US House votes to bar FCC net neut rules The US House of Representatives has voted to prevent the FCC's new net neutrality rules from taking effect. As if you expected anything less. On Tuesday, the House approved a resolution that "disapproves" (PDF) the net neut rules laid down by the FCC in December, with the vote splitting almost entirely along party lines. 241 …
Who cares if these rules are repealed? Seriously, who gives a shit? They're utter crap written by a pro-business jerkass who was appointed by a pro-business administration.
Within less than a quarter of these rules going into effect the largest telecoms provider IN THE FUCKING WORLD (AT&T) has implemented usage based billing, traffic shaping and throttling. Again, let me reiterate: they have gone as far as "legally" allowed by the FCC to fuck over their customers.
As if that was not enough they, among many other telecoms companies (such as Verizon, the last bit of the original AT&T left un-reassimilated), are taking the FCC to court to have these rules struck down as well as lobbying heavily to Republicans to have them repealed by Congress.
Who gives a shit anymore about what this government does? Everyone is in Big Business's pockets and those who aren't are a marginalized superminority that can't possibly ever really effect change. We're boned. They've won. The bloody game is over. They have flat out won.
What's wrong with "usage-based billing"? This is a real question, not a trolling attempt: what is wrong with "pay for what you use"?
Note that does not mean I endorse the practice of selling "unlimited" accounts and then throttling/capping them, but if the contract states out front that "you pay us $X per month and we will provide you Y GB of traffic at Z Mbps", where is the problem?
My biggest whinge is with ISPs trying to be both Utilities and service providers at the same time - "you use our physical lines, you will be forced to use our services". These companies should be one or the other - to a company providing internet access, it shouldn't matter what the *content* of the traffic actually is (FTP/iTunes/iPlayer/torrent/gaming) only the *throughput* should matter. It's the same cost/byte regardless of what those bytes make up at the destination.
"usage based billing, traffic shaping and throttling"
These are essential measures to allow fair shares of a finite resource and to prevent the tragedy of the commons. Quite why Mr Prewitt doesn't see that is a mystery to me. If he uses more capacity than his neighbors, why shouldn't he pay more? If he is generating unreasonable amounts of real-time video traffic, why shouldn't it be shaped to match a fair share of the available capacity? And if he really sucks down more bits than anyone else sharing the same access router or switch, why shouldn't his line be throttled to restore fair shares for other people.
I guess similar questions apply to the way he drives his SUV or Hummer... or is it a big pick-up?
Let's hope Obama does the right thing with this crap Bill.
"Who gives a shit anymore about what this government does? Everyone is in Big Business's pockets and those who aren't are a marginalized superminority that can't possibly ever really effect change. We're boned. They've won. The bloody game is over. They have flat out won." .... Bryce Prewitt Posted Wednesday 6th April 2011 05:05 GMT
Quite so, Bryce Prewitt. Although your conclusions are totally false and arse about face, if you'll excuse the vulgar vernacular. Nobody with more than just little common sense gives a shit anymore about what corrupt governments do, for they have proved themselves to be an expensive and ignorant irrelevance which can't possibly ever really effect change. And it is they who have lost to those into Bigger Pictures ...... and are both Anonymous and Legion .....:-) and Everywhere and Nowhere, Baby, for that's where IT's at. ....[ amfM gives a nod to Jeff Beck's, "Hi Ho Silver Lining"]
El Reg ...... You're a bit slow off the mark whenever so much has been shared directly with you. Do you have a Houston type, Virtual Space Flight problem, which a simple flick of a key switch can cure and solve?
This is another glaring bit of evidence that political money is poison to democracy. How anyone can be against 'net neutrality is beyond me. This very same crap came up with the telephone, and the gov't had to force interoperability and access. Can't the Repubs imagine what a lack of this type of legislation would have meant for the telephone? Not change 'telephone' for 'Internet.' Morons....
"How anyone can be against 'net neutrality is beyond me" .
That depends upon your value for net neutrality. I'm not convinced an ISP should try to offer the same latency or throughput for a large file download as they should for a VOIP connection for example, given that they can make both types of connection work better if they are prioritised in different ways. Similarly if they sell smaller and larger GB/month caps prior to throttling based on their marketing we can expect them to throttle the cheaper customers sooner than the more expensive ones. If ISPs do nothing to control spam emanating from compromised customer machines they are likely to find wanted email being sent from their network getting blocked along with the spam.
So everyone agrees on the need for net neutrality when it comes to conflicts of interest, as with the classic case of a railway company which owns a steel mill prioritising their own steel traffic over their competitors. But I don't think anyone who understands these issues as they affect ISPs expect the ISPs not to manage their networks.
First, there's no such thing as unlimited bandwidth and it's nothing to do the Net Neutrality.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with bandwidth caps or traffic shaping to _control what you do_ over your connection, that's do do with your supplier selling you something that they cannot afford to supply, so have to control how much you use until they can afford what you are using.
Net Neutrality has nothing to do with traffic shaping to ensure a _providers network operates effectively_. They might lower bandwith to bulk transports protocols like FTP or lower priority to SMTP as it's a background process you don't usually see, so that they can reduce latency on SIP/Skype so the quality is good when you phone your mother in Spain.
