Exactly why net neutrality was important
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
401 points (98.8% liked)
Technology
59605 readers
3458 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Obligatory fuck ajit pai
Has Biden made this a priority?
He couldn't until there was a Democrat majority in the FCC.
Now it's a priority.
Well he's got a few months to make something happen then.
Until then its just talk.
They're holding a vote on it in October.
load more comments
(9 replies)
Who saw this coming???
/s
RIP net neutrality, it was nice knowing you.
“Why should we upgrade our tech when we can just artificially reduce capacity and charge more for priority access?”
Fuck these pricks.
The network can handle everyone currently on it yet they cry like it's causing them issues.
Fucking liars.
The issue is there are profits left on the table! Unacceptable!
When it's mafia it's extortion, when it's ISPs it's just "good business practices."
They might not be able to easily, but that's 100% on them for spending their obscene profits on yet another nesting yacht rather than upgrading their infrastructure to actually keep pace with demand
It's yachts, all the way down
The fuck is “fast gaming”. And what games demand this?
I would guess that since it mentions teleconferencing and gaming, that they want to create low-latency fast-lanes.
But they also mention TikTok, so I am not completely sure that they are referring to latency.
This article isn't very good at explaining what they're talking about on a technical level.
Reading trough all the marketing terms used. I’m more afraid of selective slowing down connections instead of the mentioned “speeding up” connections.
Yeah they won't speed up shit, that requires investment in infrastructure. They'll just slow down all existing lanes by 40%, blame it on something unrelated, and then charge you 2.5x as much as you used to pay to get your original speeds back.
Don't do that. Don't read through them. Let that shit be.
Also don't help your "non-tech-savvy" relatives and friends with crap you've told them before you don't use. They think it's fine and normal until they are left alone to deal with it. "But how will I use Facebook?.. I dunno, don't use it myself, can't help you".
The reason crap is popular is also because we the relatively savvy people have conditioned normies to think that they choose what to use and we'll just help them with everything, but the authority who tells what's good and what isn't is not us, it's Google and Apple and other shitmakers.
No free IT help without representation, I say. Which means that I'll help them if they suddenly want to become Linux users. Or something else I can respect. But not with things I've never advised them to use in the first place, quite the contrary. I'm for adult usage of the Web, with normies accepting responsibility for their own choices.
EDIT: This butthurt comment meant that we shouldn't wait for normies to abandon all that. Leading by example. Like with ICQ being abandoned in favor of Skype. Network effect isn't real (... anymore with enshittification negating it fully), it can't hurt you.
EDIT2: And I know it's offtopic.
I agree with you, I usually tell relatives to call their isp and scream at them. It's usually stuff I could probably help with but if the isp gets more hell they might change for the better.
Yo TikTok with a latency higher than 2 ms is completely unusable trash!
Or under 2 ms.
I have a hard time believing that since TikTok is such a popular mobile app, and 4G users are going to have a minimum of 200ms latency over-the-air.
5G does offer much faster over-the-air latency of only 1ms, but if TikTok were to become unusable if the latency between tower and server exceeds 1ms, I would expect to hear widespread complaints about that, as the vast majority of users aren't going to have <2ms latency between them and the server. Pinging TikTok.com from my 5G handset (in a major metro area) shows a latency of 80ms. Admittedly, AWS and GCP, where TikTok hosts content primarily for US users, likely has better latency. My personal experience with those platforms doesn't suggest that it would be that good- pinging the cloudfront CDN endpoints associated with my account, I get latency between 40-60ms.
Besides, video streaming shouldn't be affected by latency, only throughput. TikTok videos are just MP4 files on a CDN, as long as you can download them faster than you can play them, high latency shouldn't even be noticeable to the user, outside of initial load times for latency exceeding a few hundred ms (up to a second or so delay if establishing a fresh TCP connection, depending on the latency).
Maybe TikTok Live could be an issue, but its a one-way channel so a delay shouldn't be noticeable like it would be with a 2-way teleconference. Maybe if there was high jitter or packet loss, the stream could have extremely low quality.
load more comments
(1 replies)
Low latency matters a lot more than bandwidth in any game that isn't turn based.
Oof, they don't have net neutrality over there eh?
Gonna be bollocks for them until they can get that brought in. There's an election coming up there right? Maybe they can vote for the party that pledges to bring in net neutrality laws, it's about time they had them considering it's 2024.
I wish them the best of luck <3
Net neutrality being brought up as an election topic would be very unusual for our politics. Our two party system is very set on the topics that they like and don't like to bring up.
Of course the parties have negative incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum about these topics that they fight so hard to advertise. Otherwise, they might need to come up with new reasons for people to vote for them.
Except that ignores how net neutrality only became a thing in the last 2 decades there’s only so many presidential admins in that period. So 5 elections vs 20 years to discuss a topic… it’s not weird that it comes up more outside of an election year. Feigning both sides/everything’s rigged bullshit is a mindless simplification.
Still, I can’t tell if you’re choosing to ignore how Obama campaigned for it or how Biden and Harris campaigned way more for it, especially concerning reversing trumps FCC decisions.
No reason to ignore the fact that Biden made it a priority in the first year or so of the admin.
Acting like it’s rigged absolves republicans of their actions: “Net Neutrality Won’t Survive a Trump Presidency” and lumps good folks in with the worst.
