# Net Neutrality



## Hawk (Jan 15, 2014)

Concerning the US government's overturning net neutrality, wouldn't it be possible for content providers, say Netflix, to simply provide an alternative method to allow users to get around any service throttling? The primary one that comes to my mind is simply use a SSH tunnel. Would that work, or am I missing something? Would there be other ways? Or is this an issue IT professionals believe isn't worth keeping up on?


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 15, 2014)

The government did no such thing. The courts declared what telecom companies want to do is legal and, in fact, stated the government cannot prevent this. Always NPR for the best coverage on this: http://goo.gl/maoznW

As far as content providers providing their own network, Google already does this and some think this is one of the reasons behind the development of their own fiber network. I would be curious if there may be investors and a big push by Google to create their own network, or a threat to the others who try to restrict the net.


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## saxon3049 (Jan 17, 2014)

To be honest, this could be a make or break of the net as a medium as a whole.

I say this as the bigger ISP's do honestly see a compute cycle for low bandwidth sites, http://www.yourblog.org / http://www.blowthedoroutyourarse.com etc. rather than amazon.tld ebay.tld et al. Why should that cost us the same as the big guys? If the little guys get lower priority then the big guys they are going to be shafted and a lot of the bigger companies are liking anti-net neutrallity to boost profits. The whole situation is going to get a hell of a lot worse before it even seems to get better.


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## drhowarddrfine (Jan 18, 2014)

I was afraid of this. The 'net is like radio in its infancy. Back then, everyone had a broadcast station. Eventually company owned stations were restricted to certain channels and all the radios only tuned to those frequencies while the amateurs were put elsewhere. I see the 'net going the same way in 50 years but, then again, not everyone had the ability to build a radio transmitter and it's far easier to get canned software to build a web site. The social uproar alone may fight against this but I'm not hearing it yet.


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## Deleted member 9563 (Jan 19, 2014)

Tim Wu's book could be of interest to some here. 

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires


> It is easy to forget that every development in the history of the American information industry — from the telephone to radio to film — once existed in an open and chaotic marketplace inhabited by entrepreneurs and utopians, just as the Internet does today. Each of these, however, grew to be dominated by a monopolist or cartel.


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