Verizon Consumer CEO Says Net Neutrality 'Went Literally Nowhere' (theverge.com) 73
Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath has declared that net neutrality regulations "went literally nowhere." Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules. "I don't know what net neutrality does," Sampath told The Verge. "I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality."
When pressed about potential anti-competitive behaviors like zero-rating services, Sampath deflected by focusing exclusively on traffic management concerns, arguing that networks require prioritization capabilities during congestion. "For traffic management purposes, we need to have some controls in the network," he stated. The interview comes as Verizon faces a different regulatory challenge from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is holding up Verizon's Frontier acquisition over the company's diversity initiatives.
When pressed about potential anti-competitive behaviors like zero-rating services, Sampath deflected by focusing exclusively on traffic management concerns, arguing that networks require prioritization capabilities during congestion. "For traffic management purposes, we need to have some controls in the network," he stated. The interview comes as Verizon faces a different regulatory challenge from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is holding up Verizon's Frontier acquisition over the company's diversity initiatives.
Sowmyanarayan Sampath is clearly a moron (Score:2)
Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules
Clearly he's a moron (left and unaware what reason the right hand is doing something).
Re: (Score:2)
Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules
Clearly he's a moron (left and unaware what reason the right hand is doing something).
He obvious knows exactly what he is prevaricating about.
Re: (Score:2)
He obvious knows exactly what he is prevaricating about.
Then he's "playing dumb"? I know quite a few people around here doing the same...
Re:yes? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
snow job by the snowman
Re: (Score:3)
Then he's "playing dumb"? I know quite a few people around here doing the same...
That's not playing, that's called being a trump syncophant.
Re:Sowmyanarayan Sampath is clearly a moron (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't know what problem the lobbying-twisted FCC's rules attempts to solve either. I know what problem net neutrality was supposed to solve.
In short, monolithic providers like Verizon double-bill. They bill you for your packets and then they bill the person you're communicating with for your packets too. It's not like the mail where only one side pays. Both sides have to pay or neither gets served. Naturally, the side who pays more gets to define the nature and shape of the service both side get. As the end-user consumer, that isn't you.
There is an exception: Verizon is part of a cartel of about 20 Internet providers who trade traffic without charging each other. If as a Verizon customer you want to talk to someone buying service from elsewhere in the cartel, Verizon will only charge you. This process is called "peering."
Like the rest of the cartel, Verizon engages in "closed" peering. This means that small businesses and anyone Verizon can bully is excluded and must bend to the double-billing. Here's where net neutrality was supposed to act: by requiring "open" peering where Verizon would trade packets with anyone once *one* of their customers had paid them to do so. No more double-billing.
Re: (Score:3)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, but that was part of the nonsense. Shaping specific traffic doesn't work well and is rarely used outside the "enterprise", let alone used abusively.
Re: (Score:1)
I don't think that is what net neutrality was ever meant to address. Nor do I think that what it was meant to address ever happened. It was always intended to prevent a theorized problem from arising, not to address a problem that existed.
Re: (Score:2)
Moron? Hardly. He just wants to make sure you don't notice what the right hand is doing.
Re: (Score:1)
If anything, aggressive lobbying against a rule that wouldn't do anything is a public service.
DEI (Score:2)
What, they are filtering packets based on "race" now? :)
I wonder what "flag" I should set on my packets to get priority routing...
Re: (Score:2)
What, they are filtering packets based on "race" now? :)
I wonder what "flag" I should set on my packets to get priority routing...
It's called "traffic shaping" and has to do with bias against the "byte-stuffed challenged".
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
I have to say, a phone company hitting government red tape during an attempted merger for being "too woke", was definitely not on my bingo card. This is such a strange timeline, I can't even tell if this is being done sincerely or if the Republicans simply are trying to maintain optics that they're tilting at the "woke" windmill when in reality they are just enforcing anti-trust regulations without wanting to appear as anti-big-business. It's either a case of 3D chess, or I'm just trying to see some order
The internet has changed a lot (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
well ISP need to be banned from owning streaming services.
