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Net Neutrality Gives 'Free' Internet To Netflix and Google, ISP Claims (arstechnica.com)
Frontier Communications is asking employees for help in its fight against state net neutrality rules in California, claiming that the rules will give "free" Internet to major Web companies while raising costs for consumers. From a report: The Internet service provider urged employees to submit a form letter asking Governor Jerry Brown to veto the net neutrality bill that was recently approved by the state legislature. Frontier sent an email to employees and set up an online form for them to send the form letter to Brown. "I am proud to work at Frontier and help operate a network that is part of an incredibly successful Internet ecosystem that is the backbone of our economy and daily life," the form letter says. But net neutrality rules "will harm consumers and impose complex layers of costly regulation," and therefore "deter investment and delay broadband deployment in California, especially in rural areas that still lack high-speed Internet access," the letter says. The letter claims that net neutrality rules "will create significant new costs for consumers" but did not make it clear what those new costs would be.
Netflix/google/whomever is paying for internet access, in a different way then regular consumers.
The teleco's can go fuck themselves.
I paid for it. I the customer. I already paid for it.
When you say free, you mean you want to double-charge. You want to charge them to get to me, as much as you want to charge me to get to them. But they make all their money from me. This really boils down to, you want to double-charge me.
I already paid for it.
It doesn't cost you $100/month to move the electrons. You aren't buying $100/mo worth of equipment. Be honest. It is all profit, and you like profit with minimal cost. If you could get all your profit that way, you would love it. You prefer slavery. If you could, you would do it.
You drink blood. Eventually, you end up drinking your own, along with the vast pool of mine and everyone like me. It kills you when you do it. To watch you die at your own hand I just have to be able to wait long enough to see it.
Net neutrality on a technical level is less regulation and complexity, not more.
The idea is very simple, treat all traffic equally and design your network to peer with the other guy's in such a way that it keeps costs down for both parties.
Netflix is the reason your customers are buying faster tiers of internet,.
I find it fascinating when a corporation "encourages" its employees to a certain political action and helpfully provide them a script. Corporations are people, money is speech, and coercing your employees's speech is a very pure expression of malignant capitalism.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It's the easiest way to make money.
"If you like your doctor, you can keep him. If you like your insurance plan, you can keep it."
Because being blatantly dishonest makes the media cry out about how brave and what a hero you are.
All the whining about Net Neutrality is garbage. Running an ISP is an inexpensive task, relatively, and it scales very well. The larger you are, the cheaper each additional customer is. I am literally baffled how large megacorps like Frontier, Spectrum nee Charter, and Comcast don't have 50% profit margins at their prices.
For all I know they do have 50% profit margins, and all this garbage about rising costs is just that... garbage.
The only reason that this has lasted so long, and the incumbent idiocy has not been ousted by competition, is because they don't have competition in most of their markets. Monopoly pricing has become the norm rather than the exception in the US. In the EU, which is no easier or more difficult to provide Internet to, consumer internet costs 1/2 to 1/4 what it does in the US. As far as I can tell the primary driver between the difference in price is that the EU municipalities never created monopoly markets for Internet.
"I will trust Google to 'do no evil' until the founders no longer run it." Hello Alphabet.
Why are corporations all a bunch of lying-ass trash?
It's all about feedback loops. There is no penalty for them to constantly lie but there is plenty to gain from deceiving people.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
The more I hear "We need to stop net neutrality/government oversight because it will prevent us from serving poor rural customers" the more I wonder if telcos have been withholding service from these areas strategically, so that they can promise to get them service every few years in exchange for regulatory favor or just money, then renege on their promises only to bring up the same areas a few years later when they want something else.
This is my favorite quote. It turned out that less than 1.5% of people had to change their insurance plans due to the ACA. Which means that Obama's biggest lie was when he was only 98.5% correct. Compare/contrast with what the current president says this week. (I don't know what he'll say, and it doesn't matter; we all know it will be far less than 98.5% correct).
Back to the original point: certain people and organizations lie because their followers will believe them no matter how ludicrous their claims may be. In the case of most ISPs, the people who matter (lawmakers) believe them because their campaign contributions depend on it. In the case of politicians, well, you can tell a lot about a person by seeing what political folks they vote for.
Yes yes, we know that argument. It's been passed around for a while now. It's no less bullshit now than it was then. The customers are paying for their pipe. The content producers are paying for their own pipe. Everyone is *already* paying for their access.
The reality that has been demonstrated is that ISPs only want to double-dip, making their customers pay AND make the content-providers pay for the exact same traffic. There is absolutely no evidence that says ISPs ever have or ever will lower prices for consumers by having content-creators pay the difference.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/...
Until you are blocked from going to infowars.com, Alex Jones is not an example.
I hate fat people.
