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Reddit, Twitter, and 200 Others Say Ending Net Neutrality Could Ruin Cyber Monday (theverge.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: More than 200 businesses and trade organizations have signed a letter to the FCC asking that the agency reconsider its plan to end net neutrality. The letter is signed by an array of big and recognizable tech and web companies: that includes Airbnb, Automattic (which owns WordPress), Etsy, Foursquare, GitHub, Pinterest, Reddit, Shutterstock, Sonos, Square, Squarespace, Tumblr (certainly to the displeasure of its owner, Verizon), Twitter, and Vimeo, among quite a few others. The letter is being released on Cyber Monday and speaks directly to the internet's constantly growing role in the US economy. "The internet is increasingly where commerce happens," the letter says. It cites figures saying that $3.5 billion in online sales happed last year on Cyber Monday and $3 billion on Black Friday. Throughout all of last year, online purchases accounted for $400 billion in sales.
Finally, a convincing argument to end net neutrality
Twinstiq, game news
Please reconsider.
Instead of doing anything to stop you, we'll just pretend we care and ask you to stop. We don't want established players such as ourselves to have a death grip on the industry. No, not at all. So please, won't you reconsider?
Run the experiment.
Don't like it? Invest in your own network infrastructure, folks.
Government gets in the way of your effort? Well, then government is the actual problem, now isn't it.
If cyber monday and black friday only get 3x an average day in sales, that's like the difference in mall sales between a Saturday and a Monday.
I would have thought the difference was bigger than that.
The only way to convince this FCC to keep Net Neutrality will be to hit them where it counts - in their constituents pocketbooks. If every fifth Comcast, ATT, Charter, Verizon, etc., customer dropped their internet package effective immediately, they might get the idea and hang onto it.
Otherwise internet users are hoping for a judicial mandate to overturn this capricious politically motivated change to policy, and that will take a decade or more to resolve, and by that time the damage will have been done.
Invest in your own network infrastructure, folks.
Well now, this is the problem isn't it. It would take billions to start a company to compete with the likes of AT&T, Verizon, and Level 3. And they will use their power to stand right in front of you at the city council meetings explaining why you shouldn't be allowed to use their poles that we the citizens paid for.
So yeah... let's get started building our own ISPs... It's going to be a long road.
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Jeff Bezos will only have an eleven figure net worth!
alibaba did $25B on singles day; does china have fcc-style net-neutrality?
Store located on Elm Street claims making Elm Street less accessible will be catastrophic.
News at 11.
-Styopa
If it is that important to these players, and if they are handling that much of commerce, why the hell they did not spend enough in lobbying (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) to "educate" me using the proper channels (i.e K street firms staffed by ex senators and reps). The way I see it now, all these firms are making this load of money and they are not paying proper tribute, no no not tribute, campaign contributions, to us. Under what premise these companies expect any help from us? What part of pay to play they don't understand?
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
If it’s on reddit and Twitter I guess that’s that. Get the lights when you leave.
President Madagascar is going to fix the economy by killing everything that makes it run. Duh.
Love,
Pooty Poot
"beware of Greeks bearing gifts"?
Can we still say that on the internet?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
And if you have to ask how net neutrality is protecting cyber monday then we're just going to accuse you of being stupid, mostly because we don't have any case to explain this.
I'm so tired of hearing about Cyber Monday, Pre Cyber Monday, Pre Pre Cyber Monday, Cyber Wednesday, Post Cyber Monday blow out sale, Your last chance to get online black Friday deals...blah blah blah
Again you are being stupid about the topic.
What would happen is amazing paid comcast $500 million to priotize their traffic for cyber Monday? So that Wal-Mart traffic ended up going half as fast as shopping at Amazon?
How much wouild that affect buying habits?
Net neutrality is there to prevent that kind of scenario. Where the big rich stores get extra fast service and everyone else loses out completely.
Stupid conservatives don't know what they are fighting. Because all they listen to us fox news.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
You can be sure that Comcast is right now figuring how to put a toll on every transaction made over its lines.
That tells me that net neutrality regulations - while hiding behind the facade of "good for the consumer" - will actually be used by entrenched players to increase competitive barriers.
It's called "regulatory capture":
Regulatory capture is a form of government failure that occurs when a regulatory agency, created to act in the public interest, instead advances the commercial or political concerns of special interest groups that dominate the industry or sector it is charged with regulating.
And it benefits large corporations already embedded in a market.
Do you really think a few thousand pages of "net neutrality" regulations aren't going to be de facto written by Google's lawyers? Hell, "net neutrality" as being discussed is the product of regulatory fiat by an industry lobbyist.
What on Earth makes anyone think "net neutrality" isn't just Google et al making a politicized attempt to regulate away competition?
The plan just got fucked up when the country gagged on having Hillary! shoved down its throat.
There is no way in hell the ISPs are going to mess with eCommerce except where it pertains to bandwidth-heavy goods and services. That would be so greedy and such an assault on ordinary users that it would make the average Republican voter become open-minded to nationalizing the big ISPs and making utilities out of them. It would rank right up there on the level of stupid as fining grandma for downloading family photos and using Facebook to talk to her grandkids.
