Senators Bash ISP and Push Extensive Net Neutrality 427
eldavojohn writes "Remember when Verizon sued the FCC over net neutrality rules? Well, Senators Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Al Franken (D-MN) see it a bit differently and have authored a new working bill titled 'Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection Act of 2011 (PDF).' The bill lays out some stark clarity on what is meant by Net Neutrality by outright banning ISPs from doing many things including '(6) charge[ing] a content, application, or service provider for access to the broadband Internet access service providers' end users based on differing levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery of Internet protocol packets; (7) prioritiz[ing] among or between content, applications, and services, or among or between different types of content, applications, and services unless the end user requests to have such prioritization... (9) refus[ing] to interconnect on just and reasonable terms and conditions.' And that doesn't count for packets sent over just the internet connections but also wireless, radio, cell phone or pigeon carrier. Franken has constantly reiterated that this is the free speech issue of our time and Cantwell said, 'If we let telecom oligarchs control access to the Internet, consumers will lose. The actions that the FCC and Congress take now will set the ground rules for competition on the broadband Internet, impacting innovation, investment, and jobs for years to come. My bill returns the broadband cop back to the beat, and creates the same set of obligations regardless of how consumers get their broadband.'"
Won't someone think of the oligarchs! (Score:4, Funny)
Won't someone think of the oligarchs!
Re:ISPs have the right (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:ISPs have the right (Score:5, Insightful)
Franken 2012! (Score:5, Insightful)
Please, Al, please run!
Senate Affirmations with Al Franken (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not a big fan of Al Franken. I'm with him on this one thing. He's dead wrong on too many other things for me to vote for him for anything. Something about a broken clock being right twice a day.
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Re:Franken 2012! (Score:5, Insightful)
the man actually reads the bills that come in front of him, and he's actually honest about why he makes a vote.
we don't get that out of other republicans and democrats, almost universally. they just toe the party vote and/or remain as anonymous [techdirt.com](and opaque) [techdirt.com] as possible.
I'd like to see him up top (pres), but I think he needs time to build some reputable people with him. aka folks who don't whore themselves out to the most expensive lobbyist/corporation.
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He seems pretty honest and forthright. Even if he didn't use the Bumper Sticker idea I sent him - {G}.
Pug
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Which was? Seriously, you left us all hanging there, you tease.
Funny, I can't find anyone here claiming he is.
Face it, you couldn't admit a clown like Franken was right on something without getting in a few out of context digs. That's pretty sad.
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Somehow I don't think you did.
See what I did there?
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He also throws chairs when angry and is generally quite crazy. He will never be president. If he ran, people would just show those infamous pictures of him flipping out.
Yeah, it be like if an alcoholic coke-head ran for president. No one would ever vote for him.
Oh, wait...
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Pigeon Carrier (Score:5, Funny)
Speaking for the pigeons, we approve. We don't want to sniff or otherwise inspect your packets. We just want to deliver them and get our feed.
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Yeah, it's lame that they didn't notify us about that...last night.
http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/1uCzRXh3ZEk/Slashdot-Launches-Re-Design [slashdot.org]
Franken may be a little crazy, but not on this (Score:5, Interesting)
Franken is one of those comedians who, with age, has gotten less and less funny and more and more nutball. Most of them are SNL alum too, which must say something about the mental toll of being on that show. Dennis Miller and Janeane Garofalo, I'm looking in your direction.
But on this and the Comcast/NBC merger, the guy is dead on. Who better to appreciate the depths of evil at NBC than a SNL alum, after all?
Re:Franken may be a little crazy, but not on this (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see it (Franken, at least). His books are the thing that switched my political reality. And they are funny. There's nothing nutball about his political stances--nothing along the nutball levels of a Glen Beck or Michele Bachmann, at least.
Miller and Garofalo were never funny to begin with, so the argument they are no longer funny is invalid ;-)
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I knew Dennis Miller had completely gone to the dark side when watching the first episode of The Dennis Miller Show. He was interviewing Arnold Schwarzenegger and asked the hard hitting question: "Governor, why don't people realize how awesome you are?".
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We should not be hearing these messages. Messages invoking violence, murder, or the stupidity of calling out Obama's birth origin.
If Al Franken is a crazy son of a bitch, the message he's trying to get across is the one I agree with. So if it takes a crazy son of a bitch to get that message across, by all means, Mr. Franken, go nuts.
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Bachmann is nutty. (Score:2)
Bachmann on Hardball calling for an calling for an investigation into members of Congress to determine who among them has an anti-American agenda [youtube.com].
