Special delivery: Activists drop 100,000 net neutrality complaints on FCC Activists have delivered a massive package to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) that they say contains roughly 100,000 citizen complaints. Members of Fight for the Future say they collected the complaints from Americans who want the commission to investigate the use of "zero rating" programs by telcos. The …
Fiber optic triple play. Internet, telephone and 'cable' TV.
All carried on one fiber.
The TV service is sold by the month.
It occupies bandwidth on the fiber, but in a defined time slice that's not "the Internet".
Point being, one's preconceived definitions are about to get fuzzy here. Tread carefully.
It'd be fun to sit in the meeting and continuously derail the proposals with counterexamples.
Better yet, let's hook each of them up to a sort of bullshit detecting system that's connected to a high voltage alternating current line on one side & a Youtube live stream on the other. Anytime anyone catches one of them spouting bullshit the viewer hits a key & sends a zap down the line to the lying sack of shit on the other end. That way we can keep the bastards honest as they're trying to explain their next round of reasoning.
If they refuse to be hooked up to the BDS then we can just club them with a cricket bat until they stop lying, aka their lips stop moving.
We're sick & fekkin tired of our bills being so high, the bills getting bigger for no damned good reason, & them raping us for every penny they can. All those charges & fees they pass along to the customer as if it's GOT to be done? No, only the *taxes* _must_ be passed on, everything else is supposed to come out of YOUR arse as the cost of doing business.
Bah, what do I know. I'm just a Comcast victim with no bloody competition to use as a lever to force them to change. Grrrrrr...
So instead you get Netflix and Youtube slowing your stock trade down instead of some random cat video shared on a smaller video site or self-host?
Of course if you're carrying out the kind of HFT that depends on super fast connections to the transaction servers, you'd deserve everything you get for trying to do it on 50:1 contended domestic broadband.
So speaks someone who has completely failed to understand net neutrality. ISPs are allowed to manage traffic for quality of service reasons, but can't prioritise one service above another based on payment by the originator. They can't for example charge Netflix to give priority to their video over other video streaming services, but they can slow down all video steaming if the network is congested.
+1
It isn't about traffic prioritisation, its about service provider prioritisation.
Net Neut is an anti-corruption, pro-competition play.
Just to show how this works out with zero-rating, my wife signed up to Presto (free trial for one month) unaware that its a foxtel service, zero rated on Telstra (her phone) but not via our ADSL link (Westnet).
I've had to cancel it as she used 3/5 of our monthly allowance in a week.
The service ran more smoothly over tethered phone link than it did over the ADSL. So if I'm a new VoD startup, how do I compete with Foxtel's cosy arrangement with Telstra?
So if I'm a new VoD startup, how do I compete with Foxtel's cosy arrangement with Telstra?
You call them up and get your own arrangement.
Let's face it, unless you're trying to set up a YouTube type of service (that is, user provided videos), the only real barrier to entry for creating a Video On Demand service is the cost of licensing the content. The internet connection(s) are probably the least expensive part.
So speaks someone who has completely failed to understand net neutrality. ISPs are allowed to manage traffic for quality of service reasons, but can't prioritise one service above another based on payment by the originator.
Steve Todd, this may be true, but ISPs will spend a lot of money in compliance to prove that only QoS is in place, not provider preference. This is the insanity of any centrally mandated scheme.
As much as few here will admit, Net Neutrality is nothing more than a perpetuation of a crony capitalist agenda to push out all but a few large ISPs and remove any real competition from the market place. Perhaps things are different in the EU and UK, but this is exactly the result of virtually all regulatory, public policies in the US.
That isn't the definition of Net Neutrality used by the FCC in the US. Under the new rules, the ISP is NOT allowed to prioritize based on type of service, origin, or destination, so no they CANNOT slow down all video streaming. Just as they cannot slow town torrents, file transfers, or anything else. All must suffer equally on a "broadband" connection.
So no, they aren't allowed to implement QOS. Your VOIP traffic has the same priority as a cat video, and they are forbidden to sell you an upgrade to put any QOS on it -- unless you are moved from a "broadband" connection to a private circuit. Which, if your VOIP is from a cable provider, is exactly what they have done. That way they can do QOS on the voice traffic - but that traffic runs on separate channels from the "internet" traffic even if it come in on the same fiber or copper.
This is what happens when definitions aren't agreed upon beforehand. What you get and what you thought you were getting are two different things.
For what you ask (net neutrality) you may just get it.
Issue is elsewhere. The provider is determining that the streaming gets priority over the same trade you mentioned. As a user I disagree.
I would like to have MY interface on the BNG (or CMTS) configured with MY POLICY. One I DEFINE. If I would like the trade to have priority over streaming on my interface I will do so MYSELF.
By the way do not try to tell me it is impossible. I have written that software stack 3 times in my life in different capacities and from different aspects (business access and interconnect, residential BNG and residential vCPE). The issue is not with this being not technically impossible. The issue is not with it not being productizable in general.
The issue is with the SP marketing and product management not having a clue on how to market it and monetize it, concocting cretinous idiotic "burst bandwidth for money" schemes (hello BT Broadband product management, how many times did you try to work on that?) and failing. After that blaming the whole idea as unworkable.
The practice is right, being the client upper on the food chain.
Application is usually wrong - As soon as Consumer Quality of Service [of that slice of service non-leveraged] is diminished because of the leveraged kind.
And that is easily testable, and Consumer Organizations should be.
A consumer has no reason to complain if the contracted service is provided in full.
.....Example:
Allow us to think that a 'well intended actor' [where are those?] a well financed university with private donations [Harvard?] decides trough their own Senior Advisers Board to provide free On-The-Distance-Education to some forgotten-of-the-World zone.
Local Government at that zone provides for a bare-bones contract and [Harvard?] provides education through this zero-rate-tariff mechanism.
What [Harvard?] could be doing wrong? This mechanism ensures that resources are ONLY SPENT on the Courses themselves.
.....Another ex:
This same [zero-rate] mechanism could be used by National Libraries to provide all of the classic books [not going to talk about damn extensive copyrights] to all of their Population, on the mobile also.
Educative Bodies on the always dismissed Documentary Video Libraries. etc. etc.
[Harvard] isn't an ISP. They are not breaking net neutrality by providing a free service any more than Google or El Reg are. The local ISP would be breaking net neutrality if they only provided a subset of the net for free, rather than an alowance. What if, for example Oxford or the Sorbon decide to offer free courses also. The locals wouldn't be able to access them under the scheme you describe, even though they may be better for some if not all users.
Also just because something is held up to be good by TPTB doesn't mean that Internet users should be forced to take it. The point of neutrality is to let the users decide what they want rather than forcing particular systems on them.
"...The local ISP would be breaking net neutrality if they only provided a subset of the net for free, rather than an alowance..."
Nop, ISPs just billing upper on the stream. No rule broken. That flow provided additionally to the service allocated by End of the Line billing.
"...The point of neutrality is to let the users decide what they want rather than forcing particular systems on them..."
What if my Government decided to build a Public Library at my little town an populate it with the Classics, but people here really wants manga, pop. magazines and fiction].
Is my Government being non-neutral?
'Freedom' is a too easy flag. Always look who's carrying it.
"The group said that within the package were printouts of each complaint"
The only ones harmed by this stunt were the unsuspecting trees used to make the paper for those 100,000 print outs.
On the other hand no lobbyists were harmed in the pulling of this. Next time save a tree print your complaint on a lobbyist.
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