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Figured we could use a dedicated Net Neutrality thread instead of cluttering up the other threads in D&D. Net Neutrality What is it? - A legal framework that prohibits Internet Service Providers from discriminating against differing types of lawful traffic. wait what? - It's the way things are with the internet right now, and the FCC and FTC have had patchwork policies in place to enforce this since the internet began. wait I heard on  that this only started in 2015 - In 2015, the FCC reclassified ISPs as utility providers so that they would be required to conform to Title II of the telecommunications act of 1934, legalling making them a "common carrier," as opposed to an "Information Service"Common Carrier? Information service? - quoted from the Communications Act on 1934: quote:Information Service: isn't acting as a pipe for other people's content the definition of what an ISP does? - Yes. why don't ISPs want to be classified in this way? - Because most ISPs these days are part of larger conglomerations that have their own services to compete with things like Netflix, and in most locations, there's only a handful of choices for internet access, so most people are stuck with only one or two options for internet access. Comcast doesn't want people to watch TV Netflix and Amazon Prime, they want them to use their Xfinity streaming or whatever. What's this about blocking and throttling - back when ISP regulations were in that regulatory grey area, ISPs would toe the line and slowly push the limits of what was acceptable practices, but they weren't actually supposed to do it, but a few of them did to block services like Vonage or FaceTime. what changed? - Two court cases. Comcast v. FCC in 2010 and Verizon v. FCC in 2014, which removed the FCC's ability to enforce neutrality regulations against ISPs, because they were considered an Information Service. So ISPs can do whatever they want. In response, the FCC under Tom Wheeler reclassified ISPs as common carriers so that the status quo of ISPs being barred from blocking competing services in favor of their own ones. And then Trump, in his zeal to negate everything that has happened since Obama was president, appointed a new FCC commissioner to get the FCC to undo that order. Won't that make things go back to the way they were? NO.. The Title II reclassification was necessary because the DC circuit court of appeals had already decided that existing law gave ISPs the ability to discriminate against different types of lawful traffic, and those rulings are still on the books. So the FCC under Pai gave this convoluted procedural reason for why he was getting rid of net neutrality, and acting like it wouldn't change things, when he wasn't mentioning that the legal framework that had existed before that mostly prevented these kinds of practices no longer exists. what about the FTC? - At the moment, the Federal Trade Commission does have the power to regular ISPs, along with any other business engaging in trade across state lines. However, they can only go after ISPs for breaking their promises. If an ISP doesn't pledge to not block or throttle, the FTC can't do anything about it. And already ISPs are removing their "no paid prioritization" pledges from their websites, and there's a pending court case between AT&T and the FTC that could result in the FTC losing their authority to regulate internet service providers. Let's not mince words here, the current attack on Net Neutrality is an attempt to create a regulatory gap where the FCC says it's the FTC's problem and the FTC says it's the FCC's problem, and Comcast, Spectrum, AT&T, and Verizon can do whatever they want.
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Dec 18, 2017 19:53
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gently caress Ajit Pai in his stupid, self-admitted shill rear end.
