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FCC Rescinds Claim That AT&T, Verizon Violated Net Neutrality (arstechnica.com)
jriding writes: The Federal Communications Commission's new Republican leadership has rescinded a determination that ATT and Verizon Wireless violated net neutrality rules with paid data cap exemptions. The FCC also rescinded several other Wheeler-era reports and actions. The FCC released its report on the data cap exemptions (aka "zero-rating") in the final days of Democrat Tom Wheeler's chairmanship. Because new Chairman Ajit Pai opposed the investigation, the FCC has now formally closed the proceeding. The FCC's Wireless Telecommunications Bureau sent letters to ATT, Verizon, and T-Mobile USA notifying the carriers "that the Bureau has closed this inquiry. Any conclusions, preliminary or otherwise, expressed during the course of the inquiry will have no legal or other meaning or effect going forward." The FCC's Wireline Competition Bureau also sent a letter to Comcast closing an inquiry into the company's Stream TV cable service, which does not count against data caps. The FCC issued an order that "sets aside and rescinds" the Wheeler-era report on zero-rating. All "guidance, determinations, and conclusions" from that report are rescinded, and it will have no legal bearing on FCC proceedings going forward, the order said. ATT and Verizon allow their own video services (DirecTV and Go90, respectively) to stream on their mobile networks without counting against customers' data caps, while charging other video providers for the same data cap exemptions. The FCC under Wheeler determined that ATT and Verizon unreasonably interfered with online video providers' ability to compete against the carriers' video services.
its a fake like climate change!
Well, gentleman, we've been sold out.
People who say "sheeple" have about as much sophistication as an AOL user, and in fact are probably actually AOL users.
It was good while it lasted.
Will the last one out please turn off all the lights?
--
BMO
they are changing their name to the Ministry of Communication.
And rural white men with high school diplomas stood openmouthed in shock as their wives read aloud the newly opened the cable bill.
America, made great once again...
Do we start peering a new Internet to steer around The Matrix? Routers of The World Unite? Or worse.. HAM radios and QPSK modulators? One can only hope it won't to that point. We shall see.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have backups to corrupt.
You numpty. How else are you going to "go about" net neutrality without regulation?
There has never been any net neutrality "legislation". It's only been regulation. If you can't even get the basic facts straight, you should stay out of this discussion.
Who are these "economists" who felt net neutrality was unnecessary and counter-productive?
Say, are you having Kellyanne Conway write your Slashdot posts now?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Who are these "economists" who felt net neutrality was unnecessary and counter-productive?
It's too bad there isn't some place once could go to look for answers to questions like these.
Some sort of repository of information, indexed by topic that someone could use to track down answers.
I feel your pain. Without such a resource, highly intelligent and technical people such as ourselves are often left clueless and in the dark when it comes to these matters.
It's impossible to be well informed in the modern age.
(Ans: Dr. Mark Jamison, economist at the University of Florida)
Actually, the cable bill will only keep going up as it has done. The big expense will be the fees for access to every single website you value too much not to use, with higher costs for more obscure topics. They're all going to need to charge you once net neutrality goes and they get throttled out of existence, then their audience tanks, which kills their ad money and affiliate revenue, and they go out of business because their main (or quite likely only) source of revenue vanishes. And any site which is non-commercial -- your friend's blog, say -- will be so slow that you'll never bother checking it.
As they defend anything the cheeto insurgent does. Oh, you cry about Democrats, the corruption and how they forget the little guy, and give your vote to the guy that was already price checking stuff like this for his corporate buddies during the campaign. But this is really what you wanted, isn't it? As long as you can fuck over the liberals in your head, as long as you can stomp on people that do nothing to you, you will readily sell down the river all the principles you claimed to stand for here on Slashdot. Net neutrality? Fuck that! Who cares about that nerd shit as long as Trump does the MAGA song and dance?
You certainly don't. And we are paying for your incompetence as voters.
> something that obviously has helped small companies and the internet grow all these years
Huh? We haven't HAD net neutrality regulations "all these years". The FCC rule on network neutrality was issued in mid 2015 and the first enforcement letters sent in the last couple of months. If you think what we've been doing "all of these years" has helped the internet and small companies grow, that's an argument AGAINST Wheeler's new net neutrality regulations.
The argument FOR network neutrality is that ISPs might in the future stop continually improving service and switch to a model that would be bad. That's a legitimate concern, and the intention behind the network neutrality rules was good.
