Republicans’ “Internet Freedom Act” would wipe out net neutrality

What a crock, man. ISPs were given stupid amounts of money many years ago to build out infrastructure. Guess what? They made a token effort, did largely nothing, pocketed the money, and aren't held accountable. This bill is based off of the laughable premise that ISPs in general are people with morals and scruples. Let's not kid ourselves, ok? They have neither. Profit is not just the bottom line, it is the ONLY line.

And as far as your hypothetical argument goes: Both customers are already paying for their bandwidth. The problem is the ISPs are selling bandwidth they can't provide, because they're overselling the nodes on their network. If I've got a DSLAM or a UBR that can handle 300 connections, and I sell 450 under the premise of "well, not everyone will be on the internet at the same time.", then great, fine. But oh noes! Lots of people have similar schedules. Right? Working 9:00 to 5:30, home by 6:00, and by 6:15 everybody is watching cat videos on youtube. So suddenly that 300 connection UBR is handling 400! That's where peak hour issues come from.

I won't even entertain the ridiculous argument you're making with paragraph four. You wanna know why Neflix supports Net Neutrality? Stand by, you're about to get your ass handed to you. Some major ISPs suddenly started noticing that a large chunk of their network traffic was coming from Netflix. Traffic using bandwidth, I should mention, that is already being paid for by the consumer. These ISPs suddenly decided to let the BGP sessions between their networks stagnate by not expanding the connections. Imagine a router for each company, sitting next to each other, with 20 ports on each. Only five are being used. It would cost nothing to run another fifteen. But the ISPs refuse, and demand money in a peering negotiation. The connections are left to stagnate until Netflix pays out. No, this is not a theoretical. This has already happened. Now here's the funny part. Are you sitting down? Netflix offered to pay for more routers and hook them out. On their own dime. Would cost the ISPs nothing. They refused. Netflix offered them (and every ISP, actually) an installation of servers on the companies' own networks that function as caches of netflix content, which drastically reduces off-net Netflix traffic. This is called the Open Connect Program. I know about this program because the small ISP I work for took them up on that gracious offer. The major ISPs have access to this program and they refused. Ultimately Netflix did buckle and pay out, and the ISPs ceased their restriction of the connection between the two networks. You can make no mistake on when and where, just look at the graph I linked. You can see some major ISPs all suddenly take a dive on netflix traffic, and miraculously rise when Netflix pays out. Without title 2, without net neutrality, with "internet freedom", that kind of thing will be far, far more likely. It won't help innovation. It'll stifle it. All the big corporations will pay the ISPs extra cash to prefer their traffic to the exclusion of competitors. Want to start a company? Good luck with that, when your competitors are in every home and on every TV and anyone curious enough to look at your website is either throttled into oblivion or simply rerouted to the paying competitor. No. No. Fuck that. Fuck this bill, fuck the shills. The internet will not survive without Net Neutrality.

I'll even go so far as to make a prediction. If the big money interests do win this fight, and the internet is corrupted, you're gonna see a massive rise in darknets. We'll see Cuban style handrun ethernet cable. The internet will stagnate. Nations will found their own to get off of what we've destroyed. And then you'll see legislation that bans these darknets over some imagined dire situation or another. You might be happy with that sort of world, but the rest of us aren't.

/r/news Thread Link - arstechnica.com