Netflix will pay Comcast to not throttle; this is why Net Neutrality matters

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Interesting! I throw away telnet, FTP and the Berkeley R-protocols at the first sign of congestion, because nobody should ever be using them. For anything. Well, OK, they can be used for testing and debugging, but that’s it.

With SCP and SFTP and SSH available free for every platform, there’s no good reason to allow spavined nags on the highways.

As for net neutrality, call your ISP and offer to mark your all packets with QOS and let them charge you for delivery accordingly. But don’t hold your breath waiting for a sane and knowledgeable response! These are the people who block port 25 to their end users (no private mail servers allowed) but won’t block known worm propagation traffic; reason and logic are strangers to them.

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I use an ISP that would definitely know how to answer a question about QoS markings, though they might or might not have infrastructure that’ll actually process them. There isn’t really a need for them to charge differently for them, except for whether they bother handling the markings, because it doesn’t change your overall usage, just which part of your traffic gets delayed/dropped during congestion. But it wouldn’t actually work for most Internet traffic, because what you mostly care about are packets that you’re receiving from somebody else, and YouTube isn’t going to bother marking the packets they send you.

And yeah, obviously this decade you’d use SSH instead of telnet, and SFTP or SCP instead of ftp for private traffic, but there’s a fair bit of vanilla FTP still around. If you’re downloading a Linux distribution from a public server, it doesn’t matter if somebody eavesdrops on it, and if you’re concerned about security you’re going to do a checksum anyway, not because somebody might have tampered with your download, but because packets might have been lost during transmission or somebody might have tampered with the download site you got it from.

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If Cogent is anywhere near the problem, then the fact that there are congestion and politics isn’t at all surprising. They’ve usually been one of the lowest-priced Tier 1 ISPs, selling bulk data to the content providers, and are often in peering fights with other carriers that would like to charge them money rather than giving them free peering.

Ever since the Internet started having significant consumer-eyeball networks and content-provider-specialist networks, they’ve been arguing about who should pay money to whom. The consumer networks say that the content providers should pay them, because they’re giving them access to consumer eyeballs; the content providers say the broadband carriers should pay them, because people buy broadband so they can access content. In reality, they both need each other. I remember early on when Comcast’s executives were saying “Napster is Evil! Music sharers are Nasty Pirates Ripping off our Content Provider Job Creators!”, and the working-level folks, if you talked to them in private, almost all said “Duh, why do you think people buy broadband from us? It’s so they can download music.” Today lots of consumers buy faster broadband because they want to watch streaming movies; most people don’t need more than 1-2 megabits if they’re not doing that.

And both of them used to fight with the long-haul carriers, though that happens a bit less since the long-haul carriers bought up the DSL and home fiber businesses or were bought by the local telcos, and the cable TV networks built or bought their own long-haul networks.

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One of the most visible fights being the spat between Cogent and Level3 back in '05. When that resulted in the peering connection between Level3 and Cogent being shut down for a few days it caused no end of problems for people who were single-homed to only one network or the other.

Each side, of course, blamed the other for that little game of chicken. The main good fallout from that was that they contractually agreed that the connection couldn’t be unilaterally shut down again without advance warning to customers.

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I am suggesting the FCC be involved directly and in a regulatory role.

What was sad was your attempt to play at pitying your rival. That’s weak sauce.

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@billstewart, I bet Google/Youtube would be more than willing to provide QOS (if they don’t already) for streaming media and search results etc. but your point is still extremely good - everybody has to co-operate, including the pipe provider and both endpoints of any data connection/transaction. Which is unlikely to happen… I don’t see any ISPs rushing to implement per-packet billing, and many influential net pundits (including Cory, I think) utterly hate the idea.

And I’m doing my best to help kill it! :smiling_imp: It should all die. If you’re not worried about security and you’re going to check a hash afterwards anyway, bittorrent is probably more appropriate. I’ve been refusing to allow FTP and telnet service daemons to be installed on servers for about a decade now, and the results have been overwhelmingly positive… at this point I don’t believe there are any use cases where a better alternative to FTP does not exist.

