UK Regulator Proposes Easing Net Neutrality Rules Following Brexit 54
UK regulator Ofcom proposed changes to net neutrality rules carried over from the European Union to give telecommunications and internet providers more flexibility. From a report: Internet service providers should be allowed to offer a broader range of premium packages on a wider variety of parameters such as latency, and could include discounted tariffs during off-peak hours, according to proposals from the watchdog published Friday. "The net neutrality rules constrain the activities of broadband providers, and could be restricting their ability to develop new services and manage their networks," Ofcom said in the report.
Net neutrality is shorthand for rules that intend to ensure traffic carried over telecom networks is treated equally, without favoring certain services or content. Debates over such regulations often prove controversial due to tensions over what constitutes an open and free internet and fears consumers could suffer if it becomes harder to compare prices. The report proposed that telecom providers be allowed to not charge a customer's overall allowance for certain services, like public health advice.
Net neutrality is shorthand for rules that intend to ensure traffic carried over telecom networks is treated equally, without favoring certain services or content. Debates over such regulations often prove controversial due to tensions over what constitutes an open and free internet and fears consumers could suffer if it becomes harder to compare prices. The report proposed that telecom providers be allowed to not charge a customer's overall allowance for certain services, like public health advice.
Fucking Tories (Score:5, Insightful)
Always looking for ways to help their pals get richer.
You can see what is going to happen. Your internet connection will be shit unless you pay extra for the premium packages, a load of crap you don't want bundled together. The failing Now TV will get a boost because Netflix above potato quality costs an extra £29.95/month.
It's always pitched as creating more "choice" for consumers. It's like you have a "choice" of dentists, because if you can even get an NHS one the waiting time will be measured in months... Unless you pay for it yourself, in which case they can see you this afternoon.
Re:Fucking Tories (Score:5, Interesting)
There is no "UK as in a bunch of "united" people working together. This is about a bunch of stock brokers and money speculators. Key Brexiters like Reese-Mogg were shorting the pound [twitter.com] in order to profit from the economic collapse Brexit caused. Exactly the same thing repeated just now when the pound was shorted by the hedge funds [fortune.com] that financed Liz Truss to become prime minister [theguardian.com].
I mean, they make more attempt to hide it than American PACs, so I guess it's not quite as gratuitous as it is in the states, however the UK Conservative party is one of the few parties in the world which can compete with the US Republican party on the level of fully legal corruption it achieves.
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Exactly the same thing repeated just now when the pound was shorted by the hedge funds [fortune.com] that financed Liz Truss to become prime minister [theguardian.com].
Don't look for some conspiracy where there is none. Much of the world saw the Liz Truss train wreak coming. You didn't need to have magic insider info to know to short the pound, you just needed to read her stupid policies.
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Hmm.. I don't think the claim would be that she was deliberately making stupid policy. Rather, that she was financed and supported by people who realised they could make a killing by getting her in. If you saw the link I gave before [theguardian.com] she raised £500k for her leadership bid, most of which came from hedge funds, which may see small beer in the US but in UK party internal politics that's quite a bit.
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Yeah, it is standard practice for every wealthy industry to have someone push for laws that give them options for greater profit to the detriment of the market and their own clients. It produces an unending "churn" of law-change proposals which must constantly be fought in order to keep things workable.
I don't think the problem is exclusive to Tories though. This churn is unending no matter what political faction is presently in dominance.
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disney will like to force to you buy disney+ with (Score:3)
disney will like to force to you buy disney+ with all ISP internet plans so that is why Network Neutrality is needed.
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In that case, scare conservatives away from the idea by claiming Disney will force their kids to watch LGBTQ characters. Troglodytism is about the only thing that can trump greed within GOP (no pun intended).
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The fact that comcast is both ISP and content creator is the real problem. That kind of a company should be broken up but we don't have any anti-trust laws in this country. Same for big tech companies. They should all be broken up. This grocer merger with Kroger buying Albertsons/Safeway is terrible for basically everyone but shareholders. Watch Biden's government approve it anyway. I'm sure we can find numerous other examples of huge companies dominating in to many markets and mums the word.
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The reason is simple. If you can charge more for "priliged access to some services but not others", it would very rapidly lead to deals from major providers asking ISPs to degrade access to competing services so that they're not comfortable to use.
I.e. the paid service where gamers are provided lower latency on their connection overall? Completely possible under net neutrality rules. Service where you provide better latency only to some services? Illegal for reasons mentioned above.
Re: Problem is they lump in access with improvemen (Score:3)
That's not at all what people are worried about.
The "neutrality" refers to content.
The concern with abandoning net neutrality is the danger of different content being treated differently, whereby your ISP can decide that only paid services will get gigabit throughput and everything else can do with 128k... or worse, start picking and choosing whether or not to deliver content based on politics.
