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Net Neutrality Goes Down in Flames as FCC Votes To Kill Title II Rules (arstechnica.com)
As we feared yesterday, the rollback of net neutrality rules officially began today. The FCC voted along party lines today to formally consider Chairman Ajit Pai's plan to scrap the legal foundation for the rules and to ask the public for comments on the future of prohibitions on blocking, throttling and paid prioritization. ArsTechnica adds: The Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 today to start the process of eliminating net neutrality rules and the classification of home and mobile Internet service providers as common carriers under Title II of the Communications Act. The Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) proposes eliminating the Title II classification and seeks comment on what, if anything, should replace the current net neutrality rules. But Chairman Ajit Pai is making no promises about reinstating the two-year-old net neutrality rules that forbid ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful Internet content, or prioritizing content in exchange for payment. Pai's proposal argues that throttling websites and applications might somehow help Internet users.
This is what we get America. Voting largely along party lines or for religious reasons! You thought Trump wait till you see what Betsy Devos, Jeff Sessions, Scot Pruitt are going to do. I am hoping here the states will do the right thing and add some laws against this but I am not sure how much authority they will have. Also, state legislators are probably cheaper to buy anyway!
Pay your ISP bill in increments of 0.01, preferably by paper cheque. Automation makes this easy. Offer to pay in 0.25 increments for a 'small fee', or randomize the increments. Insist on a paper bill showing all payments.
Include the following on your voicemail: "If this call drops or has lag, this is because ISP is possibly throttling packets. Please offer to pay ISP more money and hope for better service.
Throttle incoming connections from the ISPs ad servers. Setup a pi-hole for ads.
You know, it's funny. 10 years ago I would be right there with you folks, panicking and hyperventilating ( well, drinking a beer and grousing anyway. We all cope in our ways, don't judge )..but if the years have taught me anything, it's to appreciate opportunity when it comes along.
Had I my own way, my and other's lives would be infinitely better with virtually no downside. However, the world doesn't work like that ( shocking, I know ). Once I stopped fighting it, I realized that despite it's broken nature, the world still manages to push forward to society's benefit ( though most refuse to acknowledge that ). Set backs are sometimes needed to make leaps forward, and sometimes "set backs" are only considered such because individuals lack the vision to find the opportunity.
So relax; breath. Trust in yourself and find the opportunities presented. You, and society, will be fine, I promise.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Lol. This fantasy world is so funny. How is crazy become main stream? I love a good conspiracy but beating a dead horse over and over and over and over. Lol.
It was pretty stupid with the Obama birth certificate bullshit. Now this Russian crap is even worse.
Who will get the most stupid award?
That statement and those like it are misleading. Netflix's problem is that they were paying the cheapest "Tier 1" ISP to "dump" traffic to other "Tier 1" ISPs who refused to upgrade their side of the connections due to this asymmetric data flow. "Tier 1" ISPs want to keep traffic balanced, and upgrade links based on this.
What people are asking for is like complaining that the highway system won't build enough roads to your warehouses and that there are traffic jams into the cities you want to ship to. What do the likes of Amazon do to overcome this burden? They build their warehouses closer to where their customers are and where there are not road blocks.
Taking this back to the ISP world, that means Netflix needs to pay more money to be located on "Tier 1" ISPs which have better connections to their customers, or they need to pay their end-customer ISPs to be co-located on their networks.
This is what people forget: the Internet isn't just some network. It is a network of networks, and each ISP has their own network, and they peer (connect) at various places to exchange traffic. The top few ISPs peer settlement-free (aka "Tier 1" ISPs), and then some ISPs peer for other reasons (mostly to defer their uplink costs to the "Tier 1" ISPs). Practically all of the cable companies peer settlement-free with each other, but really because they don't compete in a single market and all that traffic passed direct bypasses the "Tier 1" ISP uplink.
Back to the warehouse analogy - whose fault is it if Amazon can't get products to their customers? Whose fault is it if they build their warehouses where there are traffic problems, or when their customer demand outpaces the roads from the warehouses?
Most people can't explain how the Internet really works with financial settlements and peering. They just want to pay the cheapest fees and get it all.
Great educational link: Internet Peering.
Netflix was the cheapskate buying transit from other shitty providers and then acting like they had nothing to with the congestion issues that arose between their ISP and the ISP(s) of their customers.
There's a reason that Cogent kept seeing its peer link dropped by other ISPs - Cogent was abusing its peering agreements.
If Comcast, Verizon, Sprint were dropping the peer link on a paid peer that did nothing wrong, they would have been sued. If they were dropping a settlement free link on a peer that did nothing wrong, that peer would have said something and not quietly acted like they were doing nothing wrong. All the info provided by the other companies shows huge imbalances on settlement free links and saturation on paid ones.
