Thank You, Phish Fans, For Caring About Net Neutrality (theoutline.com) 79
If you venture over to Battle For the Net, which encourages internet users to call Congress to advocate for the preservation of net neutrality rules, you'll find something peculiar: Several of the top sites that direct calls are Phish-related. (Phish is an American rock band.) From a report: As someone on Twitter pointed out, the traffic from phish.net -- which describes itself as "a non-commercial project run by Phish fans and for Phish fans" -- appears to be coming from a pop-up message that greets visitors to the site. The same pop-up, which directs to www.battleforthenet.com, appears when you visit the site's forums and setlist pages. So, it appears that Phish fans, while in the midst of discussing their favorite extended noodling sessions, are leading the charge to save us from our impending telecom-dominated hellscape. Thanks, guys!" Phish.net sees over 400,000 unique visitors each month, according to web analytics firm SimilarWeb. In July, the website served over one million unique visitors.
Phish? (Score:2)
I don't understand what I just read. Is Phish bad? Is it related to Phishing?
Re: Phish? (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF are you on about??
Net neutrality has been the de facto state of the Internet since its inception nearly 50 years ago (not 20). No ISP felt brazen enough to violate the principles of the net until there were clearly-established monopolies in major markets that would allow for effective control of content by a few companies.
The government getting involved is a regulatory response to companies that are doing bad (e.g., anti-competitive) things. It is literally one of the jobs of government to regulate these things.
Through Net Neutrality (and Common Carrier status for ISPs), the government is not telling people who can do what on the Internet - it is telling companies they they can't control who does what on the Internet. As in "completely the opposite of what you said".
Re: Phish? (Score:5, Informative)
Since you obviously weren't around then, allow me to teach you a bit of history: Network neutrality was the original state of affairs, and it was self-enforcing until all the independent ISPs got bought up or run out of business by conglomerates.
A brief history (Score:2)
https://www.freepress.net/blog... [freepress.net]
Government causes problems. Answer: more gov? (Score:1)
Translation:
The market worked.
Government got involved.
Big business allies with big government.
Problems.
Now, your solution is...more government? How about severing big business from big government instead?
https://fee.org/articles/goodbye-net-neutrality-hello-competition/
Re: Government causes problems. Answer: more gov? (Score:2)
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FEE is a propaganda outlet for True Believers in Hayek, Mises, and other economic charlatans.
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Yes, they are an American Band. They're comin' to your town, they'll help you party it down, they're an American Band.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
They were actually a bit hard for me to get into the first time I saw them. They seemed to be very.....disjointed and rambling on pointless jams and I say this as a huge Grateful Dead fan. Sometimes they just seemed silly. Their drummer often wore a dress (or a mumu?) and sometimes they'd jump up and down on small trampolines while playing their guita
Re:Phish? (Score:5, Informative)
Wikipedia to the rescue: "Phish is an American rock band that was founded at the University of Vermont in Burlington, Vermont in 1983. The band is known for musical improvisation, extended jams, blending of genres, and a dedicated fan base."
Seems to me the Slashdot editors could have beefed up the summary a bit.
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What about the vegetarian and vegan readers, though?
How about
Much better. Thank you Aziz.
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Don't worry about the vegetarians and vegans. They won't be with us for long
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Your body can't synthesize souls of the animals meat eaters consume unless you eat meat. This is why meat eaters age more slowly. It's the reason vampires don't age at all - they consume full sized human souls, not stunted animal ones.
It's basic science.
Phish (Score:2, Insightful)
Don’t worry; google, Apple and he rest will issue a statement that they are “disappointed by the decision” 20 pages deep on their sites that no one will see.
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Well I never heard of "Phish" but we've all heard of "phishing" so let's all assume that for once, spammers are on our side.
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Ads! Everywhere! (Score:2)
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Looks fine with uBlock Origin.
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Trump is a this year...
That sums him up pretty nicely, yes.
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Whatever. We don't let the canal operators determine who gets the water; its the same thing.
"Shape their traffic"; that's hilarious. Its not theirs. Its their customers' traffic. Their business is in providing the channel. If Youtube and Netflix are their big problem, then they should just switch to billing per unit usage. Then individual customers can and will police their own usage, and make their own decisions about whether they want to pay for watching hi-def video.
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You don't seem to understand what net neutrality is. Ouch.
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"No true Scotsman" fallacy detection meter at 90%.
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You don't seem to understand what net neutrality is. Ouch.
Yes, I do. And it is a major roadblock to smaller operators being able to provide internet access to smaller markets where the larger companies will never set foot. The "ouch" part is YOU not understanding how this Obama regulation does that, because you're comfortable in your well-wired little enclave and really don't care enough about fly-over country to worry about why it is millions of people have little better than dial-up internet in 2017. The slamming on of the brakes in that area is a symptom of th
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There is absolutely nothing about net neutrality which would prevent a small ISP from doing "things like fixed wireless solutions with modest backhaul without reserving the
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The FCC net neutrality rules never prevented limiting traffic for bona fide network management purposes, they only prevented such things on an inequitable basis (e.g. throttling Netflix, but providing unlimited bandwidth for the provider's own content service).
