The ISP can still see you using a VPN and throttle all VPN traffic. The only way to avoid it is to use an ISP that doesn’t throttle.
Basically your choice is to find someone who doesn't do this, and hope that the path from whatever service or site you're wanting doesn't go through the pipes of an ISP that does want to throttle on its way to you.
It's going to be a mess once this has ramped up to the full vision of the ISPs.
NN isn’t the issue — the issue is local governments that make deals with a single ISP to prevent competition. If ISP competition were possible, the NN becomes irrelevant because ISP’s want customers and customers would demand the services they want and shop around for an ISP that serves their need.
We should be complaining about the lack of ISP competition, not NN. Remember the days when long distance phone calls actually cost a lot of money? That was the result of a Bell monopoly.
Besides, this is a tangential issue; it's related in someway, but such competition doesn't help consumers when it comes to what their ISP can and cannot do. Even without city contracts, it's really expensive in the US to start an ISP; we've seen countless stories about ISP start-ups here on HN which show the difficulty of such a venture, and it's why we don't see more of it. Heck, Google with its deep pockets could not make it work even in cities that were happy to bend over backwards for them.
Even if we were to have more last mile ISPs, how does that help when the rest of the upstream is plagued with ISPs that are deprioritizing traffic based on their preferences? What good is it to have an ISP at the last mile in Seattle if the route to Seattle de-prioritizes this traffic?
Net Neutrality is equally important to the striking down of the city-wide contracts ISPs have managed to get. This was a state by state thing and the story was the same each time; the ISPs promised far more than they delivered to the states, and the states just ate the bill while the ISPs fought in court each and every time. I don't believe for a moment that the ISPs should be able to use our Tax Payer money to have laid cable like this then bend us over a barrel for it.
More competition would be great, but this alone doesn't solve the issue. How big of a price tag does a BenevolentISP have before it's an offer too good to refuse? Why even give them the power to use our money to screw us even further?
So go ahead and use a VPN, but it won't matter when you're throttled to 50 kb/s
> If you have to pay extra, fine, but let's be clear that the only changes are monetary ones,
Are you suggesting that they wouldn't throttle, they'd just block? I'm not sure how this is any better or changes the scenario; you still have to pay to use a service you currently can use just fine.
Blocking, throttling, the end result is the same; you are unable to use the service because the ISP has decided they deserve to be paid for your use of this service. Whether it's a work VPN or a VPN service, there would be no distinguishing.
Plus, we've already seen such muscling from ISPs as they wanted cuts of service profits with regards to the Netflix throttling. Comcast decided "we deserve some payment from Netflix", and forced a contract to be made, all the while consumers were unable to use a service because Comcast decided that "oh, we deserve a cut here."
If VPN usage increased, I see no reason why the same wouldn't happen, regardless of the use. Since there's no singular entity to press on here (as was the case with Netflix), just press on the end-users by means of throttling, or cut it off all together.
We have plenty of historical evidence that ISPs will do whatever they want if they can get away with it, including throttling.
Note, Comcast actually does something like this already. If you get on their gigabit plan, their dumb monthly cap of 1 TB still applies, but you can pay more to remove that cap and go back to the unlimited it used to be.
What I'm missing is how the initial comment relates to the first, specifically they won't throttle or make any QOS changes because too many people use it. We've seen that Comcast in particular is more than happy to throttle services just because they can or want to, and in the case of Netflix, consumers didn't even have an option to pay more to make it work properly; Netflix just would be terrible for them no matter what.
What I'm saying was a response to the idea that people can somehow just use a VPN to circumvent any restrictions, which makes no sense to me. Usage reports will clearly show a high level of traffic going over VPN, and the response will just be to make this part of a new tier of service as well; to recoup the value lost by people bypassing tier/package service with a VPN, the price will be adjusted accordingly.
So I'm sorry, I guess I'm just being dense, but I'm not sure exactly why VPN services wouldn't be affected if VPNs became a means of circumventing the intended Tiering/Package offers.
