If I want a connection that's worth $50 ($1/mbps) and Netflix wants a connection that's higher quality and therefore worth $4/mbps, should Verizon be allowed to sell us those, as they do today?
Again, Netflix is not asking Verizon for service. You just pointed out earlier that Level3 was their ISP, not Verizon. If they were willing to move to Verizon as their ISP, Verizon would probably be happy. But then Comcast would still be asking for a cut of the action, and Level3 could theoretically demand a pay-off for not-throttling the traffic. And every other ISP and backbone provider could separately demand a payoff from Netflix.
And now you're setting up a very dumb system, where every time you want to set up a website, you have to go around to each ISP and negotiate terms to have them carry your content on their private network. It's the death of the Internet, the return to the walled gardens of AOL and CompuServe.
Level3 was not relying on "free connections". They were relying on peering agreements, which is what the Internet runs off of. And ultimately, this has nothing to do with the volume of data being moved in or out, but the volume of money being made from that data. Netflix is making money. Verizon wants that money. They're in a position to try to extort that money from Netflix. So they're doing that. It has nothing to do with anything other than that.
And none of this has anything to do with what we were talking about. You changes the subject from you wanting a cheap/crappy connection for your business, which you no net neutrality rule would prevent. Net neutrality is about prioritization, throttling, and blocking of traffic.
Netflix is not the Verizon customer that's complaining. Netflix is the Verizon competitor (in the realm of VoD) that is complaining. And I'm the Verizon customer who's complaining. Because even though I already pay Verizon for access to Netflix, Verizon is trying to extort extra money both from me and from Netflix.
Let me repeat that for a second. I pay Verizon for access to Netflix. That's what I'm paying for when I pay for my Verizon connection. A connection to Netflix, and any other site or service that I want to access. That's their business. Take away all of the services that pass through their connection, and I have no reason to pay them for that connection. That bandwidth is what *my* $50/month pays for. Verizon doesn't get to demand extra pay from people providing content over their network, because the only reason anyone pays for their network is to attain access to that content.
Look at amtrack, we have high speed rail through RI because it gets them 3 people on the hill. Making it faster to fly than take high speed rail for the NYC to Boston leg and skipping 2 large city's on the route.
Not sure I can parse those sentences, but Amtrak doesn't have high speed rail anywhere that I'm aware of. If it had high speed rail between Boston and DC, that would be awesome. Unfortunately we do not.
We have cities without beltways because mayors though it would kill the city.
Is that what you mean by "central planning"? That just seems like... planning. You don't think cities should have any planning for their development, where to build streets, how to zone different areas?
No doubt, sometimes when people make plans, they're bad plans. I don't think that's unique to whatever "central planning" is, or government planning, or any other kind of planning. The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. I guess your solution is to have an absolute clusterfuck of the "free market" all the time?
I guarantee you Netflix doesn't operate through a cable modem. That's why I said "commercial grade connections". We're talking about The connection between Netflix and Comcast. Thousands of gigabits.
But we're not really talking about the quality of Netflix's connection. Netflix has good Internet connections, and I'm sure they pay a lot for it. That has nothing to do with net neutrality. The question is, what happens between Netflix's ISP and my ISP when I try to watch a Netflix movie? Does my ISP have the right to prioritize or de-prioritize that traffic depending on whether they've gotten paid off by Netflix?
Again, all the bandwidth in question is already being paid for. ISPs just want to be able to decide whether I can use that bandwidth for services that they don't directly make money from. They already make money indirectly from those services, in that I pay the ISP so that I can access those services.
MOST of their customers buy the crappy one.
My point is, at a certain point, it doesn't make sense to complain, "I can't get a shitty enough connection!" Getting a $50 FIOS connection is shitty enough.
The customer wants it, the service provider wants to sell it, and you want to make it illegal.
No, like I said, net neutrality has nothing to do with that. It does not specify the Verizon needs to provide the same level of service to all customers with any kind of connection. It just specifies that, for the level of service that's being provided, Verizon should not be throttling some services while prioritizing others. That is, you can have your crappier/slower $1/mbps connection, but Verizon can't use that as an excuse to specifically throttle Netflix while exempting their own VoD service from any throttling/QoS.
I'm beginning to think that you're presenting arguments dishonestly.
It kind of sounds like you're thinking of internet connections as being one-way, as if there's a fundamental difference between oen end and the other, and information only flows one way. They're actually two way, packets travel both directions, and commercial grade connections are almost always synchronous- both directions flow at the same rate.
I'm not sure what part you're referring to. Many businesses (and probably most homes) use DSL or cable ISPs, which are often not symmetrical connections. Or did you mean something else?
The way it works is that a quality connection to the next building over is pointless.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. What you're asking for, "I want to have a cheaper shittier connection," is a pointless thing to ask for. But still, net neutrality doesn't stop Verizon from offering that. Verizon doesn't offer that because it's a dumb thing to provide.
The rest of your post is rehashing other old arguments, all unrelated to what we were talking about. Netflix isn't asking for free bandwidth. Netflix has paid for bandwidth with their ISP. Verizon's customers have paid for bandwidth with Verizon. All that's being asked is that everyone provides the bandwidth to their customers that their customers have paid for. If Verizon customers have paid for a lot of bandwidth so that they can watch Netflix movies, then allowing Netflix movies to pass over their network is not "free" bandwidth for Netflix. It's "paid" bandwidth by the Verizon customers who are paying their monthly bill.
None of this is related to the earlier discussion about bandwidth and jitter, and only needing the connection sometimes.
