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Silicon Valley Kicks Off Fight On Net Neutrality (cnn.com)
Web companies met with FCC Ajit Pai on Tuesday and urged him not to gut the net neutrality rules that protect their traffic, a week after he met with broadband providers that have tried to kill the Obama-era regulations. From a report: The Internet Association, a trade group representing companies like Facebook, Google, and Amazon, stressed the importance of defending current net neutrality rules in a meeting with Federal Communications Commission chairman Ajit Pai on Tuesday. "The internet industry is uniform in its belief that net neutrality preserves the consumer experience, competition and innovation online," the group said in the meeting, according to a filing with the FCC. "Existing net neutrality rules should be enforced and kept in tact." The net neutrality rules, approved by the FCC in 2015, are intended to keep the internet open and fair. The rules prevent internet providers from playing favorites by deliberately speeding up or slowing down traffic from specific websites and apps. This is the first face-to-face encounter between the tech association and the new FCC head. It comes on the heels of reports Pai met with the telecom industry to discuss changing how the rules are enforced, potentially weakening them.
Customers want walled gardens! Just look at cable bundles, it is clearly that bundles is the most popular choice by far. Also, customers want more commercials - just look at how popular are Super Bowl commercials are. It follows that Internet access should be bundled walled garden with auto-play video commercials inserted into browsing. This is what consumers want! Other internet is for dirty pirates and darknet hackers.
/sarcasm
You got Trumped!
A government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations, shall not perish from the earth!
Corporations are people too, my friends
Until Concast decides to block Google. Or Concast decides to replace Google ads with their own.
So If I agree to slow lanes they will build a lane to my house?
I can't pay extra for priority if I can't get a lane.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
If I pay for internet i want my packets sent to me without any type of priority based on source or destination. I would be moderately interested in enabling classes of service for TYPES of traffic, but not based on their source. That would be something an ISP should do out of a best practice. My point is that if I pay for 10Mbit, give me 10 Mbit and leave my traffic alone. THAT is net neutrality. Anything else is just not neutral.
As a mostly libertarian person, I see this as a reason for the government to have control of the communication system in the same model as they have roadways. Want to connect to the roads (by driving your car on it), then you have to meet specific standards meant to protect everyone else, but other than that you are free to connect and go where you want. You pay for your usage (through gas taxes...a model that is currently in flux due to electric vehicles), but other than that, no one tells you how much you can use or where you can go.
In fact, anything that requires the power of eminent domain should be handled this way. Electric grid owned by government. Anyone can produce and sell through it, as long as they meet the safety requirements.
If the cable companies want to throttle traffic depending on where it comes from, at the least they would need to lose common carrier status.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
One reason to have NN is to permit new kids on the block to grow.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are information incumbents.
They are able to pay for access if they need to, especially if it stops new competition.
For them support NN is a real comment on how important it is to the network.
I say they should go ahead and get rid of net neutrality. This will, by definition mean that the various ISPs are actively curating their services, and therefor are responsible if anything bad happens (DOS attacks, viruses, etc) because they are now responsible for the traffic going through their networks.
You don't get to take control of something and then wave away any responsibility. You want control? They you have to take the responsibility too. Don't want the responsibility? Then don't take control.
This is precisely what also pisses me off about Windows 10. Microsoft has taken control away from the operating system, but they refuse to also take responsibility. The end result is that Windows 10 is quickly becoming the most despised Windows in history.
Unfortunately most people don't have a choice in ISPs, so what options do people have, besides lawsuits?
Do you use facebook? It would sure be a shame if suddenly you had to pay a $10/month premium to access it.
Want to watch Netflix without waiting 60 minutes for the show to buffer? That'll be another $20/month please.
Want to use Google? That's an extra 50 cents per search, paid to your ISP.
If you are unable to see how incredibly anti-consumer this move is, and how badly it will directly hurt *everyone* except ISP shareholders, then you are not qualified to have an opinion. If you really think that this is nothing more than some political game of playing favorites, then you are an idiot. Now go sit down and let the adults talk.
No, friend, you don't understand how this works. The ISPs will charge Danegeld to content providers that want faster service (on top of what they pay for their basic connectivity), while you also pay the ISPs Danegeld for your connection to the Internet (as well as paying for access to the content providers). The amount of the Danegeld is always going up, too. So the ISPs get you and them coming and going. Under the Trump administration, this is called 'good business' and it's 'good for America'. You should pay with a smile on your face, and thank them for the privilege of helping to Make America Great Again </sarcasm>.
