Civil Rights Groups Divided On Net Neutrality

HughPickens.com writes: Edward Wyatt reports at the NY Times that the NAACP, the National Urban League and the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition have sent representatives, including the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, to tell FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler that they think President Obama's call to regulate broadband Internet service as a utility would harm minority communities by stifling investment in underserved areas and entrenching already dominant Internet companies. "We got a lot of poor folks who don't have broadband," said Jackson. "If you create something where, for the poor, the lane is slower and the cost is more, you can't survive." "I think we're all on board with the values embedded in what President Obama said, things like accelerating broadband deployment and adoption," says Nicol Turner-Lee, vice president of the Minority Media and Telecommunications Council and a member of the group including Mr. Jackson that met with the F.C.C. chairman. "The question is, will we be able to solve these issues by going so far with stringent regulation?"

Some of the groups that oppose Title II designation, like the Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, have received contributions from organizations affiliated with Internet service providers, like the Comcast Foundation, the charitable organization endowed by Comcast. But those organizations say that the donations or sponsorships do not influence their positions. "We get support from people on all sides of the issue, including Google and Facebook," says Brent A. Wilkes, national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. "We don't let any of them influence our position." For it's part, the NAACP says its formal policy position is that the NAACP neither endorses, nor opposes the formally defined concept of net neutrality but supports the need to particularly focus on underserved racial and ethnic minority and poor communities, while highlighting the importance of protecting an open internet.

Comments

Shakedown

[fizzer06]

Give Jackson money and he'll go away.

Re:Shakedown

[MisterSquid]

What confuses me is how Net Neutrality could do anything but help the urban and rural poor because Net Neutrality aims to prevent ISPs from discriminating between the sources and destinations of packets meaning that the traffic of non-profits (for example) and will be equally served by ISP networks in the US to the users of those networks.

Am I missing something here?

My suspicion is that the advocacy groups don't have a good understanding of how Net Neutrality will protect all users and content providers from ISP exploitation and that these advocacy groups have been given misinformation by advisors who, in fact, are in the back pocket's of the ISPs.

Is this what's going on?

Re:Shakedown

[SuricouRaven]

Pretty much. The ISP argument goes something like this:
1. The urban poor can't afford internet, and we're not going to pay for expensive cable-laying in areas of low population density because the RoI would be awful.
2. Unless new business opportunities change the situation, like being able to provide value-added service for preferred content providers (ie, demand money from other companies in return for not slowing their traffic down to an unusable level).
3. Therefore net neutality means no rural or low-cost internet.

Re:Shakedown

[Imsdal]

You are missing the fact that Net Neuttrality hinders the development of alternative business models. This is bad for everyone, but especially bad for customers who are least well served by the mainstream alternative. This is pretty much exacty poor people.

Net Neutrality is only needed because of the last mile monopoly. Remove that and no one would have thought of the idea of NN for a second. You don't like the practices of your local ISP? Well, get another one, then. As long as there is a last mile monopoly, the situation isn't ever going to be good (for consumers - it's excellent for monopolists!). Fight that instead!

This is also, not coincidentally, why the NN debate is much less intense (in fact, almost non-existent) in Europe.

Re:Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

But in the end, who pays for it doesn't change a thing. Neither connection providers nor content providers have an interest in investing lots of $ in providing service to rural or poor neighborhoods (and even less to poor rural neighborhoods). ROI is all that counts.

Re:Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

> My suspicion is that the advocacy groups don't have a good understanding of how Net Neutrality will protect all users and content providers from ISP exploitation and that these advocacy groups have been given misinformation by advisors who, in fact, are in the back pocket's of the ISPs.

You're under the mistaken impression that these advocacy groups cannot be effectively rented out for causes not obviously contrary to their own.

Pretty sure they were calling Google racists or something a while ago...

Re:Shakedown

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Aside from the groups that are merely clueless or for sale, the major argument involves a little careful wordplay about what 'internet access' will actually mean as well as some careful dodging of inconvenient questions concerning prices.

Given the present cost of providing service and accepted margin, there are a variety of areas and people who don't end up with internet access, mostly urban poor and rural. The theory is that, without net neutrality, various exciting new business models (mostly variations on shaking down existing internet activity for more money; but never you mind that...) will be possible, which will make it economic to provide service to the currently underserved. Don't, of course, ask why this change would lead to more access in shitty areas, rather than continued non-access in those areas and higher prices elsewhere, or inquire as to whether an internet built on shaking down businesses looking to reach customers might be wildly in favor of incumbents...

It is also quite likely that, in terms of understanding and the people involved, there's a lot of holdover from the assorted minority-interest/minority-owned radio and TV battles. With the exception of the people who are simply too young to have been involved, those are the areas were people concerned with lack of minority access to culturally relevant communications systems are likely to be coming from; but, inconveniently, those areas really lead to a number of nasty misunderstandings: "Internet" isn't especially similar to broadcast media. People who come at the problem from a background in scrabbling over broadcast media seem to fall fairly readily into one of several traps.

Most obviously, the temptation seems to be to fall into notion that 'internet access' is more or less a binary thing, possibly with some understanding of 'broadband' vs. 'not broadband'. In this case, the ISP strategy is to promise some additional coverage of uneconomic customers at cheap rates(often with a raft of fine print limitations and for a limited time, because it's a screwjob rather than a good faith offer) if they are allowed to get their way with customers who have enough money to be worth squeezing. If your background is campaigning for access on behalf of those without access, this looks fairly attractive. Unfortunately, you end up being the least-valued customers of an even worse oligopoly ISP at an overall cost that is likely to be higher than just outright subsidizing the additional households that actually ended up getting service.

Re:Shakedown

[Roodvlees]

No net neutrality only hinders the development of some bad business models. We (the rest of the world) do have a properly regulated internet market and there's much more investment into lesser populated markets. At the same time net neutrality has allowed the development of many business models that are in use today, should we stifle their further development?

Re: Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

Broken window fallacy

Re:Shakedown

[swb]

The urban poor can't afford Internet? Every time I drive through "poor" urban areas, I'm always amazed at the forest of DISH/DirecTV dishes on apartments. Half the time I wonder if its not an NSA branch office or occupied by a NASA tracking station.

AFAIK most cities who signed cable franchise agreements required the entire city to be wired. While I'm sure more affluent areas were wired first, I seriously doubt my own city (Minneapolis) isn't universally wired 30 years later.

And 80% of the population is urban, and I would wager that number is slightly higher for African Americans, meaning that most of them live in areas with accessible broadband.

Re:Shakedown

[drinkypoo]

The urban poor can't afford Internet? Every time I drive through "poor" urban areas, I'm always amazed at the forest of DISH/DirecTV dishes on apartments. Half the time I wonder if its not an NSA branch office or occupied by a NASA tracking station.

while you can get internet from dish, you don't want it, and it costs more than DSL, which is what most poor urban households have got. It is the cheapest and shittiest option. I have two dishes on my rental, and I am using 0 of them. The installers don't take down old dishes for fear of creating leaks, so they just stay up until the building falls.

Re:Shakedown

[TheCastro1689]

It depends on who the poor are. A lot of times you have to think that poor people are the ones working in call centers and probably get a discount on the dish and service. You also have to think that if it's low income housing that accepts section 8 vouchers and the person then might have enough to get a basic cable package.

Re:Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

while you can get internet from dish, you don't want it

I think his point was that if the "poor" can afford satellite TV, they don't need internet access to be subsidized.

Re:Shakedown

[drinkypoo]

I think his point was that if the "poor" can afford satellite TV, they don't need internet access to be subsidized.

