Posts by Jetblack

Putting the internet into neutral, or neutering the net?

Logical error by exclusion of key phrases?

Erm - do you realise that you ignored the qualifier "for the commercial benefit of the ISP or third parties"?

IOW, the situation you describe would be perfectly fine - because it's not prejudice to commercially advantage the ISP.

It's not a brave new world - apparently

The equivalent practice in the old public switched telephone network (PSTN) world would have been for your telephone company to say

"you know what, no, I'm not going to connect you to that number. It's for a horoscope service (or an insurance service, or roadside breakdown service - insert your own idea here...) and we have a competitive one of those - or there's another one who pays us money to let people call them. So, sorry, that number is just going to come up with unavailable beeps"

If telephone companies had started doing that there would have been hell to pay.

There should be no difference with the Internet. We paid our telephone companies to connect a circuit between us and a destination PSTN address (aka a phone number) on request. When we pay ISPs, it should be to direct IP packets between us and a destination Internet address (aka an IP address) on request. For some reason ISPs have decided there's some sort of difference and they should be able to dictate who we communicate with.

Why doesn't the unregulated model work? Because, in the end, you just get to choose between a set of ISPs, each of which has decided who they're going to set up a "relationship" with on the Internet. So you end up having to choose between different subsets of the Internet. It would be like having to choose which phone numbers you were going to be able to dial.

The simple formulation of the soundest net neutrality regulation would just say:

"ISPs cannot block or otherwise prejudice the exchange of IP packets between their subscribers and other Internet users for the commercial benefit of the ISP or third parties."

That's it. There's no problem with shaping or grooming traffic so everybody gets an optimal experience based on limited network bandwidth. That is *not* what net neutrality is intended to address. I agree with previous posters that charging for "bytes used" is not unreasonable. It's no different than other utilities like electricity, gas, and water. It's what was done on the PSTN - except now it's bandwidth consumed rather than temporarily hiring a circuit - Megabytes are the new minutes.