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What fears about Net Neutrality have come to pass? I was really concerned about it at the time, I admit, but now seems overblown in retrospect. Internet speeds
by Reedx 6y ago
What fears about Net Neutrality have come to pass?
I was really concerned about it at the time, I admit, but now seems overblown in retrospect. Internet speeds, for example, have only improved since then. And haven't seen the concerns about web site bundling or priority access manifest.
- seibelj 6y agoAlso, speeds in Europe have been on average worse than the USA, despite their strong NN laws https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-country.php https://www.fastmetrics.com/internet-connection-speed-by-cou... They have even had to ration internet during COVID https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/03/19/internet-use-could-rationed-prioritise-health-services-online/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2020/03/19/internet-u... Although I despise our internet oligopoly in the US, in the EU it seems to be even worse despite their heavy handed regulation.
- fakedang 6y agoThe EU is a whole different level of incompetent, but attributing that to regulation alone would be misleading. For one, Europe is much denser than the US. Naturally net loads would be high if everyone were forced into a lock down uniformly, with armed patrols and the like.
- Rebelgecko 6y agoWas the internet rationing in the EU even necessary, or was it just a knee-jerk solution to a problem that didn't actually exist? At the time it seemed like the latter. Presumably Amazon, Netflix and friends are back to full bitrates now, has it caused any problems? Edit: although if the EU requests to slow down data were totally unnecessarily it certainly doesn't disprove your point about excessive regulation
- sandworm101 6y ago>> And haven't seen the concerns about web site bundling or priority access manifest. How would you know? Absolute blocks are one thing, artificial performance differences another. If your ISP was slightly reducing the performance of one streaming service to advantage another, how many people would actually test for this? If a phone maker (apple/google/whatever) was feeding an ISP money to ensure their phones would be that little bit better on the network, wouldn't most people chalk that up to differences in hardware? True evil survives by being difficult to detect with certainty.
- Rebelgecko 6y agoDidn't Netflix create fast.com to help find out if any ISPs were throttling Netflix servers? I imagine they'd be pretty vocal about it if any ISP was artificially harming them. Although I guess the problem of net neutrality is that smaller streaming services would need equivalent speed tests to verify if they're being hurt by lack of NN.
- mywittyname 6y agoNetflix finally acquiesced and paid ISPs (Verizon, AT&T, Cox) money to stop throttling their service. Though, this happened long before Pai took control of the FCC (~2014). If you have one of those ISPs and Netflix, then you're paying your ISP twice: directly for the internet connection, and indirectly for the privilege of being able to use Netflix. This was literally the argument in support Net Neutrality, which ISPs said would never happen. It only took months for ISPs to capitalize.
- jakelazaroff 6y agoWasn't that a peering agreement? IIRC, ISPs weren't throttling Netflix per se — Netflix was just paying them for direct access to their last-mile networks, rather than going through "the open internet".
- deelowe 6y ago> What fears about Net Neutrality have come to pass? ATT appears to have a transparent proxy [1] on LTE that selectively disables protocols based on usage. As a rural LTE user, we completely lost our ability to work/school from home for 2 weeks as a result until I could find a suitable alternative. Note, there was no violation of TOS or anything like that. [1] - https://forums.att.com/conversations/other-phones-devices/att-transparent-proxy-not-stable-hanging-connections-to-websites/5ee7bfdf483393542c96b341 https://forums.att.com/conversations/other-phones-devices/at...
- twoodfin 6y agoNet Neutrality regulations as debated a few years ago were never going to apply to wireless service providers.
- mixmastamyk 6y agoSelling of browsing history (shudder) did happen, didn't it? One of the reasons Firefox moved most users to DNS over HTTPS.
- ryanlol 6y agoPeople have the strangest ideas of what “net neutrality” implies. This has nothing to do with it.
- atomi 6y agoRidiculously expensive data caps exclusively used for wealth extraction.
- dimensi0nal 6y agoBlanket data caps have nothing to do with net neutrality.
- anfilt 6y agoThey can if the provider white lists their own services or certain services from the data caps.