11 ms·

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is important.

by bzxcvbn 5y ago

WanderPanda 5y ago
*should be an option that you can book at your ISP.
- aaomidi 5y ago
  Please elaborate
- WarChortle18 5y ago
  Given that I only have one ISP available to me. How would that work? This is a problem of their own making. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Comcast has a monopoly in my area for high speed internet. Every other option is 25mbps(on a good day) or below. Comcast has shut down all potential competition. So yea if they want to be a regional monopoly they might have some regulations placed on them they don't like.
bmitc 5y ago
It's also an example of how it's already been lost.
- mnd999 5y ago
  That’s pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it. These regulations can just as easily be removed and replaced with proper net neutrality rules.
  - bmitc 5y ago
    I didn't say it couldn't be regained. But it will be an increasingly uphill battle. Regulators and politicians have been sold to the highest bidders.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    There is the cartel effect going on (lobbying against municipal broadband), but even in the absence of that, it's still tough to be an ISP. Think about how much money it costs to dig up a street and put cables under it, and then run them into each house along that street. People that want to use the Internet don't have enough money to do that, and that's why the business is tough. My experience from working at fiber ISPs is that the infrastructure is the hard part. Google Fiber got a good deal in its partner cities to run the fiber next to existing power lines (which not every city has, they're all underground here). When they ran out of easy install opportunities, expansion stopped. My experience was the same at a NYC-based ISP. If your building was on a street that already had open access tunnels, then we could serve you. If not, you were out of luck. If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I've seen proposal after proposal for trenching, microtrenching, nanotrenching, picotrenching, attotrenching... and none of these worked in the real world. (I might have made some of those up; I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Didn't try it, but I imagine it would irritate people with its intrinsic flakiness and ugliness.) The rest is simple, you can set up a full fledged fiber ISP for under $1000 in equipment! Figure out how to dig up the street profitably and you unlock a ton of wealth. (This, incidentally, is why people keep trying to sell wireless solutions. No streets to dig up. WiFi with pringles can antennas! 5G! A huge constellation of satellites! And honestly, it kind of works. But not so well that people are switching from their fiber connection to Starlink or whatever.)
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      >If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, The same way we got power to the homes which was government assistance and the private companies not expecting them to be totally profitable in a few years.
    - dzhiurgis 5y ago
      FWIW In my place grave diggers is a synonym for a least paid profession.
    - sandworm101 5y ago
      >> If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I Same as they did with electricity a century ago. If you want to provide service to the profitable urban area then you must run wires to the non-urban areas too.
- freemint 5y ago
  Compliance can be forced by law in a country which is capable of self regulation.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.) That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level departments with wide latitude to set regulations with the weight of law behind them but not the same high barrier of changing them as it takes to change a law. Technically this allows agencies to be more nimble, or as much as possible in any lumbering bureaucracy. On the other hand it means that very important pieces of public policy are even further removed from election accountability and subject to the whims of different administrations. Whether you're for or against it, the Keystone pipeline is a prime example of the insanity that results from this. It was approve & construction begun on one administration, a final portion for it put on hold by another, then opened again by a third, a fourth stopped it again resulting in its backers cancelling it (seemingly) once and for all. Forget about the difficulties of generation-long projects, this makes anything longer than 4 years highly uncertain.
  - serenitylater 5y ago
    You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      It's not about "half the country hates it", though. Plenty of projects have widespread support, but are only backed by one party (or no party). It's clearly a bug, as it causes undue preference for the status-quo above and beyond the popular will (and the common good).
