The FCC is Expected to Propose the Return of Net Neutrality Protections Oct 19th

CrayonMaster@midwest.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 1192 points – The FCC is Expected to Propose the Return of Net Neutrality Protections Oct 19th - Let’s Hope They Get it Right!
eff.org

Network neutrality is the idea that internet service providers (ISPs) should treat all data that travels over their networks fairly, without discrimination in favor of particular apps, sites or services

The FCC will meet on October 19th to vote on proposing Title II reclassification that would support accompanying net neutrality protections

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I will post Fuck Ajit Pai every time I see news about net neutrality until it's fucking back.

F U C K

A J I T

P A I

Ajit creamPai is just a puppet of the corporations, he's a dick that's corrupt and rubbing the fact that he's corrupt in your face, but he's just the most visible festering boil on the whole ugly face of our government.

Fuck Ajit Pai!

That dude was such a fucking cunt

I mean fuck Ajit Pai and all, but that is a very efficient mug and it doesn't deserve hate for being associated with the grim reaper of digital freedom.

We need to end unjustified hatred of big mugs now.

I use a big mug but Pai's mug is both unreasonable and hideous.

I missed the word "post" on the first read through and was rather concerned about your method of protest.

Strong and brave 👏👏👏👏

Well you're weak and cowardly

Let em know keyboard warrior 👏 👏 👏

That’s great but can we stop rubberbanding our rights in and out of existence?

To do that the current party in favor of removing rights needs to be kept out of power long enough that they conclude that removing rights is an electoral loser and changes their ideology accordingly.

I'm not going to hold my breath.

hopefully at least when ISPs and companies see that it’ll just be back and forth, and that things like “fast lanes” can’t be relied upon in business planning there just won’t be a market for it, or at least the fuckery will be significantly diminished because it’s not reliable long-term

ISP's are also the same companies that market and sell fast lanes(i.e. 5G), and they have bigger bribing/lobbying pockets than everyone on Lemmy and reddit combined. They ain't changing shit and will throw money at it to make sure their business models don't change (hint - look at the supreme court).

as aStonedSanata mentioned, different tech isn’t what we’re talking about: fibre shouldn’t be limited to the speeds of, say ADSL or cable to keep things neutral

what we’re talking about here is, for example, netflix paying your ISP to prioritise traffic to their service over other services… this causes an enormous disadvantage to new startups, because they likely can’t afford to pay a similar fee or even enter into complex agreements with every carrier! in which case, netflix has a better service not because they’re better: just because they’re incumbent

of course these kind of things happen all over the place, but it’s the exact failure of capitalist systems that governments should seek to patch with regulations (like net neutrality) because it’s not good for consumers, the economy, or innovation… which are all the very things that capitalism is meant to promote!

Along with busting monopolies. Which the Biden admin is actually trying to tackle.

New technology is not fast lanes like you are implying though. It’s functionally different equipment. Running services is relatively cheap but expanding them and installing new technology like 5G requires a lot more physical equipment due to 5Gs lower range. So it does indeed cost more. Atleast initially and most likely continuously as it requires more physical equipment. So more failures innately.

I'm aware 5G is new hardware and infrastructure, but my point is ISPs And service carriers are one and the same, and there are multiple business models that throttle speeds (ie premium 4G service vs deprioritized cheaper 4G service), fast lanes in 5G, whatever other QCI stuff the carriers are doing - all stuff they don't want to change and my point was they will spend money fighting it in court vs willingly changing anything

I still can't work out what 5g is supposed to do. Can you ELI5 please?

It enables low latency fast speed connections to large amounts of devices. Its drawback is that it has a shorter wavelength reducing its range.

https://www.emfexplained.info/site/misc/image/Fullsize/11248.png

This shows integration with the 4G towers.

“The shorter wavelength means 5G can carry a lot of data much faster than 4G, but it also means a much shorter range. 4G wavelengths have a range of about 10 miles. 5G wavelengths have a range of about 1,000 feet, not even 2% of 4G's range. So to ensure a reliable 5G signal, there needs to be a lot of 5G cell towers and antennas everywhere. We're talking on every lamppost, traffic light, etc. because even trees can block 5G signals.” https://www.businessinsider.com/5g-high-speed-internet-cellular-network-issues-switch-2019-4

Have to click description to see the transcript.

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I'm not sure long term viability is a huge concern for them as long as they can make a dollar today.

that’s true, but this would require time and money to implement, market, etc, and would almost certainly require big b2b contracts to be signed

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My internet is run by my coop power company, just a reminder that all the major ISPs took billions and promised fiber and then royalty fucked us, so now my internet is run by a rural power company.

