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Tom Wheeler Defeats the Broadband Industry: Net Neutrality Wins In Court (bloomberg.com)
Andrew M Harris and Todd Shields, reporting for Bloomberg: The Federal Communications Commission won a major appeals court ruling supporting its efforts to prevent broadband Internet service providers from favoring some types of web traffic over others. The Washington-based court Tuesday denied challenges to the federal government's so-called net neutrality regulations, which were backed by President Barack Obama. The ruling hands a victory to those who champion the notion of an open internet where service providers are prevented from offering speedier lanes to content providers willing to pay for them. It's a defeat for challengers including AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Comcast Corp., which said the rule would discourage innovation and investment.FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said, "Today's ruling is a victory for consumers and innovators who deserve unfettered access to the entire web, and it ensures the Internet remains a platform for unparalleled innovation, free expression and economic growth. After a decade of debate and legal battles, today's ruling affirms the Commission's ability to enforce the strongest possible internet protections -- both on fixed and mobile networks -- that will ensure the internet remains open, now and in the future."
I'm trying hard to think no of anything even marginally resembling an innovation which has come from Comcast - but I'm drawing a blank. So I can't see that having it their own way up until now has resulted in what they claim will be stifled by these rules.
On a side note: Tom Wheeler, I think many of us were wrong about you. Thank you!
#DeleteChrome
You're confusing traffic shaping with prioritization.
Doing something like prioritizing VOIP packets over FTP, for instance, is perfectly acceptable, because the reason for doing it is that VOIP traffic is much more affected by latency than FTP. If I'm trying to talk via VOIP at the same time I'm FTPing a large file, and the network hits congestion, I'm generally much better off having the FTP transfer slow down than I am having my VOIP throughput degrade. It's still a neutral network because it doesn't care what VOIP service I use, as long as it's standard VOIP traffic. This is a "Cars with 4 people/buses/etc can use the left lane during rush hour, everyone else has to use the right 3 lanes" situation.
What we're talking about is something like Comcast or AT&T trying to make _their_ Streaming Video/VOIP/FTP service work better than Netflix or whomever, by deliberately making Netflix worse, or forcing Netflix to pay extra to not get degraded. They can do this in a variety of ways, including throttling any Netflix connection, while exempting their own, or putting in Data Caps that apply to Netflix traffic, but not to their own streaming service. This is a "GM owns this toll road, so the charge for GM vehicles is $1.00, but the charge for Ford vehicles is $10.00" situation, and that's what you can't do according to Net Neutrality.
now that the FCC is regulating the internet, which you may recall got to be what it is today largely because it was unregulated.
In the late 80s, the internet was just this weird academic network that could not make money so no corporations paid any attention to it. Businesses were fighting over various online services (were you on Compuserve, or AOL, or The Source?). Then the government funded the NSFnet, and let outside companies join onto the NSFnet. And still nobody cared about the internet.
Then government-funded CERN invented the WWW, and government-funded NCSA invented Mosaic, and people started to care about the internet.
So "unregulated" for a bunch of government-funded projects is a very relative term. Far less regulated than the other online services, I'll grant you, but those were all regulated by their corporate owners, not by the government.
And that's really the lesson here. The internet won because it had far less overall regulation, while the other services were locked down and controlled. Now, the big ISPs want to "regulate" their pipes. The government passed a regulation, net-neutrality, which says "nobody can lock-down and control their pipes in certain uncompetitive ways". So, I think that you are arguing for very high (but corporate) regulation, and the NN folks are arguing for very low (but governmental) regulation.
You want no regulation? As long as it makes money, that cannot happen. But we get to choose between one hands-off sheriff, or a bunch of small despotic warlords. And I'm happy with how the court has chosen.
> were you on Compuserve, or AOL, or The Source?
Yes. Now get off my lawn.
Bark less. Wag more.