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Surprise Surprise (Net Neutrality, not actually neutral...)
I know this isn't technically hardware but its the closest match i could find as the best place to put this.
http://techraptor.net/content/new-net-neutrality-regulations-not-entirely-neutral
"Of particular concern are the passages regarding ‘reasonable network management’ as it pertains to ‘copyright protection.’ These passages allow ISPs to act as the internet police, blocking and throttling customers they deem to be engaged in illegal activity. This is somewhat ironic because it was Comcast’s throttling of BitTorrent users that brought Net Neutrality to a head in the first place. Also ironic is that when the FCC discovered that Comcast was clandestinely throttling their BitTorrent users, they ordered them to stop. Comcast agreed to move away from this behavior and stated that they would find another way to manage their internet traffic."
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Comments
This isn't surprise surprise, the little scenario that article fabricated would never fly, and the FCC would force Comcast to reverse the decision to throttle its users just like they did before and give them a fine on top of it.
Torrenting itself is not illegal and is not a copyright infringment issue either. Just like the end of the article said, "it's to early to raise alarm" since the regulations haven't even gone into effect yet so its clearly to early to be raising alarms and grabbing the pitchforks.
This is little better than Fox News/CNN's fear mongering for the sake of views.
I know, its called sarcasm ;-).
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
I think it is a significant loophole.
You are correct in saying that torrents are not, in and of themselves, illegal. Neither is encrypted traffic, or tunneled traffic, or various other technologies.
Those technologies help to ensure privacy, and are often abused by people who do use them to perform illegal activity.
So the loophole is - they can block you for using them. And they have a legitimate claim - a lot of (insert your tech) traffic ~could~ be indicative of illegal traffic. Remember, it doesn't have to actually indicate anything, they could throttle/block you for any reason and just use this as blanket justification, and it would hold up all the way until someone actually does take them to court and forces them to provide evidence - and possibly past that depending on the quality of their legal argument. And then the ball would be back in your court - you can either accept the block/throttling, or you can incur the legal expensive of taking them to court ~and~ have to give up that privacy in an attempt to prove that it was not.
It's not an insurmountable burden, but it's a significant burden. And it's an entirely concievable circumstance... ISPs are notorious outright blocking torrents regardless of intent, and throttling based on just traffic volume. If all they need is a thinly veiled excuse other than "traffic shaping" I don't think they would hesitate to jump on it.
After all, if you disagree with their practice, who else are you going to go to for your high speed internet? And that, I think, is the real problem with Broadband in the United States.
ALso of considerable note, is that this loophole pertains to "copyright protection" - which reeks of the MPAA/RIAA. Which almost guarantees it will be abused
That's speculation and conjecture and extremely biased, I admit. But yeah...
That's who was a driving force behind the previous bills that were shot down. Your statement is speculation, don't know about biased. It's also not unfounded speculation. Cat is out of the bag. Who knows what happens next. Hopefully nothing for awhile.
It is only a matter of time before the US government gets involved with the regulation of internet traffic.
They just cant resist having something out there that is so widely used that in not under Govt. control. Hopefully it is still years away, but dont doubt for a minute its coming, sooner or later.
Comcast is lucky they have a monopoly on broadband service in many parts of the US. They consistently rank in the bottom 5 of customer satisfaction each year.
There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.
-- Herman Melville
Can't even put it into words how happy it makes me that people so far in here actually get it, i.e. have pulled the wool from their eyes.
When this whole net neutrality bill passed, the comments on PCGamer and Reddit made it sound like it was the second coming of Jesus. Anybody who expressed any whif of negativity or concern was immediately lambasted as a right wing nut job republiCON, etc etc etc.
All i did was try to point out to people that it was crafted behind closed doors on purpose, and that should be cause for concern and even i was lambasted. Unfortunately this is NOT one of those situations where i will relish being able to say 'I told you so".
