Nobody Reads This

Net Neutrality is a hot button topic for some money grabbing corporations (Read the US Government) and the FCC finally got involved in the debate throttling Comcast over their practices.

In recent months (Years?) Comcast has been scanning their traffic and limiting connections used for file sharing likely in an effort to retrofit their office with gold plated RJ45s and the Federal Communications Commission deemed this as a violation of net neutrality.

That is to say that all layers of the internet, all nodes therein and the traffic between them should be treated equally. This is the first time I have heard of this principle being applied to consumer connections and I guess this judgement in effect regards the client PCs as nodes of the internet rather than customers of it – The implications of which could be far reaching. In my mind, even if your PC is connected to the internet 24/7 it is still technically a customer and should be treated as such.

If you would allow me an analogy; imagine a network of train stations (I wanted to say a Truck stop but I will avoid the obvious pun), these represent the internet. Rails are the connections, Stations are the Servers, different rail companies control different rail lines (in the same way ISPs control the Net connections). To me, I imagine the client PC as a customer in a train station who goes from station to station on the ISPs trains. To compare the FCCs decision – We should treat the customers as their own little stations and perhaps they send their own little trains across the network.

You see how the analogy works? Genius. It may be true in some respects that in this day an age the Home user is more like a node than ever before – But I think we are a long way off the autonomous serving of a typical node (server) on the internet. Whilst we can effect changes on the internet of all kinds, they are most often small insignificant changes and only the top few percentile of the internet customers actually change the way nodes work.

Stations are still run by webmasters, rail traffic is still directed by the ISPs and we are still generally just customers of this network.

That is not to say that I disagree with the ruling, I just think that invoking net neutrality in this ruling seems incorrect. Surely we should tackle the greater issues of privacy, fair use and service equality.

Regards,
JamesR.

Is putting far too much effort into his titles (Then again my Chroming at the Mouth one earned me a decent number of hits!)