The old thread died so here is a new one.

Some of this info is old but a lot of people still don't know what is going on. Here is a brief summary.

Quote :

"Net Neutrality What is Network Neutrality? Network Neutrality -- or "Net Neutrality" for short -- is the guiding principle that preserves the free and open Internet. Put simply, Net Neutrality means no discrimination. Net Neutrality prevents Internet providers from speeding up or slowing down Web content based on its source, ownership or destination. Net Neutrality is the reason why the Internet has driven economic innovation, democratic participation, and free speech online. It protects the consumer's right to use any equipment, content, application or service on a non-discriminatory basis without interference from the network provider. With Net Neutrality, the network's only job is to move data -- not choose which data to privilege with higher quality service. Who wants to get rid of Net Neutrality? The nation's largest telephone and cable companies -- including AT&T, Verizon, Comcast and Time Warner -- want to be Internet gatekeepers, deciding which Web sites go fast or slow and which won't load at all. They want to tax content providers to guarantee speedy delivery of their data. They want to discriminate in favor of their own search engines, Internet phone services, and streaming video -- while slowing down or blocking their competitors. These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services -- or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls -- and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road. The big phone and cable companies are spending hundreds of millions of dollars lobbying Congress and the Federal Communications Commission to gut Net Neutrality, putting the future of the Internet at risk. Sign the petition!! https://secure.freepress.net/site/Advocacy?page=ActionAlertTakenPage&id=162 Learn more at http://savetheinternet.com"

I signed the petition yesterday. I hope some of you do the same. If nothing else, spread awareness.

[Edited on March 28, 2008 at 10:07 AM. Reason : .]

3/28/2008 10:06:37 AM

internet petitions are worthless

3/28/2008 10:10:43 AM

good attitude

[Edited on March 28, 2008 at 10:14 AM. Reason : its obvious that you completely missed the point of the entire thread, thanks for reading....]

3/28/2008 10:13:19 AM

i was going to sign the petition, but the page took too long to load.

3/28/2008 10:56:30 AM

wow

3/28/2008 10:58:24 AM

Its all a load of bullshit fueled by content providers and the naive tools of the blogosphere hive mind.

the majority of the internet is not a public entity, dispite what you might think. Most of it is privately owned. If anything, government regulation of the internet will result in:

1) Higher cost. Goverment regulation always means higher cost for companies and that gets passed right to the consumer. Not to mention that enforcing service levels on the internet would be insane. The cost to tax payers would be enormous.

2) Poor service. As more and more bandwidth intensive applications start to hit the internet ISPs will have to build more to facilitate the growth. This cost will get passed to consumers which is fine. Better service = more money. The problem is that certain applicatons using more than their share of available bandwidth result in poor service for everyone. Things like bit torrent. These ISPs want everyone to get atleast certain level of service, and if they have to throttle some guy downloading anime all day, then they're going to do it. In fact, enforcing equal service levels for all users is much fairer way to handle the internet than letting everyone do what they want to the point where no one can do anything. To this point they'll charge content provides more for QoS and guaranteed bandwidth for intensive applications. Which makes sense. You use more, you pay more. Otherwise everyone looses

3) Fragmentation and withdrawl from markets. Regulatons forcing companies to handle all traffic accross the cloud equally could result in some just plain de-peering. If they cant meet the service level expectatons for their users or if its going to cost them too much to do so, they might just stop offering those services. Or if joe blow ISP is peering with verizon and sending a ton of shit verizons way they may tell them to get fucked and de-peer. Or if a content provider uses more bandwidth than they're willing to pay for, they'll just cut them loose. You might even get seperate internets opperated by each provider. Because none of them want to deal with the new mess of traffic from provider to provide, they split into seperate networks. Think of it like a cable provider or (formerly) sattilite radio. Some content providers may be available on some networks, but others (either through exclusitivity agreements or inablity to afford access) are only available on some networks. But atleast within each network you'd have net neutrality!


