European ISPs Ask ITU To Limit Net Neutrality 120
judgecorp writes "The UN telecoms body, ITU, is busy writing new regulations for international telecoms — and European service providers, through their body ETNO have urged ITU to enshrine a two-tier Internet by defining a right for service providers to charge more for end-to-end quality of service, as opposed to best efforts connection. The two-tier Internet is opposed by Net Neutrality advocates, and has been outlawed in the Netherlands."
Re:Bell heads vs net heads. (Score:5, Informative)
No, guaranteed end-to-end quality is a private trunk line from point to point. This is basically not useful for general communication except in very rare situations. I can't imagine anyone sane being willing to pay for it unless the service providers deliberately add jitter or otherwise attempt to disrupt typical use of normal connections to force the issue, which is why the ITU should absolutely not recommend such an ill-advised concept.
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So high-speed traders aren't sane? I've heard they're not ethical, and that we're not sane for allowing it, but never that they're insane...
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That's a rare situation. Most folks don't buy a special trunk to the exchange, because most people don't have those sorts of requirements. Other reasonable examples of private trunk lines include companies setting up video feeds for later broadcast, big companies setting up high-speed multi-city intranet systems, etc. None of these are the typical things that most companies or individuals would do, however.
Either way, by "I can't imagine anyone sane being willing to pay for it", the "it" didn't refer to
Re:Bell heads vs net heads. (Score:4, Insightful)
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There are protocols that offer guaranteed Quality of service, without dedicating all the bandwidth. If not all of the bandwidth is used, other applications can use the spare capacity. This is something that can be provided relatively inexpensively, to varying levels.
Preventing an ISP adding jitter to force people into using this would be hard, but Net Neutrality is an absolute ban on the protocols and that seems overkill.
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They wouldn't deliberatly add jitter - that would be legally problematic, and very embarassing if the policy were leaked.
Sort of like how everyone quit using Comcast after it was discovered they were using Sandvine to interfere with Lotus 123 users?
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Why should they get to charge you money for what should be a basic feature of any conformant network?
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They want the net to be neutral, just not too neutral, and for everyone except them.
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End to end quality
Ever get an "all circuits are busy" message? Just different granularity during congestion. Instead of per packet, it's per connection.
TWO WORDS. (Score:1)
FUCK & YOU.
Whole world is corrupt. I swear.
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Not corrupt. Just blood hounds looking for "revenue streams", trying to "monetize" everything.
Yup, but anything other than this is a bit too close to communism or socialism for a great many people so we are stuck with it.
Squeeze "mo' money" out of Netflix, Youtube, etc. In the old days these would be a bunch of mobsters. Now they're businessmen (not the 'fatherly neighborhood businessman' kind), but one-percenters.
"If you look after the pennies the pounds will look after themselves".
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From a long-view, it is better to get over our pathological fear of socialist programs and use some moderate application of them to preserve a happy balance before we slip too far down that slope.
I quite agree with this actually, but I have always felt I was in the minority in thinking like this.
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Those were.
Boosh.
Screw them (Score:1)
Screw those telco's. It's time us slashdotter get of our lazy ass and create that peer-to-peer wifi/radio system.
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APRS [wikipedia.org] is here for years and not banned. No reason to suppose an analogous system with more bandwidth would be problematic...
Of course, the catch is no encryption for amateur radio, which is the only place you can create a nationwide mesh network (Part 15 just doesn't have any suitable frequency bands that aren't already cluttered to hell and back.)
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APRS [wikipedia.org] is here for years and not banned.
Let's say we build a network over these frequencies. You can then watch AT&T, Comcast and all the others complain to the congress for "unfair competition". Your frequencies will all belong to them very quickly, rest assured of that fact.
That is, unless you can lobby congress more than they can. No? I thought so.
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Indeed. How many stories have we seen where a municipality requested one of the big cable/comm cherry-picking companies set up operations in their area and were denied? You know the rest of the story: The municipality would go about setting up their own network and the commercial companies would file suits against the municipalities citing unfair competition and other things. The business world is crazy in that they certainly want their cake and to eat it too.
So yeah, the very moment someone sets up free
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That is, unless you can lobby congress more than they can. No? I thought so.
Actually, the amateur lobby is pretty strong. To wit, hams have a nontrivial (but small) amount of some pretty desirable chunks of bandwidth all across the spectrum. Not to mention there's the whole disaster response thing - nobody else matches it. Furthermore, much of that spectrum is internationally allocated - it would be difficult to get away with just selling it off.