Satellite TV is cheaper than internet access, if you only get a basic package, and especially if you take an introductory deal and then never make a payment. The average household can do that three or four times, if you put it in the kids' names too.

Re: Shakedown

[gomiam]

Wrong fallacy fallacy. Among other reasons: there is no fallacy in the GP.

Re:Shakedown

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

>> Give Jackson money and he'll go away.

This. Remember when beer distributorships were harming minority communities by entrenching already dominant companies? And then Jackson's kids mysteriously ended up owning a distributorship or two...and suddenly all was well? http://www.martinlutherking.or...

Re:Shakedown

[operagost]

Give Jackson booty and he'll go away.

FTFY

Re:Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

Presumably someone already has, but it was for exactly the opposite reason.

Re:Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

Every time I drive through "poor" urban areas, I'm always amazed at the forest of DISH/DirecTV dishes on apartments.

Most of those dishes are not active.

Very rarely do they get taken down or reused. The installer just puts up a new one, because that's all the subcontractor knows how to do. Removing them incurs liability without making money. When you see a 6-unit building sprouting 10 satellite dishes, all that means is that in the past decade, 10 different tenants had service at some point in time.

Boston did a survey two years ago in preparation for an ordinance that would require the installer to remove abandoned dishes. They found 76,000 satellite dishes and only 27,000 satellite subscribers in the city. The FCC blocked the ordinance.

Re:Shakedown

[Immerman]

Really? I'm paying $25/month ($35 after taxes, fees, etc,etc,etc) for the slowest, crappiest Centurylink DSL line available (3 mbps, closer to 2mbps in practice). That's approximately the same price as the cheapest satellite TV plans I can find*, and is plenty fast enough to watch Hulu, TED, Youtube, etc,etc,etc.

*I'm assuming they have a similar asshole "hidden fees" policy to cable and ISPs.

Re:Shakedown

[MisterSquid]

Because of your clear and thoughtful reply, I understand the context and positions much better.

Much appreciated.

Re:Shakedown

[Immerman]

Better yet - why not ask why the existing situation, without any net-neutrality regulations, hasn't led to better service already? I mean it's been possible all along, but now that we're threatening to regulate their sorry exploitaitive asses, suddenly we're supposed to believe we'll be making it less cost-effective to do the things they already weren't doing?

Re:Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

especially if you take an introductory deal and then never make a payment

I must admit, the idea of signing up with no intent of ever making a payment had never crossed my mind. But how feasible is that really? After you've used your name and then your spouse's, surely there will be a red flag in the system for your address. So you only get, what, 2 months? Assuming you get cut off once the bill is one month past due.

I just can't see the practice of signing up multiple times as being viable.

Re:Shakedown

[q4Fry]

If true, that would be informative, but I'm a little skeptical of a web site called "martinlutherking.org" that seems to be devoted to besmirching MLK.

Re: Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

Broken window fallacy

How so?

The Broken Window Fallacy states that the kid who broke the window stimulated the economy by requiring the person to buy a new window, completely ignoring that that person is now out cash that could/would have gone to something else.

Without Net Neutrality, we have cases of ISPs going "gee, Netflix, that sure is some purty data you're sending to our customers. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it", and then Netflix has to pay the customer's ISP as well as their own ISP. Or put another way, the ISP "broke the window" and now Netflix is "paying to replace it" with cash that could/would have gone elsewhere.

How exactly does forbidding ISPs from "breaking the window" introduce the Broken Window Fallacy?

Re:Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

Satellite TV is cheaper than internet access, if you only get a basic package, and especially if you take an introductory deal and then never make a payment. The average household can do that three or four times, if you put it in the kids' names too.

One a Satellite is launched, with services like XM radio and TV that are one-way broadcasts... They can pretty much provide it for free or to as many people who'll pay for it in a given area. The only costs they have is launching satellites every once in a while and getting content to stream to users. They also make money off advertising.

Paying for TV and XM radio is like paying to listen to normal radio on AM/FM. It should be illegal.

Re:Shakedown

[Caesar Tjalbo]

This is also, not coincidentally, why the NN debate is much less intense (in fact, almost non-existent) in Europe.

It's very intense and existent in Europe. Just google "eu net neutrality" to get some idea.

Re:Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

What confuses me is how Net Neutrality could do anything but help the urban and rural poor because Net Neutrality aims to prevent ISPs from discriminating between the sources and destinations of packets meaning that the traffic of non-profits (for example) and will be equally served by ISP networks in the US to the users of those networks.

Am I missing something here?

My suspicion is that the advocacy groups don't have a good understanding of how Net Neutrality will protect all users and content providers from ISP exploitation and that these advocacy groups have been given misinformation by advisors who, in fact, are in the back pocket's of the ISPs.

Is this what's going on?

You're missing the bribe-donations that were paid the opposing groups that, of course, totally didn't have any effect on their positions at all.

Re:Shakedown

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing the fact that Net Neuttrality hinders the development of alternative business models.

Where by "hinders" you mean "facilitates". It's kind of hard to develop a new business model when you have to pay the old model a a "that's a nice business you've got there, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it" surcharge to operate.

Re:Shakedown

[leslie.satenstein]

Give Jackson money and he'll go away.

So far as I know, European countries do impose network neutrality. And they do it with faster broadband speeds. My son who lived in Riga, Latvia in 2010, had 8megabits per second fibre access to the apartment building in which he lived, and at a standard fee. (They actually had fibre, because thieves stole the wire for the metal it contained. One night the elevator cables were stolen.)

Re:Shakedown

[beastofburdon]

If they didn't still have commercials I would be all for it, but they just can't resist that extra revenue stream.

First Do No Harm

[SuperKendall]

What problem will be solved RIGHT NOW by passing strict regulations for ISP's to abide by?

None? They why pass a regulation to fight terrors not yet real, and increase costs?

Re:First Do No Harm

[Chibi Merrow]

Thankfully no one is proposing 'strict regulations'. The modest and reasonable regulations (which already apply to not-insignificant chunks of Verizon's FiOS network) being pushed for by Title II advocates would cut off things such as paid prioritization schemes and providers favoring their own paid services by exempting them from technologically unnecessary bandwidth caps, however.

Re:First Do No Harm

[Jane Q. Public]

What problem will be solved RIGHT NOW by passing strict regulations for ISP's to abide by?

The fact that the United States is something like 26th of industrialized countries in average internet bandwidth, AND more expensive than even those that have far better service.

The big ISPs haven't been investing in infrastucture, because they haven't had to. They don't compete. In 80% of the United States, people have only one real choice for low-latency, modern broadband.

Instead, they've just been pocketing their insane profits.

You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.

It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.

(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)

Re:First Do No Harm

[Anonymous Coward]

Basically, content owners: read the United States Media Monopoly (90% of what you read, watch on TV, learn in school and so forth is made by 4 companies, look up a book by Ben Bagdikian) want control over content distribution as well so they can snuff out competition. And that means taking control of the last mile and forcing everyone else, specifically anyone competing with them such as pirated TV channel or bit-torrent traffic, or netflix or youtube, or Khan academy, to die by making it artificially too expensive to compete. Fact is movies and television are, increasingly, becoming an outdated, outmoded form of content.

Before those mergers, ISP's did not complain about bittorent; sure some caps existed, but they viewed it a selling point.

That is their stated objective, and everyone knows it.

