Re: Trump appointments
"makes me wonder on who's vested interests is he trampling now?"
in general, ANYONE who's used increased gummint regulation/presence/etc. to become wealthy.
The entire idea of Trump's approach is the same as Reagan's approach was back in the 80's: make gummint SMALLER, and LESS INTRUSIVE, but keep sensible regulations that 'level the playing field'.
So, we can expect fewer restrictions except for those that would allow ISP #1 to block or throttle ISP #2's competing services.
But _I_ would _LIKE_ to see a tollway on the intarwebs, for those who are willing to pay it, in the form of TOS-like packet prioritization. You could design this in such a way that the impact on normal traffic would be minimal, but the effect on the priority traffic would be incredible. THEN, the fees charged to priority subscribers would pay for infrastructure updates, and MAYBE lower the price for everyone else.
It's already that way, sort of, for "business class" (unfiltered) vs "consumer class" (filtered, changing IP addresses, NAT instead of direct, etc. etc.). "business class" costs you SEVERAL TIMES as much, and your throughput is often capped, but you can run a name server and a web server and even have people send e-mail directly to your IP address, if you want, NOT having to go through some 3rd party server that might be scanning your mail to target you with ads [for example].
So if Netflix pays EXTRA to get 'high priority' on all of its packets, then everyone wins. That's how I see it.
To make this work, you'd have to limit the amount of traffic that can be high priority (let's say 20% of the maximum bandwidth that the pipe could possibly transfer). This way the theoretical maximum reduction in performance is only about 20% on NORMAL traffic, which is probably not going to be any different than real numbers in actual practice. The difference is that priority traffic gets to go FASTER. That's all. So, set the limits [like this] properly, and let the free market do the rest!
