Ya know, you're such an amazingly funny guy, it's no wonder nobody takes you seriously.

This is my area of expertise. I built the Bell System, the greatest communication company the world has ever known. Remember Bell Labs? The people drank the Kool-Aid poured by MCI that they could do it cheaper and better if Ma Bell were dead.

Anyway if this "fast lane" passes it will only affect your ability to watch free dancing cat videos because Netflix bought more bandwidth. It will not noticeably affect anything but streaming video.

Is this a grab for control of the Wide World of the Web? Of course it is.
Ma Bell is dead and yet the people weep.

I think you are suffering from lack of imagination. Cat videos today..but who knows how we will be using the web 5 years from now.

I bought a phone last thinking that because I could check email on wi-fi with it it would cover all my needs.

Now suddenly you can do deposit cheques using your phone camera or scan barcodes or all sort of the useful things that my stupid phone simply can't do. I suffered from a fatal lack of imagination and now am stuck with a phone that is so slow its not worth me getting a mobile data plan for. Which means that because our school district hasn't put wi-fi in my classroom I have to occasionally piggy back the wi-fi on my student's phones if I need to download something that might be useful to the lesson.

So let's talk about this streaming cats business. I don't stream videos of cats in my classroom. I stream videos of experiments, because the school district is so underfunded we don't have any lab equipment. The students doing the online classes stream instructional videos.

Again, you are suffering from a lack of imagination if you think that everyone not only uses the internet the way you do, but that they always will.

It's not exactly a lack of imagination. He's showing a complete misunderstanding of the fundamental issue between backbone providers and ISPs. Simply creating the Bell System isn't enough expertise to understand how the peering system of the modern internet works.

So let's talk about this streaming cats business. I don't stream videos of cats in my classroom. I stream videos of experiments, because the school district is so underfunded we don't have any lab equipment. The students doing the online classes stream instructional videos.

You are correct but how would an American ISP affect you in Canada. You have way more problems up there with your ISPs than we do down here. Your ISP are more restrictive in how much bandwidth you can use than ours. That restricts everything not just streaming video. Why do they have to stream videos from the US of A?

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I'll just bet Al Gore is involved......he must wanna throttle the internet.
After all, he invented the thingy and he must feel guilty about it contributing to that global warming theory of his.

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"Freedom is just Chaos, with better lighting." Alan Dean Foster

It's not exactly a lack of imagination. He's showing a complete misunderstanding of the fundamental issue between backbone providers and ISPs. Simply creating the Bell System isn't enough expertise to understand how the peering system of the modern internet works.

You want to play? Let's play. The Bell System was the entire package, no peering was necessary. One system it worked. Go drink more MCI Kool-Aid. How is that competition working out for you.

I say leave it as it is. Let them do as Netflix has done and set up their own CDN and place their own servers at ISPs this avoids peering. Netflix uses 1/3 of the bandwidth of the entire Interweb during peak viewing hours. Don't tell me what I know. I question what you know.

So are you for or against "net neutrality"?

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It's not exactly a lack of imagination. He's showing a complete misunderstanding of the fundamental issue between backbone providers and ISPs. Simply creating the Bell System isn't enough expertise to understand how the peering system of the modern internet works.

You want to play? Let's play. The Bell System was the entire package, no peering was necessary. One system it worked. Go drink more MCI Kool-Aid. How is that competition working out for you.

I say leave it as it is. Let them do as Netflix has done and set up their own CDN and place their own servers at ISPs this avoids peering. Netflix uses 1/3 of the bandwidth of the entire Interweb during peak viewing hours. Don't tell me what I know. I question what you know.

So are you for or against "net neutrality"?

Yes. I want to play. First, display to me that you understand the peering issue at hand.

I am very much in favor of net neutrality. But what does net neutrality mean to you and how do you define it before we continue.

So let's talk about this streaming cats business. I don't stream videos of cats in my classroom. I stream videos of experiments, because the school district is so underfunded we don't have any lab equipment. The students doing the online classes stream instructional videos.

You are correct but how would an American ISP affect you in Canada. You have way more problems up there with your ISPs than we do down here. Your ISP are more restrictive in how much bandwidth you can use than ours. That restricts everything not just streaming video. Why do they have to stream videos from the US of A?

Again, you miss the point of the issue. The ISPs are going to the content providers, such as Netflix, and demanding more money out of them for which the ISP's customers already pay access for. They are double-dipping by charging both the users they sell internet bandwidth to and the content providers trying to reach customers.

So how would an American ISP affect someone in Canada? Easy. If their Canadian ISP takes the same route as say Comcast has done with Netflix and charge Netflix to pay them money to reach their customers, Netflix must in turn increase their prices to people accessing their content to offset these increased costs.

