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GeekNights 20100621 - Network Neutrality
Tonight on GeekNights, we discuss our favorite topic: network neutrality. In the news, AOL, Nullsoft, and VLC are in the news, people complain about Twitter for the wrong reasons, and e-readers are getting surprisingly cheaper.
- Rym's Thing - Something Fantasy
- Scott's Thing - Pi is.. wrong?
Comments
Scott's mic cut out for like 5 seconds, beginning at 27:11
Geeknights 20100621 - Network Neutrality
Expanded Show Notes - Show Run Time: 01:04:31
Time | Notes
---------+----------------------------------------------------------
00:00:00 | Intro
00:00:24 | Opening Chit-Chat
| - It's the first day of summer!
| - Time Zones
| - Warm today. Warm yesterday. Even warmer today.
| - Every in-joke ever
| - Rym is attending the SIFMA Expo this week
00:06:14 | News
| = E-readers in the news
| - Price drop on the Nook e-reader - now $150 for the Wi-Fi only version
| - No word yet from Amazon on their price
| - Used books versus new books versus e-books
| - Rym's last used book smelled of lox (Mmmmm, bagels and lox...)
| - Value analysis of an e-reader versus an iPad
| - The book reading experience (Scott needs that "book smell")
| - Tangent on Collectible Card Games and their variants
00:13:38 | = Twitter in the news
| - Utah Attorney General tweets the kill order for death row prisoner
| - Internet in an uproar, but it's not really that newsworthy
| - People don't respect new media
| - Engineers don't like Twitter
| - Too many people don't get how Twitter works
00:21:13 | = VLC in the news
| - AOL has forced VLC to remove Shoutcast support from their video/audio player
| - But does anybody out there really care?
| - Shoutcast license not compatible with GPL license (and is almost anti-GPL)
| - Licensing discussion - MIT/BSD vs. GPL
| - VLC would have to bundle adware to keep Shoutcast
00:25:59 | Things of the Day
| - Scott - Pi is wrong? (Two Pi or not Two Pi, that is the question...)
| - Rym - Something Fantasy (or, Poor Typography Choices)
00:29:59 | Meta Moment
| - ConnectiCon 2010 is July 9-11
| - Book Club: The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch
| - Pax Prime is September 3-5 (Labor Day Weekend)
| - Geeknights is broadcast on Ustream (when we remember to turn the camera on)
| - Be sure to check out the website and forums at www.frontrowcrew.com!
00:31:53 | Main Topic - Network Neutrality
| - Geeknights hasn't done a whole show on Net Neutrality before, but it has had mentions
| - Only tech professionals seem to properly understand it AND care about it
| - It doesn't say anywhere that networks have to remain neutral... BUT IT SHOULD!
| - There is no overall law governing the internet
| - The government could regulate the whole mess, but that means no more "wild west"
| - Most of the internet should be unregulated
| - Evil Companies and How much evil are you willing to put up with?
| - The law can't keep up with the speed of the internet
| - Professional Opinion Time: We need Network Neutrality, not Internet Neutrality
| - The base of the network should not be aware of the content residing on it
| - ISPs started getting snarky about who could send traffic across their networks
| - Analogy of how the internet works in comparison to hitch-hiking
| - We need a completely open, dumb baseline infrastructure
| - Discussion of Regulation of ISPs
| - Discussion of the real motivation behind the death of Napster, et al.
| - Discussion of "Why pirate now when you can get legal media for free?"
| - Discussion of Bandwidth Caps, Metering, and Reasonable Rates
| - The world where people have more bandwidth is the world where content providers can cut out the middleman
| - Data transport at the last mile and at the high ISP level should be data-agnostic
| - The Last-Mile providers should not be able to have content production capability
| - The ISPs should essentially be a utility
| - The problem with a la carte pricing in relation to net neutrality
| - Discussion of TV Production Houses, Advertisers, and other vested interests
| - The internet destroys all middlemen - only service/utility providers will remain
01:03:35 | Outro
e-Readers: While I'll admit the Nook's price drop is tempting, it's going to take a bit more than that to get me to buy an e-reader. Like Scott has a list of things that'd make an MP3/personal media device better, I have a list of stuff that needs to be in an e-reader before I take the plunge. I must say that the Nook strikes me as a better platform than the Kindle, though - more open in regards to formats + based on Android = a partial win in my mind.
Twitter: While I do think it was a bit tacky for the Atty General to broadcast the notice over Twitter, I don't necessarily see anything wrong with it - it's a valid medium. As for the Engineers who don't like Twitter, apparently they have forgotten Sturgeon's Law. Besides, no one is going to force them to use it.
