It would be great to get things like this out of the hands of arbitrary-law-makers (aka regulators).
As opposed to ... what, for-sale-lawmakers?
Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
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Re: Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
#32It would be great to get things like this out of the hands of arbitrary-law-makers (aka regulators).
I agree with you. Government regulation of the internet is going down the wrong hole. It's odd that opposing opinions can't be discussed on HN. They're just downvoted into oblivion and a hivemind forms.
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Re: Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
#33They are just getting warmed up for 2015
Imagine if they grab both sides of washington in 2016 and then the supreme court nominations by the end of this decade.
Country will become a wasteland.
Re: Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree with you. Government regulation of the internet is going down the wrong hole. It's odd that opposing opinions can't be discussed on HN. They're just downvoted into oblivion and a hivemind forms.
It isn't government regulation of the internet. It's government regulation of cable companies that provide the internet. I don't want the government monitoring or restricting my internet. I would like the government to prevent companies from doing that to me.
> It isn't government regulation of the internet. It's government regulation of cable companies that provide the internet.
I think this is a distinction without a difference.
It isn't a restriction of free speech. It's a restriction on what the newspapers can print to deliver the speech.
Re: Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
#35I would like to see net neutrality force uploads and downloads on service provided to consumers be equal. 50megabit service, allows 50megabit upload.
No, you actually dont. All ISPs operate on oversubscribing each available meg. If they did what you are proposing, the only options would be 1 mb up/down stream, 3 MB up/down speed, and 5 mb up/down speed. Many ISPs have 100-10,000x over subscriptions per meg
I think asymmetric links and oversubscribed link are apples and oranges.
Re: Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think it can be tied to payments though. It would really be just what you think is more important on your network.
Based on the text quoted in the article, I think it's relevant to note that traffic can't be prioritized "based on compensation or lack thereof by the sender to the broadband Internet access service provider." I may be reading it wrong, but to me that says specifically that ISPs can't hold content providers hostage for payments, but says nothing about throttling end users' access to content.
Theoretically the goal is to allow some forms of desired prioritization without giving these natural monopolies a huge club to beat service providers up with.
We want to be able to do prioritization of packets. QoS is not inherently evil. A smarter network can fully serve more clients for the same $$$ of infra, by understanding and prioritizing packets which are more or less sensitive to latency and/or packet loss.
The problem is we simply can't trust the ISPs, and there's no choice / no competition to switch to when they misbehave. And as we can see, it's very difficult to write a law which only allows these "acceptable" forms of QoS.
For example, if a customer wants lower latency on their VPN tunnel used for 4K HD video conferencing from home to the office, is it OK for Comcast to offer a higher priced plan to the consumer to get that? I think we want to keep these options open, and saying it has to be an opt-in service and show up on the consumers bill is an interesting middle-ground.
The other part is ensuring the baseline service is actually providing what they say it is, and if you can't get a reliable 5Mbps netflix stream to work 95% of the time on your "50Mbps" plan then they are failing their baseline SLA and customers should be entitled to refunds.
Re: Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
#37So captured Congressmen and the cable lobby rebranded the much rumored Title X after activist groups started referring to it as "Title Xfinity." Sen John Thune, a primary sponsor of this bill, has taken over $50,000 in political contributions between AT&T, Comcast, NCTA, Time Warner Cable, U.S. Telecom, and PACs associated with these groups. We're not talking about a well-reasoned GOP alternative to "Obama's plan to…
Several big name tech companies are against net neutrality rules: Intel, Qualcomm, Cisco, IBM, Juniper Networks, Corning, Panasonic, dLink, Broadcom, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, among many other notable tech companies. http://www.tiaonline.org/sites/default/files/pages/Internet_... It's ignorant to assume only those who support this bill benefit from political contributions. It almost seems as if the people who are mos…
Or they just want to sell DPI gear.
Re: Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Based on the text quoted in the article, I think it's relevant to note that traffic can't be prioritized "based on compensation or lack thereof by the sender to the broadband Internet access service provider." I may be reading it wrong, but to me that says specifically that ISPs can't hold content providers hostage for payments, but says nothing about throttling end users' access to content.