Will comcast make caps go lower as cable tv starts it death dive?
Take ESPN out of the base package?
Re: (Score:2)
Take ESPN out of the base package?
Unfortunately, Disney (usually) requires ESPN to be carried in order to get all their many other channels ... Apparently, ESPN is very profitable.
Re: (Score:2)
Sling works around this by putting all Disney channels on the Disney tier.
Stupid simple example (Score:4, Informative)
I have several employees who can't reach the company VPN from home. They have to use their phone as a hot spot, and everything works fine. Local ISP is blocking VPN traffic. Annoying as frick.
Re: (Score:2)
this is quite strange. in the US? what ISP?
I highly doubt this is by design... especially post COVID.
there might be some seeing on their gateway to allow it?
Re: (Score:1)
Spectrum was doing it in some areas during covid briefly. It wasn't a mistake, they sold "Prioritize your VPN traffic for $10/month"
If you did not subscribe they would block the connection.
It didn't last long until they got public grief for it and changed the blocking into just deprioritizing.
Re: (Score:2)
Is your VPN over something that has been deprecated by a bunch of ISPs for security reasons, like PPTP?
Re: (Score:2)
It'll be some squirrelbrained mobile ISP nonsense like UDP not working through 5 layers of cgnat or whatever.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: Stupid simple example (Score:2)
My bet is that their homeâ(TM)s IP Address scheme overlapped that of their business. ISPs donâ(TM)t block it, but your employees routers surely could be a dead end.
Re: (Score:2)
Remote users are on the 172.16.105.0/24 IP Range. Possible. But unlikely.
Re: (Score:2)
I've found that default router settings block certain kinds of VPN connections, namely "Disable IPSec ALG" in Netgear Nighthawk Ax8 Ax6000 for IPsec VPNs.
Re: (Score:1)
I've seen similar problems with ATT that actually came down to them redirecting DNS rather than blocking VPNs. A real pain in the ass that they shouldn't do at all, but will stop doing if asked.
"Look left; look right; anywhere but your pocket." (Score:5, Insightful)
"I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality."
To adapt an adage about identifying assholes: If you don't see the problem that net neutrality is intended to solve, then you ARE the problem.
Re: (Score:1)
Net neutrality is the internet (Score:5, Insightful)
The laws were introduced to protect that, to prevent corporations chopping up the internet into pieces and charging people through the nose for certain types of traffic.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
yep if you need to slow down people due to congestion then you do it for everyone not just those not paying for the top tear plain.
Actually, net neutrality didn't prohibit this. Telcos absolutely are still within their rights to sell tiered subscriber access, so long as all the data flowing through their pipe is being deprioritized equally.
OK under net neutrality:
Offering various service plans with differing data speeds, caps and/or deprioritization levels. (El cheapo plan that barely works / Mid-priced plan that is only deprioritized during heavy traffic / Premium plan that has limited or no deprioritization / etc.)
Not OK under net n
Dumb Smart People (Score:4, Insightful)
This smart man shouldn't play dumb, because he clearly doesn't know just how smart us dumb people are. For example, we can tell he's lying. We can also tell he's avoiding the question. AND, we can tell he's a dumb smart person because he doesn't know how smart us dumb people are. The circle of stupidity is complete.
Which Net Neutrality? (Score:3)
Is he referring to the Net Neutrality where consumers get access to the internet without their ISP "shaping" the traffic to benefit their own interests or is it the Net Neutrality where the ISPs protect the consumers from whatever their ISP sees as "bad" for the consumer?
Let me explain (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (Score:1)
You can already host a business off a residential connection. The only issue there is having a dynamic IP, and net neutrality has nothing to do with either.
Net Neutrality 'Went Literally Nowhere' (Score:4, Insightful)
Because they paid Ajit really well to ensure it.
