I’m stunned. Do you similarly object to FedEx having both overnight and 2 day delivery?
Bandwidth and latency are not the same thing. To have a good teleconferencing experience we need a (1) low latency and (2) stable connection. The amount of bandwidth isn’t critical because teleconferencing isn’t that much data. If we don’t put things like that on a fast lane either they aren’t going to work or we will have to build way more internet capacity than we actually need.
When the internet was invented one packet was more or less the same as any other and the traffic between nodes was roughly symmetrical. Neither things are true today. We are sending different types of data over the network and traffic has become heavily asymmetrical. When requirements change technology needs to change.
No. I’m being more accurate than you and a couple other posters, to wit —
First of all, it has apparently been the policy for about two years. It has been the practice for much longer, but if we can’t use words accurately to describe whether something is attributable to government regulation or by widespread voluntary business practice, then basic facts are being misrepresented.
And second, it is perfectly clear to me that the appeal to tradition is being used as a premise to support the conclusion that net neutrality is good. Otherwise, why is it being repeated so often? Some posters have delved deeper to explain why past practice deserves to be continued, which I commend. But when this appeal to tradition has been repeated a dozen times during the course of this thread, such a lazy argument deserves to be called out for being useless as phrased.
I won’t quite call this a strawman, but it is awfully close. The false premise you’re citing isn’t quite what is being claimed by the anti-net neutrality side. The basis of that side’s argument seems to go like this:
The practice of net neutrality has been around for a long time.
Government did not mandate met neutrality until recently, yet the practice persisted.
We should follow the practice of not getting the government involved for the following reasons, etc.
I’m still not convinced of that line of thinking, but it is cogent. Responding to that argument with “it has always been the policy!!!” is not responsive to the substance therein. That’s why I’m suggesting that this specific argument be dropped, because it is often being phrased in an unfactual way and it is generally not addressing the substance of the other side’s argument.
Your analogy here is inapt, at least in a discussion focusing on ISPs. It would be more appropriate to describe it this way:
The UPS truck arrives at an apartment building with a big stack of packages. The crimson tag on this package means it gets delivered first, to #419; then the orange tag packages go to 602, 310 and 120; the yellow tag packages go to 710, 516, 201 and 115; then the other 30-odd packages get delivered. The driver could just start at the seventh floor and work his way down, getting the job done more efficiently, but he has to proceed by the priority tags.
That sounds like a fucked up concept that benefits no one and slows delivery because the driver has to take longer at each stop.
ISPs are a nautral monopoly, like electricit or water or sewer, not becuae of govt regulation, but becuase of pratcial realities.
Unless every competitor runs cables down my street, I don’t have a choice.
That’s why natural monopolies are not guaranteed by the govt, but they are regulated by the govt, to prevent them from using their monopolistic power to screw the consumer.
That works well for long lines, but is much more problematic for the last mile.
It’s not going to work for cable systems at all, and phone systems would require extensive modifications in order to be able to switch between competing carriers.
Just like if you use an alternative electric provider, you may be paying them for generation, but you are still paying your local utility for distribution.
Lack of ability to roll out thousands of miles of cable for every city for every competitor is what stifles competition. Government intervention is what keeps them from abusing their monopoly powers.
Getting rid of net neutrality would not open the market up to competition, it would just remove the consumer protection regulations on an existing monopoly.
There would not be on new company, nor one new mile of cable laid because of a loss of net neutrality.
The changes you advocate for would make for a worse experience for pretty much everyone. There certainly are some changes that I’d like to see, but the changes you wish to see suck.
Are you stunned by the fact that ISPs have many packages, from slow data lines to massive 100+mbps pipes?
You have a choice in what speeds you want. This would be removing that choice from yo9u, and putting it into the hands of the ISP.
I do object to FedEx deciding whether my package should go ground, 2 day, or overnight, which is what you are advocating for.