And you know, trains don't need to be junky and slow. It's just that our trains are junky and slow because we haven't invested money in it. I would argue that it'd be smart for us to fix that exact problem.
I mentioned this elsewhere, but my school system had a concept called "forced fail". If your teacher did not believe that you had successfully learned what you were supposed to learn over the course of the semester, they could "force fail" you in spite of your grade. I had a couple of instances where this happened to me.
In one instance, for example, I figured out what my grade had been in the class. In the event of a "force fail", they wouldn't tell you what your grade would have been, but I had all of my papers, tests, and homework, and I knew what each one was supposed to be worth as a percentage of my grade. I had a 'B' (83%, IIRC), and she failed me anyway. It was a creative writing course, and I was asked to write a persuasive essay. It was very open-ended. I wanted to have some fun with it, so I wrote an essay arguing that teachers should not assign homework. After I handed it in, the teacher told me that she didn't know how to respond and was having trouble finding the flaw in my logic, but my conclusions were wrong. Though the writing was good an I would otherwise have received an 'A' on the paper, since my conclusions were incorrect, she gave me a 'B-'.
So that's what I had to deal with.
Also, though it's not directly related to the discussion, I can tell you that out of the "best students" in my highschool-- i.e. high GPA, all honors and AP classes, National Honors Society-- almost all of them cheated on a regular basis. They would copy each others' homework, plagiarize their papers, and occasionally cheat on tests. The argument was that, with all of their honors classes, they had so much homework and so many papers that they couldn't reasonably be expected to do them all. And they were right.
They were even caught cheating at one point, and there was a minor scandal because 10 of the "best students" had cheated on a major test. I think it was a history final, but I don't really remember. The point is, it was all swept under the carpet because "they're good kids" and "it would look bad". The whole idea of these kids being "good kids" and the "best students" was such a sham.
I'm always confused by this objection to "central planning". For example, I've argued that the US should build up the train system, and have been told that it's a terrible idea because it's an example of "central planning". The government building up the train system requires that it assumes to know what's good for us, where we will want to travel, and it can't possibly know with perfect forethought.
Meanwhile, some of these same people will support the building an maintenance of the highway system, government support of the American auto industry, and gasoline subsidies. Somehow all of those things represent "freedom" because it means I get to feel good about myself when I buy a cool car.
Or the government can't build Internet infrastructure, because "central planning". Meanwhile, it's fine for Verizon to run most of the vital infrastructure. I guess that's fine because Verizon is too incompetent to plan anything?
Essentially what I'm getting at is, whenever I hear this objection to "central planning", the real issue always seems to boil down to "rich people might not make enough money."
Also, there's something in your response that doesn't seem to add up. You're talking about the service that *you* can get from ISPs. Net neutrality doesn't say that you can't make a deal with Verizon for a crappier connection. Verizon can sell you a connection with high-latency and high jitter, at a discounted price, and *that* doesn't violate net neutrality. The violation would come if Verizon provides low-jitter connections only to certain endpoints.
So if you're talking about getting a connection for yourself and your clients, for them to access other services, it's not really the issue here. If your clients want to provide a service that does or does not require low-jitter, then that's when net neutrality comes into play. And when you remove net neutrality, that means that you'll have to negotiate with every ISP that your clients customers (the users of those services) are connecting from, and pay them each a separate fee in order to get the terms that you want. I really doubt that will work out beneficially for your clients.
When network neutrality is defined as "all http packets must be treated the same" that means my jitter, reliability etc has to be exactly the same as what Netflix gets, which has to be exactly the same as what the hospital gets.
Well first, I don't think that's a serious abstract problem. For example, you might live in an area where Verizon offers FIOS, and maybe the lowest plan they offer is $50 for 25mbps symetrical connections. You could complain, "But I don't need 25mbps. I want a connection with a 200 mbps download rate and a 1mbps upload rate, and I want to spend $2/month on that connection." And that's great, but it's not really Verizon's responsibility to offer that service to you. I certainly don't think that the rest of us should be forced into having worse Internet connections so that Verizon can provide you with exactly what you want. It makes a lot more sense to say, "Sorry, you'll just have to live with the lowest service that they offer."
So you might have to live with a higher quality of service. Tough.
And of course, most proponents of net neutrality are not necessarily opposed to quality of service for some services. For example, I think most would agree that it would be fine to prioritize traffic for VoIP or audio/video streams, as long as it were applied universally, e.g. Verizon can prioritize all VoIP traffic, but they can't just prioritize their own VoIP traffic while throttling Skype. If that were the debate, I'm sure it could be settled without too much trouble.
If you think "inane, stupid, and soul-crushing" ends at high school, you've been sheltered.
I didn't say it ends, but in my experience, it decreased a lot. I don't know if that says something about the extreme stupidity of my high school, but I don't think anyone who knows me would say that I've been sheltered.
But equally importantly, as you get older, you get better at dealing with various things. I suppose that idea is underlying a big part of my argument, even if I didn't spell it out. Part of what I find so objectionable is the idea that we can take a 17 year-old, look at some marks on a paper, and tell him, "Sorry kid. You've got no potential. You're worthless to society, and we have no interest in you trying to expand your horizons."
Of course, that's not necessarily what a college entrance rejection needs to mean. We, as a society, could be offering other additional educational opportunities. We do, to some extent, with community colleges. We could be offering apprentice programs to get jobs outside of the college track. We could stop teaching our children that "either you go to college, or you work at McDonalds," or at the very least, we could teach them that it's possible to work at McDonalds with some dignity. Instead, we basically teach our kids, "Go to college or you're worthless. McDonalds workers are worthless. There are not other worthwhile paths. Oh, and by the way, you're not cut out for college because this paper says so."
