it will have to be cached at a lower rate onto the local machine for later viewing.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Your paying customers will start complaining. And switching to other providers. Or making others switch to other providers by publicly complaining.
So, no, there's no obligation other than needing to offer good services to be able to keep your customers.
Let's consider the alternative: you throttle Netflix. This hurts Netflix's business. It will benefit Netflix's competitors. Internet access is a utility, where traffic should be treated equally in order to allow people and businesses to use the internet as a way of providing their services. With equal treatment from ISPs.
If your ISP wants to manage their traffic, they could for example ask their customers money for faster connections, or ask money per amount of data transmitted. Or upgrade their lines.
This post has been posted from a connection through which all traffic is guaranteed to be treated equally by national law. And Netflix works just fine.
No, we're not talking about unrelated issues here. We're talking about Net Neutrality directly preventing helping out the needy in some small way. Let's not do that. Yes, I also like my entertainment to be inexpensive, don't get me wrong, but it's hardly the highest ideal.
Frankly, "Net Neutrality" was always ignoring the specific real problem in pursuit of some purist goal. The real problem is cable companies with local monopolies fucking their customers. Even if we pretend that very specific problem is very important, we can focus on that. Offering free Wikipedia to third-world nation in no way harms our goal of keeping our internet bill down.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Net neutrality does not say "all traffic must be treated exactly the same", it says "all traffic of a particular type must be treated the same"
I think some people would disagree with you on that and argue that any form of traffic shaping is not neutral and potentially undesirable. The purest form of net neutrality is that everyone gets a pipe, and whatever bandwidth that pipe has, they can use to transfer whatever data they want without the ISP examining it at all.
If an ISP wants to adopt your position and shape by traffic type but not by traffic source/destination, customers can probably reduce that to the alternative version anyway by sending all traffic over some sort of encrypted channel that the ISP can't penetrate. VPNs do this all the time. However, doing so does require some technical skill on the part of the customer and some co-ordination between different systems to set up the necessary channels, so it isn't an option for everyone. It also requires the ISP not to de-prioritise any traffic they can't inspect, of course.
Whether that degree of opacity is actually the best way to run things is a different question. It does also prevent potentially useful traffic shaping by ISPs even when most people might consider acceptable, such as prioritising real time services over bulk data transfers at peak times. On the other hand, if your time to complete an off-site back-up is going up by 25% every quarter because many of your neighbours enjoy Netflix and your ISP doesn't want to pay for more bandwidth, you might have a legitimate grievance even then. There are few easy answers in this area, even to questions like what net neutrality actually means and what (if anything) does constitute appropriate traffic shaping.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Now this is something you'd have to explain. How is Net Neutrality keeping you down? Net Neutrality exactly keeps cable companies from fucking you even more by not allowing them to throttle certain services that they wish to sell to you instead.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The fundamental problem here is that one group's wants and desires (the end-users') are being suppressed. This came about because nearly all local governments granted a monopoly to a single cable service provider. They were well intentioned - often making 99.9% coverage and bandwidth limits a condition of that monopoly. But at the same time they discounted or didn't believe in the market influence of competition, so didn't give much consideration to the harm that granting a monopoly - even a regulated monopoly - does.
Once the cable companies had the monopoly, they could basically ignore end-users' desires, thus depriving them of their voice in the ISP market. On top of that, they are now empowered because they are the only means of internet access to those customers. All the power of those customers' dollars, none of the drawbacks of having to listen to what those customers want! And they chose to leverage that power by trying to extort additional money from websites to deliver content that their customers had already paid them for.
Net neutrality is a band-aid to try to fix this problem. By prohibiting different pricing based on content source, it prevents this type of extortion. But like the original monopoly regulatory kludge, it kills off another aspect of the market - differential pricing based on the cost to actually deliver that content. If Netflix is streaming content to the ISP, that's a lot of bandwidth and so costs the ISP a lot of money. If Netflix installs content servers at the ISP, that eliminates the bandwidth consumption and so costs the ISP less money. But net neutrality essentially prohibits the ISP from passing that cost savings on to the customer. The ISP has to charge the same price for all content, regardless of source and the bandwidth cost to obtain data from that source. It's just one regulatory fix which mostly but not entirely works, trying to fix another regulatory fix which mostly but not entirely works.
The ultimate solution is to restore market power to the end-user. Let them vote with their dollars. This has the advantage of pitting dynamic human minds against any tricks the ISPs try to come up with to increase prices or degrade service. Right now we're trying to fight the ISPs' tricks using static laws, which take decades to implement in response to their previous tricks, giving them plenty of time to figure out new tricks.
