Thanks to net neutrality rules, Verizon throttled a California fire department's unlimited data plan

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Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2018/08/22/thanks-to-net-neutrality-rules.html

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Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think linking this to net neutrality is spurious.

Net neutrality wouldn’t preclude our providers from throttling the overall bandwidth that end-users have access to. It would prevent providers from prioritizing traffic from one internet source over another.

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Would this be a reBoing?

Or is there enough new info?

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Yesssss, Yessss Verizon, embrace your greed, push firefighters onto the bandwagon for municipal internet. We’ll welcome their American Heroes PR push with open arms.

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Profit of the company over the welfare of the workers charged with protecting the community. Seems pretty much on target these days. And an actual human being was made aware of this situation and still was locked into greed over decency and good sense…obviously wasn’t their community on fire or their loved ones fighting the fire.

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Headline fail. This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Cell phone throttling is nothing new and was permitted under the old neutrality rules.

But the Verizon manager who refused to release the throttle should be assigned to a fiery pit in the afterlife.

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It’s also possible that the manager didn’t have the authority to release the throttle, or he didn’t know the appropriate person in the myriad of twisty passages that makes up verizon’s hive mind of a back end that could have gone clicky-clack.

Part of me wants to chalk this one up to corporate indifference and stupidity rather than actual, active malice.

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Dear Bonivus_elderheart: I’m going to go with the idea that corporate indifference and stupidity actually IS actual, active malice.

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But if the outcome is the same, isn’t either cause something that must be addressed for the public good?

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The linked article links the issue to net neutrality, and whether or not net neutrality is related seems to be a key point under dispute. If you’re going to claim it has nothing to do with net neutrality, then failing to make an argument for this position is begging the question.

“They already did this” is not a very good argument, since it’s perfectly logically possible that they were already violating net neutrality principles or rules.

The headline is confusing, though, and doesn’t do a good job of presenting the linked article.

ETA:

The throttling was done under a provision in the rule for “reasonable network management”, and was supposed to only apply in times of high network congestion, though actually Verizon and other carriers were flouting the rule by advertising plans that throttled after a threshold had been reached - i.e. the throttling was built into the plans as part of their rate structure, not used as a mechanism for managing network congestion.

Why not just cap data usage entirely instead of throttling? Presumably because they like to throw “unlimited” into their advertising.

So net neutrality is related, but only because telcos like to advertise “unlimited data” on plans that are actually limited.

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