Just addressing the questions Fail Boat brought up:

Quote :

"I could be wrong, I get the impression this stuff is pennies compared to having to dig up the ground which Verizon has invested in doing."

You may be right. There is a cost-benefit component of this as well - a better router/switch may get you more out of the same line, etc. But I don't think that really changes the logic of my statement.

Quote :

"And why should they? They make content."

I don't claim they should, just pointing out what is.

Quote :

"Excuse me? "

You are excused.

Quote :

"Equipment makers pay the cost of increased bandwidth?"

Everyone along the vertical - equipment makers, contractors, service providers, content providers (if the law allows this) and end users - will feel some of the cost of additional bandwidth, its just a matter of elasticity. My point is that if the law excludes content providers from paying this cost (and it may not completely based on litigation), that means that much more the rest pay.

9/22/2009 5:44:54 PM

Quote :

"Everyone along the vertical - equipment makers, contractors, service providers, content providers (if the law allows this) and end users - will feel some of the cost of additional bandwidth, its just a matter of elasticity."

I'm having a hard time understanding how a seller of equipment that provides more bandwidth feels the cost of more bandwidth. Contractors? The ones installing the equipment? I'm probably just retarded.

Huh?

9/22/2009 6:27:22 PM

Because of the way we do telecom in this country, I'm not 100% upset over this NN stuff, but I never did understand the big fuss. As near as I can tell, there was never any problems with this up to now, and even then, the only time I heard about the evils of not having NN was from NN proponents (meaning the people pushing for government regulation, not people who think NN is a good idea). Everyone seems to like to trot out the ESPN thing, but NN doesn't solve that because thats ESPN blocking people from accessing their content, not AT&T blocking people from TW. The big problem that NN proponents seem to be afraid of, networks holding their customers hostage from parts of the internet seems to me to be much ado about nothing. For one, ISPs tried that a long while ago. The most famous one was called AOL, and it did surprisingly well for its time, then customers demanded more open access and the rest is pretty much history. For two, it seems to me that such a scenario plays out much the same way global nuclear war would, that is everyone getting screwed over. If nothing else, I think such thoughts of network hostage taking by ISPs would be completely kept in check by simple MAD.

Quote :

"So? I can't help that Time Warner isn't smart enough to figure out how to handle the bandwidth hogs without having to resort to punishing everyone. "

Except they aren't punishing everyone else. I don't know a ton about this, and I'm sure Shaggy can correct where I'm wrong, but as I understand it, this is the problem at hand (simplified):

You (the ISP) have a 10Mb pipe, you sell that pipe to 10 users at "speeds up to 2Mbps". During most of the day, most of your customers aren't home, so anyone using this pipe can easily get their 2Mb without a problem. During peak hours, with normal web traffic, most of your customers will use anywhere from 1Mb - 2Mb intermittently, that is, no users will be using their full 2Mb for extended periods of time worst case they all get 1Mb during peak time. So it works out that all of your customers easily get their 2Mbs 98% of the time, it's there almost always when they need it, and not there when they don't. This means everyone gets to split the cost of a 10Mb pipe instead of everyone paying for their own T1.

Now 2 of your customers, well they really like their tentacle porn, so they fire up bit torrent and download all day and night. During the day, most people aren't home so this isn't a big problem, BT uses all the bandwidth it can get and uses your customer's full allotment, but since most people aren't home, no one else really notices. But then comes peak hour time. Your 2 BT customers are using 4Mb between the two of them, and using it constantly, so your other 8 customers now have only 6Mb to split between them. So now, worst case they get .75 Mb between them all, just because of 2 customers.

QoS would let you take the BT traffic during peak hours and drop it to 1 Mbps as the network load goes up, giving everyone the same service they used to have before the introduction of BT. How is that punishing everyone? Sure you could put in a 20Mb pipe, but now your customers have to share the costs of a 20Mb pipe when previously a 10Mb did just fine, and a less costly solution would give everyone their old service back. Doesn't making everyone pay for more bandwidth that they really won't use except on peak hours seem more like punishing everyone to you?

9/22/2009 7:49:13 PM

^ Yeah, I get that. Everyone that isn't a BT whore gets that. The problem is, if you make it OK for the capitalists to throttle one type of traffic, they will most certainly experiment with all types of traffic to figure out how to maximize their profit, most certainly to the detriment of the consumer. And in the absence of any real competition, you better believe the consumers will get the shortest end of the stick.

