Your comment seems to suggest that QoS of any kind is bad here. Consider that 3rd-party IPTV and VoIP, without QoS, will be degraded equally with, say, BitTorrent. If you ran things, a customer's IPTV service would start cutting out every time they downloaded a large file (or started BitTorrent), because the connection would become saturated with your data download and no mechanisms are allowed to give preference to time-sensitive streams (VoIP/IPTV).
A phone booth (what's that?) is property of the phone company. They, as the owner, forbid non-users from bothering the current user of the booth.
This seems to be inconsistent with your earlier statement:
Basically, everything is "public" to you unless you're on your own property.
In addition, private citizens don't have the right to be police on their own private property. They can only "enforce" certain civil and property rights, and in a manner that isn't itself illegal. Your logic would seem to make it impossible to ever record someone else's conversation on a third party's private property. I can't go into a mall and record someone's conversation (with their consent), because I need to track down the mall management and get them to sign something? The mall could ask you to leave, and refusing to do so could mean you're breaking a law, but the law has nothing to do with recording and everything to do with trespass.
You're making things unnecessarily complex. Does the person have a reasonable expectation of privacy? That's all that matters. You're inventing artificial rules here. (And, again, the wording of the laws of the state in question, as well as case law, make these "rules" different from state to state anyway.)
Audio is not recorded by an ATM. You do know that the article and the law in question here deal with audio recordings of conversations, right? Capturing images/video is something completely different and not prohibited in this situation.
And either you're missing my point, or we're hopelessly talking past each other. "I didn't mean any harm" isn't usually a valid defense. In crimes that are not strict liability, where intent is required, intent to cause harm is rarely a requirement. It's intent to perform the act that is illegal that matters. It's usually the community/legislature that defines what "harm" is, not the people performing the illegal acts, so "intent to cause harm" would of course be argued by those charged with the crime. If he intended to record someone, and didn't have their consent, he would be in violation of most laws written to prohibit recording of people without their consent, regardless of whether he intended to do something "wrong".
If this is indeed a strict liability crime, none of this matters, because there doesn't have to be intent. If his finger slipped and he started recording someone accidentally, he's guilty. Normally criminal laws aren't written like this, but there are cases where it makes sense for a law to be written that way.
I don't think that would fly. Situations where simply informing someone that they're being recorded are typically situations where it's reasonable for someone to withdraw their consent by not speaking, or hanging up the phone. It's a little ridiculous to suggest that in order for a cop to withdraw his consent, he must walk away from a traffic stop without talking to the people he pulled over. Saying, "I do not consent to being recorded," or, "Turn off the fucking camera, bitch," is a clear indication that the officer does not consent to being recorded, and if you continue to do so, you are breaking the law (where applicable).
And, of course, all of this depends on how the law is worded in your specific state.
So someone having a conversation in a phone booth, or taking a dump in a public restroom, or having a discussion with their doctor or lawyer in their office, or having a quiet lunch with their spouse in a restaurant, none of these people have an expectation of privacy and we should be able to videotape them and their conversations?
I'm not sure that I buy that the nature of the property matters here. It should be whether or not the parties to the conversation have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The nature of the property might factor into that test, but probably not in the black-and-white manner you suggest.
And of course, it's going to depend on how the state words its law here. Unless they're all worded identically, there are going to be edge cases that are treated differently depending on what state you're in.
The fact that they were already being recorded might be good information to help this kid fight the charge. It seems odd to suggest that the officer never consented to being recorded when he knew it was already being recorded (as a public record?) by the camera in his car.
However, please realize that this state has some fairly strict privacy laws that do indeed prohibit the recording of conversations such as these without the consent of the parties involved. If this kid recorded the officer's conversations without the officer's permission (as a consequence of filming him), it would seem that he broke the law, and an arrest would be appropriate, though a bit harsh. (We also don't know if the kid was being a punk prior to all of this and deserved what he got.)