If you want to guarantee free reign on the internet you need to get rid of the ridiculous laws allowng local monoplies in state governments. Every provider needs to be able to have access to every market. The resulting competition will guarantee net neutrality.

3/28/2008 12:16:56 PM

^tl;dr

3/28/2008 12:25:03 PM

Net Neutrality is a bad idea. It will keep prices high, harm network performance, and curtail the expansion of network providers into unserviced areas.

I find it unlikely that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) could work out a way to charge Content Providers (CP) for higher priority, it is just not how any other similar markets manage to operate (such as Cable and Satellite television).

What is likely, and has already happened, is for ISPs to work out different tiers of service for customers. But, what needs to be understood is that networks are a capital intensive business. It takes a lot of money to put cable in the ground and it takes a long time for it to pay back. For example, financial companies keeping in contact with ATMs, telephone traffic, etc, require a level of service far more reliable than your web-page requests. Preventing the network owner from treating the traffic differently would force the network builder to build two separate networks when one would have sufficed with prioritization, doubling prices for everyone involved.

As such, for much of America high speed internet is still unavailable in any form. Limiting the capability of such networks by restricting how they can manage the data carried there-in only serves to slow the expansion of networks into new teritories. But, more than that, if also enforces old ways of network management. For example, since I download a lot, I could volunteer for a lower network priority in exchange for lifting my bandwidth limits. Thus allowing me to use whatever network bandwidth remains after everyone else has gone. Sure, during peak usage times my throughput would suck worse than usual, but at night when everyone else is asleep all that bandwidth would be mine!

And there are companies which operate under similar preferences. They want to move a lot of data as fast as possible but don't care when during the day. With prioritization such companies would help share the costs of the network without curtailing the performance of other customers. Without prioritization, the network owner has only two choices: keep prices high, or harm the performance of the other customers which now must battle for network space against the hogs.

3/28/2008 12:44:12 PM

Hat tip to Shaggy

3/28/2008 12:47:22 PM

what do you mean by de-peer?

3/28/2008 1:22:52 PM

Quote :

"If you want to guarantee free reign on the internet you need to get rid of the ridiculous laws allowng local monoplies in state governments. Every provider needs to be able to have access to every market. The resulting competition will guarantee net neutrality."

Exactly. One of the more compelling arguments of Net Neutrality proponents has been the relative lack of competition in the broadband ISP market - i.e., unlike the days of dial-up, the market is mostly carved up by a very small amount of national players - mostly cable and phone companies. Usually you have only one or two options per market because of this.

Yet this is precisely because of the franchising monopoly laws that exist at municipal levels which grant exclusive domain to single cable (and telco) operators. Break up that monopoly and you'd have a much higher level of competition for services at the local level, which would work to alleviate at least some of the Net Neutrality concerns.

3/28/2008 1:31:05 PM

the internet works because all the major providers connect to each other. This is called peering. They setup agreements between each other to handle each others traffic. If you run a traceroute from your computer to another one on the internet you'll see what providers your traffic travels over. Heres an example trace from my rr business connection here in Maine to one of my companies servers in our Verizon hosting center in Mass.

Quote :

