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posted by Fnord666 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:06PM   Printer-friendly
from the brace-for-impact dept.

Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1937

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.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/15/washington-dc-net-neutrality-protests-restoring-internet-freedom


Original Submission

Related Stories

Support Net Neutrality Day / FCC Chairman Ajit Pai's Tone-Deaf "Verizon Puppet" Skit 44 comments

[Ed note: Some important context for this submission appears in this c|net article: Internet sites to protest Trump Admin's net neutrality plan

A group of activists and websites including Imgur, Mozilla, Pinterest, Reddit, GitHub, Etsy, BitTorrent and Pornhub are planning a campaign Tuesday to draw attention to an upcoming FCC vote that could radically reshape the way the internet works.

[...] Tuesday's campaign is the latest effort by activists to dissuade the FCC from repealing Obama-era rules that effectively classified internet service providers as utilities. The classification, known as Title II, forced companies like Verizon, AT&T and Comcast to treat all internet traffic equally. Last week, protesters marched outside Verizon stores around the US.

Earlier, a handful of tech trailblazers -- including Vint Cerf, a founding figure of the internet Steve Wozniak, a co-founder of Apple; and Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web -- posted an open letter on Tumblr criticizing the proposed repeal of net neutrality.

"The FCC's rushed and technically incorrect proposed order to abolish net neutrality protections without any replacement is an imminent threat to the Internet we worked so hard to create," the letter said. "It should be stopped."

Imagine if all sites defaulted to, say, dial-up or ISDN speeds unless they paid extra for full-speed internet. The large, incumbent sites on the net could easily absorb such costs. Smaller, new, or niche sites (such as SoylentNews) could not afford to pay for faster access. If this is not what you want, then contact the FCC and/or your elected representatives and let your view be heard.]

takyon writes:

Ajit Pai jokes with Verizon exec about him being a "puppet" FCC chair

On Thursday night in Washington, DC, net neutrality advocates gathered outside the annual Federal Communications Commission Chairman's Dinner to protest Chairman Ajit Pai's impending rollback of net neutrality rules.

Inside the dinner (also known as the "telecom prom") at the Washington Hilton, Pai entertained the audience with jokes about him being a puppet installed by Verizon to lead the FCC.

Pai was a Verizon associate general counsel from 2001 to 2003, and next week he will lead an FCC vote to eliminate net neutrality rules—just as Verizon and other ISPs have asked him to.

At the dinner, Pai played a satirical video that showed him planning his ascension to the FCC chairmanship with a Verizon executive in 2003. The Verizon executive was apparently Kathleen Grillo, a senior VP and deputy general counsel in the company's public policy and government affairs division.

The speech was apparently not supposed to be public, but Gizmodo obtained footage of Pai's remarks and the skit. You can watch it here.

The vote is currently scheduled for Thursday, Dec. 14. The FCC and Federal Trade Commission announced that they will work together to punish ISPs that don't keep their promises (assuming they make any).

Previously: Washington DC Braces for Net Neutrality Protests Later This Month
FCC Plans December Vote to Kill Net Neutrality Rules
FCC Will Reveal Vote to Repeal Net Neutrality This Week
Comcast Hints at Plans for Paid Fast Lanes after Net Neutrality Repeal
More than a Million Pro-Repeal Net Neutrality Comments were Likely Faked


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:20PM (71 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:20PM (#570614)

    The answer is the market: Organize yourself in ways that are demonstrably profitable and therefore self-sustaining; maybe it will be painful at first, but that is the only way to ensure that you'll get what you want.

    Concretely: Quit running to daddy; build your own fucking networks.

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:32PM (2 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:32PM (#570616)

      The free market doesn't exist. The closest we've been to it in the past brought us charlatans and frauds and the race to the bottom. Go live in Somalia if you can't handle the truth. Maybe that will open your eyes.
      Myth of the Free Market: http://robertreich.org/post/61406074983 [robertreich.org]

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:40PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:40PM (#570622)

        The Somalians new nothing of voluntary exchange before the failure of their, and nothing of it afterwards.

        Yet, despite their culture of coercion which gave rise to warlords, the people's lives still improved immensely, because a market did develop where the authoritarians were too weak to control it.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:50PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:50PM (#570702)

          Xeer [wikipedia.org] must be the model we're looking for. An overview:

          Different groups within Somali society undertake oral agreements with each other to define xeer law. Despite this informal nature there is a series of generally accepted principles, agreements and ideas that constitute xeer, referred to collectively as xissi adkaaday. These are: the payment of diyya (livestock, usually healthy female camels) by the collective group (clan, sub-clan, lineage or diyya group) from which an offender originates as compensation for the crimes of murder, bodily assault, thievery, rape and defamation of character, given to the victim or victim's family; the protection of vulnerable or respected members of society such as the elderly, women, children, poets, guests and religious people; obligations to the family such as the payment of a dowry to a bride; the rights of a widower to marry the dead wife's sister and the inheritance of a widow by the dead man's brother; the punishments for elopement; the division and use of natural resources like water and land.

          Does that sound like it?

          I wonder if it's possible to declare oneself an independent diyya group. Nothing gets under my skin more than being held accountable for the words and actions of others on a collective and several basis due to circumstance of birth.

    • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:34PM (2 children)

      by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:34PM (#570617) Journal

      I liked where the OpenLibernet whitepaper (PDF) [openlibernet.org] was going, but it didn't go anywhere. I had minor objections, but I forgot them.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @01:23PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @01:23PM (#571133)

        Thanks for that post!

        I just read it. It is a theoretical paper with a couple of econ equations. Not much in the way of networking in it. But its a start. Which is more than can be said for the whole of the telecom industry in the past decade.

        • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Saturday September 23 2017, @05:41PM

          by JNCF (4317) on Saturday September 23 2017, @05:41PM (#572137) Journal

          It is a theoretical paper with a couple of econ equations. Not much in the way of networking in it.

          From my fading memory, that seems correct. There are meshnet papers that are more thorough (like CJDNS, which is a real system), but I don't know of any that propose incentives like the OpenLibernet paper does. I haven't searched for any in a while.

          But its a start. Which is more than can be said for the whole of the telecom industry in the past decade.

          I like how everybody interpreted your original post as being enthusiastic about monolithic corporations developing their own proprietary balkanized networks, as if those wretched contraptions could successfully compete with open standards in the long run.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by canopic jug on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:40PM (11 children)

      by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:40PM (#570621) Journal

      The answer is the market.

      Been there, done that. We already tried that in the 1970's and 1980's with a disparate assortment of private, incompatible, isolated networks. Remember Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi, GEnie, and the others?

      Apparently not.

      They never could get it together to provide decent service or a decent price, let alone grow to any mentionable size. Interoperability and communications between those networks were not possible. Remember the Internet? Yep. You're still using it.

      Guess which was organized by the government and which was left to the "free" market?

      --
      Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
      • (Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:47PM (5 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:47PM (#570624)

        There was long a clear need for hooking up geographically disparate computers.

        Just because government threw a pittance at one particular low-level project means shit. It's a total misrepresentation of the history of the Internet.

        • (Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:05PM (3 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:05PM (#570632)

          There was long a clear need for hooking up geographically disparate computers.

          Yet the "free market" couldn't figure out how to do it. It took government intervention to get it done. Funny how that works, isn't it?

          Free market: 0. Government: 1.

          • (Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:10PM (2 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:10PM (#570634)

            Evolution by variation (supplier competition) and selection (consumer choice).

            You're betraying your innate misunderstanding of this process; why are you so partial to the ridiculous theory of Intelligent Design?

            • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:29PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:29PM (#570641)

              Intelligent Design

              Free market moron uses Red Herring! It's not very effective.

              Anyway, "evolution" chose ARPAnet, the government system, over your free market systems such as Prodigy, CompuServe, Delphi, etc. that were mentioned earlier.

              How long are you going to keep fighting a lost battle? Yes, it's a lost battle for you as evidenced by the tactics you just employed.

              Or are you just a troll and I swallowed the bait hook, line, and sinker?

              • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:25PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:25PM (#570682)

                So - you're a swallower? I've a few things I'd like to discuss with you in private . . .

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:36PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:36PM (#570690)

          Thank you this is an excellent post we will make sure you are well compensated for your shilling Anonymous Coward.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:41PM (2 children)

        by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:41PM (#570646) Journal

        Not gonna argue, 'cause you are at least mostly right. But, is the internet still working because of "government", or because of "standards"? What I think is, today's standards were adopted readily, and widely, because government was using and backing them. But, government didn't exactly write the standards all on their own. It was more like a critical mass thing, where enough agencies, corporations, and people were on board with "The Internet", so everyone else just fell into line. It was a choice of "conform, or be left behind".

        • (Score: 5, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:07PM

          by canopic jug (3949) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:07PM (#570666) Journal

          It's definitely the standards. But I make a distinction between the first two phases of the Internet which were the pre-commercialization and the post-commercialization. The solid government period was pre-commercialization. That is to say pre-1996 it was guided by government projects. However, for all the shortcomings of that model back then there was still the possibility to bring in top experts and let them do their thing. Today, there are fewer experts and they would never be allowed to do anything without being micro-managed into unemployment by a gaggle of MBAs. Anyway, long and short of it was that there was a period of time when the standards that comprise(d) the Internet were made possible through the government.

          I'm a middle-path fan, myself. Historically, it seems to be the only model that has consistently worked. However, we've already done the free-market experiment with networking in the 1970's and 1980's. It did not get anywhere. Nowadays we're in a third phase where the very standards themselves are under attack [boingboing.net] from the corporations because the lessions from past decades have not soaked in to the older generations and most of the younger generations don't even know what the WWW is let alone the Internet.

          --
          Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by sjames on Wednesday September 20 2017, @09:17PM

          by sjames (2882) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @09:17PM (#570850) Journal

          There was a bit more to it. For example, one thing that has kept things somewhat open is carriers not wanting to be on the wrong side of liability by looking too closely at the data they carry. We need to be careful not to erode that fear of liability if we want to maintain a free internet.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:08PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:08PM (#570668)

        1970s and 1980s

        Grammar National Socialism is the only legitimate form of government.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @06:55PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @06:55PM (#570779)

        it's not that simple. you're detailing a failure of proprietary shitware compared to a more open source approach. i doubt the fucking government helped anything.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:57PM (51 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:57PM (#570627)

      Concretely: Quit running to daddy; build your own fucking networks.

      We've tried that. Every time it happens the local cable and phone monopolies run crying to daddy government to buy laws to outlaw any challenge to their business model scam.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:59PM (50 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @02:59PM (#570630)

        Obviously, you net neutrality folks should be putting time into getting government completely out of the business of the Internet.

        • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:16PM (17 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:16PM (#570636)

          Now why would we do that? If there's no regulation whatsoever, there's nothing to keep you big business types from using monopoly tactics to squeeze out competition. I've never, ever seen you "free market" cunts scream about regulation when it helps to shut down municipal broadband. Not once. Municipal broadband is the very definition of that which you cling to, yet it's *crickets* from you whenever it comes under attack.