It's also quite telling that only Netflix had this problem - Amazon, Youtube, Hulu, etc. somehow managed to choose transit options appropriate to the volume of traffic they generated.
I'm a conservative, and even I believe that as things stand right now, this has the potential to be a huge mistake. However, if Pai wants to turn this into an actual good thing for consumers, he's going to need to go full-Monty on his proposals. To wit: don't just remove the restrictions, but also the protections which apply to telcos under Title II. Strip away the privileges held by telcos and cable companies alike, in the form of their protected monopolies. Maybe we could even reinstate a truly free market, by the elimination of all FCC policies, period. And then petition Congress to actually give the FCC the power to fully overrule any state or local restrictions, so that they can't blockade the free market, either.
After all, that's pretty much the party-line mantra, at this point, isn't it? Liberals legislate everything to the point where it hurts, and conservatives eliminate legislation to the point where it hurts. So then, do it, Pai. Eat your own dog food.
Of course, maybe Pai's argument would be that if he actually went too far down that path, than the telcos and cable companies would sue... but the thing is, at this point they're always suing over anything that is even remotely pro-consumer. If they're not suing the FCC after the dust clears, then clearly there's something wrong. So why the hell not?
Come on, Pai. Let's do this thing!
THIS is the real problem.
We need to fight against regulations (which benefit established players but prevent new comers) and court system abuse. If anything regulation and protectionism has enabled the mess we have with limited ISP choice.
I don't care if there's zero regulation on neutrality, if we get the protectionism out of the picture and new companies are allowed to compete we the people will vote with our wallets. We will have net neutrality for the same reason we no longer have obnoxious roaming charges and long distance charges are a thing of the past (at least within the country). Someone offered a better product and people began switching to it forcing everyone else to fall in line. Right now protectionism and lawsuit abuse keep that someone else from popping up.
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There is one simple message coming out of this, putting republicans into office benefits NOBODY bur the gop power-mongers
Bullshit!
It's also quite telling that Comcast refused to install the content caches that Netflix and others offered for free that would have drastically reduced Comcast's peering traffic.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
It makes some sense for network operators to have throttled p2p connections in the past due to their affect on the network Torrents actually do cause performance problems on DOCSIS nodes, especially large ones.
Can you actually show proof that Verizon throttled Netflix?
Neither of those articles really refuted what I said.
Yep, all those companies were risking their settlement free agreements with Cogent and/or violating paid peering agreements with Cogent by deliberately throttling connections. In reality Cogent was irresponsibly allowing settlement peer links to go heavily unbalanced to the point that the other side was throttling the whole thing to maintain the ratios or simply shutting down links.
Things like this are interesting:
"In the past, if two networks transferred so much data between themselves that they were about to exceed the capacity of their connection, they would have gotten in touch to solve the problem. As M-Lab notes in its report, “[T]he traffic that flows through these interconnections is the lifeblood of the Internet—nearly all of the value of the Internet comes from the exchange of traffic, even when the ISPs involved are fierce competitors.” The engineers would have worked out a solution to open the access network’s door to the outside world more broadly. And they would split the minor costs of doing this upgrade—a $300 piece of fiber, a $10,000 souped-up router. A January 2013 OECD report found that 99.5% of Internet interconnection agreements at Internet Exchange Points happen without any formal contracts; engineers easily make deals to share the very low cost of trading traffic between networks in the same building."
The key here is that the ISPs transfer data between themselves, not one ISP transferring fifty times as much data towards an ISP than it receives.
"In the past, requests for upgrades were routinely granted. Now, suddenly, upgrades are impossible without painful negotiations over fees that have no perceptible relationship to the cost of making the upgrade—and Comcast and the other eyeball networks are making no promises about restraining themselves in the future."
The upgrades were for easy and routinely granted when the equally exchanged traffic hit certain thresholds. When one side is the cause of the imbalance, they are the ones that need to pay for it. The alternative is forcing all customers of an ISP to pay for the demands of some while also effectively subsidizing the business model of Netflix.
Netflix had a reason for choosing Cogent and it had nothing to do with ensuring the best experience for their customers.
I'll point out again here that this didn't happen to Hulu, Youtube, Amazon, etc.
As for that second article, ISPs are not obligated to give free datacenter space or network access to anyone, especially not a previously abusive user. Did Netflix offer to pay for the rack space and transit they wanted, or were they expecting another free ride?
Their example is poor, sure. So, better example would be to "deprioritize" any traffic to/from PizzaHut to the point where a pizza could be delivered from another company before the page loaded.