" Tracing route to 65.221.111.1 over a maximum of 30 hops 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms rrcs-24-39-3-121.nys.biz.rr.com [24.39.3.121] 2 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms rrcs-24-39-4-2.nys.biz.rr.com [24.39.4.2] 3 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms gig10-1-0.ptldmeptl-rtr02.nyroc.rr.com [24.25.160.38] 4 14 ms 14 ms 14 ms ge-5-1-0.syrcnycsr-rtr03.nyroc.rr.com [24.24.7.149] 5 29 ms 29 ms 29 ms te-3-3.car2.cleveland1.level3.net [64.156.67.13] 6 124 ms 201 ms 212 ms ae-11-11.car1.cleveland1.level3.net [4.69.132.197] 7 32 ms 36 ms 36 ms ae-4-4.ebr1.washington1.level3.net [4.69.132.194] 8 29 ms 31 ms 36 ms ae-91-91.csw4.washington1.level3.net [4.69.134.142] 9 29 ms 29 ms 29 ms ae-4-99.edge1.washington4.level3.net [4.68.17.210] 10 28 ms 27 ms 27 ms mci-level3-te.washington4.level3.net [4.68.63.166] 11 27 ms 27 ms 28 ms 0.ge-5-0-0.XL3.IAD8.ALTER.NET [152.63.41.150] 12 36 ms 36 ms 36 ms 0.so-7-0-0.xl1.bos4.alter.net [152.63.0.209] 13 36 ms 36 ms 36 ms 0.so-7-0-0.xr1.bos4.alter.net [152.63.16.122] 14 38 ms 38 ms 38 ms 0.so-7-0-0.WR1.BOS6.ALTER.NET [152.63.29.217] 15 38 ms 39 ms 38 ms so-1-0-0.ur1.bos6.web.wcom.net [63.111.123.30] 16 39 ms 39 ms 38 ms 208.254.32.2 17 39 ms 39 ms 38 ms 208.254.32.218 18 38 ms 38 ms 38 ms 65.221.111.1 Trace complete. "

You can see it starts out on rr's network and then from hop 4->5 it goes onto Level3's network. Then from hop 10->11 it goes from Level3 to MCI/verizon (our hosting provider).

Road Runner and Level3 have a peering agreement for handling this traffic. Level3 in turn has peering agreements with a number of providers (including MCI in this case). The end result is that instead of RR having to peer with each provider individually (costing $texas) they just peer with Level3.

De-peering, as you can imagine, is to end the peering arangemnt between two providers. If RR started putting too much of a strain on Level3's network Level3 might de-peer them. This would cut off the cheap route to many destinations forcing RR to send traffic through another peer. Incrasing cost and decreasing performance.



^Net Nuetrality and increasing competition between providers are very different topics.
Net Neutrality is the government enforced clusterfucking of the internet.
Relaxing local government restrictions to increase competition is a proven market solution to create higher quality service.

[Edited on March 28, 2008 at 1:59 PM. Reason : .]

3/28/2008 1:53:10 PM

Quote :

"Net Nuetrality and increasing competition between providers are very different topics. Net Neutrality is the government enforced clusterfucking of the internet. Relaxing local government restrictions to increase competition is a proven market solution to create higher quality service."

I'm more pointing out the significant degree of overlap between the two. The fact that there is a very limited amount of entry points to the high-bandwidth internet is one of the arguments frequently employed by the NN crowd - i.e., large players can impose such access and content restrictions by virtue of market share.

However, were this not the case, and say, Time Warner decided to suddenly be dicks about serving certain non-TW content or whatnot, many other providers are capable of stepping into the void. Thus, local monopolies on high-speed access exacerbate the issue.

3/28/2008 2:39:04 PM

bttt

3/30/2008 9:12:53 PM

You have no response beyond bttt?

3/30/2008 9:17:14 PM

I am not going to argue with you

I don't agree with you and I think Net Neutrality is a viable option

I am simply just trying to spread awareness

[Edited on March 30, 2008 at 9:38 PM. Reason : http://savetheinternet.com/=faq]

3/30/2008 9:37:08 PM

bttt

4/15/2008 2:38:04 PM

I guess the best we can hope for is that someone actually reads the thread and realizes why net neutrality is a stupid idea.

4/15/2008 2:47:23 PM

you work for Time Warner Cable don't you



bttt

4/16/2008 9:57:14 AM

I think we all understand what you, and the NN crowd are getting at here... but to quote the FTC:

Quote :

"there is evidence that new entrants employing wireless and other technologies are beginning to challenge the incumbent wireline providers (i.e., the cable and telephone companies). Second, to date we are unaware of any significant market failure or demonstrated consumer harm from conduct by broadband providers."