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
They're about to be #1, they're buying up time warner as well. Zeig Hail! (sp)
It wasn't a recent bill that passed. It was that the FCC decided that a bill that passed in the 1930s now gave them the power to regulate the Internet after it used to not do so. And that's being challenged in court. It could also be reversed by a future FCC, and probably will if a Republican is elected president, or possibly a Democrat who wants to return to the Clinton-era "hands off the net" approach.
Big regulations tend to primarily benefit groups that have a bunch of lobbyists to affect their implementation. This may or may not correlate with the supposed intended beneficiaries. The problem is that you hire a bunch of bureaucrats to implement stuff, but they don't really know what they're doing, as it depends on the fine details of how businesses operate. So they have to talk to people who do know what is going on, and that means lobbyists.
Talking to lobbyists isn't always a bad thing; if they were writing regulations at random without the slightest clue how the businesses actually work, they'd often hamstring or shut down entire industries without meaning to. But lobbyists that work for particular companies tend to push regulations that benefit that company--especially at the expense of competitors.
Expect the main real-world effect of net neutrality regulations to be making it massively harder for small ISPs to get started or hang around. That's usually how it goes with regulations, as the big companies can hire lobbyists that push things to squash the small companies. That means less competition, which has a lot of bad effects for consumers, though they're often in the domain of, good things that new start-ups would have brought never happen, but people didn't know that they would have happened if not for stifling regulations and don't miss them.
I think the reality of it is that small ISPs are done.
There are anti-monopoly rules, but there are certain industries where competition isn't feasible - such as utility. You don't have to have 7 different companies running 7 different sets of power lines down your street, and 7 different phone lines, and 7 different cable lines, etc.
So utilities are more or less allowed to be a monopoly, so long as they agree to abide by some pretty heavy regulation to ensure they don't abuse that monopoly. That is part of those 1930's laws - you can be a monopoly providing an essential service, and we agree you can make a profit, but that profit gets limited (and if you make too much you have to rebate it or reinvest it), and you have to provide access to everyone. And if you get too big nationwide, we can still break you up (Bell breakup of 1982)
Cable got around that, because television was never mandated as an "essential" service, like electric and phone have been. And there was always the alternative of Over-The-Air television (which still exists, but it's been so hobbled it's hardly competition), and satellite TV providers.
Internet is shifting to be an "essential" service - which I agree, I believe it is. That doesn't necessarily mean lower prices, but it should mean better access, reliability, a standard delivery speed, enforceable and hopefully clear traffic rules, and that you won't be unnecessarily price gouged.
Neverrmind, my comments were about Texas' lack of electric monopolies and were not related to Net Neutrality.
If you're interested about Texas' method of avoiding electric monopolies then look here: http://www.powertochoose.org/
I'm familiar with Direct Access across utilities (I work in the power/utility industry, although I'm not familiar with Texas specifics, similar laws are in other states) - but you still only have one set of power lines running to your home - and who owns those? Power Generation is just one aspect of it - Distribution is the other.
Generation can be commoditized - just like your choice of Internet Portal or Email Provider or anything else could be commoditized (and is on the internet). But it's not practical to have 8 different companies running various different lines out to your home - the last mile is where it gets pretty pricey with low return.
Ironically, in many situations, 3rd party generation ends up being more expensive for the customer, by the time they pay the tarrifs, distribution charges, public use and other local fees, and whatever else the "lobbiests" can get them to cram into the law - since now they are not on the hook for the generation aspect of it and get unshackled from some of the more restrictive regulations on price control.
----
*edit*
To kinda break this down -- companies don't like regulation. "Regulation" generally is a way to legislatively (legally) protect consumers (or workers, or just the public in general) from companies - price gouging, pollution, health and safety standards, etc. Companies absolutely hate it. So they do everything they can (lobbyists, campaign donations, etc) to try to bend the regulations to their favor.
