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Steve Wozniak: Net Neutrality Rollback 'Will End the Internet As We Know It' (siliconbeat.com)
An anonymous reader quotes Silicon Beat:
Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak penned an op-ed on Friday with a former Federal Communications Commission chairman, urging the current FCC to stop its proposed rollback of Obama-era net neutrality regulations. In the op-ed published by USA Today, Wozniak and Michael Copps, who led the FCC from 2001 to 2011, argued the rollback will threaten freedom for internet users and may corrode democracy... "Sometimes there's a nugget of truth to the adage that Washington policymakers are disconnected from the people they purport to represent," they wrote. "It is a stirring example of democracy in action. With the Internet's future as a platform for innovation and democratic discourse on the line, a coalition of grassroots and diverse groups joined with technology firms to insist that the FCC maintain its 2015 open internet (or 'net neutrality') rules."
In the joint letter, Wozniak and Copps write that "We come from different walks of life, but each of us recognizes that the FCC is considering action that could end the internet as we know it -- a dynamic platform for entrepreneurship, jobs, education, and free expression."
"Will consumers and citizens control their online experiences, or will a few gigantic gatekeepers take this dynamic technology down the road of centralized control, toll booths and constantly rising prices for consumers? At stake is the nature of the internet and its capacity to transform our lives even more than it already has."
In the joint letter, Wozniak and Copps write that "We come from different walks of life, but each of us recognizes that the FCC is considering action that could end the internet as we know it -- a dynamic platform for entrepreneurship, jobs, education, and free expression."
"Will consumers and citizens control their online experiences, or will a few gigantic gatekeepers take this dynamic technology down the road of centralized control, toll booths and constantly rising prices for consumers? At stake is the nature of the internet and its capacity to transform our lives even more than it already has."
If the internet was supposed to be free and open then Steve Jobs would have built it that way to begin with instead of with a single holy app store. Keep things simple, not neutral.
What bugs me is that there so many enemies of freedom and so many enemies of 'Net neutrality. On one hand, every dictatorship wants to censor the Internet, and on the other, there are a few corporatists who want to kill it and turn it into a corporate media distribution system. Everyone else on the planet wants a free and open Internet. Yet we seem to have to be fighting these anti-freedom forces endlessly. Well, I'm staying - not breaking - staying - and will be donating - yet again - to a pro 'Net neutrality group.
It's only in the last few years that companies have created totally vertical integration with content creation to delivery. That is a major difference, in my mind; hence the need for laws.
-
How the heck can anyone believe that there's currently "net neutrality" when we've so recently seen certain videos being demonetized, certain subreddits being banned, certain domain registrations being dropped, certain web hosting services being cancelled, and certain CDN services being denied, all because this content or web sites affected didn't express a far-left political viewpoint? Anyone who thinks there's "net neutrality" now is a fool.
Lets face it, American internet users are just cattle who need to be fed and exploited by a few walled garden corporations farming income for their billionaire owners. The idea that the internet is useful for anything but extorting money from its users is laughably left wing. Enjoy your slavery cattle!
Facts are history now plebs have politics for religion on social media.
But he's really gone over the top on this one. The Net Neut rules have barely been in place for a year and a half. For him and the vast majority of the rest of us, "the Internet as we know it" is the Internet that existed before these rules were put into place.
Now that Trump has his pen and his phone, do you still like that imperial Presidency?
Where laws don't matter?
If Obama can implement net neutrality without Congressional action, Trump can unimplement it.
Who's freedom would that be? The freedom of companies like Google and Cloudfare to ban websites and confiscate domains they don't like? I sure hope it's the end of that internet! I liked the one we had before.
Oy vey! It's anudda Shoah, I tells ya! Anudda Shoah!
Perhaps you weren't born at the time, but it used to be that you could pick any ISP you wanted...by simply dialing a phone number with your modem. Since those days, technology has advanced, but policy has regressed. I should be able to connect to an ISP of my choice...over a high-speed broadband connection. That is what the FCC mandated for 'long distance' providers. The Internet should be no different.
Part of the problem is that while yes, there are many users of the Internet who want it to stay open and free, there is a segment of the Consumer population that wants it to be Cable TV, and Perhaps Gaming Distribution 2.0
The idea behind DRM, and video rental systems over the internet is just asinine. But you have to look at where a particular segment of the Computer using public is going: Android Tablets, which is Linux turned against iteslf, and iPads. What do both of these things look like? Portable Televisions. They don't have keyboards, they don't have mice. They are tools of Content consumption.
