I have never seen a "Netflix charge" on my Comcast bill. They have not been charging their users extra for Netflix.

They HAVE asked Netflix to pay for the capacity upgrade at the border gateways -- capacity that is being used in large part by Netflix and is making Netflix money. Netflix is profiting from a peering agreement that Comcast has to pay for. Seems fair to me that Netflix pays part of the costs of upgrade.

In fact, I'd say that if Comcast has to increase everyone's bill to pay for capacity upgrades required to handle Netflix traffic, THAT would be charging their customers for Netflix traffic -- even if the customers aren't Netflix customers.

In any case, Netflix is not being throttled. All traffic through that gateway is seeing congestion, not just them.

I understand very well how cable companies are granted franchises to operate in different municpalities, yes. I have yet to find one that has been granted a monopoly.

Yes, they have rules, and must get a franchise. But having a franchise is not the same as being granted a monopoly. In fact, all of the cable franchising ordinances I've seen hve mandated that the franchise be non-exclusive (i.e., not a monopoly) and are specific in saying that there can be other franchisees.

You probably think that a liquor store that gets a business license to operate in a certain city has been granted a monopoly, too. No, sorry, having to follow a law to be able to operate (a law that is specific in saying that any franchise cannot be a monopoly) is not creating a monopoly.

The comment I replied to spoke about ISPs not being able to censor content "at all". That's patent nonsense. The FCC ruling is specific in using the term "legal" when referring to what content may not be controlled. For a reason. No, the FCC doesn't determine what is legal, but the congress does. That's still censorship if they decide that the content you want to view is illegal, and the ISPs can cut you off with the full approval of the FCC and despite any yammering about "net neutrality" and "no censorship".

Except for all those other ISPs, that is. If this problem is of so much concern to the customers, why has no other company stepped in to provide better service? Defacto monopolies cannot survive when competition is justified to solve service issues.

So you're buying Netflix' spin on the issue? Your link is to a Netflix statement. It isn't about routing, it's about solving border congestion. The route is the same.

Applying only to all "legal" content. Illegal content, such as gambling sites or whatever else the government decides is illegal, can be censored at will. By the way, distribution of classified material is illegal, so goodbye Wikileaks.

Further, the ruling does nothing to solve the congestion issues.

It certainly can be. There's a lot of "if you can trip over it" stuff between some of the systems I administer and the network they connect to.

I've had a wonderful fiber to cat5 converter that decided it would not pass any packets larger than about 128 bytes. Ping worked great. You could initiate all kinds of TCP connections, like the initial SSH handshaking. It was fascinating to see how the network reacted to different ping packet sizes while tracking this down. Make them small enough, the destination was alive. Make them one byte too large, the destination was offline.

That was a network problem. It was isolated by pinging various controlled devices on that network and seeing what things stopped answering when the packet got too big.

Thanks for telling me that I don't control the language. Your response fits the new definition of "troll" perfectly.

You either didn't read or didn't parse what I said. I have no difficulty accepting the new definitions. I'm quite happy with meaningless terms being bandied about as if they contained universal truths. Show me what I said that confused you about that. I just pointed out that they were meaningless, which I think is what you were saying, too. The "rail" wasn't.

Because both "troll" and "hacking" have been made into pointless useless words through the magic of "common use" by common people who have no clue what they were supposed to mean.

"An algorithm that can detect trolls" is a meaningless statement. If it is an algorithm, it needs a definition to work from. That definition is not going to be based on historical or accurate usage of the term. In fact, the summary gives you a good idea what it will be based on:

It also observes that higher rates of community intolerance are likely to foster the anti-social behavior and speed the ban.

So, the "definition" of "troll" is going to be "people who display unpopular or angry behavior when confronted by an intolerant social media environment." Gee, anyone slashdotted recently? "Community intolerance" is not the problem, I guess, it's the reaction of people in a supposedly open forum to that intolerance.

There will be no direct definition as such. It will be an empirical model based on correlation between use of angry or unpopular phrases and the subsequent ban of the poster. That's the new "troll". Say enough stuff that people don't like, you're a troll.

You mean like this, from the first sentence of the actual study abstract, written by the scientists doing the study:

Ocean acidification triggered by Siberian Trap volcanism was a possible kill mechanism for the Permo-Triassic Boundary mass extinction, but direct evidence for an acidification event is lacking.

Emphasis mine. Evidence is lacking. The only "evidence" they have is a computer model. Sadly, outside the modelling community, and sometimes within, models are taken as physical reality instead of a mathematical construct that is supposed to represent reality but can differ from reality significantly. Empirical models have no basis in physics, they simply extend correlation to causality. Physical models always make simplifying assumptions because the systems are too complicated to have an analytical (exact) solution, or can't be calculated fast enough to be useful.

This study was converted from "possible" but "evidence lacking" result into "was caused by" by a journalist with a political agenda, because that has a more "pleasant ring" to the political faithful that are his audience.

Where did you get this from? The student said that other students used the teachers' accounts, but nobody said they were doing it with the knowledge of the teachers or with their permission. Even with their permission may be unauthorized access, since I'm going to guess that the AUP for the systems involved prohibit account sharing. If they don't, they should.

Here's what the fine article says about the intent of the student who was arrested:

That's when he tried the other computer, which he realized was used by a teacher he didn't like, and realized that he could use his wide-reaching access to wreak some havoc.

No, the analogy would be that you leave a key under a rock and then someone you haven't given permission to use the key or enter your house uses that key to enter your house with the intent to "wreak some havoc", but doesn't do much before he decides to leave.

Were he charged with "hacking" you might have a point. "Unauthorized access to computer systems" does have a lower bound. Don't access a computer system without authorization and you're well below the lower bound.

