BitTorrent CEO On Net Neutrality 223
angry tapir writes "According to BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker, the Internet industry has to regulate itself by responding to consumer demands in the wake of the recent US federal court ruling that the Federal Communications Commission didn't have authority to enforce its net neutrality rules."
How about (Score:4, Interesting)
We just GIVE the FCC the power to regulate (bitchslap) troublemaker isps like comcast.
The free market wont fix it. Nobody else will fix it. So make the FCC do something useful for a change.
Altho i'm not sure why we allowed internet provider greed to ever bring up net neutrality at all. Neutrality should just be the way things are by default.
We're just not a very bright species i guess. Or too many of us are getting paid one way or another to be tools for the isps. Sell everyone out for a buck.
Re:I know everyone is against the FCC and all... (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyone remotely honest doesn't have the kind of money needed to run these days, either.
"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account is a crime that has never been found out, because it was properly executed." by -Honore de Balzac
which is normally paraphrased as 'Behind every great fortune there is a crime'.
Thus the only way an honest man can get into congress is if a corrupt man helps him get there.
Which leads into this quote "Now and then an innocent man is sent to the legislature." by Kin Hubbard (1868-1930)
Re:Bittorrent != Piracy (Score:3, Interesting)
Whoever creates the monopoly, should regulate it (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm actually kind of glad it hasn't fallen under the FCC, because it just wouldn't make any sense. Whatever level of government is creating the monopolies, is who should be regulating. Cable Company has a franchise with your city? Then the city is the one who should demand neutrality (and any other necessary pros for the quids). And in the rare situations where an ISP doesn't have any monopoly force, there's no need to regulate them, because their customers and competitors can handle the job.
I know people generally hate this idea, because they don't want to get involved with local politics and only show up for general elections so they can vote party tickets, but tying the special favors directly to the restrictions is the right thing to do. If you don't like local politics, the problem is with you, not the fact that you have a local government. Get over it, face up to your responsibility, and demand some conditions the next time you use government to transfer your power to other private entities.
Re:I know everyone is against the FCC and all... (Score:5, Interesting)
Actually, it turns out that the image of people spending oodles on worthless crap is not an entirely accurate picture. Watch and learn from Elizabeth Warren [youtube.com]. Are there outliers? Sure, but the statistical trends she describes are very very clear.
If you don't have time for the whole thing, one of her basic points is that middle class folks are not in fact buying lots of clothing or appliances or other shiny toys, but are spending far more on housing than they used to (for a house which is not much larger and probably older than what their parents would have bought in the 70's), and because of the higher fixed expenses have significantly less discretionary funds to spend and save. So on average an American middle class family is doing everything they can to reduce spending and still not making ends meet, much less have any savings available.
Re:I know everyone is against the FCC and all... (Score:4, Interesting)
Because Bittorrent users upload. Cut the upload and they won't be targeted. Of course, that kinda negates the point of Bittorrent, but oh well.
YouTube's a download activity. Ditto Hulu.
You see, residential connections are horribly one-sided, optimized for downloads moreso than uploads (especially cable - any wonder why the biggest blockers are cable companies? Comcast, Time-Warner...). In fact on cable, it's so bad that a few users on the top tier high-speed plan can easily take down an entire node just by uploading at full speed, because no one else can fit their upload packets into the stream. And anyone who's played with a packet shaper knows what happens when you don't prioritize VoIP and online gaming. When the upstream is saturated, the internet is slow for everyone and latencies go through the roof.
But downloading huge streams is easy for cable because the upstream requirement is very low while you're grabbing MTU-sized packets on the downstream (a tiny 64-byte TCP ACK packet for a 1460 user bytes), especially since the download bandwidth is effectively unlimited - there's just that much of it around.
They're happy that people are using Hulu and Netflix and other stuff - download is effectively free, and there's actually enough of it to go around for everyone to stream all day. But uploads - well a few video chats and VoIP calls aren't doing too much (barely 100 kilobits in most cases) compared to the megabits that a few torrent users easily consume.
Perhaps the only comparable activity to Bittorrent uploading 24/7 would be a VPN, but even VPNs tend to be at best very bursty and not continuous.