Steve Jobs, Woz's partner, was a huge part of this. Openness on the Apple Platforms ended with the Apple II GS series, and the Macs were all largely closed to the outside world until the advent of OSX. Many Pre-OSX Macs, had proprietary EVERYTHING, and even the speaker Jack was proprietary. OSX opened the Mac world up some by giving us a MacOS running on BSD.
This allowed Mac to Survive and gve us the Trusted Computing Nightmare that was iOS. All the sudden you have what the DRM Corps want: A Computing platform where everything is a Rental transaction, and consumers money can be funneled from their wallets constantly. Thats what is happening now with iDevice owners.
Apple should have died off back in the 90s. They should have gone out of business completely. Consumers should have resisted the introduction of DRM into computers and rejected networks like NetFlix.
Maybe for the USA, but the rest of us will move on and leave the USA further and further behind.
At some point in time, a complete "hardware" - reboot.
"30+ years without "net neutrality" regulations, 2 years with" - bzzzzzzt. Wrong.
For the 1990's to mid 2000's ISPs and telecoms were typically separate entities. Telecom access was dialup or DSL - both regulated by Title II. Since the ISPs weren't in the telecom business they didn't require regulation - they had no reason to block/throttle based on service/source/destination/whatever.
From then until 2014 various FCC rules and regulations (including the "Open Internet Order") governed ISPs. In 2014 Verizon "ruined it for everyone" by challenging the OIO and taking the FCC to court. They won, but the judge suggested that if the FCC was going to police ISPs it would have to classify them as common carriers. So the FCC did.
Did not CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, and many other internet providers have this same vertical integration?
I can still use the Internet without touching Facebook or Google. For the time being. The Net Neutrality laws were put in place to maintain the status quo in the face of possible breaking the 'net into walled gardens. 'But we would never block or restrict access to the Internet' many ISPs say. Fine. Then Net Neutrality rules won't affect the way you do business, so shut up.
Yeah, these rules are a prior restriction on certain business models. Which isn't really the American way. We'd rather leave the market open, allow businesses to develop their own products and structures and apply rules and legislation once some harm to consumers has been identified. But the Internet is a natural monopoly of sorts. There isn't another one that I could choose should the current one prove to be unsatisfactory. Even if I have multiple ISPs serving me, should Google, Sourceforge or the GOP fundraising websites end up on the other network, that would pretty much destroy the utility of the single interconnected network.
Have gnu, will travel.
Your argument is quite flawed. Firstly, you're implying that just because the regulation wasn't needed before means it wont be needed now or in the future. And if it wasn't needed because everyone is already playing nice then there should be no harm in having it, since the only way it would effect anything is if they decided not to play nice. Secondly you're trying to deflect to a different issue with a "two wrongs make a right" sentiment. Just because Facebook, Google and Twitter are bad for the health for internet doesn't mean it's OK for Comcast, Verizon and AT&T to screw over the internet even further.
Internet spans the whole world, not just the United States. Just pointing it out, don't mind me.
I guess the biggest advantage of net neutrality would be ISPs not putting in buggy filters/overhead to detect and slow down certain streams but end up bogging down their whole network.
However the internet experience doesn't seem overly neutral already.
Free lanes were recently converted to toll lanes here, and what was the result: Gridlock for the regular folks, and those in the Teslas, Porsches, BMWs made it home on time while everyone else waited...this will be no different.
He means, the regulation that we've had for 2 years of the internet's 48 year history? Is that the control grab that the internet is doomed without?
The internet did fine for all of its history so far without increasing government regulation. Now, we're seeing more and more grabs for control by repressive governments all around the world who want to have the final say over what happens on it.
Um... no.
FTFY
Not saying it's a good thing, one party impeding another party's freedom to express themselves basically isn't a good idea, even if for no other reason than it's far better to know what's actually going on around you than not, but your case is always better if you're accurate about describing what's actually going on.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
So rolling back something that was never actually implemented in the first place (the policy was due to go into effect in March, I think) is going to spell doom for the ENTIRE Internet as if US policy has any bearing on the rest of world.
