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FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

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221–230 of 302 posts

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#221
post #106

A lot of people in these comments are making the case that removing net neutrality didn’t do much harm, so why bother bringing it back. Let me make the counterclaim. The argument against net neutrality is that it might stifle innovation. Well, we had net neutrality for many years and innovation didn’t seem all that stifled. Hence, what’s the harm in bringing it back?

I am going to repeat this in every chain: net neutrality is the law in California.

And ISPs are treating it like it's the law in the whole country: https://www.cnbc.com/2021/03/17/att-will-count-hbo-max-towar...

> The change will extend beyond California, since, AT&T said, “the Internet does not recognize state borders.”

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#222
These sorts of bills aren't necessary if you create an environment that provides enough competition. A lot of areas are getting more ISP's coming in and laying fiber which is forcing the big companies like ATT and Spectrum to compete. Imo the government stepping in is just another instance of them refusing to use the tools at their disposal to break up monopolies and instead inserting themselves into a position that gives them more power over the internet. As usual they create problems and then come up with MORE laws to fix the problems they've created, which inevitably leads to more issues down the road.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#223
post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having a flat price for internet sounds similar to having flat price for electricity or water - where your grandma (who turns off all the light switches whenever she leaves a room) would pay the same for electricity as a frat house mining bitcoin in the cupboard. The difference is that to provide you with more electricity, the power company has to burn more natural gas, and pay more for that. When a data network is…

wow - go read up on oversubscription; you might get a better idea about how networks work. The idea that any provider has 100% back end capacity for the full bandwidth of every node connection is beyond laughable.

Nobody said that they did.

Though sometimes they do. Do you think the unmetered connection a data center buys is oversubscribed by their ISP? They pay for it not to be, and then they use the full capacity. It's still not metered.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UPS literally asks you what it is! They ask if its a weapon, has lithium batteries, etc. This analogy is bad.

UPS cares if you are shipping something that is a physical or legal hazard for them, because they are responsible for the safety of their employees, facilities, and the other packages. If you can make a reasonable argument that one kind of data or another creates a meaningful hazard for the pipe that carries it, please do.

I just think this analogy sounds like someone who has never actually shipped something. There are many rules for shipping—-it is silly to say that UPS just takes the box and ships it without a care. UPS cares if the content is fragile, illegal, dangerous to ship, overweight, alive, high value, perishable, tobacco, magnetic.. the list goes on and on.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#225

One of the biggest arguments I remember being made back when net neutrality was a hot topic was that ISPs would bundle and sell specific websites as tiered plans. Infographics like this one [1] were shared widely. Has this happened in the US? I’ve definitely seen ISPs start to apply data caps and throttling, but haven’t seen the aforementioned packaging (at least with the major ISPs). I ask because this is one of the…

People were screwed, but not like this. ISP's mostly put the screws to streaming services. Just point them to Netflix's price hikes shortly after they felt the effects of NN getting repealed in ~2019, or the constant back and forth between Verizon and Netflix.

Mobile customers didn't get away scot free though. This did enable mobile service providers to offer more tiered plans, which on average raised prices on worse service via caps and throttled speeds. Some people may still be "grandfathered" in to old unlimited plans, but a lot of people either paid more, got worse service, or both.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#226
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix pays their upstream ISP to saturate the link they pay for. Why should Verizon, Comcast and others demand payment from Netflix? They are connecting customers to the internet, and should be peered to IXs that can feed what their customers need. Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network to lighten the burden on their IX uplink. It will get untenable if every random ISP charges each content provider.

Netflix shouldn't pay their ISP and some other ISP to deliver traffic. That's unreasonable. But if Netflix connects directly to Verizon, Comcast, etc, it's not inheriently unreasonable for Netflix to pay for that connection. Verizon, Comcast and many other telcos and cablecos are national transit ISPs as well as residential ISPs, and paying a transit ISP to get packets to the ISP's customers (and peers) is totally no…

This is conflating two different things.

If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in New York, they're using Comcast as a transit network. If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in Los Angeles, they're not, and getting the traffic between their house and the IX in Los Angeles is what Comcast is charging their own customers for.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#227
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that remotely the same thing? The infographic above and others clearly claim that ISPs will be blocking services then requiring you to pay for them separately. Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, and for example has been regular practice all across Europe (which has "net neutrality"). Isn't it just shifting the goal posts after the original claims of NN campaigners were discredited…

>Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, Excluding some services from bandwidth cap is perhaps slightly less extreme than throttling specific services, which is itself less extreme than blocking those services outright. All are violations of net neutrality. The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it.

> The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it.

They do that.

If your plan has, say, a 1 TB cap with no services that are exempt from the data cap you can pick any 1 TB from any mix of services you want without hitting your cap.

