Slashdot Mirror
FCC Won't Delay Vote, Says Net Neutrality Supporters Are 'Desperate' (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Federal Communications Commission will move ahead with its vote to kill net neutrality rules next week despite an unresolved court case that could strip away even more consumer protections. FCC Chairman Ajit Pai says that net neutrality rules aren't needed because the Federal Trade Commission can protect consumers from broadband providers. But a pending court case involving AT&T could strip the FTC of its regulatory authority over AT&T and similar ISPs. A few dozen consumer advocacy groups and the City of New York urged Pai to delay the net neutrality-killing vote in a letter today. If the FCC eliminates its rules and the court case goes AT&T's way, there would be a "'regulatory gap' that would leave consumers utterly unprotected," the letter said. When contacted by Ars, Pai's office issued this statement in response to the letter: "This is just evidence that supporters of heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day as their effort to defeat Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom has stalled. The vote will proceed as scheduled on December 14."
then wouldn't a delay actually help the Reptilians... I mean Republicans?
Mike @ The Geek Pub. Let's Make Stuff!
Companies will be free to fuck the consumer! Yay! Land of the free! Home of the voiceless!
The FCC took over regulation of interstate communication in 1934 with the Communications Act of 1934. The took over this authority from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Their job is regulating interstate commerce aspects of communication. Punting this to the FTC is disingenuous and probably illegal. Perhaps the executive branch needs to be reminded to follow the law.
For two decades everyone said hey!keep your government hands off of the internet! And then one day some Verizon customers had Netflix get depriotitized and now we want big brother running the thing???
This is not good. Every draft rule seems to have the words lawful traffic. Whatâ(TM)s lawful? Whoâ(TM)s to say that wonâ(TM)t change after your party of choice wins or loses control of the fcc?
Obviously you paid shills haven't read the Communications Act of 1934.
"This is just evidence that supporters of heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day as their effort to defeat Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom has stalled."
Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
Here is a simple definition of net neutrality and links to further reading that will clear up you questions.
https://www.eff.org/issues/net...
You are welcome on my lawn.
Talks of fast lanes, throttling, no competition, price gouging, predatory advertising, should I go on? And that's just off the top of my head,
Situations that have effected me personally.
When contacted by Ars, Pai's office issued this statement in response to the letter: "This is just evidence that supporters of heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day as their effort to defeat Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom has stalled. The vote will proceed as scheduled on December 14."
In other news, people being held at gun point often become desperate when nothing they do can convince the gun totter to let them go.
Your premise seems to be that you can only create laws in response to a problem, not in an attempt to prevent one.
Very simple:
* I pay $ISP from my campaign funds.
* $ISP drops packets to $OTHER_CANDIDATE's website, or actively injects malware in the HTTP transaction making it look like the website is malicious.
* I win the election.
oh my fuck can we please stop with this "well it was all fine and dandy back then" bullshit.
There are examples all over that provide excellent examples of why ISPs should not be allowed to have direct control over the data that flows over their networks. Even Canada has a shocking example: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/telus-cuts-subscriber-access-to-pro-union-website-1.531166
This fight has never been about what the state of the affairs was 5/10 years ago, it's about what the state of affairs will be 5/10 years from now, and putting rules in place to make sure that doesn't happen.
So fuck off with your nonsensical "WAH ALL GOVERNMENT IS BAD LET THE MARKET DECIDE" republican horse shit. It's stupid, and only idiots like you believe in it.
I read the front page but there is no mention of specific problems it tried to solve. Would you care to link to the specific page that has that info?
The specific problem was collusion between large sites and ISPs to give more priority to certain sites in the bandwidth stream.
The answer seems to me to be obvious: If an ISP in your area is doing this, buy some bandwidth on the backbone and use it as an advertising point to grab their business.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
And here are a couple of specific examples:
Comcast throttling bittorrent https://www.wired.com/2011/10/bittorrent-throttling-comcast/
Comcast requiring payment from Netflix https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/02/23/comcasts-deal-with-netflix-makes-network-neutrality-obsolete/?utm_term=.52c1fd061840
And before you think the second is reasonable, recall that Netflix has already paid for bandwidth to the Internet, and Comcast's customers have already paid for bandwidth as well.
And they cannot wait for the money to be theirs....
Seriously, while undoubtedly Google and other profit from network neutrality, the ones that profit most are ordinary citizens with not a lot of disposable income and small companies. Doing away with network neutrality is about the most anti-citizen thing the FCC could do. Does fit right in with the tax reform in that though. I guess the ones that voted for this administration just like getting screwed over...
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
"Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom...." Orwell himself couldn't write better newspeak.
I still don't understand why the answer isn't to start a competing ISP
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The law places the FCC in charge of regulating interstate communications. The FCC doesn't get to decide whether a law is good or whether they can just ignore it. That is illegal and well outside the authority of the executive branch. Congress has the authority to change the law, but the FCC is required to follow the laws whether they're a good idea or not. Perhaps the executive branch should stop overstepping their authority and follow the laws enacted by Congress. Perhaps you paid shills should learn something about laws and the Constitution.
This is just evidence that the billions of dollars to be made by doing nothing except forcing heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day.
FUCK HIMSELF.
His staff is welcome to join him.
AT&T willfully and deliberately blocked Facetime because it competed with AT&T's own services. Comcast forged TCP RST's to kill bittorrent traffic they didn't like. Comcast & Verizon were shown in no uncertain terms to be deliberately throttling Netflix in order to make Netflix cough up more money. Given that Netflix competes with Comcast's and Verizon's own "home grown" services, this is explicitly why Network Neutrality was formalized. NN was the way the Internet basically had worked up until the point in time where these large incumbent monopolies did this.
Complete and utter drivel. How exactly is making the internet "free" a bad thing for anyone except media companies that want to profit from fast lanes?
It started specifically in 2007, when bittorrent was being blocked by Comcast, and they lied about blocking it, until so much technical evidence came forward that they had to admit that, yeah, they were blocking it. This was followed up by a court case looking into the blocking in which Comcast paid people on the street $50 to show up to the courtroom in support of Comcast, to make it look like people generally supported them blocking bittorrent.
Notice how Comcast's current statement is "we would never block LAWFUL content."? It's because the first part of the NN repeal also repeals the court decision that disallowed Comcast from blocking bittorrent. Comcast and Verizon have also been lobbying to have the FCC prevent states from making their own net neutrality rules. I guess Republicans only care about states rights when its a dog whistle for their racist bullshit, and when its regulatory capture meant to fuck over the consumer, fuck states rights.
When Tom Wheeler came to the FCC in 2014, everyone fucking hated him, and he originally was ALSO going to kill net neutrality, and the citizens of the internet rose up and said that was bullshit.
The fact that you can't remember that far back either says you're a shill spreading this fucking farcical lie that "things were fine before 2014" and that it wasn't madness of litigation and ISP's blocking services or that you're literally too young to fucking remember, which means, you're at most, like 20 years old. Maybe, if your formative years, when you didn't understand shit about the world, were spent online and you thought "things were fine" maybe you need to fucking look a little harder.
Because the barrier to entry is so high not even Google can afford to do so in most cities.
Oh you CAN crate laws for all kinds of reasons, but you SHOULD only create laws for really good ones. As in not just because someone somewhere came up a with a hypothetical thing that might some day be a problem.
... Chairman Pai's plan to restore Internet freedom ...
And by that, he means the freedom for ISPs to do whatever they want to customers and their traffic.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Expects to be spoon-fed the reasons why instead of doing his own research
You'll have to do that but the simple answer is: Data packets are data packets. ISPs should not be allowed to slow or block some and speed or otherwise give preferential treatment to others. They should not be allowed to block your access to perfectly legal websites or services just because it suits them to do so. Naturally this makes them all butthurt because they can't gouge people and companies for as much profit as possible by making up fake fees and tiered access plans. They already tried some of this sort of crap and were called on the carpet for it, made to stop doing it. Now if the FCC votes to take the leash off ISPs they'll go back to doing all that and worse. Be sure to enjoy paying extra because you wanted access to Slashdot, for instance.
Ahem.
https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=388863
https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/18/fcc-facetime-att
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-rating
Also a longer than I care to remember list of ISPs that continually screw with VPN services.
That's just to name a few.
You've got to be either stupid or have drank enough party kool-aide to rot your brain to believe what you just wrote.
It's not that, it's just that the comments were faked to the FCC by anti-NetNeutraility bots, and they're concerned that America is waking up to their criminal activities in hacking the "vote".
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
So wouldn't the answer be to lower the barriers of entry with deregulation and decentralization?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
The barrier is high because of government (local and federal) restrictions.
You are correct, Google did demonstrate this quite well.
It's in the first link on that page.
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/why-the-fcc-cant-save-net-neutrality starting at the heading: The many faces of network discrimination
That's the kind of question that gets you butt raped in a dark alley.
In particular, Comcast has been sandbagging fair use of encryption and swarmstreaming traffic across the board, while also illegally charging Netflix just for traversal of it's network. Now they want to charge customers for using Netflix too. This is all blatantly illegal, and always has been. Now they have an inside guy to try to overturn the law though.
I hope the Republicans do a complete scorched earth policy on all fronts. A policy so damaging to the country that those 30% of fucking idiots that voted for the Pussy-Grabber-in-Chief and his minions realise they're getting ass fucked through and through. Hope springs eternal doesn't it ?
If Congress had done what they should have done back in the day and mandated that content providers and transmission providers be separate companies I wouldn't have a problem with removing net neutrality provisions. Without a regulated separation between the two we are encouraging content holders and transmission providers to merge together into large conglomerates. Once these large media companies are formed they have an financial interest in selling their customers their content and limiting access to others content which is inherently unequal. If transmission providers were mandated to not provide content the only thing they could compete on would be speed and reliability which is good for the consumer.
Thanks, that is what I was looking for. I wanted to compare that against some other claims that Facebook and Google have cemented their position since Net Neutrality, with an argument being made that NN helps them. (The reasoning is that without NN, if the ISP offers a preferred channel, and anyone buys it, then say Google is forced to buy it as well, leading to lower profits to Google.) My goal was to deciding, for myself, which option I think is less harmful.
