ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC’s Internet rules, critics say
ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC’s Internet rules, critics say
FCC plan rejected request to ban what agency calls "positive" discrimination.
“Why should we upgrade our tech when we can just artificially reduce capacity and charge more for priority access?”
Fuck these pricks.
The network can handle everyone currently on it yet they cry like it's causing them issues.
Fucking liars.
The issue is there are profits left on the table! Unacceptable!
When it's mafia it's extortion, when it's ISPs it's just "good business practices."
They might not be able to easily, but that's 100% on them for spending their obscene profits on yet another nesting yacht rather than upgrading their infrastructure to actually keep pace with demand
It's yachts, all the way down
The fuck is “fast gaming”. And what games demand this?
I would guess that since it mentions teleconferencing and gaming, that they want to create low-latency fast-lanes.
But they also mention TikTok, so I am not completely sure that they are referring to latency.
This article isn't very good at explaining what they're talking about on a technical level.
Low latency matters a lot more than bandwidth in any game that isn't turn based.
Oof, they don't have net neutrality over there eh?
Gonna be bollocks for them until they can get that brought in. There's an election coming up there right? Maybe they can vote for the party that pledges to bring in net neutrality laws, it's about time they had them considering it's 2024.
I wish them the best of luck <3
Net neutrality being brought up as an election topic would be very unusual for our politics. Our two party system is very set on the topics that they like and don't like to bring up.
Of course the parties have negative incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum about these topics that they fight so hard to advertise. Otherwise, they might need to come up with new reasons for people to vote for them.
Except that ignores how net neutrality only became a thing in the last 2 decades there’s only so many presidential admins in that period. So 5 elections vs 20 years to discuss a topic… it’s not weird that it comes up more outside of an election year. Feigning both sides/everything’s rigged bullshit is a mindless simplification.
Still, I can’t tell if you’re choosing to ignore how Obama campaigned for it or how Biden and Harris campaigned way more for it, especially concerning reversing trumps FCC decisions.
No reason to ignore the fact that Biden made it a priority in the first year or so of the admin.
Acting like it’s rigged absolves republicans of their actions: “Net Neutrality Won’t Survive a Trump Presidency” and lumps good folks in with the worst.
Net neutrality couldn’t happen while republicans block the commissioners for the job: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23800161/gigi-sohn-fcc-nomination-dark-money-campaign-net-neutrality-profile
So why not blame it on the people who are actually documented as destroying net-neutrality and advocating against it. Why instead invent some all powerful Illuminati like cabal only to end up making it a both sides thing?
Republican attacks over bs tweets are just one of the reasons we can’t have nice things. Another reason is because people like to imagine a rigged system pulling the strings to pretend there’s some order in the chaos. All it does is suck the support away from anyone trying to do the right thing.
Data is data unless they can commodify it. Data is like a river that never ends. Doesn’t cost them Anything. We are subject to monopolies who charge above and beyond maintenance and massive profits while destroying competition
You seem to be misinformed on how the internet works. Nothing is "free". ISPs have to buy equipment, pay for expensive physical connectivity (without disturbing existing infrastructure), and usually have to deal with constant, ever increasing bandwidth requirements.
I'm all for a bit of net neutrality, but ISPs tend to get a lot of flak for policies like this, for seemingly no reason. For example, let's say ISP A and Upstream B have a mutual bandwidth sharing policy (called Peering) where both sides benefit equally from the connectivity. ISP A determines that N is using all the bandwidth to Upstream B. ISP A has three options: N gets all the bandwidth to Upstream B (disturbing other traffic to/from that network), N has to be throttled to allow all traffic equally, or ISP A and Upstream B need to expand their network again (new equipment, new physical links) which will cost a lot of money. N doesn't even pay ISP A or Upstream B, they just pay their ISP C. In the end, ISP A has to throttle N, and N is the one who had to expand/change their business model to deliver content to their customers. They had to go out and buy services from many upstream providers to even the load and designed a solution to install Caching boxes inside each ISP's datacenter so their traffic could reach end users without going upstream.
That's a good summary!
IMO, the customers of A are paying A to access to the internet, including N. So A should charge their customers enough that they can pay for the equipment to deliver that.
In a working market with many participants, customers can choose a cheaper ISP that has congested/throttled peering, or a more expensive ISP with gold-plated interconnects.
The problem is that in the US, typically your choice of ISP is limited by geography. In many other places you have open fiber networks where the last mile is shared and then you can choose what ISP you want ontop of that, and the ISP is what determines how good your peering is.
And installing caching boxes inside of ISPs is actually a really efficient solution (as well as peer-to-peer)
enshittification.
my theory is that they are pushing for more expensive upgrades like fiber.
Charter has/had a dark fiber ring ready for use back in 2005. I assume most other cable providers have similar, because they had to build it out after the first FCC spending bill after 99
Per the article, this looks to be limited to mobile internet and not traditional broadband. While I can understand the practicality of carving out unique bands of the wireless spectrum for specific uses, charging extra for it seems scummy.
Its always, no no this is for X, not Y.
(a few years pass)
They accepted X, now there is precedent, let's take Y.
This is the start, not the finish.
Fight this or it will make its way to your interests.
My $0.02.
Sure, it’s $0.02 now, but in a few years that’ll be precedent and you’ll start asking for $0.04. I’m on to your game!
What!?
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Some net neutrality proponents are worried that soon-to-be-approved Federal Communications Commission rules will allow harmful fast lanes because the plan doesn't explicitly ban "positive" discrimination.
FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's proposed rules for Internet service providers would prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.
Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick, who has consistently argued for stricter net neutrality rules, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that "harmful 5G fast lanes are coming."
In a different filing last month, several advocacy groups similarly argued that the "no-throttling rule needs to ban selective speeding up, in addition to slowing down."
That filing was submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Technology Institute at New America, Public Knowledge, Fight for the Future, and United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry.
The draft order argues that the FCC's definition of "throttling" is expansive enough that an explicit ban on what the agency called positive discrimination isn't needed:
The original article contains 635 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
I hope the EU handles that. I'm happy that I'm not in the US.
Maybe they mean low latency internet connections. This might need some better hardware installations on the side of the provider. This is probably not about net neutrality.
Read the article before commenting, Nimrod.
The article is about positive discrimination. The so-called critics fear that there is room for additional fees for for enhanced services, even the FCC clearly says that services should not be degraded and treated equally.
When FCC says that they never banned all prioritisation every "critic" is in state of alert. They ignore the fact that internet needs kinds of regulations to work properly on technical level and conflate the statement with the one above. FCC probably allows technical measures to regulate important cases of traffic shaping and even blocking when it's harmful for the service overall. This implies the fact that net neutrality can be guaranteed with these regulations.