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A comment on Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: 'The system is failing'. Parent comment

Re:Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: 'The system is ... by simonh on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @02:19PM (#16578417)
>...a few years before the recent FCC decision as a period of net neutrality, but it had so few effects that the average consumer did not notice it being implemented.

The whole point of net neutrality is that you shouldn't notice it, because you should just be able to use your network connection for whatever you want.

In 2005 a Republican appointed FCC commissioner under a Republican president ordered an ISP to stop blocking VOIP services on their network. This is a real thing that happened and I think plenty of people have noticed how useful VOIP and related services like Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, Discord are even if they aren't aware that the ability to use them has only been enabled by regulatory intervention.

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Re:Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: 'The system is ... by twblalock on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @02:24PM (#16578469)
If that's the case I was thinking of, that was a single regional ISP in North Carolina. VOIP would have happened anyway.
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Re:Tim Berners-Lee on the future of the web: 'The system is ... by khedoros1 on Tuesday March 13, 2018 @04:35PM (#16579546)
One of the original reasons that Bittorrent clients started sending encrypted data was to get around ISP packet inspection that tried to throttle torrents. That worked for a while, until ISPs started throttling based on torrent-like transfer patterns.

That wasn't a single regional ISP; it was a pretty common behavior. It's also something that would be fixed by either having a range of different ISPs available in a region, or enforcing net neutrality (in the sense of treating data as an opaque payload to be delivered).

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