Abolish the cable monopolies. Convert the monopoly into a tightly regulated service contact for the physical cable or fiber which runs to the homes, and only the physical cables. No content service allowed. The cable maintenance company then makes money by leasing bandwidth along that fiber to different ISPs at a fixed (regulated) rate. The ISPs then have to compete with each other based on quality of service and price. If an ISP tries to pull a Comcast and deliberately degrades Netflix, they will hemorrhage customers as they flee to a different ISP who isn't degrading Netflix. And they'll do it in a matter of weeks or months, not the years or decades it took to get Net Neutrality implemented. This is how we regulate utilities, and oddly enough this is how "socialist" Europe does it.
The current Silicon Valley fetish of thinking that access to the internet is somehow going to lift the world out of poverty strikes me as the height of hubris.
What would help more than anything is to eliminate the oppressive governments that are starving their own people or ensuring access to clean water or modern health centers. They see high technology as the answer to every problem. It's the exact same nonsense as the "put computers in every school / give every child a laptop or iPad / kids need to learn to code" nonsense. Sure, it's important for kids to have access to and be exposed to technology, but it's silly to make that the focus when the real effort simply needs to be on getting the basics taught well. It's the same with fighting poverty - we need to start with the basics. First, we need to ensure people are safe, free, and have access to clean food, water, and health care.
I'll credit Bill Gate's foundation for eventually figuring this out, after wasting million here and there on pointless high-tech approaches. Sounds like Wales and others haven't gotten there yet.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Yes, but it's not net neutrality that should be forcing them to upgrade but rather existing fraud false advertising etc laws, an ISP needs to responsible to upgrade all circuits within it's network up to and including connecting to other networks. Otherwise they are not honestly offering 75mbs or whatever they are selling. Now I say circuits, wireless is a different beast and frankly where you have the most ability to vote with your feet. In the meantime any ISP with any monopoly rights needs to be held this net neutrality standards and require any transit providers they use do the same.
Try working in B2B hosting segment you pretty much have to give out your mrtg graphs for all your transit circuits. You better be able to handle at least one failure if not failure in everything in that fiber path or you're not going to get much business. But unlike last mile ISP's people can pick and choose.
Long term the last mile should go municiple as in full fiber from home to CO, let the ISP's use CWDM to light up customers. That keeps ISP's in the ISP business and muni's in taking care of that last mile. Fact is fiber that was put in in the 70's works perfectly well today and nobody expects that to change. Fact is that same fiber can easily handle 100x as much bandwidth than the current top end consumer services (gigabit to the home) on a single channel.
No sir I dont like it.
To borrow an expression used in a discussion about USENET of old: You're conflating "use of the net" and "use on the net". Net neutrality is exactly everyone can use the network just like everyone else, without prejudice or premium subscription required.
The whole teh zuck+frends "internet.org" walled garden-shtick breaks that "use of the net": You're blocked and no longer a first class citizen able to have your traffic passed like everyone else. You're chattel, beholden to your freemium subscription you can't pay for because you're poor so you're stuck in a situation where some of your traffic is passed, but not all. This ultimately holds you back and indeed long-term causes an increase in the premium required to get out.
This says nothing about whether some hosts will refuse to serve you unless you pay ("use on the net"): The internet was designed as and so far still is cooperative at its traffic-passing fundament. That this also has implications on how much people are willing to pay for content, typically not very much at all, is something else again. Net neutrality is about the traffic, not the content. You should not have to pay extra for your traffic depending on destination and teh zuck's "internet.org" walled garden breaks this. This devolves into him trying to own the poor.
Jimbo-boi apparently doesn't see this, and apparently neither do you, or you think it "the right perspective". I say that if you do indeed think that you need to think about it more, for example until you understand what the internet was built to do. Hint: It wasn't built to let teh zuck own the poor.
I collect some stats and notice that a disproportionate amount of traffic over that pipe is, say, Netflix, but not all.
Then you deserve to go out of business, because you are absolutely incompetent at managing your bandwidth distribution.
But let's pretend that you're actually talking about something reasonable: you notice that your tubes are full, but you don't want to take money from your CEO's yacht fleet. You, an as ISP are well within the constraints of net neutrality to evenly restrict the flow of traffic over your pipes, but without discriminating against anyone who isn't paying your extortion money.
