Sonia Arrison

Net Neutrality and Piracy

Here’s a column I wrote recently on the connection between the two.

April 18, 2007 | Comments |

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    The issue at hand is not about packet rate. It's about packet type and packet destination. By all means, specify and enforce traffic volumes (and have your marketing people earn their money by selling that, instead of "unlimited" - separate discussion).


    However, if my ISP decides to, for example, block or degrade my VoIP calls which are by no means "always on" and, when on, consume less than a third of my upstream bandwidth, I know they're only doing it to push their own more expensive VoIP service. In violation, I would claim, of their contractual obligation to make "reasonable efforts" to push my packets in return for my money.


    The linked article is nothing but a rehashed "if X then the pirates/terrorists/child molsters win" strawman.

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    Regretfully, your article is simply regurgitating Comcast's corporate line. Please see Ed Foster's column on this.

    Even if Comcast's assertions were correct, why doesn't Comcast provide its customers with clear guidance on their download limits? Again corporations like to promise you in a friendly fashion everything under the sun. But then when you take them at their word by actually using the "unlimited" bandwidth you were sold, you then become an evil abuser.
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    Sonia, I think you're using an overly expansive definition of network neutrality here. I don't know anyone who thinks that limiting the total bandwidth a user consumes is a violation of network neutrality. And it's certainly not a violation of network neutrality for a company like Apple—which is not an ISP and doesn't route anyone else's packets—to offer differentiated service.

    There certainly are good reasons to avoid neutrality regulations, but I don't think cracking down on piracy is one of them.
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    I've rented a couple of movies on line using Amazon's Unbox service; each was ~2 GB in size. So it is quite possible to download several GB of legal content in a month, and the number of ways of doing so is only going to increase in the next year or two.
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