321–330 of 388 posts
I browse voat because I want to see what conservative/trump supporters think and I came upon this thread here: https://voat.co/v/technology/2253983 I was wondering if you guys could address these guys concerns. We need everyone on the same side. We all want a free internet. Appreciate the help.
China does not have net neutrality. Almost everything coming into the country from outside is utterly filtered to hell and back. They do have a vibrant tech economy though. So they have their own Google (Baidu). They have their own Twitter (Weibo), WhatsApp(WeChat), Amazon(Tao Bao). So in the future of no net-neutrality, we'll see ISPs being value-added resellers of their own regionally partitioned versions of these…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do they block or throttle VPN traffic?
Some ISPs throttle P2P/torrent. I don't know specifically about VPN.
I browse voat because I want to see what conservative/trump supporters think and I came upon this thread here: https://voat.co/v/technology/2253983 I was wondering if you guys could address these guys concerns. We need everyone on the same side. We all want a free internet. Appreciate the help.
Here's my argument. I would be fine without any form of net neutrality IF consumers had a true choice of ISP. BUT, I've lived in 4 different states and 6 different cities in the past 12 years and have only ONCE had a choice between different ISPs. Comcast and their ilk have created monopolies in the majority of markets, therefore to enforce the free market it is necessary to force them to provide equal access to internet traffic.
I browse voat because I want to see what conservative/trump supporters think and I came upon this thread here: https://voat.co/v/technology/2253983 I was wondering if you guys could address these guys concerns. We need everyone on the same side. We all want a free internet. Appreciate the help.
short answer:
These rules are 2 years old and did nothing good for the internet. the solution is to dissolve municipal monopolies. they do this all the time - everytime they corruptly assign a monopoly to provide a service like electricity, water, etc.
The problem is too much government and the left just wants to pile on the beaurocracy and centralize the decision making regarding the global internet in washington. Stupid.
Why shouldn't a medical monitoring company negotiate peering and higher guaranteed bandwidth so doctors can remotely with live data to ensure the safety of critical patients? [hint: ALL companies do this, it is physically impossible not to]
Because the government is scaring stupid people with the thought of higher netflix prices to grab more control of the internet that they have been illegally surveiling already. Meanwhile, they also scramble to add idiotic things like netflix taxes because they are just too idiotic and greedy. Oh not to mention the government's backwards attempts to prosecute piracy and weaken/criminalize encryption.
technical answer if you're up for some reading:
As an engineer, net neutrality is a totally misguided and unattainable. Companies that provide things like realtime communication obviously need to negotiate and guarantee lower latencies. Anyways, just like with labor and healthcare, some people just want to pretend that internet service doesn't operate under economic laws. They're always looking for some savior/excuse to abolish free enterprise like internet, automation, altruism, etc.
I like how reddit user /u/natermer puts part of it (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldandBlack/comments/6mviva/whats_... ):
There are two major types of network traffic you tend to see on the internet. One is a 'elephant' type bulk transfers. These are big files, bittorrent, video streaming and such things. These types of things use a lot of the available bandwidth and can cause transfers that last many minutes to many hours. However they are latency sensitive.... It doesn't matter if it takes 1 or 10 or a 100 seconds for the packets to cross the internet just as long as you can move a LOT of packets at the same time.
The other type of data transfer you see are things that are very latency sensitive. Remote controlling of mechanics, remote monitoring, remote desktop, video conferencing, gaming, VoIP, and other types of latency sensitive protocols. These things use relatively little bandwidth compared to the 'elephants' but are extremely latency sensitive... meaning you want the transfer to go as quick as possible, but don't really need to transfer that much. The modern Internet works based on peering agreements. ISPs have multiple connections with other ISPs. many times these connections are almost ad-hoc as it depends on geography and other variables that makes some connections 'less then ideal'. These connections vary in quality, performance, latency, and cost.
If ISPs can route traffic based on protocol and provider then they can possibly save significant amount of money and improve performance for their customers. They can shuttle latency sensitive protocols over expensive links and allow bulk transfers to use massive amounts of cheap bandwidth to reduce their own and their customer's costs.
If you go 'full network neutrality' and treat each packet the same then you can have your VoIP call stuck in a FIFO buffer queue behind your Xbox's game download.. making it impossible to have phone calls.
For example: TCP/IP protocol is connection oriented and this is used for critical connections and there is a ack/nack response/reply conversation going on where clients validate and confirm packets. This means that every TCP/IP transfer is a two-way street... even if you are downloading you still have to upload some packets to confirm and continue the connection.
