FCC chairman Ajit Pai out, net neutrality back

ZDNet ^ | 30.November.2020 | Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols

[mewzilla]

Net neutrality...Obamacare for the internet.

[Eagle Forgotten]

Under the same circumstances, the RATS always have the outgoing whatever resign before so that the new RAT appointee remains entrenched.

No, Pai is following the normal custom here. His predecessor as Chairman was Tom Wheeler, appointed by Obama in 2013. Wheeler did not resign right near the end of Obama's term, enabling Obama to entrench a successor. Instead, he made his resignation effective January 20, 2017. That enabled Trump to immediately appoint Pai as Wheeler's successor.

Story about Wheeler here: https://www.cnet.com/news/tom-wheeler-fcc-net-neutrality-open-internet-unlikely-defender/

[Boise3981]

We do not have net neutrality now

We kind of do. Net-neutrality was the law of the land under Obama. Trump's picks tried to reverse it but most of those changes are still in court, so they haven't taken effect yet. Further, CA passed their own net-neutrality law and given their population and size of the economy ends up dictating terms to the rest of the country a lot of the time.

But once the court cases are resolved, if net-neutrality goes away it will result in some ISPs (certainly not all) throttling up favored content and throttling down disfavored content. That's the entire point of it.

Sometimes getting "favored" status will be technical (like HD video). Sometimes it'll be financial ("If you pay me more, I'll make sure you're favored"). Sometimes it might be ideological ("I don't like what this network says, so I'm going to make it harder to get to and a lower quality when you do").

You can argue it won't be a big deal or that it won't effect things you care about. You can say net-neutrality is good or bad. Those are just opinions. But handling different content in different ways is *explicitly* what ending net-neutrality is about. And understanding that we may end up getting censored as a result is why a lot of people are anxious about ending net-neutrality.

But we should be honest about what net-neutrality is and the potential effects of ending it.

[palmer]

And understanding that we may end up getting censored as a result is why a lot of people are anxious about ending net-neutrality.

Name a case of censorship before the NN you say is now the "law of the land". Also what are you going to do when the ISPs simply manage excess traffic with data cap? Demand unlimited data for everyone?

Also please explain exactly how a site like FR would be censored and how government control of the internet prevents that. Don't know if you were around for the recent election, but there was a lot of censorship.

All of the major ICPs have backed net neutrality, including Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Each company has poured millions of dollars into the Internet Association, which lobbies Congress on their behalf. The organization backed a “Day of Action” in July 2017 in which members posted banner ads encouraging their users to protest the FCC’s rollback of net neutrality rules.

https://www.libertarianism.org/building-tomorrow/real-reason-facebook-netflix-support-net-neutrality

Whose side are you on? What's your angle?

[Boise3981]

Net-Neutrality requires, by law, that providers treat all data the same.

Getting rid of net-neutrality then allows providers to treat some data differently; favoring some, discriminating against others.

That's literally the definition of what net-neutrality is.

The question then becomes: If some content is favored and other content is discriminated against, how confident are you that YOUR content will be the one that is favored and not the one that's discriminated against. If you feel like there was already "a lot of censorship" shouldn't you be leery of giving corporations and media companies the ability to discriminate even more?

Maybe it's not Free Republic. Maybe Twitter pays a premium to speed up their content and slow down Parler. Maybe Comcast (a major ISP that owns NBC-Universal) decides to boost MSNBC and slow down Fox or OANN or Newsmax.

Ending net-neutrality doesn't automatically make that happen, but it opens the door to doing so. And once the door is open, someone somewhere will do it. I don't know how, or when, or what the overall impact will be. But some ISP is going to discriminate based on ideology and political belief. Some other ISP is going to discriminate based on money. How sure are you that you won't be the one on the short end? I'm not at all confident.

[palmer]

Maybe Twitter pays a premium to speed up their content and slow down Parler.

Specifically how would Parler be slowed down?

From the Obama FCC order: There is a ‘2-second rule’ for video watching: People are willing to wait 2 seconds for a video to load, but the rate of abandonment increases significantly thereafter if the video doesn’t load.

We are inserting the government into the operation of ISPs because people have short attention spans? They can't wait two seconds. Do you think Parler (which is mostly text) can be slowed down by two seconds, and if so, how? The amount of bandwidth the Parler page needs is trivial. How exactly will they add the two seconds latency to the Parler site loading. How will they do that when I'm on my VPN?

You still haven't explained your angle. Why are you so invested in government control of the industry? Are you a trial lawyer? They will make a mint suing providers for perceived two second delays. Also you haven't explained why an order that is supported by Facebook, Google and Twitter https://thehill.com/policy/technology/339044-twitter-joins-net-neutrality-day-of-action is good for internet openness. They are the companies doing the censorship.

[Boise3981]

The lack of self awareness or imagination is just amazing.

You simultaneously claim that there's massive censorship and then don't worry at all about a change in law that would make censorship easier and more likely.

If I prioritize traffic to NBC/Universal and users max out my capacity then no matter how trivial the bandwidth required by other services, they're not going to load.

But you're right, it doesn't even take a lot. If I slow down your service for just 2 seconds it'll crater your users/subscribers and kill your platform. Even a small delay is enough to put companies under because users are fickle. So even if I've got the bandwidth for Parler, I just input a 3 second delay for any parler traffic request, and then users abandon the platform. They can do it even when you're on your VPN by saying "if it's not on our whitelist, slow it down." You can VPN around all you want, you're not avoiding that.

You clearly don't understand how the technology works or what a change to net-neutrality means as a practical matter.

[palmer]

VPN connections are encrypted, so there's no way to "whitelist", throttle, or blacklist. There's no way to know what is going across the link. You haven't answered why you are in favor of more government control, which inevitably leads to rent seeking and corruption. I can only conclude you support big government for whatever reason.

I just input a 3 second delay for any parler traffic request,

Uh huh. Just input into what? Exactly how will they add that latency? What specific equpment will add the latency and how will it do it? Routers? Which routers, and how?

If I prioritize traffic to NBC/Universal and users max out my capacity then no matter how trivial the bandwidth required by other services, they're not going to load.

If capacity is maxed out then NBC will start to degrade as well, The parler page is 50kbytes. That's two frames of video (about 1/30th of a second). If the parler page doesn't load then the NBC video won't be watchable by anyone.