It's really unfortunate. Especially so when we don't even know that 17 year-old. They could be a bright, interesting, talented, motivated kid who has been having a rough couple of years. Maybe it's even his fault to some extent, but after all, we're talking about teenagers. Think about how much is going to change after the age of 17. Think about how much potential a 17 year-old has to change for the better, if given the right helping hand. But we don't like to give helping hands-- it's too much fun to watch other people fail.
I just don't think the rest of us are missing out for lack of their "creativity".
Look, I'm not even talking about "creativity". I don't think anyone is saying, "Let's let stupid people in to college, because maybe they'll make some crazy art-installation with glow-sticks covered in feces!" or whatever. But what if they're clever? What if they're smart and interesting, but they see from a different perspective? What if they're just square pegs trying to fit into round holes. It's not about creativity.
If you're intelligent enough to find the classes stupid and inane, you can easily get a B in class without opening a book and just by half-sleeping in class.
I think you're underestimating the levels of stupidity that high school can reach. Just to give an example of my own life, I completely failed English a few times in high school. Where I grew up, they could give you a "forced fail", which basically means that you had a passing grade, but the teacher did not feel that you had adequately learned the material. It was not uncommon for teachers to "force fail" students that they didn't like, and who they felt were disobedient or disrespectful. For example, I had a teacher say that I could not pass the English class because I failed to turn in a paper. I'd turned in the paper, but she didn't accept it because I hadn't turned in pre-writing over the course of writing the paper. I actually had turned in the pre-writing, but she didn't accept that because my outline was "unacceptable". She was not required to clarify why my outline was "unacceptable". Strictly by the grades I had in that class, even getting a 0% on that paper, I had a low 'B', but I failed the class.
Tell me again how anyone can easily get a 'B' in the class? Luckily, I had rich, understanding parents who let me take a year off after high school, and then paid for me to go to an expensive private college. I did really well there. Other young people aren't so lucky.
I expect people that want to get in to put in the effort for it. Someone that has the resilience and the mental strength to succeed in something they don't enjoy should accomplish even greater things when they start doing things they love.
Sure, but this expectation is naive, at best. Talk about "resilience" and "mental strength", but if you spend a good portion of your young adult life getting kicked in the teeth, sometimes what you really need is for someone to give you a chance. No one is endlessly resilient. No one has ever been successful without a lucky break providing some opportunity, and you can't expect people to know the joy of doing something they love if they're never given that opportunity.
So what's wrong with thinking that society should try to increase those "lucky breaks" and let some unfortunate people have a little opportunity? Sometimes, a light at the end of the tunnel does a lot more to motivate a young person than yet another kick in the teeth.
I do blame young adults who check out and lose interest (this idea that a 16-18 year old is a "kid" is a peculiar 20th century notion).
Oh, I still don't. Call them what you like, my point is something like this: Don't blame someone for acting crazy if you've already locked them up in an insane asylum. Acting crazy in the asylum may be the most appropriate reaction.
But I think you're wrong in a very different way. I'm guessing that you're the sort who loves to preach "buckling down and doing the work" and "personal responsibility" as the solution to every problem. You're poor? Well you should have worked harder. You're sick? Well you should be working harder on getting better. Got paralyzed in a horrible accident? Work harder in growing those nerve cells back. Stop being a lazy whiner, assuming that you're a special little snowflake.
Right? Something like that?
Well sometimes it helps to actually look at the source of the problem. Work can be inane and stupid. Sometimes you need to work through it. Sometimes you need to say, "Hey, wait a minute. This is inane and stupid. Let's figure out a better way of doing this." Sometimes you need to quit and get a better job. Have you ever considered that part of the reason why the professional world is so inane and stupid is that we teach our kids to respect and suffer through inane stupidity?
I don't think everyone is a special little snowflake, but certainly we aren't all the same. Certainly we have different strengths and different capabilities. I have no doubt that our society would benefit from fostering children's strengths rather than punishing any bit of non-conformity.
Nobody cares if you failed because you are incapable or if you failed because you felt the work was inane and stupid. I'll hire the guy who is less capable but actually does the work over the prima donna who feels the work assigned him is beneath his precious skill set.
And that might be one way in which you're stupid. I won't hire someone who's going to be a prima donna and refuse to do necessary work, but I will hire someone who comes to me and says, "Look, I know you asked me to do this project, but this is inane and stupid. I've written up a report detailing exactly why it's inane and stupid. With your permissions, I'm going to be working on this other thing instead, which will further our interests better." Not only will I gladly hire someone who has the sense to make that argument, but I'll promote him if he's right.
If you won't, then get you're head out of your ass and learn how to run a business.
I don't think I get what you're arguing here. Your customers want cheap high bandwidth connections. Don't we all? What does that have to do with the topic at hand. We'd all like things to be cheap. I'm not even sure how net neutrality is related.
As for the requirements you describe, that they don't use it often, that you don't care much about jitter or latency, etc. That doesn't sound like a niche set of requirements. That sounds roughly like what most businesses want from a backup connection. Again, I'm not sure what the argument here is.
In the context of knowing what movies have told me about prisons and Nazi concentration camps, I doubt that's literally true. But yes, it can be awful. During my highschool years, I saw some awful, petty, spiteful, vicious behavior. And right now, I'm just thinking about the teachers. Forget about all of the strange pressures, fears, and concerns you have regarding your peers, and it's still an awful experience.
It's an: 'Are YOU ready for this program?' question..."Checking out and losing interest" has consequences regarding your ability to perform at the college level.
