Net Neutrality Is Complicated: Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales (indiatimes.com) 149
In an interview, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales backed the principle of Net neutrality, but added that enabling poor people to access the Internet is equally important. Wales also defended Wikipedia Zero, a project that aims to provide select services free of cost on mobile devices in developing markets. He said :Wikipedia Zero follows a very strict set of principles such as no money is ever exchanged and so on. Net neutrality is such a complicated topic, it is something that I am extremely passionate about and I think is incredibly important. And at the same time I think getting access to knowledge for poorest people of world is also very important. Sometimes those two things can be in tension and we have to be really careful about it. I think fundamental thing is that we maintain and open and free Internet.
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Exactly. Just think "dumb pipe". Traffic can be managed at the end points.
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Netflix customers are only a portion of all customers. Expecting ISPs to upgrade peer links at the expense of all customers to satisfy the bandwidth demands of some is wrong and effectively forces all customers to subsidize Netflix' business model.
Why isn't Netflix buying transit on the large networks they wish to put traffic on to and/or using CDNs like EVERY OTHER major streaming company?
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Why are you claiming that Netflix are at fault for ISPs failing to meet customer bandwidth demands?
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There's two parties here - Netflix' transit provider, and the ISP.
Why should ALL customers of an ISP have to pay to support infrastructure upgrades due to the demands of a subset of customers, especially when that issue only comes up because the company generating the traffic has chosen to buy transit from another ISP?
If Netflix would buy transit on the large networks on which it wishes to put massive amounts of traffic this wouldn't be a problem.
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The other customers are consuming bandwidth and causing traffic of their own, whether through YouTube, Hulu, steam game downloads or whatever. They're not compensating for others Netflix use, they're paying for the service they receive.
If they aren't using much bandwidth then there are typically cheaper tariffs they can use.
Next you'll be hitching about soccer moms with their big SUVs clogging the roads that motorcyclists help pay for.
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Because Netflix customers are already paying for bandwidth.
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Netflix isn't a customer, or this would be a problem in the first place.
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*wouldn't
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But the people who are watching Netflix are customers of the broadband company AND THEY ARE ALREADY PAYING FOR THEIR BANDWIDTH.
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Their ISP/transit provider isn't paying or isn't paying enough for their side of the connection or this wouldn't be a problem.
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Their ISP/transit provider isn't paying or isn't paying enough for their side of the connection or this wouldn't be a problem.
What does that mean "not paying enough"? Are they paying for their bandwidth? Do you think Netflix pays for the bandwidth that their servers use or not? And if not, how do they get their connections to the Internet?
Do you think Netfix is just stealing a nei
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So, why is Netflix even part of this discussion? It sounds like a simple contractual problem. There are already mechanisms in place for people who don't live up to agreements. You sign a contract, you perform or don't perform. You don't get to say, "Hey, this turned out to be more expensive than I thought, so we have to make certain bits on the Internet more expe
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You can set prices by the flow rate, not the amount or type of data of data. Content is nobody's business.
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It only matters how fast you want to flow that 10 gig video. Instead of showing it live, it will have to be cached at a lower rate onto the local machine for later viewing.
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It is not supposed to matter to you as an ISP. You sell bandwidth. What your customer does with said bandwidth is none of your business.
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It is not supposed to matter to you as an ISP. You sell bandwidth. What your customer does with said bandwidth is none of your business.
If all customers wanted was bits they could offer you rand(). Reality is those bits must be transported to you from somewhere and that has varying cost for the ISP. Behind the scenes there's a huge struggle over peering, transit and CDNs on whose terms and prices. It doesn't really cost the ISP the same for you to download from your neighbor's FTP server as from a server in Australia. And the big ISPs ("tier 1"), CDNs like Akamai and big content providers like Netflix do throw their weight around to make su
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Yes, and it's on them to figure this out. If they didn't, why the fuck would I need them? If you can't work on these terms close shop, the market will make sure someone else takes the opportunity.