"Would you care to link to the specific page that has that info?"
Pretty simple:
paid prioritization / availability of some internet sites and providers over others:
example 1: without net neutrality, the ISP can offer a package that only allows access to their own properties. Does the ISP own a streaming service, then your internet service can only reach that service, you the customer can't reach netflix or hulu. Maybe they offer a higher tier internet package you can buy that will let you visit these services... or maybe they don't.
example 2: without net neutrality, the ISP can throttle netflix traffic to a crawl unless netflix pays some fee to your ISP. I mean sure the customers are already paying a fee to access netflix via the internet service, perhaps they are even paying extra just for permission to reach netflix but that's not important. They can also go after payments from each service and server with a "pay us, or people visiting from our network will be throttled to minimal speeds".
The effect of the loss of net neutrality is that:
a) services owned by the ISP do not have to be treated the same as other services. They can do whatever they want to make sure competing services are not reachable, not usable, or cost a lot more.
b) large services will pay the ransoms to the ISP to get their services to consumers. So facebook and netflix will pay the ISP for premium access. This serves to enrich the ISP, and entrench the big players.
If facebook-next comes along, or youtube-next comes along but doesn't have the money to pay all the ISPs not to block or throttle them into oblvious, then oblivion is where they'll stay. Even if they can pay their own hosting and bandwith costs, they also have to pay EACH ISP the ransom due to send those packets to the ISPs customers.
The resulting internt will have a few dozen channels owned by large companies, most of which will belong to the ISPs themselves, and a few more behemoths like apple etc that can afford the pay to be reachable.
Your new website or service, dies on the vine. Comcast users aren't going to pay comcast extra money each month to reach your site, and you can't afford to pay comcast and every other provider money to reach their customers.
I read the front page but there is no mention of ...
Maybe you should read beyond the first page before wasting everyone's time by asking questions that you can easily answer for yourself.
Your posting history shows that you post about network neutrality and little else, and your posts generally add nothing to the discussion.
You have made a habit out of feigning ignorance (as you are doing here), despite having your questions answered over and over. Your only interest seems to be trolling and spreading FUD.
I still don't understand why the answer isn't to start a competing ISP
Well, there are generally three possibilities of a wired ISP: One using phone lines, one using cable, or one using fiber. Most of us have less than all of these options. If you want to start your own competing ISP, then you'll need to create your own infrastructure. To do this, you will need to figure out where to install it, and then negotiate rights with each of the property owners along the way, so that you can locate your stuff on their property. They will probably want money from this, and it'll likely be a lot. And if any of them refuse, you are going to be out of luck. The existing infrastructure was created using rights of way that were created for the telephone system or other government facilitated rights of way.
So maybe you could start your competing ISP using wireless. To do that, you would just need to gain rights to use the public spectrum. Your checkbook needs to open wide to do this.
Look, I am pretty far on the right politically, but the situation here is deeply corrupt. The existing providers are using public, government granted resources to build their businesses, but somehow think that they shouldn't be regulated. If they had to individually negotiate the rights to use - and pay a mutually agreed rent to - all of the property on which they've built, then I would buy the argument. But this is *far* from a free market that can provide competition.
The *only* rational policy is to treat any infrastructure that uses government facilitated rights of way, or public air spectrum, as a public utility. All traffic should be required by law to be routed as efficiently as practical, without regard to content, or origin/destination of the traffic. And it should not be possible for any company to simultaneously own any part of the infrastructure (directly or indirectly), and any content that it carries. And if they don't like it, they should be free to build their own infrastructure with no public aid of any kind.
a bad thing for anyone except media companies that want to profit from fast lanes?
Media companies don't profit from fast lanes. Telecoms profit. Media companies are the losers, and oppose "fast lanes".
They're desperate to accomplish the tasks they were asked to perform by their Lord Trump, before that piece filthy rotting traitor gets impeached.
I still don't understand why the answer isn't to start a competing ISP
Good luck getting several hundreds of millions in subsidies from taxpayers, like the incumbents already have.
Let's not pretend there is a market in the ISP industry in the US.
Do you remember watching Netflix back then? ISPs would force Netflix traffic over congested links so people felt like they still needed Cable TV for Real Entertainment. A simple example, but a quite clear one.
The provider "fast lanes" were a similar ploy, favoring certain content.
In that position, the ISP can pick the winners and losers. Since the ISP is in a monopoly position, the customer has zero power to switch and remedy the situation.
I get a few of the reasons why ISPs shouldn't be bridled by "common carrier" rules, but with players like Comcast and Frontier they have repeatedly shown that they do not act in good faith.
in 2014 Netflix was paying Comcast because its traffic was being deprioritized
Verizon was slowing down Netflix in 2014 as well and asking for money
https://arstechnica.com/tech-p...
https://www.extremetech.com/co...
... when it was introduced in 2015? When the regulators sat down in that meeting they must have acted in response to a specific trouble caused by lack of net neutrality prior to that. What was that trouble? I am genuinely interested.
Comcast throttling Netflix and Bittorrent, the former had to pay up to setup CDN's on Comcast's networks to avoid throttling. Someone didn't wanna pay their peering for all those bits coming from Netflix. Just one example of why NN got enacted. I could go on.. Verizon blocking Facetime? The current fuckery with mobile providers dishing out 'no cap streaming' 'deals' to favor their affiliates.
But, don't worry. NN is dead, it has been dead since Ajit Pai was installed as chairman. They haven't been enforcing NN at all anyway, so yeah.. except now the ISP's will have a completely free hand to do all the fuckery they desire.
You'd have to pass a regulation to do that!
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
The Netflix issue was never about Net Neutrality, it was simply about paying for services rendered. The backbone Netflix connected to had lopsided peering agreements with pretty much everyone they connected to as there is a lot more data headed downstream than up. This caused a bottleneck that could only have been alleviated by downstream backbones allowing the data transfer to get even more lopsided. Sure they could have done this but instead they offered Netflix direct access to their networks for a fee; bypassing Netflix's own ISP. That didn't affect the speed of data once it was on their network, it just bypassed the bottleneck between backbones.
And it doesn't matter if both the end user and Netflix paid for internet access, it matters what peering agreements exist between both the sender and the receiver. I might pay the same gas taxes for road maintenance as the next guy but if I choose to live near a small rural road instead of near a 4 lane highway I can't complain that it takes me an extra 45 minutes to get to work because my speed limit is limited to 30mph and theirs is 65.
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
Bots or not, all those comments are going to /dev/null. No one is reading those. They never had any bearing on this deal.
No; it is a natural monopoly. If it costs $500 for every household you "pass" in a city or town (assuming near-zero permitting costs) then with 100% uptake your monthly capital recovery for the fiber is $6.55. If you have 50% then we are looking at $13.10. Once we drop to 30% uptake, we are around $20/month just for the fiber in the ground. $20 capital recovery would mean a monthly cost of around $100 to cover peering, repairs, core infrastructure, customer support, etc., at a minimum. Too many competitors and the economics simply don't work.
We need to redirect our efforts elsewhere. The internet's protectors need to be pressuring congress and senate to pass new regulations that overrule the FCC and re-implement Net Neutrality outside of Title II, it's own beast, it needs its own laws. FCC is a lost cause, wasting our time with them. Bother your congress-critters.
Rutherford B Hayes would concur, you know, if he wasn't dead.
comcast still to this day throttles bittorrent.
yoru point is pointless.
But some are more equal than others.
In 2013, comcast throttled netflix and extorted millions of dollars out of netflix to allow them to continue to operate. Their own documents showed they were doing it on purpose. It was literally: "Gee - that's a popular website you've got there. It'd be a shame if something were to happen to it."
If it can happen to netflix in 2013, it can happen to the next big thing whenever the big internet kleptocracies want. Personally, I think what comcast did then already falls under fraud, extortion and racketeering laws, but having some clear cut protections would be nice.
That said, I also believe that filing the internet under title 2 is NOT a good idea. That would give the FCC way too much power to regulate the internet if existing regulation of radio under title 2 is any indication. Sure, they *might* prevent another comcast extorting netflix (hey - we can dream), but the same legislation would give them the power to set up the internet equivalents of public decency filters, the fairness doctrine, and who knows what else (all in the interests of fighting terrorism/pedophiles I'm sure).
The result of all of this is that people fall into several groups:
1) Politicians For NN - they see the new powers to regulate the internet and are giddy with joy
2) Politicians Against NN - they are generally getting bribed by the ISPs
3) People For NN - they see things like comcast v netflix and are righteously outraged
4) People Against NN - they see the FCC wants new regulatory powers over the internet and are aghast
5) People who have no idea what NN is, and, if they bother to try and find out, basically end up parroting either 3 or 4 depending on whom they listen to.
It's high for other reasons as well (running transmission medium to each building is not a trivial expense), but those do contribute.
Wouldn't want to get in the way of the Chairman now, would we.
I'm sure he knows best.
Both parties are full of crap and only a complete tool trusts either side.
I'm not finding a reference for when the FCC got a law passed authorizing it to regulate the internet--the closest you get is the Telecommunications Act of 1934, but people had little concept of modern computers at the time, never mind most of the things we do with computers now. They'd consider the El Cheapo calculators we can pick up at a dollar store to be incredibly impressive and not just because those things can fit into a pocket.
It would be...reasonable to ask that, if the internet is going to be treated as telecommunications ect ect, that Congress actually pass the damn law saying as much. Having net neutrality be baked in on that level might also be actually preferable, especially since the ISPs being defined as common carriers by the FCC and having net neutrality regulations has failed quite entirely to prevent things like the MAFIAA from trying to get the ISPs to do their enforcement. (I would suggest not going for net neutrality but rather going straight to requiring they be agnostic about the content of their pipes--with them encouraged to know only the minimum amount of information required to ensure data gets where it's going, and not a single nibble more.)