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[quote=“Cowicide, post:25, topic:23896”]
An overzealous FCC (oxymoron) isn’t the problem here. This is a problem manufactured by a lack of proper broadband ISP competition.[/quote]

You speak as if the FCC hasn’t been involved up to this point. Have you ever looked into how we got here? How the accidental competition between duplicate telephone and cable networks is the only thing keeping us from having to deal with government-granted monopolies on Internet access?

Of course Comcast is a massive, anti-competitive, protected oligopoly. Ask yourself this question - protected by whom? And you’re absolutely correct about competition fixing the problem. So how do we get there? Is involving the FCC even further going to increase competition? A regulatory agency that has a history of censorship, incompetence, and cronyism, headed by a man who used to be the head of a cable company trade group?

So … the way to fix this is to remove the political hurdles, correct? Not add more of them?

The point you are missing is that the FCC is the one doing the coddling, along with state and local governments. I will point out, again, that the head of the FCC is a former cable industry lobbyist. Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Involving them further is going to make things worse, not better.

There’s no need for that. All that needs to happen is removal of the barriers to competition - the franchise laws and special deals that protect Comcast’s market position. Comcast is such a behemoth slug that startups will eat them alive in ten years; hell, Google is trying already, even in the current environment, by building out yet another network.

Adding more FCC interference is not the answer - it’s how we got there in the first place. Ask the broadcast TV companies what it’s like to have the FCC all up in your business, fining you for people cussing on your networks or having wadrobe malfunctions. Just last week there was a story on this same website about the FCC sniffing around news broadcasts and journalists asking about how they decide which stories to run. These are not the people you want in charge of the Internet - we want to keep them as far away as possible.

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Hardly. The FCC has been involved since the beginning. This was a power grab by the FCC to assert more authority over the ISPs. And it’s not over by any means.

This is the FCC we’re talking about here. The people who censor network television? The people who kept a three-party oligopoly in television protected for 50 years? The people who go after low-power FM pirate radio stations and lock their operators in jail? These are not malicious assumptions, the FCC has a colorful and varied factual history of protectionism, cronyism, and censorship, and absurd punishments for actions that shouldn’t even be criminal.

Comcast is no hero - far from it. They are the crony, coddled and protected by laws and regulations they themselves largely wrote. But the way to deal with that is not to give their benefactor, the FCC, more power (and here I will again remind you that the head of the FCC used to be a cable industry lobbyist). Comcast is only in a position to be suspected of throttling because of the FCC and corrupt local governments. The way to deal with that is to strip away their legal protections and throw them to the wolves of competition. Competition lowers prices and improves service.

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Good. The FCC needs to have more authority here to counterbalance the monopolized marketplace.

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The FCC, to a large extent, created the monopolized marketplace. Why would you want to give them more power to further entrench their monopolist cronies? I’m so confused as to how anyone could think that the FCC is in any way opposed to the large cable companies or telco providers.

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All. By. Themselves

Your cynicism about government is your own. The FCC may or may not stop anything, but it sure as heck will slow it down.

And that IS the role of any government, when new disruptive ideas come along. To regulate the market to minimize disruptions and create opportunities when captialism runs to excess (as it always will). And hey, maybe the FCC will come around in terms of having a spine? If they ever do and they’re not involved anymore, what good would that be? Better to keep them in the game, even if it is just a show, for now.

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We don’t want “minimized disruption” here. “Minimized disruption” is how we ended up with Comcast in the first place. We WANT disruption. We WANT new startups, new technologies, and new ways of doing business to proliferate. We WANT faster speeds, more reliable networks, more choices, and lower prices. Right? And the FCC has never found a spine in the last 78 years - why would they start now?

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You speak as if the FCC hasn’t been involved up to this point. Have you ever looked into how we got here?

