Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality (Wired)

Posted Jul 31, 2013 4:57 UTC (Wed) by tterribe (guest, #66972)
In reply to: Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality (Wired) by rahvin
Parent article: Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality (Wired)

> Allowing servers on last mile connections has nothing at all to do with
> network neutrality. Providers base the pricing on the assumption in the
> TOS, Comcast also bans servers on residential connections but allows them
> on business connections which cost a little bit more.

That's funny, because I thought net neutrality was _all_ _about_ preventing price discrimination.

I say this as someone who was recently forced to switch to a "business" connection because Comcast decided, without warning, to start blocking _incoming_ port 25 and there's no way to specify an alternative SMTP port in an MX record, and I don't have time to deal with re-architecting the e-mail setup I've been using for years.

Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality (Wired)

Posted Jul 31, 2013 15:08 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

While that is one small aspect, the fact that there has been price discrimination between "residential" and "business" service with different ToS around home servers since broadband was invented was not what created the call for Network Neutrality. What caused the call for Network Neutrality were threats by the major consumer ISPs to intentionally degrade service to major web video services such as Netflix, which compete with their own paid-TV offerings, unless the ISP was paid a protection fee. Many felt that this would set a bad precedent for ISPs to go all-in on content inspection and application-based billing where any service offered on the Internet would be blocked or degraded to uselessness and require special fees to make work, especially if it competed with a service the ISP offered.

Now That It’s in the Broadband Game, Google Flip-Flops on Network Neutrality (Wired)

Posted Jul 31, 2013 17:49 UTC (Wed) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

Good description, it was far more concise than my own. The problem is that there have been so many people abusing the term that people have begun to forget what it really was and is about. For example the Cogent/Comcast traffic dispute where Cogent claimed Comcast wanted to charge them for unbalanced traffic flows had something to do with network neutrality.

If Comcast started throttling and degrading connections to Google while giving priority routing to Bing because Bing paid them money that would qualify as network neutrality.