ECA Net Neutrality madness

· 625 words · 3 minute read

I swear… Government enforced net neutrality people can be downright maddening at times with their lack of logic and lack of knowledge.

I received this email from the ECA wanting me to call Obama and complain that he isn’t advancing government controlled internet further… Never mind that I signed up for the ECA because of the Schwarzenegger supreme court case, and not for this nonsense.

On December 21, the FCC will meet and it’s reported that FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski will outline his Net Neutrality proposal with a vote before the end of the year. Instead of the preservation of a neutral internet where traffic is treated equally, we have that the proposal would://

Require wired broadband providers to let subscribers access all legal content, applications, and services with the flexibility to manage network congestion and spam as long as they publicly disclose their network management approach.

Allow broadband providers to experiment with dedicated networks to route traffic from specialized services like smart grids and home security systems as long as they don’t hurt the public internet.

Permit tiered pricing.

This is not a “neutral internet.” This is changing the definition of Net Neutrality and declaring “mission accomplished.”

Write the FCC now and tell them we won’t stand for this bait and switch.

Net Neutrality was promised by President Obama upon his election. This is not Net Neutrality. We need to speak up to make sure we get the law of the land we were promised. Write to the FCC today!

Happy gaming,

The second and third ones are the insane ones. You don’t want them to be able to run data from other services over their network if they are a broadband provider? So you mean… Cable internet providers shouldn’t be able to route data for their cable boxes and route TV shows over their network? Phone companies that have broadband shouldn’t be able to run their voice calls over the network? Both of these are “dedicated networks” running alongside their internet connections… They’re just ensuring that they can keep doing that as well.

And the tiered pricing thing? So you don’t want people to be able to pay for a 256k/256k connection for $15 if they want, or to upgrade to a 15000k/1024k connection for $60? Personally, I would love to be able to use faster connections by paying for them.

As far as traffic management goes, you honestly don’t mean that you want the internet company to have no recourse against people cheating the TCP protocol and flooding their network with connections so that their packets get more bandwidth than normal users, right? This is the main thing they want to have control over. Bittorrent users who run their software during peak hours should yield to other people doing downloads. Bittorrent can be left on during non-peak hours and use all of that non-peak bandwidth if they want, but when they do that during peak hours, it should be expected that they would get lower priority so that everyone can get good service… Unfortunately Bittorrent and other swarm connection packages cheat by making themselves look like hundreds of separate connections, each getting as much priority as those single connections other applications use under the current style of routing. All they want to be able to do is to enforce some sort of niceness to these programs so other people can actually use the internet that they’ve paid for. I personally would look at some sort of system where the more data you send rapidly, the lower priority it would get. That way those who interact with the net less often would get very quick results in congestion, while those who are doing massive transfers would have their packets dropped slightly more often.