OK so the FCC has decided and net neutrality is dead
https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/14/16776154/fcc-net-neutrality-vote-results-rules-repealed
But for the most part it had no effect on your life, facebook still works, netflix still works, what is the problem.
The problem is that the internet is supposed to be free, not just for some but for everybody.
This became a first hand problem for me over the past week. I have been using the internet as a way to make my living since about 1995.
The thing is you have a connection to the internet, via a dialup modem, university network, ADSL whatever and then from there you connect to the “rest of the internet”.
Back a long time ago the infrastructure of what was hosting the other end of the internet, sometimes mattered, if you were connecting to the protien database and it was down for maintainence, you had to do something else until it was back up. But you didnt need to think too hard about how you connected to it, you just put in the internet address, and zoom you were there. Obivously this was possible because lots of network engineers had paved the way with their souls, but apart from that it was pretty much free to use as you please.
Zoom forward from 1995 to 2018 where we are no longer in a net neutral world. I am trying to get some source code from github.com. My internet connection from my house to the Croydon exchange is fast enough it syncs at 19Mbps down and 1 Mbsp up. But where does it go to from there? Obviously it goes to my ISP who will remain nameless, an then it goes one hop at a time until it reaches the repisitory at github.com. When it does so it goes there over “public roads” and “toll roads”. The issue is that if I was destined for Netflix.com there might be some peering arrangement set up with my internet service provider so that traffic will always be nice and quick. Hence the average internet user will say ISP X is great, my Netflix never stutters, join ISP X. So this change of network structure from allowing the traffic to flow freely, but instead being in partnership with the provider of traffic, means the little guys are at a disadvantage over the big guys, meaning it becomes a user pays system. I get it nothing in the world is free.
Why am I having a sulk about this, capitalism isnt new? Well it is 7:12 am and I want to do some study into Mask RCNN in Pytorch, which is all out there and freely available, the great library of Alexandra hasnt burned yet, knowledge is free, this is great, but I cannot get to it because of net neutrality is gone. I am waiting for a download of PyTorch 0.3 with cuda 8.0 for unbuntu and the server that it is hosted on isn’t one that gets popular votes from my ISP as being a cool and groovy place to so where the ISP will pave the road with gold so I can get fast connectivity. So instead I am back to dialup speed trying to expand my knowledge. This is how net neutrality harms the community. I cant learn because of toll roads on the internet.
I am not a happy camper. When I got in contact with my ISP about it , they said they cannot guarantee anything outside of the network.
Anyway bugger it I will just go for a walk and let it download and hope for the best.
But when it is a 4.5Gb download from somewhere that will not resume, I am out of luck, I will have to go back to the underground sneaker network from the late eighties where people who have the data can be contacted one at a time.
The internet is dead.
Sam