• Dark Arc@social.packetloss.gg
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    8 months ago

    This comment is the worst misrepresentation of penguins I’ve ever seen. It sounds like a red herring. It makes me want to vomit. People get away with this because nobody actually knows what penguins are. They just take what the media writes and accepts it as truth.

    On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally. In other words it means you don’t have to pay $5 extra for high speed access to Lemmy because Reddit and your ISP (say Comcast) would prefer Lemmy not exist.

    • debanqued@beehaw.org
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      8 months ago

      On a serious note, plenty of people here surely know what net neutrality is. Net neutrality is the guarantee that your ISP doesn’t (de-)prioritize traffic or outright block traffic, all packets are treated equally.

      That’s true but it’s also the common (but overly shallow) take. It’s applicable here and good enough for the thread, but it’s worth noting that netneutrality is conceptually deeper than throttling and pricing games and beyond ISP shenanigans. The meaning was coined by Tim Wu, who spoke about access equality.

      People fixate on performance which I find annoying in face of Cloudflare, who is not an ISP but who has done by far the most substantial damage to netneutrality worldwide by controlling who gets access to ~50%+ of world’s websites. The general public will never come to grasp Cloudflare’s oppression or the scale of it, much less relate it to netneutrality, for various reasons:

      • Cloudflare is invisible to those allowed inside the walled garden, so its existence is mostly unknown
      • The masses can only understand simple concepts about their speed being throttled. Understanding the nuts and bolts of discrimination based on IP address reputation is lost on most.
      • The US gov is obviously pleased that half the world’s padlocked web traffic is trivially within their unwarranted surveillance view via just one corporation in California. They don’t want people to realize the harm CF does to netneutrality and pressure lawmakers to draft netneutrality policy in a way that’s not narrowly ISP-focused.

      Which means netneutrality policy is doomed to ignore Cloudflare and focus on ISPs.

      Most people at least have some control over which ISP they select. Competition is paltry, but we all have zero control over whether a website they want to use is in Cloudflare’s exclusive walled garden.

      • beefcat@beehaw.org
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        8 months ago

        A website isn’t a common carrier, you cannot argue that a website isn’t allowed to control who they serve their content to. An ISP is a common carrier because they simply act as a dumb pipe between the provider (websites) and the consumer.

        Cloudflare is a tool websites use to exercise that right, necessitated by the ever rising prevalence of bots and DDoS attacks. Your proposed definition of net neutrality would destroy anyone’s ability to deal with these threats.

        Can you at least provide examples of legitimate users who are hindered by the use of Cloudflare?