Why do we forget who created Net Neutrality? (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
If it went nowhere (Score:2)
Then what's the objection? Sounds like they're working as intended, keeping companies in line with its aims rather than being assholes.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:1)
Fire this clown (Score:3)
You can manage and optimize the traffic on your network without discriminating against the type of traffic. You could also stop wasting your money on retards like Sowmyanarayan Sampath who don't do anything to deserve a 1.5 million salary, let alone several more millions in bonuses, and instead invest that money back into your network so that you don't *have* to manage or optimize it as much. Absolutely no person on the planet does anything worthy of earning 7 figures in a year.
Re: (Score:1)
Re: (Score:2)
You'd be an absolute fool to treat HTTP, realtime telecomms, and bulk P2P traffic equally.
This isn't the same as "not discriminating".
You aren't managing traffic congestion if you aren't paying attention to the latency and loss tolerances of the different types of traffic.
You also aren't managing traffic congestion if you are discriminating against certain types of legitimate traffic.
Re: (Score:1)
Typical CEO (Score:2)
Ho hum (Score:2)
Another CEO being an asshole. Nothing new.
Really, how convincing. (Score:3)
He's quite possibly telling the truth in the narrow sense where verizon totally deprioritized some bulk traffic on that overloaded backhaul because reasons that one time and it helped VOIP jitter at the expense of some graininess in youtube that nobody noticed; and it was fine; but in the much more important and revealing sense; he's lying: net neutrality 'went nowhere' because the whole point(at least in the US context) was to not depart from the status quo and to avoid someone's monetization plans ruining things. Even network engineers are going to lose interest when it's just working; obviously the public couldn't care less when the internet is delivering the packet between hither and yon as intended; so once the threat of needing to pay the "good friends of verizon" tithe to avoid having 3-5 business days of latency added receded, so did the urgency about it. I assume that there's some enterprise 5G SD-WAN offering that's technically paid prioritization that verizon would trot out as an example of how we totally introduced paid prioritization and it actually made everything better; but the point was never esoteric special cases of top shelf SLAs; it was quite plausible proposals to set up tolls and seek rents across large portions of the internet.
Re: (Score:1)
Like an umbrella (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
This would be more akin to assming you don't need an umbrella because you're standing in a place where it has never, ever rained. Should it suddenly start raining, I'm all for it, but unless it does I'd rather spare the effort of carrying an umbrella for nothing.
Anyone who says it's okay to kill net neutrality (Score:2)
The reason that neutrality going away here and there hasn't caused you massive problems and cost you a ton of money is because the companies who stand the profit from killing it aren't sure that it's going to stay dead. And it hasn't, with politics waxing and waning and bringing it back and forth.
America's democracy is on the verge of collapse. And you can bet your
Re: (Score:1)
Net Neutrality isn't solving a problem. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:1)
It is a foolish waste to create regulations to prevent problems that never existed. It is a good way to cause unexpected problems and raise costs for zero benefit, not a good way to benefit the people.
Or to put it simply - Don't fix what ain't broken.
gosh did he miss out (Score:2)
Talk about a missed business opportunity. So all traffic is managed equally by algorithms that provide the best QOS possible for everyone, right?
Verizon’s CEO for Consumers Trolls Net Neutr (Score:3)
“I still don’t know what problem we’re trying to solve.”
That’s Verizon’s consumer CEO, Sowmyanarayan Sampath, playing dumb in an interview with The Verge. The guy responsible for 115 million wireless and 10 million broadband lines in the U.S. doesn’t understand net neutrality—or pretends not to. Either way, it’s disqualifying.
Let that sink in. The executive who oversees a third of the nation’s connectivity admits he doesn’t grok the principle that your carrier shouldn’t get to decide what apps, services, or content load faster—or at all—based on what makes them money. And yet, he’s fully empowered to throttle, shape, or “manage” your traffic however he wants.
