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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.
Feels like we've had a lot of those lately.
The internet was NOT invented for ISP profitability. Fuck this treasonous noise.
If it isn't crystal-clear to everyone by now, let me state the obvious for your benefit: The FCC, which apparently is in the hip pocket of ISPs and wireless companies, does not give a flying fuck about what the citizens of the U.S. actually want the Internet to be, all they care about is being Good Little Doggies for their corporate patrons. On the other hand the Baby Boomer generation will probably love it; the Internet will likely become like a larger version of AOL.
Corruption is the biggest thing our founders were worried about as a threat to our form of government. For years it has been getting worse and worse. We've finally reached the point of critical mass and are now in a snowball or thermal runaway type of situation where we cannot recover.
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!
From a system designed to ensure information flows no matter what... to a system designed to ensure selected information flows at a rate determined by your wallet.
Another change to America that will squeeze the 99% for the enrichment of the 1%, sold with the lie that they're doing it for the exact opposite reason.
You know, I'm not big on class warfare but at some point you have to realize that your society is going to shit if its primary focus is to benefit a small subset of the population to the detriment of the majority.
When civilization has reached the point where open access to information is a necessary component to personal liberty and critical decision making, the curtailing of neutral access in favor of preferential access based on monetary criteria is the first step toward societies in which people are starved and beaten. That you fail to appreciate this causal relationship only underscores the futility of your use of expletives.
One of the things I always told my kids growing up is that a piece of the truth is almost useless by itself; you need enough of the whole truth to understand what's going on.
The piece of truth you learn in capitalism Sunday school is that businesses try to maximize profits and that this forces them to innovate. This is true, but it misses the other part of the truth: businesses also try to minimize risk, and this cuts against the innovation impulse.
It's the force of competition that makes businesses take risks and thus innovate, and nowhere is the competition fiercer than in a commodity market. That's why businesses want to differentiate their products, and that's what net discrimination is all about. They want to make it impossible to compare different services by making it impossible or difficult to get content except through certain channels. Expect exclusive deals so you'll find yourself choosing between getting local baseball programming on one provider or the latest Star Trek series on another.
It's all about hanging onto customers, and there's two ways to do that: to make them happy, or make it painful to leave. Of the two, making it painful to leave is less risky.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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!
Obama's Net Neutrality is only 18 months old. Before that, was it so bad? During it, was it better?
Here's what I'm REALLY angry about - these goddamn local monopolies. Of I have choice of a shit sandwich (AT&T) or a dick up the ass (Comcast).
I am paying $49/month for 1.5Mbps DOWN and .25Mbps up. Really AT&T? I could get better by signing up with Xfinity if and ONLY if I get one of their "packages". But Internet only? Nope, don't offer that in your area. (I didn't realize that they have to run a separate cable for internet only and it's a real burden on them. /s)
Sure. Look at how Internet service worked on cell phone networks before Apple blew the old system up with the iPhone. Apple didn't do this out of idealism, but because it couldn't differentiate itself in an environment where the carriers controlled the user experience.
In fact in general look at how inferior US cell service is to the rest of the developed world. This was a result of a deliberate calculation by the Reagan administration that a more innovative network would result if carriers were free to choose their own standards. What they did was try to make it as painful as possible to change carriers while nickel-and-diming their subscribers for all they were worth. It was a safe, profitable strategy, like auto companies taking their mediocre old car platforms and putting exciting new bodies on them.
Meanwhile, in Internet services the competition is cutthroat because a level playing field is baked into the very architecture of the system, and innovation has been moving too fast for ISPs and cellular carriers to tie down their customer bases with "exclusive content". But it is coming. I've dealt with these people before and that's their wet dream: a captive customer base.
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Net Neutrality has nothing to do with how much your ISP charges you.
Except that my ISP is my cable TV company. Without net neutrality they can slow down Netflix, Hulu, et al. to discourage cord-cutting, or charge per-packet while zero-rating packets from their own streaming service. Plenty of other shenanigans are possible.
Whomever owns the last mile has to be required to deliver every packet without discriminating
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!
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?