Decius wrote:

Hijexx wrote:
As best I understand that is the main thrust of the Net Neutrality argument. Everything else you described seems to be superfluous to the issue.

That is because you've been mislead. With regard to laws that say "the internet shall be neutral" there is literally no difference between a situation where you have a base latency of X and they add on a special low latency connection to a particular video server such that your latency to that particular server is now Y instead of X, and a situation where you have a base latency of Y and they degrade your performance other than to that video server such that your base latency becomes X and your latency to that video server becomes Y. Net Neutrality laws would ban both situations, and the later is extremely unlikely to occur in practice. It is literally a law that prohibits ISPs from setting up leased circuits or SLAed channels to particular servers.

I haven't read the actual laws being ballyed about, so I can't say that it would or wouldn't cause that situation. To me, it's moot. The root problem is monopoly protection of last mile providers, most of which was stolen (acquisition of @Home properties by Comcast, Cablevision, Adelphia et all at ridiculous valuations) or hijacked (acquisition of BellSouth, Qwest, NYNEX, Ameritech, etc by ATT & Verizon over the years while using tax abatements, and the USF fees to boost profitability and valuations). Eliminate the monopoly protection and you eliminate the problem.

One thing that you're forgetting is that up until fairly recently, most Internet traffic was exchanged in public peering points, which gave everyone equal QoS through the exchange (and equal access to each other, that was the point). It was only within the last 8 years or so that private peering became a real concern and where private peering contracts would contain sections that would allow for tiers of QoS between peers. Within the last 3 or so years, this has gotten further up the stack to layer 4 and above. While technologically speaking, this is useful and tremendously nifty, it is being used for evil. If the net neutrality issue goes either way, all we'll be doing is entering into an arms race where core routing technology will get ever more sophisticated (and slower) to break the ever clandestine use of packets to evade detection or hijack better QoS levels than they should have. Someone will figure out a way to profit from that arms race and the customer will lose.

Unfortunetly being "informed" of the issue doesn't lead people to the root problem. It just polarizes everyone on the basis of "big business" versus "freedom", which is utterly insane. The issue has always been, and will continue to be, monopoly of access to the resource. The best solution to that which I've heard is to put the plant into a public trust and force every provider to lease it. In my mind, that's still suboptimal, but it's better than what we have today.

RE: Save the Internet!