The regulations for electricity fall under FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission). For telephone it's the FCC (Federal Communication Commission). They have similar rules - your allowed to be a "monopoly" in your area provided that you restrict your rate of return to something reasonable, are transparent with your earnings and income, provide equal access to everyone in your area of service (rural coverage - this is why people out in the sticks can get telephone and power), ensure a standard of reliability (ever wonder why the telephone and light people will be out at midnight in the middle of a storm fixing the lines, but the cable will be out for days? This is why), restrict pollution and interference to the public, and various other things that are, on the whole, pretty nice for the public, and not necessarily so nice for the company.
So, back in the 1990s - Utility companies convinced people that utilities were bad - "Monopolies", and you should have the power to choose!
And so there was a sweeping wave of deregulation during the mid 1990s - mostly pushed by the utility companies themselves -- because they saw a loophole to be able to sidestep a lot of the regulation under the guise of free market economy - even though the last mile was still just as monopolized as it ever ways, and would remain that way.
You saw long distance blow up and go crazy with the dot com bubble-- the entire telecom industry got turned upside down, partially because of the cellular eruption, partially because of MCI/WorldCom, and partially because of the explosion of internet services. Enron and the west coast power situation, where, because of this deregulation, they were able to turn off local power plants and "import" cheaper out of state power, causing massive state wide brownouts - and pulling in huge profits the entire time.
So it was about 10 years later we saw the results of deregulation - it wasn't terribly pretty. Don't get me wrong, I'm not for regulating everything (and being in the power industry, my company is under the burden of a lot of regulatory requirements, and they are cumbersome) - but I do see that the ~intent~ is to protect the public - because a corporation has no morality of it's own. The board of any publicly traded company has a legal obligation to put the interests and profit of the company first, for the sake of the shareholders - and that often puts the morality, the consumer and the public at a distance second place for consideration. And the board of directors has the luxury of being able to hide behind the semi-anonymous mask of "the group", so no one individual gets held accountable -- at least until something goes really bad and the scramble to point fingers and witchhunt begins.
And internet came in and flew under the radar of all of that. I think the FCC is just now catching up to it.
Maybe - today's Republicans are a different breed. But it was the Democrats that deregulated a lot of the industry in the 1990s (Clinton was Hands Off of everything except.... well, I won't go there), and Republicans that placed some of the most restrictive ~environmental~ regulations on industry back in the 1970s (founding of the EPA - a presidential executive order, even), and public interest regulations in the 1990 (Americans With Disabilities Act). Then Commerce Secretary Herbert Hoover helped to create the Federal Radio Commission in The Radio Act of 1927, the precursor to the FCC in 1927 as a Republican.
I just find it interesting how things like this appear to be very politically charged on the surface, but when push comes to shove appearances aren't always what they seem, and very often the split along party lines is the opposite of how you would expect it.
And Republicans were isolationist on foreign policy in the 1920s and 1930s, too. A lot has changed since then.
In this case, it was the Republican appointees to the FCC who were against the new regulations and the Democratic appointees who were in favor of it. The president's party gets one extra commissioner on the FCC, so the Democrats in favor of the regulations won. That said, they didn't do this until Obama came out in favor of it late last year, so it's far from guaranteed that if another Democrat gets elected in 2016, he'll also favor heavy Internet regulations.
Since this is a hardware section of the forums, let's talk about hardware.
The fundamental issue here is one of having enough bandwidth. If you're an ISP and letting your paying customers use as much bandwidth as they want all the time never creates any bottlenecks, then that's what you do and you never throttle anyone. The problem is of what happens when too many people want to use too much bandwidth at once and it overloads your network.
This is mainly a problem of the "last mile", namely, running cables or whatever out to homes. The backbone part of a connection isn't so expensive; if you're going to dig a ditch and put fiber optic cables in, much of the cost is digging the ditch, and you can put a whole bunch of cables in there, or just one. It costs more to put 100 fiber optic cables in than just one, of course, but nowhere near 100 times as much. So if you're going to handle all traffic connecting big city A to big city B (how the Internet works is more complicated than this, but this is a simplification), you dig the ditch once and put a whole bunch of cables in at once. But you're really just connecting one point in big city A to one point in big city B.
