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Net Neutrality Alone Won't Solve ISP Throttling Abuse, Here's Why 200

Posted by samzenpus from the keeping-it-fair dept.
MojoKid writes Net neutrality is an attractive concept, particularly if you've followed the ways the cable and telco companies have gouged customers in recent years, but only to a limited extent. There are two problems with net neutrality as its commonly proposed. First, there's the fact that not all traffic prioritization is bad all of the time. Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly. Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example. Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people, or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency. These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.
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Net Neutrality Alone Won't Solve ISP Throttling Abuse, Here's Why More

Net Neutrality Alone Won't Solve ISP Throttling Abuse, Here's Why

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  • When you encrypt everything... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:20PM (#48320905)

    ...then you won't be able to decide what traffic gets priority except through port designation.

    Fighting "net neutrality" a silly thing to get hung up on; sooner or later, the need for high speed, low latency connections will be ubiquitous. Hiding from that very real fact, will only make that process uglier in the future.

    • Re:When you encrypt everything... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by jellomizer ( 103300 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:40PM (#48321069)

      However your TCP/IP packets can have encrypted data... but it also needs to have unecrypted the host and destination information.
      Unless you are encrypting via a proxy server or port forwarding over ssh. For the most part when you connect to Netflix your ISP can say oh this data is from netflix lets slow this down.

      • Exactly. The payload is encrypted, not the entire packet. You can't route traffic if you don't know where it's going. If people start watching Netflix through tunnels, the ISPs will just throttle tunnels.

        Net neutrality doesn't have to mean that each packet is equally important, it should just mean that the ISPs and backbone network should be neutral about it. How about letting the endpoints decide how to prioritize their own traffic? Seems like an obvious way to stop abuse from ISPs and still get QoS for

    • Re:When you encrypt everything... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by sycodon ( 149926 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:45PM (#48321109)

      All I know is that if they advertise X megs down and I pay for X megs down, then should have X megs down, 24/7 if I choose.

      • Re:When you encrypt everything... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by Andtalath ( 1074376 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:55PM (#48321205)

        So buy dedicated bandwidth then.
        It is fully possible to do it.

        It's just about 40 times more expensive.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by sconeu ( 64226 )

          So, I should pay $X + N to get a service is advertised for $X?

          • Re:When you encrypt everything... (Score:5, Interesting)

            by Xenx ( 2211586 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @07:01PM (#48321697)
            Thats why most services are marketed as up to the given speed. It actually is cheaper to offer a mostly full speed connection than a full speed connection. As long as they provide a defined minimum connection speed and don't default to that speed most of the time, then there really is no reason for complaint.

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by tepples ( 727027 )

              As long as they provide a defined minimum connection speed

              As far as I can tell, home ISPs tend not to guarantee a minimum connection speed.

            • But that is like selling a package of up to 12 donuts and only giving you ten. The ISPs do not just restrict you to less sometimes, when they simply cannot handle the load at peak, they just do it because it is easier. Since they can get away with only giving you 10, they do so. Yes, apsolutly, you get what you pay for and it is reasonable that you would get some amount of internet brownouts at peak and your connection might slow down while 1000 other people in the area get home from school/work and start

              • Re: (Score:3)

                by Xenx ( 2211586 )
                I work for an ISP. Most of our customers get somewhere from 80%-105% of their package level, while all showing the same connection speeds between our equipment and the router. It would technically be possible to adjust the speed profiles of every customer to guarantee they get the same rate. However, it's easier(to set up the customer and support the customer) to have a general profile for the package level and put the 80% in the contract.

              • Plenty of packaged goods have "average contents X" written on them...

            • Re: (Score:3)

              by rtb61 ( 674572 )

              It is all about unlimited greed and marketing lies. Rather than investing in additional cable to provide greater bandwidth, unlimited greed demands that they simply lie about the bandwidth and ration it out, until they are forced by regulations to stop lying as the reality is mostly there is no real competitive choice. Even where there is a choice of providers, cartel agreements kill any possibility of that. Should the cartel break down as a result of a newcomer, simply buy them out based by paying for mor

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by s.petry ( 762400 )

          From a logical sense I would agree if, and only if, the service provider claimed Minimum 10Mbps Max 100Mbps and no matter what you could not be reduced below the minimum (regardless of traffic type). That's how it's advertised, and you can't find anything in the fine print saying "We'll screw with your traffic if it's something we don't like or competes with our other products". In other words, currently we have completely false advertising.