Only if the college is equally inane and soul-crushing. Which, I'll grant you, it seems to me that some of them are. I've been to colleges that were essentially, "High School part 2, this time, it's douchier!" But I would say that, on the whole, colleges tend to be less awful than high school, so the correlation is probably going to be a bit thrown off. There probably *are* kids who did poorly in high school, who would do well in college, but who can't get into college. We wouldn't really know, though, if we don't have a way to identify them.
Reasonable rules can be figured out, but it's not easy because there is value in being able to choose whether your application needs inexpensive bandwidth or premium quality bandwidth. Which means that ISPs will charge more for better.
But here's part of the thing: I'm not sure we want our emergency services to be dependent on paying a random ISP for "premium" service. In talking about emergency services, I think you raise an interesting point, and my first thought is that they should have guaranteed service levels as part of the deal for whichever ISP you've provided monopoly status to. Verizon wants a monopoly in this area? Ok, so they must provide some kind of side-band for the emergency services to automatically get the highest possible priority, and guaranteed access at all times. I believe we already do this with 911 phone calls, for example. When we auction off radio bandwidth, we reserve certain bands for emergency services. I don't know why the Internet should be different.
It's telecommunications infrastructure, and it should be reliable for our vital services without individual municipalities deciding to pay for the "extra-special premium package". You shouldn't be able to compare Netflix with the fire department. If the fire department needs special access, then they should just have special access. Making it about the amount they're willing to pay opens a few different bad possibilities, e.g. the local fire department deciding to cut corners and not pay for the premium package, Netflix outbidding the fire department and getting higher priority, etc.
having all Cs shows a lack of ability to do the hard work or a difficulty with or lack of commitment to basic academics.
I really don't agree. I agree that it's not exactly hard to get a B in high school, but I don't agree that failing to do so indicates either stupidity or laziness. There's at least a few other possibilities.
One of them being, frankly, that high school really can be inane, stupid, and soul-crushing. I don't blame kids who check out and lose interest. You're taking a bunch of people during what may be some of the most difficult years of their lives, and asking them to spend their time performing some of the most boring work possible, where nobody actually cares about the product of their work.
"Fill out this worksheet. Nobody actually benefits from you doing this, but your future depends on it because I want to make sure you're working hard and following directions, for no purpose. Plus, I'm on a power trip because I've failed at life and this is the best job I can get. I'm not even interested in the material on the worksheet, and we'll throw it away when you're done, but you'd better get it done immediately. If not, I'm going to make you sit quietly for an hour doing nothing."
It's kind of insane that we treat young adults that way. I think if I had to go back in time to my highschool years right now, I'd probably tell half the teachers to go fuck themselves, purely out of frustration. Yet here I am, I fairly well educated and relatively successful adult.
The issue isn't really about college admissions. It's about our entire education system. Throughout the entire system, we promote and encourage "achievement robots". That's what most of society believes that we need, when you get down to it. Part of the reason there are "talented C students" in the first place is because we take talented children and say to them, "You don't fit the mold, so I'm going to treat you like you're mediocre, at best. Here's your 'C'. If you want an 'A' or a 'B', please fit the mold better."
Our education system is not about seeking success for each child and promoting the welfare of each child. It's a factory, turning out little 'appropriately successful human being' cogs and tossing out any units that are determined to be 'defective'. "You're not what we were looking for. As a society, we don't want to invest in whatever your potential is. Go get a job in a service industry."
Most colleges operate that way too, to an extent. Since that's what our highschools are, and that's what our colleges are, of course that's what the college application process will be. It's perfectly appropriate for what we're trying to do. The question is, are we trying to do the right thing?
Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first?
If that were really the problem, I'm sure someone could have simply added in something saying that emergency services' traffic can be prioritized. Hell, I think it would be fair to say it *must* be prioritized, as long as you can determine which traffic is being used for emergency services.
But part of the problem is, who decides what's spam? I'm sure that Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon don't think their ads are spam.
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ? They are both http web traffic.
Again, who decides which ads you want to see? If you're on a slow connection and don't want to see ads, get AdBlock. Get a browser that downloads and displays text first, or that doesn't download images at all. You think Verizon is going to deprioritize their ads?
All that aside, I think all of your objections can be dealt with, and ISPs still wouldn't like it. In the end, they're not looking for the freedom to block spam. If they were, no one would be complaining. They're looking for the right to charge Netflix extra money, to prevent competition with their own video services. They want to charge Skype extra money so that they can charge more for their own VoIP service. That's all this is about.
Yeah, I find those kinds of arguments disingenuous, especially when there have been municipal Internet projects blocked by those private companies in favor of maintaining their own monopolies.
We should be sending these companies a message: Either you act like our own public infrastructure, or let us build our own public infrastructure. But don't take hundreds of billions of dollars of government money to build our public infrastructure, block our attempts to build our own infrastructure, and then claim that your network is completely private.
I think there was even some notice when I downloaded it, I only remember it vaguely, but I did see it. It was a prominent warning that said something to the effect of, "We will be collecting data on how you use this, including pretty much anything we want to collect, but the data will be aggregated and anonymized, so we won't collect personally identifiable information." So it's not like they were secretive about it.
So you may not feel comfortable about it, but in that case, you should be able to just use production versions of Windows.
Ok, so if you know this stuff, what does it mean for a particle to be its own antiparticle? Does that mean if it comes into contact with another such particle, they're both annihilated? Does that mean that they're neutral to matter and anti-matter, or do they still somehow fall into one of those categories?
