Discussion on question by Shog9: Net Neutrality and Stack Overflow / Stack Exchange

Quick question: can people outside of the US actually DO anything? I'm well aware of the Net Neutrality problem, but it seems like an internal US legislation problem. Of course, SHOULD the US screw up net neutrality, then very quickly this will be a "rest-of-the-world" problem as well... But, again, it doesn't feel like anyone outside of the US can, legally, have any say in the matter.

Can someone clearly define what net neutrality is? Is blocking an IP (or range of them) based on a DNSBL a violation of net neutrality? Is a selective peering policy at an internet exchange a violation of net neutrality? Is there a line where "private" transport between multiple parties becomes "internet" and a severe violation of net neutrality? Is providing only IPv4 service (not IPv6) a violation of net neutrality?

@Javia1492 Comparison that does not hold, where were all you guys when EU introduce the stupid Cookie law, making awful websites?

@TylerH it's sattire, but that's certainly the path we could head towards.

@MBraedley Nice scenario. So, with net neutrality, can the bigshot pay the ISP to set up additional infrastructure for exclusive use, thus guaranteeing the 500Mb/s rate for the future?

@MBraedley One good argument against that is tele-medicine, isn't there a good case to be made that life-saving bits should be prioritized? I'm not sure that they are currently.

For anyone that want's to see the internet without net neutrality: jointhefastlane.com

I could use bogus data, but that seems like cheating.

Basically, the linked system / form seem to target US citizens, so I wonder if I can even fill them out...

Does net neutrality only implies to legal/lawful sites? How would you discriminate between the legals and illegals?

The battleforthenet.com page seems to be having problems. "There was an error submitting the form, please try again" - retries get the same error.

A friend of mine who is a bit of a programmer-celebrity (if there is such a thing?) got very tight-lipped when the topic of "justice" came up, and he said (I suppose cynically) that every time people he'd seen use words like justice or fairness, they were actually advancing their own agenda. He exempted me from this, but said, basically everyone else who used these words weren't using them for the advancement of what you'd like to think the words mean.

When carriers talk about throttling the top 5% of users (there will always be a top 5% by the way so this means you whoever you are) it reminds me of the rolling blackouts in California that turned out to not be because of a supply or usage problem. It was accounting funny business. I want my money spent on making room for all the users.

This is a problem, because only half of what this fifth connect wants is available. In a world without net neutrality, the provider for this fifth connection could pay for a fast lane, and squeeze out the other four connections. In a world with net neutrality, though, every connection would instead run at 80% of what they can handle, so the new connection would only use 400Mb/s.

@Wildcard So, to contrive a situation, let's say that we have a router that is capable of routing 1000Mb/s worth of packets in aggregate, and that it is currently supporting four connections that are using 750Mb/s of that capacity. Everything is good, because each connection is running at 100% of what they can handle and/or need. Now suppose we add a fifth connection, and it's some biggshot that wants to transfer at a rate of 500Mb/s all by itself.

Come to think of it, I am a techie but no internet guru and would benefit from a more detailed analysis of how this would affect global internet traffic.

@MBraedley what if network congestion is such that you can only handle 10% of your traffic? Should you handle 10% of the traffic of each individual connection (letting them all time out), or should you while getting your outage handled forward only 10% of the connections so that those at least can complete?

@MBraedley see, this is slippery. Fundamentally, packets aren't "slowed." They are either sent or not. So at a CPU-cycle-length scale of time, one connection HAS to be prioritized—in other words, selected to be handled first—or none would ever be handled at all. So at a technical level, what does this really mean?

@TRiGisTimothyRichardGreen I have no idea what popular American belief is, I don't live there, don't intend to do so and can't really say I read enough of what goes out of there to discern a popular belief, but I am pretty convinced that if private isp around the world see a way to make more money, a precedent will help them cross the fence

@FélixGagnon-Grenier Contrary to popular American belief, most other countries are not in a race to become more like the USA.

Current thought is a blog post explaining why we think this is a good idea and how readers can participate, along with some sort of (dismissible) banner linking to the post to be shown for the duration of the 12th, @Servy. The latter bit is still kinda TBD; we should do something, but ideally we're focusing on educating folks & not annoying them.

Does John Oliver's GoFCCYourself.com still work?

@Won't Net neutrality is something that affects all us internet users, regardless of politics...

It might be worth noting that the current Chairman of the FCC is Ajit Pai, who was not the Chairman at the time of the Title II change-- that was Tom Wheeler. Non-US readers might be confused or not up to speed on the details here.