The purpose of regulating utilities is that you don't really have the option to stop doing business with them.
No, the point of regulating utilities is for various groups to enrich themselves and to create artificial monopolies.
Unless they split the infrastructure from the content/data parts of the business (similar to phone in the 80s, what gave us an explosion of phone options at low prices, or to power)
That's not what happened in the 80's. What happened in the 80's was telecom deregulation: we went from one government-mandated monopoly to many different telecom providers. Wire sharing was part of that process.
Furthermore, mandated wire sharing (separating infrastructure from content/data) is different from net neutrality. Since wires are often installed under government created monopolies to begin with, mandating wire sharing may well be a good thing. With mandated wire sharing, ISPs can still discriminate against traffic, it's just that if an ISP screws up too badly, it's easy for new providers to enter the market.
Wire sharing mandates exist in Europe. Let's talk about whether to have them here, instead of this stupid net neutrality debate. Of course, wire sharing does nothing for Google or Netflix, so they don't promote it, and existing telecoms hate it too; that's why it isn't even on the table.
Net neutrality is precisely not that, it is not favor YouTube over Vimeo,
I didn't say that. What I said is that it artificially favors one business model over another. So, it doesn't favor YouTube over Vimeo, but it does favor YouTube's free tier over sites that charge for hosting and sharing video.
No, I want the ISPs to advertise '2GB/month' and be done with it, for a basic tier, and you pay according to transfer rates per second and per month, not according to whether my preferred streaming provider has entered some promotional relationship with my ISP.
Yes, that's what you want. But for my parents, E-mail plus a couple of "streaming provider that entered some promotional relationship with their ISP" is a fine plan, a plan you deny them.
It very much is profit-maximizing, otherwise they wouldn't bother with this campaign at all.
You are responding out of context. You basically said that ISPs are motivated by "reveling" in something, implying some sinister motivations and evil desire to hurt people for the sake of hurting people. I pointed out that that's bullshit: ISPs are profit maximizers. In fact, both corporate proponents and corporate opponents of net neutrality are profit maximizers. The question is how those positions maximize profit for the companies.
Google, Netflix, YouTube, etc. maximize profit through pushing net neutrality because net neutrality supports their no-pay streaming models and their advertising-based revenue. Those models work best if they can distribute their costs as widely as possible, which is what net neutrality achieves. When those companies say that they push net neutrality because they want to help consumers and enable competitors to enter the market, they are lying through their teeth.
ISPs maximize profit through opposing net neutrality because repealing net neutrality lets them meet market demand better. You may not think that a 2GB/mo plan with promotional, ad-supported video streaming is a good deal, but other people happen to think differently.
Net neutrality is the typical socialist impulse of "we don't need 23 deodorants". Net-neutrality proponents are like people who want to regulate the deodorant market to make sure that only four standard deodorant choices are offered. Net-neutrality opponents don't want such restrictions; you may think that bacon deodorant or promotional Cinnabon(TM) deodorant is silly, but it's not for you to decide.
-A basic plan for 'generic' internet with a relatively low cap, useless for any new business to do high-bandwidth things, one that would be rejected out of hand by consumers today because it's useless. -That basic plan is, however, made acceptable to consumers by having 'exemptions' for blessed content providers (like netflix and such), and then consumers buy that plan or isp gets the plan subsidized by netflix and google, so suddenly it's ok, just need to stick to youtube and netflix and the cheap plan works.
So you are saying that without net neutrality, my parents could get a very cheap plan that would cover their E-mail and web browsing needs and let them watch a limited number of streaming video sites. But you disapprove of that choice and want to force my parents to pay more for a plan just so that the plan you want, a plan that offers unrestricted streaming from any site, doesn't get more expensive.
I think you just confirmed that the motivations behind pushing net neutrality are selfish geeks wanting their unrestricted browsing habits subsidized by the rest of the population.
We've already seen this exact thing play out on T-mobile, where they had '2GB/month, *but* youtube and netflix won't count, you want content from Vimeo? Tough, you'll have to pay more for Vimeo than from Youtube because youtube played ball and vimeo didn't.