Whether or not the law is appropriate or being applied in the way they intended is a question for the people of this state to answer, not the Slashdot community.
His point is perfectly valid. Name-calling really isn't necessary here.
Your definition of "criminal intent" appears to be intent to (knowingly) break the law. If this were a requirement to find someone guilty of a crime, one need only claim that they didn't know it was illegal. "Ignorance of the law" would suddenly be a valid defense for everything. Here, intent simply means that you intended to record someone else's conversation, and you knew you were doing it without their consent. It doesn't matter if you didn't know it was illegal; you still intended to do it. "Intent" exists.
However, the parent poster is actually talking about strict liability, which means that intent (in any form) is unnecessary for a conviction. I have no idea if this law is a strict liability law, but if it is, the state believes that protection of a person's private conversations is so important, that people should take reasonable precautions *against* something being inadvertently recorded, so they view a conviction without mens rea to be acceptable, because the risk of punishment effectively provides that incentive to take those precautions. If strict liability is the case here, and you don't like it, and you live in this state, by all means write your legislators. Otherwise, don't tell people in other states how you think they should run things. They're capable of making their own choices.
We're focusing on the "evil officer" being a jerk here, but I suspect that the kids he stopped were the ones being the jerks. Of course, we wouldn't hear about that, but have we considered the possibility that the kid deserved it? If he was breaking the law, and it was the officer's discretion to arrest him for it (or simply consent, as you suggest), what would you do if the kids you pulled over were being punks?
The point is, we don't have all of the information here. The officer's response might be a little more reasonable than this biased angle would lead you to believe.
And before we get angry with him just on the principle of the matter, remember that this is a state law, not the officer's law, and not the law of the entire US or necessarily your own locality. It makes little sense to get all upset about some other state's laws. Let them govern themselves however they want.
One thing every possible civilization in the universe shares is the same immutable laws of physics, and the same basic components of matter and energy. Communicating with photons is natural and obvious, and those same laws of physics make photons of certain energies desirable or undesirable for long-distance communication. How your species developed makes little difference.
There's always the possibility that some "new physics" will be discovered that is leaps and bounds more appropriate for this type of thing than photons, but there's no evidence of that yet and no reason to suspect it exists. Keep an open mind, sure, but you can't go through life assuming everything you know is wrong. Based on what we know today, it's the most likely choice (the only choice, really), so it makes sense to pursue it until we know otherwise.
I can't speak for the other poster, but one of my chief complaints about Firefox is when the UI hangs because a web page is doing something (loading or executing some bad javascript). I like to spawn off tabs to load in the background while I'm reading something else, and I regularly find Firefox completely unresponsive until one of those background tabs wraps up whatever the hell it's doing.
Sorry for replying twice, but I felt that there was one part of my message that I didn't give enough attention to. I wholeheartedly agree with the position that AT&T should not be in the business of unilaterally degrading service to sites like Google and YouTube simply because those services are popular, and a lot of the bandwidth used by AT&T's customers originate from those sites. I think that's a terrible idea and unfair to these sites and to the customers. But there's more to the "net neutrality" than this one aspect. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I am against AT&T's version of a non-neutral Internet, but I am also against the popular view of a "neutral" Internet. It sounds like I am pro-AT&T here only because I seem to be the only person taking the position that a completely "neutral" Internet isn't necessarily a good thing.
QoS decisions always have to be made upstream. If you are being fed two 10Mbit streams from two sources, and the next hop in the route is only 15Mbit, you have to decide how to fit 20Mbit of data down a 15Mbit connection. With no QoS cues, you slow each stream down 25% equally, and queue packets in the hopes that the congestion will only be temporary. QoS flags and reservations could allow you to guarantee 10Mbits to one stream, for example, leaving 5Mbits for the other. This would allow you to guarantee uninterrupted IPTV service while allowing your file downloads to suffer more than they would have normally. But since this has to be done upstream of every link (since that's where the decision is made to send one sets of packets over another), it requires QoS awareness (and respect) along every hop between the content provider and the destination. This is not done on the public Internet, because it would be abused mercilessly. You need dedicated, independent data connections.
