The Freakout Over Net Neutrality Makes No Sense

[rangerrebew]

The Freakout Over Net Neutrality Makes No Sense

If the FCC wants to protect "net neutrality" and benefit consumers, it should focus on removing government impediments to competition, not adding vast new regulations. (Shutterstock)

    5/19/2017
 

Regulation: "Net neutrality" has become the Holy Grail of various so-called consumer organizations. But government regulation isn't what consumers need. Competition is. And there would be more of that if the government would get out of the way.

On Thursday, the Federal Communications Commission voted 2-1 to start undoing the massive expansion of the FCC's regulatory control over the internet, enacted two years ago by the Obama administration under the guise of protecting "net neutrality."

http://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/fcc-takes-the-first-step-toward-a-truly-free-and-open-internet/

[driftdiver]

This is a crazy complicated issue.  The big internet providers want to use your data to compete with google.  They will also throttle traffic to sites they don't like which could very well kill small businesses, competing businesses and sites like this one.    I'm not sure what the answer is but I certainly don't trust the big telecom companies.

[Oceander]

This is a crazy complicated issue.  The big internet providers want to use your data to compete with google.  They will also throttle traffic to sites they don't like which could very well kill small businesses, competing businesses and sites like this one.    I'm not sure what the answer is but I certainly don't trust the big telecom companies.

What providers have been throttling traffic to sites they don't like?   Net neutrality was a fig-leaf to protect the likes of Netflix and its subscribers from being asked to pay their fair share for the huge amount of resources they consume by preventing isps from charging by bandwidth usage.  On some smaller networks, particularly those with shared IP addresses, the guy who watches Netflix may make browsing an online forum difficult for the other people who share the IP address.  Under net neutrality, that guy couldn't be forced to either lower his usage or pay a premium for it.

[EC]

What providers have been throttling traffic to sites they don't like?

https://wiki.vuze.com/w/Bad_ISPs

Or:

https://www.theverge.com/2014/5/6/5686780/major-isps-accused-of-deliberately-throttling-traffic

Five major internet service providers in the US and one in Europe have been accused of abusing their market share to interfere with the flow of the internet for end users. The accusations come from Level 3, a communications company that helps connect large-scale ISPs like Comcast or AT&T to the rest of the internet. According to the company, these six unnamed ISPs are deliberately degrading the quality of internet services using the Level 3 network, in an attempt to get Level 3 to pay them a fee for additional traffic caused by services like Netflix, a process known as paid peering.

""They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content.""

"They are deliberately harming the service they deliver to their paying customers," writes Level 3's Mark Taylor. "They are not allowing us to fulfill the requests their customers make for content." While Taylor doesn't name names, he describes the six offenders as "large broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market." He adds that "in countries or markets where consumers have multiple broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers." He also says that Level 3 won't be paying up. "Our policy is to refuse to pay arbitrary charges to add interconnection capacity," he explains.