ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Internet rules, critics say
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I don't think there's necessarily a problem with having multiple service tiers where low latency/jitter or high throughput is only guaranteed on a higher tier. But if the network is rigged so that low-tier customers get a bad experience even in low-demand conditions, there's almost certainly some unethical fuckery going on. Basically, there's probably some point where "best effort" needs to be imposed as a baseline rather than a premium option.
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/blogs/company-town-blog/sto...
The problem is when there is no effective market for price competition.
With a competitive market, prices will naturally drop to approximately efficient resource allocation
And McDonald's can charge more for people who roll through the drive-thru in expensive cars, then do a soft-pull through the payment processor, then pay a 3rd party for your current income, then get your credit score, then scan your twitter history for controversial posts, then lower prices for customers who spend equally at Burger King, then raise prices for people who are bad for the bottom line such those who vote for more govt regulation... or maybe democrats in general.
I mean, the goal is to maximize profits, so there's nothing wrong with that. Everybody needs individualized probing to determine the price they can bear as individuals. That's market competition for you - efficient resource extraction.
Gamers have no idea what they are talking about. They will blame the ISP, the gaming company, the "servers", the "net code", or anything other than themselves. They will tie up your support lines until you just give them this little win so you're not wasting all your money listening to them complain.
For gaming traffic, it should absolutely be prioritised because reduced lag provides the best experience.
Having said that, given there is such a small amount of traffic produced from gaming, why not just make it prioritised already?
I don't mind so much if I can pay for improved latency, but if the standard service provided is purposefully degraded to justify it then that's when it's iffy
There would also need to be some serious data to support an actual benefit compared to the standard latency
Because that's what's happening with datacaps, they are charging hundreds of dollars per month because there is no unlimited data on gigabit connections.
Meanwhile, in Italy you at 5€/month for 50gb of phone internet. And that's sticker price!
1 - high priority, but very and really small bandwidth (usually depending on the line tech: xDSL, cable or fiber). Usually enough bandwidth for an handful of audio calls/game traffic streams. The client is in charge of that QOS on its domestic network though.
2 - the best effort lane.
Namely, the ISP would have to enforce that QOS at the modem, or line collect, namely as close to the client as possible.
IPv[46] has the TOS field for that with diffserv (other?). IPv6 could tell the ISP fine grained traffic requirements with pre-defined standard IPv6 labels.
There is no reasonable reasons the ISP would charge for the "fast lane". It should be default and neutral to as many ISPs as possible and ISP transits/peerings should keep the priority of the fast lane.
Since the bandwidth would be limited early the network hierarchy and omega shmol, this means little to no incentive to cheat on it.
That would unlock "for almost sure" high quality audio communications (with the encrypted audio stream protocol chosen by the user software/hardware) and ultra fast gaming on domestic line internet.
It's still "neutral" within the rationale of net neutrality, because the ISP isn't enforcing what lanes get used for what, the customer has total control.
It's not much in comparison to watching 4K footages, but it's an order of magnitude higher than 30megabytes.
On any tiered system with enough adoption there's a strong incentive to make the lower tiers worse to upsell to the higher tiers. It's going to be like the TSA tiers.
What companies want, is to be able to invest with ISPs to ensure they have optimised capacity available to ensure their service works well. Now, the issue then becomes: does the ISP use that as an excuse to neglect their own investments in public peering, or backhaul and only optimise for paying partners?
In that respect, as an internet user and competitor to others, I'd definitely want all ISPs to be accountable for ensuring their networks have capacity to meet the demands of their users at a baseline level. But if someone wants to invest over and above that, then I don't believe that's a bad thing.
What I also object to is ISPs holding us, as services, to ransom, saying "if you want to deliver to our customers, you have to pay for transit." this is increasingly something that ISPs are pushing for around the world. In theory they want it to be a tax on content providers that funds their networks, ultimately the customers pays, but it's the ISPs double dipping. They charge consumers for their internet connection and then want to charge the content providers for you using it.
Sometimes I'll randomly open something with Chrome by mistake and just seeing 70% of the article filled with pop-up ads makes my brain just shuts down thinking about regular people.
The only real exception I can think of is that Google Meet's audio quality has recently been worse under Firefox than under Safari's. My guess is that the issue is on Google's end (since Firefox used to be fine), or that maybe Safari has access to some special microphone APIs.
For example, the audio in FF outside of Apple sounds real clear and overall great in my experience.
Some Javascript or maybe Canvas heavy pages run much more slowly on Firefox and are almost unusable on Firefox for Android. I find that this is rare, though.
I'll keep using Firefox + uBlock + Personal Blocklist + Dark Reader + Disable Javascript + Disable CSS + Tampermonkey + Old Reddit Redirect + CORS Everywhere + Consent-O-Matic + Hide YouTube Shorts + Load Reddit Images Directly + ...
Please cite some actual examples.
Not even in the slightest.