VLC: Does anybody really use Shoutcast servers anymore? I'd think that Pandora and last.fm would have pretty much killed Shoutcast as an internet radio source. It appears that VLC has started packaging in Icecast instead, so methinks it's going to be a moot point and AOL has succeeded in doing nothing but shooting themselves in the dick on this one.
Just for Scott:
Yeah, it's a Pizza Pi
As for the main topic, I'd have to say I'm right with you guys on that one - Internet access should be treated as a utility with standardized, fair metering and the content providers should be kept the hell away from being ISPs or striking sweetheart deals with the ISPs.
http://symphonyofscience.com/
this is their latest video...
P.S. I didn't want to make a whole new thread for this so I just dumped it in here...
I can't wait for the next book club episode!
I ended up getting the audio book of "The Lies of Locke Lamora", listened to it in two days .
I had been tracking PAX flight prices since we decided we were definitely going (the day after PAX East), and noticed a crazy price drop on April 14th. Pulled the trigger then and haven't seen anything better since. Yapta.com is really good for inputting a list of flights you want to track, and they email you alerts based on pricing changes.
Got a great flight on Continental for $308. There have been flights since just as cheap but they have not been A) non-stop, and
Continental 1581 Thu, Sep 02 out of Newark International (EWR)
9:00 AM - 11:53 AM
Leaving on a 3PM flight on Monday so we can sleep in.
If you've got free Continental miles coming your way as you mentioned in the show, you're probably flying out of EWR as that's their hub, but it's definitely a hike compared to the other airports if you guys are coming from Queens. Probably like an hour worth of train hopping, or a $50 flat-fee car service each way.
blah blah blah companies won't invest in infrastructure blah blah blah disproven argument that it'll raise prices blah blah blah republican talking point.
I fail to see how enforcing utility status for data carriers will prevent them from expanding.
My big beef with internet access and pricing is the lack of competition. I'm not going to pretend to understand all the history behind municipal contracts and last-mile rights as to who owns the cables and fibers, but someone needs to sort this shit out eventually. How does the old landline phone system work? Obviously, you could switch home phone providers and they didn't have to send someone out to your house to lay cable. Is this because it is deemed to be a utility? If so, then I fully support making internet access one as well.
What is wrong with a content provider selectively denying service based on your ISP? Take for example, the UK, where Brits pay a license fee to the BBC and in return get access to BBC content. Some of this content is distributed online, and the BBC blocks access (or tries to, at least) for those outside the country, based on their IP. Why would you find this immoral? Surely any end node receiving a HTTP GET (or whatever) should have the right to respond to it however they like? If I want to restrict access to my friends who've already emailed me their static IPs, or to people who have at least 3 prime octets, why shouldn't I have that right?
Also, why do you consider Chinese censorship a network neutrality issue? Say I set up my home router to filter what traffic my kids can see. As far as I understand, that's the same idea as what China is doing; the only difference is scale. If you think it's immoral for them to treat their citizens that way, sure, but that's a political freedom issue, not a net neutrality one. If scale matters, when does it start to matter? Is it okay for a university to do the same? A smaller country like Monaco?
You can't blame them because they got a real sweet deal. If the Telco would sell a 1.5 DSL service to a customer for $30 a month the new competitor could get that same line at a wholesale cost of about $20 and resell it for $25. Why spend millions of dollars to install your own equipment when you could just resell someone else's equipment for pure profit?
Do you know why Broadband picked up in the USA? It is because of HR 1542 The Internet Freedom and Broadband Deployment Act of 2001. This is the legislation that fixed the reselling loophole and promised to keep the FCC from regulating the Internet.
Further reading:
S.652 -- Telecommunications Act of 1996
H.R. 1542 —Internet Freedom and Broadband Deployment Act
RUPRI - The Internet Freedom and Broadband Deployment Act of 2001 (H.R. 1542): Considerations for Rural Communities
You're right, though, just in a broader sense. Imagine the following scenario:
Wires (with the bullshit from the ISPs and issues with the government) for low-latency services like gaming, day-to-day communications, and high performance needs.
Wireless (with the bullshit from the ISPs and issues with the government) for normal people who don't need high performance and don't care otherwise.
Wireless (pirate-style) for all of the "bad" things
Whenever we have a revolution in the ad-hoc wireless networking sphere, it will open the door to high-latency anonymous (relatively) unblockable communication.