Uhh...we actually did have net neutrality for most of the time that we had the Internet. Remember: the Internet operated over telephone lines for most of its existence, and those lines were regulated under the same Title II classification that Obama’s FCC simply extended to cable ISPs. It’s a matter of bringing Internet-over-cable in line with the regulations that have existed for Internet-over-anything-else for the duration of the Internet’s history.
That,or one could actively support - both morally and financially - those who are fighting for 'Net neutrality.
I think Wozniak is vastly overestimating the influence of the United States here. It may have some consequences elsewhere because a number of big Internet service companies are based in the US, but in general I think nobody outside the US will notice.
That sounds like good news. I'd welcome an end to the internet as we know it where everyone connects everything from trafficlights to nuclear powerplants onto some global network. Insane.
Just to play devil's advocate for a moment, the other side of that coin is that goods and services can be funneled to the consumer constantly as well. That's sort of the whole idea of a consumer. It's not a one-way street. When it is, consumers aren't consumers any longer, and their willingness to let the funneling of their resources away will also go away.
At the most basic level, either you consume, or you die. Next step up, you consume and your life / lifestyle can be enhanced. These are all desirable to some degree. There are legitimate issues about reasonable and unreasonable levels and kinds of consumption, but what makes that really tricky is that it almost always varies from person to person.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
For the first half of that, the Internet was not widely commercialized. Was it more free before it was commercialized or after?
Will you join me in condemning commerce on the Internet?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Nonsense; we've had those kinds of companies since the earliest days of the Internet.
Most stupid comment already at the beginning. You probably do not realize that there is a dynamic to the behavior of anti net-neutrality entities as well.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Not sure why this is modded Troll. Agree or disagree with the his point, sure. But This is a perfect example of "Troll is not a replacement for "I disagree".
Beware of the Leopard.
The companies might have existed but the software sophistication of those companies wasn't at the level it is now, they were trying to make it work.
Today, they are trying to only make the experience good if you consume their content, and worsen the experience if you don't - with crap like zero rating and intentional congestion to competing content providers.
I can still use the Internet without touching Facebook or Google.
Facebook, barely, Google, hahaha, no. You do any web browsing whatsoever, you're loading fonts, API shit, libraries, et cetera from Google.
And Facebook's closing in on the same level of pervasiveness.
Of course, you could be one of those retards who thinks that by using a text-based browser with no functionality, you're successfully avoiding tracking. Protip: You're still falling afoul of analytics which you can do _nothing_ about, and your ISP is likely selling information to the big boys on top of it.
Or is he just uninformed? 5G rolls out in a couple years. When it does, most people in the US will get 2 or 3 or 4 more competing providers offering them broadband service over fixed wireless. Add that to the 1 or 2 or 3 broadband choices most of us have now (I have at least 3) and that’s more than enough to prevent most of the problems you people like to fantasize about.
We didn't need the regulations for 30 plus years. They put the regulations on place to keep the internet as it is. Not to change it.
AT BEST it means that the poster has never used or looked into the internet previous to the current administration, and therefore would be lying about the claim of 30+ years. There's no "-1 lying their ass off" mod, so troll mod is closest, since the only non-liar way the OP could make the claim is if they knew it was wrong but wanted to rile people up by their asinine and ridiculous statement.
See the other posters with their presentation of reality.
But being a zombie argument,there IS no argument against the OP, and, again, it needs to be buried, like any zombie. And since there's no "-1 zombie argument" mod, Troll mod is again the only valid option.
foreverity
I think the word you're looking for is eterness or something like that.
Ezekiel 23:20
Both FB and Google have their little widget snitches all over the Internet. But the domains of these widget snitches are generally known and can be deadsunk in your hosts file. I have a lot of Google spying deadsunk, and on some of my computers all of Facebook deadsunk. The only reason I haven't complete deadsunk Google's divers domains is that I like YouTube and need some Google stuff to work to enjoy YouTube. If there was anything that could be considered competition to YouTube I'd use it, but as it is, websites like DailyMotion et al. are markedly limited when compared to YouTube. Facebook, I use on one computer merely to log into then promptly out of my FB account. All the other computers here do not even know facebook.com and all the other snitchy FB domains even exist.
Yeah, you can do what you want with your own website, that is a almost a completely separate issue from 'Net neutrality. So if Google decided their website would be bright purple on Tuesdays, every Tuesday, with loud blaring embedded audio screams to boot, that's Google's business .. and has nothing to do with the issue of 'Net neutrality.