The car analogy would be a vehicle that drives 60mph to Walmart and to 10mph or not at all to a mom and pop shop...
Re:Problem is they lump in access with improvement (Score:4, Funny)
what if for gamers an ISP wanted to be able to charge $5/month more for better latency? The extra money would be spent on improving equipment along the lines for people that paid
Oh man that's hilarious. You almost had me going there for a minute. A company putting the profits back into infrastructure upgrades? Next you'll tell me they will pass along lower operating costs to the customer!
Re: Problem is they lump in access with improvemen (Score:3)
The extra money would be spent on improving equipment along the lines for people that paid,
Or they'll just de-priotitize the traffic of those that didn't pay.
Re:Problem is they lump in access with improvement (Score:4, Insightful)
By all means, but then you cannot call your offering "Internet", because that would be false advertising. Call it AOL, Compuserve or BBS and don't expect normal peering or other internet norms to apply to your company.
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That is to say, they block being able to pay for improved service offerings
That is such bullshit; you can always pay for a better line, even in places where net neutrality is the law of the land.
Re: Problem is they lump in access with improvemen (Score:2)
Bull.
Nothing prevents an ISP from offering a better plan that goes along different links for better latency for a gamer.
It does, however, mean that all traffic generated from that gamer geat to go over that link, if they want it to do so.
In any case, there is the possibility of having vastly lower latencies for everyone by using fair queuing in the routers and switches, but providing excellent service with such things will always be more expensive than rent seeking behavior.
Corrupt Dic# Move (Score:2)
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You mean national corporations. Brexit kicked multinationals.
Lack of competition almost always results in companies sucking in the longer run. These telecoms will talk about "economies of scale", but lack of competition usually wipes out scaling advantages. They may roll normal for a few years, but the discompetition monster will gradually eat away their brains.
This was the goal of BREXIT (Score:5, Insightful)
Brexit was pushed by wealthy people so that they could get rid of those inconvenient rules from the EU: inconvenient because they stop their wealthy friends from ripping off ordinary people.
One of the people who pushed Brexit was Dyson. He imports his products from Malaysia or perhaps other Asian countries, so better access to European markets hasn't helped him since he moved manufacturing out of the UK.
Re:This was the goal of BREXIT (Score:4, Interesting)
and the UK could become a democracy again, free from all-determining EU lobbyists.
And yet, in order to export many products to EU countries, manufacturers still have to conform to EU regulations, but now with no influence over those regulations.
It turned out that nobody in power was even remotely interested in the good parts of Brexit.
That's because no one can get interested in non-existent and imaginary "good parts".
Re:This was the goal of BREXIT (Score:5, Insightful)
and the UK could become a democracy again, free from all-determining EU lobbyists.
And yet, in order to export many products to EU countries, manufacturers still have to conform to EU regulations, but now with no influence over those regulations.
It turned out that nobody in power was even remotely interested in the good parts of Brexit.
That's because no one can get interested in non-existent and imaginary "good parts".
And right now the Tories can play leadership musical chairs, while not needing to hold an election. I think it is time that if a party changes leadership more than 3 times in a given period, then it should automatically trigger an election. It's not to say that they won't get elected again, but if too many drunk clowns of the same team are fighting over the wheel, then maybe it is time to stop the bus and see if the passengers want a different team in driving that bus.
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The only solution is proportional representation.
Every government will be a coalition, and if one party goes like the Tories have, the coalition falls apart and we have an election.
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The only solution is proportional representation.
Every government will be a coalition, and if one party goes like the Tories have, the coalition falls apart and we have an election.
I am not totally sure how proportional representation would work in a parliamentary system? The current system is essentially each area electing their representative and sending them off to the parliament to fight for their interests. The country's head cheese is then the person who represents the representatives of the party with the most seats. As far as I am aware proportional representation potentially breaks the regional representations of the MPs?
I suppose the biggest problem right now is the represen
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There are several systems of proportional representation, some of which keep a connection between an MP and the area that elected them, and some of which don't. Among the ones that do -
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It's not to say that they won't get elected again
If they ran an election right now they not only would they not win, they wouldn't even be the opposition party. They'd be relegated to a minority player. They've never polled lower.
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and the UK could become a democracy again, free from all-determining EU lobbyists.
And yet, in order to export many products to EU countries, manufacturers still have to conform to EU regulations, but now with no influence over those regulations.
It turned out that nobody in power was even remotely interested in the good parts of Brexit.
That's because no one can get interested in non-existent and imaginary "good parts".
And right now the Tories can play leadership musical chairs, while not needing to hold an election. I think it is time that if a party changes leadership more than 3 times in a given period, then it should automatically trigger an election. It's not to say that they won't get elected again, but if too many drunk clowns of the same team are fighting over the wheel, then maybe it is time to stop the bus and see if the passengers want a different team in driving that bus.
