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FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

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Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#161

Post by SllX »

godelski wrote: post #149
SllX wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except for the fact that the facts are different. When you sign up with an ISP, you’re signing up for a guaranteed service at a physical location with defined jurisdictional borders and laws governing it. My ISP throttling their New York customers who try to use Netflix isn’t going to affect me. Honestly throttling their Oregon customers wouldn’t either. This is factually different from Facebook who serves people ind…

> When you sign up with an ISP, you’re signing up for a guaranteed service at a physical location with defined jurisdictional borders It's messier than that. This works if all NY, OR, gets its traffic distributed through a guaranteed hub in those locations. Specifically when you know the end point of the user. Let's just take the simple case and say a Google employee sitting in a CA office is working with a Microsoft…

ISPs are already rate-limiting users based off the service tier they paid for. If you’re paying for 250 Mbps down and 1 Mbps up, you’re not getting the 1 Gbps down 5 Mbps up connection that your neighbor is offering. If you choose to upgrade to the 1 Gbps plan, you’re using the same equipment over the same wire.

Choosing to then sell you an additional premium option where you get the full 1 Gbps you theoretically could get but don’t already pay for, but they’ll give it to you for a selection of curated services including their own is possible, and to incentivize you to not use a VPN, they won’t count it against your data cap when you access Netflix at 4K on 4 screens simultaneously because you’re now a VIP customer—all of that would violate the spirit of net neutrality. T-Mobile already does similar things as a “bonus” for their customers and technically, it’s not net neutral. There’s all kinds of ways to discriminate between paying customers, and that was the original fear of not having net neutrality: that the internet would become just like cable TV. That hasn’t happened with or without net neutrality as law (or as an FCC rule at least). Pretty much most markets have explicit data caps on some ISPs at least now, but the way it started was ISPs rolled that out slowly, over the course of years, market by market.

You are correct that other States could pass similar laws. I don’t follow the politics of other States much, but if California can do it, so can they, but other States can’t rely solely on the fact that California did a thing and now they don’t have to bother taking any legislative action themselves, if it’s important anyway (and I’m not convinced this particular issue counts as important). California even won in Federal court, great! There’s precedent for it now, but that doesn’t mean ISPs would necessarily lose in a different circuit, and they could always force a circuit split in a friendlier district.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#162

Post by wredue »

FireBeyond wrote: post #132
swashboon wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was why Netflix setup Fast.com to use production servers and use data loads that mimic actual streaming video. Early on in streaming ISPs were throttling Netflix traffic when the household streaming demands started spiking (around 6 at night when every house in America would get home and turn on some streams). I believe there was a whole fight over peering agreements related to that... Speedtest.net was definite…

> Speedtest.net was definitely getting gamed and may still be or at least Comcast et al was prioritizing burst traffic Hell, during the height of this Comcast partnered with Speedtest, and now hav their own Speedtest servers all over the country, so you don't even leave Comcast's network.

I think most larger ISPs current have their own speed test nodes these days.

It’s problematic if they don’t, because if Comcast detects a virgin running a speed test, they can throttle virgin traffic to give lies as results. So virgin need to run their own nodes.

If you kill net neutrality, that behaviour is legal.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#163

Post by hn_acker »

slaymaker1907 wrote: post #153
rich_sasha wrote: post #82

Not an American: what is the non-libertarian public-facing argument against net neutrality? I'm sure its opponents say it's bad for the general public for some reason, and one of them might be some kind of "let market competition work it out" etc. If you discard that, what is left? There is probably also the argument that various businesses want this repealed, this is kind of clear.

Some applications want extremely low latency compared to pretty much anything else such as cloud gaming. Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently. It's kind of like how when ordering stuff online, sometimes you don't care if it takes 3 weeks to arrive but other times you want same day shipping. It would be a bad experience if U…

> Net neutrality rules might get in the way of a cloud gaming service negotiating with an ISP to route their traffic more efficiently.

This is not convincing to me at all. ISPs could have supported low latency internet for everything, not just for gaming. If latency is too low then it's because the large ISPs are purposefully doing a bad job of upgrading to fiber and expanding fiber to places without internet access. Fiber would allow ISPs to provide service for cheap and still profit in the long term [1]. Subsidy fraud is as normal as breathing among large telecom companies such as AT&T [2], Comcast [3], and Verizon [4].

Internet bandwidth is not like shipping of physical goods. Sending twice the data doesn't cost the ISP twice the money, nor does it take twice the time. Data caps are artificial and unnecessary [5]. Any ISP trying to justify expensive, fast internet by bringing up metaphors of physical transfers and physical scarcity is lying to you.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/06/why-slow-networks-real...

[2] https://www.techdirt.com/2020/10/06/mississippi-says-att-too...

[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con...

[4] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/16/verizon-t-mobile-oversta...

[5] https://publicknowledge.org/no-cap-the-truth-about-data-caps...]

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#164

Post by hn_acker »

wslh wrote: post #58

Is data portability being treated by any government group? The last time I tried LinkedIn denied my access to their API, it seems it is "arbitrarily open".