So one person trying to role out IPTV will not be able to compete with another company that has money to throw at it. If every service has the same priority on the pipe then you build your technology around that condition knowing that congestion is solved by bigger and better pipes.
In the general case, you wouldn't have IPTV service from two providers simultaneously. But even in the event you do (maybe individual networks want to start their own IPTV service with only their programming?), the "preferred path" allowed to both content providers up to your doorstep would give you the *option* of preferring one over the other. We don't have the option to enforce such consumer-driven prioritization because the infrastructure flat out doesn't exist.
Your assertion that congestion is "solved" by bigger and better pipes doesn't take into account that this is effectively an arms race. If you have a gigabit Internet connection, and you fire up an application like BitTorrent, or just start a vanilla file download from a well-connected content provider, your fat gigabit connection will still become saturated, though perhaps for less time than a slower connection would be. Your equally-prioritized IPTV stream will be degraded and you will curse your IPTV service as being less reliable than your old cable TV. The only way to eliminate the possibility of congestion is to guarantee that your Internet connection is faster than everyone else's put together, which is ridiculous. You need the ability to prioritize traffic in order for 3rd-party bandwidth-sensitive services to exist. We don't have 3rd-party IPTV competitors today, and we never will with a neutral Internet. Content providers need the ability to negotiate with ISPs in order to get a QoS-aware network path to customers' doorsteps. I think both sides agree with this statement. The question, according to my understanding, is who should pay for it. Content providers say AT&T should pay for it, since this is about providing parity with AT&T's IPTV services, while AT&T views this as "new infrastructure" like any other and should be paid for by the individuals requesting it.
Regarding VoIP, start up a few BitTorrent connections, some file downloads, some YouTube streams, and see how clear your VoIP call sounds. The number of bandwidth-consuming applications you can start is limited by your computer's capabilities, not the speed of your Internet connection. You will always be able to saturate your Internet connection, regardless of how big it is (within the realm of reason). A saturated, QoS-neutral Internet connection will always degrade *something*; you just normally don't care because you experience that "degradation" as longer-than-usual file download times. Degraded IPTV is something we will have far less tolerance for, especially if you're paying for it. Avoiding the problem of how to prioritize two "preferred" content streams by banning the practice outright seems, to me to be a little short-sighted.
Now, the "other half" of what Net Neutrality advocates oppose, with ISPs "extorting" money from content providers, to keep their sites running as fast as they are today, I absolutely agree with. This would be an abuse, and (it seems to me) a terrible business decision making your service less usable than it was before. In the event you have multiple content providers paying for preferential QoS-aware connections (such as one subscriber with two IPTV services), it would make the most sense to give the customer direct control over bandwidth reservations and prioritization, where a conflict exists, rather than based on how much money the content provider paid. The former makes sense; the latter does not. But you can't have either without the ability to allow content providers to do this in the first place.
In my eyes, the truth is a bit in between both of these positions. I think AT&T is making a few absurd statements, and Net Neutrality advocates are also making a few absurd statements. There are ways we can satisfy both sides, I think, but before we do that, we have to separate the nonsense from the realistic.
I strongly feel that something is getting lost or distorted in translation (and that may very well include the path from AT&T's planners and Ed himself, not just between Ed and the media, or the media to your ears).
You say that treating traffic differently based on traffic type is fine, but consider that in order to give preference to one type of traffic over another, you must necessarily carry that type of traffic over a new, QoS-aware network connections, and set up a business relationship with the providing entity to guarantee QoS is respected. If Google took these steps, and Yahoo! did not, wouldn't that be an example of giving "preferential" treatment to one source over another?
