Rules Of The Internet Now Complete In A Convenient 583-Page PDF

[catswold]

I see the vapid cheerleaders of state control are here en force.

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." --Santayana

Name one thing government has taken over that has resulted in lower costs to consumers. This is AT&T break up redux. It took decades for the telephone industry to recover from the break up of "Ma Bell" and the ultimate result was higher costs and inferior service.

As for the new rules, note the abundant use of to be defined ambiguous terms, like "fair." Define "fair." Who decides what is "fair."

Since its inception, the internet has flourished and expanded in unimaginable ways, all without government control. Why on Earth would we who use it want to "fix" something that's not broken--especially using rules intended for the regulation of hardwired telephones 85 years ago?

This is going to be shredded in the courts. The only thing it assures is that we will all be paying more money for less/inferior service.

In the future, it will not be private companies "throttling service" depending on user demand and bandwidth availability, it will be bureaucrats setting up general rules based on someone's assumptions as to what each user "needs."

You guys can cheer and chant and call the rest of us "shills," but that won't change the inevitable outcome. We will all pay for this pointless exercise in pseudo-democracy.

 

[hang-the-9]

All very common sense points that would make anyone go "well duh of course". Which means that lobyists will start bying up goverment officials to neutralize this in the guise of "this will stop advancement and will be bad for free market".

 

[InvalidError]

That's what a router is used for. There is a little thing called QoS (Quality of Service). You limit the bandwidth per MAC address (or sometimes IP/Hostname).

That's ghetto-QoS: you permanently reserve a chunk of your capacity for specific applications to ensure enough bandwidth to accommodate your prioritized applications is available at all times, regardless of exactly how much capacity the application is actually using to avoid momentary congestion.

Real QoS using Ethernet Class-of-Service priority queues and IP Differentiated Services lets routers assign packet forwarding priority which eliminates the need to permanently set aside bandwidth for those more sensitive services. If a prioritized service becomes active, its traffic cuts in front of lower priority traffic and whatever remainder of capacity is left remains usable by said lower priority traffic.

Real QoS is far more efficient, elegant and reliable. Unfortunately, there is no standard to handle it across border routers and the FCC's new rules have effectively banned it.

 

[xaphodB]

Comcast Cheers!: Instead of bribing magnitudes of bureaucrats; 535 congressman, all the countless federal judges, cabinet members, "czars" and so forth, I now only need to bribe 3 out of 5 FCC chairs to deem any traffic of my choosing as 'unlawful'.

 

[Anakha00]

Rule #3 sounds misguided: since Netflix relied heavily on a single transit provider to reach ISPs, that made Netflix vulnerable to single-point congestion. To the end-users, this gets perceived as throttling but since it is a transit issue, the third rule does nothing to prevent that.

At the same time, this rule also prevents services that could legitimately benefit from prioritized traffic forwarding (high quality VoIP, very low latency/jitter gaming and real-time streaming, etc.) from ever launching over public networks. To accommodate these types of service, extra capacity would need to get built to ensure promised quality standards are met and that spare capacity would usually be available for normal traffic when not in use by those who paid for it.

Not that it sounds very likely in the near future, but they did actually allow for exceptions to that rule (and all other rules). On page 58, paragraphs 130-132 allow for exemptions in the event that they prove to "have some significant public
interest benefit" which could certainly fit cases like VoIP as you were saying where everyone can benefit.

 

[kiniku]

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[kiniku]

Yay! The government in control of the internet! I'll be watching my mailbox for my Century link bill because we all know when government steps in and regulates something my costs must fall! OMG! I'm so excited!

 

[InvalidError]

On page 58, paragraphs 130-132 allow for exemptions in the event that they prove to "have some significant public interest benefit" which could certainly fit cases like VoIP as you were saying where everyone can benefit.

Assuming service providers, ISPs and all other middlemen involved would be willing to bother going to the FCC to get exception rules for every little thing on top of the technical and administrative details that would need to get sorted out between providers to make it work.

It would have been much simpler to stick with basic neutrality (ban all forms of discriminatory traffic management for normal traffic) and let ISPs do whatever they want for subscribers and OTT providers who want to pay for premium treatment. The FCC would still have the option of jumping back in if ISPs let non-premium degrade to the point where people start complaining and the issue turns out to be something more questionable than a peering dispute.

Having tools that could be used for delivering value-added features banned by default sounds like poor IT policy.

 

[hang-the-9]

That's what a router is used for. There is a little thing called QoS (Quality of Service). You limit the bandwidth per MAC address (or sometimes IP/Hostname).

That's ghetto-QoS: you permanently reserve a chunk of your capacity for specific applications to ensure enough bandwidth to accommodate your prioritized applications is available at all times, regardless of exactly how much capacity the application is actually using to avoid momentary congestion.

