[MyDogHasFleas]

re Internet Slowdown: I'm stuck on a dissonance between the status as presented vs. the reality as I understand it. I may well be wrong/uninformed and I'm happy to be educated if so.

Here's the status as presented:

"Battleforthenet.com (a project of Demand Progress, Engine Advocacy, Fight for the Future, and Free Press) has organized a day of protest against the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online. Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible."

Here's my 2 points of dissonance:

1. "...FCC proposal that will allow Internet providers to charge companies additional fees to provide access to those companies’ content online."

a) the FCC proposal is about allowing Internet providers to optionally provide higher speed/quality access for a fee, not about "charging" fees "to provide access".

b) There's nothing stopping Internet providers from doing this right now, since the original FCC net neutrality regs were shot down by the courts. So saying the FCC proposal would "allow" them to do it is not accurate, as they are "allowed" to do it right now.

So, as far as I know, the correct statement would be:

"... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing an optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access to the companies' content online."

2. "Those additional fees will allow Internet service providers to essentially choose which parts of the Internet you will get to access normally, and which parts may be slow or inaccessible."

From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a company's content.

[AnthonyMouse]

> "... FCC proposal that would not disallow Internet providers from providing an optional fee-based service to companies for higher quality/speed access to the companies' content online."

In the context of government regulation "allow" and "not disallow" mean the same thing. But "allow" implies letting monopoly ISPs get away with doing something wrong while "not disallow" implies avoiding unwarranted government interference. You can hardly fault them for their language choice there.

And there is very little practical difference between "access" and the lack of "higher quality/speed" necessary for the service to be used. Netflix at four frames per second is hardly "access to Netflix."

> From reading the FCC proposal, I think that an ISP would not be allowed to slow down or make "inaccessible" content from companies that have not paid a fee. Rather, the fee would be to improve speed/quality of access to a company's content.

Again, these things are equivalent. There is no difference between "slow down" and "not speed up" in practice. It has the identical result, you're just using different words.

[MyDogHasFleas]

There's no difference between "allow" and "not disallow"? There's a huge difference.

"Allow" means to affirmatively allow ISPs to charge fees when they couldn't before, while "not disallow" means to not put new regulations in place stopping ISPs from charging fees.

"You can hardly fault them for their language choice" -- to me it's much more than a language choice, it's saying something correctly or incorrectly, realistically or framed in some other reality.

And if saying it correctly "implies avoiding unwanted government interference", does that justify saying it incorrectly? Do the ends justify the means? Is propaganda OK if it's for a cause we believe in?

An analogous discussion for "slow down/make inaccessible" vs. "not speed up". There's no difference between these things? I think there's a huge difference. If I'm a company that doesn't pay the fee, will I get the same service I did before, or will I be slowed down/cut off?

As I read the proposed FCC regs, it's pay-for-speedup rather than don't-pay-and-get-slowed-down. But this "Internet slowdown day" campaign is explicitly saying that sites will get slowed down. How do I reconcile these two things?

[AnthonyMouse]

> "Allow" means to affirmatively allow ISPs to charge fees when they couldn't before, while "not disallow" means to not put new regulations in place stopping ISPs from charging fees.

How is that a difference? The result of both is identical: The ISPs won't be permitted to charge fees.

Look at it in a different context. Because of a technicality in the wording of a statute, all existing traffic laws are found unconstitutional. The legislature introduces a bill that reinstates most of the traffic laws in a way which is constitutional but the bill doesn't reinstate the prohibition against driving while intoxicated. Are you really claiming that someone who points out that the bill "allows driving drunk" is incorrect? At best you're being incredibly pedantic.

> An analogous discussion for "slow down/make inaccessible" vs. "not speed up". There's no difference between these things? I think there's a huge difference. If I'm a company that doesn't pay the fee, will I get the same service I did before, or will I be slowed down/cut off?

In the presence of sufficient capacity no packets are dropped and there is no fast lane or slow lane. The only way to have a fast lane is to have insufficient capacity and then allocate the existing capacity in preference to the fast lane at the expense of the slow lane. The result is to slow down the people who don't pay the fee.

[MyDogHasFleas]

I would say the pedantry is on the other foot. :)

Your drunk driving analogy is strained to say the least. Net neutrality has not been in effect though all of ISP history, except for a brief period before the courts shot it down. To compare that to a hypothetical drunk driving law scenario is way off the mark. It's much closer to reality, as opposed to pedantry, to say that the new regulations don't disallow the ISPs from charging fees, because for almost all of history, there was no regulation about this.

Regarding fast/slow lane, you are making two logic errors. One, implicitly assuming it's a zero-sum game, when it's not. The FCC's intent is to incent ISPs to increase capacity so they can allocate that capacity for new (paid) services. Not to slow down existing clients. Two, assuming we are just talking about bandwidth. Quality of service in all its aspects could be on the table for paid services. Bandwidth alone is not sufficient for good streaming.