The government (including the FCC) has been incredibly hands-off overall. Educate yourself, this is how we got here:

Why Comcast and other cable ISPs aren’t selling you gigabit Internet

Experts have been begging for the FCC and the government to act:

Susan Crawford, previously with the Obama administration and now back to teaching law at Cardozo Law School, says the entire battle shows Comcast’s “existing overwhelming market power.” In her view, there’s simply not enough competition to create a functioning market for peering and transit. It’s time for the FCC to act, she says, “as the looming cable monopoly stops looming and starts muscling levers into place.” - source

“Is there anywhere else in the ecosystem where somebody demonstrates something that’s really cool and great, and faster and better, and doesn’t put it out for more than two years?” Blair Levin, a former FCC official and current executive director of Gig.U, told Ars. “Would Apple ever say, ‘here’s a phone we’re thinking about doing, maybe a couple years from now you’ll get it. We could do it today but… no, we’re not going to do that’?” - source

How the accidental competition between duplicate telephone and cable networks is the only thing keeping us from having to deal with government-granted monopolies on Internet access?

That’s not “accidental” competition. The only reason Comcast hasn’t gobbled up telecoms is because of the limited government oversight we still have left. Apparently, people like you would like to remove the tiny amount of oversight we still have.

Of course Comcast is a massive, anti-competitive, protected oligopoly. Ask yourself this question - protected by whom?

I already answered that question multiple times. It was coddled by a lax government, not an overzealous one.

So how do we get there?

With lax government. You keep acting as if Comcast was forced by the government to become an oligopoly. Comcast became an oligopoly because government didn’t do enough to stop it.

Is involving the FCC even further going to increase competition? A regulatory agency that has a history of censorship, incompetence, and cronyism, headed by a man who used to be the head of a cable company trade group?

Yes, I think Obama has made despicable choices with the FCC. Obama is a piece of shit. That’s a given. There’s also a terrible problem throughout our entire government (including the FCC) where lobbyists enter government and vice versa. But, that’s why I support things like this.

But, like many things in life, things aren’t black and white. Despite its flaws, the FCC has often been the only barrier to Comcast being even worse than it already is today. While being far too weak, the FCC is better than nothing.

In your libertarian-esque haste to damn all that is government oversight, you’re conveniently leaving out the fact that the government is the only thing that’s even tried to stop or slow down absolute corporate communism in our republic.

Do you think Comcast or the rest of the industry would self-regulate itself without the FCC? The only reason Comcast isn’t even worse is because of what little we can still get our government to do on our behalf. You’d have us remove those barriers.

These aren’t true technical hurdles, these are political hurdles enabled by anti-American, anti-competitive sloth in (too big to exist) corporations that are increasingly calling all the shots as they push false dilemmas onto consumers who lack proper choices in broadband.

So … the way to fix this is to remove the political hurdles, correct? Not add more of them?

I’m not sure if you’re being purposefully obtuse or not, but I’ll give you benefit of the doubt that you’re simply having a hard time with reading comprehension.

There are not technological hurdles for Comcast to provide more bandwidth that businesses and consumers need. As I’ve already proven in my previous post with sources, Comcast easily has enough money to increase bandwidth. They just don’t do it because they lack competition.

The evil government isn’t stopping Comcast from increasing bandwidth. Comcast is stopping Comcast.

The political hurdle to overcome is the one in which our government stops allowing libertarians and other corporatist appeasers to call the shots and keep our oversight and regulation at bay. The political hurdle to overcome is to finally give our government more teeth to split up Comcast.

That’s why more Americans need to get involved in their government so it does more to look out for them instead of corporations.

The point you are missing is that the FCC is the one doing the coddling, along with state and local governments.

I already addressed that in my previous post. Once again, life isn’t black and white. While the FCC is too lax, it’s also one of the only barriers we’ve had.

You’re idea of “fixing things” is to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Corporations aren’t going to regulate themselves. To think otherwise is to be delusional and ignore history.

If Comcast can’t handle demand with their massive profits, then it’s time to break them up and introduce competition that can and will. Actually, it’s already time to break them up as they never should have been coddled into this anti-competitive position in the first place.

There’s no need for that.

There’s is an absolute need for that. Comcast uses its sheer size and weight to crush competition before it can even get started. That hurts competition, consumers and even thwarts democracy as well.

Comcast is such a behemoth slug that startups will eat them alive in ten years

That’s over-simplistic, delusional, “free market”, libertarian drivel right there.

Comcast is only a “slug” when it comes to offering better services and bandwidth to consumers and businesses because it cuts into their enormous profits. On the other hand, they are quite agile when it comes to using their huge size in making anti-compeitive maneuvers that thwart smaller competition.