Real QoS using Ethernet Class-of-Service priority queues and IP Differentiated Services lets routers assign packet forwarding priority which eliminates the need to permanently set aside bandwidth for those more sensitive services. If a prioritized service becomes active, its traffic cuts in front of lower priority traffic and whatever remainder of capacity is left remains usable by said lower priority traffic.

Real QoS is far more efficient, elegant and reliable. Unfortunately, there is no standard to handle it across border routers and the FCC's new rules have effectively banned it.

I don't think that is what the rules banned. What they banned was speeding things up or slowing them down based on how much a web site paid them, from the ISP to the general internet. Amazon streaming, paid 200 million a year, you get THIS MUCH speed from our customers, Netflix paid only 30 million, oh, sorry, we don't know why your HD video is stuttering from Comact connections, maybe another 100 million will help us find the button that will fix this. You would not want to have your customers leave because they could not watch something would you? It's the Internet Mafia. Pay us or something bad may happen to your customers when they try to use your service. The ISP that try to enable those connections based on how much a web site pays them are basically thugs that go into your store and toss your products on the floor then say "give us $100 a week, you see what a tough neighborhood this is, or we can't be responsible if this happens again or worse".

It's not just a matter of good speeds and if you pay more you can have better speeds, the FTC is trying to make sure that if there is, say 100MB available for speed, that everyone gets that same 100MB not get trottled to 20MB because someone did not pay enough. It's a matter of the ISP dropping the service to certain sites to an unaceptable level. You had smooth HD movies for a year but all of a sudden it's buffering, pausing, tough to connect, yet all the other stuff is fine and runs at the same speeds. That kind of action needs to be stopped.

The in-house slowdowns happen because someone is grabbing all of the 10MB or whatever is available to them based on service, that is only from the PC to the router to the modem to the ISP, not from the ISP to the internet which is where the issue was they are dealing with. That's where a good router and the QOS management would come in, it will make sure that a single app, say bittorent since downloads tend to grab all the bandwidth they can grab, does not take up your whole pipe to the ISP.

 

[RedJaron]

As for the new rules, note the abundant use of to be defined ambiguous terms, like "fair." Define "fair." Who decides what is "fair."

And this is the problem. Not only that, who defines if it's "significant public benefit" or other such subjective qualities? To many of us this seems like a simple question, but when you're dealing with greedy people on both sides they'll look for any possible loophole. That's why laws need to be written so incomprehensively complex because they have to be completely explicit on what it and is not allowed.

 

[Kadathan]

Comcast Cheers!: Instead of bribing magnitudes of bureaucrats; 535 congressman, all the countless federal judges, cabinet members, "czars" and so forth, I now only need to bribe 3 out of 5 FCC chairs to deem any traffic of my choosing as 'unlawful'.

I'm sure it will work exactly like that. Go prove your point by getting google.com banned, that'll show us ignorants.

 

[spartanmk2]

#1 Should be Wheaton's Law: Dont be a dick!

 

[Hellbound]

This part somewhat worries me.. "complete ban on ISPs' ability to block lawful content.".. Lawful to whom, federal, state, or local government?? My guess would be federal.. But even with that, sites like The Pirate Bay could be considered "illegal" and blocked by the ISP.

Won't be long till they end up blocking sites that are so called "unlawful"... That is not open and free internet..........

 

[InvalidError]

What they banned was speeding things up or slowing them down based on how much a web site paid them, from the ISP to the general internet. Amazon streaming, paid 200 million a year, you get THIS MUCH speed from our customers, Netflix paid only 30 million, oh, sorry, we don't know why your HD video is stuttering from Comact connections, maybe another 100 million will help us find the button that will fix this.

Due to the administrative overhead of managing real QoS-based routing and the need to build extra network capacity to ensure QoS'd traffic gets through without crushing non-QoS traffic, there would be price tags associated with use of QoS-based routing. Without additional revenue for the ISP and transit providers, which means someone has to pay extra for use of QoS facilities, they are not going to bother offering it to service providers and end-users. If they are allowed to charge for QoS, then you can bet there would be a fairly direct correlation between the rates paid and the amount of traffic allowed.

This would be very similar to air mail vs ground mail: air mail is too expensive for most people to bother with it unless they absolutely need their stuff shipped across the country overnight.

 

[RomXXII]

Rule #1 is stupid and trivial. If you outlaw independent news services, it's okay to ban them? Dictators say cheers.

Well that's a dumb assumption. Has any independent new service been considered illegal? If even right-wing supremacists are allowed to roam the Internet with zero checks and balances, what gives them the precedent to declare an "independent" news outlet as illegal?

When they talk about illegal, they're obviously talking about piracy and other similar activities. So yes, if they could prove your black-hat chat group is doing illegal shit, they're well within their rights to block your access to that content.

