2014: The year the Americans broke the internet

http://www.thedrum.com/opinion/2014/01/18/2014-year-americans-broke-internet-good

by yiedyie • 12 years ago

77 53 12 years ago

Loughla• 12 years ago

Anytime someone says something like, " and I don't want to add to the hyperbole already out there, but," I write them off.

That is an admittance to using hyperbole, and therefore invalidates the argument, correct?

hrkristian• 12 years ago

It's up there with "I'm not a racist, but..."

Doesn't affect facts, though. Just means be more sceptical...

giantrobothead2• 12 years ago

Or "I don't mean to be rude, but..."

jff• 12 years ago

For a while, the Something Awful forums apparently word-filtered "I'm not racist, but" to appear as "I'm extremely racist, and"

BlackDeath3• 12 years ago

The year the Americans broke the internet.

Yeah... you're welcome, I guess?

I suppose I should have called my representatives, right? Well, their interns, at least...

huhalu• 12 years ago

More like US Appeals Court broke internet

giantrobothead2• 12 years ago

"The Year Multinational Corporations with Powers Beyond the Scope of Individual Actors Broke the Internet" just isn't as catchy a title, huh?

wavefunction• 12 years ago

There have always been multinets even if it seemed like one over-arching Internet, but users and technology are just going to have to become more sophisticated. Some good folks will be lost along the way to criminals and "intelligence services" (but I repeat myself!) We can't give up the dream and that remarkable goal of networked computing and communication and information accessibility.

It took some time but the assholes got their shit together. Which is what we're seeing now. These assholes have always been with us throughout human history, causing problems and violence and bringing out the worst in the rest of us.

So we need to maintain vigilance, and work early to undo their harm they cause to us and themselves. I forgive them, because they are born with hearts of fear and that will never change. We can't allow them to dictate our lives though. We know what's right and what's wrong, and we simply need to make sure they are put in the sandbox to play with their toys where they can't hurt anyone else while we move forward together as a family.

This is why no one individual should have too much power over anyone else, and no office or government should be similarly afforded the powers to destroy on a whim. There will always be these folks with us, and if we offer them opportunities to express themselves, they will to our shame and regret.

(I know, lots of "theys" and "us." I invite you to take a chance and perhaps expand your mind.)

mullingitover2• 12 years ago

I forgive them, because they are born with hearts of fear and that will never change

I think it's not 'hearts of fear' but 'laserlike focus on maximizing shareholder value, greater good be damned.'

RickS• 12 years ago

I think that comes from a place of fear in a lot of people. Money is power, and protection. What does money ultimately buy us if not safety? Perhaps not always literal physical safety, but the safety of knowing you can live life as you see fit without restriction.

Basically, money buys contentedness, and those that remain bound to contentedness are often there through the avoidance of the things that cause them fear.

greenyoda• 12 years ago

Any U.S. decision on net neutrality can only affect the part of the internet that's within the U.S., so outside the U.S., the internet remains as it always was. I'm surprised that the author, writing from the U.K., thinks of "the internet" in such a U.S.-centric way. Did the Great Firewall of China also "break the internet"?

rqebmm2• 12 years ago

for people in China? In a manner of speaking: Yes.

badman_ting2• 12 years ago

Hey, it was ours to break.

emocakes• 12 years ago

lol, yeah, everything is american, i forgot...

rayiner5• 12 years ago

Stuff created by our defense department in conjunction with our universities certainly is American. To this day, ICANN operates under authority delegated from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

badman_ting2• 12 years ago

Well, in this case it is. lol.

alexeisadeski3• 12 years ago

Americans giveth and Americans taketh away.

aidenn02• 12 years ago

Note that I've seen VOIP latency increase in the wake of a cable-company deploying a phone option. Disguising the nature of the traffic caused the latency to drop again.

rahimnathwani• 12 years ago

How do you disguise the nature of the traffic without also changing the route taken by the packets?

I would be inclined to test this with/without a VPN connection, but then I wouldn't know whether the improvement was due to avoiding throttling/whatever, or just that my VPN server has better quality routes to the VoIP endpoint.

I guess if you VPN to the VoIP server itself, then it would be a fair test.

aidenn02• 12 years ago

All RTP seemed to exhibit the issue, so we just setup a test with two RTP endpoints. We wrote a very simple UDP mangler/demangler (XOR with a fixed key) and ran it on both ends of the RTP connection.

diminoten5• 12 years ago

I fail to see how this breaks even the US Internet. Comcast will never cut off the flow to certain parts of the Internet for the sake of charging you to go there. They'll always let you go to those places, they just won't let you go there as quickly if you don't pay extra.

I don't think I have to tell you all how shitty this would be, but it's not a "broken" Internet. We can sit here and concoct all kinds of worst-case scenarios, but we could also do that with anything. Your babysitter could feed your kid a bottle of aspirin - this is within the realm of physical possibility, just as it's within the realm of physical possibility that Comcast starts shaking down websites.

And before anyone even brings it up, Netflix and Comcast's peering agreement has nothing to do with net neutrality. Without peering, Netflix's path to consumers was long. With peering, it's not, which leads to faster speeds. That's it. Peering agreements have existed for many years, and will need to continue to exist for the Internet to continue to exist. It'd be much worse for the Internet to abolish all peering agreements in the name of neutrality (wtf?) than it would be for the FCC to have no teeth in enforcing net neutrality.

