We all know the internet is not a big dump truck, thanks to Sen. Ted Stevens. But what if it were an car. Well, Rocketboom considers the possibility to explain why net neutrality is so important.
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There’s another net neutrality bill on the floor of the US House. Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) proposed the Internet Freedom and Nondiscrimination Act (H.R. 5994) this week, a bill that would make net neutrality “an antitrust matter.”
The problem with the bill is that it doesn’t outright ban discrimination against certain types of data. In fact, it would allow an ISP to restrict, say, BitTorrent traffic. However, under the proposed law, if an ISP decides to restrict BitTorrent it has to restrict all torrent traffic equally. This is hardly a step in the right direction since it gives legal protection to ISPs to tell people how they can and cannot access data.
One of the frequent arguments the ISPs make for reshaping net traffic is that file sharing usage has skyrocketed, placing a huge demand on the the ISP’s ability to provide bandwidth to all. So how much bandwidth does file sharing eat up? Wired did an analysis of what turns out to be a very difficult question to answer.
One interesting thing they found is that peer-to-peer traffic may have decreased thanks to free, http-based services like Hulu and YouTube. This undermines their central idea that the people eating up the bandwidth are all thieves engaging in illegal activity.