That's nutty enough to pass the "nutball" mark on my meter.
Re:Franken may be a little crazy, but not on this (Score:5, Insightful)
Man, you really told that dude. Put him in his place.
Nothing wins an argument like "You should try opening your eyes." It's like, BLAM! TKO!
I'm going to have to remember that one. "You should try opening your eyes for a change." It's sort of like, "...because your stupid, that's why!" Except "You should try opening your eyes" has more class. There is just no comeback for "You should try opening your eyes."
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Wouldn't a better solution be to break-up the ISP Monopolies, just as we broke-up the AT&T Phone monopoly during the 1980s?
Trying to impose net neutrality is a good idea, but doesn't solve the CORE problem: Lack of choice for customers. They are treating the symptom rather than the root disease.
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The best bet to network neutrality is either institute line sharing rules, or the US government fund the mass expansion of fiber lines which ISPs can then compete for consumers over those lines.
Unfortunately, the latter would require a ridiculous amount of tax dollars, get libertarian panties twisted in a bunch, and would never pass. The former would be hard enough to get through Congress.
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Lack of customer choice is a core problem that needs to be addressed, I agree. But it isn't the only problem.
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What exactly about him do you find "nutball"ish?
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I think he's mainly talking about the way that O'Reily goes absolutely apeshipt about Al Franken. It's common knowlege that O'Reily only goes apeshit over nutballs, therefore Franken must be a nutball.
Also Franken has poor taste in ties. It's absolutely unacceptable for a Senator to wear ugly ties.
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There is a line that any entertainer can cross where self-righteousness about some cause, combined with their innate narcissism, turns them from a talent into an insufferable bore. With comedians this seems to often take the form of the once funny comic talent whose stand-up routines evolve from funny routines, with some political content, into full-on raving diatribes where not a laugh is heard. Franken (and many others like Miller and Garafalo) was at one point a guy you would have on your show to make fu
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He's trying to do the right thing in Washington. You'd have to be a nutball to do that.
Re:Franken may be a little crazy, but not on this (Score:5, Insightful)
Franken hasn't billed himself as a "comedian" in well over a decade. Unlike the very unfunny Dennis Miller, who still tries to do standup, mostly in front of audiences who know him from his right-wing radio show. For them, showing up at Miller's shows is more of a tribal identifier than comedy consumption.
For the most part, Franken was always more of a writer than a performer and anyway, he left the comedy business a good while ago, though you could say the U.S. Senate is pretty comical.
I voted against Franken last time (Score:5, Insightful)
I didn't think Franken sounded any better than Coleman in the last election and voted for the devil I knew.
I must say that I have been shocked to see his name so often attached to great ideas (actual NN, ending ACTA secrecy, etc.). I will definitely be sending my vote his way next time around; I think he is one of the few senators with people's rights actually guiding him.
US = World (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that all telcos are waiting US decision to very soon spread those policies around the world. Will be very difficult to revert once they have control over all internet information. Besides, there is a deeper problem illustrated by two Brazilian episodes: 1) YouTube was blocked to the whole country due a decision involving a celebrity sex video (really). 2) Telcos already advertise promotions like "free social network access", not to mention dozen of lawsuits against Orkut for cloned profile, etc.
Putting all together: As soon as telcos start to dictate internet's tone, will be much easier for governments to implement restrictions without consulting people's right or even the content/service provider.
Let's hope not!!
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"Telcos" can regulate their private networks however they want. You are merely paying for an IP address from their servers as a privilege. Calling on politicians to tell sysadmins how to regulate their network traffic is totally insane.
If you give the government power to regulate the internet, it's going to be a field day of DMCA takedowns, piracy site takedowns, and more. Every lobbyist with access to government politicians is going to "dictate internet's tone." Governments are the most corrupt organizatio
Getting what you paid for (Score:5, Insightful)
I should get what I pay for.
Google should get what they pay for.
Party X should not be able to pay for party Y to get less than what has been paid for.
"up to" means "at least"? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The ISPs should have to spell out exactly what they are selling and what it costs. Selling much, much more than you can deliver is bait and switch.
Today 1mbps is fine for light browsing, but if the local ISP sells that to everyone, then youtube adds HD video, and everyone tried to watch it at the same time, they're going to be
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DSL isn't really better. DSL is constrained to sharing the CO's link to their backbone just as cable connections are constrained to sharing a cable node's link to their backbone, the only difference is where it's located.
