This one about ISPs are already allowed to split their services up, but dont:
For one thing, the Obama Administration itself made clear that curated Internet packages are lawful in the United States under the Commission’s 2015 rules. That’s right: the conduct described in a graphic that is currently being spread around the Internet is currently allowed under the previous Administration’s Title II rules. So, for example, if broadband providers want to offer a $10 a month package where you could only access a few websites like Twitter and Facebook, they can do that today. Indeed, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals recently pointed out that net neutrality rules don’t prohibit these curated offerings.
So the complaint by Mr. Takei and others doesn’t hold water. They’re arguing that if the plan is adopted, Internet service providers would suddenly start doing something that net-neutrality rules already allow them to do. But the reason that Internet service providers aren’t offering such packages now, and likely won’t offer such packages in the future, is that American consumers by and large don’t want them.
Additionally, as several fact-checkers have pointed out, as part of the European Union, Portugal does have net neutrality regulations! Moreover, the graphic relates to supplemental data plans featuring specific apps that customers could get from one provider, beyond the various unrestricted base plans that provider offered. As one report put it, this example “is pointing to an example that has nothing to do with net neutrality.
About allowing the FCC to police ISP with the now reform, was not allowed before apprently.
Perhaps the most common criticism is that ending Title II utility-style regulation will mean the end of the Internet as we know it. Or, as Kumail Nanjiani, a star of HBO’s Silicon Valley put it, “We will never go back to a free Internet.”
But here’s the simple truth: We had a free and open Internet for two decades before 2015, and we’ll have a free and open Internet going forward.
Many critics don’t seem to understand that we are moving from heavy-handed regulation to lighttouch regulation, not a completely hands-off approach. We aren’t giving anybody a free pass. We are simply shifting from one-size-fits-all pre-emptive regulation to targeted enforcement based on actual market failure or anticompetitive conduct.
For example, the plan would restore the authority of the Federal Trade Commission, America’s premier consumer protection agency, to police the practices of Internet service providers. And if companies engage in unfair, deceptive, or anticompetitive practices, the Federal Trade Commission would be able to take action. This framework for protecting a free and open Internet worked well in the past, and it will work well again. Chairman Ohlhausen will soon offer further details.
The plan would also empower the Federal Trade Commission to once again police broadband providers’ privacy and data security practices. In 2015, we stripped the Federal Trade Commission of that authority. But the plan would put the nation’s most experienced privacy cop back on the beat. That should be a welcome development for every American who cares about his or her privacy.
I’m pretty sure the FCC can decide what parts of Title II they enforce. So if he thinks some parts of Title II are out dated or hinder small ISPs, he can say, hey, we’re not going to enforce these parts of Title II in regard to ISPs. So basically he could say the only part of Title II he is enforcing is no fast lanes and treating all data the same.
An excellent question, one which most often is only answered with, “Well Comcast throttled Netflix!” Which is valid, but wait, there’s more! /billymays
For one thing, if you used a VPN you would download faster from Netflix. Meaning that the bottleneck was inside Comcast’s last mile, while your article claims otherwise. Also, as Soon as Netflix paid the money, the connection instantly got better, just from a flip of a switch. This means, there was no hardware deficiencies causing the slowdown, it was 100% manufactured throttle by Comcast to intentionally slowdown the connection its customers had with Netflix.
This is the most relevant piece to the article. It asserts that Comcast had problems handling the amount of bandwidth that their users requested from Netflix. A couple of things to point out here.
Comcast shouldn’t be selling bandwidth they can’t provide. If they sold 100Mb/s connections to 5 people in an area, they better be damned sure that their network can handle 500Mb/s of throughput. Period.
People tested the performance of their bare cable connection to Netflix (performance was utter shit), and then their cable connection, connected to a VPN service, connected to Netflix (performance was good).
Immediately upon Netflix paying extortion money, performance immediately improved. Which is 100% proof positive evidence that there was no infrastructure problem.
I’ll go about reading the entire article at some point in time. I take serious issue with how they used the fire hose analogy. The reason that doesn’t work is because Netflix isn’t going to send data faster than the end user’s cable modem is requesting it. They’re saying that the gateway into Comcast’s networks are being flooded by a couple of users’ cable modems. If that’s actually what’s going on, it would be FAR more damning than Comcast throttling Netflix. This person put a lot of work into this irrational defense of Comcast, I’d hate to see it not be picked apart piece by piece.
One parting question though. Is it really so hard to believe that Comcast wouldn’t charge extortion money from Netflix since Netflix’s vastly superior service conflicts with Comcast’s shitty on-demand service?
If they want to use the fire hose analogy, then maybe people should refer back to all the tax breaks they got to increase the size of that fire hose in the form of optical fiber.
