181–190 of 281 posts
Dear Mr. Schneiderman: If a video steaming service (such as Netflix or YouTube) installs a "appliance" or "cache" to provide faster video to a certain ISP's customers, do you believe that violates net neutrality, and if so, why?
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Yes, I've actually run part of the internet for around 16 years.
great, maybe you can provide evidence to back up your claim that gamers can (accurately) determine which party is in breach of a peering agreement
That said - a peering agreement can have a variety of terms so a gamer isn't likely to be privvy to that. But if you see latency and loss on a certain link, you've likely identified the problem. Typically both parties are bound to solve it if its the actual peering link, a fair amount of the time its an individual ISPs problem so that ISP would be obligated to upgrade its internal link(s) to meet the demands of its customers.
Some time ago (2014) I convinced (forced under contract) a very large last-mile carrier to fix/upgrade its internal links after I browned out a few counties with my paid-for usage. Its not that hard, it just took a lot of phonecalls on my part and calls with our finance department... I guess the alternative was for them to let me continue browning out their customers for a section of the San Francisco bay area, having them ragequit and switching to someone else. Or wasting thousands and thousands of hours with customers complaining about terrible service.
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I’m glad you asked – this is a very important question. In short, the regulation is needed to protect against ISPs prioritizing their profits over their consumers, which is something we have seen in the past where regulations were lacking. As a preliminary matter, it’s important to recognize that net neutrality principles and protections in different forms have actually been around since 2005 and even earlier. So the…
Could you please reference what it was the courts struck down related to Title I enforcement? This is news to me and I'm very interested in a more complete view of things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
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Do you also extend this to allow for pay-for-what-you-use? I don't disagree with charging people more for how much they use, but a lot of net neutrality proponents lose their minds at the suggestion that somebody who uses 5 GB a month should pay less than the kid streaming 10 TB of torrents every month.
I think the overlap between those is muddled for a few reasons: 1. Zero rating. Wikipedia+facebook is free, everything else counts towards the cap. This was a subject of major debate in India. 2. First party zero rating - YouTube and Vonage count towards the cap, your ISP's streaming video or VOIP service does not. 3. Negotiated zero rating. "binge on" and similar, which is basically vendor neutral but limits the typ…
Given a scenario, ask the following:
"If enforced, will this give the users a financial incentive to pick one information source on the Net over another to get the same content?"
If the answer is YES, then the scenario is a violation of net neutrality principles.
So for the 4 scenarios you listed, the answers would be YES, YES, LIKELY NOT, and NO*
(*only because we restrict the test to sources on the Net).
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I think the overlap between those is muddled for a few reasons: 1. Zero rating. Wikipedia+facebook is free, everything else counts towards the cap. This was a subject of major debate in India. 2. First party zero rating - YouTube and Vonage count towards the cap, your ISP's streaming video or VOIP service does not. 3. Negotiated zero rating. "binge on" and similar, which is basically vendor neutral but limits the typ…
Why is #2 a violation of NN, but #4 is not? Does it really matter if the video is transferred using IP on top of "internet" frequencies, or IP on top of "video" frequencies, or QAM on "video" frequencies?
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I think the overlap between those is muddled for a few reasons: 1. Zero rating. Wikipedia+facebook is free, everything else counts towards the cap. This was a subject of major debate in India. 2. First party zero rating - YouTube and Vonage count towards the cap, your ISP's streaming video or VOIP service does not. 3. Negotiated zero rating. "binge on" and similar, which is basically vendor neutral but limits the typ…
Why is #2 a violation of NN, but #4 is not? Does it really matter if the video is transferred using IP on top of "internet" frequencies, or IP on top of "video" frequencies, or QAM on "video" frequencies?
In theory, the problem you refer to should be addressed by anti-monopoly laws (NN is a tool to address a different problem).
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Not AGSchneiderman, but I'll try my hand at some of these. 2. Because the "gentleman's agreement" behind peering has broken down, and the last-mile telecoms realized they can demand money from both sides. 3. Because any entity the size of the govt has many parts. The NY AG is not working at the FCC, nor do they work at federal antitrust organizations. 4. It certainly would, but the incredible infrastructure investmen…
Your points on 2+4 are not based in fact and are extremely general statements. On point 2 - All of these agreements work, sometimes the agreements where more money is at stake take longer to sort out but they do get sorted out. The biggest fact involved is that when the agreements are slow to get sorted out, the parties involve lose customers and revenue. On point 4 - in areas where competition for the last mile is a…
#4 If you check the Broadband Initiative Data for 2013 (last year of available data) at https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/fcc-b..., you can see for the fastest speeds of 50Mbps down, there's at most one provider for 82% of America.
I'm not suggesting hamstringing ISPs at all, but bringing them to heel since they won't willingly do so. E.g., here in NYC, Verizon is being sued for being unwilling to keep its contract to make FiOS available to every residence (https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/13/nyregion/ny-sues-verizon-...)
If net neutrality fails, would it makes sense aggressively pursue a legal effort to break up "big cable"? Back in the long distance/DSL days, the local telcos were forced into allowing alternate vendors to sell long distance & Internet service over the copper wire running to one's house. Can we bust up Comcast's strangehold on the Internet service available to my apartment by forcing them to allow any vendor to sell…
We don’t even need to bust up telcos. All that needs to happen is the FCC needs to switch from huge, infrequent bandwidth sales to frequent regional bandwidth auctions. This will basically solve any last-mile oligopoly woes.
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Fortunately, it's not just my office that’s publicly supported net neutrality. (My office did submit its own public comment in support of net neutrality because we had an issue we wanted to address that was unique to our experience.) Several other state AGs submitted a comment in support of net neutrality as well (available here: https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/10717283141719/2017.07.17%20Att... ) You are right that a b…
For those like me wondering which states (pulled out of the pdf above): Illinois, California, Connecticut, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Oregon, Vermont, Washington
I’ve called both the NY and NV Attorney General. I hope NV is ready to cooperate to investigate this serious identity theft issue.
