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FCC Moving To Retain Control of Net Neutrality
An anonymous reader writes "The FCC is moving to take control of Net Neutrality once again due to public backlash over the issue, and plans to produce new regulation for broadband providers, as well as take a more rigorous role in their oversight. The details should be released on Thursday."
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=10/05/05/2222250
lolwut? The summaries even end almost exactly the same!
Living With a Nerd
Net Neutrality as proposed is useless.
It has giant loopholes to allow ISPs to do the same exact shit that got them in trouble in the first place.
And we won't be able to bitch because they'll just say they're Net Neutrality compliant.
http://www.eff.org/press/archives/2010/03/04
How about:
- The customer decides what's fair
- The government ensures there is enough competition so that customers actually have a choice
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
You are deluded.
The government is saying "We want ALL traffic treated equally"
Comcast is saying "we want to force Youtube, Netflix and Google to pay us or we'll THROTTLE their traffic"
So Comcast will be taking away your choices, they'll be able to block sites, restrict traffic and essentially extort every major site on the internet.
And you don't like it? tough. Where you going to go? AT&T? Verizon?
They'll all be pulling the same shit. Your only choice will be between who you think will be throttling your service the least.
With the proposed plan by the government, AT&T, Comcast and Verizon will have to leave the traffic alone and guarantee a level of QoS.
If all that video you are downloading is too expensive, they can charge you more, and THAT will be your choice.
And that's the way it should be.
If I want to download 500GB of movies a week and video-chat on skype all day, I will have that choice and the services will be fast.
But, I will have to pay for that just like anything else.
Why do you oppose that?
Why do you support Comcast throttling competing services and extorting them?
Why is that to be preferred over paying an extra $20 or $40 a month if you are a heavy bandwidth hog?
Frankly, I have had it with Americans who would rather toss-off their civil rights and protections in order to save a few bucks.
Engadget has a great summary here. The "third way" resembles what some were discussing in the earlier thread.
Are you a minor, convicted felon, or illegal alien? No? Then you probably have the right to vote, which means you have a choice.
You're probably thinking it's not a useful choice. Maybe you're one of the lucky few to live in an area served by multiple ISPs. Many aren't; there's a reason for regulating broadband like any other public utility -- it's so expensive to run new lines to setup parallel service that most areas won't ever see more than one provider. And there's really no reason they should; the cost of running new lines just gets passed on to us, the customers, and when competition ultimately succeeds and leads to the defeat of one of the competitors, leaves behind wasteful redundancy.
We're not complaining that we don't have competition in the clean-water market; even areas that privatize the service just privatize bits and pieces (customer service, billing, etc.) on top of a single monolithic operation, with government-mandated quality levels. You don't get different water when you switch water companies, and you shouldn't get a different internet when you switch ISPs, either. The less innovation a service needs to provide (how much innovation do you need in gas, electricity, water, phone service, roads, or broadband access to the internet?), the more the service is about connecting and not creating, the less need there is for competition to get it. Regulation can be sufficient.
Where companies have tried to innovate / value-add to the internet, it's been terrible -- AOL or MSN, anyone? We don't want fancy features on the service itself, we just want good, clean, fast access to any part of the internet, where the real innovation happens. And we don't want to pay for competing companies to fall over each other tearing up streets, putting up poles, running various cables everywhere to get it.
Times are tough in DC, so nothing like asking a ton of people to send as much money in as possible.
Well, Mr. Obama said he was going to find a way to make another economic stimulus happen.... ;)
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Why does the FCC have to step in and regulate. It's a simple matter of fraud and falls under the jurisdiction of the justice dept. I pay the ISP for my connection with a certain bandwidth. I choose to use that bandwidth to access youtube. What gives the ISP the right to throttle my bandwidth or charge the third party money for me to access their service. What this is about is the cable companies want to shut off access to these online services so they can compete with special for pay services like on demand movies. Its pay to play predatory monopoly business practices and has nothing to do in any way with net neutrality.
The customer is exactly where this bill should go. Google already pays their ISP to carry traffic. Why should they be paying their ISP _and_ yours (directly)? If more users download stuff from Google, then Google's bill to their ISP will go up, and Google has thus paid their part. If your ISP really wanted to get paid from somewhere and not increase the customer's bill, they should charge their peering partners more to carry the traffic originating from them.
Customers will pay one way or the other for actual capacity, but ending net-neutrality could have them paying for an extraordinary increase in ISPs' profits. The government sanctioned these ISPs' monopolies and needs to exercise some regulatory oversight in return.