Isn't it best to wait until there is some kind of demonstrable failure before bringing the Federal government in to regulate? The concerns about what could happen are legitimate... but until there is some real proof of consumer harm, it seems silly, and potentially very dangerous to the vitality of the internet itself.

4/16/2008 10:16:25 AM

If people wanted to discuss Net neutrality again, then they would and you wouldn't need to bttt this constantly. You are being obnoxious.

4/16/2008 10:18:15 AM

bttt

4/16/2008 10:27:08 AM

Quote :

"internet petitions are worthless"

4/16/2008 11:30:09 AM

We need to clear some things up.

Primarily, a majority of the internet was built with tax payer money. Despite all the hoopla you hear about fiber networks and what not, a lot of that capital came from your taxes.

Secondly, the concept of open market resolution when applied to a public service such as the internet is ludicrous. Your ISP doesn't own the back bone, a very small handful of companies do. Some of those backbone providers also have internet service providers of their own as well, creating an obvious conflict of interest when it comes to providing QoS policies with competing ISP businesses. This is bad for you, in that not only will your ISP pass the extra bandwidth cost that ATT is charging on to you, but you also won't be guaranteed improved bandwidth at all. Your ToS, after all, is with your ISP and not the backbone provider.

Secondly, in removing net neutrality, backbone providers will then become responsible for the traffic running across their network. Currently, they aren't because technically they aren't monitoring any traffic. However, when they start applying QoS policies based on traffic characteristics then they will be monitoring the network and will be technically liable for the kind of traffic they are allowing. While there is no precedence for how courts would handle that liability, I'm positive no carrier would want to risk being ground zero for potential obscenity lawsuits, illegal file swapping (up to this point, the RIAA couldn't target neutral carriers) and access to websites of questionable origin: as ATT filtering got ATT into hot water over the past summer.

Its hilarious that LoneSnark mentioned he'd have the right to buy more bandwidth for off peak bandwidth usage without quite understanding that p2p traffic would be one of the very first things a now liable carrier would go to lengths to stop. You may think this notion is outlandish, however service provider interest in traffic management technology is extremely high. Every SP and Enterprise customer meeting I've been in concentrated on being able to identify top talkers for the sole reason of being able to scale/control that particular traffic.

Lastly, holding a notion that open internet stifles innovation is naive and suggests a serious lacking in the understanding how backbone providers work. There's serious interest on the enterprise side for more bandwidth, and those are the customers that provide the margins necessary for intensive capital investment. Is verizon business bringing their new national gigabit backbone up for the consumer division? No, its bringing it up to future proof their enterprise customers that pay very large sums of money. That investment will eventually trickle down consumer side, as cable laid doesn't suddenly disappear. Furthermore, the new arena for expansion in internet services is from being able to provide television and video services on a large scale ala FiOS TV, and U-Verse. These offerings absolutely dwarf the bandwidth of sites like Youtube and google and are, surprise, offered by the backbone providers themselves.

4/16/2008 1:35:24 PM

Quote :

"Primarily, a majority of the internet was built with tax payer money. Despite all the hoopla you hear about fiber networks and what not, a lot of that capital came from your taxes."

That does not sound plausible. I remember during the tech burst when a lot of baby fiber optic companies went bankrupt because they were unable to service the massive debts they built up laying fiber. How could this be if Uncle Sam paid for it? Do you have any evidence that uncle sam paid to lay most of the current installed fiber capacity?

Quote :

"Secondly, in removing net neutrality, backbone providers will then become responsible for the traffic running across their network."

Eh? You have it completely backwards: no one is arguing we remove net neutrality because net neutrality has never been on the books! Legally mandated net neutrality has never existed, so how could removing it cause problems? And the rest of your statements are rendered meaningless because you base them all on the false assumption that net neutrality has been the law of the land when it has never been.

That said, SandSanta, don't you owe me $100?