The argument that it was needed now is the one that is flawed. Turning it into a regulated utility essentially damns it to stay exactly where it is frozen in time. With Google and Facebook at the helm.
Don't believe me. Look at regulated electric utilities. Still running 40+ year old coal and nuclear plants and not planning to shut them down for another few decades. Why? Because nothing you can do about it, cost is sunk, and their profit is guaranteed.
Essentially this regulation is about handing the reins over to large multinational corporations, who WILL decide what you can and cannot see.
But please keep espousing the benefits of net neutrality while they steal the internet right out from under you, regulated all to hell and permanently. Another Obama era piece of shit that will never go away.
I really like Woz, but all of this bullshit about "hurr durr repealing net neutrality is going to destroy the internet as we've known it" is such absurd hyperbolic bullshit. These rules didn't even exist until a year or so ago and I don't believe they ever actually were *implemented* before the repeal.
So nothing has changed. Legislatively and legally and as far as regulations, the internet is the same today as it was a year ago and five years ago and fifteen years ago.
How does it feel to have big companies refusing to transmit your bits because they don't like the content? Maybe you're getting a feeling of what the alt right has to put up with now. Don't worry though - they are private companies and they can do what they like. It's not the same as government censorship.
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Since most people don't really understand how the net work, let alone how computers work, it's ridiculously easy to bullshit the masses. You can see this every day with phishing scams, "Your PC/phone/tablet is INFECTED!" scamware, social media hoaxes, and on and on. Unfortunately, this also gives big ISPs (and Hollywood for that matter) plenty of room to sling their own bullshit as well.
Oh, no! You have walked into the slavering fangs of a lurking grue!
I'm so god damn fucking tired of this net neutrality bullshit.
STOP FIGHTING THE WRONG THING.
It's like the issue of health care. Sorry, but most of the people fighting for universal coverage and all this bullshit are FUCKING IDIOTS. I agree with the need to do something about health care, but they are FIGHTING TO ADDRESS IT IN THE WORST WAY POSSIBLE.
With health care, they simply want to take the fucking INSANE costs of health care and spread them across *everyone* so that everyone has to pay for everyone, period. And the health care industry still makes out like fucking bandits. The REAL fight that should be happening is to address the costs in the first fucking place, so that an individual can be responsible for their OWN fucking health insurance the same way they are for their own fucking auto insurance.
With the internet, they simply want to force shit legislatively to prevent over-reaching corporate interests and censorship. They're addressing a failure in regulation with more regulation which will also fail. We all get fucked. The REAL fight that should be happening is to address the lack of competition and the granting of regional monopolies by internet providers. OPEN IT UP and all of these issues will resolve themselves. Comcast gets to fuck me in the ass because they're the only player in any given area that they do business. That's fucking BULLSHIT.
steve, you are not bill gates, steve jobs or linus torvalds. nobody has the status to say when or if the Internet will end.
They'be both perfectly cromulent words.
If you think I voted for Trump because of this post, you're wrong. I voted for Dr. Jill Stein of the Green Party. Again.
Very true indeed. We don't need laws until people seek to do things that are unfair and unacceptable - then we have to make laws to forbid those acts. However, any societies that has to make laws against X is likely already to be saturated with X; the existence of the laws strongly suggests that they are being broken wholesale.
The following extract from the Tao Te Ching is relevant, especially the final part about "thieves and brigands".
"The more prohibitions that are imposed on people,
The poorer the people become.
The more sharp weapons the people possess,
The greater is the chaos in the country.
The more clever and crafty the people become,
The more unusual affairs occur.
The more laws and regulations that exist,
The more thieves and brigands appear".
- Tao Te Ching
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I can still use the Internet without touching Facebook or Google. For the time being. The Net Neutrality laws were put in place to maintain the status quo in the face of possible breaking the 'net into walled gardens. 'But we would never block or restrict access to the Internet' many ISPs say. Fine. Then Net Neutrality rules won't affect the way you do business, so shut up.
Uh uh. The way to regulate is to wait until anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior manifests, THEN start rolling out the rules. Prospective regulation is a recipe for stifling innovation and locking in the status quo. Saying, "You won't be hurt so shut up" is not sufficient reason for slapping rules on people.
Mod parent up.
How about a moderation of -1 pedantic.
