10 ms·

> "If murder hadn't happened in a certain area yet, would it be 'too preemptive' to outlaw it?" But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they

> "If murder hadn't happened in a certain area yet, would it be 'too preemptive' to outlaw it?" But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). > "Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now." But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem.

jackmott 9y ago
>But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. yes we do
saulrh 9y ago
> But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. I think that this is the part that I can't comprehend. The railroads misbehaved so badly that the government had to break rail transportation as an industry to kill them. Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. Bell's abuse of its monopoly was similarly severe. How do people hold this belief without becoming laughingstock?
- ghaff 9y ago
  >Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. No. There's actually a very healthy cargo rail system and relatively little trucking is truly long haul.
  - saulrh 9y ago
    According to the DOT [1] it looks like my intuition is a bit out of date. Right now US freight about even, trucking still a little bit ahead by ton-mile. Ten years ago rail carried 2/3 as much freight as trucks. Last-mile delivery on trucks (from the rail station to the point of use) is taken care of by the unit of measurement (one ton of freight traveling one mile), so I think that those numbers are relatively reasonable. So I'll admit: fair enough, the rail industry is still healthy and carrying a good amount of cargo. I'll withdraw the wording; we do not in fact use long-haul trucks for everything. The fact that trucks are competing with rail at all, however, given the geographical extent of the US and how horrible long-haul trucking is, I believe makes me stand by my claim that the US rail industry was broken and never recovered. It frankly astonishes me that driving something down the highway is even remotely financially effective in comparison to rail freight. And, of course, none of this is relevant to my original point: the railroads abused their powers to an astonishing degree and the government was forced to smash them for the good of the economy. Is it obvious to me that today's ISPs are following in the footsteps of yesterday's railroads and telephones and I don't understand how people convince themselves otherwise. [1] https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_50.html https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
    - thinkloop 9y ago
      It's wasn't obvious to me that trucking is much less energy effecient than rail. According to treehugger.com rail achieves "400 ton-miles per gallon whereas trucks currently hover around 130 ton-miles per gallon" [1]. I wonder why that would be - rubber tires vs steel-on-steel? Traffic? There isn't much traffic during the majority of a long-haul and the last few miles have to be done by truck anyway. [1] https://www.treehugger.com/cars/rail-versus-trucking-whos-the-greenest-freight-carrier.html https://www.treehugger.com/cars/rail-versus-trucking-whos-th...
      - hirsin 9y ago
        Braking and acceleration - once you get x tons of anything moving, it generally wants to keep moving. Trains are tens of times longer than trucks, brake significantly less often, and have a lot more horsepower for acceleration.
        int_19h 9y ago
        The other thing is, you can string wires along the rails relatively easily, and power everything directly with electricity - which offers substantial savings from efficiency of large scale power generation, even accounting for distribution losses. Better yet, you can then use regenerative braking, and feed energy back into the line. I do believe there's some benefit from the tracks themselves as well, though. Surely there's a lot less friction (per ton of weight) between the train wheels and steel rails, than there is between truck tires and the road?
        libertyEQ 9y ago
        >you can string wires along the rails relatively easily, and power everything directly with electricity - Except all freight trains in the US have 6600 HP diesel engines, usually ~6-8 engines per 100 cars from what I've seen (which is mostly coal).
        int_19h 9y ago
- transposed 9y ago
  I don't think that many people actually do hold this belief. That's why someone had to make a bot to create the illusion.
  - rtpg 9y ago
    A bunch of the GOP seems to hold this belief. If there wasn't such a strong movement for net neutrality, I bet a bunch of Democrats would like this as well. I understand there are a lot of lobbyists, but there are many people who sincerely believe the "less regulation and more competition will solve the issues" mantra. I place a lot of the blame on outlets like the Wall Street Journal giving credence to arguments that strip out all context and use fancy words to justify these positions. Doesn't help that other people are afraid to call out their lies because they came from the same social circles. Yes, the "free market + competition makes things cheaper" argument works well when you remove all the reasons why a specific case does not fit the theory perfectly.
    - thinkloop 9y ago
      It's tiring how the dialogue is still so ideological. Every single person agrees that there should be 1 or more regulation. We are just determining their precise character. I wish public discussion would become more nuanced and specific to the issue at hand.
    - jinfiesto 9y ago
      I'm pretty liberal, and I believe that there is some truth to the "less regulation and more competition will solve the issues" mantra. The issue here being that there isn't a real way to inject more competition into the ISP space. Soooo, we are just getting less regulation. Which will inevitably lead to abuses.
      - QAkICoU7IDNkpFu 9y ago
        Break up the biggest ISP's by force.
        9y ago
rectang 9y ago
But the beneficiaries of your "net freedom" are a handful of regional monopoly ISPs who are protected by regulations that realistically won't ever be rolled back.
