There may be some misconceptions here, so I'll clarify a few things just in case:
1) Net neutrality doesn't mean everyone gets the exact same speed. ISPs are free to offer a plethora of offerings each with their own price, speed and extras (if any). There are also no new guarantees to subscribers, i.e. if the wiring is crap deal with it.
2) CDNs have nothing to do with net neutrality. A typical large ISP will offer co-location services and content providers may use the service the same as any other customer. There can even be other arrangements as they see fit, but the important thing is that no one messes with the tubes.
3) Again, just in case because this is brought up a lot, ISPs can still offer filtered subscriptions. There's a market demand for filtered subscriptions and catering to that demand is fair game.
4) ISPs are still free to apply filters on traffic in the interests of maintaining their network. This is important for example when dealing with (D)DoS attacks or worm outbreaks.
Net neutrality levels the playing field for content providers, so if you get VoIP from your ISP the service may still be better than that of a given competitor by virtue of having less latency. But what the ISP cannot do is artificially inflate their advantage, as doing so would be in violation of a free market on the Internet.
But what the ISP cannot do is artificially inflate their advantage, as doing so would be in violation of a free market on the Internet.
Can we please stop using this term, please? It's pretty clear that we can't agree on a definition of "free market"(¹), so we might as well stop using it.
(¹) For many people, the idea that one must restrict the ISP and subscriber's freedom of contract to preserve the free market is a logical contradiction.
Yes, there's no one true definition of a free market but to say there's a logical contradiction rather strikes me as a jump to conclusions. What I meant was, impeding the flow of packets to or from competing networks prevents free trade on the Internet. It's easy to get the two mixed up, but the parallels between net neutrality and the rise of free trade in the 18th and 19th century seem realistic imho. I'm no historian though, merely biased by being on the content provider side of the fence.
If my network has huge connectivity between end users and individual cable head-ends, but contended bandwidth between the head-end and major internet interconnection points, I absolutely want to give customers an incentive to use the cable head end to customer bandwidth, rather than Internet to customer bandwidth.
(As far as I can tell, net neutrality only matters in the context of video (or possibly bulk file sharing of video); virtually no other traffic on wired networks is meaningful
enough in scope, scale of bandwidth used by users, or performance/latency sensitive enough to be an issue. This is essentially a Comcast vs. YouTube/Netflix argument.)
Colocating equipment at head ends isn't a solution, because 1) not every provider will colocate, so if you can't preference colocated streams over non-colocated streams from other similar services, there's much more impact on other users
2) it might not be feasible to offer third-party colocation in every part of your network where there is bandwidth oversubscription.
> Colocating equipment at head ends isn't a solution, because 1) not every provider will colocate, so if you can't preference colocated streams over non-colocated streams from other similar services, there's much more impact on other users
I've read this 10 times but I can't follow. In particular, who is this "you" exactly? And what kind of impact?
2) it might not be feasible to offer third-party colocation in every part of your network where there is bandwidth oversubscription.
This is not a concern for net neutrality but rather the individual ISPs. No ISP is obliged to offer any kind of hosting whatsoever.
"You" being a hypothetical local network provider (potentially comcast, but more relevantly a small startup)
The impact being video streams from netflix/youtube killing your network. A better example is probably a rural WISP; huge bandwidth from tower to the 300-500 max users, but limited backhaul from the tower to your hundreds of miles away central location.
On 2), if you don't offer colocation to third parties, but only to your content partners, that works well IFF you can incent your end users to hit those servers preferentially. If that means offering iptv from them for $20/mo which doesn't come out of your bandwidth cap, and having a 200 GB/mo cap for other traffic, that is a win for everyone except netflix. If you aren't allowed to say "iptv from our servers is cap-free, everything else is capped", users hitting Netflix will continue to saturate the backhaul and no one will use the local media server iptv.
(I'm not necessarily saying net neutrality is a bad idea (or a good idea), but that there are specific user-beneficial cases which net neutrality hurts. I'm concerned that Comcast basically can rape everyone today with the laws that are in place, and is entirely likely to use net neutrality laws to do so as well -- they're a perfect example of an incumbent being so big that regulations just serve to entrench them. Competition is the answer, and net neutrality in some ways helps competition among pure-IP cloud-delivered services, but hurts competition among access providers.)
Terms like "net neutrality" and "reform" are often used to trick an audience into agreeing with the speaker by having the listeners fill-in-the-blank with their own favourable definitions.
So, when it comes to state action, "net neutrality" will mean whatever the government says it means. Your definitions won't matter once the bill is passed and/or the regulatory interpretation is promulgated.
> Terms like "net neutrality" and "reform" are often used to trick an audience into agreeing with the speaker by having the listeners fill-in-the-blank with their own favourable definitions.
That would be a sad state of affairs.
> So, when it comes to state action, "net neutrality" will mean whatever the government says it means
I'm no expert, but I don't think this accurately depicts how the legislative branch works.
> Your definitions won't matter once the bill is passed and/or the regulatory interpretation is promulgated.
Chillax, you appear to have a very grim view of your nations governance. That's fine and all, but it doesn't change what net neutrality is about so I'm not really sure how this is relevant. TFA opposes the FCC in the interests of net neutrality and more often than not, people have wildly varying ideas about what that means for service providers, content providers, and subscribers.
1) Net neutrality doesn't mean everyone gets the exact same speed. ISPs are free to offer a plethora of offerings each with their own price, speed and extras (if any). There are also no new guarantees to subscribers, i.e. if the wiring is crap deal with it.
2) CDNs have nothing to do with net neutrality. A typical large ISP will offer co-location services and content providers may use the service the same as any other customer. There can even be other arrangements as they see fit, but the important thing is that no one messes with the tubes.
3) Again, just in case because this is brought up a lot, ISPs can still offer filtered subscriptions. There's a market demand for filtered subscriptions and catering to that demand is fair game.
4) ISPs are still free to apply filters on traffic in the interests of maintaining their network. This is important for example when dealing with (D)DoS attacks or worm outbreaks.
Net neutrality levels the playing field for content providers, so if you get VoIP from your ISP the service may still be better than that of a given competitor by virtue of having less latency. But what the ISP cannot do is artificially inflate their advantage, as doing so would be in violation of a free market on the Internet.
EDIT: disambiguated things