          Anyone working in IT (especially in the ISP territory) understand

          • Comcast (just like AT&T in the 70s) should be broken up to increase competition and remove the monopoly powers that are currently being abused illegally.

            Except that the breakup shouldn't be by region, but by service provided. Break up Comcast into three companies:

            1) Networking - This company will maintain the network and sell access to Comcast's new ISP company (see #2) and other ISPs.

            2) ISP - This company would sell Internet access to consumers and businesses. They wouldn't maintain the network but w

  • nope (Score:5, Insightful)

    by BradMajors ( 995624 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:21PM (#48320917)

    "Video streams... examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly."

    No they don't. Bad example.

    • Re: (Score:2, Troll)

      by poetmatt ( 793785 )

      The entire post was bad. Voice isn't even latency sensitive and the reason for prioritizing as an ISP is because of how shitty they are doing in managing their bandwidth, aka deliberately creating a lack of. If things aren't being saturated, there shouldn't be a need for prioritization at all.

      Is there a need for compression and optimization? Absolutely.

      • Voice isn't even latency sensitive

        Yes it is. Latency may be interpreted as hesitation, or thinking the other party is uncertain as to what to say. And sometimes it interferes with collision avoidance mechanisms in conversation, when two people will talk over each other, wait, talk over each other again, etc.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Shinobi ( 19308 )

        Voice communication is incredibly latency sensitive. As low as 100ms, it starts to cause disruptions in how people talk to each other.

      • "Voice isn't even latency sensitive"

        Please leave your geek card on your way out

    • clarification: prioritization conflates latency with bandwidth. Right now a lack of bandwidth is the most prominent reason for increased latency.

      • I don't think that's (usually) true, but I'm no expert. My understanding is that latency is an issue because of excessive amounts of buffering in routers, because RAM is cheap and they can.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jon3k ( 691256 )
      Came here to post this. Video doesn't need low latency at all.
      • Noninteractive video such as Netflix doesn't need low latency. But good luck playing OnLive or PlayStation Now (formerly Gaikai) or even FaceTime with a satellite uplink.

  • Content Creators must not also be ISPs (Score:4, Insightful)

    by DontBlameCanada ( 1325547 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:24PM (#48320941)
    It'd be like having Ford control traffic flow on the Interstates. "All Express lanes are only open to Ford vehicles and the 'partners' who've bought premium service for their customers."
  • You want low latency for web traffic, and most video streaming can handle some latency. It's not latency that gets in the way, it's variations in latency/jitter. You could have a constant 500ms latency and a video stream would work fine. There's almost no traffic that actually requires high bandwidth and low latency.

  • latency doesn't matter for video, bw, jitter does (Score:5, Informative)

    by raymorris ( 2726007 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:26PM (#48320963) Journal

    > Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly

    Very wrong. Horrible latency, 500 ms, will require that the video buffer for half a second. Latency does not matter at all for prerecorded video. Jitter matters some, and sufficient bandwidth matters a lot. When someone doesn't have a basic understanding of the facts, the opinions they come to based on their misunderstanding of the facts are not persuasive.

    VoIP is a good example of an application with specific needs, low jitter and low to medium latency, contrasted with Netflix style video, where bandwidth is #1. A low latency application is ssh/telnet or any other text based interactive protocol.

    • Jitter doesn't really matter for video or voice either, other than increasing the buffer time. Think about it this way, Netflix doesn't care if you get 10s of video as a single burst, as long as it can occur at least once every ten seconds. The information can be buffered and played back smoothly. Now obviously you can take that to an extreme where VOIP or video conferencing is unusable but jitter that significant is hardly common.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by msauve ( 701917 )
        "Jitter doesn't really matter for video or voice either, other than increasing the buffer time. "

        Which is to say it (and latency) matters a great deal for interactive video and voice.

