Q&A #2 + Net Neutrality Nuance

Key Takeaways

hey everyone no math here I just want to post two quick announcements for you first the number of you who have opted to subscribe to this channel has once again rolled over a power of 2 which is just mind-boggling to me I'm still touched that there are so many of you who enjoy math like this just for fun apparently and who have helped to support the channel by watching it by sharing some of the content here and of course for a very special subset of you directly supporting through patreon really each and every one of the two to the nineteenth of you mean a lot to me and as a thanks and just for fun I'm gonna be doing a second Q&A session I left a link to where you can ask an upvote questions it should be on the screen here and in the description and just like with the first one I'll answer questions in the podcast that I do with Ben eater and Ben Stein hug since I don't know I think discussions are more fun than answers in a vacuum by the way if you guys don't already know about eaters channel what are you doing this man is the bob ross of computer engineering if you want to understand how a computer works and I mean really understand it from the ground up his channel is 100% the place to go trust me he is a very good explainer but anyway the reason I bring him up that he and I just recorded a pretty interesting conversation about net neutrality and I want to be very clear Ben eater is not against net neutrality and nor am i however the issue is a lot more nuanced than I first realized and because there were already many great videos about net neutrality and why it's a good thing which I agree with to offer content that you may not have seen before this conversation was a chance to unearth some of the trade-offs that are at play here you see the thing about eater is that before he was creating phenomenal educational content he worked for many years in the networking industry so he has a pretty clear view of both sides of the equation and a pretty intelligent way of articulating what they are I'm just gonna play you a minute of the conversation here and then link to the full video if you want to go see it on Ben's channel which you should be going to check out anyway but for those of you who would prefer to listen to a 45-minute conversation in podcast form maybe over a commute we did also publish it as an episode of banben and have you know consumers kind of want an unlimited service or we want to believe we they want to believe you have concluded service it's essentially guaranteed that we'll never extra is that right need and and the you know the one or two people way off on me on the end that are that are abusing the providers are called to be using I think the customers would say they're you seeing what they they're paying for but the ones that are really off the charts you know the providers like yeah we'll just limit the traffic will give them will slow them down or slow down the applications not to interrupt but Victorian seems like an interesting example just because this is a peer-to-peer type thing and then there's a whole pile of hype around decentralized possibilities with like blockchain and whatnot and to the extent that that is an aspect of the future of the Internet that you have a little bit more possibility for some services to be a decentralized in this way and I think there's even a lot of things that just have a straight-up BitTorrent type flavor when it comes to file sharing and things of that sort like do you see that as a little bit more on the horizon and would you see that as an example of like potentially harmful harmful things that come about when you are very strict about net neutrality about abiding by it I would necessarily categorize as a peer to peer I think the I also I understand what yeah that you're not saying that it's like necessarily dangerous to abide by it strictly I'm sort of eating that out of you but no yeah I mean I think the thing the thing that happened with BitTorrent and we were going a little bit too far down that rabbit hole but the thing that happened with BitTorrent was this was an unusual thing this is [Music] [Music] you