In addition to that, both are constrained to the interconnects their backbones have to the other parts of the internet, which is quite often a bigger issue than the last mile bandwidth constraints.
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I don't think it's so cut and dry. In particular when the DSL provider is the incumbent telco. Starting from interconnecting issues to the backdones. Not a single cable company has a Tier 1 network. Whereas Qwest, Verizon/UUNet, Sprint, and AT&T are all Tier 1 networks. Cable Companies are strictly Tier 2, often buying connectivity from the Telco companies they compete with for consumer customers.
Cable doesn't have the infrastructure and redundancy most Telco DSL networks have. Telcos started putti
Re:"up to" means "at least"? (Score:5, Insightful)
Advertise 3 numbers - minimum guaranteed, average (that is achievable over, say, a day) and peak bandwidth. That would reduce the confusion greatly.
For example, my connection is advertised as "up to" 80mbps (up/down), which is great. I manage to get about 32mbps average and the bandwidth sometimes (for a few hours every day) drops down to 10mbps (let's assume this is due to the ISP). I still think that my connection is great, especially for what I pay for it. However, the ad could have said 10/30/80 mbps (min/avg/max). The contract actually specifies a minimum guaranteed bandwidth, but I am too lazy to go now and look it up.
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If they cannot deliver it, then they shouldn't advertise it. It's not complicated.
They don't advertise "at least" x Mbps (Score:3)
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So you're saying that "up to" means "at least"? Do you not realize that broadband bits cost 20-40 times less than commercial bandwidth, precisely because it's shared 20-40 times? Now you want the government to change the service level of a shared circuit to that of a dedicated circuit? Any idea what this does to prices? Any idea how you'd actually achieve this, since it's impossible to build a core network that can handle all the concurrent data that the end points can throw at it?
If dedicated lines are prohibitively expensive and an extremely robust "core network" impossible to build, why can so many service providers in northern Europe and southeast Asia provide an extremely consistent 100+ mbps, even at night when virtually everyone is online (say in South Korea), to every single household for anywhere from $10-$50/month? I understand that truly dedicated bandwidth costs more, but it's bullshit to claim that pure economics dictate paying $60+ per month for something that's been s
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What you are saying is that it's "impossible" for it to cost more than $60 per month for 1/20th or 1/40th of a dedicated line.
Quick math. DS3's (45Mbps) cost around $3500 per month. Order 1 DS3 for every 9 people (9 people at 5Mbs = 45Mbs) = $388.89 per month per person. Feel free to get you and your closest 8 neighbors to cough up $388.89 per person (not including router, and cables to each house beyond the first), and you can get yourself a 5Mbps connection that you can do whatever you want with, and t
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Very good analysis of the fundamental principle at stake. Said that way, it is very clear that the purpose of Net Neutrality is to defend the free market from those who would bias it, not to inhibit the free market. That is exactly the sort of illumination that ought to send the anti-free-market rats scurrying.
Thank you.
If I may offer one slight modification:
"Party X should not be able to pay party Y to cause party Z to get less than what party Z paid for."
That makes the core anti-free-market agenda a bit m
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The biggest laugh in this whole net neutrality is the premise that ISPs have sold a customer a service that they can not provide. Then the
Re:Getting what you paid for (Score:5, Insightful)
If paying full price is the cost of preventing large corps from dominating the internet landscape, Im all for it.
in the end, it is about presenting a level playing field of all participants. There may be some inefficiency in this model, but that cost is more than made up for in choice and innovation.
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What if you don't care about Yahoo and just want a discount on your connection? Net Neutrality will prevent that, forcing you to pay full price.
But you aren't going to get a discount on the connection. You're still going to pay the full price, like it or not.
Just like you pay for ESPN and Fox !news if you have cable, whether or not you actually want them.
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Please, shut the fuck up.
Internet Service Provider. Let us just look at that for a moment. Ready? Lets move on to the point then. INTERNET, ALL OF IT. PERIOD. Any questions?
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The other side of that argument is that group discounts is good for both the provider and consumer. A large reliable income for the provider and an overall reduced price for the customer....assuming the consumer uses the service.
I liken it to heath insurance. Much cheaper in groups, but the healthier people lose out because they pay for the unhealthy.
I'm just offering another view... screw ESPN360, my ISP has it to...
Franken is the common man (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus H Christ, why is a former comedian the smartest politician we have? It's embarrassing that this guy has to come to Washington to kick some sense into them just because our elite educational institutions have been pumping out the smartest dumb fucks on the planet for years.