    • Re:latency doesn't matter for video, bw, jitter do (Score:4, Insightful)

      by khasim ( 1285 ) <brandioch.conner@gmail.com> on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:58PM (#48321229)

      Latency is usually the first problem. You'll have trouble when you're running up against the speed of light.

      But you can usually run a 2nd pipe to add bandwidth. With the same latency as the 1st pipe. And a 3rd pipe. And so on.

      And that's where I think TFA gets it wrong. Network Neutrality cannot be about prioritizing one kind of traffic over another. The ISP's already lack the incentive to add more bandwidth. Even though that bandwidth is what they are selling. Allowing them to prioritize traffic means that they will be more incentivized to NOT add more bandwidth.

      That was the problem that Netflix had with Comcast. And once Netflix coughed up some money, Comcast instantly found more bandwidth.

    • > Video streams and gaming are two examples of activities that require low-latency packet delivery to function smoothly

      Very wrong. Horrible latency, 500 ms, will require that the video buffer for half a second. Latency does not matter at all for prerecorded video. Jitter matters some, and sufficient bandwidth matters a lot. When someone doesn't have a basic understanding of the facts, the opinions they come to based on their misunderstanding of the facts are not persuasive.

      VoIP is a good example of an application with specific needs, low jitter and low to medium latency, contrasted with Netflix style video, where bandwidth is #1. A low latency application is ssh/telnet or any other text based interactive protocol.

      And this underscores two issues with the net neutrality debate as it currently stands. First, we actually do want prioritization of packets with services like VoIP having higher priority. The issue is that what we don't want is for Comcast to prioritize their own VoIP service above competing services such as Voice Pulse. That's a somewhat fine distinction in today's soundbite world.

      Issue number two is that for services like video streaming bandwidth is king - and it's easy for companies to simply refuse

      • > we have to do something. We also have to be mindful that giving federal government agencies more power turns out bad about 90% of the time. But - we have to do something.

        The second sentence needs to be a firm bound on the first and third. All too often, "we have to do something " is followed by "and this idea is something , so we have to do it". Knowing that our type of government is designed to be fair, not to be effective, we should say "we have to do something when and if we know that something

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zak3056 ( 69287 )

      A low latency application is ssh/telnet or any other text based interactive protocol.

      I disagree quite strongly with the above--text based interfaces really don't become unusable until you hit absurd latency (>2500ms). ssh/telnet are quite usable at >1000ms latency, and even high packet loss isn't really a huge concern. Even working over 110bps links, where one could actually type faster than the line rate wasn't a real problem until you filled up the buffer (I can't give you examples of what latency was like under those conditions, because I never measured it, but you've got 200ms or

      • You certainly CAN use a text interface with 1000ms latency. You can also watch video at 56K, I did a lot of that late at night when I was a teenager. I'd sure rather have a few Mbps for video and 100ms for text, though. At 100ms, even Stephen Hawking's typing will get ahead of the echo, and his arms are paralyzed- he types by blinking his eyes ala Morse code or similar.

        • I should have used preview. That should say I'd certainly prefer less than 100ms, preferably less than 25 in order to have that "real time" feel, no noticeable lag.

          Also should say at 1000ms Hawking will get ahead of the echo.

      • >ssh/telnet are quite usable at >1000ms latency,
        Only if you type at less than one character per second... sheez.

        I've worked on systems with that kind of latency, and it was a horrible nightmare.
        To the point where I would open a text editor and type out commands there, then copy and paste them into the session rather than having characters show up well after they were typed and only being able to spot a typo several characters later (when it would take another second per character to navigate back and

  • Net Neutrality means you don't favor one host over another for the same protocol, not that you treat all protocols exactly the same. In the case of the ISPs vs. Netflix, the ISP's are trying to slow or block streaming videos from Netflix while allowing or prioritizing streaming videos from providers who pay the ISP's fees. This is non-neutral prioritization.

    Neutral prioritization is giving priority to streaming video/music/gaming over other types of data like e-mail without regard to the hosts providing the services.

    This critical distinction seems to be ignored by the poster.