    - hackernewds 5y ago
      something half the country hates can be good for the whole country. think COVID vaccines and lockdowns
ComradePhil 5y ago
Only if you use the internet primarily for streaming. If you use the internet primarily for something else, with "net neutrality", you will be paying for the video streaming traffic (which makes up 60% of downstream traffic) even though you don't use it for that. If Netflix is required to pay the ISPs, Netflix just increases their prices and it doesn't affect internet users who don't primarily stream video.
- beowulfey 5y ago
  Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality" too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have to subsidize their electricity use.
  - rglullis 5y ago
    Honest question: is there any place in the US where electricity is subsidized or has discriminatory pricing?
    - mpalczewski 5y ago
      California, sort of: They figure out what sort of place you own, pigeon hole it with other "similar" places and charge you more per kilowatt hour if you use more than they think you need. It's a procrustean bed approach.
    - JaimeThompson 5y ago
      Electricity is routinely subsidized for large companies building new factories such as the GigaFactory Tesla is building in Nevada. You can also look up "name of area / state" and search for electrical tariffs.
      - rglullis 5y ago
        Ok, but these subsidies are not based on a specific group. Some might think to be bad to subsidize Tesla, but would there be such a thing as subsidies for weed farmers? The reason I am asking: unless there are such subsidies, it would mean that people pay proportional to their usage, so OP's joke about "electricity neutrality" would not only be wrong, it would be against net neutrality as well.
ogurechny 5y ago
It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Anywhere in the world there are local and global popular services that generate high volumes of traffic. Providers naturally care about getting shortest paths to them, plan in advance, join local exchanges, and so on, even if they don't have any direct agreements. For starters, it might lower your traffic costs. In some locations there are mid-tier ISPs offering just good connectivity with all locally popular networks; they offer the solution for low-tier ISPs for some extra coins. However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
  > It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. > However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers. I think you need to work on your imagination. ISPs in the USA have already tried this (not sure if it is still happening).
  - User23 5y ago
    > Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. Categorically false. There’s no “net neutrality” legislation enacted or proposed that doesn’t have giant and vague QoS and general network operations carve-outs.
    - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
      The EFF was fairly happy with the FCC's Title II proposal back in 2015: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet-fcc-officially-embraces-title-ii https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet... In 2018 Markey and others proposed simply overturning Pai/Trump's overtuning of Title II. I don't know precisely what you're referring to ... the closest I could find was the EFF's objections to the FCC proposals from 2011 which had things like "vague QoS and general network operation carve outs": https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fcc-s-net-neutrality-rules-its https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fc... The EFF seemed much happier with the FCC proposals 4 years later. What am I missing?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
hackernewds 5y ago
Reminder that Netflix was a big proponent for axing net neutrality laws. Disagree with the premise though, Netflix has fast.com to make it transparent to customers that their NETFLIX volume is being throttled, and hence providers naturally do not throttle Netflix
- landemva 5y ago
  >>> Reminder that Netflix was a big proponent for axing net neutrality No, I remember the opposite. Netflix argues for net neutrality because that forces last-mile internet providers to absorb the bandwidth costs of Netflix's business model. https://www.theregreview.org/2021/11/10/kim-can-netflix-win-neutrality/ https://www.theregreview.org/2021/11/10/kim-can-netflix-win-... ' In the original claim, Netflix v. SK Broadband, Netflix invoked a net neutrality argument—based on the idea that internet service providers should treat all content equally—and argued that SK Broadband would discriminate against Netflix by imposing high network usage fees. Netflix also argued that SK Broadband should cover the increased costs of network traffic since it has an obligation to provide internet services to its customers. '

