Net Neutrality Bullshit

[xwred1]

I don't think mmos are as interchangeable as people make them sound. Once you start playing you get hooked and it can be addictive.

Wow runs well in wow, and is sufficiently non-carebearish for me to go around a grief people. And there's enough other people playing for me to go grief. Alot of my friends play it. Its a casual enough interest that if I couldn't play Wow I just wouldn't play any MMO.

I don't see how complaining about Wow is different from complaining about anything else. Is it invalid to complain about e.g. a crappy memory manufacturer? People complained about bad capacitors on motherboards from certain vendors and those vendors made a change.

You guys seem unusually hostile to complaints about Blizzard. I'm not even complaining so much as giving you guys an anecdotal story of what its like, the things that people complain about. When it happened to me last night, I just shrugged and went to bed. I hadn't really played much at all this weekend, but shortly after I started to put in a real session they had a restart.

[converge]

I've been made unusually hostile about it by the news.com story and increased attention it is getting. Its silly.

[xwred1]

I don't think its any different than complaining about anyone else's service or product. Most of the people complaining are Blizzard fan's, its a friendly complaint.. they like the game and are crossing their fingers for Blizzard to work through the issues.

Yeah the natural monopoly talk might be a little strained. Its like saying Apple has a monopoly on Macintosh computers or Dell has a monopoly on Dells. But MMOs do involve a network effect, and there's a time investment too -- if you have some guy in the game who has tons of gear and is all leveled up, you will be more reluctant to just dump him.

I've heard of snuff videos where people with characters like that kick the addiction and record themselves destroying all the equipment and then deleting the character :)

[converge]

Beware of large corporations in sheeps clothing asking for FCC enforcement of Internet access/content?

http://news.com.com/Net+neutrality+m...?tag=nefd.lede

[xwred1]

You mean Microsoft, Yahoo, and those guys? Seems obvious why they'd want it.

http://www.slate.com/id/2140850/fr/rss/

I can't wait to drop my current voip line for Comcast voip service once they start degrading mine.

[robosycho]

Lawsuits

I can't wait to drop my current voip line for Comcast voip service once they start degrading mine.

There is a slight issue with that. What about your current voip? Just because you don't have to worry about whats going on for whatever reason, how is that fair? They lose their customers because Comcast or whoever else is intentionally degrading their signals. I can see this sparking debate on a larger scale about information rights... Is the information that they modify yours or that of your voip provider? Or does it all belong to your ISP? Can anyone say lawsuits?

[xwred1]

Well they should pay Comcast to be able to reach me. I'm on Comcast's internet, buying a huge upload/hosting pipe isn't enough for the privilege of doing business with me.

[robosycho]

Well they should pay Comcast to be able to reach me. I'm on Comcast's internet, buying a huge upload/hosting pipe isn't enough for the privilege of doing business with me.

But then that changes the purpose of the ISP. Its no longer just connecting you to the web and other users, it now connects you selectively to other users. I don't see why I should pay someone not to handle the data that I am sending out. Or why the service that I am using should pay for the data that I send. By using the ISP I do, I entrust them to handle the information that I generate and request carefully. If I perform any online transactions and they aren't with the bank that my ISP is partnered with, will they not be processed? Will the numbers be slightly wrong? Will I simply not be able to reach my bank via the internet? Sure making a VoIP call fuzzy doesn't hurt me in the long run, but what will that open the door to when another enterprising individual takes advantage of it?

[Second]

I've heard of snuff videos where people with characters like that kick the addiction and record themselves destroying all the equipment and then deleting the character :)

Is this what you were referring to? I have no interest in the game, but the friend that showed this to me told me that this guy and all of his items were awesome. He also told me that this could be possible to fake because of beta testing on new servers or something by copying your character and then when you delete it, you are only deleting the copy, while making it seem like you are deleting the original. But like I said, I have no idea.

[xwred1]

I don't see why I should pay someone not to handle the data that I am sending out. Or why the service that I am using should pay for the data that I send. By using the ISP I do, I entrust them to handle the information that I generate and request carefully. If I perform any online transactions and they aren't with the bank that my ISP is partnered with, will they not be processed? Will the numbers be slightly wrong? Will I simply not be able to reach my bank via the internet? Sure making a VoIP call fuzzy doesn't hurt me in the long run, but what will that open the door to when another enterprising individual takes advantage of it?

Its their network, they should be able to do what they want. Some body has to pay them to supply broadband.

Is this what you were referring to?

Yeah, that looks like the one I heard of. Pretty good stuff.