Latency is not going to get any better if you remove net neutrality. Even if your conferencing provider is paying more to the ISP’s, the latency is determined by how far it goes, and how many hops, and how long every router along the way takes to determine where it goes. The only thing that adding the requirement for all the routers to check how much the packet has paid to be transmitted through the network is increased latency for all packets.
What kind of latency are you really seeing these days? Explain how you think that changing net nutrality rules will improve it.
The internet has been asymmetrical from the start. It was set up so that a university or other research lab could share data with people around the world. By that very nature, you had a server and client relationship from the very beginning.
The nature has changed, but a packet carrying a part of a genotype sequence in the 90’s is no different from a packet carrying a part of a cat video, so, the fact that the data is a different type has nothing to do with it either.
You are correct it is not a proof of its benefits. I was responding to this assertion though:
“Net neutrality stifles competition among ISPs.”
Since net neutrality was the way the internet has worked since the get-go it is provably false that it stifles competition among ISPs. They’ve done just fine.
You continue to conflate bandwidth and latency. Bandwidth is how many packages you can receive a second. Latency is how fast a single package gets from the source to you. ISPs provide different bandwidth packages but are blocked by net neutrality from offering latency packages.
Huh? Who says the person sending the data wouldn’t be able to choose how fast it goes?
The number of hops and how long each router takes are variables that ISPs control. Or at least they could if net neutrality didn’t force them to treat all packets equally.
A slight overall increase in latency is a small compromise for an improvement in latency critical applications.
Noticeable latency in VoIP applications, Google Home, and (sometimes) in games.
And have I not been clear? If we get rid of net neutrality networks can start prioritizing some data over others. The proverbial “fast lane”.
Each university would have servers and clients so the amount of data going in each direction is roughly equal. Today, you have “Netflix U” which is sending out many thousands of times more traffic than it receives.
Seriously? Have you ever used traceroute? An ISP represents the endpoint network between you and the target server. They control the packets getting from and to you and what router they initially get sent to. Between your ISP’s initial router and the target server, there are dozens of hops. Are you trying to say that your ISP has control over all of those transfers? I am really not believing that. I have seen route maps to a server three miles from me that takes thirty hops, going through Dallas, Boston, San Jose, Chicago, Kansas City, La Crosse, and on, and on. How much could your ISP control all of that, when it does not even own half the connections in the routing?
The routing protocols are specifically designed so they don’t need to be controlled in that way. Controlling them would only slow down the traffic.
Besides, even if your ISP offered “faster lanes” for your video conferencing traffic, there is no guarantee that the distant end ISP would support that.
So, you would be gaining MAYBE lower latency video conferencing, at the expense of your ISP really throttling Netflix streaming unless you paid more. Doesn’t seem like a good tradeoff to me.
“Apparently”? Is the sum of your knowledge on the subject derived from skimming this thread? Because it’s not that simple. The principles of net neutrality have been FCC policy for over a decade and rather than being voluntary business practice was the subject of a number of lawsuits between providers and the FCC. The reason for the 2 year old regulations was because the FCC lost those lawsuits.
Yes. I have been clear that I have not studied this subject at all, and my point in participating in this thread is to understand it better.
So if you please, go look at my question in post 112 and the response in 114. That’s what I know about this particular point. Are you saying I was misinformed?
Also, what’s the difference between FCC policy and FCC regulations? How can something like this be a policy but not a regulation?
It shows that the cost of prioritizing traffic can bring benefits that outweigh the cost.
If porn users cost the ISP $200 extra then I don’t see a problem with passing on the cost to the people that use it. As a rule allocating costs to only those consuming a product will result in greater economic efficiency.
Charging Netflix, and thereby its subscribers, more because it uses more resources? Reasonable and good.
Charging more to access content that uses the same amount of bandwidth as something else, but happens to be owned by the ISP or pay money to the ISP for the privilege? Not so bueno, IMO.
Is it possible to have one without the other? If so, why isn’t that the best policy?