Donald Trump Presidency discussion thread II

listermint wrote: »

I would like YOU to tell us what harm this regulation is doing, in some detail with your understanding of why it was brought in please.

The problem is that although NN requires that the ISPs treat all traffic as neutral, internet use is not.

In extremis: Earthquake hits San Francisco. Infrastructure takes a knock, but is still functioning with limited capability. NN requires that traffic from hospitals, utilities, government, and other organisations be treated on an equal basis to traffic coming from Youtube users uploading their videos showing how they experienced the quake. Fundamentally, this is a problem.  The telephone/common carrier network thing was mentioned, but the FCC/Federal Government has a Wireless Priority Service program, in which telephone traffic is absolutely not treated equally (Though, interestingly, if you dial 911, you are not given any priority on the telephone network, as regulation covers only if you have a WPS code).

In a more practical commercial service, consumer internet usage varies by time and hour. You can imagine that a whole bunch of us get home after work, have dinner, and at about 8pm, we're all watching Netflix or Youtube or whatever high-bandwidth thing we are doing. Customers would like their service to be smooth without that dreaded "Buffering" wait symbol, which means that data transfer is time-sensitive. Non-time-sensitive information such as email, under NN, must be given an equal priority. In most cases, it doesn't matter so much if an email is delayed a minute or two, so why not allow an ISP to jiggle the data transmission so that the materials which must be given priority in order to have a better customer experience are? Is Hotmail or Yahoo News going to suffer significant harm if their pages take an extra moment or two to load, as opposed to the intermittent Netflix or Youtube experience? This is not a factor of paid priority for certain services, this is looking at it simply a matter of efficient optimization of a finite resource: Bandwidth. Instead of spending tons of cash upgrading lines, the same lines can be better utilised. A win for all concerned.

Now, it is certainly possible, and a large concern often stated above, that the exact same tool which can be used for providing better customer service in the most altruistic manner can also be used for 'evil', with paid prioritisation, costs, and so on. However, anti-trust regulation can be used to mitigate the negative use without prohibiting the positive use. In effect, the argument seems to be "Let's prohibit the good because it might be used for bad, even though we can punish the bad if it is abused." It's throwing the baby out with the bath water. NN can be seen to force inefficient use of infrastructure, let alone penalise inefficient use or place the more inefficient companies at a competitive disadvantage.

It's not as if such things, as I say, have not been going back for quite a few years. The FCC slapped Metro PCS for blocking VOIP services as far back as 2005. When Verizon was being funky with tethering applications in 2012, they ran afoul of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau. Nobody is being so naive as to say that the companies aren't going to stretch the limits of what they can get away with. Hey, if everyone followed the spirit of the law, let alone the intent, we wouldn't need a police force. But anti-trust is hardly a new concept and, though perhaps not perfect, overall does a pretty reasonable job of balancing corporate needs with consumer needs in multiple industries, to include computers. (Ask Google and Microsoft how they've been getting on recently in European courts, for example).

It can work, and an interesting debate here from some apparently fairly neutral perspective, on what a good regulatory structure could look like. It doesn't have to be NN, even if you're not of total faith with the FTC.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/washingtonbytes/2017/03/15/is-antitrust-the-right-framework-for-net-neutrality/#442718cb8b53

In the meantime, some new idiocy. https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/cdc-gets-list-of-forbidden-words-fetus-transgender-diversity/2017/12/15/f503837a-e1cf-11e7-89e8-edec16379010_story.html?utm_term=.637b0f23306c
The Trump administration is prohibiting officials at the nation’s top public health agency from using a list of seven words or phrases — including “fetus” and “transgender” — in any official documents being prepared for next year’s budget.
Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

[Edited to Add]
Sorry, forgot to address Blowfish's specific example.
The first instance seems to be more a matter of arguing over method, than of result or intent. I think we all accept as a reasonable practice that when you use a company's service made available for public use, that part of the trade is that said company gets a bit of advertising space to use on you. Be it on Youtube with adverts which pop up half-way through the video you are watching, through "Connect to this airport internet for free by watching this video", I am not hearing major outlash. The only difference here is that in the Comcast case presented, it was superimposing its advertising on what you were doing, instead of separating it out into a separate block. There are certainly some moral questions over the technique of basically modifying the data going to the browser, but it doesn't strike me as a major example of corporate evilness to make you see an advert you had no particular interest in seeing when using a public service.
As for the torrent, the same argument can be made as I did above. Torrents are not time-sensitive, and can be throttled a bit without significantly affecting the user experience. There is rarely a time expectation on such things anyway, as the seed numbers are entirely out of everyone's hand. There is a difference between optimisation, and gimping to the point of impracticality. If torrents were blocked to 1k/s, sure, a company could say "We are not blocking them!", but equally the anti-trust regulators can say "Yes, but you've gone way over what competition allows."

The lobbying is for profiteering and nothing else

Of course it's for profiteering. Comcast (my ISP) is going to want me to love its service and pay them lots and lots of money. And be so happy with my service (my wife and I tend to use our bandwidth for movies and gaming) that I will tell all my friends how happy I am with them, so they will also go pay Comcast lots of money. All without their having to spend metric tons of money in upgrading infrastructure. That's not to say that I cannot benefit from it at the same time, though. There is such a thing as a win-win. Why do I pay anyone money for a service, but because I believe I get value or enjoyment out of it?