          You actually WANT regulation, you just want it set up to only benefit YOU. I have only three words to say to that: Go, fuck, and yourself.

          • (Score: 1, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:23PM (3 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:23PM (#570638)

            Regulation is what squeezes out the newcomer by making the barrier to entry that hurdle which a Big Business has already cleared.

            Indeed, a government regulatory agency is itself a goddamn monopoly; you want a monopoly to protect you from monopolies—it makes no sense!

            • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:46PM (2 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:46PM (#570648)

              Yes, I want a monopoly controlled by we the people to protect us from monopolies controlled by C-level sociopaths. How is that so hard to understand?

              Then again, on second thought, maybe you're right. "We the people" gave us fucking Trump and a Republican house and senate. CLEARLY "we the people" can't be trusted with that level of power.

              • (Score: 2, TouchĂ©) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:06PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:06PM (#570714)

                Yes, I want a monopoly controlled by we the people to protect us

                Thanks for the laugh. The US government controlled by "we the people". Hee hee! What a riot.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:38PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:38PM (#570880)

                If net neutrality were the only issue in the election, I would've voted for Hillary Clinton.

                Trouble is, on 100% of the other issues with disagreement, she was horrible. Unlike her and her voters, I don't hate America. I don't feel guilty for being part of the greatest civilization ever, and I have no desire to see that civilization brought down.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by JNCF on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:47PM (1 child)

            by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:47PM (#570649) Journal

            I've never, ever seen you "free market" cunts scream about regulation when it helps to shut down municipal broadband. Not once. Municipal broadband is the very definition of that which you cling to, yet it's *crickets* from you whenever it comes under attack.

            "'Free market' cunts" is an awfully large umbrella; at least in this context, I definitely fall under it (see my OpenLibernet post above). Here I am on SN, over two years ago, arguing that municipal governments should be given the means to defend their own internet infrastructures. [soylentnews.org] Now you've seen it.

            • (Score: 2) by JNCF on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:52PM

              by JNCF (4317) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:52PM (#570654) Journal

              Err, over three years ago. Time is weird.

          • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:50PM (10 children)

            by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:50PM (#570653) Homepage Journal

            You haven't paid any attention whatsoever to what I've said on Capitalism and how Monopolies have no place in them then. You should try opening your eyes and reading once in a while.

            --
            My rights don't end where your fear begins.
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:37PM (9 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:37PM (#570732)

              I doubt that is the case, people hear you and try and point out your naivety but you refuse to accept that your model is broken. The free market inevitably leads to behemoth corporations since putting everything under one umbrella enables ever higher profit margins. The behemoths influence legislation, so round and round we go.

              I think the free market is a marvelous idea! But there is no place for human greed or unethical practices. Those things HAVE to go.

              See how stupid my position is? Yours is only slightly better, but comparing shit to worse shit isn't a validation.

              • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @06:34PM (8 children)

                by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @06:34PM (#570765) Homepage Journal

                "My model" has created essentially every prosperous nation the world has ever seen. I'll stand by that record any day.

                --
                My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:08PM (7 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:08PM (#570792)

                  I'll stand right beside you with the sign saying "This man suffers from clinical psychosis." I wouldn't trust you beyond managing a 7/11, and even then I'd be worried you'd shoot a customer carrying a non-weapon in their jacket.

                  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:23PM (6 children)

                    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:23PM (#570815) Homepage Journal

                    S'what they get for walking around a chicken leg under their arm. Nice complete dodge of the issue, by the way.

                    --
                    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                    • (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:30PM (5 children)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:30PM (#570834)

                      The issue was capitalism and monopolies, and it was addressed by pointing out that capitalism leads to monopolies unless you have massive government regulation (non free market).

                      You responded with a red herring

                      "My model" has created essentially every prosperous nation the world has ever seen. I'll stand by that record any day.

                      I responded with a similar level of critical analysis regarding your mental condition.

                      You respond with:

                      S'what they get for walking around a chicken leg under their arm

                      Clearly you are a borderline psychotic who should have his firearm license replaced with a nice padded cell.

                      Nice complete dodge of the issue, by the way.

                      You are correct, I did not address your stupid point because it was stupid. You want to look at only the positives and ignore the negatives, you should change your name to The MIghty Ostrich. You need some learnin' boy, most of the US domination has been through shady tactics of empire building and has little to do with capitalism vs. communism.

                      • (Score: 2, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:57PM (4 children)

                        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:57PM (#570845) Homepage Journal

                        You refuse to address the issue because you are wrong and you know it. Capitalism has created the vast majority of the world's wealth. Socialism and Communism have destroyed more wealth than they have created.

                        --
                        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:48PM (3 children)

                          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:48PM (#570883)

                          Why bother arguing with an ideologue? Common sense doesn't matter, just your crappy simplistic viewpoint of the world. China would beg to differ, it took them a while to catch up but they're about to leave the US and other Western countries in the dust. You'll be that old semi-senile guy yelling "capitalism!" while all the young folks go about building a better world. Most likely it will involve capitalism, because as I always say the world needs a mix. Only morons such as yourself think capitalism is the end-all-be-all. I blame propaganda, but I also adhere to certain amounts of personal responsibility and lay the blame upon you as well for being too lazy to get a real education.

                          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:11AM (2 children)

                            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:11AM (#570918)

                            Why bother arguing with an ideologue?

                            Why did you bother typing out a full paragraph to say "nuh uh!"?

                            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:51PM (1 child)

                              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:51PM (#571241)

                              Cause going through the trouble of getting sources about socialized healthcare is a waste of time, your brain twists around, moves the goal posts, and does back flips coming up with reasons that reality is wrong. Posting a quick paragraph about your stupidity is easy, spending time on documenting exactly WHY is time consuming and therefore not something I'll do for an argument with an ostrich.

                              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:05PM

                                by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:05PM (#571253)

                                I'm not TMB. I'm just an AC asking you why you think playground namecalling is anything more than your own mental masterbation.

                                Interesting to note that you think backing up your own viewpoints is too time consuming.

        • (Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:28PM (31 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:28PM (#570640)

          Yeah, because that'll work great! Hell, the 'free market' can't even do health care worth a crap. The U.S.'s free market is more expensive and no better to less effective than pretty much any other industrialized country on the planet. Did I mention your 'free market' is MORE expensive. LOL. And that's in a market that doesn't have a physical restriction of having to have infrastructure running to every building. You need to stop fantasizing about your imaginary 'free market', get off your unicorn, put the meth down, and join the rest of us in the real world..

          • (Score: 2, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:53PM (30 children)

            by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:53PM (#570655) Homepage Journal

            The free market gave the US the most advanced healthcare industry on the planet despite massive government interference. Care to try again?

            --
            My rights don't end where your fear begins.
            • (Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:14PM (25 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:14PM (#570673)

              What exactly do we have, other than high costs, that other countries don't?

              Other countries have lower rates of infant mortality. Other countries have longer life expectancy. Other countries have lower rates of obesity. The only thing we're "most advanced" at with health care is how much we spend on it.

              Try being one of the tens of millions of Americans without health insurance and then tell us all how advanced our health care system is.

              • (Score: 2, Disagree) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:18PM (24 children)

                by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:18PM (#570675) Homepage Journal

                Sell that garbage to someone that doesn't know that other countries rely on the advances in healthcare that the American market has created. Consider for a moment every healthcare advancement that's come out of the US and then picture the world without any of them.

                --
                My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:13PM (8 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:13PM (#570716)

                  Care to separate those advances which were developed at public universities or using research grants from NIH or other government agencies vs. those made by for-profit health institutions using their own moneys?

                  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @06:19PM (7 children)

                    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @06:19PM (#570755) Homepage Journal

                    Let's do it the easy way instead. You point out a significant medical advancement from a nation that at the time had socialized medicine and I'll point out two from just the US.

                    --
                    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:34PM (5 children)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:34PM (#570838)

                      ongoing socialized medicine [nhsggc.org.uk]

                      Nice goal post moving, you're an intellectual GIANT TMB, GIIIANNNT /s

                      Guess you just can't face the facts that so much of the US advances are funded by tax payers, your poor model of perfection is so iiiiignoraaant. You're an ignorant FOOL TMB, ignorant as FUCK. If you'd at least stop posting that shit online like its the second coming of christ I wouldn't need to point out your deficiencies.

                      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:59PM (4 children)

                        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:59PM (#570846) Homepage Journal

                        Oh, you mean they're funded by capitalists who've had their money stolen? Yeah, no shit. There wouldn't be anything to steal if it weren't for capitalism.

                        --
                        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:50PM (3 children)

                          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:50PM (#570884)

                          You're really swinging for the fences here. I guess you really are the taxation is theft guy, TMB the bloody idiot.

                          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:15AM (2 children)

                            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:15AM (#570919)

                            When you have no valid argument, ad hominem, amirite?

                            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:54PM (1 child)

                              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:54PM (#571244)

                              That is the way TMB operates, I just have no desire to point out the problems with the base assertion that capitalism is the only reason humanity has advanced. It is arrogant and naive, and no amount of arguing will change the mind of the likes of him.

                              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:02PM

                                by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:02PM (#571249)

                                And yet for all your enlightenment, the best you could come up with is a one-line post to call TMB names?

                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:19PM

                      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:19PM (#570895)

                      You're the one who made the assertion. It's your responsibility to provide evidence for your claim.

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:40PM (14 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:40PM (#570733)

                  hahahahaha, yeah the US is the sole inventor of all modern technology. Get off your high horse you nit.

                  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @06:17PM (13 children)

                    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @06:17PM (#570753) Homepage Journal

                    If you'd bother to check your history books, we damned near have been in healthcare for the past hundred years or so. This attitude of superiority comes from being genuinely superior.

                    --
                    My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:13PM (12 children)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:13PM (#570798)

                      Yes, the US was the world leader for a long time after WWII due to our economic maneuvering. That doesn't make us inherently better, we were just lucky to be positioned so well after the war. But hey, you never let extenuating circumstances stop you from making stupid statements so please, do continue with your arrogant stupidity trying to sell US healthcare as a "better system".

                      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:26PM (11 children)

                        by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:26PM (#570816) Homepage Journal

                        Yes, yes it very much does make us better when the metric is what system has produced the most medical advances in the world. Do please tell us how socialism or communism is better even though it has failed to produce anything worthwhile every single time it has been tried at a national level.

                        --
                        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:21PM (10 children)

                          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:21PM (#570830)

                          Because all the data on socialized healthcare shows it is better for the citizens and private healthcare options are still able to exist, but they must compete on a level playing field instead of their monopolistic insurance influenced field. Suck a dick you red herring piece of crap.

                          • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @09:02PM (9 children)

                            by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @09:02PM (#570847) Homepage Journal

                            No, it most certainly does not. All the data shows that you get shitty care and insane waits for any kind of treatment. Even if you're willing to pay more. Why the hell do you think so many people come to the US for treatment?