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If I want a connection that's worth $50 ($1/mbps) and Netflix wants a connection that's higher quality and therefore worth $4/mbps, should Verizon be allowed to sell us those, as they do today?
Again, Netflix is not asking Verizon for service. You just pointed out earlier that Level3 was their ISP, not Verizon. If they were willing to move to Verizon as their ISP, Verizon would probably be happy. But then Comcast would still be asking for a cut of the action, and Level3 could theoretically demand a pay-off for not-throttling the traffic. And every other ISP and backbone provider could separately demand a payoff from Netflix.
And now you're setting up a very dumb system, where every time you want to set up a website, you have to go around to each ISP and negotiate terms to have them carry your content on their private network. It's the death of the Internet, the return to the walled gardens of AOL and CompuServe.
Level3 was not relying on "free connections". They were relying on peering agreements, which is what the Internet runs off of. And ultimately, this has nothing to do with the volume of data being moved in or out, but the volume of money being made from that data. Netflix is making money. Verizon wants that money. They're in a position to try to extort that money from Netflix. So they're doing that. It has nothing to do with anything other than that.
And none of this has anything to do with what we were talking about. You changes the subject from you wanting a cheap/crappy connection for your business, which you no net neutrality rule would prevent. Net neutrality is about prioritization, throttling, and blocking of traffic.
Netflix is not the Verizon customer that's complaining. Netflix is the Verizon competitor (in the realm of VoD) that is complaining. And I'm the Verizon customer who's complaining. Because even though I already pay Verizon for access to Netflix, Verizon is trying to extort extra money both from me and from Netflix.
Let me repeat that for a second. I pay Verizon for access to Netflix. That's what I'm paying for when I pay for my Verizon connection. A connection to Netflix, and any other site or service that I want to access. That's their business. Take away all of the services that pass through their connection, and I have no reason to pay them for that connection. That bandwidth is what *my* $50/month pays for. Verizon doesn't get to demand extra pay from people providing content over their network, because the only reason anyone pays for their network is to attain access to that content.
Look at amtrack, we have high speed rail through RI because it gets them 3 people on the hill. Making it faster to fly than take high speed rail for the NYC to Boston leg and skipping 2 large city's on the route.
Not sure I can parse those sentences, but Amtrak doesn't have high speed rail anywhere that I'm aware of. If it had high speed rail between Boston and DC, that would be awesome. Unfortunately we do not.
We have cities without beltways because mayors though it would kill the city.
Is that what you mean by "central planning"? That just seems like... planning. You don't think cities should have any planning for their development, where to build streets, how to zone different areas?
No doubt, sometimes when people make plans, they're bad plans. I don't think that's unique to whatever "central planning" is, or government planning, or any other kind of planning. The best laid schemes of mice and men often go awry. I guess your solution is to have an absolute clusterfuck of the "free market" all the time?
I guarantee you Netflix doesn't operate through a cable modem. That's why I said "commercial grade connections". We're talking about The connection between Netflix and Comcast. Thousands of gigabits.
But we're not really talking about the quality of Netflix's connection. Netflix has good Internet connections, and I'm sure they pay a lot for it. That has nothing to do with net neutrality. The question is, what happens between Netflix's ISP and my ISP when I try to watch a Netflix movie? Does my ISP have the right to prioritize or de-prioritize that traffic depending on whether they've gotten paid off by Netflix?
Again, all the bandwidth in question is already being paid for. ISPs just want to be able to decide whether I can use that bandwidth for services that they don't directly make money from. They already make money indirectly from those services, in that I pay the ISP so that I can access those services.
MOST of their customers buy the crappy one.
My point is, at a certain point, it doesn't make sense to complain, "I can't get a shitty enough connection!" Getting a $50 FIOS connection is shitty enough.
The customer wants it, the service provider wants to sell it, and you want to make it illegal.
No, like I said, net neutrality has nothing to do with that. It does not specify the Verizon needs to provide the same level of service to all customers with any kind of connection. It just specifies that, for the level of service that's being provided, Verizon should not be throttling some services while prioritizing others. That is, you can have your crappier/slower $1/mbps connection, but Verizon can't use that as an excuse to specifically throttle Netflix while exempting their own VoD service from any throttling/QoS.
I'm beginning to think that you're presenting arguments dishonestly.
It kind of sounds like you're thinking of internet connections as being one-way, as if there's a fundamental difference between oen end and the other, and information only flows one way. They're actually two way, packets travel both directions, and commercial grade connections are almost always synchronous- both directions flow at the same rate.
I'm not sure what part you're referring to. Many businesses (and probably most homes) use DSL or cable ISPs, which are often not symmetrical connections. Or did you mean something else?
The way it works is that a quality connection to the next building over is pointless.
Yeah, that's kind of my point. What you're asking for, "I want to have a cheaper shittier connection," is a pointless thing to ask for. But still, net neutrality doesn't stop Verizon from offering that. Verizon doesn't offer that because it's a dumb thing to provide.
The rest of your post is rehashing other old arguments, all unrelated to what we were talking about. Netflix isn't asking for free bandwidth. Netflix has paid for bandwidth with their ISP. Verizon's customers have paid for bandwidth with Verizon. All that's being asked is that everyone provides the bandwidth to their customers that their customers have paid for. If Verizon customers have paid for a lot of bandwidth so that they can watch Netflix movies, then allowing Netflix movies to pass over their network is not "free" bandwidth for Netflix. It's "paid" bandwidth by the Verizon customers who are paying their monthly bill.
None of this is related to the earlier discussion about bandwidth and jitter, and only needing the connection sometimes.
So you oppose air travel?