What Title II does is force that separation back in place hard and fast, and in a way they can never effectively take over content distribution networks. They become like the power distribution company or AT access to the lines gets sold at the same price to everyone and is regulated by local government. And to be honest, these guys are not just co-coordinating with the government to execute psychological warfare operations on the public this time around; they are very seriously looking to do some things that will have a very serious impact on the viability of some business operations and the ability of internet commerce and innovation to continue. It won't stop there; it'll go to shopping and business sites next, and it doesn't need to. In 2000 you needed racks of computers to host a few hundred thousand hits a day website; now you need two or three boxes, it's a different ballgame.

Of course they pound the table like insolent children every chance they get but in all reality, it's time to forcibly divest the internet from these content producers.

The only reason for an "internet fast lane" is because of the need to real-time communications to go over the internet; 911, voice, data. QOS\COS is here, it's been here for a long time, you can buy transport in a metropolitan area and get it to work, and most SS7 hook-ups work that way anyway.

Sure there's some socialism mixed in here, but fact is we're rapidly approaching an internet where a national hundred megabit a second network with extremely low latency is feasible, and the content producers don't want a world in-which users can download a high-definition movie in 10 minutes.

Re:First Do No Harm

[fustakrakich]

Well, nobody's complaining. Why should they provide better service? Where's the incentive? I mean, yeah, people blabber about it all the time, but when it comes to action? Poof! Where did everybody go?

Re:First Do No Harm

[Imsdal]

What you are saying is in effect "We have local monopolies. That's bad. Let's add regulations to make sure that the local monopolies wont' do bad things." That is putting a lot of faith in regulation. How did that work in other markets?

The only thing that will help is breaking up the local monopolies. That is where poeple should put their lobbying efforts. ANything else is a fool's errand.

Re:First Do No Harm

[Tom]

The fact that the United States ...

This is not a USA topic. European governments are already falling in line and falling over themselves to lick the telcos boots as well. It's disgusting, really.

Re:First Do No Harm

[jmac_the_man]

You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.

It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.

(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)

Title II very obviously DID NOT impose a free market, because the company it regulated for most of its existence HAD TO BE BROKEN UP BECAUSE IT WAS A MONOPOLY.

Title II would also not impose actual competition. Unless there are multiple providers capable of serving an address, it's not really a free market. Land line telephone service (currently regulated under Title II) pretty much has one option per area. (Two if you count phone service from the cable company, which is really VoIP rather than an actual land line.)

Re:First Do No Harm

[Anonymous Coward]

The alternative is breaking up the monopolies, and if you think passing neutrality legislation is going to be tough doing that would be downright impossible.

Re:First Do No Harm

[Anonymous Coward]

What problem will be solved RIGHT NOW by passing strict regulations for ISP's to abide by?

The fact that the United States is something like 26th of industrialized countries in average internet bandwidth, AND more expensive than even those that have far better service.

The US has between 10 and 1000 times the land area of other "industrialized countries".

And, so fucking what? Not being able to watching Netflix at 4X HD seems to be somewhat of a first-world problem...

The big ISPs haven't been investing in infrastucture, because they haven't had to.

Yep, that AOL dialup everyone's using sure has stagnated...

They don't compete. In 80% of the United States, people have only one real choice for low-latency, modern broadband.

Cherry-picking. What's a "real choice"? What's "low-latency"? What's "modern"?

Gee, you seem to have really limited things with your choice of words. Now WHY would you do that?

Oh, yeah, because you had to constrain things so you could have an argument.

Ooops.

Instead, they've just been pocketing their insane profits.

You left out "1%!!!", "EVUL CORPARASHUNS!!!", and a few paeans to Marx.

You can't expect free market forces to fix a situation in which there is no free market. The obvious answer is Title II Common Carrier status.

Let's see - Jesse Jackson, the Urban League, and Comcast don't agree with you. That's quite the diverse collection of people from all over the political and ethnic spectrum

Yet you have the unmitigated ARROGANCE to claim the proper course of action is "obvious".

Not only that, your response to a situation made bad by government regulation is MORE GOVERNMENT REGULATION. Why don't you go ask Eric Garner if picayune government regulation is a good thing.

It worked just fine for landline telephones. It can work for internet.

(PS: before anybody yells that it didn't work for landline telephones, yes, it did. Ma Bell wasn't broken up for lack of service and high service fees. It was different reasons altogether.)

Pathetic attempt to deflect arguments related to the breakup of Ma Bell unleashing innovation in telecommunications is pathetic.

What's the color of the sky on your planet? In the 100 years before Ma Bell was broken up, we went from rotary-dial telephones to rotary-dial telephones.

In the few decades since Ma Bell was broken up, we went from rotary-dial telephones to smart phones that can surf the internet, do video chats, take HD videos.

Yeah, no innovation there.

Re:First Do No Harm

[drinkypoo]

What you are saying is in effect "We have local monopolies. That's bad. Let's add regulations to make sure that the local monopolies wont' do bad things." That is putting a lot of faith in regulation. How did that work in other markets?

Well, today you are allowed to connect non-approved devices to your telephone line, and telcos have common carrier status. So it worked beautifully.

Re:First Do No Harm

[TheCastro1689]

The only action with a company with a monopoly is to go without. Most people can't go without their Netflix and Facebook, so you have the problem where the company has no incentive to change. In markets where the local municipality or CO-OP does the internet no one has commercial service, why pay more? In places that have the choice of google fiber or FIOS, Comcast takes a huge hit. That's the reality, no competition for what has no become essentially a need/utility like electricty or gas or oil has created a vacuum between what the customer wants and what is provided.

Re:First Do No Harm

[TheCastro1689]

Regulation is what kept airlines profitable, regulation is what got phone service to rural parts of the country. Regualtion can be good, in can also be bad in the case of long distance service because of the illusion of "natural monolpolies" in services that don't really have natural monopolies. Regulations are also why city water is cleaner than bottled water.

Re:First Do No Harm

[Anonymous Coward]

^ This post has been proudly sponsored by Comcast, Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner. Thanks for being our voice of truth to the brainless, unwashed masses.

Thanks, AC. Your check is in the mail.

Re:First Do No Harm

[Anonymous Coward]

^ This post is being repeated ad naseum by a brain-dead, basement-dwelling Occutard who doesn't realize ad hominem attacks are not a logical argument.

Re:First Do No Harm

[Chibi Merrow]

Let's see - Jesse Jackson, the Urban League, and Comcast don't agree with you. That's quite the diverse collection of people from all over the political and ethnic spectrum

Yes, such a wide spectrum, consisting of Comcast and political activists funded by Comcast...

Re:First Do No Harm

[dgatwood]

None of which will really do much good. All the cable company has to do to get around those regulations is to ensure that only traffic to Netflix goes through a particular link using routing rules, then decide to never upgrade that link. It's just as anticompetitive whether Netflix is paying them to upgrade the link or not, but with this pretend version of net neutrality, the poor are screwed even harder, because they lose Netflix as an alternative to the cable company's extortionate video on demand service. At least the wealthy have the resources to sue if things get bad enough.

What we actually need are strict regulations. Specifically, we need a very simple addition to the Federal Communications Act:

Any information service that owns and maintains infrastructure for transporting data to individual consumers and businesses shall lease access to that infrastructure in a nondiscriminatory fashion, at standard rates to be set on an annual basis by the commission, to any other party that wishes to provide service in that area unless at least ten infrastructure providers actively provide service to the specific address that the competing business is requesting permission to serve.

That one paragraph will do more to ensure net neutrality than all the other proposed regulations put together. It would apply to all technologies, whether cable, fiber, wireless, or something yet to be invented, and would have the effect of permanently creating competition in the Internet service market, by making the wire providers be a regulated utility, and the actual ISPs be able to compete by leasing their lines.