HOWEVER, modern carrier networks are exceedingly complex, and getting more complex all the time. "A packet is a packet is a packet" is a recipe to create horrible service for everyone. Modern are WAY more intelligent than that, and need to be if youb want usable voip that doesn't sound like satellite news coverage, with 1000ms of delay after each thing you say. Laws enforcing network neutrality, if they were written to avoid a lot of unpleasant, unintended consequences, would need to be perhaps 500 pages long. That's *my* issue with Wheeler's regulations - I like general concept, but it was horribly oversimplified, dumbed down to the point of being stupid. A draft rule (not the final rule) would have outlawed blocking spam - you have to treat every source equally means you can't discriminate against spammers. The final rule was *slightly* more nuanced than that, but not by much.
My own opinion is that we should have very specific rules, tailored to objectional behaviors that ISPs are actually doing or about to do, rather than a huge overbroad rule based on a nebulous fear of what some ISP *might* someday do. The overbroad, dumbed down rule criminalizes intelligent network management, in the name of trying to prohibit something that nobody is doing anyway. As an example, one sender, a major mailing list, sends emails to 35,000 of your customers. Then another sender, Bob, sends an email to *one* of your customers, an email from one person to another. It'll take your mail server an hour to churn through the 35,001 emails and deliver them all. Should Bob's person-to-person email sit in the queue for an hour while you first process the 35,000 copies of the "Deal of the Week" email? Intelligent management of your service says that you deprioritize the bulk sender. Is that allowd by Wheeler's rule? Maybe, maybe it'll get you in legal trouble. (That may depend on if the bulk sender is the DNC or not.)
It gets complicated when you get into the technical details of actually implementing it without making service worse for everyone. For that reason, I think we're better off narrowly targeting specific actual problems, rather than Wheeler's shotgun approach.
Perhaps the best compromise is to allow differential treatment of TYPES of packets / packet streams, but not allow differential treatment of packets /streams FROM particular source IPs / identities / organizations nor allow differential treatment of packets / streams TO particular IPs / identities / organizations.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Trump begins to prove he is just another liar in office.
The whole reason the republican party is so willing to tolerate his bullshit theatrics is that his actual policies are a wet dream come true for the people who have been fertilizing the swamp. They are letting coal mines pollute streams again, repealing laws that protect grandmothers from being ripped off by "financial planners." And reducing the safeguards on the kind of real-estate bank lending that caused the housing meltdown. Its open season on the little guy like never before.
Sure, e.g., here are the first few 5-score comments from the Slashdot thread "How President Trump Could Destroy Net Neutrality" on Nov-10, 2016:
Etc., etc.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
Are you mad? There hasn't been any improvements to infrastructure because Republicans refuse to pay for anything. They have been actively been working against the executive branch for 8 years precisely so that you can make the above statement. They controlled the purse. If they had worked with the President we would have seen something. The Republicans are not set up to legislate anything, instead, you see Trump talking about toll roads, so yes, you will see infrastructure but likely given to private parties in which you will be paying tolls on. In fact, I will bet you, your taxes won't be going down anytime soon either, but a lot of things are going to be expensive.
That sounds good at first, for a second or two, any is a reasonable *general concept*, a one-sentence summary of a 500 page policy.
Let's look at "differential treatment". I've got three connections in rural Arizona, microwave, copper, and satellite. The microwave connection has the most *bandwidth*, it can send the most packets per second. It also drops the most packets - data sent over that link may or may not arrive. The copper is reliable, and packets get there soon, but it has the lowest bandwidth- it can't carry very much data. The satellite connection can carry more data, but each packet takes a long time in transit - it has to go to space and back. So I've got different options, different treatment for different flows. None are "preferential", none *better* than the other, all *different*. Btw I also have two ways of getting packets to Arizona in the first place - a direct fiber connection with relatively low bandwidth, and a higher bandwidth connection that takes a 500 mile detour through Los Angeles. Again two differentb routes, neither *better* than the other, but with *different* characteristics.
Over half of the traffic on a residential ISP comes from one source - Netflix. If you've worked a few days as a carrier network engineer, you know the flow characteristics that Netflix needs - the right balance of bandwidth, delay, jitter, and packet loss that provides your customers a good experienceb with Netflix. You quickly learn how to set up your queuing strategies, shapers, policing, and routing to optimize customer experience for *most* of your evening traffic, the Netflix traffic. Some would pass a law requiring us to pretend to be stupid and ignore all that we know about providing good service, making it illegal to set the shapers, routes, and queues properly knowing what we know about Netflix traffic. That's just really ignorant. The result would be that your experience for *all* flows would get worse, if it's illegal for us to use our knowledge of the requirements of the major services you want to use (Netflix and Youtube mostly, those two are 75% of residential traffic.)
> Email takes almost no bandwidth these days.
