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Net neutrality advocates are planning two days of protest in Washington DC this month as they fight off plans to defang regulations meant to protect an open internet.
A coalition of activists, consumer groups and writers are calling on supporters to attend the next meeting of the Federal Communications Commission on 26 September in DC. The next day, the protest will move to Capitol Hill, where people will meet legislators to express their concerns about an FCC proposal to rewrite the rules governing the internet.
The FCC has received 22 million comments on "Restoring Internet Freedom", the regulator's proposal to dismantle net neutrality rules put in place in 2015. Opponents argue the rule changes, proposed by the FCC's Republican chairman Ajit Pai, will pave the way for a tiered internet where internet service providers (ISPs) will be free to pick and choose winners online by giving higher speeds to those they favor, or those willing or able to pay more.
The regulator has yet to process the comments, and is reviewing its proposals before a vote expected later this year.
(Score: 2) by Scrutinizer on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:06PM (2 children)
Agreed, Cogent was the entity actually violating its peering agreement with Comcast by imbalancing its traffic with Netflix's data. I figured that point didn't need to be made since it was Netflix shopping around for these no-charge peering agreements it could violate (L3 was another Netflix peering agreement provider along with Cogent).
According to your link, the FCC did its "common carrier" classification a mere two years ago. That seems odd, considering I haven't heard of AOL execs being hauled off to prison over kiddy porn crossing their networks. Regardless, this smacks of "government made a change and now everything is horrible! Rather than just roll back, we now need even more government changes! Panic! Panic!".
When two nodes on a network are charged fees to communicate, that is NOT "double dipping". "Netflix and you" are no different than "Soylent News and you",
in that each entity pays for data both sent and received to it. It has been this way since ancient Internet times and remains true today.
In conjunction with this smokescreen over "Netflix paid!" and "double-dipping ISPs" nonsense, I'm absolutely ready to throw out the entire "net neutrality" bathwater. Lies (or misunderstandings) do not make good endorsements for government policies.
Note: none of the above excuses Comcast for being at best a scumbag company, if not outright fraudsters in need of criminal prosecution.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:00PM (1 child)
ISPs were classified under Title II until the early 2000s, when first the cable companies, then the internet divisions of telcos were reclassified as Title I. That rougly coincided, by the way, with ISPs taking tens of billions from the government to wire everything and then did fuck all, implementing abusive TOS and all manner of other evil shit. Assholes.
The FCC did the right thing in 2013, by requiring net neutrality and ISPs fought it tooth and nail. The courts said that Title I classification doesn't give the FCC authority to take such steps. So they pushed on and reclassified ISPs under Title II, which gives the FCC authority to require net neutrality.
I posted several FCC links detailing the reclassification history of ISPs a few months back in a comment on another article about net neutrality.
My apologies, I'm too lazy to go and look it up for you, ATM.
I never claimed that each side paying for its own bandwidth was double-dipping. If you look at Comcast's behavior over this, they refused to increase bandwidth on *already congested* peering links, so they could use the impact of degraded service on their customers as a cudgel to beat Netflix and other streaming providers into entering into direct interconnect agreements (with hefty fees) or force them onto CDNs where they could extract access fees.
Netflix offered its OpenConnect [netflix.com] solution, which could have resolved this issue, but Comcast flat refused.
But that's just a sideshow as far as net neutrality (and Title II classification) is concerned.
Then you don't understand what net neutrality is and what it means for liberty and freedom of expression on the Internet. Joe Desertrat details this succinctly here [soylentnews.org].
Net neutrality isn't really about who is peering with whom or who pays for interconnections. It's about requiring ISPs to carry traffic without bias, refraining from traffic shaping, blocking or throttling, except when required by congestion or network management issues. Full Stop. And that is not only net neutrality. It's good policy.
If ISPs can arbitrarily shape, throttle and block traffic, who is going to lose?
I, for one, don't want my internet connection to be "curated" (read: censored) by heavy-handed ISPs.
Reclassifying ISPs as Title I (information services) rather than Title II (common carriers) as was done in the early 2000s was a poor idea back then (Fuck you very much, Dubya!) and is an even worse idea now.
If you look at the history of ISP build outs, competition, quality of product offerings and end-user satisfaction during various ISP classification regimes, I imagine you'll be quite surprised.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
(Score: 2) by Scrutinizer on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:44PM
I acknowledge your general history and leave alone the points you denote as minor.
Access to the Internet is in danger of Bad Things (censorship, unnecessary throttling, blocking, etc.) because governments crushed competition among ISPs and favored big corporations. There's the problem. "More government" to fix a government-made problem is the age old lie that has been used to burden everyone with income taxes (post WW2), insane health care prices (EMTALA), tying benefits to corporate jobs and thereby crushing entrepreneurs (WW2-era wage controls). If you WANT a horrible, censored, slow Internet, the quickest way to get that is to tie the fast-moving Internet to the insane, schizophrenic, and unaccountable monster that is government.
Rather than duct tape more government onto the increasingly nasty situation of monopolistic ISPs, Internet networking, and such, the proper solution is to rip all that government support away and stop keeping the small competitors out. If the current ISPs bleed to death, fine - more will show up to replace them, and you can take your pick.