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why net neutrality is important.

WanderPanda 5y ago

*should be an option that you can book at your ISP.

aaomidi 5y ago
Please elaborate
WarChortle18 5y ago
Given that I only have one ISP available to me. How would that work? This is a problem of their own making. They can't have their cake and eat it too. Comcast has a monopoly in my area for high speed internet. Every other option is 25mbps(on a good day) or below. Comcast has shut down all potential competition. So yea if they want to be a regional monopoly they might have some regulations placed on them they don't like.

bmitc 5y ago

It's also an example of how it's already been lost.

mnd999 5y ago
That’s pretty defeatist. A cartel of corrupt politicians and large cable companies conspired to regulate against it. These regulations can just as easily be removed and replaced with proper net neutrality rules.
- bmitc 5y ago
  I didn't say it couldn't be regained. But it will be an increasingly uphill battle. Regulators and politicians have been sold to the highest bidders.
- jrockway 5y ago
  There is the cartel effect going on (lobbying against municipal broadband), but even in the absence of that, it's still tough to be an ISP. Think about how much money it costs to dig up a street and put cables under it, and then run them into each house along that street. People that want to use the Internet don't have enough money to do that, and that's why the business is tough. My experience from working at fiber ISPs is that the infrastructure is the hard part. Google Fiber got a good deal in its partner cities to run the fiber next to existing power lines (which not every city has, they're all underground here). When they ran out of easy install opportunities, expansion stopped. My experience was the same at a NYC-based ISP. If your building was on a street that already had open access tunnels, then we could serve you. If not, you were out of luck. If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I've seen proposal after proposal for trenching, microtrenching, nanotrenching, picotrenching, attotrenching... and none of these worked in the real world. (I might have made some of those up; I think "attotrenching" is what I called just running cables into people's windows and not burying them. Didn't try it, but I imagine it would irritate people with its intrinsic flakiness and ugliness.) The rest is simple, you can set up a full fledged fiber ISP for under $1000 in equipment! Figure out how to dig up the street profitably and you unlock a ton of wealth. (This, incidentally, is why people keep trying to sell wireless solutions. No streets to dig up. WiFi with pringles can antennas! 5G! A huge constellation of satellites! And honestly, it kind of works. But not so well that people are switching from their fiber connection to Starlink or whatever.)
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    >If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, The same way we got power to the homes which was government assistance and the private companies not expecting them to be totally profitable in a few years.
  - dzhiurgis 5y ago
    FWIW In my place grave diggers is a synonym for a least paid profession.
  - sandworm101 5y ago
    >> If you figure out how to profitably get wires to people's houses, you solve the ISP's problems. I Same as they did with electricity a century ago. If you want to provide service to the profitable urban area then you must run wires to the non-urban areas too.
freemint 5y ago
Compliance can be forced by law in a country which is capable of self regulation.
ineedasername 5y ago
In the US we had it for a brief period of time. Then we got an FCC chair who not only took it away, but actively trolled people who were angry about it. (And that's before we even get into the issue of the public comment ballot box getting stuffed by copypasta spam in favor of killing net neutrality and wink-and-nudge blind eye turned away from it.) That's the double edged sword in the US of having executive level departments with wide latitude to set regulations with the weight of law behind them but not the same high barrier of changing them as it takes to change a law. Technically this allows agencies to be more nimble, or as much as possible in any lumbering bureaucracy. On the other hand it means that very important pieces of public policy are even further removed from election accountability and subject to the whims of different administrations. Whether you're for or against it, the Keystone pipeline is a prime example of the insanity that results from this. It was approve & construction begun on one administration, a final portion for it put on hold by another, then opened again by a third, a fourth stopped it again resulting in its backers cancelling it (seemingly) once and for all. Forget about the difficulties of generation-long projects, this makes anything longer than 4 years highly uncertain.
- serenitylater 5y ago
  You can have plenty of projects get done that take longer than 4 years. You will have problems getting projects done that half the country hates if it takes longer than 4 years. This seems like a feature not a bug.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    It's not about "half the country hates it", though. Plenty of projects have widespread support, but are only backed by one party (or no party). It's clearly a bug, as it causes undue preference for the status-quo above and beyond the popular will (and the common good).
  - hackernewds 5y ago
    something half the country hates can be good for the whole country. think COVID vaccines and lockdowns

ComradePhil 5y ago

Only if you use the internet primarily for streaming. If you use the internet primarily for something else, with "net neutrality", you will be paying for the video streaming traffic (which makes up 60% of downstream traffic) even though you don't use it for that. If Netflix is required to pay the ISPs, Netflix just increases their prices and it doesn't affect internet users who don't primarily stream video.

