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

ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

arstechnica.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 329 posts

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#301

Post by HWR_14 »

vel0city wrote: post #271
HWR_14 wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't stop you from watching in 4K video. It just provides another option. But critically, this is an option that you, the customer, negotiate with T-Mobile. You contract for X gigs plus unlimited sub-480p traffic. And tiered data (X gigs of high-speed, Y or infinite gigs of low speed) is really common in cellphone contracts. This is just making it clear you can get the low speed data without having to burn your…

> X gigs of high-speed, Y or infinite gigs of low speed But then why even bother with the paperwork to get approved to be a part of the program? Why doesn't T-Mo just ignore usage below some average throughput speed for any traffic?

A couple of reasons. One is that your paperwork guarantees you'll pay attention to their "throttle this down to sub-480p" request, which let them have their customers (who opted into it from t-mobile) not have to worry about how that apps streaming was free. That is, T-Mobile customers who turned that feature on could be presented whitelisted apps without needing to configure them. Two is that "free video streaming" sounds better when selling a service to their customers than "free Xmbps connections". Three is it allows a lot more freedom to T-mobile. They know they need to average X mbps so the stream doesn't jitter, but they can totally take advantage of an uncongested five minutes to let you download quickly to build your cache.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#302

Post by gameman144 »

bsenftner wrote: post #175
beardedetim wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This has been my experience as well along both sides of the axis. If you're not "Lets Go Brandon" or whatever the equivalent is on the left, you usually are reasonable and have valid opinions. Even more so, we usually share the same ideals just have different ways of getting there. There isn't huge division out there. Just two camps of dicks with most of us in the middle.

Quoted post unavailable.

Not that one should need to qualify statements on here, but I happen to also not be a Trump fan.

To say that there is no "Let's Go Brandon" equivalent on the left, though, is just false: there are plenty of similar phrases on the left as well. Let me offer a few that pop up where I live:

* ACAB

* Defund/Abolish X

* Black Lives Matter (as a political statement, that is; if anyone disagrees with this at a values level, then that's something different)

* Drumpf / Cheeto / "Orange Man"

These are also buzzwords which are used to quickly communicate group membership. Another method is to dehumanize the opposition, e.g. calling President Biden "sleepy Joe" or "senile", or calling Trump a "mentally deficient fascist".

There's nothing wrong with not liking a political figure. There's nothing wrong with seeing tribal behavior and calling it out. If you can't even put yourself into your opponent's shoes long enough to see any such criticisms of your own tribe, though, you're willfully remaining ignorant of a whole world view.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#303

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

orangepurple wrote: post #291
wil421 wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve had both AT&T and Comcast 1gbps and never had any noticeable data transfer issues. A lot of things like Usenet downloads were close to saturating the wire speed, close to 100MB per second. Comcast’s upload speed is abysmal (coaxial), AT&T was symmetrical (FTTH). How could I test this?

speed.cloudflare.com fast.com In my experience these always tell the truth

Not if your ISP is priotizing your traffic (only) when you go there :-)

As it happens all around the world, and has been told here several times.

One possible symptom is that your lagging Video conferencing, VPNs, other remote working stuff, even simple down- and uploads to/from whereever are suddenly fast.

As long as you are visiting these speedtesting sites.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#304

Post by CyberRabbi »

kmeisthax wrote: post #89
CyberRabbi wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t fully understand how anti-censorship is a virtue when defending Google and Netflix but then becomes a vice when defending regular people’s ability to not be arbitrarily banned on Twitter.

Because the Republicans were hypocrites on this issue. No more and no less. "But Twitter is a private platform" is entirely a way for Democrats to wave that in their face. Trump called Net Neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet" and gave Ajit Pai the power at the FCC to kill it. The GOP was all for "ISPs are private platforms" and "regulating ISPs violates their free speech" back then, when they thought they were on…

> "But Twitter is a private platform" is entirely a way for Democrats to wave that in their face.

So inconsistency on matters of equal treatment and individual freedom is due to cynicism and political expediency? That doesn’t sound good

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#305

Post by orangepurple »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #303
orangepurple wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

speed.cloudflare.com fast.com In my experience these always tell the truth

Not if your ISP is priotizing your traffic (only) when you go there :-) As it happens all around the world, and has been told here several times. One possible symptom is that your lagging Video conferencing, VPNs, other remote working stuff, even simple down- and uploads to/from whereever are suddenly fast. As long as you are visiting these speedtesting sites.

