Internet in the US shifts out of Neutral

[MikeSharp01]

The US regulator has shifted the status of regulation around the internet out of neutral. This has the potential of profound implications I am not sure I can see any upsides for the 'little people' - somebody has said that regulating the internet, so keeping it neutral, is on a par with regulating water quality and Tim Berners Lee thinks thus:

 

Q: Are there any internet-related laws in the United States or the UK that you think need to be scrapped?

A: My concern is in America maybe, having been in a leading position really on the internet for a long time that with (the loss of) net neutrality it will…not really be an open internet. I talked a good bit to start-ups in Washington a couple days ago, and they were concerned that if the net neutrality goes away they will…have to negotiate it [their service] and have it unblocked by each ISP (Internet Service Provider).  That will be impossible and very transient. Whereas if they had started their service in the UK or Europe…you just launch a new website. And you don’t have to worry about it being blocked by different ISPs. Their Obama-era regulations – rules about net neutrality – were very valuable in the U.S. and we should try to preserve them.

(Source: HERE , 15.12.2017)

 

I wonder how the hub feels about it?

 

Edited December 15, 2017 by MikeSharp01
Typo

[Jeremy Harris]

I think the main issue is the side effect this will have on all of those that don't use any of the big  services.  I can see that the big search engines will quickly become even more challenging to use, in terms of getting balanced results, than they are now, if the big players are the only ones with lots of bandwidth.

 

My main concern is that those that use the internet for non-commercial purposes, like this forum, will be sidelined and lose bandwidth to the point where they are even harder to use in some areas.  My broadband speed is already slow, and it looks as if it will now get a great deal slower if my ISP agrees to allocate more bandwidth to streaming services that pay them to slug down everyone else's connection speed.  That would be a real PITA, but thankfully we do still have some smaller ISPs who may not choose this path, like Andrews and Arnold, so perhaps the thing to do is switch away from the mainstream ISPs if your don't want your internet speed to be throttled right back by the activities of Amazon etc in streaming video.

 

 

[ProDave]

I noticed a pledge in yesterdays Scottish budget, for super fast broadband to all homes in something like 2 years.  It will be interesting to see how that plays out.

[le-cerveau]

Just had a look (at the Scotland one) so 30M to 100% of homes by 2021!  

 

Really, every single home and business (no exceptions) with 30M fiber broadband.  There are bound to be some get out clauses somewhere!

[ProDave]

Yes there must be a get out clause, or it will be "available" but at an astronomical cost to reflect the work needed?

 

The cmmunity council here tried to get a private system installed, delivered to each home by wifi, but that has stalled because none of the suppliers tendered to install the system.

[lizzie]

We are currently renting a house which is on a development that runs through a golf course. A private road. The BT internet is a max of 6mb - when it works - and that is paying for their superfast system which they admit they cannot provide here but if you drop down to the lower level you would get 2mb at best. BT  will not upgrade the 30 year old copper to fibre, in fact they refused to do anything even after efforts by the local MP.

 

The residents got together last year to get. a fibre broadband company in and eventually a deal was agreed with gigaclear and ours was installed a few months ago. Its great I get huge speeds and on line life has returned. One bugbear is that is only thta speed in the room where the box is. Outside that room wi-fi is poor and I am using range extenders but that is probably this house not the cable broadband.

 

Is not cheap, we pay circa £60 a month for internet only. Installation cost about £300. The cost was worth it to me as it it was so bad on the BT system I often had to go to a local cafe to download things.....house build related thing so v important!

[SteamyTea]

How hard can if be to make a 'citizens' network.  We carry around the technology these days, just needs someone to come up with a simple way for people to connect all the routers and phone wireless hotspots together.

It still amazes me, that were I live (6 houses) that there are 5 wireless routers permanently connect to the internet and probably 9 phones that are capable of being connected.

So how much does that all cost, £3000/year for 11 people to have access.

There just has to be a better way than relying on phone companies.

Edited December 15, 2017 by SteamyTea

[lizzie]

I totally agree Steamy Tea

[oldkettle]

With regards to the NN and on many other topics I can't recommend Marginalrevolution blog enough. 

 

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/11/end-net-neutrality-isnt-end-world.html

And

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/11/points-net-neutrality.html

[Jeremy Harris]

Perhaps we're guilty of taking a too US-centric stance on this.  Certainly the US dominates the internet, but many of the really big servers are in Europe, and AFAICS, UK and EU legislation isn't likely to change to allow ISPs to favour one particular content provider over another.

 

That really leaves the big potential knock-on effect of things like search engines, the vast majority of which are all still US based, and so, unless they deliberately change their search algorithms to compensate, will serve more results for the bigger bandwidth users, I suspect.  Google has, in my view, become near-unusable already if you are looking for unbiased technical information, as even with quite specific and complex Boolean search strings it still serves up several pages of paid for crap that has little relevance to the search.  At the other extreme, engines like DuckDuckGo use a shotgun approach, and serve up loads of irrelevant answers just because their search algorithms are crap.

 

I've been playing around with search engines a fair bit recently, driven by the exceedingly poor performance of the big players (unless you are content to be product placements instead of proper search results).  The golden rule seems to be to always search via a VPN and always via a browser set to accept no cookies at all.  It helps if you search from a smaller window, too, as that restricts the chance of bias from browser profiling.  Sadly, one of the better ways of finding stuff quickly and accurately seems to be to use the Tor Browser, via a VPN, and search using the Dark Net, as the chance are that you will find the information you want far more quickly.

 

It'll be interesting to see how the change in this US legislation impacts the rest of the world.  My guess is that there may be a backlash, with more server farms relocating out of the US to countries where there is still freedom for every website to carry a "weighting" based solely on it's popularity, rather than how much it's owners pay an ISP.

[MikeSharp01]

1 hour ago, JSHarris said:

, UK and EU legislation isn't likely to change to allow ISPs to favour one particular content provider over another.

Tend to agree on the EU but not sure if some people in the UK don't hope for a bonfire of regulation post Brexit. Agree we mat be taking to US centric a view though.