I can’t speak for the rest of Europe, but in Britain it’s worked pretty well. You just need an aggressive regulator. Its not perfect, but then what is.

The fact that running the internet with the present system is difficult is not an argument for changing it. Its a complicated system – but one which works.

Fair summary?

That was also the case in the US during the time of enforced line sharing.

Strangely in Hong Kong, perhaps due to a regulatory organisation unwilling to put up with ILEC shenanigans, line sharing was quite successful. Broadband penetration is one of the highest in the world, data pipes are cheap, and quickly installed. {Of course, now that the market has been grown to saturation, the ILEC tycoons, Li Ka-shing and son Richard, have gone back to their paid politicians and had line sharing eliminated to drive the mature market back in to the monopolies’ hands.}

for example, you don’t particularly care how long HTTP packets take to arrive, as its non real time. You do care how long it takes for media streaming packets to arrive, as if they arrive too late they are useless. And if you were downloading a particicularly large file (for example a DVD) – you might be willing to pay extra to have it download by a particular time.

However, giving priority to http://www.cnn.com packets would quickly lead to corruption. (as it would cnn who’d pay for it, rather than the consumer).

Suppose for a moment you ran Comcast and your objective was to maximize revenues. Your customers are paying Vonnage and even Skype to carry voice over your monopoly cables. You go to Vonnage and say, “gimme a share or I will make the same offer to Skype or even run Comtron-VOIP myself” or you go to the local telco monopoly and say, “gimme and i will impose a surcharge on VOIP packets on my wires” or ….

The cable companies and telcos have government imposed monopolies on last mile. Back in the days when the US was a raving left-wing socialist state, the evil feds required such monopolists to be “common carriers” so that they would not be tempted to play such games. But now that we live under the Leader in a Rich People’s Republic, we know that interfering with the power of monopilies is BAD and we accept happily whatever deals they offer us and ask for another.

On the bright side it’s virtually impossible to break the net permanently. The worst Congress could do is totally fumble the US’s current role as technological leader.

That isn’t what I got from Ed’s posts.

‘Scenarios for network discrimination typically involve an Internet Service Provider (ISP) who looks at users’ traffic and imposes delays or other performance penalties on certain types of traffic. To do this, the ISP must be able to tell the targeted data packets apart from ordinary packets. For example, if the ISP wants to penalize VoIP (Internet telephony) traffic, it must be able to distinguish VoIP packets from ordinary packets.’

But you are probably right and I am probably wrong. I think Cian tried to tell me(everyone) that above.

‘Filtering according to who the destination is – is not reasonable.’

It is ok to give my IP priority(I pay for more service) and my packet type priority but it is not ok not give my destination priority? Because that is how you would – services being given provision based on their relationship with the provider?

Do I have it right now?

Being British I haven’t been following this debate particularly closely, so I may have missed some of the details.

There are different types of filtering.
There is filtering at the customer level. In practice this comes down to making sure that bandwith hungry applications (filesharing mostly) do not suck up all the bandwidth. The main problem is applications which are constantly downloading at peak rates (e.g. bittorrent) – as opposed to web surfing/email which download in bursts at peak rate. ISP accounting assumes mostly the latter kind of use and so charge customer’s accordingly (and purchase bandwidth upstream accordingly). Most ISPs will therefore filter the kind of packets, so that they don’t swamp the connection. Assuming the contract allows it, this is perfectly legal. Its a problem caused by disruptive new technologies – but one which would sort itself out in a real, government enforced, free market (like the UK).

Incidentally, voIP is not a heavy user of bandwidth (that’s the point) – and ISPs who filter/slow voIP packets are doing so to protect their own monopolies as telcos.

A second type of filtering is far more dangerous. That is when the packet is filtered according to destination. Technologically there is nothing stopping ISPs from doing this, and there may not be anything legally stopping them from doing this. However, it would seriously undermine the internet as we know it. Currently, ISPs in the US (but not in “socialist” Europe) largely control access to the internet in their local areas via broadband (where there is competition, it tends to be quite limited). However once you’re on the internet, you can access anything. That includes internet telephony, cinema download sites, apple iTunes and the Washingon Times for all your Moonie needs. However, if ISPs were able to filter packets, they could control which sites and applications go priority access. This would mean one of two things:
1) They would give priority to their own applications (TimeWarner film downloads, BellSouth VoIP), killing competition.
2) They would charge destinations a tax for “priority” access.

Needless to say, the success of the internet has been due to unfiltered, unmediated access. This would kill it. This is about the government interfering in the market place – ironically something Republicans claim to be against.

Now ISPs will claim that this is about them being able to discriminate between low and high-tier customers. As far as I can see this is bullshit. There are mechanisms in place for them to be able to do this at the moment (corporations use these all the time for their own virtual private networks). Offering guarantees of service for certain kinds of service is one thing. Deliberating reducing quality is another thing entirely.

However this should be something which is placed on top of the existing system. The current system works. It doesn’t work properly, and ISPs have all kinds of problems purchasing the right amount of bandwidth, but it works and these problems are no different to those facing other kinds of private company. I fail to see why large incumbent companies should be protected from risk.

This is not what is being talked about here. You are confusing the smoke with the fire.

What is being talked about is services being given provision based on their relationship with the provider, which is not a particularly valuable thing unless you are intentionally downgrading the service of others.

So, for now, in response to any proposed bill, the only proper response is a short post that goes someting like this –
Look at what those scumbagging fucktards are up to now!

Any deviation from the above approach means you are an idiotic tool of the fucktarding scumbags.

My thoughts as a scumbagging fucktarder are –
Theoretically service providers need to discriminate between high(and mid and low) tier customers. When I am downloading porn, and a high burst comes through, my packets priority can be downgraded, but the packets of another high tier customer using this VOIP thingy would need to be given priority.

Otherwise everyone would need to pay more for service or service would suck for services prone to having problems with this jitter thingy.

Any way after reading ‘everything’ that is how it seems to me.

So theoretically it seems like there is a legitimate need to ignore net nuetrality. But maybe I am wrong?

What incentive does Comcast have for screwing VOIP users? Do they provide phone service over their lines?

Maybe Cian could expand on her/his post above?