Theoretically the goal is to allow some forms of desired prioritization without giving these natural monopolies a huge club to beat service providers up with. We want to be able to do prioritization of packets. QoS is not inherently evil. A smarter network can fully serve more clients for the same $$$ of infra, by understanding and prioritizing packets which are more or less sensitive to latency and/or packet loss. T…
> And as we can see, it's very difficult to write a law which only allows these "acceptable" forms of QoS.
The IP header has QoS bits. It's not hard to write a law that doesn't prohibit ISPs from honoring those bits, or even from charging customers for a given amount of bandwidth at a given level of service. As long as any service/application can tag their packets however they like, and as long as the ISP is treating all equivalently tagged packets equivalently, there is no network neutrality problem with that. And it provides a clear line.
Trying to put significantly more complicated logic than that into the middle of the network in order to try to recognize specific types of traffic is inherently defective anyway. The ISP would end up picking winners and losers based on what traffic it recognizes for prioritization. And it would inherently bias the future of the internet against innovations because new protocols would be unrecognized until they became sufficiently popular and would never become sufficiently popular if they can't be prioritized but have to compete against incumbent protocols that are.
Re: Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
It isn't government regulation of the internet. It's government regulation of cable companies that provide the internet. I don't want the government monitoring or restricting my internet. I would like the government to prevent companies from doing that to me.
> It isn't government regulation of the internet. It's government regulation of cable companies that provide the internet. I think this is a distinction without a difference. It isn't a restriction of free speech. It's a restriction on what the newspapers can print to deliver the speech.
> It isn't a restriction of free speech. It's a restriction on what the newspapers can print to deliver the speech.
It's a restriction on bus drivers refusing passengers based on what newspaper they're reading.
Re: Republican net neutrality bill would gut FCC’s authority over broadband
#40So captured Congressmen and the cable lobby rebranded the much rumored Title X after activist groups started referring to it as "Title Xfinity." Sen John Thune, a primary sponsor of this bill, has taken over $50,000 in political contributions between AT&T, Comcast, NCTA, Time Warner Cable, U.S. Telecom, and PACs associated with these groups. We're not talking about a well-reasoned GOP alternative to "Obama's plan to…
> captured Congressmen The FCC actually seems more captured than congress. The head of the FCC is a former lobbyist for ISPs and Telcos.
That's kind of misleading (not your fault, I'm sure...the tech press has done a terrible reporting job).
He was President of the National Cable Television Association, the major cable industry trade group. They did do lobbying, but he left that job in 1984. At the time he held this position, it was just about television. The members of NCTA did not offer internet service or telecommunications services, for the simple reason that there was no public internet yet. The cable companies were all relatively small--the consolidation that led to the small number of giant companies we have now had not happened yet.
The other telecom group he was involved with that does lobbying is CTIA, which is the major trade group for cellular and wireless. He was their President from 1992 to 2004. As I said, they do some lobbying. They also do a lot of testing and evaluation of devices, develop standards and certifications, administer the short code system, put on a couple major trade shows, do safety campaigns and educational programs to teach responsible wireless use (e.g., don't text while driving), and assorted other things along those lines.
The regulations for wireless phone service he negotiated with the FCC in the mid '90s are similar to the Title II proposal that seems to be on the way--which is an approach that the current CTIA objects to for internet. (And note that this approach worked well for phone. All the carriers massively expanded their infrastructure, cellular voice is quite competitive, ubiquitous, and cheap).
Between those positions, and after the latter, he's been involved with a bunch of companies as founder, President (or CEO or similar), or board member. These have been in a variety of areas, including aerospace component repair, investment banking, wireless providers, cloud services, and content providers. (He's also was on the PBS board, and was a trustee of the Kennedy Center, and wrote a couple history books on the civil war--he seems to have very wide interests).
Taken as a whole, he's been involved heavily in organizations or companies that have reason to be on pretty much every side of any telecom issue, so if he does have some prejudice toward any past employer there is no reason to believe it would be toward ISPs. His actions certainly don't show signs of pro-ISP prejudice, considering that most of his proposals have pissed them off.