Obama ruins the internet

lomiller said:
What the ISP’s have said is that (for now) they don’t want to charge their users any more they are only looking to charge additional fees to companies who provide services over the internet. Since these charges will end up being passed onto consumers via higher prices anyway, maybe Twitter should cover the costs by adding a surcharge to tweets from selected users…
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Yeah, but for the user that's a distinction without a difference, I suppose.
 
PhantomWolf said:
They can't pay to have someone else slowed down, but they can pay to make sure that they are always faster, which at the end of the day achieves the same result.
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Exactly.

"We're not throttling the startup, Twitter has paid for priority access!"

Aside from the pure commercial, profit-driven shenanigans this will produce is the door it opens. If you can "slow" traffic down (by whatever cleverly named mechanism), can you slow it down to the point that browsers would time out before receiving any useful amount of data?

Could a website be blockaded from public view without any kind of court order to shut it down/suspend web access?

Creating an analogy for that has to go absurd places.

See, here at the print shop, we produce and bundle the newspaper. Advertisers, of course, take up a lot of the total page space in many newspapers. Well, we've streamlined our operation and now have Priority Printing Services™. Our advertising customers can pay for this and their ads will be printed by the machines, guaranteed to be seen by every reader. We will continue our Standard Tier*, naturally, for all of our customers!

*Standard Tier services feature enthusiastic interns armed with a set of colored sharpies who will replicate your advertisement on as many papers as they possibly can, but no assurances can be made they will be complete or accessible on all papers circulated.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
How would that not violate anti-trust law?
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It would and the FCC chairman mentioned that the enforcer of antitrust laws, the FTC, is responsible for stopping that bad action if it occurs.

Of course what he didn't bother to mention is that the rules being revoked allowed the FCC to stop the bad actor quickly. While anti-trust actions typically take so long to complete that by the time it resolves it is too late for the damaged competitor to recover (e.g Microsoft illegally killed Netscape).
 
Delphic Oracle said:
Exactly.

"We're not throttling the startup, Twitter has paid for priority access!"

Aside from the pure commercial, profit-driven shenanigans this will produce is the door it opens. If you can "slow" traffic down (by whatever cleverly named mechanism), can you slow it down to the point that browsers would time out before receiving any useful amount of data?

Could a website be blockaded from public view without any kind of court order to shut it down/suspend web access?

Creating an analogy for that has to go absurd places.

See, here at the print shop, we produce and bundle the newspaper. Advertisers, of course, take up a lot of the total page space in many newspapers. Well, we've streamlined our operation and now have Priority Printing Services™. Our advertising customers can pay for this and their ads will be printed by the machines, guaranteed to be seen by every reader. We will continue our Standard Tier*, naturally, for all of our customers!

*Standard Tier services feature enthusiastic interns armed with a set of colored sharpies who will replicate your advertisement on as many papers as they possibly can, but no assurances can be made they will be complete or accessible on all papers circulated.
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Not really, unless their previous standard was for all adverts to be done by enthusiastic interns armed with a set of colored sharpies.

A startup will have access to the speed they pay for, so whatever the ISP service of the server is the speed they will run at, and if another ISP's customer goes there they would do so at the standard speed of the network. They can't be blocked by throttling down the customer's speed or the websites' ISP speed because that would result in a breach in contract with either the customer or the website. Rather what they would do is have a throttled rate as their Standard rate, and then increase the speed of Priority sites. It'd be like say you had 30 mbs download speed to all the web except for the sites that paid extra for premium service, and they were running at 150 mbs instead.
 
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PhantomWolf said:
It'd be like say you had 30 mbs download speed to all the web except for the sites that paid extra for premium service, and they were running at 150 mbs instead.
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For example... Say your ISP's standard package speed on cable is 30mps down, 10mps up and they decide to create a content provider that competes with Netflicks. They can't slow Netflix below your contracted 30mps, but they can entice you to their site by running it at 100mps down for their ISP customers. Same for is they wanted to compete with Steam, while they can't cause your Steam downloads to run slower, they can say come to ours and you can download 5x faster. Or say your ISP decides to partner with iTunes so that now you can download from iTunes at at 150mps while the likes of Spotify can only be used at 30mps. Or perhaps they partner with Bing and allow connections to their searches to be run at 75mps compared to Google or Dogpile's 30mps connections.

And that's the issue, it decreases the ability to compete with those that control the gates or have loads of money to spend on priority treatment, creating the ability for ISP's to direct their customers to specific websites over others.
 
PhantomWolf said:
For example... Say your ISP's standard package speed on cable is 30mps down, 10mps up and they decide to create a content provider that competes with Netflicks. They can't slow Netflix below your contracted 30mps, but they can entice you to their site by running it at 100mps down for their ISP customers. Same for is they wanted to compete with Steam, while they can't cause your Steam downloads to run slower, they can say come to ours and you can download 5x faster. Or say your ISP decides to partner with iTunes so that now you can download from iTunes at at 150mps while the likes of Spotify can only be used at 30mps. Or perhaps they partner with Bing and allow connections to their searches to be run at 75mps compared to Google or Dogpile's 30mps connections.

And that's the issue, it decreases the ability to compete with those that control the gates or have loads of money to spend on priority treatment, creating the ability for ISP's to direct their customers to specific websites over others.
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I bet one internet that pretty much every person hooked up to one of the big ISPs will be getting a letter in the next few months which says (in a dozen pages of really small font legalese) that they reserve the right to slow down service to whomever, whenever, and whyever they feel like. But they will give you the option to cancel your service with them yourself if you do not agree to these terms (standard cancelation fees may apply).

Anyone want to take that bet?
 
paulhutch said:
Of course what he didn't bother to mention is that the rules being revoked allowed the FCC to stop the bad actor quickly. While anti-trust actions typically take so long to complete that by the time it resolves it is too late for the damaged competitor to recover (e.g Microsoft illegally killed Netscape).
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I see.

Unfortunately you cited a bad example - Netscape needed killing.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
I see.

Unfortunately you cited a bad example - Netscape needed killing.
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Except they didn't kill it, Netscape continued on to v9 which stopped being supported in 2009, 8 years after the case. It also in part lives on in Firefox.
 
Upchurch said:
Funny side story. I actually bought a copy of Netscape back in the day. It came in a box.
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I used Mosaic (and later Netscape), but I don't recall ever paying for a browser in my lifetime.
 
PhantomWolf said:
For example... Say your ISP's standard package speed on cable is 30mps down, 10mps up and they decide to create a content provider that competes with Netflicks. They can't slow Netflix below your contracted 30mps, but they can entice you to their site by running it at 100mps down for their ISP customers. Same for is they wanted to compete with Steam, while they can't cause your Steam downloads to run slower, they can say come to ours and you can download 5x faster. Or say your ISP decides to partner with iTunes so that now you can download from iTunes at at 150mps while the likes of Spotify can only be used at 30mps. Or perhaps they partner with Bing and allow connections to their searches to be run at 75mps compared to Google or Dogpile's 30mps connections.

And that's the issue, it decreases the ability to compete with those that control the gates or have loads of money to spend on priority treatment, creating the ability for ISP's to direct their customers to specific websites over others.
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Does your contract say you have to have 30mbps from Netflix specifically?

This is where the tapatalk signature that annoys people used to be
 
Delphic Oracle said:
Does your contract say you have to have 30mbps from Netflix specifically?

This is where the tapatalk signature that annoys people used to be
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Or maybe they just raise the price or lower the speeds of the plans they offer. Except for their content of course.
 
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