All a behemoth like Comcast has to do is manipulate its prices to destroy small startups. The only “startups” that have any hope of making a dent are other oligopolies. And, oligopolies are not true “startups” in the best, competitive sense of the word.

Google is trying already

Case and point.

As I said, the only “startups” that have any hope of making a dent are other oligopolies. Since when is Google a “startup”? They are yet another anti-competitve, behemoth oligopoly and are far from being a new player on the scene. They are not a “startup”. Google is another “too big to exist”, anti-competitive mega-corp that needs to be broken up itself.

You’re obviously satisfied with anti-competitive oligopolies tearing into the lion’s share while leaving everyone else out of it. I am not. I think true competition is healthy not only for free enterprise and consumers, but also for democracy itself. A few mega-corp oligopolies shutting out almost everyone else doesn’t cut it, sorry.

All that needs to happen is removal of the barriers to competition - the franchise laws and special deals that protect Comcast’s market position

I agree that anything that may coddle Comcast needs to be reformed, but that’s over-simplistic and leaves out too many other factors that desperately need to be addressed.

Adding more FCC interference is not the answer - it’s how we got there in the first place.

That is absolutely not how we got here. How we got here is our government didn’t do enough oversight and regulation to keep competition healthy. You’ve got it reversed.

Ask the broadcast TV companies what it’s like to have the FCC all up in your business, fining you for people cussing on your networks or having wadrobe malfunctions.

You’re acting like the corporate media that focuses like a laser on negatives to support their corporatist agendas. Sure, the FCC has its downsides, but that doesn’t mean we throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Government isn’t perfect and it will never be because it’s a human institution. But, once we completely remove government from corporate oversight, we end up with a decidedly non-human institution that puts nothing but profits of the few ahead of everyone else.

Your “free market” unicorn fantasties have failed and have failed miserably. It’s time for us to get more involved in our government and our government to get more involved in corporate regulation.

More:

How the US could block the Comcast/Time Warner Cable merger

Internet horror stories: How ISPs screwed over Ars readers

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[quote=“Cowicide, post:53, topic:23896”]
Susan Crawford, previously with the Obama administration and now back to teaching law at Cardozo Law School, says the entire battle shows Comcast’s “existing overwhelming market power.” In her view, there’s simply not enough competition to create a functioning market for peering and transit. It’s time for the FCC to act, she says, “as the looming cable monopoly stops looming and starts muscling levers into place.”[/quote]

That’s an accurate enough description of the situation, but she doesn’t address the root cause: why is there not enough competition? Other markets don’t have this problem, and if Comcast is reaping the profits you say they are, why aren’t other companies getting into the business and getting some of those profits for themselves?

The answer, of course, is that they can’t. Local and state governments have erected barriers to competition with local franchise laws, based on the flawed premise that having multiple overlapping networks is a problem that must be addressed through soft monopoly grants to favored corporations. The FCC has also erected barriers to competition with hugely expensive and onerous licensing (look up COALS on their site).

Ask youself: when was the last time you heard about an ISP startup? Doesn’t that strike you as odd, especially after the early 90’s when there were so many? What happened to all of those companies? (Hint: they didn’t get bought by Comcast!)

The reason the competition is accidental is because the rationale always given for franchising laws and telephone monopolies was that multiple networks were too expensive and the cable companies needed to be treated like utilities (sound familiar?). It was a fortunate accident of history that both telephone lines and cable lines can carry data, because otherwise we’d be stuck with one network in every area. So we got redundant networks, even though the telecoms and cable companies fought competition tooth and nail.

The FCC does not have a “tiny amount of oversight” in this area. They have the power to shut down any TV station, radio station, or cable provider at virtually any time, due the vague nature of their regulations. With Net Neutrality, they are attempting to assert control over Internet content. That should bother you.

Let’s try a different tack. If they are being coddled, who or what are they being protected from? More government regulation? Why would the coddlers protect the coddled from themselves?

So you agree that the FCC is a corrupt, cronyist organization - yet you still want to hand them more power over the Internet? The mind boggles.