beowulfey 5y ago
Damn, maybe we should get rid of "electricity neutrality" too. Would be great if we just charged extra to all these bitcoin miners and marijuana grow farms so I wouldn't have to subsidize their electricity use.
- rglullis 5y ago
  Honest question: is there any place in the US where electricity is subsidized or has discriminatory pricing?
  - mpalczewski 5y ago
    California, sort of: They figure out what sort of place you own, pigeon hole it with other "similar" places and charge you more per kilowatt hour if you use more than they think you need. It's a procrustean bed approach.
  - JaimeThompson 5y ago
    Electricity is routinely subsidized for large companies building new factories such as the GigaFactory Tesla is building in Nevada. You can also look up "name of area / state" and search for electrical tariffs.
    - rglullis 5y ago
      Ok, but these subsidies are not based on a specific group. Some might think to be bad to subsidize Tesla, but would there be such a thing as subsidies for weed farmers? The reason I am asking: unless there are such subsidies, it would mean that people pay proportional to their usage, so OP's joke about "electricity neutrality" would not only be wrong, it would be against net neutrality as well.

ogurechny 5y ago

It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Anywhere in the world there are local and global popular services that generate high volumes of traffic. Providers naturally care about getting shortest paths to them, plan in advance, join local exchanges, and so on, even if they don't have any direct agreements. For starters, it might lower your traffic costs. In some locations there are mid-tier ISPs offering just good connectivity with all locally popular networks; they offer the solution for low-tier ISPs for some extra coins. However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers.

PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
> It is quite obvious, at least from outside of USA, that “net neutrality” there is how certain group of corporations has been trying to lobby the codification of rules preferential to them to use in battle with other group of corporations. Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. > However, it is hard to imagine that some ISP would try to make the big source of traffic pay for what has already been paid by customers. I think you need to work on your imagination. ISPs in the USA have already tried this (not sure if it is still happening).
- User23 5y ago
  > Complete nonsense. "Net neutrality" means that there is no preferential treatment of packets based on origin or destination. Categorically false. There’s no “net neutrality” legislation enacted or proposed that doesn’t have giant and vague QoS and general network operations carve-outs.
  - PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago
    The EFF was fairly happy with the FCC's Title II proposal back in 2015: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet-fcc-officially-embraces-title-ii https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/02/huge-win-open-internet... In 2018 Markey and others proposed simply overturning Pai/Trump's overtuning of Title II. I don't know precisely what you're referring to ... the closest I could find was the EFF's objections to the FCC proposals from 2011 which had things like "vague QoS and general network operation carve outs": https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fcc-s-net-neutrality-rules-its https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/02/pt-ii-eff-evaluates-fc... The EFF seemed much happier with the FCC proposals 4 years later. What am I missing?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

hackernewds 5y ago

Reminder that Netflix was a big proponent for axing net neutrality laws. Disagree with the premise though, Netflix has fast.com to make it transparent to customers that their NETFLIX volume is being throttled, and hence providers naturally do not throttle Netflix

landemva 5y ago
>>> Reminder that Netflix was a big proponent for axing net neutrality No, I remember the opposite. Netflix argues for net neutrality because that forces last-mile internet providers to absorb the bandwidth costs of Netflix's business model. https://www.theregreview.org/2021/11/10/kim-can-netflix-win-neutrality/ https://www.theregreview.org/2021/11/10/kim-can-netflix-win-... ' In the original claim, Netflix v. SK Broadband, Netflix invoked a net neutrality argument—based on the idea that internet service providers should treat all content equally—and argued that SK Broadband would discriminate against Netflix by imposing high network usage fees. Netflix also argued that SK Broadband should cover the increased costs of network traffic since it has an obligation to provide internet services to its customers. '