That's why the Internet wire should be - and should be kept - open, fair, and neutral for everyone who wants to make use of it.
Well then, the regulators should put out a statement outlining what exactly is considered a free, open and fair Internet and mail or email it to those who operate the wires so they are well aware of expected behaviour. And should any unfair, censorial and/ or anti-competitive practice(s) arise at the wire level there would be cause legitimate to regulate according to that statement.
'And he has no one to answer to but his creator either, which frees him up to speak his mind honestly.
Infinitysimum?
#DeleteFacebook
So, how about this overly-simplified concept:
Get a bunch of neighbors together. Buy a commercial internet connection. Use open source WiFi mesh to connect everyone together.
It won't work everywhere, but it would in many US neighborhoods.
-D
I know right? Why do we even have speed limits on the road. It's not like a horse drawn carriage can do any more than 20km/h. Nothing ever changes. We as a species are in a perfectly stable equilibrium. We certainly don't need any regulations, every regulation anyone could ever need already exists.
Or maybe... and just hear me out... Maybe the world has changed, corporate interests have changed, and the reason the regulations were brought in to begin with was that the first 28+ years of the internet was actively under threat from corporate actors.
If I sound like I'm mocking you condescendingly, I am.
Netflix and a host of other companies disagrees with you.
But as a consumer, fuck'em. They need to be treated as a utility if they want to keep their local monopolies.
It's 2017 and I'm still on 1.5 Mbps/.25Mbps connection for $50/month. Or it's get an overprices shit package from the Comca$t crooks.
Because AT&T and Conca$t bribed my mostly Republican legislature.
Google wants to come into my area but the other assholes sue to stop them.
He was talented in hardware 30 years ago. He is now a living relic and his opinions have been shit for some time.
Who here really thinks that the internet is more free today than it was just a few years ago, ...
Everyone who thinks that the net was MORE FREE after the corporate takeover of independent providers of Cable services, raise your hand to your ass and insert.
Naw, in the old days before the mainstream media content was online, everything was already vertically integrated. They create their giant silos of crap, but you can't even smell it from someplace decent.
They're way less integrated than AOL or Delphi were.
The reason it can't "end the internet as we know it" is because the internet is not only proprietary video services. Those are what will be harmed, but that was always a shit show. In the old days you had to pay bribes to RealMedia if you wanted your content to be full speed.
The problem is competition in the last mile, not the rules. Net neutrality is a great concept, but the only reason to make it a rule instead of a selling point is the lack of competition. That won't last forever; places that are freed and get competition don't tend to go back. It will slowly go away.
Blindly mod parent up because it follows your ideology and has nothing to do with NN. Nice.
What do you expect from a country who's laws do apply to the wealthy who's behavior would be considered treason in a civilized country.
The wealthy have controlled and limited public education for over a 100 years and you blame your masses for being uneducated, all of America is working as intended divided and conquered by shit leaders who work against them and shit media who lie to them about everything.
I can't wait until your ISP screws you over. When that day comes(it will be soon, if not already) then I'll link you back to this thread.
:o) Trading, prospering, being productive and the like is part of freedom. I have no issue with people working with the Internet, so long as it's on fair, open honest grounds. Moreover, just because an event occurs on the Internet is no excuse should it be some sort of defrauding or theft. So things being on the up and up, no one really should have issue either way, and you are free to do as you please, and you shouldn't need suffer fear of legitimate authorities. If not, if you act criminally towards your neighbour virtual or no, Internet or no, you should fear the authorities.
What you complain about the left doing is what the right are doing right now. Look at the orange Tantrum In Chief.
funny you managed to stir discussion over a utterly moot point, you better stick to write lousy php code or whatever your real talents allow you
Can you, though? I just sent a gift to a friend on the opposite coast. The package weighed 52 lbs. I paid about $70 to get it there. Can you do that? I don't think you could even do it for fuel costs, much less pay the driver and the wear and tear on the transport vehicle(s.)
Yes, there's a lot of truth to this, especially since we now have a bought-and-paid for legislature. Net neutrality is definitely very high up on the list of things like this, too.
I'm not really suggesting that. I'm more suggesting that the consumers aren't the problem. IMHO, the regulators are the problem. The people that are supposed to be watching out for the best interests of the consumers. The post which I replied to was proposing that consumers were a significant part of the problem - I don't see it that way.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Yeah, mostly at this point in time, it is about the far right. Because they're very active right now. The nail that sticks up the furthest is the nail that gets hammered down.
