Join the Battle for Net Neutrality

Re:Join the Battle for Net Neutrality by atonse on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @11:27AM (#15758050)

You're right, a lot of this is an education problem.

Many (including myself) have for years thought that this wasn't a problem. How did we get along before this?

But there are dozens of cases before NN was codified, where ISPs were blocking and slowing down traffic. One of the most high profile was how Comcast was slowing down Netflix in the NY Metro Area.

After the rules went into place, Netflix speeds just magically increased, and Comcast said it was a coincidence. Uh huh, sure.

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Re:Join the Battle for Net Neutrality by jerkstate on Wednesday November 22, 2017 @11:51AM (#15758252)

> magically increased

there was a technical reason for the performance improvement; netflix started peering with Comcast: http://www.businessinsider.com/paid-peering-explained-2014-2

but let's consider the world where the pipes stayed the same size; suddenly the lawyers say you have to stop shaping Netflix traffic (shaping means randomly dropping TCP traffic in order to signal to both ends that congestion exists in the network and they should slow down sending). Lack of shaping means congestion and slowness for all content traversing the same pipe, not just the heaviest users. So people watching Netflix get a slightly better quality and less buffering, but it takes 10 seconds to load any website traversing that pipe.

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