The internet works because networks have agreements to let data pass through their networks, and it's a like-kind exchange. If point-to-point fees have to be paid, we'll have an amazing mess on our hands.
This is why I have trouble accepting the Net Neutrality advocates' vision of a non-neutral Internet. I believe the real (as opposed to imaginary/potential) issues have to do with services such as IPTV. It's impossible to compete with an ISP-managed IPTV service (such as AT&T's) unless the content provider has a dedicated, QoS-aware network pipe to the ISP's network, and the necessary agreements to honor that all the way to the customer's connection. Otherwise, when a customer starts up BitTorrent, their TV is going to cut out when their broadband connection becomes saturated, because everything is degraded equally (net neutrality). Who should have to pay for that QoS-aware data connection? Content providers say the ISP should, since it's about providing parity with the ISP's own IPTV services.
It would be absolutely absurd (and completely impractical to manage and implement) for an ISP to deliberately degrade random web sites' services, when the data pipes aren't congested. Even QoS doesn't step in until the need exists to prioritize (such as when a link becomes saturated or congested). Unless I'm completely missing something (possible), it would appear to me that most Net Neutrality advocates haven't the slightest clue how the Internet actually works, and it scares me when people that don't understand something attempt to regulate it.
I don't think content providers are being hit up to avoid "lesser" connectivity (extortion?). I think the concern is that when content providers want *privileged* connectivity, such as to provide QoS-aware IPTV service, the ISPs feel that the content providers should be the ones to pay for that privilege. AT&T manages its own network, so it can deliver IPTV service (for example) and do the necessary QoS magic to ensure that TV service doesn't cut out whenever someone fires up BitTorrent. 3rd-party content providers can't make that guarantee without dedicated connections/agreements for that same QoS magic, and that's going to cost money.
"Put simply", this isn't about sites that customers *don't* want privileged/degraded, it's about upcoming services that customers are going to *want* to see privileged/degraded.
Why would you continue to give your business to an Internet provider that significantly degraded service like this?
Now that our stellar neighborhood is becoming a little more complex than points of light, are there charts or (sky) maps out there that diagram these newly discovered planets and how their orbits might look?
I've also often wondered why we don't have Eve Online-style maps of our own galaxy. Even if we don't know distances for some stars to any meaningful degree of accuracy, surely we could come up with a best guess, or represent stars as lines representing the range of possible distances.
The bandwidth will never be "enough" until it's infinite. Many types of services (file downloads especially) will transfer data as fast as your data connection will allow it. The only way you can guarantee uninterrupted service (guaranteed bandwidth) for something specific like IPTV is through a technology like QoS. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how fast your network connection is, because there will always be things that will happily saturate it, and with no way to prioritize, everything gets degraded equally.
We actually have this problem today with VOIP services like Vonage, but since voice is such a low-bandwidth service, it's not easy to degrade noticeably on a broadband connection. But it's possible.
Actually, if you look at the article, it was published just about a year ago. It's not clear to me why this is front page news on Slashdot. As you say, lots of things have happened in the last year with IPTV.
I agree on the a la carte ideas. With all of this stuff delivered electronically now, why are we still stuck subscribing to channels? Let me subscribe to individual shows, or "packages" of shows (a traditional channel). How better to support your favorite show than funding it directly? (For a little more money, maybe your subscription could be without advertisements!)
Here's what I'd like... a good, fast internet connection. Period. Let me worry about what I'm getting over that connection.
What do you want to happen when you use an Internet service that attempts to consume all available bandwidth? Most file downloads or BitTorrents will do this naturally. With nothing to differentiate traffic, all services are degraded equally, and your TV starts to cut out whenever you do a file download.
QoS would solve this problem, but in order to honor QoS from 3rd-party IPTV providers, those providers would have to have dedicated network connections to your ISP, and a business relationship that would require your ISP to honor that QoS information and prioritize their IPTV packets ahead of your other random Internet traffic. This arrangement seems to be what Net Neutrality advocates strongly oppose, so it would seem that 3rd-party IPTV over your idealized "One Internet Connection" won't be happening any time soon. The only practical option today would seem to be what AT&T is doing.
