f13.net

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080413.WBmingram20080413150531/WBStory/WBmingram

Neil Berkett, new ceo of Virgin Media (a bigass British ISP), has made a public statement in which he basicly says he is tossing Net Neutrality (the idea that all traffic packets across the net should be treated equally, with no traffic priority shaping or other things) out the window, and will soon be offering local companies the choice of either negotiating deals for preferential packet treatment or being relegated to the digital equivilent of the slow lane.

Hopefully enough people vote with their wallet and nip this in the bud.

The problem is a large amount of people probably wouldn't even notice the difference.

Ironic that his name should start with berk (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/berk).

When you are Verizon's size and you have your tongue up the FCC's ass, this is not such a dangerous position. For Virgin Media on the other hand, it is.

I don't think people understand that when you start fucking with the internet it tends to fight back.

The internet always wins.

The system goes on-line August 4th, 1997. Human decisions are removed from porn watching. Internet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29th. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.

I signed up with Virgin Media for a brief period in December as I was pissed off with my old provider.  I cancelled before my contract period started properly and ran back to my old provider because VM were shit shit shit.  They throttled speeds so much in the evening that it would take nearly 2 minutes for a page to load (like these forums iirc) and one sunday, the performance was so bad that I was getting speeds that I haven't seen since before I upgraded to a 56k modem 10+ years ago.  It was diabolical.  I wouldn't touch them again yours.

Can someone explain the issues with net neutrality to me? As far as I understand, the core idea is that ISP's want to be able to prioritize data based on its type (e.g., when there's not enough bandwidth to go round, your voice over IP traffic might get precedence over your neighbour's download of the complete season 3 of Lost.) And yes, they're attaching a revenue model to it where you can pay to boost your priority.

This seems to me, frankly, to make a lot of sense. Can someone explain why are we all against this?

It does make a degree of sense, the problem is most people are expecting it to result in a lot of websites that aren't loaded with cash getting heavily sidelined because they simply don't have the revenue to pay for priority. You won't have any problems accessing microsoft.com but it may take a few minutes to load up Ubuntu's website. Far more importantly is it's not that huge a step from charging sites and services for priority to insisting on a small fee for your customers to be able to access them.

The basic result of it would probably be that popular sites with money backers would become more popular (as they got easier to access) and smaller sites that couldn't afford it would get less popular because people don't want to have to wait 2 or 3 minutes for a page of lolcats to load. Basically it's likely to result in a brake on innovation on the web, sites like google probably wouldn't have ever got started if when they launched it had taken people a minute or so to get their results back if somewhere like Yahoo was near instantaneous.

Its very clearly a monopolistic asset grabbing move by the movers and shakers out there. Same as it ever was in the land of free trade.

Opposition to net neutrality (the status quo, which resulted in the growth of the Internet) is primarily being driven by telephone companies working in cartel that still have an effective monopoly on backbone provisioning. They want to "put a stop to people using our services for free". This somewhat ignores the fact that ISPs are paying them for the leased lines that make up the Internet. The intention is to continue to charge the ISPs (who will cease to exist unless they are backbone providers with their own fiber anyhow) and then charge the individual customers as if making a long distance telephone call. This is only a good thing if you have a huge number of shares in the big telecoms companies and wish to watch the Internet become another medium dominated by big media corporations.

It should cost you more money if you want more bandwidth. It should not cost you more money if you want to go to a site such as f13.net instead of fox.com or if you want to download Linux rather than download a DRM locked movie.

Not exactly. Telecom companies and backbone owners can already priortize by packet-type -- that is, they can priotize say VOIP over HTTP requests. What they're NOT allowed to do is prioritize by provider. That is, they may not prioritize packets coming from Google's servers over packets coming from www.mylamelivejournalpage.com.

They lie a lot, and claim they want to prioritize things like streaming video, but if you read into what they're asking for they want to prioritize by who is sending the packets. In short, they want to be able to extort the SHIT out of any popular site, online store, by telling them to pay up or see their bandwidth throttled.

Since backbones are common carriers, this sort of shit isn't going to fly no matter how many dollar signs they see. Moreover, if those idiots actually got their way, they'd be fucking lynched -- along with every politician who can possibly be blamed for it -- by an angry public whose porn is now downloading at glacial speeds.

Essentially:

f13.net takes 3 minutes to load

ign.com takes 5 seconds to load

That is, unless schild manages to get enough money together to dump into the site to compete with ign.  It changes traffic from purely a matter of content to a matter of financial backing.

Could we change it to where Kotaku never loads again?

 :drill:

There is also the fact that which end determines how fast you load?  The originating IP?  The destination?  What about all those intermediaries?  The system breaks down the millisecond a packet has to leave its subdomain.

That's why this is a push from one of two places -- either common carriers who run major backbones that most IP traffic flows across at SOME point, or some of the stupider ISPs.

It's also why Google, Amazon, and a bunch of other big name web giants are pushing back -- they don't feel like sharing their profits to AT&T AFTER already paying out the nose for their bandwidth.

the internet begins fighting back:

http://stopvirgin.movielol.org/