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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

#241

Post by randrews »

CyberRabbi wrote: post #16
randrews wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been asking this exact question for years. I feel like most people got some well-meaning propaganda on this and see net neutrality as an anti-censorship thing (which, hooray for anti-censorship) without thinking through all the totally reasonable and useful things that would violate the letter of it.

I don’t fully understand how anti-censorship is a virtue when defending Google and Netflix but then becomes a vice when defending regular people’s ability to not be arbitrarily banned on Twitter.

Doesn't become a vice for me; I'm against censoring regular people too. Everyone should be able to say whatever they want.

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

#242

Post by robbedpeter »

hansel_der wrote: post #224
odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but the problem is on the ISP side. For example, lets assume a building with 10 apartments has guaranteed 100Mbit connection to the building. If ISP was honest, they would sell 10Mbit connection to each apartment. What they do (at least here) is sell 100Mbit to each apartment and hope their usage isn't all at the same time since it can't support it. I ended up paying more for a 200mbit connection straight to my…

oversubscription is totally normal, the ratio is a matter of discussion thou (imo good isp shifting blame for congestion events is dishonest thou.

Oversubscription should be regulated and totally transparent to the customer. Something on the monthly statement like:

"You pay for symmetric gigabit internet access. You share this line with 4 customers, and load balancing means your service performance will be equally distributed among the users of the line at any given time. The internet egress point where you leave Honest Joe's network is a 25gbps connection and is shared by 382 other gigabit residential customers. The average load at egress is 14.5gps down, 5 gbps up."

Allowing customers to pay a premium for dedicated access is a net good as well, because that can finance infrastructure improvements.

It's greed and lack of transparency that causes shitty service. It's repeatedly merged isps that are so big that they can afford to not give a shit about the last mile.

The sick joke is the unused fiber capacity. Many of the large isps have residential fiber presence, but don't want to invest in towns under 100k people, so they leave the fiber to rot. A lot of ambitious small isps funded and deployed fiber throughout all sorts of places in small town America but didn't stipulate the use of the fiber when they sold out.

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

#243

Post by randrews »

hedora wrote: post #69
randrews wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been asking this exact question for years. I feel like most people got some well-meaning propaganda on this and see net neutrality as an anti-censorship thing (which, hooray for anti-censorship) without thinking through all the totally reasonable and useful things that would violate the letter of it.

If locating the CDN node in the ISP network makes financial sense for the ISP (smaller lines to the internet backbone) or the CDN (lower egress charges / better latency), then one of those two businesses will seek out an arrangement. What does throttling traffic or charging customers different amounts for different sites have to do with whether the CDN machine will lower network operating costs? (Other than that the…

That's exactly my point: "seeking out an arrangement" is exactly what net neutrality outlaws, and while it's obviously bad to artificially slow someone down, NN proponents also say they're against artificially speeding some traffic up. That seems dangerous to me, like we could accidentally outlaw CDNs or something.

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

#244

Post by jmyeet »

odshoifsdhfs wrote: post #205
jtbayly wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do networks not fill up and get congested?

Yes, but the problem is on the ISP side. For example, lets assume a building with 10 apartments has guaranteed 100Mbit connection to the building. If ISP was honest, they would sell 10Mbit connection to each apartment. What they do (at least here) is sell 100Mbit to each apartment and hope their usage isn't all at the same time since it can't support it. I ended up paying more for a 200mbit connection straight to my…

I disagree with this. You're touching on two separate issues.

The first is that many US broadband connections are on traditional cable systems (or HFC). And these are a shard bus design, meaning you and your neighbours are competing for bandwidth. This is a common cause of degredated connections.

Compare this to fiber The fiber connection isn't shared at all... until you reach some junction, exchange or node. There are various flavors of fiber (eg FTTH/FTTP, FTTN, FTTC).

This brings us to the second issue: bandwidth beyond the last mile is also oversubscribed and it makes zero sense to do it otherwise. Residential customers in particular just don't use that much bandwidth and they don't use it consistently. I mean a gigabit connection is enough for 30+ 4K streams at once at pretty much max quality. But being able to burst bandwidth for fast downloads is really nice.

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

#245

Post by jaywalk »

monocasa wrote: post #240
jaywalk wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may not have been fleeting by the dictionary definition of the word, but it definitely was by the way the rules are applied. I've worked in the broadcast industry and have had to deal directly with this subject, so I'm not just spouting nonsense here.

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

#246

Post by jmyeet »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #195
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…

Personally I would rather have a healthy competitive landscape than NN, but I’ll take the latter in a pinch.

Net neutrality has real impacts. It wasn't that many years ago where weirdly Netflix was basically unusable on FIOS. And of course it worked like a dream over a VPN. Verizon had minimal peering with Netflix to extract fees for "pushing" data and because Netflix competed with their cable TV business.

Competition is a trickier issue because in most cases overbuilds make little economic sense. The best situation is probably municipal fiber (who builds and maintains it) and retail ISPs rent that infrastructure to provide services.

But instead the US incentivized cable network builds in a terrible way: by providing franchises. The ISPs would pay the city for a monopoly, basically. Cities got addicted to this income and were allies in opposing competition as a result.

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

#247

Post by lettergram »

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 US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world.

Lol what? I can get 5-10Gb/s fiber in my town for $120-$200/month.

If I want 1Gb/s fiber it’s $55/month.

If I want 100mb/s it’s $20/month.

To your point it’s about regulatory capture. Not all states and localities have that issue, it’s almost entirely to do with several corrupt states that get targeted.

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

#248

Post by monocasa »

jaywalk wrote: post #245
monocasa wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It may not have been fleeting by the dictionary definition of the word, but it definitely was by the way the rules are applied. I've worked in the broadcast industry and have had to deal directly with this subject, so I'm not just spouting nonsense here.

I've also worked in the broadcast industry; you are just spouting nonsense. You get fined for knowingly allowing several minute long continuous chants like that, and can get your license taken away.

It wasn't fleeting in either the dictionary nor the regulatory sense.

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

#249

Post by tenebrisalietum »

throwaway894345 wrote: post #195
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…

Personally I would rather have a healthy competitive landscape than NN, but I’ll take the latter in a pinch.

If ISPs could do anything to the Internet content their subscribers requested, including block it, zero-rate it, or modify it, how many ISPs would a competitive landscape need in order to guarantee there is at least one that performs no blocking at all?

I doubt poles could physically handle the number of lines to ISPs that are needed to guarantee this.

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

#250

Post by joshgachnang »

lettergram wrote: post #247
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 US has some of the most expensive Internet access in the world. Lol what? I can get 5-10Gb/s fiber in my town for $120-$200/month. If I want 1Gb/s fiber it’s $55/month. If I want 100mb/s it’s $20/month. To your point it’s about regulatory capture. Not all states and localities have that issue, it’s almost entirely to do with several corrupt states that get targeted.

Well I’m jealous of you then. You must know that is an extreme outlier in the US though. I’ve been lucky to get 50-100mbps for $60 in most cities I’ve lived in.
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