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Your comment seems to suggest that QoS of any kind is bad here. Consider that 3rd-party IPTV and VoIP, without QoS, will be degraded equally with, say, BitTorrent. If you ran things, a customer's IPTV service would start cutting out every time they downloaded a large file (or started BitTorrent), because the connection would become saturated with your data download and no mechanisms are allowed to give preference to time-sensitive streams (VoIP/IPTV).
This seems to be inconsistent with your earlier statement:
In addition, private citizens don't have the right to be police on their own private property. They can only "enforce" certain civil and property rights, and in a manner that isn't itself illegal. Your logic would seem to make it impossible to ever record someone else's conversation on a third party's private property. I can't go into a mall and record someone's conversation (with their consent), because I need to track down the mall management and get them to sign something? The mall could ask you to leave, and refusing to do so could mean you're breaking a law, but the law has nothing to do with recording and everything to do with trespass.
You're making things unnecessarily complex. Does the person have a reasonable expectation of privacy? That's all that matters. You're inventing artificial rules here. (And, again, the wording of the laws of the state in question, as well as case law, make these "rules" different from state to state anyway.)
Audio is not recorded by an ATM. You do know that the article and the law in question here deal with audio recordings of conversations, right? Capturing images/video is something completely different and not prohibited in this situation.
And either you're missing my point, or we're hopelessly talking past each other. "I didn't mean any harm" isn't usually a valid defense. In crimes that are not strict liability, where intent is required, intent to cause harm is rarely a requirement. It's intent to perform the act that is illegal that matters. It's usually the community/legislature that defines what "harm" is, not the people performing the illegal acts, so "intent to cause harm" would of course be argued by those charged with the crime. If he intended to record someone, and didn't have their consent, he would be in violation of most laws written to prohibit recording of people without their consent, regardless of whether he intended to do something "wrong".
If this is indeed a strict liability crime, none of this matters, because there doesn't have to be intent. If his finger slipped and he started recording someone accidentally, he's guilty. Normally criminal laws aren't written like this, but there are cases where it makes sense for a law to be written that way.
I don't think that would fly. Situations where simply informing someone that they're being recorded are typically situations where it's reasonable for someone to withdraw their consent by not speaking, or hanging up the phone. It's a little ridiculous to suggest that in order for a cop to withdraw his consent, he must walk away from a traffic stop without talking to the people he pulled over. Saying, "I do not consent to being recorded," or, "Turn off the fucking camera, bitch," is a clear indication that the officer does not consent to being recorded, and if you continue to do so, you are breaking the law (where applicable).
And, of course, all of this depends on how the law is worded in your specific state.
So someone having a conversation in a phone booth, or taking a dump in a public restroom, or having a discussion with their doctor or lawyer in their office, or having a quiet lunch with their spouse in a restaurant, none of these people have an expectation of privacy and we should be able to videotape them and their conversations?
I'm not sure that I buy that the nature of the property matters here. It should be whether or not the parties to the conversation have a reasonable expectation of privacy. The nature of the property might factor into that test, but probably not in the black-and-white manner you suggest.
And of course, it's going to depend on how the state words its law here. Unless they're all worded identically, there are going to be edge cases that are treated differently depending on what state you're in.
The fact that they were already being recorded might be good information to help this kid fight the charge. It seems odd to suggest that the officer never consented to being recorded when he knew it was already being recorded (as a public record?) by the camera in his car.
However, please realize that this state has some fairly strict privacy laws that do indeed prohibit the recording of conversations such as these without the consent of the parties involved. If this kid recorded the officer's conversations without the officer's permission (as a consequence of filming him), it would seem that he broke the law, and an arrest would be appropriate, though a bit harsh. (We also don't know if the kid was being a punk prior to all of this and deserved what he got.)