Net neutrality couldn’t happen while republicans block the commissioners for the job: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23800161/gigi-sohn-fcc-nomination-dark-money-campaign-net-neutrality-profile
So why not blame it on the people who are actually documented as destroying net-neutrality and advocating against it. Why instead invent some all powerful Illuminati like cabal only to end up making it a both sides thing?
Republican attacks over bs tweets are just one of the reasons we can’t have nice things. Another reason is because people like to imagine a rigged system pulling the strings to pretend there’s some order in the chaos. All it does is suck the support away from anyone trying to do the right thing.
Well said, even if you are the grossest of schnapps.
Data is data unless they can commodify it. Data is like a river that never ends. Doesn’t cost them Anything. We are subject to monopolies who charge above and beyond maintenance and massive profits while destroying competition
You seem to be misinformed on how the internet works. Nothing is "free". ISPs have to buy equipment, pay for expensive physical connectivity (without disturbing existing infrastructure), and usually have to deal with constant, ever increasing bandwidth requirements.
I'm all for a bit of net neutrality, but ISPs tend to get a lot of flak for policies like this, for seemingly no reason. For example, let's say ISP A and Upstream B have a mutual bandwidth sharing policy (called Peering) where both sides benefit equally from the connectivity. ISP A determines that N is using all the bandwidth to Upstream B. ISP A has three options: N gets all the bandwidth to Upstream B (disturbing other traffic to/from that network), N has to be throttled to allow all traffic equally, or ISP A and Upstream B need to expand their network again (new equipment, new physical links) which will cost a lot of money. N doesn't even pay ISP A or Upstream B, they just pay their ISP C. In the end, ISP A has to throttle N, and N is the one who had to expand/change their business model to deliver content to their customers. They had to go out and buy services from many upstream providers to even the load and designed a solution to install Caching boxes inside each ISP's datacenter so their traffic could reach end users without going upstream.
The correct answer in that scenario is C should be paying for it, as in the stated scenario C's traffic would be exceeding the peering arrangement with B and/or A, but there were/are a number of reasons that breaks down in the real world.
Sender pays is what Korea has. It does not work well at all.
Peering isn't Sender Pays, Peering is "I'll carry your traffic if you'll carry mine", with the understanding that when there's an imbalance in one direction or another that an exchange of some sort is had, be it dollars, bandwidth limits, or similar. In this case, where C interconnects with A which interconnects with B, if C's traffic is so substantial that it's saturating the crosslink between A and B, A would need to evaluate whether their peering agreement with C means that C needs to be paying for the network upgrade, or if there's enough traffic moving from A's network into C's to offset that, and that the interconnect between A and B is the root issue. In your example, rather than paying more into ISPs and, essentially, indirectly funding US network backbone infrastructure upgrades across the board, they solved their problem with cache servers that they handed out like candy to avoid their costs to C sky rocketing. G solved this problem by buying a bunch of dark fiber which was laid on spec by contractors and started peering directly with the Tier 1 providers, dramatically reducing their cost delta.
Where Korea's system differs is that in traditional Tier 1 peering, as I understand it, T's ISP (call them P) should be using some of the money they get from T to pay Q and R for the excess traffic of their customer, but instead Q and R were, per the government, allowed to also charge T for delivery of their packets, resulting in T having to pay both on the up and downlink side, charging them twice for the same bit. T, rather than attempt what G did, told Korea to pound sand and exited the market.
That's a good summary!
IMO, the customers of A are paying A to access to the internet, including N. So A should charge their customers enough that they can pay for the equipment to deliver that.
In a working market with many participants, customers can choose a cheaper ISP that has congested/throttled peering, or a more expensive ISP with gold-plated interconnects.
The problem is that in the US, typically your choice of ISP is limited by geography. In many other places you have open fiber networks where the last mile is shared and then you can choose what ISP you want ontop of that, and the ISP is what determines how good your peering is.
And installing caching boxes inside of ISPs is actually a really efficient solution (as well as peer-to-peer)
enshittification.
my theory is that they are pushing for more expensive upgrades like fiber.
Charter has/had a dark fiber ring ready for use back in 2005. I assume most other cable providers have similar, because they had to build it out after the first FCC spending bill after 99
Per the article, this looks to be limited to mobile internet and not traditional broadband. While I can understand the practicality of carving out unique bands of the wireless spectrum for specific uses, charging extra for it seems scummy.
Its always, no no this is for X, not Y.
(a few years pass)
They accepted X, now there is precedent, let's take Y.
This is the start, not the finish.
Fight this or it will make its way to your interests.
My $0.02.
Sure, it’s $0.02 now, but in a few years that’ll be precedent and you’ll start asking for $0.04. I’m on to your game!
What!?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Some net neutrality proponents are worried that soon-to-be-approved Federal Communications Commission rules will allow harmful fast lanes because the plan doesn't explicitly ban "positive" discrimination.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's proposed rules for Internet service providers would prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.
Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick, who has consistently argued for stricter net neutrality rules, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that "harmful 5G fast lanes are coming."
In a different filing last month, several advocacy groups similarly argued that the "no-throttling rule needs to ban selective speeding up, in addition to slowing down."
That filing was submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Technology Institute at New America, Public Knowledge, Fight for the Future, and United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry.
The draft order argues that the FCC's definition of "throttling" is expansive enough that an explicit ban on what the agency called positive discrimination isn't needed:
The original article contains 635 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I hope the EU handles that. I'm happy that I'm not in the US.
view more: next ›