We can just as easily do like the utilities do and charge users based on the time with which they use their bandwidth. Want to download torrents much more than the average user, then you have to do it after prime hours or else you will pay to offset the cost of the infrastructure to support your habit.

9/22/2009 9:40:20 PM

Quote :

"The problem is, if you make it OK for the capitalists to throttle one type of traffic, they will most certainly experiment with all types of traffic to figure out how to maximize their profit, most certainly to the detriment of the consumer. And in the absence of any real competition, you better believe the consumers will get the shortest end of the stick."

I'm curious as to

a) How you think they would throttle traffic so that they maximize their profit and do so in such a way that is worse than the current situation, damaging to the consumer and not outside advertised and contracted obligations.

b) How you think that stopping ISPs from doing any sort of QoS / throttling because someone, somewhere might abuse that ability isn't the same punishing of everyone that you're rallying against.

c) Why you even think any of this is necessary now.

Quote :

"We can just as easily do like the utilities do and charge users based on the time with which they use their bandwidth. Want to download torrents much more than the average user, then you have to do it after prime hours or else you will pay to offset the cost of the infrastructure to support your habit."

Ah yes, that will be an improvement. We can go back to the days of ISPs sending you "Free 250 Hours!!!" CDs in the mail. Or are you suggesting that charging more depending on when you use your internet is somehow preferable to charging more based on how you use your internet?

[Edited on September 22, 2009 at 11:18 PM. Reason : fgh]

9/22/2009 11:17:54 PM

doesn't skype have to jump through all sorts of unnecessary hoops because lots of telco's de-prioritize their traffic because they want to sell their own VOIP?

9/22/2009 11:33:44 PM

Even if they do, I don't see how NN would address that. All they need to do to keep the status quo is section off a portion of their pipe for their own VOIP service and no other traffic, just like they do now for cable. skype still has to go over the portion of the network that is regular internet, and TW or whoever gets to sell their own unimpeded service. Even better, because NN legislation makes filtering and QoS illegal, even if the customers bitch up a storm and demand that VOIP traffic get prioritized, their only option is to get an ISP owned VOIP solution as thats the only solution that will legally have any sort of priority since it's already sectioned off.

9/23/2009 7:27:48 AM

Quote :

"How you think they would throttle traffic so that they maximize their profit and do so in such a way that is worse than the current situation, damaging to the consumer and not outside advertised and contracted obligations."

They obviously will throttle more and more so that they can squeeze more "bandwidth" out of their pipes up to the point people start to complain and/or leave. We are talking about the cable companies here, their track record across the country is fairly abysmal on the customer service and quality side of things.

Quote :

"How you think that stopping ISPs from doing any sort of QoS / throttling because someone, somewhere might abuse that ability isn't the same punishing of everyone that you're rallying against."

I really have no idea what you are saying here.

Quote :

"Ah yes, that will be an improvement. We can go back to the days of ISPs sending you "Free 250 Hours!!!" CDs in the mail. "

Solid hyperbole. The difference between now and then is when my neighbors logged into the BBSs and maxed at their 56k connections downloading 100kb jpg porn files from the news servers, it effected me exactly 0%.

Quote :

"Or are you suggesting that charging more depending on when you use your internet is somehow preferable to charging more based on how you use your internet?"

I'm suggesting a load balancing method that isn't so nefarious as being able to throttle different transport mechanisms.

9/23/2009 8:14:50 AM

Quote :

"Even better, because NN legislation makes filtering and QoS illegal"

i'm saying that i thought they were using these methods to make things like skype worse than they would be normally, so that they aren't competition for the cable companies' VOIP products.

9/23/2009 9:10:53 AM

There no evidence of that. Most likely people are just getting shitty peers. skype isn't even a normal voip service. Its a convoluted p2p system.

Heres what im trying to get accross. QoS is not bad. Fail boat keeps repeating the same tired bullsit that they're going to start filtering content. Thats not the case and has never been the case. They dont give a shit about the content because it doesn't affect them.

On the issue of cable node congestion, which has 0 to do with throttling of any sort, that issue is specific to cable providers and entirely seperate from this discussion. its one purely of cost benefit analysis. If there is 1 user having problems its going to cost them more in 1 day of labor than they're going to recoup over 2 years of having that user as a customer. This is why they dont run fiber out to everyone in bum fuck nowhere's houses. Its completely cost prohibative. And you thinking they should just do it anyways doesn't fix the cost issue.

