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Author Topic: Net neutrality is dead. Bow to Comcast and Verizon, your overlords (AKA DOOOOOM)  (Read 18558 times)

wraith808

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Advocates of a free and open Internet could see this coming, but today's ruling from a Washington appeals court striking down the FCC's rules protecting the open net was worse than the most dire forecasts. It was "even more emphatic and disastrous than anyone expected," in the words of one veteran advocate for network neutrality.

The Court of Appeals for the D.C. circuit thoroughly eviscerated the Federal Communications Commission's latest lame attempt to prevent Internet service providers from playing favorites among websites--awarding faster speeds to sites that pay a special fee, for example, or slowing or blocking sites and services that compete with favored affiliates.

Big cable operators like Comcast and telecommunications firms like Verizon, which brought the lawsuit on which the court ruled, will be free to pick winners and losers among websites and services. Their judgment will most likely be based on cold hard cash--Netflix wants to keep your Internet provider from slowing its data so its films look like hash? It will have to pay your provider the big bucks. But the governing factor need not be money. (Comcast remains committed to adhere to the net neutrality rules overturned today until January 2018, a condition placed on its 2011 merger with NBC Universal; after that, all bets are off.)

"AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast will be able to deliver some sites and services more quickly and reliably than others for any reason,"  telecommunications lawyer Marvin Ammori (he's the man quoted above) observed even before the ruling came down. "Whim. Envy. Ignorance. Competition. Vengeance. Whatever. Or, no reason at all."

More at link.
« Last Edit: January 15, 2014, 03:04 PM by wraith808 »

rgdot

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Should I say something basement worthy?  :P


wraith808

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Maybe we should replicate this thread there... there's quite a few basement worthy words that I'd say about this...

rgdot

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Well let's just say delivery and production/content are distinct and only one entity can force it to remain that way.

wraith808

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Which is why I found that picture I added quite telling as to the problems with this whole thing.

rgdot

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If other countries follow this model the internet will die, I have no doubt the US will find a sufficient (whatever that may mean) market for those $5 extras but a major portion of the rest of the world will not. So if CNN is happy to participate in a $5 extra scheme for premium content that someone will be able to see for free, not illegally but because of market conditions, in India then so be it.

Stoic Joker

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It's precisely this type of blatantly obvious ultra greedy money grab that makes groups like Anonymous such a hit with the grass roots type folk. I really think somebody needs to get beaten with a history book that has been turned to the chapter on why Bonnie & Clyde were so :o ing popular.


Edvard

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...AAaanndd from the "let's take it straight to the basement" department, ladies and gentleman I give you the opposing view:

http://www.zdnet.com...his-time-7000025167/

 :P

wraith808

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I ... shouldn't have read that.  Really, there are shills... and there are fscking shills.  And he is... 

...I'm going to calm down.

rgdot

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What did I just read??? (actually only read half of it, may be the rest is great but I guess I will never know  :-\  )

Renegade

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...I'm going to calm down.

No. Don't calm down. Get mad. Get real mad.



Something like that.
Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

Stoic Joker

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...AAaanndd from the "let's take it straight to the basement" department, ladies and gentleman I give you the opposing view:

http://www.zdnet.com...his-time-7000025167/

 :P

I think the only thing that that actually proves is that it is indeed "humanly" possible to swallow the corporate sausage sideways. :-\

Now all they have to do is get the internet chopped up into nice cleanly packaged "entertainment" channels like cable TV and we can all go back to using ham radio and the library for our information sources. Well... At least the segment of the populace that hasn't devolved into a palpitating set of media overloaded eyeballs can.

SeraphimLabs

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Tbh I have to agree partially with both sides in this.

While the FCC very much should pass regulations prohibiting ISPs from charging end-users additional fees to access certain services, at the same time they cannot reap the benefits of CDN technology and the efficiency gains that introduces while staying perfectly neutral.

Thus, service providers are allowed to pay other service providers for premium placements, but providers to end users cannot restrict or otherwise paywall what is available to their users.

Kind of a compromise there, best of both worlds.

wraith808

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I think that what comcast is doing with netflix/xbox currently is fine, in regards to making it so that if you access netflix from your xbox then it doesn't count against your cap.  It's good for the end user, and the end user isn't paying for the privilege.  But when you get into a la carte services to do the same and it be the consumer that has to pay for it?  Or giving them the ability to throttle individual services? 

That is just ripe for abuse.  And when you get down to it, the providers want to make money.  That's their business.