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Dec 18, 2017 20:00
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A good short with a good starting list of some ways we need neutrality is this: https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-violations-brief-history MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. Vonage filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving a slew of customer complaints. The FCC stepped in to sanction Madison River and prevent further blocking, but it lacks the authority to stop this kind of abuse today. COMCAST: In 2005, the nation’s largest ISP, Comcast, began secretly blocking peer-to-peer technologies that its customers were using over its network. Users of services like BitTorrent and Gnutella were unable to connect to these services. 2007 investigations from the Associated Press, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and others confirmed that Comcast was indeed blocking or slowing file-sharing applications without disclosing this fact to its customers. TELUS: In 2005, Canada’s second-largest telecommunications company, Telus, began blocking access to a server that hosted a website supporting a labor strike against the company. Researchers at Harvard and the University of Toronto found that this action resulted in Telus blocking an additional 766 unrelated sites. AT&T: From 2007–2009, AT&T forced Apple to block Skype and other competing VOIP phone services on the iPhone. The wireless provider wanted to prevent iPhone users from using any application that would allow them to make calls on such “over-the-top” voice services. The Google Voice app received similar treatment from carriers like AT&T when it came on the scene in 2009. WINDSTREAM: In 2010, Windstream Communications, a DSL provider with more than 1 million customers at the time, copped to hijacking user-search queries made using the Google toolbar within Firefox. Users who believed they had set the browser to the search engine of their choice were redirected to Windstream’s own search portal and results. MetroPCS: In 2011, MetroPCS, at the time one of the top-five U.S. wireless carriers, announced plans to block streaming video over its 4G network from all sources except YouTube. MetroPCS then threw its weight behind Verizon’s court challenge against the FCC’s 2010 open internet ruling, hoping that rejection of the agency’s authority would allow the company to continue its anti-consumer practices. PAXFIRE: In 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found that several small ISPs were redirecting search queries via the vendor Paxfire. The ISPs identified in the initial Electronic Frontier Foundation report included Cavalier, Cogent, Frontier, Fuse, DirecPC, RCN and Wide Open West. Paxfire would intercept a person’s search request at Bing and Yahoo and redirect it to another page. By skipping over the search service’s results, the participating ISPs would collect referral fees for delivering users to select websites. AT&T, SPRINT and VERIZON: From 2011–2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet, a mobile-payment system that competed with a similar service called Isis, which all three companies had a stake in developing. EUROPE: A 2012 report from the Body of European Regulators for Electronic Communications found that violations of Net Neutrality affected at least one in five users in Europe. The report found that blocked or slowed connections to services like VOIP, peer-to-peer technologies, gaming applications and email were commonplace. VERIZON: In 2012, the FCC caught Verizon Wireless blocking people from using tethering applications on their phones. Verizon had asked Google to remove 11 free tethering applications from the Android marketplace. These applications allowed users to circumvent Verizon’s $20 tethering fee and turn their smartphones into Wi-Fi hot spots. By blocking those applications, Verizon violated a Net Neutrality pledge it made to the FCC as a condition of the 2008 airwaves auction. AT&T: In 2012, AT&T announced that it would disable the FaceTime video-calling app on its customers’ iPhones unless they subscribed to a more expensive text-and-voice plan. AT&T had one goal in mind: separating customers from more of their money by blocking alternatives to AT&T’s own products.
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Dec 18, 2017 20:03
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Well it looks like Chuck Schumer is going to try and force a vote on the senate floor to try and force the FCC to keep the Net Neutrality rules. Also, for those wondering what's happening now that the FCC voted to repeal it? Well not much, at first. The rules have to be entered into the Federal Register and have to follow the Administrative Procedures Act, which prohibits "arbitrary and capricious" rulemaking. And I just wanted to share this quote from a dissent written by Scalia, Ginsburg, and Souter about ISPs trying to tie themselves up in legal knots over trying not to classify themselves as a telecommunications provider: quote:If, for example, I call up a pizzeria and ask whether they offer delivery, both common sense and common “usage,” ante, at 18, would prevent them from answering: “No, we do not offer delivery–but if you order a pizza from us, we’ll bake it for you and then bring it to your house.” The logical response to this would be something on the order of, “so, you do offer delivery.” But our pizza-man may continue to deny the obvious and explain, paraphrasing the FCC and the Court: “No, even though we bring the pizza to your house, we are not actually ‘offering’ you delivery, because the delivery that we provide to our end users is ‘part and parcel’ of our pizzeria-pizza-at-home service and is ‘integral to its other capabilities.'" Cf. Declaratory Ruling 4823, ¶39; ante, at 16, 26.1
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Dec 18, 2017 20:26
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I'm guessing this would fit here, but it seems Pai has been Doxxed already.