Re:Franken is the common man (Score:5, Insightful)
Jesus H Christ, why is a former comedian the smartest politician we have? It's embarrassing that this guy has to come to Washington to kick some sense into them just because our elite educational institutions have been pumping out the smartest dumb fucks on the planet for years.
Is it really? Usually the best way to get the pulse of the public is to see what comedians are joking about. They can rip people a new arsehole from behind the guise of comedy, and nobody really gives a crap. Now if $yourFavoriteTalkingHead does the same thing, they in turn get ripped a new arsehole by $theOpposingViewTalkingHead and it goes into a shouting match on the Today Show.
I'm all for level headed comedian policy makers. I would have moved across the river to Minnesota to vote for Frankin, I had to watch all his ads anyway ;)
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Jesus H Christ, why is a former comedian the smartest politician we have?
He's not the smartest, his interests just align with the common man rather than the corporate elite.
Might have something to do with the fact that he isn't a former lawyer/CXX/Trustafarian.
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Actually, I'd almost be willing to bet that he's above the 80'th percentile for intelligence in the Senate. You need to have some serious brain power to turn out comedy week-after-week for years, especially of the more cerebral stuff that he did.
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I think he's using the system the way it's supposed to be used. He wanted to change something so he became a politician to try to change it. I'm not too familiar with this guy so while I can't back up the things he has done before this, I am greatly pleased with what he has done regarding this bill.
QoS (Score:2)
I think QoS could add some amount of value, but I think it needs to be carefully.
I have an idea of how QoS might be implemented in a "fair" manner.
I Win7, I know you can assign QoS to an App or data stream. Let an ISP have 3 different priorities.
1) High priority would be a guaranteed bandwidth that a customer gets. An example of this might be I have a 2Mb up on my connection. I might only have 192Kb of "dedicated" bandwidth because ISPs over subscribes. I can assign on my machine to flag a packet to have hi
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If the government is so concerned re: oligarchies (Score:5, Interesting)
...then why do they pass laws and ordinances mandating their existence? If you don't believe me, try starting your own phone or cable company sometime.
I love it when government passes laws adding new regulations to solve problems created by government rather than just fixing their initial mistakes. The closest we got to to sanity was the AT&T breakup by the Judicial branch, but the legislative and executive branches were bought off sufficiently bought to more or less undo all of the good done there.
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Because some markets are natural monopolies [wikipedia.org] in which the most economically efficient outcome is in fact a monopoly.
The supply curve you were probably taught in econ 101 is upward sloping, but that's actually a not-always true simplification. For instance, the supply curve of computer software is actually downward sloping, because higher numbers of customers = a lower cost to produce the software per customer. Most supply curves are actually an upward-sloping parabola, where the economies of scale create the
Mobile Service Providers (Score:2)
In other offtopic news... (Score:2)
...the new slashdot censorship icon just isn't cool. Censored guy looks like having no emotions or so.
And well, I wanna see how this process will look like in Europe.
Manufacturing does NOT fuel jobs (Score:2)
Or rather, manufacturing doesn't fuel jobs any more than any other job fuels jobs. What idiots usually mean when they say this is that manufacturing makes things people can hold, actual physical products, but that has nothing to with anything. People buy what they want. Whether they spend $10 on a movie ticket or a toaster or cell phone minutes, they still spend $10. Someone else gets that $10, spends it on resources used to sell the service or product that was bought.
I am soooo tired of this malarkey.
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Manufacturing does in a way fuel jobs, in that it produces new goods that bring in money external to the local economy. You can't support an economy composed entirely of service personnel unless there's a great outside desire for the service (read: tourist traps, Vegas, and the like). The money incoming from manufacturing however has a greater tendency to come in from outside the local environment, and money flowing into an area rather than circulating around it creates demand for additional services and
I'm a "customer" dammit (Score:2)
One suggestion (Score:2)
The bill lays out some stark clarity on what is meant by Net Neutrality by outright banning ISPs from doing many things including...(7) prioritiz[ing] among or between content, applications, and services, or among or between different types of content, applications, and services unless the end user requests to have such prioritization.
Hopefully the bill will specify that's an opt-in request, not an opt-out.
.
This is why Slashdot needs to have a special HERO (Score:2)
Finally, someone in an elected office who understands what net neutrality mean to us.
Oh... My.. God... (Score:2)
Internet Freedom, Broadband Promotion, and Consumer Protection Act of 2011
If BP CPA. Soon, if this law is allowed to pass we'll be overrun by Certified Practicing Accountants working for British Petroleum. We're on to you...