Stoic Joker

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Or giving them the ability to throttle individual services?
More specifically giving them the ability to cripple a service, just because it was decided that it was bad.

All this does is fast track the ability of mega corporations to crush anything they perceive as a "threat" to their profits and/or dominance. Net neutrality is about allowing all 65536 of the available ports in the TCP/IP stack free and equal time. All the crap about needing to prioritize the point to point communications via traffic shaping across the backbone is just posturing bullshit while that try like dancing monkey hell to cover the simple fact that they oversold their infrastructure yet again.

They want to pretend they can sell every clown in town a 50+MB pipe and then on a holiday weekend when there's nothing on TV and folks decide to Netflix/hulu/etc a movie to keep the kids still, they want to blame pirates of aliens of something for the fact that the system can't actually handle that kind of peak load. All because some twink in accounting didn't believe that that many people might actually try to do X at the same time.

So sure piss down my back and tell me it's raining. They've been trying to figure out how to turn the internet into the same ala carte nightmare since the original fad started to catch on.

Renegade

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That is just ripe for abuse.  And when you get down to it, the providers want to make money.  That's their business.

New mobile phone plans? Want to talk to your spouse without paying a $1 per minute? Just get the extended spouse plan for +$20 per month. Got kids? Talk to them for under $5 a minute for only +$30 per month. etc. etc.

This is not going to end well.
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Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

Deozaan

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There was a post about this on The Verge, but the real beauty was in the comments:

There's a great discussion/argument between AntarcticOutpost and (eventually) Joao Sousa starting about here:

You can’t have everyone in the world simultaneously streaming Netflix, just as you can’t have everyone in the world simultaneoudly charging their electric car.

Actually, yes you can, and yes you can. Here’s why:

For this scenario, I’m going to use Pandora as the example of the content producer. Donno why, probably just because I feel like it.

So you and Pandora are on opposite sides of the street. You and Pandora are both already paying for your electricity, plumbing, etc. everything you need to make sure you can run at optimal efficiency. Now you want to connect to each other. Here is where your ISP comes in. You want to connect to Pandora, yes, and consume their content, but the flow is not one way. For every request there is an ack. Pandora also wants to connect to you.

So Pandora, obviously, being a big company and all that, wants to buy a corporate grade bandwidth pipe, with Gigabits of bandwidth. They pay the monthly fee for that, and with that money the ISP upgrades their infrastructure to connect them up to their network. But that’s just one half of the equation. You also pay for your own, somewhat lesser of course, connection to that network. Let’s imagine the comparison between these bandwidths:

Pandora You
| |
| |
|
|
|
|
|

So of course, whatever bottleneck occurs is because you haven’t paid enough for more bandwidth.

Now imagine suddenly that 5 more people want to connect up to Pandora. So the ISP uses their monthly fees to hook up the requisite routers and switches to make sure that they can all connect up to Pandora. But, whoops, now Pandora does not have enough bandwidth to provide them all with full-speed service for every customer (assuming every customer uses the maximum bandwidth). That’s actually Pandora’s problem. They need to pay more for more bandwidth.

Obviously things change as we move away from simple “across the street” analogies. However, the principle does not change. Every person pays to hook up to each other via their monthly ISP fee. This fee goes into expanding the infrastructure such that it can support at the very least that bandwidth connection to the rest of the network, if not more.

Want to see some proof that what I’m talking about is not actually happening? Try looking at the massive profit margins that these ISPs are generating. I’m not the first to point this out either. Further proof? The fact that when Google Fiber comes into town with Gigabit bandwidth, suddenly and almost instantaneously, competing ISPs are capable of transmitting at up to 3x the speed they were currently providing for no additional cost to the consumer.

The evidence is overwhelming. Data caps don’t make sense. ISPs are creating an artificial scarcity of bandwidth and then attempting to commoditize the flow of data to justify their lack of infrastructure investment.

There's some back and forth and more explanation and debate. I thought it was a good discussion.

And that bit near the end where he mentioned suddenly transmitting 3x the speed for no additional cost? I recently experienced that myself. I was paying $50/mo to my Cable company for 5 Mbps down and 0.5 Mbps upload speeds. For years it's been those speeds and those prices, and that the only rate/plan they offered. Just last Fall a DSL provider in the area installed some fiber cables and offered me a deal of about 15Mbps down & 1Mbps upload speeds for about $40/mo for the first sixth months, at which time it would go up to somewhere in the $60s I think.