Re:First Do No Harm

[dgatwood]

What you are saying is in effect "We have local monopolies. That's bad. Let's add regulations to make sure that the local monopolies wont' do bad things." That is putting a lot of faith in regulation. How did that work in other markets?

It works acceptably in power delivery, though government-owned nonprofit corporations work a lot better. And Internet service is pretty similar in terms of the costs involved, minus the generation part. The nice thing about nonprofits is that they have no incentive to cut corners on infrastructure improvement, because the money has to go somewhere. and it can't go into the pockets of investors.

Re:First Do No Harm

[Pfhorrest]

There's no reason one approach has to block the other.

If there is a monopoly, it should be regulated as a common carrier.

If they don't want to be regulated as a common carrier, they have to let the competition in.

Let the ISPs themselves choose. Would you rather be a regulated common carrier monopoly or free to do as you like in a highly competitive market?

Either way, the users win.

Re:First Do No Harm

[dgatwood]

They don't compete. In 80% of the United States, people have only one real choice for low-latency, modern broadband.

Cherry-picking. What's a "real choice"? What's "low-latency"? What's "modern"?

It's not cherry picking. "Real choice" means a choice that meets the legal definition of broadband, and has low enough latency that normal use of the Internet isn't painful.

The most critical word was "broadband", which has a strict legal definition. Going forward, that definition is 10 Mbps down, 2.9 Mbps up. AFAIK, only one satellite service can provide that (just barely), and DSL can only provide that (just barely) in a few rare places that support ADSL+ with Annex M, and even then, only within about 1,000 feet of a central office or specially configured remote terminal, if memory serves. So the vast majority of DSL and satellite service no longer qualifies as broadband.

Low latency typically means "not satellite". Satellite adds approximately half a second of round-trip latency. At such high latencies, the Internet does not work very well:

• Web browsers can only open so many connections at a time, and most browsers limit you to three per hostname. So if you have a hundred tiny resources on a page, the page would take a minimum of 15 seconds to load over a satellite link, regardless of the speed of that link. And that's best-case performance; the actual bandwidth limits compound this. Ad blocking is pretty much mandatory, and even then, you're going to be miserable.
• VoIP calls are painful with half a second latency. In addition to being challenging to avoid stepping on each other's sentences, such long latency wreaks havoc on the technology used to prevent feedback and remove echoes.
• Using ssh over such a connection? Fugghedaboudit.

Most consumers have only one usable choice that qualifies as broadband. In a few areas, folks have two. Even that isn't enough competition to provide real choice, because duopolies tend not to compete more than absolutely necessary unless one of them is a newcomer, and even then, only for a short time (after which the entrenched monopoly usually runs them out of business, but if they don't, then competition still invariably settles down).

Now if you'll think back to high school economics, with supply and demand (a free market), if the supply gets too low and the demand stays high, the price goes up, and once it gets to a certain point, it becomes profitable for another player to enter the market and compete, and supply increases, and the price drops back. However, that can only happen when the barriers to entry are low enough to allow other players to feasibly enter the market.

When you have a per-household cost of $2,500–$5,500 for fiber service, even if you're a monopoly, it is going to take you well over a decade to pay off the infrastructure costs, assuming typical service prices. A business considering jumping into such a market has to ask themselves, "Can I steal 50% of the customers in this market, and then hold out against an entrenched monopoly for 20 years without them undercutting me so much that they bury me?" I think you'll find the answer is always "no".

For this reason, you'll never get the steady stream of market disruption required for supply and demand to function properly as long as each ISP has to provide its own physical infrastructure. It is simply a non-starter.

Re:First Do No Harm

[fustakrakich]

The only action with a company with a monopoly is to go without.

Nonsense, you stop protecting their monopoly. That probably means you need to stop reelecting politicians that are owned. I see that as the principle problem.

Less interference...

[psherman2001]

I'm all for less government intervention in most things, but let's be real -- the government has helped create the ISP monopolies that currently exist, and "Net Neutrality" strikes me as an intrusive shell game... Hoping I'm wrong. How do we get back to real competition and value for our money? .

Re:Less interference...

[SeaFox]

You seize the last mile infrastructure under "eminent domain", "national security", or whatever reason your want to give. Then let the service providers lease access to that to deliver their connections to the backbone. Use the funds from the lease to pay for the upkeep of the network (the first thing the current providers will do once they lose the ownership of the network is stop rolling techs to make people who lose service get upset and side with them).

Re:Less interference...

[TubeSteak]

and "Net Neutrality" strikes me as an intrusive shell game... Hoping I'm wrong.

You're wrong, probably because you have some wrong notion of what "Net Neutrality" is.
I won't rehash the explanation, look it up or just check this thread later in the day.

How do we get back to real competition and value for our money?

End local franchise monopolies.
-This might have to be done State by State
Force cable companies to open their infrastructure to (cable ISP) competitors.
Enhance build out requirements so that the infrastructure will reach under served populations.

The basics of creating competitive markets are not news to anyone.
The problem is that national ISPs/TV providers have enormous influence in shaping the local State regulatory environment.
Consequently, government is the problem, insofar as it has been captured by corporate interests and is not working to benefit the citizenry.

And before anyone says "deregulation!!1"
free markets != competitive markets

Re:Less interference...

[Anonymous Coward]

"End local franchise monopolies.
-This might have to be done State by State"

These have been illegal for nearly two decades now. It hasn't helped, because investing in redundant last-mile physical infrastructure is expensive, and almost never profitable for the second player, so you will never have more than one physical cable TV line and one physical phone line per house.

Re:Less interference...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lemme help ;)

What "net neutrality" is, is
1) Nothing we have yet to win. We have it NOW and must do all we can to make sure that we keep it.
2) If we lose it, Google and Facebook will be able to spam you with their ads at 100 Mbps, while your own VPN connection to the office behind your mom-and-dad shop two blocks away will stop being usable for of lack of bandwidth.

Now I might have exaggerated it a bit, but that's how you have to see the general idea.

What losing it also means is that a small scale (regional, or just new) alternative to the big content providers won't be able to get off the ground unless they pay up first. A guy trying to start his own web shop will find that his customers can reach him at crawl speed while they get broadband only if they go shopping at Amazon.

Re:Less interference...

[Anonymous Coward]

If we have NN now, why was Netflix forced to buy connections to the Verizon and Comcast network recently to "reduce the network bottleneck" that was artificially put in place in order to shake Netflix down for more money?

And I quote:

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the groups that oppose Title II designation, like the Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, have received contributions from organizations affiliated with Internet service providers, like the Comcast Foundation, the charitable organization endowed by Comcast. Parts of the Rainbow/PUSH Coalition’s annual symposium on civil rights were conducted last week at Comcast’s offices in Washington.

And of course that made no difference at all. Aren't there some more pressing civil rights issues right now? Something about police brutality?

Re:And I quote:

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we can only solve one issue at a time, and must focus on just one thing with monomaniacal devotion until it is completely solved, and only THEN move on to other issues.

Am I doin' it rite?

The same companies

[Anonymous Coward]

That cry loudest for the right to double/triple dip with fast lanes will invest the least in new infrastructure. Plust they already got billions of government money to build out something they never provided.

Only way the poor will be served is allowing competition, not how net neutrality will be decided.

Re:The same companies

[polar red]

>competition
wake up to the real world please. competition does not work with less than 4 sellers.

What?

[EmperorOfCanada]

I think these guys don't know what they are talking about. How about 1mbs for $10. That is not net neutrality just a crappy connection. I don't think that anyone disagrees with various speed connections in that it is the end user who makes the choice as to how much speed they want, not some backroom strongarming where they screw the upstream providers out of business.

Re:What?

