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Verizon Consumer CEO Says Net Neutrality 'Went Literally Nowhere' (theverge.com) 51

Verizon Consumer CEO Sowmyanarayan Sampath has declared that net neutrality regulations "went literally nowhere." Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules. "I don't know what net neutrality does," Sampath told The Verge. "I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality."

When pressed about potential anti-competitive behaviors like zero-rating services, Sampath deflected by focusing exclusively on traffic management concerns, arguing that networks require prioritization capabilities during congestion. "For traffic management purposes, we need to have some controls in the network," he stated. The interview comes as Verizon faces a different regulatory challenge from FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr, who is holding up Verizon's Frontier acquisition over the company's diversity initiatives.

Verizon Consumer CEO Says Net Neutrality 'Went Literally Nowhere'

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  • Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules

    Clearly he's a moron (left and unaware what reason the right hand is doing something).

    • by cstacy ( 534252 )

      Sampath claimed he couldn't identify what problem net neutrality was attempting to solve, despite Verizon's history of aggressive lobbying against such rules

      Clearly he's a moron (left and unaware what reason the right hand is doing something).

      He obvious knows exactly what he is prevaricating about.

    • by Spazmania ( 174582 ) on Monday April 21, 2025 @02:39PM (#65321225) Homepage

      I don't know what problem the lobbying-twisted FCC's rules attempts to solve either. I know what problem net neutrality was supposed to solve.

      In short, monolithic providers like Verizon double-bill. They bill you for your packets and then they bill the person you're communicating with for your packets too. It's not like the mail where only one side pays. Both sides have to pay or neither gets served. Naturally, the side who pays more gets to define the nature and shape of the service both side get. As the end-user consumer, that isn't you.

      There is an exception: Verizon is part of a cartel of about 20 Internet providers who trade traffic without charging each other. If as a Verizon customer you want to talk to someone buying service from elsewhere in the cartel, Verizon will only charge you. This process is called "peering."

      Like the rest of the cartel, Verizon engages in "closed" peering. This means that small businesses and anyone Verizon can bully is excluded and must bend to the double-billing. Here's where net neutrality was supposed to act: by requiring "open" peering where Verizon would trade packets with anyone once *one* of their customers had paid them to do so. No more double-billing.

      • by r0nc0 ( 566295 )
        Actually I think there was another layer to the discussion IIRC - wasn't there also something about how content providers also own the pipes that deliver the content and can shape traffic to suit their content vs. actual needs. In other words the content providers should be kept at arms length or more from the content delivery...
    • Moron? Hardly. He just wants to make sure you don't notice what the right hand is doing.

  • by cstacy ( 534252 )

    What, they are filtering packets based on "race" now?
    I wonder what "flag" I should set on my packets to get priority routing... :)

    • by cstacy ( 534252 )

      What, they are filtering packets based on "race" now?
      I wonder what "flag" I should set on my packets to get priority routing... :)

      It's called "traffic shaping" and has to do with bias against the "byte-stuffed challenged".

    • I have to say, a phone company hitting government red tape during an attempted merger for being "too woke", was definitely not on my bingo card. This is such a strange timeline, I can't even tell if this is being done sincerely or if the Republicans simply are trying to maintain optics that they're tilting at the "woke" windmill when in reality they are just enforcing anti-trust regulations without wanting to appear as anti-big-business. It's either a case of 3D chess, or I'm just trying to see some order

  • The increasing availability of fiber to the premises plus most people moving from torrents to one way streams instead have changed the way the internet has been architected. The fact that most people are connecting to the internet via walled garden phones has also de facto regulated traffic as well. The of rolling out CG-NAT instead of ipv6 is something that should be studied, as it regulates IP traffic by controlling IP addresses more tightly.
    • well ISP need to be banned from owning streaming services.

      Will comcast make caps go lower as cable tv starts it death dive?

      Take ESPN out of the base package?

      • Take ESPN out of the base package?

        Unfortunately, Disney (usually) requires ESPN to be carried in order to get all their many other channels ... Apparently, ESPN is very profitable.

  • by ebonum ( 830686 ) on Monday April 21, 2025 @01:05PM (#65320959)

    I have several employees who can't reach the company VPN from home. They have to use their phone as a hot spot, and everything works fine. Local ISP is blocking VPN traffic. Annoying as frick.

    • by rta ( 559125 )

      this is quite strange. in the US? what ISP?

      I highly doubt this is by design... especially post COVID.
      there might be some seeing on their gateway to allow it?

      • by Anonymous Coward

        Spectrum was doing it in some areas during covid briefly. It wasn't a mistake, they sold "Prioritize your VPN traffic for $10/month"
        If you did not subscribe they would block the connection.
        It didn't last long until they got public grief for it and changed the blocking into just deprioritizing.

    • Is your VPN over something that has been deprecated by a bunch of ISPs for security reasons, like PPTP?

    • never seen a isp block a vpn unless it was using such a outdated mode they simply quit supporting it.
    • My bet is that their homeâ(TM)s IP Address scheme overlapped that of their business. ISPs donâ(TM)t block it, but your employees routers surely could be a dead end.

    • I've found that default router settings block certain kinds of VPN connections, namely "Disable IPSec ALG" in Netgear Nighthawk Ax8 Ax6000 for IPsec VPNs.

  • by Pseudonymous Powers ( 4097097 ) on Monday April 21, 2025 @01:12PM (#65320985)

    "I still don't know what problem we are trying to solve with net neutrality."

    To adapt an adage about identifying assholes: If you don't see the problem that net neutrality is intended to solve, then you ARE the problem.

  • by coopertempleclause ( 7262286 ) on Monday April 21, 2025 @01:15PM (#65320995)
    For the most part, it isn't trying to solve a problem. Net neutrality is the default status of the internet.

    The laws were introduced to protect that, to prevent corporations chopping up the internet into pieces and charging people through the nose for certain types of traffic.
    • yep if you need to slow down people due to congestion then you do it for everyone not just those not paying for the top tear plain.
      • yep if you need to slow down people due to congestion then you do it for everyone not just those not paying for the top tear plain.

        Actually, net neutrality didn't prohibit this. Telcos absolutely are still within their rights to sell tiered subscriber access, so long as all the data flowing through their pipe is being deprioritized equally.

        OK under net neutrality:
        Offering various service plans with differing data speeds, caps and/or deprioritization levels. (El cheapo plan that barely works / Mid-priced plan that is only deprioritized during heavy traffic / Premium plan that has limited or no deprioritization / etc.)

        Not OK under net n

  • Dumb Smart People (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Spinlock_1977 ( 777598 ) <Spinlock_1977@[ ]oo.com ['yah' in gap]> on Monday April 21, 2025 @01:19PM (#65321007) Journal

    This smart man shouldn't play dumb, because he clearly doesn't know just how smart us dumb people are. For example, we can tell he's lying. We can also tell he's avoiding the question. AND, we can tell he's a dumb smart person because he doesn't know how smart us dumb people are. The circle of stupidity is complete.

  • by Monoman ( 8745 ) on Monday April 21, 2025 @01:22PM (#65321017) Homepage

    Is he referring to the Net Neutrality where consumers get access to the internet without their ISP "shaping" the traffic to benefit their own interests or is it the Net Neutrality where the ISPs protect the consumers from whatever their ISP sees as "bad" for the consumer?

  • Let me explain (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rpnx ( 8338853 ) on Monday April 21, 2025 @01:24PM (#65321023)
    Net neutrality does some important things. 1.), it protects p2p traffic which isps have a history of discriminating against. 2.) It allows hosting a business off a residential connection and for the case of Verizon ib particular 3.) it prevents mobile isps from discrimnating against laptops (which they currently do to boost contract phone sales).
  • by awwshit ( 6214476 ) on Monday April 21, 2025 @01:25PM (#65321029)

    Because they paid Ajit really well to ensure it.