                            --
                            My rights don't end where your fear begins.
                            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @09:42PM (8 children)

                              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @09:42PM (#570859)

                              Why the hell do you think so many people come to the US for treatment?

                              Not GP, but to answer your question, look at the numbers, they don't. Comparatively, very few people come to the US for treatment. Although I do agree that the numbers are indicative of the quality of the US's health care system (spoiler: it sucks)

                              • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:53PM (7 children)

                                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @10:53PM (#570887)

                                He doesn't care about facts, he only cares about propaganda. Dude is fucking dumb. All this same shit has been trotted out before, but he always returns to the same crap arguments that ignore reality. My guess is he just can't BELIEVE the US empire is falling so he's falling back on the comfortable and familiar dreams.

                                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:09AM (6 children)

                                  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @12:09AM (#570917)

                                  So, all you got is ad hominem...

                                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:26AM (5 children)

                                    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:26AM (#570979)

                                    It's not ad hominem to say someone doesn't care about the facts, and are kind of dumb, when they just made an easily checked and objectively false statement. To declare the US health care system is the best on the planet is patently false and not backed up by data. To rave about 'why do so many people come to the US for health care' when less then half the number of people go to the US as go to Iran is absurd. That the poster doesn't care about facts is not ad hominem, it's just a fact.

                                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:28PM (4 children)

                                      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:28PM (#571219)

                                      The statement "Dude is fucking dumb" is ad hominem, and it is pathetically deceitful of you to try to claim otherwise. If the false statement is so easily checked and objectively demonstrated to be false, why not post THAT instead of a post that a third-grader would be ashamed of?

                                      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:37PM (3 children)

                                        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:37PM (#571277)

                                        The original 'Dude is fucking dumb', wasn't me. But the only thing improper about the statement is the term 'fucking" and while it distracts from the point and is not helpful, it's not really ad-hominem.

                                        dumb
                                                      adj 1: slow to learn or understand; lacking intellectual acuity;
                                                                    "so dense he never understands anything I say to him";
                                                                    "never met anyone quite so dim"; "although dull at
                                                                    classical learning, at mathematics he was uncommonly
                                                                    quick"- Thackeray; "dumb officials make some really
                                                                    dumb decisions"; "he was either normally stupid or
                                                                    being deliberately obtuse"; "worked with the slow
                                                                    students" [syn: {dense}, {dim}, {dull}, {obtuse}, {slow}]

                                        I think that in this case, I'd give the benefit of the doubt and go with 'being deliberately obtuse' as the most accurate use of the term dumb. But i think 'dumb' is a perfectly valid word choice for someone who deliberately and repeatedly spouts obvious untruths. It's accurate, not ad-hominem.

                                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:25PM (2 children)

                                          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:25PM (#571345)

                                          But i think 'dumb' is a perfectly valid word choice for someone who deliberately and repeatedly spouts obvious untruths. It's accurate, not ad-hominem.

                                          ad hominem [thefreedictionary.com]
                                          adj.
                                          1. Attacking a person's character or motivations rather than a position or argument
                                          2. Appealing to the emotions rather than to logic or reason.

                                          True or not, attacking the person rather than the argument is ad hominem, and is an invalid debate tactic.

                                          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @10:42PM (1 child)

                                            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @10:42PM (#571446)

                                            In retrospect, I have to agree. Calling the poster dumb was ad hominem, calling the action dumb would not have been.

                                            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @12:22AM

                                              by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 22 2017, @12:22AM (#571487)

                                              Whoa, wait, what? Listen, pal, that's not how it works around here. Once you've made a claim, you stick to it no matter what.

                                              Seriously, though, I look forward to throwing more ideas around with you, AC, to see what bits break off whose ideas first. =)

            • (Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:26PM

              by Hyperturtle (2824) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:26PM (#570684)

              I think the problem is coverage, not quality.

              (I won't even get into who is eligble for said coverage and how to fund it)

              I have to wonder if some of our incredibly expensive cures would be less expensive of the economies of scale were to kick in -- or if only people like the pharma bro guy are responsible for many of the costs of what could be cheap, but isn't.

              Anyway, a taxpayer handout for everyone to get covered, plus jerks like him and his business plans to raise prices because he can -- clearly will make any solution cost more than it has to, even if we had remained with what we had before the ACA. It's insurance that pays through the nose most of the time, and our system makes our premiums go up in part due to that kind of greed.

              But there's no question the US has among the most advanced medical care systems for diagnosis and treatments that one could hope for. In intractable problem is that many people hope to be a part of it and don't have the resources to do so.

              Preventative maintenance coverage could do a lot to keep costs down...while still offending nearly everyone as not being enough in either direction.

              Regardless, I'd pay a few more bucks in taxes* as part of some massive government initiative to try to prevent the spread of preventable illnesses and raise the standard of living, but that opinion is not shared by everyone.

              *I don't know what that amount actually is, but my opinion of what acceptable costs would be based on what actually is proposed and who is actually covered...the sky is not the limit

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:39PM

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:39PM (#570693)

              If you weren't a poor person you could have traveled to other countries to see their healthcare systems for yourself.
              Maybe there is some million dollar an hour dick extension surgeon somewhere in the USA but the average joe schmoe might as well go to fucking china.

            • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:00PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:00PM (#570711)

              US the most advanced healthcare industry on the planet

              You almost owe me a new keyboard, good times. Well let's see, the U.S. is sooo advanced we must have the longest life spans... Japan, Switzerland, heck can't even see the U.S. on that list. Well it must be child mortality?... Luxemburg, Iceland... nope the U.S. is far, far down the list.

              Hmm, well the US must be so obviously better than everyone else that people must come to the U.S. in droves to get a piece of the fantastic level of health care available here. How many Health tourist does the U.S. get? Let's go with the high end, the U.S. gets like 85K health tourist! It MUST be the best, go USA, go USA!... But wait, Singapore gets 400K+ people a year, that just must be an outlier, ohhh, Thailand gets 400K+ too, and Malayasia 340K+. Okay who compares to the US, wait Iran gets 200K+, India 150K+, fuck, the US must really suck.

              Well how does the US compare in health ranks by the WHO? Is it in the top 10?... nope. Top 20 for fucksake?... nope.

              Your beliefs seem to be based on delusions of nationalism. Brother, I'd suggest you get some mental health care, but considering the health care system your in, well, your screwed.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @01:11AM

                by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @01:11AM (#570937)

                But President Reagan got rid of it back in the 80s :)

    • (Score: 5, Informative) by crafoo on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:07PM

      by crafoo (6639) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:07PM (#570664)

      The only one running to daddy here are the large ISP corporations. They are paying local and federal representatives and policy makers to exclude competition and erect artificial barriers to new businesses entering the market. In an effort to restore competition and an open market, the populace has decided it is in our best interests to enact "common carrier" rules. In exchange for monopolistic position of maintaining and providing the internet infrastructure, these same companies may not interfere, filter, or in any way modify information using this infrastructure. Much the same way 3rd party contractors may not erect toll booths on interstate highways.

      It's our infrastructure. We make the rules. Don't like it, GET OUT.

  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by jmorris on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:30PM (51 children)

    by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:30PM (#570643)

    As usual, the "activists" and "community organizers" are beavering away at distracting everyone from the actual problems while helping the corporate overlords quietly funding them.

    This effort is nothing more than the other streamers not named Netflix trying to have everyone else pay for their distribution system. Well that is the overt part, we all know Soros isn't really interested in any of that, he wants to have his people making the decisions of who gets banished or not from the Net.

    We need transparency and open access. To get that we have to have the rules of the Net align with reality. Bandwidth is not free. Infrastructure is not free. Geography exists and distant connections involve more work. Mandating that any of those limitations be treated as free creates distortion. In the early growth phase it was simpler to handwave all that away in the interest of not confusing the new users, but streaming has forced it to the front. Bandwidth should therefore, at minimum, always be metered so as to encourage the notion to enter the public consciousness that the Internet is a poor substitute for broadcasting and that streaming is dumb unless it can be cached at the edges of the network.

    But the biggest problem isn't shaping up to be metering or tiered access based on charging both sides of connections and kickback schemes, etc. It is simply access. There is an active attempt to thought police whole subcultures off the network. Good luck getting me to give half a crap about your unfettered access to The Pirate Bay when I'm worried about whether every account I use is going to go dark next week and the sites I visit banned from DNS.

    Once again, there is a solution to these problems. The last mile and the core infrastructure are natural monopolies and are going to have to be regulated. But do it smart. Government regulated utilities own the last mile but can't directly serve customers. ISPs can lease access to the physical plant at fixed regulated prices and non-discriminatory terms and then offer a multitude of plans, rates, etc. to customers. Yes that will make a wild west scenario for awhile like when we deregulated long distance and we see now with the MVNO market. But we will find out what customers really want enough to pay for and it will be an actual market that can adapt to change in the future.

    Then we have to regulate the core as a utility too. DNS certainly, probably formalize access rules to the NAPs and such. Paypal and such have to act like banks and obey the non-discrimination laws. Facebook and Twitter either open up again and keep their common carrier exemption or they don't. No more having it both ways. The market may be about to solve Google for us, but if they survive as a monster drop the hammer on them too.

    • (Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:50PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:50PM (#570652)

      Crazy meter is spiking everybody, this might be the big one!

    • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:54PM (15 children)

      by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @03:54PM (#570656) Homepage Journal

      Look up "peering agreements" soon please because you haven't a clue what you're speaking about.

      --
      My rights don't end where your fear begins.
      • (Score: 2) by Scrutinizer on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:17PM (14 children)

        by Scrutinizer (6534) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:17PM (#570717)

        Look up "peering agreements" soon please

        Except that peering agreements aren't applicable when it comes to streaming media outfits like Netflix, which generate a huge amount of outgoing traffic and comparatively none in return. Netflix wants to hide behind "net neutrality" so it can subsidize its customers' use of Netflix' bandwidth with the fees I pay MY ISP, even tho I don't "do" Netflix.

        Peering agreements, as I'm sure you already know, are made between networks that generate roughly equal traffic across the other parties' networks. If a network wants to blast a ton of data over someone else's network while not accepting much traffic back in return: no peering agreement.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:43PM (13 children)

          by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:43PM (#570737)

          Netflix is not a network operator, and just because it is one way traffic does not mean the users are not paying for it. Is there some poor ISP at the bottleneck which is losing money? Nope, didn't think so, otherwise they would be front and center crying like little babies. Just more of the telco greed going on, nothing new to see here.

          • (Score: 1, Troll) by Scrutinizer on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:53PM (12 children)

            by Scrutinizer (6534) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:53PM (#570742)

            Netflix is not a network operator

            Thank you for making my point for me. Netflix is not a network operator and thus has nothing to bring to the table to offer in exchange for a peering agreement. Netflix must pay for the data it generates and sends onto others' networks. Soylent News pays for the data it generates and sends, I pay for the data my Internet servers generate and send, Amazon pays for the data it generates and sends.