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Of course, the catch is no encryption for amateur radio
Another catch is the forbidding of commercial traffic.
But the biggest catch is scaling, meshes work fine for low data rates but you quickly reach a point where it is difficult to add more capacity in the places where you need it.
Furthermore the latency is likely to be bad due to the very large number of hops.
Personally I highly doubt that a mesh network will ever offer better quality of service than even "best effort" internet traffic over a typical DSL/cable connection.
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peer-to-peer wifi/radio system.
This just isn't going to work. WiFi solves the easy problem (range 0-30 metres - you can just pull a cable if you are desperate). The difficult problem is the middle range; 100m -> 10km (or up to about 50km to 100km in country areas). At that kind of range sensible size links are expensive enough that they have to be shared, but there aren't enough people and money to easily afford a dedicated group to maintain them. At one point this was handled by individuals and little mom & pop companies in
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Jesus once said, "That which you do unto the highest-ping of my brothers, so you do unto me."
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peer-to-peer wifi/radio system.
This just isn't going to work. WiFi solves the easy problem (range 0-30 metres - you can just pull a cable if you are desperate). The difficult problem is the middle range; 100m -> 10km (or up to about 50km to 100km in country areas).
Actually, it can work, and it has, both in rural areas and poor countries. All at low cost and maintenance. There are devices like the mesh potato [core77.com] that have been used to build networks in South Africa. And the WiLD projects [nyu.edu] have deployed networks with links ... yes, up to 100km.
Just look at all these mesh networks [meshroot.com] deployed or in process!
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What would be cool is if DD-WRT and Tomato came in a mesh variant. I personally have a stack of routers running alternative installs, but there must be jillions of routers out there that could participate.
Why would you not want this? (Score:4, Interesting)
To me, the danger (which has never come to pass in a lasting way) is that an ISP would potentially degrade services for competitors.
Again, that has not really come to pass (the Comcast DDOSing of torrents was about the only example, and they were spanked for it). Exiting laws, without network neutrally, prevent such shenanigans.
But I cannot see in any way why a consumer would not WANT to be able to pay for some premium network service with guaranteed levels of quality for one application (and by that I mean in the network sense) rather than having to pay for an entire internet connection with much greater speed and quality.
As we seek to replace phones and TV with pretty much just internet it makes a ton of sense to me to allow cable companies to charge for "premium internet" for a portion of content and/or services.
That is why network neutrally laws do much more harm than good; they protect against a danger that is not real while retarding the advanced internet of the future from arriving at our doors.
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You're twenty years too late. The Telcos designed such a system. It was called ATM.
You know why most people have never heard of it? Because it fscking sucked and was primarily relegated to providing point to point connections over DSL.
We've seen the Glorious Telco Future and rejected it already. They don't know crap about anything other than making PSTN calls, and we don't need ATM Mk II.
A world of difference (Score:2)
Come on, ATM required quite expensive dedicated hardware. If you can use the same hardware you own today, but Comcast can guarantee for a fee that accessing video from one particular server will not have hiccups in playback, you don't need to do anything hardware wise to make that work.
Once network service was commoditized to the point where the hardware is not special or expensive, other services that did not make sense before can finally work.
Re:A world of difference (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem.
1. You pay extra to access that specific site.
2. Other people who don't pay will see slowly degrading quality (simply by letting dead infrastructure hardware go unreplaced).
3. Soon everybody has to pay premium just to get NORMAL access to any site.
4. You'll see anti-competitive behaviour simply by not having a premium plan for specific competitors (nobody is forcing them to provide premium plans for every single website).
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How is your example any different than anything currently? Quality of connection degrades as ISPs move away from dial up and websites get too heavy, so you move to their new 512K adsl servic, which is fine for a year or so before sites get heavier and heavier and your quality of connection degrades, so you upgrade to the new 2MBit service....
2G mobile Internet to 3G mobile internet to 4G....
It's not ensrhined in law for a start. (Score:1)
Secondly, they do (too slowly) upgrade their networks whereas with enshrined "premium services" means they can squeeze you for access AND the site you want to get to for access which will reduce demand and avoid or at least delay even further access to the internet.
