
FCC Says BitTorrent Throttling Illegal, EFF Releases Tool for You To Test Your ISP For It - terpua
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/fcc_says_bittorrent_throttling_illegal.php
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jrockway
Wow, the government is actually helping people instead of corporations for
once? I'm confused, there must be some ulterior motive...

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qqq
The Government does not just help corporations. It also, frequently, hurts
them. Overall, the majority of corporations would be better off if the
Government mostly left them alone and stuck to the basics of maintaining law
and order.

The Government also both helps, and hurts, everyday people, all the time. And
again people would, overall, be better off if the Government did less. But
that is no reason to be skeptical of the good will of the Government when it
does something genuinely helpful. Even in most of the cases where Government
is harmful, it _means well_.

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mattmaroon
I don't believe that. Most cases in which the government is harmful are caused
by individuals putting their own interests above that of their constituencies.
"The Government" is not an organism and it's a very common mistake to think of
it (or a corporation) as one. It's a group of individuals many of whom have to
be reelected to maintain their status.

Farm subsidies exist, even though every economist says they should not,
because congressmen like the bucks passed to them by the agricultural lobbies,
because those bucks help them get reelected. Etc.

For a real interesting read, pick up Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. It
explains how the interplay between government officials who meant well and
ones clinging to power through corporate dollars degraded our country's diet
to the point where it's significantly less healthy than that of indigenous
tribes who eat nothing but red meat. It's neat how a government mandate to eat
less meat instead became one to eat more carbs.

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qqq
I agree with most of what you say. But consider again those cases where an
individual legislator "puts his own interest first". In those cases, our
_system of government_ put officials in a situation where they have a conflict
of interest. That is a flaw in our system of Government and should not be
blamed on the malice of any individual. Whatever you do in a _conflict of
interest_ there was no single, clear path to follow, so no one can blame you
too much, and if you choose the wrong path it's an understandable mistake.

If you don't want people to use power, don't give them power. It's not,
individually, their fault.

I do not wish to defend out and out corruption, but that's relatively uncommon
compared to simple conflicts of interest. Most people are selfish, _and
there's nothing wrong with that_ , and what's going wrong is asking them to
make terrible choices between themselves and others.

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mattmaroon
Totally. Our lawmakers are given an incentive system that often puts their
interests in direct opposition to ours. People over time will trend toward
their own interests.

It's not so much that we cannot give them power (or want not to) as that we
must do so while aligning their interests with ours. One example (and I'm not
sure I support this) would be to force all campaigns to be government funded.
Find every possible reason why lobbyists give money and stop it.

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qqq
The more of a free market, and small government, we have, the less there is
for lobbyists to buy, and the less decisions for politicians to make. Moving
in that direction will at least lessen the problem. :)

That's kind of what I mean about power. For example, if there are people in
charge of the economy -- with power over it -- that's a problem and people
will want to pay them to use the power to their benefit. But there needn't be
anyone with power of that sort.

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Xichekolas
The argument that torrent users degrade the network for other users is tenuous
at best, and I wish someone would start calling people out on it.

If the ISP says I have a 6m/768k broadband line, then I should be able to
saturate that limit to my heart's content, with whatever I want to
download/upload. If it degrades the local network somehow, that is the ISP's
fault, not mine, and my neighbors are free to be angry at the ISP for an
unreliable connection.

What is the point of having a connection that you can't use to its potential?
If torrent users really are degrading the network, then lower the speed caps
for the given price tier, as you have obviously oversold capacity. Or, better
yet, upgrade the network. Laying a guilt trip on people for 'using too much of
something they paid for' is just retarded.

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wmf
The argument that torrent users should be able to use all the bandwidth
they've paid for is totally disconnected from ISP economics, and I wish
someone would start calling people out on it. Wait, that's what I'm doing
right now.

ISPs are built on statistical multiplexing. They pay something like
$40/Mbps/month and resell that bandwidth for around one tenth that price. If
ISPs had enough capacity to satisfy all their customers simultaneously, they
have to increase prices or decrease speeds enormously. If 6M service suddenly
cost $200/month, then any kind of multimedia on the Net dies immediately.
Statistical multiplexing benefits almost all Internet users (whose traffic is
bursty), so it's not going away.