[meustrus]

If 1mbps always meant 1mbps, that would be a solid connection to nearly anything on the internet. The only reason it isn't is because the networks are shitty, so you get somewhere between the advertised speed and a 56K dialup speed at random, usually with awful latency. The maximum bandwidth is a terrible metric by which to sell internet, because there are any number of reasons the network won't live up to it. Of course when I buy internet I've got some idiot customer service person trying to tell me that 15mbps is needed for gaming and 7mbps won't cut it when as a programmer with experience in networking and gaming I know that the bandwidth needs are usually quite small and it's the latency (which they don't advertise) that really matters.

I wonder if the light bulb market can ever get away from "60W equivalent" marketing. How that turns out should give us an indication of how to get away from the peak bandwidth marketing for internet connections.

Re:What?

[EmperorOfCanada]

I suggest that they advertise it in Neflixes basically how many simultaneous netflix streams the household can handle. This is complicated because it depends upon the device but I suspect that an HD Netflix stream could be an acceptable standard.

And you are correct. If I had a 256k connection with awesome ping times then pretty much every game would be fine. But 1Gbs with a 200ms ping time would leave me a bleeding/resetting corpse in most games.

What does Net Neutrality even mean???

[phizi0n]

It has lost all of the original meaning and has become a buzzword with a generic "don't do things that I don't like" meaning. Look at all the Netflix shakedowns for instance. Is it neutral for ISP's to accept a caching server from Netflix? Not unless they would be willing to take servers from everybody else. Is it neutral to leave a link saturated? It's bad for users but it is neutral to the data as long as you aren't purposely forcing routes to only use that link. Does anyone care what neutrality is in this case? No, they just want Netflix to be faster.

We're never going to get anywhere by trying to put a bandaid on our current ISP clusterfuck in America. If we want real change then we have to break up the monopolies again and split the physical infrastructure from the service providers. We need competition in order to fix the plethora of problems with ISP's which go far beyond whatever version of "net neutrality" you believe in.

Re:What does Net Neutrality even mean???

[meustrus]

It's bad for users but it is neutral to the data as long as you aren't purposely forcing routes to only use that link.

ISPs are forcing Netflix to only use saturated links. Although to be less cynical, it's possible that Netflix is forced there not by explicit policy but because the links haven't been upgraded in ten years.

Re:What does Net Neutrality even mean???

[ckhorne]

For politicians, "net neutrality" is something to get people fired up about an idea, so that it can be wrapped up with other things. The recent Obama push for net neutrality isn't for the sake of net neutrality as we geeks know and love, but rather some vague notion of a clean internet. The real aim is to move the internet under Title II so that it can be heavily regulated. It would also be subjected to the 16.1% universal service fund tax (as spelled out in the telecom act of 1996).

With the recent events such as the Federal Election Commission wanting to impose new regulations on internet-based political activities, I question the motives of the government heavily regulating the internet, and if it would stay neutral for long. The government has a long, long history of grabbing up any amount of control and power it can reach, and I'm personally fearful that moving the internet under Title II will force on so many regulations that, even if the internet was "net neutral", it would be hampered in plenty other ways. How much more innovation would the telephone have gone through over the past 100 years if it weren't regulated? There's no way of knowing, but I personally don't want to see the internet thrown to that kind of experiment.

"Net Neutrality" is being used as the boondoggle to move the internet under Title II. This is a power grab by the government, and has nothing to do about protecting the consumer. Yes, I believe net neutrality is paramount to protecting the innovation that the internet brings us; but moving it under Title II does nothing to guarantee that.
 

Re:What does Net Neutrality even mean???

[Chibi Merrow]

The real aim is to move the internet under Title II so that it can be heavily regulated. It would also be subjected to the 16.1% universal service fund tax (as spelled out in the telecom act of 1996).

Neither of those assertions are remotely true. There were already periods where Internet access was subject to Common Carrier regulations, and parts of Verizon's FiOS network are still under it to this day because it gave a tax and subsidy benefit to Verizon. If anything, internet access is already HEAVILY regulated, and Title II would simplify things immensely.

The bit about the USF tax is just propaganda from the NCTA.

Re:What does Net Neutrality even mean???

[phizi0n]

It's bad for users but it is neutral to the data as long as you aren't purposely forcing routes to only use that link.

ISPs are forcing Netflix to only use saturated links. Although to be less cynical, it's possible that Netflix is forced there not by explicit policy but because the links haven't been upgraded in ten years.

Peering contracts make it impossible for the public to have any clue what is actually going on with the saturated links since the contracts are secret. Caching servers are a good way to reduce traffic on the backbone links but giving them directly to ISP's is a bad thing for neutrality because the ISP's then get to pick and choose who they accept hardware from or get flooded with hardware from everyone. Competition in Europe has produced a much better ecosystem with many ISP's to choose from and lots of exchanges where they can connect to each other easily and cheaply.

Re:What does Net Neutrality even mean???

[meustrus]

Your idea to fix what's wrong with American ISPs by bringing in a European level of competition sounds very interesting. How did Europe get that kind of competition in a market with such high initial capital costs? Do you have a plan for how we could do the same in America?

I don't get it

[Radical Moderate]

As far as I know, most minorities have access to electricity, water, and telephones. But treating internet like a utility will somehow keep it out of the inner city? And the free market will soon be bringing low-cost internet to the poor that's just as good as the overpriced connection I pay for? What planet do these guys live on?

Re:I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

Being in a so-called minority doesn't exclude you from anything. Money does.

Re:I don't get it

[Roger Wilcox]

I've been convinced for some time now that Jesse Jackson and his ilk do not truly represent the people they claim to stand for. Their position on this issue makes absolutely no sense.

The only feasible explanation I can imagine is that they are abusing the trust of the gullible in an attempt bring the force of public opinion down against Title II designation for broadband.

Title II seems the sanest answer available for our current situation, as we have seen it succeed at reigning in other natural monopolies for 80 years at this point. Why this push didn't come 15 years ago is a mystery to me.


Aside: the fact that this is part of the conversation all of a sudden means that the man behind the propaganda curtain is now actively trying to influence *your* thoughts on the issue. Watch carefully to see how they paint this across the media.

Re:I don't get it

[usuallylost]

The article makes it sound like the various groups are mostly lining up on the side that donates to them. So groups that are supported by Comcast, and the other ISPs, are against title II regulation and those that are supported content providers, such as Google and Facebook, are for it. At the very least that creates the appearance that their positions might be for sale. Though it is possible that they just solicited companies they agree with for donations. Which of those you believe is going to depend upon your opinion of the people involved and both could be true since we are looking at a bunch of different groups.

Re:I don't get it

[drinkypoo]

Jesse Jackson represents Jesse Jackson, first and foremost. I don't know anyone who doesn't wish he would just go the fuck away, and that includes the [few] black people I know well enough to know how they feel about Jesse. (Hey, I grew up in whitey-white land, Mexicans aside, so sue me.)

Re:I don't get it

[operagost]

Check your privilege, cracker!

Fuck all these people

[fustakrakich]

Just give us the dumb pipe. *Sheesh*.. When are we going to stop with the bullshit?

Re:Fuck all these people

[jandersen]

Look, I don't want to be smug about it, and I do feel your pain, I really do, but this is the kind crap you get when you live under the ideology of the 'free' market and 'small state'. I know, your state is broken and corrupt, but it doesn't really have to be like that - it's broken because it is owned by large corporations that have no interest in real democracy or taking care of the interests of ordinary people. Call it communism if you must, but then bear in mind that what you think you know about communism has been fed to you by those self-same corporations, who are terrified that people might think that more common ownership could be worth trying.