- jquery 9y ago
  Pre-2015 - keep the govt out of our internet! 2017 - save us government we need your kind regulations! No thanks. It’s amazing what a little bit of polishing a turd and renaming it will do.
  - extra88 9y ago
    Wrong. Net neutrality proponents have been advocating for the FCC's pro-NN actions long before 2015, the problem was courts kept shooting them down because they said (probably correctly) that they didn't use their authority the right way.
    - jquery 9y ago
      Most people want NN, when it comes to censorship (this is why I use Sonic.net). They don't want NN when it comes to gaming latency vs. email latency. There's a big difference, but NN lumps them in as the same thing. This is why we should punt to Congress that ensures NN applies to the First Amendment but not to voluntary trade.
      - comex 9y ago
        > There's a big difference, but NN lumps them in as the same thing. No it doesn't. The FCC's net neutrality orders have always included an exception for "reasonable network management", most recently defined as: > (f) Reasonable network management. A network management practice is a practice that has a primarily technical network management justification, but does not include other business practices. A network management practice is reasonable if it is primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service. (emphasis mine; source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/8.2 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/8.2) Prioritizing gaming latency is clearly a "primarily technical" concern rather than a matter of "business practices" - at least as long as the ISP didn't try to charge game publishers for the service. So it would be fine.
veidr 9y ago
A lot of proponents of what you call "net freedom" lie about fast lanes or wave their hands and pretend that won't happen, though, because they are deeply unpopular with a huge majority of internet users.
badestrand 9y ago
> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen At least in Germany planning a murder is illegal. Just like preparing a terrorist attack is - otherwise the police wouldn't be allowed to stop it. Also Wiki: "In some jurisdictions, the very act of preparing for a crime is a criminal offense in itself" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_preparation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_preparation) For the US, interesting read: https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-basics/incomplete-crimes-conspiracy-attempt-solicitation.html https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-bas...
- Endy 9y ago
  "Conspiracy to commit murder" is a crime. So, there's that.
cmurf 9y ago
What sort of idiotic nonsense is this? The law absolutely provides for law enforcement intervention to stop a murder from happening, and to charge the perpetrator(s) with attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder. And I'm sure some people think murder is not a problem, but most of the rest of us think they're also crazy. You know, if the ISPs were better at selling this particular turd sandwich, or turd polishing it at least, what they'd do is say they intend to charge astrometric tons more per unit of spam, email and crappy ads, that slow down people's machines and disproportionately suck up internet resources. But they aren't. So why do they want this? To do exactly the same f'd up shit they've been doing with cable TV.
- sctb 9y ago
  We've asked you several times to stop breaking the guidelines. Would you please try to do better? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
zamalek 9y ago
> Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now. It's called shaping and you easily pay 2x the price to avoid it. Everyone above the poverty line pays.
- notyourday 9y ago
  No, it is called PNIs to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other eyeball networks where whoever puts the PNIs still pays to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other eyeball networks to reach their eyeballs over those PNIs.
  - ReverseCold 9y ago
    PNIs?
    - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
      Private Network Interconnect "With peering, there are two methods that connectivity is formed on. The first is where direct connectivity is established between individual networks routers with multiple 10Gigabit Ethernet or 100Gigabit Ethernet links. This sort of connectivity is known as “private peering” or PNI (Private Network Interconnect)."[0] [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/internet-routing-and-traffic-engineering/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/internet-routing-a...
- another-dave 9y ago
  Is traffic shaping website specific? I thought it was just related to packet size, etc. — as in, British Telecom may throttle bandwidth at peak times for data that looks like it may be videos, torrents etc. In my mind, this is very different to allowing YouTube load faster than Vimeo
  - dx034 9y ago
    Haven't heard of shaping before in the UK. I'm not aware there's any form of payment for prioritised traffic, at least not for broadband. On the contrary, BT participates heavily in LINX, the London network exchange. Speed differences will happen though, e.g. I notice that Netflix sometimes tends to be a bit slower but that doesn't improve using a VPN so that I guess it's not BT's fault.
Griffinsauce 9y ago
Wait, "net freedom" seriously? That's a cynical name considering what that choice entails. If you called it "corporate freedom", sure.
tambienben 9y ago
>But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. And they literally wouldn't be if internet service was delivered in a free market. The problem is that the market isn't free. ISPs have spent years rigging the market in their favor, politically. The landscape is already hostile to the consumer--they intend to make it more so.
- ekianjo 9y ago
  That's why the law should dissociate the "tubes" from the service providers. Let any company operate on the infrastructure with their own policies as long as they rent the lines, and the lines should be traffic agnostic by definition.