Thirdly they will enshrine walled gardens where the ISP can sell THEIR internet hosting THEIR products and screw over anyone daring not to use the approved connection software. I.e. only their VOIP to their customers. Other VOIP or conversations
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So basically you are trying to claim that some versions of AOL and Compuserve would have been illegal under "Net Neutrality", as not all of their offerings were full internet access...?
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AOL and Compuserve were pre-internet online services. They offered services and saw no reason to change their services right away when the internet became a household word.
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I see you have learned well from the cable TV industry. Once cable became widely accepted, TV radio stations decreased broadcast power and the scenario you described above happened just as you said.
This is what they do. It's "bottled water."
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Increasing the data cap is a small step in the right direction, but unfortunately Comcast continues to treat its own Internet delivered video different under the cap than other Internet delivered video. We continue to stand by the principle that ISPs should treat all providers of video services equally.
Cnet News [cnet.com]
Stupid to ignore laws of physics (Score:2)
Comcast continues to treat its own Internet delivered video different under the cap than other Internet delivered video.
In reality it SHOULD be different getting something from a local network verses a more remote store.
The flip side of your argument, is that you are literally calling to be charged to access data on other computers in your own house.
WHY?
It seems to me that common sense should prevail, and that in the end things that cost less should be charged less for.
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In reality it SHOULD be different getting something from a local network verses a more remote store.
It already is. Every hop in an IP route does it's own traffic management and slows down the connection. The closer you are the faster (in practice; holding all other things, such as link bandwidth and utilisation constant) your traffic goes. That's before you start taking into account that longer distance links tend to have higher latency and lower available bandwidth.
Normally, the way around this descrimination is to connect directly to the ISP where your customers are or to another ISP which has a goo
You have a poor idea of "discrimination" (Score:2)
It is not "discrimination" to simply give you a better deal on something locally.
It takes nothing away from anyone else if I give you something for free.
I am not sure why this concept is so hard to grasp.
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(Remember we're talking about the bandwidth from your ISP, not content!)
Such is not the business your ISP should be in, it's not up to them to decide whether I get my news for 'free' from Fox News or pay additional charges when I get it from CNN. And it makes NO difference who does the paying, CNN the provider or me the consumer.
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eg. Netflix $8/month. If Comcast could offer a competitive service for $6/month because of the money the same from bandwidth, that's fine
What Comcast is doing is doing is charging customers *extra* on top of Netflix's service through caps and giving priority to Comcast's own services.
If I owned road tolls in Illinois and a car dealership, then only stopped cars that weren't from my car lot
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In reality it SHOULD be different getting something from a local network verses a more remote store.
Great, so if I set my torrent client to vastly prefer peers on Comcast IP ranges, there'll be no cap?
Nope, it's only uncapped for their specially ordained traffic.
Re:Why would you not want this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Easy. It's happening right now on Comcast.
Use Netflix? It counts towards your 250GB limit. Use Comcast's Xfinity service? It doesn't. So you can end up paying more for Netflix once you exceed your 250GB limit, or you can use Comcast's service and get it all for "free". If that's not promoting Comcast's service overy say, Netflix/Amazon Prime/Vudu/ITunes/etc, I don't know what is.
Hell, why should Comcast route VoIP packets for you? They can jitter all packets to make all VoIP stutter annoyingly. Of course, they will happily sell you a phone service free from such irritants.
Or TV - you want Hulu? Sure, 250GB. BTW, we have a special deal if you take Comcast cable - you can use our Xfinity online streaming for free.
It's all about providers intentionally crippling the competition. Hell, you see it in Canada - where all the providers seem to rush headlong into UBB, forcing Netflix to reduce quality to save bandwidth. But of course, their TV over IP solutions are free from such limits. (And we have vertically integrated monopolies too - each of the big three own content produces, TV channels, TV stations, distirbution networks, last mile, and provide phone and internet service).
So they got caught once. It just means they'll be sneakier the next time around.
Why is a bonus a problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Use Netflix? It counts towards your 250GB limit. Use Comcast's Xfinity service? It doesn't.
So what??
It's not harming in any other way, access to any other service.
What they are giving you is a discount that is reflected by the technical reality that they can transmit video to you over their own network for a lower cost than access to services on the internet at large.
Again it's not harming the quality of anything you receive from anywhere. It's not making it more expensive to get video from one source over another on the internet - just letting you access videos that are not technically "on the internet".
You are also getting files stored on your own hard drive for free without using any of your data cap! Does that piss you off also? Don't you think that if you play music held on a server in your living room Comcast should deduct that from your cap as well?