Hold on there Citizen, that attitude is not going to Make America Great Again, and I think you know that! You have to pay, and pay, and PAY if you want greatness, because only Big Corporations and the Trump Administration can give you that! You should pay with a smile on your face, and thank them for the privilege of helping to Make America Great Again </sarcasm>.
It's also a copy&pasted troll story older than the hills, just FYI.
ayunt 'murika grayut.
Quite frankly, if what you just outlined came to be reality, I'd dump the Internet entirely, and I think many other people would, too, which is why I'm starting to wonder if part of the 'Make America Great Again' plan is to destroy the Internet in the U.S.
What part of this nonsense has to do with net neutrality?
Wait, it's 2017 and you've never heard of Linux or the GPL? Also, how is this net neutrality? This is a licensing problem you have and not net neutrality. Let me tell you what net neutrality is: Say Microsoft had an interest in all other OS downloads, they convince the ISPs to limit the speed/access to sites they dictate and/or redirect OS searches to their site instead. Thus preventing access to their competitors. Now MS starts an entertainment business and further convinces the ISPs to limit/redirect Youtube, Netflix, Amazon Streaming, Pandora, etc, etc to encourage consumers to use their FAST HD entertainment. So the ISPs decide to set up a business model to allow the other companies to compete for more access/speeds benefiting only them leaving little option for the consumer. OR they did with cable and offer tiered access to specific sites at various prices. They will go far further hurting the consumer then they ever did with bundling cable. Also, why do you feel justified in taking a community code without contributing back? I know capitalism is capitalism, but linux is for a better overall community not for a single profiteer. Make your own shit if you want that.
This is their business, toad
forget net neutrality - lets have a real open market for access - stop cutting subsoity checks to ATT/Verizon/Comcast and CUT THE RED TAPE TO GET ACCESS TO EXISTING INFRASTRUCTURE! Force the telcos to sell access to polls the same way FRAND patents have to be shared - no denials and reasonable terms. This is more than fair because the telcos use eminent domain to have the polls in the first place, and thats fine so long as its a community resource.
They're not suggesting charging consumers (yet). This is about charging providers who use a lot of bandwidth (eg Netflix) extra. Of course they will pass the cost on to the consumer. When large parts of the US are effectively internet monopolies, the networks are in a powerful position.
CALPERS and other giant employee retirement funds need to start making noises about dumping Telco stocks if network neutrality is killed. It's a kleptocracy and that's the only defense real people now have.
Didn't happen. What kind of dolt develops for a system without looking at the licensing first?
Then with all the extra profit they will actually run fiber,dsl,cable or something else fast to my house? Yay! /s
Oh that's not the way it works either is it?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
but the real argument against NN is that there's a lot of competition in the world of ISPs. Which is true if you include dial up & cell phone providers. Heck the cell phones even count as broadband by the legal definition of it.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Nice editing CNN.
Yet. Exactly. And that powerful position is exactly why things like Net Neutrality are necessary. It's not a matter of "if" they abuse their position, but "when". You know they will fuck over literally every single person they possibly can. It's just a matter of time, and how quickly they build up their hubris.
Early mobile phone providers are a great example. They literally nickle and dimed you for every conceivable thing. For every service you wanted to access. Now, they still try to, but it just doesn't seem as bad because almost everything people use is over the internet that the provider is unable to control. Removing Net Neutrality will return you to exactly the state we were in before.
You want to use twitter? Sure, just go through our portal that conveniently charges you 5 cents per post written or read. It *will* happen, because it's been done before, and the ISPs will have no incentive to *not* do that. (Oh? You want to change ISPs? Too bad! We sued all the other players in your area to the point where we are the only option!)
Do you think companies like YouTube, Facebook, etc. campaign for net neutrality out of the goodness of their hearts? Of course not. They are lobbying for their financial interests, which do not coincide with yours.
Internet service in the US is such an unholy mess of regulations, rent seeking, government-granted privileges, restrictions, political interests, big money, and clueless techies that it is hard to know what any particular regulation does. I strongly doubt, however, that "net neutrality" will accomplish what people promise for it. Most likely (and given who is lobbying for it), it will simply cement the role of politically powerful and well-connected corporations.
Instead of imposing even more regulations in the form of net neutrality, it would probably be better if the federal government got rid of regulations, and perhaps also forced local governments to allow more competition.
It depends. Is your house on $TELCO executive's brand new yacht?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Google, Facebook, and Amazon have razor-thin margins and huge volumes. If they had to pay for access, their business models might be in big trouble. Cloud computing might get more costly relative to local computing as well. So, no, they don't do this out of selflessness, they do it because it matters to their bottom line, big time.
