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ah you kind of said similar things to me while i was typing another comment. I think it's dangerous to be too sweeping with things like, "sites owned by the pa

ah you kind of said similar things to me while i was typing another comment. I think it's dangerous to be too sweeping with things like, "sites owned by the parent company of the ISP will be as smooth as butter." Let me explain by talking about a net neutrality problem my clients and I had when I operated a small business, supporting small businesses. We installed VoIP systems, hosted at Rackspace, communicating over services like Time-Warner Cable. We were pretty sure that TWC had specially prioritized their packets, but we also could not get the most reliable performance without installing a router at our customer site, and dedicating a portion of bandwidth to communicating with a single IP address. QoS sounds great when you're talking about it, but not when you are talking VoIP over it, in my experience. So, stick with me here for a sec, pls - I still oppose TWC prioritizing their own traffic, but only in a way that I can't do for mine. So here comes my disagreement with the word 'neutral'. I do not want a neutral network. I want a fair one. It's subtle, but a valuable distinction IMO. So, people keep telling me that "A good neutrality implementation won't outlaw prioritization", but is that true? If I'm a voter, and I am not an engineer, does that make any fucking sense to me? Confusion is extremely bad for democracy. Anti-competetive capitalism certainly also is.

tga_d 12y ago
"Fair" reminds me far too much of the horror that is FRAND. It simply provides far too much leeway on the part of the company, who would almost certainly get the largest say in what is "fair." For example, they could easily market "Is it fair that a web site who pays more for quality service gets the same treatment as those who pay less?" as justification for charging sites for "fast lane" fees.
orthecreedence 12y ago
> A good neutrality implementation won't outlaw prioritization I think to have true net neutrality, the provider needs to make no distinction about the traffic that's going through it. People pay for access to 1s and 0s at a certain bandwidth and that is provided without prioritizing one type of traffic over another (save for upload/download speeds). At least, this is how I hope it works. If you want QoS, you'd do so on your own network with your own router. > Anti-competetive capitalism certainly also is. Free market and democracy are two separate issues, although it would be my argument that they are in constant disagreement with each other...at least in the case of American Capitalism. In the US, you have large corporations lobbying for less and less regulation generally at the expense of the citizens (and thus the republic). When something becomes so pervasive that society as it exists cannot live without it (like the internet), it's my belief that it's in the hands of government to regulate it ferociously so that it's not at the whim of a company which doesn't have your best interests in mind. This is especially true, in the case of internet, in places where only one ISP exists and the usual ridiculous argument of "Just switch providers!" doesn't work. Even if there are two providers, they are generally both terrible anyway. There comes a point where people in the US need to realize that yes, free market is great, but it doesn't mean that the citizen's best interests (or customer's interests, even) are represented by <insert corporation here> and this is where regulation comes in. There's a balance. Anti-competitive capitalism can, in moderation, be absolutely great for democracy. The free market is not the ultimate oracle of truth, it is yet another weight on the scale of a free, open, and intelligent society where common good is the ultimate goal.

tga_d 12y ago

"Fair" reminds me far too much of the horror that is FRAND. It simply provides far too much leeway on the part of the company, who would almost certainly get the largest say in what is "fair." For example, they could easily market "Is it fair that a web site who pays more for quality service gets the same treatment as those who pay less?" as justification for charging sites for "fast lane" fees.

orthecreedence 12y ago

> A good neutrality implementation won't outlaw prioritization I think to have true net neutrality, the provider needs to make no distinction about the traffic that's going through it. People pay for access to 1s and 0s at a certain bandwidth and that is provided without prioritizing one type of traffic over another (save for upload/download speeds). At least, this is how I hope it works. If you want QoS, you'd do so on your own network with your own router. > Anti-competetive capitalism certainly also is. Free market and democracy are two separate issues, although it would be my argument that they are in constant disagreement with each other...at least in the case of American Capitalism. In the US, you have large corporations lobbying for less and less regulation generally at the expense of the citizens (and thus the republic). When something becomes so pervasive that society as it exists cannot live without it (like the internet), it's my belief that it's in the hands of government to regulate it ferociously so that it's not at the whim of a company which doesn't have your best interests in mind. This is especially true, in the case of internet, in places where only one ISP exists and the usual ridiculous argument of "Just switch providers!" doesn't work. Even if there are two providers, they are generally both terrible anyway. There comes a point where people in the US need to realize that yes, free market is great, but it doesn't mean that the citizen's best interests (or customer's interests, even) are represented by <insert corporation here> and this is where regulation comes in. There's a balance. Anti-competitive capitalism can, in moderation, be absolutely great for democracy. The free market is not the ultimate oracle of truth, it is yet another weight on the scale of a free, open, and intelligent society where common good is the ultimate goal.