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2014: The year the Americans broke the internet
- Loughla 13y agoAnytime someone says something like, " and I don't want to add to the hyperbole already out there, but," I write them off. That is an admittance to using hyperbole, and therefore invalidates the argument, correct?
- hrkristian 13y agoIt's up there with "I'm not a racist, but..." Doesn't affect facts, though. Just means be more sceptical...
- giantrobothead 13y agoOr "I don't mean to be rude, but..."
- jff 13y agoFor a while, the Something Awful forums apparently word-filtered "I'm not racist, but" to appear as "I'm extremely racist, and"
- BlackDeath3 13y ago>The year the Americans broke the internet. Yeah... you're welcome, I guess? I suppose I should have called my representatives, right? Well, their interns, at least...
- huhalu 13y agoMore like US Appeals Court broke internet
- giantrobothead 13y ago"The Year Multinational Corporations with Powers Beyond the Scope of Individual Actors Broke the Internet" just isn't as catchy a title, huh?
- wavefunction 13y agoThere have always been multinets even if it seemed like one over-arching Internet, but users and technology are just going to have to become more sophisticated. Some good folks will be lost along the way to criminals and "intelligence services" (but I repeat myself!) We can't give up the dream and that remarkable goal of networked computing and communication and information accessibility. It took some time but the assholes got their shit together. Which is what we're seeing now. These assholes have always been with us throughout human history, causing problems and violence and bringing out the worst in the rest of us. So we need to maintain vigilance, and work early to undo their harm they cause to us and themselves. I forgive them, because they are born with hearts of fear and that will never change. We can't allow them to dictate our lives though. We know what's right and what's wrong, and we simply need to make sure they are put in the sandbox to play with their toys where they can't hurt anyone else while we move forward together as a family. This is why no one individual should have too much power over anyone else, and no office or government should be similarly afforded the powers to destroy on a whim. There will always be these folks with us, and if we offer them opportunities to express themselves, they will to our shame and regret. (I know, lots of "theys" and "us." I invite you to take a chance and perhaps expand your mind.)
- mullingitover 13y ago> I forgive them, because they are born with hearts of fear and that will never change I think it's not 'hearts of fear' but 'laserlike focus on maximizing shareholder value, greater good be damned.'
- RickS 13y agoI think that comes from a place of fear in a lot of people. Money is power, and protection. What does money ultimately buy us if not safety? Perhaps not always literal physical safety, but the safety of knowing you can live life as you see fit without restriction. Basically, money buys contentedness, and those that remain bound to contentedness are often there through the avoidance of the things that cause them fear.
- greenyoda 13y agoAny U.S. decision on net neutrality can only affect the part of the internet that's within the U.S., so outside the U.S., the internet remains as it always was. I'm surprised that the author, writing from the U.K., thinks of "the internet" in such a U.S.-centric way. Did the Great Firewall of China also "break the internet"?
- rqebmm 13y agofor people in China? In a manner of speaking: Yes.
- badman_ting 13y agoHey, it was ours to break.
- emocakes 13y agolol, yeah, everything is american, i forgot...
- rayiner 13y agoStuff created by our defense department in conjunction with our universities certainly is American. To this day, ICANN operates under authority delegated from the U.S. Department of Commerce.
- tjgq 13y agoBy that same logic, all websites are European (Swiss? French? German?) because HTTP was invented by Tim Berners-Lee while at CERN.
- retr0h 13y agoJust keep those websites off my lawn
- thirsteh 13y agoThen we Danes would like our ice cube bags back, please.
- krapp 13y agoFine. But keep the Legos coming or there will be hell to pay.
- badman_ting 13y agoWell, in this case it is. lol.
- alexeisadeski3 13y ago
- aidenn0 13y agoNote that I've seen VOIP latency increase in the wake of a cable-company deploying a phone option. Disguising the nature of the traffic caused the latency to drop again.
- rahimnathwani 13y agoHow do you disguise the nature of the traffic without also changing the route taken by the packets? I would be inclined to test this with/without a VPN connection, but then I wouldn't know whether the improvement was due to avoiding throttling/whatever, or just that my VPN server has better quality routes to the VoIP endpoint. I guess if you VPN to the VoIP server itself, then it would be a fair test.
- aidenn0 13y agoAll RTP seemed to exhibit the issue, so we just setup a test with two RTP endpoints. We wrote a very simple UDP mangler/demangler (XOR with a fixed key) and ran it on both ends of the RTP connection.
- diminoten 13y agoI fail to see how this breaks even the US Internet. Comcast will never cut off the flow to certain parts of the Internet for the sake of charging you to go there. They'll always let you go to those places, they just won't let you go there as quickly if you don't pay extra. I don't think I have to tell you all how shitty this would be, but it's not a "broken" Internet. We can sit here and concoct all kinds of worst-case scenarios, but we could also do that with anything. Your babysitter could feed your kid a bottle of aspirin - this is within the realm of physical possibility, just as it's within the realm of physical possibility that Comcast starts shaking down websites. And before anyone even brings it up, Netflix and Comcast's peering agreement has nothing to do with net neutrality. Without peering, Netflix's path to consumers was long. With peering, it's not, which leads to faster speeds. That's it. Peering agreements have existed for many years, and will need to continue to exist for the Internet to continue to exist. It'd be much worse for the Internet to abolish all peering agreements in the name of neutrality (wtf?) than it would be for the FCC to have no teeth in enforcing net neutrality.