In contrast, smaller players tend to have bigger margins, so they can more easily pay for this out of those margins. But ISPs are probably not going to bother with trying to charge small players anyway because it's a lot of effort for little revenue, and they'd much rather have the small players grow to be big, at which point they can then charge them.
Wait, it's 2017 and you've never heard of Linux or the GPL?
The thing about people who get played is that it looks even worse if they start their reply with the very thing that should've made it obvious that they're getting played.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Amazing that people can't spot themselves about to be played from a mile away.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Google, Facebook, and Amazon are information incumbents....
For them support NN is a real comment on how important it is to the network.
Or is it a real comment on how the real purpose of NN is in fact to keep new kids unable to compete with the incumbents?
In fact you'll find this is the effect of most regulations, keep the largest players fat and happy and free of sky "competition".
Regulations support corporatism, not capitalism.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If I pay for internet i want my packets sent to me without any type of priority based on source or destination.
As a technically astute users I want MY packets sent such that Netflix has priority over my other web traffic. I don't care if my web pages load a little slower so long as it does not affect streaming video quality in the house.
Why is this so hard to comprehend? Why do so many Slashdot users not understand that people WANT PRIORITIZED TRAFFIC. Don't make something people strongly want illegal, because they will figure out how to get it anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Yet. Exactly. And that powerful position is exactly why things like Net Neutrality are necessary. It's not a matter of "if" they abuse their position, but "when". You know they will fuck over literally every single person they possibly can. It's just a matter of time, and how quickly they build up their hubris.
Early mobile phone providers are a great example. They literally nickle and dimed you for every conceivable thing. For every service you wanted to access. Now, they still try to, but it just doesn't seem as bad because almost everything people use is over the internet that the provider is unable to control. Removing Net Neutrality will return you to exactly the state we were in before.
You want to use twitter? Sure, just go through our portal that conveniently charges you 5 cents per post written or read. It *will* happen, because it's been done before, and the ISPs will have no incentive to *not* do that. (Oh? You want to change ISPs? Too bad! We sued all the other players in your area to the point where we are the only option!)
The service Netflix (for one example) has a price - and that price is independent of the costs Netflix incurs in providing that service.
The ONLY thing "net neutrality" does is say Netflix gets all that, and the providers that have to build infrastructure to supply the bytes from Netflix to its consumers can't charge Netflix to do so.
WHY IS THIS A FEDERAL GOVERNMENT ISSUE?!?!?!
You wonder why the feds pull off crap like "warrantless wiretaps" and "persistent surveillance"? You don't like that?
THEN STOP SAYING THE GOVERNMENT NEEDS THE POWER TO SOLVE FIGHTS OVER WHO GETS WHAT PIECE OF A MARKET.
Because our government IS GOING TO USE THAT POWER AGAINST US.
Or maybe you LIKE the fact that the NSA listens to your phone calls.
Quite frankly, if what you just outlined came to be reality, I'd dump the Internet entirely, and I think many other people would, too, which is why I'm starting to wonder if part of the 'Make America Great Again' plan is to destroy the Internet in the U.S.
Ha. You think tehre's a plan.
The Trump administration makes the underpants gnomes look detail oriented.
He has been trolled successfully.
Slashdot should delete this thread.
It is off topic and an ancient troll copy paste.
Nope not even near water.
Have they ever considered putting their yacht in a pond?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I improved the headline.
It's only been the big bandwidth users (Netflix, Roku), whom have been affected by 'Net Neutrality'. I want to see big teleco go after the mom and pop websites before I support net neutrality. Let's see big telecom ban Dailykos, or freerepublic first.
A government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations
Hey you seem to have forgotten that Hillary wasn't the one elected.
Instead we elected Trump - what reason does he have to support the corporations? Unlike Hillary he did not take millions in "charitable donations" from them. Unlike Obama he is not owned by Goldman Sachs.
In fact the most logical thing is for Trump to actually work AGAINST corporate interests, because they would be competing against Trump's own businesses!
Trump is the first president in a LONG TIME who is actually not beholden to, nor seemingly in direct support of, corporatism.
We would have got the same effect electing Sanders also - which is why the Democrats made sure he would never be the candidate.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
who cares? kill bittorrent and bitcoin, and reclaim our interwebs. OS is irrelevant.
I would be moderately interested in enabling classes of service for TYPES of traffic, but not based on their source.
You claim that "so many Slashdot users not understand that people WANT PRIORITIZED TRAFFIC", as a reply to a post that is advocating for prioritized traffic, with the end user dictating the prioritization.
