It’s only pointless if people come up with ridiculous scenarios that no one is proposing. There is no net neutrality proponent that is proposing to ban tiered service or transfer limits.
Bandwidth tiering, maybe. There certainly are a lot of people opposed to QoS tiering, though.
Which has nothing to do with my original statement.
Latency guarantees are QoS.
What competition are people thinking about.? We have one provider in most markets. In the US our service is slower and more expensive than most industrial countries. Those that have several providers, like we do, have very little difference in price or speed. They talk about “competition” .It is a fairy tale.
I bring up the question because recently AT&T petitioned the FCC not to include gaming under the category of [required] broadband service - essentially they want to exclude it from current net neutrality rules, presumably so that they could manipulate it and sell it as a seperate package. I’m not pulling some silly, far-off scenario out of my ass - the main reason I suspect that ISPs want relaxed net neutrality is so they can pull stuff like this.
They are able to do this now and it’s a fair way to control
I can’t imagine a scenario in which there would be an application which you describe, at least under anything resembling the current average conditions. Currently high bandwidth applications are hampered by the difficulty of providing enough bandwidth at their end - the ISP’s backbone is rarely the limiting factor. So if a site wanted to offer HD quality video, under current typical internet service the end user is capable of handling this, but it’s a massive undertaking from the provider. I would guess that rarely is the weak link in the chain the traffic shape at the ISP level.
I think the idea that the major players involved on the scene already would gain an overwhelming advantage against newcomers into the market. Those with the power to influence the ISP’s to traffic shape would wield tremendous power - and the small internet upstarts that have resulted in so much innovation would be crowded out. I have a very difficult time buying the idea that the lack of net neutrality would actually damage innovation - it seems to me that a big part of why the internet has been such a massive game changer is because everyone competes on a level playing field, at least in terms of people having access to them.
This is true, but I view it as a lesser evil. Asking people to pay for tiered usage of bandwidth seems fair.
Well - time sensitive online gaming is something of a killer app, and it requires low latency - and it works just fine under current rules. Typical users can find servers under 50ms ping time easily. I’m not sure that this isn’t a solution looking for a problem.
If high bandwidth and low latency connections are a desirable thing on the market then they have incentive to upgrade their network to keep ahead of their competitors even without being able to shape traffic.
If the competition stagnates in this regard, it’s at least in part to the imperfect market for these services. Unless you’re lucky enough to have multiple types of high quality internet access available to you, your choice is limited or none. Combined with the fact that these services are often subsidized by the government (mostly to force wide availability in less desirable areas) there’s definitely a public interest in keeping the ISP playing fair.
I suspect that a large part of the reason is that they wanted there to be a certain barrier to entry to “broadband” service. They gained more by having granny checking their e-mail paying $50 a month than they lost by having a few torrent masters of the universe also paying $50 a month. Which makes me think that your proposed benefit of net neutrality being a lowered cost for entry for casual users won’t come to fruition - at least not in the very common case where there’s no real choice for the individual. You either take the one broadband provider you have accessible to you, or you don’t.
Nonsense. ISPs already do have different price breaks for different bandwidth.
What net neutrality is about is Comcast not being able to tell Hulu (for example) that they’ll not let users to download video there at the standard speed they can download things from Comcast.com unless Hulu pays them a big chunk of change for that privilege. Or AT&T Internet shutting down (or crippling so they may as well have shut it down) their users’ access to sites like Skype that let people get phone-quality communication because they want people to pay for AT&T phone services instead.
Net neutrality is absolutely imperative.
Some believe corporations will act fairly and reasonably. They have never shown that in the past. Then if they are given the power to meter ,who thinks they will use it wisely and fairly.