Should an E911 call or tele-surgery packets really be treated the same as Netflix? Net neutrality forces the ISP to do that and that seems like madness to me.
We don't want every administration for the next 100 years to treat the internet as a victim of regulatory abuse, pushing it and pulling it towards their vision of "beautiful".
But the real issue here is that the need for net neutrality is a symptom and not the root disease.
The disease that needs to be solved is a complete lack of competition in the ISP market. Service providers could differentiate themselves by QoS.
You wouldn't need a net neutrality law if you had competition.
I don’t buy this argument because you not only need competition, you need a market with perfect information. Net neutrality buzzes on in the sidelines. I would wager that the majority of customers would not care if their ISP limited certain types of packets and would not attempt to switch ISPs (that is, if they even can switch).
So you can have net neutrality be removed, and nobody care that it was removed, but still be in a much worse position than before.
Similarly, the PATRIOT act was passed, and "nobody" cared. That doesn't mean that nothing changed.
And it's origin/destination that ISPs demonstrably want to prioritize by.
Why not? It costs my ISP more to deliver certain packets than others. Sending a packet from San Francisco to San Jose is far cheaper than sending one from San Francisco to Sydney. Internet traffic costs are not the same across the world. Transit pricing in Australia is probably the most expensive in the world - it's roughly 20x higher than in the US. Why should ISPs be forced to pretend all traffic costs the same, when in reality it doesn't?
So, yeah, that transit cost is already accounted for in your monthly internet bill.
Also, it's not productive to try and pretend that the prices levied by ISPs have anything to do with their costs; like all capitalism-born companies their prices are based on what the market will bear. Municipal broadband providers have proven that cost is nothing but a red herring used to justify prices and a lack of innovation.
Technically yes, but in many cases the ISPs are essentially the same company as the network provider. Xfinity is the ISP and Comcast is the network provider. Uverse is the ISP and AT&T is the network provider. Same with Fios and Verizon. Network providers do not want to be ISPs for legal benefits.
>That transit cost is already accounted for in your monthly internet bill.
While true, this doesn't address the issue I have with the current pricing model. The current internet pricing model is similar to an all-you-can-eat buffet, with a limit to the rate at which you can grab food, and how many pounds of food you can take per month. The issue is, a person who takes 5 pounds of pasta pays the same price as someone who takes 5 pounds of lobster. Under net neutrality, ISPs can't price based off food cost, and can only price based off weight. This leads to unfair pricing situations, as exampled above.
It is possible to come up with more nonsensical examples with even larger cost discrepancies. Under your idea, should sending a packet across the street cost the same price as sending a packet to Mars? The first relies on $X0,000 of infrastructure costs, while the second relies on billions.
The idea that 'pricing based off a packet's source or destination should not matter' makes sense in a world where all packets (or food in this example) are free, however, in the real world all packets have a cost associated with them.
And in your E911 example, there are already ways for this to be solved without requiring censorship or throttling of data on the public networks. You can already buy life-/safety-critical bandwidth that is "off-Internet bands", if you need it - the point is, this isn't lumped with the 'general public Internet'.
So in effect these messages would only arrive 33% faster. Not to mention the cost of having to monitor traffic and the additional charge to do so on the consumer in comparison to the "anarchic" TCP model we have now.
The last time we bad this conversation when Verizon first sued for the rules to be dropped. Level 3 showed that the apparent need to create these fast lanes were due to an artificial bottleneck created by isps to throttle Netflix. When the new rules passed, the version that went in still allowed for these fast lanes to be created, but only through the supervision of the chairman. Whichb was a win for isms, despite the internet community cheering.
Also included I the original title 2 is that you would not have a data cap and yo u would be charged for the internet you use versus a bulk sum every month. Articles around this time showed that after subsidies and tax credits to build infrastructure. It took TWC only a $1.24 to supply a custoomer internet access in which they charged $49.99. This included all operating costs.
On average, yes, but in the event where a malicious attacker completely DoSes the network with packets, the prioritized packets would be more than 33% faster than average.
An operator like Verizon, for example, that runs phone service (including emergency calls) over the same lines as their standard internet service pretty much has to prioritize packet types differently. This is expected and understood by all parties.
The Net Neutrality that people are up in arms about is related to limiting traffic of the same class based on which endpoints are involved. For example, Verizon cannot throttle (or worse, outright block) HTTP traffic to Netflix/Hulu/Youtube to 1KB/s to drive users to their own competing service.
I recently moved to Texas and was surprised and rather impressed at their two-layered electrical market. There is one "power distribution company" for an entire region, regulated (I assume) by the state/county. I never do business with them, but they hook my building up to the grid and maintain the lines. Then I choose a power generating company from a wealth of plans and providers, based on whatever criteria I care about.
Doing something similar for internet service would be fantastic, but still requires neutrality from the last-mile infrastructure. Apparently in the UK they've managed something like this through something called local-loop unbundling, which I assume is part of why we don't hear so much about NN from over there.
I would love to see something like that in the US; ISPs will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
The problems here come from ISP's that won't upgrade their infrastructure to support the demand, because they are trying to maximize profits, and see advantages to being able to charge/extort fees from actors they think can afford it (netflix for example) or they feel are competing with their own offerings.
Oh well .. that's the america we live in now.
You need regulation in markets like.