I don't know, but that has nothing to do with the FCC. The FCC does not have the authority to regulate what online companies do. Data portability is something Congress has yet to pass laws on. If Congress passes such a law, then it would probably place the responsibility of enforcing data portability onto the FTC.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#165

Post by wredue »

arghnoname wrote: post #127
RankingMember wrote: post #118

This is exactly the kind of thing I point to when disaffected people say that voting for Democrat or Republican presidents makes no difference. I'm not saying either are roses, but one has clearly different results in unsexy-but-important issues like net neutrality.

It's not clear to me which party is more supportive of a 'free' internet. During the Trump and COVID era Democrats became much more aggressive in advocating for and explicitly pushing censorship regimes against what they consider to be misinformation. Probably any political faction on earth is going to want to control information flows to their advantage. Whoever you vote for will probably want to censor or limit the…

The free internet has absolutely nothing to do with disallowing business from supporting terrorism on their software platforms dude.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#166

Post by hn_acker »

seanw444 wrote: post #129
jpalawaga wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regulation is a response to bad behaviour, not the cause of it. We started with a free market. People acted poorly. In came regulation. Specifically: regulation that was not imposed on us as society, but of our own choosing. Not to say that regulation can't cause issues of it's own. But regulation (believe it or not) is there for a reason, even if imperfect. Actually, it's quite telling that you confused 'free market…

Leaving it up to what people are willing and capable of doing sounds as fair as can be to me. That's what competition is there for. It also is not perfect, but it is better. I expect to get dogpiled on Hacker News though. The demographic here has a fondness of rules. We give computers rules. That fondness translates to non-technical fields, for better or for worse. In this case, worse.

> Leaving it up to what people are willing and capable of doing sounds as fair as can be to me. That's what competition is there for. It also is not perfect, but it is better.

Is it better? Congress and the FCC has never done much to punish wrongdoing by ISPs [1]. Large ISPs including AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon commit subsidy fraud with impunity. (See the links in my other comment. [2])

And on the issue of fairness, large ISPs [3][4][5] and some government officials [6][7] do their best to prevent broadband subsidixes from reaching small local ISPs. At the very least, the FCC should (and won't, but should) place heavy penalties on large ISPs for their abuses of customers [8]. By heavy penalties, I mean at least 80% of the revenue gained from anti-competitive practices.

[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/22/fcc-adds-a-nutrition-lab...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949298

[3] https://communitynets.org/content/monopoly-providers-mire-nt...

[4] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/02/15/report-shows-comcast-con...

[5] https://www.techdirt.com/2015/04/16/alec-threatens-to-sue-cr...

[6] https://www.techdirt.com/2021/02/19/new-bill-tries-to-ban-co...

[7] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/04/11/illinois-missouri-and-ne...

[8] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/06/couple-bought-ho...

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#167

Post by s3p »

joecool1029 wrote: post #126
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>50% of US GDP is in states that are almost certainly going to prevent traffic throttling: https://www.naruc.org/nrri/nrri-activities/net-neutrality-tr... It's probably not worth it to add in a whole bunch of BS just to try to make a bit more money in maybe Fl and Tx. Especially given the fact that it's not as straightforward as it seems - and legal consequences could easily outweigh any benefits. On top of that, I'd…

> Net neutrality is wildly popular with the public. In the tech bubble. Outside of the bubble you will be hard pressed to find people able to actually articulate what net neutrality is. And those people are easily swayed by partisan means: ('The democrats want more government regulation that's going to increase your internet and wireless bills') ISP's only have to claim 'your costs have gone up due to new government…

This did not happen. Net neutrality was supported by EVERYONE who was not in government at the time.

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#168

Post by s3p »

pyuser583 wrote: post #11

Did any of the bad effects of not having net neutrality actually occur when it was gone? Did ISPs throttle competition? I haven’t seen any reports of this happening. I haven’t seen any studies showing this happening systematically. I’m woefully uninformed, so I really would like to hear more about this. What has been happening these past few years?

Remember the Verizon zombie cookie?

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/verizons-zombie-cookies-will-f...

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#169

Post by hn_acker »

bombcar wrote: post #96
rich_sasha wrote: post #82

Not an American: what is the non-libertarian public-facing argument against net neutrality? I'm sure its opponents say it's bad for the general public for some reason, and one of them might be some kind of "let market competition work it out" etc. If you discard that, what is left? There is probably also the argument that various businesses want this repealed, this is kind of clear.

In a simplistic view, net neutrality prohibits QoS bandwidth allocation. You can't prioritize video over Linux ISO downloads. In reality that would be solvable.

Indeed. There should be no need for bandwidth "allocation" because fiber would provide enough for high-bandwidth tasks (video and games) and low-bandwidth tasks (sending emails) at the same time, for everyone. If large ISPs hadn't been purposefully committing subsidy fraud instead of building fiber, they wouldn't have to rely on lies about network scarcity. (For bonus info, see another comment I wrote [1].)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37949298

Re: FCC moves ahead with Title II net neutrality rules in 3-2 party-line vote

#170

Post by hn_acker »

r00fus wrote: post #110
bombcar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a simplistic view, net neutrality prohibits QoS bandwidth allocation. You can't prioritize video over Linux ISO downloads. In reality that would be solvable.

This is not true at all. What it means is that an ISP can't prioritize their own video service over say, Netflix. Or their own (perhaps ad-infested) download service vs a straight ISO download from a distro's site.

Net neutrality prohibits ISPs from restricting internet traffic based on content, senders, and recipients [1]. It is not exclusively about restricting internet for profit reasons.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality

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