this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2024
401 points (98.8% liked)

Technology

60052 readers
3783 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related content.
  3. Be excellent to each another!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 294 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Exactly why net neutrality was important

[–] [email protected] 176 points 8 months ago (10 children)
[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Has Biden made this a priority?

[–] [email protected] 56 points 8 months ago (1 children)

He couldn't until there was a Democrat majority in the FCC.

Now it's a priority.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well he's got a few months to make something happen then.

Until then its just talk.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago

They're holding a vote on it in October.

load more comments (9 replies)
[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago

Who saw this coming???

/s

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

RIP net neutrality, it was nice knowing you.

[–] [email protected] 94 points 8 months ago

“Why should we upgrade our tech when we can just artificially reduce capacity and charge more for priority access?”

[–] [email protected] 51 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Fuck these pricks.

The network can handle everyone currently on it yet they cry like it's causing them issues.

Fucking liars.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The issue is there are profits left on the table! Unacceptable!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

When it's mafia it's extortion, when it's ISPs it's just "good business practices."

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

They might not be able to easily, but that's 100% on them for spending their obscene profits on yet another nesting yacht rather than upgrading their infrastructure to actually keep pace with demand

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

It's yachts, all the way down

[–] [email protected] 42 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The fuck is “fast gaming”. And what games demand this?

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I would guess that since it mentions teleconferencing and gaming, that they want to create low-latency fast-lanes.

But they also mention TikTok, so I am not completely sure that they are referring to latency.

This article isn't very good at explaining what they're talking about on a technical level.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Reading trough all the marketing terms used. I’m more afraid of selective slowing down connections instead of the mentioned “speeding up” connections.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 8 months ago

Yeah they won't speed up shit, that requires investment in infrastructure. They'll just slow down all existing lanes by 40%, blame it on something unrelated, and then charge you 2.5x as much as you used to pay to get your original speeds back.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Don't do that. Don't read through them. Let that shit be.

Also don't help your "non-tech-savvy" relatives and friends with crap you've told them before you don't use. They think it's fine and normal until they are left alone to deal with it. "But how will I use Facebook?.. I dunno, don't use it myself, can't help you".

The reason crap is popular is also because we the relatively savvy people have conditioned normies to think that they choose what to use and we'll just help them with everything, but the authority who tells what's good and what isn't is not us, it's Google and Apple and other shitmakers.

No free IT help without representation, I say. Which means that I'll help them if they suddenly want to become Linux users. Or something else I can respect. But not with things I've never advised them to use in the first place, quite the contrary. I'm for adult usage of the Web, with normies accepting responsibility for their own choices.

EDIT: This butthurt comment meant that we shouldn't wait for normies to abandon all that. Leading by example. Like with ICQ being abandoned in favor of Skype. Network effect isn't real (... anymore with enshittification negating it fully), it can't hurt you.

EDIT2: And I know it's offtopic.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I agree with you, I usually tell relatives to call their isp and scream at them. It's usually stuff I could probably help with but if the isp gets more hell they might change for the better.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yo TikTok with a latency higher than 2 ms is completely unusable trash!

Or under 2 ms.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I have a hard time believing that since TikTok is such a popular mobile app, and 4G users are going to have a minimum of 200ms latency over-the-air.

5G does offer much faster over-the-air latency of only 1ms, but if TikTok were to become unusable if the latency between tower and server exceeds 1ms, I would expect to hear widespread complaints about that, as the vast majority of users aren't going to have <2ms latency between them and the server. Pinging TikTok.com from my 5G handset (in a major metro area) shows a latency of 80ms. Admittedly, AWS and GCP, where TikTok hosts content primarily for US users, likely has better latency. My personal experience with those platforms doesn't suggest that it would be that good- pinging the cloudfront CDN endpoints associated with my account, I get latency between 40-60ms.

Besides, video streaming shouldn't be affected by latency, only throughput. TikTok videos are just MP4 files on a CDN, as long as you can download them faster than you can play them, high latency shouldn't even be noticeable to the user, outside of initial load times for latency exceeding a few hundred ms (up to a second or so delay if establishing a fresh TCP connection, depending on the latency).

Maybe TikTok Live could be an issue, but its a one-way channel so a delay shouldn't be noticeable like it would be with a 2-way teleconference. Maybe if there was high jitter or packet loss, the stream could have extremely low quality.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

If you read my comment again you might realize it's a joke about TikTok being trash.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago

Low latency matters a lot more than bandwidth in any game that isn't turn based.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Oof, they don't have net neutrality over there eh?

Gonna be bollocks for them until they can get that brought in. There's an election coming up there right? Maybe they can vote for the party that pledges to bring in net neutrality laws, it's about time they had them considering it's 2024.

I wish them the best of luck <3

[–] [email protected] 13 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Net neutrality being brought up as an election topic would be very unusual for our politics. Our two party system is very set on the topics that they like and don't like to bring up.

