Slashdot Mirror
Net Neutrality is Not a Pirates' Fight Anymore (torrentfreak.com)
Today millions of people are standing up for net neutrality and an open internet. The "Battle for the Net," backed by companies including Amazon, Google, and Netflix, hopes to stop a looming repeal of current net neutrality rules. While the whole debate was kickstarted ten years ago when torrent users couldn't download their favorite TV-shows, it's no longer a pirate's fight today, writes TorrentFreak: Historically, there is a strong link between net neutrality and online piracy. The throttling concerns were first brought to the forefront in 2007 when Comcast started to slow down both legal and unauthorized BitTorrent traffic, in an affort to ease the load on its network. When we uncovered this atypical practice, it ignited the first broad discussion on net neutrality. This became the setup for the FCC's Open Internet Order which was released three years later. For its part, the Open Internet Order formed the foundation of the net neutrality rules the FCC adopted in 2015. The big change compared to the earlier rules was that ISPs can be regulated as carriers under Title II. While pirates may have helped to get the ball rolling, they're no longer a player in the current net neutrality debate. Under the current rules, ISPs are allowed to block any unlawful traffic, including copyright infringing content. In fact, in the net neutrality order the FCC has listed the following rule: "Nothing in this part prohibits reasonable efforts by a provider of broadband Internet access service to address copyright infringement or other unlawful activity." The FCC reasons that copyright infringement hurts the US economy, so Internet providers are free to take appropriate measures against this type of traffic. This includes the voluntary censoring of pirate sites, something the MPAA and RIAA are currently lobbying for. That gives ISPs plenty of leeway. ISPs could still block access to The Pirate Bay and other alleged pirate sites as a voluntary anti-piracy measure, for example. And throttling BitTorrent traffic across the board is also an option, as long as it's framed as reasonable network management. The worrying part is that ISPs themselves can decide what traffic or sites are unlawful. This could potentially lead to overblocking. Currently, there is no indication that any will, but the net neutrality rules do not preventing these companies from doing so.
...there will be an encrypted version of the internet available on another level.
Rest assured of it.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
I stand with these corporations, NN must be important or my favorit companies wouldn't be supporting it.
Thinks they support this for YOUR benefit.
It is them using YOU for their own benefit.
All I see on Google's front page today is some tribute to a costume designer who died in 2012. Informing others about the recently deceased is apparently more important to Google.
Slashdot mentioned a few companies in the summary, but left out other Giants that are equally notable. This includes AT&T, who also pledged to participate in this campaign and is doing so. If you're listing the largest supporters of this net neutrality campaign, it is incorrect to leave AT&T off the list
Currently, there is no indication that any will, but the net neutrality rules do not preventing these companies from doing so.
That in a nutshell is why there is no need for regulation or argument. Nothing is going on that is preventing an open internet. You aren't being blocked or prevented from engaging in legal activities.
The worst thing to do is establish regulations where none are needed. That will be worse because it will overlay a bureaucratic group of cronies who will spend 99% of their time handing out favors to the largest bidders, and 1% pretending to do the work for which they were hired.
Seriously? Accepting an article linking network neutrality to piracy? Fuck off, /.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
this administration has already proven itself more than willing and capable of ignoring the 'will of the people'.
Prodigy called, they are offering you a free 14.4k modem if you sign a two year contract.
I fell better knowing they've got our backs.
This issue has always had broad implications.
Twinstiq, game news
Please use it!
I got a pop-up message when I visited my web host provider, DreamHost, this morning.
Please upgrade your plan to proceed.
Just kidding. You can still get to this site *for now*. But if the FCC ends net neutrality, your cable company could charge you extra fees just to use the websites and apps you want. We can stop them and keep the Internet open, fast, and awesome if we all contact the U.S. Congress and the FCC, but we only have a few days left. Learn more.
Thinks they support this for YOUR benefit.
Who cares that they only support this for their own benefit? In this case, their and our interests align extremely well: we want to be able to choose from whom to purchase internet services and they want us to have the freedom to choose because their services are currently a consumer favourite. Give it a few years and their opinion may change if they suddenly find they are competing with a new startup but the longer net neutrality lasts the better established and harder to change it becomes.
Follow the money trail. Middle aged guys at the tops of corporations exploiting younger workers. Of course they won't fight this... killing this bill will give them kickbacks!
Sorry Kid, we're not in power yet. The last of the boomers aren't relinquishing the reigns like they need to be doing. Instead we're busy trying to corral the ones we can get a hold of and throw them in nursing homes where they can stop being a menace to themselves and others. In another 20 to 30 years maybe enough of them will have died off or at least have been sequestered away that we can start cleaning up the mess they've left the world and actually make some damn headway to putting human life back on the track to social improvements.
I accuse YOU of ILLEGAL PACKET PRIORITIZATION for refusing to let me RFC 1149 pigeons land!
None of the companies allegedly supporting net neutrality is mentioning this on their home page today. They are all big enough that they can get the peering rates they want for their traffic. It seems likely that they don't *really* care, they just have some old guard or pretend to care because net neutrality was essential to their business model when they developed their massive enterprises.
The simple fact is that a telecom company shouldn't be able to interfere with data in the pipe.
Even delaying delivery by a few seconds for some companies can shape everything from campaign donations to which newspapers you read.
Let's put this conversation in the correct context.
In the 90's, governments had a choice between treating internet providers as utilities or trusting private enterprise to figure it out. Fast forward to today, and look at the results of this grand experiment.
In the U.S.A., we have a small hand full of mega corporations that charge higher rates for slower speeds than the nations that chose to treat it as a utility. Two years ago, the FCC attempted to take a step in the direction of fixing that.
