111–120 of 329 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Quoted post unavailable.
Nearly every prominent conservative politician of the past ten years has come out publicly against "net neutrality". Particularly when a state like California sets its own regulations. And yet these are the very same people who will vigorously defend the rights of other states to pass laws that directly contradict Supreme Court decisions, or pre-existing Federal laws.
> California's net neutrality law is similar to the federal rules repealed under former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. California prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful traffic. It also prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers, bans paid data cap exemptions (so-called "zero-rating"), and says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality prot…
Easy. If you operate a cell network, your bandwidth is extremely limited, so when it's congested, you throttle streaming video content so everything else is still fast. The same problems affect wired ISPs, but it's easier to run more fiber (often from a local office, not to homes) than to get more spectrum, install more towers, or create the next generation of wireless broadband.
The easiest, absurd case of cell networks falling over is at music festivals. They just don't have the bandwidth to handle thousands of people in a small area.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
[flagged]
IME politics is based around clusters of concrete conclusions like "abortion should be legal". All arguments and abstract principles (like "states rights") are deployed and discarded opportunistically in the service of the fixed conclusions.
A/B test competing stances across a couple jurisdictions if you feel like it or if/when it benefits you
You dont really need to hold a strong stance on anything, leave that to people who affect nothing
Earlier quoted context omitted.
IMO states' rights is a pretty nerdy issue if you take a step back and think about it. Very few people are such nerds.
That mostly because we've become accustomed to the federal government meddling in internal affairs more than it is supposed to. The union is supposed to be akin to the EU but without international sovereignty for states.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the question becomes who should be charged for bandwidth. The ISPs in this case are arguing they want to charge a small subset of above normal bandwidth consuming services rather than the ISP customers.
Why should the companies pay for it? There are agreements in place for bandwidth between the peering companies and last mile providers. They shouldn’t care how it’s consumed. The issue is not use it’s prioritization. That’s the danger. Netflix pays to prioritize their traffic over Discovery+ or your video streaming startup. Now when it’s busy and the pipe is fully consumed, Netflix is perfect and your company is drop…
Legislators let the ISPs get away with it and it’s why we have such high prices for such trash service compared to other first-world countries.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with your general point (a lack of competition is why they can get away with double-charging for traffic), though this feels like a theoretical concern as of yet. But you're conflating different ISPs with different types of anti-competitive behavior. Prioritizing non-streaming-service (e.g. throttling Netflix at prime time) packets could, for example, help a regional ISP stay competitive. That's different tha…
> this feels like a theoretical concern as of yet. This was Ajit Pai's argument. That we should regulate nothing until there's a problem. There are two problems with it, (1) It's already a problem. There have been documented examples of ISPs throttling, favoring their own partnered content. Also they are actively expanding or seeking to expand zero rating which is anti-competitive. (2) At the point you actually have…
It’s why even in Silicon Valley in 2022 we’re paying Comcast and can’t get Google or even Verizon FTTH.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't support this, but I can try to steel man this position. Largely it comes with the idea that use = cost, and that infrastructure has limited capacity and is therefore zeroish sum. For example, a common idea is that we should tax trucks more than other cars because they cause a large amount of damage to our roads. Following that logic, the companies that encourage users to consume more bandwidth should be charg…
Doesn't Netflix already pay on a usage basis for their bandwidth? If you run a small website that gets 100 users a month, you pay very little for bandwidth. If you run a video streaming site with millions of users you pay a lot. And the users also pay for the bandwidth to download. Exactly how many more times do the ISPs need to get paid?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In spirit I agree with you. The reality gets more complicated. The canonical example here is Netflix. Netflix's traffic is _mostly_ outbound and because it's video streaming, there's lots of it. If an ISP has a 10G circuit, then Netflix may end up taking up 50% of that circuit during prime after-work time. Because the circuit is limited in throughput, if Netflix takes up 50%, then remaining internet services need to…
This is exactly why it started because Netflix switched to a lower tier provider (Level3 iirc) and the big ISPs wanted money pay for the transit which Level3 and Netflix didn’t want to pay. It all went away when Netflix started installing CDN caches.
And it wasn’t just level3, it was L3, Akamai, and Limelight: https://www.businessinsider.com/akamai-to-lose-netflix-as-a-...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers" This is not 'Net Neutrality'. If data providers like Netflix want 'special service' then they can pay for it. 'Net Neutrality' is more like Carriers cannot charge more for email, than for games, than for messaging, than for something else. Carriers should be able to charge whatever they want for whatever Qo…
>If Netflix wants more bandwidth with lower latency, fine, they can pay for that. Why should Netflix pay for this? They aren't the one choosing to send traffic onto that network, the ISPs CLIENTS are. The ISP shouldn't have any ability to charge Netflix for actions their clients are taking - and they should have to treat all traffic that a client asks for equally. Can you imagine an electric company trying to get som…
They can pay for better QoS, which will result in better QoS for their customers if they want.
Or their customers can, or both.
"Can you imagine an electric company trying to get some sort of fee from Samsung because they sell a lot of electronics that people use in their houses..."
That analogy doesn't work because Samsung, in that case, has nothing to do with the data flow. Netflix obviously does.
Netflix should not have to pay special fees because they are 'Netflix' or 'it's video' or 'it's movies' - but they should definitely have to pay fees relevant to QoS of their upload bandwidth. Just like you, I and everyone else.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't support this, but I can try to steel man this position. Largely it comes with the idea that use = cost, and that infrastructure has limited capacity and is therefore zeroish sum. For example, a common idea is that we should tax trucks more than other cars because they cause a large amount of damage to our roads. Following that logic, the companies that encourage users to consume more bandwidth should be charg…
This fight is not so much about usage “bandwidth” as it is about ISPs who want to prioritize traffic depending on the source and whether the source is paying them an additional “priority” fee. Allowing them to do that creates an non-level playing field, which disadvantages the smaller sources that many users would be very interested to view.
Look at YT and the hiding dislikes. That was all about establishment players being very widely and publicly disliked for poor quality information, outright lies in some cases.
How did people know?
Thos smaller sources able to get a lot of attention.
The minute ISP's get to prioritize, they get to create near infinite artificial value by making endless deals about who gets what and when.
Nobody but the ISP'S and establishment support that garbage.
There is no value added to anyone, except the ISP's and establishment.