4/16/2008 2:33:22 PM

It hasn't been the law of the land as enacted by congress, but the telecoms have been prevented from acting against it by rules set by the FTC and FCC, which therefore become the law of the land.

4/16/2008 2:36:41 PM

Quote :

"That does not sound plausible. I remember during the tech burst when a lot of baby fiber optic companies went bankrupt because they were unable to service the massive debts they built up laying fiber. How could this be if Uncle Sam paid for it? Do you have any evidence that uncle sam paid to lay most of the current installed fiber capacity?"

Cable laying across the nation was often joint government/private business efforts, especially when concerning smaller markets. Buying the(very expensive) equipment for that capacity was a private endeavor.

There's an over abundance of dark fiber in the nation right now, a majority of which is owned by one company.

Quote :

"You have it completely backwards: no one is arguing we remove net neutrality because net neutrality has never been on the books! Legally mandated net neutrality has never existed, so how could removing it cause problems? And the rest of your statements are rendered meaningless because you base them all on the false assumption that net neutrality has been the law of the land when it has never been."

Carrier neutrality, or 'net neutrality' is currently implied to an extent. Insofar that carriers don't actively and openly filter their traffic and government doesn't hold them liable for it. As mentioned by others, peering agreements are also in place to ensure a degree of self regulation- which have hilarious consequences when companies like Cognet are involved and scuffles lead to the inability of large groups having access to certain parts of the internet.

I also want to state 'net neutrality' as a concept has been around since the beginning of telecommunication. It is to that which I refer to and not a law or official government regulation. Take care not to make assumptions incorrectly, as I know you're quite adapt at that task .

Quote :

" That said, SandSanta, don't you owe me $100? "

I've stated in public on this forum that I have no intention of ever paying you.

<3<3
xoxo

[Edited on April 16, 2008 at 4:39 PM. Reason : >:<]

4/16/2008 4:38:50 PM

Quote :

"Cable laying across the nation was often joint government/private business efforts, especially when concerning smaller markets."

On what grounds? Which government agency paid for these joint efforts? Where could I read more about it? I ask because this changes from an example of over-building to a scheme of milking the government where the company is involved simply to overcharge for materials or land, taking their profits up front, and leaving the government with, in this case, worthless cable.

Quote :

"It hasn't been the law of the land as enacted by congress, but the telecoms have been prevented from acting against it by rules set by the FTC and FCC, which therefore become the law of the land."

Interesting. Well, if we assume that is true then there is no need for VOLCOM's people to push legislature through congress, as net neutrality is already the law of the land. Why are we here, then? If net neutrality is already enforced by government fiat, then why is anyone jockying for new legislation on this issue? It would seem redundant if what you say is true.

Quote :

"I also want to state 'net neutrality' as a concept has been around since the beginning of telecommunication."

A concept is not law. As such, I would suggest to you that since there was no legally binding rules that backbone providers engage in net neutrality and yet they chose to do so anyway for all these decades then new legislation is not required. If an economic entity wants a neutral network connection then if they can find a willing provider then they will contract for it. If net neutrality is valuable then people will pay for it.

4/16/2008 5:57:51 PM

Quote :

"Why are we here, then?"

Because V0LC0M has read a couple of articles on the ol' blogosphere where this whole issue goes completely over people's heads.

4/16/2008 6:18:15 PM

The thing i have against the whole blogosphere concept of Net Neutrality is that the only people who would benefit from such a law are content providers.

The recent debacle was started when the CEO of AT&T was asked about people like google starting to offer voice and iptv services over the internet and QoS related to those services. His response was that he couldn't guarantee QoS through the cloud without significant monetary investment. The interviewer edited the quote out of context to make him sound like he was against anyone accessing those services without paying more. Retard conglomerates like slashdot jumped on it and blew it out of proportion to what we have now. Whats really funny is that when AT&T bought bell south, one of the provisions the FCC made them accept was that they wouldn't filter content. Which they never had any intention to do. So really the only thing the recent Net Neutrality craze has done is unite 2 of the largest telecoms in the US.