Assuming your ACA statistics are correct, it doesn't change the fact that insurance premiums went up tremendously after its passing. The skyrocketing premiums are directly related to the ACA. If you drove a nice car and I passed a law that made it two or three times as expensive to keep, would I be 98.5% correct in saying that, "if you like your current car, you can keep it?"
We didn't even see those kinds of rapid premium increases under the George W. Bush administration, one of the worst presidents in living memory. He would likely be the worst president in living memory if it weren't for the fact that Obama provides such stiff competition.
Frontier and other ISPs are upset because they spend the minimum amount necessary on infrastructure upgrades and maintenance. They oversold their minimalist networks as much as they possibly could, and then the likes of Netflix and YouTube came along and ISP customers started all consuming massive amounts of bandwidth instead of it just being the file sharers that ate bandwidth like mad.
So now, in order to meet customer demand, ISPs have to use some of the profits they've been racking in hand over fist to go out an upgrade their networks. But, instead of just getting the job done, they'd rather spend a few million on a political propaganda campaign and buying off politicians to try and kill Net Neutrality so they can keep their grubby mitts on the most profit possible.
Now, make no mistake, either way consumers are still going to get screwed in the end, but, better they get screwed while getting an upgraded infrastructure, instead of letting the ISPs rip off Netflix and others for the crime of serving content. Because without Net Neutrality, the ISPs get to demand tolls from Netflix, and Netflix's prices go up, while the ISPs sit back and do nothing. With Net Neutrality, the ISPs will raise prices and implement data caps - but they also build infrastructure to handle the demand.
And Netflix already has all the incentive in the world to research, develop, and adopt new video codecs like AV1 to make their content smaller, because they still need to pay to have their content mirrored all around the country. And the smaller that content is, the less they have to pay.
Which is why this whole entire scheme is utterly dependent on the monopolies granted to the ISPs by the local government. If you had a choice of multiple ISPs and your ISP began throttling a content publisher for not paying them, you would simply cancel service and subscribe to a different ISP. The only reason they have the temerity to try to charge content publishers is because they know their customers are captive, and cannot flee to a different ISP. Essentially, not only do they have a monopoly on providing service to their customers, they also have a monopoly on giving content publishers access to those customers.
The whole thing is probably the best current example of government regulation run amok. The initial service monopolies granted by the local governments may have been well-intended (to prevent telephone poles from being strung up with dozens of unsightly wires, for guarantees to provide services to low income areas, etc). But it should be clear by now that they're doing far more harm than good, and should be abolished. We've tried government regulation of ISPs for 20+ years and it's failed miserably. Give competition a chance. Aside from access speed, things were actually better back in the 1980s and early 1990s when everyone used dialup connections. I remember canceling service with several ISPs which dissatisfied me before I found one I liked.
with net neutrality, content publishers and distributors get to peer directly with an isp and flood their network with whatever data the content provider wants.
No, that's not how that works. Content publishers' ISPs get to peer with other ISPs because that's how the Internet works. Without peering, there's just a bunch of unconnected networks, of "walled gardens", and not the Internet. You want to go back to the days of AOL, Prodigy, and CompuServe? Fine. Go start that business and see how it goes. Meanwhile, the rest of us want access to the Internet.
And content providers don't "flood their networks". That shows another fundamental misunderstanding of what's going on. This is not a broadcast network. A company like Netflix isn't just sending out all their video, all the time, to everyone. Their users request the video, and then the request goes over the ISP's network, over to Netflix's ISP, to Netflix's server, and Netflix allows the download. Verizon is trying to charge Netflix for Netflix allowing Verizon customers to download something.
Without net neutrality, content publishers... have an incentive to keep spurious traffic low
They have an incentive to keep their traffic low regardless. Again using Netflix as an example, they already pay a boatload of money for internet access. They have to move massive amounts of information very quickly, and that's expensive. If they could cut their bandwidth needs by 20%, they'd save a bunch of money. They'd do it if they could.
... and pass on the costs to the consumer.
This is another one of those fundamental misunderstandings of how things work. While it's true that when a company has to pay more, they sometimes "pass on the cost to consumers," that's not necessarily how that works. That economic model imagines a world where businesses set their prices by figuring out their costs and just adding a set percentage to everything. Businesses don't set prices that way!
Let's say you were paying $100 for a product last year, and this year the price is increased to $110. Was that because prices went up somewhere in the supply chain and the product now costs $10 more to produce?
Probably not. Yes, it's possible that the product costs $85 to bring to market, and the cost went up to $95, and they increased their price to account for the difference. Or it might be that it costs $70 to bring to market, and the price went up to $90, but they decided that they could only get away with raising the price by $10. Or it might even be that the price went down from $85 to $75, but they raised the price anyway because demand was high and they thought people would still buy it at the higher price.
Companies don't just transparently pass costs on to consumers. They set the price based on supply and demand, with varying levels of profit margin.