Sounds like a perfect plan for my parents. The fact that net neutrality takes away that options is one of many things wrong with it.
If redbox suddenly ousts netflix because the FCC mandates that redbox has fair access as netflix, that's not the government picking a winner.
If the government says "we want transit on the Internet to function in ways favorable to YouTube", then they are very much picking winners and losers. And that is what net neutrality is.
No, they'll have a 'generic' service with some crazy low cap like 2GB/month which will break any non-whitelisted streaming site
So, a perfect plan for my parents. But you don't want them to have that plan available to them because you want to force people to subsidize all streaming sites.
as they revel in the ability to nickle and dime
Companies don't "revel in abilities", they maximize profit. The parade of horribles you invent is not profit-maximizing.
First of all ISPS like Comcast is not a private publisher. They are middleman.
That's what publishers always are: middlemen.
It has been clear in the last decade that they've imposed changes to their own benefit and against their customers
That's what companies are supposed to do: they are profit maximizers.
What you're saying is as idiotic as saying: The law gives law enforcement too much power over my driving when they say I can't drive on the sidewalk and run over pedestrians.
Driving over pedestrians harms them. Comcast offering you a service under conditions you don't like doesn't harm you.
The whole situation is parallel to your neighbor causing a nuisance
Comcast failing to offer you Internet service under the conditions you desire doesn't cause you harm and doesn't infringe on any of your rights; "my neighbor causing a nuisance" is an infringement on my property rights. Hence, the two situations aren't parallel at all.
The police can't do anything because there's no ordinance.
Ah, you live under the misconception that the only way you can enjoy property rights is through ordinances and regulations. No wonder you are so confused.
So you get noise ordinances passed but then the asshole neighbor does a lot of business with the city council members and suddenly they're removing the noise ordinance because it's "overreach"
Sadly that doesn't happen. What does happen is that assholes like you and Google get laws and ordinances passed to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
Somehow the potential for censorship counts as censorship.
It doesn't "count as" censorship, it's a step towards censorship. And politicians of both parties have declared their intent to censor content.
I'm afraid people are going to care less about countries like China and Cuba preventing criticisms of their governments since that now falls into the same bucket of "censorship".
I suggest you worry more about domestic issues and let the people of China and Cuba deal with their own problems.
Access to what? ISPs are the Internet. There is nothing else they can provide access to except to each other. They do that via peering and transit agreements.
When the stream Netflix plan costs $10/month extra, but Xfinity and Hulu are free, it will have shifted to being about picking winners and losers.
If Netflix is too costly without net neutrality, that means that net neutrality regulations and the federal government picked Netflix as a winner, and ending net neutrality simply reverses that market distortion. What we really have in the case of Netflix (and YouTube, Google, and Facebook) is typical regulatory capture: big, powerful corporations lobbying government to pick them as winners. That's what you are promoting when you promote net neutrality: crony capitalism and regulatory capture.
but don't fabricate a public mandate when 99.9999% of people who give a fuck disagree with what is happening
That's pretty much always the case in politics: concentrated benefits versus diffuse costs. It certainly applies here: net neutrality provides concentrated benefits and imposes diffuse costs, which is why you have such vocal net neutrality proponents and hear little from the other side.
Try to guess the number I'm thinking of..... It's the number of people who voted for Trump based on his Net Neutrality stance.
We elect representatives that represent us on a variety of issues. In the last election, we elected a pussy grabbing businessman over a faux-progressive career politician. That tells you the tradeoffs people generally prefer, namely less regulation and lower taxes as opposed to more social justice and progressivism. Repealing net neutrality is consistent with that choice.
When regulatory bodies completely ignore the will of the public you have a much bigger problem.
It's not the job of regulatory agencies to give the public whatever the public wants. It's the job of regulatory agencies to follow the law and the Constitution.
Tim Wu, a law professor at Columbia who first coined the term "net neutrality," writes for the New York Times: Allowing such censorship is anathema to the internet's (and America's) founding spirit.