 

[Calvin Huang]

Now I am going to wait for some consumer friendly news outlet to digest the 500+ rules to give an opinion on the overall effect. I would definitely fall asleep reading it and would miss important legal terminology. I would like to know if there are loop holes or what they will claim to be an oversight. Legal experts will be all over this to find a loop hole in order to take advantage of it. Just hope the consumer wins in the end and hope this was not just to calm down the people that were getting tired of the poor internet speeds at high prices. If they don't make the ISP upgrade their infrastructure to support the speeds they promise you, then it will not change things until your local city provides ISP services.

Net neutrality is not really concerned with pricing and service quality beyond basic consumer rights and prevention of rent-seeking behavior, Since ISPs are natural monopolies, there's not a lot that can be done to fundamentally improve those areas without direct intervention, which many Americans would clearly flip out about given how idiotic the Tea Party response to net neutrality has been.

That said, recent court rulings have made it legal again (ridiculous that this was ever in question) for municipal governments to create their own ISPs to compete with the telecoms.

 

[Anthony L]

I was really hoping for more than 4 points. Trying to read through nearly 600 pages of really dry legalease would take me nearly a month of the little free time I get.

 

[bit_user]

Hooray! Finally, something else to read other than the iTunes TOS agreement!

The difference is that these rules apply to ISPs. They are the ones who need to read this. Whereas your iTunes ToS applies to you, and you are the one who's punished if you break them (due to not reading, etc.).

There are many laws that apply to businesses. They employ teams of lawyers for compliance with those and all the contracts they enter into, etc.

 

[bit_user]

This part somewhat worries me.. "complete ban on ISPs' ability to block lawful content.".. Lawful to whom, federal, state, or local government?? My guess would be federal.. But even with that, sites like The Pirate Bay could be considered "illegal" and blocked by the ISP.

Won't be long till they end up blocking sites that are so called "unlawful"... That is not open and free internet..........

That's what the first amendment is for (assuming you're in the USA). If some state or municipality or even congress bans content in violation of the first amendment, then the law can be directly challenged. Such bans & challenges happened long before the internet, and it will probably keep happening long into the future.

 

[bit_user]

#1 Should be Wheaton's Law: Dont be a dick!

A dick according to whom?

There's a reason legalese is so obtuse - they're (ideally) trying to eliminate the subjectivity, so that it can be consistently interpreted by law enforcement and courts.

 

[bit_user]

TRUSTYOURGOVERNMENTTOMAKEEVERYTHINGMOREFAIR

And the answer is no. We don't trust. That's why we have a vote and should demand transparency. If we're not happy with the status quo, positive change is possible. I think we've seen that here.

They even had a public comment period for the rules, and it appears to have worked.

And hey, the new rules are available for everyone to see! How cool is that?

 

[bit_user]

Yay! The government in control of the internet!

Hey, at least you have control of the government. Even if it's fairly indirect, it's a lot more control than you have over ISPs, which are monopolies in some regions.

I'll be watching my mailbox for my Century link bill because we all know when government steps in and regulates something my costs must fall! OMG! I'm so excited!

This doesn't affect competition (unfortunately, IMO), so the only effect on pricing should be due to the amount of traffic ISPs were previously throttling.

 

[bit_user]

You guys can cheer and chant and call the rest of us "shills," but that won't change the inevitable outcome. We will all pay for this pointless exercise in pseudo-democracy.

Nobody here has said the existing system of governance in the US is perfect. But it certainly did produce one outcome we consider positive.

It's easy to find faults with the current system, but at least there's some transparency and control ultimately rests in the hands of the people. That's the difference between the government deciding what's fair, vs. leaving it upt to corporations.

With that said, if you have a better solution, I'd like to hear it.

 

[bit_user]

Define unlawful and describe how you will enforce these measures in other countries like South Africa for example?

It's a US law, affecting companies offering internet service in the US.

South Africa should pass their own Net Neutrality law. Unfortunately, they've been cracking down on press freedom in recent years, which is its own problem.

 

[bit_user]

It's funny. They've increased the definition of broadband twice. Now the internet's a utility. I don't recall ever having the electricity suck this badly.

If it's not a utility, what is it? They have the same kind of local monopoly as utilities, and it's becoming an increasing necessity, like utilities.

Decades ago, getting false busy signals and dropped telephone calls wasn't uncommon. It took a while for the technology to catch up with the demands of a global telephone network.

The biggest difference I can see between traditional utilities is that your usage of water/gas/electricity/phone can fluctuate, but stays within a fairly well-defined range. Whereas average network speeds are increasing, thus enabling new and more demanding services, such as HD streaming and video conferencing. So in some regions demand will always outstrip supply by a significant margin. That's not really a net neutrality issue.