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Xichekolas
Oh I realize how it works. It's the same reason my university parking
department could oversell parking spaces. Not everyone is going to be on
campus at once.

Thankfully not every user is using BitTorrent. But some are. If the
statistical model assumes that no one will ever use all they are alloted, then
the model is broken and needs to be re-calibrated. If this results in a price
increase, at least that is transparent, rather than traffic shaping and
individual throttling, which denies people something they paid for, and
basically amounts to false advertising:

> _"Speeds up to 150x faster than dialup![1]"_

[1] But you can't actually take advantage of that rate, because it'd be rude
to your neighbors.

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tocomment
Is there anywhere to post the results from using the tool? Has anyone tried
it?

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mattmaroon
I'm assuming that they still have the right to throttle indiscriminately
right?

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newt0311
Is BT throtteling bad? Maybe.

Do I want the FCC to regulate it? Definitely not. If the US govt. wants to
crack down on ISPs this way, I would prefer that they at least do it through
congress. Giving government more power is in general a bad idea. When this
power is given to unelected bodies like the FCC (in a system based on "rule by
the people") its a recipe for disaster. We already know that government
bureaucrats are not the smartest of the bunch when it comes to IT. Do you
really want to give them even more power to regulate it in the hopes that they
don't do something stupid? I would rather leave it to corporations which have
at least some incentive to act rationally.

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mattmaroon
I have to disagree about regulation. Most people have 1, maybe 2 choices of
broadband providers. Where natural monopolies are involved, the free market
has no chance to set things right, and government regulation is a necessity.

If we all had 3 or more cable companies to choose from, I'd agree.

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BrandonM
But the regulation is a double-edged sword. The simple act of regulating makes
it harder for new competitors to enter the game.

Let's say someone wants to compete with WOW and Time Warner (the two cable
broadband providers in my area), so they get a reasonably-fast connection (but
much lower than their competitors, since they have few customers) and get as
many new customers as possible. They advertise that they are just as fast as
the competition most of the time (not during peak hours), but the price is $10
cheaper per month.

This new company starts doing well, and then the BT users start to increase in
proportion as the tech-savvy individuals migrate to this newer service. Speeds
go down as a result, and it turns out that something like 50-60% of the
traffic is long-running BitTorrent transfers. Customers start complaining of
slow speeds and other occasional issues. This new competitor has a few
options:

    
    
      1. Upgrade the infrastructure
      2. Repackage the service
      3. Throttle BT traffic
    

Option 1 is a no-go because the company has just started to turn a positive
revenue, and by the time money is found and spent on upgrades (which will also
take a significant amount of time), a large part of the customer base will
have left, and the company's reputation will be poor as well.

Option 2 also has the danger of losing customers. In order to have the
intended effect, existing customers will have to make the choice of paying
more for the same speed (Why'd I switch, anyways?) or paying the same/less for
a lower "guaranteed" speed. Again, this choice is a net lose, although if the
company is lucky and can do 1 and 2 at the same time, they might stay in
business, at the cost of killing their momentum/reputation.

Option 3 is clearly the simplest solution with the least backlash, except that
because of FCC regulations, it's illegal. Instead of being allowed to
(hopefully) temporarily throttle BitTorrent bandwidth as the company increases
its customer base and its infrastructure, it is quite possibly forced out of
business.

Bandwidth throttling is arguably fair anyways. Consider your OS: if there is a
long-running process which will saturate bandwidth, any good OS will put it at
a low priority, so that bursty activity (browsing, small downloads, SSH
sessions) have a reasonable response time. So we are perfectly happy to
throttle our own bandwidth when it benefits us, but it is not okay for the ISP
to do the same exact thing, only on a larger scale?

This is not what Net Neutrality is about. Net Neutrality is about preventing
content providers from creating deals with ISPs that lock out smaller content
providers. It is not about protecting users' "rights" to saturate the network
at full speed and kill everyone's bandwidth, especially when the reality is
that a substantial amount of that traffic is illegal.

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mattmaroon
I'm missing how the BT thing matters. An upstart could throttle
indiscriminately. They just can't discriminate between different types of
traffic.

They could easily just put a 10-20gb/mo download cap on their service as
Comcast and the others probably will.

