Net Neutrality Rules Expire Monday, as Lawmakers Push for Paid Data Prioritization

Megalith

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Net Neutrality rules will officially be repealed tomorrow. Coincidentally, US Representative Marsha Blackburn championed the idea of paid data prioritization at a hearing last week, effectively urging ISPs to charge customers more for fast lanes. Experts say that service providers will probably wait before screwing us, however.

I would also point out that in real life, all sorts of interactions are prioritized every day. Many of you sitting in this room right now paid a line-sitter to get priority access to this hearing. In fact, it is commonplace for the government itself to offer priority access to services. If you have ever used Priority Mail, you know this to be the case. And what about TSA pre-check? It just might have saved you time as you traveled here today.
 
Ok. But the data lines can only go so fast with existing infrastructure (e.g. DSL)...so does that actually mean that they will slow down customers who won't pay a premium? What about latency?

Does Sen Blackburn actually understand the full details of what she's pushing? She's attaching her name this this regards to the history books.
 
I am a Tennessean and a Republican -- and in my opinion Marsha Blackburn is a total idiot and corporate shill. I think she actually does understand what she is proposing -- but her campaign is bought and paid for by the big telecom companies, so what do you expect? She needs to be voted out of office -- soon.
 
I am a Tennessean and a Republican -- and in my opinion Marsha Blackburn is a total idiot and corporate shill. I think she actually does understand what she is proposing -- but her campaign is bought and paid for by the big telecom companies, so what do you expect? She needs to be voted out of office -- soon.
If it may be so bold, those who have experience in politics have often said that many of these Senators and Congress people do NOT understand the concepts and bills they push. That goes for both sides of the aisle. They have paid interns who do the research for them and then give them a summation. Again, that is not a conservative or a liberal politicians approach. That is the approach of almost all politicians in Washington regardless of political affiliation or party.

I think someone may have gotten to Ms Blackburn with the exact argument she put forth, and for someone who is unaware or not very tech-savvy, it makes a great deal of sense.

The issue is the potential abuses that could come with it.

On the whole, what she is saying isn't wrong. It just is blindingly naive to the abuses that could come with it.

For what she is talking about to work, the infrastructure needs to be rebuilt in this country and a standard base rate of speed needs to be established and affordable.

If we are being honest, we as enthusiasts use bandwidth much more than your average person browsing the internet.

Those people tend not to care about the things we care about with relations to speed.

I do think she is smart in that she said that this requires a more nuanced approach rather than a black and white one. I do think as a part of that nuance, there needs to be consumer protections put in that prevent companies from gouging or enacting and internet version of the gpp that's currently screwing with things.

I'd be open to discussions on what they have in mind, but any bill that doesn't have black and white consumer protections built in to me is an immediate non-starter.

What I wouldn't do is carry on like a blithering idiot, yelling and screaming and throwing Tantrums. That serves no one. If this is the way things are going, I'd rather make it the best possible deal for all parties including the consumer it could possibly be. And if I'm raving like a lunatic, I don't see how I would be able to represent the consumer end of things.
 
For what she is talking about to work, the infrastructure needs to be rebuilt in this country and a standard base rate of speed needs to be established and affordable.

If we are being honest, we as enthusiasts use bandwidth much more than your average person browsing the internet.

Those people tend not to care about the things we care about with relations to speed.

I do think she is smart in that she said that this requires a more nuanced approach rather than a black and white one. I do think as a part of that nuance, there needs to be consumer protections put in that prevent companies from gouging or enacting and internet version of the gpp that's currently screwing with things.

I'd be open to discussions on what they have in mind, but any bill that doesn't have black and white consumer protections built in to me is an immediate non-starter.

Eh, substitute average person for average household, and would it be hard for them to use say three HD+ streams, real-time video streaming, and latency sensitive gaming, all at once? It's still only one line, right?

Honestly any time we try to set the idea of a minimum speed, at some point we'll be hamstringing ourselves, and whatever rules might be used to upgrade that speed will be leveraged by telcos.

But I do agree that this isn't black and white. I'd actually prefer prioritization services, including paid ones, if they were on my terms (minimum gaming lag!), but the devil's definitely in the details!
 
Ok. But the data lines can only go so fast with existing infrastructure (e.g. DSL)...so does that actually mean that they will slow down customers who won't pay a premium? What about latency?

Does Sen Blackburn actually understand the full details of what she's pushing? She's attaching her name this this regards to the history books.