Seriously, a lot of this feels like watching a group of people working on a program who keep implementing crocks with the assurance that these are only really temporary patches and they'll go back Any Day Now and implement a proper fix or at least a reliably-working kludge...with the distinct feeling that this 'any day' is going to be a few eons after the heat death of the universe. Can we please just implement the proper fix? One that might actually get us the real thing?
Thanks for the thoughtful reply. As a consumer I don't like the idea of bittorrent throttling at all, even if I haven't used it myself but I want to be able to. Regarding the ransom though, it seems that only very successful provides would have to pay it. If I start a new youtube I can't imagine ISPs would bother to throttle it, until such time that my new youtube it huge but then it seems like a fair game. Netflix, Google and FB are monopolies, it seems to me if they are slowed down by the greedy ISPs that can't necessarily be that bad.
What makes you think it's *deregulation* that will lower the barriers to entry?
The thing actually that will lower the barrier to entry is regulation to stop the current players using their current scummy tactics to keep the competition out.
Not really sure what you expected.
No, and I don't believe you're arguing in good faith. It's not like there's a $10 billion fee to start an ISP, or an army of paperwork-clutching government employees trailing after the fiber crews. A large difficulty is negotiating rights of access, especially if one has to negotiate such rights with every individual landowner, and it's also just plain costly to lay lots of fiber optic cable. And aside from a knee-jerk opposition to any and all regulation, there is no reason why there should not be some sort of regulation governing how you are allowed to be an ISP.
You seem to be on quite the streak of douchebaggery these last few days.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
can't tell if your shilling or not but obviously when you tried to get that website off the ground, you would have to enter into content agreements with possibly a handful of different ISPs in order to avoid for instance, constant buffering (which translates into no one using your site, because ISPs slowed it down so much that it sucks). The default would be the slow lane, and you would have to pay to get "upgraded". So you wouldn't be able to "start the new youtube" because you would need a few million to even try. Thus raising the barrier to entry on what used to be "any idiot with an internet connection and free web server software".
As i understand it, the telco situation in the USA is monopolies. Content is hardly a monopoly. Video sharing sites alone number in the tens or hundreds. For some americans, as i understand it, they only have the choice of 1-2 ISPs. So im not really worried about google being a monopoly as i personally use duck duck go daily
As a potential lottery winner, I totally support tax cuts for the wealthy
https://imgur.com/qa3Ryyd.png
I won't be hyperlinking the second post's delivery of [CITATION NEEDED]s one by one, but you seem to have a real keen interest on finding specifics so I'm sure you won't mind looking them up by hand.
I still don't understand why the answer isn't to start a competing ISP
And you, as an ISP would connect to where exactly? Why, that term would be an upstream provider. Keep in mind that your upstream provider can then do whatever they want with your traffic, after all, that will become their right once that pesky NN is removed.
Let that sink in for a while and tell us all how your competitive ISP is going to make a difference.
That is a pack of lies, and you are a liar.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
If net neutrality fails it will just mean all the smart people can pack up their shit and start a new internet and scrubs like you can pay by minute on your AOL 2.0. I personally can't fathom why you'd be so excited by this.
Maybe the way to scare these ISPs into leaving this alone is making it an "all or nothing" situation. If you are going to throttle or block certain data, then you become responsible for policing ALL OF IT. If you insert yourself as the keeper of the data, you better be blocking all illegal and illicit content, failing to do so at their own peril.
Eh, wishful thinking, I know.
As a consumer I don't like the idea of bittorrent throttling at all, even if I haven't used it myself but I want to be able to.
See, right there bit torrent traffic shouldn't be 'throttled' per se, but it, along with email, and other bulk non-realtime services, should be least priority. VOIP, gaming, etc and other such real-time monitoring should be highest priority. regular web browsing in the middle.
The important thing to note is that despite a lot of bleating by the ISPs about this, this is really nothing to do with net neutrality. Most net neutrality proponents are fine with sensible traffic shaping to the benefit of all users. If my 5GB torrent takes 20 seconds longer to complete so that your phone call doesn't have 10 two second audio dropouts, that just makes sense. When the pipe is full, some traffic has to be dropped, and dropping it based on service type is fine. drop a few torrent packets and keep the voip packets is fine and does not violate net neutrality.
dropping voip packets to competitors voip services, while keeping voip packets from the servcie we own / partner with/ get revenue from however does violate net neutrality.
I've been a strong proponent of FCC-enforced NN. However, this article does raise some really good counter points. Pai and crew keep saying that the market should decide, and ignore the fact that there's absolutely no competition for the vast majority of the nation (only one broadband provider in my entire state, for example). The EFF article talks about how fostering competition is really the solution, if it could somehow be done. Here's something that was done in a small town where I used to live that really could make a huge difference.
If you don't feel like clicking on the link, the short story is that there's a municipal fiber network, but they actually don't act as an ISP. They are just a last-leg service and you select from a range of ISPs that have run a service to the town's central hub (which greatly lowers the barrier to entry for an ISP). Some are calling it new and novel, but it sounds to me like the Internet of the 90s, where you pay your phone company for the line and you pay AOL or some such to act as your ISP. Then the phone companies bought out the ISPs and that's how we ended up with today's mess. I vote for switching back to the 90's model like my old town did.
Since it solved that problem, which is not hypothetical at all as anyone with experience in the real world prior to the law can tell you, and causes no problems, why would you want to do away with it. This is the proof that Pai and his buddies are morons. They are so stupid they really think that people will believe the "We must do away with it because it is superfluous and has no effect" line of bullshit.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Pure BS.
First, it's actually YOUR DUTY as an ISP to make sure that your clients are getting good service. Typically it involves paying the network that produces the content for peering.
Second, Netflix will gladly install caching edge servers in your datacenter and manage them for you: https://openconnect.netflix.co... - all free of charge. This saves something like 95% of the total backbone traffic. Yet Comcast was refusing it.
Considering that all of our telecommunications companies had all the time, resources, and motivation that it would have taken to build the information superhighway for over 10 years and they failed to deliver until one was graciously delivered to them by our government and tax payers.
I would say there is plenty of evidence they will adopt short term measures to nickel and dime consumers instead of providing a general use platform that facilitates broad innovation like the internet as we know it. The problem that net neutrality is attempting to solve is the behavior of our carriers and content providers left to their own devices.
They own the very extensible MMS network and have no restrictions on it's use, we all have access. Why does it suck? It should have replaced the internet by now!
You're lucky if you can average out to only $500 per household. Fiber typically costs ~$30k per mile, so you'll only get it down to that price if you have at least 50 houses per linear mile, or 1 house per 100 feet (including the cost of going over streets, mandatory open space, etc.). In the suburbs, it ends up often being somewhat higher than that, and in rural areas, you're probably low by an order of magnitude or more.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I think you need to adjust your tinfoil hat and disconnect that intravenous Alex Jones news feed.
providers that also have video services of their own still fuck with netflix traffic all the time.
That would be the answer but most of the same actors who want to do away with net neutrality also pay congress to keep a high barrier to entry and they're the first so sue you if you try so.
I mean that should be enough heuristic for anyone who isn't a paid shill to get what's going on.
Soon, they'll just refer to him as dear leader.
Since Pai literally said that he would not be taking public comment into consideration, we kinda know that for a fact.
They weren't enforcing NN with Wheeler either. Google couldn't resist the ToS "improper" fuckery. I don't see the point of keeping the status quo myself.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/08/google-fiber-continues-awful-isp-tradition-banning-servers
https://ecfsapi.fcc.gov/file/7522219498.pdf
As i understand it, the telco situation in the USA is monopolies.
Local telcos are still monopolies for wired telephone service. ISPs are not. The two words are not synonyms.
See here
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
this decision? It does seem to mesh with the philosophy that government interference in free markets is a net-negative. The argument could certainly be made that the federal government has no business telling Comcast, Cox, et al what to do with their networks. You could argue that they get preferential status, but two wrongs don't make a right. Wouldn't the correct solution be to revoke their monopolies along with the net neutrality regulations?
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
I, personally, stink of desperation.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
The thing I cannot help noticing is that Net "Neutrality" advocates heavily pepper their verbiage with 'fuck' and 'fucking.'
So, you stupid fuckers, are you frantic? When NN ends and the world doesn't self destruct, what the fuck will you fuckers have to curse about next?
and then negotiate rights with each of the property owners along the way, so that you can locate your stuff on their property.
You don't locate "your stuff" on their property until they become a customer. Until then you stay on the already negotiated easements and public rights-of-way.
To do that, you would just need to gain rights to use the public spectrum. Your checkbook needs to open wide to do this.
Point-to-point microwave is relatively cheap. We've got a local wireless internet company, and their rates do not reflect a billion-dollar FCC licensing investment.
If they had to individually negotiate the rights to use - and pay a mutually agreed rent to - all of the property on which they've built,
They already pay a mutually agreed rent for access to the public rights of way. It's called a "franchise fee", and for Comcast in this area it is 3% of their revenue.
The *only* rational policy is to treat any infrastructure that uses government facilitated rights of way, or public air spectrum, as a public utility.
That is an assertion, not an obvious fact.
And it should not be possible for any company to simultaneously own any part of the infrastructure (directly or indirectly), and any content that it carries.
So telephone companies should not be allowed to operate a 411 (information) service?
The real number is closer to $5000 per mile unless it's very sparse. Higher costs are usually caused by bureaucracy, not installation or material costs.
That's about the most intelligent summary of the situation that I've seen thusfar. Of course, the fact that Comcast abused their position in no way suggests that we need to hand the government a ready-made tool for draconian censorship. It's a bit like jumping out of the frying pan and into a roaring volcano.
No ISP is responsible to giving you an amazing connection to every site and service on the internet. Once that data is on their network you can make a case that they shouldn't interfere with it (true net neutrality) but they aren't responsible if the sender is using a TRS-80 on a dial-up modem to serve up their music service and that was effectively the issue with Netflix/Comcast.
The problem wasn't Comcast paying the other network for peering, it's was that the other network WASN'T PAYING for peering. For a long time Comcast et al. were letting them freeload off an outdated and unbalanced peering agreement then when they decided enough was enough they told them to pay. Netflix's ISP refused and told everyone that they needed to let the continue because everyone needed Netflix. At that point it was just a waiting game and while a lot of smaller ISPs folded Comcast decided to wait it out for better terms.
The fact Netflix was offering a direct connect for free is besides the point, that is just a business decision; you might not like it but that's the way business is done, the owner of the network gets to decided who or what connects to it. But since it was offered and in your world Comcast was under some type of moral obligation to accept Netflix' terms I'm sure you've already signed up for Amazon's in home deliveries right? After all Amazon is offering to deliver their parcels right inside your house even when your not home. It's so much better than having to deal with going to some pick up spot or calling and getting a time for delivery so why shouldn't you be obligated to sign up?
Of course that's just my opinion...... you could be wrong!
First, it's actually YOUR DUTY as an ISP to make sure that your clients are getting good service.
It is my duty as an ISP to make sure they are getting the service they paid for. It is not my duty to make sure that every customer gets 100 mbps service to every site everywhere on the internet 24/7, because that's not what they're paying for.
Second, Netflix will gladly install caching edge servers in your datacenter and manage them for you: ...- all free of charge.
Of course I'm not paying them to do this. Why should I pay THEM to use my electricity and network backbone so they can charge my customers for their content?
This saves something like 95% of the total backbone traffic.
So this one company is 95% of the incoming backbone traffic I get? Wow. Sounds like it should be them paying for any network upgrades to deal with the traffic that causes the congestion and that they are making a profit from. They should absolutely be paying to be colocated in my datacenter since they're going to be putting such a load on my network. It will save them a lot of money in paying for their own network access, since they won't need the fat pipes they are buying from their ISP, so "free" isn't going to happen.
Yet Comcast was refusing it.
Yeah, and if you'd let them into your facility for free because gee, they aren't going to charge you for the privilege of them being in your datacenter, then you're going to go out of business very fast. How many other colo servers will you host for free? I'd like to get in on that deal. I'd love to put a server in a managed, backup-powered high-connectivity data center for free. And since the connection will have to be at the highest data rate (so no Comcast customer would get less than they paid for), it would be wonderful. And for free!
Netflix, Google and FB are monopolies, it seems to me if they are slowed down by the greedy ISPs that can't necessarily be that bad.
You realize that Netflix, Google, and FB, all have the resources to pay for any "fast lanes", while potential competitors cannot. This makes the monopoly situation worse not better.
Because even when multiple large ISPs are in an area, they collude with one another to keep prices high and service levels basically the same. Small ISPs are easily bought up if they truly cause problems for the big guys.
The free market just doesn't create competition in this space.
Clearly he doesn't think he serves the masses. Unwashed or otherwise.
Madame Defarge has his name. There will be a reckoning. Eventually.
I wonder if the solution might be that the ISP must be "net neutral" if there are no competing ISPs (properly defined to avoid abuse) within 50 miles or something like that.
Yes, let's deregulate the availability of space to run physical cables to every subscriber's location. While we're at it, let's deregulate ourselves more wireless spectrum; that'll help things out a bit.
https://motherboard.vice.com/e... (Nov 21 2017)
"... received a dressing-down at a congressional hearing this month"
"... deranking those kinds of sites"
Party political congressional hearings are talking of deranking, what kinds of sites can be found with search results.
NN just keeps on giving power to people who want to control the net and alter news search results.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Wow, a troll that thinks trolling net neutrality discussions is fun.
Wake up call little troll. Without NN you will have no possibility to continue trolling. So in the interest of self preservation, you, and anyone else in favor of freedom of information should be in favor of NN.
#1 ISP customers requested all of the traffic that Netflix sent.
#2 ISP customers were not receiving the bandwidth that they had paid for.
#3 Netflix offered to put their servers closer to the ISP customers, lowering the bandwidth on backbones.
#4 ISPs artificially throttled Netflix as evidenced by data collection, and proxies bypassing the issue.
#5 Verizon pushed Netflix traffic through congested peer connections as evidenced by an unfortunate Verizon graphic.
How are ISP's NOT a monopoly in the US? The vast majority of consumers have the choice of "one"...not sure how that's not a monopoly.
Of course I'm not paying them to do this. Why should I pay THEM to use my electricity and network backbone so they can charge my customers for their content?
You meant to write "my slaves", didn't you? People that you own and exploit for profit.
Because your customers PAY YOU to get the content. It's not like Netflix just shoves data into your network .
We ARE desperate to save the Internet from the shitbags that are trying to destroy net neutrality, and the greedy piece of shit corporations who are looking to make yet more money when they're already raking in plenty.
No, you're right - we should pressure Comcast to behave ethically without having to create laws.
And with them being a Monopoly in most of the places that they occupy space, that really shouldn't be a problem - it's not like anyone NEEDS the Internet for work or anything like that... /s
If there's no competing ISPs even within 1 mile of me, they still have a monopoly and can screw me over if they don't play by net neutral rules. Distance is meaningless. Either you have multiple ISP options at your property or you don't.
You should probably open up the market to allow greater competition, thereby removing Comcast's ability to abuse their position.
Anyway you already have laws against monopolies, so if, as you say, Comcast is a monopoly abusing it's power, then why the hell do you need new laws? Start by enforcing existing ones.
Given that the FCC is operating under regulatory capture, the sooner they vote, the sooner the courts get to sort this out.
Except that it would require people to be more neighborly, it seems to me this might be a good opportunity for neighborhood-wide mesh networks to spring up. Probably won't happen, but I can dream, can't I?
Bullshit. Your goal was to muddy the waters and "just ask questions" that people have asked repeatedly all over the internet for years so that someone could copy and paste a link to the same answers that have been available for years. If you were really interested in finding answers for yourself, you wouldn't be asking for them in a comment thread.
The FCC was looking for meaningful comments. Taking somebody else's form letter and attaching "me too" to the end will always go straight to the trash. It doesn't matter which side your form letter takes.
Unless you have more money to line Chairman Pai's pockets with you are wasting your breath trying to convince the FCC to delay or forget about eliminating the Net Neutrality rules.
That does sound sensible. I don't know what I'm missing then but we are back to the claim that the primary effect of Net Neutrality is that it prevents ISPs from asking the big guys for ransom. And also that in principle it should not treat small guys unfairly but historically that has not been the issue. If that is correct then NN solves the wrong problem. We should have laws to prevent ISPs from acting as monopolies towards consumers, not to prevent them from acting unfairly to obscenely profitable companies.
Mod up. This is precisely true.
Your ISP's own streaming service will get priority. Netflix / Google / Apple / FB have enough cash to throw at the ISP to buy their way in.
youtube-next, or itunes-next from some new startup... that goes nowhere. Comcast, etc isn't going to give their traffic any bandwidth without a ransom. Customers get shitty performance / connectivity, and the service dies.
The monopoly situation gets worse, not better.
Pai and crew keep saying that the market should decide, and ignore the fact that there's absolutely no competition for the vast majority of the nation (only one broadband provider in my entire state, for example).
They are absolutely not ignoring it -- in fact, they've already addressed the problem by re-defining one provider as "competition"!
https://arstechnica.com/inform...
I've been a strong proponent of FCC-enforced NN. However, this article does raise some really good counter points. Pai and crew keep saying that the market should decide, and ignore the fact that there's absolutely no competition for the vast majority of the nation (only one broadband provider in my entire state, for example). The EFF article talks about how fostering competition is really the solution, if it could somehow be done. Here's something that was done in a small town where I used to live that really could make a huge difference.
If you don't feel like clicking on the link, the short story is that there's a municipal fiber network, but they actually don't act as an ISP. They are just a last-leg service and you select from a range of ISPs that have run a service to the town's central hub (which greatly lowers the barrier to entry for an ISP). Some are calling it new and novel, but it sounds to me like the Internet of the 90s, where you pay your phone company for the line and you pay AOL or some such to act as your ISP. Then the phone companies bought out the ISPs and that's how we ended up with today's mess. I vote for switching back to the 90's model like my old town did.
That would be the ideal situation yes; however, the government has granted our current ISPs a monopoly in most markets of the USA. We cannot legally do your example in most areas because of those previous agreements. This is why net neutrality must exist in its current form. The government took away true competition when it made those agreements, because of that we need the regulation so consumers can't be screwed by the monopolies the government allowed to happen.
Future government can always use one of Comcast's own plays against it if they go all stupid with their internet plans:
" Thats's a nice Monopoly you got there. . . would be a shame if something happened to it. "
hey, maybe it will fuel innovation.
"We should have laws to prevent ISPs from acting as monopolies towards consumers, not to prevent them from acting unfairly to obscenely profitable companies."
The point is that the NN laws that force them to treat their own service, the same as the service from obscenely profitable companies, also forces them to treat the service from [new startup] the same.
without NN, comcast prioritizes its own streaming service since that's hte most profitable since it owns it. Then it tells netflix, well... pay us a huge pile of money and we'll let packets from our customers reach your service too. because that's still hugely profitable for comcast.
But the new upstart streaming service? Comcast doesn't want another competitor to its own streaming service. They let netflix on for a huge pile of cash... but your new startup. It doesn't have that huge pile of cash to pay comcasts ransom, so its going to die on the vine.
NN would ensure bandwidth to the new streaming startup is prioritized the same.
This is in the consumers interest. I am paying my ISP to send my packets accross the network to the services I want to consume. I am paying for the pakcets the service sends back to me. That's literally service I pay my ISP for.
The ISP should be neutral in that, they shouldn't be allowed to inject themselves in an decide which destinations work best, base on how much money those destinations are coughing up. And they shouldn't be allowed to freeze out competitors by screwing with the traffic. Given internet access is virtually a utility and in many respects the last mile is a monopoly or duopoly the 'market' cannot ensure consumers can choose a provider that offers them the type of neutral service it wants, so it HAS to be regulated.
So this SpaceX idea with the low earth orbit satellites may not be such a bad one then ? https://arstechnica.com/inform...
Actually, it IS your duty to make sure that customers can reach the fucking 1-st most popular destination on the Internet with a reasonable speed.
You've changed a lot of words between your first claim and this one, but it is still wrong. My responsibility ends at the edge of my network. I cannot control what other network providers do, and I cannot control what bandwidth other content providers pay for.
If it weren't for a total lack of competition
There are four ISPs I can call at any time for service here, and those are just the ones I'm familiar with. There's 13 listed in the phone book. I see lots of competition. A friend of mine told me that he would routinely change ISPs, just to keep getting the "new customer" discounts. Six months with A, six months with B, back to A, then B ... were there no competition, how could he have done this?
You meant to write "my slaves", didn't you?
No, I wrote exactly what I mean. As an ISP I have no slaves. Every customer is free to go elsewhere for service, at which time they'll find that their new ISP also has no responsibility for anything off-network for them.
Because your customers PAY YOU to get the content.
No, they don't. They pay for a connection to the internet at the specific bandwidth to them. They do not pay me for a 100 Mbps connection to Netflix, simply because I have no control over the bandwidth they get to Netflix one they leave my network. I also have no authority to sell the Netflix content, so I cannot legally charge my customers for it.
It's not like Netflix just shoves data into your network.
No, they don't shove their data anywhere. The put it on THEIR ISPs network, which then has to pass a border gateway to mine, and then via mine to my customers. It's those other networks being involved that makes your original claim wrong.
burn the internet to the ground and maybe a phoenix will rise from the ashes..
Is that realistic though? Comcast may start their streaming service but there's little chance they'll entice me even if it's a $1 less a month than Netflix and even with the same selection if I'm used to Netflix. As for the upstart streaming service, Comcast likely wouldn't be slowing them down, they just wouldn't let them in the premium channel unless they pay.
What I find off is that almost all scenarios without NN are hypothetical, where NN in the present situation allows for Google et al to keep maximum profits. I'm not saying ISPs shouldn't be regulated, just that this regulation seems wrong. Perhaps there should be a regulation to prevent ISPs from throttling the upstarts but historically they haven't been doing that anyway. Maybe the ISPs should be merely required to disclose completely how they are treating different traffic.
Exactly! Since you are using public easements and rights-of-way, you have to make your service available to the public on a non-discriminatory basis.
If I don't get to choose which companies' wires go on the pole in my backyard, those companies don't get to choose whose data they want to route.
dom
Is that realistic though? Comcast may start their streaming service but there's little chance they'll entice me even if it's a $1 less a month than Netflix and even with the same selection if I'm used to Netflix.
What if netflix constantly drops out, times out, buffers; and their service is buttery smooth?
As for the upstart streaming service, Comcast likely wouldn't be slowing them down
Because? What financial reason does comcast have not to slow them down?
What I find off is that almost all scenarios without NN are hypothetical
Because you should fill the lake with lead so you have a concrete non-hypothetical example to reference when making decisions whether to dump lead in the lake?
You forgot:
* 6 months later, the FEC gets a case together and the DOJ sends me to FPMITA prison.
I want AT&T to kill Facetime, because it's an Apple monopoly as much as any of the stuff being criticized. Until Apple releases an Android client or allows somebody else to do so. Because I have family who are Apple ninnies who I seldom can communicate with.
"Get an iPad" Apple apologists will retort ==== fuck off.
Specifically the 10th amendment about powers being reserved for the State. Then cut government power at the state level. Less government is always better.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
Net Neutrality was not introduced in 2015. It was the rule of the internet from the very start. But some big corporations decided that the rules didn't apply to them, so started ignoring the rules, and one of them took the FCC to court to establish that the way the FCC was regulating the internet wasn't legitimate.
The court decided in the corporation's favor, saying that the FCC should instead do it another way. That is what the FCC did in 2015, correctly identifying the internet as a communications service, and carefully restoring the same light touch regulation they had before.
So anyone who wants to overturn the way the internet has been since the very beginning had better establish a serious problem that needs to be fixed by doing so.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
You have no idea what Net Neutrality is, do you? Here's a brief tutorial:
The Internet is composed of three basic groups: clients (people like you and me), servers (organizations like Google and Slashdot), and the network in between (provided by ISPs like Comcast and AT&T). Net Neutrality is intended to regulate the network in between clients and servers so that ISPs can't choose which servers get the best service.
Since Google is a server in this scenario (as a web site providing news search results), they are not regulated by Net Neutrality.
What Net Neutrality really means is that if you choose to search for news at a Russian propaganda site, your ISP cannot block you or slow you down just because your ISP has a deal with Google.
dom
I'd also add that no Network Neutrality gives cable ISPs the ability to leverage their ISP monopolies to protect their cable TV systems from competition. Suppose Comcast required all Internet Video providers to pay them in order for their sites to be usable. If they didn't pay, customers could still access the services, but at speeds so slow as to render the service unusable. Of course, the fees would get passed to the consumers in the form of increased prices. (If Netflix has to pay EVERY ISP to keep their service usable, they'd be all but forced to raise their prices.) Meanwhile, Comcast's own video service won't need to pay these fees and will be able to keep their prices lower*.
A lot of Net Neutrality can be summed up as the ISPs whining: "Those Internet Video companies are taking customers away from us! We need to be able to stop it even if it means abusing our monopoly!"
* Well, as low as cable TV gets, which means a big dose of "under the fold" fees that you only discover after you sign up for cable TV and introductory rates that look good until your promotional period ends and your rates jump up significantly.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
FCC under pai NEVER CARED about us.
NEVER.
CARED.
ABOUT.
US.
just to be clear about things, in case there was any doubt.
I just hope that the next admin can undo all the damage this one has done. just like trump makes it his goal to undo all obama changes; I hope the next guy undoes all THIS admin's changes.
until then, we have no one to speak for us. and they are LAUGHING at us, all the while.
Thanks, Clueless Flyover State Morans. you just fucked us ALL over, real good. I hope stigginit was worth it, because you also stuck it to yourself, you fool!
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
ISPs are definitely monopolies. At best, for some, duopolies (cable ISP and teleco ISP). In my area, I have Charter for wired, high-speed Internet. I have no other options. If Charter started blocking sites or slowing them down arbitrarily, I could gripe about it, but my choices would be to either cancel my service (tough to do for a web developer) or continue paying them. My situation is the same as most Americans - with some people being lucky enough to have a second choice.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
youtube-next, or itunes-next from some new startup
Or forgetting content providers, just me connecting my home network to a friend's home network down the street. That's Internet service and should not require a ransom payment to be usable either.
The [FCC] took over this authority from the Interstate Commerce Commission. Their job is regulating interstate commerce aspects of communication. Punting this to the FTC is disingenuous and probably illegal. Perhaps the executive branch needs to be reminded to follow the law.
The FCC regulates the interstate commerce of communication technology and utilities. They didn't take over all consumer protection, especially consumer fraud and antitrust (which remained with the FTC and the Justice Department). If the FCC had taken these over, how would you explain, for instance, the breakup of AT&T?
Most of the bad aspects of "network non-neutrality" are the result either of:
- integration between ISPs and companies that provide the services for which they carry the packets - either outright membership in the same conglomerate or special deals - giving them an incentive to favor the packets of their "partners" and committing anticompetitive behavior,
- penalizing packets of services that are costly to carry, a threat to their partners' business models, or of heavy users - thus providing less than what a reasonable person would expect of "internet service" and committing consumer fraud.
Meanwhile the FCC tends to apply technical solutions to anticompetitive behavior problems, and considers two players "competition" (when "the invisible hand" requires at least 3 and typically four or more competitors before cartel-like behavior breaks down without collusion to keep it stable).
I have, for years, been advocating that Network Neutrality be moved to the FTC and Justice Dept, which have no issues with penalizing or disassembling companies that shaft the consumers.
But the FTC can't just step up to this plate - and Pai is being disingenuous to speak as if it could. Some of the "hands off the Internet" legislation explicitly blocks the FTC from playing in that game. Congressional action is required to re-enable it.
Having said that, one could expect the Trump administration to go for it. The media conglomerates that are driving network non-neutrality are exactly the ones that have run the totally anti-Trump mainstream media. Turning the FTC attack dogs loose on them, with an eye to dismembering their unholy alliances, would be a dandy way to punish his enemies by doing something good for the bulk of the consumers. B-)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I'll agree that, in an ideal world, we wouldn't need Net Neutrality regulations. We were actually doing fine without them until AT&T CEO Ed Whitacre looked at Netflix and other Internet companies making money and said "hey, these companies are getting a free ride. They don't pay us therefore they must be getting free Internet access. If they're profiting off our customers, we want a cut." Of course, Netflix and others DO pay for bandwidth - they just were paying different companies and not AT&T. AT&T (and then other ISPs) threatened to slow down any service unless they paid them for the privilege of reaching their customers. Meanwhile, they still charged the customers for the privilege of reaching the Internet.
Of course, part of this was directed at the rapidly expanding Internet Video field. The big ISPs saw Netflix and others as threats to their Cable TV offerings. They couldn't compete with Cable TV so they decided to use their ISP monopolies to slow down Internet Video. Either the Internet companies paid up (profit for the ISPs) or they were slowed down (which the ISPs hoped would lead to people leaving them for cable TV - and more profits).
The FCC responded to these ISP threats (and some actions) with Net Neutrality. At first, it was a watered down, essentially useless Net Neutrality but the ISPs sued to stop even that. The court rulings basically forced the FCC to enact stronger regulations which actually provided protections.
At every turn, the ISPs were the ones necessitating Net Neutrality because they want the freedom to abuse their monopolies to increase their profits and stop any competitors.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Why do you need a list of problems? Should we wait until the internet is broken before we put in some very light regulation?
"open up the market"? There's all kinds of other providers on the market. And they unofficially carve up the country and do not operate in the same territories, because they want a local monopoly everywhere they serve. But a local monopoly somehow doesn't count as a monopoly.
Even the Title 2 was the ISPs' own fault. The FCC used Title 1 first - which essentially led to a useless joke of a regulation. The ISPs didn't even want that and sued to stop it. The courts demanded that the FCC use Title 2 instead - which they did. Had the ISPs just shut their mouths, they could have paid lip service to Net Neutrality while jumping through tons of loopholes to abuse their monopoly positions.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
And even where Google did try to set up a competing ISP, the established ISPs fought tooth and nail to keep them out. Not only did they use lobbying/bought-and-paid-for politicians, but they would sue Google in court and try to tie up the cases. Had it been a smaller company and not Google, the new ISP would have been bankrupted before they even began.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
This is the solution that I advocate. A lot of the problems stem from the ISPs seeing the Internet as a threat to their cable TV profits. This makes them try to leverage their Internet monopolies to prop up their cable TV service (by hurting any competing service that uses the Internet - such as Netflix). If Comcast, for example, were broken up into "Comcast ISP" and "Comcast TV", then "Comcast ISP" would have less financial incentive to charge Netflix more just because they're cutting into Comcast TV's profits.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
ISPs serving the general public aren't in danger here, I think they'll do just fine. What is more troubling is what happens to the core of the internet that the general public doesn't often see. What happens at the backbone when AT&T or Comcast decide to play favorites? What if they slow down Netflix in favor of Amazon? Or vice versa if you prefer Amazon and now it's slowed down and Netflix is faster and cheaper?
For common carriers, government insisted that they play fair. This makes sense when the government assisted AT&T originally by granting a monopoly, and so after the breakup the holders of the shards of AT&T had to continue playing fair. Today the internet is a common carrier, the big owners did not create that backbone they own today. At the more local level, the cable companies created their infrastructure but only with help from the local government. The internet belongs to the people, not to the corporations.
If they get rid of net neutrality, then we must break up these companies the same way the original AT&T was broken up. We cannot afford to have the internet controlled by the same companies that also own movies, telephones, information, social media, etc.
We know from history that companies will absolutely take advantage of any lack of regulatory framework. Without any doubt we know they will abuse their power.
All consumers in the US also have a choice of one and only one internet. Net neutrality absolutely affects the internet backbone. And the backbone is where the damage is going to happen. We have tons of ISPs, not just a few, so if Netflix is going to be throttled then it will be by the backbone owners.
You've changed a lot of words between your first claim and this one, but it is still wrong. My responsibility ends at the edge of my network. I cannot control what other network providers do, and I cannot control what bandwidth other content providers pay for.
No. It's you who are squealing like a pig being slaughtered. In case of fucking Comcast they were DECLINING TO BUILD UP THEIR INTERCONNECTIONS. Nobody was asking them to provide free transit to Netflix, they were asked to build up their fucking network so their fucking edge had enough capacity to peer with Netflix.
And Netflix is bending over their backwards to accommodate ISPs, at that.
There are four ISPs I can call at any time for service here, and those are just the ones I'm familiar with. There's 13 listed in the phone book.
I offered this bet several times - if by the end of the next year I have at least 3 wireline ISPs that will provide me more with more than 50Mbps connection then I'll pay you $10000. Otherwise you pay me that sum. I live in a middle of an affluent neighborhood (ZIP code 98119) and I can't get anything except Comcast or slow DSL. Do you believe your own convictions? I'm ready to post that sum into an escrow right now.
No? Then shut up your mouth. I actually used to run an ISP and I fucking know how deeply US ISPs are screwing people.
Re NN and a non-discriminatory basis AC?
How are other search products doing under NN? Growing in a competitive market?
NN protection has kept better search products out.
The NN protected net is searched by products that are happy to help with congressional party politics and the deranking of news results.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Its potentially much worse than that. Say you are a minority democrat/republican in a state like Texas/California. Wouldn't it be really annoying if you couldn't reach the webpage of a particular candidate to learn how to donate your time or your money? Or what about news sites that vet and share leaked information, or even regular news sites? Oh I'm sorry, your ISP doesn't partner with Bank of America. Better close your account and open one with Chase. If you want to file that insurance claim online, you're going to have to pay for the premium package.
Next comes the true free market. You pay per byte, per site at market rate.
Over the weekend Uverse hid the 5g Wifi and only allowed their wireless set boxes to access it. I had to configure everything except the Roku back to 2G. The 2G congestion was so bad I had to hook a pihole to the router after manually changing the 2G frequency back as it put everyone in the neighborhood on the same frequency. It took me 2 phone calls and 4 hours to figure out what happened.
Certain companies were essentially blackmailing other companies to let them have their bandwidth back.
Certain companies were also killing and cutting the bandwidth on other traffic that their customers were using., despite the customers having paid for a certain level of bandwidth.
There are more details and more incidents, but that's more than enough info to get the idea. They were doing exactly what net neutrality stops.
Actually the internet functions more like a utility, and since it is a communications method, it's completely appropriate the FCC regulates it.
If the companies hadn't violated the spirit of net neutrality, they wouldn't have instituted actual rules known as net neutrality.
Killing net neutrality to "restore freedom" is like killing the constitution to "restore freedom". That's the exact opposite of what killing it does.
Of course, you're just an anonymous coward troll, and probably a paid one at that.
Duh! Trump assigned him there so he could destroy the FCC.
You really ought to lay off the Koolaid, because right now they got you hook, line, and sinker
You are missing the far more dangerous aspect here. Without NN, ISPs can censor and block anything they want to. That includes infromation in regards to political candidates (national and local), legislative bills, unfavorable reviews and artciles, etc.
Getting rid of NN is the perfect end-around. The first amendment only protects you from government censorship. Corporations can do whatever they want. With the Citizens united ruling, that includes throwing their weight behind whoever is most favorable to their bottom line. With all the ways ISPs have all but guaranteed monopolies across the nation, people have little choice besides not having any access at all which these days is pretty much impractical.
You think tiered service and fast lines is the worst part of the NN repeal? With NN gone you have the perfect, always connected propoganda tool. You want to know why the spineless neo-fascists have been trying to rush everything through here? They want this all in place before the midterms so we can become a democracy just like Russia.
~X~
Won't happen. You see, those funds didn't come from MY pocket. That was the SuperPAC's money, donated by the friendly ISP who wants me in office. It's a shame they'll never catch the criminal who made that hack, but the election is over and I won.
~X~
The *only* rational policy is to treat any infrastructure that uses government facilitated rights of way, or public air spectrum, as a public utility. All traffic should be required by law to be routed as efficiently as practical, without regard to content, or origin/destination of the traffic.
Ad hominem from an AC, whatever. You should have included explicitly that said terms include no blocking by terms of service use-restrictions. I.e. having a contractual term of service that forbids operating a server. I'm educated enough that I understand how that is implied by what you said, but I think it's an important factor here.
I work in telecom, and I think you might be a little needlessly pedantic here. For all intents and purposes, the ISPs for the VAST majority of the population of this country ARE the telcos and cable cos, which are also those same entities who own the last-mile. Either that or you just woke from a coma and think it's still the latter half of the 1990's... (and even THEN the last mile was still owned by the ILECs).
What's the round-trip latency on something that isn't terrestrial? For me, anything about 250ms and my ability to do work flatlines. (I work a lot with SIP and RTP.)
You conveniently forgot that Netflix offers or at least offered to set up equipment on the ISP's network that would host Netflix's content. That in of itself would have kept the data local except for any scheduled synchronization on the edge systems. But iirc, the ISP's wanted Netflix to also pay money to host this equipment, which I think Netflix was offering free-of-charge to the ISP's. So the underlying story is that the ISP's were playing chicken with Netflix and ultimately won.
Guess you Trumpsters showed us.
I'm 3 miles away from the nearest McMansion typical suburban lot size (1/5 to 1/4 acre lots) subdivisions, and there is a fiber line that comes up to about 1 mile away from my house. I have absolutely zero wired providers in my area, unless anybody considers Windstream at $700/mo (plus fees & taxes) for 10 mbps symmetric something that the average family or small business (1 employee - me) can afford - nowithstanding any renegging that Windstream will do at some point mid-contract term (I've heard a lot of chatter about this over the past year). Instead I'm forced to use "old guy who is reselling his Spectrum (formerly TWC) residential service to 25 households with factory-default UBNT equipment and doesn't even understand that he's got his traffic shaping rules ass-backwards" which very often ends up with latencies in the 800 ms to 1800 ms range 3 hops up to the local Spectrum aggregation node, or using Sprint tethered off my phone or a wireless modem, which are fine and usable until I reach the 22 GB within a month marker, and then I risk "deprioritization"... which could mean 2G speeds...
Oh and the kicker? I've actually had 3 of AT&T's linemen tell me that I'm totally qualifying for the older adsl service (one lineman was on the pole on my properly line working a trouble ticket for a neighbor who has that exact service). But any time I try to order, the answer is forever the same... "Sorry, the computer says you can't have it. And computers never lie." I can't even get an answer as to whether there is actually a problem with the margins and attenuation of the signal, or if there's some stupid in-line filters on the 48-conductor on the pole or what. I can't even get to talk to anybody in their engineering department at all.
Name makes me associate to Chairman Mao, Chairman Jinping and others.
first russians, now bots. you millennials need to learn how to deal with not getting your participation trophies. because reality does not care for your feelings.
Trolls are hedonistic griefers. They care not about consequences.
In 2012 I had a phone service that decided to offer Facebook traffic for free, I had an internet service that charged more to access some streaming sites than others. Even before that I played games with wildly different pings to servers which were co-located in the same datacentre. At 2pm all pings were equal. At 7pm as the internet generally got a little slower the pings to all servers NOT owned by the ISP got higher while the ISP's servers at the same facility stayed the same. They did however offer our gaming league to improve QoS to our server ... for a fee.
Your ignorance does not mean there wasn't a problem.
How sad we all need a VPN, of course until "they" start blocking that. Good-Bye internet, sorry for all the suckers who can't live w/o it though. We should be starting a citizens network, and leave the present one to comcast, at&t, and the US government, including those who can afford it.
The market is not always a solution. Sometimes what you need is a service and only one party is needed. You only have to look at the UK energy or water markets to realise the impracticalityâ it brings. Markets should not be more important than the people being served. Politicians often are too blinkered to see this.
The FCC was looking for meaningful comments. Taking somebody else's form letter and attaching "me too" to the end will always go straight to the trash. It doesn't matter which side your form letter takes.
Nope. Even if someone sends a carbon copy of another letter it is pretty clear that they support the same stance. FCC should have taken it into consideration.
The only thing they were looking for was mails to validate the position they've already taken.
Pai have already been paid for getting rid of net neutrality, it is too late to change his decision.
I don't trust the government not to twist Net Neutrality to their advantage, and I also don't trust ISP monopolies not to fuck things up without it, so I dislike the current two options and would prefer a third choice. By breaking ISP monopolies across the country every single one of these problems would be solved by having a competitive market, and without the need for further government regulations.
You don't locate "your stuff" on their property until they become a customer. Until then you stay on the already negotiated easements and public rights-of-way.
Bob wants service. Bob's property is surrounded by Tims, Tammys, and Georges properties. Tim, Tammy, and George don't want your service, and won't give you right of way. Good luck with potential customer Bob.
They already pay a mutually agreed rent for access to the public rights of way. It's called a "franchise fee", and for Comcast in this area it is 3% of their revenue.
Yep, the government already created those rights of way. And they charge a franchise fee to the approved franchise. And that franchise charges the customers additional money for that fee. So basically we are paying to give right-or-way to our property. And the only reason that right-of-way exists is because the government said "we're taking this portion of you land for public use".
Part of the problem here is that not just everybody get's access to those rights. Even Google has trouble getting access to these things and they are trying to put in their own fiber. Imagine trying to rent capacity from an existing cable/telco to start a competing ISP.
So private companies get exclusive access to public resources that are essential to their business model. And then think that the public doesn't have to right to control some aspects of their business?
The *only* rational policy is to treat any infrastructure that uses government facilitated rights of way, or public air spectrum, as a public utility.
That is an assertion, not an obvious fact.
yep the GP asserted that it was the only rational policy. Never made a statement of fact.
And it should not be possible for any company to simultaneously own any part of the infrastructure (directly or indirectly), and any content that it carries.
So telephone companies should not be allowed to operate a 411 (information) service?
The point is that there is some obvious conflict when Comcast is trying to sell streaming service on their delivery system in competition to people who rely on the Comcast delivery system. It's like saying it's totally OK for Dominos to own access to the public road system, don't worry Papa Johns will be fine. Or for Walmart to have exclusive control of the shipping industry, of course Amazon deliveries will get through just fine. When you control the game, you control who wins.
Unregulated businesses is why we got the Sherman Act.
This is just evidence that supporters of heavy-handed Internet regulations are becoming more desperate by the day...
See, this statement bothers me. Not because I'm insulted to be called "desperate" or because net neutrality is being called "heavy handed" (which it's not), but because it shows they fundamentally misunderstand their role. If you're in government and the people who you govern are becoming "desperate", that almost certainly means that you're doing a bad job. Your constituents should not be "desperate". Even if you think your constituents are wrong, the idea that their "desperate" should ring alarm bells that you're moving too fast, not communicating properly, or fucking things up in some other way.
But not Ajit Pai. The self-satisfied shmuck is congratulating himself on causing distress among the people he works for.
Well, you could say that everyone is allowed to dig everywhere they want, put cables where they want, use power poles however they want and we'd sure get more ISPs.
I think the complaints will become fairly loud though once people have power outages, water cuts and the streets have holes and trenches in them all over.
When this country is finally torn apart in civil war due to assholes like Trump and Pai, make sure you get one more jab in before you're lined up against the wall and shot.
If I start a new youtube I can't imagine ISPs would bother to throttle it, until such time that my new youtube it huge but then it seems like a fair game.
The problem is that, without building out new bandwidth, ISPs will only have a fixed amount of bandwidth for all their traffic, so if they sell expanded bandwidth to some customers, it's going to come out of the bandwidth that would have been allocated elsewhere under an even-handed distribution. So an ISP could arbitrarily decide that streaming video would, by default, get an amount of bandwidth sufficient only to stream 640x480 video, and if a streaming service wanted more, they would have to pay for it. Netflix is big enough that it can afford to pay for the higher-tier access package, and if your ISP were, say, Time-Warner, streaming from their own service would automatically get all the bandwidth it needs. But your putative startup streaming service wouldn't have the market share to have the income to be able to pay for the 'enhanced experience' access package, so all their video would either be limited to 640x480 resolution or buffer incessantly, making the startup less competitive against Netflix and Time-Warner's streaming service.
Netflix is also paying for the bandwidth to ISP to have its content served to consumers. ISP gets paid from both hosting company and consuming company. If I create webserver on cloud, I pay for CPU, network usage, storage, etc.
In both of your examples the FTC would step in pretty quickly to put a stop to those practices. It would be considered unfair competition for an ISP to prevent customers from accessing others' services.
Of course we're desperate. We're desperate to maintain an open and free internet.
Doesn't the law prohibit the legislature from delegating legislative power to the executive branch? I've always been unable to figure put why it was legal for any of the executive regulatory bodies to exist. I'm not very good at grokking law though. Could someone explain it?
refactor the law, its bloated, confusing and unmaintainable.
This is good information. I am coming to the conclusion that an ISPs regulation that would be best for the consumers would be one that would somehow guarantee fairness for the small players. In general the laws should protect the weak. I still am convinced that NN as it is protects the strong, by virtue of Google, Facebook and Amazon being for it. That said, I don't know what that ideal regulation would be. Perhaps a regulation that just forces ISPs to publicly report about their traffic speeds, who/what gets throttled and who/what gets higher speeds, would be a good start.
If you want to get Africa online, it is a great idea. Satellite can not compete directly with terrestrial services due to latency. Try it sometime, the average user is not equipped to understand long fat networks, and the average design/protocols are not optimized for them.
Most of their current scummy tactics consist of bribing regulators to create regulations.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Isn't that why you use multiple upstream providers?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I just wish I ran the ISP serving Mr. Pai. "Thanks, Ajit! By the way, your bill's going up, and here's the list of tiered stuff you may be interested in."
Net Neutrality is anti-Internet, can never be achieved, can never be enforced, and censorship has only be done by governments and you want the government to control the Internet.
Nobody is upset by QoS. We're upset about things like Comcast forcing Netflix to pay an extra fee in order to prevent heavy throttling (to the point where the service was unusable). We're upset about things like Comcast forging RST packets on our bittorrent connections (that's not throttling, it's poisoning the traffic - it doesn't slow down the torrent, it breaks it).
We want to buy simple access to the Internet. What Comcast, et al want to sell is basically Cable TV 2.0.
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
#maga
ISPs are definitely monopolies.
When a city the size of about 50,000 has 13 of them, I don't think the word "monopoly" applies in any sense.
I can't speak to your situation.
I work in telecom, and I think you might be a little needlessly pedantic here.
When you talk both legal and technical matters, it is important to use the right terms. "Telco" is not synonymous with ISP. ISP is a much bigger universe. Yes, telcos and cable companies are also ISPs, but that function is still different. A major difference is that while the telcos have a true monopoly on wired telephone service, and cable companies used to have a true dejure monopoly on cable services (but no longer), neither one has ever had a true monopoly on ISP services.
That makes differentiating the terms important when you are talking about ISP regulation. ISP regulation isn't just trying to get back at those awful cable companies that we all hate so much, it includes ALL the ISPs, even the small ones trying to compete against the big ones.
If you want to throttle ISP competition, the best way is to regulate ISPs so that it is even harder for the small competitors to succeed.
Either that or you just woke from a coma
I think those that just woke from the coma are the ones who think that their ISP has a monopoly.
Again, the reality on the ground in the bulk of this country suggests that your distinction is not really all that relevant. And this isn't about "getting back at", this is about "don't fsck with my packets for fun & profit".
No. It's you who are squealing like a pig being slaughtered.
And I thought you wanted to have a serious discussion instead of just toss insults.
they were DECLINING TO BUILD UP THEIR INTERCONNECTIONS.
Yes, they declined to pay to expand an interconnect that was being saturated with traffic primarily from one source. I note that you've now transitioned from talking about my responsibilities as an ISP into a rant about Comcast.
Nobody was asking them to provide free transit to Netflix,
Actually, Netflix asked them for free colo. And when did this discussion about what you think my responsibility to my customers is change into some "free transit" request? You're on a different topic now, altogether.
I offered this bet several times - if by the end of the next year I have at least 3 wireline ISPs that will provide me more with more than 50Mbps connection then I'll pay you $10000.
So you are deliberately slanting your bet by limiting the options to wireline and certain speeds. I'll bet you this: if by the end of next year there is a 10Gb fiber service to my house that costs just $10, I'll pay you $10,000. Otherwise, you pay me. How about those terms?
I can't control who competes in your area. If there isn't enough customer base to support another ISP, that's not my fault.
I actually used to run an ISP and I fucking know how deeply US ISPs are screwing people.
Somehow I don't doubt that you are intimately familiar with how ISPs screw people. I am also familiar with how some of them don't.
But that wasn't what you claimed. You claimed that an ISP has a responsibility to make sure the service works to everyplace on internet. You've yet to counter just one of the reasons I've told you why that isn't true. All you can do is go off on a tangent about Comcast.
Right - so again, the solution is increased regulation. Introduce a constitutional amendment that stops bribery being considered free speech and stops it being legal.
You conveniently forgot that Netflix offers or at least offered to set up equipment on the ISP's network that would host Netflix's content.
I don't think that has been forgotten.
But iirc, the ISP's wanted Netflix to also pay money to host this equipment,
Of course ISPs would expect Netflix to pay for colocation services. You think Netflix deserves to get free electricity, backup power, and network connections just because? Netflix is being paid for their services, why shouldn't the ISP get paid for providing direct service to Netflix?
which I think Netflix was offering free-of-charge to the ISP's.
"Free of charge" is not "free of cost". You want the ISP to pick up Netflix's costs of doing business, and the ISPs aren't that stupid.
Would you expect your local ISP to give you free colo services in exchange for you providing the hardware they would plug into their net? I don't. Then consider the amount of traffic that Netflix would be putting onto the ISPs net and then wonder why the ISP wouldn't hook them up for free.
So you are deliberately slanting your bet by limiting the options to wireline and certain speeds. I'll bet you this: if by the end of next year there is a 10Gb fiber service to my house that costs just $10, I'll pay you $10,000. Otherwise, you pay me. How about those terms?
Oh no, you're not squirming away from this one. I'm not specifying anything unusual, 50Mbps is not unusual (I'm not even asking for 100Mbps) and I'm ready to change "wired" to "unmetered". If you can get me an unmetered 50Mbps wireless connection then I'm also OK with that.
Are you ready for my bet? Or are you going to eat your own words?
Yes, they declined to pay to expand an interconnect that was being saturated with traffic primarily from one source. I note that you've now transitioned from talking about my responsibilities as an ISP into a rant about Comcast.
No, they declined to expand. They didn't have to pay ANYTHING extra apart from trivial costs of additional ports in traffic exchange points. Let me repeat, Comcast decided to screw their cattle because they had no competition and felt no consequences from rent-seeking behavior.
I can't control who competes in your area. If there isn't enough customer base to support another ISP, that's not my fault.
It's a fucking downtown area with average house prices south of $1 million. If there's no "customer base" there then there's no customer base anywhere in the US.
But that wasn't what you claimed. You claimed that an ISP has a responsibility to make sure the service works to everyplace on internet.
Oh no, I didn't. ISPs have responsibility to perform all reasonable actions to make sure that customers can comfortable use their applications. Netflix is not a fucking site somewhere in middle of China.
Somehow I don't doubt that you are intimately familiar with how ISPs screw people. I am also familiar with how some of them don't.
There aren't any good ISPs in the top 10, so fuck you. There are some good local ISPs but they are being killed off by the top10.
"Waaaah Netflix gets free electricity!". Seriously, you want to tell me that the ISP does not receive any net benefit out of that deal? And do you want to tell me that hosting a rack of Netflix's equipment and paying for the electricity and the rack is far costlier than the benefit received by the ISP?
Where do you live that you have 13 different ISPs? For most people, they have one or two ISPs to choose from. A quick Google search located this report that, at 25Mbps (the current definition of broadband), 30% have no providers, 48% have only one provider, and 19% had 2 providers. Only 3% had 3 or more providers. That means that nearly a third of people in the US don't have broadband and two thirds have only 1 or 2 providers. If you have 13 different ISPs, you're very lucky, but you're also a huge exception to the general rule.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
That's a great idea. Too bad the anti-NN people are doing whatever they can to make that legally impossible.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
The large providers may not directly compete with each other in certain areas, but plenty of smaller ones step in to fill the void.
I've had this discussion with so many people who claim that "there is no other choice in my area". So I hit up Google, and 30 seconds later I have a list of 5 other ISPs in their area, not including mobile providers.
"I'm not aware of other options" is not the same as "there are no other options".
But yes, you certainly could do a better job of opening up the market to encourage even more competition. Right now the biggest obstacles to entry are regulatory and legal restrictions. You have too many laws, not too few.
There's a vital difference here. The EM spectrum is a limited public resource that must be regulated to be useful at all. Fiber isn't. We can lay more fiber a lot easier than we can add frequencies to the useful bands of the spectrum.
A company that is transmitting over the air is using a limited public resource, and it makes sense to apply certain requirements (exactly which requirements we can argue about). There is no similar argument for regulating fiber.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Not handing out my address, but no - there is one real DSL option and exactly one Cable option if I'm excluding satellite and cellular. Sure, legally DSL is open to competition, but in practice there are only higher prices and speeds so slow as to not be worth it.
Unless you have some secret place to look...
There's also a difference between "there are no alternatives" and "all the alternatives are slower or more expensive".
If Comcast is the cheapest and fastest ISP in your area, then that really sucks. But you DO have other options. Comcast is obviously not a monopoly when you're telling me you have multiple DSL providers available, AND you have satellite and cellular on top of that.
Basically at this point your complaint isn't "Comcast is a monopoly" so much as "I'm unhappy that none of my many options are as cheap and fast as I want them to be". I can certainly sympathise with you, but that's not much of an argument for having the government come in and regulate the internet.
By that logic, Microsoft was never a monopoly. And yet it was ruled to be abusing its status as one.
If all the options are worse because they are not allowed to compete at the same level, that is a monopoly as determined by our courts.
Really? So if I don't like the incumbent monoploy ISP I can just get myself a roll of optical fiber and string up a line across town to some data center that will route packets for me?
Right of way for cross-town fiber is just as much a limited shared resource as radio spectrum. THAT is why Comcast et al should be strictly regulated. The FCC's domain is that last-mile shared resource, NOT the Internet as a whole.
The big national ISPs and their stooges are intentionally equivocating between local carrier service and the global Internet to confuse and derail the pro-NN opposition. GP commenter fell right into this trap ("filing the internet under title 2" and "would give the FCC way too much power to regulate the internet"). NOBODY wants the FCC to regulate The Internet. The Internet is fine. It's the last mile that's a mess, because the giant national ISP companies are abusive, unregulated monopolies.
You should be fighting against the government sponsored monopolies that you cite (one broadband provider in your entire state).
However, since there's cellular and satellite options for all states, so I am skeptical of your claim of only one provider. They may have the fastest/lowest latency connections but they are hardly the only option.
So again, stop your local municipalities from granting monopoly rights to only one company, which is another way to stifle competition by the entrenched.
Where do you live that you have 13 different ISPs? For most people, they have one or two ISPs to choose from. A quick Google search located this report that, at 25Mbps (the current definition of broadband), 30% have no providers, 48% have only one provider, and 19% had 2 providers. Only 3% had 3 or more providers. That means that nearly a third of people in the US don't have broadband and two thirds have only 1 or 2 providers. If you have 13 different ISPs, you're very lucky, but you're also a huge exception to the general rule.
This is the problem with floating definitions of broadband. When you increase that floating definition to 50Mbps, how do those new lower stats serve to prove your point?
What zip code do you live in sir, so we can research your claim of only 1 provider with 25Mbps? I suspect your claim will be false however I will keep an open mind.
Amazing to smell it coming from the FCC!
I was addressing the AC's fear of things like public decency filters on the net like they are on the air. There's no excuse to regulate the net on that basis.
As far as last mile goes, the last-mile people should be required to run dumb pipes. That's the closest to a fairness doctrine there should be.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You can actually voice your opinion directly from this link: http://gofccyourself.com/
It takes you directly to the FCC website page to voice your opinion.
Click the "Express" link there to get to the relevan case page.
Then, finish filling-out the info and submit.
It is EASY! it is your duty to chime-in!
We, the People, really need to understand and demand what truly serves the People!
(This link was created/maintained by John Oliver's "Last Week Tonight" organization.)
Self-importance and self-indulgence is the root of ALL evil.
Don't they realize that the removal of NN affects them negatively? I mean, why pay lobby money when i can just silence the opposition? I know this is a harsh simplification, but still.....
This is the problem with floating definitions of broadband.
No, that's the problem of a floating definition of "ISP". When you contort the definition of ISP to be "faster than 50 Mbps" or "faster than 25 Mbps", then you can come up with whatever statistics you want. But "only one company that sells a service at a speed I want at a price I want to pay" doesn't turn them into a monopoly. I could claim that Chevrolet is a monopoly because "only Chevrolet makes a car with the features I want at the price I want to pay", but I would be amazingly wrong, and it would be amazingly wrong to create special regulations based on my personal choice.
Oh no, you're not squirming away from this one. I'm not specifying anything unusual,
I'm not squirming away from anything. I have no reason to bet you anything, since I have no control over who competes in your area. All I did was counter-bet using my own limits on the defined service, just as YOU set your limits on what you would consider an ISP. If you get to set the limits on your bet, I get to set them on mine.
No, they declined to expand.
You're still ranting about Comcast instead of discussing the point at hand, which is what MY responsibility as an ISP is towards connectivity outside my own network. What Comcast did is not relevant to that point.
It's a fucking downtown area with average house prices south of $1 million. If there's no "customer base" there then there's no customer base anywhere in the US.
"Customer base" means "people who would buy your service", not just "people who could afford your service". People who have money don't buy stuff just because they can afford it. Nobody says "hey, look, another ISP. I'm happy with what I've got but I think I'll change just for fun." It's only when you get enough people who are not happy with their existing service and want to change that there is a customer base for a competitor. I can't control whether there are enough of those people, or force a new ISP to come compete with the one you don't like.
Oh no, I didn't. I
Not in those words, but to that effect. I think it was "make reasonable use of", which includes end-to-end considerations.
ISPs have responsibility to perform all reasonable actions to make sure that customers can comfortable use their applications.
You did not say "reasonable actions", but again, "comfortable use" [sic] has end-to-end considerations.
Netflix is not a fucking site somewhere in middle of China.
It doesn't matter where Netflix is, I have no responsibility to make sure that Netflix has sufficient bandwidth to provide their service -- which is part of the ""comfortable use" result -- UNLESS Netflix is on MY NETWORK where I am responsible for network bandwidth. If Netflix colos in my datacenter, or through other means buys network service from me, then they are a customer I have a responsibility to. And yes, you can bet that if Netflix colos in my datacenter they are paying for the network access they need to sell their content. I ain't giving network access away for free.
There aren't any good ISPs in the top 10, so fuck you.
Your use of profanity helps your argument, not. All it proves is that you don't want a serious discussion. Bye.