Goodbye, net neutrality

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Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby KleinerKiller » Fri Feb 24, 2017 7:13 pm

The new FCC chairman is already beginning the renewed effort to dismantle net neutrality, first by a vote to eliminate open internet transparency protections for mid-size ISPs. Companies with up to 250,000 subscribers are now exempt from sharing information on broadband speeds and other important consumer information. This measure directly opposes ones put in place by Obama to protect net neutrality, but Ajit Pai -- the outspoken enemy of net neutrality whose sole goal is to destroy it -- said that it was more important to get rid of "onerous reporting obligations" than to keep consumers informed.

Net neutrality will not survive this administration. And when it inevitably dies, I fear it will never come back, no matter who takes the office next (if anyone's even left to do it).
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Tesseracts » Fri Feb 24, 2017 8:48 pm

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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Sat Feb 25, 2017 12:37 am

God, the right wing/individualist fixation on merit can be really fucked up sometimes. Privatization of things like education and healthcare is one thing, but internet speed? The whole idea of turning internet speed into a commodity depends on there being a large consumer base of people who are so lifeless and petty, that they cannot sleep a wink at night unless their internet is precisely a whole 2.000000000000000037564 seconds faster than everybody else's, liking a post on facebook first becomes something worthy of being a privilege; that youtube viewing becomes a privilege must be DESERVED! And, while there may be a few privilege-hungry imbeciles who would jump at the chance to type "FIRST!" at the cost of an additional $50/month, that doesn't seem to be an idea embraced by the majority. What's next, the politicization and eventual elimination of Cash neutrality? Are they going to try and charge $60 a month for the privilege of ever spending more than $20 ever? Or what about getting movement neutrality? For just $49.99/month, you too can move around for more than a total distance 20 miles a month, by foot or by vehicle! Now, that's an untapped commodity right there! Ooh, here's an idea? Why not go after breathing! You can charge $10 per 10,000,000 breaths! With the EPA inevitably going bust, it's inevitable anyway.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby iMURDAu » Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:17 am

This is what happens when people who aren't educated enough to know what the fuck the internet is and how it works are allowed to vote for our leaders.

No, you know what? Fuck it. The vast majority of people don't care about this issue as long as they can get on facebook and youtube.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Learned Nand » Sat Feb 25, 2017 1:37 am

The annoying thing is, people actually do care about the issue. There was a tremendous outpouring of support for net neutrality when the FCC was considering common carrier classification for ISP's a couple of years back. People care; they just didn't express that in their votes.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby blehblah » Mon Mar 06, 2017 10:28 pm

This isn't a surprise.

There is more than Facebook and Twitter at stake.

When the carrier also owns the content, it is vertically integrated. That means the carrier favours the content it wishes (by not slowing it to a crawl, or not counting it against data caps - which are artificial, but that's an aside).

Where might that lead?

Maybe accessing a news site that isn't part of the profit motive of a carrier doesn't make sense to the carrier, so they slow that to near-zero rates because they are favouring content from their own sites. They can do so because they are allowed, since, you know, they are creating more competitive packages, which maybe include sites with content that favours certain groups, because they are allowed... and around we go.

The big carriers win because they have the money to lobby, rinse, and repeat.

The very idea that competing based on the quality and quantity of Internet access provided somehow stifles competition is ludicrous. The further idea that with net neutrality, these providers can't provide additional services without literally restricting access to competing online services is dulling to common sense.

Make no mistake - it's not about enhancing access to 'preferred' services. It is about degrading access to competing services.

It amazes me that people can blow and suck at the same time. "Fuck net neutrality because free market!"

Whatever - AOL worked great, until it didn't, so why not try it again?
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby ghijkmnop » Mon Mar 06, 2017 11:15 pm

Redacted
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Mon Mar 06, 2017 11:38 pm

But hey, at least they can pay out of the nose to be the first person to retweet Ryan Renolds!
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby mancityfooty » Mon Mar 06, 2017 11:46 pm

Or when their monthly fees go up because the ISPs want more money out of Netflix and Hulu.

I'm wondering where my google fiber will be on this.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby blehblah » Tue Mar 07, 2017 2:07 pm

mancityfooty wrote:
I'm wondering where my google fiber will be on this.


That's a good question, you lucky bastard. Google is, as are most online service providers, pro-neutrality. Unlike other online service providers, they have the deep pockets needed to build their own network. Even with their deep pockets, it takes time, meaning the vast majority of people access their services via a non-Google ISP.

The only companies for whom net neutrality doesn't make sense are those who own an ISP.

http://fortune.com/2016/11/18/google-ne ... p-netflix/

Jimmy Schaeffler, telecom industry consultant at the Carmel Group, said that "the bottom line is that things will change and there will be less optimism among and fewer opportunities" for companies like Google that do not own the internet networks.

"That's going to impede their success and those that rely on what they do," Schaeffler added.
Republicans in Congress or at a Republican-controlled FCC under a Trump administration could also pare back new privacy rules adopted in October that subject internet service providers to stricter rules than those faced by Google and other websites.