If you're AT&T and you notice one backbone is more saturated than another, that just means your funds allocation for bandwidth is wrong. Say (simplified) you're allocating 50% of your bandwidth funds to backbone 1 (B1), and 50% to backbone 2 (B2). This is based on the assumption that your customers will draw traffic equally between B1 and B2 (50% and 50% of traffic).
You notice that B1 is constantly congested. You take some measurements and find the correct bandwidth allocation would be 75% B1, 25% B2. So what you do is reduce your bandwidth to B2 from 50% to 25%, take the money you save by doing that and use it to pay for increased bandwidth on B1 from 50% to 75%.
Net Neutrality and Netflix have absolutely nothing to do with this. The only principle here is one of giving the customers what they want and have paid for, and doing so at minimum cost to yourself. The reason Net Neutrality had to be implemented was because ISPs were reducing bandwidth to B2 from 50% to 25%, pocketing the money they saved doing that, and trying to get Netflix to pay for increasing B1 from 50% to 75%.
Remember, the customers already paid the ISP for that bandwidth. It shouldn't matter to the ISP where the customers use the bandwidth - they've already been paid $x for y Mbps. If the customers decide to use more of that y Mbps on B1 instead of B2, then the ISP has to reduce bandwidth to B2 by the exact same amount that they increase bandwidth to B1, meaning there's virtually no difference in cost to them..
It is not supposed to matter to you as an ISP. You sell bandwidth. What your customer does with said bandwidth is none of your business.
If all customers wanted was bits they could offer you rand(). Reality is those bits must be transported to you from somewhere and that has varying cost for the ISP. Behind the scenes there's a huge struggle over peering, transit and CDNs on whose terms and prices. It doesn't really cost the ISP the same for you to download from your neighbor's FTP server as from a server in Australia. And the big ISPs ("tier 1"), CDNs like Akamai and big content providers like Netflix do throw their weight around to make sure they get the better end of the deal.
Just because network neutrality hides it from the consumer doesn't make it go away, it's just tying the ISP to offer a variable cost bandwidth at a fixed price. It's good to avoid double dipping because the ISP can charge content providers on a whim, but it also takes away their ability to charge for actual differences in cost. They have to average it out, but are always looking for ways to make the mix cheaper. Like back when the web was a big part of it, caching was a big thing. It's not new and it's not going away.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Are they obligated? How about forming the question as "Should we make them obligated?" In your example, the cost of fixing a situation is much cheaper in proportion to the billions in profits an ISP can make. "Level3 is carrying a bunch of that Netflix traffic, and notes that it has more than enough bandwidth to carry it. It says the only problem is Verizon refusing to take 5 minutes to upgrade its system." https://www.techdirt.com/artic... I think that by now it should be pretty clear that ISPs are holding back progress in improving the quality of Internet speeds in order to increase profits and to try to slow the pace of people cutting the cord. I don't think that is an acceptable situation.
No, the alternative is that they find ways to reduce the cost of Internet service in those countries non-preferentially, so that those people actually have access to that world of knowledge, rather than just a limited, filtered, sometimes biased fragment of it. Wikipedia is acting as though their information is the only information of value. Their "Internet" is like a closed-access journal that gives free access only to summaries of the articles. It impedes understanding and progress. It hurts the very people that they're trying to help.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
That's how it works today.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Very glad you brought this example up! This is a great example of something that has nothing to do with Network Neutrality, that people commonly conflate with neutrality.
Does the principle of net neutrality obligate me to upgrade that pipe...?
No. Definitely not. This is an issue of network management and making your customers happy.
What network neutrality does state, is that the ISP must not try to filter or alter the traffic that comes from that pipe. That's all it has to say on the matter.
Its the simplest possible way to operate network devices. Your home router is (for the most part) net-neutral and all you have to do is plug the thing in.
The problem is that nobody actually wants net neutrality. And that's where it gets hard because service providers want neutrality broken in a different way than service users (and of course no two of anybody wants it broken in exactly the same way, but definitely some generalizations can be drawn.)
Service providers want to be able to charge a premium for every single bit (and often double-charge cause you know, there's two ends to that connection!) So they want to do things like the internet fast lane to force Google and Microsoft and whoever else to pay through the teeth (and they couldn't care less about Ma's Awesome Quilts from bumfuckit nowhere because the premium Google will pay for prioritizing Youtube covers the revenue they get from hundreds or thousands of those small sites.
