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Comment by westbywest | Hacker News Reader

I'm not sure anyone wants broadband that can't throttle its bittorrent users a little.

I comment in agreement with the need to maintain QoS for reasons of network health, especially if you need to maintain minimum guaranteed bandwidth in the presence of misbehaving clients (e.g. botnets, ping floods, not just abusive torrenters).

However, the carriers in questions have often not been using QoS for reasons of improving service, but rather to penalize the percentage of broadband users who actually use a large portion of the bandwidth they're paying for.

For example, say you buy 1.5Mbit DSL and then carefully set up your torrent client to use a consistent 1.0Mbit during nighttime. A month later you get a disconnect notice from your ISP claiming that you were hogging bandwidth, probably leaving you SOL since that's the only viable ISP in your area.

This is the sort of business practice the FCC is trying to address.

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You aren't SOL, you can stop using so much bandwidth. You can be a conscientious user of shared resources. Using a constant stream like that is almost always a bit lacking in legitimacy. It usually means you are using the service in ways that your service plan wasn't designed to be used, either you're downloading and/or sharing large, perhaps copyrighted videos, music, or software, or you are running a server for gaming or something like that.

Those 1.5Mbit DSL is "maximum capacity." Not what you should try to consume. Ultimately, all the customers go through one pipe, or a shared few pipes, so those hogging the lines negatively affect others.

In my opinion, it's the users of the bandwidth that are greedy. Do they really need 1,000 movies on their hard drives? Many bit torrenters have more content than they could ever watch in their entire lives...

Strawman argument. If I break the law, charge me. Otherwise you have no business second-guessing what I transfer over the line I pay for.

If they don't want people to use the bandwith they pay to get, they should say so by advertising their monthly cap or whatever.

The idea that I can only transfer the particular types of bits across the wire that my ISP thinks I should is exactly the point of net neutrality rules. If that's not an infringement of free speech, I don't know what is.

In many cases, you are breaking your contract with the ISP. Read almost any residential contract and it says the subscriber agrees not to run servers for example. My ISP in california even blocked port 80 upstream.

Limiting the ability to share movies online is not an infringement of free speech.

It could be argued such contracts violate net neutrality.

I'm pretty sure the telcos don't have enough lines for everyone to place a call at the same time. Are you also going to argue that running a call center should be prohibited, too, because you are excessively using shared resources?

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