Tech Giants Support 'Red Alert For Net Neutrality' Movement

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May 3, 2018
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You don't make sweeping regulations based on things that MAY happen. that is absolutely ridiculous. The left pretends there was no internet prior to 2015. Do you know anyone who has had their access to the internet cut off or their plans price skyrocket since the repeal? I doubt you do. There is very little evidence of the things NN was supposed to prevent from actually happening prior to NN.
 

caustin582

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The net neutrality regulations were made in direct response to abusive actions by Comcast and other major cable companies. There is no "may" here. Prior to 2015 there were many regulatory rulings, but ISPs routinely skirted around them. You should read up on the history of the issue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_States#Regulatory_history
 

husker

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Arguments in favor of Net Neutrality scare tactics to sneak a bunch of government regulations into something it doesn't currently control. Even if you buy into the reasons for NN, a much better solution is to allow for more competition among ISPs by breaking up the cable provider monopoly. If your ISP starts unfairly throttling your connection or filtering content, you could just switch to someone who actually wants to provide fair service in exchange for your money.
 
I actually like my cheap Tmobile tablet plan which has unlimited music streaming but 2GB for everything else. It's only $20 per month and I stream music nearly all the time. It technically violates net neutrality, but it something that some consumers want. So blanket rules about data aren't always a win, sometimes it's a lose for consumers. Tmobile has the same thing with BingeON video for their tablet plan at $35 per month. Watch as much youtube as you want. If you ride the train like I do, it's really nice.
 

caustin582

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Okay, so let's break up the cable monopolies. I agree that would be the best solution, but good luck getting that to happen. Until then, we're better off with NN.
 


Comcast was throttling Bittorrent downloads, which you know most of that traffic was not legal and taking up alot of bandwidth. I'm for some Net Neutrality as long as they have rules where the consumer wins in the end. But a blanket regulation that all data is equal is simply stupid.

For instance, if the bandwidth for a particular neighborhood was being saturated by a few houses using bittorrent. I think it would be reasonable to throttle them. The government could make it so that Comcast is allowed to throttle 20-30 days of the year, for times when people are home for the holidays, or there's an unusually large amount of traffic that day. Being only given a certain amount of days would mean they couldn't oversell a neighborhood, they'd still have to make upgrades, but it would mean all the customers would be able to get a fair share of the bandwidth if Comcast was allowed to prioritize web surfing or something to that extent to make sure the majority of people have a good experience. That would be a reasonable regulation.

Another reasonable net neutrality regulation would be the ability to throttle by type of data, but not specifically from any provider. That would still allow for the "little dogs" to compete with the big dogs at a level playing field. So for instance, if a small competitor to netflix wanted to rise up and sell streaming movies, comcast would be forced to throttle both providers equally and wouldn't be allowed to charge for fast lanes. Also, if you stipulated that comcast would only be allowed to throttle during times of high congestion, and like I said earlier, for maybe only 20-30 days out of the year. It would mean they'd still have to keep their network upgraded to allieviate systemic traffic congestion.

The biggest problem with internet in this country is not net neutrality. It's a lack of service providers and consumer ISP choice. That's what people should be fighting for. When you look at the largest campaign donators from the 2012 and 2016 elections, you'll see some of the largest as Comcast, ATT, Verizon etc.... They people unfortunately have their hands in the pockets of both Democrats and Republicans. That's why they have local monopolies.
 

caustin582

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Torrents are used for plenty of legitimate downloads. It's a very efficient way to share data. Regarding bandwidth, NN regulations do not prevent companies from putting throttles, caps, or extra charges on high bandwidth accounts. If someone's using too much, they can slow them down or make them pay more. NN just stops ISPs from inspecting the *type* of data and treating it differently based on their own judgment.

Edit: The reason this is so important is because an ISP's ability to control data introduces a severe conflict of interest. Comcast wasn't just throttling bittorrent; they were also caught throttling Netflix. Again, if Netflix was simply taking up too much bandwidth, Comcast would be well within their rights, under the full provisions of net neutrality, to throttle the connection of those who are using too much bandwidth because of it. But they were specifically throttling/blocking Netflix data regardless of how much bandwidth people were streaming from it. Now why would they do that? Could it have anything to do with the fact that Comcast offers television service, and more and more people these days are pulling the plug in favor of online content? Hmm.
 
