gigaom.com — Daniel Berninger of GigaOm argues that Net Neutrality isn't enough, telco's and other internet providers need to maintain a hands off policy when it comes to packet analysis and shaping. Limiting traffic based on certain programs and ports is no different from forming special rules for individual websites.
Jan 15, 2007 View in Crawl 4
mattdennisJan 15, 2007
No one is saying that ISPs shouldn't be able to limit your rates, what they're saying is that they can't limit rates based on applications. What no one (except the telcos) wants to happen is to see things like "1000gbps for HTTP, 1kbps for BitTorrent, etc". If they give a cap of X, they have no right to dictate how and/or what for you use the bandwidth that was sold to you. In other words, they have to be neutral carriers and not prioritize, shape or limit your traffic based on the contents.
freffJan 15, 2007
A "real" study, huh? From a "researcher" who's consulting with the National Cable and Telecommunications Association? Interesting.
ghostlywindJan 15, 2007
I just want isps to leave our internet alone and allow us to do with it what we please. 2 months ago i was using bittorrent and uploading at 20 kbps and my internet company called me said i was dling illegal stuff. I asked them how they knew and they said my upload was so high. They banned the bittorrent protocol and i'm never allowed to use it again unless i switch internet companies.
cbeck527Jan 15, 2007
sorry for my ignorance, but what are you people talking about?!?
humpingmonkeyJan 16, 2007
@freff"In this case, free market fails because companies have managed to position themselves so that existing regulation makes puts them at an advantage to competing options that a consumer may want. "Exactly how does it fail? Having a competitive advantage is the name of the game. The purpose of a truly free market is for producers to create and consumers to indulge, not to maintain a commercial egalitarian utopia."If you argue that network neutrality is unnecessary because free markets will take care of competition, then you have to completely open up those markets, and make options readily available to all customers. "Absolutely. That's the first thing you've said that makes sense."That's not going to happen, therefore there needs to be protections for consumers to protect against pricing discrimination from service providers."Sure it won't happen as long as we live in a mob-rule, collectivist society. Pricing Discrimination? By that do you mean effective marketing in response to a segmented market? Consumers have all the 'protection' they need by virtue of their decision to consume or keep their wallet in their pocket.
kade13Jan 16, 2007
Strongly agree... I hate the ISPs doing this, i have a 8mb connection that was advertised as being 'unlimited' but limiting traffic or some packets of data is the same as limiting my usage. In some ways i can understand the need to do this because it hinders other peoples usage at certain times but they should atleast schedule the limit to certain times of the day so that i can atleast use the full bandwidth sometimes.. but thats not the case. I can only ever get about 400-450 KBs which is less the half the advertised speed. Btw thats not the speed i get most of the time, just when i download directly from web.. my bittorrent speed sucks it maxs out at like 200 even at night.. and since im tied into a 12 month contract im gonna be F'd in the A for the next few months, then i'll switch to another ISP@ghostly -- dude beotch is right, your ISP cant ban you from using BitTorrent or P2P cos its not illegal and they have no right to say that crap.. either switch ISP or phone them up and stick it back up their ass and tell them to unban you cos they have no legal reason to do that.
jzp_diggJan 17, 2007
"i paid for my bandwidth [...]" Nope. No consumer broadband is priced appropriately to the cost of delivery. It is all priced at marketing numbers and based on competition in the local region. Period."if you don't have enough bandwidth for me [...] don't sell it to me." Go read up on statistical multiplexing. If you want guaranteed bandwidth, get back into the circuit-switched age and run point-to-point circuits to your interested destinations. The global Internet just doesn't work like that and *never* has.