72% of Consumers Don't Know What Net Neutrality Is
exstreamist.com
exstreamist.com
We were basically warned this would happen too, that Net Neutrality opponents just keep beating the drum until the general population got tired of resisting.
In short, submitting comments to the FCC or protesting is nearly completely irrelevant because Ajit Pai is gonna be Ajit Pai. I think there's a less than 1% chance that the Open Internet Order is not revoked.
At its core the net neutrality debate is a fight between media providers and transmission. It is clear to most tech literate people that net neutrality is a very good thing. Less clear is that media (including privacy) regulation is also a good thing.
The transmission side of the argument is clearly in the camp of the Republicans (as noted by campaign contributions) while the media companies (think social media and online advertising) is clearly in the camp of the Democrats (as noted by campaign contributions). The primary weapon in matters of media versus transmission is ignorance of the issue at hand.
The media side has very powerful weapons in that they control the content. If they fear regulation coming they can provide content to bolster their users. Think back to the SOPA legislation. These companies are largely unregulated and nothing scares them more than regulation.
The transmission side just has to be persistent to win their argument and hope they can hang on long enough to out last the patience and technical understanding of the public. This strategy has won wars and can easily win political arguments.
The transmission side of the argument is also fearful of regulation, but these guys have to walk a fine line. If they can dodge regulation because regulators are more interested in limiting online media then so be it, but this isn't the ideal outcome for these guys. Ideally the transmission companies would like a slice of that unregulated online media revenue, but it only makes sense if both media AND transmission remains loosely (at best) regulated. This requires a lot of careful political maneuvering and not upsetting political constituents.
The general population never resisted, because they were never really participants in the conversation.
Most of the net neutrality activism happened within the bubble of people who work in or care deeply about tech. I don't know very many people in the general public who had heard the term "net neutrality" before I mentioned it to them, and I live in Silicon Valley, so I would expect the general public here to be a bit more technology-inclined than in the rest of the country.
This should be a wake up call to proponents of net neutrality -- better marketing and communication with the general public is going to be needed.
Net Equality would have likely perked up more interest.
yeah, marketing is nuanced like that and i think this distinction would have made a good difference.
net-favorism, anti-throttling, anti-discrimination, equal-access would have also done better, i think.
Imposing a significant time cost makes certain types of applications unusable.
It doesn't correctly communicate that it's different rates for different target sites.
In America, 'equality' is not considered as a universally positive word.
Heck, anti-racketeering or anti-collusion may be better.
The biggest failure of the net neutrality movement was it did nothing to undermine the belief that net neutrality represented a change in the status quo. It would have been better to lead with the idea of big business (telecoms) or the government (FCC) meddling with the Internet.
This highlights an unfortunate aspect of our public sphere. The unvarnished truth is rarely enough to influence public opinion. Those of us in the computers, and engineering must recognize that rhetoric based on emotion is a more effective tool when communicating with the general public. Facts are necessary but not sufficient.
If one supports competition and free markets, recognize that the ISP business is not free and open to competition, and used regulation to gain monopoly or duopoly status. We need some regulation to either try and create competition, or at least prevent abuse of their current monopoly/duopoly status.
Looks like the question was simply, "Do you know what net neutrality is?"
I would also like to see an actual bill with an actual legal definition. Given how regulations work, I would hope the authors of said bill put the actual regulations in it. I still want to see one of these advocacy groups put out a proposed bill.
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-10-201A1.p... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FCC_Open_Internet_Order_2010
If they are old enough you can use this metaphor:
Anti-Net Neutrality is for turning the Information Superhighway into toll roads.
If they need further explanation, go with the highway analogy. Imagine if all of the roads in the country were privately owned, but still free to use. You pay your tax and the money is distributed among the companies. Now the company that services your neighborhood decides that they want more money, so they erect tollbooths at the entrance to the neighborhood but tell companies that they'll wave the toll if you're going to a certain company. So Wal*Mart might pay the fee and get you free access, while Mom&Pop shops can't afford it so you have to pay a toll to visit them. They claim it is necessary because the Mom&Pop shop gets too much traffic and they aren't helping to pay for the roads in your neighborhood, even though the shop is in the next town over and the extra traffic doesn't really cost the road company anything.