When you're a provider using, say, fixed wireless ... you DO want to pick out destinations/sources like Netflix to throttle because their operation can represent an enormous portion of all of the traffic a provider might be able to carry. Sometimes pushing 90%. So yes, a provider may want to throttle just Netflix, for reasons that go to whether or not they can even stay in business. Or in many cases, they give up trying to start such service businesses because they know that people like you will be there d
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Yeah, big corporations like Google and Netflix are bad!
I prefer little Mom 'n Pop corporations like Comcast and AT&T!
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Hey, everybody! It's ScentCone showing off his customary disconnect from reality. Colour me surprised.
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Yes, I am entitled to use the bandwidth I have bought from my ISP to access whatever sites I want. Just like I am entitled to use the electricity I buy from the power company to power whatever I want. I'm entitled because I paid for it. That's what Capitalism is, comrade.
What you're basically saying is the power company should be able to cut my electricity because I plugged in a particular brand of toaster.
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Yes, I am entitled to use the bandwidth I have bought from my ISP to access whatever sites I want.
You just don't want the people who grow your food to be able to use the internet. Because you're special, and they're not.
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Yep, that's what I said, totally.
I actually work for a small company who is trying to provide people in rural areas with Internet using distributed WiFi.
So yeah, go fuck yourself, but you'll have to wait for Comcast to pull out first.
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ISP's can already (and do, obviously) manage network resources by customer. So if all their customers are using 90% of their bandwidth to watch Netflix, then what exactly is the problem?
How dare people use 90% of the internet to do 90% of what they do on the internet!
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So, tell me all about your experiences with small local ISPs and how they aren't at all concerned with federal regulations that prevent them from shaping their traffic.
Please, tell me yours. Because in none of your comments have you actually backed up this assertion. Name the ISP, and provide a source that shows they are particularly concerned about regulations against shaping traffic based on content, not just regulations in general.
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What percentage of American households is actually served by a small local ISP these days?
I'm going to go out on a limb here, and guess that figure is represented by a single digit.
Re:Thanks, Phish fans (Score:5, Informative)
ScentCone blathered:
Thanks, Phish fans, for your hipster disdain for those deplorable people in flyover country. You know, the ones that will only ever get usable internet access when small, local ISPs provide it to them. But who can't possibly throw Comcast- or Verizon-sized corporate budgets at the compliance costs of an intrusive regulator regime, and who can't trot out things like fixed wireless solutions with modest backhaul without reserving the right to shape their traffic to best serve their smaller groups of customers at rational prices. Thanks, Phish fans, for doing the bidding of two or three giant corporations! You're the best.
In other news: black is white, up is down, and the speed of light is regulated by the FCC.
I happen to live in rural Ohio, where the iLEC does its "traffic shaping" by hard-limiting DSL to 768/112 kbps at the DSLAM for folks who live outside of the city limits. It doesn't have to do that, because it runs fiber to the DSLAM, but its NOC operators are paint-by-number idiots, managed by an incompetent nincompoop who got his job via nepotism.
Note that this iLEC basically owns rural southern Ohio. It offers higher speeds within city limits, because it has to try to compete with Time Warner/Spectrum there - and is hemmorhaging customers to EvilCorp, because TW/Spectrum's current entry-level service is nominally 100mbit (in practice, it's closer to 120mbit, as measured by me via DSLspeed).
You are advocating the entire country be held hostage by the mega-ISPs for the dubious benefit of rural incumbents, most of whom couldn't find their asses with both hands and a GPS, technically speaking.
Oh, and most Phish fans are hipsters in the same sense that Jerry Garcia was a military strategist ...
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I was enjoying this comment till the anti-rural thing came out. Why dirty your post with that?
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omfglearntoplay commented:
I was enjoying this comment till the anti-rural thing came out. Why dirty your post with that?
It's not anti-rural at all. It's anti-iLEC.
Urban iLECs (i.e. - the so-called "Baby Bells") have been forced, kicking and screaming all the way, to upgrade their systems to compete with cable TV MSOs-as-CLECs for the ISP market. Many of them have clueful technical staff at the NOC, and have an actual strategy for physical plant upgrade to compete with the Spectrums, et alia, because they're basically locked into a cage match with the cable bigs. Not so for the majority of
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Actually it's the opposite.
Net neutrality is cheap to implement. Breaking net neutrality require more complex routers/software which are not worth developping if you are a small ISP.
Small ISPs tend to respect net neutrality and large (if allowed) tend not to.
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EXACTLY!
With net neutrality, the little guys and startups can try to compete with the big boys. Without it, they will never be able to get in the game.
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Thank you, ScentCone, for doing the bidding of two or three giant corporations (Comcast, AT&T, Time-Warner)! You're the best.
Interesting (Score:2)
frist post! (Score:1)
fluffhead w00t w007
I remember when /. used to support NN (Score:2)
The oldest /. story I could find on net neutrality [slashdot.org] the tenor of the comments is largely that the internet was founded on net neutrality and it wasn't until ISPs figured out yet another way to swindle consumers that it was even an issue.
What happened? More partisan politics? More paid shills and less moderation? For all the things that would divide the /. folk, there were two things that united us: free competition within a market free of monopolistic interference (hi Microsoft!)...and Natalie Portman covere
Why thank for "Net Neutrality?" (Score:2)
Its originator, Professor Wu, is even against the monster it has turned into.