His justification for throttling you into oblivion is the same tired line tier-one ISPs have been peddling since the late '90s—back when sharp-eyed sysadmins were busting them with packet captures from Ethereal, the open-source sniffer that grew up to become Wireshark. It’s always the same story: blame the mythical bandwidth hoarder, hand-wave about “network management,” and pray nobody remembers when Comcast got caught spoofing TCP RST packets to silently kill BitTorrent connections—then flat-out denied it until the packet logs made lying impossible. I’m honestly surprised Sampath didn’t defend it as a necessary safeguard “against that one person in your town who’s sucking up all the bandwidth”—his exact words, mind you.
Because nothing says “public utility” quite like throwing an entire neighborhood under the bus to throttle a protocol you don’t like.
And just when you think the playbook couldn’t get any dustier, Sampath reaches for the most threadbare metaphor in the telco FUD arsenal: the firefighter in traffic. That’s right—packet shaping isn’t about corporate deals, it’s about saving lives.
“If there are 300 people using a congested road, and if a firefighter needs to go through, people are going to move aside and let him go through. That’s all we are saying.”
Except that firefighter isn’t a first responder—it’s Disney+, or whichever content partner Verizon is bundling into your “unlimited” plan. This isn’t emergency access; it’s product placement. Click-through rates. Inflated subscriber counts. Sampath even brags that Verizon’s “non-connectivity business” is now a $15 billion operation—built on bundling, streaming tie-ins, and convenience-fee masquerades. And all of it rides on the very network he insists is neutral and fair.
This is where the sleight-of-hand becomes stage magic: throttle independent traffic, subsidize partner traffic, and declare it a win for consumers because technically, you’re paying less for Netflix. Never mind that you’re paying more for everything else.
And let’s not pretend this is new. Verizon has a long history of trying to own both the pipe and the content. Remember when Verizon acquired Yahoo? When they acquired AOL? When they launched Go90 and tried to monetize landscape mode? None of it worked, but the ambition never went away. Now, the strategy is subtler—bundle services like Disney+, Hulu, ESPN+, Max, and YouTube Premium, and quietly rebuild the walled garden. Verizon controls the gate, the gatekeeper, and increasingly, the content behind the gate.
And if you’re wondering how seriously Verizon takes the “rules of the land,” that Sampath is making a show of genuflecting towards, here’s the cleanest contrast you’ll see outside a packet trace. When the FCC tried to enshrine net neutrality under Title II—rules that literally said don’t block, don’t throttle, don’t extort—Verizon went to war. Lawsuits. Paid astroturfers. A full-court regulatory press. But today? The same FCC—reshaped by Trump appointee Brendan Carr, who literally wrote the Project 2025 chapter on turning the FCC into a partisan mouthpiece—is now threatening to block mergers over corporate DEI policies. And Sampath? He shrugs and says, “We have to follow the rules of the land.” Amazing how that phrase suddenly acquires moral weight—when the regulation leans the right way.
The next time Sampath assures you it’s all just reasonable traffic management, remember: this is a man who looked directly into a camera and claimed not to understand net neutrality. Whether it’s willful ignorance or finely-tuned dishonesty doesn’t matter—the result is the same. You’re not listening to a network engineer. You’re listening to a corporate tool whose one job is to sell you the congestion that his packet shaping policies create.
I gotta pay for a VPN (Score:2)
because Verizon just doesn't route some networks. Just flat out refuses. Won't mention why. Claims they don't. But the packets don't flow.
That's why we need neutrality. To ensure you're not fucking your customers up the ass.
Net Neutrality in a nutshell (Score:2)
Some of us pay a bit more for a business line and have, say, 1Gbps symmetric which is closer to the actual speed due to the line actually having a "real" SLA.
However, in both cases, I don't expect my ISP to be farking with my data. My speed isn't supposed to be 1Gbps symmetric unless I'm runnin
What is a photocopier (Score:1)