            Netflix doesn't want to pay for the traffic it generates and sends. That's not my problem - I don't want to pay for Netflix's traffic. If Netflix can't afford to pay for the data it generates and sends, it has two valid options: charge its own customers a price which allows Netflix to pay for its own traffic, or shut down and go out of business. Attempting to use the guns of government to get everyone who doesn't use Netflix to pay for Netflix's traffic is, among other things, armed robbery.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:18PM (3 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:18PM (#570805)

              Netflix does pay for their bandwidth, but some greedy bastards in the middle want to charge double for that traffic. If those middle-men interconnects can't figure out their own business model then its time we replaced them with a simple utility common carrier model. Can't stand making too much money and need more? Fuck off, now you get to make NONE. Nice lame argument though, I'm sure it will convince a few of the less knowledgeable readers.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:38PM (2 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:38PM (#570822)

                Netflix does pay for their bandwidth, but some greedy bastards in the middle want to charge double for that traffic.

                Nope, that's just the story told to simpletons to rile them up. The "middle-men interconnets" get along with everyone else, since everyone else is following the established pattern of paying for the network traffic their equipment pushes out to "middle-men interconnects". If you remove "middle-men interconnects", you lose the giant data pipes that connect your isolated town with anyone else.

                By all means, tho, feel free to build your own "middle-men interconnect". I'm not joking. Competition is great, right?

                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:05PM (1 child)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:05PM (#570828)

                  That is precisely what I advocated, turn it into a utility that doesn't give two shits about what data is going where. You fail reading comprehension, you fail critical thinking. All bandwidth is paid for, the ISPs pay the interconnects for their service, and they charge customers for the bandwidth. So far not a single company has come out saying "this is unfair we can't afford the bandwidth going through our network!" They are saying "unfair, we want to charge more because free markets!" You're a moron if you can't see the double dipping for what it is, just opportunistic CEOs trying to squeeze blood out of a rock.

                  Tag on the billions they got for FREE and misspent, yeah, I'm crying a fucking river over here. Their record profits sure do need to be propped up /s

                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:48PM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @08:48PM (#570843)

                    If you're referring to the ancient practice of ISPs oversubscribing their available bandwidth, that is a fraud issue with offering "unlimited* (*no, not really unlimited) Internet access; so-called Net Neutrality won't fix that, but prosecutions for fraud, closing down and selling off at auction the fraudulent company's assets, and threatening to do the same to other ISP fraudsters WILL fix the problem you're worried about.

                    Incidentally, that's called "the rule of law", a thing which we're supposed to be using, but obviously aren't. Why are you paying taxes to fund those double-fraudsters who enable corporate fraud and then don't prosecute it?

                    I haven't kept up to speed on the whiners and thieves at Netflix, but they were indeed not paying for traffic they were generating, and this was right as they kicked off the hue and cry over the net neutrality fraud. If Netflix is finally paying their data bills, great! So what's your problem if not ISP fraud which there are laws already on the books to deal with?

            • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:53AM (7 children)

              by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:53AM (#571070) Homepage Journal

              Thank you for making my point for me. Netflix is not a network operator and thus has nothing to bring to the table to offer in exchange for a peering agreement. Netflix must pay for the data it generates and sends onto others' networks. Soylent News pays for the data it generates and sends, I pay for the data my Internet servers generate and send, Amazon pays for the data it generates and sends.

              I'm no fan of Netflix, but how exactly does their data get onto the internet? Hmm...I wonder. Maybe they sneak into people's homes at night and plug their servers into their internet connections? No. That's not it. Yeah, they go out behind a Starbucks and steal their Wifi.

              Of course they pay for their data. They have contracts with ISPs who they pay (hefty sums too, I'm sure) every month to carry their internet traffic.

              And end users of Netflix pay their ISPs a fee to carry *their* internet traffic. So tell me again, who's not paying for their data?

              --
              No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
              • (Score: 2) by Scrutinizer on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:07PM (6 children)

                by Scrutinizer (6534) on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:07PM (#571151)

                I'm no fan of Netflix, but how exactly does their data get onto the internet? Hmm...I wonder. Maybe they sneak into people's homes at night and plug their servers into their internet connections?

                I may be behind the times, but "net neutrality" was indeed being used as a smokescreen by Netflix to abuse no-fee peering agreements to, yes, sneak its data into ISPs' networks without paying for the data it was using. Here's a related blurb from an article [qz.com] I dug up:

                The threat of new access fees being passed through to Netflix were making third-party CDNs [content delivery networks] a less certain option for Netflix and in early 2012, Netflix began to transition its traffic off of CDNs and onto transit providers with settlement-free routes into Comcast’s network. [...] [Netflix] also purchased transit from Cogent, which had a settlement-free peering arrangement with Comcast. Netflix’s experience with Cogent resembled its experience with Level 3. Shortly after Cogent began delivering Netflix traffic requested by Comcast subscribers, Cogent’s routes into Comcast’s network started to congest.

                Assuming that those shennanigans by Netflix have ceased (can't be arsed to check), then the remaining big flag with "net neutrality" seems to be ISPs fraudulently advertising unlimited access which is anything but. There are already existing laws to punish fraud, which could ultimately be used to imprison CxOs and sell off the offending company assets at auction to someone less likely to continue the fraud. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

                "Net neutrality" looks like a codephrase for trying to enshrine technical standards into law at gunpoint, which is a really REALLY bad idea, even moreso with any tech computer/Internet related.

                • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:34PM (5 children)

                  by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:34PM (#571163) Homepage Journal

                  The threat of new access fees being passed through to Netflix were making third-party CDNs [content delivery networks] a less certain option for Netflix and in early 2012, Netflix began to transition its traffic off of CDNs and onto transit providers with settlement-free routes into Comcast’s network. [...] [Netflix] also purchased transit from Cogent, which had a settlement-free peering arrangement with Comcast. Netflix’s experience with Cogent resembled its experience with Level 3. Shortly after Cogent began delivering Netflix traffic requested by Comcast subscribers, Cogent’s routes into Comcast’s network started to congest.

                  Assuming that those shennanigans by Netflix have ceased (can't be arsed to check), then the remaining big flag with "net neutrality" seems to be ISPs fraudulently advertising unlimited access which is anything but. There are already existing laws to punish fraud, which could ultimately be used to imprison CxOs and sell off the offending company assets at auction to someone less likely to continue the fraud. Rinse and repeat as necessary.

                  The "shennanigins" you refer to are those of Comcast, not Netflix. Let's look at that. What caused congestion at the peering point?

                  1. Congestion on the Comcast end was causing the problem.
                  2. Netflix was already paying Cogent for transit and no congestion was happening on Netflix's side.
                  3. Presumably Comcast's customers were requesting data from Netflix within the contractual limitations of their agreement with Comcast

                  Why was there congestion on Comcast's end when Comcast can and does enforce bandwidth limits on its customers in accordance with their customer agreements? The reason is that Comcast's interconnect was unable to support the bandwidth that *they* sold to their customers. Netflix had nothing to do with it. Comcast wasn't able to honor their customer agreements and blamed Netflix for their lack of capacity.

                  Or am I missing something here?

                  "Net neutrality" looks like a codephrase for trying to enshrine technical standards into law at gunpoint, which is a really REALLY bad idea, even moreso with any tech computer/Internet related.

                  No. Net neutrality is about making sure that ISPs do not choose what content its customers may view or publish. Specifically, it states that ISPs must treat all data packets requested or sent by their customers without bias, except where necessary to address congestion and/or network management issues.

                  That's not a technical standard, that's the principle that ISPs should provide the pipes for their customers, who pay for bandwidth, not for curated access to the Internet.

                  Without net neutrality, ISPs can pick and choose what traffic to pass or block, making them the arbiter of the information to which you may or may not have/provide access. That may be okay by you, but I don't want anyone deciding for me what I can upload or download.

                  --
                  No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
                  • (Score: 2) by Scrutinizer on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:10PM (4 children)

                    by Scrutinizer (6534) on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:10PM (#571178)

                    Or am I missing something here?

                    I believe you are. Your point #2 (Netflix paying Cogent) hinged on a no-settlement PEERING AGREEMENT. These agreements are for like-or-similar traffic loads in that ingoing and outgoing traffic must be comparable. (I later found another article with this stated explicitly: Applicant must maintain a traffic scale between its network and Comcast that enables a general balance of inbound versus outbound traffic. [arstechnica.com])

                    Netflix was paying a comparatively tiny price to gain access to a route of no-settlement peering agreements, knowing that using said routes would instantly cause a massive traffic imbalance that violates the nature (and according to that linked article, also the letter) of such peering agreements. Ergo, outside of lawyerese, Netflix was not paying for the data it was generating and pushing out to others' networks.

                    On point #3 (ISP's customers paying for Netflix data), you might be glossing over how paying for access works. BOTH server-owners AND end-user clients pay for Internet access, and it's not "double dipping" because in practice both the server owner and the end user are just clients on the Internet: both want to talk to each other from a distance, across networks they don't own, and both pay for access. In light of this, your points #3 and #2 seem to contradict each other. (If your point #3 is related to ISPs' habit of falsely offering "unlimited" Internet access, then that crime is already covered by simple laws against fraud and false advertising. If those existing laws aren't being enforced to your liking, why would you think that NEW laws would be better enforced?)

                    Net neutrality is about making sure that ISPs do not choose what content its customers may view or publish.

                    I (perhaps mistakenly) thought ISPs were already being treated as common carriers, which among other things, provides them with immunity from prosecution from, say, kiddy porn laws, as long as they don't filter the delivery of data its customers request. Again, new "net neutrality" laws not needed. Additionally, back in the ISP heyday (before government interference by supporting the established defacto ISP monopolies choked almost all of them out), the market supported many specialty ISPs which WOULD censor your Internet for you. Whether you or I think such a thing is silly is beside the point. We got to where we are now using government interference - what makes you think more and continued government interference is the answer?

                    • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:43PM (3 children)

                      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:43PM (#571192) Homepage Journal

                      I believe you are. Your point #2 (Netflix paying Cogent) hinged on a no-settlement PEERING AGREEMENT. These agreements are for like-or-similar traffic loads in that ingoing and outgoing traffic must be comparable. (I later found another article with this stated explicitly: Applicant must maintain a traffic scale between its network and Comcast that enables a general balance of inbound versus outbound traffic. [arstechnica.com])

                      That peering agreement was between Cogent and Comcast, not Netflix and Comcast. And yes, I am quite familiar with peering agreements.

                      Comcast has played games with their peering connections for years, maintaining congested peering links in an (mostly successful) effort to force their competitors to pay them directly (via direct interconnects) or indirectly (via CDN access fees). See this article for more details:
                      https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-to-pay-comcast-for-internet-traffic/ [qz.com]

                      Interestingly (okay, not interesting or surprising), Comcast has done this almost exclusively with their competitors in the content distribution business. Comcast has also been caught degrading their customers' connections when it suits them [arstechnica.com] as well.