With net neutrality, ISPs like Comcast are forced to allow Netflix traffic, and all other traffic through, without charging both ends or degrading performance - performance which is already paid for by the customer.

my suggestion is that it may be time to consider changing the model from one that runs all communication through centralized isp's to one that is more distributed by nature.

while wireless routers are not designed to communicate in this way modest firmware changes could fix this,as well as some caching software for frequently vued files on the computer side a lot of the redundant communication would have to pass over the isp only once rather than time after time.so smatter vue's dancing kitty video and while he vue's it 3 more people in the general area also want this video so it gets cached across several local hard drives and each subsiquint
request is handled locally until no requests come in for long enough for the file to time out making the space available for other caching.
this would work for very local clusters like my apartment complex the one next door and the one across the street.
for longer range connections some of the routers in each cluster would have to be able to talk at longer range to talk to routers in other clusters.
the idea is let the isp's do what they want but be able to bypass the isp's when necessary hopefully they will realize that they are in the business of selling a commodity and will get back to selling as much of it as they can as cheaply as they can and if this fails then we can just keep adding bypass until they become irrelevant.

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my suggestion is that it may be time to consider changing the model from one that runs all communication through centralized isp's to one that is more distributed by nature.

That's not the way it is setup currently.

You have backbone providers, literally they have control and are responsible for the entire internet backbone. Companies like Level3, CenturyLink, Cogent, Savvis. Then you have ISPs, some of whom are also backbone providers like AT&T, Sprint, SBC, & Verizon.

The way Net neutrality works is these backbone providers agree to let data pass through each other's network without charging each other. They treat all data the same, no matter if it is streaming video, emails, SETI@Home workunits, whatever.

The way the entire industry is setup is that backbone providers charge ISPs to access the Internet. ISPs in turn sell off portions of this access to customers; i.e. you and me. The waters are muddied by the fact that some ISPs are also backbone providers.

Since being a backbone provider requires incredibly fast networks, the cost of laying out and maintaining the fiber optic cable can be onerously expensive. Therefore backbone providers will maintain an entire area of land and agree to peer data from other backbone providers for free; the costs come from their customers, the ISPs.

Since the ISPs are the ones that offer access to the internet, the problem truly comes in that most areas have no ISP competition to drive prices down. When Comcast insists that their proposed merger with Timer Warner Cable will not reduce competition - it is because they don't compete in the same areas, almost as if they have agreed to stay out of each other's turf to artificially increase costs to their customers.


Further, the likes of Comcast forcing Netflix to pay to reach Comcast's customers or it will degrade performance to said customers by not allowing the traffic to pass through unimpeded, or by using the money from their customers, again that's you and me, to pay for upgrades to their infrastructure to allow smooth performance without having to double-dip and charge the likes of both us and Netflix.

Oh boy, if I have to start worrying about this, I'm lost...:)

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rOZZ
Music
Pictures

i believe if i am paying for 40 mbit down and 10 up that is what i should get,
comcast believes that i should only get this if i do not use it.

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i believe if i am paying for 40 mbit down and 10 up that is what i should get,
comcast believes that i should only get this if i do not use it.

I don't have that problem. I pay for 60Mbit down and 25MBit up, and that's exactly what I get. [Edited to add] Of course, this has nothing to do with net neutrality at all. Net neutrality isn't about the bandwidth one receives from their ISPs, but the delivery of the bits to you in an equal, unimpeded manner.

my suggestion is that it may be time to consider changing the model from one that runs all communication through centralized isp's to one that is more distributed by nature.

That's not the way it is setup currently.

You have backbone providers, literally they have control and are responsible for the entire internet backbone. Companies like Level3, CenturyLink, Cogent, Savvis. Then you have ISPs, some of whom are also backbone providers like AT&T, Sprint, SBC, & Verizon.

The way Net neutrality works is these backbone providers agree to let data pass through each other's network without charging each other. They treat all data the same, no matter if it is streaming video, emails, SETI@Home workunits, whatever.

The way the entire industry is setup is that backbone providers charge ISPs to access the Internet. ISPs in turn sell off portions of this access to customers; i.e. you and me. The waters are muddied by the fact that some ISPs are also backbone providers.

Since being a backbone provider requires incredibly fast networks, the cost of laying out and maintaining the fiber optic cable can be onerously expensive. Therefore backbone providers will maintain an entire area of land and agree to peer data from other backbone providers for free; the costs come from their customers, the ISPs.

Since the ISPs are the ones that offer access to the internet, the problem truly comes in that most areas have no ISP competition to drive prices down. When Comcast insists that their proposed merger with Timer Warner Cable will not reduce competition - it is because they don't compete in the same areas, almost as if they have agreed to stay out of each other's turf to artificially increase costs to their customers.