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If Netflix was the ISPs customer, none of this would be a problem.
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Your paying customers will start complaining. And switching to other providers. Or making others switch to other providers by publicly complaining.
So, no, there's no obligation other than needing to offer good services to be able to keep your customers.
Let's consider the alternative: you throttle Netflix. This hurts Netflix's business. It will benefit Netflix's competitors. Internet access is a utility, where traffic should be treated equally in order to allow people and businesses to use the internet as a
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Yes, but it's not net neutrality that should be forcing them to upgrade but rather existing fraud false advertising etc laws, an ISP needs to responsible to upgrade all circuits within it's network up to and including connecting to other networks. Otherwise they are not honestly offering 75mbs or whatever they are selling. Now I say circuits, wireless is a different beast and frankly where you have the most ability to vote with your feet. In the meantime any ISP with any monopoly rights needs to be held
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I collect some stats and notice that a disproportionate amount of traffic over that pipe is, say, Netflix, but not all.
Then you deserve to go out of business, because you are absolutely incompetent at managing your bandwidth distribution.
But let's pretend that you're actually talking about something reasonable: you notice that your tubes are full, but you don't want to take money from your CEO's yacht fleet. You, an as ISP are well within the constraints of net neutrality to evenly restrict the flow of traffic over your pipes, but without discriminating against anyone who isn't paying your extortion money.
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You notice that B1 is constantly congested. You take some measurements and find the correct bandwidth allocation would be 75% B1, 25%
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That's how it works today.
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Why should Verizon have to upgrade anything to satisfy Level3's customer?
There's a reason why this issue is only effecting Netflix and why their traffic is entering the networks of major ISPs via peer links, and that's because Netflix chose to save money by using other transit providers that would knowingly abuse settlement free peering links. They could pay for CDNs and/or transit directly on these networks the way every other major streaming provide does, but then they might have to cut into some of thei
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Verizon should upgrade to satisfy THEIR OWN customers.
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Netflix isn't a customer or this wouldn't be a problem.
What people are really saying is that ISPs should let customers of other ISPs freeload on their networks at the expense of all customers due to the demands of a subset.
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Very glad you brought this example up! This is a great example of something that has nothing to do with Network Neutrality, that people commonly conflate with neutrality.
Does the principle of net neutrality obligate me to upgrade that pipe...?
No. Definitely not. This is an issue of network management and making your customers happy.
What network neutrality does state, is that the ISP must not try to filter or alter the traffic that comes from that pipe. That's all it has to say on the matter.
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Net neutrality does not say "all traffic must be treated exactly the same", it says "all traffic of a particular type must be treated the same"
I think some people would disagree with you on that and argue that any form of traffic shaping is not neutral and potentially undesirable. The purest form of net neutrality is that everyone gets a pipe, and whatever bandwidth that pipe has, they can use to transfer whatever data they want without the ISP examining it at all.
If an ISP wants to adopt your position and shape by traffic type but not by traffic source/destination, customers can probably reduce that to the alternative version anyway by sending al
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What about equal traffic exchange provisions in settlement free peering agreements? It sounds like those end up on the chopping block of pure neutrality.
Netflix is unwilling to lease 4U of rack space (Score:2)
ISPs won't take Netflix's Open Connect Appliances, which are 4U in size, because Netflix is unwilling to lease 4U of rack space in the ISPs' data centers.
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Still misses the point. Netflix, and only Netflix, caused this problem in the first place by putting it's traffic on the networks other providers to be sent to ISPs via peer links. Now it wants to solve that problem by pushing companies to give Netflix free space, power, and cooling in their datacenters.
How about no?
Netflix could have chosen to use CDNs or to buy transit directly on the large networks it wished to supply traffic to, but instead chose to use cheaper transit providers that would abuse settl
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Netflix could have chosen to use CDNs or to buy transit directly on the large networks it wished to supply traffic to, but instead chose to use cheaper transit providers that would abuse settlement free peering links.