                      The whole Netflix brouhaha was about Comcast trying to erect barriers to entry for competitors of their content delivery systems (cable TV).

                      The double dipping comes with Comcast forcing its competitors to pay for bandwidth that it's already charging its own customers.

                      These are just straight-up anti-competitive business practices, with Comcast using its market share to extort its competitors. The specifics have little to do with Net neutrality per se, except that it sets a precedent for ISPs to treat arbitrary network traffic with bias. If they can do that with their competitors, they can do so with their (and yours) political allies and enemies.

                      The FCC is looking to reclassify ISPs as "Information Services" (Title I) rather than "Common Carriers" (Title II) [fcc.gov]. This would remove the requirement that ISPs may not, as you said, "alter the delivery" of customer data. Which opens up the possibility that ISPs could, in control, block and throttle its customers' data, making ISPs the censors (or curators, if you want to soft-pedal it) of the Internet.

                      That's what this is about, not shady business practices or someone trying to save a buck.

                      --
                      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
                      • (Score: 2) by Scrutinizer on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:06PM (2 children)

                        by Scrutinizer (6534) on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:06PM (#571203)

                        That peering agreement was between Cogent and Comcast, not Netflix and Comcast.

                        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)

                          by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:00PM (#571325) Homepage Journal

                          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!".

                          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.

                          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.

                          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.

                          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.

                          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

                            by Scrutinizer (6534) on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:44PM (#571360)

                            I acknowledge your general history and leave alone the points you denote as minor.

                            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.

                            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.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:01PM (6 children)

      by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:01PM (#570660) Journal

      "Bandwidth is not free."

      Well, THAT's fair enough. Charge for the bandwidth used. That's pretty much end of discussion on that account. Oh, wait, no - you can't say that "unlimited bandwidth" is restricted to 10 gig, then charge $1000/gig over that. That would be abuse of monopoly.

      "Infrastructure is not free."

      I really do think that most of us understand that. However, I did the math recently, and posted it to one of these discussions. My ISP says it's impossible to build out that last mile of high bandwidth internet. However, I looked up the accepted industry numbers, and found that a startup with about 5 million dollars could supply fiber to my area, and MAKE THEIR MONEY BACK IN LESS THAN SIX MONTHS!!

      No, you don't get away with citing the cost of infrastructure, as an excuse to throttle bandwidth. Around much of the country, fiber is available to home users for less than $50/month - $27 doesn't seem to be an uncommon price, in areas where fiber is available. (I specifically recall that price listed in Philadelphia.)

      More, the telcos were ALREADY PAID by Uncle Sam to extend broadband internet out into the boonies - and they just haven't done so. They pocketed that money and/or spent it in high density, competitive areas, such as the big east coast cities. But, even there, they only built in the most desirable areas, leaving the ghettos in the dark - as usual.

      You, Jmorris, have entirely to much faith in the market - free or not. The corporates want to milk us for all they can get, with the very least investment that they have to make. And, people like myself will NEVER get genuine high-speed internet, because the rat bastards are totally uninterested in me.

      What good is streaming of any type, if my damned internet can't even stream? Seriously, man, I seldom try to stream anything from Youtube, because it takes repeated buffering breaks. A three minute song will take anywhere from six to twelve minutes to "stream" on most days. On bad days, fifteen or more minutes.

      But, remember, I did the math. My ISP could put fiber to my door, along with all my near neighbers, charge us a mere $100/month for six months, AND IT WOULD BE PAID FOR!!

      Infrastructure, my ass.

      • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:51PM (5 children)

        by jmorris (4844) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @04:51PM (#570705)

        you can't say that "unlimited bandwidth" is restricted to 10 gig

        Yes, outright lying in ad copy is already illegal, but as is all too common now, laws are only enforced in a sporadic fashion. That needs fixing generally.

        I did the math. My ISP could put fiber to my door, along with all my near neighbers, charge us a mere $100/month for six months, AND IT WOULD BE PAID FOR!!

        No, I seriously doubt you can find over 8K subscribers willing to pay $100/mo for Internet inside a footprint small enough to build out for 5M. Most people are perfectly happy with their current, much less expensive, service. You have a math error somewhere or missed some major expenses. Doesn't even pass the smell test.

        What good is streaming of any type, if my damned internet can't even stream?

        Ok, you are pissed because your ISP is crap. Fair enough. I actually get half of the speed I pay for out to the wider Internet (not just to the speedtest.net node on my ISP's wire) so I could stream if I wanted to, but usually just stream audio. I'm deep in flyover country but I'm not expecting high speed Internet miles out in the wilderness either.

        You, Jmorris, have entirely to much faith in the market - free or not.

        Not really. This ain't a free market, not Internet, not much of anywhere. I want to push toward one. They do work, every time they are actually tried and socialism / heavy handed government monopolies fail every time. Success / Fail is almost directly related to whether the thing observed is closer to the free / non-free side.

        • (Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:09PM

          by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday September 20 2017, @05:09PM (#570715) Journal

          "Most people are perfectly happy with their current, much less expensive, service. You have a math error somewhere or missed some major expenses. Doesn't even pass the smell test."

          I am currently paying $75/month for 2 meg service. The next - and highest - level of service is $99/month for 3 meg. Yes, there are enough customers who would be willing to pay $100/month for OH MY GOD GIGABIT FIBER!!! Basically, all of us.

          But, I guess that I'm better off than you are. Most of the time, I get better than half of the bandwidth that I'm paying for. Usually, it's pretty close to 3/4.

        • (Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:06AM (3 children)

          by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:06AM (#571037)

          This ain't a free market, not Internet, not much of anywhere. I want to push toward one. They do work, every time they are actually tried and socialism / heavy handed government monopolies fail every time. Success / Fail is almost directly related to whether the thing observed is closer to the free / non-free side.

          Care to cite an example of a free market that has worked and not eventually degraded into a monopoly/cartel situation? There is no "pure" system that does not end up with a flawed result.

          • (Score: 2) by jmorris on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:55AM (2 children)

            by jmorris (4844) on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:55AM (#571049)

            That is something I have said before. Mises solved economics with his _Human Action_ but we still lack the social technology to create a government that can permit it to be implemented. Our experiment with a Constitutional Republic was mostly compatible with a market economy but decayed into a Universal Franchise Democracy that obviously isn't. None of the 20th Century *isms even pretend to be compatible. This is the leading problem currently facing civilization. We all can see that only market economics can possibly create enough wealth to sustain even half of the current world population but it is equally obviously dying from a fatal case of Democracy in the West and worse elsewhere.

            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:13PM (1 child)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:13PM (#571262)

              Few countries actually have Democracy, and the US has been so subverted by politics and corporate lobbying that it is a joke. What we need is real democracy, not some dictatorship like you anarcholibertarian types seem to want.

              I wasn't sure what "human action" was supposed to mean so I looked it up, first paragraph on the page was

              The masterpiece first appeared in German in 1940 and then disappeared, only to reappear in English in 1949. It was a sensation, the largest and most scientific defense of human freedom ever published.

              As is well known, Mises's book is the best defense of capitalism ever written. It covers basic economics through the most advanced material. Reading this book is the best way you could ever dream up to learn economics. Every attempt to study economics should include a thorough examination of this book.

              Color me disgusted. Anyone who bothers reading after an intro like that is obviously a sucker looking for the cure-all.

              From wikipedia:

              An actual equilibrium may involve a recurring cycle, but not true dynamics. True dynamics involve non-repeating evolutionary change.

              So blowhard intros, sweeping claims of grandeur, and nit picking words in order to feel special lol "true dynamics". Yeah, you're in a cult jmo.

              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:18PM

                by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:18PM (#571265)

                not some dictatorship like you anarcholibertarian

                @.@

                Shouldn't be surprising then that you consider a democracy as something desirable, as opposed to just tyranny of the majority oppressing all those minorities which are so fashionable to defend these days.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:11PM (12 children)

      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:11PM (#570796) Homepage Journal

      This effort is nothing more than the other streamers not named Netflix trying to have everyone else pay for their distribution system. Well that is the overt part, we all know Soros isn't really interested in any of that, he wants to have his people making the decisions of who gets banished or not from the Net.

      Let's look at that. Netflix and the other streamers you complain about, pay their ISPs to carry their traffic. End users of Netflix and those other streamers pay their ISPs to carry their traffic. Hmm...seems like everyone is paying for their bandwidth.

      This is challenging for some ISPs because they don't actually have the capacity at their interconnection points to provide the bandwidth they sell to their customers. So they either threaten to, or actually do, throttle connections that are well within the limits of the contracts they've made with their customers.

      In an effort to mitigate the deficiencies (read: unwillingness to build their infrastructure to meet their contractual agreements) of the ISPs, Netflix will provide (at the expense of Netflix) caching devices [netflix.com] which are housed within the ISPs infrastructure to assist the ISPs in meeting their contractual agreements.

      It can be argued that other streaming sites might do similar things. However, most don't have the economic muscle to give free hardware to ISPs. Hmm. What do we do now? ISPs could implement caching servers themselves, thus saving them money on (incredibly cheap, see below) bandwidth. Or they could build their networks to support the bandwidth for which they are charging customers.

      But that's not a good solution for many ISPs, because in addition to providing internet services many of these folks compete with streaming services like Netflix and others via other content distribution mechanisms (cable/satellite TV, etc.), so they want to be able to protect the other parts of their business from competition. So they will (falsely) claim that these services are getting a free ride and need to pay more, in an effort to disadvantage the streaming services relative to their own offerings and raise barriers to entry.

      Not sure what George Soros has to do with it, except you seem to like using him as some non-specific whipping boy.

      We need transparency and open access. To get that we have to have the rules of the Net align with reality. Bandwidth is not free. Infrastructure is not free. Geography exists and distant connections involve more work. Mandating that any of those limitations be treated as free creates distortion. In the early growth phase it was simpler to handwave all that away in the interest of not confusing the new users, but streaming has forced it to the front. Bandwidth should therefore, at minimum, always be metered so as to encourage the notion to enter the public consciousness that the Internet is a poor substitute for broadcasting and that streaming is dumb unless it can be cached at the edges of the network.

      Yes, transparency and open access are critical. I feel slightly nauseous agreeing with you, but I'll try to keep it together. The rules of the net are, and have been for decades, that ISPs will provide free peering (excluding a *very few* exceptional cases) to each other to avoid building and maintaining enormously complicated and expensive metering and billing systems.

      Distant connections do not involve "more work," the infrastructure is already in place and marginal costs are incredibly small. For example, Cloudflare pays less than US$10/Mbps per month for transit in North America [cloudflare.com]. Those are market-based prices and not set by any regulation or government.