Whether or not the law is appropriate or being applied in the way they intended is a question for the people of this state to answer, not the Slashdot community.
His point is perfectly valid. Name-calling really isn't necessary here.
Your definition of "criminal intent" appears to be intent to (knowingly) break the law. If this were a requirement to find someone guilty of a crime, one need only claim that they didn't know it was illegal. "Ignorance of the law" would suddenly be a valid defense for everything. Here, intent simply means that you intended to record someone else's conversation, and you knew you were doing it without their consent. It doesn't matter if you didn't know it was illegal; you still intended to do it. "Intent" exists.
However, the parent poster is actually talking about strict liability, which means that intent (in any form) is unnecessary for a conviction. I have no idea if this law is a strict liability law, but if it is, the state believes that protection of a person's private conversations is so important, that people should take reasonable precautions *against* something being inadvertently recorded, so they view a conviction without mens rea to be acceptable, because the risk of punishment effectively provides that incentive to take those precautions. If strict liability is the case here, and you don't like it, and you live in this state, by all means write your legislators. Otherwise, don't tell people in other states how you think they should run things. They're capable of making their own choices.
We're focusing on the "evil officer" being a jerk here, but I suspect that the kids he stopped were the ones being the jerks. Of course, we wouldn't hear about that, but have we considered the possibility that the kid deserved it? If he was breaking the law, and it was the officer's discretion to arrest him for it (or simply consent, as you suggest), what would you do if the kids you pulled over were being punks?
The point is, we don't have all of the information here. The officer's response might be a little more reasonable than this biased angle would lead you to believe.
And before we get angry with him just on the principle of the matter, remember that this is a state law, not the officer's law, and not the law of the entire US or necessarily your own locality. It makes little sense to get all upset about some other state's laws. Let them govern themselves however they want.
One thing every possible civilization in the universe shares is the same immutable laws of physics, and the same basic components of matter and energy. Communicating with photons is natural and obvious, and those same laws of physics make photons of certain energies desirable or undesirable for long-distance communication. How your species developed makes little difference.
There's always the possibility that some "new physics" will be discovered that is leaps and bounds more appropriate for this type of thing than photons, but there's no evidence of that yet and no reason to suspect it exists. Keep an open mind, sure, but you can't go through life assuming everything you know is wrong. Based on what we know today, it's the most likely choice (the only choice, really), so it makes sense to pursue it until we know otherwise.
Is it illegal to use time travel to win yourself the lottery?
Please re-read the parent post.
I can't speak for the other poster, but one of my chief complaints about Firefox is when the UI hangs because a web page is doing something (loading or executing some bad javascript). I like to spawn off tabs to load in the background while I'm reading something else, and I regularly find Firefox completely unresponsive until one of those background tabs wraps up whatever the hell it's doing.
Sorry for replying twice, but I felt that there was one part of my message that I didn't give enough attention to. I wholeheartedly agree with the position that AT&T should not be in the business of unilaterally degrading service to sites like Google and YouTube simply because those services are popular, and a lot of the bandwidth used by AT&T's customers originate from those sites. I think that's a terrible idea and unfair to these sites and to the customers. But there's more to the "net neutrality" than this one aspect. I suppose it would be more accurate to say that I am against AT&T's version of a non-neutral Internet, but I am also against the popular view of a "neutral" Internet. It sounds like I am pro-AT&T here only because I seem to be the only person taking the position that a completely "neutral" Internet isn't necessarily a good thing.
