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"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."
"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."
Honestly, what can we do? This is an unelected board with a majority that will change this no matter what we say. Congress has not taken up the issue in any way, and doesn't seem to have any intention of ever doing so, so what would be the purpose of writing to them? It just looks to me like Ajit Pai is going to force this measure through, no matter the science, business, societal, or ethical concerns.
In short, the current FCC doesn't give a damn about any of us.
Come on it's just a series of tubes, it's not that hard to figure out.
Don't blame the FCC, blame the 48% that voted to put a lunatic administration in charge. If you assign a wolf to protect the chickens, you don't blame the wolf for eating the chickens.
Let's put an organisation which didn't understand how the internet works in charge of regulating the internet! What could go wrong?
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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.
The question is however, who gets to be allowed to do what and should the middlemen be allowed to do much of anything and if so, why? It isn't their packets to manage.
I'll agree it's not the best phrasing, probably because it would be "unprofessional" to write an accurate headline like "Ajit Pai is a fuckwit ISP shill that doesn't even know how the internet works."
As for the stewardship of the "owners of the wires," they manage to be basically the only private entities less popular than any part of the government. Do you know how fucking hard it is for a business to be LESS POPULAR THAN THE GOVERNMENT? if I were running the Heritage foundation or whatever hyper-capitalist think tank bribe machine, I would be taking the CEOs of AT&T and Charter out into the desert, and having a sincere talk with them about getting their goddamn shit together before they blow this for everyone.
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Can't have it both ways. If they get to keep their government-protected monopoly and benefit from taxpayer subsidies, the government gets to attach strings like enforcing basic fairness. I often hear arguments like yours from the free market types that don't fully understand the issue, who seem to have forgotten that monopolies aren't a free market and prevent fair market competition and allowing them to expand horizontally with unfair competition, and allow other large providers to pay them to abuse their own dominant positions, is the very antithesis of the free market.
It seems unlikely that they don't actually understand it. The problem here is an active attempt to do harm rather than just the usual incompetence. So the fact that they are publishing stuff that is wrong on this many levels just means that they are taking a lead from their masters and recognizing that they can say what they like regardless of any concept of reality.
Equally the general public will find it unlikely that they don't actually know so the EFF campaign might not be very effective as lobbying.
Obama did not make undoing the Bush presidency his own undertaking, in fact he kept a lot of Bush era policies that needed to stay in place. You're a moron.
First thing I thought of when I read the summary. "As the FCC would have it, an Internet user actively expects their ISP to provide DNS to them." Yes, they do. They can get DNS elsewhere, but almost everybody expects to get DNS from their ISP and most aren't aware there are other options.
Not that people need to be reminded of this, but a huge part of this administration is irresponsible and dangerous ignorance or pure maliciousness to the benefit of few, which has not changed anything so far quite unfortunately.
I hope the EFF, ACLU and the lawsuits that are coming against the FCC results in something. Unfortunately though, the justice system isn't showing many signs that it's all that much different from the administration too.
No, networks do NOT need traffic controls. Fixed fucking pipeline without oversubscribing like a lying fuck is what we need.
You are the moron who has obviously never administered a network of any large scale.
Man, the stupid is strong with this one. Look, oversubscribing bandwidth is a perfectly acceptable thing to be doing. When one calculates the needs of 1000's of users, 95% of those users are not going to be using anything near what the pipe is capable of. This is where traffic and congestion controls come in. A small number of people using lots of bandwidth can coexist just fine with a lot of low-bandwidth users. This is simple shit, you are the stupid one. Oversubscribing isn't a problem, it's how ISP's make money. I have no problem with it. It's just smart business. Most of the users won't use the capacity.
Now please, go spread your stupid elsewhere. Grow some braincells and get an education before you post about something you obviously know nothing about.
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.
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This is exactly the level of refined use of logic and truthfulness that we have to come to expect from Donald Trump and his supporters. Reasonable people have some problems dealing with this because all the eye rolling we do makes us dizzy, so excuse me while I sit down for a bit.
The FCC can't overrule the will of congress, and in fact their prior attempt (prior to the one being discussed) was struck down by the supreme court.
I assume that you're talking about the "third way" approach, in which the FCC tried to impose network neutrality while designating ISPs as "information services" rather than "telecommunications services." The court struck that down because the FCC didn't have the authority to regulate information services in this way - in fact I don't think that "information service" is a real thing, it's just a term that they made up as a half-assed compromise - but they did have the authority to regulate telecommunications services. So, the court said, all that the FCC needed to do was change this designation, then they could apply network neutrality without issue. Both of these powers, determining what what category a service falls under, and regulating telecommunications services, are powers granted to the FCC by congress.
I don't know what you mean by "visceral argument." You seem to agree with me that our current Republican government is responsible for selling us out, you just don't seem to think that that this is a problem. You also make reference to an explicit instruction by congress not to regulate the internet - I'm not familiar with this instruction, but it is certain that it either doesn't say what you're implying or that it's one of multiple instructions that the FCC has received on this issue (I'm sure that they have had many, and I doubt that they all agree).
You should learn about QoS and ... well pretty much everything else. Also, 911 specifically doesn't rely on VOIP, because that would be stupid, but NOBODY is claiming they can't give E911 service a priority.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The most fundamental thing to understand about how the FCC operates is that they are run by lawyers. Lawyers do not think like either engineers or normal people. They only think in terms of rules and rule frameworks, and they use language in these rule frameworks that is fairly decoupled from reality.
What I mean by this is that if you want to change the FCC, you need a lawyer that can translate your concerns into their language, and play their game for making rules and procedures. Right now, the ideology at the top is in favor of making rules that let ISPs do whatever they want. If I had a meaningful choice of ISPs for my home internet, I would actually agree with that approach. Unfortunately, I only have 2 choices, and they both already suck, so I'm in favor of minimal regulation telling them to not be total dicks.
Management is the huge wrench that is thrown in the gears of Net Neutrality. Get rid of management and let the Engineers run it.
Try reading and understanding the paragraph that the article is paraphrasing.
https://transition.fcc.gov/Dai...
The article is claiming that the FCC position is the complete opposite from what the FCC says it is in the document. The article is pulling something out of context to make a false assertion. Here is another section from the FCC document, that explains the true position of the FCC:
Below we examine both how consumers perceive the offer of broadband Internet access service, as well as the nature of the service actually offered by ISPs, and conclude that ISPs are best understood as offering a service that inextricably intertwines the information processing capabilities described above and transmission.
Bush era screwed up so badly that the rest of the world now suffers from influx of refugees. Clinton era decisions are the cause for the crash in '08. Obama was a mediocre president that lacked power to clean up the crap from both earlier administrations and therefore we got Trump who by the rest of the world is seen as a clown.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.