Are we going to lose net neutrality?

[k9bfriender]

@treis

If they are able to do that it means ESPN is taking that money and creating content people want to watch. That is a net win for consumers.

The problem with that, is that the payouts do not actually always match what it is that people want to see.

ESPN, for example, reaches only 3 percent of the total cable audience, but gets paid 18 percent of cable subscription fees, according to MoffettNathanson Research. Fox, by contrast, reaches 13 percent of the cable TV audience, but gets only 3 percent of subscription fees.

When companies fight, it is not the consumers who win.

[treis]

@k9bfriender

Maybe they are hosted on AWS, as well, I was not, and am still not able to find anything on hosting other than “most of their PBS interactive” streaming, but I’ll take your word on that.

But that still changes nothing. Unless you are saying that Amazon is going to pay a flat rate to all the ISPs, and all their traffic will be treated the same, there are going to be different tiers of service you can buy from AWS as well, where the more you pay, the less you get throttled.

AWS already has different tiers of service. I can choose three tiers of geographic edge servers depending on how latency critical my application is. This seems to be good for everyone involved.

A throttling tier seems similar. Those that need reliable bandwidth can get it. Those that don’t get cheaper rates. And it gives AWS an incentive to work with ISPs managing their traffic. The end result looks better for everyone to me.

@k9bfriender

Yeah, that was two companies improving their infrastructure, not a bad idea, but not something that came about due to either the presence of, or lack of net neutrality.

It was effectively a violation of net neutrality even if the underlying mechanism was different.

@k9bfriender

Their symbiosis is to spend as little to get as much as possible from the consumer. I have no doubt that the big ISPs and the big CDNs will be just fine.

The losers will be any small ISP’s that have tried to stay afloat, and small CDN’s that haven’t been acquired yet, and the consumer, who will be paying a higher price to have access to less content.

That’s not what has happened. AWS and their ilk has been an enormous boon for small companies. A start up can go from zero users to literally millions overnight. The consolidation of providers hasn’t reduced consumer access to content. It’s increased it because the scale of AWS makes hosting content cheap and easy. Heck, they even provide a free tier where you can host a site free for a year.

[eschereal]

@treis

As I said before, those companies will use AWS or Google or Microsoft as their host.

I think you are not understanding this term. A host provides hardware support. Any given domain still has to have a unique IP address, which means the packet filters will still be able to detect where the packet is originating and thus stick it at the back of the queue, placing favored packets ahead of it as they come in.

In short, “deregulating” the internet places control of its traffic in the hands of the wealthiest companies, squeezing out the little guys, as the rest of “capitalism” has been striving to do. It is really the opposite of a “free market” and anathema to everything that made the 'net a worthwhile medium.

[treis]

@eschereal

I think you are not understanding this term. A host provides hardware support. Any given domain still has to have a unique IP address, which means the packet filters will still be able to detect where the packet is originating and thus stick it at the back of the queue, placing favored packets ahead of it as they come in.

Your technical information is, unsurprisingly, wrong again. A domain absolutely does not have a unique IP address. The domain for content hosted by Amazon, for example, looks like [random_string].cloudfront.net. There’s no way to tell from that URL to determine where that content is actually coming from.

Even if ISPs can theoretically pierce that veil, your missing the point. The point is that Amazon or whoever isn’t going to take their customers’ traffic being throttled laying down. And they are big enough to be more than a match for any ISP.

[asahi]

@atifmunawar

Both sides of the court have nonetheless equal pros & cons. If a user is all about surfing social media, blogs, surveys, etc he/she will not prefer fast file-transfer over speedy browsing and vice versa. At the end of the day, it all depends on the type of user.

reported

[Dr_Paprika]

So what are the consequences of this recent decision to strike down the FCCs authority to demand net neutrality? It doesn’t apply in California. Does it apply to Canada, in practice?

Net Neutrality Rules Struck Down by Appeals Court

After nearly two decades of fighting, the battle over regulations that treat broadband providers as utilities came to an end on Thursday.

A federal appeals court struck down the Federal Communications Commission’s landmark net neutrality rules on Thursday, ending a nearly two-decade effort to regulate broadband internet providers as utilities.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, in Cincinnati, said the F.C.C. lacked the authority to reinstate rules that prevented broadband providers from slowing or blocking access to internet content. In its opinion, a three-judge panel pointed to a Supreme Court decision in June, known as Loper Bright, that overturned a 1984 legal precedent that gave deference to government agencies on regulations. “Applying Loper Bright means we can end the F.C.C.’s vacillations,” the court ruled.

The court’s decision put an end to the Biden administration’s hallmark tech policy, which had drawn impassioned support from consumer groups and tech giants like Google and fierce protests from telecommunications giants like Comcast and AT&T.

The F.C.C. had voted in April to restore net neutrality regulations, which expand government oversight of broadband providers and aim to protect consumer access to the internet. The regulations were first put in place nearly a decade ago under the Obama administration and were aimed at preventing internet service providers like Verizon or Comcast from blocking or degrading the delivery of services from competitors like Netflix and YouTube. The rules were repealed under President-elect Donald J. Trump in his first administration, but they continued to be a contentious partisan issue that pit tech giants against broadband providers.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/02/technology/net-neutrality-rules-fcc.html

[Dr_Paprika]

This likely won’t be the last time Looper is quoted. What regulations will avoid being gutted? Which States have the strongest local protections?

[Dr_Paprika]

Sorry, I did not use a gift link for the above quote. Here is a gift link from WaPo on the same subject, but I cannot say what the limits on it are.

https://wapo.st/4gyjdnw

[wolfpup]

@Dr_Paprika

Does it apply to Canada, in practice?

I don’t see how any US policy on regulating ISPs could affect a Canadian ISP. IIRC, Rogers once throttled certain high-bandwidth protocols, but in the spirit of net neutrality, the CRTC outlawed the whole practice of deep packet inspection (i.e.- any kind of discrimination based on content).

[Buck_Godot]

The enshitification of America continues unabated. The supreme court has clearly envisaged a country of by and for the billionaires.