Either way, it's bad to repress anyone's speech. Anyone's speech, IMHO. But what's going on right now is a flare-up being caused by some very prominent far, far-right-wing talk. Moderate ideas don't tend to lead to repression of speech. Extreme ones do, and right now, the extremists are mostly evident on the right facet of the spectrum. They're pissing people off not just on the left, but in the middle as well. This leads to muttering of the form "someone oughta shut those people up" because, to be blunt, it's irritating and people tend to want to scratch the itch without really thinking about the scab and scar that will result.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Net Neutrality does not put the definition of QoS in the hands of the federal government, so how CAN something go wrong with putting QoS in the hands of the government?
PLEASE stop swallowing the bilgewater from the anti-NN propaganda sites. If you're not swallowing bilgewater, stop producing it you deceptive retard.
Remember: the Internet operated over telephone lines for most of its existence
This is a gross oversimplification that elides the entire point of the Net Neut debate: Yes, the user's connection to the ISP was over a telephone line and was regulated by Title II. But so what? There was zero regulation of (1) the rate at which the ISP decided to send any particular piece of data over that telephone line; and (2) the rate at which the ISP decided to allow its customers access to the Internet at large. All that was handled by big scary market forces.
Net Neut regulations truly paralleling Title II would mean that the ISP (e.g., CableCo) has to send all data between itself and its customers down at the same rates, but that's not what anyone really cares about. As I've said before, this entire battle is generally a proxy for "stream as much as I want to without paying more," which involves not just data flow from the ISP to the customer but data flow to the ISP from the outside world. This puts ISPs in a position of having to set all-you-can-eat prices without any reasonable expectation of what a given customer can and will actually "eat." That's an unsustainable business model. Just because the FCC temporarily pretended there was a free lunch doesn't mean that there really is one.
If they totally de-regulate ISPs and the Internet in America turns into something more like AOL than a free and open Internet, then I'm likely bailing out, getting a library card, and likely having a slightly smaller electric bill every month from not having a computer and networking equipment powered up all the time. Got no interest in what ISPs want to do with the Internet, given their druthers.
But with all this talk of mandatory social media contact information being tracked and monitored, given away at the border, our free Internet is already shitting itself.
Get ready for real cancer with Trumpies and their vatnik-minded cronies trying their luck at regulation.
Net neutrality is irrelevant today. Google, Facebook, and domain providers are engaged in far worse and nefarious activities.
Bifurcation. Everything is both fair and unfair. acceptable and unacceptable, right and wrong. Property is theft.
Hate to break it to you, but the whole world is that way.
Is it as gross a "simplification" as the claim that there's been 30+ years of no NN laws and the internet has been fine?
No.
But here you are whining about a meaninglessly different quibble on detail instead of the honking big lie of the OP.
Wonder why?
I'm wondering what you use besides Google. For me, it has answers I just can't find anywhere else.
Expected behavior is a shifting target. Parts of the internet are like party lines carrying traffic for different groups of users. Should the Internet company provide QoS on some packets for you or not?
'But we would never block or restrict access to the Internet' many ISPs say. Fine. Then Net Neutrality rules won't affect the way you do business, so shut up.
Exactly. I wonder why no one has bearded Ajit Pai on the record -- preferably on camera -- and asked him outright, "Mr. Pai, if the Internet corporations say they're not violating net neutrality now, and they have no intentions of violating net neutrality, then the existence of net neutrality regulations has no effect on them. Why would you want to waste the FCC's resources in the repeal of something which won't affect them unless they want to engage in practices that are prohibited under its provisions? This creates the appearance of your acting solely for the benefit of the corporations, rather than for the citizens of the United States."
"This is a gross oversimplification"
No, it's not. You just don't think hard enough.
"Yes, the user's connection to the ISP was over a telephone line"
Yup.
" There was zero regulation of (1) the rate at which the ISP decided to send any particular piece of data over that telephone line"
Because we had 56k modems or 128Kb ISDN. The rate was 56k or 128Kb. Or the big, awesome T1-5 cables. Nerds at home dreamed of having their own dedicated T1.
"the rate at which the ISP decided to allow its customers access to the Internet at large"
See above.
" All that was handled by big scary market forces."
Except not, it was tech.
