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from the would-you-like-YouTube^WNetflix^WFacebook^WAmazon-with-that? dept.
Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times writes about Portugal's Internet which shows us a world without net neutrality, and it's ugly. Basically, tiered services get in there through a loophole for zero-rating.
After paying a fee for basic service, subscribers can add any of five further options for about $6 per month, allowing an additional 10GB data allotment for the apps within the options: a "messaging" tier, which covers such services as instant messaging, Apple FaceTime, and Skype; "social," with liberal access to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, and so on; "video" (youTube, Netflix, etc.); "email and cloud" (Gmail, Apple's iCloud); or "music" (Spotify, Pandora).
Portugal isn't the only country allowing tiering of internet services. In Britain, the internet service provider Vodaphone charges about $33 a month for basic service but offers several "passes" allowing unlimited video or music streaming, social media usage, or chat, at additional tariffs of up to $9.30 per month. [Ed's Note: This is not entirely accurate - Vodaphone's ISP home broadband offering (17Mbps) is £24/month unlimited usage, the additional figures quoted are for faster fiber connections (38 and 76 Mbps) where available. How you use your connection is irrelevant. This is the same for many European ISPs. Smart phone costs are entirely separate.]
Although both countries are part of the European Union, which has an explicit commitment to network neutrality, these arrangements are allowed under provisions giving national regulators some flexibility. These regulators can open loopholes permitting "zero-rating," through which ISPs can exclude certain services from data caps. That's what the Portuguese and British ISPs essentially are doing.
If the vote on the 14th of December repeals Net Neutrality then consumer options will be greatly reduced while increasing greatly in prices as we can see from Portugal's example.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pav on Tuesday November 28 2017, @08:29PM (2 children)
Free speech activists say this is just another vector to shut down freedom of expression on the internet. I follow progressive politics, and already Twitter and YouTube have been banning and demonotising content and accounts either silently or using "Russia, Russia, Russia" hysteria. Hell, they've attacked Wikileaks with the Russia thing so much people are actuallly starting to believe it... repetition (repetition, repetition, repetition) is the oldest form of mind control after all. (BTW, Jimmy Dore does a great job debunking the mainstream narrative : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PX9U6nKHJmk [youtube.com] ). If deprioritising political voices into oblivion becomes possible it WILL happen. Disagree with a companies interests? Piss off a government entity and the company has headquarters in its juristiction? If this becomes legal it WILL be used for censorship.
(Score: 2) by meustrus on Tuesday November 28 2017, @10:21PM (1 child)
I can't tell what you're responding to. Did you put this in the wrong place?
Do I interpret you correctly that fast laning / zero rating / bundles will be "another vector to shut down freedom of expression on the internet"? It's an interesting point. However, "Twitter and YouTube" didn't obtain the power to censor their users for progressive purposes. They gain it for free by virtue of their decentralized infrastructure, unless they go out of their way to give us end-to-end encryption like Apple and Google sometimes do. And in YouTube's case, they have long used that capability to serve the MPAA/RIAA mafia.
If they are censoring unpopular speech, it's because that's what the market wants them to do with their power. But the fundamental problem is that they have that power to begin with. It's arguably worse if they never use their censorship powers the way they are now, because then the sheeple wouldn't know that they were capable of censorship at all. As it stands, censoring Russian propaganda etc. only makes it easier to make exactly the argument you are making.
If there isn't at least one reference or primary source, it's not +1 Informative. Maybe the underused +1 Interesting?
(Score: 2) by Pav on Thursday November 30 2017, @04:29AM
The argument I was making is if censorship became so bad on mainstream platforms that people tried moving to eg. Diaspora (federated Facebook replacement), Mastodon (federated Twitter replacement) etc... then these could (and probably would) be made to perform so badly as to be unusable (because Netflix!). You're right that the market wants mainstream platforms to censor speech... viewers aren't the customers, they're the product after all (the customers being companies often owned by oligarchs with a certain political views).