* My current ISP offers greater than 1000/1000 fiber for a smaller monthly payment than my first home broadband connection in 2003. Adjust for inflation it's probably 1/2 the cost while being over 50 times better. It's incomparable to the dial up before then.
* I don't see a lot of ads on the internet. If I see an ad on a website I either upgrade my adblock or I stop going to that website.
* I don't have a ton of subscription services. If you were to tally my subscription services and weigh them against what I previously used for competing services I am saving a ton of money. Cable TV, DVDs, and CDs were expensive.
* It's so casual and fun to jump on a voice call with a group of friends to play a game, or someone shares a screen of an anime and we have a little movie night. It's so easy to see what games my friends are playing. It's so easy to watch any movie I want, or listen to any song that I want, or play any game I want. The tools to have fun online are way better than ever.
* It's possible to learn about anything I am curious about. You can do everything, from getting a highschool level lecture to read the latest research from the top researchers. I often find experts willing to answer my questions, even though I am coming in as a complete stranger.
* I absolutely love the move towards more independent publishing. The number of interesting people I follow on twitter, or youtube, or watch on twitch is insane. Before the internet media felt like a monoculture with everyone watching the same 40 channels on TV every night. I'm subscribed to indie newsletters instead of magazines. I'm watching Starcraft 2 tournaments instead of the superbowl. Some of this was around before the internet, but it's much more now and the long term trend is looking great.
* I can get involved in so many interesting conversations, and I rarely have problems finding interesting conversations to listen in on or join in on. People from all walks of life, with all kinds of perspectives.
- If the industry gets its way, adblockers will become illegal or practically unusable.
- I get the impression you don't shy away from pirating. For those that don't engage in it, for one reason or another, it's a lot harder to e.g., watch any movie they want. What service is it? How much? Is it available in your country? Is something you saw was on there last week still there? Etc. This also generally applies to most other forms of media (games, music, etc)
- Screensharing for movie nights and such is slowly becoming more difficult, as more services implement DRM which disables capturing video (or even screenshots?!) from a stream
Again, I don't agree that the Internet is dying, or it's become a "monoculture," or anything like that - but we do have to be wary of the direction some groups would love to take it.
But at the least some providers are helping it with "watch together" offerings. Although at moment its pretty limited and not great experience. But it's not like they aren't making progress toward improving that (though glacier and painfully slow)
100% agree, and this has been true since I've been a netizen.
I think aside from GSL, the only major SC2 tournament still standing is ESL which got bought by the Saudis.
Personally, I watch ASL, the major Brood War tournament. But even though that has more Korean viewership than SC2, it's still declining in public interest and increasingly becoming unsustainable.
Internet pricing really hasn't changed at all all that much and my speeds have improved drastically from the "internet of old". Not to the speeds your getting but enough to show a dramatic improvement from what was before (50/50mbps).
Apart from the quality of websites themselves with ads, what we can do with the internet has improved immensely.
I follow one and the missus another, and inevitably both have their rights bought by different companies so (at least) two subscription services are required for following live events.
Anyway, one argument they make is that people can use 5G for their home broadband. From what I've seen, that doesn't actually work in practice. Even though there are cell towers, once the telcos pull out, there's nothing to plug the cell tower into, so you end up with lots of 5G bars, but 2G speeds. Either way, it's a good story, and it helps extract more profits.
Bank regulators would “retire” after a deregulation push then banking industry would so happen to hire that same person as some midlevel executive or director. GS was infamous for this [1]
Wonder if we see the same between telcos/major ISPs and FCC
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20140220160810/http://www.nytime...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolving_door_(politics)
https://archive.nytimes.com/mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2...
> Second, that the company repeatedly promised reliable, “no buffering,” “no lag” internet, especially to services like Netflix or to online games like League of Legends, but was in fact purposefully letting the interconnections between TWC and outside companies degrade to an alarming degree — unless the companies, like Netflix, were willing to start paying for access to TWC customers.
> https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/02/time-warner-cable-la...
Several years ago, emergency personnel in california were dismayed when their consumer grade plan didn't give them good service in an emergency. There was a big stink about it, but requiring the provider to eat the cost when the government doesn't pay for what they need is short sighted. Those emergency personnel were unprepared, and they tried to shift blame for their foolhardiness.
It may be possible to give everyone the same emergency grade service for the same price, but that price will be extremely high.
It may be possible to give everyone the same low jitter, low latency experience that gamers want, but the cost will be higher for people who don't care about such things.
With that said - many of you already pay for "enhanced" video over cellular data connections - and few gripe about it.
I'm all for open, dumb pipes and all, but the mobile device space is very crowded as it is, and it's really not a lot of fun to have Google Maps fail to load when you're in a crowded area because a ton of people are posting on Instagram or playing Fruit Ninja.
What difference does it make? If they're allowed to deprioritize certain connections over 5G, how long until they're allowed to do it over any connection?
And I've never heard of "enhanced video over data" - is that a US only thing?