QoS decisions always have to be made upstream. If you are being fed two 10Mbit streams from two sources, and the next hop in the route is only 15Mbit, you have to decide how to fit 20Mbit of data down a 15Mbit connection. With no QoS cues, you slow each stream down 25% equally, and queue packets in the hopes that the congestion will only be temporary. QoS flags and reservations could allow you to guarantee 10Mbits to one stream, for example, leaving 5Mbits for the other. This would allow you to guarantee uninterrupted IPTV service while allowing your file downloads to suffer more than they would have normally. But since this has to be done upstream of every link (since that's where the decision is made to send one sets of packets over another), it requires QoS awareness (and respect) along every hop between the content provider and the destination. This is not done on the public Internet, because it would be abused mercilessly. You need dedicated, independent data connections.
In the general case, you wouldn't have IPTV service from two providers simultaneously. But even in the event you do (maybe individual networks want to start their own IPTV service with only their programming?), the "preferred path" allowed to both content providers up to your doorstep would give you the *option* of preferring one over the other. We don't have the option to enforce such consumer-driven prioritization because the infrastructure flat out doesn't exist.
Your assertion that congestion is "solved" by bigger and better pipes doesn't take into account that this is effectively an arms race. If you have a gigabit Internet connection, and you fire up an application like BitTorrent, or just start a vanilla file download from a well-connected content provider, your fat gigabit connection will still become saturated, though perhaps for less time than a slower connection would be. Your equally-prioritized IPTV stream will be degraded and you will curse your IPTV service as being less reliable than your old cable TV. The only way to eliminate the possibility of congestion is to guarantee that your Internet connection is faster than everyone else's put together, which is ridiculous. You need the ability to prioritize traffic in order for 3rd-party bandwidth-sensitive services to exist. We don't have 3rd-party IPTV competitors today, and we never will with a neutral Internet. Content providers need the ability to negotiate with ISPs in order to get a QoS-aware network path to customers' doorsteps. I think both sides agree with this statement. The question, according to my understanding, is who should pay for it. Content providers say AT&T should pay for it, since this is about providing parity with AT&T's IPTV services, while AT&T views this as "new infrastructure" like any other and should be paid for by the individuals requesting it.
Regarding VoIP, start up a few BitTorrent connections, some file downloads, some YouTube streams, and see how clear your VoIP call sounds. The number of bandwidth-consuming applications you can start is limited by your computer's capabilities, not the speed of your Internet connection. You will always be able to saturate your Internet connection, regardless of how big it is (within the realm of reason). A saturated, QoS-neutral Internet connection will always degrade *something*; you just normally don't care because you experience that "degradation" as longer-than-usual file download times. Degraded IPTV is something we will have far less tolerance for, especially if you're paying for it. Avoiding the problem of how to prioritize two "preferred" content streams by banning the practice outright seems, to me to be a little short-sighted.
Now, the "other half" of what Net Neutrality advocates oppose, with ISPs "extorting" money from content providers, to keep their sites running as fast as they are today, I absolutely agree with. This would be an abuse, and (it seems to me) a terrible business decision making your service less usable than it was before. In the event you have multiple content providers paying for preferential QoS-aware connections (such as one subscriber with two IPTV services), it would make the most sense to give the customer direct control over bandwidth reservations and prioritization, where a conflict exists, rather than based on how much money the content provider paid. The former makes sense; the latter does not. But you can't have either without the ability to allow content providers to do this in the first place.
In my eyes, the truth is a bit in between both of these positions. I think AT&T is making a few absurd statements, and Net Neutrality advocates are also making a few absurd statements. There are ways we can satisfy both sides, I think, but before we do that, we have to separate the nonsense from the realistic.
I strongly feel that something is getting lost or distorted in translation (and that may very well include the path from AT&T's planners and Ed himself, not just between Ed and the media, or the media to your ears).
You say that treating traffic differently based on traffic type is fine, but consider that in order to give preference to one type of traffic over another, you must necessarily carry that type of traffic over a new, QoS-aware network connections, and set up a business relationship with the providing entity to guarantee QoS is respected. If Google took these steps, and Yahoo! did not, wouldn't that be an example of giving "preferential" treatment to one source over another?
