Comment by xrange | Hacker News Reader

Comment by xrange | Hacker News Reader

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As an American, with an uncertain dog in this fight, could someone explain the pro side to net neutrality? I can certainly see that in theory if your ISP is providing you a bit pipe, they shouldn't treat different bits differently. But the status quo seems like it has been working remarkably well for the last 20 years (at least from my perspective). It seems like the big hub-bub is that one of the hated cable companies is slowing down Netflix traffic to extract a ransom from Netflix.

A.) Is this really a government concern that potentially some people won't be able to stream "House of Cards" without buffering? And then we're also worried about the fact that your ISP could decide at some time in the future to pull the same extortion stunt on other services that are less trivial (examples of the worst case scenario might be good, and why it hasn't happened so far).

B.) Apparently there exists a technical fix by using a VPN, so then if you are really inconvenienced, you could use this, or potentially another ISP (satellite seems like it should be available to most people with only one cable provider, right?).

C.) Why wouldn't the customers complain to/blame their ISPs just as much as Netflix? I have a hard time caring about the plight of either the big cable companies or Netflix (or Facebook, Google, any other billion dollar enterprise).

...I'm know I'm ignorant on this issue, but I can't help to think that both sides are blowing things out of proportion.

> It seems like the big hub-bub is that one of the hated cable companies is slowing down Netflix traffic to extract a ransom from Netflix.

The combination of limitation choice and blocking policies are actually the big thing -- Netflix specifically and "ransom"/paid prioritization are recent aspects of that debate, but it really goes back to things like Comcast blocking Bittorrent, and many ISPs having rules governing what kind of applications users are permitted to use on their connection.

> Is this really a government concern that potentially some people won't be able to stream "House of Cards" without buffering?

No, the government concern is that incumbent ISPs (who often face very little local competition) will use blocking and/or paid prioritization policies to inhibit competition with their own services (many of the major incumbents also offer their own services, like streaming video services, cable TV service, phone service, etc., for which services offered over the public internet by other providers are competition.)

> Apparently there exists a technical fix by using a VPN

In the absence of the no-blocking rule, VPNs could be blocked by ISPs, thwarting this workaround.

> Why wouldn't the customers complain to/blame their ISPs just as much as Netflix?

Lack of significant competition means that you don't have to care that people are complaining to or blaming you.

>it really goes back to things like Comcast blocking Bittorrent, and many ISPs having rules governing what kind of applications users are permitted to use on their connection.

...I'm not up to speed on Bittorrent, but are they specifically blocking Bittorrent, or is coming under the ruberic of "thou shall not run a server behind your cable modem"? Certainly I can see that the 'net is supposed to be peer-to-peer and your server shouldn't be blocked from your residential connection, but can't you usually upgrade to a "business" package and get around those limitations? On the one hand I suppose you could get mad at having to pay extra for the "full" internet. On the other hand I suppose that someone could equally say that they're offering a discount for offering less services.

I'm interested to know what other sorts of things/applications ISPs may be blocking. Is there a name-and-shame site out there listing various ISPs and what they don't allow. Kind of a Consumer Reports for ISPs? And I suppose someone has crunched the numbers and knows what percentage of people are only served by one broadband supplier. Is it 10% of the population who can't get DSL, wireless, satellite or some other form of competition of some kind?

> I'm not up to speed on Bittorrent, but are they specifically blocking Bittorrent, or is coming under the ruberic of "thou shall not run a server behind your cable modem"?

Maybe try googling before you comment? Comcast would inject forged TCP rst packets to inbound bittorrent connections. It did not send these packets to people running servers or other peer-to-peer protocols. In fact, people complained that the resets would sometimes prevent Windows Remote Desktop from working and Comcast adjusted their system to prevent it from jamming.

https://www.eff.org/wp/packet-forgery-isps-report-comcast-af...

> I'm interested to know what other sorts of things/applications ISPs may be blocking. Is there a name-and-shame site out there listing various ISPs and what they don't allow.

The current issue isn't really blocking, it's throttling. There are a couple of sites that do this sort of measurements. Look at http://www.measurementlab.net/

> Is it 10% of the population who can't get DSL, wireless, satellite or some other form of competition of some kind?

The FCC's current definition of broadband is 25mbps.

Vast majority of DSL isn't broadband speed (Avg is 10Mbps.) 4g isn't broadband speed (~12Mbps). Satellite isn't broadband speed (~15Mbps and usually expensive compared to wired.)

At 25mbps, 20% have no service and 55% have only one service.

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/09/most-of-the-us-has-n...

Thanks for that informative link about the number of providers and the speed links. I wonder what the velocity of those numbers is, or how fast the average speed available is increasing. Also, I am enjoying my advancing years quite a bit. <you need to read this next part in the Ernest P. Worrell lecturing mode (look him up)> You kids and your making a federal issue about only having one provider of 25Mbps for your you-tubes, and your corporately produced circuses. Talk about a first world problem. Back in my day we had 9600bps, and by golly we were grateful to have that. Get off my lawn ;-)

Are you serious, there are developing nations with better internet than America. This isn't about how great 'murica is, it's about how because of a lack of competition, American internet is about to become a liability. My first modem was 600 baud, so cut the old man crap.

A perfect job for the FTC.

Net neutrality is the way things ran for most of the last 20 years. This is less of a change but a return to what worked well in the recent past. The reason we are even discussing this topic is that telecoms are moving away from net neutrality.

A) What happens if your ISP blocks all VOIP traffic unless you buy their phone service bundle? Or throttle all streaming video (which competes with their cable offerings)? In other markets these would be seen as an abuse of monopoly power (which, in many local markets, telecoms are). Given that, is indeed a government concern.

B) Any workaround is trivially blocked by the ISP.

C) It isn't obvious to the consumer why a site is slow, especially if some competing sites do pay the extra fees ISPs are asking for. Again, local monopolies (and oligopolies) mean that telecoms don't have much incentive to make their customers happier: at this point nobody is going to forgo internet service entirely.

As far as billion dollar enterprises are concerned, Google, Facebook, or Skype could have been squashed in their infancy. AOL search would be the best we ever got - or the only search engine that AOL users could access: there's no incentive to improve when you're the only option.

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