If you look at content delivery you really have 2 basic systems.
1). Direct connection to the content source
2). Decentralized p2p sharing.

Option 1 is expensive to the content provider. It also doesn't harm the network. More money for more bandwidth can be put directly into new infrastructure to support the bandwidth.

Option 2 is expensive to the network provider. By hosting content in a p2p network, a content provider can off load a huge ammount of bandwith requirement. However, consumer broadband connections and the local networks that support them are not designed to handle that capacity.

Increased capacity for option 1 can clearly be laid on the content provider. Increased capacity for option 2 must be eaten by the network provider. This means either start throttling high useage or increases prices. They wont increase the prices of their enterprise clients, so they're going to hand the costs to you and me.

So just like everything else, the Net Neutrality argument really comes down to content providers vs network providers.

In this case content providers eating the cost is better for consumers. A Net Neutrality law would force the network providers to eat it. Which means worse service and/or higher cost for you and me.

Realisticly a Net Neutrality law passed tommorrow would really have no effect. Most providers honor net neutrality because its good for everyone involved. However, long term its a bad idea for the health of the internet.

4/16/2008 6:37:38 PM

Quote :

"the internet works because all the major providers connect to each other. This is called peering. They setup agreements between each other to handle each others traffic. If you run a traceroute from your computer to another one on the internet you'll see what providers your traffic travels over. Heres an example trace from my rr business connection here in Maine to one of my companies servers in our Verizon hosting center in Mass. "

:sigh:

I guarantee you that you arent seeing all the devices in the traced path.

4/16/2008 6:55:49 PM

The traceroute was just to show an example of the handoff from one peer to another.

4/16/2008 6:57:14 PM

ah

I think one of the main discrepancies I dont like about NN is the fact ISP's can degrade the voice services of other providers while increasing the quality of their own. This practice is monopolistic and I would think at some point of relevance, would violate some consumer laws of sorts.

Meh, its just a big issue of shit at the moment.

Oh and to add about if the "Internet" is publicly or privately owned... I think the Govt or Supreme Court needs to make a decision of if the ISPs contributed their own money towards a pubic system, or if the ISPs actually bought real estate of the internet and can rightfully own it. Something along these lines is the decision that is going to have to be established.

[Edited on April 16, 2008 at 7:16 PM. Reason : .]

4/16/2008 7:14:03 PM

I think you'd be hard pressed to prove they're actually degrading service. They probably QoS their own stuff, but i doubt they actively harm others. I've had vonage on RR and the only problems I've ever had with it have been purely vonage's fault.

If you could prove they were actively degrading other service, I still dont think it qualifies as monopolistic because you still have the option of a landline. Also, in many places a lack of other available providers is due to local governement regulation.

If the government decides to yank all networks paid partially with government funds, rural service will disapear and your prices will go up.

[Edited on April 16, 2008 at 7:21 PM. Reason : .]

4/16/2008 7:19:13 PM

how much did Devetsikiotis pay you to open this thread?

4/17/2008 2:58:01 AM

Well the reason to push net neutrality through in some for is pretty simple.

Charging tiered services for content providers based on popularity has terrible implications, namely being, if you're a new guy that suddenly becomes popular and you automatically get jumped to an enterprise level tier, then you absolutely will not be able to afford a level of access to match your growth. You would be then inhibited from unrestricted expansion.

That of course, is ignoring the fact that telcos would be profiting off of other people's content.

As a content provider you'd have accounting for the following under the new system:

-Billing for your presence provider
-Separate billing for all major backbones

Thats beyond retarded and the flaws with this system are immediately obvious.