I'm not arguing that the state should own everything and that private ownership should be abolished, but there are things that are best cared for by society as a whole - the state is only one of several possible candidates to represent society's interests. Infrastructure, including telecommunication, is definitely one of those areas that should be owned wholly by society, regulated by legislation and possibly paid for through taxes. As I said, it doesn't have to be through the state, but it should definitely not be owned by large, for-profit corporations like it is now.

Re:Fuck all these people

[Mal-2]

I'm not arguing that the state should own everything and that private ownership should be abolished, but there are things that are best cared for by society as a whole - the state is only one of several possible candidates to represent society's interests.

This makes your desire socialism rather than communism. Socialism is maligned by much of the popular media here as well, on the (quite correct) belief that the huddled masses don't understand it and will do as they are told by their betters, but that doesn't make it the same thing. What reigns currently is more akin to "national socialism", corporations in bed with and eventually owning the government.

Re:Fuck all these people

[drinkypoo]

What reigns currently is more akin to "national socialism", corporations in bed with and eventually owning the government.

Uh, what? No, and also no. Calling something socialism doesn't make it socialism. It's capitalism, specifically corporatism (which is a kind of capitalism — I despair of us fixing this every time someone tries to claim that corporatism is not capitalism. Buy a dictionary.)

Re:Fuck all these people

[Anonymous Coward]

Capitalism, on the other hand, is exalted primarily by the mouth breathers of society, who are incapable of understanding how they are being taking advantage of, and thus the huddles masses just do as they are told by their betters.

And you have exemplified this BEAUTIFULLY. The irony is alive and well.

Re:Fuck all these people

[meustrus]

"national socialism"

You mean fascism?

Re:Fuck all these people

[fustakrakich]

I can't worry about peoples' philosophical predilections. I do know that we are now paralyzed by majority rule, and everybody is too corrupt and greedy to respect any alternative. So, we remain in this stalemate. Progress is slow, but 40 years ago most communications were even slower and much more expensive. So, I guess, something good is still coming out of it. In the meantime, consider all their attempted impediments as a challenge to develop circumvention that nobody can control and ration.

Re:Fuck all these people

[Mal-2]

"national socialism"

You mean fascism?

That's what I was getting at, yes, just using a deliberately deceptive term I thought would be immediately recognized.

Actually a smart strategy for comcast

[NaCh0]

This is both cynical and genius on Comcast's part. For no good reason, people still listen to race hustlers like Jesse Jackson. Feed him some money and watch the protester buses and media circus roll into town. Facts will no longer matter.

Re:Actually a smart strategy for comcast

[SuricouRaven]

It's disgusting, but effective.

Most of the objections I've seen are justified by ideology - conservatives arguing that net neutality is bad because all forms of government regulation are bad by default.

Some civil rights groups are corrupt?

[davydagger]

Some of the groups that oppose Title II designation, like the Urban League and the League of United Latin American Citizens, have received contributions from organizations affiliated with Internet service providers,

gasp, I hardly didn't see that coming. This is fucking capitalism motherfuckers. This is why you can't have a civil rights group that isn't anti-capitalist. This shit needs to end. like yesterday

net neutrality affects the poor the most. Bridge the digital divide.

abuse

[Tom]

The problem here is one of marketing. The parties interested (read: Telcos) are big corporations with millions of PR budgets. They've managed to create terms like two-tier Internet and "fast lane" and all the other PR bullshit. They've created a story to sell, that what they want would be good and has many advantages. It's really text-book PR work.

Some people didn't see the thing being built and are falling for the smoke and mirrors. The simple truth they need to be told is that yes, the story sounds compelling, maybe even convincing. But the reality is that anything that can be abused for profit will be abused for profit, and it will look nothing like the story they're being sold now.

How about tell them of the benefits

[hawkingradiation]

And then let the incumbents try to explain, rather than having to dispute every negative claim about Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality would, instead of being tiered, would allow and has allowed each community to be treated equally. It would allow the Internet to be treated more like a utility. It is like how you receive water in your community now, everyone pays the same rate. If these guys think that the water company will allow them to get their water for little or less money and that somehow someone else would foot the bill for them because of a tiered structure, would you believe the water company? No they would probably only invest money that they were getting back from the community. If water was declared a right, then the company providing might be forced into providing set water. I can think of ways a person or a company can benefit from Net Neutrality. I will give three examples: Google and Facebook and Paypal. Mark Zuckerberg only had a few thousand in cash to start his first server farm, and I doubt the founders of Google had that much more. When Elon Musk came to the United States he had little cash and received $300 million from his part the sale of Paypal to Ebay. Where would Google, Facebook, Tesla and countless others be today without Net Neutrality? They depended on access of various users to be consistent when they were small and when they became large. Try explaining to poorer neighbourhoods that they could create a startup based upon money to pay and not being in a slow lane. The Internet is part of the American dream, we are not done yet. The results are plain to see.

Re:How about tell them of the benefits

[g4sy]

Stop using the water analogy. The technology is fundamentally different. Using QoS, we can control the priority of packets which are on a shared line. That is impossible with water droplets in pipes. If it were possible, I would support it. Because 1. I'd pay less money for "hard" water for rinsing, but a little more for "soft" water for the washing mashine 2. water utilities would be much better run, with better services, tiers, etc.

I don't see anyone complaining about socializing (through legislation) the grocery chains to ensure that they build stores in places which some social justice warriors deem to be necessary. We know how such central planning works out, and we as a globe have decided to leave grocery stores to the free market. Despite the fact that poor rural areas don't have hipster eco expensive grocery stores. Oh the humanity!!!

Taken to their logical conclusion, your arguments would have us forcing every style of every grocery store to build in the stupidest of locations. What I don't get, is if social justice warriors and socialist thieves (from the common good) think it's so important to have grocery stores in poor rural areas, why don't they get off their asses and actually do that (by commercial or co-operative or whatever means available). Why is it necessary to force OTHERS to do your bidding?? (through the genuine threat of violence through law). Oh, and btw I think my analogy is valid for purpose: if you think that the internet is more important than nutrition for the purpose of given everyone a fair start in life, get a grip on reality man. Get outside your comfort zone. If you spend time trying to help people who are mentally STUNTED for all aspects of human life, even the ones outside the intarwebs, then come back and try to repeat your arguments.

Re:How about tell them of the benefits

[Anonymous Coward]

Here is my stance.

If an ISP wants to throttle video, so be it, as long as all video is throttled equally. No playing favorites. The same can go for online gaming, surfing, etc. No giving preferential treatment to one specific business. All business types must be treated equally.

As for mobile Internet, such as for phones, I don't know.

Re:How about tell them of the benefits

[Red_Chaos1]

Stop using the water analogy. The technology is fundamentally different. Using QoS, we can control the priority of packets which are on a shared line. That is impossible with water droplets in pipes. If it were possible, I would support it. Because 1. I'd pay less money for "hard" water for rinsing, but a little more for "soft" water for the washing mashine 2. water utilities would be much better run, with better services, tiers, etc.

It's a fine analogy for what is needed, stop being a worthless pedant. You mention QoS. That's fine and great, but it needs to be an opt-in thing that the customer requests, not something we all have to cope with because $ISP is busy putting the squeeze on another content provider for more money for another McMansion for all the execs and board members despite the fact that the end user is already paying for the content and its delivery.

I don't see anyone complaining about socializing (through legislation) the grocery chains to ensure that they build stores in places which some social justice warriors...

Oh shit, here we go with this dumbassery...

