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Good. The thing is that network “fast lanes” work by slowing down all other lanes.
It’s responsible for the last few years of streaming price hikes. ISPs throttle streaming services, then customers complain. Streaming services pay for fast lanes, then pass the cost on to customers.
Fuck Ajit Pai and his orange overlord.
If it wasn’t so goddamn infuriating, all of these “free market” enthusiasts trying to argue that introducing artificial scarcity into the market to try to game the whole system would be kinda hilarious.
See also “deregulation” types arguing for even more stringent regulation of unions.
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Gotta love how ISPs were told they can’t slow some things down, so they thought they could get away with speeding other things up instead.
The thing that told them they can’t slow things down is Net Neutrality. That’s what this is. It was created under Obama, repealed under Trump, then reinstated under Biden. They didn’t speed up anything. The law was repealed, so they went back to price gouging large data users.
I wonder if this would affect speed tests. I know using Ookla’s speed test is inaccurate because ISPs change speeds when connected to certain servers.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The Federal Communications Commission clarified its net neutrality rules to prohibit more kinds of fast lanes.
While the FCC voted to restore net neutrality rules on April 25, it didn’t release the final text of the order until yesterday.
The final rule “prohibits ‘fast lanes’ and other favorable treatment for particular applications or content even when the edge provider isn’t required to pay for it… For example, mobile carriers will not be able to use network slicing to offer broadband customers a guaranteed quality of service for video conferencing from some companies but not others,” said Michael Calabrese, director of the Open Technology Institute’s Wireless Future Project.
Under the draft version of the rules, the FCC would have used a case-by-case approach to determine whether specific implementations of what it called “positive discrimination” would harm consumers.
Under the original plan, “there was no way to predict which kinds of fast lanes the FCC might ultimately find to violate the no-throttling rule,” she wrote.
Any plan to put certain apps into a fast lane will presumably be on hold for as long as the current net neutrality rules are enforced.
The original article contains 765 words, the summary contains 189 words. Saved 75%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
“Fast lanes” have always been bullshit.
If you’re paying for 100mbps, and the person you’re talking to is paying for 100mpbs, and you’re not consistently getting 100mbps between you, then at least one of you is getting ripped off. This reality where you can pay extra money to make sure the poors don’t get in the way of your packets has never been the one we live in.
Of course, there are definitely people who are getting ripped off, but “fast lanes” are just an additional avenue by which to rip them off a little more; not a single provider who’s currently failing to provide the speed they advertise is planning to suddenly spend money fixing that and offering a new tier on their suddenly-properly-provisioned internet, if only net neutrality would go away.
As Bill Burr said, I don’t know all the ins and outs, but I know you’re not trying to make less money.
Fucking yes. This is genuinely a HUGE win.
Yay, spam email servers now have full speed. Spam away! You do realize prioritizing traffic is kind of the network norm right? NN was one of those, let’s fix a problem that doesn’t actually exist. You know that right?!?
Network neutrality became policy after Comcast, Verizon, and ATT were all caught throttling Netflix while their own competing services were lagging behind in market share. It was a response to a real problem that was harming competitors and consumers.
That’s a real problem for sure, but I’m not a fan of the solution.
They should have been found guilty of anticompetitive behaviour and split up into multiple companies.
Here in Australia we’ve gone down that path though there was no actual lawsuit. We just saw problems starting to creep in and dealt with it proactively. The vast majority of network infrastructure is now owned by a company called “NBN Co” (National Broadband Network) which is required to provide the best available network technology to every single household/business in the country. All pre-existing network operators were forced to sell their infrastructure to NBN Co and any business can provide services to anyone for a reasonable fee paid to NBN Co. Mostly it’s broadband internet, but literally anything can go over the pipes. The fee varies depending on the bandwidth and QoS level.
They are also investing in network upgrades, including state of the art DSL routers that can run at decent speeds for most people (I get about 80Mbps) and all new connections are Fibre as well as existing connections are gradually moving to Fibre (on those, you can usually get 10Gbps). Each building can have multiple connections, at least four but large buildings obviously get more. If you live in the middle of the desert with no wired networking at all, then you get a wireless one. Satellite if necessary, though usually it will be “fixed wireless” which is basically cellular with large/high quality a rooftop antenna.
NBN Co is tax payer funded, but mostly only to accelerate fibre installations. Aside from that upfront capital expenditure it is profitable and some of those profits are paying off the tax payer’s uprfront investment.
Net neutrality is just Common Carrier rules as applied to the Internet. It’s frankly a no-brainer.
Your proposal should definitely also have been done – allowing telecoms to also produce content at all is a massive conflict of interest and should never have been allowed in the first place – but it doesn’t obviate to also regulate the pure telecoms even after the breakup.
The thing is there are no pure telecoms anymore. There’s a company that maintains underground infrastructure and gets paid when that infrastructure is used, and is incentivised to upgrade the infrastructure because they make more money if it’s used more.
And there are thousand of companies that benefit from the infrastructure, and they can charge customers pretty much whatever they want… though it better not be an excessively high price because every ISP, even a tiny one with a single employee, can provide service nationwide at the same raw cost as a telco with tens of millions of customers.
The difference between what we have done, and net neutrality, is our system provides an open book profit motive to upgrade the network. Net Neutrality doesn’t do that.
Fundamentally there is a natural monopoly in that once every street in a suburb is connected, then why would anyone invest in digging up the footpath and gardens to run a second wired connection to every house? The original provider would have to provide awful service to justify that, and they can simply respond to a threat of a new network by improving service just enough (maybe only temporarily), for that new investor to run for the hills.
Net Neutrality stops blatant abuse. But it doesn’t encourage good behaviour. Our NBN does both.
The type of traffic shaping you are thinking off can still be done under net nutrailty and was never an issue.
The things NN is trying to “solve” was never an issue either
Net neutrality is the status quo, it’s not trying to “solve” anything
Then it shouldn’t be an issue to implement it then right?
Bless your heart
Bless your heart