The problem is that most people in those cities don't live at the endpoints of the cable. Consumer ISPs have to either run wires (cable lines, fiber optic cables, etc.) to every single customer or else use a wireless system. Wireless has a whole host of problems, from being less reliable to having limited frequency space available for use to needing to use about 60% of "bandwidth" just for error detection and correction--and that's ignoring the bandwidth use of resending packets that didn't make it intact the first time. This is why all of the "good" home or business ISP options are a wired connection of some sort.
So let's suppose that you're an ISP and you've laid out your network and your customers are using it. And you see that at peak times, they're trying to use 120% of your bandwidth available. What do you do?
Ideally, you lay down more cables so that you have enough capacity for everyone. But that takes time, and if that's your only solution, then everyone has a slowed down connection at peak times for the next year until you can build out the additional capacity. What do you do in the meantime?
Well, you can look at your bandwidth numbers and notice that 1% of your customers are using 20% of your bandwidth, and 5% are using 50% of your bandwidth. So you think, I could throttle performance on just 2% of my customers during peak times and give flawless service to the other 98%. Of course, if those 2% are paying a lot more for much higher bandwidth, then maybe you don't want to do that.
Or maybe you look at what types of traffic your customers are using and notice that streaming videos takes half of your bandwidth all by itself, in spite of only accounting for a tiny fraction of Internet usage times. So you could slow performance on streaming videos while letting everything else have the maximum bandwidth. A handful of your customers have to wait a little longer for videos to load, but everyone else gets flawless service.
And then, of course, the people who stream videos for hours per day scream about it and say that this is so unfair. Video streaming services like Hulu and Netflix complain. In comes net neutrality regulations to say that ISPs can't do that.
But remember, the problem is that there just isn't enough bandwidth available for everyone to use all they want in the short term. Regulations don't change that. If ISPs aren't allowed to selectively slow down particular traffic, the alternative is that instead, everything is slow. Instead of 5% of customers thinking their Internet connection is slow today, 100% of them do. I don't see that as an improvement.
The real fix, of course, is building out more capacity. If the ISP had more bandwidth everywhere, then everyone could use all the bandwidth they want and it would be fine. Until, of course, people found ways to use plenty more bandwidth and again overloaded the ISPs network. Which would probably happen within months of the newly added capacity, if not sooner.
Selectively throttling things is really just a short-term band-aid. The history of the Internet clearly demonstrates that having more bandwidth available is better than selectively filtering traffic, with few exceptions for things that will eat up arbitrarily large amounts of bandwidth if it's available.
If the question is of what government regulations there ought to be, the focus needs to be on getting more bandwidth. Treating ISPs as public utilities that aren't allowed to make very much profit is the opposite of what needs to be done. ISPs will build massive capacity if they think it's profitable to do so and won't if they don't. Telling them, if you build more capacity, we're not going to let you make enough money on it to make it profitable, is exactly the wrong message to send.
The problem is that demagogues can easily regard past investment as "free", and advocate limiting profits to little enough that it's impossible to recover enough of the initial capital cost to make building the infrastructure worthwhile. This is hardly unique to Internet infrastructure; prescription drugs have a much worse case of it. But if the government is heavily involved in the intricate details of running ISPs, there are always going to be demagogues pushing things that will implicitly tell ISPs that they should never build any more capacity because it will be unprofitable.
That doesn't mean that the demagogues will always get what they want; they often don't. But fending that off and dealing with it when they do get their way will be an added cost of doing business that reduces the incentives of ISPs to build more capacity. Less Internet bandwidth means a lesser Internet for everyone.
Above, Ridelynn noted that we don't intrinsically need multiple ISPs running their wires everywhere, just like we don't need multiple electric companies running cables everywhere. But once a network is built, it has some fixed capacity that isn't going to increase. For electricity, the capacity needed tends not to change much as years pass, though there are seasonal variations.
For Internet bandwidth, in contrast, the demand tends to go up very fast as years pass. If an ISP is going to have to add more capacity all over the place to keep up with demand, is there any intrinsic reason why the first ISP in should be the only one to add the additional capacity? I say it's better if anyone competent who wants to add capacity of their own is encouraged to do so, even if--especially if--it's a different ISP that will compete with the incumbent.
