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.
A quantum state of signature may or may not be here... you just ruined it.