Yeah, I'm a sucker. Sue me.
angrymnk wrote:
Listen you, (google edit ) person of limited brain capacity, anything is *potentially* a bandwidth hog. The only relevant factor is: THE USER ALREADY PAID FOR IT REGARDLESS OF WHAT IT IS BEING USED FOR.
What is it you think the user has already paid for? The end users monthly payments barely pay for the cost to lay the damn wires to his house over the expected lifetime of those wires. That's great if all you want to do is connect to services hosted directly on your own ISPs network. You, as a home user, do not pay a freaking dime for the bandwidth used to host AWS's customers, or any of a dozen other hosting services out there. You don't pay for the backbones. You don't pay for the cables run across various oceans, which have to constantly be re-run because the one we ran 5 years ago isn't close to sufficient to manage the requests for bandwidth.
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If the comcast does not like it being used for something, then it shouldn't have all those pretty commercials that say *high quality video, online games, music and everything interwebz you can possibly want and or need at speeds $provably_wrong_number.
Um... Comcast makes their network faster for you by not allowing a handful of knuckleheads to drag the performance into the dirt. That's the part you don't seem to be able to grasp. Paid "official" hosted content is one thing, because the money for the bandwidth trickles around all the networks that are affected. Peer to peer stuff isn't. That guy two doors down who's downloading terrabytes of torrents and then hosting them for anyone on the net who wants them is going to kill your network performance, and he's not paying any more money than you are. Comcast has to either throttle that action *or* increase the cost to all its home users so as to have sufficient bandwidth for anyone who wants to do peer hosting at their home (or put hard caps on total usage I suppose).
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It is not up to comcast, it is up to the user. That is what the common carrier piece is about.
Huh? That doesn't even make sense. The common carrier bit means that they'd come under additional regulations. That's it. It specifically means that they can't refuse to do business with anyone for any reason and must provide access to whatever services the government decides are necessary in their role as a "public utility".
The irony is that making them a common carrier, not only wont affect their ability to throttle content based on type and/or location, but arguably would give them more power to do so. If, as a common carrier, they are required to provide a certain level of performance to all users for a reasonable fee, then failing to take action against those who abuse the network and deny other users that performance level would be something they'd actually be required by law to do something about.
I'll point out again, that those pushing this don't really care about your freedom to do what you want on the internet. Quite the opposite. They just want to regulate it more. That's the ultimate agenda here. Just a lot of people don't realize it.
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And no it wouldn't shut the internet down; just like with other utilities, people would adjust their habits accordingly and not, for example, waste water.
Wrong. It will no longer just be a matter of discretion versus public relations on the part of a private ISP. It'll be law. You get that in places (like where I live) where droughts happen, they pass laws limiting how much water you can use, what days you can water you lawn, fine you if you use too much, etc. What do you think will happen to bittorrents if ISP were made into utilities? Instead of just risking being throttled, they would be subject to fines and possibly even jail for disrupting a public service. I'm assuming that's not really what you want.
Seriously. Engage the ol noggin for once. What you're screaming about would accomplish the exact opposite of what you claim you want it for.
Edited, Feb 20th 2014 6:53pm by gbaji