I am in a country that suffers a lot due to U.S. (Score:2)
however, at times like this, i say to myself "Well, there are good people in america too after all".
i mean it.
Maybe we should fix... (Score:3, Insightful)
... the way ISPs (and other utilities) work so that we can actually have real competition. Competition would basically fix this sort of thing, wouldn't it? Droves of people don't want X-ISP because X-ISP is throttling/sniffing/whatever traffic. Y-ISP comes in and advertises they don't do that (and in fact, they don't). Droves of people switch to Y-ISP.
Right now, though, because of the way ISPs share (or don't share) infrastructure and all that, we don't have competition; we have local monopolies. The fact that we allow local monopolies is why we now are struggling to regulate them; regulation may not be required, though, if we actually had competition. By "competition" I mean competition for the same customer using the same - more or less - technology; e.g., one person looking for cable can actually buy from multiple providers.
Maybe I misunderstand how it works right now, but it seems to me that allowing local monopolies is a bad idea and is the only reason we are having to go down the regulation route. Maybe if the infrastructure were public and paid for through $x-per-customer-served by the provider, thus allowing multiple providers access to the same infrastructure at the same cost (and that cost going to the local government, which would be maintaining/improving/whatever the infrastructure), we wouldn't have need for all this?
I wouldnt mind content priortization If... (Score:3)
it was vendor neutral.
I think VOIP and streaming movies SHOULD get priority over bittorrent traffic as long all VOIP and streaming movie vendors are treated equally whether its youtube, netflix or comcast or my calls are made on skype or at&t.
NN is Defined! (Score:3)
Net Neutrality has so many definitions floating around that it's to confusing to bother with. Until now. Despite the fact that it's a very hard-to-read sentence, I think this is actually what a violation of net neutrality: "6) charge[ing] a content, application, or service provider for access to the broadband Internet access service providers' end users based on differing levels of quality of service or prioritized delivery of Internet protocol packets". Let's just make that illegal and forget the rest.
/. has many Corporate Propagandist.... (Score:3)
If you do not fully agree with Net-Neutrality, then you support the Corporate Welfare State and Net-Nepotism.
Vorizon, ATT, Comcast... are all Internet Access Providers (IAP). You pay for access. /., Yahoo, Microsoft, Sony PS, eTrade, Amazon... are all Internet Services Providers. You pay for services and/or view advertising for freebees.
WikiPedia, Google,
Corporate, religious, or special interest control of access to content, information, news media is un-American and conflicts with The USA Constitutional freedom to speak, practice a religion, obtain information on science, weapons and/or art.
If you are against Net-Neutrality, then you are against US and all folks who stand for patriotism and the American way of life.
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Re:One thing that's getting old... (Score:5, Insightful)
IMO, the annoying part is ever being called a "consumer."
It reduces my existence down to the one-dimensional act of consuming. Makes me feel like some sort of herd animal grazing on whatever slop the farmer is throwing in front of my face.
Granted, there is utility in only focusing on one dimension when that's the one being, ahem, focused on. For example, IT calls the individuals who operate computers "users."
But from an economic standpoint, it is dangerous to reduce people to consumers, because it locks you into thinking that that is their actual purpose for existence. We see this a lot now: that consumption = good, and any diminution in consumption is somehow bad.
Words are powerful, and "consumer" is not a positive word.
Re:One thing that's getting old... (Score:5, Insightful)
Son, welcome to what's known in these parts as "free market capitalism" where you have two functions: to work for as little as possible and to consume as much as possible.
When corporations have the same constitutional rights as you, the term "citizen" really doesn't have much meaning anymore. "Consumer" is nothing but accurate.
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My mom was a nurse at the county hospital in San Antonio. In the 90's the a lot of verbiage changed including calling people admitted to the hospital from customers instead of patients.
She felt the same as you regarding that term..
Re:One thing that's getting old... (Score:5, Insightful)
Words are powerful, and "consumer" is not a positive word.
In line with my sig of the week, I think we should be called owners.
After all, "We built this internet one Dial-UP account at a time" for the last 20 or 30 years. We built the carriers and ISPs with our dollars. We hired them to run it, not to own it.
They run infrastructure thru right-of-way corridors granted by us, and send content thru the airways granted by us, and we pay the bills. Every month. Between cellular and internet connections most geeks pay well north of $100 per month to these companies. Its time we had our say.
Re:One thing that's getting old... (Score:5, Interesting)
I would prefer to be a client. a customer may choose to buy what is provided. A client produces requirements that must be fulfilled.