And for the second. Imagine that your neighbors are ordering stuff from Amazon. Amazon is making lots of money delivering to the homes. However, they are overloading our neighborhood roads with their vehicles. Our neighborhood roads have become congested because of Amazon. Now Amazon is saying that this congestion is solely our problem. However, since they are the ones making money from our roads, we want them to pay their fair share for profiting from our roads. We are only doing this for big corporations like Amazon who are not paying their fair share and causing us congestion. We have never tried to make mom and pop stores pay this fee.
That's a good scare tactic, but isn't very informative (or necessarily true). Net Neutrality only came into effect on June 12, 2015. I don't think people will recall paying extra to watch Netflix or YouTube before that date (because they weren't). And paying extra probably won't be the effect if net neutrality is rolled back, so it will undermine the argument to reinstate it.
The problem is that we need net neutrality to help balance the power against big vertically integrated Media/ISPs like Comcast and Time Warner. But it is more about the future potential abuse, so people won't care until there is some event that really affects a lot of people.
You didn't see it directly, but that money came out of the same pot that would have paid for more content on Netflix.
http://time.com/80192/netflix-verizon-paid-peering-agreement...
It's not like Netflix moved their servers into Comcast or Verizon data centers and paid for the bandwidth (although they offered and the offer was rejected). How many other internet companies pay the end user ISPs for their peering bandwidth? Why should they? That's what the users are paying for.
I think a clarification would be helpful here. Were they "deliberately undersizing" or were they refusing to to increase capacity to accommodate the surge in additional Netflix traffic without being paid?
This is how Cogent described it, “Comcast refused to continue to augment capacity at our interconnection points as it had done for years prior.”
via: https://qz.com/256586/the-inside-story-of-how-netflix-came-t...
Comcast claims: "Comcast executive vice president David Cohen said Comcast was forced to react when the flow of traffic with Cogent went from roughly equally to Cogent sending five times as much data as Comcast was sending back."
via: http://www.mercurynews.com/2014/05/08/cogent-ceo-comcast-pur...
That's an arbitrary assessment. It is a problem for both sides. Netflix was paying Cogent for bandwidth. Cogent was taking advantage of a peering agreement (peer ~ equal) that was then thrown way out of balance. Netflix switched from paying Cogent to paying Comcast - both sides had obligations to pay for bandwidth from the beginning.
It's not like the consumers could switch to a less dickish provider, they're often a local monopoly. You may also note that there were no repeats of this problem after 2015, even though many high bandwidth services appeared and grew in this time.
You may also note that there were no repeats of this problem after 2015
Implicit in that statement is that there have been no paid peering agreements (the Netflix/Comcast solution) since 2015, which I know for fact is not true.
many high bandwidth services appeared and grew in this time.
Examples? What high bandwidth companies appeared after 2015 that have even 1% of Netflix traffic?
- A company who owns roads, and charges you to drive on them, wants to charge more for highly-used routes.
- A bus company is raising fees on routes with the most riders.
- Cable companies charge more for high-demand "premium" channels.
- Stores charge more for items that are higher in demand.
- Electric utilities charge surge prices during high demand times. So do some ride share taxis.
- Network companies charge more for high-demand connections? Preposterous!
It's rare that businesses will "commute" a fee, like happened for"commuters" in the last century.
I used the bridge metaphor for a while, but unlike bridges there is no maintenance required from increased usage or traffic jam generated from high traffic to netflix or google.
If total traffic increases those costs go up, not if a higher percentage of users access specific sites.
That would be like charging trucks more to cross a certain bridge because there are more cars on the freeway two towns over.
The problem with this analogy is that cable already comes in packages. The key here is that you already pay for the access to all channels. But all of the sudden they see a new revenue stream in restricting access to promote their own properties.
So, it's not the internet that is being regulated: It's ISPs (Net Neutrality is the wrong word to use). You already pay for internet access, so does Netflix. Why all of the sudden would you want to let ISPs charge more for what you are already paying for?