Quote :

"On what grounds? Which government agency paid for these joint efforts? Where could I read more about it? I ask because this changes from an example of over-building to a scheme of milking the government where the company is involved simply to overcharge for materials or land, taking their profits up front, and leaving the government with, in this case, worthless cable"

Looking for those documents is hard because its actually on a municipality basis. For instance, fiber laying around the town of cary had a bill footed in part by the town of cary.

ATT's U-Verse rollout in North Carolina required specific legislative changes by the NC General assembly.

and so on and so forth.

Its not really 'milking' the government and I didn't intend to paint telcos as shoplifting infrastucture. I just wanted to highlight that with the exception of FiOS to the home, the bill is rarely footed entirely by the private sector.

4/17/2008 1:00:33 PM

Quote :

"Charging tiered services for content providers based on popularity has terrible implications"

If that ever happens then we can look into whether or not it actually has terrible implications.

Quote :

"That of course, is ignoring the fact that telcos would be profiting off of other people's content."

And what is wrong with that? RDU is profitting off Southwest, Comedy Central is profitting off the Daily Show, etc. etc. Netwoks do not build themselves, someone must pay. And why is it better to bill poor grandma trying to check e-mail instead of YouTube? Being YouTube will be slightly less profitable and being poor grandma will be slightly more profitable. Hell, seems like a down-right progressive outcome.

4/17/2008 4:58:24 PM

bttt

4/22/2008 3:01:38 PM

bttt

5/1/2008 3:05:46 PM

what are you doing? are you expecting all of us to all of a sudden start caring about this?
Even hard-core geeks are tired of talking about this right now, and non-geeks don't know enough about it to care one way or another

5/1/2008 3:30:33 PM

bttt

if you don't like the topic or don't care about it, don't read or respond to it.... it's really that simple

[Edited on May 2, 2008 at 12:03 PM. Reason : I am not doing this to fight with anyone, just to spread awareness because I think its important]

5/2/2008 12:01:44 PM

Or you could stop obnoxiously bumping it back to the top, as you have nothing further to contribute, and it would appear no one else does either.

Really. Knock it off.

5/2/2008 12:30:17 PM

bttt

[Edited on May 6, 2008 at 3:28 PM. Reason : just for you Steve]

5/6/2008 3:27:34 PM

thanks, I was wondering what's happened in this arena in the past 4 days

5/6/2008 3:48:14 PM

http://brentroad.com/message_topic.aspx?topic=528448&page=1#11662476

and it begins

6/4/2008 3:42:45 PM

Net Neutrality would in no-way affect usage caps. And, it shouldn't: there are people that are abusing their internet connection to the detriment of their neighbors; it is only sensible for the provider to find a way to either discourage such abuse or at least charge them a fair price for it.

6/4/2008 6:29:58 PM

yea if net neutrality were actually about fairness bandwidth caps would be part of it. Pay for what you use.

If you wanted to keep unlimited downloads, then isps would need to throttle harmful traffic (bit-torrent) in order to maintain service levels.

6/4/2008 7:02:17 PM

http://www.networkperformancedaily.com/2008/06/bandwidth_caps_and_the_cogniti.html

6/18/2008 1:47:03 PM

Quote :

"If people wanted to discuss Net neutrality again, then they would and you wouldn't need to bttt this constantly. You are being obnoxious."

6/18/2008 2:02:23 PM

Three questions and one comment, as there's some things about net neutrality I've never understood:

1.) What do the people that do not support network neutrality call their side of the argument?

2.) Why couldn't I start up my own telecommunications company that operates under the current status quo, even if this bill passed?

3.) Does this make only certain websites free and the rest of the internet pay-per-view? If so, how do web advertisers possibly think this is a good idea? Do they think that if there are less "free sites" that it will make everyone cluster to those?

My personal opinion is I pay a monthly bill to Suddenlink for high-speed internet. This gives me the right to read and watch almost anything. If they think they're undercharging me, they can charge me more, and I might not continue to buy service from them.

[Edited on June 18, 2008 at 9:08 PM. Reason : /]

6/18/2008 8:51:37 PM