Out of Pod Experience

Thanks for the informative post, Rain. Ive been hearing about this for months on the radio, so sadly I dont think it's a hoax.

Greetings!


This seems to be important, although I have no idea what's going on.


I guess the very fact that I do not know what's going on ...
... but I probably should ...
... means that a layman's term explanation in the OP would be seriously helpfull. (hint!)


In case I do not overestimate the importance of this,
it would be seriously helpfull in case you want more attention. (hint!)


Also, I have no idea why you mention zero connections to TQ,
but I guess this would be important too?



Tell me what's going on.

Imagine I am a completely ignorant person that cares,
but is literally unable to filter out the relevant, necessary information.


Thanks.

:)

o7

(:

well basically, internet companies in the US are trying to remove the FCC's ability to regulate their operation. which is the basic job of the FCC. to put it simply, internet service providers in the US are trying to make it so their service can be restructured in a more profitable way. at the expense of neutral net traffic.

right now, all they can sell is bandwidth. raw throughput. under the proposed system, they can sell bandwidth based on what is being transmitted.

slightly more alarming is the fact that they've done underhanded things to discriminate based on content (comcast throttled netflix because it netflix and a paid service.)

it's possible this issue will pass, and that's great news for iSPs assuming that internet service is a given. but it's not.

in my wilder imaginations, I'm seeing a revolt on a national scale. think Incarna type of unsub threats but on a national scale.

I'm quick to write things off as a fool's errand, like the occupy movement and silly things like yellow ribbons. but if I'm motivated to do something about an issue like this, chances are a lot of people like me are motivated too.

I will cancel home internet service, and skillqueue for the next year from a surface pro install of EVE, using a public internet connection, in order to send a nice message to my ISP. for real.

Basically, "fast lanes" and "slow lanes" are not exactly what is happening here. The ISPs have their eyes on potential goldmines - they can essentially extort money out of content providers with the threat of giving them arbitrarily low packet priority on their networks. They know that by doing this, their customers would likely stop paying for those services if they run into stream buffering, long load times for websites, etc. and through that, the ISPs can leverage their effective monopolies against these content providers and make a load of money - which you won't ever see being invested into infrastructure, mind you.

The ISPs do not lack the infrastructure to handle all of that traffic from websites like Netflix. They do not lack the money to upgrade their infrastructure either, and the customers of those ISPs have paid for it many times over (yes, Comcast has seen a return on investment for their infrastructure, many times over, despite what they say about wanting to do paid prioritization to pay off their investments in their infrastructure) - ironically, it helps that Netflix and other services have a high bandwidth demand, because that drives uptake of higher-tier broadband packages.

You won't see net neutrality debates in any country where you actually have a choice between Internet providers, because the moment customers see a drop in performance, they'll switch ISPs. That simply isn't a choice for most people in the US.

Every year the USA seems to get just a little bit more **** to live in for average joe

I doubt that has anything to do with what's going on in the US. Server hiccups happen.