Here's a final question - name a single network neutrality bill that would prevent Comcast from doing what they are doing, and why.
Because quite simply, that's not something network neutrality laws address at all.
Re:Why is a bonus a problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not harming in any other way, access to any other service.
Indeed, Comcast is not violating network neutrality here. Abusing their regional monopolies and leveraging it to give themselves an edge over Netflix is what they are doing.
Which, in the context of Comcast's activities, is beside the point.
Unfortunately there aren't any. A bill that would go a long way to solving the problem that is Comcast would be one that disallows carriers from owning media companies (and vice versa) and forces ISPs into the Common Carrier part of telecom law. Network neutrality and conflict of interest concerns solved.
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Microlith is pointing out that network neutrality is an unfortunate necessity - because we simply cannot trust for-profits to act in any way other than short-term selfishness, and they have enough rope to hang everyone along with themselves.
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...What they are giving you is a discount that is reflected by the technical reality that they can transmit video to you over their own network for a lower cost than access to services on the internet at large...
Exactly what cost to drag data off the internet and send it to you? A phony cost. ISPs use caches and only need to bring (static) content onto their network once. Popular content stays in the caching equipment and then, cost-wise, it is the same as content that originated from their network. THE ISPs need the caching equipment anyway, so no real cost there. When all is said and done, the extra cost is very, very small. In some cases ISP peering arrangements make the cost go away.
There should be very strong
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DRM'd content often isnt static, depending on the scheme used it might get encrypted with a different key per user.
Also some of these providers like to insert ads into the stream, so you're not downloading a static video file...
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ISPs use caches and only need to bring (static) content onto their network once.
No. There are services that provide it for specific content providers, however passing EVERYTHING through a transparent proxy is infeasible.
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Strenghten antitrust legislation adn start to actually enforce it with some teeth.
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What they are giving you is a discount that is reflected by the technical reality that they can transmit video to you over their own network for a lower cost than access to services on the internet at large.
You are right that this is a technical reality. But that doesn't mean it is okay: we are in this situation because of politics. Comcast should be a service provider (ISP and cable TV provider), but not a content provider. Allowing monopoly content providers and service providers to merge into one distorts the market.
Here's a final question - name a single network neutrality bill that would prevent Comcast from doing what they are doing, and why.
The FTC should not have allowed Comcast to purchase NBC. The people against it, senators did too: yet it passed despite significant opposition, in part, because Meredith Baker voted yes in e
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What they are giving you is a discount that is reflected by the technical reality that they can transmit video to you over their own network for a lower cost than access to services on the internet at large.
You're the one not in touch with reality. Level3 is the primary CDN for Netflix, This means all peers/customers with Level3 get Netflix bandwidth for FREE. Comcast is not only a peer with Level3, but they use Level3 and one of their many links to the internet. Netflix doesn't cost Comcast any more than their own internal services.
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We have bandwidth caps and ISPs offering off-quota services in Australia, and we don't have the problem you describe.
I think the key difference is that for some reason, "free market" America is saddled with a whole bunch of monopolistic ISPs. Here, we had one telecommunications company that was initially publicly owned, but later floated and sold on the market. As far as I can see, this isn't hugely different from America's private ISPs, which used government funding to roll out their infrastructure.
When we
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Uh huh. Telus : They use animals in their commercials because they can't find a human willing to advertise for them.
Saskatchewan seems to be a bright spot with FTTP being rolled out.
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For one person, sure. Share it across 2, 3, or 4 people using VOIP/netflix/etc. and it takes considerably less effort to blow past.
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Because, I don't know, suggesting this design is indicative that the people involved have no idea how TCP/IP or networks in general work.
The old solution, which is the hands-down best solution to any network congestion issue, is to increase the size of the pipe! Playing games with QoS and other attempts to 'fix' things are just band-aids to problems that should be solved upstream.
You see, TCP/IP is by its very nature fair; Why? Because it doesn't know what is contained in the data packet it received, only t
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And / or get a bigger pipe. So you can download stuff @ 50MB/s, and still video chat with someone in Hong Kong at full HD.
Why would an ISP offer 50MB/s service if it can already sell you the premium package specifically tailored to hong-kong-HD-video-chat?
