News FCC Formally Proposes Net Neutrality Rules

wow that was a rambling idiotic post i made above.

note to self, cut down on the coors lites at lunch.

you mean like comcast would block voip packets so you will pay for their phone service? why should that be illegal?

and regarding your espn 360 example, i dont understand. i know they have deals with providers. i used to have to switch from my internet provider and borrow my nightbors wifi signal to get espn 360. i had time warner and they had verizon, or maybe vice versa. . espn wanted to shake money out of the providers, whats wrong with that?

 

No, it's not about blocking certain types of packets. VoIP packets are probably on their own VLAN anyway and you don't get access to that VLAN unless you pay for the phone service. I am sure they have some QoS (throttling) rules in place in order to give things such as VoIP comms priority and will continue to because that is outside the scope of these rules. Again, bandwidth management and traffic priority is NOT the issue. It's about blocking certain protocol suites and traffic over certain ports without giving anyone a good reason. Most software uses specific unique ports to send data. The ISP can have ACL's in place to examine the IP header and drop packets either with a source or destination address from a certain port. The new rules simply make them explain what they are filtering and why.

Apologies if that is in another language. I've been studying for the CCNA for 6 months and I don't really know how else to say it. Basically, ISP's can still block traffic, but only if it is illegal AND if they do, they have to be transparent about exactly what it is they are blocking and why. ESPN360 is a poor example for this argument. I just threw it in there because I was excited that Cox was finally going to offer it. It's irrelevant to this discussion.

Another thing that it is designed to prevent is discrimination against certain websites. Urtoosmall explained it well with the analogy to the "Sports Tier" similar to your TV channel line-up. There has been a lot of talk about you paying subscriptions levels for specific content pretty much exactly like your TV service. You want to go read an article on ESPN.com? Unless you have the sports and information tier, you are limited to Yahoo! and Amazon. If you think about that scenario for more than about 5 minutes, you will realize how much of a logistical nightmare that would be to try and control. You thought the chaos was out of control when Obama won? Filter people's internet and see how long it lasts before the entire freaking country implodes.

 

i understand this. this is what i explained earlier. lets lets say they want to offer a service where they only allow traffic through port 80 and a couple others so that users only can use a few services. why should they have to explain anything to the government? why should they have to explain anything to anyone except their customers, who can just leave them if they dont like it?

if they try to offer a "tiered" intenet, so what? i wont buy that. why should that be illegal? why dont you just not buy the thing you dont want.

this is exactly like the example i described earlier where they filter all search through one engine and block another. so what? i dont want that, so i will get the full unfiltered version.

 

That's the point! They don't tell ANYONE, not even their customers. They aren't required to report to the government all of a sudden. They just have to be transparent about the things that they filter.

The plan that the ISP's had was to not offer an unfiltered version, period. Your scenario of choice doesn't exist.

 

if i thought they were secretly filtering me i would switch providers.

but consumers love the unfiltered version. do these companies hate profit so much that do not offer consumers something they desperately want to purchase? something that would give them a massive competitive advantage over any compeition that was not offering it?

 

Right. I'm not sure that's always possible in some areas though. Unless I'm mistaken, Cox was pretty much your only shot at internet here for a long time. With AT&T and Verizon showing up though, I'd say you have a valid point. However, the average internet user probably wouldn't be able to determine why their file sharing stuff wasn't working. Most people I know would probably get frustrated because they thought they had it set up wrong as opposed to immediately blaming the ISP. Then my mom would call me and expect me to be able walk her through setting up a program that I have never used over the phone off of the top of my head.

For me, it's not about consumer choice or provider freedom...filtering the internet defeats the purpose of the internet. It doesn't make sense.

Even if your typical browsing is limited to about 4 sites, it is inevitable that you will want to look up something random at some point. What happens in that situation? Do you call the ISP and up your subscription to look up the symptoms of strep throat or how to change an alternator...do you call a friend and get them to look it up for you? What if you have a date that wants spaghetti and you need a recipe? What if you are interested in the specs of a new holographic device coming out? If you can think of a more inefficient use of time and frustration, I'd love to hear it.

I understand the point of letting people be retards and screw themselves by not subscribing to the unfiltered version but I question the profitability of setting up the infrastructure and access controls needed to implement that filtering system, not to mention the SERIOUS increase in processing power for networking devices that would be needed and unnecessary strain on the backbone. I feel pretty confident saying that such a system could not be either financially or logistically sustained.

 

those questions are like asking me "what if you want to look up movie times on your phone, and you are not paying for a data plan?" and then concluding that phones should not be sold without data plans.

given the way the government works, and the fact that we are not having these sort of problems now, cant we hold off on regulating?

this is a solution looking for a problem.

 

No, it's not. The comparison would be trying to look up movie times on your phone while paying for a data plan but you can't because the content is blocked with no explanation of why.

 

this all assumes that the providers dont want profits and want to drive customers away. a phone that doesnt get movie times sucks. people will change providers if you do that to them. and a intenet provider that blocks or slows certain services will lose customers. or possibly gain customers if the blocking of that service speeds the network performance and most customers dont use it.

 

This assumes the existence and availability of a provider with these unrestricted services and these restrictions not becoming industry standard.

I'm not sure why you keep going back to network performance. It's a non-issue here.