The end of net neutrality

MoreCoffee

Well-known member
Valued Contributor
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
19,115
Location
Western Australia
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Catholic
Political Affiliation
Moderate
Marital Status
Single
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes
Do you care that the US administration is planning to end net neutrality?
 

psalms 91

Well-known member
Moderator
Valued Contributor
Supporting Member
Joined
Jun 22, 2015
Messages
15,205
Age
75
Location
Pa
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Charismatic
Political Affiliation
Conservative
Marital Status
Married
Yes, a very bad move
 

user1234

Well-known member
Joined
Feb 2, 2017
Messages
1,654
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Other Church
Marital Status
Separated
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes
Do you care that the US administration is planning to end net neutrality?
Yes, I think it's time the net got off the fence and made up it's mind who's side it's on! :thinkerg:
 

tango

... and you shall live ...
Valued Contributor
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
14,084
Location
Realms of chaos
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Christian
Marital Status
Married
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes
Ultimately it's hard to see how it can go any other way. Someone has to fund the infrastructure and unless that someone is the public sector, worldwide, there are going to be demands for the people funding the structure to be able to make a profit from the structure.

Unless the net could be funded by government in such a way that it could never be used as a political football (which seems vanishingly unlikely) it's inevitable that sooner or later it will be changed such that those who pay more get more.
 

NewCreation435

Well-known member
Valued Contributor
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
4,914
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Christian
Political Affiliation
Conservative
Marital Status
Married
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes

MoreCoffee

Well-known member
Valued Contributor
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
19,115
Location
Western Australia
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Catholic
Political Affiliation
Moderate
Marital Status
Single
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes
In a practical sense I am not sure what that means?

It may mean that you'll pay more for services delivered over the internet.
 

Lamb

God's Lil Lamb
Community Team
Administrator
Supporting Member
Joined
Jun 10, 2015
Messages
31,566
Age
57
Gender
Female
Religious Affiliation
Lutheran
Political Affiliation
Conservative
Marital Status
Married
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes
Fortune magazine has an article on it http://fortune.com/2017/11/23/net-neutrality-explained-what-it-means-and-why-it-matters/

Here is a good article by Wired magazine from 2014 https://www.wired.com/2014/06/net_neutrality_missing/
"We shouldn’t waste so much breath on the idea of keeping the network completely neutral. It isn’t neutral now. What we should really be doing is looking for ways we can increase competition among ISPs—ways we can prevent the Comcasts and the AT&Ts from gaining so much power that they can completely control the market for internet bandwidth. Sure, we don’t want ISPs blocking certain types of traffic. And we don’t want them delivering their own stuff at 10 gigabits per second and everyone else’s stuff at 1 gigabit. But competition is also the best way to stop these types of extreme behavior."
 

MoreCoffee

Well-known member
Valued Contributor
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
19,115
Location
Western Australia
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Catholic
Political Affiliation
Moderate
Marital Status
Single
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes
Fortune magazine has an article on it http://fortune.com/2017/11/23/net-neutrality-explained-what-it-means-and-why-it-matters/

Here is a good article by Wired magazine from 2014 https://www.wired.com/2014/06/net_neutrality_missing/
"We shouldn’t waste so much breath on the idea of keeping the network completely neutral. It isn’t neutral now. What we should really be doing is looking for ways we can increase competition among ISPs—ways we can prevent the Comcasts and the AT&Ts from gaining so much power that they can completely control the market for internet bandwidth. Sure, we don’t want ISPs blocking certain types of traffic. And we don’t want them delivering their own stuff at 10 gigabits per second and everyone else’s stuff at 1 gigabit. But competition is also the best way to stop these types of extreme behavior."

That bus departed years ago. They are dominant in the USA and net neutrality is about pricing for services not neutrality for political content. The idea is that Comcast and AT&T can't charge more for services like Amazon, NetFlix, and other services than they charge for their own "in house" services.
 

tango

... and you shall live ...
Valued Contributor
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
14,084
Location
Realms of chaos
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Christian
Marital Status
Married
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes
That bus departed years ago. They are dominant in the USA and net neutrality is about pricing for services not neutrality for political content. The idea is that Comcast and AT&T can't charge more for services like Amazon, NetFlix, and other services than they charge for their own "in house" services.

The trouble is that as soon as government gets involved in regulating this kind of thing there are usually all sorts of side effects.

At one level net neutrality, in the sense that the net should be neutral and regard all packets as being equal, fundamentally fails. Voice and video traffic needs to be prioritised over text traffic, or voice and video stop working. It's fairly basic quality-of-service stuff - if you send an email and all the packets get jumbled up, as long as they can be strung together again in the right order when they arrive it doesn't matter. If that happens with voice or video the whole thing breaks - the packets need to arrive in sufficiently close to the right order to be able to process them usefully.

At another level, the idea that Comcast shouldn't be able to prioritise its own video streaming service over Amazon Prime or Netflix or Hulu or whatever else, in principle it's a laudable aim but still falls flat sooner or later. Is there a reason why people shouldn't be able to pay more to mark their content as being more important than the endless cat videos circulating around the internet? If you're trying to watch an instructional video to learn something, perhaps you'd appreciate the option to pay to get a bit of extra bandwidth rather than the net regarding your packets as being no more and no less useful than the video of a cat chasing a laser pointer the person next door is watching. Conversely, if you were producing educational videos perhaps you'd appreciate the chance to pay a little extra to mark your packets as being higher priority, even if only so you could offer a premium service to your subscribers.