"would mean that the ISP (e.g., CableCo) has to send all data between itself and its customers down at the same rates"
Customers being the wholesale customers, not the consumers of the 'prodcut' of the connection service. Seems like a great idea, should apply to ISPs.
"As I've said before, this entire battle is generally a proxy for "stream as much as I want to without paying more," "
Uh, yeah. Just like business and people 'won't pay any more taxes than they have to' and would be foolish to do so.
" involves not just data flow from the ISP to the customer but data flow to the ISP from the outside world. This puts ISPs in a position of having to set all-you-can-eat prices without any reasonable expectation of what a given customer can and will actually "eat." That's an unsustainable business model. Just because the FCC temporarily pretended there was a free lunch doesn't mean that there really is one."
I don't even know what you're getting at here. You set up a cynical strawman in the preceding sentence and then take it down here, I guess. The whole above paragraph has nothing to do with Net Neutrality.
perpetuanium
But of course, some will be more neutral than others.
A continuum exists between "trolling" and "serious, thoughtful discussion". The provocative language of the post is clearly further to one side of the continuum. Besides, if there were any thought put into the post, it wouldn't have glaring inconsistencies like attributing the rise of Facebook and Google to regulations that weren't in place until 2 years ago. Whatever argument he might have been trying to make has been totally thrashed repeatedly in this thread.
These days, we have genuine trolls who use "freedom of thought/expression" in the manner that a terrorist uses a human shield. Some of them don't even know they're trolling. Some have just been reading other troll posts and web sites and think this is the thing to do. There has been a lot of funny business surrounding the net neutrality issue, beyond the usual Telecom lobbying. like the flood of automated comments against net neutrality on the FCC's web site and their refusal to investigate it. Come to think of it, there's been a lot of similar funny business around the FCC chairman himself, and the man who appointed him.
You won't know a deceptive actor by his name or face or UID, but you will know him by his actions.
They certainly are and they obviously keep it as hush hush as possible.
Still both issues are vital to the internet at large. The restrictions posed by the EU are every bit as bad too.
Good, end it. Alphabet, Apple, FB, M$ have corrupted the original purpose to the point of breaking it anyway. Good riddance.
In case it was not already glaringly obvious, consider how amazingly applicable the extract from the Tao Te Ching is to today's USA.
More and more prohibitions... and the people (except for the 1%) have become steadily poorer.
The more "sharp weapons" (nowadays mostly guns, although knives are also common), the greater the chaos (mass shootings..., police brutality...)
The more clever and crafty the people become (in response to the cleverness and craftiness of politicians, Wall Street, and their pet lawyers), the more "unusual affairs" occur (Enron, Bernie Madoff, pretty much everyone on Wall Street, the Democratic Party, the Republicn Party, the CIA...)
The more laws and regulations, the more thieves and brigands. Well, just look at them!
I am sure that there are many other solipsists out there.
I would agree with you....except there have been various blocking mechanisms in place and the net neutrality regulations only when some large ISPs began demanding payments so as to not throttle back speeds.
There were large content creators that were also large nationwide ISPs in the 1980s? Because that's what we're dealing with now.
We absolutely need more regulation. I have no issue with regulating your speech, your requirement to purchase health insurance, the regulation of your guns, any of it. Bring it on!
Yea, I mean, if years ago, imagine how the net would be destroyed if a company like Time Warner and America Online had merged to become a mega.... Oh, wait...
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
The way to regulate is to wait until anti-competitive or anti-consumer behavior manifests, THEN start rolling out the rules.
Too late. And very difficult to do once a company has monetized some particular behavior. You'll get shareholders to come crying to their legislators to lay off, lest the proposed rules harm profits and their holdings value.
Prospective regulation is a recipe for stifling innovation and locking in the status quo.
Fine. I want to buy a product that meets some consistent and repeatable standards. Innovation can be provided by new entrants into new markets, selling their products as enhancements to the current baseline. I'd be really pissed if my power company started delivering 48 Vdc or 400 Hz power to my house tomorrow.
Have gnu, will travel.
I'm not sure why you'd say it wasn't commercialized. It was open and blossomed commercially from like, 1993 on.
-- I'm the root of all that's evil, but you can call me cookie..
Yes, there were.
In any case, whatever problem you delude yourself into thinking exist in the marketplace, regulation by the FCC is not the answer.