If you are unable to see how incredibly anti-consumer this move is, and how badly it will directly hurt *everyone* except ISP shareholders,
I have a friend who lives for every word Rush Limbaugh spouts. He knows nothing how the Internet works or what net neutrality is other than it's big government squashing the common man and as soon as net neutrality is abolished his cable rates will go down. You can't argue with people like that and Limbaugh has legions of followers who truly believe this. If killing net neutrality brings a dystopian Internet perhaps that will be enough to break up these ISP monopolies like what happened with AT&T in 1984. That could be a silver lining. There is no need for net neutrality regulation with a truly competitive ISP marketplace.
This idiot troll is posting everywhere. I guess it gets paid by-the-post, with no basis on the quality or originality of the work. Same body, "more relevant" subject line. The troll's sponsor apparently could not afford to pay for mod points so it is living in a well-deserved "-1" oblivion, I wish there was a -10, cause this one deserves it based on its mendacity and laziness.
Only I can judge you.
what are "underpants gnomes"? Are they very vague and fuzzy creatures?
Only I can judge you.
tangent much?
I get that you have a drum to bang but, could you do it somewhere more appropriate? Like on the walls of your Mom's basement instead of the interwebs? Your use of bolding is impressive, it is great to see you now have some command of using HTML tags. Great job!
Only I can judge you.
I can't tell if you're serious or not, but...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gnomes_(South_Park)#Plot
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I was definitely serious. Thanks!
South Park is not in my regular rotation, not my style. I watched a few episodes but just couldn't get into it, my life doesn't feel that impoverished for having deleted that from my viewing habits.
Only I can judge you.
I guarantee you, as sure as the sun sets at night and rises in the morning. The ISPs will argue for control when it suits them, and against responsibility when it suits them. You linking the two issues will not matter 2 bits to their corporate interests.
Here's what they will say:
Liability? Oh no, we're just common carriers!
Control? Oh yes, we need that, to, ahem, improve service and provide targeted advertising! Why, untargeted advertising is bad, it is mere spam! Targeted advertising is good, no one can be against stuff they want!
Left unsaid will be the shakedown the ISPs will perform against content companies: Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Vimeo, Ashley Madison, eBay, PayPal, LinkedIn, Steam, Pinterest, Netflix, ...
Also left unsaid will be the quiet death of startups and innovators who cannot pay. They "don't matter" to the ISPs because they don't have money to pay off the protection racket. Nice company you've got there; it would be a shame if something happened to it!
If it's going to be that unpopular -- and I'm sure they know it will be -- how about... not trying it in the first place because you're supposed to represent me and not corporations? They're going to either start a smear campaign over Net Neutrality as it gets closer or be as quiet about it as possible, but only because I'm pretty sure they know they have to convince people that removing it is not the worst thing to hit the Internet since fake news.
This is such a prime example of how much power companies have over the American population at large and it's pretty disgusting. Am I a dirty liberal? Probably, but I don't see why expecting representatives to represent the opinions of the majority of the country, instead of a very rich few -- sorry, vocal few; campaign donations are free speech now -- is so difficult. There's a good reason why Congress' approval rating has been so low for so long.
"Corporations are people, too." I hope Mitt Romney is never given the chance to forget he uttered that filth.
Or more simply: all streaming video metered at $10/GB, except if you use your ISP's own streaming video service -- meaning that becomes pretty much impossible for the next netflix-style company to disrupt the existing market and offer something better since it's extremely hard to reach a critical mass of users that way.
...election campaign would've done a lot more for their cause than millions of dollars in lobbying. Instead, they went all in for Hillary, and fought tooth and nail for her. Don't be surprised if the current administration is rather pissed off at them. Elections have consequences. Backing the wrong side in elections has bad consequences.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
"Urging" means nothing against the army of telcos and their huge donations with sights set on burring kill Net Neutrality.
Plus the telcos claim it "hurts jobs", Trump got the champion kill to lead the Department.
Nope, if Silicon Valley want's to save NN, those tech billionaires break need to break out the war chest check books, it's time to "go to the mattresses".
I'm OK with the Danegeld if they make it legal for a bunch of us to put on helmets and pick up swords and attack the corporate offices. That's the traditional way to deal with Danegeld.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I Pay my ISP to provide that infrastructure.
I pay 40% more than I used to, for the same speed.
It looks like I am indeed Paying to increase the total bandwidth I (not Netflix, it is me making the request) use.
How is Netflix adding to their cost, is Netflix running stuff over their Network just for fun, or is it to their customers that are requesting it?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg