Net Neutrality Is Just "Mumbo Jumbo"

Ergasiophobia writes "It seems the National Cable & Telecommunications Association is spreading a blatant lie in the form of a commercial claiming that the net neutrality act will cost the consumer more and that it is 'bad' for the consumer. This, of course, ignores how much the cable companies will profit from the act's defeat. For some truthful information on the net neutrality act check out savetheinternet.com" This honestly seems too stupid to actually be real. Anyone know for sure?

Comments

What's real?

[gambit3]

You asking if the commercial is real?

It is. I've seen it in the Dallas-Fort Worth area once.

Re:What's real?

[scoove]

I've seen in it Ames, Iowa for a couple of weeks now.

Yea, same in southwest Iowa. Iowa Telecom is pretty active in these things. These same crooks got a usually illegal cross-subsidy snuck through the public utilities commission a few years ago to apply a mandatory fee of $3.50 on every phone line in every home or business from their telephone monopoly that they could use to put into the coffers of their Internet and DSL operations which had competition. Imagine your electric company adding fees that they then put into their inefficient, lousy grocery store so they could drive the good stores out of town that didn't have the extra funding from a monopoly. They also had an issue with some donations of very expensive gifts to the public utilities officials at the same time that got swept under the rug.

The incumbant phone companies and cable providers don't like competition. They don't like the consumer having choice. They need that video revenue on top of Internet, voice, etc. to really clean things up. $220 a month per subscriber is a target they routinely discuss.

That they'd run false advertising is the least of their disgusting behavior. When you find out how much money they grease the political skids with (not to mention all the nice fact-finding vacations in exotic locations they're sending your congresspeople to of both parties), you'd be ill.

From the mouth of a senator

[e-diocy109]

from Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS): "Opposing the heavy hand of regulation that network neutraliy represents is critical if we are to maintain the Internet as an open, evolving, and market-based tool, and to protect children and families from the negative aspects of Internet content that exist today" soo... If I'm understanding correctly, Net Neutrality will allow our children to view porn? Aaaannnd voting down net neutrality will protect the children? Hmm... but wait a second... wouldnt opposing a 'heavy hand of regulation' be the EXACT OPPOSITE of protecting people from certain types of internet content? I think giving my telecom control over which websites will get priority traffic and which won't will definitely protect me from some internet content alright. Ought to get rid of all those pesky choices and alternate points of view.

Two question for the great debate.

[NZheretic]

From the blog

In California there was an outrage when it was disclosed that electricity companies had deliberately idled plants while supplies were tight and then waited for prices to skyrocket on the spot market. If the current Internet network infrastructure provided by the backbone providers and Internet service providers can currently support much higher speeds and data quantities to current customers, then is the act of packet filtering and setting arbitrary low speed and data caps also effectively providing an "idled" service?

Is a tiered Internet service, where content providers would be effectively competing on a similar market to the electricity "spot market", a market based entirely on artificial Scarcity?

Devil's advocate

[daveschroeder]

It's not that it's hard to understand. Here are the problems:

The large "source" providers have already paid money. That is they are connected to ATT, or MCI, or whoever. How many times do they have to pay?

Yes, they paid to be connected to a backbone provider. But what about your local broadband provider? You're paying them for your connection, you say? Yes, and that price has been so far structured on use to date. What happens when the use starts shifting from web browsing and email checking to people *routinely* downloading/obtaining all of their TV shows, movies, and so on, via legal commercial channels? Tough shit? What if their current pricing and usage model doesn't support that? Yes, you're paying for "unlimited" 5Mbps cable modem service, or whatever. And *you* can get and use that, *today*. And you can keep that pipe full 24/7 in many markets without raising an eyebrow. As long as you're one of the "1%" customers: the small group of customers that use a majority of the resources. What happens when that "1%" grows to 15? 25? 50? What happens when $50/month for 5Mbps service no longer covers their costs?

What about DSL providers whose operations may largely be supported by telephone business? What happens if they lose a quarter, third, or half of their paying $30/month landline customers to VoIP? You might argue they're already losing them to cell phones, and so on, and I'd agree. But the bottom line is, they're looking for ways to continue to support their operations five years down the road. If charging large source providers (like a forthcoming iTunes Movie Store) or "taxing" VoIP traffic are ways to continue to do it, is it surprising that they're trying to explore that avenue?

Once all companies can make more money by charging the other side, they will have no incentive for competeting to get your business. After all, they still get to charge the other side. This is a nice way to remove true market competition.

Yeah, because the competition for my home broadband connection right now (and that of MANY others) is truly dizzying.

...

The "source" provider today, is Google, yahoo, etc (from tellcos POV). But with p2p growing faster, the source will be everybody. So are they saying that they will shortly split our costs based on upload/download?

p2p "growing faster"? What, you mean legitimate p2p? I wouldn't say it's "grown" since they heyday Napster. And large commercial providers like YouTube, Google, Apple, and so on don't use p2p; they use commercial content distribution networks and their own distributed services. Not p2p. So then, the "source" is "Akamai", but the content still originates from "Apple", or whomever, and that's who they're looking to charge. Even if Apple decided to distribute all the HD movies on the next generation movie store via BitTorrent, the point is they'd still want to recoup costs from Apple, for the reasons I outlined above.

This isn't Level3 and Qwest and AT&T that are doing this (at least from the backbone side). This is Comcast and TimeWarner and the local telephone providers. The companies who have MILLIONS of broadband customers paying anywhere from $25 to $50 or so dollars a month on these broadband services, and they can see a day when, as new commercial media services evolve, that their overall network usage could increase a hundredfold, a thousandfold, or more.

It's easy to sit here and say Google already pays to be connected to Level3 or Cogent and I already pay to be connected to Charter. But what if I and a hundred thousand others all of a sudden start downloading a few 1 gig movies from a legitimate commercial provider every other night between 6 and 10pm? How can they support that? What kind of buildout to the headends and COs is required by the cable and telephone operators to support this massive surge in use that isn't compatible with their current pricing and service delivery model?

There's all kinds of arguments from both sides. I'm sure greed is ALWAYS involved to an extent. But the point is, this didn't just come out of nowhere.