Jon Brodkin

The Federal Communications Commission asked a lot of questions in its latest network neutrality order. One of them is whether the commission should start treating fixed broadband and cellular Internet as one and the same for the purposes of no-blocking and anti-discrimination rules.

But for now, the commission is continuing the course it's taken previously by treating fixed and wireless Internet differently. Like the 2010 Open Internet Order that was largely struck down by a federal appeals court ruling, the latest Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) lays out rules for ISPs to follow on disclosing network practices, blocking applications and websites, and discriminating against Internet services.

But cellular carriers such as Verizon Wireless, AT&T, Sprint, and T-Mobile face less strict rules than fixed (e.g. wired) Internet providers, allowing them to block applications that don't compete against their telephony services.

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler repeatedly said that his network neutrality proposal doesn’t authorize Internet fast lanes.

“This proposal does not provide or mandate paid prioritization,” he said to reporters after the FCC’s vote. “There is nothing in this proposal that authorizes a fast lane. We ask questions but don’t jump to conclusions.”

So has everyone who called this a “fast lane” proposal gotten the story wrong? Not exactly. As Commissioner Mignon Clyburn said during the meeting, there are no rules at all against Internet service providers blocking traffic or prioritizing some content over others. That’s because a federal appeals court in 2014 overturned the FCC’s previous net neutrality order, issued in 2010.

While the FCC’s latest proposal doesn’t specifically authorize fast lanes, it didn’t have to: they’re already legal. ISPs can charge Web services like Netflix (“edge providers” in regulatory parlance) for a faster path to consumers over the last mile of the network because there aren’t any enforceable rules against it. The important thing is that the proposal apparently doesn’t ban fast lanes.

The Federal Communications Commission is scheduled to vote on a controversial "fast lane" proposal, and it's inspired a bunch of people to protest by slowing down their own websites.

Recently, a Web hosting company called Neocities throttled its home page, and MaxCDN gave customers the option of doing the same -- but this only slowed websites down for people connecting from an FCC IP address. Now, there's an easy way to throttle your website for everyone who visits.

Venture capitalist Brad Feld just announced the project. There's a Stop The Slow Lane page and a small bit of code on GitHub that inserts the "slow lane" widget on a website.

"The FCC could soon let Internet providers charge websites to access a bogus 'fast lane' and slow down every site that doesn't pay," Feld wrote. "Do you want a slower Internet? Neither do we. Show the world what the FCC's 'slow lane' looks like by embedding the #StopTheSlowLane Widget on your site!"

A Comcast executive said he expects the company will roll out "usage-based billing" -- what most people call "data caps" -- to all of its customers within five years.

Speaking with investors, Comcast Executive VP David Cohen said, "I would predict that in five years Comcast at least would have a usage-based billing model rolled out across its footprint."

Comcast, which has about 20 million broadband customers, has rolled out caps to some of the areas that it serves, including Huntsville and Mobile, Alabama; Atlanta, Augusta, and Savannah, Georgia; Central Kentucky; Maine; Jackson, Mississippi; Knoxville and Memphis, Tenessee; and Charleston, South Carolina.

Customers generally get 300GB of data per month, with $10 charges for each extra 50GB. (During the trial period, customers can exceed the cap for three months out of any 12-month period without incurring extra fees.)

Comcast told Ars last November that "98 percent of our customers nationally don’t use 300GB/month." Cohen said that Comcast will raise the limit over time so that the large majority of users won't go over it, suggesting that 500GB is a possible monthly limit by 2019.

For all of Netflix’s complaints about Internet service providers harming video performance, one of the company’s top technology experts is confident that the streaming company can solve most of its customers’ problems. }

The best-known parts of Open Connect are probably the storage boxes that Internet service providers can take into their own networks to bring content closer to consumers. Internet service providers (ISPs) can also peer with Netflix, exchanging traffic directly without hosting Netflix equipment.

But these aren’t the only ways Netflix’s Open Connect technology can deliver good quality. Netflix used to use third-party CDNs such as Akamai, but it has moved most of its traffic over to Open Connect in the past couple of years.