Lastly consumer broadband has never had guaranteed rates. Its not cost effective to offer 1 to 1 bandwidth at $50/month. Now if you want to pay for guaranteed bandwidth verizon or time warner will gladly run fiber or t1s out to your house as long as you sign a 2 year contract at several thousand a month.

9/23/2009 9:47:13 AM

Quote :

"Thats not the case and has never been the case. They dont give a shit about the content because it doesn't affect them. "

Please, don't be naive. Just one example:

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2008/05/isp-content-f-1/

And what I've pretty much been saying all along:

Quote :

""Once you have a mandate built into the law and you give an order that they build in the surveillance architecture, then it is a shorter walk to get Congress to extend that mandate," Ohm said."

Quote :

"Lastly consumer broadband has never had guaranteed rates."

I don't think I'm arguing for guaranteed bandwidth. I don't know how the agreements are worded on the residential services, but absent real competition, if any company is advertising a service and what they are delivering isn't really close, then someone has some explaining to do. If they advertise 5mb and you can only get 1mb from 5pm-11pm, then they need to widen their own pipes. Sure its easy to throttle BT during these time periods, 10 years from now when competition forces them to widen the pipe enough to make TV on demand a reality, how do we know they want throttle all TV downloads in an effort to encourage you to stick with their old school TV service? Again, when you have sometimes at most 1 other competitor, it's pretty hard for them to be honest with their filtering and QoS schemes.

Quote :

"This is why they dont run fiber out to everyone in bum fuck nowhere's houses. Its completely cost prohibative. And you thinking they should just do it anyways doesn't fix the cost issue. "

I haven't said a damn thing about fiber to everyones has. We clearly talking about the average case here, not the outliers.

9/23/2009 10:05:08 AM

Quote :

"They dont give a shit about the content because it doesn't affect them. "

except when the cable providers also sell content that competes with (usually cheaper) internet content.

9/23/2009 10:11:20 AM

Like someone else said, I think it's just a matter of trust. In a perfect world, we would let telecoms and ISPs do whatever they want to ensure the speed and integrity of their networks. However, past actions have shown us that these companies are willing to do whatever they can to maximize their profits even if it means screwing their customers.

Even if they aren't doing it now, it's not inconceivable that TWC or AT&T would start restricting access to web content that competes with some of their other core businesses. In fact, you'd have to be downright naive to think that they haven't considered doing just that. Hell, you can already see it with AT&T influencing what Apple does and doesn't allow to be put on the app store. And then you have metered usage which is nothing but an attempt to get people to stop using online video services.

I think the most important part of this regulation is that it requires ISPs to make how they manage their networks public. That way, the FCC can determine whether or not they are doing legit QoS like Shaggy is saying, or if they are selectively restricting content for the betterment of their other core businesses. Allowing these companies to just do whatever they want with their pipe can only have negative ramifications for the consumer.

9/23/2009 10:17:56 AM

And if it was just requirements for disclosure that would be awesome. But it isn't.

I have made various arguments in this thread, made many others elsewhere. Here is a different one.

An ISP has many mechanisms at its disposal to milk their customer base. They can cut investment causing QoS to falter. They can skimp on customer service. They can annoy content providers. They can incentive other products. They can raise prices. All of these make them more money at the expense of annoying their customers. Outlawing one does not fix the underlying problem: lack of competition. The ISP will have arrived at its current mix in order to minimize annoyance of their customer base while maximizing profits. Outlawing one element of the mix, therefore, can only harm consumers, as it will force a reshuffle of the mix to a higher customer annoyance equilibrium.

To use the example in the post above, let us assume Comcast's only purpose of usage caps is to cut down on the use of competing video services. In effect, they are boosting sales of their video services by annoying customers of their internet services. Outlaw this practice and, yes, internet customers will not be annoyed by the caps, but they will find themselves annoyed other ways to compensate, either through price increases, cuts to investment, or cuts to customer service. Which, based upon observed preferences, the customers would have preferred to put up with the caps than what they did wind up with.

Especially when a real solution is going to be here shortly: all that freed up spectrum is going to spawn lots of wireless ISPs, lots of competition that will not just shuffle the mix while maintaining the same annoyance vs. profits equillibrium, it will actually push it down in favor of the customer.