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You mean the foreign corporations?
not this tired old argument again (Score:5, Insightful)
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Uhh, which other ISPs would they lose the customers to? Very few communities have any sort of choice when it comes to broadband. So the wallet-voting you're proposing is for everyone to go without any sort of broadband access? Good luck with that.
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Wait, you think we all had to wait for the Democrats to tell us that AT&T and Comcast were "villains out to screw us as much as possible"? Have you ever read any of the contracts or end-user agreements from them? Being "out to screw you as much as possible" is in their corporate charter for chrissake.
It's their business model.
Re:Not sure about that (Score:5, Interesting)
You know how many ISPs service the address I'm posting from?
One.
Well, I must just be in some obscure backwater, right?
Nope. This is a pretty nice area of Brooklyn. You know, in the largest city in the US.
Things are slightly better at the office. At that address we've got two ISP choices. Of course one of them is DSL that tops out at only 3 Mbps.
If the government to built out some sort of nation-wide publicly owned fiber network and let a few thousand ISPs compete to provide Internet access over it, the market could solve these problems. But as long as ISPs own the lines -- line ownership being something pretty damn close to a natural monopoly -- consumers need legislative protection from them.
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At least I hope my VOIP call to 911 gets priority over somebody's torrent.
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Maybe that's not what VOIP is for.
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Why not though? Shouldn't a packet-switched voice service (eventually) have the same quality and reliability guarantees as circuit-switched? It's a step backwards otherwise.
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Don't know how it works in the US actually but over here in Europe things like emergency calls and communications vital to national security and such tend to always have priority. So you could just make a law that says you can't mess with the flow of traffic unless it is necessary in order to ensure that emergency calls get through (with proper legalese wording of course).
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unless it is necessary in order to ensure that emergency calls get through (with proper legalese wording of course).
And that's why I'm so skeptical of Net Neutrality. Oh, sure it will be great for a while, but eventually regulations will allow, or even require, different packets to get different priority, and as with all other industries, it's only a matter of time before the big players are the ones writing those regulations. "Proper legalese wording" always ends up being "wording chosen by industry" given enough time.
They would, in a free market (Score:2)
But the US is not a free market. It's a big corporation market. It's more Adam Smith than the old Soviet Union, but only barely. I dare say that in many ways, Red China is more Adam Smith than the US, but only because they are growing so fast they don't have time to implement the bureaucracies necessary to slow it down.
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(7) prioritiz[ing] among or between content, applications, and services, or among or between different types of content, applications, and services unless the end user requests to have such prioritization..
(emphasis added). It's about time something like this happened.
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I'm not sure about the legality of prioritizing VoIP traffic under these rules, but if it's illegal to prioritize VoIP traffic, it's not really a problem. VoIP currently works just fine with no prioritization, and that's before you adjust your router's QoS rules.
In fact I'd say it would be better to make traffic prioritization by type illegal to shut the door on any potential future loopholes ("Comcast gives ComCastVPN packets higher priority than all other traffic! Get your ComCastVPN router today! Standar
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Lets get hypotheical for a moment:
We do give priority to VoIP traffic. All I have to do is write a "codec" that tunnels binary data over SIP. Now you're in contention with my "phone call".
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So will this eliminate caps, and thus make my connection to an important site vulnerable to my neighbors whim to download a big binary?
Should have addressed this in my other reply...but you could run into that situation with or without caps, as long as your connection is oversold.
A cap is basically just a way of false-advertising a limited connection with an allowance for burst speeds as an unlimited connection (which it isn't) so that your telco can oversell their connections more. If your neighbor decides to download a big file and your connection is severely oversold, you'll get no bandwidth as long as your neighbor hasn't run into his
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Furthermore, what I consider to be priority should be different than what you consider priority. In a classic "Me" vs. "You", why should your VOIP/Skype traffic get any more priority than my WoW traffic? But that's what it would come down.
Many services these days are pushing the bounds of latency and fighting for the priority.
The problem is that the companies
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When the FCC starts censoring content, you'll be sorry.
WTF? How does proposing a specific law that prevents ISPs from interfering with free speech lead you to lame slippery slope fallacy assertion that the FCC will be censoring content?
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Just like the FCC censors phonecalls, right?
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This was what was done with Telcos as part of common carrier status. If it makes sense for your fucking phone, why the fuck doesn't it make sense for the Internet, which, for the most part, runs on the same goddamn networks as your fucking phone.
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This is the moderate fix. The proper one is utilitization.