DISQUS

Technology Liberation Front: Internet Companies’ Bogus Plea for Regulation

  • mwendy · 2 months ago
    Agreed. The Net Neuts appear to be pushing so-called "fin-syn" like regulations onto largely unregulated ISP facilities and infrastructure. This overly-prohylactic approach will stifle innovation and roll-out of needed transport.
  • scottcleland · 2 months ago
    well said! dead on.
  • MikeRT · 2 months ago

    Plain and simple, these companies want regulation to ensure that ISPs can’t capture a larger share of the profits that the Internet generates. They want it all for themselves. Phrased another way, the goal is to create a subsidy for content creators by blocking ISPs from getting a piece of the action.


    The ISPs create the perception with the public that they are getting neutral access to these websites with their ISP service plan. If they are secretly jacking these websites, then they are defrauding their customers in a moral, if not legal, sense.

    Metered bandwidth is the answer to most of this, but the FCC should be empowered to force them to advertise these policies to their customers so that they do not give them the perception of neutral access to basic internet services.

    They can't have it both ways.
  • George Ou · 2 months ago
    "Large, established companies are not known for being ahead of trends, for one thing, and the anti-authoritarian culture of the Internet is the perfect place to play “beleagured upstart” against the giant, evil ISP. There could be no greater PR gift than for a small service to have access to it degraded by an ISP."

    Vuze was never a victim in any shape way or form from TCP resets because Vuze has their own BitTorrent seeds (what Vuze refers to as "pre-seeding"), and BitTorrent downloads were never affected. Just like nobody actually tries to distribute copies of the bible over BitTorrent because it works 20 times faster and easier using the free web hosting space Comcast already gives you. The FCC filing was merely a manufactured legal case and PR ploy and it worked.

    The outcome of that case was to force Comcast to fairly throttle users based on heavy usage which ironically DOES slow down Vuze content distribution whereas the old TCP reset system did not. But Vuze values the PR more than they view their ability to service their users.