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Twitter is throttling traffic to websites Elon dislikes
(www.washingtonpost.com)
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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This has nothing to do with net neutrality. Either you didn't read the article, you didn't understand what you read, or you don't understand what net neutrality means.
To your credit, the use of "throttles" in the headline is (likely intentionally) deceptive. It's the wrong term entirely. What Xitter did was make their own servers wait ~5 seconds before serving an http redirect.
Sounds exactly like he is disregarding net neutrality to me.
Edit: To be clear, proponents of net neutrality believe that all corporations, not just ISPs should follow net neutrality. It's because of this exact situation that people want shit like this put into law.
This is the key here, though. Twitter isn't an ISP, they're just making it more annoying when navigating from their site to elsewhere.
Which is hilarious. This will only hurt them.
People will just think Twitter is slow. Obviously Threads or NY Times will work normally when people are on those sites.
Net neutrality is the concept of an open, equal internet for everyone, regardless of device, application or platform used and content consumed. You can argue semantics all day but twitter slowing traffic or redirects to certain other websites is a violation of net neutrality. If not the letter of the definition then for sure the spirit of it.
They're violating the spirit of net neutrality, but not the law. Since they aren't an ISP, they can't actually slow down or block you from accessing certain websites. The most they can do is slow down (or block) their own URL redirection service when its used to access to those domains. That's within their right of free speech, even if it's really fucking petty.
Just concede and learn from your mistake, because you're missing the point. Cloudflare throttles connections to sites as part of their DDoS protection, but that isn't even remotely related to net neutrality. On your site, you can do whatever you want, but ISPs preventing customers from accessing certain sites (or accessing them as they would "normal" sites) is what net neutrality is concerned with.
He’s like the asshole bakers who won’t make the cake for the gay wedding. Or he’ll do it eventually but whine about it the entire time and it’ll arrive late and burnt.
I've got no problem baking anyone a cake, but you're right it'll be late and burnt. I can't bake for shit.
But your assumption that I wouldn't force anyone to bake that cake, you're absolutely right.
I was talking about Elon, but I’m sorry about your lack of baking skills in case you wanted to be good at it or something.
While still expecting to get paid.
That's because you don't know what an "internet service provider" is. Twitter is not one.
I know what ISP means. Read my edit.
Twitter isn't, and shouldn't be under any obligation to respond to you proxying your requests through their url tracker with any service level.
Is it unethical? Yeah. Does it violate the letter of proposed NN laws? No. Does it violate the spirit of proposed NN laws? Also no. Those laws don't cover what happens while a request is inside a parties network, only the traffic that travels in and out of it, of which Twitter was manipulating neither.
Well, I suppose they could deliver a few packets with a couple microseconds of latency when they delivered the HTTP response payload but they would have to literally modify their OS's TCP stack to do so and the entirety of that actual throttling would be literally milliseconds of difference.
It definitely draws direct parallels to net neutrality. It also shows the consolidation of web services into the hands of a few large corporations and the impact it has on the internet.
Im sure Twitter would argue that it's not throttling, they don't limit the speed in any way. But it does make it appear to end users as if the web site is loading slower.
It would be interesting if these sites could see a noticeable drop in traffic during the period Twitter was imposing delays on the redirect. If so, thats potential lost revenue and a basis for a lawsuit.