They don't have any incentive to improve general internet performance or provide better generic plans if they can earn more by selling you only a fraction of that
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But I cannot see in any way why a consumer would not WANT to be able to pay for some premium network service with guaranteed levels of quality for one application (and by that I mean in the network sense) rather than having to pay for an entire internet connection with much greater speed and quality.
This is the opposite of network neutrality. On some level most people don't object to consumer paid for QoS for specific traffic. But the key is that the consumer is paying for that service level - not whoever o
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Exiting laws, without network neutrally, prevent such shenanigans.
Uhm, sorry, but existing regulations[1] (in this example) supported net neutrality.
The point that some of us are trying to make is that they don't do so explicitly, and given the attitude of so-called content owners and telcos, we feel a little more certainty is required.
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[1] It was the FCC, not Congress, who spanked Comcast, as I recall.
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It is obvious some ISP's will not be able to resist the temptation to raise artificial (speed) barriers on certain services if they feel it would make them an extra dime.
Such barriers could be based on certain ports, protocols, IP addresses or most likely deep packet inspection, all things a free internet can do without.
This would be an extremely slippery slope towards effective censorship and possible a multi-tiered internet, the cheap
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But I cannot see in any way why a consumer would not WANT to be able to pay for some premium network service with guaranteed levels of quality for one application (and by that I mean in the network sense) rather than having to pay for an entire internet connection with much greater speed and quality.
It is technically impossible to single out one application and treat it in a privileged way without using deep packet inspection, deliberate bandwith throttling, closed communication protocols with lots of encryption and security by obscurity, and a whole bunch of other things that limit the Internet and make it only feasible for global players and large companies to offer certain end-to-end services.
Despite of what you might think, you do NOT want that. (Perhaps you think you want it because you do not hav
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It is technically impossible to single out one application and treat it in a privileged way without using deep packet inspection
I've been thinking for a while now that any internet service, in addition to specifying max up/down speeds, should have some portion as a guaranteed (quality metric here) connection. Give the user a way to specify what gets priority. The ISP shouldn't care if it's VOIP or random webpages, if the user flags it as high priority it gets treated as such up to the designated bandwidth.
Any concerns with this? It should satisfy both net neutrality (ISP doesn't discriminate by traffic type) and QoS concerns for
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The problem lies not in ISPs charging end users more for faster, more reliable connections, but in ISPs charging content creators more for faster, more reliable connections.
The ISPs' dream scenario would be to cut deals with content creators, making them pay them millions of dollars a year so that people who go to those sites will get there faster. The problem with this is that:
1) The ISPs get paid twice for the same data. Once when their user (who paid a monthly fee) says "I want to see this YouTube vide
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My experience as a FiOS customer that uses both Amazon Instant and Hulu does not fit your description. I've not seen slow performance from either site. I don't find this surprising given that we're generally talking about 480p streams which aren't that bandwidth-intensive to begin with.
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My FIOS/Amazon/Hulu scenario was a "what if this was allowed", not a "this is happening now." If deals are allowed to speed up traffic and furthermore exclusive deals are allowed, it could get to the point that the sites that work fast enough to satisfy end users depends on the ISP you use.
This fight will never end... (Score:4, Interesting)
Until networks are government-owned, said government is incorruptible and network neutrality is enshrined in the constitution.
Even then, it only ensures relative safety for the country which meets the above three criteria.
What I'm saying is, fighting against these laws isn't enough.
Someone in Europe or North America is going to enact a severely tiered internet at some point, and everyone in favor of net neutrality needs to be ready with an alternative that will change the game.
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Someone in Europe or North America is going to enact a severely tiered internet at some point, and everyone in favor of net neutrality needs to be ready with an alternative that will change the game.
I'm stockpiling access points so that I can use them to build a small network in the future. The internet is a network of networks, right? :)
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Sadly, I agree.
Mobile phone companies -> "Let's sell customers new cell phones that eat through their data allotment in under a week." I mean, why upgrade their towers? It's not like bandwidth isn't going for knockdown prices, and it's not like they don't already have the equipment to lay a fiber trunk as thick as my leg that will never be completely saturated, even if every person in the US were to use that one particular tower, and all for the corporate equivalent of a few cents.
