Aqizzar, there is some precedent for prioritizing traffic though, which is one of the big problems here.
ISP's already can and do filter websites, or throttle customer's connections... the throttling is either wholesale throttling where above a certain monthly bandwidth use they choke your connection, or targeted, where certain kinds of communications, such as traffic resembling p2p or traffic on certain ports, is choked.
Yes, the internet itself cannot be controlled by any of the companies providing access to it, but their customers' access to it can, and that's all they need.
They can't blot out a part of the internet because yes, it will reroute itself around them. The packets that pass through their hardware, however, are completely at their mercy within the confines of the law... and part of the issue is that the law here isn't fully developed and clear about what they get to do with those packets... and part of what they want to do, likely as a new income scheme, is to charge people to give their packets "priority" in reaching their end-users.
The problem with that "priority" system, however, is that increasing the priority of those packets is essentially a misnomer for lowering the priority of everyone else's. The fear there is that people not able or not willing to pay off ISP's would have access to their own information slowed and limited... which unfairly skews the nature of the internet in favor of large business entities and subsequently against the favor of individual users and smaller entities without such financial resources.
The gist of what keeps me in the "this is so bloody bad, don't let it happen!" camp is that a customer of an ISP is paying for full access to the internet, the entire set of things contained therein. They are not paying for full access to a sub-set, Rich Internet, and poor access to the sub-set Poor Internet.
Beyond that, if a telecom was allowed to decide the kinds of info sent over their wires, or the way that data was used, or whether it got delivered properly, the origins of the home internet connection would have been muddled in the first place because when dial-up modems started coming around the phone companies would have thought "hey we can charge them to have a phone line connection and charge them separately when they're calling with their modem!", which is bollox because what you're paying for is sending data over their wires on a given protocol, regardless of what that data is or who it's going to (with the exception of the distance it travels to get there, which is somewhat of a reasonable provision in terms of telephone calls, moreso back then than now though).
From memory, here's an example of why this is bad for people and bad for the market:
I don't recall where this happened or the company found to be doing it, but there was an instance in the news where a large primary ISP was providing bandwidth to other small, localized ISP's with big-scale commercial pipelines (I hate calling them that, "series of tubes", *shudder*). This was obviously what you would call "wholesale" bandwidth... the small ISP's were getting a lot of bandwidth pretty cheap.
Through a bit of smart business, they were passing on this savings to customers, and buying internet through the small ISP's gave the customers a cheaper rate than buying home internet connections through the larger ISP.
This worried big ISP, so they started throttling the bandwidth of the smaller ISP's in a textbook example of anti-competitive practices.
If net neutrality is not properly preserved in law, this kind of thing might be legally allowed to become common practice, and since many big ISP's will likely hop onto this bandwagon if it's clearly legal to do it, an oligopoly scenario unfolds where the customer is left without much choice to vote against it in the free market either.
The best defense for the interests of the customer and other non-corporate, non-wealthy interests who need internet access, is to be proactive and tell the ISP's that bandwidth is bandwidth and the law doesn't give a pair of fetid dingo's kidneys that they don't like treating all packets equally.
[ June 06, 2008: Message edited by: MuonDecay ]
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Topic: The apocalypse. What will become of DF? (Read 2147 times)