Battle for the Future of the Internet

FrgMstr

FrgMstr

Just Plain Mean
Staff member
Joined
May 18, 1997
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Make your voices heard on this topic by sending a letter to teh FCC and Congress if you have not done so already. Check out this site and give it a read. If you use an internet connect, it is worth your time. Unless of course you want some heartless POS provider deciding what information you should get quickly to your browser or desktop.

internet-weird.jpg

Cable companies are famous for high prices and poor service. Several rank as the most hated companies in America. Now, they're lobbying the FCC and Congress to end net neutrality. Why? It's simple: if they win the power to slow sites down, they can bully any site into paying millions to escape the "slow lane." This would amount to a tax on every sector of the American economy. Every site would cost more, since they'd all have to pay big cable. Worse, it would extinguish the startups and independent voices who can't afford to pay. If we lose net neutrality, the Internet will never be the same.
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If I actually believed that sending a letter/fax/making a phone call to my Congressional reps would have any effect whatsoever in today's world I'd do it, but alas, that's not the case and I'm simply not going to waste the time I'm gifted with on this paltry BS. I get that it's important, I really actually honestly do, unfortunately "the people in charge" don't and will sway towards whoever makes the biggest campaign donations 'cause they can do that shit now that the limits are long since history and their coffers can be filled continuously by lobbyists and special interest groups.

It's a sad state of affairs but it's already too late to do anything substantial about it.
 
Tiberian said:
If I actually believed that sending a letter/fax/making a phone call to my Congressional reps would have any effect whatsoever in today's world I'd do it, but alas, that's not the case and I'm simply not going to waste the time I'm gifted with on this paltry BS. I get that it's important, I really actually honestly do, unfortunately "the people in charge" don't and will sway towards whoever makes the biggest campaign donations 'cause they can do that shit now that the limits are long since history and their coffers can be filled continuously by lobbyists and special interest groups.

It's a sad state of affairs but it's already too late to do anything substantial about it.
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pretty much with you there, given the current state of the FCC they won't allow anyone to stop them from removing everything that was passed over the previous 8 years. i'm more surprised that it even survived this long into the current administration, i figured it was going to be the first thing on the list to be removed.
 
Tiberian said:
If I actually believed that sending a letter/fax/making a phone call to my Congressional reps would have any effect whatsoever in today's world I'd do it, but alas, that's not the case and I'm simply not going to waste the time I'm gifted with on this paltry BS. I get that it's important, I really actually honestly do, unfortunately "the people in charge" don't and will sway towards whoever makes the biggest campaign donations 'cause they can do that shit now that the limits are long since history and their coffers can be filled continuously by lobbyists and special interest groups.

It's a sad state of affairs but it's already too late to do anything substantial about it.
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Our protests over SOPA and PIPA made a difference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
 
i don't like jon oliver. but i do agree with his points on net neutrality. the first video anyway.

why people make this a political issue is beyond me.
 
I think the internet as we know it time is limted. Every country is going to have their own little network and the net will become heavily censored and companies that don't pay the isps enough will be hard to access or blocked entirely.
 
The new fcc chairman already said he wasn't going to listen to the publics opinion on this didn't he? That's what it sounded like to me.

Having said that I still posted my feelings on it awhile ago. Go FCC yourself!
 
I think this would have been a better article picture. :p

Dont-worry-Sir.jpg
 
tunatime said:
I think the internet as we know it time is limted. Every country is going to have their own little network and the net will become heavily censored and companies that don't pay the isps enough will be hard to access or blocked entirely.
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You can kind of see us [H]ard type folks going back to something like BBS type days.
 
ruffbytes said:
You can kind of see us [H]ard type folks going back to something like BBS type days.
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Funny you should say that. I quite enjoyed the BBS days. There were hundreds of ips all competing for customers. Now there's only one or maybe two providers who want to limit what you can do on it and all we complain/post news about is limiting them on restricting us. It's silly it's even gotten to this point.
There's two major issues as far as i can see.
Limited choice in ips. Sure there's 20 dsl providers, but who wants dsl? And the entry to market isn't impossible. There's municipalities who got together to give a choice to the customers who got shut down through legal means because even though they weren't providing service, the ISPs took them to court.
The second and yet equally important issue with ISPs who are owned or own content companies. There's a conflict of interest when (made up example but there are tons in real life) comcast owns or is owned by directtv and they see lots of bandwidth going to netflix. Now they play games with caps and throttling to try and get people to switch to a service they own. Their job should be providing the best speeds at the best price with the best uptime. That's it. Anything else is nonsense.
 