Netflix pushes more bandwidth than any CDN (aside from, maybe, CloudFlare, who doesn't cache video and, therefore, wouldn't benefit Netflix) can handle. While they could have chosen to work with a CDN provider who can't support them they, instead, chose to use transit providers who can actually provide the bandwidth Netflix needs (and pays for) and let them sort out the details. And before you say (or imply) that Netflix should sort the details out themselves, that's what they're trying to do in offering th
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Why isn't Netflix buying transit directly from these ISPs if they wish to push this much traffic on their networks?
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Re: Netflix is unwilling to lease 4U of rack space (Score:2)
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The fact that users are requesting the traffic isn't relevant unless you think that companies who supply content shouldn't have to pay for transit simply because customers of an ISP are requesting it.
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Netflix pays for transit. Netflix pays low-rent transit providers for transit. Many of these low-rent transit providers (or, as pedrop357 put it, "providers that would abuse settlement free peering links") refuse to in turn pay major home ISPs for transit through the home ISPs' networks.
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Peering abuse (Score:2)
The ISP isn't Netflix's customer if Netflix's transit provider "would abuse settlement free peering links" by sending far more traffic in one direction than it receives in the other.
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Or, wait, should I be expecting Comcast to pay me for all the data they send down my coax, because they send several thousand times as much data my way as I send theirs? Because that's exactly what you're proposing.
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Is there a document describing standard industry practice for when a particular interconnection is eligible for settlement-free peering status?
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What's your point?
I'll break down the argument into multiple points:
1. Not all transit providers are equal. Some make better deals with peers than others.
2. Some transit providers are less expensive because they lack the ability to make the best deals with peers.
3. To cut costs, Netflix chose a less expensive transit provider.
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There is no industry standard practice; each network sets their own requirements for peering. The best resource I know of is The Art of Peering: The Peering Playbook [sacramento.ca.us].
Just like with transfer caps, the ISPs are manipulating (lying about) the discussion for their own benefit. They have monopoly powers through captive customers and in many cases have an interest in degrading traffic which competes with services they offer like video.
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1. Not all transit providers are equal. Some make better deals with peers than others.
Not all watermelons are equal, either; some are larger and/or have fewer seeds than others. In fact, outside of mathematics, it is quite rare to find two truly equal entities. Basically, inequality is a given in the real world. Hell, not all streaming video providers are equal, which is why many people subscribe to two or more. In fact, Netflix uses multiple tra
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Thank you for clarifying and providing the sources.
You mention Tata. That reminds me of a previous Slashdot article from five and a half years ago [slashdot.org] describing Comcast's habit of refusing to upgrade links that are clearly congested.
But I disagree with one point of your terminology:
The concepts we're discussing here are so simple you have to either be an idiot or a troll to not get them.
At least you proved you weren't trolling; I guess that only leaves one other possibility.
You don't have to be an "idiot" (person with severe intellectual disability) to happen not to have learned about the finer points of long-haul Internet peering negotiation.
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You are correct, sir, but it certainly does help enable one to speak with authority on subjects they do not understand. ;)
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Often it's the last mile that's saturated, especially if it's wireless. A Netflix Open Connect Appliance won't open up more RF spectrum, procure land for more cell towers, or launch more communications satellites.
And even on networks with a wired last mile (fiber, cable, and DSL), who pays to power and cool the OCA, and who pays the opportunity cost for 4U of rack space that the ISP could be leasing to someone else?
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Why shouldn't it?
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You are joking, right?
If Netflix met the an ISP's peering requirements then why wouldn't the ISP peer with them? Doing so would bypass transit providers and their transit links which the ISP has to pay for. Installing the Netflix content distribution devices does the same thing.