Except it wasn't. Since amounts less than $10,000 are not reported, the reports cannot be used to catch people who are just splitting deposits. The article you linked to said it was her other financial activities that raised the red flag, at which point the investigation disclosed the deposits. They didn't come knocking just because of the deposit pattern.

Not saying the government is acting appropriately in this case, but she did break the law.

Then you've just lowered the threshold for reporting to $4000. That means they've reported your $9000 deposit and the $4000 one. And anyone else who has deposited more than $4000. Like me, when my paycheck is deposited.

No, the bank does it.

No. What makes you think the IRS is going to seize your money just because you deposited more than $10,000? It happens alot. It isn't a crime. BUT it can be combined with income information and might cause an investigation if you're busy making routine $20,000 deposits and withdrawals but you report only $5000 in income.

There's no magic to the $10,000 threshold. It's just a nice round number that will result in the vast majority of transactions to not be reported. Since the $9000/$4000 transactions aren't reported, it isn't like the feds can detect the attempts at gaming the system and come after you. The law against gaming the system is there not to catch people who just split the deposits because they don't want them reported, but to allow increased penalties for those they determine are money laundering (a federal crime) through other means.

So they kept from granting a franchise to a company that had no other plan than cherry-picking your neighborhood. You wanted them to cherry-pick you, but I can bet that the rest of the people in that city did not care. You weren't "a few dozen vs. a large corporation", you were a few dozen vs. everyone else in the city. Why should they be happy about it? If they want another company to come in and this franchise was granted, then there would already be two companies serving the same area and a third would have even less economic justification for trying to get a franchise.

The existing company has a contractual agreement to provide service to the entire city. Since most cable franchise ordinances were based on models from other places, it is unquestionably the case that your city was prohibited from granting a franchise to another company unless the terms were essentially the same as any existing franchise. The new company had no reason to agree to serve an already served area, did they? Why would they agree to serve an entire city and face legal consequences from not doing that in exchange for a few dozen more subs?

I don't see him saying that. Not at all.

No argument there. If Netflix buys services from Level 3, then Level 3 is on the hook to provide that service.

But Netflix did not buy service from Comcast. It's the peering that is congested, not the internal Level 3 network.

Do you not realize what it would cost to provide 100% service to everyone at the same time? It would require a huge investment in capacity that would be underutilized most of the time. The cost of service would skyrocket for no apparent benefit.

This isn't a new concept. There was never one dialtone generator for each subscriber telephone line, there was a set number based on statistical usage patterns. There was never one step-by-step switch for every phone line, there were a fixed number based on statistical use patterns. (And when BBSs/dialup ISPs became so popular it skewed that pattern to more and longer calls consuming switch capacity. That's why telcos tried to get "data line" service as an extra cost feature, so they could pay for the added switching capacity necessary to support the new pattern.)

And sometimes, if you tried to make a long distance call during heavy use (like on Mother's Day) you got a busy signal. Not because Mom was talking to one of your siblings, but because there were no long distance circuits available.

And you think that 100% capacity should be the goal? I'd rather pay less and get some congestion at peak periods, thanks. You see, we're seeing the exact same pattern in ISP service that we saw when BBSs/dialup hit the wireline. Systems designed for expected use patterns are being overloaded because more people are getting more data for longer times. I didn't want to pay a "data line" charge then, I don't want to pay a "my neighbor wants Netflix" fee, either.

I keep asking, nobody has given me an answer. What ISP has been granted a monopoly? What two ISPs have been granted a duopoly? If you are unhappy with your cable-wired internet service, what stops you from starting your own ISP and providing better/faster/cheaper service? Hint: it isn't the government.

Yeah, the existing cable companies are evil for agreeing not to compete directly. Unfortunately, you cannot legislate that they must enter a market where they don't want to. You CAN use legal remedies if they have contractually agreed to service an area and they haven't. But if there is an area where there is no service, grab the opportunity for huge profits by creating your own cable company and providing it. Someone would have done that -- if they could make a profit. It isn't the government stopping them, it's simple economics.

Yes, government funded cable service is a direct competition with private companies. How is that not obvious?

What is NOT prevented is the formation of a private company to provide that ISP service. Do you know why this isn't happening? Because it isn't profitable. It can only be "profitable" if the government steps in and uses taxpayer dollars to fund it. Government doesn't need to care about profit, they can do it for "free". I.e., using tax money. Involuntary subscribers. And when government can offer services at below cost, how can any private company compete? You think it is fair for that to happen?

And no company is smart enough to take advantage of all the disaffected subscribers to the awful BIG_COMPANY by trying to provide service to them? Seems like an easy chunk of money to pick up. Walk into an area, give better cable service at faster rates and you'll have people beating a path to your door.

Given that the FCC net neutrality rules have NOTHING to do with breaking up defacto monopolies and nothing to do with peering congestion and are not limited to the BIG_CABLE_ISP or BIG_TELECOM_ISP, it is a bit hard to accept this claim.

The only reason we all share the cable tv infrastructure (not "Internet") is because there is typically only one cable TV provider in an area. If you want to be the second provider, go for it. You won't make any money, but you aren't prevented from trying. We already don't all share the same telco infrastructure for phones, since a large number of people have abandoned wireline for wireless.

Unfortunately for your argument, the "Internet" infrastructure isn't "all shared" by everyone either. It's different infrastructure for cable vs. telco vs. wireless. If my neighbor has DSL he's not using the same infrastructure I am. The guy next to him is wireless, and it isn't the same infrastructure either.

Which ISP has been granted a monopoly? If they have, why are there so many of them to choose from?

I'm sorry, but there are no easements in my backyard and thus no right to drive your backhoe through it. Your franchise will give you access to the public rights of way, which isn't my backyard.