Personally I tend to be very wary when governments start getting too heavily involved in regulation under the guise of protecting customers. To take the situation right now, would you want a Trump-led administration to have the power to decide what counts as "fake news" and stop it from propagating across the internet? You know, to protect customers from fake news. Having seen a few instances where regulation that was supposed to protect customers did the exact opposite I'd want reassurance that the government getting involved in regulating the internet wasn't going to become yet another one.
 

psalms 91

Well-known member
Moderator
Valued Contributor
Supporting Member
Joined
Jun 22, 2015
Messages
15,205
Age
75
Location
Pa
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Charismatic
Political Affiliation
Conservative
Marital Status
Married
The trouble is that as soon as government gets involved in regulating this kind of thing there are usually all sorts of side effects.

At one level net neutrality, in the sense that the net should be neutral and regard all packets as being equal, fundamentally fails. Voice and video traffic needs to be prioritised over text traffic, or voice and video stop working. It's fairly basic quality-of-service stuff - if you send an email and all the packets get jumbled up, as long as they can be strung together again in the right order when they arrive it doesn't matter. If that happens with voice or video the whole thing breaks - the packets need to arrive in sufficiently close to the right order to be able to process them usefully.

At another level, the idea that Comcast shouldn't be able to prioritise its own video streaming service over Amazon Prime or Netflix or Hulu or whatever else, in principle it's a laudable aim but still falls flat sooner or later. Is there a reason why people shouldn't be able to pay more to mark their content as being more important than the endless cat videos circulating around the internet? If you're trying to watch an instructional video to learn something, perhaps you'd appreciate the option to pay to get a bit of extra bandwidth rather than the net regarding your packets as being no more and no less useful than the video of a cat chasing a laser pointer the person next door is watching. Conversely, if you were producing educational videos perhaps you'd appreciate the chance to pay a little extra to mark your packets as being higher priority, even if only so you could offer a premium service to your subscribers.

Personally I tend to be very wary when governments start getting too heavily involved in regulation under the guise of protecting customers. To take the situation right now, would you want a Trump-led administration to have the power to decide what counts as "fake news" and stop it from propagating across the internet? You know, to protect customers from fake news. Having seen a few instances where regulation that was supposed to protect customers did the exact opposite I'd want reassurance that the government getting involved in regulating the internet wasn't going to become yet another one.
Net neutrality has worked well so why mess with it? The answer of course is that Trumps buddies in business want it that wauy. I just hope there is something left of the middle class when this clown gets voted out
 

tango

... and you shall live ...
Valued Contributor
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
14,084
Location
Realms of chaos
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Christian
Marital Status
Married
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes
Net neutrality has worked well so why mess with it? The answer of course is that Trumps buddies in business want it that wauy. I just hope there is something left of the middle class when this clown gets voted out

Let's not pretend that those on the left care any more about the middle classes, and there's far more to the whole thing than blaming it all on Trump.

The simple reality is that as something reaches capacity it has to be rationed somehow. Otherwise we end up in the situation where critical communications are deemed to have no more value than someone watching a video of a cat.. Why should a company like Netflix be allowed to create a service that uses a huge amount of bandwidth and then just assume that the providers of the bandwidth should continue to supply as much as they need, for no extra cost? When I look at the tidal wave of drivel that is Faceache these days I wonder just how much internet bandwidth is little more than an endless waste of resources - we survived for however many thousands of years without checking for funny memes or to see how many people liked our post, yet these days so many people appear incapable of functioning without checking in every few minutes, or making sure the world knows just where they are at any given point in time. Much like physical junk mail took on a whole new dimension when email arrived and all but unlimited amounts of spam could be sent at virtually no incremental cost, so now the online garbage accumulates unchecked.

Some years ago there was an idea circulating that emails should carry a cost. Only a very small cost - maybe 1c per message, maybe a fraction of a cent per message - that would be sufficiently small that the average person sending and receiving normal volumes of mail would barely notice the cost but a spammer sending a billion emails every day would be priced out of business. It's easy to insist that everything should be free and everything should be equal but I'd imagine most of us would rather genuine emails were treated with a higher priority than the latest news that yet another Nigerian prince died and left us his fortune and the latest improbable anatomical enhancement product. The crucial thing is that I want the freedom to decide what counts as priority for me, rather than letting the government get involved.

I'm still of the view that the best way to encourage companies to play fair is to make it easier to set up in competition to them, so that if a company mistreats its customers those customers have other options. What government regulation often does is appears to be on the side of the consumer while it actually prevents competition and therefore results in consumers getting progressively worse and worse deals, as companies do the absolute minimum to tick all the boxes required by the latest piece of legislation (legislation they often helped draft)

What do you think is going to happen if the government gets involved in ever-more regulation of the internet?
 

MoreCoffee

Well-known member
Valued Contributor
Joined
Jul 13, 2015
Messages
19,115
Location
Western Australia
Gender
Male
Religious Affiliation
Catholic
Political Affiliation
Moderate
Marital Status
Single
Acceptance of the Trinity & Nicene Creed
Yes
Net neutrality has worked well so why mess with it? The answer of course is that Trumps buddies in business want it that wauy. I just hope there is something left of the middle class when this clown gets voted out

Impeach him and Michael Pence too, then appoint the soon to be Democrat speaker of the house as president :D
 
Top Bottom