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Europe's Net Neutrality Doesn't Ban BitTorrent Throttling (torrentfreak.com)
Millions of Europeans will have to do with throttling on BitTorrent. The Body of European Regulators of Electronic Communication (BEREC) published its guidelines for Europe's net neutrality rules on Tuesday in which it hasn't challenged the BitTorrent throttling practices by many ISPs. TorrentFreak reports:Today, BEREC presented its final guidelines on the implementation of Europe's net neutrality rules. Compared to earlier drafts it includes several positive changes for those who value net neutrality. For example, while zero-rating isn't banned outright, internet providers are not allowed to offer a "sub Internet" service, where access to only part of the Internet is offered for 'free.' However, not all traffic is necessarily "neutral." ISPs are still allowed to throttle specific categories for "reasonable" network management purposes.
I don't see what's wrong with trottling bit torrent OUTBOUND traffic, so long as INBOUND speed isn't altered. This is the practice in most places already.
Politics; n. : A religion whereby man is god.
Your BitTorrent packets have lower priority than most other traffic. That's objective fact.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with it. No one's treating the packets differently based on address.
Put the government in charge of QoS priority decisions at the ISP level. What could go wrong?
I'm just glad we can run torrents on any port. So they can play whack a mole.
Strong encryption everywhere fixes this.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Net Neutrality is an issue of prioritising traffic based on source.
Throttling bitcoin is an issue of prioritising traffic based on protocol.
Net Neutrality rules shouldn't cover this, not unless it's lumped together in an overarching them of Quality of Service.
They will then throttle every port, and then whitelist only the big companies that pay up.
All network accesses are neutral, but some accesses are more neutral than others.
That's entirely grammatical where I come from.
This thing that grew up and out mostly because of the lack of interference from government.
Sorry, this thing that grew up and out STARTED with government interference.
So let corporations be in control? I can't agree with that.
Corporations have shown time and again they have NO interest in supplying good service at a reasonable cost to their customers. (Comcast and TW) They want to maximize profit. They will find every way possible to achieve that goal. History proves this. The recent recession is a great example of that behavior. Not to mention Enron and a lot more.
Currently the ISPs have monopoly power. That's why I'm paying $85/mo for 20Mbps/2Mbps service. And it keeps going up because there is any competition.
An effective "democracy" creates the illusion the people have a say in their government.
ISPs have monopolies in areas simply because local governments have given them the monopolies.
Your problem is still government.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
No.
It started with the government.
It had no interference at all by them. Just some research money thrown at it early on.
No regulations, no overwatch, Nothing. This allowed enormous growth and a massive, almost unheard of rate of innovation.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Luckily the Dutch rules around neutrality are more strict. The Dutch also tried to push these same rules to be applied to the whole EU. But the corporate world convinced these "politicians" otherwise.
In the Netherlands "zero rating" is strictly prohibited: https://www.bof.nl/2016/05/25/...
The only thing that changes when you substitute "government" in for "corporation" is now the people managing the Internet have guns.
What a great idea THAT has been shown to be /s
- Have you considered that the price is going up because demand is going up?
- Have you considered that a higher price encourages new entrants into the market?
- Have you looked into how local policies effectively grant monopolies and raise barriers to entry?
- Have you considered that Enron was merely outright criminal, the same way the government is on a daily basis?
- Have you considered that profit actually represents the transformation of scarce, valuable resources (labor, capital, materials) into something more valuable (Internet service)?
Wonder what the public key field is for?
In the US (and probably EU). inbound mail (SMTP), etc is usually blocked by ISPs. And sometimes outbound SMTP is also blocked except for a few select mail providers plus access to the ISP's own mail server.
It's probably the only way to keep spam under some semblance of control, but it isn't exactly network neutral. It's much easier for me to host my mail server on Google apps, than it is for me to continue running mail on my own hardware at a colo. The IP block I'm on gets blacklisted, most ISPs won't accept mail from me, and some ISPs refuse to even send me mail. I feel that it's hard to get into the email game unless you're Google, Hotmail/Microsoft, Yahoo, and a handful of others that dominate.
spammers ruined it for us little guys.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
What you have just described gives an artificial advantage (or disadvantage in the case of bittorrent) to managed protocols, discouraging innovation. A neutral network should not discriminate based on packet contents whatsoever. It is fundamentally impossible to fairly classify traffic, because there will always be unknown traffic and lack of agreement on priorities. In some cases, encryption may even prevent classification; why should those packets suffer? The only place where QoS is both functional and useful is on a customers own connection, where they set priorities among their own traffic.
Beyond that, an ISP has no business discriminating based on address or packet contents. The moment that is allowed, ISPs game the system. As seen, they invest in smart hardware capable of culling unwanted traffic rather than adding capacity, which inevitably results in a more congested network. This devalues the network for all non-priority traffic. There is exactly one good solution: add more capacity when necessary. This is the simplest, least expensive, and perfectly fair. It also ensures that there will be an excess of capacity available for innovative new protocols and uses.
Government gave you your pretty little thing....why do you hate it so much?
Bring it down to a crawl. These selfish people take up all the bandwidth in order to move stolen contents. It seems the solution has been technical all along.
"Stolen contents" such as Linux Distros and other legitimate ISOs?
ISPs have monopolies in areas simply because local governments have given them the monopolies. Your problem is still government.
And there you have one of the classic ironies of "free markets". The proponents of "free markets" publicly preach "small government", but in reality they need the collusion of "big government" to establish and maintain dominant positions in their industries. Some interesting background reading; Monopoly power and the decline of small business: big business vs democracy, growth & equality.
The government WANTS control.
They never really had any before. They started it and left it.
The internet grew on its own. Now the governments want to regulate it. There is not much of it at the moment. But government covets power and there is a lot of it to be had by regulating the internet.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
The first thing that should be done should be on the local levels.
MAKE LOCAL FRANCHISES ILLEGAL!
Cities making it impossible for competition to come in is and always has been a bad idea.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
No. Not "The proponents of free markets"
Big businesses that use government to protect their positions are not proponents of a free market. They may say it, but what they do is anti free market.
Many people who want a job, or run small businesses want to see more of a truer version of a free market. Do not paint the partners of big government regulations with the same brush as real people that encourage free market capitalism.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Government has never really been known to stop regulating where you want them to. They sort of excel at expanding regulatory power.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
No. Not "The proponents of free markets" Big businesses that use government to protect their positions are not proponents of a free market. They may say it, but what they do is anti free market. Many people who want a job, or run small businesses want to see more of a truer version of a free market. Do not paint the partners of big government regulations with the same brush as real people that encourage free market capitalism.
Perhaps I should have said [irony]free markets[/irony] instead. The reality is that there is no such thing as a free market. Every market has its rules (written or unwritten); it just depends which set you are playing with. And since the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980s (under Reagan in the US and Thatcher in the UK) the rules have been stacked in favor of the 1%. What neo-liberals tout as "free market capitalism" is just means to make the 1% ever richer and entrench their power.
Ironically, the only way to tackle this is to elect governments with the will and the power to curb the power of big corporates and the wealthy 1%; i.e. change the rule book. The markets won't magically level the playing field. There's no profit in that for the dominant players.