"The FCC Still Doesn't Know How the Internet Works" (eff.org)

An anonymous reader writes: The EFF describes the FCC's official plan to kill net neutrality as "riddled with technical errors and factual inaccuracies," including, for example, a false distinction between "Internet access service" and "a distinct transmission service" which the EFF calls "utterly ridiculous and completely ungrounded from reality."

"Besides not understanding how Internet access works, the FCC also has a troublingly limited knowledge of how the Domain Name System (DNS) works -- even though hundreds of engineers tried to explain it to them this past summer... As the FCC would have it, an Internet user actively expects their ISP to provide DNS to them." And in addition, "Like DNS, it treats caching as if it were some specialized service rather than an implementation detail and general-purpose computing technique."

"There are at least two possible explanations for all of these misunderstandings and technical errors. One is that, as we've suggested, the FCC doesn't understand how the Internet works. The second is that it doesn't care, because its real goal is simply to cobble together some technical justification for its plan to kill net neutrality. A linchpin of that plan is to reclassify broadband as an 'information service,' (rather than a 'telecommunications service,' or common carrier) and the FCC needs to offer some basis for it. So, we fear, it's making one up, and hoping no one will notice."
"We noticed," their editorial ends, urging Americans "to tell your lawmakers: Don't let the FCC sell the Internet out."

Comments

Re:neutrality breaks shared resources

[duke_cheetah2003]

You have to classify traffic to prevent congestion. Congestion will break the interwebz. As soon as you're classifying traffic, which is already happening, you have no neutrality If you want a simple example of how neutrality breaks shared and limited resources, remove quotas from your file system or schedulers from CPU resource management.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf...

Please don't be a moron. Proper network traffic management is perfectly ok under NN. Networks have to have traffic controls, you just can't have a network without it. ISPs already tried to put this forth as a reason for no NN. Where NN comes in is what traffic management ISPs are allowed to do. Doing it for network health and usability is perfectly ok. Giving some customers preferential treatment? No.

Learn the difference, stop spreading misinformation.

Re:Everything hinges on the legal definition

[mikael]

The ISP's were considered to be "common carriers" like telephone companies. Telecom companies could charge different prices for residential/business telephone lines. They could charge for value added features like caller ID, voicemail, three-way dialing, as well as international, national, local and emergency calls, but they could not bill you according to what you were talking about or who you were talking to for a particular distance.

ISP's can charge you for particular data rates (although with ADSL/DSL that varies according to how far you are from the telephone exchange. With fibre-optic cable networks, the signals travel at a fixed bit rate, but you get a maximum data transfer rate based on your pricing option).

The fear is that they'll start trying to charge you value-added features such as bundles of websites (video, social, messaging, photographs) or even levels of video compression.