Further, the likes of Comcast forcing Netflix to pay to reach Comcast's customers or it will degrade performance to said customers by not allowing the traffic to pass through unimpeded, or by using the money from their customers, again that's you and me, to pay for upgrades to their infrastructure to allow smooth performance without having to double-dip and charge the likes of both us and Netflix.

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yes that is all true but decentralizing the topology of the internet does not require changing the isp's but merely adding to them.
with the added advantage that more paths means a faster network no high speed backbone needed.

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my suggestion is that it may be time to consider changing the model from one that runs all communication through centralized isp's to one that is more distributed by nature.

That's not the way it is setup currently.

You have backbone providers, literally they have control and are responsible for the entire internet backbone. Companies like Level3, CenturyLink, Cogent, Savvis. Then you have ISPs, some of whom are also backbone providers like AT&T, Sprint, SBC, & Verizon.

The way Net neutrality works is these backbone providers agree to let data pass through each other's network without charging each other. They treat all data the same, no matter if it is streaming video, emails, SETI@Home workunits, whatever.

The way the entire industry is setup is that backbone providers charge ISPs to access the Internet. ISPs in turn sell off portions of this access to customers; i.e. you and me. The waters are muddied by the fact that some ISPs are also backbone providers.

Since being a backbone provider requires incredibly fast networks, the cost of laying out and maintaining the fiber optic cable can be onerously expensive. Therefore backbone providers will maintain an entire area of land and agree to peer data from other backbone providers for free; the costs come from their customers, the ISPs.

Since the ISPs are the ones that offer access to the internet, the problem truly comes in that most areas have no ISP competition to drive prices down. When Comcast insists that their proposed merger with Timer Warner Cable will not reduce competition - it is because they don't compete in the same areas, almost as if they have agreed to stay out of each other's turf to artificially increase costs to their customers.


Further, the likes of Comcast forcing Netflix to pay to reach Comcast's customers or it will degrade performance to said customers by not allowing the traffic to pass through unimpeded, or by using the money from their customers, again that's you and me, to pay for upgrades to their infrastructure to allow smooth performance without having to double-dip and charge the likes of both us and Netflix.

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yes that is all true but decentralizing the topology of the internet does not require changing the isp's but merely adding to them.
with the added advantage that more paths means a faster network no high speed backbone needed.

Any interconnect that exists between ISPs to get the data across the world would essentially be the backbone. This backbone will always need to be faster than all other parts because it literally carries the bits for everyone.

The backbone of the internet isn't the problem with net neutrality. The problem with net neutrality is that ISPs wish to force content providers (e.g. Netflix today, possibly SETI@home tomorrow) to pay for access to it's customers or suffer performance degradation. Comcast should not be forcing Netflix or SETI@home to pay for access to you and me as we already pay Comcast for access to Netflix and SETI@home.

What Comcast has done to ruin net neutrality is to purposely degrade Netflix performance until Netflix agreed to pay for the bandwidth that customers use - that customers already pay for! If Comcast is allowed to do it to Netflix, it will be able to do it to all others; demanding more money for what is already being paid for to increase their own profits.

If Comcast is allowed to continue this behavior, you can be sure that other ISPs will follow. Smaller startup companies that may wish to compete with Netflix, or Hulu, or any other type of internet content will be burdened with having to pay excessive fees just to reach a user base. No startup content provider will be able to afford such fees until they get a user base; they won't get a user base until they afford the costs of reaching users.

This cannot be allowed to happen, and this is why net neutrality is important.

what comcast is saying is that you can only have the services you pay for if you only use them part time .
this to me would seem to be a deceptive trade practices and should be illegal.
they also want to charge netflixs to provide services that the costumers have a already pay bings in two more things double billing for services and restraint of interstate trade.
to the first class action, to the second restraint of interstate trade is what congress decides write your congress, man or woman.
as to needing an isp to pay for satellite's or or sea cables isp's for the most part do not own this they lease time on them and so can anbody else that has the money and besides meteor ion bust transmission bouncing signals off the moon and other satellites or putting up satellite's as us hams have done in the past are all possibilities, no isp required.

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what comcast is saying is that you can only have the services you pay for if you only use them part time .
this to me would seem to be a deceptive trade practices and should be illegal.

That is not at issue with net neutrality. In fact, I do not see Comcast saying that at all.

they also want to charge netflix to provide services that the costumers have a already pay bings in two more things double billing for services and restraint of interstate trade.
to the first class action, to the second restraint of interstate trade is what congress decides write your congress, man or woman.