Of course the parties have negative incentive to do anything more than the bare minimum about these topics that they fight so hard to advertise. Otherwise, they might need to come up with new reasons for people to vote for them.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Except that ignores how net neutrality only became a thing in the last 2 decades there’s only so many presidential admins in that period. So 5 elections vs 20 years to discuss a topic… it’s not weird that it comes up more outside of an election year. Feigning both sides/everything’s rigged bullshit is a mindless simplification.

Still, I can’t tell if you’re choosing to ignore how Obama campaigned for it or how Biden and Harris campaigned way more for it, especially concerning reversing trumps FCC decisions.

No reason to ignore the fact that Biden made it a priority in the first year or so of the admin.

Acting like it’s rigged absolves republicans of their actions: “Net Neutrality Won’t Survive a Trump Presidency” and lumps good folks in with the worst.

Net neutrality couldn’t happen while republicans block the commissioners for the job: https://www.theverge.com/2023/7/20/23800161/gigi-sohn-fcc-nomination-dark-money-campaign-net-neutrality-profile

So why not blame it on the people who are actually documented as destroying net-neutrality and advocating against it. Why instead invent some all powerful Illuminati like cabal only to end up making it a both sides thing?

Republican attacks over bs tweets are just one of the reasons we can’t have nice things. Another reason is because people like to imagine a rigged system pulling the strings to pretend there’s some order in the chaos. All it does is suck the support away from anyone trying to do the right thing.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Well said, even if you are the grossest of schnapps.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

Data is data unless they can commodify it. Data is like a river that never ends. Doesn’t cost them Anything. We are subject to monopolies who charge above and beyond maintenance and massive profits while destroying competition

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (2 children)

You seem to be misinformed on how the internet works. Nothing is "free". ISPs have to buy equipment, pay for expensive physical connectivity (without disturbing existing infrastructure), and usually have to deal with constant, ever increasing bandwidth requirements.

I'm all for a bit of net neutrality, but ISPs tend to get a lot of flak for policies like this, for seemingly no reason. For example, let's say ISP A and Upstream B have a mutual bandwidth sharing policy (called Peering) where both sides benefit equally from the connectivity. ISP A determines that N is using all the bandwidth to Upstream B. ISP A has three options: N gets all the bandwidth to Upstream B (disturbing other traffic to/from that network), N has to be throttled to allow all traffic equally, or ISP A and Upstream B need to expand their network again (new equipment, new physical links) which will cost a lot of money. N doesn't even pay ISP A or Upstream B, they just pay their ISP C. In the end, ISP A has to throttle N, and N is the one who had to expand/change their business model to deliver content to their customers. They had to go out and buy services from many upstream providers to even the load and designed a solution to install Caching boxes inside each ISP's datacenter so their traffic could reach end users without going upstream.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

The correct answer in that scenario is C should be paying for it, as in the stated scenario C's traffic would be exceeding the peering arrangement with B and/or A, but there were/are a number of reasons that breaks down in the real world.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

That's a good summary!

IMO, the customers of A are paying A to access to the internet, including N. So A should charge their customers enough that they can pay for the equipment to deliver that.

In a working market with many participants, customers can choose a cheaper ISP that has congested/throttled peering, or a more expensive ISP with gold-plated interconnects.

The problem is that in the US, typically your choice of ISP is limited by geography. In many other places you have open fiber networks where the last mile is shared and then you can choose what ISP you want ontop of that, and the ISP is what determines how good your peering is.

And installing caching boxes inside of ISPs is actually a really efficient solution (as well as peer-to-peer)

[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (1 children)

enshittification.

my theory is that they are pushing for more expensive upgrades like fiber.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

Charter has/had a dark fiber ring ready for use back in 2005. I assume most other cable providers have similar, because they had to build it out after the first FCC spending bill after 99

[–] [email protected] 17 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Per the article, this looks to be limited to mobile internet and not traditional broadband. While I can understand the practicality of carving out unique bands of the wireless spectrum for specific uses, charging extra for it seems scummy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Its always, no no this is for X, not Y.

(a few years pass)

They accepted X, now there is precedent, let's take Y.

This is the start, not the finish.

Fight this or it will make its way to your interests.

My $0.02.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Sure, it’s $0.02 now, but in a few years that’ll be precedent and you’ll start asking for $0.04. I’m on to your game!

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:


Some net neutrality proponents are worried that soon-to-be-approved Federal Communications Commission rules will allow harmful fast lanes because the plan doesn't explicitly ban "positive" discrimination.

FCC Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel's proposed rules for Internet service providers would prohibit blocking, throttling, and paid prioritization.

Stanford Law Professor Barbara van Schewick, who has consistently argued for stricter net neutrality rules, wrote in a blog post on Thursday that "harmful 5G fast lanes are coming."

In a different filing last month, several advocacy groups similarly argued that the "no-throttling rule needs to ban selective speeding up, in addition to slowing down."

That filing was submitted by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Open Technology Institute at New America, Public Knowledge, Fight for the Future, and United Church of Christ Media Justice Ministry.

The draft order argues that the FCC's definition of "throttling" is expansive enough that an explicit ban on what the agency called positive discrimination isn't needed:


The original article contains 635 words, the summary contains 158 words. Saved 75%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

I hope the EU handles that. I'm happy that I'm not in the US.

load more comments
view more: next ›