Users on the other hand want things to be affordable and, in many cases far more importantly, to just bloody work right. We want VOIP prioritized no matter what VOIP service we use. We want all streaming music and video to be prioritized over download-only content such as bittorrent. And at the same time, we don't want you to just throttle bittorrent completely because when we're not on a VOIP call, we want the bandwidth to be available for anything else we're doing.
Those two sets of priorities are occasionally in sync to some degree -- as long as Youtube and Netflix and a few other "big" video sites are fast, we don't really care so much about the smaller ones. I mean we do in principle but not so much in practice really because for things like music and video, the available content is far more important than the brand name or even the price. If I make some dumbass little video site and can't afford a fast lane, people will still come providing I have some unique content that can't be found elsewhere. I might lose a couple of percent due to slow load times but for the most part, people will still suffer through a shitty buffering cycle if they really want to watch the video.
VOIP providers are a totally opposite example though. There are innumerable VOIP providers out there of all shapes and sizes, and as long as the thing works, they're all essentially equivalent. So if Skype is shelling out big bucks for the fast lane and I can't afford to do that when I roll out my little VOIP package, I'm basically screwed.
So that's the overall issue. How to make everybody happy (or at least not completely pissed off) is a whole other story because the VOIP example is far and away the more common scenario. And of course it has to be written in strict legal fashion because its super easy to tilt the board (accidentally or otherwise) in favor of the big providers. We're very lucky that in this particular fight, there's big users as well (Google, Netflix, etc.) They obviously have different desires again from your average home user but the debate has been framed in the context of "full neutrality" vs "ISP-favored non-neutrality" with not much grey area or coloring outside the lines, so all end users are kind of getting grouped up into one lump sum and leaves us with some gorillas of our own for once.
ISPs won't take Netflix's Open Connect Appliances, which are 4U in size, because Netflix is unwilling to lease 4U of rack space in the ISPs' data centers.
Yes, and the Catholic church has strict rules about altar boys, but it's hard to see how this organization outcome could have been averted once the crucial decision was made to merge ascetic monasticism with moral authority.
This bugs me so much I sit around posting mindless screeds on Slashdot about how a billion people should flip off the Pope, never getting around to what all these people might then do with themselves in my purportedly pristine post-Pope society.
Catholic church: humanity's oldest cultural institution.
Wikipedia: humanity's youngest cultural institution.
They both have problems. Imagine that.
Often it's the last mile that's saturated, especially if it's wireless. A Netflix Open Connect Appliance won't open up more RF spectrum, procure land for more cell towers, or launch more communications satellites.
And even on networks with a wired last mile (fiber, cable, and DSL), who pays to power and cool the OCA, and who pays the opportunity cost for 4U of rack space that the ISP could be leasing to someone else?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Netflix customers are only a portion of all customers. Expecting ISPs to upgrade peer links at the expense of all customers to satisfy the bandwidth demands of some is wrong and effectively forces all customers to subsidize Netflix' business model.
Why isn't Netflix buying transit on the large networks they wish to put traffic on to and/or using CDNs like EVERY OTHER major streaming company?
What about equal traffic exchange provisions in settlement free peering agreements? It sounds like those end up on the chopping block of pure neutrality.
If Netflix was the ISPs customer, none of this would be a problem.
No, I would demand that the peer sending all that extra traffic across our peering link pay for that extra traffic and/or pay to upgrade both sides of the link.
Why should Verizon have to upgrade anything to satisfy Level3's customer?
There's a reason why this issue is only effecting Netflix and why their traffic is entering the networks of major ISPs via peer links, and that's because Netflix chose to save money by using other transit providers that would knowingly abuse settlement free peering links. They could pay for CDNs and/or transit directly on these networks the way every other major streaming provide does, but then they might have to cut into some of their profits.
Wikipedia keeps demanding more donations despite sitting on a pile of cash. They don't use that cash to fix their flawed and disreputable editor network that leads to grotesquely skewed wikipedia pages.
Wales now wants to use that cash to push that agenda ridden view of society onto people AND not provide them with access to alternate sources of information that might actually challenge the narrative and offer some semblance of truth?
Fuck Jimmy Wales, fuck his view of net neutrality and fuck the idiots that keep giving Wikipedia money.
God dammit, is it time to donate again? I don't want to but I'm afraid of Jimmy.
Why are you claiming that Netflix are at fault for ISPs failing to meet customer bandwidth demands?
Because Netflix customers are already paying for bandwidth.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Why shouldn't it?
Verizon should upgrade to satisfy THEIR OWN customers.