9/23/2009 12:06:14 PM

Quote :

"Outlawing one element of the mix, therefore, can only harm consumers, as it will force a reshuffle of the mix to a higher customer annoyance equilibrium. "

Oh, another LoneSnark thought experiment with no factual basis whatsoever. Just...whatever seems marginally intuitive at the time the post was made.

9/23/2009 12:13:02 PM

And which part is contradicted by the facts? Or are you going plop down the whole "I don't know but I feel confident it is impossible for you to know!"

9/23/2009 5:19:56 PM

Quote :

"I'm having a hard time understanding how a seller of equipment that provides more bandwidth feels the cost of more bandwidth. Contractors? The ones installing the equipment? I'm probably just retarded."

Bandwidth usage is going up, this regulation won't end that, but it doesn't really cause it either. I'm talking about pressure on the margins as service providers will need to cut costs to maintain profits.

9/23/2009 7:16:44 PM

http://www.reason.com/news/show/136278.html

Quote :

"Genachowski doesn't merely envision a Web bound by FCC rules, but one subject to the momentary whims of FCC commissioners. "I will propose that the FCC evaluate alleged violations of the non-discrimination principle as they arise, on a case-by-case basis." In theory, this gives the FCC more flexibility, allowing the agency to be smarter and more generous when weeding out violators. But in practice, it's likely to expand the bureaucracy's reach as it refuses to define the boundaries of its authority."

9/23/2009 11:38:59 PM

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ytech_wguy/20100407/tc_ytech_wguy/ytech_wguy_tc1510

Quote :

"Net neutrality faces serious setbacks First, a primer for the uninitiated on "net neutrality." Net (as in network) neutrality is the idea that all traffic on the Internet should be treated equally and — more to the point — should come at the same price. Right now, for instance, you don't have to pay more to watch a YouTube video than you do to check your email, even though the YouTube video eats up more bandwidth and, in theory, costs your ISP more for you to watch. Websites and most consumers love the idea of net neutrality. ISPs, on the other hand, are not fans. In fact, the net neutrality movement arose as a response to major ISPs' plans to attempt to charge websites and service providers more for "better" service on their networks. Fail to pay up and that YouTube video might take twice as long to download ... or it may not download at all. ISPs call this the cost of doing business and a necessary reality in an era where bandwidth isn't growing but the amount of data being pushed through the available pipes is. Net neutrality proponents call this extortion. No matter who is right, things were looking up for net neutrality fans after the FCC and the Obama administration came out with specific and strongly worded recommendations and plans that they would push for net neutrality as the Obama broadband program (100Mbps to everyone!) moved forward. But the showdown had already begun prior to the Obama era, way back in 2007, when Comcast, the country's largest cable company, began throttling BitTorrent downloads, effectively putting a speed limit on how fast they could go. The FCC put the kibosh on the practice, and ISPs, led by the mammoth Comcast, sued. Then the FCC announced even more sweeping rules that it planned to enact in the future. This week, a major legal ruling was handed down in the Comcast case, and the tide has now turned in favor of the ISPs. The District of Columbia Court of Appeals said that the FCC had overstepped its authority in mandating net neutrality and that ISPs should be free to manage traffic however they see fit, noting that under current law, the FCC does not have "untrammeled freedom" to regulate broadband services. (In other words, Congress would have to specifically grant such powers.) The ruling was unanimous among the three judges on the panel. Now net neutrality fans find themselves facing a serious uphill climb. Not only does the ruling open up the way — for now — for ISPs to ask websites and service providers for money; it might also allow them to restrict certain services from running on their networks entirely. Comcast, for example, may not want you to watch Hulu on its service, since then you'd have less of a reason to pay $60 a month for cable TV. It may also be able to ban VOIP services like Skype, so you'll pony up another $20 for wired telephone service. The dominoes are already lining up. What happens now? The FCC has more tricks up its sleeve. As the MSNBC story above notes, broadband service could be reclassified to fall under the other heavily regulated telecommunications services that the FCC oversees, but that would likely result in additional legal wrangling and longer delays for the broadband plan to go into effect, a so-called nuclear option that would turn the world of broadband into a bit of a bureaucratic nightmare. If it doesn't take this route, the FCC will instead have to ask Congress for the power to implement net neutrality rules as it sees fit, but that's a political game in a time when Washington seems awfully low on political capital. Don't rule out an appeal to the Supreme Court, either. Stay tuned — for as long as your Internet service holds out, anyway."

