Perhaps this means the other shoe will fall. Will local regulations making it easy for municipalities or other actors to set up their own ISPs?
Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
111–120 of 131 posts
Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
#112Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
#113Why is this not a bigger deal?
Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
#114We could make all the laws we want about Net Neutrality, it wouldn't change the fundamental flaw that made this problem possible in the first place: too much centralization.
I hear that the US, there are only 2 ISPs: one of the big 2, or the little local one. In France, we have about 4. At the other end, we have Google, Amazon, but most notably we have YouTube and Netflix.
Clearly the market is not efficient. Why do we have so big players in the first place? Why do we tend to have only the big players?
Because of the infrastructure. In the way the internet is distributed, artificial economies of scale and barriers to entry favour the big ISPs (this is clearly the case in France, I suppose the US is the same). And, we have asymmetric bandwidth, which kills peer to peer exchanges. If people were allowed to host servers at home, there would be no need for things such as YouTube, Blogger, or Facebook (search engine are still a thorny problem, though).
If we got rid of this over-centralization, it would be harder to discriminate your bandwidth in the first place. Net Neutrality would be the default, instead of something we have to fight for.
Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
#115Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why should ISP 's be stopped from discriminating? A company that blocked Google would find its competitor's saturation bombing ads for "Google compatible" Internet service. Followed by the tort lawyers saturation bombing ads for class action lawsuits alleging breach of contract and tortious interference in contracts.
right, but a company who blocked a startup competing with google would face next to no backlash, while (if they were big enough) severely disadvantaging said startup. heck, it doesn't take blocking - what if google loaded in 0.05 seconds and duckduckgo loaded in 1 second? i'm pretty sure that would push most of the users google's way.
This, right here, is the real danger - that relinquishing net neutrality will end up stifling competition and, thus, innovation.
You can't prioritise some packets without disadvantaging others. Unless the rules were crafted very, very carefully (and, let's face it, do we really think that would happen), I could easily envisage major connectivity providers auctioning off a handful of "prime video streamer" slots to companies like YouTube and Netflix, leaving other companies' services unusable. And that's just what I can imagine - the unintended consequences that I can't imagine are potentially far, far worse.
We got from 14.4k dial-up to multi-megabit always-on broadband (both fixed-line AND mobile) without compromising on net neutrality. The potential disadvantages far outweigh the claimed advantages.
Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
#116Definitions from US Code Title 47: "(1) Advanced communications services The term “advanced communications services” means— (A) interconnected VoIP service; (B) non-interconnected VoIP service; (C) electronic messaging service; and (D) interoperable video conferencing service." "(11) Common carrier The term “common carrier” or “carrier” means any person engaged as a common carrier for hire, in interstate or foreign c…
common carrier n. - an individual, a company or a public utility (like municipal buses) which is in the regular business of transporting people and/or freight. freight n. - Goods carried by a vessel or vehicle, especially by a commercial carrier; cargo. Packets are neither classified as people nor freight.
They could be classified as freight ... if you implemented RFC 1149 using FedEx instead of avian carriers.
Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's a fairly narrow and presumptious definition of the possible consequences resulting from a lack of Net Neutrality. There is no real limitation on how the ISPs can wield their power AFAIK. For instance, why wouldn't they offer HuffingtonPost (essentially a blog) the opportunity to buy faster access for their readers? But, even if we were to take your assumptions at face value, I'm not sure how you gloss over oth…
All I argued that it isn't an ethical issue. Because it isn't. >How can something be both made willfully unfair, yet be ethical? Is it unethical that Yankees spend twice the league average on their ball-club because it is most certainly unfair. After all, not every team gets to be based in New York. And I'd be careful with words like 'fairness'. A socialist and a libertarian will have vastly different definitions of…
> Netflix didn't spend billions building and maintaining the infrastructure, as well as acquiring all those customers.
Neither did the telecoms spend billions in developing movie streaming software, yet they benefited from all the content consumption.
> Telecoms got subsidies to build their infrastructure, but they never agreed to Net Neutrality. Is that fair?
Neither did they explicitly assert that they will be net-biased.
Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
#118How much should the rest of the world care about this?
If a web service is hosted, say, in Europe and is being consumed by a customer also in Europe, will they be affected? AFAICT, they shouldn't.
Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
#119How much should the rest of the world care about this? If a web service is hosted, say, in Europe and is being consumed by a customer also in Europe, will they be affected? AFAICT, they shouldn't.
That's like saying the rest of the world shouldn't care about the UK's content filtering. None of us live in isolation; all our lawmakers are friends and they like to share ideas and cut deals.
Re: Net neutrality is half-dead: Court strikes down FCC’s anti-blocking rules
#120I know this isn't a popular opinion, but I think we need to reconsider accepting precedent that we're OK with the US government regulating the Internet (without legislation, no less). With the concern about surveillance, copyright abuse, DMCA/Computer Fraud and Abuse Act abuse, and content regulation (in the case of the UK and China), is this really the solution we're looking for? Neutrality is a real problem, but this seems like throwing the baby out with the bathwater.