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

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

#231

Post by hedora »

I'd rather they focus on universal broadband access:

1) Set a minimum 1th percentile download and upload speeds and 99th percentile RTTs, bucketed in 1 minute intervals over a 30 day period. If an ISP falls below that for more than 1% of customers, then they automatically lose any right of way exclusivity that they hold, and also are broken into a common carrier and retail group.

1a) Throttled / non-prioritized / blocked services count toward the SLA.

2) If a telco is not meeting the universal access requirements in an area, then their networks are automatically transferred to a telco that is meeting the requirements. The receiving telco must hold the infrastructure until it meets SLAs for 10 years. If all the local telcos fail, then ownership reverts to a locally-owned (no more than 100K subscribers) co-ops.

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

#232

Post by hn_acker »

Net neutrality is gone, so why is the internet mostly the same (to people with money to spare for higher bandwidth tiers which are just as overpriced as the lower tiers)? Because STATES (Washington, Oregon, and California) passed net neutrality laws to partially compensate for the lack of regulation from the top [1].

But in the first place, net neutrality does nothing about affordability [2], subsidy fraud + corruption [3], deceptive pricing [4], and regulatory capture [5]. Net neutrality would be a relatively minor consequence of a competitive internet service market. In other words, net neutrality is a necessary outcome and nothing close to a sufficient condition.

[1] https://www.naruc.org/nrri/nrri-activities/net-neutrality-tr...

[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/what-low-income-people...

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/19/senator-ted-cruz-pretend...

[4] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/fcc-says-too-bad...

[5] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/07/after-years-of-stupid-ga...

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

#233

Post by hedora »

rsingel wrote: post #183
vxNsr wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

NN rules didn’t (and likely won’t) affect mobile carriers due to the limited nature of wireless spectrum, the FCC views throttling and data prioritization as a necessary evil.

This is not true. FCC net neutrality rules apply to mobile carriers. So do the ones in California Europe India and Canada. There is leewway for a reasonable ment, but those measures can only be used temporarily during times of congestion and have to be as application agnostic as possible

If that is the case, then 100% of cell carriers are in violation of the law.

If you know of a counterexample I'd like to hear it. In particular, California network neutrality says they can't discriminate against services or devices.

Complying with the law would imply that any 5G plan could work with any 5G device, so people could use their $10/month tablet add on plans for home broadband and laptops / tethering.

Similarly no company would be offering bundles or degrading streaming bandwidth on a per-service basis.

For what it's worth, Comcast is also obviously in violation of the above rules, as are the AT&T business 5G terms of service (which specifically say you can't use the service for residential services, such as streaming video, but you can use it for things like video conferencing.)

It could just be that the law is not being enforced.

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

#234

Post by 15457345234 »

tzs wrote: post #227
thfuran wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 y…

A 1TB cap really hides the issue. Let's reflect on the impact with a more restrictive cap, say, 10GB.

If my ISP gives me 10GB from any service that isn't big_video_streamer but unlimited data from big_video_streamer it's immediately obvious that while they're not 'deciding' how I use their connectivity they're definitely 'coercing' me into going with big_video_streamer if I want to stream videos, which isn't their job as - ideally - a neutral conduit for traffic.

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

#235

Post by xenadu02 »

BurningFrog wrote: post #204

The internet developed without Net Neutrality. 2015-2017 there was Net Neutrality. 2018-2023 there was not. Empirically, the disaster that Net Neutrality claims to avoid, is hard to observe.

That is not correct at all. The internet developed with "net neutrality" because that's how ARPANET and later the internet had always worked. Peering agreements developed based on symmetrical traffic loads and providers regularly upgraded links as needed.

NN was originally imposed by the FCC because Verizon started blocking VPNs, requiring customers to pay for a "business" plan if they wanted VPN support. That was the first wide-scale break with internet tradition and it rightly freaked a lot of people out.

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

#236

Post by hedora »

lr4444lr wrote: post #154
AlexandrB wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If net neutrality is not relevant anyways, why are ISPs so dead set against it?

