Same way the NSA would be regulated against spying on the general population: remove money from the equation.
Think about it, the only reason Comcast is doing all this is so they can charge premium fees on certain services. If you don't allow them to do so (which is very easy to enforce, as customers can report such pricing policies), they have no incentive to be against net neutrality.
This is why the current status quo has worked for so long: ISPs have no way to legally make profits out of "premium" traffic, so they (generally) don't apply outrageous QoS measures. Money is the only incentive, and removing that incentive solves the problem without the need for active policing.
"This is why the current status quo has worked for so long: ISPs have no way to legally make profits out of "premium" traffic, so they (generally) don't apply outrageous QoS measures. Money is the only incentive, and removing that incentive solves the problem without the need for active policing."
And because they weren't allowed to charge extra for "premium" traffic, they essentially switched over to the over-subscription model in order to make profit. The tighter you squeeze, the stronger it oozes out the sides. And never in the place or way you wish it would!!
>Companies like Comcast have no interest in slowing down web site traffic
Yeah? How about money?
As a comms engineer, I too think about the technical implications of this.
But you have to remember that the people who push for the abolition of net neutrality are mainly the finances guys, i.e the ones responsible for bringing as much money as possible to the company. And when you put yourself in their shoes, all of a sudden you get dreams of Comcast turning the Internet into the same kind of market it has in cable television. And you very quickly forget about QoS, bandwidth, latency and the job of "delivering the bits" and just think in terms of profits. You wouldn't know what most of those terms mean anyway...
Well, in short, any web site with any money to pay the ISPs is likely already running on a CDN that's been paying the ISPs for a decade. The portion of that market that's not yet monetized is likely very small. Besides, slowing down general-purpose web traffic makes it look like your service just totally sucks ass.
But more generally, slow-loading websites make the ISP's service look shitty. There's almost no cost for them to just QoS the low-bandwidth stuff up and it makes people think their service is better.
> But more generally, slow-loading websites make the ISP's service look shitty
Exactly, so people will just leave that ISP and sign up with one that doesn't throttle traffic. Except most people have only one ISP in their area. Yay free market!
Even in a truly free market, most areas would only have one ISP. See how Verizon and AT&T have dramatically scaled back or stopped their FiOS/U-Verse rollout plans. If a company with easements and existing infrastructure (and thus lower costs) has decided it can't justify the investment, how would anyone else?
I was saying "Yay free market" as in "a truly free market is a bad idea as seen by local ISP monopolies," not as in "our free market has failed us and needs to be freer."
In a truly free market, there would be one company that owns everything, including infrastructure. Not a world I'd like to live in.
Also makes me much more trustful about the openness of Atom. Much better than the closed development processes that I usually see from big corporations (e.g Google, Apple, Samsung, EA, at their respective open-source websites).
More like this is why we can't have nice promises. Promises, on their own, are useless. Why should you get the PR boost from an openness promise if you don't actually end up fulfilling it? This is pretty much like false advertising, where you promise some aspects of a product and end up delivering something different. No matter your excuse, this is wrong and unfair to competitors.
But business is business and companies still end up making those weak promises to grab some more market share.
Because it wasn't a god damned promise!! There should be nothing wrong with saying "this is our current plan" and that plan changing down the road (when it makes sense to change).
Anyone who has ever worked on anything in their life knows that plans change. Sometimes plans change to something else that's better. Sometimes ideas that are great on paper don't work in practice and need to be scrapped. Sometimes a plan is a great idea but an unanticipated roadblock makes it impossible or prohibitively expensive to accomplish.
So yes. Companies can never say anything publicly until it's already done. And I think that's a god damned shame. So again I say, this is why we can't have nice things.
That said, we all know "that guy". You know, the slick "idea guy" marketer who always has grand plans but never follows through? Who jumps on any hot PR topic that gets him publicity? After a while, you sort of tune him out, because you know his plans never amount to anything.
I have no idea whether cloudflares efforts fall into this pattern. But I know enough companies that behave this way that I think I can safely say that not all corporate "plans" are announced with the intentions of actually following through on them.
Well, the decision to make electricity forbidden was a mix of building (by closing a circuit, not relevant to 100% capacitive systems), spark (ditto), heating and adding power consumption. There is some debate as to whether those last two still always apply to 100% capacitive devices (as this is important to Israeli soldiers and hospital workers).
But ultimately, most Rabbis know that these reasons have mainly been brought up to avoid making those "holy days" look like other days by allowing the use of computers, microwaves and so on, so it's not just going to go. Every practicing Jew has thought about it. Many hope our Rabbis change their mind one day, seeing how hard life without electricity has/will become and how plausible solutions may exist.
> "In general, we have a very clear ‘do not call’ policy (attached) that is given to every staffing professional" ... "Unfortunately, every six months or so someone makes an error in judgment, and for this type of violation we terminate their relationship with Google."
The recruiter knew from the how the Google HR to Eric Schmidt email reads. The 'secret' part of this agreement is being over emphasized, if you're going to have a non-poaching agreement your staffing employees need to know or it's utterly pointless.
Legally, you're right. But if you were one of Oculus's founders and you were not a hypocrite, this would be a good way to promote Kickstarters like yours.
Disclaimer: I have never used Kickstarter myself, and this one more data point against doing so. But I'm just pointing out what would be right.
Disney had extensive successful experience with animated movies prior to acquiring Pixar.
Facebook with games? HN's community and most people who would buy something solely for games would disagree. But who knows, maybe we'll see Facebook operate a successful diversification strategy by perfectly catering to both casuals and hardcore gamers. Unlikely but one can dream...
> In February 2006, Google made a significant concession to the Great Firewall of China, in exchange for equipment installation on Chinese soil, by blocking websites which the Chinese government deemed illegal.
>Mozilla doesn't believe an Open Web precludes proprietary applications
By definition, it must. It's a slippery slope and it's the reason Mozilla is vehemently against EME. The rest of that line sounds like nonsense to me in that context.
>The point has also already been made that this makes it possible for Unity games to run on open platforms without requiring closed source blobs.
Awesome, the joys of running proprietary software on Linux. Ah, why even have a FOSS OS then? Ditch it and get Windows! /s
Think about it, the only reason Comcast is doing all this is so they can charge premium fees on certain services. If you don't allow them to do so (which is very easy to enforce, as customers can report such pricing policies), they have no incentive to be against net neutrality.
This is why the current status quo has worked for so long: ISPs have no way to legally make profits out of "premium" traffic, so they (generally) don't apply outrageous QoS measures. Money is the only incentive, and removing that incentive solves the problem without the need for active policing.