    Net Neutrality doesn't demand that no network optimization by the ISP's ever occur, it states that the host should not be a factor in the ISP's optimizations. If the host does factor into the optimizations, then the ISP's begin extorting hosts to pay for priority service which the ISP's customers have already paid for. Additionally, hosts that can't afford to pay for priority distribution by the IPS's soon find that users can't access their services.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by suutar ( 1860506 )

      The problem the poster seems to be trying to point out is that the term "Net Neutrality" gets thrown around a lot without having a solid meaningful definition. Yours looks good to me, but I bet if you asked 20 people what they thought it meant you'd get 22 answers and maybe two would be compatible with yours :)

      • His definition for example has exactly nothing to do with any so-called Net-Neutrality regulations.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jedidiah ( 1196 )

          In general government mis-labels things. Consider it a variation on Madison Avenue marketing where they have the strangest tendency to claim that a product's weakest feature is actually it's strongest.

          The double think is strong with both of them.

          The way government operates these days something labeled "the net neutrality" act would likely be a big pile of corporate welfare for the telecom industry (much like Obamacare is).

    • Net Neutrality means you don't favor one host over another for the same protocol, not that you treat all protocols exactly the same.

      That's what it means to you and me. I just posted an example of an email that I got from CREDO about it. Here's the exact line:

      Tom Wheeler, the president's newly appointed FCC chair, recently proposed rules that would allow Internet service providers (ISPs) to divide the Internet into fast lanes for wealthy corporations and slow lanes for the rest of us.

      That's what "net neutrality" means to them. It's meaningless anti-corporate drivel but it's what a lot of people believe. It also hooks into preconceived notions and prejudices to make it an easy sell to their customer base, but it doesn't help the bigger discussion of the issue.

      If we can't define what we (and by "we" I mean technically literate people) by net neutrality then th

    • This. Absolutely.

      The article gave a bad explanation of the requirements for video, as noted by other posters here. Nevertheless, it is true that video-streaming has different requirements than two-way voice calls, which both have different requirements than a Tor relay. These can each be enhanced by appropriate optimization, as the parent describes.

      The "neutrality" is about the identities of the provider and the consumer, not about the type of data.
    • No it does not! Read the various bills that have come out and you see that your definition does not apply.
      Net Neutrality would mean that my ISP can no longer setup a spam email filter, it would mean school ISP can no longer block access to various sites(reason why some groups have been supporting net neutrality), it would mean my ISP cannot block traffic on various ports know for various security attacks and with no common usage.
      What you are defining goes under the term application neutrality.

  • eh BW fixes all issues. a real competitive ISP market (not the US select monopolies) can deliver that.
    the answer is more bandwidth not traffic shaping. Then we can talk about net neutrality.

  • ugh (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Charliemopps ( 1157495 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:34PM (#48321023)

    My God... Please stop!
    Peering has nothing to do with net neutrality.

    Stop confusing the two.

    No ISP has any legal, moral or regulatory obligation to connect to any specific peer. If they did, the peer could just charge whatever they wanted. It's up to the content provider and the ISP to work out who they want to use together. Those agreements are fraught with arguments, bullying, etc... it should be addressed by the FCC. But none of that has anything to do with Net Neutrality. If it did, the content provider could make a similar argument that "Those people living out on that island. We want them to have our service! You're violating Net Neutrality by not running a cable across the ocean floor!" The ISP as an independent business has the right to hookup whichever customers they want inside the guidelines of their franchise agreements with local towns... as well as whichever peers they want. Netflix can no more force them to use Level3 than the ISP can force Netflix to use a different peer (and that was the actual argument) The ISPs just said "No thanks. We'll do without." which was well within their rights.

    A violation of Net Neutrality would be like "ok, we don't want you watching netflix so... Netlfix is priority 9999 on our sandvine... hahahaha!"

    Netflix could, and did, fix their bandwidth issues by connecting to the peers the ISPs were ok with them using. Again, you could argue that Netflix should have had more bargaining power in that regard. The ISPs usually force content providers into using the ISPs subsidiary peers. But that's not a net neutrality issue. We almost lost the Net Neutrality battle over this stupid mixup of terms.

    • Those agreements are fraught with arguments, bullying, etc...

