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Net Neutrality Gives 'Free' Internet To Netflix and Google, ISP Claims (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on from the closer-look dept.

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.

15 of 361 comments (clear)

  1. Why? by RickyShade · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Why are corporations all a bunch of lying-ass trash?

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

      It's the easiest way to make money.

    2. Re:Why? by CastrTroy · · Score: 5, Informative

      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

      They are only sending content that the end user has requested. The content publishers are paying their ISP for every bit that they send out and receive (via a leased line of a specified bandwidth) and the end user is paying for every bit that they send out and receive from their ISP. They want to be able to double charge though. They want to charge the end user to receive the data, but also want to charge the content publisher for letting the customer receive the data.

      --

      Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
    3. 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.
    4. 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.

    5. Re:Why? by gnunick · · Score: 5, Informative

      > Nonsense. ACA banned catastrophic health insurance/health saving accounts.

      Not even remotely true. I still have my HSA.

      --
      I have no special gift, I am only passionately curious. --Albert Einstein
    6. 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.

    7. Re:Why? by jeff4747 · · Score: 5, Informative

      ACA banned catastrophic health insurance/health saving accounts.

      Since I currently have a HSA, I'm gonna have to point out you're wrong.

      The ACA banned catastrophic health insurance plans and HSA-backed plans from the ACA marketplace. The ACA marketplace is not "insurance". In fact, it's a small percentage of insurance plans. Employer-based plans can still be HSA plans, and employer-based insurance dwarfs the ACA marketplace insurance.

      Where you pay for your own routine doctor visits and only have coverage for actual medical emergencies.

      The problem with this plan is people just don't do routine doctor visits when they have this plan. Which means they end up getting far more medical emergencies.

      If your response is something like "but I paid for my checkups!!!!", you're forgetting the cost-sharing aspect of insurance. You paid more for your insurance because the vast majority on these plans did not get regular medical care

      It's much cheaper to pay for someone's $100 annual visit for a couple decades and catch that they have high blood pressure instead of waiting for them to show up in an ER with complications. Strokes aren't cheap.

      When they pass 'ACA for car insurance', it will require coverage for oil changes, which will cost you $5,000 once all the costs are rolled in.

      This might be funny if you forget most states have mandatory car insurance, as well as minimum requirements for that insurance.

  2. 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      BS.

      The internet was doing just fine before the corporations took it over.

      It was actually better.

    2. 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.
  3. 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.

  4. AT&T's "our pipes" BS all over again by bersl2 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    https://web.archive.org/web/20...

  5. ISP gets free Google and Netflix by Njovich · · Score: 5, Interesting

    They are right and it's called market power. ISP's should thank god Google and Netflix aren't charging ISP's yet for the privilege of having their service, as consumers would be happy to ditch any service that doesn't offer them.

  6. 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.