Edit: Also, I'm sorry that someone is voting you down for a misunderstanding. I think that's inappropriate.
Some existential threats to countries:
* An equally or more powerful country declares war on the country. (Actually even an underdog can occasionally win, so the power criteria isn't strictly needed for a threat...) Similarly for a group of countries against another group of countries.
* Increased tensions within a country build up to a civil war. Survivable (USA) but still a threat.
* The US State Department doesn't like the country's leader(s)
* Country cannot produce as much as or more than it consumes. Side effects include mass starvation, coup attempts.
* Modern "acts of war" but not necessarily carried out by a war-declaring entity like another country. E.g. terrorist attacks on infrastructure. Probably worst (but least likely) threat is an EMP detonated about as high up as the ISS, if you wanted to affect a country the size of the continental US.
* Government bankruptcy.
* Mass disease (thankfully less of a threat given modern medicine and distribution)
I'll stop there...
You seem to have a very unusual concept of what makes an existential threat, and I think countries is an easier analogy to try and understand your reasoning.
> * An equally or more powerful country declares war on the country. (Actually even an underdog can occasionally win, so the power criteria isn't strictly needed for a threat...) Similarly for a group of countries against another group of countries.
What if the attacking country declared that its goal is to gain power over the country to exploit it economically, but let the country continue to exist (essentially colonialism)? Would you still consider that an existential threat?
> * Increased tensions within a country build up to a civil war. Survivable (USA) but still a threat.
What if the declared goal of all parties to the war would be to keep the country intact, just with different sets of rules? Would you still consider that an existential threat?
> * The US State Department doesn't like the country's leader(s)
How does that threaten the country existentially? That's just about who has power in the country, not about whether the country exists, isn't it?
> * Country cannot produce as much as or more than it consumes. Side effects include mass starvation, coup attempts.
But a country with a starving population is still a country, isn't it? And a country that had a coup is still a country, isn't it? So, why is this an existential threat to a country?
> * Modern "acts of war" but not necessarily carried out by a war-declaring entity like another country. E.g. terrorist attacks on infrastructure. Probably worst (but least likely) threat is an EMP detonated about as high up as the ISS, if you wanted to affect a country the size of the continental US.
But would that change that it's still a country? Why would you consider this an existential threat when the country still exists afterwards?!
> * Government bankruptcy.
How is that an existential threat for the country? It's just a bankrupt country then, isn't it?
> * Mass disease (thankfully less of a threat given modern medicine and distribution)
Wouldn't that just result in a country with a lot of ill and ultimately dead people? That doesn't make it not a country, does it? Why do you consider this an existential threat to the country, then?!
> I'll stop there...
Sure, I think I got the idea, but I really did not get your reasoning behind this. I don't really expect that you respond individually to each question above, that probably would be a huge waste of time ... my point is: Why would you consider any of that an existential threat to a country when the country in all cases almost certainly still exists afterwards?
For the sorts of existential threats I care about, you can read https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/Existential-Risk... where the Thing at risk is the bright future of mankind.
Given that, I hope you'll see that everything I gave was a threat. Threats aren't certainties. Threats aren't themselves states that are isomorphic with or inevitably lead to non-existence. A war might be lost, and the nation as it was is conquered and absorbed into the winning nation. With this not-uncommon possibility, war is obviously an existential threat. But extinction isn't certain. What if the victor ends up mostly leaving the nation alone after (e.g. Israel vs its neighbors)? Or you might define that a country becoming a client-state still counts as continuity of existence (I don't) and that is not uncommon too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_sovereign_state... has a nice list of things that no longer exist, and some of these things we might both agree count as countries that no longer exist -- definitions are important -- as opposed to sovereign government changes within a stable geographical boundary, or country unions that fell apart with the individual members remaining. If you went through them and picked out the common threads between them (the list itself begins with "conflict, war, rebellion, annexation, or uprising", so consider things likely to lead to those for even more threat options) then those commonalities would probably count as common existential threats.