The big tech companies are for net neutrality because they don't want to have to go through ISPs to get their content to you, so it saves them money. The ISPs want net neutrality so they can promote their content, or force the big tech companies to pay up to get their products promoted, so they make more money. In the end if you are for net neutrality or against it, you are just a pawn for these businesses to make more money.
 



pssst, please, you know 99% of torrents are for pirating movies and programs. I've literally never in my life used needed to use a torrent for any downloading, or was given a download link by someone because it's more efficient.




Net Neutrality does prevent companies from putting throttles on certain types of data, like video streaming for example. Instead of discriminating against the type of data, they simply limit all bandwidth to that user but that assumes that user uses a large amount of data in a month. That's where we run into net neutrality, because sometimes it's not the user that's a problem, it's just a matter of circumstance and timing. For instance, Netflix currently consumes 36% of all internet bandwidth during peak hours. That's just 1 video service. Currently, most video services are in their infancy and haven't hit their full stride just yet. Those services will consume more and more bandwidth. So let's just say 10 years from now, neighborhood congestion is a real problem. It's christmas break and a bunch of kids are still playing fortnite, people are watching netflix and other streaming, and all the stores are closed so everyone is stuck in the house. The neighborhood saturates, what's comcast supposed to do?? They could limit everyone's bandwidth equally. They could limit streaming services to 1080p bandwidth. They could can just allow a total free for all and do no throttling. I would honestly prefer they limit torrents first, then streaming services. But that can't happen with net neutrality.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against net neutrality. I don't think companies should be allowed to sell "fast lanes" and throttling certain services all the time and trying to sell you a fast lane. But I do like being able to buy a cheap plan with a data cap and getting around that data cap for certain services, albeit throttled (Tmobile does this now). I also think companies should be reasonably allowed to throttle for X amount of days per year to help with unusual congestion but only during times of heavy congestion.
 


Netflix does not compete with comcast TV. Netflix content is usually pretty old, or a season has already made it's run through TV. Netflix currently takes up 36% of the total internet's bandwidth for the entire country during peak hours. That's just 1 service. The problem is, perhaps those people watching netflix aren't heavy users, they're just watching during peak hours and congestion for the whole network is too high. Which is why it's better to throttle the offending service.

 

caustin582

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Just because Netflix doesn't have the same exact content as cable TV doesn't mean that it doesn't compete. People only have so much time to watch shows and movies, and for lots of them online streaming is enough to get their fix. It absolutely eats into cable revenue.

If bandwidth were truly the issue, then why was Comcast suddenly able to stop throttling Netflix after they paid their extortion money? It's not like Comcast used it to instantly upgrade their infrastructure.
 

BaRoMeTrIc

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Actually the very first victim of Net Nuetrality is Comcast threatening to slow customers speeds who decide to ditch cable for online streaming. Now they don't even have to pretend that they aren't throttling speeds for customers who stream, They can just flat out refuse speeds capable of streaming to customers who cut the cord.
 

Giroro

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That piece isn't "against" net neutrality, There's literally a section header titled "Why I'm neutral about net neutrality". It's just saying that Net Neutrality, in itself, isn't going to magically solve all the problems that the ISPs are causing - and that competition in the market is much more important.

However the problem with the elimination of net neutrality, is that under the current system competition is not only technically impossible - it is actually illegal in most municipalities.
We either need to treat internet like a basic protected utility (honestly I think internet access is far more important than natural gas), or we need to actually open up the market so that anybody can start up their own ISP using any technology they want. Although, since cable and fiber is laid across public land it would still be nearly impossible for a start-up cable company to build out enough infrastructure to enter even a small subset of one market.

The new FCC rules, however, give all the power to a very small number of ISP companies, and makes it legal for them to block access to anything they want - for example disallowing a potential competitor in their region from hooking up to the internet in the first place. The new rules give a market where some of the least-trusted and most-monopolistic companies on earth now have no regulation and no competition. It's the worst possible case.

Comcast doesn't like that people are paying $8 for netflix instead of $150 for cable? Then Comcast can just throttle netflix to the point that the service is useless until Netflix pays ransom to comcast (and passes the cost onto their customers) - There is actually a lot of evidence that this has already happened -more than once. Notice how Netflix doesn't cost $8 any more - 2 of the last 3 price hikes were connected directly to the court rulings, which caused the old FCC to pass the regulations that were repealed. The effective date for the repeal was April 23; and a mere 3 days later Amazon announced that they will have to increase the price of their Prime streaming services by 20%.
Granted, There are a lot of things Comcast wont' be able to do for a little while longer, because they agreed to temporarily follow additional neutrality requirements when trying to get their purchase of NBC approved.
Speaking of which, the companies who own CNBC and CNN now get to arbitrarily decide who is allowed to access sites like foxnews and breitbart - so I have no idea why certain members of the right-wing media are advocating what will lead to the destruction of their own careers / political movement.

