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ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

arstechnica.com

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Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#231

Post by noworriesnate »

hansel_der wrote: post #226
Karunamon wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe regulators should look into that? Common practices or not, it’s nothing short of fraudulent to sell something you know you can’t provide.

isp contracts usually include something called an Service Level Agreement (SLA) that gives room for this sort of service degredation. maybe there should be some discussion over statistical properties of that degredation and minimum service levels, because ppl tend to watch tv at roughly the same time.

Instead of regulating the statistical properties of the degradation, what if we just required ISPs to refund customers for times when they tried to use the bandwidth they were sold but couldn’t? Maybe the refunds could be 1.2 times the original price of that bandwidth. So if there’s an outage, you don’t pay for that time. That might line up the incentives better.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#232

Post by Cerium »

brezelgoring wrote: post #225
RealStickman_ wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's why every website should use HTTPS.

I don't know if that would change things, they know the whole SSL Handshake by virtue of being the ISP. I'm not sure anything can save you here.

I think the point of SSL is that parties in the middle with full view of the communications still cannot view or manipulate payload.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#233

Post by hansel_der »

Karunamon wrote: post #222
lelandfe wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's definitely expensive (2014 data): https://www.broadbandsearch.net/blog/internet-costs-compared... > the United States ranks second on the list of OECD countries, behind only Mexico, for most expensive internet prices > When we look at Europe as a whole, we can see that the United States pays more for broadband internet access than any other country on the continent; in fact, rates in the US are more than double…

I don’t think data that is eight years old is really relevant anymore, especially on a technical topic like this. Is there anything newer? I'd expect prices for bandwidth to decrease over time.

wholesale connectivity is getting cheaper, but consumer bandwidth cost is largely driven by last mile cost, where not that much has changed in the last decade (docsis3 has made cable somewhat tolerable and falling optics prices have made ftth attainable) .

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#234

Post by pessimizer »

wodenokoto wrote: post #215
wrycoder wrote: post #2

> California's net neutrality law is similar to the federal rules repealed under former FCC Chairman Ajit Pai. California prohibits ISPs from blocking or throttling lawful traffic. It also prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers, bans paid data cap exemptions (so-called "zero-rating"), and says that ISPs may not attempt to evade net neutrality prot…

Recently I ran out of mobile data, and using my phone providers app, I couldn’t buy any additional data, because I had no data left to connect to them. There are definitely circumstances where it makes sense to give users free access to data, just like how it makes sense that you can call toll free numbers. The opportunity for abuse is probably large enough to warrant that we can’t have nice things.

Your ISP is not charging itself to connect to you.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#235

Post by ZoomerCretin »

scld wrote: post #223
ekianjo wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. Really? Some highly developed countries have fairly expensive Internet as well. Not sure the US is much of an exception, if you consider not just the cheapest countries.

Not per megabit. It's middle of the pack. It's also like half to a quarter as dense as most Europeans areas being discussed. It's expensive in large part because of our myriad land use nightmares.

The density argument falls apart in our cities, which are frequently both dense and have expensive (per megabit) internet

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#236

Post by jaywalk »

monocasa wrote: post #228
mbg721 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The entire reason "Let's Go Brandon" became a thing was that the incident validated conservative complaints about big media bias. It was "Were you saying 'Boo', or 'Boo-urns'??" in real life.

Sort of. AFAICT, it had more to do with the fact that you can't drop knowingly allow f-bombs on broadcast TV without having your license taken away, so sometimes reporters will pretend they misheard something so they don't have to cut away during live interviews.

Nah, the profanity rules are substantially relaxed for live broadcasts these days. "Fleeting expletives" will not trigger a fine. Indeed, just watch a Sunday afternoon NFL game and you're guaranteed to hear some naughty words. Primetime games generally use a delay so the audio can be dumped, but the afternoon games don't bother with it even though they're on broadcast TV as well.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#237

Post by shukantpal »

RHSeeger wrote: post #217
bberenberg wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't support this, but I can try to steel man this position. Largely it comes with the idea that use = cost, and that infrastructure has limited capacity and is therefore zeroish sum. For example, a common idea is that we should tax trucks more than other cars because they cause a large amount of damage to our roads. Following that logic, the companies that encourage users to consume more bandwidth should be charg…

If I pay you to bring me a package from , all is well. If 10 other people pay you to bring them packages from , all is well. If 100 want to pay you to bring them packages from and you suddenly don't have enough manpower to deliver those packages... do you suddenly start charging because they have too many people that want packages? No, because that would be ridiculous.

No it wouldn’t be ridiculous because both the sender and receiver are customers here

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#238

Post by jaywalk »

Karunamon wrote: post #219
jaywalk wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There isn't a consumer ISP anywhere that doesn't oversubscribe bandwidth. It makes zero sense to give a residential connection dedicated bandwidth.

Maybe regulators should look into that? Common practices or not, it’s nothing short of fraudulent to sell something you know you can’t provide.

They're selling a service that provides "up to" the quoted speeds. Generally, the provisioned rate is actually higher than the quoted speeds, so unless the ISP is particularly awful they definitely can provide those speeds. Just not 100% of the time, which is why they're "up to."

The amount of capacity required to guarantee speeds would be massive. And how far does that extend? Does the ISP have to maintain that capacity just within their network? Or would every peering connection also have to be able to handle 100% of subscriber bandwidth?

The whole idea quickly falls apart as soon as you look at it a little deeper.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#239

Post by ZoomerCretin »

jmyeet wrote: post #46

The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least). Pai's argument for repealing net neutrality was that it wasn't a Federal government concern. That was originally what prompted California to institute these rules. But suddenly it wasn't a state issue either. Weird . The US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world…

> The whole net neutrality saga just exposed the deep regulatory capture between ISPs and the FCC (the Republican Commissioners at least).

An effective method for defeating geographic internet monopolies is to force ISPs to rent out their lines at fair prices. This is the status quo in the UK, where competition forced internet prices to lower. That this common sense pro-consumer policy is not pursued by the Democratic FCC commissioners is evidence of some lesser level of regulatory capture of their side as well.

Re: ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

#240

Post by monocasa »

jaywalk wrote: post #236
monocasa wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sort of. AFAICT, it had more to do with the fact that you can't drop knowingly allow f-bombs on broadcast TV without having your license taken away, so sometimes reporters will pretend they misheard something so they don't have to cut away during live interviews.

Nah, the profanity rules are substantially relaxed for live broadcasts these days. "Fleeting expletives" will not trigger a fine. Indeed, just watch a Sunday afternoon NFL game and you're guaranteed to hear some naughty words. Primetime games generally use a delay so the audio can be dumped, but the afternoon games don't bother with it even though they're on broadcast TV as well.

It wasn't fleeting, the crowd was chanting it during the whole interview.

The production staff almost certainly went out of their way to include it in fact.

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