  - alansammarone 9y ago
    That's by far the best solution.
  - tambienben 9y ago
    What happens when the highest bidder rents up all of the infrastructure? I believe your suggestion is already practiced with phone carriers. The infrastructure is finite & there are physical bandwidths limitations, at least currently.
Joeri 9y ago
Even the language is wrong. Getting rid of net neutrality doesn’t introduce fast lanes, it introduces slow lanes. Nobody will get faster service than today, but some will get slower service.
- derefr 9y ago
  Some people could get faster service than they do today, in the sense that a given flow (e.g. VoIP data) might go from having equal QoS priority to having higher QoS priority, meaning that under congestion, their flow might go from being slow (before) to being the-speed-they're-paying-for. Of course, that would come at the expense of other flows (e.g. BitTorrent) having lower relative QoS priority, making them slower under congestion. It's zero-sum. This type of flow management is already how VoLTE flows are prioritized on LTE (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem); I wouldn't be surprised to see land-line ISPs implement it.
  - nerdponx 9y ago
    It's zero-sum Not so fast. It's zero-sum if and only if call Internet subscribers have the same ability to pay for the service. If any user has a very high willingness to pay, but does not have the resources to pay it, then this amounts to a transfer of "wealth" (i.e. bandwidth) from that user to another who might not value it as much. It's not hard to construct utility curves in which this decreases total welfare. That said, QoS is probably not the concern here. This is very much not a zero-sum proposal.
  - Fnoord 9y ago
    The net neutrality in the EU isn't perfect, but it does allow for QoS for things like VoIP. EDIT: Example: Free Music Streaming by T-Mobile [1] is active in EU as well. So if you stream from Spotify its "free" yet when you stream from your home server, via a VPN, or an unsupported service it isn't "free". [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-data-used-with-spotify-pandora-itunes-radio-and-certain-other-music-services/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-da...
  - 9y ago
ikurei 9y ago
> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). Murders are punished after they happen. But a plot to murder is in itself a crime. Also, the fact that punishments come after the fact has nothing to do with this. Murder isn't banned after it happens. It's banned before it happens. Lastly, you say "the law only acts retroactively". The main purpose of punishing past actions is to disuade people from doing them in the future. If I hate my boss but I decide not to murder him because I don't want my child to grow with me in prison, the law has stopped a crime before it happens.
Molaxx 9y ago
Murders are illegal "upfront". The regulator declared it illegal. The police would definitely stop a murder attempt.
loup-vaillant 9y ago
Wait a minute, the opposite of net neutrality is called "net freedom"? This is sick (the lack of net neutrality is more likely to reduce freedoms than to promote them). If you remotely support net neutrality, please never use that term again. This is self defeating.
- Angostura 9y ago
  The freedom in this case is for the ISPs.
- sambe 9y ago
  I'm pro-net neutrality and I'm against dishonest marketing, but I think overall it's important to take the higher ground and remain intellectually honest. Doing otherwise results in a mud-slinging contest. Existing regulations are a restriction on the freedom of service providers. That is undeniable. There many cases where we restrict freedoms for the greater good, but I don't like to pretend we are not doing so in those cases. I'd also add that freedom is not the right to demand other people give you something you want. I wouldn't say that I've lost my freedoms if there are no good ISPs left after the regulatory change. Everyone involved can still either choose an existing provider or set up their own. We have monopoly/anti-trust laws when that ceases to be the case. Of course, this may not be the efficient path to a world that a huge majority of people want - which is why I slightly side with net neutrality.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    > Existing regulations are a restriction on the freedom of service providers. Then go ahead and call it "corporate freedom". The network isn't getting any more free without neutrality.
    - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
      An ISP doesn't necessarily have to be a corporate entity. It could be a municipality (e.g. city of Chattanooga) or hypothetically owned by residents directly.
musage 9y ago
> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, No, but it does outlaw it before it happens. The question isn't "is it happening at the moment", but "should it ever happen".
mgkimsal 9y ago
> proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. But the reply was in reply to Ajit's position that "we don't know what will happen because we don't have them".
mosselman 9y ago
" proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem." Don't care whether there will be a problem with how the internet works as they will become filthy rich. That is why they want to kill net neutrality; dollar dollar bills. They couldn't care less about the user experience.
dragonwriter 9y ago
> But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. “network freedom” was the FCC’s original name for net neutrality before it shifted to “open internet”; because it protected end-user freedom. Using “net freedom” to refer to the abolition of that protection is, well, about as honest as the rest of the anti-neutrality effort.
- libertyEQ 9y ago
  Is the internet network infrastructure not owned by corporations, and isn't this giving them the freedom to do with their asserts as they see fit?
likelynew 9y ago
> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). In a way the law tries to accomplish this by limiting ways like guns, bombs and sometimes doing checks randomly or based on suspicion.