Edit: and given all that, I don't think net-bias is an existential threat to the internet. The internet -- definitions are important -- may cease to exist, but I don't think net-bias by ISPs would be a big reason why, and the scenarios I can picture the internet actually ceasing to exist seem to be able to happen just as probably with or without ISPs not upholding (or being forced to uphold) neutrality.
Well, yeah, but what does it mean for abstract things to exist in the first place?
> where the Thing at risk is the bright future of mankind.
But that is a very different thing from a country, isn't it? Couldn't countries continue to exist as totally dystopic entities?
> Given that, I hope you'll see that everything I gave was a threat.
Oh, sure those are threats, to something. But so is net bias, isn't it? But that doesn't automatically make it a threat to the country, does it?
> Threats aren't certainties. Threats aren't themselves states that are isomorphic with or inevitably lead to non-existence.
But a threat also isn't just anything that could possibly contribute to the demise of something in some minor manner under extremely unusual circumstances, in particular an existential one, right?
> A war might be lost, and the nation as it was is conquered and absorbed into the winning nation. With this not-uncommon possibility, war is obviously an existential threat.
Which is why I specifically asked about the case of a colonial war.
> Or you might define that a country becoming a client-state still counts as continuity of existence (I don't) and that is not uncommon too.
Why don't you? As I understood you, you wouldn't consider (the possibility of) a complete change of how the country is governed to be an existential threat, to the point that you apparently wouldn't consider the change to a dictatorship or monarchy an existential threat. What is it then that makes this an existential threat, when it seems that as far as the power structure is concerned, there wouldn't really be much of a difference whether you have a corrupt dictator or a governor from another country running your country?!
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_former_sovereign_state... has a nice list of things that no longer exist, and some of these things we might both agree count as countries that no longer exist -- definitions are important -- as opposed to sovereign government changes within a stable geographical boundary, or country unions that fell apart with the individual members remaining.
But do countries have to be sovereign? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Country, sovereignty is not a defining characteristic of a country.
> The internet -- definitions are important -- may cease to exist, but I don't think net-bias by ISPs would be a big reason why, and the scenarios I can picture the internet actually ceasing to exist seem to be able to happen just as probably with or without ISPs not upholding (or being forced to uphold) neutrality.
Well, yes, exactly, definitions are important, that is kindof my point, and as far as net bias being an existential threat to the internet is concerned, I think you are probably simply missing the point by using a definition of "the internet" that's not useful in the context. Just as it is not useful to assume that someone speaking of "existential threats to a country" means exclusively roads and buildings, it's not useful to assume that someone speaking of "existential threats to the internet" means exclusively cables and routers.
When people speak of "existential threats to a country", they usually mean some sort of power structure and societal structures and culture in addition to the geographic boundaries and what infrastructure can be found within it. The fact that you are now steering towards sovereignty as a relevant distinguisher between whether a country continues to exists or not suggests that you do as well, even though that is not part of the general definition of a country.
Similarly, for the internet, when people talk about net bias being an existential threat to the internet, noone means by that that the internet protocol will be dead without net neutrality. What everyone means is that it is going to change massively how the internet is going to be used, that many of the good effects that result from the power structure of a neutral internet will stop, to the point that it culturally wouldn't be recognizable to someone who only knew the neutral internet, notwithstanding the fact that IP packets will still be IP packets.
How would that play out with VPNs? Well, if netflix users would be forced to a) pay for a vpn and b) pay for comcast to allow the vpn to be fast, or not to any of that and just go with comcasts video service. So netflix will want to pay comcast so that their users don't jump ship. Comcast might let them, but even that is not a given.
The real problem is not so much the lack of NN, it's the monopoly for the last mile. But without NN and no competition in the last mile service, we will have a problem.
[1] Or any other ISP who has a monopoly in a large enough segment of the market.