[Deviant Ollam]

Its their network, they should be able to do what they want.

that's not exactly accurate. i've been following along with this thread as it's developed, unable to totally cobble together an opinion that embodies my respect for the free market and my distaste for non-neutral internet providers without sounding like a hypocrite.

here's how i've come to terms with the matter...

these companies chose to go into business and become internet service providers. not teleco service providers, not television service providers, but internet service providers. the internet, by its very nature, gains and sustains its value by virtue of the fact that it is a dumb (in the "unbiased" sense, not the "non-intelligent" sense) network which shows no priority to any of the traffic on it.*

when you pay for access to the internet (in a true and fair sense) you are not just paying for a package of bandwidth and connectivity, but rather you are paying for access to the ideal that is the internet... an anonymous, unregulated, open system whose greatest value to society and the world is its unbiased or "dumb" structure.

companies who are selling filtered or non-neutral internet access (which herein after i am going to start calling "crippled" internet access) are not truly providing what they advertise. they are giving people a TCP/IP connection which has links to the internet, but they are not actually allowing these people "access" to the internet in the fullest sense of the word.

i feel that if companies want to behave this way (and they certainly have a right to, since in a free country one should have the power to buy and sell any good and service you want as long as you do not interfere with another person's rights) they should be prohibited from calling themselves "internet service providers" and using words like "unlimited" to describe their service.

companines who filter or QoS anything other than a static figure of upstream and downstream bandwidth should advertise and operate as "network connectivity providers" and (perhaps) should be obliged to include prominent disclaimers in their advertising and service agreements which ensure customer's knowledge of the fact that they do not provide full, true "internet access."

this is just the beta version of my opinion. i'll keep refining it and look forward to more thoughts on the matter from people here as the matter develops. i'm chasing this philosophy like a hound. with a bit of luck and with the discourse the forums provides, i'll be able to tree it eventually.


for a much more detailed and developed summary of this argument, see Doc Searls and David Weinberger's terrific piece World of Ends.

[converge]

dead on...

[xwred1]

I wonder if it would be fair for the gov't to enforce a definition of Internet that means unfiltered. Like how they enforce the term "organic" (they do this, right?).

So you can't market yourself as an internet service provider unless you provide internet per your definition.

So converge, you're cool with heavily filtered isps as long as they don't advertise themselves as Internet then? Cause at first it seemed like the idea of neutrality at all was abhorrent to you.

In my area, I think the only person I can get unfiltered internet from is SBC. Comcast discriminates against Vonage and has vague bandwidth caps, and Clearwire (they advertise heavily in my area, to the point of putting on TV commercials about how they are better than comcast and sbc) blocks Vonage outright, along with alot of other ports and discriminates against p2p traffic.

Of course, none of their advertising mention this at all. They just talk about being fast, giving me internet, stuff like that.

[converge]

So converge, you're cool with heavily filtered isps as long as they don't advertise themselves as Internet then? Cause at first it seemed like the idea of neutrality at all was abhorrent to you.

of course I'm cool with heavily filtered ISPs .. I have no intention of using them.

come now.. who could possibly argue net neutrality as a bad concept in ideal situations. I pointed out that walking money or market competition is a great way to work towards that. but this is not what I'm railing against at all... I think Deviant touches on it quite well. Requiring clear advertising of services you are providing makes sense in a lot of cases. As a consumer it is generally your responsibility to read past the service hype, but truth in advertising is always a welcome thing. If the ideals of the Internet mandate complete transport free of content filtering/monitoring.. sounds GREAT to me. Demanding federal regulation of how the networks are privately managed is a completely different thing.. and just ludicrous in my opinion. argue elsewise, I'm listening :)

[xwred1]

Demanding federal regulation of how the networks are privately managed is a completely different thing..

Thats why its hard to come up with a good balance, because the idea of pure untainted Internet is (potentially) at odds with a free market in this case.

I'm not convinced its a good idea to leave it to the market to sort out. The problem is, it seems like broadband competition is pretty weak. Most of the time, you've got maybe two competitors. It doesn't seem unreasonable that they both draw their lines in the room and filter out different parts of the internet. So you're screwed with either one. So you can't rely in a free market because its too easy for them to just collude on that issue.

In my area I'm already almost screwed if I want Vonage service. My only choice if I want non-crappy Vonage service and broadband is SBC, and they're gonna charge me more for the DSL if I don't have a telephone line from them. So I'm still eating it a little bit there too.

Course, I can choose a Vonage competitor that isn't popular enough to be filtered down, but thats kind of unfair to Vonage.

With Telcos you can make an argument for gov regulation cause they built their networks as protected monopolies with some amount of subsidization. I don't think you can do that with the cable companies though, so then you're giving the cable companies a competitive advantage.

These companies are saying they need to tier off the internet (I'll get more into that in a moment) because someone needs to pay for new network infrastructure. Personally, I'd rather them charge what broadband Internet is worth than play these shell games. I'm sure I'm a minority though, the average broadband user would be oblivious to most of these things. To them, the internet is more like TV and they are just fed whatever the provider gives them.

Thats a whole other trend I don't like... making the internet more like TVs where its all about the big content providers. IMHO, doing stuff like blocking p2p traffic (in principle, blocking it because it is end to end, not because it might carry pirated material) and giving people crap uploads while turning around and promoting fast download speeds is a vector in that direction.

About tiered Internet, I think you can have two definitions of it. You can tier it so some people pay to get high priority traffic. Like a business gets their vpn traffic prioritized, maybe. Anything not prioritized is all equal. Prioritizing some things implies degredation of everything else, BUT that should only happen under congestion. The other kind of tiering put out there has intentional degradation in place targetting specific uses of the network that will apply all the time. I think I'm ok with the first kind of tiering, but I don't like the second kind.

Now, if the major broadband companies could put together packages I could buy for my house where none of my stuff is degraded or discriminated against, I think I'd be ok with it -- assuming it wasn't some outrageous price like a T1 or something. I don't think it can really be that expensive, it should be more inline with current prices if anything.