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Net neutrality advocates are planning two days of protest in Washington DC this month as they fight off plans to defang regulations meant to protect an open internet.
A coalition of activists, consumer groups and writers are calling on supporters to attend the next meeting of the Federal Communications Commission on 26 September in DC. The next day, the protest will move to Capitol Hill, where people will meet legislators to express their concerns about an FCC proposal to rewrite the rules governing the internet.
The FCC has received 22 million comments on "Restoring Internet Freedom", the regulator's proposal to dismantle net neutrality rules put in place in 2015. Opponents argue the rule changes, proposed by the FCC's Republican chairman Ajit Pai, will pave the way for a tiered internet where internet service providers (ISPs) will be free to pick and choose winners online by giving higher speeds to those they favor, or those willing or able to pay more.
The regulator has yet to process the comments, and is reviewing its proposals before a vote expected later this year.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by NotSanguine on Wednesday September 20 2017, @07:11PM (12 children)
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.
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.
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
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)
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)
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:
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)
This is already covered under applicable laws against fraud and/or false advertising.
Incorrect. Netflix violated the terms of the no-fee peering agreements it was using and therefore did not pay for its traffic.
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)
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)
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)
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
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)
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)
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)
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
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.