That was on a different thread that is now locked, but wasn't this discussion political as well?
Sometimes political discussions involve technology. Now that one locked thread in question may have deserved to be locked, but for different reasons that just the fact that it happened to involve politics.
If your living outside the United States, I could perfectly understand the worry about US involvement and political attitude towards the internet. Just as a US citizen I am deeply concerned about US, Chinese, UK, North Korean, and various other entities involvement in the internet.
As it should be.
"These passages allow ISPs to act as the internet police, blocking and throttling customers they deem to be engaged in illegal activity"
Good!
Buy your shit!
I bet some of you are against the FCC when it regulates content on TV or film, or when government tries to regulate video game violence and sex with ratings. I just find it odd that some people are for government-regulated internet traffic, yet against government-regulated entertainment. They are inconsistent about government intervention.
People are so willing to cede their power to government, instead of using their own power. It's almost the same as with MMO premium subscriptions. Now imagine these same people clamoring for the government to make MMO subscriptions "neutral".
maybe ISPs shouldn't claim to offer services they aren't able to consistently deliver. i pay for a 18 Mbps package but i barely get 4-6 Mbps every time i have complained they say the 18mbps is a "best effort" claim.
So what I'm saying is if you as an isp can supply 1000 people with max, non throttled connection speed then do not take on more than 1000 customers until you have expanded your infrastructure to handle more//otherwise its just putting the cart before the horse.
That is my biggest complaint about Quizzical's argument in favor of an ISP's ability to throttle. I agree with TribeofOne on this.
ISPs are selling a package - and they aren't able to deliver on those claims. They perfectly control how many people they put on infrastructure, and sure, 1-2% may use "most" of the bandwidth, but they aren't using anything that wasn't sold to them - they aren't out there stealing it - they were promised XX-Mbs unlimited, or up to some arbitrary cap, and they are just using what they were sold.
I'm not saying ISPs need to make unlimited bandwidth available to all customers, can't traffic shape or throttle, or can't institute data caps - I am saying they need to tell you exactly what they are going to sell you. I'm actually for a thoughtfully implemented "pay by the byte" structure -- you get whatever speed you can get, but you pay for what you use in volume, not whatever the max speed you happen to be able to get is.
For what it's worth - the electrical grid has a throttling mechanism. If you tried to power the Hadron Supercollider (or some similarly large electrical load) from your home, you'd trip the main circuit breaker - and that main breaker acts as a limiting device (in more than one capacity - it is also a very important safety device, which does not have a direct metaphor to the internet).
The cost that consumers will pay for an item is inevitably linked to the cost of producing the item. If ISPs weren't allowed to sell a 50 Mbps connection without having enough bandwidth for all customers to be using the full bandwidth all of the time, that 50 Mbps connection would be awfully expensive.
If they instead had to call it a 1 Mbps connection and you could only get 1 Mbps, then most of the capacity they've laid out couldn't be used. If they had to advertise it as 1 Mbps because that's all that they could deliver to all customers all of the time, then how do you distinguish between a connection that tops out at 1 Mbps and one that will usually get you 50 Mbps but occasionally gets throttled to 30-40 Mbps? Surely the latter is better than the former.
And then there are Internet problems where even if your ISP is delivering the rated bandwidth but there's a bottleneck elsewhere, you don't see the speed that you were promised and it's not the ISP's fault. How many people can figure out that that is happening? How many would be able to figure exactly when their connection was being throttled if ISPs specifically tried to cover up throttling by prioritizing traffic from bandwidth test sites?
I take the view that, for the most part, the difference between 20 Mbps and 100 Mbps doesn't even matter. What matters is ping times and reliability. I'd much prefer a connection where every single packet gets through fast even though it tops out at 20 Mbps over 100 Mbps connection that sometimes suffers substantial packet loss or has packets delayed by multiple seconds.