      Only very, very recently. Even 5 years ago the vast majority of peering "agreements" amounted to an engineer from company A calling up an engineer from company B and saying "hey we need a bit more bandwidth, can you swing half the cost of the upgrade" and company B paying half the (really very, very low) costs involved in doing said upgrade. There were very few explicit contracts involved because everyone realized that it was in their best interests to not saturate the links. Now we have ISPs demanding m

      • Trust me, the billing for these peers is usually $0 because they are usually between ISPs. i.e. ATT Connects with Verizon. There's pretty much equal traffic between the 2. So ATT does half the peers and Verizon does half the peers. About ever 3 months the two look at the traffic that they traded and if there was a significant mismatch one pays the other. Every ISP has a department that handles that (they also handle other financial disputes but that's irreverent)

        Netflix moving 1/3rd of the internet traffic

        • And they're paying their bill, to their provider.

        • Netflix moving 1/3rd of the internet traffic in one direction? Yea, they are going to have a big bill. Sorry, that's how it works guys.

          Your argument is undercut by the fact that Comcast refused to install Netflix's content servers inside Comcast's network.

  • In my area running cables is fairly easy. I see no reason why several cables can not come to my home whether it be all from one supplier or by several cable companies. That would solve the bandwidth issues for areas similar to mine. It would also help with the outrageous costs that we can attribute to a lack of competition in the cable industry.

  • Nonsense (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PopeRatzo ( 965947 )

    Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people

    "Almost everyone agrees"?

    Were you asked? Because I wasn't asked. Was anyone here asked whether they agree? So where the fuck do you get off with "almost everyone agrees"? This is another one of those "Everyone means me and this one-eyed mouse in my pocket" situations, I think.

    Besides which, the only responsibility my ISP has (and

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      Indeed. Why should my web browsing be delayed because someone else wants to watch funny cat videos?

      ISPs should take packets from me and deliver them where I send them, and delver packets in the other direction that are sent to me. And nothing else. If that means someone else can't get reliable video playback from remote sites, because the ISP can't cripple my packets to let theirs through, tough luck.

      • If that means someone else can't get reliable video playback from remote sites, because the ISP can't cripple my packets to let theirs through, tough luck.

        It sounds like you may be buying into the incorrect notion that anything that's happening to your packets will affect someone else's reliable video playback.

        None of the ISPs' net traffic prioritization has anything to do with providing better service to you or me. It is entirely about being able to sell a "premium" service. And about control.

  • Hence why.... (Score:3)

    by Dega704 ( 1454673 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @05:50PM (#48321161)
    Lately I have become less concerned with enforcing net neutrality on the incumbent monopolies and more concerned with addressing the root problem by ending said monopolies. As long as everyone is held captive by these profiteering gluttons, there are always going to be problems and battles over how they can and cannot user "their" pipes. Municipal fiber networks need to be built and they need to be open-access. The good news is that the demand for such networks is increasing by the day; and widespread, nonpartisan support for them is easier to come by than support for net neutrality rules enforced by the FCC. We should strike while the iron is hot and get the ball rolling while the incumbents are still mostly clinging to their crappy copper and wireless networks. Better to do that than wait for them to eventually turn their copper monopolies into fiber monopolies and be facing the same problems ten years from now. To this end, the first step that needs to happen is to clean up the unholy mess that is UTOPIA in Utah. It is fouling up the waters for every municipal fiber project by being the resident whipping boy that every opponent points to when they want to argue that muni-fiber networks are a bad idea.
  • The ISP should be concerned only with delivering their advertised data rates sold to the customer at low latency, regardless of how much it is used. It is not their problem if the user maxes out their upload with torrents or something, that is the user's problem (and rather easily solvable by using a modern router with fq_codel. Ingress traffic is another issue... also made difficult by the ISP, by buffering stuff too much). If they cannot actually produce the connection they advertised... then it is tim

  • Nothing New (Score:5, Insightful)

    by organgtool ( 966989 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @06:08PM (#48321285)
    FFS, we've been over this a thousand times. No one is suggesting that Net Neutrality does away with ISPs performing QoS. Net Neutrality just means that ISPs can't prioritize traffic for their services of video/VOIP/etc over competing video/VOIP/etc. It's one of the few problems that has a relatively easy solution and the only reason we haven't implemented it is because there are enough special interest groups with enough power and money to make sure that they're not forced to play fairly with their customers' traffic.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tom ( 822 )

      This 100 times.

