Net Neutrality

[Wschnitz]

The biggest red flag to anyone should be the ISPs' listing problems they have had prior to 2015 citing the law in 2015 as the reason they had problems in 2011 and so on.

Or the fact that they took 400Million+ of our tax dollars to roll out fiber in major cities and didn't roll out any at all.

There is no 'Free Market' happening when corporations paid off politicians ahead of time to own all the infrastructure to disallow any new players.

[Schnitzer318is]

I'm constantly surprised when I hear people talking about Net Neutrality as if it were a bad thing. As demonstrated here, they are either horribly misinformed (thanks Fox), or just stubbornly aligned with the right. Touting the "free market" argument out does not apply to telecoms because they do not compete. Their service areas are cut out through contracts with municipalities so Time Warner, Cox, Comcast, etc. are the only game in town when it comes to broadband. That's one of the reasons Google Fiber is taking so long to roll out... they are being denied access to the service poles and infrastructure under those agreements.

Net neutrality is extremely important to the future. The internet is one of the few places left where you aren't forced to jump through some sort of gate way hoop to get to content you desire (except geographical limitations). As mentioned, if declassifying the ISP's as title 2 service providers occurs they are free to decide what (and how fast) you have access to content.

[GAbOS]

https://arstechnica.com/business/2014/03/netflix-got-a-bit-faster-on-comcast-after-opening-its-wallet/

This is what was happening before changes were made during Obama's time that they are threatening to roll back now. Old story, but maybe not everyone has seen it.

[Wschnitz]

Stop believing politicians and corporations lies.

[SkiFree]

Because humans tend to be reactionary instead of proactive.

Then when it happens they just go, "Welp, guess that's just how it is now."

fixed


For someone who has not been following this at all and yearns for the yesteryear of the internet's wild west .... how do we get back to letting the be internet great again?

[z31maniac]

Because Americans are reactionary instead of proactive.

Then when it happens they just go, "Welp, guess that's just how it is now."

[BraveUlysses]

hurr durr dont want the gubbermint doing anything hurr durr

[Wschnitz]

I don't get how anyone can't see right through this, ISP's could very easily block content entirely that doesn't give them positive propaganda. Could be further abused politically to only promote certain politicians on their service, blocking all content that could be seen as support of another candidate.

You don't get advertisements when you call someone on the phone, why get them when you search for information on your next research paper, or want to send your family member an email. Why even risk ISPs blocking anything they don't like.

[BraveUlysses]

More good reads:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/ars-technica-supports-net-neutrality/

And to help further stress the importance of net neutrality, here are a few scenarios, each perfectly plausible or already happening, that might be possible if ISPs give up on the attempt to be neutral Internet providers:

*Perhaps you'll one day have to pay your Internet overlords for Ars—or your second-favorite website—content to render quickly. (Or perhaps the sites themselves will need to pay.) Pay up or the site will remain slow. A slow-rendering Ars might push our readers to competing sites that have either ponied up for fast-lane service or didn't need to pay because they were granted free fast-lane access (often called "zero rating") as part of some business deal.

*Perhaps YouTube and Vimeo will count against your data cap—while an ISP's own "preferred" video service won't. (This sort of thing is already common on mobile connections.)

*Perhaps your ISP, under pressure from various industries, simply begins blocking various websites—say, a file-sharing website that some people use for piracy but which you use to share multitrack mixes with your band. Is that a decision you want an ISP to be making?

*Perhaps you'll have trouble watching your favorite video service. Maybe not because your ISP has "blocked" it, but because your ISP limits streaming video bandwidth within its network... which might just happen to benefit its legacy cable TV or IPTV system. (Netflix is so big and has so much leverage that this is not a major worry for the company—but what about the next Netflix?

*Perhaps your ISP will throttle the high-bandwidth BitTorrent file-sharing protocol—or whatever replaces it. (Remember the Comcast BitTorrent debacle that resulted in Comcast paying $16 million?) Or maybe your ISP will just charge you extra to use it.

*Perhaps you'll be bombarded with javascript-injected advertisements overlaid onto Web pages—ads put there by the ISPs. ISPs are already doing this, to some extent, with Internet service doled out for free at coffee houses and airports. And some small ISPs have tried it with home Internet service.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/how-title-ii-goes-beyond-net-neutrality-to-protect-internet-users-from-isps/

[MR E30 325is]

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.

I definitely have some reading to do.

[Wschnitz]

Don't let the Internet turn into cable, those who think the internet will be fine either way, remember when cable was supposed to be commercial free cause you were paying for it?

[Wschnitz]

Tomorrow is another day that websites will support Strong Net Neutrality.

https://www.fightforthefuture.org/ If you don't know what this means.

https://netneutrality.internetassociation.org/action/

Please, inform yourselves, and ignore the media, especially fox news, in their rhetoric on how this could be bad for you.

[BraveUlysses]

Woah

nothing happened under O
It's going ok now
Why have any form of govt intervention?
What needs to change?

We had net neutrality under Wheeler's tenure at the FCC and it was good.

This is another case where you don't understand anything about this issue but still bleat out 'govt bad' without utilizing one of your remaining 3 brain cells.

[Wschnitz]

Woah

nothing happened under O
It's going ok now
Why have any form of govt intervention?
What needs to change?

Nothing needs to be changed, Title 2 was a good decision by the FCC under President Obama term. Which was the people of the United States decision with overwhelming support of it in comments.

Now that President Trump has picked a previous Verizon Lawyer as FCC chair, he wants to remove what Americans wanted in favor of 'less consumer protec- err Heavy Handed Government Regulation!'. This way Comcast, Verizon, and so on could continue on with the Idea of Internet Packages (something that was already starting to appear in different forms until the Title 2 Legislation was pushed through).

The fact that you think nothing happened in Obamas 8 year term that would change the situation shows how little you know of Net Neutrality.

[gwb72tii]

Woah

nothing happened under O
It's going ok now
Why have any form of govt intervention?
What needs to change?