Is Verizon annoyed that people are complaining about how their Yahoo/AOL sells the full content of full emails to advertisers? They can just replace the text of news articles about it to something more positive. Expect news sources (well the very few that aren't already owned by an ISP) to start changing their opinions to "make the ISPs happy so they don't shut us down". At this point ISPs can now legally block you from contacting your congressman to express your opinion about the situation, if they want. The could redirect traffic to a political opponent's website to a donation page for somebody in their pocket (on a technical level this one is actually really easy to do).
What would happen if, overnight, one of these ISPs decided that they are jealous of Alphabet's success, so they block access and hold Google (including play store apps) ransom; Or maybe its Apple or microsoft or any of the other top US companies. What if they decide use throttling to extort JP Morgan, Visa, Wall Street, or even the Federal Government itself. It is a major risk to both our economy and national security. - and they can do it LEGALLY. What will you do if your bank's ISP stops them from processing withdraws, deposits, card transactions, etc until you start start putting 10% of your income towards an "internet banking" fee (that also happens to break local real-life transactions). One CEO of a major ISP -one guy- could wake up tomorrow and (legally) destroy our entire economy. He could even argue that his fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders required him to do it - as the first ISP to flip the kill-switch will likely make record-breaking revenue as the rest of the economy collapses around them.
These are the kinds of self-serving "alternative business models" that former Verizon Lobbyist Ajit Pai had in mind when he started pushing for the repeal. They are trying to flip the power from the "anybody who makes money online" back to the ISPs.

I'm not saying any of these doomsday scenarios are likely (other than forcing you to pay more for streaming services since that's already happening), but the consequences are so monumentally huge that even the tiniest possibility is utterly unacceptable.
 




Comcast never throttled Netflix, that's not true. The problem is that netflix's traffic had gotten so big, that in certain areas of comcast's internet, the bandwidth was fully saturated where Cogent, netflix's internet transit provider, would connect to comcast's network. Netflix started screaming because they thought Comcast was throttling them, but low and behold it was Cogent prioritizing their retail customers over netflix who was using huge amount of bandwidth. To alleviate this congestion, Netflix created a CDN of their own called Netflix Open Connect and had reached deals with many ISP's to allow Netflix to connect their CDN to their network. The problem is that Comcast has it's own CDN, and Comcast told them they could use their CDN (Content Distribution Network) for a fee, or buy more bandwidth from Internet Transit Providers. When explained this, Netflix was screaming to get their own dedicated pathway for their CDN to Comcast, but comcast said no. Netflix decided to buy more bandwidth pathways to Comcast via ITP's.

A CDN is a network of servers located around the country. You push your content to the servers, then when someone logs into netflix or other content service, instead of reaching across the country for a stream, the content is pulled from the closest server alleviating alot of traffic congestion.

The CEO of Netflix actually mislead congress about this, stating Comcast was throttling them and wanted to charge them for a fast lane. It's a little more complicated than that. So it's not comcast not wanting netflix to compete with it's TV service, instead it's more of Comcast trying to sell it's CDN services. This can be regulated, but can be done outside of Net Neutrality regulations, it doesn't need to be a part of NN.


 

Giroro

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It doesn't matter what percentage of bandwidth is used by which service. That is the entire core philosophy behind net neutrality. If you pay for a service, then the ISP should provide that service. Period. Netflix pays their ISP to send the video. Netflix pays extortion money to the "middle men" ISPs for "interconnect fees". And you pay fees to have netflix delivered to your house. the ISPs are getting paid three times for a single connection - and now they want quadruple-dip for providing that exact same service.
Netflix isn't some "offending service" that is sneaking onto networks and stealing away 'our' bandwidth - they are paying for every megabyte (twice).
Should UPS be mad at Amazon for shipping "too many" packages? Of course not, because more packages means more money for UPS. What happens when UPS gets backlogged? Does UPS slow shipping speeds for Amazon and start charging an you an extra $5 'walk from the truck to the door' fee when you sign for amazon packages? Of course not - they hire more employees and put more trucks on the road, because they know they will lose business to Fed Ex (or USPS, DHL, OnTrac) if they don't keep up with demand.
The problem is Comcast has no "Fed Ex" because competition in the cable market is illegal. Instead all their competition is alternative providers like " bike messengers" and "Uber Eats", and it is allowed by the government because they all "deliver stuff". So they can basically charge anything they want, slow speeds, and outright refuse to provide the services that they are being paid for, and the market has no choice but to accept it. In fact, they are highly motivated to provide inferior service, because Comcast isn't just a "shipping service" in this analogy, they also own their own "marketplace" that competes with Amazon... Actually, Comcast competes with Amazon IRL too, so that part is true outside of the analogy.

