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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.

8 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Last I checked by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Netflix/google/whomever is paying for internet access, in a different way then regular consumers.

    The teleco's can go fuck themselves.

    1. Re:Last I checked by HiThere · · Score: 5, Insightful

      From my perspective it was considerably better. Tech sites were easier to find, and there was a lot less garbage. And almost no spam.

      OTOH, there are lots of different use cases, and mine is a small subset. And if my use case were dominant, we'd all still be on dial-up.

      --

      I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
  2. I hope Frontier burns... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Re:Why? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It's the easiest way to make money.

  4. Former ISP Employee by The+Raven · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  5. Re:Why? by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.
  6. Re:Why? by kqs · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  7. Re:Why? by Solandri · · Score: 5, Insightful

    but also want to charge the content publisher for letting the customer receive the data.

    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.