Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

exstreamist.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 138 posts

Re: 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

#101

Post by drdaeman »

rubatuga wrote: post #94
icebraining wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet, in my Western European country, I have four ISPs offering service (with their own cables) to my apartment.

That's inefficient. Why not just have one?

Choice. If you have only one line to your CPE, you have none. If there are multiple lines (ISPs) to chose from - you can select the best one available. As the ISPs have to actually compete for customers (assuming they don't collude to screw everyone - which is a legal problem) and any bad behavior will be punished by losing some market share, their customers will benefit from this.

Also, resilency/failover. If one connection goes down, you have a backup. It may be uncommon, but for some people who rely on Internet connectivity, this is useful.

Single provider just can't know best.

Talking about efficiency... For efficiency's sake it may make some sense to move demarcation point a little further, to some mini-PoP in the neighborhood, but to have choice the end-users need to own their lines there, and I'm not sure it's convenient and without the drawbacks.

Re: 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

#102

Post by protomyth »

mastax wrote: post #93
protomyth wrote: post #65

It would probably help if more advocates agreed on what they mean by net neutrality. Having listened to advocates on various news networks, I'm pretty confused what they actually mean. I would also like to see an actual bill with an actual legal definition. Given how regulations work, I would hope the authors of said bill put the actual regulations in it. I still want to see one of these advocacy groups put out a pro…

I think the existing Open Internet Order does a pretty good job: https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-10-201A1.p... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010

Now, someone just has to find a house rep to introduce the legislation.

Re: 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

#103

Post by oneplane »

Maakuth wrote: post #10

This brings to my mind some Sony Music executive defending their malware-enabling CD DRM - - "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care?"

That brings to mind a (probably unimplementable) thought I had around the same time: disallow people that do not understand what things are to make choices about it that affect everyone.

Re: 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

#104

Post by jandrese »

cheald wrote: post #86
jandrese wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix did pay a ransom to Verizon and Comcast back in 2015. You didn't see it directly, but that money came out of the same pot that would have paid for more content on Netflix. http://time.com/80192/netflix-verizon-paid-peering-agreement...

No, that money came out of the pot of money that they were previously paying to Cogent for transit through to Verizon and Comcast. Describing an extremely-typical paid peering agreement as a "ransom" is massively intellectually dishonest.

They still payed Cogent for the peering, but they had to also pay Comcast and Verizon for the same peering (just on the other side), because both companies were deliberately undersizing their connections to Cogent until Netflix paid up.

It's not like Netflix moved their servers into Comcast or Verizon data centers and paid for the bandwidth (although they offered and the offer was rejected). How many other internet companies pay the end user ISPs for their peering bandwidth? Why should they? That's what the users are paying for.

Re: 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

#105

Post by jandrese »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #88
jandrese wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix did pay a ransom to Verizon and Comcast back in 2015. You didn't see it directly, but that money came out of the same pot that would have paid for more content on Netflix. http://time.com/80192/netflix-verizon-paid-peering-agreement...

Not even sure this would fall under the net neutrality umbrella. Comcast and Verizon weren't specifically discriminating or shaping Netflix traffic. Netflix was buying and over saturating the cheapest bandwidth they could. The question became who pays to upgrade to accommodate it. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but the current Net Neutrality rules don't address this situation.

It's kind of like a business saying that it doesn't discriminate against a minority, but when one of those people walk in the door they just never get served. It's still discrimination even if it's not overt. It's the kind of thing that Netflix could definitely argue as a Net Neutrality violation over at the FCC, especially once they got a demand to pay up.

It's not like the consumers could switch to a less dickish provider, they're often a local monopoly. You may also note that there were no repeats of this problem after 2015, even though many high bandwidth services appeared and grew in this time.

Re: 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

#106

Post by WillPostForFood »

jandrese wrote: post #104
cheald wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, that money came out of the pot of money that they were previously paying to Cogent for transit through to Verizon and Comcast. Describing an extremely-typical paid peering agreement as a "ransom" is massively intellectually dishonest.