So I called my Cable company and asked them to suspend my account (vacation hold) for 3 months so I could test out the new ISP without cancelling my current one. And after a month I felt satisfied with the speeds and reliability of my new ISP, so I called the Cable company to cancel my account. They told me I could get 50Mbps download speeds for $50/mo or I could get 15 Mbps download speeds (which is what the competing ISP offered) for only $35/mo (which was a.

So how come they could suddenly provide me with 3x the speed for $15 less, or 10x the speed for the same price I'd been paying them for years just because a new ISP came into town?

olamoree

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Hey Guys, this is some very serious stuff!  You are on the verge of having your lifeblood altered for pay.  The ISP's got Tom Wheeler installed as Chairman of the FCC and he is doing his job... selling the public out to his cronies and ex cronies at OUR expense.  He is proposing a Fast Lane (the corporate ISP buddies) and a Slow Lane (for the rest of the lame jerks that take it lying down).  But all is not yet lost if you get up off your butt and send that important email.  Altho the FCC, Tom and two Democrats voted 3-2 to sell out, they also decided to allow four months of "lets hear it from the public" and for EVERYONE that has an internet connection, they need to send that letter.  It will have worldwide consequences if we don't speak up.  Tom Wheeler answered one of my letters and said that he was all for "Open Internet" and would fight for it... but he DIDN'T mention Net Neutrality which is whats at stake.  You can compose your comments on this site... https://dearfcc.org/ and you have about 115 days left to comment... so why not send them 10-20 comments?  The action that you should be looking forward to is that Internet Service be passed to Title II services such as telephone, telegraph, etc. that CANNOT be pieced out to ISP's that want to chop up the market to fill their pockets.  And I am not only talking about US residents who will be affected... but the whole world!  If Ver/ATT/Comc control the internet in the US, anytime you or me in a foreign country resolves a URL that has anything to do with passing thru the USA, it will be split... into the Fast Land and the Slow Lane... where do you want to be?  Wouldn't it seem reasonable that the internet should be neutral?  Neutral in its equal treatment of all users and not MORE equal for some.  So guys, get involved and don't just read the pessimistic blogs of the "lay down and take it" folks that think that the guvment will just tell you what to do... remember, your taxes pay those bums wages and you have every right to demand what you want the internet to be!  So plz decide to sent your comments to the FCC right away.  Thanks.

mouser

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I submitted using the dearfcc page, as recommended by olamoree  :up:

Renegade

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Dear FCC,

Thank you for taking the time to ignore me.

F**k you,

Renegade

I think that's probably about as productive as it will ever get. The same assholes that had their asses handed to them over SOPA only brought it back with a different acronym. They'll continue until they have worn down any resistance and gotten what they want.

There is no "democracy". There is no "justice". There is only "just us" - and you and I are not a part of "us".

Bend over and learn to like it. Or at least get used to it. We don't have a choice. Our voice means NOTHING. They don't care. We are nothing but cattle to be milked & slaughtered.

This is a feature of the system - it is not a bug.

Now... repeat after me... MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Old McDonald had a farm...
Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

40hz

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One word: FidoNet. :Thmbsup:

"Let's go living in the past." ;)

Renegade

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One word: FidoNet. :Thmbsup:

"Let's go living in the past." ;)

No. Today we have meshnets.

I know you hate Reddit, but... it's a good start:

http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/

GAME OVER.

Technology cannot be stopped. Something else will rise up. The technocrats cannot win. Ever. Except for those that willfully surrender.

This is not over yet. ;) http://youtu.be/qn0B4OhipVs?t=3m22s

Slow Down Music - Where I commit thought crimes...

Freedom is the right to be wrong, not the right to do wrong. - John Diefenbaker

40hz

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One word: FidoNet. :Thmbsup:

"Let's go living in the past." ;)

No. Today we have meshnets.

Fido would work on a mesh infrastructure.  ;)

I know you hate Reddit, but... it's a good start:

http://www.reddit.com/r/darknetplan/

I don't hate Reddit. Just strongly dislike some of the childishness and posturing you find there.

Reddit is one of those things that falls under the:  "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it" type of thing for me.

As Socrates said: “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men's writings so that you shall come easily by what others have labored hard for.”


Technology cannot be stopped. Something else will rise up. The technocrats cannot win. Ever. Except for those that willfully surrender.

That remains to be seen. A lot depends on who controls the technology and frames the discourse. Look no further than North Korea for a good example of how thoroughly a human brain can be conditioned to believe anything - and act upon it.

This is not over yet. ;)

Agree. Not by a long shot. 8)