arstechnica.com— The FCC stopped accepting reply comments on network neutrality yesterday, and nearly 27,000 individuals and companies submitted their thoughts before the deadline. Some of these were quite crass.
Jul 17, 2007View in Crawl 4
Perfect example. If you have Shaw Cable up here in Canada, it has been long suspected that they use the same software they currently use to slow down torrent traffic to slow down competing VoIP services like Vonage or Primus (Shaw has it's own VoIP service). Clients who feel their service is sub-par can pay them 10.00/mo. for "premium service", which presumably removes the filtering. I've heard from some techs I've talked to that paying the fee does zip because they can't work at that level of granularity. They filter the entire neighourhood or they don't. They come out, verify your line is working properly and showing a certain amount of dropped packets or less ... and then they walk out, every month collecting your "Vonage Tax".I've toyed with the idea of installing Vonage and then using a free utility I found on the Internet to measure my hops during a call, but I'm not that motivated, so I honestly can't say if it's true or not.
Yeah. I can't wait until the government has precedent to regulate the Internet. At least now the telcos aren't censoring anything. The FCC doesn't have to worry about losing profit, so they'd be glad to censor the Internet!
the problem isn't that the government would be regulating your internet, it's that huge companies would be! do you want to be able to research your ISP's competitor on the internet? not possible with net neutrality.plus, while the government might be regulating to determine if a network was neutral, it would be less regulation total in that the ISPs couldn't regulate what content you had access to, or how fast you could get it. (which is essentially the same thing - slow your favored content down enough and you'll go with their favored alternative.)
gakiJul 18, 2007
Perfect example. If you have Shaw Cable up here in Canada, it has been long suspected that they use the same software they currently use to slow down torrent traffic to slow down competing VoIP services like Vonage or Primus (Shaw has it's own VoIP service). Clients who feel their service is sub-par can pay them 10.00/mo. for "premium service", which presumably removes the filtering. I've heard from some techs I've talked to that paying the fee does zip because they can't work at that level of granularity. They filter the entire neighourhood or they don't. They come out, verify your line is working properly and showing a certain amount of dropped packets or less ... and then they walk out, every month collecting your "Vonage Tax".I've toyed with the idea of installing Vonage and then using a free utility I found on the Internet to measure my hops during a call, but I'm not that motivated, so I honestly can't say if it's true or not.
tech42erJul 18, 2007
Yeah. I can't wait until the government has precedent to regulate the Internet. At least now the telcos aren't censoring anything. The FCC doesn't have to worry about losing profit, so they'd be glad to censor the Internet!
superdupergcJul 18, 2007
the problem isn't that the government would be regulating your internet, it's that huge companies would be! do you want to be able to research your ISP's competitor on the internet? not possible with net neutrality.plus, while the government might be regulating to determine if a network was neutral, it would be less regulation total in that the ISPs couldn't regulate what content you had access to, or how fast you could get it. (which is essentially the same thing - slow your favored content down enough and you'll go with their favored alternative.)
superdupergcJul 18, 2007
man and we can't just have a government-owned internet, because then they could do whatever they wanted with it (politicized internet control = bad)
darkdragonJul 18, 2007
They have already publicly stated that if there is no network neutrality, they intend to throttle sites that do not pay them...
darkdragonJul 18, 2007
<a class="user" href="http://www.savetheinternet.com">http://www.savetheinternet.com</a>
error601Jul 18, 2007
Leaving it alone would mean you are against net neutrality.
msf2Jul 18, 2007
Pipes? The internet is not a series of pipes.
thebellmaster1xJul 20, 2007
Er, no? I don't see any tiers right now, do you?