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Taking The Profit Out Of Killing 'Net Neutrality' (cringely.com)
Robert Cringely has a plan to ensure that internet providers will never profit from the end of net neutrality:
We are being depended upon to act like sheep -- Internet browsing sheep, if such exist -- and without a plan that's exactly what we'll be. The key to my plan is that this is a rare instance where consumers are not alone. There are just as many or more huge companies that would prefer to keep Net Neutrality as those that oppose it... Those companies in favor of Net Neutrality obviously include the big streamers like Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and a bunch of others. They also includes nearly every big Internet concern including Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft. Those are some pretty big friends to have on your side -- our side...
So I suggest we all join ZeroTier (ZT), a thriving networking startup operating in Irvine, California. There are other companies like it but I just think ZeroTier is presently the best. ZeroTier is a very sophisticated Virtual Private Network (VPN) company that has created a Software Defined Network that goes beyond what normal VPNs are capable of. To your computer or almost any other networked device (even your smart phone), ZT looks like an Ethernet port, whether your device has Ethernet or not. Through that virtual Ethernet port you connect to a virtual IPv6 Local Area Network that's as big as the Internet itself, though the only users on this overlay network are ZT members.
The trick is to get all those big companies that are pro-Net Neutrality to join ZT. The most it will cost even Netflix is $750 per month, which is probably less than the company spends on salad bars in their Los Gatos HQ. Embracing ZT doesn't mean rejecting the regular Internet. Netflix can still be reached the old fashion way. I just want them to add a presence on ZT, too... What the ISPs won't like about this plan is that ZT traffic can't be read to determine what rules or pricing to apply. They could throttle it all down, but throttling that much traffic isn't really practical.
So I suggest we all join ZeroTier (ZT), a thriving networking startup operating in Irvine, California. There are other companies like it but I just think ZeroTier is presently the best. ZeroTier is a very sophisticated Virtual Private Network (VPN) company that has created a Software Defined Network that goes beyond what normal VPNs are capable of. To your computer or almost any other networked device (even your smart phone), ZT looks like an Ethernet port, whether your device has Ethernet or not. Through that virtual Ethernet port you connect to a virtual IPv6 Local Area Network that's as big as the Internet itself, though the only users on this overlay network are ZT members.
The trick is to get all those big companies that are pro-Net Neutrality to join ZT. The most it will cost even Netflix is $750 per month, which is probably less than the company spends on salad bars in their Los Gatos HQ. Embracing ZT doesn't mean rejecting the regular Internet. Netflix can still be reached the old fashion way. I just want them to add a presence on ZT, too... What the ISPs won't like about this plan is that ZT traffic can't be read to determine what rules or pricing to apply. They could throttle it all down, but throttling that much traffic isn't really practical.
...to ZT that was so thoughtfully removed in the summary.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Running away from walled gardens to another walled garden is not a solution to the net neutrality problem and certainly doesn't "take the profit out" of it. It just moves that profit to another company. /vertisement.
The internet is not for sale by any pseudo owner. Fuck them. This is the commons and we can control it if we organize.
This approach (tunneling traffic to avoid the ISP slow lane) is too simple for a reason- it is trivial for the carriers, or anyone with simple flow data, to detect tunneled/VPN traffic and then route it prejudicially (even if the carrier cannot read the encrypted payload). Itâ(TM)s what PRC and other totalitarian regimes have been doing for years : penalizing tunneled traffic by default.
..from Zero Tier, because it "promotes cyberattacks." What do you do then?
Why woudn't throttling this be practical? If the ISPs are free to throttle everything else, and they don't mind their customers suffering, why would they stop at a VPN, especially a VPN that is meant to stop throttling. In fact they can throttle it much more than any other type of content, since it just means that the users will stop using it and switch back to accessing their content directly.
Yeah, lets solve this buy paying ZT a ransom instead of AT&T or Verizon.
No, I don't think so. This is just a (very) thinly veiled ad for yet another company trying to make a profit off providing access to services people are already paying for.
