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Net neutrality never meant your ISP would not charge you more for higher speeds to your home. It never meant your ISP would not charge you for pulling more data
by bregma 6y ago
Net neutrality never meant your ISP would not charge you more for higher speeds to your home. It never meant your ISP would not charge you for pulling more data than some cap, and it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type or data caps.
Those things were never what net neutrality was about.
Net neutrality was about ISPs providing differential pricing or services based on data originator. For example, you ISP charging Netflix extra for every byte from Netflix carried over their circuits, on the threat of blocking or throttling those packets. "Nice place you got here, shame if something was to happen to it. Me and they boys will be around Thursdays to collect."
Most of the fall-out from a lack of network neutrality was hidden behind higher fees for your streaming services. Those fees are unlikely to come down as a result of the restoration of net neutrality because they can instead be added to the streaming service's bottom line. You're not going to notice the rollback even though the loss of net neutrality probably resulted in billions of dollars being taken from the consumer's pockets into various corporate coffers. The market could bear it and the only change is whose pockets it goes in to.
- slim 6y agoit never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type it actually means that. net neutrality means isp does not get to discriminate packets. if you have 1G bandwidth you are free to use it for any packet you want
- bregma 6y agoThat is not what net neutrality meant. It has always meant that a carrier could not discriminate based on the origin of the packet, not the content of the packet.
- wtallis 6y ago> it never meant your ISP would never throttle data based on content type [...] Accurately classifying traffic as video streaming vs bulk downloads, or gaming vs VoIP, etc. is a technological impossibility. Any scheme to do so is trivially defeated by things like VPNs and at best devolves to a cat and mouse game with ever-more draconian deep packet inspection. A good Net Neutrality regulatory regime must prohibit ISPs from being lazy and only prioritizing the most popular VoIP protocols and services they know about, which means in practice that Net Neutrality has to go all the way to prohibiting discrimination based on content type. If ISPs want to throttle, they have to do it on the basis of actual traffic patterns. If you want to deprioritize heavy traffic flows, you have to identify them based on the observed pattern of sending lots of large packets, rather than classifying it based on the notion that a certain port number means a certain kind of traffic.
- bregma 6y agoDiscriminating on the origin of the packet does not require any kind of deep inspection since the originator is in IP metadata. Net neutrality means not discriminating on the originator of the packet, not the content.
- wtallis 6y agoRepeating your assertion does not make it true. Net Neutrality has always included an aspect of not discriminating for or against certain protocols, because giving preference to specific protocols has the effect of giving preference to the incumbent services that are using those protocols and dissuading innovation and the development of alternatives. Net Neutrality is about ISPs being neutral and not influencing the market for services offered over the net. Since ISPs can unfairly influence the market using techniques beyond just inspecting packet origins and destinations, Net Neutrality has to cover those techniques too.