> and it's really not a lot of fun to have Google Maps fail to load when you're in a crowded area because a ton of people are posting on Instagram or playing Fruit Ninja.
You have very mixed messaging - first you say that it only affects some types of connections (with the implication that it's a bad thing, but at least it won't affect everyone), but now you're turning around to say it's a good thing, actually. The reason why we should advocate for ISPs to be blind to whether someone's using Instagram or Google Maps is because, if they're not, it won't be used for the benefit of the consumer like you imagine. It will be immediately used to segment the internet into pieces and charge customers separately for it, as just another way of squeezing more money.
Most budget carriers in the US, and even some plans on premium carriers only serve 720p video unless you get a higher tier plan. The reasons are data consumption.
> You have very mixed messaging - first you say that it only affects some types of connections (with the implication that it's a bad thing, but at least it won't affect everyone), but now you're turning around to say it's a good thing, actually.
QoS is a good thing. If you talk on a VOIP phone, you reasonably expect the other person to hear you clearly - not garbled and choppy. On congested networks, sometimes the network has to decide which packets to drop or slow down. They can do it indiscriminately, or they can do it by need, with realtime communications clearly being a higher priority than a large file upload for example. QoS is nothing new, and it's likely already done by your ISP.
> It will be immediately used to segment the internet into pieces and charge customers separately for it, as just another way of squeezing more money.
Then, I wonder, why it has not already been done? ISP's have been free to do this since day one of the internet. Why just now?
The ideas around "net neutrality" are complex, and unfortunately don't mean the same thing to two different people. Fearmongering about some dystopian future internet has got a lot of people's feathers ruffled, mostly over nothing in my opinion.
It's not unreasonable for ISP's in general to charge people based on consumption. We already do this with bandwidth, after all. However, until the day where egress traffic is entirely free, there is costs associated with consumption in both terms of bandwidth and data size. Networks have finite bandwidth, and the faster someone's connection is and the more data they consume, the more of these finite resources they prevent other customers from accessing.
I've not argued against QoS in general - of course the network has its limits. The thing I'm arguing against is that the power to discriminate between internet traffic based on its origin, not on the exact way the bandwidth is used in general. To my knowledge, the former isn't being done, yet.
> Then, I wonder, why it has not already been done? ISP's have been free to do this since day one of the internet. Why just now?
That's similar to asking why companies haven't implemented every anti-consumer practice imaginable to squeeze out the most money yet. <Major food producer> could've shrunken their product's packaging by 15% while retaining the same price two years ago, so why are they only doing it now? My guess is that, for one, this could be legally problematic in some countries. Also, if your competition isn't also switching to this model, your services would become a lot less desired. However, as the population of internet users nears 100% in first-world countries all while the ISPs require constantly increasing profits, I can easily foresee something like this coming in the future.
It would be a guaranteed money-maker - create more plans, where connection is throttled unless you're connecting to a Preferred Website, then ask companies to pay up to speed up their websites and upcharge users to get access to the full internet.
> It's not unreasonable for ISP's in general to charge people based on consumption.
Well, then they can do that. Consumption-based internet plans are extremely common - in some countries, even "unlimited" plans can even end up as "several terabytes of data and then severely throttled" plans. Still, I don't see where the ability to discriminate based on what website you're connecting to comes in.
Even then, it's very debatable that this is actually something that we need - given the present-day situation where internet usage is at an all-time high and ISPs seemingly have no issues building and supporting networks that make up for the average bandwidth that they can expect to use, limiting those services (barring a sudden explosion in average bandwidth use) would seem like price-gouging rather than rationing a limited service.
https://www.att.com/support/article/wireless/KM1169198
https://www.t-mobile.com/support/plans-features/activate-hd-...
2. Unless the cell tower is already overloaded, that wouldn't even matter, would it?
3. Even if it is overloaded, if everyone is deprioritized, nobody would be. Even if they prioritized gaming, that's not going to noticeably affect anyone else.
The way I see it, even if cellular companies found a way to implement this, it would only affect people to the extent they're not already giving QoS priority to gamers. And gaming is pretty indistinguishable from a voice call anyway, so they would have to break that at the same time.
> With the no-throttling rule, we ban conduct that is not outright blocking, but inhibits the delivery of particular content, applications, or services, or particular classes of content, applications, or services. Likewise, we prohibit conduct that impairs or degrades lawful traffic to a non-harmful device or class of devices. We interpret this prohibition to include, for example, any conduct by a BIAS [Broadband Internet Access Service] provider that impairs, degrades, slows down, or renders effectively unusable particular content, services, applications, or devices, that is not reasonable network management. Our interpretation of "throttling" encompasses a wide variety of conduct that could impair or degrade an end user's ability to access content of their choosing; thus, we decline commenters' request to modify the rule to explicitly include positive and negative discrimination of content.
2. Face public backlash
3. Roll back your plans
4. Wait a few years, repeat steps 1-3 and face slightly less backlash every time - eventually it's gonna work out for you and then we're never going back