jackmott 9y ago

>But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. yes we do

saulrh 9y ago

> But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. I think that this is the part that I can't comprehend. The railroads misbehaved so badly that the government had to break rail transportation as an industry to kill them. Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. Bell's abuse of its monopoly was similarly severe. How do people hold this belief without becoming laughingstock?

ghaff 9y ago
>Ninety years later we're still using long-haul semi trailers for everything. No. There's actually a very healthy cargo rail system and relatively little trucking is truly long haul.
- saulrh 9y ago
  According to the DOT [1] it looks like my intuition is a bit out of date. Right now US freight about even, trucking still a little bit ahead by ton-mile. Ten years ago rail carried 2/3 as much freight as trucks. Last-mile delivery on trucks (from the rail station to the point of use) is taken care of by the unit of measurement (one ton of freight traveling one mile), so I think that those numbers are relatively reasonable. So I'll admit: fair enough, the rail industry is still healthy and carrying a good amount of cargo. I'll withdraw the wording; we do not in fact use long-haul trucks for everything. The fact that trucks are competing with rail at all, however, given the geographical extent of the US and how horrible long-haul trucking is, I believe makes me stand by my claim that the US rail industry was broken and never recovered. It frankly astonishes me that driving something down the highway is even remotely financially effective in comparison to rail freight. And, of course, none of this is relevant to my original point: the railroads abused their powers to an astonishing degree and the government was forced to smash them for the good of the economy. Is it obvious to me that today's ISPs are following in the footsteps of yesterday's railroads and telephones and I don't understand how people convince themselves otherwise. [1] https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_50.html https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...
  - thinkloop 9y ago
    It's wasn't obvious to me that trucking is much less energy effecient than rail. According to treehugger.com rail achieves "400 ton-miles per gallon whereas trucks currently hover around 130 ton-miles per gallon" [1]. I wonder why that would be - rubber tires vs steel-on-steel? Traffic? There isn't much traffic during the majority of a long-haul and the last few miles have to be done by truck anyway. [1] https://www.treehugger.com/cars/rail-versus-trucking-whos-the-greenest-freight-carrier.html https://www.treehugger.com/cars/rail-versus-trucking-whos-th...
    - hirsin 9y ago
      Braking and acceleration - once you get x tons of anything moving, it generally wants to keep moving. Trains are tens of times longer than trucks, brake significantly less often, and have a lot more horsepower for acceleration.
      - int_19h 9y ago
        The other thing is, you can string wires along the rails relatively easily, and power everything directly with electricity - which offers substantial savings from efficiency of large scale power generation, even accounting for distribution losses. Better yet, you can then use regenerative braking, and feed energy back into the line. I do believe there's some benefit from the tracks themselves as well, though. Surely there's a lot less friction (per ton of weight) between the train wheels and steel rails, than there is between truck tires and the road?
        libertyEQ 9y ago
        >you can string wires along the rails relatively easily, and power everything directly with electricity - Except all freight trains in the US have 6600 HP diesel engines, usually ~6-8 engines per 100 cars from what I've seen (which is mostly coal).
        int_19h 9y ago
transposed 9y ago
I don't think that many people actually do hold this belief. That's why someone had to make a bot to create the illusion.
- rtpg 9y ago