They still payed Cogent for the peering, but they had to also pay Comcast and Verizon for the same peering (just on the other side), because both companies were deliberately undersizing their connections to Cogent until Netflix paid up. It's not like Netflix moved their servers into Comcast or Verizon data centers and paid for the bandwidth (although they offered and the offer was rejected). How many other internet c…

because both companies were deliberately undersizing their connections to Cogent

I think a clarification would be helpful here. Were they "deliberately undersizing" or were they refusing to to increase capacity to accommodate the surge in additional Netflix traffic without being paid?

This is how Cogent described it, “Comcast refused to continue to augment capacity at our interconnection points as it had done for years prior.”

via: https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...

Comcast claims: "Comcast executive vice president David Cohen said Comcast was forced to react when the flow of traffic with Cogent went from roughly equally to Cogent sending five times as much data as Comcast was sending back."

via: http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/05/08/cogent-ceo-comcast-pur...

Re: 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

#107

Post by austincheney »

sharkweek wrote: post #6

Doesn't surprise me at all - the level of energy in the most recent protests around the repeal was optically quite a bit lower than previous efforts. We were basically warned this would happen too, that Net Neutrality opponents just keep beating the drum until the general population got tired of resisting.

It is a balance of ignorance. I really do believe most people don't know and don't care about net neutrality no matter how beneficial it may be to them in the most immediate sense.

At its core the net neutrality debate is a fight between media providers and transmission. It is clear to most tech literate people that net neutrality is a very good thing. Less clear is that media (including privacy) regulation is also a good thing.

The transmission side of the argument is clearly in the camp of the Republicans (as noted by campaign contributions) while the media companies (think social media and online advertising) is clearly in the camp of the Democrats (as noted by campaign contributions). The primary weapon in matters of media versus transmission is ignorance of the issue at hand.

The media side has very powerful weapons in that they control the content. If they fear regulation coming they can provide content to bolster their users. Think back to the SOPA legislation. These companies are largely unregulated and nothing scares them more than regulation.

The transmission side just has to be persistent to win their argument and hope they can hang on long enough to out last the patience and technical understanding of the public. This strategy has won wars and can easily win political arguments.

The transmission side of the argument is also fearful of regulation, but these guys have to walk a fine line. If they can dodge regulation because regulators are more interested in limiting online media then so be it, but this isn't the ideal outcome for these guys. Ideally the transmission companies would like a slice of that unregulated online media revenue, but it only makes sense if both media AND transmission remains loosely (at best) regulated. This requires a lot of careful political maneuvering and not upsetting political constituents.

Re: 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

#109

Post by mobilefriendly »

austincheney wrote: post #107
sharkweek wrote: post #6

Doesn't surprise me at all - the level of energy in the most recent protests around the repeal was optically quite a bit lower than previous efforts. We were basically warned this would happen too, that Net Neutrality opponents just keep beating the drum until the general population got tired of resisting.

It is a balance of ignorance. I really do believe most people don't know and don't care about net neutrality no matter how beneficial it may be to them in the most immediate sense. At its core the net neutrality debate is a fight between media providers and transmission. It is clear to most tech literate people that net neutrality is a very good thing. Less clear is that media (including privacy) regulation is also a…

Fact is, Democrats get majority of telecom dollars https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B09

Re: 72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is

#110

Post by sullichin »

leeoniya wrote: post #16
dieterrams wrote: post #5

Survey methodology and all that, but it wouldn't surprise me in the least if most of the affected population didn't know. Net Equality would have likely perked up more interest.

> Net Equality would have likely perked up more interest. yeah, marketing is nuanced like that and i think this distinction would have made a good difference. net-favorism, anti-throttling, anti-discrimination, equal-access would have also done better, i think.

these are all better names than net neutrality.
Post reply on HN