This is closer to the truth.

as to needing an isp to pay for satellite's or or sea cables isp's for the most part do not own this they lease time on them and so can anbody else

No backbone provider uses satellites; the latency is too great to provide any benefit.

Sure, you can pay for a direct hookup to a backbone provider. I hope you have a lot of money because you're not exactly their target demographic.

that has the money and besides meteor ion bust transmission bouncing signals off the moon and other satellites or putting up satellite's as us hams have done in the past are all possibilities, no isp required.

And how are those possibilities going to make it from source to destination and back again? Someone has to pay for that infrastructure, and the maintenance thereof.

Individuals just don't have the money or time to pay for a direct infrastructure, which is why we pay ISPs. Net neutrality is about making ISPs treat all bits equally regardless of source or destination.

i agree that comcast should be stopped but this only solves the problem for now and only with comcast.
sometimes it is necessary rather than holding a fig leaf in front of you and saying my cloths are in the wash to buy a second set of cloths.
whether it is comcast or the nsa or china or whoever i want my internet to be free a centralized topology will always make this difficult decentralize and set yourself free.

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i agree that comcast should be stopped but this only solves the problem for now and only with comcast.

Agreed. I'm only using Comcast as a recent real-world example. My statements are by no means limited to Comcast only, but to all ISPs.

sometimes it is necessary rather than holding a fig leaf in front of you and saying my cloths are in the wash to buy a second set of cloths.

For us, on the other side of the equation, the other set of cloths would be greater ISP competition. Most ISPs will not enter cities where another ISP already exists because they do not want to compete. They can then artificially increase prices, and with no alternative access to the internet, both you and internet content providers are forced to pay their toll at whatever price they set.

whether it is comcast or the nsa or china or whoever i want my internet to be free a centralized topology will always make this difficult decentralize and set yourself free.

<sigh> It isn't about centralization. It is about the delivery of bits to you. It wouldn't matter if the internet was decentralized, someone would still have to bring those bits to your home, and you have to pay for that service.

This completely misses the point of the net neutrality discussion. It is not about the backbone. It is about how the bits are delivered.

Yes. I want to play. First, display to me that you understand the peering issue at hand.

I am very much in favor of net neutrality. But what does net neutrality mean to you and how do you define it before we continue.

Net neutrality means Netflix's traffic will be treated the same as any other traffic. Peering is swapping bandwidth instead of money.

The sad fact is the people would rather have smooth dancing cat videos above all else and that requires a fast lane or collocation.

This is all about dancing cat videos.

while wireless routers

Keep wireless out of the equation, there is not enough bandwidth to make a difference. Anyway the same players controll that too.

Oh boy, if I have to start worrying about this, I'm lost...:)

Exactly.It's a very boring technical topic.

yes that is all true but decentralizing the topology of the internet does not require changing the isp's but merely adding to them.
with the added advantage that more paths means a faster network no high speed backbone needed.

You are talking last mile. How do you do that? Don't get all communist on me now.

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Yes. I want to play. First, display to me that you understand the peering issue at hand.

I am very much in favor of net neutrality. But what does net neutrality mean to you and how do you define it before we continue.

Net neutrality means Netflix's traffic will be treated the same as any other traffic. Peering is swapping bandwidth instead of money.

The sad fact is the people would rather have smooth dancing cat videos above all else and that requires a fast lane or collocation.

This is all about dancing cat videos.

No, this isn't about dancing cat videos. This is about your right to watch dancing cat videos unimpeded, and for that traffic to not be treated any better or worse than my traffic.

More importantly, this is about conflicts of interest. This is about, for example, Comcast charging content providers for access to customers while offering a similar or competing service without that extra cost. Specifically, Comcast owns NBC, NBC has a video streaming service called Hulu that allows consumers to watch NBC content on the net. This service competes with the likes of Netflix's services. If Comcast can make Netflix pay for access to customers while it's own service doesn't have that added burden of cost, it creates an unfair advantage for any content provider, including potential startups.

But why stop at Hulu vs Netflix? What about Verizon starting a cloud service that competes with Office 365 or Google Apps? Further, why stop at conflicts of interest? If they can be allowed to charge content providers for access to customers, why not force all internet destinations, like SETI@home, for the privilege of accessing the people that wish to visit their sites?

The implications and potential for abuse is too great not to be addressed. This goes far beyond cat videos. This goes to ensuring that people who pay for a service like internet access being able to choose their own destinations unburdened.

No, this isn't about dancing cat videos. This is about your right to watch dancing cat videos unimpeded, and for that traffic to not be treated any better or worse than my traffic.

Well this is no longer about distributed computing than now is it? Do you agree that email and such will feel no effect if Netflix gets a fast lane?

You thought breaking up the Bell System was a good idea didn't you?

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