On the contrary - the FCC, as demonstrated by its history of censorship, cronyism, and protectionism is considerably worse than nothing.

Right - that’s why it is riddled with lobbyists and revolving-door corporate apparatchiks, ran a technologically-stagnant telephone monopoly for decades, protected an air-travel oligopoly for decades until Jimmy Carter broke up the cartel, and protected a three-party oligopoly in television for nearly 50 years. In other words, the government and your corporate communists are the same people, and always have been.

Ad hominem will get you everywhere!

No, the evil government isn’t stopping Comcast - they are stopping Comcast’s would-be competition and protecting Comcast’s profits. Again - why aren’t there a hundred ISP startups trying to get a piece of those sweet Comcast profits with faster and cheaper service, like there are everywhere else on the Internet?

Actually, the historical record is completely filled with exactly what we’re facing now - the rich and powerful using government regulations to suppress competition and protect their market position. Corporations do, in fact, regulate themselves - that’s the system we have right now, and it is not a good one.

Yes - because of the rules the FCC and corrupt local governments have put into place.

Google did not exist 20 years ago. They started with just a couple of people. They are a huge company now, certainly - and that should tell you something. Where are the nascent Googles of the ISP market?

I’ve already clearly stated that I’m not happy with the current situation. I prefer true competition. Where you and I differ is on how we get there - you believe the corporations are anti-competitive, and I believe that the FCC is anti-competitive.

Like what? I’m fine with dealing with other factors, but why don’t we deal with obvious ones first?

Yep, the FCC has downsides … like the NSA has downsides.

How is a market with government-granted monopolies at the state and local level and FCC licensing at the federal level a “free market”? And is the Internet a relatively free market? Has it been stagnating, or producing all kinds of new sites and things that people are using to make their lives better?

Your delusion is that what you’re looking at today is a free market. It isn’t even close.

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So you agree that the FCC is a corrupt, cronyist organization - yet you still want to hand them more power over the Internet? The mind boggles… On the contrary - the FCC, as demonstrated by its history of censorship, cronyism, and protectionism is considerably worse than nothing.

Once again, your reading comprehension and ability to observe shades of grey fails you. The FCC is much more complex than your over-simplistic, libertarian, caricaturistic fantasies. You only focus like a laser on negatives, which only offers a portion of the picture.

Once again, life isn’t a black and white, libertarian fantasy. It’s very telling that I’m able to observe the negatives, while you can’t admit any of the tangible positives. Your laughable, one-sided view isn’t seated in reality.

Ad hominem will get you everywhere!

Being purposefully obtuse with me got you nowhere with me. Deal with it.

In your libertarian-esque haste to damn all that is government oversight, you’re conveniently leaving out the fact that the government is the only thing that’s even tried to stop or slow down absolute corporate communism in our republic.

Right - that’s why it is riddled with lobbyists and revolving-door corporate apparatchiks, ran a technologically-stagnant telephone monopoly for decades, protected an air-travel oligopoly for decades until Jimmy Carter broke up the cartel, and protected a three-party oligopoly in television for nearly 50 years. In other words, the government and your corporate communists are the same people, and always have been.

Now re-read that back to yourself and see if you can’t find your own contradictions. The government can do both good and bad.

A lesser evil Democrat did some good once the American public made a better choice in their representation.

The government isn’t a non-changing, monolithic entity and you just unwittingly admitted it.

Your delusion is that what you’re looking at today is a free market.

You have vast reading comprehension obstacles to overcome. That is the exact opposite of what I said. No wonder you’ve got so many other things backwards as well. Attempting to employ free market principles does not equal a free market. It just ends up deregulating entities that sorely need to be regulated and we end up in the shitty position we’re in today.

I suggest you go back and read my many sources and educate yourself on our messy, complex world.

The FCC does not equal the NSA and all government isn’t pure evil that keeps innocent corporations from bringing Americans and the world a free market utopia.

More suggested reading:

The FCC needs to be reformed, needs better leadership and needs more teeth to break up destructive, anti-competitive oligopolies and resist their construction in the first place. But for you to ignore any and all good that the FCC does (or at least tries to do in the face of corporatist corruption) is delusional.

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