FCC Public Comment Period For Net Neutrality Ends Tomorrow, July 15

samzenpus (5) writes "The deadline for the FCC's public comment period on their proposed net neutrality rule is coming up fast. The final day to let the FCC know what you think is tomorrow, July 15. A total of 647,000 comments have already been sent. Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon and other tech companies are making a final push for net neutrality saying that the FCC decision, "shifts the balance from the consumers' freedom of choice to the broadband Internet access providers' gatekeeping decisions." The Consumerist has a guide to help you through the comment process, so make sure your voice is heard."

Re:Win or lose the government will find a way

[AndrewBuck]

Way to repeat the industry propaganda. Net neutrality does not say anything at all about the upgrades you carry out, all it says is that whether or not the upgrades are done, you can't priveledge one customer over another because that person paid you to speed their traffic and slow others.

-AndrewBuck

Re:Dumb question...

[Anonymous Coward]

The FCC can force this on internet companies by reclassifying their status. The courts agreed with Verizon because internet service providers are classed as information services, which doesn't allow the FCC to regulate them the same way they do other things. It's really a question of whether ISPs are "information services" or if companies like Google and sites like Slashdot are the information services, and Verizon, AT&T, etc are utilities for access to such. It's like asking whether the electric company provides light in your home.

Political Absurdism

[bill_mcgonigle]

Quick, do you vote "yes" or "no" on the Jabberwocky?

This [aclu.org] is the most lucid summary I've seen of the current "debate". Quoting:

The things that bug me most about the net neutrality debate are:

0) The whole slow lane/fast lane conception is just wrong. Internet traffic looks nothing like vehicle traffic. On roads, you have only a few lanes to put cars in. On the internet, it's more like you break up the cars and trucks into atoms (packets), mix them all together, pour them through various choke points and reassemble them at their destination no matter in what order they arrive.

Traffic management at these levels IS needed, and managed at a e2e level by a TCP-friendly protocol (generally), and at a router level by queue management schemes like "Drop Tail". Massive improvements to drop tail, fixing what is known as "bufferbloat" with better "active queue management" (AQM) and packet scheduling schemes (FQ) such as codel, fq_codel, RED, and PIE are being considered by the IETF to better manage congestion, and the net result of these techniques is vastly reduced latency across the chokepoints, vastly improved levels of service for latency sensitive services (such as voice, gaming, and videoconferencing), with only the fattest flows losing some packets and thus slowing down - regardless of who is sending them. Politics doesn't enter into it. Any individual can make their own links better, as can any isp, and vendor.

Some links:

http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra... [ietf.org]
https://datatracker.ietf.org/d... [ietf.org]
http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra... [ietf.org]
http://tools.ietf.org/html/dra... [ietf.org]

Furthermore individual packets can be marked by the endpoints to indicate their relative needs. This is called QoS, and the primary technique is "diffserv".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D... [wikipedia.org]

There are plenty of problems with diffserv in general, but they are very different from thinking about "fast or slow" lanes, which are rather difficult to implement compared to any of the techniques noted above. You have to have a database of every ip address you wish to manipulate accessed in real time, on every packet, in order to implement the lanes.

IF ONLY I could see in the typical network neutrality debater a sane understanding and discussion of simple AQM, packet scheduling, and QoS techniques, I would be extremely comforted in the idea that sane legislation would emerge. But I've been waiting 10 years for that to happen.

We have tested, and have deployed these algorithms to dramatic reductions in latency and increased throughput on consumer grade hardware, various isps and manufacturers have standardized on various versions, (docsis 3.1 is pie, free.fr uses fq_codel, as does streamboost, as do nearly all the open source routing projects such as openwrt)

I really wish those debating net neutrality actually try - or at least be aware of - these technical solutions to the congestion problems they seek to solve with legislation. I wouldn't mind at all legal mandates to have aqm on, by default. :)

It makes a huge difference, on all technologies available today:

https://www.bufferbloat.net/pr... [bufferbloat.net]

See also the bufferbloat mailing lists.

1) if we want true neutrality, restrictive rules by the ISPs regarding their customers hosting services of their own have to go - and nobody's been making THAT point, which irks me significantly. In an age where you have, say, gbit fiber to your business, it makes quite a lot of sense from a security

Re:Sick Joke

[AndrewBuck]

Wow, yet another industry shill posting as AC to spread propaganda. I think you are the 4th or 5th one in this thread.

In answer to your misinformation...

Net Neutrality originally meant: leave the internet alone, it's been working fine for years.

Yep, and it still does mean that. You can claim it means whatever you want, but the people areguing for common carrier status want exactly this, and nothing more.

Then corporations start to throttle back our bandwidth, and instead of the courts charing them with selling a fraud, or deceptive trade practices

I would be very happy to see them do this, unfortunately it would be a tough case to make because they always weasel language into the contract you sign with them saying they can "regulate speed for QOS reasons" and that your speed is "up to" some threshold, etc.

the FCC and Obama come in with a plan to give government control over the internet, and require the ISPs to log your internet activity and just give it to police whenever they ask for it. And of course Mr. Obama and the FCC call this plan "Net Neutrality".

This is just ludicrous. In what way is saying to ISPs "you can't discriminate based on who sends the traffic, you have to treat it all equally" equal to "governemnt control over the internet" in the pejorative sense you are intending for it to mean. I guess the government would have some control as all regulations are a form of control, but that is not what you meant. The people arguing for net neutrality want all players to have the same access to the public internet without large entites paying to prevent their data from getting through, so why would they want the government to do exactly the same thing. You were just trying to scare people into doing what the giant corps want, which is to let them screw their customers over by forcing them to pay for a connection and then pay again to make it not suck. Furthermore, your comment about logging on the internet is pretty funny in light of the Snowden leaks. Why would they need to pass a law to "log the internet" when they have been doing exactly that for years. Just more phony scaremongering to confuse people who are not well informed.

That's right, they gave it the same name, but it has a completely different meaning.

Nope, that was just the big ISPs and their paid shills who post AC on sites like slashdot. Go crawl back into the hole you came out of. To quote Woodie Guthrie "all you facists are bound to lose". You might win on this one and get the two tiered internet your paymasters want, but the people are slowly learning how badly they are being screwed over and eventually they will wake up and take action.

-AndrewBuck