What is "anathema to America's founding spirit" is giving a federal agency control over what private publishers can and cannot say. That is what FCC net neutrality regulations do.
Comcast charging more for Netflix, on the other hand, isn't "censorship". It is "anathema to America's founding spirit" for the federal government to force printers to print content that they don't want to print.
And by going this far, the F.C.C. may also have overplayed its legal hand. So drastic is the reversal of policy (if, as expected, the commission approves Mr. Pai's proposal next month), and so weak is the evidence to support the change, that it seems destined to be struck down in court.
Wu got it backwards: the legal case for net neutrality regulation is exceptionally weak, as is the evidence that it is needed in the first place; and the whole thing was regulatory overreach. This challenges to the reversal will go down in flames in court, unless they find some progressive activist judge.
It's not in the interest of consumers, because it will significantly increase the investments and hurdles for Internet startup companies to effect that there will be less competition and less consumer choices in the long run.
That analysis presumes that ISPs will try to charge new entrants more than they will charge Netflix. That's a ludicrous assumption. To the contrary, ISPs will go where the money is, namely to Netflix, Google, YouTube, and Facebook and demand significant transit fees for traffic from those companies, while leaving Internet startups alone because Internet startups don't have much money and already pay for egress. Once you realize that, it becomes clear why Netflix, Google, YouTube, and Facebook are lobbying so hard for net neutrality: striking down net neutrality hurts their business models badly while making it easy for new entrants to compete.
You'll need millions of investment funding and countless deals and (re-)negotiations with Verizon and Comcast just to establish a new "cloud" backup product.
No, you don't, because small companies are simply covered by whatever their hosting provider already has negotiated. And hosting providers already charge for egress, which covers ISP peering/transit. Those "countless deals and (re-)negotiations" mainly affect huge, wealthy companies that either run their own infrastructure or have sweetheart deals from their ISPs. That's exactly why companies like Netflix and Google are fighting a repeal of net neutrality kicking and screaming: this is a very real threat to their bottom line and market dominance.
If it was about billing for traffic, they could simply charge per GB/TB.
Theoretically yes. In practice, they can't do that because consumers don't like it.
It's about billing based on content, Comcast wants to make Roku, Sony TV, Dishes internet option, live Sports, Netflix, etc. Disproportionately expensive.
No, they want to make it proportionately expensive, i.e., more expensive than now.
Repeal of NN allows then to pick winners and losers in various markets,
ISPs are in the business in order to make money, not to pick winners and losers. If an ISP doesn't offer access to Netflix, it will lose users and attract new ISPs into the market, so there are limits to what they can do. That is exactly the kind of healthy competition the market needs in order to get rid of near monopolies like Netflix, Google, Comcast, etc.
Sure, maybe the *average* user monthly fee wil lbe the same, but guarantee over the long run the per-user rate would increase, with them pointing to useless entry tiers as a way to say they are providing an affordable option,
So you agree then that net neutrality achieves what it is supposed to achieve: it results in higher charges to people who put heavy demands on infrastructure and lower charges to people who use the Internet only very lightly. Great, mission accomplished.
The worrying part is that the ISPs get to pick the winners and losers.
That worries me far less than the federal government picking the winners and losers, which is what it would do under FCC administration of net neutrality.
I have a new internet streaming service, tough, Netflix has paid to be 'the' preferred streaming provider, creating a tough barrier of entry to the market.
You're saying that of all the greedy, selfish corporations who usually want to create barriers to entry, just by accident Netflix, Google, Facebook, and a bunch of other mega corps argue for net neutrality out of benevolence? Of course not.
What happens when net neutrality falls is that ISPs will go to Netflix and other big bandwidth hogs and negotiate payments for transit; that means costs for services like Netflix and YouTube will go up significantly. New entrants into the market, on the other hand, are simply covered by their existing ISP agreements and it's not worth for ISPs to try to push for higher payments out of them.
No, it's not, because I can have exactly as many water providers as I can have ISPs, namely one. That's why it's a perfect example in my case. I can't pick a better competing offer for either.