The answer is that these ISPs compete with Netflix for video services and they can take advantage of their monopoly position to degrade traffic from Netflix to their customers in favor of their own services and they can extort Netf
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No, I would demand that the peer sending all that extra traffic across our peering link pay for that extra traffic and/or pay to upgrade both sides of the link.
Every problem a solution that's simple and wrong (Score:2)
For every problem, there is a solution that's simple, easy, and wrong.
> Traffic can be managed at the end points.
Netflix IS an endpoint of Comcast's network. There is a router at which Comcast's network ends. Netlfix wants to plug in to Comcast's network and dump billions of dollars of traffic. Comcast wants to do as you suggest and manage that endpoint.
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Netflix just has to pay for its bandwidth. The amount of data is completely irrelevant. It's not complicated.
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No, the alternat
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Net neutrality is actually very simple. He just opposes it,
Net neutrality addresses first-world problems. He rightly points out that there are more important problems in the world, even the world of the internet.
And now I must go scrub myself with a Brillo pad to clean off the stain of defending Jimmy Wales.
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I think what's most important for Jimmy Wales is that he receives enough suckers that he can guilt into believing that wikipedia just doesn't have enough funding and needs more of it, even though that's a load of crap and his nonprofit company spends somewhat lavishly.
Let's not even get into the fact that most wikipedia articles are biased towards a pan-European, North American, and Australian viewpoint, in spite of claiming that they have strict "NPOV" rules, or the fact that administrators will simply del
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Yes, and the Catholic church has strict rules about altar boys, but it's hard to see how this organization outcome could have been averted once the crucial decision was made to m
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Wales saying, "there are more important problems in the world" is meaningless blabbering.
If my roof is leaking, I could say, "well, there are more pressing problems in the world", but that doesn't change the necessity to fix the fucking roof.
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So let's first solve world hunger and repressive regimes? While the corporations eliminate Net Neutrality?
Yes, there are other problems in the world too. Yay for multitasking!
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No, we're not talking about unrelated issues here. We're talking about Net Neutrality directly preventing helping out the needy in some small way. Let's not do that. Yes, I also like my entertainment to be inexpensive, don't get me wrong, but it's hardly the highest ideal.
Frankly, "Net Neutrality" was always ignoring the specific real problem in pursuit of some purist goal. The real problem is cable companies with local monopolies fucking their customers. Even if we pretend that very specific problem i
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Now this is something you'd have to explain. How is Net Neutrality keeping you down? Net Neutrality exactly keeps cable companies from fucking you even more by not allowing them to throttle certain services that they wish to sell to you instead.
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No, Net Neutrality also means you can't "zero-rate" content. Throttling is just one of many ways the cable company can advantage themselves. Adding a strict data cap then not counting their own content against the data cap is another (and cables companies are all flipping to that now).
Want to allow poor customers access to Wikipedia without charging that to their data plan? Well, that's the exact thing Net Neutrality needs to forbid.
Slashdot is full of people who are fans of the words "Net Neutrality", b
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Nobody keeps you from providing free ISP service for the poor, if you have it in your heart.
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Oh, sure, but you're now making it harder to help out the third world because of an obsession with fighting your cable company, which has been my point all along.
How about we fix the damn local monopoly (the real problem), instead of making things worse for the needy?
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How do you make it worse for the needy by providing free service?
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The current Silicon Valley fetish of thinking that access to the internet is somehow going to lift the world out of poverty strikes me as the height of hubris.
What would help more than anything is to eliminate the oppressive governments that are starving their own people or ensuring access to clean water or modern health centers. They see high technology as the answer to every problem. It's the exact same nonsense as the "put computers in every school / give every child a laptop or iPad / kids need to lea
You need to think about this more (Score:1)
To borrow an expression used in a discussion about USENET of old: You're conflating "use of the net" and "use on the net". Net neutrality is exactly everyone can use the network just like everyone else, without prejudice or premium subscription required.