Bulk uploads from your home network can interfere with the acknowledgements and cause massive latency spikes and other issues unless you have a router that intellegently manages buffers and gives priority to different types of packets. You have a very fast network connected to a very slow uplink and your TCP/IP acks can get stuck behind a massive queue of bulk transfers.
This happens commonly when people are using bittorrent and they don't understand why they get fast downloads, then it throttles back to almost nothing, and then they get fast downloads again. This will continue in a saw-like fashion where you see fast performance, then massive latency spikes, and then slow performance, and then fast performance again.. repeating. Many people assume that this is caused by ISP throttling when in fact it's their own network equipment suffering from bad buffer/queue management. They will go out and buy new home routers only to see the problem get worse because the routers are as dumb as before, but now have even bigger queues and even more memory to (mis)manage. (there are VERY effective ways to fix this, btw)
I could go on and on.
Also keep in mind that the modern internet works through things called 'Content Delivery Networks' or CDNs for short. Bulk transfer of files from one side of the internet to the other side is expensive and high-latency. Co-located datacenters for webservers and small/medium business installations charge premium amounts for internet access and usage is metered on the server side. So most popular websites depend on CDNs to cache content and distribute it back out to the user in a way that is actually physically close to the user on the internet.
This can dramatically lower costs, increase availability, and improve performance and user experience.
One of the ways CDNs do this is by having private networks running in parrallel to the public internet. Sometimes they are logical networks like VPNs or they are entirely separate physical networks.
Youtube, for example, depends on Google's private Fiber network for content delivery. When you are streaming videos Google uses as little as the public internet as possible. They have connections as local to you as possible that (ideally) connect directly to your ISP's network and streams data to you.
Other CDNs depend on collocated servers in the ISP's datacenter to cache data, stream video, and other things. Thus if you take a very naive approach to network neutrality and try to say 'all packets are treated as equal' you not only possibly increase the costs for yourself and others, but also you destroy the suitability for the internet to be used for low-latency protocols AND you will do NOTHING to help start-ups be competitive with big names like Google.
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Google doesn't need to care. They can out purchase speed tiers/entire ISP's to make their services extremely favorable/speedy to use or just out right prevent competition in certain areas. They own the biggest ad network in the world. This will be in their favor. Funny how libertarian mythology doesn't really hold up to even the most basic of game theory applications.
Their biggest and most lucrative service is search. What if I click a link in google's search result and my ISP refuses to take me there? Or does it work differently?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While the EU does have net neutrality, there are loop-holes for some forms of zero-rating (which is basically the same bullshit, just jumping through a few hoops). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating
Do NN proponents really believe that they could prevent the loopholes here?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There really isn't a sound argument against net neutrality. Many do argue that the FCC shouldn't have the authority to regulate the internet, and often argue that idea to subtly change the subject. If someone argues to abolish something, they should either argue in favor of a replacement, or argue that that thing should not exist at all. Unfortunately, I haven't heard even a flawed version of either argument. Another…
I think there is a more nuanced libertarian argument that you haven't mentioned, and that is not so much "I am against all regulation" as much as "I think regulation is generally bad for efficiency and/or disagree with it on moral grounds so I want to be convinced why it is necessary." In other words, I want to be convinced that: 1) There is a problem here at all. The regulation that is being repealed was only introd…
Similarly, this post also doesn't read as the beginning of a debate or a discussion; it reads as the end of one. All three of your demands taken together imply "Net Neutrality doesn't matter. If any regulation is not perfect then we should get rid of it", which is both a ludicrous position to hold on NN, and a facet of "I am against all regulation" which the intro supposedly distanced itself from.
An appeal to reason is all well-and-good, but using it as a sandwich for an obvious Nirvana fallacy, makes your points impossible to swallow.
Apparently, it's quite difficult to maintain net neutrality, yet its advantages to the average citizen seem enormous. Therefore, shouldn't we fix something else instead? Like the way these laws are established?
"Fix something else" is right on, but "instead" is highly problematic. We can try to fix multiple things. The root of this problem and many others is that Congress and the executive are corrupt and have no particular interest in doing their job properly. Much of that stems from a bad electoral system. Fixing that is hugely important and would be highly useful. However, that fix is likely to take a long time. Certainl…
Can anyone in the US explain why the government/FCC is so eager to abandon net netrality laws? Was it demanded by the electorate? A promise in a manifesto or something? I remember the topic of NN coming up a few years ago and was largely defeated after public outcry - has public mood changed since then?
This is a case where a few companies really want to be able to change their pricing structures to increase profits, and consumers in general don't want that but also aren't particularly involved. So there isn't a big public outcry (except among HN readers <3) and these companies are lobbying the FCC hard to make "business-friendly" changes. It's called concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.