So many websites depend on cloudflare that it would be difficult for them to justify prioritizing it and (iirc) Netflix uses fast for content delivery

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#306

Post by Karrot_Kream »

imtringued wrote: post #276
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unlimited internet is mostly a marketing term. Until you buy a DIA circuit you are just getting regular ISP access or prioritized ISP access.

Yes but that is the ISP's problem. They are the ones that must get their damn business model in order.

There's no point being angry here, anger won't solve this mess or give you "unlimited internet". I'm just relaying the reality. There's _no definition_ of "unlimited internet" that's enforceable by law. The closest you have is a DIA circuit which is as close as you'll get to having an ethernet cable directly connected into an ISP router to your house. Other than that, "unlimited internet" doesn't mean anything. A residential ISP will do some best effort packet routing, and a business-grade non-DIA ISP package will give you prioritized packets and usually an SLA on your connection. Some connections may give you a data cap per month while others don't, but even without a data cap there's no guarantee that your packets will be prioritized or even not dropped due to congestion. The only industry standard that guides QoS and bandwidth metering is the standards that networking equipment vendors come up with in their implementations and that's the only thing offering a semblance of repeatability to this industry.

IMO the solution has to come from the FTC. The US has neglected to regulate telecoms in the name of innovation for a long time, but now so much of everyday life happens atop telecom companies that I think it's imperative they regulate properly. This includes term sheets showing exactly what internet service is being offered and maybe just doing away with the term "unlimited internet" altogether.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#307

Post by kmeisthax »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #304
kmeisthax wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the Republicans were hypocrites on this issue. No more and no less. "But Twitter is a private platform" is entirely a way for Democrats to wave that in their face. Trump called Net Neutrality "Obamacare for the Internet" and gave Ajit Pai the power at the FCC to kill it. The GOP was all for "ISPs are private platforms" and "regulating ISPs violates their free speech" back then, when they thought they were on…

> "But Twitter is a private platform" is entirely a way for Democrats to wave that in their face. So inconsistency on matters of equal treatment and individual freedom is due to cynicism and political expediency? That doesn’t sound good

Sort of. It's more like one side is being inconsistent because the other side has given them adversarial license to do so by also being inconsistent, but in the opposite direction. Both sides should want common-carrier regulation for both residential ISPs (Comcast) and OSPs (Twitter).

There's also a related problem in which both sides not wanting something their constituents want will use each other as an excuse to not do the thing. For example, Right to Repair polls very favorably with basically anyone, but politicians do not want to touch it with a 10 foot pole. It is an "antipartisan issue", one that has popular support but bipartisan opposition. One way you can kill an antipartisan issue is by turning it into a partisan one, so that your side's supporters shut up about it and the opposing side's supporters are deadlocked by yours. There have been attempts to do this by R2R opponents, by say, telling angry farmers that R2R actually only benefits rich, MacBook-toting liberals.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#308

Post by nijave »

wrycoder wrote: post #2

> 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…

Afaik there was some somewhat legitimate concern it would effect mixed content networks. E.g. networks that carry voice, video, and internet or networks that provide different "tiers" (business vs consumer)

Theoretically it should make access cheaper by allowing ISPs oversubscribe networks while still guaranteeing performance to certain customers but, in practice, I find it highly unlikely that savings would ever get passed on to the customer (instead converted into "shareholder value")

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#309

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

imtringued wrote: post #277
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they want to sell you 3Tb of bandwidth but you only use 2Gb, and they want you to pay extra for that 2Gb to not be slow - despite that you already paid for it to be a set speed. There's no growth left selling bandwidth. So they need to get growth by being anti-consumer.

It's almost like selling a 3TB SSD with only 500GB capacity but it dramatically throttles down once you go past 400GB so that it is impossible to fill it up to 3TB in any reasonable time frame. To hide the scam, they want to prevent your computer from running any software that would need the whole 3TB.

I imagine this is coming to a cloud near you in 20 years when the cloud has reached its peak.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#310

Post by nijave »

bcgraham wrote: post #187
lwkl wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The road-tax is neutral, it doesn't matter what goods you transport. Imagine charging the producers of the most transported goods to pay a fee in addition to the road-tax and otherwise blocking their goods being transported for the rest of the month. Net neutrality asks the internet to work how road taxes work. You pay for a certain bandwidth (a truck) and you can transport whatever goods you want with that. It doesn…

Note that roads are not neutral in the “net neutrality” sense, since emergency vehicles are prioritized. There’s a cogent argument against net neutrality on similar grounds: i.e., prioritizing traffic with prioritized purpose, especially in the face of congestion.

Also HOV, express lanes, toll roads, and other private roads
Post reply on HN