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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday December 02 2017, @04:10PM (2 children)
If SN was generating a massive imbalance of traffic never before seen that totally breaks the status quo oversubscription model (common in the electrical grid, municipal water systems, etc.), the default reaction would be to extract payment for the new and disruptive pattern from the disruptive source. This is especially the case where "no-charge peering agreements" are in place, and which some large ISPs have with other backbone providers. The breakage of such peering agreements is at the source of the imbalanced traffic (hence Netflix's backbone partners such as Cogent getting their peering agreements revoked due to breaking the balance of traffic from Netflix's new traffic spikes). This is why my claim is not a strawman, as you assert.
"Third party content producers" is just a talk-around phrase for "streaming video" sites. Streaming video sites want to keep a low price tag on their service and as such are keen to offload the actual costs of infrastructure to deliver the new paradigm of "constant stream of high bandwidth, low latency data for hours and hours" to anyone else they can.
Note that I am not trying to assert that the slimy, fraudster, monopolistic ISPs are the good guys in this case.
(Score: 5, Touché) by tibman on Saturday December 02 2017, @07:11PM (1 child)
Your argument doesn't make sense once you realize that the ISP subscribers all bought X$ mbit connections and they cannot exceed their paid limits. At no point can "streaming video" sites offload their costs onto the ISP. If an ISP oversold it's capacity then that is on the ISP, not the consumer or the third party content producer. The ISP is effectively charging customers for more bandwidth than they can actually deliver.
SN won't survive on lurkers alone. Write comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 03 2017, @03:02AM
I agree to a limited extent, in that the prolific "unlimited Internet" which are of course not unlimited are fraudulent. Tiered plans with burst and extra fees beyond the specifically-defined data limits are of course possible to do, and can be reasonably priced since the servers I'm paying for in a remote data center are doing exactly that right now.
The "third party content producer" is just obfuscation for "streaming video site", and the massive traffic imbalance that brings ALSO impacts no-fee peering agreements in addition to the problem with fraudulent ISP access plans you identified. The access costs for such streaming video sites would be/are much higher if they were paying for the data they actually used instead of shopping around for backbone providers with peering agreements they could have the backbone provider violate for a while which is why there was big news a couple years ago regarding Cogent's peering agreements being revoked by some ISPs - it was due to the violation of such peering agreements due to the massive traffic imbalance caused by your "third party content producers" aka streaming video.