Outside the US, 100 percent of Netflix traffic is distributed using Open Connect equipment. The percentage is in the “high 90s” in the US, with plans to hit 100 percent this summer. Even if the storage boxes aren’t inside an ISP’s network, they’re not too far away. They could even be in the same data centers, the Internet exchange points where Netflix transit providers connect to ISPs.

AT&T urged the Federal Communications Commission to avoid reclassifying broadband Internet access as a telecommunications service, which is something network neutrality advocates are asking the FCC to do.

Reclassification would open broadband providers up to common carrier rules under Title II of the Communications Act, similar to regulations that have covered our phone system since 1934. One of the most interesting arguments made by AT&T is that Title II reclassification would force giant changes in the peering and interconnection markets. Reclassification could also bring lots of new requirements for ISPs that don’t directly serve consumers, AT&T argued.

Lots of people are angry about Federal Communications Commission Chairman Tom Wheeler's Internet "fast lane" proposal that would let Internet service providers charge Web services for priority access to consumers.

But one Web hosting service called NeoCities isn't just writing letters to the FCC. Instead, the company found the FCC's internal IP address range and throttled all connections to 28.8Kbps speeds.

"Since the FCC seems to have no problem with this idea, I've (through correspondence) gotten access to the FCC's internal IP block, and throttled all connections from the FCC to 28.8kbps modem speeds on the Neocities.org front site, and I'm not removing it until the FCC pays us for the bandwidth they've been wasting instead of doing their jobs protecting us from the 'keep America's Internet slow and expensive forever' lobby," NeoCities creator Kyle Drake wrote.

[Commentary] The Federal Communications Commission's proposal to let Internet service providers charge Web services for a "fast lane" probably isn't a good thing for the Internet -- even the FCC said so itself in 2010 when it warned that such payments would give ISPs "incentives to allow congestion rather than invest in expanding network capacity."

But it's important not to exaggerate the potential effects of the proposed rule.

We have seen headlines such as "The FCC’s new net neutrality proposal is already ruining the Internet" and "Net neutrality ruling scaring VCs away from investing in certain startups."

Right now, there are no network neutrality rules in place in the US. The rules the FCC issued in 2010 were overturned by a federal appeals court, and now the FCC is writing new ones that will probably be weaker than the original plan.

It may well be true that startups will have a tougher time competing against the Netflixes, YouTubes, and Hulus of the world if and when those companies purchase a faster path from ISP data centers to consumers' homes. But it's hard to believe that venture capitalists will suddenly ignore Internet startups in any great numbers.

There's still a huge opportunity for startups to upend the cable TV business model that consumers hate, venture capitalist Joel Yarmon of Draper Associates told Ars. Draper has invested in Twitch.tv, SocialCam, and other online startups.

"You'd better believe I'm looking for companies that are going to disrupt that [TV market] and you better believe that whether I fund them or not, people are going to start companies that disrupt [it] because that is an opportunity," he said.

Yahoo announced that it will stop complying with Do Not Track signals that Web browsers send on behalf of users who wish to not be monitored for advertising purposes.

When users click the Do Not Track setting in their browser, an HTTP header is sent to websites to state the user’s preference not to be tracked.

"While some third parties have committed to honor Do Not Track, many more have not,” the project website states. “In February 2012, the major online advertising trade groups pledged at the White House to support Do Not Track by the end of 2014; that promise remains unfulfilled. Efforts to standardize Do Not Track in the World Wide Web Consortium have resulted in deadlock, despite frequent urging by American and European policymakers.”

Yahoo also refused to honor Do Not Track signals from Internet Explorer 10 in late 2012 because Microsoft decided to turn it on by default instead of asking users to make the choice.

Netflix is looking for an engineer to research using a peer-to-peer architecture for streaming.

When asked whether the company intends to stream video using P2P, a Netflix spokesperson replied only that "the best way to see it is that we look at all kinds of routes."