And opponents (Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon, et al.) all say they totally support NN, but oh, they don't want to be forced to obide by it for "reasons". And there are already examples of ISPs (Verizon, namely) throttling others or exempting their traffic (from data charges). Lawmaker opponents keep claiming it's "regulating the internet", but it's not -- it's regulating ISPs since they have mono/duo-polies.
The ultimate irony here, is that this battle is pitched as Silicon Valley vs. the U.S. government, with Silicon Valley fighting for a free and open internet and the government trying to pass legislation to pave the way for private companies to enforce tax policy. But in actuality the battle for a free and open internet has morphed into the people vs. Silicon Valley, with tech companies as the villains in the story.
The arbitrary censorship on social media sites (such as Facebook, and Twitter) has gotten really bad. Platforms like Youtube for content-hosting and Patreon for fundraising have begun demonetizing and delisting their political opponents. Lower level infrastructure such as GoDaddy and Cloudflare have even now begun to enforce political delisting.
Wake up. Private companies are already enforcing a tax on your internet consumption if you are guilty of wrongthink. Whether it's Verizon, Twitter, Patreon or Cloudflare, who cares, it's the same thing.
What the comes down to is an argument on how much agency a company has to control their service if we've deemed their service "critical to the public good."
This take is probably unpopular, but since I haven't seen many of these points and there are some very big players (IBM, Cisco, Juniper, Intel, Ercisson, etc.) that are against net neutrality with some of this reasoning, I'll fill you in some points that you probably won't hear:
1.) Routing traffic does not have equal cost. Peering, load balancing, and other aspects of routing are complex and carriers have people whose livelihoods revolve around handling these issues. A web request to a backwater site a couple hops away from you has nowhere near the load implications that streaming a 2 hour 4k movie has.
2.) Net neutrality is a bad fix for the underlying issue; local/state governments make it exceedingly easy to get a monopoly going with pole attach and franchising rules. Without this monopoly, neutral connections are a constant danger to the incumbent ISP. It is much easier to break into markets with lax regulation like Texas because of how their franchising permits work.
3.) Net neutrality is largely a power play by advertising/media companies that have no appreciable revenue other than pushing content. Facebook, Google, 4chan, etc. need advertising because they have very little value outside it. This obviously isn't an issue if you're Cisco, Intel, or the like, because they have a product other than you.
It's just a blank slate for people to project their political biases on.
[1] https://www.wsj.com/articles/millennials-unearth-an-amazing-...
I got Hulu which I'm not overly happy with. Playstation Vue was a lot better.
It might seem petty, but its important to be specific when reporting scientific results even for pop sci. This article chops and changes between consumers and US citizens a lot which could cause confusion
As for the FCC, Ajit Pai, and Net Neutrality, I'm much more open-minded to the current FCC policy after having listened to him on the latest Recode/Decode podcast. His speaking patterns make him sound like he's an energetic jerk, but I don't disagree with lots of the policy agenda he mentioned. I detest the games they played with the citizen comment submission system and the "cyberattack" they claimed happened, but that seems only tangentially related.
I'm not sure that the FCC is the right instrument to enact net neutrality -- I feel like demolishing arbitration and allowing consumers to sue the crap out of ISPs for unfair competition actions would go further. The FCC has only been good at restricting speech, not protecting it.
Is every packet equal?
Wouldn't that offer a big competitive opportunity for an ISP that supports Net Neutrality?
I'm sorry, what?
While I'm sure you're going to beat a drum about "regulation" and "free markets" it might be worth stepping back and actually assessing the issue from a practical, rather than ideological stance
Utilities naturally gravitate toward monopoly. Would you want to have multiple sewer lines running to your house, because your upstairs bathroom costs more money than downstairs with a different "provider"?
Stringing up competing sets of coax cable, telephone lines or fiber optic cables is a losing proposition for the ISP's themselves
Why subject yourself to competition, when you can simply carve out your own market and be "the" provider in an area? Comcast doesn't want to overlap with Time Warner, because Time Warner is the incumbent provider. Even if Comcast offered a faster internet service, they'd be building their market share from zero
There's a reason why I regularly measure more than what I have contracted, on independent speedtests. It's not inefficiency, it's allowance.