...deem to be necessary. We know how such central planning works out, and we as a globe have decided to leave grocery stores to the free market. Despite the fact that poor rural areas don't have hipster eco expensive grocery stores. Oh the humanity!!!

Except grocery stores already do that by themselves, because a customer is a customer, and they would only be punching themselves in the nuts by refusing to build in poor areas. Swing and a miss!

Taken to their logical conclusion, your arguments would have us forcing every style of every grocery store to build in the stupidest of locations.

Where you're going is hardly the logical conclusion, and as I already pointed out, your grocery store analogy is a lame duck that doesn't fly.

What I don't get, is if social justice warriors and socialist thieves (from the common good) think it's so important to have grocery stores in poor rural areas, why don't they get off their asses and actually do that (by commercial or co-operative or whatever means available).

You must be a 1%er or a shareholder in a major ISP or something. That or you're just that special kind of stupid. You're not even trying, you're just spewing bullshit and insults. Do you really expect anyone to care one whit about what you're saying (besides me, obviously) by doing that? I'm guessing not, you're probably just here to rip juicy ones into cyberspace and get high on the fumes and ride the unearned feeling of smug superiority (even though you're not remotely superior in any way that I can see so far).

Why is it necessary to force OTHERS to do your bidding??

Well, you see Corky, when people refuse to do the right thing of their own volition, it eventually becomes necessary to force them to behave in the appropriate manner rather than keep going on like the selfish and narcissistic jack-offs they are and would otherwise continue to be. Maybe if people didn't take their self absorption and selfishness to such ridiculous degrees then such regulation wouldn't be necessary.

(through the genuine threat of violence through law).

BAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA(long inhale)HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.... HAHAHAHAHahahaha...whooo, hahaha, man, hehe, that was a good one.

Oh, and btw I think my analogy is valid for purpose: if you think that the internet is more important than nutrition for the purpose of given everyone a fair start in life, get a grip on reality man. Get outside your comfort zone. If you spend time trying to help people who are mentally STUNTED for all aspects of human life, even the ones outside the intarwebs, then come back and try to repeat your arguments.

Re:How about tell them of the benefits

[Anonymous Coward]

^ This post has been proudly sponsored by Comcast, Verizon, AT&T, Time Warner, and the Libertarian/Republican Party. Thanks for being our voice of truth to the brainless, unwashed masses.

Thanks, g4sy. Your check is in the mail.

Re:How about tell them of the benefits

[meustrus]

Grocery stores are an even less appropriate analogy than water. Internet service providers do not provide an endpoint service (usually). They provide the highways. Netflix and Amazon Prime Video and YouTube are the grocery stores, and nobody is proposing that they be regulated as utilities. But it would be madness to put our roads to the grocery stores in the hands of for-profit corporations, especially if one of those corporations happens to also be NBC. Net neutrality is about telling that corporation that no, you cannot arbitrarily put up road blocks to Netflix to drive traffic to NBC. You cannot only maintain the roads to NBC. And if somebody builds a grocery store across town over and pays someone else for a highway into your residential neighborhood, you are not allowed to put up a toll booth. The residential customers are already paying for your roads in their neighborhood. Why should Netflix have to pay a toll for you to get from the residential network onto the roads they already paid for to get to their servers? Especially when NBC doesn't?

Re:How about tell them of the benefits

[meustrus]

(more importantly, why should the new grocery store across town have to pay the toll?)

A telco lobbyist argues

[Anonymous Coward]

... "If you create something where, for the poor, the lane is slower and the cost is more, you can't survive."

So slow lanes cost more? Hence banning net neutrality, means the poor can be treated just like rich people. To paraphrase SuricouRaven, "Net neutrality means we can't save the poor". The telcos have created a great strawman. The telcos were given monopolies to offset the cost of rural services. They were then paid by the US government to upgrade those rural networks. There is no reason for rural communities to receive a cheap and nasty service.

All the telcos have to do is wait for some rabid social justice warrior (SJW) to campaign against net neutrality.

The hole in their argument is obvious: Being just like rich people means spending lots of money like they do.

How does non-neutrality help poor communities?

[Black Copter Control]

big companies don't want to deliver to poor communiies -- period.

"We'll give your community 'internet service', but you're only allowed to use MSN" Isn't my idea of of improved service.

If you want to improve service, then stop banning communities from putting together their own ISP's. If AT+T doesn't want to service the South Bronx, then the South Bronx Community Association should be able to run it's own community internet service.

JusticeForZemir

[Anonymous Coward]

#JusticeForZemir

Murdered by Jessie's boys over Ferguson.

I don't get it

[Anonymous Coward]

What the NAACP wants is free high speed internet, none of that jive talk about hour long download

Eh

[Anonymous Coward]

Any civil rights group against net neutrality needs to get their shit together because they're wrong. We need to make ISPs Title II already and end this fucking bullshit issue that should have been dealt with years ago.

I get why they fight so hard. It's because being Title II makes it a lot harder to fuck over customers.

Political Co-Option

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're a tier one ISP and you don't have a single argument or principal to stand on when it comes to Net Neutrality, here are some handy steps to get what you want.

1. Confuse the issue with buzzwords / obfuscations / technocalities so people find it difficult to understand
2. Try to turn the issue of "Internet Freedom" on its head by arguing that you have a right to restrict users. Conflate with "liberity"
3. Bring outside political actors into debate. Try to divide opposition along polarized political lines. Stick them in the quagmire of politics.
2. Pay lots of journalists and shills to engage in all these tactics constantly over years so that vigilant people get tired / bored and go away.
5. Bribe congress to pass legislation. Turn net into cable 2.0.
6. Profit.

P.S.

If any nasty cores of resistance hold out, like Aaron Schartz, or Netflix, or e.g. Slashdot, lean on each of these "leaders" in their own appropriate way in order to mute, co-opt, corrupt or destroy them as appropriate. All it takes is Time and Money.

Re:How does non-neutrality help poor communities?

[Anonymous Coward]

> big companies don't want to deliver to poor communiies

They don't want to deliver to anyone which proves your argument wrong. I live in downtown Seattle, and my building is still stuck with ISDN. Yes, we still pay per minute charges to connect to the Internet. Comcast can't offer service because the Director's Rules prevent them from installing equipment, and we're too far from the CenturyLink CO for DSL. It's not that the phone and cable monopolies won't provide service to poor areas. They don't want to provide service at all.

Re:LOL at 'civil rights'...

[fnj]

Well, you're all over the place. There are one or two good points buried in there, but the bottom line is, take your racism and Jew baiting and SHOVE IT, you sad excuse for a human being.

You ask "who decided". Well, as a society and historically speaking, it's poetic justice, isn't it? I mean Americans were so goddam sure they had a right to own slaves, and that having those slaves was a win, the chickens have come home to roost, right? Who to blame but themselves? Their own white asses. The fact that all those slaves just happened to be selected by color gave them an identity and brotherhood to go with their rage.

It's sad, because there are, and always have been, many Americans who are truly color blind.

Who is behind all this confusion uncertainty and

[Anonymous Coward]

Net Neutrality is a simple concept, some groups of people and muddling the words and meanings. Who are these people and why are they doing this. I presume these people are not in jail yet, and have families and hope for a bright future for their families, even if they want to screw the futures of the rest of us.

Net Neutrality has already lost

[Anonymous Coward]

The pro-neutrality side is divided, leaderless, disorganized and poor. The anti-neutrality side is united, well-led, extremely well organized and has more money than we can ever hope to *imagine*. Should I also mention that they own our "representatives"? We're already defeated. Give up.