The whole teh zuck+frends "internet.org" walled garden-shtick breaks that "use of the net": You're blocked and no longer a first class citizen able to have your traffic passed like everyone else. You're chattel, beholden to your freemium subscription you can
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The second world is basically Russia and China.... China has it's own issues that go way beyond any ideas of net neutrality, and I have no idea what goes on with Russian internet.
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* corporations are people too
WP:OBLIGATORY (Score:5, Funny)
[citation needed]
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https://news.slashdot.org/story/16/05/30/178249/net-neutrality-is-complicated-wikipedia-founder-jimmy-wales [slashdot.org]
Re:WP:OBLIGATORY (Score:4, Insightful)
Now let's analyze what's wrong with that. Facebook is a for-profit company whose business model depends on being able to communicate with anyone through their service. Therefore, their efforts to enable people to access Facebook are entirely self-serving. That means that they aren't noble or generous at all, but rather strategic.
Now if Facebook's funding also benefitted every other social network from the tiniest site all the way up through Google+, I would consider that philanthropy. As long as it only benefits them, it isn't really benefitting the poor, because the perceived benefits are balanced out by limiting their future access to other competing services and reducing competition that will eventually provide improvements that they care about.
The same argument holds for Wikipedia, even though there's no profit motive. Imagine if every time somebody threatened to fork Wikipedia to push them to fix governance issues, Wikipedia said, "Yeah, but a third of your potential audience won't even consider going to your competing site because it will cost them money." So market manipulation on behalf of Wikipedia will have a chilling effect on dissidence.
So no, net neutrality isn't complicated. Manipulating the price of Internet service in favor of specific companies or organizations always comes with a price. The notion that something is better than nothing might be true in the short term, but it has very real long-term consequences.
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Therefore, their efforts to enable people to access Facebook are entirely self-serving. That means that they aren't noble or generous at all, but rather strategic.
So? You get something where you had nothing before. Benefit is included even if it fits a self-serving strategic move by others.
As long as it only benefits them, it isn't really benefitting the poor, because the perceived benefits are balanced out by limiting their future access to other competing services and reducing competition that will eventually provide improvements that they care about.
For that I'd need to give you a big fat [citation needed]. This is the first mover principle at work, nothing more. By offering Facebook for free to those who don't have it they are still getting something they didn't have access to (if they wanted it) before. If they are in a position of no longer being poor there's no intrinsic reason why they are locked out of competition to som
Phrasing (Score:2)
... getting poor people to access the Internet is equally important.
"Getting" or "enabling" ? The former sounds like it's for your benefit [washingtonpost.com], the latter for theirs. Which is Jimmy - and Mark (Zuckerberg).
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I value the editors for moderating their opinions, and wish we all could do as well.
WHERE IS YOUR TONGUE? IS IT IN YOUR CHEEK?
Neutrality only when it applies to someone else (Score:3, Insightful)
Talk about a double talking weasel. Net neutrality(why don't we call it net neutering instead?) is great when it applies to somebody else, but fuck you if you want me to play by the same rules.
Fuck you guy, just fuck you.
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Oh and when I said "net neutering" what I meant was, is that is what Wales is trying to do here, neuter the internet. Still, he's a weasel.
Net neutrality is a band-aid (Score:4, Insightful)
Once the cable companies had the monopoly, they could basically ignore end-users' desires, thus depriving them of their voice in the ISP market. On top of that, they are now empowered because they are the only means of internet access to those customers. All the power of those customers' dollars, none of the drawbacks of having to listen to what those customers want! And they chose to leverage that power by trying to extort additional money from websites to deliver content that their customers had already paid them for.