      TFA has no clue and appears to be a 12 year old blogger who just discovered a few things about the Internet that suck.

      Net Neutrality has nothing to do with shaping traffic based on service and everything to do with shaping traffic based on commercial contracts, i.e. who sent it. It's not the equivalent of the mail service having 1st and 2nd class post and telegrams, but about whether or not the mail service can deliver your (same class) mail slower than mine because they like me more.

    • That;s what you define it as. That's what technical people everywhere define it as... but it's not at all what regulations are being written around, yet you continue to support them as if they were.

      Meanwhile without regulations nothing has actually needed fixing long-term (Netflix is doing just fine now), certainly nothing that would have been fixed by any proposed legislation. But you want to break it, you want to fuck over the internet because you think your technical definition matches the words comin

  • Unadulterated bullshit. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jedidiah ( 1196 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @06:08PM (#48321289) Homepage

    Unadulterated bullshit.

    The point of net neutrality is not to ensure that your stupid reruns perform adequately well but that they perform equally well regardless of whether they are coming from your last mile monopoly or some other competing service.

    If my Netflix performance has gone into the crapper then Time Warners competing service better be suffering the same problem.

  • Quality of Service is built into IPv6. The ISP shouldn't have anything to do with QoS. That is solely the discretion of the service or client. If I want, I can configure my servers so that SMTP traffic has a very low QoS for IPv6 based networks. Network Neutrality ensures that ISPs don't alter that QoS along the way.

    We're a long way off from IPv6, and we shouldn't be. But that's another issue. ISPs shouldn't handle the throttling. They should give equal priority to everything.

  • Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bob9113 ( 14996 ) on Wednesday November 05, 2014 @06:57PM (#48321665) Homepage

    Email and web traffic can tolerate significantly higher latencies, for example.

    Bullshit. You don't know which of my traffic is higher priority. The end user can and should have network management tools, but the ISP better damned well not decide that my kids watching Nemo in HD is more important than my rsync transfer of a log file telling me why the master server just barfed. That is my choice, not the ISP's.

    Similarly, almost everyone agrees that ISPs have some responsibility to control network performance in a manner that guarantees the best service for the most number of people,

    Bullshit. Just, bullshit. Citation needed. No, people who understand networks do not believe that the pipeline providers should be doing traffic prioritization based on endpoints.

    or that prioritizes certain traffic over others in the event of an emergency.

    Vague fear mongering. What if the network companies prioritize the wrong things in their search for a little more revenue and something bad happens to the children? THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

    These are all issues that a careful set of regulations could preserve while still mandating neutral traffic treatment in the majority of cases, but it's a level of nuance that most discussions of the topic don't touch. The larger and more serious problem with net neutrality as its often defined, however, is that it typically deals only with the "last mile," or the types and nature of the filtering an ISP can apply to your personal connection.

    I don't know if this is intentional or not, but throwing piles of vaguely related and confusing facts at a story then saying, "Therefore, we shouldn't regulate now!" is a standard tactic from the Koch plalybook. Shove it.

    The public, including tens of thousands of network administrators, have spoken without equivocation: We want net neutrality. Period. When the ISPs come up with better regulation, they can propose it, and we will consider it. Until then, we will not move an inch on our demand for Net Neutrality. It has worked since the first day of the Internet. It is why the Internet made so many people, including the ISPs, rich. If they don't like it, they can GTFO or DIAF.

    • Do you honestly think that network traffic will never be contested? That it is realistic to have highways wide enough that there will never be congestion? In a real internet (in fact on the internet for its entire existence), the network is managed. Different data has different priorities, it just does. It would be nice if the user could determine them but at the moment the technology is that the network provider determines them.

      The real question is is the provider being a dick about it, not whether they ma

  • Look it's quite simple. Verizon has been throttling users of Netflix. Case close. Go no further than that. We have real world cases to look at not some hypothetical double-dutch bull shit. Net Neutrality would prevent Verizon from doing this. Period. That's the point. Let us not forget the Billions of tax payer money that has gone into the coffers of Verizon and other ISPs to enhance their infrastructure and didn't. So don't give me this bull shit crocodile tears about cost. If the telecoms and cab

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