swhx7
Premium
join:2006-07-23
Elbonia
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to GOLFnSUN
Re: Who decides what's reasonable?
Hopefully most readers will recognize your post as a bad caricature of the actual issues, but I want to clear away some of the nonsense in case some readers might be led astray.
said by GOLFnSUN  :The EFF - their idea of reasonable is anarchy. Anything goes because they have never met a corporation that they don't hate.
So according to you, neutrality advocates favor a situation where one person's internet access doesn't work right because the neighbors are free to use all the bandwidth, and there's no way to control this unless ISPs can selectively sabotage certain parts of a subscriber's communications and charge third parties for not having their access to subscribers squashed? Nice try, but no one will believe such obvious distortions.
said by GOLFnSUN :The company network engineers - hey what do they know, they only have to satisfy the majority of users. But the bandwidth hogs won't be happy no matter what they do.
Anti-neutrality people are a one-trick pony: their only argument is trying to confuse the neutrality issue with the different issue of "bandwidth hogs". Unless neutrality is abandoned, they wail, the internet will be overloaded. Promoting this fallacy is the only ammunition they have and they just repeat it over and over in many variations.
If ISPs need to restrain the amount of bandwidth a customer uses, or the amount of total traffic the customer sends and receives, they can do so without violating neutrality. They can set tiers of service; they can set caps and charge more for going over the caps; they can disable or restrict a customer's account if he/she breaks the rules.
This alleged issue of "hogs" has nothing to do with network neutrality. Neutrality means the ISP shouldn't be looking inside your traffic to suppress certain kinds of uses, or making it slower depending on where it goes or comes from.
A neutrality rule is like the government saying, if there's too much traffic on the roads, you won't be allowed to drive six cars at once (assuming you could do that) - but as long as you're not adding more than your share, you're free to drive a red or blue car, or go north or south.
Anti-neutrality is like a rule that only Toyotas can go straight through while Chevys must be sent on long detours; and you may go the short way to Walmart but have to detour before getting to the farmers' market. There may be some pretext of preventing overcrowding, but anti-neutrality doesn't serve that purpose and really has a different agenda. |
