That is interesting. It will take me some time before I respond to it. You din't tell me what you think about the title 2 reclassification , I would be interested to get your opinion on the question I posted in #39 ?
Yeah, well, Title II is dated, and I'm not sure I favor relying on unilaterial forbearance by the FCC as a regulatory regime.
Part of this becomes a problem because it is so easy for each side to twist things.
For example, we really do want service providers to have the ability to filter certain things by default, such as SMTP connections to random machines, because as a practical matter we understand that there's a huge amount of abuse which originates in this way. Or to throw up a filter blocking :1433 the next time there's a
widespread SQL server attack. These are generally good things. The problem is, we hear mealy-mouthed "protect mah netwohk" type talk from the likes of Stephenson who then use it to justify things like data rate caps and "fair share of the network." And it becomes difficult to see what shade of gray we're discussing.
I expect that a service provider might need to do things that actually protect its network. Back in 1994, one of our upstreams here was getting SATAN portscanned by another local service provider, and their "solution" was to null route them at the edge. I'm going to go so far as to say that was not an appropriate reaction, though I understand the sentiment. Regardless, I went and chewed out their CEO and got a pledge that they would never filter our pipe without permission or at least notification again. My expectation is that "Internet service" should be an attempt to provide access to as much of the Internet as is reasonably possible.
Lots of the current debate has been weasel-word twisted from realistic historical issues. "Fair share of the network" is a completely reasonable concept. Consumer grade connections are sold on the idea that they're oversubscribed, which means that there isn't enough bandwidth to supply full speed to all subscribers 24/7. This is part of what makes Internet access economical. However, what these companies are actually promoting as "reasonable" caps are a load of cow manure. Let me put it to you this way. 1 megabit per second over the period of one month is approximately 330GB of data transferred (depends on days, counting method, etc). So you want some fun? Let's do some math on AT&T's latest U-verse caps.
http://arstechnica.com/business/201...s-for-home-internet-and-steps-up-enforcement/
Let's say I order a U-verse 1Gbps connection. I'm allowed 1TB of data. If we work the math, that's about 3Mbps continuously for a month. Yay. I actually get to use 0.3% (that's zero-point-three percent) of my connection.
Now let me tell you a dirty little secret. Bandwidth is pretty cheap.
It's been getting cheaper. Locally here, it's gone from $300/megabit down to about $1.50/megabit in the last ~15 years. In that same time, Internet speeds have increased, but Internet connection prices have also trended upwards. I'd say that you can now get about 3x the Internet per dollar spent that you could 15 years ago. You do the math.
And then let's do the math a different way. Those usage caps? Figure it out. If 330GB of data costs your service provider ~$1 or so, and Comcast is charging $10 for every extra 50GB, that's ~$65 for 350GB. That's quite the profit there.
You're not getting your fair share of the network. And the cable/telcos see the writing on the wall, so there isn't a huge amount of incentive for them to give you access to large amounts of data. They know that sooner or later they'll lose the lucrative things like telephony ($40/month?!? Really?!?!?!?!) and cable TV. So they're doing their best to screw it to Netflix and any other providers of those services. In part by making it impractical for you, the customer, to make heavy use of the services.
Further, companies such as
AT-"mah-pipes"-&T aren't always focused on the issue of providing the service that their customers have paid for. When I pay a provider for Internet access, I expect to get Internet access, not access-to-those-providers-who-have-also-agreed-to-pay-a-premium-to-connect-to-AT&T. As a customer, *I* am paying for AT&T's pipes. AT&T doesn't get to insist that both sides of a connection must pay them, that leads to perverse results. Is AT&T going to degrade my connection to this web site because iXsystems hasn't paid AT&T for access? I mean, that's really where that sort of logic ends up. ISP's collect revenue from their customers in order to connect their customers to the Internet. I'm fine with that being on a best-effort basis, but attempting to extort large web portals for money is not "best-effort." And the problem is that we have seen the end users being held as hostages far too often in the various peering battles, so while I would personally prefer to keep the government and regulation out of it, we need someone who is big enough to scold the little children, and even spank them when necessary.
There will always be some practical realities involved in providing Internet service to end users, but what we're seeing in the market is mostly a load of self-serving crap. Local municipality-based broadband services, Google Fiber, and dedicated service providers like Sonic have no problems delivering uncapped services to end users. If all ISP's behaved like that, we probably wouldn't need to be worrying about Title II.
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