And you know, trains don't need to be junky and slow. It's just that our trains are junky and slow because we haven't invested money in it. I would argue that it'd be smart for us to fix that exact problem.
I have not, but it sounds interesting. Thanks for the recommendation.
In one instance, for example, I figured out what my grade had been in the class. In the event of a "force fail", they wouldn't tell you what your grade would have been, but I had all of my papers, tests, and homework, and I knew what each one was supposed to be worth as a percentage of my grade. I had a 'B' (83%, IIRC), and she failed me anyway. It was a creative writing course, and I was asked to write a persuasive essay. It was very open-ended. I wanted to have some fun with it, so I wrote an essay arguing that teachers should not assign homework. After I handed it in, the teacher told me that she didn't know how to respond and was having trouble finding the flaw in my logic, but my conclusions were wrong. Though the writing was good an I would otherwise have received an 'A' on the paper, since my conclusions were incorrect, she gave me a 'B-'.
So that's what I had to deal with.
Also, though it's not directly related to the discussion, I can tell you that out of the "best students" in my highschool-- i.e. high GPA, all honors and AP classes, National Honors Society-- almost all of them cheated on a regular basis. They would copy each others' homework, plagiarize their papers, and occasionally cheat on tests. The argument was that, with all of their honors classes, they had so much homework and so many papers that they couldn't reasonably be expected to do them all. And they were right.
They were even caught cheating at one point, and there was a minor scandal because 10 of the "best students" had cheated on a major test. I think it was a history final, but I don't really remember. The point is, it was all swept under the carpet because "they're good kids" and "it would look bad". The whole idea of these kids being "good kids" and the "best students" was such a sham.
I'm always confused by this objection to "central planning". For example, I've argued that the US should build up the train system, and have been told that it's a terrible idea because it's an example of "central planning". The government building up the train system requires that it assumes to know what's good for us, where we will want to travel, and it can't possibly know with perfect forethought.
Meanwhile, some of these same people will support the building an maintenance of the highway system, government support of the American auto industry, and gasoline subsidies. Somehow all of those things represent "freedom" because it means I get to feel good about myself when I buy a cool car.
Or the government can't build Internet infrastructure, because "central planning". Meanwhile, it's fine for Verizon to run most of the vital infrastructure. I guess that's fine because Verizon is too incompetent to plan anything?
Essentially what I'm getting at is, whenever I hear this objection to "central planning", the real issue always seems to boil down to "rich people might not make enough money."
Also, there's something in your response that doesn't seem to add up. You're talking about the service that *you* can get from ISPs. Net neutrality doesn't say that you can't make a deal with Verizon for a crappier connection. Verizon can sell you a connection with high-latency and high jitter, at a discounted price, and *that* doesn't violate net neutrality. The violation would come if Verizon provides low-jitter connections only to certain endpoints.
So if you're talking about getting a connection for yourself and your clients, for them to access other services, it's not really the issue here. If your clients want to provide a service that does or does not require low-jitter, then that's when net neutrality comes into play. And when you remove net neutrality, that means that you'll have to negotiate with every ISP that your clients customers (the users of those services) are connecting from, and pay them each a separate fee in order to get the terms that you want. I really doubt that will work out beneficially for your clients.
When network neutrality is defined as "all http packets must be treated the same" that means my jitter, reliability etc has to be exactly the same as what Netflix gets, which has to be exactly the same as what the hospital gets.
Well first, I don't think that's a serious abstract problem. For example, you might live in an area where Verizon offers FIOS, and maybe the lowest plan they offer is $50 for 25mbps symetrical connections. You could complain, "But I don't need 25mbps. I want a connection with a 200 mbps download rate and a 1mbps upload rate, and I want to spend $2/month on that connection." And that's great, but it's not really Verizon's responsibility to offer that service to you. I certainly don't think that the rest of us should be forced into having worse Internet connections so that Verizon can provide you with exactly what you want. It makes a lot more sense to say, "Sorry, you'll just have to live with the lowest service that they offer."
So you might have to live with a higher quality of service. Tough.
And of course, most proponents of net neutrality are not necessarily opposed to quality of service for some services. For example, I think most would agree that it would be fine to prioritize traffic for VoIP or audio/video streams, as long as it were applied universally, e.g. Verizon can prioritize all VoIP traffic, but they can't just prioritize their own VoIP traffic while throttling Skype. If that were the debate, I'm sure it could be settled without too much trouble.
If you think "inane, stupid, and soul-crushing" ends at high school, you've been sheltered.
I didn't say it ends, but in my experience, it decreased a lot. I don't know if that says something about the extreme stupidity of my high school, but I don't think anyone who knows me would say that I've been sheltered.
But equally importantly, as you get older, you get better at dealing with various things. I suppose that idea is underlying a big part of my argument, even if I didn't spell it out. Part of what I find so objectionable is the idea that we can take a 17 year-old, look at some marks on a paper, and tell him, "Sorry kid. You've got no potential. You're worthless to society, and we have no interest in you trying to expand your horizons."
Of course, that's not necessarily what a college entrance rejection needs to mean. We, as a society, could be offering other additional educational opportunities. We do, to some extent, with community colleges. We could be offering apprentice programs to get jobs outside of the college track. We could stop teaching our children that "either you go to college, or you work at McDonalds," or at the very least, we could teach them that it's possible to work at McDonalds with some dignity. Instead, we basically teach our kids, "Go to college or you're worthless. McDonalds workers are worthless. There are not other worthwhile paths. Oh, and by the way, you're not cut out for college because this paper says so."