POTS

[Anonymous Coward]

We have had POTS (Plaiin Old Telephone Service - or something like that) for decades so that people everywhere could have a decent means to communicate, no matter their location. This was done in a large part via Title II. We need the same now for Internet service, call it POIS (Plain Old Internet Service). Unfortunately, many telecom providers are trying to drop their POTS responsibilities (the price one pays to have a monopoly) in underserved areas of the country. Time to call out the regulatory hammers! You want to control our communication infrastructure? Then you will have to provide that communication to EVERYBODY! I don't care if they live on a mountaintop in Bumfark Utah that is 100 miles from the nearest cell tower and you don't want to provide a land line to their residence!

Yep, this is what I wanted to say

[drinkypoo]

The NAACP is completely, utterly wrong about this. They have it completely backwards. We already paid the phone company to extend the DSL network to all subscribers, they were supposed to be done with that back in 2000, how's that coming along? Oh, fourteen years behind schedule, and still not done, and never going to happen unless we force it. And we aren't in the habit of forcing AT&T to do anything.

I hate to have to point this out

[Trailer Trash]

I hate to have to point this out but Rainbow/PUSH isn't a "civil rights organization" by any stretch of the imagination. It's Jackson's personal vehicle for racialist shakedowns like this:

http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...

He has about $10M in the bank:

http://www.celebritynetworth.c...

The only "civil rights" he cares about are those of his bank account.

THREE not TWO

[Anonymous Coward]

I have said this countless times, and hundreds of thousands of people know it, yet it never seems to come up. There are THREE plans, not TWO. Pay close attention

PLANS
===========
1. Plan to let the internet providers do whatever they like including throtling.
2. Keep the Internet as it has always been because it's worked fine (True Net Neutrality).
3. Let the Government under the FCC take over authority of the Internet (Obama's plan "Net Neutrality" as he calls it).

1 is bad, and 3 is worse. 2 is the only viable option.

BUT... Since everybody emailed the FCC that they wanted "Net Neutrality", they and Obama with the very selective hearing, and mincing of words, are going to implement number 3.

Does everybody get it yet?

Re:LOL at 'civil rights'...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Irish were sold as slaves too. Hmmmm....

Wow, that seems backwards

[Anonymous Coward]

Kind of like saying today that power company regs are bad because only the rich get electricity, except that's not how it turned out.

This is particularly striking, because the internet is one of the more equalizing things around.
It allows someone of meager means to play with the big guys.

If the FCC manages to make intelligent rules,
Title II will likely make the poor more able to buy Internet service.
It should provide a thriving, competitive market, hopefully driving the cost down and performance up.

Hopefully he has no clue, but it is possible he just speaks for the highest bidder, even if it is against his primary claimed cause.

And somehow this is relevant

[RogueWarrior65]

The fact that this is even being brought up should tell everyone that it's not about making sure that all traffic is treated the same. Nope, nope, move along, nothing to see here.

Broadband Internet needs to be classified utility

[anegg]

I have Verizon as my telecommunications provider here in Maryland. I had DSL Internet and phone with Verizon until I met with Verizon's marketing engine following the big FIOS rollout. My Internet/phone bill combined was $75 prior to FIOS. Verizon convinced me to switch to FIOS Internet and phone with a 3-year agreement; my bill initially went down to $68/month, but would rise to $113 in the third year. I was assured that there would be "another deal" that would make the price lower as long as I committed to another term of service. A little over four years later, and Verizon is charging me $125/month for Internet and phone, insisting that this is the "best price" I can get. Color me a sucker.

I was recently upgraded "for free" to 15 Mbps up in addition to 15 Mbps down. This happened after I was heavily marketed to buy this not-so-valuable (to me) capability 2 months earlier. Funny thing - the same day that I received the glossy postcard from Verizon announcing the "free" upload speed upgrade, I received that month's bill from Verizon, complete with a $7 cost increase for FIOS Internet (which took my bill from $116 to $125). Just how stupid does Verizon think I am? The message is clear - I will buy whatever Verizon wants to sell me, and if I don't, I'll get anyway, and Verizon will increase the cost of my service.

The real kicker is the way that the cost is divided up. FIOS Internet service is $75/month; my phone is $30 (the balance of my bill is various fees and taxes that Verizon has broken out separately over the years to obfuscate their rate increases). Of the two (Internet and phone) I believe that I could do without Verizon's phone service much more easily than the Internet. I have a cell phone, and I can subscribe to a broadband VoIP service for about $3/month and operate it over my Internet service. I can't cut out Internet at this point and run it over my phone service. My job, my wife's job, my kid's school work, and access to a myriad of necessary on-line services (banking, investments, my grad school, Amazon for purchasing, etc.) all depend on my Internet service. Hardly anything depends on my phone. If that isn't a clear sign of a utility service, I don't know what is.

Its long past time for Internet service to be classified and regulated as a utility - the Verizons and Comcasts of the world have clear demonstrated how they will reap a fortune in fees from people who have to use their services left unregulated. With regulation will come other encumbrances, such as the ability for the FCC to enforce (or not) "Net Neutrality". So be it. The big communications providers have gobbled up all of the Internet access services and combined them under a very small number of companies, while at the same time the public's use of Internet for practically every aspect of work, school, and commerce as grown by leaps and bounds. Internet access is a utility. Let's declare it so.

Re:LOL at 'civil rights'...

[Anonymous Coward]

You do know the first documented slave-owner in Virginia was black, right? And that Cherokees owned slaved? Sure, white Southerners were the majority of the slave owners, but not the only ones.

Re:Broadband Internet needs to be classified utili

[silas_moeckel]

Split the difference, glass between your house and one or more central points is a utility. Layered networks a switched/vlaned muni network that can get community services, lifeline internet, emergency services, startup ISP's, local patching, or whatever people can think to do with it. Now bigger providers can take a pure optics handoff as well. The muni is only taking care of glass and potentially it's own swtich network. The muni potentialy has the long term view to put the glass underground.

Fuck 'em

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to say it, but I just don't give a fuck. Can't get cheap broadband in the middle of nowhere or in the ghetto? Sucks to be you!

Yes, Net Neutrality is a "First World White People problem". But as a First World White Person, it is the problem I want solved. Access for the rural/poor isn't my top concern. Making sure Comcast can't fuck with Netflix is.

Wish I had mod points

[Radical Moderate]

Great comment. Do you have a newsletter? :-)

Re:Broadband Internet needs to be classified utili

[anegg]

I like your idea. Back in 1997 or so I speculated about the "information utility" that towns/cities could provide based on ATM. The town provides the basic data "pipe" and anyone who wants to sell you a service over that pipe can do so.

Perhaps local jurisdictions need to take the existing cable/optics infrastructure by eminent domain and use it for the benefit of the public. That court case from Connecticut where the Supreme Court held that private property (houses) could be taken by the city so that a developer could build more financially-remunerative structure on them seems to set the groundwork in place. What could be more of a benefit to the public than to have an information utility service, especially since Verizon effectively dismantled the highly-survivable communications infrastructure that they were originally entrusted with (well, ATT was entrusted with ...)?

Re:Broadband Internet needs to be classified utili

[silas_moeckel]

The nice thing about an all optical solution is no active devices are needed at the muni level. Passive mux and management of cwdm channels is all that is really needed. Other bits like macsec can help keep the muni's honest.

Cyberspace

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there no place on this little blue planet that is neutral?
Yes ... cyberspace.
Home use to be as with schools and Libraries and that's in the real world.
So, with the creation of the virtual world with it's endless possibilities ... cyberspace is one of the last dominions.
If you want to kill the NET ... let your government take it over or ... turn the power off ... and watch people actually try to go up to chat with a stranger!