4/9/2010 12:08:19 AM

Thats exactly what the court should have done. The FCC was way out of line and its good to see the fed can still control itself atleast some of the time.

Transparent QoS would be by far the best solution to this problem. At the same time the FCC should make local state granted monopolies on service illegal.

^ The guy that wrote that article is obviously a moron with no idea how the system works or how content is distributed. Content caching is only going to continue and move further and further to the edge of the network. That means $$$$ for ISPs to host internet content. The last thing they'd want to do is pass up the chance to make money by restricting user access. If one provider starts blocking content, just switch to another to get it. We'll probably never get to that point anway.

My favorite thing is how these idiots love to use hulu as their primary argument but are completely oblivious to the fact that

Quote :

"C:\Users\Eric>tracert http://www.hulu.com Tracing route to a1700.g.akamai.net [24.143.194.41] over a maximum of 30 hops: 1 <1 ms <1 ms <1 ms gimmedempackets.maine.rr.com [192.168.1.1] 2 * * * Request timed out. 3 23 ms 8 ms 7 ms gig3-1-0.scbome08-10k001.nyroc.rr.com [24.25.160.49] 4 22 ms 11 ms 9 ms gig6-0-1.ptldmeptl-rtr02.nyroc.rr.com [24.25.160.105] 5 34 ms 21 ms 32 ms ge-6-0-0.syrcnycsr-rtr03.nyroc.rr.com [24.24.7.145] 6 25 ms 23 ms 25 ms ae10-0.rochnyei-rtr000.nyroc.rr.com [24.24.21.221] 7 44 ms 39 ms 39 ms ae-3-0.cr0.chi10.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.72] 8 39 ms 40 ms 39 ms ae-0-0.cr0.chi30.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.21] 9 45 ms 43 ms 44 ms ae-4-0.cr0.nyc20.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.24] 10 42 ms 51 ms 40 ms ae-0-0.pr0.nyc20.tbone.rr.com [66.109.6.157] 11 43 ms 43 ms 43 ms 24.143.194.41"

its hosted by their ISP. Their ISP gets cash money to provide that idiot user fast access to hulu.

QoS, on the other hand, is protocol based. I totally agree that any QoS measures should be publick knowledge. SIP/RTP traffic should get priority since its the standard for VOIP and non-proprietary. Then web traffic and chached sources. Then other traffic. and then finally put stuff like bit torrent at the bottom of the barrel. What that means is that when people are doing voip or web browsing their traffic gets prioritized ahead of p2p traffic. The effect is better quality voice calls for all SIP voice services (ex vonage). (ISP voip offerings opperate on separate networks so they aren't affected by any bandwidth issues, QoS helps non-ISP offerings). Web browsing is non-time sensitive, but you dont want it to wait behind p2p packets because that creates a slow user experience. Lastly, p2p down at the bottom will notice almost no change in speed because those packets are not time sensitive at all. QoS will not drop p2p packets, they'll just get delayed. During off peek hours there wont be any traffic ahead of them so they run at normal priority.

QoS is a way better way to handle it than caps. Ironically, hulu and other cached sources are immune to caps on networks that do use caps. So these idiots that think ISPs are gonna kill hulu are double stupid.

4/9/2010 12:30:49 AM

Quote :

"things were looking up for net neutrality fans after the FCC and the Obama administration came out with specific and strongly worded recommendations and plans that they would push for net neutrality as the Obama broadband program (100Mbps to everyone!) moved forward."

Sheer stupidity. What we need, first, is 2mbps to everyone. People need access to the internet, anything faster is a luxury. Luckily, I suspect the internet is available everywhere via the cellphone network... so good going America! We're done, nothing more for the FCC or Obama to do!

4/9/2010 11:12:15 AM

Bad Google

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9180192/Google_denies_talks_with_Verizon_to_end_Net_neutrality_?taxonomyId=18

8/5/2010 1:25:00 PM

http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/11/all-95-candidates-who-pledged-support-for-net-neutrality-lost-on-tuesday.php

damn, how the hell did that happen

11/4/2010 2:48:02 PM

that owns. great news for the health of the internet.