An example of what? A government-mandated monopoly?
We didn't need net neutrality in law for a very long time because TCP/IP hardware and software was net-neutral by default, because that's what packet switching does.
And what has changed about TCP/IP hardware and packet switching these days according to you?
Well, gee...because customers are here to buy things they want, and not the thing they don't want?
You personally aren't representative of all customers.
although non-nerd people may be asking why their bills are going up
Why would they be asking that if their bills go down?
Fortunately I live rather far away from the United $tate$ so the broadband subsidies scandal and regulatory capture and other ways of politicians being in bed with small, disproportionately powerful groups of people shaping the US has little or no impact on my ISP situation.
So why the fuck do you weigh in on US policy debates? And why do you advocate more regulatory capture for the US? Are you trying to sabotage the US?
If the ISPs are free to throttle everything else, and they don't mind their customers suffering,
You talk about ISP customers as if they were a homogeneous group; but they are not. There are many different classes of users. For example, we can divide users up into very high volume users, average users, and low volume users. ISPs don't mind making a small number of very high volume users suffer or force them to pay a premium in order to lower prices a little for their average users and expand their user bases with special low-price offerings to poor low volume users.
The key to my plan is that this is a rare instance where consumers are not alone.
Ro Khanna, prominent advocate of net neutrality, actually illustrated what's likely going to happen: your all-you-can-eat plan gets broken up into smaller packages and you pay for each of those. Notice how full access costs pretty much the same under both "net neutrality" and "no net neutrality". It's unclear why he thinks this is not in the interest of "consumers".
There are just as many or more huge companies that would prefer to keep Net Neutrality as those that oppose it... Those companies in favor of Net Neutrality obviously include the big streamers like Amazon, Hulu, Netflix, YouTube and a bunch of others.
Yes, and they favor this because they don't want to have to pay for the extra infrastructure costs that their services impose on ISPs; instead, they want to spread out those costs evenly among all Internet users, even those that don't stream. Net neutrality is a means by which they can make that happen. Without net neutrality, Netflix and Netflix users need to pay slightly more on average, but others need to pay slightly less.
They could throttle it all down, but throttling that much traffic isn't really practical.
Netflix traffic either goes directly to Netflix servers or through some VPN. Each of those implies different wires for it to travel over. ISPs not only can easily "throttle" based on this, they actually already have to account for it differently in their peering/transit arrangements with other ISPs. They don't need to look inside packets and they don't really care. What they care about is that a lot of traffic goes over particular wires. If those wires go to some VPN provider, then they will likely charge more for transit to that VPN provider in the future and the costs and prices for the VPN provider will go up. Arguably, that is as it should be: Netflix or some high traffic VPN require a lot of infrastructure to support, and repealing net neutrality allows ISPs to charge those companies more.
Well, I think both your original statement and your level of understanding of science are pretty clear. We'll just have to live with having a low opinion of each other.
[I] could make the same "argument" about electricity or gas but [I]'d be provably wrong because I actually do have a number of utilities pestering me with offers in those areas.
Hence, your point about water utilities was a red herring.
And the very point of Internet service from its very beginning was the uniformity and interchangeability.
And for 40 years, we got that without FCC imposed net neutrality. Furthermore, charging differently for different traffic doesn't affect uniformity and interchangeability anyway (in fact, that's already happening).
So why the hell would I want something different when the value of the Internet
Why would anybody care what you want? Do you believe that just because you want something, laws and regulations need to spring into existence to give it to you?
All net neutrality advocates have done is special pleading for their interests and presenting a parade of horribles. Neither is a compelling argument for FCC net neutrality.
Let's not kid ourselves: many nerds simply advocate net neutrality because they full well know that if net neutrality disappears, their ISP bills may well go up substantially. I have no problem with that, and I don't see why the FCC or lawmakers should care either.
Sorry I pointed a potential one out. Why do YOU misunderstand how that can be helpful?
