4 ms·

People probably believe that the positive effects are on the more obscure or hypothetical side while the negative effects would be more severe and definite. So

by gdulli 9y ago

People probably believe that the positive effects are on the more obscure or hypothetical side while the negative effects would be more severe and definite. Sorry to the hearing impaired community for not prioritizing your latency needs, but Fox News buying up all the ISPs and controlling the news is worse.

ocdtrekkie 9y ago
The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical. Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call. And yes, there's a whole list of individual token offenses ISPs have committed that people will spam out when you point this out, but it doesn't change the fact that the fears and horrors propping up this movement on a large scale do not exist.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical No they aren't; many of them are things that the FCC responded to in if years of enforcing net neutrality principles through case by case actions, such as mobile and fixed broadband ISPs blocking services that competed with their offerings, and blocking other lawful services or content, sometimes for political reasons. > Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call. “Fast lanes” have gotten blown out of proportion because of discussion of a possible weakness in an earlier draft of the 2015 order. They aren't actually a concern for the non-neutral net, they are a concern about a potential end-run around a net regulated for neutrality but with a loophole. Unfortunately, a popular distortion side that that draft was designed by enemies of neutrality rather than people trying to save it who might have designed the draft insufficiently tightly, and so “fast lanes” have become associated with the goals and plans of the anti-neutrality camp rather than just a potential weakness in a no-longer-relevant pro-neutrality draft regulation. I mostly blame John Oliver for that. Although, in point of fact, edge provider preference much like fast lanes exists in the form of zero rating, which is occurring in the mobile broadband space. It's not precisely the same thing, but had much the same issue.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Viewed with a more holistic approach, I understand a lot of those case by case issues, and have a lot less panic about them. It's easy to paint a pile of different events with a broad brush, especially if you already view a group of companies as inherently evil by default. (I get why the net neutrality propaganda campaign has been so successful, it's super easy to convince people to hate Comcast and Verizon, we all already do.) But for example, the paid fast lane situation... does not currently exist. The whole "you might have to pay for the social media package to see this tweet" nonsense? Not only doesn't actually exist but has no chance of even remotely existing.
    - wmf 9y ago
      Paid fast lanes sort of do exist, but the content providers are the ones paying. This is worse in some ways because it is invisible to consumers but it's better in the sense that consumers don't pay for infrastructure they don't use.
- pishpash 9y ago
  I agree the bigger issue is lack of competition. Why isn't there equal outcry about that?
- plandis 9y ago
  Comcast has a very slow lane for all BitTorrent traffic (they effectively blocked it back in 2007/2008) until the FCC died them to not do that. You’re argument is probably false. The fears are real we’ve seen ISPs provide tired bandwidth in the past. Everything except BitTorrent traffic was in the fast lane and BitTorrent traffic was in the slow lane.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    FWIW, Comcast's statement clearly indicated it would not throttle or block lawful content. If you're being honest, you should be able to agree that most BitTorrent traffic is not lawful. As of 07/08, I think maybe the most common use of legal BitTorrent was that some Linux distros offered their ISOs over it. Today this might be a bit more interesting of a case since a lot of software patchers from major protocols now use the BitTorrent protocol to patch software. I believe Star Citizen does, Blizzard games may as well. Windows Update at the very least now uses a similar system, though I don't know if it's specifically BitTorrent based or not.
    - dragonwriter 9y ago
      > FWIW, Comcast's statement clearly indicated it would not throttle or block lawful content. If you're being honest, you should be able to agree that most BitTorrent traffic is not lawful. Most BitTorrent traffic may not be, but that's a matter of content not protocol. Most of the people physically located in the death row wing of a particular prison may be condemned convicts but if a government says it's not going to kill anyone not duly sentenced to execution and just drops a bomb on that wing, killing mostly condemned criminals, but also a few correctional officers and service workers, the action would be clearly out of line with the commitment.
      - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
        Sure, but again, the example given is ten years old, when there was almost zero legitimate BitTorrent traffic, and it was unreasonably difficult for ISPs to combat illegal traffic in other ways. (Of course, I suspect net neutrality supporters would be far angrier if Comcast were to inspect the contents of the BitTorrent content to determine if it's legal or not.) If you're going to throttle a protocol to keep your network optimized for legitimate users, crippling a piracy protocol seems pretty practical, wouldn't you say?
- eldridgea 9y ago
  What do you mean by token offenses? "Fast lanes" as a general product aren't likely going to be offers on the company home page, they're going to be in the private peering agreements they have with larger companies. This has already happened. [Netflix had to pay Comcast](https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-comcast-to-end-slowdown/ https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-com...), and [Comcast throttled their VoIP competitor Vonage](https://www.wired.com/2006/03/comcast_throttling_vonage_users/ https://www.wired.com/2006/03/comcast_throttling_vonage_user...). Vonage and Netflix started working again but the why was never made public. It seems likely that paying for fast lanes was involved. These aren't the cold hard facts we'd like to have about what exactly happened, but they're clear violations of Net Neutrality that were resolved ambiguously. As far as negative effects in general, beyond fast lanes, there's more than a few examples: * [AT&T blocked FaceTime](https://www.savetheinternet.com/att-facetime https://www.savetheinternet.com/att-facetime) * [Verizon blocked Google Wallet](http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/06/technology/verizon_blocks_google_wallet/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/06/technology/verizon_blocks_go...) * [Verizon throttles video](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/verizons-throttling-of-video-should-be-investigated-by-fcc-petition-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/verizons-throttl...) * And [a lot more](https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations-brief-history https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio...). The violations are often subtle, and haven't always affected everyone, but the negative effects of the lack of NN are not hypothetical.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    As I suggested, if you look at these incidents individually, there's very different perspectives you can glean: Netflix gets free colocation from ISPs through Netflix Open Connect. (Hilariously, Netflix claims it "offers this for free to ISPs", whereas if you realize it is colocation, it is obviously Netflix should be paying for it.) Net neutrality cripples ISPs' negotiating position with Netflix (since it prevents ISPs from controlling their traffic in other ways), which protects their special treatment, ironically, since only Netflix has the market share to dictate terms to ISPs. If you made a startup video competitor, you'd have to pay for the service net neutrality guarantees Netflix gets for free. ISPs must host Netflix's boxes for free, or get hit by a deluge of upstream Netflix traffic. FaceTime is an excellent example of a reasonable reason a provider may wish to get involved in content for performance reasons: Everyone switching to video chat would have a massive and immediate impact on that ISP's network traffic. With "unlimited data" models, ISPs don't necessarily get increased revenue to offset massively increased bandwidth use and network congestion. It's understandable why AT&T moved here. I actually prefer a pay-as-you-go data model, because it incentivizes carriers to provide neutral data as fast as possible: The more you use, the more money they make. Verizon blocking Google Wallet stands in a long line of incidents where good PR has reversed the blame. ;) Google refused to allow competitors' payment systems from using the secure element in phones... a market Google has monopoly control of. Eventually, Verizon's hardline stance on being able to offer a competing service forced Google to rework Wallet to be more fair, and not get an exclusive security feature everyone else was prohibited from using. Of course, Google just moved to kill their competition another way: They bought out Softcard/ISIS and turned it into Android Pay. (And kicked Windows Mobile Softcard users to the curb too, hurting a second competitor in the process! Efficiency!) NFC payment competitors to Android Pay on Android phones like Samsung Pay only exist today thanks to Verizon's hardline stance.

