FCC sets Net Neutrality hearing date
THE FCC HAS SET an official date for a vote on proposed net neutrality regulations.
The commission has said that an October 22 meeting will be the venue for debate and possible approval of the plan. If instituted, the new regulations would be the first to guarantee net neutrality across the US.
Earlier this week FCC chairman Julius Genachowski suggested that the commission would seek to impose rules which would prevent telcos from blocking or limiting network traffic based on the application in use.
Shortly after Genachowski's comments hit the wires, opposition to the plan began to surface as telcos voiced concern over the plan. Service providers have long argued that managing network traffic is an important way to prevent high-bandwidth applications such as P2P sharing from slowing traffic for all users.
Opposition to the plan also mounted in the form of Republican senators who worried that the net neutrality rules would amount to federal control over the telecommunications industry.
Several senators briefly considered legislation limiting the FCC's ability to regulate internet traffic, but have since reportedly backed off the plan in favour of direct talks with Genachowski.
The debate is the latest in what has become a global issue regarding net neutrality. The EU has also been wrestling with the idea of net neutrality as service providers increasingly look to monitor and manage various types of network traffic. µ
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"...managing network traffic is an important way to prevent high-bandwidth applications such as P2P sharing from slowing traffic for all users..."
I call shenanigans on that statement. Can we kill it already.
If a user has a 1Mb down .75Mb up connection to the net and they are only running a bit torrent client it may consume the entire 1/.75 connection. It's not going to magically eat all the bandwidth on the internet, it's not even going to consume all the bandwidth of their ISP. No 'traffic shaping' is required.
If I have a 1Mb connection and you have a 1Mb connection the fact that I'm actually using my entire connection _only_ effects you if our ISP only has 1Mb that it's reselling. That's the rub with P2P and other high bandwidth applications. Before the advent of P2P and HD video streaming users rarely used their entire allotment of bandwidth and the few times they did was relatively short lived. Overselling at the rate of 1000 to 1 or 10000 to 1 is a thing of the past if people actually get to use the bandwidth they are paying for.
If the ISP has 100 Mb of capacity and their users are using all of that bandwidth, if they go out and acquire another 100 Mb of bandwidth, some evil P2P application isn't going to somehow gobble it all up. If the user still has a 1 Mb / .75 Mb connection that's the most bandwidth they will consume.
So please, kill that meme already. The problem isn't evil P2P applications, it's ISP's overselling their network. They want the ability to throttle or otherwise 'network manage' your connection so that you only use 0.1 Mb of the 1.0 Mb connection you are paying for. In that way they can continue to oversell their network without actually having to invest in improving their capacity.
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I DIDN'T GET A HURRUMPH OUT OF THAT GUY
The current US FCC rules state clearly that ISPs (in the US) cannot prohibit customers from running services on the customers' computers (at home!). As a matter of fact, that is what ***ALL*** large ISPs do in the US, either by the terms (who reads them?!) or by technical means (blocking traffic), often both. In other words, you are not allowed to (or cannot) run your own web server at home, no own e-mail server at home etc.
Now, is the FCC finally enforcing a standing rule after a decade of doing nothing? Or are they still wasting time and money over nipple slips? Ha!
(.)(.)