      As for "caching at the edge of the network," as I mentioned Netflix (and others) are happy to bear the cost of providing hardware and software for such caching to the ISPs at their own expense. If ISPs were at all interested in serving their customers, rather than using their status as the last-mile provider to raise barriers and disadvantage those who compete with their content distribution businesses, they'd either provide those caching services themselves or increase their transit bandwidth to meet the demand indicated by their contracts with their customers.

      But they're not interested in that at all. And there's not a censor, a marxist or a librul authoritarian in sight.

      Once again, there is a solution to these problems. The last mile and the core infrastructure are natural monopolies and are going to have to be regulated. But do it smart. Government regulated utilities own the last mile but can't directly serve customers. ISPs can lease access to the physical plant at fixed regulated prices and non-discriminatory terms and then offer a multitude of plans, rates, etc. to customers. Yes that will make a wild west scenario for awhile like when we deregulated long distance and we see now with the MVNO market. But we will find out what customers really want enough to pay for and it will be an actual market that can adapt to change in the future.

      Okay, now I actually hurled. Yes. This exactly how things should be done. The issue, however (at least in the US), isn't the FCC (well, except if they remove common carrier status from ISPs and/or deny states/localities the ability to set their own regulations), it's corrupt state and local governments that are blocking municipal (and/or utility-like regulation of) last-mile networks, funded not by the like of George Soros, but by Comcast, Charter, AT&T and Verizon.

      This isn't (it always is with you isn't it, jmorris) some sort of lubrul plot to censor you or anyone else. Rather, supporting net neutrality is exactly the opposite of a plot to censor the internet. What's more, it's one of the few things that the US Federal government can do to support internet freedom.

      --
      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
      • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:20PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:20PM (#570811)

        TOO MUCH COMMON SENSE!!! Get the fuck outta here, we only want Libertarian ideologies and facts that support them. Everything else is ignorant ramblings of the enslaved.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:13PM (10 children)

        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:13PM (#571155)

        Netflix and the other streamers you complain about, pay their ISPs to carry their traffic.

        Netflix tainted the "net neutrality" cause by scheming to NOT pay for the data it was generating. [qz.com]

        No comments from me about the rest, since stopping ISP fraud and corrupt government interference in markets is something we both seem to generally agree on.

        • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:50PM (9 children)

          by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:50PM (#571169) Homepage Journal

          Netflix and the other streamers you complain about, pay their ISPs to carry their traffic.

          Netflix tainted the "net neutrality" cause by scheming to NOT pay for the data it was generating. [qz.com]

          No comments from me about the rest, since stopping ISP fraud and corrupt government interference in markets is something we both seem to generally agree on.

          Netflix paid for their bandwidth. They didn't experience congestion, nor did they cause it. A lack of capacity on Comcast's part caused the congestion.

          Comcast did not have the capacity to support the data being requested by their customers. Given that Comcast limits customer bandwidth in accordance with the level of service paid for by their customers, they should have the infrastructure to support the bandwidth they're selling. They did not and blamed Netflix. They then used their market power to extort Netflix.

          I don't use Netflix and I have no financial relationship with them. I'm also not a Comcast customer, so I have no skin in that game.
          The issue was that Comcast sold more bandwidth than they could deliver and blamed Netflix for their failings.

          From the article [qz.com] *you* linked:

          A few months before Netflix launched Open Connect, it also purchased transit from Cogent, which had a settlement-free peering arrangement with Comcast. Netflix’s experience with Cogent resembled its experience with Level 3. Shortly after Cogent began delivering Netflix traffic requested by Comcast subscribers, Cogent’s routes into Comcast’s network started to congest. According to Cogent’s CEO, “[f]or most of Cogent’s history with Comcast…[as] Comcast’s subscribers demanded more content from Cogent’s customers, Comcast would add capacity to the interconnection points with Cogent to handle that increased traffic.” After Cogent began carrying Netflix traffic, however, “Comcast refused to continue to augment capacity at our interconnection points as it had done for years prior.” [emphasis added]

          Nope. Comcast specifically gave a competitor (Netflix) the finger and used their large customer base to extort them.

          --
          No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:20PM (8 children)

            by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:20PM (#571183)

            The issue was that Comcast sold more bandwidth than they could deliver

            This is already covered under applicable laws against fraud and/or false advertising.

            Netflix paid for their bandwidth.

            Incorrect. Netflix violated the terms of the no-fee peering agreements it was using and therefore did not pay for its traffic.

            From the article *you* linked:

            I'm dismayed that you would try to use a CEO's argument to support your own. Looks to me like Cogent wanted to keep Netflix's money and still not pay Comcast for the imbalance of traffic which violated the Cogent-Comcast peering agreement.

            • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:50PM (7 children)

              by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:50PM (#571197) Homepage Journal

              I'm dismayed that you would try to use a CEO's argument to support your own. Looks to me like Cogent wanted to keep Netflix's money and still not pay Comcast for the imbalance of traffic which violated the Cogent-Comcast peering agreement.

              Cogent-Comcast agreement. Where is it that Netflix was a party to that agreement?

              I'd read the whole article if I were you, Comcast did exactly the same thing (ensured that their peering links were congested, degrading service to their competitors) with, almost exclusively, their competitors, in a (mostly successful) attempt to force them to pay (directly) for direct interconnects or (indirectly) via CDN access fees.

              You're talking out of your ass and it smells that way too.

              --
              No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
              • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:18PM (6 children)

                by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:18PM (#571209)

                Cogent-Comcast agreement. Where is it that Netflix was a party to that agreement?

                A valid point, but not germane to the topic as the Cogent customer unbalancing the traffic which violated the Cogent-Comcast agreement was... Netflix. Bringing this up is a mere distraction because what would happen is that Comcast would rightly end its peering agreement with Cogent, Netflix would drop Cogent and move to another backbone provider - just as Netflix did with L3 before moving from L3 to Cogent!

                What happens when you dump a major ISP's portion of 35% of ALL North American Internet traffic onto a network? CONGESTION! Where was that traffic from? NETFLIX! So, once again, Netflix (and its nonpayment) is the problem. You keep ignoring my repeated concession for ISP oversubscription fraud, so I'll assume we're in agreement on that and that you're just a yuuge fan of Netflix getting free service for some strange reason. Perhaps you just hate hate HATE Comcast. Even a Nazi murderer should receive due process.

                You seem to be intentionally blinding yourself, and I'm not sure why. You previously seemed like a reasonable fellow.

                • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:28PM (1 child)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:28PM (#571272)

                  You seem to be willfully missing the point that Comcast engaged in artificial throttling of competition and uses the specious claim of congestion to try and legitimize their devious actions. If there is an issue with bandwidth than Comcast can update their agreement whenever the contract terms allow in order to account for the network traffic increase.

                  The big issue is that ISPs are greedy fucks trying to lock down the market so they can implement artificial scarcity controls. Why? Because people WILL pay extra to get what they want. I for one think microtransactions are a death knell for the free internet, apparently you are falling for the lame ISP arguments without paying enough attention to the details.

                  It sure would be nice if US citizens cared as much about individual freedoms as they do corporate profits. The capitalist "free market" tripe has really sunk in deep, speaking generally and not necessarily at you AC.

                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:03PM

                    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:03PM (#571369)

                    If the government locks out some players and showers other wish favor and money, that is not capitalism.

                    The USA is currently operating under a mix of mercantilism and corporatism, also often deemed "crony capitalism".

                • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:23PM (3 children)

                  by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:23PM (#571304) Homepage Journal

                  It's impossible for a non-party to an agreement to violate the terms of said agreement,as they are not a party to same.

                  Not going to continue this discussion with you. I said all I had to say.

                  You might want to bone up on contract law [wikipedia.org] and how contracts *only* apply to those that are parties to such contracts. Funny that.

                  --
                  No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
                  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:07PM (2 children)

                    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:07PM (#571332)

                    It's impossible for a non-party to an agreement to violate the terms of said agreement,as they are not a party to same.

                    Strawman. Netflix generates ~35% of all US Internet traffic, and it was shopping around for backbone providers with no-fee peering agreements with Comcast. Netflix' traffic imbalanced the traffic, causing the backbones to be in violation of the peering agreement, and when Comcast threatened to yank the agreement from one backbone, Netflix went shopping around for another.

                    No matter which way you slice it, in this case, Comcast is the "good guy", and Netflix/Level 3/Cogent are the scumbags.

                    • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:29PM (1 child)

                      by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:29PM (#571346) Homepage Journal

                      No matter which way you slice it, in this case, Comcast is the "good guy", and Netflix/Level 3/Cogent are the scumbags.

                      You are either woefully misinformed or shilling for Comcast.

                      I'm not sticking up for Netflix, Level 3 or Cogent. I have no dog in that fight.

                      That said, Comcast's douchebaggery in this case (and many, many others) is not at all in dispute.

                      --
                      No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
                      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:49PM

                        by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:49PM (#571363)

                        Your hatred for Comcast (deserving, I don't deny) is blinding you. No entity, including Comcast, is going to accept a situation where an outside party is dumping yuuge amounts of data into their network without compensation. Cheating by trying to abuse no-fee peering agreements is not compensation.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by melikamp on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:09PM (13 children)

      by melikamp (1886) on Wednesday September 20 2017, @11:09PM (#570891) Journal

      I agree more or less completely, the way network neutrality is being framed is a pure distraction from the really important internet issues. "Internet freedom" is not about who pays what rate to stream video from which site and how fast... The easiest way to explain why this is retarded is to point out that in short 10 years the landscape of the net will change considerably: who, when, whence, where, which format... you name it, and so all this wonderful legislation is doomed to be obsolete, useful only to some service providers who just don't feel like competing, bless them. Just to dip the very ends of toes into the technical detail, why the fuck would anyone want FPS gaming traffic to be treated the same as a software package download, or email, or text chat? They all have vastly different sweet spots for pipe width and latency, and all of these metrics are in constant flux because the tech is evolving at neck-breaking speed. So are we actually going to make sure no one can ever play FPS anymore, or what? Or are we going to write all this technical ping/latency/protocol details into law, only to wake up the next day and find out the public moved on to completely different protocols and applications?

      What we sorely need, and what "net neutrality" distracts us from, is the protection of consumer and just plain human rights of the netizens.

      Why would you care how fast a video is being downloaded, if leaving an offensive comment about it can put you in jail?

      Why would you care how fast the video is streamed, when you are being forced to install a hostile, uncontrollable audio-video webcam in your bedroom in order to access it? Would speed even matter if you could download and cache every video you cared to see?

      What if Alice wants to run a Web server at home? Right now ISPs can disconnect her for a breach of contract if she dares. She doesn't care how fast it is, she just wants to serve files using her own iron and free software, period. Will "net neutrality" make her server as accessible as Netflix? As fast? Like the fuck it will: that's not even remotely technically possible. Instead, for fairness' sake, Alice will have to shut the fuck up and use the "fair and neutral" internet as a pure consumer, because that's the only kind of "problem" net neutrality will fix: how to feed the corporate providers of net services, regardless of their profile, aim, or indeed competency.