What the ISPs won't like about this plan is that ZT traffic can't be read to determine what rules or pricing to apply. They could throttle it all down, but throttling that much traffic isn't really practical.
If they can throttle popular destinations like NetFlix, or protocols like BitTorrent, why wouldn't throttling a VPN be practical?
Once all the video companies are on ZT, followed by social media and search, (don’t forget gaming!), that’s probably 80 percent of all Internet bandwidth.
For fast-paced games, low latency is very important and any kind of additional layer will add latency.
So everyone in the country should send their traffic through a single VPN? How does that scale to 300m citizens, and what will stop the VPN company from throttling webpages that don't pay their internet baksheesh?
There is not information here, no news, nothing funny just a blatant add for a company with a really expensive and really dubious sounding VPN. I view slashdot as my source of all news that is not fake. What went wrong here. @cowboy_neil - we need answers.
The FCC wants to roll back imperial fiat which should have been legislated properly.
What's an "imperial fiat"? Is that some sort of Italian car driven by an Emperor? Or are those just words that don't convey meaning, but you think they sound educated? Like "paradigm shift". Also, the FCC was empowered to pass the rules it did, just as the current regime is empowered to declare those older ones void. None of this is a matter of overreach, no matter what the current board's leadership claims.
The FCC also doesn't want to have to regulate ISPs as common carriers, because that's an incredibly expensive piece of work.
Odd. Regulation is remarkably easy and inexpensive given a} the regulations are already published, and b} this kind of regulation doesn't require any actual effort on the FCC's part until one of the mega-ISPs decides to try to weasel those regulations for "value-added-services", a.k.a. more profit. And even then, it's a fairly simple matter of passing a decision.
This isn't like regulating the alcohol industry, where you actually need people to go out and try to get bartenders to serve under-agers and the like.
Your internet is no different with the rollback of this fake "network neutrality" then it was for the 8 years Obama was in office and it was okay. And, for the record, nothing about this "network neutrality" prevented anything you feared happening to the internet.
What alternate-history universe are you from? In ours, several ISPs were on the brink of, and beyond the brink of anti-consumer actions. The most obvious example was double-dipping, demanding additional payments from Netflix. "It would be a terrible shame if something happened to your pretty packets as they traverse our network." Consumers were already paying for their bandwidth... for the ISP to obtain, transport, and deliver the packets that were requested. If consumers contract for #Mbps and a monthly cap of #Gb of data, they've paid for those bytes' transit, and that they come from a source with deep pockets shouldn't matter.
It would only have changed the words that ISPs use to throttle traffic. Instead of "throttling Netflix" they would just "throttle encrpted video playback" but still could have given preference to their data which is a live stream.
How about they don't throttle anything because they've been paid to deliver the packets already? Just a thought. Also, the main purpose behind network neutrality.
You got suckered.
Well, there's an assumption. Turns out I don't live in the country getting suckered. I just know that crap flows downhill.
But here's the biggest sign that you're off your rocker: if the network neutrality regulations were ineffective, why would the FCC under Ajit Pai be so incredibly zealous about repealing them? It should be easy to earn voter happiness by bowing to the public pressure and saying "fine, let them keep their placebo regulation." Right. Because it's not a placebo. It's very much protecting the public from more predatory practices than the massively-profitable ISPs are already undertaking.
"Oh no... he found the
What the FCC proposes to end in December isn't network neutrality; it never was. It's an impostor masquerading as network neutrality because some influential wonk put that label on it and legions of ignorant fools propagated it.
Meet the real network neutrality: citizens owning the very same physical network that they use. It's time for eminent domain to be applied against that network and get rid of this chatty impostor once and for all.
Which is why Verizon et al are also petitioning to pass a federal law that prevents states from passing state laws to protect privacy/neutrality. Because internet is "inherently interstate"... you heard it right, they're looking to both claim they don't deserve Title2 and that they are interstate and shouldn't be able to be regulated by states either.