It's really unfortunate. Especially so when we don't even know that 17 year-old. They could be a bright, interesting, talented, motivated kid who has been having a rough couple of years. Maybe it's even his fault to some extent, but after all, we're talking about teenagers. Think about how much is going to change after the age of 17. Think about how much potential a 17 year-old has to change for the better, if given the right helping hand. But we don't like to give helping hands-- it's too much fun to watch other people fail.
I just don't think the rest of us are missing out for lack of their "creativity".
Look, I'm not even talking about "creativity". I don't think anyone is saying, "Let's let stupid people in to college, because maybe they'll make some crazy art-installation with glow-sticks covered in feces!" or whatever. But what if they're clever? What if they're smart and interesting, but they see from a different perspective? What if they're just square pegs trying to fit into round holes. It's not about creativity.
If you're intelligent enough to find the classes stupid and inane, you can easily get a B in class without opening a book and just by half-sleeping in class.
I think you're underestimating the levels of stupidity that high school can reach. Just to give an example of my own life, I completely failed English a few times in high school. Where I grew up, they could give you a "forced fail", which basically means that you had a passing grade, but the teacher did not feel that you had adequately learned the material. It was not uncommon for teachers to "force fail" students that they didn't like, and who they felt were disobedient or disrespectful. For example, I had a teacher say that I could not pass the English class because I failed to turn in a paper. I'd turned in the paper, but she didn't accept it because I hadn't turned in pre-writing over the course of writing the paper. I actually had turned in the pre-writing, but she didn't accept that because my outline was "unacceptable". She was not required to clarify why my outline was "unacceptable". Strictly by the grades I had in that class, even getting a 0% on that paper, I had a low 'B', but I failed the class.
Tell me again how anyone can easily get a 'B' in the class? Luckily, I had rich, understanding parents who let me take a year off after high school, and then paid for me to go to an expensive private college. I did really well there. Other young people aren't so lucky.
I expect people that want to get in to put in the effort for it. Someone that has the resilience and the mental strength to succeed in something they don't enjoy should accomplish even greater things when they start doing things they love.
Sure, but this expectation is naive, at best. Talk about "resilience" and "mental strength", but if you spend a good portion of your young adult life getting kicked in the teeth, sometimes what you really need is for someone to give you a chance. No one is endlessly resilient. No one has ever been successful without a lucky break providing some opportunity, and you can't expect people to know the joy of doing something they love if they're never given that opportunity.
So what's wrong with thinking that society should try to increase those "lucky breaks" and let some unfortunate people have a little opportunity? Sometimes, a light at the end of the tunnel does a lot more to motivate a young person than yet another kick in the teeth.
I do blame young adults who check out and lose interest (this idea that a 16-18 year old is a "kid" is a peculiar 20th century notion).
Oh, I still don't. Call them what you like, my point is something like this: Don't blame someone for acting crazy if you've already locked them up in an insane asylum. Acting crazy in the asylum may be the most appropriate reaction.
But I think you're wrong in a very different way. I'm guessing that you're the sort who loves to preach "buckling down and doing the work" and "personal responsibility" as the solution to every problem. You're poor? Well you should have worked harder. You're sick? Well you should be working harder on getting better. Got paralyzed in a horrible accident? Work harder in growing those nerve cells back. Stop being a lazy whiner, assuming that you're a special little snowflake.
Right? Something like that?
Well sometimes it helps to actually look at the source of the problem. Work can be inane and stupid. Sometimes you need to work through it. Sometimes you need to say, "Hey, wait a minute. This is inane and stupid. Let's figure out a better way of doing this." Sometimes you need to quit and get a better job. Have you ever considered that part of the reason why the professional world is so inane and stupid is that we teach our kids to respect and suffer through inane stupidity?
I don't think everyone is a special little snowflake, but certainly we aren't all the same. Certainly we have different strengths and different capabilities. I have no doubt that our society would benefit from fostering children's strengths rather than punishing any bit of non-conformity.
Nobody cares if you failed because you are incapable or if you failed because you felt the work was inane and stupid. I'll hire the guy who is less capable but actually does the work over the prima donna who feels the work assigned him is beneath his precious skill set.
And that might be one way in which you're stupid. I won't hire someone who's going to be a prima donna and refuse to do necessary work, but I will hire someone who comes to me and says, "Look, I know you asked me to do this project, but this is inane and stupid. I've written up a report detailing exactly why it's inane and stupid. With your permissions, I'm going to be working on this other thing instead, which will further our interests better." Not only will I gladly hire someone who has the sense to make that argument, but I'll promote him if he's right.
If you won't, then get you're head out of your ass and learn how to run a business.
I don't think I get what you're arguing here. Your customers want cheap high bandwidth connections. Don't we all? What does that have to do with the topic at hand. We'd all like things to be cheap. I'm not even sure how net neutrality is related.
As for the requirements you describe, that they don't use it often, that you don't care much about jitter or latency, etc. That doesn't sound like a niche set of requirements. That sounds roughly like what most businesses want from a backup connection. Again, I'm not sure what the argument here is.
In the context of knowing what movies have told me about prisons and Nazi concentration camps, I doubt that's literally true. But yes, it can be awful. During my highschool years, I saw some awful, petty, spiteful, vicious behavior. And right now, I'm just thinking about the teachers. Forget about all of the strange pressures, fears, and concerns you have regarding your peers, and it's still an awful experience.
At least it was for me.
It's an: 'Are YOU ready for this program?' question..."Checking out and losing interest" has consequences regarding your ability to perform at the college level.
