Former Daily Show funnyman John Oliver’s recent 13-minute net neutrality rant ended with a plea to Internet commenters the world over to “once in your lives, focus your indiscriminate rage in a useful direction.” Oliver used his new HBO comedy news showLast Week Tonight to try to convince people to take advantage of the FCC’s initial open commenting period regarding the net neutrality debate, which runs from May 15 to June 27.
via Time
June 3, 2014
The number of core factual errors in this guys rants leave the viewers more miss-informed than I would have thought possible.
First he frames wireline as industry created monopoly, when in fact it’s a regulatory created monopoly. EVERY city government grants a monopoly for utilities, so no competition is possible. And many/most of those cities ask for payments in return, in effect taxing their consituents for the privelege of no competition, and setting agreed rates with the government leaders.
Second he completely ignores the reality that bandwidth hogs doing high volume streaming video and P2P “sharing”, account for about 10-20% of the customers, and better than 95% of the ISP bandwidth. Sure Netflix wants the other 80% of it’s non-customers to pay for their customers bandwidth.
Lastly, existing network strategies for rural America, do not even include wireline. They include limited spectrum unlicensed wireless, that doesn’t even begin to meet the transport speeds available on fiber. And these radios have shared bandwidth, where high volume UDP traffic completely trashes the service for the other 80% of the customer base, because UDP streaming video doesn’t play fairly with TCP packetloss congestion controls.