If your plan has 1 TB cap but say Netflix is exempt from the cap you can still pick the exact same 1 TB from the exact same mix of services without hitting your cap.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why did the mega providers so desperately want net neutrality to die? Why did so many lobbyists work to kill it? "I really don't get what all the fuss is about." This is a bit like the Y2K bug. There was a huge amount of noise and fear-mongering, and millions of developers spent an enormous amount of time fixing code and preparing systems. Y2K came and suddenly everyone is sure it was all just drama for nothing. What…

>Why did the mega providers so desperately want net neutrality to die? Why did so many lobbyists work to kill it? because they want more leverage in their negotiations with netflix, amazon, google, spotify etc. That's all it boils down to, how much one major corporation has to pay another major corporation. There's a reason why they're only pushing for neutrality on the ISPs, if they were actually concerned about lar…

> if they were actually concerned about large corporations abusing their control over critical online infrastructure they'd be pushing to regulate other classes of "service providers" like google, amazon, cloudflare, etc.

Many of the people who are pushing for net neutrality are also pushing for this. It's such an easy strawman counterpoint to just say "If people really cared about educating children, why are they only pushing for better schools? They should also be pushing for better in-home care and childhood nutrition!" ... um, they are?

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#229
post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Netflix shouldn't pay their ISP and some other ISP to deliver traffic. That's unreasonable. But if Netflix connects directly to Verizon, Comcast, etc, it's not inheriently unreasonable for Netflix to pay for that connection. Verizon, Comcast and many other telcos and cablecos are national transit ISPs as well as residential ISPs, and paying a transit ISP to get packets to the ISP's customers (and peers) is totally no…

This is conflating two different things. If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in New York, they're using Comcast as a transit network. If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in Los Angeles, they're not, and getting the traffic between their house and the IX in Los Angeles is what Comcast is charging the…

What other transit ISP gives you a discount because the traffic is local?

Do you or your customer get a discount when you're both only connected with a transit ISP? No, both parties pay for connection to the transit ISP (even if it's the same).

Traditional wired telephone networks are almost always caller pays (although cellphones in the US are caller pays toll, callee pays for wireless segment), but IP networking has always been both end points pay. It's not some new thing Comcast (or whoever) invented in 2006 or whenever.

If you want to connect to customers behind ISP A, you typically need to pay an ISP that's connected to ISP A, or pay ISP A, or qualify for peering with ISP A. If you and ISP A are both paying ISP B for that data, then there's motivation for you an ISP A to peer; if not, ISP A says we're happy to take your traffic through peering with these ISPs or you can pay us for a direct connection. Maybe a bit less cost for 'paid peering' vs a full transit connection.

In the old days of dial-up, all you needed to start an ISP was two T1s, one for your uplink, one for your modem pool. Once you got a little bigger, you'd look to see what content networks you could peer with to reduce your transit budget. After the move to broadband which has a bias towards only two, maybe three companies running wires to homes, and the FCCs abandonment of mandatory line sharing from the telecom act of 1996, we run into the situation where there's a handful of residential ISPs nationwide, and they almost all run transit networks, and there's no longer an economic incentive for them to peer with content networks --- they can justify peering with most other transit ISPs, so there's no cost savings from peering; and they have no competitive need to offer better service.

The solution isn't mandating 'neutral treatment', it's mandating competitive local access markets via mandatory line sharing[1], and splitting up the national transit business from the last-mile business, ala 1984 AT&T.

[1] But with tighter regulations, so that incumbents can't cross-subsidize retail prices to be lower than wholesale pricing as was common in the early 2000s before mandatory line sharing ended; building out new wiring where line sharing was infeasible was another common loophole. It'd be way more competitive if the wiring providers weren't permitted to offer retail services, but that might be a bit too meddlesome.

Re: FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel

#230

One of the biggest arguments I remember being made back when net neutrality was a hot topic was that ISPs would bundle and sell specific websites as tiered plans. Infographics like this one [1] were shared widely. Has this happened in the US? I’ve definitely seen ISPs start to apply data caps and throttling, but haven’t seen the aforementioned packaging (at least with the major ISPs). I ask because this is one of the…

The sky was supposed to fall if net neutrality were abrogated, and IME, that hasn't happened. The only change I (and people I know) witnessed was throttling once broad data limits were exceeded, which IIRC wasn't what was at stake, and which I for one didn't object to, i.e., that people would have to pay for what they use. In short, I have not seen bandwidth or pricing weaponized at all to target specific businesses…

At one of my previous places, AT&T offered FTTN, but only if you used their router. The router somehow managed to break next-level NAT, so there was no way to use FTTN without giving AT&T access to your LAN. That violates California's network neutrality laws that prohibit discriminating against certain devices (though so does every single cell carrier plan that prohibits tethering, or swapping a phone with a tablet or a 5G dongle).

The cell phone companies around here also all have some form of blurring video for some streaming providers, and bundling subscriptions to other video providers.

Comcast definitely weaponized data caps with absurd overage fees, and also didn't invest in backend network infrastructure until they were under 3MBps average video streaming speeds on their 100MBps plans.

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