that sounds more defiant than I wished, I just mean that, yes, indeed, the USA does a lot of things that other countries do not, but in this case, I am not sure how it applies
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?
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(I think I'm in support of the idea, but I have yet to see a clear definition that cleanly applies to the world of networking.)
@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
it's not so much about the countries as it is about the service providers
gtg, I'll be glad to continue that discussion laters
@Azendale Net neutrality is the idea that all bits should be treated equally. Regardless of where your bits are coming from or going to, they should be treated the same as everyone else's bits. At a concrete level this basically means that every bit should travel through the network as fast as it can, given current network load, total network capacity, and the bandwidth that you pay for. If one bit needs slowing, due, for instance, to network congestion, then all bits should be slowed.
@MBraedley so if you can handle some bits faster but not others...you shouldn't? Reminds me of FedEx actually letting packages sit in the office and take up space rather than deliver them because the customer hadn't paid for overnight shipping.
@Wildcard Well, no. I say as much in my third sentence.
Every entity that has to route packets should take roughly the same amount of time to route every packet. They can't control how fast a particular service can send or receive packets, but the goal of the routing entity is to get every connection it's handling to operate at the fastest throughput it can.
And if it has to slow down one connection, then it should slow down every connection equally (percentage wise).
Does the current net neutrality bill have anything to do with giving ISP's the ability to block what they (or the government) consider illegal content? I don't want to bother writing yet another unpopular opinion piece on meta, but there are good reasons to oppose it when it comes to censorship
@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?
@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 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.
I could envision an outage, and then the technicians working to recover, and they happen to recover their own services first. Then several hours later, the recover everybody's connections. Result? Lawsuit, net neutrality violation!
@Wildcard We're not talking about outages though - this is normal operations. Ending these rules would enable the practically monopolistic cable companies to go "To access twitter, pay an additional 5,99$ a month" or charge the companies directly to be accessible by users. This has the potential for an unprecedented chilling effect on the internet in general and free expression. Guess what happens to websites critical of cable companies or a cable companies' pet issue? Not reachable anymore
The only surefire way to safeguard that is to classify cable companies as common carriers and prohibit them from doing that explicitly.
@Romoku nobody who makes these rules cares much about a site for programmers disappearing. If there's anything meaningful we can do, it's writing them directly - hence the rather specific call to action.
@Shog9 Possibly the No Agenda guys had to wrong, but they usually dig into things pretty well and left me with the impression that not all of it was in effect until well after Obama was out of office. I don't see anything in those docs that point to future-stuff, but there has to be some sort of timeline for implementing otherwise wouldn't a lot of people got sued right away?
@Shog9 The point isn't about the public caring whether some programming site disappears. It's about achieving a political outcome from this call to action. The silent majority will only be impelled to act if it personally affects them. Therefore, blacking out SO is the most effective way to convey the message.
@PeterTurner There was at least one lawsuit shortly after the document I linked to above went into effect, challenging its legality (I don't have a link for that handy, sorry, but you can probably find it pretty easily).
It went nowhere
Folks (including myself) tend to have short memories for stuff that doesn't affect them daily.
The visible result of these rules has mostly been... Shit hasn't gotten worse. Perhaps a little better. That's not exactly the sort of thing that keeps it fresh in one's mind.
So, you'll find a lot of the articles on this, and talking points from those still talking about it, stuck in the 2014 mindset - note that you're not the only person in that thread working on the assumption that some / most of this was still in the "proposed change" phase.
@Shog9 seems to me that the net effect has been 0 thus far if no one has been prosecuted for breaking them. I know they went in to effect, but I think there's a still a timeline for full adoption somewhere.
@PeterTurner prosecution for breaking the rules takes years and rarely happens then. Usually there's a settlement of some sort.
The practical effect of having enforceable rules isn't companies getting hauled into court, it's companies adjusting their behavior to avoid excessive legal fees hashing out a settlement.
here's where I get my news: noagendaplayer.com/listen/928/2-03-23 John C. Dvorak apparently thinks it didn't go in to effect. It'd be good to get him to either retract that statement or investigate it more, otherwise I feel a bit lied to.
Hey @Shog9, do you think it would be possible to add some verbiage explaining how this is not a US-only thing but will affect internet users the world over? Maybe to your meta post, maybe as a new one, I don't know. I'm thinking that the techies among us will grok that but others likely will not.
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.
> Even folks who aren't based in the US have probably benefited from the work of those who are at one point or another; if nothing else, this is where our servers live so any additional headaches when it comes to providing access are gonna be a problem.
I had a dedicated section in an earlier draft of the blog post, but ended up cutting it
@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.
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.
@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?
@Wildcard No, net neutrality would in general disallow that sort of behaviour. The best that a bigshot could do is locate their data/services closer to their customers by, say, connecting directly to the ISP network. They could also pay for equipment upgrades for the ISP with the understanding that, while they may not be the exclusive beneficiaries, they might receive the largest benefits.
But there's also anti-competitive things to consider, like ISPs essentially extorting services like Netflix in order to finance network infrastructure upgrades, which while not falling entirely within the scope of net neutrality, are at least tangentially related.
And everything I've been talking about is pretty low level stuff, and doesn't start to consider higher implications of not having net neutrality, for instance zero-rated services like streaming music on cell phones, or preferential availability of a content service, a service that also happens to be owned by an ISP.
(See Bell Canada, which owns content creation, content provider, content distribution, telephony, and ISP business. They ran afoul of anti-competition laws for providing a VOD service for smartphones, but only to their customers, even though there wasn't any technical reason for that restriction.)
@MBraedley There are also separate tiers for business users that let them use heavier duty cables, connections, enterprise support (24/7/365 and dedicated support staff), which can make some difference
@TylerH So one thing that I didn't really touch on is that tiered service is something that is allowed. I think the prefered method of doing that, at least to residential wireline customers, is to offer different connection speed tiers. And definitely, in the commercial/enterprise space, technical support is something that you can offer various tiers for.
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.