With copper there are limits true, but with proper design it really isn't as bad as what some think or what many of the bigger guys push out. "DSL" is too vague of a term so you have to look deeper. First off anything ADSL isn't sold anymore as chip makers discontinued the chips for that years ago for the field equipment side. Now everything is VDSL at the very least. Now the next issue you battle is distance. With proper management of that depending on what you are using for equipment you can get either up to around 90Mbps or up to 140Mbps depending on which version of the standard is supported. Bond two pairs and you get about 1.8x the bandwidth (loss some for overhead). We have a customer getting 100/20 on bonded VDSL. Which all of that is xDSL technology. VDSL isn't the top of the tier either. The current xDSL standard is G.Fast which can reach speeds of 1Gbps however only for a short distance. Its design is for you to have the field equipment at the base of an apartment or have a few units going down the road so that every one feeds a few houses. Beyond the initial 500meters you start to drop down VDSL or ADSL speeds. With copper is it always going to be a game of slowly pushing fiber closer and closer to the customer and using something closer to the end customer to get faster and faster speeds. So yes you can only get so fast, but with proper design and growth of a network, that so fast milestone is almost on par with what somebody will get with fiber. Latency is the other side of that for sure. With DSL you will see an extra 10 - 15 ms compared to fiber.


How much money is the ISP's giving her?? Or is she really that STUPID.

Don't lump all ISPs together. My work think the FCC has lost their fucking mind and that all these current actions are just them being dumb asses. These desires and changes aren't from ISPs (as in all) they are from 2 or 3 of the big guys wanting some changes and the other 3000 are having this shoved down our throats like it or not.
 
Eh, substitute average person for average household, and would it be hard for them to use say three HD+ streams, real-time video streaming, and latency sensitive gaming, all at once? It's still only one line, right?

Honestly any time we try to set the idea of a minimum speed, at some point we'll be hamstringing ourselves, and whatever rules might be used to upgrade that speed will be leveraged by telcos.

But I do agree that this isn't black and white. I'd actually prefer prioritization services, including paid ones, if they were on my terms (minimum gaming lag!), but the devil's definitely in the details!

Problem is that as you said it is an idea of min speed. All that is ever discussed is marketing. You can't state that you have high speed broadband unless your service is over X Mbps down and Y Mbps up. That's it. you can still offer 128Kbps and call it high speed internet. Just don't refer to it as high speed broadband.

Might be a tad basis on this, but I don't want to offer prioritized services as I don't want to have to spend all the fucking hours required to make sure that certain customers have faster speeds when going to certain sites vs others, or trying to come up with all the various QOS requirements for our entire network. I like just running a network that has enough bandwidth to not cause congestion for customers outside of a DDOS attack and giving everyone equal priority for this traffic. It is much faster for me to change out optics or cards to give more bandwidth to the network. And in some cases, honestly probably cheaper. At least in my case.
 
" you have to pay $5 a month to get priority access(or access at all in some cases around the world) to facebook, snapchat, and instagram."


OH Noes....

The question is who are they going to try to shake down first, customers or content providers?
 
The US government is extremely corrupt at the highest levels with almost every politician from both parties bought and paid for by some corporation or special interest group. The fact that any American thinks their vote matters or they have any freedom is laughable. These snakes in the government only react when they’re exposed and shit hits the fan and that’s only until they’re fired and replaced by the next sellout. It will take a revolution before things really change but it might be too late by then.
 
The fact that this got through proves that any real form of Revolution is impossible in the US.

Lines are drawn (on the internet, because that's the only place people really dare drawing lines anymore), and people in charge step over them with a grin and a joke along the way, and no shits given.
 
Netflix has been buffering for about a week for me. Twitch too.
I check my speed and its faster then I am suppose to get. 100/10 Blast. I call them and ask if my area got a speed increase and she said no.

http://speedtest.xfinity.com/results/JGBER76IJTAREGI

Those 2 services provide "buffer servers" on the xfinity network so they do not have to have 1000 streams of the same show, they just upload the show to the xfinity neflix server nearest to your node. It is possible they are throttling it, but the main point of this is to pay for fast lanes, not mafia shake down money just to get service at rated speed. At least not yet....
 
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I can't believe she said she wants the internet to work like the TSA, who thinks those long lines are a model to strive for in anything whatsoever?
 
now all of our games can get slow so the online ads no one wants gets delivered faster because it high priority vendor QOS.
 
They didn't 'repeal' it. It was never law, it was policy, and not one that was well thought-out.