  A bunch of the GOP seems to hold this belief. If there wasn't such a strong movement for net neutrality, I bet a bunch of Democrats would like this as well. I understand there are a lot of lobbyists, but there are many people who sincerely believe the "less regulation and more competition will solve the issues" mantra. I place a lot of the blame on outlets like the Wall Street Journal giving credence to arguments that strip out all context and use fancy words to justify these positions. Doesn't help that other people are afraid to call out their lies because they came from the same social circles. Yes, the "free market + competition makes things cheaper" argument works well when you remove all the reasons why a specific case does not fit the theory perfectly.
  - thinkloop 9y ago
    It's tiring how the dialogue is still so ideological. Every single person agrees that there should be 1 or more regulation. We are just determining their precise character. I wish public discussion would become more nuanced and specific to the issue at hand.
  - jinfiesto 9y ago
    I'm pretty liberal, and I believe that there is some truth to the "less regulation and more competition will solve the issues" mantra. The issue here being that there isn't a real way to inject more competition into the ISP space. Soooo, we are just getting less regulation. Which will inevitably lead to abuses.
    - QAkICoU7IDNkpFu 9y ago
      Break up the biggest ISP's by force.
      - 9y ago

rectang 9y ago

But the beneficiaries of your "net freedom" are a handful of regional monopoly ISPs who are protected by regulations that realistically won't ever be rolled back.

jquery 9y ago
Pre-2015 - keep the govt out of our internet! 2017 - save us government we need your kind regulations! No thanks. It’s amazing what a little bit of polishing a turd and renaming it will do.
- extra88 9y ago
  Wrong. Net neutrality proponents have been advocating for the FCC's pro-NN actions long before 2015, the problem was courts kept shooting them down because they said (probably correctly) that they didn't use their authority the right way.
  - jquery 9y ago
    Most people want NN, when it comes to censorship (this is why I use Sonic.net). They don't want NN when it comes to gaming latency vs. email latency. There's a big difference, but NN lumps them in as the same thing. This is why we should punt to Congress that ensures NN applies to the First Amendment but not to voluntary trade.
    - comex 9y ago
      > There's a big difference, but NN lumps them in as the same thing. No it doesn't. The FCC's net neutrality orders have always included an exception for "reasonable network management", most recently defined as: > (f) Reasonable network management. A network management practice is a practice that has a primarily technical network management justification, but does not include other business practices. A network management practice is reasonable if it is primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service. (emphasis mine; source: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/8.2 https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/47/8.2) Prioritizing gaming latency is clearly a "primarily technical" concern rather than a matter of "business practices" - at least as long as the ISP didn't try to charge game publishers for the service. So it would be fine.

veidr 9y ago

A lot of proponents of what you call "net freedom" lie about fast lanes or wave their hands and pretend that won't happen, though, because they are deeply unpopular with a huge majority of internet users.

badestrand 9y ago

> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen At least in Germany planning a murder is illegal. Just like preparing a terrorist attack is - otherwise the police wouldn't be allowed to stop it. Also Wiki: "In some jurisdictions, the very act of preparing for a crime is a criminal offense in itself" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_preparation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_preparation) For the US, interesting read: https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-basics/incomplete-crimes-conspiracy-attempt-solicitation.html https://www.lawyers.com/legal-info/criminal/criminal-law-bas...