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Dec 18, 2017 21:23
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Dec 19, 2017 05:48
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Even though I live in Europe I still hope like hell that the US can find some way of stopping the repeal, their political decisions are very often contagious and frequently find their way into other governments' playbooks. Once European ISPs see how much Comcast and Verizon gain from the repeal of net neutrality, they will begin their own efforts at overturning EU law.
Zedsdeadbaby fucked around with this message at 12:34 on Dec 19, 2017 |
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Dec 19, 2017 12:31
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:Even though I live in Europe I still hope like hell that the US can find some way of stopping the repeal, their political decisions are very often contagious and frequently find their way into other governments' playbooks. Once European ISPs see how much Comcast and Verizon gain from the repeal of net neutrality, they will begin their own efforts at overturning EU law. Exactly, and while overturning EU law is really quite an undertaking, they will certainly give it a good college try and sooner or later that will succeed.
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Dec 19, 2017 13:17
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What is bandwidth anyway? Once the lines are up, does it cost money for the signals to be sent back and forth, or is the only issue the volume I'm using relative to local capacity? Does it really make sense to allow metering of bandwidth the way we meter water?
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Dec 19, 2017 15:38
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Nevvy Z posted:What is bandwidth anyway? Once the lines are up, does it cost money for the signals to be sent back and forth, or is the only issue the volume I'm using relative to local capacity? Does it really make sense to allow metering of bandwidth the way we meter water? Not particularly, no. Bandwidth is not a meaningfully depleteable resource, the total volume of data you transfer by itself does not really make a huge difference to the ISPs. IIRC there's also always a current on the line, so it's not like it makes a difference in electricity cost, either. The relevant limiting factor is simultaneous throughput. A classic analogy is to picture data as water and the lines as tubes (which is also why the often-lampooned "series of tubes" statement by whatshisface might not have been as far off-base as it might appear at first). There's a relatively small tube from each house going to a local node, from there a bigger tube towards a larger node where it's joined by others, and so on. Each of these tubes, and the nodes where they meet, has a capacity describing how much water can move through it at any given time. However, the total amount of water that moves through in a month is not the important part. What matters is to make sure that at any given time you have enough capacity that the tubes don't get "backed up" because there is more water that tries to move through than the pipes have capacity for. So the main cost for ISPs is maintaining and upgrading their networks so that they can handle peak simultaneous loads without getting stopped up this way, which would result in customers receiving less water (i.e. lower connection speeds) and starting to complain. For a semi-practical example, imagine you're living in a house with four other people. The house has an outgoing line that has a total capacity of 200 Mbit/s, while each of the occupants has an individual line with a capacity of 50 Mbit/s leading into that bigger line. As long as you're the only one currently online, you can download terabyte upon terabyte of horrid porn, and it will make no difference. Because no matter how much data you're getting in total, at any given time there are only 50 MBit/s going through a line that allows for 200 MBit/s. But if at any time all five occupants try to download something at the same time, even if it's just a few hundred MB in size, they're trying to force a total of 250 MBit/s through a connection that only allows for 200. So as a result, each of them is only getting an effective ~40 Mbit/s, which is a fairly significant downgrade to what they're used to. Now, of course in practice things are quite a bit more complex, but this should illustrate the general principles reasonably well.
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Dec 19, 2017 17:02
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Nevvy Z posted:What is bandwidth anyway? Once the lines are up, does it cost money for the signals to be sent back and forth, or is the only issue the volume I'm using relative to local capacity? Does it really make sense to allow metering of bandwidth the way we meter water? If you have a 100megabit line and 100 people the dumb way would be to split it up so each person gets a 1Mb dedicated line. But that is silly. In real life data and usage is bursty enough you can tell 100 people they have a 20 mbit line and have the network equipment sort out weaving everyone's data together to keep that feeling true. In a small network you can even lie and tell each person they have a 100Mb line themselves and it will rarely feel false since even multiple people actively using a computer have it sit for eons between loads when time in measured in Milliseconds. So every time they do a download they can get almost entirely the whole 100Mb. So you always 'oversell' a network. And each user really does get that speed. But that also means that if anyone REALLY uses the network to it's full extent they are rapidly cutting into everyone else's. And everything only works if everyone uses around the average. So it does make sense at a raw level to charge once someone has gone far enough beyond the average. (although in real life it's obvious lots of companies didn't do bandwidth math out beyond "what bill can we use our monopoly to arbitrarily bill") a system where everything is shared is way better than the system everyone is allocated a hard amount.