      Can Bob run a free, log-less, open-access wireless router from his property without being dragged to court every day for some packets that went through it? Or is "safe harbor" just for corporate behemots?

      Can Charlie, who owns 4 city blocks, start providing internet service to his tenants via his own fiber? Will Ma and Pa Bell connect and route him, or will the they tell him to go suck a fuck? Can a city government do that? What does the "net nutrality" have to say about that?

      Would you rather (a) download a video hella slowly (b) download it fast and go to prison, or (c) not download it at all, because all the uploaders are already pushing daisies? These are not hypothetical scenarios, people! (b) and (c) is what we all have to deal with today, even here in US. The most vocal proponents of the net neutrality would have us fix (a), and to hell with (b) and (c).

      WTF is wrong with people's priorities? What we need is the unconditional right to share any sequence of bits on the net non-commercially, and we need that NOW. We need at the very least the right to participate in democratic governance without having to rely on nonfree software, and we need it likewise NOW, and ideally we need to legislate that nonfree software scum tighter than tobacco laced with cocaine. We need the right to run any kind of server from home NOW, and ISPs should not be able to shut us down, but they should certainly be able to shape our traffic to make the net work for everyone and everything. Each one of us should have the right to share our net hookup with strangers from within a safe harbor, NOW. We need rules to rein in natural monopolies and force them to play nice with small private and municipal providers, NOW. Even aside from how fast it is, and in regard to pure routing, the "neutrality" of routing should boil down to whether a host is world-accessible or not. If it is, the routing works, and if it's not, then the routing is broken, that's it. Every minute spent talking about the net neutrality is 59 seconds of waste.

      • (Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:37AM (12 children)

        by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:37AM (#570958) Homepage Journal

        I agree with just about everything you've said. And I am completely with you with respect to the (justifiably) angry and frustrated tone of your comment as well.

        Where I part company with you is over Net Neutrality. I'm not sure how you think packet prioritization is supposed to work, given that exactly zero network providers respect QOS settings from other network providers. As such, unless end-to-end connectivity is on a single network provider, packet prioritization isn't going to happen the way you think it does.

        Net neutrality (at least as I understand it) is the requirement that ISPs pass *everyone's* traffic without bias or favor, except when required for congestion and network management purposes. This is quite important if you want to make sure that network providers don't favor their own traffic over their competitors'. This is *most* evident with streaming providers, but is also relevant in other areas (like peer-to-peer file transfers and web traffic, to name a few). Without net neutrality, if I set up a site to discuss the shortcomings of an ISP, they can throttle or block me completely with impunity and I have no recourse.

        As I see it, the important issues facing end users of internet connectivity include:
        1. Free traversal of bits. In any direction. Full Stop.
        2. The elimination of abusive TOS and contract terms.
        3. The abolition of laws restricting municipal broadband and other local last-mile utilities
        4. Synchronous upload/download speeds

        (1) and (2) are directly impacted by net neutrality rules. Yes, there are other significant issues WRT how internet connectivity is provided to end users, but net neutrality is really the only one that the Federal government has any chance of regulating. As such, it makes sense to lobby/protest/make noise to the FCC about it.

        That's not to say we shouldn't be doing other things at the state, local and corporate interaction levels too, but just calling net neutrality a distraction is ignorant at best and disingenuous at worst.

        --
        No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
        • (Score: 2) by melikamp on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:14AM (11 children)

          by melikamp (1886) on Thursday September 21 2017, @05:14AM (#570994) Journal

          I'm not sure how you think packet prioritization is supposed to work, given that exactly zero network providers respect QOS settings from other network providers. As such, unless end-to-end connectivity is on a single network provider, packet prioritization isn't going to happen the way you think it does.

          I have to admit, I do not understand this topic very well, so some of the things I say and think about treating different protocols differently may be misguided or even nonsensical to someone with more technical competency.

          Without net neutrality, if I set up a site to discuss the shortcomings of an ISP, they can throttle or block me completely with impunity and I have no recourse.

          You do not need net neutrality for this, that's my whole point. You just need the right to privacy, free expression, and association. If they block you or throttle you so much as to block you in practice, that's censorship, and should be illegal. If they merely make you slow, why do you care? They would have to do actual R&D to slow you down, too, for no apparent benefit, as you would still be accessible. I see what you are saying, but this is not a good example.

          Movie streaming: another non-example. If it's slow, cache it. If it's really really really slow, too slow to download and cache the whole thing, it's censorship, and should be illegal. And if a DRM peddler like NetFlix, who won't allow caching, is too slow to be streamed, that's just the icing on the cake.

          Other types of streaming, especially P2P ones, should be encrypted. Blocking them should be illegal, so how can an ISP identify them in order to throttle them? More R&D, and the ensuing arms race between the shaper and the shapee, and hence false positives. Unrelated customers get mad, while the service still works, albeit sluggishly, since full blocking is still illegal. Why would an ISP engage in this kind of behavior unless there was a legitimate technical reason for shaping that traffic? They would not. They would only shape it until the point of zero returns, and settle on that.

          Net neutrality (at least as I understand it) is the requirement that ISPs pass *everyone's* traffic without bias or favor, except when required for congestion and network management purposes.

          I agree wholeheartedly with every bit of the "net neutrality" package which concerns censorship (freedom to serve bits to everyone) and access (freedom to receive bits from anyone), but I feel very strongly about endorsing these ideas as "freedom of expression", and not as a part of some commercial player fairness package. The part of the package I am opposed to is the ongoing frenzy of regulating the traffic shaping. It is a distraction at best, and a dangerous scheme at worst. Not only I think it is highly misguided to lump the freedom of expression together with "net neutrality", which is some kind of level playing field for service/content providers, rather than a fundamental human right. I also think that regulating the traffic shaping by law to any appreciable extent is really, really bad idea just by itself. Traffic shaping for the sake of solving technical issues such as congestion and network management is a technical decision to make, but the proponents of net neutrality seem to want to hand it to the courts. What good can possibly come from that?

          On a very basic level, let's go back to Charlie, who is serving 4 city blocks with his private fiber. A bunch of wankers move in, and clog his network with the net streaming service of the month. Today Charlie can simply shape them, and if they don't like it, then they can cache the videos, downgrade them, or use a different streaming service if they can find one that works for everyone on that pipe. In the net neutrality world, Charlie has to make a decision: leave them be, while all of his other tenants get livid, or shape them, and get taken to court. And after Charlie wastes a bunch of cash and wins by proving the shaping was technically necessary, they will take him to court again, just to improve their quota. That's right: the immediate consequence of strong net neutrality is that every traffic-shaping decision creates a whole new liability. How can one know whether a shaping rule is truly required for network management or not? Sue, of course, that's how, and let the judge sort it out based on some expert's testimony he can't quite understand. So even the large ISPs, with swarms of lawyers on retainer, see it as an absolutely awful prospect, and small ISPs would have an even harder time.

          This is basically my thinking, and look again: why don't we have those small ISPs, for example, or any kind of real competition in that area? Shouldn't we be fighting against the monopolists by being vocal about basic consumer rights? Or should we keep wasting time on fighting for the bandwidth & latency quotas on behalf of a few select movie-streaming services, to no-one's obvious benefit, by making traffic shaping a legal minefield?

          Finally, I don't quite know who is behind this push, but I am very strongly suspecting the usual scum: the "content providers". Companies like Hulu, who smell a low hanging fruit, which is companies like Comcast. And so these Hulus, who have the copyrighted content but not the pipes, are attempting to pave a legal track for, basically, extortion. Hulus know that Comcasts, who serve both the pipes and what flows through them, just can't resist treating themselves preferentially, and in some cases it makes little technical sense for them not to. So Hulus want to start siphoning money from them, and the traffic-shaping part of the net neutrality would allow them to do just that: sue and settle, sue and settle. These are the same actors who would take the freedom of expression out behind a barn and put a bullet in her head, and I don't want any part of "net neutrality" since they jumped on the bandwagon. I just want freedom, liberty, privacy, consumer rights, and human rights, and I will keep calling them by their names, so that no one gets a wrong idea :)

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Joe Desertrat on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:36AM

            by Joe Desertrat (2454) on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:36AM (#571043)

            These are the same actors who would take the freedom of expression out behind a barn and put a bullet in her head, and I don't want any part of "net neutrality" since they jumped on the bandwagon. I just want freedom, liberty, privacy, consumer rights, and human rights, and I will keep calling them by their names, so that no one gets a wrong idea

            You are not going to have "freedom, liberty, privacy, consumer rights, and human rights", at least as far as the internet goes, without net neutrality. It has nothing to do with what individual sites such as Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or whatever do or do not allow on their site, it has to do with allowing anyone to connect with Facebook or Twitter or YouTube or whatever if they so choose with the same ability they have to connect with any other site (allowing for any physical limitations of course). If you do not like what a site does to its visitors, you have the right to not use that site, not the right to force them to do things the way you like.

          • (Score: 3, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:18AM (9 children)

            by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @08:18AM (#571057) Homepage Journal

            I'm not sure how you think packet prioritization is supposed to work, given that exactly zero network providers respect QOS settings from other network providers. As such, unless end-to-end connectivity is on a single network provider, packet prioritization isn't going to happen the way you think it does.

            I have to admit, I do not understand this topic very well, so some of the things I say and think about treating different protocols differently may be misguided or even nonsensical to someone with more technical competency.

            In a nutshell, QOS (Quality Of Service [wikipedia.org] which has a very specific meaning in the context of TCP/IP networking) is setting priority based on network header options. Those options are read (or not) by each gateway (router) that a packet passes through, and if that device is configured to do so, will prioritize traffic marked for such treatment over other traffic. This is often used to prioritize VOIP and video traffic across enterprise networks. However, I am unaware of *any* IP transit providers that will honor such QOS tags from other entities. As such, even if you tag your traffic as high priority, other entities will just ignore those tags.

            Another (and ubiquitous among network transit providers) mechanism for prioritization (which you mentioned) is traffic shaping [wikipedia.org]. This is used by most network providers. This mechanism (most often, but can take other forms too) looks at application (HTTP, p2p, VPN, SMTP, etc.) network flows and adjusts the bandwidth available to specific applications to fit the requirements of the entity performing the traffic shaping. This can be done by limiting the bandwidth (and increasing latency) for some protocols, or by silently dropping packets to match the traffic profile desired.

            Again, there is no requirement that any ISP or transit provider shape network traffic in any particular way (that's true within a net neutrality regime, by the way). Many enterprises (as well as ISPs and transit providers) use devices which perform traffic shaping both internally, as well as at Internet connection points.

            All of this is defined by each entity which controls the network infrastructure along the path of any network connection. No overarching design or traffic-shaping profile exists for the greater Internet. As an example, There are at least four (given current routing paths) network providers whose networks I need to traverse from the device on which I'm writing this comment to the soylentnews.org site.

            Let's just say for the sake of argument that I wasn't writing a comment on Soylent, but playing an FPS game (as you mentioned earlier). Which network provider should I contact to have those packets prioritized? My ISP? That might work, assuming they care enough to want to make me happy.