Also, resilency/failover. If one connection goes down, you have a backup. It may be uncommon, but for some people who rely on Internet connectivity, this is useful.
Single provider just can't know best.
Talking about efficiency... For efficiency's sake it may make some sense to move demarcation point a little further, to some mini-PoP in the neighborhood, but to have choice the end-users need to own their lines there, and I'm not sure it's convenient and without the drawbacks.
I worked for an ISP company that grew from a tiny startup, connecting just a few buildings, to a successful ISP that covered a significant part (almost all, I believe) of small (200K) city in Russia.
I haven't really interacted much with our network builders department (worked on software, and left the company some years ago, moving to another city), but IIRC in overall it worked like this - people found our offers interesting and signed up to get their buildings/apartments connected. We chose new addresses we were able to physically reach, got the approval from the building owners and the city, and laid down the wires, extending the network's frontiers.
We laid our own fiber (or, sometimes, copper) and used wireless bridges whenever we weren't able to reach otherwise. We had also leased fiber from other companies (there are companies here that have business just by providing underlying infrastructure but not offering the Internet connectivity). It's not like adding an extra fiber to an existing conduit is comparable to installing a new sewer line.
In the end, having 4-5 actually different ISPs in a building - usually all with their own lines - was (still is) a norm where I had lived. Competing offerings drove prices down, and bad behavior (sans the state-mandated ones) were mostly non-existent.
What's so different in the US, that even Google had failed?
Things like this are not as much an issue in states like Texas that require only one permit to run cable anywhere in the state. Whether or not people would like to admit it, this is a case where we can see with our own eyes regulations are seriously hurting the ability for people to start up and compete, and is the only reason net neutrality is an issue in the first place.
Ignoring Net Neutrality is something that financially benefits ISPs especially when ignored as part of a cartel. When noone does it, noone has the incentive to implement it.
Also, do you really think a new ISP can just appear, dig up new cables, wire up whole swaths of United States without being obstructed by existing ultra-rich companies lobbying in the local and federal government? (It's a rethorical question, here in my county the main Telecom used a lot of dirty tactics to make sure that the competitor had utter hell of a time trying to dig in their FTTH to compete with major telecoms obsolete copper system. The digging and building permits had to be fought on basis of every few city blocks due to bribery and friends in mayors office).
I can't simply move to a different ISP unless I want to give up on most things I do on the internet or move to a new apartment building.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak
The guy practiacally showed Isakson the door.
Man, so close.
From what I can gather the FCC changed some things which might allow groups to do things which may end up worse for end users, at least for a while. Before the FCC "repealed" it, was there a single bill/rule/law called Net Neutrality?
No sarcasm in this question, just pure ignorance- what EXACTLY is Net Neutrailty?
There is a great and easy to follow tutorial from DigitalOcean here: digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-an-openvpn-server-on-ubuntu-16-04.
Edit: It seems as though this post is rubbing people the wrong way. I'm sorry to anyone offended by this post, that was not my intent. In my mind, one can simultaneously watch out for their own safety online and advocate for sensible internet policy.
A couple situations where it will help you: The justice department issues a subpoena for your IP address because you visited a website about a protest, your ISP wants to sell your internet history to the highest bidder.
I am fully cognizant that we need to be working on NN at a collective level but individual protection is incredibly important in 2017.
Edit: To answer the comment below that I cannot reply to -- I am the VPN provider and I wouldn't do me like that.
I... I don't do this anymore. I've found myself overburdened with support calls when the tech I've configured invariable breaks. Whether it's weeks or months later. Even if what I've configured isn't the culprit, I'm still on the hook. This is actually one of the reasons why I recommend Apple products to the least tech-saavy in my circles. Just so I can direct them to Apple Support later on...
This led to what was probably one of the dumbest things I've ever done.
Wanting to be nice, I fixed a new neighbor's computer. I then fixed another, and another, and it kept going. For an area with so little population, I was shocked by the numbers.
The good news is that this drove me back to Linux. Now, I can truthfully tell them that I don't use their OS and am not qualified to fix their problem.
Still, don't fix someone's computer. Certainly don't do it for free.