this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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This comment is the worst misrepresentation of penguins I've ever seen. It sounds like a red herring. It makes me want to vomit. People get away with this because nobody actually knows what penguins are. They just take what the media writes and accepts it as truth.
On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn't (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally. In other words it means you don't have to pay $5 extra for high speed access to Lemmy because Reddit and your ISP (say Comcast) would prefer Lemmy not exist.
That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.
People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality, for various reasons:
Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.
Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.
A website isn’t a common carrier, you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to. An ISP is a common carrier because they simply act as a dumb pipe between the provider (websites) and the consumer.
Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right, necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks. Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.
Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?
We were talking about network neutrality, not just common carriers (which are only part of the netneutrality problem).
Permission wasn’t the argument. When a website violates netneutrality principles, it’s not a problem of acting outside of authority. They are of course permitted to push access inequality assuming we are talking about the private sector where the contract permits it.
One man’s freedom is another man’s oppression.
It is /not/ necessary to use a tool as crude and reckless as Cloudflare to defend from attacks with disregard to collateral damage. There are many tools in the toolbox for that and CF is a poor choice favored by lazy admins.
Only if you neglect to see admins who have found better ways to counter threats that do not make the security problem someone elses.
That was enumerated in a list in the linked article you replied to.