The second world is basically Russia and China.... China has it's own issues that go way beyond any ideas of net neutrality, and I have no idea what goes on with Russian internet.
There's two parties here - Netflix' transit provider, and the ISP.
Why should ALL customers of an ISP have to pay to support infrastructure upgrades due to the demands of a subset of customers, especially when that issue only comes up because the company generating the traffic has chosen to buy transit from another ISP?
If Netflix would buy transit on the large networks on which it wishes to put massive amounts of traffic this wouldn't be a problem.
Netflix isn't a customer, or this would be a problem in the first place.
Netflix isn't a customer or this wouldn't be a problem.
What people are really saying is that ISPs should let customers of other ISPs freeload on their networks at the expense of all customers due to the demands of a subset.
*wouldn't
But the people who are watching Netflix are customers of the broadband company AND THEY ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR THEIR BANDWIDTH.
You are welcome on my lawn.
For every problem, there is a solution that's simple, easy, and wrong.
> Traffic can be managed at the end points.
Netflix IS an endpoint of Comcast's network. There is a router at which Comcast's network ends. Netlfix wants to plug in to Comcast's network and dump billions of dollars of traffic. Comcast wants to do as you suggest and manage that endpoint.
Their ISP/transit provider isn't paying or isn't paying enough for their side of the connection or this wouldn't be a problem.
Their ISP/transit provider isn't paying or isn't paying enough for their side of the connection or this wouldn't be a problem.
What does that mean "not paying enough"? Are they paying for their bandwidth? Do you think Netflix pays for the bandwidth that their servers use or not? And if not, how do they get their connections to the Internet?
Do you think Netfix is just stealing a neighbor's Wi-Fi? Of COURSE they're paying for the bandwidth they use.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So, why is Netflix even part of this discussion? It sounds like a simple contractual problem. There are already mechanisms in place for people who don't live up to agreements. You sign a contract, you perform or don't perform. You don't get to say, "Hey, this turned out to be more expensive than I thought, so we have to make certain bits on the Internet more expensive than other bits on the Internet."
The first step in the solution is to not allow ISPs to be in the content business. The second is to increase competition, even if it means municipal ISPs.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Netflix just has to pay for its bandwidth. The amount of data is completely irrelevant. It's not complicated.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The ISP isn't Netflix's customer if Netflix's transit provider "would abuse settlement free peering links" by sending far more traffic in one direction than it receives in the other.
The other customers are consuming bandwidth and causing traffic of their own, whether through YouTube, Hulu, steam game downloads or whatever. They're not compensating for others Netflix use, they're paying for the service they receive.
If they aren't using much bandwidth then there are typically cheaper tariffs they can use.
Next you'll be hitching about soccer moms with their big SUVs clogging the roads that motorcyclists help pay for.
And Wikipedia profits from this how? If anything, it costs them more to service more people, not less.
Only crack the nuts that crack. You don't put the ones that don't crack in the sack.
No, Net Neutrality also means you can't "zero-rate" content. Throttling is just one of many ways the cable company can advantage themselves. Adding a strict data cap then not counting their own content against the data cap is another (and cables companies are all flipping to that now).
Want to allow poor customers access to Wikipedia without charging that to their data plan? Well, that's the exact thing Net Neutrality needs to forbid.
Slashdot is full of people who are fans of the words "Net Neutrality", but who haven't thought through the actual details.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You are joking, right?
If Netflix met the an ISP's peering requirements then why wouldn't the ISP peer with them? Doing so would bypass transit providers and their transit links which the ISP has to pay for. Installing the Netflix content distribution devices does the same thing.
The answer is that these ISPs compete with Netflix for video services and they can take advantage of their monopoly position to degrade traffic from Netflix to their customers in favor of their own services and they can extort Netflix.
Nobody keeps you from providing free ISP service for the poor, if you have it in your heart.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Yes, and it's on them to figure this out. If they didn't, why the fuck would I need them? If you can't work on these terms close shop, the market will make sure someone else takes the opportunity.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Oh, sure, but you're now making it harder to help out the third world because of an obsession with fighting your cable company, which has been my point all along.
How about we fix the damn local monopoly (the real problem), instead of making things worse for the needy?
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
How do you make it worse for the needy by providing free service?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
But it is a complicated issue. Sort of how Slavery and Indentured Servitude are complicated issues. While we don't want slavery, it is important that unemployed poor people be allowed to work for rich and powerful people*. Net neutrality and getting the internet to poor people is similarly complex.
/s
* corporations are people too
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.