- MoosePlissken 13y agoAnd if that's true, is it really much different than what we have today? If you have deep pockets, you can already buy speed by using the services of a CDN like Akamai. We already have an unlevel playing field.
- diminoten 13y agoRight now Comcast (except for torrent traffic, fuck them for that) doesn't meddle in what the packet is or where it's going, per se. However they do, apparently, have peering agreements with companies which allow these companies to serve traffic directly from THEIR networks, straight into Comcast's networks. This effectively does favor certain traffic over other traffic, but it's a kind of favoring that's been going on forever, and is generally accepted. I dunno. I actually fail to see how peering in general is not a violation of net neutrality, however it's so critical to the smooth operation of the Internet, I'd rather have peering than net neutrality, if I had to choose.
- wmf 13y ago
- rayiner 13y agoI've said this in a different argument, but it bears repeating: The "internet" is merely a software abstraction. It doesn't exist. What actually exists is a loosely-coordinated group of private networks, subject to the whims of the owners of those networks. Nobody "broke" the internet, because there was nothing to break. All that's happening is that the abstraction is becoming less representative of the reality, for various quite predictable reasons.
- gruseom 13y agoYou speak only of the letter and not of the spirit of the thing. This has nothing in common with the mentality that created the internet in the first place, which was cosmic and adventurous and poetic. It reminds me rather of cutting the perforations off of postage stamps. I doubt that J.C.R. Licklider would approve.
- rayiner 13y agoUndoubtedly there are lots of high-minded poetic idealists behind the development of the internet. But the universe doesn't owe it to them to make the physical nature of the world adapt to their ideals. Maybe many people imagined that the internet would be this borderless space in the ether where packets flowed unimpeded from any source to any destination. Yet, borders are one of the most fundamental facets of earthly existence, and whoever controls them, whether they be nations or network providers, have tremendous power. And that is the true nature of reality.
- gruseom 13y ago"True nature of reality"? Highly debatable! Maybe in legal offices. :) Everybody sees that concept through their own filter. I suppose to a cobbler the true nature of reality is surfaces that wear out over time.
- rayiner 13y agoTry walking all over your neighbor's lawn and get back to me about whether borders are a concept everyone sees through their own filter.
- rqebmm 13y agoas much of a pessimist as I am, I highly doubt much of the doomsday scenario will come to pass. Comcast and Verizon will likely spend a lot of time and energy staying JUST on this side of the FCC's ire, because the FCC will always have the "nuclear option" of reclassifying the ISPs as common carriers. Besides, ISPs degrade/prioritize traffic all the time through management of peering relationships. All they have to do is fail to adequately upgrade the servers that communicate with Netflix to cause congestion while at the same time spending lots of resources making sure their peering relationship with Hulu is top-notch. This would create much faster Hulu traffic relative to Netflix traffic on provider's network, but all of the traffic is still reaching the end-user in the same manner, i.e. it's still "net-neutral". The only real solution here is the common carrier reclassification because the only real problem is the last-mile-monopoly. Everything else is just business.
- dillon 13y agoI heavily disagree that the internet is now forever broken as this writer is mentioning. One year the U.S. can take one stance, but on the next year they can take another. The whole notion of being broken "For good" implies 'forever' and forever is a lot longer than the writer may realize. People will know and figure out if ISPs are in fact abusing their powers. Yes, I agree that all ISPs are evil in their own way and there is nothing we can do about that. Although, I think that the ISPs know that they are making more money off of their users than they would throttling other sites thus retaining those users is of the utmost importance.
- dragonwriter 13y ago> One year the U.S. can take one stance, but on the next year they can take another. Or even the same year; the FCC is already moving to restore (and perhaps expand by voiding barriers to municipal broadband) the substance of the ruels in its Open Internet Order, under different legal authority, based on the decision in the Verizon case. [1] [1] http://www.fcc.gov/document/statement-fcc-chairman-tom-wheeler-fccs-open-internet-rules http://www.fcc.gov/document/statement-fcc-chairman-tom-wheel...
- allochthon 13y ago> It is much more than that. As the LA Times said in the aftermath of the US Appeals court decision that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could not establish rules promoting net neutrality: bow down to your new internet overlords, Comcast and Verizon. I'm hoping Google will lead the way and provide a genuine alternative for retail Internet access, given the extent of their parallel network. Comcast and Verizon will then have an opportunity to learn that customers are people to be served and not cows to be milked.
- gress 13y agoWhy would Google's alternative be neutral when there is no rule saying it has to be?
- allochthon 13y agoThat's a good point. In terms of an ideal solution, the answer would definitely be "no." In terms of the behavior of the companies involved, I trust Google slightly more than I do Verizon or Comcast to keep the interests of consumers in mind. But trusting a for-profit corporation with something like this is not an ideal long-term arrangement.
- xFFEE 13y agoNot 2014. It was 2001. When Americans broke theirselves, because of being unable to make anything but guns. And war. They (You?) broke their own freedom, because of guns, and making money in wars. Try something else, something new.
- lettergram 13y agoI'd just like to point out, this also gives an opportunity (or at least incentive) for different forms of internet transport (i.e. googles loon).
- throwwit 13y agoI'd surmise that forcing the FCC's hand on a common carrier ruling might be preemptive to loon or another mesh-networking based co. gaining ground in a regulatorally permissive space. Especially given longer range wifi tech is on the horizon.
- kungpooey 13y agoFuck off. Everyone is responsible or no one is. Disagree? Then no, the Americans didn't do shit, their oppressive government did.