11/4/2010 2:48:51 PM

^^ Because despite claims to the contrary, opposition to the expansion of government was an issue on voters minds this time around, and the sort of politicians likely to support NN are the same ones likely to support other expansions of government.

Also I found this amusing:

Quote :

"There is no sane political analyst in America who agrees with corporate shill Scott Cleland's assertion that Tuesday's Democratic wipeout was a 'national referendum' on Net Neutrality -- or had anything to do with Net Neutrality. The only significant thing about Net Neutrality in 2010 is that 95 Democratic challengers felt confident enough to actively tell voters they support this pro-consumer position while zero candidates across the country felt confident enough to actively tell voters they opposed Net Neutrality -- for the obvious reason that opposing the free and open Internet would be a ridiculously stupid political move."

Though I have no doubt that NN specifically had much to do with this route, this is another example of what I highlighted in another thread: "There's nothing wrong with the policy, we just failed at implementation. Do it again, HARDER!"

11/4/2010 3:53:45 PM

I honestly don't think a lot of Republicans understand Net Neutrality.

My mother criticized Democrats for trying to censor the Internet through expanded regulation. After all, to mindless Republicans (note, not all Republicans are mindless), regulation=bad. I said, "you mean 'Net Neutrality.'" To which she said "yes." After I laughed for a solid 2 minutes, I explained to her why she's against something she should support. After all, if you feel that companies shouldn't try to inhibit the free flow of information and content, then you should be for 'Net Neutrality.' This was a stance she agreed with. She then left the room in embarrassment.

11/4/2010 3:54:41 PM

net neutrality is a way for google to get ISPs and their customers to pay for google's ads.

Thats it. It has no consumer benefit whatsoever.

11/4/2010 3:56:11 PM

Seems like if you believe companies are worse than the government, you're pro-net neutrality.

If you think the government is worse than companies, you're anti-net neutrality.

I want to think that net neutrality isn't necessary, but man -- Time Warner Cable. Can't trust 'em.

11/4/2010 4:23:04 PM

^^^ No, your mother loves you and doesn't enjoy her offspring laughing at her without cause. Especially when you support something you should be against.

^ I look at it another way. The Government tends to be staffed by the largest corporate players in the business. As such, the SEC is staffed by former employees of Goldman Sachs, the FCC is staffed by former/future employees of TWC, AT&T, Clearchannel, etc. Therefore, if NN ever became legislation with a chance of passage, you would also see TWC and Comcast strong proponents of the legislation for the same reason big business is always in favor of regulation: big business cannot sustainably rip off their customers without government help.

Therefore, if you trust your current suppliers to be all you will every need, then regulation is fine. If you want to retain the possibility of new competitors to enter the business and rescue customers from rip-off incumbents, then regulation is bad.

11/5/2010 2:25:46 AM

I just want to torrent gigs of porn for $19.99/month.

11/5/2010 2:42:06 AM

if anything, the fed should break up the big 3.

11/5/2010 9:35:04 AM

Quote :

"but man -- Time Warner Cable. Can't trust 'em."

11/5/2010 9:35:40 AM

FCC Chief Announces Big Win For Net Neutrality Advocates
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/04/fcc-net-neutrality_n_6613494.html

2/4/2015 12:25:20 PM

Holy lord, I got ambushed by the resident conservative at work today. I'm assuming Rush/Beck/whoever is on conservative talk radio these days is going on about this.

Apparently the FCC is trying to ruin business and it's the service providers right to do whatever the hell they want!!!!

2/24/2015 4:06:12 PM

In some instances big government is the enemy. In others, big business is the enemy. In most, both are the enemy. I trust none of them.

2/24/2015 4:42:38 PM

I haven't seen the details yet, but the vote passed the FCC to retain net neutrality.

Of course Breitbart leads the charge with this gigantic headline:
Federal Communication Control: Government Takes over Internet

http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2015/02/26/fcc-approves-net-neutrality-plan-to-control-internet-access/





[Edited on February 26, 2015 at 5:25 PM. Reason : Everyone on the Right freak out!!!1]

2/26/2015 5:21:35 PM

No one has seen the details yet - the plan was not released to the public before today's vote. I find it puzzling that this is not more of a concern to some on the left, but then again I'm just that angry conservative type who ambushes people at work with ideas I heard espoused on talk radio.

2/26/2015 6:38:46 PM

I just had more fun trolling asshats with facts on Breitbart in 10 minutes than has been had in 1 year of tdub posting. Good fucking game.