Now that it has been rescinded, we might actually get to talk about laws.
Exactly. And there were so many things that had nothing to do with net neutrality attached to it as well. This was a case where the baby did need to get thrown out with the bathwater because of how entwined everything was.

On top of that, net neutrality never did what everyone claimed it did. I can tell you with confidence at least four to five major isps who throttled VPN connections without Mercy. That is something that those net neutrality laws were supposed to protect. The problem is that the actual language didn't prevent the types of priority and throttling people claimed it did.

Instead, it gave major isps cover to throttle and keep competition down. But whenever someone would point that out, you would have the corporate shills and the paid marketers screaming that we needed net neutrality to protect our internet.

As you said, now we can actually get to the business of making laws rather than catering to isps.

In my eyes, all net neutrality did was prove how gullible the American public is.
 
I am distressed that there is a belief that regulations are the same as laws, or should be used in the same contexts.
 
Well this will get nasty for the users and the companies like netflix. Actually comcast and netflix are working together now. So netflix will probably be fine if you're with comcast.
But other services will probably be charged extra. Which will cost the companies that offer those services to lose money. After a year of users and these companies getting screwed over it'll go to court.
This is going to cost the user and the companies that offer services to lose money. In the end we'll win. But probably have to go thru a few years of crap.

Internet is around $60/month. May have to cut back if it gets really bad.
 
I already discovered that YT loads much faster over the VPN than over my AT&T native connection. This started about 3-4 weeks ago. With VPN, videos instantly start. Without VPN, 7-8 seconds to start.
 
I think that you are so close to the answer, which is BOTH -- she is an idiot that got lots of money and was told what to think. :rolleyes:

It's not just ISP's though. Think about it. The major television studios also benefit from this. How many people will be deterred from going to a streaming service, if they have to pay extra (above the service rate) for it? How many will go back to OTA broadcasts? ABC/NBC/CBS/Fox all stand to benefit from streaming service customers having to spend more for the service.

The amount of money behind all this is staggering.

I know that if I have to pay a premium to be able to get any streaming service, I will terminate that service. I already have an antennae mounted and I am prepared to cut back on the service speed of my Ineternet connection.
 
So they don't want government to regulate the internet but this bitch from the government wants to regulate the internet.

Are they really this fucking stupid.

Obviously a rhetorical question.
 
Hahahahahaha......a congresswoman who thinks the USPS is part of the government.

Priority mail IS a thing, but the USPS is NOT funded nor does it have anything to do with the government.

That said.......yes there IS priority "fast lane" in government......it's called lobbying.......
 
I already discovered that YT loads much faster over the VPN than over my AT&T native connection. This started about 3-4 weeks ago. With VPN, videos instantly start. Without VPN, 7-8 seconds to start.

AT&T has throttled YT for a long time. One of the reasons I dumped them over a year ago.
 
Net Neutrality would be great if it was really neutral but it is not. The internet grew and prospered just fine before Net Neutrality. There was nothing to suggest market forces were doing anything but stimulating growth. Under Net Neutrality we have seen the expansion of monopolistic tech companies using their power to force one political agenda while suppressing another. With the progressives in power Net Neutrality was anything but neutral. Net Neutrality is a political word for control. It gives the government power to control what we see and presumably how we will think.

I applaud this administrations efforts to reduce the power and influence of the Federal Government and by consequence returning power to the people. We should concentrate our efforts in making the market for internet services more competitive so that people can vote with their wallets. Net Neutrality = Big Brother.
 
ugh TSA Pre is a horrible example. Create a problem (treat everyone as a criminal and demand they pass some sort of screening), then charge a "priority access" fee to solve the problem.

What's the endpoint of this slippery slope? Only folks that have money can do anything? While everyone else just waits in queue?
 
AT&T has throttled YT for a long time. One of the reasons I dumped them over a year ago.

Before I dumped unversed in 2015, the issue was their DNS and ipv6. If you manually set the DNS to google or some other server, YouTube was faster. Hated uverse.
 
Net Neutrality would be great if it was really neutral but it is not. The internet grew and prospered just fine before Net Neutrality. There was nothing to suggest market forces were doing anything but stimulating growth. Under Net Neutrality we have seen the expansion of monopolistic tech companies using their power to force one political agenda while suppressing another. With the progressives in power Net Neutrality was anything but neutral. Net Neutrality is a political word for control. It gives the government power to control what we see and presumably how we will think.

I applaud this administrations efforts to reduce the power and influence of the Federal Government and by consequence returning power to the people. We should concentrate our efforts in making the market for internet services more competitive so that people can vote with their wallets. Net Neutrality = Big Brother.