So who do you want controlling your access to the free market? Verizon, Comcast or AT&T?
Where's that eye rolling emoji support on Slashdot when you need it most?
Then I would use it on your post. Thanks I'll be here all week. Try the fish and tip your waitstaff.
But seriously having rules to keep ISPs from preventing a free and open internet is exactly what's needed considering how they have tried to mess with it before. It's like those ridiculous warning sign label you've seen: "Do not lift lawn mower when it is running." It's ridiculous but you have to think there's a reason they are there. Some idiot cut his fingers and sued because there wasn't a label.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
No, they listen to their wallets after they get pumped full of campaign contributions from Comcast/Verizon/TW etc.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/29/15100620/congress-fcc-isp-web-browsing-privacy-fire-sale
Technically 1/2 the speed probably wouldn't be a big difference for online stores. I doubt it would be that noticeable. 30mbs vs 15mbs or even 2mbs vs 1mbs.
Where it would be more of an issue is for, the time sensitive releases. Such as a new iPhone that gets sold out in 5 minutes online, or The hottest sale which has a quick time to buy. So the ISP can slow down access to that site, so you don't get the deal, then if you still want it, you may go to the next lowest priced version who happens to be paying you for the speed.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I find the relationship between Reddit and net neutrality to be confusing and perhaps hypocritical.
So this letter promotes "neutrality" and "free and open internet" and "unfettered access" and so on. It is against "blocking others" and large telecom companies "picking winners and losers".
But then I think about my experiences with the Reddit discussion platform.
In my experience and opinion, Reddit's discussion platform has been one of the least-neutral and least-open and least-free discussion platforms that I've ever encountered. If you don't express the "correct" opinions, you'll often be modded down. It's not unusual to be completely banned from subreddits merely for expressing a unique or unconventional opinion.
This also reminds me of back when Slashdot reported that at least one major executive at Reddit was apparently caught editing the comments posted by Reddit users.
Then there are all of the subreddits that have been banned now and then. That's "picking winners and losers", I think.
So I find it hypocritical for them to demand all of this neutrality and openness and freedom from other platforms, yet at the same time they don't appear willing to apply those same ideals to their very own platform.
This letter says that "blocking others" from using a platform is wrong, yet that's what happens when users are banned from subreddits, or subreddits themselves are banned.
The letter says that "neutrality" is important, yet Reddit's whole voting system, which is a core part of their platform, is all about showing preference to certain users/comments/ideas.
In my opinion, their platform embodies much of what they're supposedly standing against when it comes to net neutrality.
Fortunately, the FCC isn't empowered to make such decisions on their own. The tech companies need to be speaking to Congress if they want the laws changed, and legislators will work on legislation to change the US government policy.
I assume the tech giants, knowing how our government is set up, understand this and are just using their letter as a publicity stunt.
In any case, we absolutely should not promote the idea that regulatory agencies have such a free hand to implement whatever policies they can be convinced to implement.
The iPhone is a bigger threat to cyber Monday. It was only ever a thing because people had to wait to get to work to mooch off the boss's broadband. Now they carry that speed around with them anytime. CM's years are numbered anyway.
How much wouild that affect buying habits?
Not at all
So far, Audio, and Video sharing has been the victim of lack of net neutrality. Low bandwidth websites have not been affected by lack of net neutrality. When craigslist.org, freerepublic, and dailykos get banned by ISPs, I will worry.
If Amazon loads twice as fast, that means page loads take 400 milliseconds longer if they are from Walmart's site?
I think a big deal is being made over mostly nothing.
It's the torrent freaks mostly screeching. Most actual communication on the web is low volume. Text and static graphic packets should be fine.
Both Cyber Monday and Net Neutrality are fallacies.
With Regards to "What would happen if amazon paid Comcast 500 million" to do things that benefit amazon...
Ok, what would happen is the following
a) Jeff Bezos would have slightly less than 100B
b) May be he would also have little less money to hire 'studio directors' with sexual harassment tendencies.. not sure
c) Comcast would have more money to spend attracting customers to their solutions, and competing with other service providers
d) Google, Netflix, youtube, facebook and other 'high network usage' content providers -- would either see their revenue decrease, which will slow down their 'world domination'
I do not think as a customer I would pay more to amazon distributed goods.
So here is a conservative, who will not get intimidated and bullied by your intellectually dishonest, ''Google Inc is good /Comcast Inc is bad' narrative
Actually, if you backbones are controlled by different people who don't respect net neutrality, I don't think I will want to get any more VPS, hosting, dedicated servers etc there.
No idea if latency will suddenly spike cos some other DC paid more money to be of higher priority.
Good thing US doesn't want to be the "centre of the internet" anymore. I might want to consider shifting out some of my gear to DC in the EU / Asia, since US DC providers will not be able to guarantee they will not be deprioritized in the future.
Wonder how big a hit that will be, as more of us shift out.