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AT&T Pretends To Love Net Neutrality, Joins Tomorrow's Protest With A Straight Face (techdirt.com)
Karl Bode, writing for TechDirt: You'd be hard pressed to find a bigger enemy of net neutrality than the fine folks at AT&T. The company has a history of all manner of anti-competitive assaults on the open and competitive internet, from blocking customer access to Apple FaceTime unless users subscribed to more expensive plans, to exempting its own content from arbitrary and unnecessary usage caps while penalizing streaming competitors. AT&T also played a starring role in ensuring the FCC's 2010 net neutrality rules were flimsy garbage, and sued to overturn the agency's tougher, 2015 rules. So it's with a combination of amusement and awe to see the company's top lobbying and policy head, Bob Quinn, pen a missive over at the AT&T website proudly proclaiming the company will be joining tomorrow's "day of action protest" in support of keeping the existing rules intact. According to Quinn, the company still opposes the FCC's popular 2015 consumer protections, but wanted to participate in the protest because that's just how much the sweethearts at AT&T adore the open internet.
I'll bet this is nothing more than a bargaining chip - AT&T can probably make or break the FCC's repeal of Title II. They want the FTC and DoJ to approve their acquisition of Time Warner. But the Chief Executive has previously suggested he would see the merger blocked, and of late has been agitating against some of the key content producers.
No, they're not really helping "the good guys" but for once the enemy of my enemy may be my ally in this fight, if only incidentally.
At least, until the TW acquisition is approved. Then they'll accept whatever conditions, which probably include backing off Title II and Net Neutrality support.
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It was in fact AT&T lobbyists/consultants that wrote the Net Neutrality regulations.
Consider AT&T's position in the ISP market for a moment and you realize that this was all about their DSL bandwidth limitations and how that twisted copper pair can't deliver HD content let alone 4K content at any price level to most of their customers. They can't keep their competitors from delivering high bandwidth, but they can prevent their competitors from optimizing the cost of doing so with selective practices.
Imagine cable companies offering "Base DSL speeds + ultra fast netflix, amazon, hbo, etc" for the same price as AT&T's crap service. It wold obliterate AT&T as an ISP.
"His name was James Damore."
Actually, it's definitely not that simple. Even if you discount the possibility that this is nothing more than a cynical PR stunt by a net neutrality hating AT&T all it implies is that AT&T prefers to the status quo to what they are anticipating from Trump and Pai's alternative. That does not necessarily preclude them from hating the current regulations as well, just that they might be picking what they see as the lesser of two evils. The real issue here, at least for AT&T et al, isn't really net neutrality, it's whether they get regulated by the mostly toothless FCC, as is currently (and somewhat questionably) the case, or the FTC as Trump and Pai want. Whether they win that battle or not, you can pretty much guarantee they are going to get right back onto trying to scupper net neutrality (which TFS even states they are still opposed to) again.
UNIX? They're not even circumcised! Savages!
The problem you are describing can only exists because of crappy infrastructure and ISP lock in. It's funny how other countries doesn't have this problem - because most of them actually have a competitive market.
And talking about how NN takes power away from the individual is laughable when you look at how it works right now. Most consumers doesn't have any power at all since they have no choices in what ISP to use.
The thing is, without NN there will be no new Netflix's for example because the cost of entering the market will be too high. Or for that matter, the ISP can throttle traffic to sites that they find questionable. There is no end to all the shenanigans they can do with the traffic without NN.
In the end it all boils down to that there is almost no choice for the consumers which the ISP's milk for all it's worth and a bit more.
--- Reality doesn't care about your opinions, it happens anyway and if you are in the way you'll get squished.
You what? I'll have you know my cat video packets are just as important as your tele-surgery packets. Everything for everyone!
The telesurgery argument doesn't even pass the laugh test.
There is already a great option for those that want priority for their traffic, guaranteed delivery, etc, etc: Dedicated point-to-point networks & leased lines.
Dedicated point-to-point networks aren't even that expensive, and you get a large number of guarantees you do not get with the public internet, including little things like better security, confidentiality, and reliability. You don't have to worry about somebody firing up a DOS attack & flooding a network branch during the surgery, and so on. It's the internet equivalent of sending a donated organ via courier on a private jet & helicopter instead of dumping it in a post box - you have a much greater ability to guarantee success.
In a somewhat similar fashion, Wall Street uses dedicated point-to-point network links for their trading because it's more appropriate for their needs.
Net Neutrality is about the fact that I've paid to have packets delivered to my network, and the FCC wants to allow an ISP to ensure those packets are delivered late (if at all) because of their point of origin. It's like paying for next-day shipping, and having the package delayed a week and then shredded because it originated in an Amazon warehouse. If it came from a Walmart warehouse, it comes on time and in good condition.
That's the problem: I paid to have the packets delivered to me, the ISP's should have no right to deny or degrade the service I paid for, for any reason.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Go ahead. Keep telling yourself that.
OK, I will.
I fail to see how preventing companies from abusing their position as communications carriers is a bad thing.
This entire problem is so easily avoided, too, if only companies didn't have megabucks to throw into keeping the problem form being solved.
Companies that provide internet service are telecommunications carriers, and should be treated as such.
Companies that produce content that goes over those carriers are not.
The fact that companies insist on conflating these two very different roles is the fundamental source of confusion.
Hulu and Netflix should be given the same priority as say, Dailymotion. Why should DM (and the people who use it) get screwed just because its not the most popular streaming site on the planet?
But Hulu and Netflix (and DM) all should also be given priority over say, bittorrent. This is called traffic shaping (or sometimes QoS) and most people want this to happen even though, by strictest definition, its not "neutral."
Of course there's absolutely no reason why a law couldn't be written to effectively say "protocol-based traffic shaping is fine but provider-based or user-based prioritization is not fine." Just because "net neutrality" is a catchy phrase doesn't mean we have to accept it as an strictest-sense-all-or-nothing rule. We're can aim for a middle-ground point that allows for necessary shaping practices without also allowing significant abusive practices.