Only if the college is equally inane and soul-crushing. Which, I'll grant you, it seems to me that some of them are. I've been to colleges that were essentially, "High School part 2, this time, it's douchier!" But I would say that, on the whole, colleges tend to be less awful than high school, so the correlation is probably going to be a bit thrown off. There probably *are* kids who did poorly in high school, who would do well in college, but who can't get into college. We wouldn't really know, though, if we don't have a way to identify them.
Reasonable rules can be figured out, but it's not easy because there is value in being able to choose whether your application needs inexpensive bandwidth or premium quality bandwidth. Which means that ISPs will charge more for better.
But here's part of the thing: I'm not sure we want our emergency services to be dependent on paying a random ISP for "premium" service. In talking about emergency services, I think you raise an interesting point, and my first thought is that they should have guaranteed service levels as part of the deal for whichever ISP you've provided monopoly status to. Verizon wants a monopoly in this area? Ok, so they must provide some kind of side-band for the emergency services to automatically get the highest possible priority, and guaranteed access at all times. I believe we already do this with 911 phone calls, for example. When we auction off radio bandwidth, we reserve certain bands for emergency services. I don't know why the Internet should be different.
It's telecommunications infrastructure, and it should be reliable for our vital services without individual municipalities deciding to pay for the "extra-special premium package". You shouldn't be able to compare Netflix with the fire department. If the fire department needs special access, then they should just have special access. Making it about the amount they're willing to pay opens a few different bad possibilities, e.g. the local fire department deciding to cut corners and not pay for the premium package, Netflix outbidding the fire department and getting higher priority, etc.
having all Cs shows a lack of ability to do the hard work or a difficulty with or lack of commitment to basic academics.
I really don't agree. I agree that it's not exactly hard to get a B in high school, but I don't agree that failing to do so indicates either stupidity or laziness. There's at least a few other possibilities.
One of them being, frankly, that high school really can be inane, stupid, and soul-crushing. I don't blame kids who check out and lose interest. You're taking a bunch of people during what may be some of the most difficult years of their lives, and asking them to spend their time performing some of the most boring work possible, where nobody actually cares about the product of their work. "Fill out this worksheet. Nobody actually benefits from you doing this, but your future depends on it because I want to make sure you're working hard and following directions, for no purpose. Plus, I'm on a power trip because I've failed at life and this is the best job I can get. I'm not even interested in the material on the worksheet, and we'll throw it away when you're done, but you'd better get it done immediately. If not, I'm going to make you sit quietly for an hour doing nothing." It's kind of insane that we treat young adults that way. I think if I had to go back in time to my highschool years right now, I'd probably tell half the teachers to go fuck themselves, purely out of frustration. Yet here I am, I fairly well educated and relatively successful adult.
The issue isn't really about college admissions. It's about our entire education system. Throughout the entire system, we promote and encourage "achievement robots". That's what most of society believes that we need, when you get down to it. Part of the reason there are "talented C students" in the first place is because we take talented children and say to them, "You don't fit the mold, so I'm going to treat you like you're mediocre, at best. Here's your 'C'. If you want an 'A' or a 'B', please fit the mold better."
Our education system is not about seeking success for each child and promoting the welfare of each child. It's a factory, turning out little 'appropriately successful human being' cogs and tossing out any units that are determined to be 'defective'. "You're not what we were looking for. As a society, we don't want to invest in whatever your potential is. Go get a job in a service industry."
Most colleges operate that way too, to an extent. Since that's what our highschools are, and that's what our colleges are, of course that's what the college application process will be. It's perfectly appropriate for what we're trying to do. The question is, are we trying to do the right thing?
Is it okay to deprioritize email from known spammers and allow the email from a search and rescue team to go through first?
If that were really the problem, I'm sure someone could have simply added in something saying that emergency services' traffic can be prioritized. Hell, I think it would be fair to say it *must* be prioritized, as long as you can determine which traffic is being used for emergency services.
But part of the problem is, who decides what's spam? I'm sure that Time Warner, Comcast, and Verizon don't think their ads are spam.
How about ads? On a slow wireless link, is it okay to deliver the text of a web page before the ads from DoubleClick ? They are both http web traffic.
Again, who decides which ads you want to see? If you're on a slow connection and don't want to see ads, get AdBlock. Get a browser that downloads and displays text first, or that doesn't download images at all. You think Verizon is going to deprioritize their ads?
All that aside, I think all of your objections can be dealt with, and ISPs still wouldn't like it. In the end, they're not looking for the freedom to block spam. If they were, no one would be complaining. They're looking for the right to charge Netflix extra money, to prevent competition with their own video services. They want to charge Skype extra money so that they can charge more for their own VoIP service. That's all this is about.
Yeah, I find those kinds of arguments disingenuous, especially when there have been municipal Internet projects blocked by those private companies in favor of maintaining their own monopolies.
We should be sending these companies a message: Either you act like our own public infrastructure, or let us build our own public infrastructure. But don't take hundreds of billions of dollars of government money to build our public infrastructure, block our attempts to build our own infrastructure, and then claim that your network is completely private.
I think there was even some notice when I downloaded it, I only remember it vaguely, but I did see it. It was a prominent warning that said something to the effect of, "We will be collecting data on how you use this, including pretty much anything we want to collect, but the data will be aggregated and anonymized, so we won't collect personally identifiable information." So it's not like they were secretive about it.
So you may not feel comfortable about it, but in that case, you should be able to just use production versions of Windows.
Ok, so if you know this stuff, what does it mean for a particle to be its own antiparticle? Does that mean if it comes into contact with another such particle, they're both annihilated? Does that mean that they're neutral to matter and anti-matter, or do they still somehow fall into one of those categories?