Endy 9y ago
"Conspiracy to commit murder" is a crime. So, there's that.

cmurf 9y ago

What sort of idiotic nonsense is this? The law absolutely provides for law enforcement intervention to stop a murder from happening, and to charge the perpetrator(s) with attempted murder or conspiracy to commit murder. And I'm sure some people think murder is not a problem, but most of the rest of us think they're also crazy. You know, if the ISPs were better at selling this particular turd sandwich, or turd polishing it at least, what they'd do is say they intend to charge astrometric tons more per unit of spam, email and crappy ads, that slow down people's machines and disproportionately suck up internet resources. But they aren't. So why do they want this? To do exactly the same f'd up shit they've been doing with cable TV.

sctb 9y ago
We've asked you several times to stop breaking the guidelines. Would you please try to do better? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

zamalek 9y ago

> Fast lanes DO exist in other countries right now. It's called shaping and you easily pay 2x the price to avoid it. Everyone above the poverty line pays.

notyourday 9y ago
No, it is called PNIs to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other eyeball networks where whoever puts the PNIs still pays to Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and other eyeball networks to reach their eyeballs over those PNIs.
- ReverseCold 9y ago
  PNIs?
  - ShabbosGoy 9y ago
    Private Network Interconnect "With peering, there are two methods that connectivity is formed on. The first is where direct connectivity is established between individual networks routers with multiple 10Gigabit Ethernet or 100Gigabit Ethernet links. This sort of connectivity is known as “private peering” or PNI (Private Network Interconnect)."[0] [0] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/internet-routing-and-traffic-engineering/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/architecture/internet-routing-a...
another-dave 9y ago
Is traffic shaping website specific? I thought it was just related to packet size, etc. — as in, British Telecom may throttle bandwidth at peak times for data that looks like it may be videos, torrents etc. In my mind, this is very different to allowing YouTube load faster than Vimeo
- dx034 9y ago
  Haven't heard of shaping before in the UK. I'm not aware there's any form of payment for prioritised traffic, at least not for broadband. On the contrary, BT participates heavily in LINX, the London network exchange. Speed differences will happen though, e.g. I notice that Netflix sometimes tends to be a bit slower but that doesn't improve using a VPN so that I guess it's not BT's fault.

Griffinsauce 9y ago

Wait, "net freedom" seriously? That's a cynical name considering what that choice entails. If you called it "corporate freedom", sure.

tambienben 9y ago

>But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. And they literally wouldn't be if internet service was delivered in a free market. The problem is that the market isn't free. ISPs have spent years rigging the market in their favor, politically. The landscape is already hostile to the consumer--they intend to make it more so.

ekianjo 9y ago
That's why the law should dissociate the "tubes" from the service providers. Let any company operate on the infrastructure with their own policies as long as they rent the lines, and the lines should be traffic agnostic by definition.
- alansammarone 9y ago
  That's by far the best solution.
- tambienben 9y ago
  What happens when the highest bidder rents up all of the infrastructure? I believe your suggestion is already practiced with phone carriers. The infrastructure is finite & there are physical bandwidths limitations, at least currently.

Joeri 9y ago

Even the language is wrong. Getting rid of net neutrality doesn’t introduce fast lanes, it introduces slow lanes. Nobody will get faster service than today, but some will get slower service.