Isnt all internet speeds that are sold “up to” whatever speed they sell. Maybe Comcast, or ISPs assumes that not everybody push their bandwidth to the limit, at the same time, and so ISPs might provide more speed to the Individual, than what the whole region can handle?
Plus are ISPs throttling services like netflix, more of a antitrust issue, than a issue FCC should be taking care of?
No, because antitrust has to do with competition. Netflix is not in the business of selling internet and comcast only just now got into the streaming services.
99% certain that this is true. From a business stand point, if Comcast builds a network to handle 500Mb/s, but only ends up selling 3 people on 100Mb/s service, they’ve invested money in infrastructure that (in theory) they aren’t getting paid on. The actual business model is far more complex than that, I’m sure, but that gives us something better than a straw man defense for Comcast choosing to over sell their network.
I will disagree with Adubs, and give this a definite maybe. Frankly, I would prefer if this was covered under Net Neutrality, as I wouldn’t want to have to fight media companies every time a new service comes out. But yes, Netflix and On-Demand are very similar services that I would argue are in direct competition with one another. I mean they shouldn’t be. On-Demand’s selection is ass. But in general, yeah.
its a mixed bag. they never “throttled” netflix they just didnt upgrade the backend to cogent because they wanted netflix to pay them for access to their customers.
here is a graph of the netflix data speed. see that huge uptick? that is just a few weeks after netflix started to pay comcast. Not even close to even time to upgrade the infrastructure like they said they would have too
The really crazy thing here is that everyone knows internet bandwidth usage is going to increase, and they could easily charge more for a better connection that many people would ultimately end up paying for, yet they are refusing to provide that service and make that money. Furthermore, there seems to be active physical and legal sabotage to anyone trying to muscle their way into their racket. Their solution is to just segregate all information in to tiers as if it was cable because they are all butthurt over cable turning into a dodo.
My understanding was that way back when telephone service was a new thing that there was an issue because segregating phone calls meant listening in and an invasion of privacy. Furthermore, if they did listen in and allow illegal activity that they could be held accountable. The deal was supposed to be that they treat everything equally and are not accountable. This goes the same for the internet. If they want to spy and segregate everything, then they should be held responsible for any and all illegal activity that happens on their systems.
The amount of slowdowns and intrusion required for them to police all of the internet would break the internet to the the point that no one could effectively use it. So the way I see it, the only way the internet can continue is to keep it desegregated. The other options are for them to be forever locked in legal battles over their users doing crazy stuff, or shutting it all down and flushing all of their profits down the toilet. They want all of the segregation with zero responsibility and we should not capitulate.
On another note, in the past the government has given low or no interest rate loans (backed by taxpayer dollars) for these companies to expand service to new markets in order to make them more accessible to people that otherwise would not receive service. My understanding of some of the new rules means that some of these places that have some cell phone coverage are going to be abandoned when the upkeep to profit ratio drops below what it is in more densely populated areas. There is a serious infrastructure issue here that will never become acceptable the way things are currently going.
This affects me directly, as my property is on a small valley that gets barely any cell coverage and has rather antiquated phone pedestals in the area. I’d rather pay a few bucks more to be guaranteed that either the existing infrastructure will remain serviceable, or that new infrastructure will replace it. The current trend has it looking like it may be left to die. Even as the area builds up and becomes more profitable to provide service, are they just going to add a few cell towers and call it sufficient? Even if I had good cell coverage, I wouldn’t consider it an acceptable form of internet connection for any structure.
I’d rather see some sort of segregation between providers and infrastructure. I doubt that it would be a good idea at all to have the government do it themselves, but the current system of giving tax breaks and interest free loans hasn’t been 100% effective either, and about to get worse. Having a separate utility company that provides wires or fiber or whatever based on local needs would provide whatever the local market will bear. It would also put some accountability in place so service providers can’t bullshit people about “WE HAS FIBERZ!” when the last mile is copper. If the infrastructure is out of date or in disrepair then the service providers and customers could sue for lost service, which would light a fire under them to get things working again. Maybe not an ideal solution, but better than the insanity that’s going on now.
There is a problem with this and I’ll tell you why. While a non-blocking setup is ideal, it is not practical because there are actually very few users who use the actual 100% of the bandwidth they are allotted. Most people barely use any.
Data in of itself is very “bursty”. I can understand maximizing profits based off of availability, everyone one of them oversells bandwidth. It works people while few people use a lot the vast majority use very little; while those businesses that need their stuff to work pay a much higher price to have dedicated lines. Now, I’m not trying to defend Comcast here, because overselling of bandwidth is not terribly bad (except when everyone is using 100% of their bandwidth), its when they really oversell it and don’t upgrade their infrastructure which is where the problems come from.
So in summary what I’m saying is that it’s okay to oversell on bandwidth as long as its not done too much. Most ISP’s with a bad rep oversell by too much;but if they did it properly they wouldn’t be having all these problems.
