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Depending on how this is applied/interpreted, I could see reasons to oppose it. For example, there can be a lot of "lawful traffic" that is harmful to a networ
by mdasen 5y ago
Depending on how this is applied/interpreted, I could see reasons to oppose it.
For example, there can be a lot of "lawful traffic" that is harmful to a network. T-Mobile's T&C say that these things are disallowed: "Uses applications which are designed for unattended use, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections, or applications that are used in a way that degrades network capacity or functionality", "Uses applications which automatically consume unreasonable amounts of available network capacity". I'm sure someone here is going to "but fetching RSS automatically..." but I'm going to ignore those straw-man objections. If someone is doing something that harms the network and the enjoyment of other users, it does seem reasonable to restrict that.
Likewise, many ISPs deprioritize data if a user has hit a certain threshold of usage. It isn't throttling, but they give priority to users who don't use as much data given the shared nature of the connection. That seems reasonable to me. It allows heavy users to use as much data as they want while light users aren't impacted by their heavy usage.
Many mobile ISPs throttle types of content like video. That's certainly controversial, but has become common.
> It also prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers
This always makes me wonder if that means that ISPs must deliver free transit. Most people aren't really aware of how money is paid to transmit things over the internet. For example, let's say that I want to transmit a video to a Comcast customer in LA. Can I hand it off to them in NY and say "it's your problem now since you can't charge me to deliver the traffic"? Or do I have to get it within a certain distance of the customer and pay for the transit myself? If Comcast won't advertise BGP routes non-locally if someone isn't wiling to pay them transit, is that a violation?
I know a lot of people say that they just want a "dumb pipe", but I think that's mostly because many companies are kinda scummy. We've seen ISPs do crappy things. But there is reasonable network management. For example, I've had friends who have worked at universities where 1% of the users end up consuming 50-75% of the bandwidth. They've done things like put BitTorrent traffic at a lower priority. They don't block it, but they do manage it so that the shared network works well for everyone. If a lab starts using a crazy amount of bandwidth, they don't want everyone else's usage to suffer. It's quite reasonable to manage traffic in good faith - and I think a lot of the no-management/dumb-pipe stuff comes from the fact that we've had some scummy ISPs.
- wmf 5y agoa lot of the no-management/dumb-pipe stuff comes from the fact that we've had some scummy ISPs. This is true, but that's how politics works. ISPs abused their position and lost the public's trust so now there's going to be an overreaction in the opposite direction. ...1% of the users end up consuming 50-75% of the bandwidth... The correct and neutral solution to this is per-customer fair queueing. (It's not my problem that there isn't any equipment to implement that.)