And I keep telling you: your reasoning was wrong and you misidentified the bias. You said "I think its possible the scientific community was biased toward a water flow explanation" as an explanation for why a paper was published postulating water flow when new interpretations contradict that. In actual fact, the scientific community is, if anything, biased against, not towards, a water flow explanation.
That is, your reasoning was evidently based on the incorrect notion that if scientists are biased towards something, they preferentially publish something that conforms to their biases. That's not how bias in the science works at all.
Pointing out biases can be very helpful.
It can be, but not when you speak from a position of ignorance.
Unfortunately they are, because I can't have more than one of either where I live.
Well, and there you have it: if you force Internet service to be as uniform and interchangeable as water service, then you're going to get as many providers of Internet service as you get for water: one. That's because providers can't differentiate themselves. That's one of the reasons for killing net neutrality.
When you mandate that all the products in a market are exactly the same, you encourage the formation of a monopoly.
There's little economic benefit, it's true... unless and until there's a thriving colony which will be its own excuse for existing.
Colonies only "thrive" if they produce a surplus, and that's unlikely for a Martian colony given current technology.
It's definitely a better place to start if you're heading to the asteroid belt to grab something there.
It seems to me that the most likely scenario for space colonization involves moving asteroids into lunar orbit via ITN, mining them (and making tons of money), and then using them as habitat shells that can be moved around the solar system.
You can't have a debate putting words in the mouths of others.
I'm not putting words in your mouth, I'm trying to explain to you where you misunderstand how science operates. Scientists are biased, in terms of what they work on, in terms of what they believe to be true, and in terms of what they publish; you don't need to look for "evidence" of that, it's part of the process. That's why the scientific literature is full of papers that provide incorrect explanations and incorrect results; the literature is probably biased towards such papers.
I'll be happy for my local water utility to "offer new kinds of products", I'm just not sure what those products should be.
Well, and there you have given an excellent illustration of how ISPs are not like water utilities. That's why people have less of a problem with draconian regulations of water utilities than they have with draconian regulations of ISPs.
The "safe drinking level" for perchlorate in water on Earth for a 70kg human is 32 parts per billion.
Perchlorate is so toxic to humans because of specific protein interactions (mostly, that it blocks an iodide pump in the thyroid). Giving this example in a discussion of perchlorate effects on bacteria is downright stupid.
The average level of perchlorates in Martian regolith is half a percent, and the hypothetical perchlorate brine...
Terrestrial bacteria have not had any need to adapt to perchlorate brines, so they don't tolerate it very well, so that's not a relevant argument.
Lastly, the very fact that there is so much perchlorate on Mars is clear evidence that there are no bacteria consuming it. It forms very slowly.
Or bacteria have adapted to match their growth rates to its rate of formation over the last few billion years, because any bacteria that didn't have such a mechanism would have gone extinct. Alternatively, it might be biogenic.
Sorry, your arguments are bogus: large amounts of perchlorates are not intrinsically incompatible with life as you implied. You can speculate whether they are good for life or bad for life, but that's all it is: speculation.
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No, the point of regulating utilities is for various groups to enrich themselves and to create artificial monopolies.
That's not what happened in the 80's. What happened in the 80's was telecom deregulation: we went from one government-mandated monopoly to many different telecom providers. Wire sharing was part of that process.
Furthermore, mandated wire sharing (separating infrastructure from content/data) is different from net neutrality. Since wires are often installed under government created monopolies to begin with, mandating wire sharing may well be a good thing. With mandated wire sharing, ISPs can still discriminate against traffic, it's just that if an ISP screws up too badly, it's easy for new providers to enter the market.
Wire sharing mandates exist in Europe. Let's talk about whether to have them here, instead of this stupid net neutrality debate. Of course, wire sharing does nothing for Google or Netflix, so they don't promote it, and existing telecoms hate it too; that's why it isn't even on the table.
I didn't say that. What I said is that it artificially favors one business model over another. So, it doesn't favor YouTube over Vimeo, but it does favor YouTube's free tier over sites that charge for hosting and sharing video.