People, companies, whoever, they are pay to _connect_ to the Internet, Net Neutrality means that the carrier will then let your packets move across their network on onward over other networks communicating with your destination, whatever and wherever it is.
Net Neutrality means that BTel should not, for instance, introduce latency into SIP/Skype so that the quality is so bad that it doesn't work and you are forced to use your BTel telephone to call you Mother and pay again for what you should be able to do over your Internet connection. NN means that you should be able to watch smooth iPlayer or Youtube content on your Skyee internet connection, without NN Skyee might block or more likely limit bandwidth to force you to subscribe to their premium TV content. Tescow could block access to other major online shops on their customers broadband. Vorgin might interfere with SIP,Skype,iPlayer... Oh, thinking about it, they _all_ might do _all_ of this as they all offer the same premium services and want to maximise profits and monetize their customers.
The broadband providers are all taking this to the next level, they are trying to make the places/services you visit pay as well. Want to watch video, well you'll only be able to watch video from sites that pay your provider. Want to go shopping, only from sites with higher prices as they have to pay a margin to your provider to allow you to access them. Want to send email, OK as long as you don't mind the SPAM that your provider is paid to transport to you. Have you got a website? You might have paid for a premium hosing account from your web host, but the performance will be poor as your web host isn't paying your broadband provider to "prioritise" your content over the broadband network.
Business exists to maximise profit for their investors, they have a duty to thier investors to make as much money as possible, without NN they will do everything they can think of to moneytize you, they might even spy on your connection, machine read all your emails so they can fill your screens with adverts... oh forgot, they tried that already!
thinks it means. So freetards think it means they get to download their pirated movie at the same priority as a VOIP call.
I'm for the government requiring full disclosure on how the services are provided, but not a damn thing about same are provisioned.
No it doesn't. Just because someone doesn't understand the meaning of a term, it doesn't change that term's meaning.
Companies and Governments are trying to change the meaning to suit their own agendas, but Net Neutrality as it was properly defined means all packets/protocols/platforms should be treated equally.
You pay to _connect_, if you pay for a crap connection, you probably get a crap connection, but you should get _equally_ crap access to everything. If you pay for a fantastic connection but are connecting to a site with a poor connection, you should get the best the poor end can provide, your provider should not make the decision for you, probably based on cost.
Your freetards problem is that he believes he is being sold an 8Mbps connection along with 20 Million other users. Do you think BTel has 4000 x 40Gbps connections to the interwebs?
all traffic is created and treated with neutrality on the internet...
it means that skype calls won't get prioritised over my http, or ftp downloads just because a jitter free call is important to that customer, or because the service provider Skype pays extra to the ISP.
It means that if I want to sell widgets from my online store I'll be able to upload my content just as much/fast as the next widget provider, and that traffic will reach my customers just as well as the next person.
their store won't perform better because they've paid someone else not for more speed or more bandwidth, but paid them to constantly jump ahead of my packets. for their traffic to be given greater priority whilst my traffic may be restricted to the point that connections time out or traffic drops because I can't afford to pay an ISP protection money for my traffic...
The idea that someone's conversation should be prioritised over my sending of email, instant chat message web browsing or whatever else if laughable, why is their activity so much more important than mine, (assuming we've paid the same amount of money).
Net neutrality is important to allow innovation by small players. If a small content provider has to buy, bribe or golf-buddy his way into the high-throughput net, then he'll have a significant disadvantage as compared to the entrenched players. I hope I don't have to explain to the grownups in this forum that there is a clear interest of the big players to milk their customers without any annoying disruptive competition.
Let the user pay for his net access and decide what he wants to do with it. I don't want my content provider to make the decisions for me!
The future of freedom on the internet can best be served by limiting government involvement. To that end it is good the Repubs have stripped away NetNeutality regulation.
Let large corporations compete in the market place. Less regulation fosters innovation. Liberalism has always failed where ever it has been tried.
NN has nothing, for instance, to do with prioritising VIOP. If your FTP connection has high latency, drops a few packets and ,because of congestion, packets arrive out of order, no problem TCP gets missing packets resent, the packets are re-ordered and you _might_ notice a little slower transfer. If the same happens to VOIP packets, the call setup may fail, there'd certainly be clicks and pops on the 'line' and the call may fail mid way through. Correct prioritisation of traffic over a link to make it work in the best way is _not_ a fuction of a Network Neutrality policy, it's there to make the network work.
The same applies to HTTP, however, if I drop 20% of your HTTP packets to Gorgol so that you get a much better response from Boing, as Boing are paying me to prioritise _your_ traffic to them, in the hope you'll switch and see their advertising, that _is_ a fuction of NN.
As for your store, there are many reasons why yours might not work as well as someone else's, otherwise all stores would be hosted on a third level reseller's 'unlimited everything' hosting package on an old server at a no name co-lo site.
A provider might have a Gbe to a Tier1 tansit, 2 Gbe's to a Tier2 (Cheaper) and a 10Gbe peering session to an exchange. Your wiget emporium might be on a cheap host and slow server, mine with a premium supplier in the US, but you could still get a better service as routes to your widget go over the Internet Exchage's 10Gbe whereas mine have to go over the 1Gbe Tier 1 connection. All of this is nothing to do with NN.
The rest... well, not all protocols are created equal.
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