  • Hold up here. Wasn't it Verizon and Google who wrote the damn stuff in the first place? https://www.scribd.com/documen... [scribd.com] Lets be clear, the only purpose Google had supporting Net Neutrality policy was to stop ISP's from throttling YouTube bandwidth.
    • Neither of those corporations created net neutrality, whether they supported it for their own benefit or not is completely irrelevant.
  • Then what's the objection? Sounds like they're working as intended, keeping companies in line with its aims rather than being assholes.

    • well you can think company's like t-mobile that offers no nonsense plains, forcing the market to drop there nonsense to compete. otherwise we all would still be dealing with data caps. same thing for fiber and starlink forcing cable company to also drop there nonsense to compete because they broke there monopoly.
  • by Bahbus ( 1180627 ) on Monday April 21, 2025 @01:39PM (#65321083) Homepage

    You can manage and optimize the traffic on your network without discriminating against the type of traffic. You could also stop wasting your money on retards like Sowmyanarayan Sampath who don't do anything to deserve a 1.5 million salary, let alone several more millions in bonuses, and instead invest that money back into your network so that you don't *have* to manage or optimize it as much. Absolutely no person on the planet does anything worthy of earning 7 figures in a year.

  • I.e. a moron and ignorant to boot. Either that or else somebody with is up there with Trump when it comes to lying.
  • Another CEO being an asshole. Nothing new.

  • by fuzzyfuzzyfungus ( 1223518 ) on Monday April 21, 2025 @03:35PM (#65321375) Journal
    I'm not sure if he's just lying; or if there's some very specific strawman construction of 'net neutrality' that verizon's counsel considers to be the one you are referring to when not understanding it; but it seems pretty hard to believe that someone in telcoms doesn't understand what 'net neutrality' is supposed to be about when, worldwide, 'zero-rating' of various services by telcos in agreements with their providers is not some sort of doomsayer sci-fi prediction. Reliance Jio is probably the single biggest telco that comes to mind in relation to a story about zero rating; while Facebook is probably the most prominent company in terms of who pays for coverage(and, predictably, the creation of substantial swaths of developing world where facebook is the internet was kind of shit).

    He's quite possibly telling the truth in the narrow sense where verizon totally deprioritized some bulk traffic on that overloaded backhaul because reasons that one time and it helped VOIP jitter at the expense of some graininess in youtube that nobody noticed; and it was fine; but in the much more important and revealing sense; he's lying: net neutrality 'went nowhere' because the whole point(at least in the US context) was to not depart from the status quo and to avoid someone's monetization plans ruining things. Even network engineers are going to lose interest when it's just working; obviously the public couldn't care less when the internet is delivering the packet between hither and yon as intended; so once the threat of needing to pay the "good friends of verizon" tithe to avoid having 3-5 business days of latency added receded, so did the urgency about it. I assume that there's some enterprise 5G SD-WAN offering that's technically paid prioritization that verizon would trot out as an example of how we totally introduced paid prioritization and it actually made everything better; but the point was never esoteric special cases of top shelf SLAs; it was quite plausible proposals to set up tolls and seek rents across large portions of the internet.
  • assuming you don’t need it because you’re dry is a fallacy. Right now it’s been protecting us from the worst impulses of ISPs, if only by existing and keeping the conversation alive.
  • Because nothing bad happened is either lying to you so they can do bad things to you or they haven't got a fucking clue what's going on.

    The reason that neutrality going away here and there hasn't caused you massive problems and cost you a ton of money is because the companies who stand the profit from killing it aren't sure that it's going to stay dead. And it hasn't, with politics waxing and waning and bringing it back and forth.

    America's democracy is on the verge of collapse. And you can bet your
  • It is preventing a problem. TV is the perfect example. Broadcasters had to pay to have their channel. Anyone without a channel could not get their message out. Net Neutrality protects the pipes from being monopolized like they have in the past. Without it we would probably still be paying 10 cents for a text and probably be paying 10 cents per e-mail too because instead of the internet being a tree with branches of options for traffic it would turn into single pipes.
  • Talk about a missed business opportunity. So all traffic is managed equally by algorithms that provide the best QOS possible for everyone, right?

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