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307 sats \ 11 replies \ @kepford 19 Oct 2023 \ on: Ask SN: Is net neutrality good or bad? meta
Here's one of many reasons that net neutrality is a bad idea.
All it takes to ruin the internet experience for many users is for a few users to use massive amounts of data. I have a friend that runs a small wireless ISP that serves non-profits and rural customers. He explained to me what happens.
You have a new customer that gets service. They start downloading movies eating up the bandwidth of fellow customers. Not all traffic is equal. That idea is absurd. As bitcoiners we should know this principle by looking at bitcoin's design. We pay fees to get our transaction into a block. If you don't care about your transaction being in the next block you pay less. If you have to have it you pay more. Free markets are the answer here not government force. We don't need governments to point a gun at ISPs. Honestly, I think these politicians are not at all interested in neutrality. This is just more control over ISPs. What we need is more ISPs. More competition.
You have a new customer that gets service. They start downloading movies eating up the bandwidth of fellow customers
That's not how it should work. You get the bandwidth you pay for. Not more not less. That's also how bitcoin works: you pay for the speed.
Net neutrality is that whatever you download, they don't care. You get what you pay for whatever you do with it.
Same principle with energy: if I pay for my energy, it shouldn't matter what I do with it.
If one customer impacts other customers, that has nothing to do with net neutrality. Just that your system does not isolate enough.
Or you're running a "fractional bandwidth system".
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you're running a "fractional bandwidth system".
This is a bad argument. Based on this logic all restaurants should be forced to be all you can eat.
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Why? If I pay for one meal, I get one meal.
If I pay to get consistently 100mbit/s, I should get consistently 100mbit/s. If you can't guarantee that, then that's another problem. I don't know enough about ISPs to go more into depth there.
My argument was that if you sell more bandwidth than you can provide, then it's no surprise you're going to run into problems. That's what I was trying to say.
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So to be clear I'm not defending ISPs. Most of them suck. Most oversell. My friend that runs the WISP says the same thing. Getting the government involved in network management is a terrible idea. Its really that simple. I've yet to meet a network guy that is pro net neutrality.
I agree that it is bad for gate keepers to censor or slow down traffic. Honestly, I have never seen a single example of this besides this clearly reasonable example. Many cellular providers will throttle YouTube and Netflix traffic. It chews up a ton of their bandwidth. My friend has told me about how wasteful Apple TV is for example with bandwidth. Massively inefficient. I don't think ISPs really care about censorship as much as providing fast service to the most customers. There aren't unlimited resources and a few can ruin the experience for many others.
Gov regulation is the wrong lever to pull to fix these issues. Getting them involve ANY more than they already are is gonna make it worse.
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I don't think ISPs really care about censorship as much as providing fast service to the most customers.
I also don't think that. ISPs don't want to deal with this stuff. Isn't net neutrality exactly to make this clear? That ISPs are not responsible for censorship and thus can't be fined by the government to enforce censorship?
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If that is the framing its bullshit.
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Maybe. Thanks for the discussion. I have to read more sources on that topic, like what an @anon posted here.
I realized I am missing some perspectives on that topic, like yours or that of ISPs :)
Most of the times, I agree with what the EFF is doing.
So my opinion is probably well summarized by this piece of the EFF.
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Any time.
That ISPs are not responsible for censorship and thus can't be fined by the government to enforce censorship?
--- translation ---
"If you follow my laws you won't be sued by my citizens, that is unless they think you're not following them. In all cases you better do what I say. BTW, I was going to fine you just before, because you're letting people make noise"
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So I think the issue here is that what you are describing is one way of packaging network access. I've never ran an ISP but I know people that do it on a daily basis. You cannot guarantee bandwidth. An ISP can package a plan with no caps, no filtering, and insert whatever you like. Before I had fiber I paid more for higher availability with the WISP. WISPs have constraints that cable/fiber providers do not have. The cost of providing Internet to rural customers is high and bandwidth is limited. I paid for no limits. They do no network forming. Others are not will or maybe able to afford the fee I was paying each month. For them they get reduced speeds but at a cost they can afford. I think you are forcing this into something it isn't. I have yet to see examples of ISPs abusing "the Internet". What I have seen is areas with only one ISP option. The bottom line is that happy customers don't leave a service provider. All of the net neutrality regulation ideas I have seen put more barriers between customers and service providers. We don't need more regulation on the Internet. We need less. All we need is the profit motive and open competition.
The other side of this is property rights. If I build out a network and offer you access to it as long as I abide by my contract with you we are good. Right? Why do we need the state to get into it and tell us what we can and can't do? When the state creates false floors on service they create scarcity and higher prices. Net neutrality is something I used to support btw. Every network engineer I have talked to about it has either laughed for given me a long lecture on the problems with the idea. Then I saw how companies were funding the politicians around it and realized. Yeah, this is a scam.
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All of the net neutrality regulation ideas I have seen put more barriers between customers and service providers.
I think that's where we lose each other. For me, net neutrality is to tell the government where the line is. It's not (or less) about more regulation of ISPs. It's about more regulation of the government itself.
But I think I see where you're coming from. You see it as limiting what ISPs can do. I see it as limiting what governments can force ISPs to do what they want if it's against net neutrality.
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