Portuguese ISP Shows What The Net Looks Like Without Net Neutrality (boingboing.net)

"In Portugal, with no net neutrality, internet providers are starting to split the net into packages," argues a California congressman -- retweeting a stunning graphic. An anonymous reader quotes BoingBoing's Cory Doctorow: Since 2006, Net Neutrality activists have been warning that a non-Neutral internet will be an invitation to ISPs to create "plans" where you have to choose which established services you can access, shutting out new entrants to the market and allowing the companies with the deepest pockets to permanently dominate the internet... the Portuguese non-neutral ISP MEO has mistaken a warning for a suggestion, and offers a series of "plans" for its mobile data service where you pay €5 to access a handful of messaging services, €5 more to use social media; and €5 more for video-streaming services.
The congressman notes this arrangement offers "a huge advantage for entrenched companies, but it totally ices out startups trying to get in front of people, which stifles innovation."

Comments

The trouble with Net Neutrality

[rsilvergun]

is that it's a small potatoes issue when 60-80% of your people are living paycheck to paycheck. If you want people to care about these sorts of things you've got to take care of their basic needs first. That doesn't just mean bread & circuses, that means actual stability in their lives. Trump and the anti-NN folks won because he went to the folks who are just skating by and said he'd do something that matters for them.

Basically, if you don't take care of your working class somebody's gonna come along to do it for you, and you won't like what that somebody does to you and yours.

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. When your subjects start feeling pain, then you feel pain, and in the worst way because they have nothing to lose.

Lets be honest here, the primary overwhelming, key factor in the US is healthcare. When a doctor's appointment costs $500 because you don't have insurance but only $20 if you do (not because they insurance is actually paying anything, it's just a price reduction to the actual cost), then you know your society is 100%, totally, fucked up.

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think you understand - we're talking about people who are living paycheck to paycheck living in an apartment, buying food, utilities, medical insurance, and getting by with an 11 year-old car.

They did NOT chose to be in that position. They were sold economic fairy tales of how globalization will raise everyone's standard of living up. Instead, most of the gains are going to the economic top.

Now why many of them voted for a billionaire reality TV personality is a whole different discussion.

And remember here in the States, we don't have the social safety nets that much of Europeans do.

Medical is all on us until we hit 67. Most of us are buried under student loans - even if we went to a state school and graduated with a marketable degree.

We must own cars in most of the country.

And housing costs have outstripped regular people's pay. The biggest problem in my Metro-Atlanta, Georgia, USA county is that the typical working class person can't afford to live here. We actually have homeless families. And it's because the free-market for their labor says they get paid shit and the free-market for housing says they pay dear.

We in tech are lucky enough to have high paying skillsets (and the parents who gave us the talents to do them) where we don't notice what is going on outside of our little bubbles.

This world wide wealth disparity will not end well. We are seeing the problems already: social unrest, people like Trump being elected, what's going on in Venezuela, ....

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[slashmaddy]

And killing net neutrality takes away one of the few open opportunities people had to improve their lively hood, by concentrating power to control human communication into the hands of select few who want to keep the general population living paycheck to paycheck, which is one of the few ways to enslave them.

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[Anonymous Coward]

Being forced to carry a surveillance device so you can participate in society is not an improvement.

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[ganjadude]

I dont WANT to pay attention to social issues, and many other americans dont either. We simply want to live our lives, eat, sleep work and play with our friends. Its not that we dont have time for social issues it is that social issues are not something to give a crap about in 2017

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[sjames]

The absolute numbers are nearly meangless. If you make $10 a month but a weeks groceries cost $0.50 and a luxury apartment runs $2.00, you're doing quite well. If you make $5000/month but rent is $4500 for a hole in the wall and food is $400/week, you're in deep guano.

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[dryeo]

You need a data plan or live somewhere where it is easy to leach WiFi. Data is expensive for the poor. My cheap pay as you go plan costs $10 for 60 MBs, you know how fast you can go through 60MBs in this day of the average web site being 5+MBs?
Sure I have a cheap cell phone, it's another bill to pay and hardly used.
What's scary is the kids who used to hang out at the park now hang out on facebook. It's hard for me to see that as an improvement. I also have a hard time seeing parents needing to check up on their kids continuously as an improvement but maybe we'll raise better people by keeping them sheltered from life.

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[GameboyRMH]

LOL how incredibly privileged you must be to believe this. You greatly overestimate not only the number and quality of jobs available, but the number of employers who won't instantly circle-file any application that doesn't list a college degree (of the specific level they're looking for - you could be overqualified just as easily as you could be underqualified). You have a libertarian's child's understanding of the job market and I'm guessing no Gen. Y friends who aren't similarly overprivileged.

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[sjames]

Taking a deliberately simple analogy literally is what is absurd. My implication is that someone making 60K in SF may be worse off than someone making 15K in a developing nation.

Re: The trouble with Net Neutrality

[Monster_user]

iPhones are provided by employers. Sufficient wealth to buy land is not.

The difference between land and an iPhone is night and say.

An iPhone contributes to an employee's productivity. The ability of an employee to buy land offers little benefit to the employer.