Let's talk about what the majority of bandwidth *is* for a residential ISP. Netflix. Not "streaming video", Netflix (and Youtube is huge too). We know the source of traffic, and we know which mix of latency, jitter, packet loss, and bandwidth will provide a clean Netflix stream for our customers. We know exactly which bitrate each flow needs, hell we even know how much the CLIENT is buffering, which tells us how much jitter and delay is acceptable, and when a packet is late enough that it should be dropped. So Netflix (and youtube) is *most* of our traffic, and we know a *lot* about it's requirements. Any competent carrier network engineer quickly learns how to set up your queuing strategies, shapers, policing, and routing to optimize customer experience for *most* of your evening traffic, the Netflix traffic, and which parameters work best for Youtube traffic. We don't know the bitrate needed for some other random streaming video and we damn sure don't know how much the client is caching for random streaming video, or if it's caching at all.
You said you want to ban " prioritization". Let's spend 60 seconds to get a clue about that. I've got three connections in rural Arizona, microwave, copper, and satellite. The microwave connection has the most *bandwidth*, it can send the most packets per second. It also drops the most packets - data sent over that link may or may not arrive. The copper is reliable, and packets get there soon, but it has the lowest bandwidth- it can't carry very much data. The satellite connection can carry more data, but each packet takes a long time in transit - it has to go to space and back. So I've got different options, different treatment for different flows. Btw I also have two ways of getting packets to Arizona in the first place - a direct fiber connection with relatively low bandwidth, and a higher bandwidth connection that takes a 500 mile detour through Los Angeles. Again two differentb routes, neither *better* than the other, but with *different* characteristics. Obviously I'm going to send different flows over different links. Which of those links is "preferential"? We want to toss me in jail or fine me if I send the Netflix flow over the "better" link, so tell me which one is "better" so I can avoid using it.
As I said, any competent carrier engineer in the field knows which link will provide the best experience for Youtube, and which will provide the best experience for Netflix. You're asking them to become incompetent. Nay, you want to pass a law forcing them to become incompetent.
> we all know what net neutrality is about: banning the application of arbitrary and unnecessary prioritization of the ISPs own video, VOIP and similar services relative to competing services.
Oh I know what you want. Actually better than you do - you don't know when you want low jitter and when you want low loss. I said I agree with that general concept as a goal. The thing is, while you can set up several different shaping, routing, and policing algorithms in a Cisco router, none of those algorithms is called "you know what I mean, be fair".
I've had to study over 5,000 pages to learn how to choose and configure algorithms for choosing routes, traffic shaping, traffic policing, etc just on Cisco equipment alone. I say "over 5,000", it could easily be 10,000 pages. You seem to be under the impression that none of that science exists, that proper configuration of a carrier network can be defined in a sentence or two.
I'll tell you what, why don't you go spend 15 minutes learning about what some of the most important queuing algorithms are. While you're reading about them, think about how they might apply to a) Netflix, a huge number of large packets with well-known characteristics, b) Youtube, with different characteristics, and c) unknown video, with unknown characteristics. Then we can come back and talk about your series of tubes. See you then.
In theory, you can have the general concept of network neutrality, and also have QoS.
In practice you can too. Net neutrality is about the source of the data. QoS is about the content. They are very easily distinguished by law.
I understand your point, I believe I know what you want.
I think what your missing is that the *majority* of peak traffic is from two *known* sources - Netflix and Youtube. Very well known sources. We *do* know the bitrates that Netflix uses, and we know the bitrates that Youtube uses. We even know that both are buffered significantly by the client, so jitter does not matter for these flows. We know they are pre-precorded, not live, so a delay of even 1000ms or more doesn't matter. We know that alotting more bandwidth than they use would be wasteful and alotting less will make the customer's experience worse. Pretending we don't know this stuff just makes everything worse all around.
On the other hand, you mentioned a flow from "MyFunnyHomeVideos.com". We DON'T know anything about the stream we see as packets sourced from 24.76.120.56. We don't even know if that video stream is a live teleconference, so 1000ms delay would be really bad. For Netflix, we *know* huge delay is fine. For random video stream, the samw delay could be really bad. Treating them the same makes for unhappy customers.
> I know plenty of very competent CCNP and CCIE who haven't read anything near that. You're talking 15-20 books
Just the CCNA official study guide is two books of about 1,300 pages each, as I recall, and they don't cover all of the material on the CCNA. You need to read at least one other 800 page book, I'd say, for the current CCNA. I would say one should have more than CCNA level understanding before they design the configuration of Comcast's routing and shaping. So yeah, I think "at least 5,000 pages" is about right, on that basis. Certainly more than roughly 3,000 pages you need for CCNA, because you need to understand Dash and all that too, which isn't a CCNA topic.