Call your power company and find out if they're installing fiber. Support this move as it weakens Comcast and AT&T's death grip.

Net Neutrality has been taken away before and it can be taken away again. Just get with a coop. I've torrented literal terabytes without even an email telling me not to .

Co-ops are a good thing^tm^ , I belong to several small co-ops, from electric, to telephone, to farm.

A coop near us is rolling out 1Gb fiber up/down to rural homes. Considering most of them could only get DSL or use 4G/3G internet, it is amazing. I have to wait to see if they come in town for their rollout, as they have to pay another power company to use their power poles. Everyone I know is switching to the coop as it is cheaper, more stable, and unlimited.

my power company is privately owned :(

I didn't even know co-op power companies were common, it seems like an odd (but good) service to be provided by a co-op. I wonder if there's any in the UK

They're mostly in rural parts of the states where private (read: investor owned) utilities determined the region wouldn't turn a large enough profit to expand there and the state's public utility commission didn't mandate their expansion

Ah I see, well it's nice the circumstances existed for them to come about. It's good having goods and services being provided by co-ops, for the workers especially but usually for the customers too.

This is a better idea than Net Neutrality. Stop begging government to fix things for you when you and your neighbors can just fix it yourself.

The thing is though public utilities are supposed to be implemented and paid for by the tax payers of the area. Suggesting that the government shouldn't be doing what we pay tax money for doesn't make sense. That would be like saying , "oh, I know your taxes pay for your government to upkeep the roads, but stop bothering them about it and you and your neighbours band together to fix that sink hole, and those potholes, and reline that crosswalk".

Plus these ISP's took government money to provide and upgrade infrastructure and then didn't do that and faced basically no consequences.

ISPs mostly aren't public utilities, so none of that applies to them. Taxes generally don't go to them. They're no more public utilities or tax funded than a company that would come to your house and cut your grass.

It is true that several times in the last few decades the government has handed ISPs some cash in exchange for doing specific things like expanding service to certain areas. It's more than justified to be mad at them for not holding up their end. That doesn't make them public utilities, though. The government deserves a bunch of blame for that, too, because it's stupid and handed a bunch of private companies a bunch of money with no accountability mechanism. Of course they're gonna take the money and run.

That's why I'm saying stop trusting the government to fix things like this.

The government gave these companies money to build up and expand their infrastructure though. On more than one occasion. And we don't have anything to show for it.

Ajit Pai deserve as many middle fingers as this one.

Maybe this will be the one thing that will fix my ISP and let me play online video games without frequent disconnects. I think it's bad node or something, but I had my ISP at my house over 8 times and they couldn't figure it out. Meanwhile my unifi gateway shows a high ping at least once a day.

Go spectrum!

Go spectrum!

I've noticed my Spectrum Internet has really degraded in quality in the last months, which coincides with them doing a whole bunch of upgrades to their network and such.

All of my devices in the house that use the Internet now lag in their UI presentation speed, where they didn't before.

Same with me. Over the last few months it's started to take tens of seconds to connect to any websites that aren't Google, Facebook, YouTube etc. Idk what it is or why it's happening, but it's to the point where I'm switching ISPs because it's wasting too much of my time.

I’m switching ISPs

Lucky you.

The only other option I have is a 5G cellular network, and if my cell phone is any indication, my Internet quality when I live would not be good, as there's just not enough towers in my area for the new tech.

I assume you must live before 5G service was a thing

I assume you must live before 5G service was a thing

Why would you assume that?

I was born on the day that 5G was rolled out.

j/k. :)

Change your DNS to see if it's a resolution issue.

Change your DNS to see if it’s a resolution issue.

Thanks. Yeah I was thinking about that, but I would then want to know why all of a sudden my DNS lookups were a lot slower then before, if that is the problem.

Their upgrading to your area could add more hops to resolve your dns. Doesn't hurt to test. Can apply it to a single device with issue you mentioned, flush dns (or restart device) and see if it resolved the issue.

Their upgrading to your area could add more hops to resolve your dns.

I honestly doubt that, but even if so, that would add a very few milliseconds to the round trip, not enough for a human being to really notice.

And I'm definitely noticing a difference now.

I just hope nothing "extra" gets tacked on....

Cool, now break up the monopolies while you're at it FAANG should be like 500 companies, not 5

The internet is healing.........Don't look over there, it's already necrotic...

We just need to cut that part off. Sorry Facebook, Amazon, Google, et al.

Hell yes. Glad to see some sense returning to government if a bit slowly at times

Did anything noteworthy happen as a result of removing net neutrality?

What didn't happen was internet being classified as a title II telecommunications service. So there's one consequence.