The problem with your statement is that everything is always fine until it isn't. Just because an area isn't flooded today doesn't mean that you can't say after a river goes 10 feet past its flood level that the area can't be flooded today because it wasn't flooded yesterday.

online security wasn't an issue back in 1945 so why should we worry about it now?

Company's were just starting to test the water of I am going to slow down traffic to your site unless you pay me more before stuff started to change that told them they couldn't. I have heard so many different things about what the polices would and wouldn't have done that after awhile it get apparent that you can twist them to be anything. Did you know that the net neutrality rules bared any telco company from spending money to upgrade their network? That is why you haven't seen a change in performance because the government put a ruling in place that prevented all companies from spending a cent on any upgrades for anything. Now that the rules have been removed it is now legal again to spend money. I guess my work missed that memo as I have been spending a million a year on upgrades for years. Guess the government should have come and arrested all management at my work for us investing in our network. Would have saved me about a 8 weeks over 3 years trying to figure out what to upgrade to spend money on for the year.

Before I dumped unversed in 2015, the issue was their DNS and ipv6. If you manually set the DNS to google or some other server, YouTube was faster. Hated uverse.

Interesting. Guess the 6to4 must add some delay. Many people are trying to start using IPV6 so in time something like that should fix itself, but will be awhile. We actually just had our first customer ask for IPV6 addressing. So it is slowly getting out there.
 
The problem with your statement is that everything is always fine until it isn't. Just because an area isn't flooded today doesn't mean that you can't say after a river goes 10 feet past its flood level that the area can't be flooded today because it wasn't flooded yesterday.

online security wasn't an issue back in 1945 so why should we worry about it now?
There is an informal logical fallacy: misuse of analogy. Online security in 1945 has absolutely no relevance today. An area that is not flooded today may never flood in the future or it could flood tomorrow. If there is no history of flooding it would be absurd to invest significantly in anti-flood prevention.
Company's were just starting to test the water of I am going to slow down traffic to your site unless you pay me more before stuff started to change that told them they couldn't. I have heard so many different things about what the polices would and wouldn't have done that after awhile it get apparent that you can twist them to be anything. Did you know that the net neutrality rules bared any telco company from spending money to upgrade their network? That is why you haven't seen a change in performance because the government put a ruling in place that prevented all companies from spending a cent on any upgrades for anything. Now that the rules have been removed it is now legal again to spend money. I guess my work missed that memo as I have been spending a million a year on upgrades for years. Guess the government should have come and arrested all management at my work for us investing in our network. Would have saved me about a 8 weeks over 3 years trying to figure out what to upgrade to spend money on for the year.
If monopolistic abuses by internet corporations is a concern why did the Obama administration only focus on ISP's? Why did they not address internet media monopoly's? Was the net really neutral when internet media companies promote a progressive agenda while suppressing and disparaging discussions on traditional American polices and politics?

No... Net Neutrality was "never" neutral and eliminating the Federal Governments role will only return power to State and Local control and by consequence return power to the people.
 
Hahahahahaha......a congresswoman who thinks the USPS is part of the government.

Priority mail IS a thing, but the USPS is NOT funded nor does it have anything to do with the government.

That said.......yes there IS priority "fast lane" in government......it's called lobbying.......

Eh? USPS is an independent government agency. USPS is literally a government mandated entity.
 
Net Neutrality would be great if it was really neutral but it is not. The internet grew and prospered just fine before Net Neutrality. There was nothing to suggest market forces were doing anything but stimulating growth. Under Net Neutrality we have seen the expansion of monopolistic tech companies using their power to force one political agenda while suppressing another. With the progressives in power Net Neutrality was anything but neutral. Net Neutrality is a political word for control. It gives the government power to control what we see and presumably how we will think.

The Internet has been run via Net Neutrality for the majority of its life. It was run off of NN during DARPA days, and during the early commercial years, and the mid commercials years through the DSL boom.

If your problem is with content providers like google, twitter, and facebook, then your only real option is reintroduction of the Fairness Doctrine though you probably don't REALLY want the fairness doctrine. Mind you, that would basically kill all of conservative media, but I'm not sure that will be much loss.

Nor does NN allow the government to control what we see or how we think.
 
And so, people MUST have the internet in order to keep in step with Society (employment, business, etc) and yet, there is no Government control over who provides the internet or what they will charge to use said services even though the internet started out as a Government project for Scientists to exchange data quickly.

Where's Al Gore when you need him?
 
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