Certain messaging apps...
All bets are on centralized and/or proprietary ones that can afford to pay for the privilege. I have been saying from day one that Starlink is well poised to end net neutrality.
All bets are on centralized and/or proprietary ones that can afford to pay for the privilege. I have been saying from day one that Starlink is well poised to end net neutrality.
If you're a firefighter trying to call for assistance from base camp, you don't care about net neutrality. You want your emergency phone call to have priority over everything else. You want the net to be extremely non-neutral.
On the general internet, where bandwidth is plentiful, net neutrality can keep certain pathological things from being a thing. On a specialized network where bandwidth is very scarce, it can be the cause of pathology.
Or not.
App like Silence (https://silence.im/) have been able to do secure e2e messaging using SMS as transport layer for almost one decade now.
How is that even related ?
Silence is the equivalent of Signal over SMS instead of the usual Mobile Data: There is nothing by design in Signal to stay anonymous.
E2E encryption are mainly there to prevent eyes dropping, not to provide anonymity.
A journalist or a dissident may wish to get critical communications out from a remote area without exposing their identity or location.
Not all emergencies are the same.
I somehow doubt for instance they would have a way to allow a federated and often self-hosted messaging protocol like Matrix over an anonymization networking layer like Tor, which is the only chat solution I use.
Breaking net neutrality even a little bit has consequences like creating network effects further favoring centralized solutions forcing vulnerable people like journalists, dissidents, female healthcare seekers, etc, to take on a lot more risk.
If SpaceX has bandwidth limitations they should cap everyone to dialup speeds and keep it neutral.
If they insist on breaking net neutrality, people like me will be forced to do stupid nonsense like piping arbitrary TCP/IP as base64 blobs via chatbots over some whitelisted app like Whatsapp. Or masquerade traffic as port 53 DNS queries like dnstunnel.
Protocol/app whitelisting will most discriminate against those with low technical ability.
We have been down this road.
https://techcrunch.com/2020/03/18/lynk-sends-the-first-text-...
I believe they have some sort of similar solution in place for free messaging on in-flight wifi. Having a look at how they've done that might give a better idea for what this will look like than speculation.
Still, it's a hard problem. They want to prioritise connectivity on an extremely low bit-rate channel that covers an extremely large geographic region. Messaging apps needs to be a part of that connectivity solution, but you can't have one user making the entire cell unusable by everybody else. I don't know if there is a 'net neutral' way to do that, but would love to hear your ideas.
If they can afford to support whitelisted messengers at a very limited data rate of 1k/s then they can afford to simply give people 1k/s of neutral internet access to use to communicate whatever data they feel is high value enough to fit over those constraints using any protocol they wish.
We already have internet access over HAM radio via net44. Highly bandwidth restrictive because of physics, but you can get a permanent IP assigned to your callsign and use whatever software you want with your tiny bandwidth pipe even in the middle of the ocean.
There is also the difference between free and paid. Sure, if you're paying, you should be able to do whatever you want at the advertised speed and data limits. But for a free feature, I think it's alright to limit to SMS and other texting apps (already done on inflight wifi and it works just fine).
Why not just limit to SMS? Because travelers' home carriers might levy roaming charges on SMS, and WhatsApp / Telegram / iMessage is already de facto in most of the world.
A central party trying to decide what data is most important is going to be wrong when it counts most.
If a single user is monopolizing all bandwidth and a new user joins, throttle the existing user in half to make room.
There might also need to be a way to signal a need for emergency bandwidth, 911 style, that can give you priority access for a short time window, with the option for a carrier to cut off your device IMEI entirely if it is used too frequently.