Since Trump's victory, Alphabet shares have fallen 2.4%, Netflix shares have dropped 5.9% and Amazon (AMZN, -0.45%) shares are down 2%. AT&T Inc and Verizon Communications (VZ, -0.12%) shares have been relatively unchanged, while Comcast (CMCSA, +0.59%) shares have soared 7.7%.


Buuut, it's not so cut and dried.

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/03/1 ... ity_rules/

And as excited as some of us all are that Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner have been given a bloody nose after years of price gouging and focusing on profits over customer service, the fact is that the new rules are simply paving the way for the next generation of companies who will bend the market and government to their profit-making will – and be given the freedom to do so in the policies of today.

[...]

On reading the rules – and don't buy the line that it is only eight pages of rules with 300+ pages of mere commentary – two things become clear:

1. The FCC has taken a leap of faith and produced a Hail Mary for the internet age.
2. The people that will be most served by the rules are not consumers but large internet companies.


I still tend to think ISPs should provide a connection, period. If they also have online services to hawk, no problem, but they should compete. It can get a little murky when you consider that in urban areas, pretty-much all phone and TV services are digital - it's just another connection. The ISP likes to bundle that stuff, and the network traffic consumed doesn't appear on the consumer's bill. Sure, it might erode your "up to" connection speed, but, tough titty. The reality is today, you can get a set-top box from someone other than your ISP, Netflix, Prime, Hulu, etc., and put the difference into buying a faster connection and/or higher cap.

Where Internet companies can say, "Hey now, they are unfairly limiting our availability and quality of service to their customers, and we can't just up and build a nation-wide highspeed network", ISPs can say, "Hey, we don't have the money to build and maintain nationwide networks and not use it to get a return on investment on high-margin content services when we're forced to not use our total offering, while the likes of Netflix and Apple are making money off of our investment in infrastructure, which is a low-margin, capital-intensive business."

Further, this as the Fortune article discusses, there are related regulations that confuse things. What if Google/Apple provide set-top boxes that replace commercials? Likewise, due to privacy regulations, the folks like Google and Facebook can track and mine user activity to 'tailor the online experience' (targeted adds) but the ISPs have privacy restrictions. In the other direction, is an ISP allowed to swap-out Google Adword content of web pages viewed by their customers for adds inserted by the ISP?

The Register article notes that in the regulations, the FCC openly notes there are areas where they really don't know what they're doing.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby mancityfooty » Tue Mar 07, 2017 11:52 pm

blehblah wrote:That's a good question, you lucky bastard.


Trust me, if you lived in Olathe, you'd be wanting a reason like this to stay here, too.
Well, it's that and the Ikea about 9 miles up the road.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Wed Apr 12, 2017 6:28 pm

It turns out when you preach against the thing that allows net-based corporations to make money, they aren't exactly going to be on board with that idea.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby KleinerKiller » Tue Nov 21, 2017 9:15 pm

It's happening.

No more frills, no more tiptoeing around it, no more slippery slopes -- Ajit "Soul Sodomy" Pai has announced the plan to repeal net neutrality altogether and hand over full control to ISPs, and will pursue enacting it on December 14th. Not everyone on the FCC is on board with this, and massive protests will hopefully put pressure in the other direction, but this smug piece of subhumanity will never let his vendetta go and there's a real chance he'll win out.

This is an all-or-nothing deadline. In 23 days, the internet as we know it may cease to exist for good.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Deathclaw_Puncher » Tue Nov 21, 2017 9:37 pm

Why do we let Ajit Pai have human rights, again?

Petty, vicious vindictiveness aside, this is what happens when isolation is valued by society as a perk of being rich. The entrepreneurs, within their ever decreasing closed circles, lose touch with their consumer base and resort to managerial capitalism, essentially forcing society at large to be a consumer, because adapting to the changing economic landscape carries the slightest bit of risk.

If we just let corporations fail the attosecond, no, the picosecond they became slightly irrelevant or a failure, we wouldn't be in this situation.

Perhaps it's time we pulled an Iceland on the cable companies.

I mean, seriously, how much are they are they planning to charge when they Portugal-ize the internet? Do they even know what's affordable? I half expect them to try and get away with like, over $500 a month, hell, there's probably at least one board executive who's ambitiously yearning to make it three times as much per hour.
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Re: Goodbye, net neutrality

Postby Learned Nand » Tue Nov 21, 2017 9:50 pm

Deathclaw_Puncher wrote:If we just let corporations fail the attosecond, no, the picosecond they became slightly irrelevant or a failure, we wouldn't be in this situation.

Two things:

First, a picosecond would be more lenient than an attosecond, because a picosecond is a million attoseconds long. I'm not sure if this is what you were going for.

Second, the problem here isn't that ISP's are being propped up by government cronyism. Because laying down wire is expensive, it's a business with a high barrier to entry, meaning that there aren't a lot of players involved. There are so few that most tend to have local monopolies, without other broadband competitors.

In a functioning market, if ISPs tried to take advantage of deregulation and charge consumers more to access different sites, a competitor would come along and offer a better all-in-one package. Given the current state of the broadband market, however, that isn't going to happen. If an ISP doesn't offer a plan you like, you can move, and that's about it. In the absence of a viable market solution, we need net neutrality rules to ensure that ISPs don't engage in anticompetitive business practices.
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