by gdulli 9y ago

ocdtrekkie 9y ago

The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical. Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call. And yes, there's a whole list of individual token offenses ISPs have committed that people will spam out when you point this out, but it doesn't change the fact that the fears and horrors propping up this movement on a large scale do not exist.

dragonwriter 9y ago
> The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical No they aren't; many of them are things that the FCC responded to in if years of enforcing net neutrality principles through case by case actions, such as mobile and fixed broadband ISPs blocking services that competed with their offerings, and blocking other lawful services or content, sometimes for political reasons. > Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call. “Fast lanes” have gotten blown out of proportion because of discussion of a possible weakness in an earlier draft of the 2015 order. They aren't actually a concern for the non-neutral net, they are a concern about a potential end-run around a net regulated for neutrality but with a loophole. Unfortunately, a popular distortion side that that draft was designed by enemies of neutrality rather than people trying to save it who might have designed the draft insufficiently tightly, and so “fast lanes” have become associated with the goals and plans of the anti-neutrality camp rather than just a potential weakness in a no-longer-relevant pro-neutrality draft regulation. I mostly blame John Oliver for that. Although, in point of fact, edge provider preference much like fast lanes exists in the form of zero rating, which is occurring in the mobile broadband space. It's not precisely the same thing, but had much the same issue.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Viewed with a more holistic approach, I understand a lot of those case by case issues, and have a lot less panic about them. It's easy to paint a pile of different events with a broad brush, especially if you already view a group of companies as inherently evil by default. (I get why the net neutrality propaganda campaign has been so successful, it's super easy to convince people to hate Comcast and Verizon, we all already do.) But for example, the paid fast lane situation... does not currently exist. The whole "you might have to pay for the social media package to see this tweet" nonsense? Not only doesn't actually exist but has no chance of even remotely existing.
  - wmf 9y ago
    Paid fast lanes sort of do exist, but the content providers are the ones paying. This is worse in some ways because it is invisible to consumers but it's better in the sense that consumers don't pay for infrastructure they don't use.
pishpash 9y ago
I agree the bigger issue is lack of competition. Why isn't there equal outcry about that?
plandis 9y ago
Comcast has a very slow lane for all BitTorrent traffic (they effectively blocked it back in 2007/2008) until the FCC died them to not do that. You’re argument is probably false. The fears are real we’ve seen ISPs provide tired bandwidth in the past. Everything except BitTorrent traffic was in the fast lane and BitTorrent traffic was in the slow lane.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  FWIW, Comcast's statement clearly indicated it would not throttle or block lawful content. If you're being honest, you should be able to agree that most BitTorrent traffic is not lawful. As of 07/08, I think maybe the most common use of legal BitTorrent was that some Linux distros offered their ISOs over it. Today this might be a bit more interesting of a case since a lot of software patchers from major protocols now use the BitTorrent protocol to patch software. I believe Star Citizen does, Blizzard games may as well. Windows Update at the very least now uses a similar system, though I don't know if it's specifically BitTorrent based or not.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > FWIW, Comcast's statement clearly indicated it would not throttle or block lawful content. If you're being honest, you should be able to agree that most BitTorrent traffic is not lawful. Most BitTorrent traffic may not be, but that's a matter of content not protocol. Most of the people physically located in the death row wing of a particular prison may be condemned convicts but if a government says it's not going to kill anyone not duly sentenced to execution and just drops a bomb on that wing, killing mostly condemned criminals, but also a few correctional officers and service workers, the action would be clearly out of line with the commitment.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Sure, but again, the example given is ten years old, when there was almost zero legitimate BitTorrent traffic, and it was unreasonably difficult for ISPs to combat illegal traffic in other ways. (Of course, I suspect net neutrality supporters would be far angrier if Comcast were to inspect the contents of the BitTorrent content to determine if it's legal or not.) If you're going to throttle a protocol to keep your network optimized for legitimate users, crippling a piracy protocol seems pretty practical, wouldn't you say?
eldridgea 9y ago
What do you mean by token offenses? "Fast lanes" as a general product aren't likely going to be offers on the company home page, they're going to be in the private peering agreements they have with larger companies. This has already happened. [Netflix had to pay Comcast](https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-comcast-to-end-slowdown/ https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-com...), and [Comcast throttled their VoIP competitor Vonage](https://www.wired.com/2006/03/comcast_throttling_vonage_users/ https://www.wired.com/2006/03/comcast_throttling_vonage_user...). Vonage and Netflix started working again but the why was never made public. It seems likely that paying for fast lanes was involved. These aren't the cold hard facts we'd like to have about what exactly happened, but they're clear violations of Net Neutrality that were resolved ambiguously. As far as negative effects in general, beyond fast lanes, there's more than a few examples: * [AT&T blocked FaceTime](https://www.savetheinternet.com/att-facetime https://www.savetheinternet.com/att-facetime) * [Verizon blocked Google Wallet](http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/06/technology/verizon_blocks_google_wallet/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/06/technology/verizon_blocks_go...) * [Verizon throttles video](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/verizons-throttling-of-video-should-be-investigated-by-fcc-petition-says/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/verizons-throttl...) * And [a lot more](https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations-brief-history https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio...). The violations are often subtle, and haven't always affected everyone, but the negative effects of the lack of NN are not hypothetical.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  As I suggested, if you look at these incidents individually, there's very different perspectives you can glean: Netflix gets free colocation from ISPs through Netflix Open Connect. (Hilariously, Netflix claims it "offers this for free to ISPs", whereas if you realize it is colocation, it is obviously Netflix should be paying for it.) Net neutrality cripples ISPs' negotiating position with Netflix (since it prevents ISPs from controlling their traffic in other ways), which protects their special treatment, ironically, since only Netflix has the market share to dictate terms to ISPs. If you made a startup video competitor, you'd have to pay for the service net neutrality guarantees Netflix gets for free. ISPs must host Netflix's boxes for free, or get hit by a deluge of upstream Netflix traffic. FaceTime is an excellent example of a reasonable reason a provider may wish to get involved in content for performance reasons: Everyone switching to video chat would have a massive and immediate impact on that ISP's network traffic. With "unlimited data" models, ISPs don't necessarily get increased revenue to offset massively increased bandwidth use and network congestion. It's understandable why AT&T moved here. I actually prefer a pay-as-you-go data model, because it incentivizes carriers to provide neutral data as fast as possible: The more you use, the more money they make. Verizon blocking Google Wallet stands in a long line of incidents where good PR has reversed the blame. ;) Google refused to allow competitors' payment systems from using the secure element in phones... a market Google has monopoly control of. Eventually, Verizon's hardline stance on being able to offer a competing service forced Google to rework Wallet to be more fair, and not get an exclusive security feature everyone else was prohibited from using. Of course, Google just moved to kill their competition another way: They bought out Softcard/ISIS and turned it into Android Pay. (And kicked Windows Mobile Softcard users to the curb too, hurting a second competitor in the process! Efficiency!) NFC payment competitors to Android Pay on Android phones like Samsung Pay only exist today thanks to Verizon's hardline stance.