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As an American, with an uncertain dog in this fight, could someone explain the pro side to net neutrality? I can certainly see that in theory if your ISP is pr

• dragonwriter 12y ago
  > It seems like the big hub-bub is that one of the hated cable companies is slowing down Netflix traffic to extract a ransom from Netflix. The combination of limitation choice and blocking policies are actually the big thing -- Netflix specifically and "ransom"/paid prioritization are recent aspects of that debate, but it really goes back to things like Comcast blocking Bittorrent, and many ISPs having rules governing what kind of applications users are permitted to use on their connection. > Is this really a government concern that potentially some people won't be able to stream "House of Cards" without buffering? No, the government concern is that incumbent ISPs (who often face very little local competition) will use blocking and/or paid prioritization policies to inhibit competition with their own services (many of the major incumbents also offer their own services, like streaming video services, cable TV service, phone service, etc., for which services offered over the public internet by other providers are competition.) > Apparently there exists a technical fix by using a VPN In the absence of the no-blocking rule, VPNs could be blocked by ISPs, thwarting this workaround. > Why wouldn't the customers complain to/blame their ISPs just as much as Netflix? Lack of significant competition means that you don't have to care that people are complaining to or blaming you.
  • xrange 12y ago
    >it really goes back to things like Comcast blocking Bittorrent, and many ISPs having rules governing what kind of applications users are permitted to use on their connection. ...I'm not up to speed on Bittorrent, but are they specifically blocking Bittorrent, or is coming under the ruberic of "thou shall not run a server behind your cable modem"? Certainly I can see that the 'net is supposed to be peer-to-peer and your server shouldn't be blocked from your residential connection, but can't you usually upgrade to a "business" package and get around those limitations? On the one hand I suppose you could get mad at having to pay extra for the "full" internet. On the other hand I suppose that someone could equally say that they're offering a discount for offering less services. I'm interested to know what other sorts of things/applications ISPs may be blocking. Is there a name-and-shame site out there listing various ISPs and what they don't allow. Kind of a Consumer Reports for ISPs? And I suppose someone has crunched the numbers and knows what percentage of people are only served by one broadband supplier. Is it 10% of the population who can't get DSL, wireless, satellite or some other form of competition of some kind?
    • kevinnk 12y ago
      > I'm not up to speed on Bittorrent, but are they specifically blocking Bittorrent, or is coming under the ruberic of "thou shall not run a server behind your cable modem"? Maybe try googling before you comment? Comcast would inject forged TCP rst packets to inbound bittorrent connections. It did not send these packets to people running servers or other peer-to-peer protocols. In fact, people complained that the resets would sometimes prevent Windows Remote Desktop from working and Comcast adjusted their system to prevent it from jamming. https://www.eff.org/wp/packet-forgery-isps-report-comcast-affair https://www.eff.org/wp/packet-forgery-isps-report-comcast-af... > I'm interested to know what other sorts of things/applications ISPs may be blocking. Is there a name-and-shame site out there listing various ISPs and what they don't allow. The current issue isn't really blocking, it's throttling. There are a couple of sites that do this sort of measurements. Look at http://www.measurementlab.net/ http://www.measurementlab.net/ > Is it 10% of the population who can't get DSL, wireless, satellite or some other form of competition of some kind? The FCC's current definition of broadband is 25mbps. Vast majority of DSL isn't broadband speed (Avg is 10Mbps.) 4g isn't broadband speed (~12Mbps). Satellite isn't broadband speed (~15Mbps and usually expensive compared to wired.) At 25mbps, 20% have no service and 55% have only one service. http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/09/most-of-the-us-has-no-broadband-competition-at-25mbps-fcc-chair-says/ http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/09/most-of-the-us-has-n...
• a_c_s 12y ago
  Net neutrality is the way things ran for most of the last 20 years. This is less of a change but a return to what worked well in the recent past. The reason we are even discussing this topic is that telecoms are moving away from net neutrality. A) What happens if your ISP blocks all VOIP traffic unless you buy their phone service bundle? Or throttle all streaming video (which competes with their cable offerings)? In other markets these would be seen as an abuse of monopoly power (which, in many local markets, telecoms are). Given that, is indeed a government concern. B) Any workaround is trivially blocked by the ISP. C) It isn't obvious to the consumer why a site is slow, especially if some competing sites do pay the extra fees ISPs are asking for. Again, local monopolies (and oligopolies) mean that telecoms don't have much incentive to make their customers happier: at this point nobody is going to forgo internet service entirely. As far as billion dollar enterprises are concerned, Google, Facebook, or Skype could have been squashed in their infancy. AOL search would be the best we ever got - or the only search engine that AOL users could access: there's no incentive to improve when you're the only option.