An iPhone costs a little under $1,000, and being company owned can be reallocated if the employee leaves before the phone's useful life ends.

A piece of land costs at least twice as much as an iPhone, plus the cost of developing the land. Developed land costs hundreds of thousands of dollars, multiple years wages. Financed, and including taxes and upkeep, the house will often cost at least as much as a rental. The only advantage is that the employee will hopefully have the home paid off by the time they retire, to reduce their retirement expenses.

Re:The trouble with Net Neutrality

[N3wsByt3]

shanga, c'mon, you're doing this deliberately. You understood quite perfectly what the actual meaning of his analogy was. An analogy is never meant to be taken literally btw, that's why it's an analogy: it uses different examples to make the underlying reasoning more clear. Are you one of those guys that, when asked "Could you tell me where I can find the postoffice?" you just say "yes, I could." and walk away, satisfied you've correctly answered the question? If you really didn't understood it, you might have some problems in reading comprehensively. If food costs $20 in the first, and $0,02 in the latter, the latter is better off. Idem for housing and what not. (these are *examples*, to show you the basic reasoning, namely:) The basic point of the parent poster was, that absolute numbers are meaningless (in fact, he opened his comment with that, so you should certainly have understood). If you earn $50 in one country, and $5 in another, one might claim the first is ten times better off than the latter. But that is false, because it depends on the living expenses in each country. There is little sense to refute this basic premise, since it's true.

Not quite

[zakzor]

I'm from Portugal and yes... net neutrality is the way to go of course but this post gives a little misperception (as of many here). You pay more if you want not for accessing the services but to have more data to spend on them. The access to the services is never restricted.

Re:Not quite

[Joe_Dragon]

but when the basic data is like 10gb and overages are $10/GB but is that data meter tested to be fair like gas pumps are?

Re:Not quite

[Miamicanes]

The fundamental with net neutrality is not all traffic is equally cheap or expensive to transport.

Suppose I have VDSL2 with AT&T U-verse, and so does my friend who lives in my neighborhood (served from the same VRAD). If we open a peer-to-peer connection with each other, our traffic could theoretically run through the VRAD's local switch fabric without even touching its fiber backhaul. We could fully saturate our upstream connectivity to the VRAD without having the slightest impact on anybody else.

Now, take it up a level. Friend #2 is also a U-verse customer, but he's a few blocks away... served by a different VRAD, but both of our VRADs run fiber through the same central office 3 miles away. In this case, our traffic might have some impact on others sharing our respective VRADs, but it's still running entirely over AT&T's local loop, whose raw capacity vastly exceeds anything individual users could even fantasize about doing.

OK, now take it a level higher. Friend #3 is a U-verse customer who lives 10 miles away. Our P2P traffic goes from home to VRAD to CO, from CO to AT&T's regional NOC, to CO to VRAD to home. At this point, it might have a meaningful impact on other customers, but it's still likely to be trivial because it's still traveling entirely over AT&T's own local backhaul.

Time to get a bit more complicated. Friend #4 lives across the street, but gets his internet through Comcast. Our P2P traffic goes from house to VRAD to CO to AT&T NOC, then somehow gets to NAP of the Americas in Miami, where it gets passed along to Comcast, who relays it to THEIR regional NOC, sends it to my friend's neighborhood, and sends the final few thousand feet over coax. In this case, NOTA will pile on some charges of their own to exchange traffic between AT&T and Comcast, but they're still fairly low.

Now, let's assume I'm streaming video from Netflix. Netflix pays to bring their own fiber into AT&T's NOC and probably colocates their own server to further reduce and cache the amount that has to be backhauled from minute to minute. From AT&T's perspective, this isn't much different than the scenario with friend #3... Netflix has their own network connection into AT&T, so the only AT&T backhaul that gets used is from NOC to CO to VRAD.

Finally, let's suppose someone starts their own guerrilla VOD streaming service with a name like "Voogle". Voogle's datacenter is in Kansas City, and their network service provider has to either peer privately with AT&T (and Comcast, since my friends with Comcast watch them too), or they have to find some other mutual interexchange point. As I understand it, public exchange points (like MAE-EAST and MAE-WEST) no longer exist, and all exchange points (in the US, at least) are now privately peered & leave it up to the networks to negotiate their own traffic carriage agreements. So... Voogle's NSP has to negotiate peering and transport arrangements to AT&T and Comcast (because both are big enough to say, "you need us more than we need you"). If Voogle's traffic is light, their NSP probably won't charge them much. If Voogle is streaming 4k video to thousands of customers, their NSP is likely to charge them quite a bit.

In any case, the "Voogle" case is no worse than the scenario with friend #4... Voogle's traffic originates on NEITHER AT&T nor Comcast, and it's up to Voogle to figure out how to affordably GET their traffic to the regional datacenters of AT&T and Comcast (or at least, to network exchange points into which AT&T and Comcast have their own abundant connectivity). From the perspective of AT&T and Comcast, it's more expensive than the "Netflix" scenario (because Voogle isn't big enough to peer with them directly), but it's no WORSE than a peer to peer connection between an arbitrary AT&T customer and an arbitrary Comcast customer.