            The ISP of the end node where the FPS game server is? That is definitely a possibility, especially if the FPS is a commercial entity willing to pay their ISP for prioritization. That's great! Now we're all set to have high bandwidth and low latency, right?

            Not so fast. There are two other network providers that my packets need to traverse in order to communicate with the FPS game server. I have no relationship with those network providers, nor does the host of the FPS game server. Those guys have their traffic shaping configured to support *their* needs and have no incentive to prioritize your packets.

            That doesn't mean that prioritization at the ends won't help, it just illustrates the fact that the decentralized nature of the internet makes end-to-end prioritization highly problematic.
            Which is why many enterprises purchase links from a single network provider (which traffic does *not* traverse the Internet) to provide VOIP and video services between across their various sites. That way, they can prioritize VOIP traffic or video conferences over backups, email, file transfers, etc.

            I guess I gave more than a nutshell explanation, but I hope it gives you an idea as to how Internet-wide prioritization is impractical and unlikely.

            Which leads us to Net Neutrality. Which specifically requires network providers *not* to implement specific QOS or traffic shaping, within their own networks, unless it's necessary for congestion control and/or network management.

            Without net neutrality, if I set up a site to discuss the shortcomings of an ISP, they can throttle or block me completely with impunity and I have no recourse.

            You do not need net neutrality for this, that's my whole point. You just need the right to privacy, free expression, and association. If they block you or throttle you so much as to block you in practice, that's censorship, and should be illegal. If they merely make you slow, why do you care? They would have to do actual R&D to slow you down, too, for no apparent benefit, as you would still be accessible. I see what you are saying, but this is not a good example.

            Actually, at least in the U.S., you do. It is illegal for the Government (ala the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, although that's been spotty over the past couple hundred years). There is no law that forbids (at least none of which I am aware) private entities to censor whatever they want on their premises (or in this case, their pipes).

            "No shirt. No shoes. No service."
            "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone, at the discretion of management."
            Private entities are not bound by the strictures of the U.S. Constitution. Only the Federal government and (with the Supremacy clause and the 14th Amendment) the several states.

            As I mentioned, the net neutrality doctrine disallows traffic shaping/QOS (inside the provider's network) for anything other than network congestion or management. If there is no more net neutrality, ISPs could do *exactly* as I suggested in my example.

            What's more, what if I'm not a corporation streaming video or audio, but a human rights or political activist? Without net neutrality, ISPs who disagree with me could just refuse to pass my network traffic. And without net neutrality, ISPs could, with impunity. block your access to the websites of political candidates you support or make access so slow that the site is unusable. Alternatively, they could give preferential access to those you dislike.

            Yes, it's about streaming media. But make no mistake, it's also about censorship.

            Let's focus on those streaming services for a moment. I don't use Netflix. But if I did, I *pay* my ISP to deliver the bits I request within the limits of the bandwidth I pay for. Guess what? Netflix pays their ISP for the bandwidth they use too. So. Everyone is paying to have the bits they want transmitted to/from them. Why is that somehow unfair to ISPs?

            And if ISPs can pick and choose who they accept bits from (or who you send bits to) for their customers, what's to stop them from deciding what is acceptable traffic on their network and what it isn't?

            A few scenarios of what could happen without net neutrality:
            ISP A's management are devout Catholics. They do not support abortion rights, so they block access to Planned Parenthood for their customers. Without net neutrality, that's a possibility.
            ISP B's management are staunchly Republican (or Democratic). Without net neutrality, they could decide that they don't wish to support Democrats (or Republicans) and block (or throttle) access to the group they disfavor. Or they give priority access to the those from the group they favor.

            So you see, whether it's streaming media that competes with an ISPs own content or sites (or even you) that don't comport with their ideas about what's proper, it's all the same principle. You many not care about streaming media, but there are much bigger issues at stake with net neutrality.

            Allowing ISPs to pick and choose content to favor and disfavor, you open the door to exactly the censorship you say you oppose.

            I don't pretend (okay, maybe I do :) ) to have all the answers, but despite what some folks may tell you, net neutrality is, in fact, a big deal.

            --
            No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:24PM (8 children)

              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @02:24PM (#571158)

              Not trying to beat a dead horse, but Netflix (at least in the past, using "net neutrality" to try to justify the behavior) did not pay for the data it was generating and sending into others' networks, but instead tried to abuse no-fee peering agreements (the backbone version of ISPs' "unlimited" Internet access). Here's an arstechnica article [arstechnica.com] that speaks to Netflix' schemes.

              Who paid for the delivery of all this on-net traffic, then? The customers. In Level 3's case, this means that CDN customers like Netflix would pay Level 3, while Comcast's cable modem subscribers would pay Comcast. Very simple, very clean, and according to Level 3 now, this is the way the Internet should be connected.

              But after winning the Netflix deal this autumn, Level 3 suddenly wanted to pass far more traffic over its links with Comcast. Comcast balked; Level 3 suddenly looked less like a transit vendor and more like a CDN. Comcast began talking about the imbalance in the two companies' traffic ratios and then demanded a fee from Level 3 for the traffic being dumped onto its network. (Indeed, Comcast's public peering policy states, "Applicant must maintain a traffic scale between its network and Comcast that enables a general balance of inbound versus outbound traffic.")

              • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:03PM (7 children)

                by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:03PM (#571176) Homepage Journal

                Not trying to beat a dead horse, but Netflix (at least in the past, using "net neutrality" to try to justify the behavior) did not pay for the data it was generating and sending into others' networks, but instead tried to abuse no-fee peering agreements (the backbone version of ISPs' "unlimited" Internet access). Here's an arstechnica article [arstechnica.com] that speaks to Netflix' schemes.

                Who paid for the delivery of all this on-net traffic, then? The customers. In Level 3's case, this means that CDN customers like Netflix would pay Level 3, while Comcast's cable modem subscribers would pay Comcast. Very simple, very clean, and according to Level 3 now, this is the way the Internet should be connected.

                        But after winning the Netflix deal this autumn, Level 3 suddenly wanted to pass far more traffic over its links with Comcast. Comcast balked; Level 3 suddenly looked less like a transit vendor and more like a CDN. Comcast began talking about the imbalance in the two companies' traffic ratios and then demanded a fee from Level 3 for the traffic being dumped onto its network. (Indeed, Comcast's public peering policy states, "Applicant must maintain a traffic scale between its network and Comcast that enables a general balance of inbound versus outbound traffic.")

                I've already gone through this several times. Netflix paid for their own bandwidth. Comcast is responsible for having enough bandwidth to support their customers.

                The congestion was all on Comcast's side, because they did not have sufficient capacity to support its contractual obligations to their customers.

                I addressed this in more detail here [soylentnews.org] and here [soylentnews.org].

                Once more, Netflix pays for its bandwidth and Comcast pays for its bandwidth. One of the two didn't have enough bandwidth capacity to support their customers. That was Comcast.

                I'd say the horse is beaten to a bloody pulp by now.

                --
                No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
                • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:15PM (6 children)

                  by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:15PM (#571180)

                  No, Netflix didn't pay. Netflix tried to drive a dump truck up to a buffet table that explicitly disallowed taking food outside. Netflix tried to use unpaid peering agreements that explicitly demand a balance of incoming and outgoing traffic to dump their huge load of unbalanced traffic on.

                  Netflix did not pay for the data they sent.

                  • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:44PM (5 children)

                    by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @03:44PM (#571195) Homepage Journal

                    Bullshit. You are either ignorant, misinformed or a shill for the ISPs.

                    --
                    No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
                    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:22PM (4 children)

                      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @04:22PM (#571213)

                      Nope. As repeatedly explained, as as you claim to grasp, no-fee peering agreements require that inbound and outbound traffic be roughly balanced. Netflix was demonstrably making use of no-fee peering agreements to send its traffic around the Internet.

                      If you disagree, then you are claiming that Netflix generates roughly the same incoming traffic to its own networks as it sends in streaming video out to others' networks. That idea is, in your own word, bullshit.

                      • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:19PM (3 children)

                        by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:19PM (#571303) Homepage Journal

                        Netflix was not a party to those peering agreements, either ones between Level 3 and Comcast or Cogent and Comcast.

                        --
                        No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
                        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:35PM (2 children)

                          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @06:35PM (#571310)

                          Netflix was not a party to those peering agreements, either ones between Level 3 and Comcast or Cogent and Comcast.

                          True, but irrelevant, as Netflix paid Level 3 and Cogent for access to their no-fee peering agreements with Comcast, which Netflix' traffic load then violated. Comcast isn't the bad guy IN THIS CASE no matter which way you slice it. In my book, Level 3, Cogent, AND Netflix are all scumbags IN THIS CASE.

                          • (Score: 2) by NotSanguine on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:23PM (1 child)

                            by NotSanguine (285) <NotSanguineNO@SPAMSoylentNews.Org> on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:23PM (#571344) Homepage Journal

                            Netflix was not a party to those peering agreements, either ones between Level 3 and Comcast or Cogent and Comcast.

                            True, but irrelevant, as Netflix paid Level 3 and Cogent for access to their no-fee peering agreements with Comcast, which Netflix' traffic load then violated. Comcast isn't the bad guy IN THIS CASE no matter which way you slice it. In my book, Level 3, Cogent, AND Netflix are all scumbags IN THIS CASE.

                            You're welcome to your opinion. I respectfully disagree.

                            Cogent and Level 3 *unbalanced* the peering agreement with Comcast. That it was traffic from Netflix is the part (from a legal standpoint) that's irrelevant. What's more, unbalanced perring isn't generally considered a *violation* of a peering agreement. It likely can annoy people and require a re-negotiation of the peering agreement, but traffic fluctuates significantly from month to month and discussions/changes are a normal part of managing the relationship between network peers.

                            I have no great love for any of these players, although I will say that having used Level 3, Cogent *and* Comcast as ISPs at the same time in various locations around the US both before, during, and after this debacle, Cogent had, hands down, the best service, up-time and customer support of the three. Comcast was so bad that we tried to replace them, but aside from (IIRC) XO (our primary ISP at that location), Comcast was the only local provider at that time who could provide the bandwidth we required at a reasonable cost.

                            My experience with these ISPs isn't really relevant to the Netflix debacle, but it does inform my understanding of the regard in which they hold their customers.

                            --
                            No, no, you're not thinking; you're just being logical. --Niels Bohr
                            • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:57PM

                              by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 21 2017, @07:57PM (#571367)

                              You're trying to pick at the smallest of nits in an attempt to avoid admitting that Comcast was the only rational actor among it, Netflix, Cogent, and Level 3.

                              Netflix viewers won't suddenly start sending Netflix streaming video next month. That traffic imbalance is huge and one way only.

                              That Comcast is also a giant ball of sucked scum is irrelevant to this specific situation. You hang a murderer for the murder, not because he smelled like poop and was a huge jerk.

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