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Dec 19, 2017 17:13
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On the politics of this, it's interesting to see how the centrist tech-libertarianism of the early 2000s has been ripped in half between the established left and right (or fascist alt-right). Sort of obvious at this point I guess though. This occurred to me after seeing that Corey Doctorow is now a prominent #resistance personality on twitter https://twitter.com/doctorow
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Dec 19, 2017 21:40
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icantfindaname posted:On the politics of this, it's interesting to see how the centrist tech-libertarianism of the early 2000s has been ripped in half between the established left and right (or fascist alt-right). Sort of obvious at this point I guess though. This occurred to me after seeing that Corey Doctorow is now a prominent #resistance personality on twitter he's gone a bit further left than that https://www.tor.com/2017/08/30/party-discipline/ that story still has a huge amount of technofetism and is unrealistic, but just lol at him praising "communist parties" that involve seizing corporate property overnight.
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Dec 19, 2017 21:47
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nO_-TEUvCMk
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Dec 20, 2017 08:33
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Everything about this title card makes me want net neutrality dead.
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Dec 20, 2017 16:28
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Guys like him will probably get hosed the hardest when people are forced to pay more to see their favorite angry man video gamer.
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Dec 20, 2017 22:56
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Zedsdeadbaby posted:Even though I live in Europe I still hope like hell that the US can find some way of stopping the repeal, their political decisions are very often contagious and frequently find their way into other governments' playbooks. Once European ISPs see how much Comcast and Verizon gain from the repeal of net neutrality, they will begin their own efforts at overturning EU law. While this is definitely a valid, if not more valid concern, I worry more how this will affect the overall service innovations and startups in the US which will then reflect back to Europe. Services like Netflix probably would have never taken off without net neutrality. And these new startups are usually a benefit to the consumer as they tend to do something better than their old, more financially secure competitors. Related to this I'm also slightly concerned how this will affect any services offering their content, traffic or whatever across the Atlantic. I know this is a very "good capitalistic consumer" view of things and there are more pressing concerns.
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Dec 21, 2017 13:44
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I would love to see some genuinely detailed industry analysis on this if anyone has a good source. Everything is either high level analogies or high level business deals/cases. Not that those aren't important in general, but I would very much like to go deeper. For instance, the last several years has seen an explosion in regional "IX" peering exchanges as well as a very large shift to using CDNs. This is partly in reaction to the earlier 'peering fights' and probably-strategic-undercapacity in last-mile networks driving demand for as much diversity and redundancy as possible as close to the last-mile as you can get it. Meaning, there is already a sortof defacto net un-neutrality in the sense that content delivering entities have to pay third parties to get their bits delivered and those third parties are then paying last-mile providers for capacity. Essentially a cottage industry sprung up to arbitrage between content providers and wire-owners because net-neutrality made it legally impossible for them to cut deals directly. Has anyone done any good industry analysis around what the next chapter of the internet's evolution looks like if time-warner can just pay verizon $0.01/GB to give packets from their AS a higher QoS priority on sunday nights? (p.s. Game of Thrones is basically the canary in this whole industry's coal mine).
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Dec 21, 2017 14:46
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https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/12/gop-net-neutrality-bill-would-allow-paid-fast-lanes-and-preempt-state-laws/ Marsha Blackburn to the rescue! 
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Dec 21, 2017 16:23
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| # ? Apr 16, 2024 22:56 |
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post screwed up
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Dec 21, 2017 18:58
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