Things get messier with international traffic (say, between a Comcast customer in Miami and a server farm in London or Bangalore), but dependin

Re:Not quite

[Gussington]

If Voogle's traffic is light, their NSP probably won't charge them much. If Voogle is streaming 4k video to thousands of customers, their NSP is likely to charge them quite a bit.

That was way too much text to read, but this point is wrong. NSP's already have peering arrangements with each other, and the charges are generally based on net difference (upload/download etc).
When I worked for a large ISP, we used to offer free hosting to high volume services to balance out the peering numbers and reduce our peering fees because our downloads were much, much more than uploads.

Not the first

[thegarbz]

I remember Australian mobile phone providers starting with the social networking craze by offering "Free Facebook" as part of their crappy packages. Sucks if you're a Facebook competitor.

Re:Not the first

[JaredOfEuropa]

Same here recently with free Spotify streaming, etc. And mobile phone companies in particular still like to have us believe that mobile data is an incredible scarce resource that has to be doled out with great care.

Misleading

[ebrandsberg]

Based on what I can gather, the way this plan works is that they offer some amount of bandwidth to the base plan for the general internet, then for a small amount, you can have more bandwidth specifically for particular services at a discounted rate vs. the normal overage rate. This will inevitably lead to fully walled gardens, but it isn't quite there yet. I suspect that they are trying to prevent people from using random peer to peer streaming services that put a strain on every available upstream link, and instead trying to limit where the excessive bandwidth is coming, so they can manage things better. It isn't about access exactly, but billing and cost.

Re:Misleading

[ebrandsberg]

The prices don't seem too unreasonable:

Smart net (the packaging at issue) gives you 10GB for 4.99 Euro
General bandwidth appears to be 2GB for 9.99 Euro or up to 30GB for 30 Euro

Clearly the "special" access plans are cheaper, but it isn't unreasonable the prices for the bandwidth without the smart packages.

First it was an idea.

[McFortner]

Now this is AT&T's wet dream.

Re: FUCK YOU AJIT PAI AND CRIMINAL CREW

[Anonymous Coward]

Trumpflakes get all fired up and confused when confronted with facts.

Re:You mean better choices for consumers???

[tepples]

Wouldn't it be nice if you planned to watch a lot of video to say, yes for $4.99/month don't count that against my data allowance? How is tha in any way a bad thing to let the consumer have more flexible access and payment?

What criteria does a video provider not on the list, such as your cousin's MediaGoblin server, need to meet in order to be added to the list?

Very, very few people can take advantage

[rsilvergun]

of those opportunities. It requires a lot of skill and a brutal amount of hard work. If you're already working just to survive you're in no shape to fire off a start up. And nobody's going to give you the capital because odds are you're going to crash and fail. I don't mean that as a colloquialism either. 80% of businesses fail in the first 5 years. And those are just the ones that got off the ground enough to be counted in the statistics.

Try telling somebody making $8/hr at Walmart who's only skills are blue collar ones that they can go off and be the next Zuckerberg. They'll actually agree with you because their pride won't let them admit that it's impossible; that ship sailed. But when that person goes to the polls and he/she's all alone she's going to pull the anti-NN lever because those folks are promising them jobs they know they can actually get and do. And that's sort of the problem. Folks like you look at the polls and see people support NN because they like the dreams you're selling, but they don't really believe in it. That's half of why Trump one. Millions of people who wouldn't admit they're gonna vote for him...

Net Neutrality == Free Market

[Opportunist]

Only on a level playing field new players can join, increasing competition and offering the experience of a truly free market. Anyone opposing net neutrality necessarily opposes a free market.

Re:Falsehood

[Opportunist]

And the difference is what now? If you get unlimited data to $content_provider_A and not even the option to pay for it for $content_provider_B, which one will you use?

Imagine you could get Netflix on an unmetered link but any content you get from Amazon Prime counts against your contingent. So which one will you get?

Re:Fake news ...

[cloud.pt]

In case you didn't know, communication technologies is one of the few things the EU has no direct control because it depends on ratification by individual states's communication regulatory authority (analogous to the FCC for the US).

In Portugal, I have seen first hand ANACOM giving the finger to European Comission AND the EU members regulatory association at the same time. One example is roaming charges, which thr EU will say Portugal no longer has, but we basically have a fraction of our mobile plans when we are abroad yet still inaide the EU. It's a joke

Irrational healthcare pricing

[lenski]

Mod parent up...

My wife had some blood tests done a few years ago, which initially were not covered by insurance. Cost to us: $1047.00; the provider helpfully offered a payment plan.

After much discussion and expenditure of hours we don't really have to spare, insurance covered the blood tests. Cost to the insurance company: $44.00, our copay was $4.00

So if your name is "anthem", $44.00; if your name is "nobody", $1047.00.

23.8 to 1.

This system is beyond fucked, it is simple ordinary Mafia extortion: Your money or your life.

Very similar to the net neutrality question, where the golden rule applies: He who invests properly in congressional races makes the rules.

The 2006 Supreme Court ruling about campaign donations was a silver-plated invitation to the party for a few, and a red hot poker for the asses of the many.