derefr 9y ago
Some people could get faster service than they do today, in the sense that a given flow (e.g. VoIP data) might go from having equal QoS priority to having higher QoS priority, meaning that under congestion, their flow might go from being slow (before) to being the-speed-they're-paying-for. Of course, that would come at the expense of other flows (e.g. BitTorrent) having lower relative QoS priority, making them slower under congestion. It's zero-sum. This type of flow management is already how VoLTE flows are prioritized on LTE (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem); https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IP_Multimedia_Subsystem); I wouldn't be surprised to see land-line ISPs implement it.
- nerdponx 9y ago
  It's zero-sum Not so fast. It's zero-sum if and only if call Internet subscribers have the same ability to pay for the service. If any user has a very high willingness to pay, but does not have the resources to pay it, then this amounts to a transfer of "wealth" (i.e. bandwidth) from that user to another who might not value it as much. It's not hard to construct utility curves in which this decreases total welfare. That said, QoS is probably not the concern here. This is very much not a zero-sum proposal.
- Fnoord 9y ago
  The net neutrality in the EU isn't perfect, but it does allow for QoS for things like VoIP. EDIT: Example: Free Music Streaming by T-Mobile [1] is active in EU as well. So if you stream from Spotify its "free" yet when you stream from your home server, via a VPN, or an unsupported service it isn't "free". [1] https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-data-used-with-spotify-pandora-itunes-radio-and-certain-other-music-services/ https://techcrunch.com/2014/06/18/t-mobile-stops-counting-da...
- 9y ago

ikurei 9y ago

> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). Murders are punished after they happen. But a plot to murder is in itself a crime. Also, the fact that punishments come after the fact has nothing to do with this. Murder isn't banned after it happens. It's banned before it happens. Lastly, you say "the law only acts retroactively". The main purpose of punishing past actions is to disuade people from doing them in the future. If I hate my boss but I decide not to murder him because I don't want my child to grow with me in prison, the law has stopped a crime before it happens.

Molaxx 9y ago

Murders are illegal "upfront". The regulator declared it illegal. The police would definitely stop a murder attempt.

loup-vaillant 9y ago

Wait a minute, the opposite of net neutrality is called "net freedom"? This is sick (the lack of net neutrality is more likely to reduce freedoms than to promote them). If you remotely support net neutrality, please never use that term again. This is self defeating.

Angostura 9y ago
The freedom in this case is for the ISPs.
sambe 9y ago
I'm pro-net neutrality and I'm against dishonest marketing, but I think overall it's important to take the higher ground and remain intellectually honest. Doing otherwise results in a mud-slinging contest. Existing regulations are a restriction on the freedom of service providers. That is undeniable. There many cases where we restrict freedoms for the greater good, but I don't like to pretend we are not doing so in those cases. I'd also add that freedom is not the right to demand other people give you something you want. I wouldn't say that I've lost my freedoms if there are no good ISPs left after the regulatory change. Everyone involved can still either choose an existing provider or set up their own. We have monopoly/anti-trust laws when that ceases to be the case. Of course, this may not be the efficient path to a world that a huge majority of people want - which is why I slightly side with net neutrality.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > Existing regulations are a restriction on the freedom of service providers. Then go ahead and call it "corporate freedom". The network isn't getting any more free without neutrality.
  - em3rgent0rdr 9y ago
    An ISP doesn't necessarily have to be a corporate entity. It could be a municipality (e.g. city of Chattanooga) or hypothetically owned by residents directly.

musage 9y ago

> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, No, but it does outlaw it before it happens. The question isn't "is it happening at the moment", but "should it ever happen".

mgkimsal 9y ago

> proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. But the reply was in reply to Ajit's position that "we don't know what will happen because we don't have them".

mosselman 9y ago

" proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem." Don't care whether there will be a problem with how the internet works as they will become filthy rich. That is why they want to kill net neutrality; dollar dollar bills. They couldn't care less about the user experience.

dragonwriter 9y ago

> But this is ignoring the whole debate: proponents of net freedom don't consider fast lanes to be a problem. “network freedom” was the FCC’s original name for net neutrality before it shifted to “open internet”; because it protected end-user freedom. Using “net freedom” to refer to the abolition of that protection is, well, about as honest as the rest of the anti-neutrality effort.

libertyEQ 9y ago
Is the internet network infrastructure not owned by corporations, and isn't this giving them the freedom to do with their asserts as they see fit?

likelynew 9y ago

> But even with murder, the law doesn't stop murders before they happen, but rather only acts retroactively (and that is for good reason). In a way the law tries to accomplish this by limiting ways like guns, bombs and sometimes doing checks randomly or based on suspicion.