MoosePlissken• 12 years ago

And if that's true, is it really much different than what we have today? If you have deep pockets, you can already buy speed by using the services of a CDN like Akamai. We already have an unlevel playing field.

diminoten5• 12 years ago

Right now Comcast (except for torrent traffic, fuck them for that) doesn't meddle in what the packet is or where it's going, per se. However they do, apparently, have peering agreements with companies which allow these companies to serve traffic directly from THEIR networks, straight into Comcast's networks. This effectively does favor certain traffic over other traffic, but it's a kind of favoring that's been going on forever, and is generally accepted.

I dunno. I actually fail to see how peering in general is not a violation of net neutrality, however it's so critical to the smooth operation of the Internet, I'd rather have peering than net neutrality, if I had to choose.

wmf2• 12 years ago

If deliberately congesting links to encourage another company (who happens to be a competitor) to negotiate peering is not a violation of net neutrality then we need to update the definition.

diminoten5• 12 years ago

Their peering agreement lapsed, that's all.

Nothing "deliberate" about slowing Netflix down, that's just what happens when packets have to travel further and through the greater Internet.

Put the pitchfork away.

rayiner5• 12 years ago

I've said this in a different argument, but it bears repeating: The "internet" is merely a software abstraction. It doesn't exist. What actually exists is a loosely-coordinated group of private networks, subject to the whims of the owners of those networks. Nobody "broke" the internet, because there was nothing to break. All that's happening is that the abstraction is becoming less representative of the reality, for various quite predictable reasons.

gruseom3• 12 years ago

You speak only of the letter and not of the spirit of the thing. This has nothing in common with the mentality that created the internet in the first place, which was cosmic and adventurous and poetic.

It reminds me rather of cutting the perforations off of postage stamps. I doubt that J.C.R. Licklider would approve.

rayiner5• 12 years ago

Undoubtedly there are lots of high-minded poetic idealists behind the development of the internet. But the universe doesn't owe it to them to make the physical nature of the world adapt to their ideals. Maybe many people imagined that the internet would be this borderless space in the ether where packets flowed unimpeded from any source to any destination. Yet, borders are one of the most fundamental facets of earthly existence, and whoever controls them, whether they be nations or network providers, have tremendous power. And that is the true nature of reality.

rqebmm2• 12 years ago

as much of a pessimist as I am, I highly doubt much of the doomsday scenario will come to pass. Comcast and Verizon will likely spend a lot of time and energy staying JUST on this side of the FCC's ire, because the FCC will always have the "nuclear option" of reclassifying the ISPs as common carriers.

Besides, ISPs degrade/prioritize traffic all the time through management of peering relationships. All they have to do is fail to adequately upgrade the servers that communicate with Netflix to cause congestion while at the same time spending lots of resources making sure their peering relationship with Hulu is top-notch. This would create much faster Hulu traffic relative to Netflix traffic on provider's network, but all of the traffic is still reaching the end-user in the same manner, i.e. it's still "net-neutral".

The only real solution here is the common carrier reclassification because the only real problem is the last-mile-monopoly. Everything else is just business.

dillon• 12 years ago

I heavily disagree that the internet is now forever broken as this writer is mentioning. One year the U.S. can take one stance, but on the next year they can take another. The whole notion of being broken "For good" implies 'forever' and forever is a lot longer than the writer may realize.

People will know and figure out if ISPs are in fact abusing their powers. Yes, I agree that all ISPs are evil in their own way and there is nothing we can do about that. Although, I think that the ISPs know that they are making more money off of their users than they would throttling other sites thus retaining those users is of the utmost importance.

dragonwriter• 12 years ago

One year the U.S. can take one stance, but on the next year they can take another.

Or even the same year; the FCC is already moving to restore (and perhaps expand by voiding barriers to municipal broadband) the substance of the ruels in its Open Internet Order, under different legal authority, based on the decision in the Verizon case. [1]

[1] http://www.fcc.gov/document/statement-fcc-chairman-tom-wheel...

allochthon2• 12 years ago

It is much more than that. As the LA Times said in the aftermath of the US Appeals court decision that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) could not establish rules promoting net neutrality: bow down to your new internet overlords, Comcast and Verizon.

I'm hoping Google will lead the way and provide a genuine alternative for retail Internet access, given the extent of their parallel network. Comcast and Verizon will then have an opportunity to learn that customers are people to be served and not cows to be milked.

gress2• 12 years ago

Why would Google's alternative be neutral when there is no rule saying it has to be?

allochthon2• 12 years ago

That's a good point. In terms of an ideal solution, the answer would definitely be "no." In terms of the behavior of the companies involved, I trust Google slightly more than I do Verizon or Comcast to keep the interests of consumers in mind. But trusting a for-profit corporation with something like this is not an ideal long-term arrangement.

xFFEE• 12 years ago

Not 2014. It was 2001.

When Americans broke theirselves, because of being unable to make anything but guns. And war.

They (You?) broke their own freedom, because of guns, and making money in wars.

Try something else, something new.

lettergram• 12 years ago

I'd just like to point out, this also gives an opportunity (or at least incentive) for different forms of internet transport (i.e. googles loon).

throwwit• 12 years ago

I'd surmise that forcing the FCC's hand on a common carrier ruling might be preemptive to loon or another mesh-networking based co. gaining ground in a regulatorally permissive space. Especially given longer range wifi tech is on the horizon.

2014: The year the Americans broke the internet

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