2/26/2015 9:56:05 PM

Quote :

"Therefore, if you trust your current suppliers to be all you will every need, then regulation is fine. If you want to retain the possibility of new competitors to enter the business and rescue customers from rip-off incumbents, then regulation is bad. "

This seems like the exact opposite of reality. The big guys have gotten legislation passed banning municipal broadband, they've been fighting Google in the courts, whenever Google enters a market, artificial limitations on network speeds are so prevalent we don't even notice them anymore.

If the relative lack of regulation hasn't solved these problems, then it would be the regulations that explicitly allow muni broadband, and allow for line sharing, that promotes new-comers and competition.

^^
There are lots of details out there based on statements released by the FCC, and they tend to be in line with the proponents of net neutrality. You'll see NN proponents turn against the FCC without hesitation if it turns out their public statements have been at odds with what they came up with.

2/27/2015 12:33:15 AM

^ Not to mention the whole point of this is to implement an FCC rule published over 4 years ago. Also, common carrier is a new and novel concept.

2/27/2015 1:44:33 AM

^^My biggest concern here is just the lack of transparency. Why not publish what they are passing so you can be sure it is in the with the statements they've been making, and the statements and regulations that came out in the past?

There's no need to be so secretive about it. The chair didn't even show up to talk to congress about it.

But hey, you gotta pass the bill to find out what's in it.

2/27/2015 8:28:50 AM

The communications act of 1934 isn't secret, there is no lack of transparency

since the GOP's first plan was to quickly create their own net neutrality bill (that was bad and didn't actually create net neutrality), is their response now to openly attack net neutrality or will they let the issue die?

[Edited on February 27, 2015 at 11:09 AM. Reason : .]

2/27/2015 10:52:40 AM

The other side of that coin is that the FCC can be controlled by the people through various means.

But we have no real leverage over the big internet providers, because they have regional monopolies. There's no real market competition. TWC still has upload speeds that are tiny compared to their download speeds, and there's no reason for this other than they are trying to prohibit people from uploading copyrighted content. Never mind that this practice makes things like iCloud and online backups useless, it restricts peoples' ability to upload videos to youtube, and has generally thwarted the development of things like Twitch.tv, and who knows what else.

2/27/2015 4:58:23 PM

Quote :

"there is no lack of transparency"

I wouldn't go so far as to say there's no lack of transparency. There's nothing keeping Wheeler from releasing the rule. But yeah, the secret order hand wringing is a bit overwrought. It's not unusual for the FCC to delay publishing a rule. The rule won't go into effect for 60 days after being published in the Federal Register, and, given the issue's history, it's safe to say there's a good idea of the broad strokes. Any surprises will be in the forbearance and details.

Is the FCC being transparent enough? As ^ pointed out, too much transparency is a thing. The rule has to get written at some point.

2/27/2015 6:03:35 PM

They know the big telecoms are going to sue them, and they don't want to give them anything before the 60 day clock starts ticking.

2/27/2015 7:08:56 PM

Quote :

"The other side of that coin is that the FCC can be controlled by the people through various means."

And they will. The Republicans are only making political hay right now because they can. But they will not actually reverse Title II once they get the whitehouse and therefore control over the FCC. The Republicans will be happy to use the limitless power of Title II regulation to battle for their corporate interests.

the most pliable part of the new regs is the subjective catchall provision, requiring ‘just and reasonable’ conduct. Keeping in mind this is the same agency which spent its entire history persecuting what it considered unreasonable obscenity on the airwaves, how long do we have until they decide it is unreasonable for ISPs to not actively filter traffic for piracy and obscenity?

Add to this the new taxation powers to raise money for the Universal Services Fund, a slush fund to funnel cash from all ISPs (big and small) to just the politically connected ISPs (which tend to be large).

Quote :

"The big guys have gotten legislation passed banning municipal broadband, they've been fighting Google in the courts"

If you thought the big guys were doing a lot to battle upstart competition in the courts under Title I rules, the Title II rules give them even more basis to sue. And a new venue. Now AT&T and Comcast can drag Google and small ISPs before the FCC for unjust or unreasonable competition. Won't get very far with a majority of Democrats on the board, perhaps, but by the time the regulations get a pass from the courts, the FCC will be 3/5th Republicans.

3/16/2015 4:58:50 PM