I was being genuine, there was a lot of doomsayers about what would come next and to my eye nothing changed.

Mobile carriers took advantage almost immediately by offering preferred services that wouldn't use your mobile data. Listening to Pandora? No problem! Listening to Napster or Tidal? That's data usage. And that's a pretty tame example.

Yes, it's a lot of subtle things like this that are anti competitive in their nature. These things may not seem all doom and gloom but the point is that without regulation there is no stopping them from doing worse.

Xfinity could start throttling streaming services like Netflix in favor of their own streaming service Peacock and there would be nothing to stop them except that it might piss off their customers.

For anyone who was confused by what "vote to propose" means:

If the FCC issues the notice as expected on October 19th, the next steps would be a public comment phase followed by issuance of a final rule. This process could result in a final rule restoring net neutrality requirements around spring of 2024.

Did companies ever actually do anything after net neutrality went away? I still think it's a great thing to have but just genuinely curious if anything really happened cause I didn't notice much.

Did companies ever actually do anything after net neutrality went away? I still think it’s a great thing to have but just genuinely curious if anything really happened cause I didn’t notice much.

Well I doubt if companies would tell you "we are giving you a worse Internet experience so we can make more money", voluntarily.

It's plausible that some of the websites you like run faster because ISPs aren't throttling them, while throttling the competition.

My understanding is that they mostly haven't, with a couple exceptions like a few ISPs offering to priorities to pings for gaming (as FeelThePower mentioned), throttle certain protocols (e.g. Torrenting), or refuse to carry traffic for certain sites (e.g. Kiwi Farms). All of this would be prevented under net neutrality.

As far as I'm aware though, an extremely overwhelmingly portion of traffic (like you'd have to do a lot of digging to find an example otherwise) already adheres to net neutrality since it's pretty pointless for a company to spend resources and goodwill to mess with traffic.

I don't think too much will change. It is nice in the sense it will prevent an ISP from doing things against specific sites, although like mentioned above most of the protections are theoretical ATM.

Can someone tldr what's net neutrality?

tldr: net neutrality means everything that uses an internet connection is treated equally. EX: cox communications offers a "fast lane" for gamers on their networks, but if all connections were treated neutrally, everything would be as fast as possible by default without the need for an upgraded service plan.

That's actually kinda backwards.

User speeds can still be tiered under net neutrality. But the same cap must be applied to all data.

So they can't slow down a user's Twitch connection versus their connection to YouTube live streaming. It all has to be treated the same.

A good example was when T-Mobile had 2 gig data plans, but uncapped Netflix usage. So YouTube, Prime Video, etc were at a huge disadvantage to Netflix for those phone users.

Internet infrastructure companies have to treat all traffic equally.

For example, without net neutrality, Comcast could elect to throttle any streaming services that they didn’t own / co-own. So great speeds for Peacock and Hulu, but was a Max, Netflix, AppleTV, etc all get throttled unless you pay up.

Can someone tldr what’s net neutrality?

Simplified, your ISP cannot favor one company over another when delivering their website content to your computer. All data must be delivered equally.

Wait, Net Neutrality was removed?

Yeah, and the media is owned by comcast and AT&T.

Did you know that AT&T bought time warner?

And Disney bought Fox.

So of course none of the media outlet covered that happening...because they're owned by the people who benefit from net neutrality being gone.

Sticky olde' Ajit creamPai likes to get his special treatment from the telecom companies that paid bribes to get him into his position. I just hope that his replacement is as good as Tom Wheeler was.

One of the many things fucked during the Trump years. Easy to have lost it in all that noise.

Why do you think paid subscriptions with a tier I've been a thing, it was one of the first things Donald Trump did

What would you all say if I started an ISP that offered $3 a month for service only to a handful of websites? That would be prohibited under Net Neutrality, yet I could see something like that being useful to plenty of people, like my grandparents who use the Internet only to send emails and check their local news.

I don't like it. If someone only wanted Facebook but then considered fact checking something they read, they wouldn't be able to.

And any link that came up, like to a patient portal from your doctor, might not be supported

Websites arent just one domain, they use all different kinds of CDN's and external content. If you only whitelist certain domains then virtually all sites you whitelist would be broken anyways.

How would such a thing be financially viable? Once the ability to connect to any website exists, the physical cost to access everything else is essential nothing.

It will be interesting to see how reddit reacts to this because they were ALL IN on net neutrality back in the day, I was even part of their filing with the FCC, but their recent turn against API features goes patently against the whole notion of Net Neutrality.

Good chunk of the people who give a hoot about this, have already migrated from Reddit, so hard to say, who knows though? Guess we’ll see

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