Net neutrality is a band-aid to try to fix this problem. By prohibiting different pricing based on content source, it prevents this type of extortion. But like the original monopoly regulatory kludge, it kills off another aspect of the market - differential pricing based on the cost to actually deliver that content. If Netflix is streaming content to the ISP, that's a lot of bandwidth and so costs the ISP a lot of money. If Netflix installs content servers at the ISP, that eliminates the bandwidth consumption and so costs the ISP less money. But net neutrality essentially prohibits the ISP from passing that cost savings on to the customer. The ISP has to charge the same price for all content, regardless of source and the bandwidth cost to obtain data from that source. It's just one regulatory fix which mostly but not entirely works, trying to fix another regulatory fix which mostly but not entirely works.
The ultimate solution is to restore market power to the end-user. Let them vote with their dollars. This has the advantage of pitting dynamic human minds against any tricks the ISPs try to come up with to increase prices or degrade service. Right now we're trying to fight the ISPs' tricks using static laws, which take decades to implement in response to their previous tricks, giving them plenty of time to figure out new tricks.
Abolish the cable monopolies. Convert the monopoly into a tightly regulated service contact for the physical cable or fiber which runs to the homes, and only the physical cables. No content service allowed. The cable maintenance company then makes money by leasing bandwidth along that fiber to different ISPs at a fixed (regulated) rate. The ISPs then have to compete with each other based on quality of service and price. If an ISP tries to pull a Comcast and deliberately degrades Netflix, they will hemorrhage customers as they flee to a different ISP who isn't degrading Netflix. And they'll do it in a matter of weeks or months, not the years or decades it took to get Net Neutrality implemented. This is how we regulate utilities, and oddly enough this is how "socialist" Europe does it.
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That's because it takes "static laws" to get "physical cables" buried in the first place. Otherwise, an ISP can't run its layer 1 over or under city-owned roads or non-subscribers' land to reach subscribers.
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The city owns the street and sidewalk. To run your cable under the street or sidewalk, you have to negotiate with the city. And to make this negotiation reasonable and non-discriminatory, "you want to rely on static laws" that set uniform rules under which a utility may operate in a city.
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Fair enough. Eliminating the monopolies is a big step. But it is only about 1/3rd of the problem. There are 3 steps, including the one you listed, that are needed to make this work:
1. Abolish the monopolies
2. Split the ISP from the physical wire provider.
3. Establish network neutrality laws
The first is what you stated. Unchanged, full stop.
The second part is an extension of your statement "No content service allowed." Many people just can't wrap their head around this concept any longer: There are 2 com
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Its not complicated. (Score:2)
Its the simplest possible way to operate network devices. Your home router is (for the most part) net-neutral and all you have to do is plug the thing in.
The problem is that nobody actually wants net neutrality. And that's where it gets hard because service providers want neutrality broken in a different way than service users (and of course no two of anybody wants it broken in exactly the same way, but definitely some generalizations can be drawn.)
Service providers want to be able to charge a premium for
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Service providers want to be able to charge a premium for every single bit
Which goes to Wales' other argument: Providing access to the poor. They don't have the money to pay for the premium services. So the more network resources that are dedicated to some basic level of access for everyone aren't likely to provide a profit to the providers. The providers want to assign their resources in tiers and give the best service to people who are more likely to kick back profits from on-line sales to the service providers.
It's also funny to see how the net neutrality argument suddenly c
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Even funnier when you consider the fact that Facebook removing content has exactly as much to do with net neutrality as your local library taking a book off the shelf that they disagree with. Sure censorship sucks (at least if you're the one being censored) but its got nothing to do with network transport.
Wales seems to be social engineering (Score:2)
Wikipedia keeps demanding more donations despite sitting on a pile of cash. They don't use that cash to fix their flawed and disreputable editor network that leads to grotesquely skewed wikipedia pages.
Wales now wants to use that cash to push that agenda ridden view of society onto people AND not provide them with access to alternate sources of information that might actually challenge the narrative and offer some semblance of truth?
Fuck Jimmy Wales, fuck his view of net neutrality and fuck the idiots that
Jimy Wales (Score:2)
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And Wikipedia profits from this how? If anything, it costs them more to service more people, not less.