FCC dealt major blow in net neutrality ruling favoring Comcast

Mark Smith nanog at 85d5b20a518b8f6864949bd940457dc124746ddc.nosense.org
Wed Apr 7 14:21:16 UTC 2010


On Tue, 6 Apr 2010 11:30:16 -0400
"Patrick W. Gilmore" <patrick at ianai.net> wrote:

> <http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology/90747-fcc-dealt-major-blow-in-net-neutrality-ruling-favoring-comcast>
> 
> Seems on-topic, even though policy related.
> 

It seems to me that "Net Neutrality" has been conflagrated into meaning
both of two separate things:

(a) congestion management
(b) restricting access to certain websites etc., such that an SP
creates a Walled Garden, that either the customer or the content
provider is expected to pay to or to provide access too.

I'm not against (a), because fundamental assumptions of the
Internet/TCP were short and brusty traffic, which implies end-nodes
sharing network resources, and only dominating them for relatively short
periods. P2P destroys (and yes, that is intentionally a strong word)
that assumption.

OTOH, (b) is something I completely object to. ISPs are a conduit, not
a controller of content.

So, there's the problem. According to the above, I'm both for, and
against, Network Neutrality. 

One thing which would significantly help this argument for or against
Network Neutrality is defining exactly what it is.

Regards,
Mark.




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