40Mbps of netflix has the exact same network impact as a 40Mbps Video on Demand service provided by the cable company. All data travels in exactly the same way, regardless of origin and content type. That is a fundamental fact of how the internet operates. If an ISP has to throttle then they should throttle everything equally, not just their competitors.
 

LB23

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My internet hasn't been cut off but my 100Mbps download is throttled down to 40Kbps for youtube and netflix when I am not using my VPN. So its basically unusable at that low of speeds but no I haven't been cut off.....
 

Giroro

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Comcast used inadequate network equipment to limit all traffic from Netflix's ISP (from which Netflix is nearly all traffic). Comcast then refused to upgrade that equipment, refused to let Netflix use their own equipment, and refused to let Netflix bypass that equipment - which forced Netflix to enter an extremely expensive business deal in which Netflix had no choice but to pay Comcast directly in order to restore a quality of service that Comcast didn't seem to have any problem providing only a few months earlier. Then, soon after, Netflix had to raise their subscription fees by a substantial amount to pay for it.

That is the same methodology (throttling) and end result of an internet "slow lane" - Comcast just used a slightly different technology that they would use if they were to attempt the tactic again today (by today I mean this November when Comcast's NBC merger agreement expires). At that point, there isn't really much stopping Comcast from cutting Netflix off from half the country entirely, and then buying Netflix when its stock price tanks.
 


Most cable providers allocate a frequency range dedicated for VOD separate from a person's internet service. That way if someone in your house is using the max bandwidth, video service is uninteruppted. For a neighborhood, comcast likely allocates a certain amount of bandwidth just for VOD separate from normal internet traffic.
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40kbps for youtube and netflix??? Are you sure about that, if they throttled those providers, they wouldn't throttle it that low. Go to www.fast.com for a speed test to your nearest netflix server. I'm a high data user with over 1TB on some months. Comcast has never throttled me and I just checked fast.com and am getting 180mbps.

 


While I agree that comcast is up to some shady business and aren't an ethical company. I just try to look at everything objectively. That said, Comcast operates a large network and has deals with other networks to connect to each other directly without transit. This makes up a huge internet that covers most of the internet. For the rest that it doesn't cover, it pays Tata for it's tier 1 connection. Even though comcast isn't technically a tier 1 transit, it operates it's network as one. It also charges for connections to it's network. So when a company wants to dump tons of bandwidth worth of content onto the internet, people pay tier 1 companies like Cogent and Level 3 to utilize their backbones and their connections to networks like Comcast which is currently a settlement free connection. That means that transit providers like cogent and level 3 have agreements to share traffic freely with each other, like a free trade agreement, except with bandwidth. So Netflix pays Cogent for their internet backbone, which has a free agreement with comcast, but is bottlenecked because Netflix needs so much bandwidth that they came to a crossroads. So they started paying for more bandwidth to comcast by using other tier 1 connections from level 3 and others etc... So Netflix said, why not just skip the middle man and try to get a direct connection to comcast. They wanted a settlement free agreement like the tier 1 providers, but Comcast wouldn't give that to them. Instead Comcast wanted to charge them to either use their CDN or pay for a direct connection it's own CDN that it created. That's when this whole net neutrality thing took place with CEO Reed Hastings crying foul to congress.

Keep in mind that Netflix is a mega giant corporation too, which put Blockbuster and mom and pop video stores out of business. They don't care who they have to trample over to make money. Cogent was prioritizing it's retail customers over Netflix service, this violates NN rules. But is an understandable throttling to allow everyone else a fair chance at good service like for browsing the web, or credit card processing etc.... Cogent only has so much bandwidth to comcast, it was being fully saturated by Netflix, so it decided to implement a QOS.

So really the underlying problem with Netflix isn't "all data should be equal", it's a bandwidth problem that can only be alleviated by allowing everyone a direct connection to comcast's network. Essentially a free "fast lane." Instead of Net Neutrality, the architecture of the internet could be changed with regulations governing network topography.
 
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