Because it kept them under the FCC's thumb as common carriers, forcing them into inefficiencies to comply with regulations. There's a ton of stuff I want the govt. more involved with on the internet: data privacy, clamping down on CSAM, section 230 issues... forcing ISPs to take a total hands off approach to every traffic source on their pipes? That wasn't one of them. NN harmed ISPs' incentive to innovate. I have si…

Isn't the US still dead last among developed countries at "faster speeds at cheaper prices"?

Places with common carrier setups do much better on average, as do US ISP's that focus on building out networks instead of spying on users and regulating traffic content.

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

#237

Post by lr4444lr »

thomastjeffery wrote: post #171
sfifs wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are about 70 cities in the world with a larger population than the whole of country of Finland - so maybe there is a representativeness challenge in this comparison.

That means it actually cost more to build the infrastructure per capita.

Yeah, but generally network costs grow with n^2 the number of users.

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

#238

Post by hedora »

cptskippy wrote: post #69
AlexandrB wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If net neutrality is not relevant anyways, why are ISPs so dead set against it?

A concern from ISPs is that they will lose the ability to shape and prioritize traffic, something that is often necessary. A concern from consumers is that services will be restricted or rendered unusable by throttling selectively driving customers away from services. A concern from Service Providers is that they will have to make deals with ISPs to ensure quality of service. They're valid concerns on all sides and w…

Shaping and prioritizing traffic can be done in a service-agnostic way, so the sorts of shaping they can make money off of are never "necessary."

The anti-network neutrality thing is just a money grab.

Here's a good-enough traffic shaping algorithm:

Each user gets their traffic put into two queues. High bandwidth flows go into a the low priority queues. Low bandwidth (video conferencing, interactive) flows go into the high priority queue. You round robin between all the users' queues at the local node level. If the trunk line is saturated by a few users, then their queues will be long, causing their flows to backpressure. Everyone else's queues will have ~ 1 packet in them, leading to no backpressure and negligible latency.

It's extremely difficult to do better than the solution I just sketched. It is stateless, and it is also very easy to approximate in hardware. It even handles the "I want to torrent and VOIP at the same time" problem.

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

#239

Post by somenameforme »

mattnewton wrote: post #80
deltarholamda wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Like many government regulations, it has a great name, "Net Neutrality," which, when it is actually implemented, will do much more than make the 'Net neutral. Maybe, at first, it will have something to do with "you can't throttle Web services," but it will morph into "you MUST throttle this particular Web service, it spreads disinformation, which makes the Net less neutral." It is what always happens. It is more reli…

What? How would regulation that “you must not throttle” lead to regulation for “you just throttle”? That makes no sense.

The most typical way this is done is through selective enforcement. You create rules that most of anybody can be argued to be breaking, but only enforce it for individuals or organizations that you have an issue with. With net neutrality it's pretty easy to see how this would happen. The previous net neutrality rules, under Tom Wheeler, included a carveout for nearly all rules under anything that could be justified as "reasonable network management."

This carveout is necessary due to the nature of network management, but it creates an interesting scenario. That term was used literally dozens of times, but also defined absolutely nowhere. This now gives politicians the ability to interpret it, as they see fit. For a company that runs afoul of the powers that be, suddenly it's a standard that can't be met. For those in favor, anything can be accepted as "reasonable network management."

And this is how corruption and tyranny typically works works. The cases of a somebody going completely rogue, or a politician doing something after being handed golden bars or a bag of cash - do still happen. But, by and large, the system is big enough, and complex enough, that if somebody with enough power wants to screw somebody - they can do it legally. And if somebody protests inequitable or unfair treatment, just call it a whataboutism.

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

#240

Post by hedora »

exabrial wrote: post #62
cddotdotslash wrote: post #4

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…

No it hasn’t. We’re fighting a boogieman. Instead, we’re going to do is further entrench local monopolies, since only the large guys will be able to afford to comply with regulation. You literally can’t force corporate Americas to act beneficial to their consumers of incentives are misaligned. It takes literal FDA-levels of regulation to accomplish that, and even that has failures while generally making the entire pr…

How does this cause a compliance burden? It's banning the deployment of optional technologies.

If anything, this will help small players, since it prevents big ISPs from using their market leverage to negotiate favorable terms with service providers, and doing that levels the playing field.

For instance, there was a time when you could only get high resolution Netflix through large ISPs, since they'd forced Netflix to sign some CDN deal by messing with transit pricing.

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