I’m hopeful that a degree of sanity will return to our government in 2020.
Will it be too late to restore Net Neutrality? I’m assuming a lot of new technology will quickly be applied to create fast lanes on the internet. It’ll require significant updates to a lot of the ISP’s hardware.
The major network providers won’t waste this opportunity. I think they already have the engineering ready to roll out by New Year’s.
Where does that leave Net Neutrality in 2020? Can it be restored? Will it be gone for good?
OP’s question could be generalized (perhaps a topic for another thread):
What are all the things that can be, might be, or will be buggered during the current administration, and what can be repaired, recovered, or restored afterward? What damage will be long-term or permanent?
For now, the courts are our only slim hope of protecting the web.
I’m just stunned that something I thought Net Neutrality had been secured and protected a few years ago. Having it undone in a matter of weeks is shocking.
In all, not just NN, lives will be lost. Health care will be harder for many to get, pollution will rise, climate change will not be addressed. In addition, deportations will soar, the gap between rich and poor will spread, homes will be lost, bankruptcies will mount, education will be harder to obtain. Lives will be ruined.
With NN, specifically, a new FCC could probably reinstate it (or Congress might actually grow a spine and legislate it) without too much permanent harm. The corporations will whine about intrusive legislation…but they do that about pollution, too.
Well look at what happened in the UK with the Investigatory Powers Act in 2016. Got legislated in with hardly any opposition massive outrage from various independent groups.
Edward Snowden himself said “The UK has just legalised the most extreme surveillance in the history of western democracy. It goes further than many autocracies.”
I think most people simply didn’t understand the implications, which I’d guess is a major problem with net neutrality as well.
FYI over 50 agencies in the UK can now access our browsing history WITH NO WARRANT. Here’s a list.
Why should the Department of Transport, or the Food Standards Agency, be able to do this?
And yet the vast majority of the public and indeed MPs seem to have been completely blase about it.
No, it doesn’t take any new hardware to do ‘fast lanes’. It’s basically just implementing QOS that prioritizes traffic types you want to have priority. It’s all baked in already, they just aren’t doing it (supposedly) now. To roll back, you simply take the QOS tags off and have an open pipe.
Basically, on large pipes, it’s a moot issue, unless you deliberately throttle traffic even if there is pipe available. It’s only when you are talking about pipes that are at capacity does QOS really enter into the equations, as it carves out some minimum bandwidth threshold for that priority traffic, stuffing the non-priority traffic into whatever is left. Most major networks do this sort of thing for, say, VOIP phone systems, since voice traffic requires a minimum and consistent bandwidth or you’ll get dropped packets which will give you all sorts of voice distortions.
I seriously doubt that there is a single major ISP out there (and most of the smaller ones for that matter) that don’t already have the equipment to do this today. Whether they have the technical and engineering capability to use it is another matter…the large ones will for sure, the smaller ones may or may not (though we aren’t talking rocket science here).