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from the say-it-often-enough-and-people-will-tend-to-believe-you dept.
I used natural language processing techniques to analyze net neutrality comments submitted to the FCC from April-October 2017, and the results were disturbing.
NY Attorney General Schneiderman estimated that hundreds of thousands of Americans' identities were stolen and used in spam campaigns that support repealing net neutrality. My research found at least 1.3 million fake pro-repeal comments, with suspicions about many more. In fact, the sum of fake pro-repeal comments in the proceeding may number in the millions. In this post, I will point out one particularly egregious spambot submission, make the case that there are likely many more pro-repeal spambots yet to be confirmed, and estimate the public position on net neutrality in the "organic" public submissions.
The author's key findings:
- One pro-repeal spam campaign used mail-merge to disguise 1.3 million comments as unique grassroots submissions.
- There were likely multiple other campaigns aimed at injecting what may total several million pro-repeal comments into the system.
- It's highly likely that more than 99% of the truly unique comments³ were in favor of keeping net neutrality.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday December 02 2017, @01:29PM (3 children)
Strawman. That has nothing to do with Net Neutrality whatsoever. Net Neutrality tells ISPs that they can not charge anyone but their customers for the service they provide. Nothing else.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 02 2017, @03:15PM (1 child)
That's a bit of a problem when a significant number of ISP customers are choosing behavior which breaks the longstanding oversubscription model (e.g a past ISP's 1.5Mbps T1 serving a customer base of 500 dialup users) in conjunction with the prolific "unlimited"-but-not-really-unlimited access model fraud. (It could be argued that oversubscription itself is a fraud, but it seems more of a logistical fact of life mirrored in your 240V electrical outlets and on the roads you drive over: all such resources are actually sparsely used, and 100% usage by 100% of the customers would instantly break the infrastructure.) Since "unlimited-no-not-unlimited" plans are a fraud anyhow, tiered plans with burst (such as the one I'm paying for my remote servers with) is likely the honest solution to take on the ISPs' end. There would exist honest ISPs if government force supporting the existing megacorp ISPs was removed.
There's also an issue when a remote site is generating a large imbalance of traffic across backbones which then breach no-charge peering agreements (agreements which do not charge for data transfer because the net traffic in/out is roughly the same). I've not kept up to date on the current abuses by Netflix (et al) shopping around for backbone providers with no-charge peering agreements they can abuse to dump their massively imbalanced traffic load on, but that's exactly what they were doing when this "Net Neutrality" became a popular buzzword a few years ago. That's fraud, and forcing ISPs at gunpoint to "only charge their customers" means that my Internet access bill for SSH, email, and web browsing goes up to support building the ISP infrastructure for my neighbors' constant streaming data habits.
I've paid for too many bridges to believe that a federal government action plan will merely be used to address a small, specific issue.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Monday December 04 2017, @06:06PM
Shouldn't that just be fixed by Netflix's ISP charging them for that traffic they're using? If hosting a streaming site costs you more, than have a special service package for streaming sites. If businesses are offering Netflix a deal they're losing money on, how is that anyone else's responsibility? Limit their speed or limit their bandwidth until they purchase an upgrade. No different than personal internet service -- if I want to stream movies all day long, I can't just buy any random $5/month internet plan, I'm gonna need more bandwidth than that.
Net Neutrality doesn't say they have to host Netflix for free; nor does it stipulate how they must negotiate peering agreements. It says they can't block me from accessing Netflix if I paid for that bandwidth. They can't say that Facebook is included but if you want to use diaspora* that's an extra $20/month for the expanded "full Internet" package. But they can still charge as much as they need to for the base connection. If their peering agreements are no longer equal, they can renegotiate those. Hell, they could cut the peering agreement entirely -- net neutrality doesn't say they have to serve everything that exists; it only says that the content they do serve can't be prioritized.
Besides, forcing them to renegotiate those peering agreements could be very, very good for the Internet. Because if Netflix has to pay extra for using so much upstream traffic, it encourages them (or the company serving them) to encourage more upstream traffic from the other side to equalize that gap -- ie, it creates an incentive for large corporations to encourage home servers and more distributed content delivery.
(Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Saturday December 02 2017, @09:24PM
Actually it's not quite that, Buzz. Net Neutrality restricts ISPs from preferring some packets (for whatever reasons) over others. Net Neutrality attempts to make ISP internet connections just "dumb pipes."
Which, at least IMHO, is as it should be. Without Net Neutrality, an ISP can, with impunity, demand protections payments (it'd be a real shame if your network traffic doesn't get to our customers) from SoylentNews, gab.ai, Alex Jones, motherless.com, etc.
What's more, without the requirement that all packets be treated equally, an ISP could just flat block sites they don't like.
No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr