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Net Neutrality Is Over Monday, But Experts Say ISPs Will Wait To Screw Us (inverse.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Inverse: Parts of the Federal Communication Commission's repeal of net neutrality is slated to take effect on April 23, causing worry among internet users who fear the worst from their internet service providers. However, many experts believe there won't be immediate changes come Monday, but that ISPs will wait until users aren't paying attention to make their move. "Don't expect any changes right out of the gate," Dary Merckens, CTO of Gunner Technology, tells Inverse. Merckens specializes in JavaScript development for government and business, and sees why ISPs would want to lay low for a while before enacting real changes. "It would be a PR nightmare for ISPs if they introduced sweeping changes immediately after the repeal of net neutrality," he says.
While parts of the FCC's new plan will go into effect on Monday, the majority of the order still doesn't have a date for when it will be official. Specific rules that modify data collection requirements still have to be approved by the Office of Management and Budget, and the earliest that can happen is on April 27. Tech experts and consumer policy advocates don't expect changes to happen right away, as ISPs will likely avoid any large-scale changes in order to convince policymakers that the net neutrality repeal was no big deal after all.
While parts of the FCC's new plan will go into effect on Monday, the majority of the order still doesn't have a date for when it will be official. Specific rules that modify data collection requirements still have to be approved by the Office of Management and Budget, and the earliest that can happen is on April 27. Tech experts and consumer policy advocates don't expect changes to happen right away, as ISPs will likely avoid any large-scale changes in order to convince policymakers that the net neutrality repeal was no big deal after all.
Don't you think the joker laughs at you?
"Net Neutrality Is Over Monday, But Experts Say ISPs Will Wait To Screw Us"
We need experts to tell us this? Are we all blithering idiots who need to be told common-sense business tactics? Hey, we've discovered that there's an apartment shortage in my area. I wish I could find an expert to tell me whether rents will go up in the near future.
...omphaloskepsis often...
My neighborhood is served by Spectrum (Charter Communications). They have a whole one-and-a-half stars on Yelp. Their prices suck, and they send lots of junk mail, even if you're already a customer. Oh, they also frequently call you on your cell phone and attempt to up-sell you, too (even when you're on the do-not-call list, and have told them repeatedly you do not want marketing calls). Their broadband service is also prone to many random brief outages. Short of starting a cable channel where their executives murder kittens on live TV, I can't imagine their reputation sinking much lower.
We have no other choice of land-based high speed provider. AT&T no longer offers DSL, and they have no plans to ever offer U-Verse. The only other competing providers are cellular networks, which don't offer the kind of data allowance you'd need for a home internet connection. Spectrum literally has a monopoly over the markets they serve. If they decided tomorrow that Netflix is now an extra $5/mo, or online gaming is an extra $15/mo, the choices are "cough it up", or "do without."
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DRM is like antifreeze, to the MPAA/RIAA it's sweet, to the consumers it's poison.
They're already priming the pump. I saw a Comcast commercial just two days ago that was claiming how great their new, faster service was going to be and it "included Netflix". I nearly dropped my plate. It's coming. ISPs will treat websites like channels soon enough and you're going to need to buy packaged bundles to get the websites you want.
Uh, Netscape Navigator has been history in the rest of the world for more than a decade.
Ezekiel 23:20
There are a bunch of lawsuits in the pipeline over net neutrality. I imagine the ISPs will at least wait until they start to see how they will be resolved before they do anything serious to change the current situation.
It will be the perfect excuse for me to disconnect and going back to doing things in real life, the way we were intended to. I am spending entirely too much time on the internet these days and missing out on what life has to offer. The fact that the ISP is now going to screw us just makes it that much easier for me to kick Verizon fios to the curb.
No one said you had to vote for a Democrat. There are *some* decent Republicans out there, but most won't ever be nominated because conservitards only care about "muh bortions" and their right to oppress gay rights and freedom of *other* religions. Vote 3rd party every time if you find both parties to be unpalatable.
I don't think things are black/or/white.
They won't block websites using this words. They will turn this into some kind of euphemism. Like: "You exceeded your monthly quota of broadband". At the same time, they will give you a few websites where this quota doesn't apply. It's already happening - slowly and in a very polite way, but it's happening.
I'm from Brazil. Here we have companies that give you unlimited data on WhatsApp. But if you want to use Telegram or Signal or whatever-the-fuck-you-want, your data will be charged. Think about it: after 25 days on the month, it is very likely that a significant amount of people on such kind of plans won't have access to Telegram/WhatsApp-competitor. This IS a BLOCK. It's bad for business, it's bad for us and it is bad for free speech.
Five years from now, none of the major fears like blocking sites they don't like will have materialized, but Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. will be more one sided than ever.
That's adorable you actually seem to believe that. If there is money to be made in blocking content then it will be blocked. The precise nature of the block is yet to be determined but it will happen in some form or fashion. Do you seriously think Comcast isn't going to prioritize their own content over everyone else's who doesn't pay them an arm and a leg? They've effectively gotten a government endorsed protection racket. "Nice website. Would be a shame if no one could see it..."
It's screwing us already, the people in Puerto Rico, Barbuda, Dominica, NYC and California wildfire country have already been screwed hard.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
While I'm sure the monopoly ISPs enjoy let's them give no fks, I'm confident they will do a slow boil on us frogs. Without rioting in the streets, it will be much easier on them if suddenly the senate and/or congress flips blue later this year.
I think in this most recent presidential election on the Republican side there were about six "traditional" candidates - successful government and business leaders who basically did what candidates do, and then there was Donald Trump. The votes for "some reasonable choice of a person with a good track record" got spread amongst several primary candidates, leaving Trump to pick up all of the "somebody different" vote. Plus Trump is just good at getting attention.
Also, we're living in a world where most voters have an attention span of 140 characters. People aren't reading in-depth analysis in the editorial pages, they are reading tweets.
This is a common misconception - frogs don't stay in boiling water, even if it's heated slowly. The only time that a frog will not jump out of even a slowly-heated pot is when the sides are too steep. I guess frogs are smarter than humans, in a lot of ways.
http://xkcd.com/386/
Because it isn't as catchy as "Will wait to implement site level throttling."
and Comcast Sucks ins't news is is just matter of fact.
The thing is people get emotional because Net Neutrality is touted as killing off your netflix and your youtube. But the real damage is all the stuff that your ISP handle that isn't consumer level.
I have 100mbs internet connection at home. I will VPN into work to do my work. If my ISP decides to throttle VPN Connections (because it is what bad people do too) And my work doesn't have the money or the willingness to pay the ISP ransom amount. I am stuck using a product Advertised as 100mbs but only getting 10mbs because they decide to throttle it.
I could care less if Netflix takes an extra 5 seconds to load, or I don't get 4k resolution. But If I am transferring hundreds of megs of information back and forth of work data, then having to wait is wasting my time, and costing my company money. And I am getting ripped off, because I chose that ISP because of the bandwidth promised me.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.