Yes, that's what you want. But for my parents, E-mail plus a couple of "streaming provider that entered some promotional relationship with their ISP" is a fine plan, a plan you deny them.
You are responding out of context. You basically said that ISPs are motivated by "reveling" in something, implying some sinister motivations and evil desire to hurt people for the sake of hurting people. I pointed out that that's bullshit: ISPs are profit maximizers. In fact, both corporate proponents and corporate opponents of net neutrality are profit maximizers. The question is how those positions maximize profit for the companies.
Google, Netflix, YouTube, etc. maximize profit through pushing net neutrality because net neutrality supports their no-pay streaming models and their advertising-based revenue. Those models work best if they can distribute their costs as widely as possible, which is what net neutrality achieves. When those companies say that they push net neutrality because they want to help consumers and enable competitors to enter the market, they are lying through their teeth.
ISPs maximize profit through opposing net neutrality because repealing net neutrality lets them meet market demand better. You may not think that a 2GB/mo plan with promotional, ad-supported video streaming is a good deal, but other people happen to think differently.
Net neutrality is the typical socialist impulse of "we don't need 23 deodorants". Net-neutrality proponents are like people who want to regulate the deodorant market to make sure that only four standard deodorant choices are offered. Net-neutrality opponents don't want such restrictions; you may think that bacon deodorant or promotional Cinnabon(TM) deodorant is silly, but it's not for you to decide.
So you are saying that without net neutrality, my parents could get a very cheap plan that would cover their E-mail and web browsing needs and let them watch a limited number of streaming video sites. But you disapprove of that choice and want to force my parents to pay more for a plan just so that the plan you want, a plan that offers unrestricted streaming from any site, doesn't get more expensive.
I think you just confirmed that the motivations behind pushing net neutrality are selfish geeks wanting their unrestricted browsing habits subsidized by the rest of the population.
Sounds like a perfect plan for my parents. The fact that net neutrality takes away that options is one of many things wrong with it.
If the government says "we want transit on the Internet to function in ways favorable to YouTube", then they are very much picking winners and losers. And that is what net neutrality is.
So, a perfect plan for my parents. But you don't want them to have that plan available to them because you want to force people to subsidize all streaming sites.
Companies don't "revel in abilities", they maximize profit. The parade of horribles you invent is not profit-maximizing.
That's what publishers always are: middlemen.
That's what companies are supposed to do: they are profit maximizers.
Driving over pedestrians harms them. Comcast offering you a service under conditions you don't like doesn't harm you.
Comcast failing to offer you Internet service under the conditions you desire doesn't cause you harm and doesn't infringe on any of your rights; "my neighbor causing a nuisance" is an infringement on my property rights. Hence, the two situations aren't parallel at all.
Ah, you live under the misconception that the only way you can enjoy property rights is through ordinances and regulations. No wonder you are so confused.
Sadly that doesn't happen. What does happen is that assholes like you and Google get laws and ordinances passed to enrich themselves at the expense of others.
Comcast should be free to charge whatever they want, and you should be free to choose not to do business with them.
It doesn't "count as" censorship, it's a step towards censorship. And politicians of both parties have declared their intent to censor content.
I suggest you worry more about domestic issues and let the people of China and Cuba deal with their own problems.
Access to what? ISPs are the Internet. There is nothing else they can provide access to except to each other. They do that via peering and transit agreements.
If Netflix is too costly without net neutrality, that means that net neutrality regulations and the federal government picked Netflix as a winner, and ending net neutrality simply reverses that market distortion. What we really have in the case of Netflix (and YouTube, Google, and Facebook) is typical regulatory capture: big, powerful corporations lobbying government to pick them as winners. That's what you are promoting when you promote net neutrality: crony capitalism and regulatory capture.
That's pretty much always the case in politics: concentrated benefits versus diffuse costs. It certainly applies here: net neutrality provides concentrated benefits and imposes diffuse costs, which is why you have such vocal net neutrality proponents and hear little from the other side.