"But what if the tower'
ETNO != EUROISPA (Score:2)
Not exclusive (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, since when does the ITU make "regulat
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I call that bullshit.Your theoretical defense wouldn't even make sense if absolutely anybody could pay extra for a special QoS tag, because not everybody has the money to pay for it -- smaller companies and makers of, say, free VoIP software, and virtually all p2p software would be left out. But it comes worse, in reality even the companies who'd pay the ransom wouldn't be treated equally, competition would be locked out in secret trade agreements and coalitions, and very likely certain services like movie
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very likely certain services like movie streaming would be restricted to a few (illegal) cartels.
If they are illegal, then enforce the laws. You sound like the people that want more laws passed for things like cellular phones while driving, rather than just enforcing laws against distracted driving. They are doing illegal things, so you want to
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If you have to pay extra on top
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Charging for QoS is just another way to "Tax" people above and beyond.
Define QoS (Score:2)
I don't think this is against net neutrality (Score:3)
As long as "best effort" doesn't really mean "we're gonna selectively slow down whatever we feel is using too much bandwidth" I'm ok with that.
Is this a bad thing? (Score:1)
Is this not a service that gamers might want? Is it not something that would be illegal with net neutrality?
The law is a blunt instrument. if you make something illegal, you catch a lot more than what you intend.
gov't created lack of competition (Score:2)
When US gov't killed off 3000 [google.com] phone companies to give AT&T the monopoly (because of 'national security reasons', but in reality because monopolies make better money donors to politicians), that's when the problem was born actually.
There is no reason why a business should not be able to discriminate and sell various types of products that do different things, like give preference to traffic that is more profitable.
There is no reason why in a competing market there wouldn't be various products that would
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There's no market solution to introduce ISP competition when 1 MAYBE 2 ISPs own the physical infrastructure to millions of customers in metro areas. Their only incentive is to leverage their monopoly and charge extra for "permium access" to flavor-of-the-month.com. It's far too difficult/expensive for private business to lay last mile connections. I'm sure the big ISPs will stand in their way first, followed by local governments refusing to let some "upstart" just run cable all over the community when th
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No, it's unnecessary and it's unreasonable because it doesn't have to be a monopoly on the delivery mechanism.
There is always a price for everything, and so a connection to the Internet today doesn't have to be wired at all, satellite Internet exists, wireless Internet is only a step away (I have it on my mobile phone at a very good speed, etc.)
As to cable and all that - gov't creates the barriers to entry by "owning" public assets, such as "public property" and all those taxes that gov't requires to be pai
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As to cable and all that - gov't creates the barriers to entry by "owning" public assets, such as "public property" and all those taxes that gov't requires to be paid for property create the barriers and support the monopoly power of those already with infrastructure.
Satellite internet is expensive, slow and unreliable in poor weather.
Wireless carriers as ISP are some of the worst about pricing, bandwidth and restrictions e.g. shared internet connection (not via carrier approved hardware)/p2p/...
So who's supposed to control "public property" to the benefit of citizens by opening it up to competitors, space permitting?
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Nobody, there shouldn't be such a thing as 'public property'. All property needs to be owned, every last bit of it, and if it's not owned but is 'public' for some terrible reason, there shouldn't be any business allowed on that property at all for anybody under no circumstances.
Somebody wants to pump gas or oil out of ground that is 'public'? This property needs to be auctioned off, the property is likely to be bought by more than one owner, because it's not cheap to buy oil or gas reserves, and then all ot
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The solution is a market solution, but this will not be allowed.
A "market solution" will not function unless the established players are either removed or restricted.
Either AT&T and the other monopolistic/ogliopogist telcoms need to be chopped up finely (and prevented from T-1000ing like AT&T has) or we go back to forced line leasing as it was between 1996 and 2005.
Don't forget Chile (Score:2)
IIRC, Chile also enshrined Net Neutrality in to Law.
Any other countries, besides Chile and Netherlands? I would expect Sweden to be the first...
So bad! (Score:1)
There's already a 2 teir internet... (Score:1)
(US-centric) Most average Joe internet connections are allowed to reach a MAXIMUM bandwidth, while commercial accounts can be given MINIMUM bandwidth availability and are charged for their average bandwidth. As long as particular services/sites/protocols aren't selected for or against, I'm comfortable with an "up to" and "at least" bandwidth price modeling. However, if ISPs actually need to throttle my paltry 350KBps at any time as standard network management practice, then they are over selling their net
who owns the trademark "internet" (Score:2)
Wrong Subject. It's Telcos, not ISPs. (Score:2)
It's Telephone Companies and not ISPs which do want to limit net neutrality. Different fish.