If your ISP is doing something you don’t like with your traffic, the best you can do is try to hide it until they also do something you don’t like with where you’ve hidden it.
It’s a game of cat and mouse. Think of all the resources and innovation that will be wasted on simply trying to hide and find the different traffic types.
The only real solution to solve if your ISP does something you don’t like with your traffic is to change to a different ISP.
That’s the entire reason to have the rules. If you could just switch, that incentive would keep the ISP in line. Because you can’t easily change, that’s why having the rules is important.
To respond more seriously - it’s actually not. Most of the bottleneck with networking and ISPs has to do with more material science issues than it does with transistors. Notably it has to do with getting cable into the ground, which is expensive and time consuming and the USA has a LOT of space we need to put cables into. So if it costs you 100k to dig the trench and then another 500k to buy the cables you put in that trench and then things kind of go out from there - all of which may only get you very little money relatively in terms of costs, because you’re running those cables to a mobile home park in some rural Alabama town.
If the costs of digging tunnels and trenches and laying cable were getting exponentially cheaper over time someone other than major ISPs would have solved the problem already, but they haven’t, and so they don’t.
Additionally I’ll note that Moore’s law hasn’t held true for even integrated circuits and transistors, and Intel and other companies haven’t used it as a target since 2014, and it’s been known to be faulty since before then. So even IF the computers themselves were the bottleneck (and again, they aren’t), Moore’s law wouldn’t be applicable.
Accomplishing great things takes time and effort. We can’t permanently ‘fix’ the internet anymore than an opponent can permanently ‘break’ it. The best we can hope for is to legislate things soundly enough that opinion stays swayed and people stop trying to do dumb things.
Oh yeah, you didn’t read about that when the program rolled out? I dropped them when they started pressuring me to upgrade my modem.
Anytime you see, “Xfinity Wifi” as an ssid, that’s almost always someone’s private router.
I’ve watched with some interest to see if there’s been any cases of illicit activity being pinned on the wrong person because of the supposed segmentation of network traffic for strangers on your internet connection. But then, I’ll probably be waiting a long time, because frankly, I’m of the belief that most illicit activity on the internet goes undetected 99%+ of the time.
That’s fascinating, in that my area was chosen for early FiOS rollout because of extremely high population density and service on poles rather than underground. Are we not being overcharged, since that high labor cost you site is inapplicable?
Sure, there’s certainly an argument to be made that you are, but it would also require that they then charge anyone who needed additional work a higher monthly fee as well.
It’s more complex that that, because generally companies tie things like this into overhead or infrastructure fees that are removed from the income, but it does tie into how they determine to roll out service and where.
One of the big arguments around municipal services/etc is that you can share the cost as a community and then internet is treated as a common good. If it’ll cost 1.1M to roll out service to the whole community, you raise taxes or a levy or whatever and pay for it, rather than a company making profit-based decisions.
You could then argue that people in cities would be paying for people in urban areas, but…I mean that’s kind of how local government works.
And how the heavily regulated old Ma Bell worked. But these guys get all the benefits of monopoly and want none of the oversight. There’s nothing to stop them from charging whatever the market will bear, because Comcast & Verizon will compete ferociously for customers in the ads, but not on price, which is basically in lockstep. There’s many historical examples of this kind of cooperative market gouging. Comcast is simply rolling in cash, it has more than it knows what to do with, which is why it’s always looking to buy stuff.