We elect representatives that represent us on a variety of issues. In the last election, we elected a pussy grabbing businessman over a faux-progressive career politician. That tells you the tradeoffs people generally prefer, namely less regulation and lower taxes as opposed to more social justice and progressivism. Repealing net neutrality is consistent with that choice.
It's not the job of regulatory agencies to give the public whatever the public wants. It's the job of regulatory agencies to follow the law and the Constitution.
What is "anathema to America's founding spirit" is giving a federal agency control over what private publishers can and cannot say. That is what FCC net neutrality regulations do.
Comcast charging more for Netflix, on the other hand, isn't "censorship". It is "anathema to America's founding spirit" for the federal government to force printers to print content that they don't want to print.
Wu got it backwards: the legal case for net neutrality regulation is exceptionally weak, as is the evidence that it is needed in the first place; and the whole thing was regulatory overreach. This challenges to the reversal will go down in flames in court, unless they find some progressive activist judge.
That analysis presumes that ISPs will try to charge new entrants more than they will charge Netflix. That's a ludicrous assumption. To the contrary, ISPs will go where the money is, namely to Netflix, Google, YouTube, and Facebook and demand significant transit fees for traffic from those companies, while leaving Internet startups alone because Internet startups don't have much money and already pay for egress. Once you realize that, it becomes clear why Netflix, Google, YouTube, and Facebook are lobbying so hard for net neutrality: striking down net neutrality hurts their business models badly while making it easy for new entrants to compete.
No, you don't, because small companies are simply covered by whatever their hosting provider already has negotiated. And hosting providers already charge for egress, which covers ISP peering/transit. Those "countless deals and (re-)negotiations" mainly affect huge, wealthy companies that either run their own infrastructure or have sweetheart deals from their ISPs. That's exactly why companies like Netflix and Google are fighting a repeal of net neutrality kicking and screaming: this is a very real threat to their bottom line and market dominance.
Theoretically yes. In practice, they can't do that because consumers don't like it.
No, they want to make it proportionately expensive, i.e., more expensive than now.
ISPs are in the business in order to make money, not to pick winners and losers. If an ISP doesn't offer access to Netflix, it will lose users and attract new ISPs into the market, so there are limits to what they can do. That is exactly the kind of healthy competition the market needs in order to get rid of near monopolies like Netflix, Google, Comcast, etc.
So you agree then that net neutrality achieves what it is supposed to achieve: it results in higher charges to people who put heavy demands on infrastructure and lower charges to people who use the Internet only very lightly. Great, mission accomplished.
That worries me far less than the federal government picking the winners and losers, which is what it would do under FCC administration of net neutrality.
You're saying that of all the greedy, selfish corporations who usually want to create barriers to entry, just by accident Netflix, Google, Facebook, and a bunch of other mega corps argue for net neutrality out of benevolence? Of course not.
What happens when net neutrality falls is that ISPs will go to Netflix and other big bandwidth hogs and negotiate payments for transit; that means costs for services like Netflix and YouTube will go up significantly. New entrants into the market, on the other hand, are simply covered by their existing ISP agreements and it's not worth for ISPs to try to push for higher payments out of them.
An example of what? A government-mandated monopoly?
And what has changed about TCP/IP hardware and packet switching these days according to you?
You personally aren't representative of all customers.
Why would they be asking that if their bills go down?
So why the fuck do you weigh in on US policy debates? And why do you advocate more regulatory capture for the US? Are you trying to sabotage the US?
You talk about ISP customers as if they were a homogeneous group; but they are not. There are many different classes of users. For example, we can divide users up into very high volume users, average users, and low volume users. ISPs don't mind making a small number of very high volume users suffer or force them to pay a premium in order to lower prices a little for their average users and expand their user bases with special low-price offerings to poor low volume users.
Ro Khanna, prominent advocate of net neutrality, actually illustrated what's likely going to happen: your all-you-can-eat plan gets broken up into smaller packages and you pay for each of those. Notice how full access costs pretty much the same under both "net neutrality" and "no net neutrality". It's unclear why he thinks this is not in the interest of "consumers".
