Are we “just asking questions”?
You misspelled “hard evidence”.
FWIW, it’s not necessarily true that Netflix is the only company with a direct pipeline:
(also I wouldn’t say that Wired is a cable industry shill - it seems like this debate is far more complicated that it would seem at first glance)
Well my position is as you suspect, but it’s a highly subjective judgment and I don’t really have much to add beyond that. I thought others might have some more substance, but the discussion has focused on the merits of net neutrality itself rather than Obama’s taking a strong public position on it, so that didn’t pan out.
Comcast playing nice? All I know is I’m happily stockpiling torches and pitchforks for the yet-hoped-for angry mob when people finally get fed up with Comcast throwing their weight around in local politics to make real broadband competition illegal. If a Comcast executive were to be, say, bitten to death by rabid pygmy marmosets, I’d dance on his grave. I make a prayer to the rabid pygmy marmoset god every night.
Not that I’m bitter or anything. 
Except that isn’t hard evidence, and makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims about Verizon’s network and uneducated suggestions about net neutrality. While I used the catch phrase myself, net neutrality does not actually mean “treating all packets equally.” It means treating all like packets equally. What do I mean? I mean that under any promulgation of net neutrality I’ve seen no one has a problem with prioritizing VoIP, IPTV, or etc traffic over a protocol where degradation in service quality has less of an impact (I’d argue for example most people would rather an FTP download take a bit slower versus their Netflix video become a stuttering, buffering, down-scaled mess.)
The Verizon users utilizing VPN don’t really prove anything except that it’s likely that VPN traffic could be prioritized above other protocols–and it should be. VPNs are typically used for people who are connecting to their jobs and thus have a pretty high importance to users relative to other protocols that are less important.
Deciding how to balance different protocols has no guaranteed right answer. For example for most people VoIP probably isn’t amazingly important because they have a cell phone. But there are probably still some grandmothers who have been switched to a VoIP landline as their only phone, and for them that’s their only access to shit like 911 and etc or just plain contact with the outside world (since they probably don’t browse much.) But just saying “it’s faster with VPN” doesn’t prove anything.
What you described is exactly the same thing. If they intentionally did not expand connections with the third party services that served up Netflix content, they were not being neutral towards Netflix, and would ultimately result in Netflix being slower. To single out a specific service with which you will not expand connections is inherently an attempt to slow down the connection of that service.
Netflix’s offer was an attempt to prove the disingenuousness of their tactics. It costs too much money to upgrade? Fine. We’ll give you the stuff you need to upgrade for free. That way you can no longer say that we cost you too much money due to our unequal bandwidth usage.
I also note that, in your most recent post, you ignore most of the article and focus on the one part you have an answer for–the part about VPN traffic being faster. How about the fact that Verizon deliberately leaves certain connections unhooked and runs at a lower capacity? That’s the same problem I mentioned earlier.
Not that what you say about VPNs is all the convincing. Yes, you can argue that most are used for work and thus are “more important.” But they also tend to not be very bandwidth dependent. RDP runs fine at 1Mbps, and files being used locally are usually documents or other smaller files which will download quickly.
Plus, there’s the factor that higher bandwidth connections are very often specifically advertized as being better for video. The article has the Netflix connection being three times lower than you could get on an 1Mbps connection, while he had a 75Mbps connection. That’s less than 1% maximum capacity.
Thankfully, Ted Cruz is on the case to call Obama out.
What a scum-sucking piece of garbage. I’m glad he got called out for it.
From what I can tell Ted Cruz doesn’t have any policy positions, but rather positions where he can say things precisely tailored to fire up the base of Tea Party types that put him in office. It’s kind of sad because given his background he’s almost certainly smarter than he acts, which means he’s literally playing a character to curry favor with dumb voters (and they fall for it.) Given how much trouble he made for Senate Republican leadership when they were the minority party I wouldn’t be surprised if he starts so much nonsense in the next legislative session that he’s all but outcast from any/all decision making. But since he’s only in the Senate to get name recognition that he’ll parlay into the 2016 Presidential election I doubt he cares.
The FCC, all five of whose commissioners were appointed by President Obama, by a 3-2 vote has embraced net neutrality: FCC adopts historic Internet rules
Looks like a victory for Net Neutrality and Obama!
Regulators at the independent FCC voted 3-2 today on party lines to adopt strong neutrality rules to prevent preferential service to content providers, essentially treating the internet as a utility and making sure everyone gets equal service. This means that ISPs like Verizon will not be able to give faster internet to, for example, Netflix if they have a contract and give Hulu a slower connection.
No surprise, the Dems voted to keep the neutrality and the Reps did not.
Technically, they voted to adopt rather than keep it since we haven’t had it for a (short) while.
Beside what Grumman said, I’ve been on the Net from before the beginning, and it already is nearly infinitely faster than the old days. But content providers will continue to increase the size of stuff to send over the pipe. And more people will use these faster connections. And bandwidth will never be as fast as you want it to be.
Might as well say that the solution for world hunger is to grow enough food per acre to feed everyone for free with plenty left over.
This is something to celebrate. I don’t think people appreciate just how close we were to losing the internet as we know it. Putting the future of the internet into the hands of some of the worst companies in the country would’ve been a real and significant detriment. We dodged a huge bullet here.
We’re lucky that other elements of the plutocracy on our side, the people would’ve never won on their own. It’s only because internet companies like google, amazon, etc. could throw around their weight to counter the bribes of telecom companies that people could be the tiebreaker.
Yeah, basically we are just lucky that the corporations that were on our side beat the ones that weren’t.
But he plays that character very well, we have to give him that.
Well that is true. So I’m perfectly sure that the next step is for ISPs to start charging like other utilities do - ie, by usage (maybe x amount for every 50GBs you use or something). Though at least in that way the folks that use Netflix 4K (or 8K or whatever comes after) will be paying for their own broadband usage rather than having everyone subsidize the big data users.