This is why I have trouble accepting the Net Neutrality advocates' vision of a non-neutral Internet. I believe the real (as opposed to imaginary/potential) issues have to do with services such as IPTV. It's impossible to compete with an ISP-managed IPTV service (such as AT&T's) unless the content provider has a dedicated, QoS-aware network pipe to the ISP's network, and the necessary agreements to honor that all the way to the customer's connection. Otherwise, when a customer starts up BitTorrent, their TV is going to cut out when their broadband connection becomes saturated, because everything is degraded equally (net neutrality). Who should have to pay for that QoS-aware data connection? Content providers say the ISP should, since it's about providing parity with the ISP's own IPTV services.
It would be absolutely absurd (and completely impractical to manage and implement) for an ISP to deliberately degrade random web sites' services, when the data pipes aren't congested. Even QoS doesn't step in until the need exists to prioritize (such as when a link becomes saturated or congested). Unless I'm completely missing something (possible), it would appear to me that most Net Neutrality advocates haven't the slightest clue how the Internet actually works, and it scares me when people that don't understand something attempt to regulate it.
I don't think content providers are being hit up to avoid "lesser" connectivity (extortion?). I think the concern is that when content providers want *privileged* connectivity, such as to provide QoS-aware IPTV service, the ISPs feel that the content providers should be the ones to pay for that privilege. AT&T manages its own network, so it can deliver IPTV service (for example) and do the necessary QoS magic to ensure that TV service doesn't cut out whenever someone fires up BitTorrent. 3rd-party content providers can't make that guarantee without dedicated connections/agreements for that same QoS magic, and that's going to cost money.
"Put simply", this isn't about sites that customers *don't* want privileged/degraded, it's about upcoming services that customers are going to *want* to see privileged/degraded.
Why would you continue to give your business to an Internet provider that significantly degraded service like this?
Why would you continue to give your business to an Internet provider that did this?
Now that our stellar neighborhood is becoming a little more complex than points of light, are there charts or (sky) maps out there that diagram these newly discovered planets and how their orbits might look?
I've also often wondered why we don't have Eve Online-style maps of our own galaxy. Even if we don't know distances for some stars to any meaningful degree of accuracy, surely we could come up with a best guess, or represent stars as lines representing the range of possible distances.
The bandwidth will never be "enough" until it's infinite. Many types of services (file downloads especially) will transfer data as fast as your data connection will allow it. The only way you can guarantee uninterrupted service (guaranteed bandwidth) for something specific like IPTV is through a technology like QoS. Otherwise, it doesn't matter how fast your network connection is, because there will always be things that will happily saturate it, and with no way to prioritize, everything gets degraded equally.
We actually have this problem today with VOIP services like Vonage, but since voice is such a low-bandwidth service, it's not easy to degrade noticeably on a broadband connection. But it's possible.
Actually, if you look at the article, it was published just about a year ago. It's not clear to me why this is front page news on Slashdot. As you say, lots of things have happened in the last year with IPTV.
I agree on the a la carte ideas. With all of this stuff delivered electronically now, why are we still stuck subscribing to channels? Let me subscribe to individual shows, or "packages" of shows (a traditional channel). How better to support your favorite show than funding it directly? (For a little more money, maybe your subscription could be without advertisements!)
What do you want to happen when you use an Internet service that attempts to consume all available bandwidth? Most file downloads or BitTorrents will do this naturally. With nothing to differentiate traffic, all services are degraded equally, and your TV starts to cut out whenever you do a file download.
QoS would solve this problem, but in order to honor QoS from 3rd-party IPTV providers, those providers would have to have dedicated network connections to your ISP, and a business relationship that would require your ISP to honor that QoS information and prioritize their IPTV packets ahead of your other random Internet traffic. This arrangement seems to be what Net Neutrality advocates strongly oppose, so it would seem that 3rd-party IPTV over your idealized "One Internet Connection" won't be happening any time soon. The only practical option today would seem to be what AT&T is doing.