Yes, and they favor this because they don't want to have to pay for the extra infrastructure costs that their services impose on ISPs; instead, they want to spread out those costs evenly among all Internet users, even those that don't stream. Net neutrality is a means by which they can make that happen. Without net neutrality, Netflix and Netflix users need to pay slightly more on average, but others need to pay slightly less.
Netflix traffic either goes directly to Netflix servers or through some VPN. Each of those implies different wires for it to travel over. ISPs not only can easily "throttle" based on this, they actually already have to account for it differently in their peering/transit arrangements with other ISPs. They don't need to look inside packets and they don't really care. What they care about is that a lot of traffic goes over particular wires. If those wires go to some VPN provider, then they will likely charge more for transit to that VPN provider in the future and the costs and prices for the VPN provider will go up. Arguably, that is as it should be: Netflix or some high traffic VPN require a lot of infrastructure to support, and repealing net neutrality allows ISPs to charge those companies more.
Well, I think both your original statement and your level of understanding of science are pretty clear. We'll just have to live with having a low opinion of each other.
Hence, your point about water utilities was a red herring.
And for 40 years, we got that without FCC imposed net neutrality. Furthermore, charging differently for different traffic doesn't affect uniformity and interchangeability anyway (in fact, that's already happening).
Why would anybody care what you want? Do you believe that just because you want something, laws and regulations need to spring into existence to give it to you?
All net neutrality advocates have done is special pleading for their interests and presenting a parade of horribles. Neither is a compelling argument for FCC net neutrality.
Let's not kid ourselves: many nerds simply advocate net neutrality because they full well know that if net neutrality disappears, their ISP bills may well go up substantially. I have no problem with that, and I don't see why the FCC or lawmakers should care either.
And I keep telling you: your reasoning was wrong and you misidentified the bias. You said "I think its possible the scientific community was biased toward a water flow explanation" as an explanation for why a paper was published postulating water flow when new interpretations contradict that. In actual fact, the scientific community is, if anything, biased against, not towards, a water flow explanation.
That is, your reasoning was evidently based on the incorrect notion that if scientists are biased towards something, they preferentially publish something that conforms to their biases. That's not how bias in the science works at all.
It can be, but not when you speak from a position of ignorance.
Well, and there you have it: if you force Internet service to be as uniform and interchangeable as water service, then you're going to get as many providers of Internet service as you get for water: one. That's because providers can't differentiate themselves. That's one of the reasons for killing net neutrality.
When you mandate that all the products in a market are exactly the same, you encourage the formation of a monopoly.
Colonies only "thrive" if they produce a surplus, and that's unlikely for a Martian colony given current technology.
It seems to me that the most likely scenario for space colonization involves moving asteroids into lunar orbit via ITN, mining them (and making tons of money), and then using them as habitat shells that can be moved around the solar system.
I'm not putting words in your mouth, I'm trying to explain to you where you misunderstand how science operates. Scientists are biased, in terms of what they work on, in terms of what they believe to be true, and in terms of what they publish; you don't need to look for "evidence" of that, it's part of the process. That's why the scientific literature is full of papers that provide incorrect explanations and incorrect results; the literature is probably biased towards such papers.
Well, and there you have given an excellent illustration of how ISPs are not like water utilities. That's why people have less of a problem with draconian regulations of water utilities than they have with draconian regulations of ISPs.
Perchlorate is so toxic to humans because of specific protein interactions (mostly, that it blocks an iodide pump in the thyroid). Giving this example in a discussion of perchlorate effects on bacteria is downright stupid.
Terrestrial bacteria have not had any need to adapt to perchlorate brines, so they don't tolerate it very well, so that's not a relevant argument.
Or bacteria have adapted to match their growth rates to its rate of formation over the last few billion years, because any bacteria that didn't have such a mechanism would have gone extinct. Alternatively, it might be biogenic.
Sorry, your arguments are bogus: large amounts of perchlorates are not intrinsically incompatible with life as you implied. You can speculate whether they are good for life or bad for life, but that's all it is: speculation.