There are a select few places in the nation that have taken things into their own hands to actually provide internet as a community utility. Chattanooga, TN, is one of them. I had an interesting experience in working for a company that had one of their offices in Chattanooga, and another elsewhere in TN. Both offices used the same internet provider. For the Chattanooga office, prices were ~1/5th of what they were at every other office the company ran, and speeds were ~4x faster.
These mega corporations are pouring a heck of a lot of money and pressure into government at the state level to get rid of these utilities right now. If they have the resources for that fight, they aren't fighting for survival.
how cute, the thought that your sjws will still BE sjws 30 years down the road hahaha. oh ye have little knowledge and experience.
now that they see the profit that they can get with the internet, everybody and their neighbour want a (bigger) share of it. Copyright holders are building their own netflix-esque apps. We already pay ISP's for internet access, now they want to charge the providers for additional bandwidth.
"life is a joke, and someone is laughing at me"
What is it with you Net Neutrality acolytes? Net Neutrality NEVER, EVER, EVER had anything to do with ILLEGAL traffic. Net Neutrality will actually enable blocking, throttling, and censoring of any content that is not LEGAL. This is the primary problem people like me have with it. Not only will they then go after torrents, and other illegal traffic...it will be quickly expanded by leftists to include "hate speech" (ie, anything the Left hates to hear) and any other information the govt deems "unhelpful" like wikileaks. It opens the door to content censorship and law enforcement by a whole plethora of groups. But go ahead with your rainbow unicorn picnic day, and marinate in warm, soapy words about "openness", and "fairness" and "packet equality".
Personally, I thought the cutest part was that he thinks he's supposed to get power by someone else (best of all: an adversary!!) choosing to relinquish it. It's like he wants to be a dick-sucking slave for the rest of his life.
Non-voters are hilarious, especially when they complain about not having any representation.
Like I said earlier in another thread. The term Net Neutrality is a trap because most of the supporters don't have a clue that it means!!!
;) what a crock ;) lol
This is not "Net Neutrality" this is a ticket to traffic shaping and selective throttling of the packets anyway an ISP wants.
From the summary
"And throttling BitTorrent traffic across the board is also an option, as long as it's framed as reasonable network management. The worrying part is that ISPs themselves can decide what traffic or sites are unlawful. This could potentially lead to over blocking. Currently, there is no indication that any will, but the net neutrality rules do not preventing these companies from doing so."
I esp. loved this part , "there is no indication that any will" right this will never happen lol
I use BitTorrent alot and have only used it for open source downloads. ISOs for the most part.
True Net Neutrality means, any ISP that examines and routes packets based on their internal secret algorithms and business reasons is in violation of Common Carrier regulations under Title II, clear plain and simple!!
I don't think people emphasize enough the extent to which net neutrality is largely an antitrust measure.
When broadband is a 2 or 3 player oligopoly there are plenty of incentives for deals that aren't in the interests of consumers or web innovation. These are much like the exclusive dealing agreements which were one of the classic motivations for antitrust law in the first place.
If the market were competitive -- if customers had access to more than a dozen different decent service providers, as many did in the dial-up era of shared infrastructure-- then net neutrality would rarely be a concern. If a service provider tried throttling traffic and making back room deals with content providers to unthrottle them, content providers wouldn't listen to them and customers would migrate away.
We haven't taken antitrust law seriously enough as a nation for the last 30 years. We need to be more aware of the problems of noncompetitive markets and the times when, despite its limitations, government antitrust intervention can improve matters.
Like Pirates Lead the fight till now and everyone else just caught of?
Sorry you are not that awesome. and are more of an argument against Net Neutrality, not for.
As a GenXer, I have to say many of us did try to change certain things, and most of it failed, and even then we did more than millennials. The difference is social networking and the echo chamber make millennials feel more active, but really they don't do jack shit except once every few years maybe protesting and then going back home to play arm chair social activist. I mean the mere fact others in this comment thread think that they need the baby boomers to die to change things shows that even if they vanished tomorrow, they probably wouldn't know what to change, or how to change it, just demand "change."
I did when it was first released and not sure if this pdf is the same one https://www.google.com/url?sa=...
But a large majority of it covers cell phones.
The linked article makes a bit of a mistake in confusing Net Neutrality and normal QoS.
In my opinion, for what it's worth, QoS is fine. There is a need to categorise traffic into broad classes, e.g. voice, video, background bulk data transfer, etc, as these classes have different requirements as for latency/bandwidth/reliability/jitter/etc. (e.g. voice traffic and online gaming traffic is low bandwidth and latency sensitive, FTP is much less latency sensitive, and should be de-prioritised versus interactive traffic flows like online gaming).
Net Neutrality on the other hand, is all about differentiating between different traffic flows within the same class, i.e. voice call A is more important than voice call B because person B paid more than person A.
I don't really have an issue with the original problem raised in the article, that of bittorrent traffic being throttled, although the level of throttling was clearly too much. I think people forget that in those days, before most of the streaming services that they take for granted had taken off, bittorrent accounted for a very very large proportion of internet traffic, a significantly larger proportion than it is these days.
(Apparently bittorrent averages around 25-30% of consumer upstream bandwidth, and around 2-3% of consumer download bandwidth).
And anyway, I suspect that Net Neutrality as an issue would probably just disappear if there was actual competition between service providers, rather than the series of effectively local monopolies that dominates the US internet market.
Amazon, Google, and Netflix want to use the infrastructure as much as they want without having to compensate the people who paid to build it and maintain it. I wonder what Elizabeth Warren would say about this. "You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for."
Net "neutrality" is anti-Internet.
The Internet was created with the concept that information could take different routes.
Net "neutrality" will shutdown those alternative routes.
Think of it like roads.
If you take out the house streets and secondary roads, then the highways would become a traffic jam.
.. their awful control panel.