With any luck the King can dissolve parliament. It's not like King Charles hasn't got form for it.
I've always said that the monarch trying to impose their will on a constitutional country will cause a constitutional crisis that would split any commonwealth nation... but I'm not sure if that'll be the case any more as unpopular as CRIII is, the Tories are even more unpopular and are destructive. The Brexiteers will moan and whine (what else is new) but I think most people would welcome a new GE.
The Tor
Re:This was the goal of BREXIT (Score:5, Interesting)
the UK could become a democracy again, free from all-determining EU lobbyists.
This, BTW, for our American friends watching, is the fantasy that people fell for. "Lobbyists" in this sense doesn't mean the same thing as you think of - people with vast funds to donate to politicians in order to buy the policy that they want via Super-PACS.
(most) Lobbyists in the EU terms are basically the representatives of companies working hard to explain the needs of their companies so that they can actually trade. E.g. car companies explain that they need a "no 42 steel" standard that is rust free and strong or accounting companies explain that they don't need degrees but do need people that can count. These madmen honestly believe that the EU banned curved bananas which is not just a lie [theguardian.com] but the actual classification rules that triggered this story were a UK proposal.
Niow we can make up our own rules "democratically" but everyone else in the world will ignore them and so the companies actually trading end up using the EU rules which we have no control over. Before about 90% of the rules in the EU, which are the ones everyone else in the world tends to use, were being set based on the rules from the UK.
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My account is overdue, but once it is settled I promise I will bring this up again and again and again.
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Yeah even though the EU itself admits it has a 'democratic deficit' good luck getting anyone to understand that the quango that runs the EU isn't democratic. People like the EU so much that they go into full delusion mode or have a complete lack of understanding of what 'democracy' really means.
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Yeah even though the EU itself admits it has a 'democratic deficit' good luck getting anyone to understand that the quango that runs the EU isn't democratic. People like the EU so much that they go into full delusion mode or have a complete lack of understanding of what 'democracy' really means.
If we're going to talk about "democratic deficit" let's talk about the UK where the first-past-the-post electoral system means that a party can (and often does) have an overwhelming majority in the House of Commons [wikipedia.org] with 40% or less of the vote; i.e. a government that 60%+ of the people did not vote for. The current disastrous Tory government is a classic example of this.
And then there's the House of Lords [wikipedia.org], the wholly unelected upper chamber, where wealthy people can literally buy a seat (assuming they don'
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And the UK is still far more democratic than the EU.
The House of Lords whilst not being an ideal system still actually works to limit the worst excesses of stupid populist parties, they generally leave everything alone unless it's something that guess what - the public also hates.
When I hear of a system that is more democratic than the Lords whilst not simply being the same party in power that will just rubber stamp every stupid bit of legislation that gov't pukes out then I'll support it but I haven't ever
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You clearly have no idea how the EU works.
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OK, point out precisely which element of my post is wrong and state exactly what the correct info is or don't waste my time.
Re:This was the goal of BREXIT (Score:4, Insightful)
Never ceases to amaze me how morons think that democratically elected representatives are less democratic than the house of lords. Without the EU membership it is utterly counter to reality to claim we are more democratic now.
100 Gbps to Netflix, Speedtest and North Korea (Score:2)
What could possibly be the problem here? I mean, the service providers would obviously use this opportunity to improve their service for the well-being of all — right?
I think it is more likely that they would start to offer super-high-speed connections, say 100 Gbps, at a reasonable price and when you buy it on their short-term, non-cancelable 48 months contract, you realise that the offered speed is only available when connecting to Netflix, Speedtest and servers in North Korea. The last one just so
And here we have the real reason for Brexit (Score:4, Insightful)
In the United States we have a phrase for it: "Small enough to drown in a bathtub". It means killing the government and replacing it with yourself.
That is, after there's a new government (Score:3)
Given that the head of lettuce (with a blonde wig) outlasted Liz 2x4.
Bye Bye Britain (Score:2)
Wow (Score:2)
The EU rules have started to smack of 'we have nothing else to do with our time' lately.
Way to COMPLETELY illustrate why "industry crippling laws" as we call them in the US are totally necessary :/ Dopes.
Net neutrality (Score:2)
This doesn't go against net neutrality. Net neutrality is when an ISP doesn't apply different pricing or quality of service depending on the destination or source of its customer's Internet traffic. There's nothing preventing them from charging more for providing higher speeds.
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But to complete your explanation of what net neutrality really means, add "do not apply different pricing based on the assumed type of content of a data packet". Some ISPs would gladly ignore source/destination addresses, if only they could apply arbitrary pricing based on what their "deep packet inspection"-middle-boxes think they are looking at.
And another thing... (Score:2)
Another item that will need fixed when we have adults back in our government!