The issue really isn't as simple as it is being made out here. Net neutrality (or what is being called "net neutrality") is really only necessary because the government has allowed some ISPs to become virtual monopolies via regional agreements. Where I live, Comcast has a lock on cable broadband, leaving only Dish TV and DSL as competition. If we had real competition in the broadband market, we wouldn't need government regulation to force ISPs to play fair and deliver a quality service for a good price. Trying to fix government overreach by imposing additional government regulations is probably not the best way to solve the problem.
 
I actually contacted my state senator about this. I got an impassioned response about how net neutrality is based on an "archaic" law that needs changed. I responded that this entire country was founded on an archaic document called the Constitution, which gives citizens of this country certain freedoms, and voting against net neutrality begins to remove such freedoms. I got a simple response to direct further conversation to his web page. Somehow, I don't think I will be voting for Todd Young when election time rolls around again.
 
PaulP said:
The issue really isn't as simple as it is being made out here. Net neutrality (or what is being called "net neutrality") is really only necessary because the government has allowed some ISPs to become virtual monopolies via regional agreements. Where I live, Comcast has a lock on cable broadband, leaving only Dish TV and DSL as competition. If we had real competition in the broadband market, we wouldn't need government regulation to force ISPs to play fair and deliver a quality service for a good price. Trying to fix government overreach by imposing additional government regulations is probably not the best way to solve the problem.
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So what do we do? Let them fuck us all over in the meantime while we magically wait for a competitive ISP market to fall from the heavens?
 
illram said:
So what do we do? Let them fuck us all over in the meantime while we magically wait for a competitive ISP market to fall from the heavens?
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Make it illegal for local governments to make deals with isps that limit competition and make it illegal for collusion between isps that keep competition out of areas like they currently do.

Also make it legal for municipalities to compete with private companies if they wish to create a isp. Look at what google fiber did to the specific areas it was deployed in. Now give me a reason why the changes in those areas to increase speed and decrease price wasn't happening in all the areas.
 
heatlesssun said:
Because it's not always profitable. Google Fiber even with the resources of Google has pretty much failed.
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It's long term profitability.
As soon as google announced they were deploying in a certain market, the ISPs who would be affected by competition raised their game and lowered their prices to stay competitive. Literally in every single instance this happened. If it's too expensive, why did the current ISPs become competitive with google fiber almost immediately?
 
heatlesssun said:
Because it's not always profitable. Google Fiber even with the resources of Google has pretty much failed.
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That failed because of politics. Town/state jurisdictions were holding google hostage financially to run their lines through their town. Not to mention all the existing telco's and cable companies who wouldn't let them use their poles for cable runs. Google was pushed out by the mega corps and the lobbyists protecting them.
 
The reason net neutrality is threatened is because we haven't classified internet service as a commodity and/or public service like water and electricity. This needs to happen because it is becoming increasingly difficult to live without internet access. Many people's jobs depend on it.

Imagine if your local utility company suddenly said you have to pay them extra money in order to shower, and you refused they would reduce your shower pressure to a trickle.
We have the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners to prevent this from happening. I don't see politicians screaming about water neutrality ever. It needs to be extended to internet service.
 
Scizyr said:
The reason net neutrality is threatened is because we haven't classified internet service as a commodity and/or public service like water and electricity. This needs to happen because it is becoming increasingly difficult to live without internet access. Many people's jobs depend on it.

Imagine if your local utility company suddenly said you have to pay them extra money in order to shower, and you refused they would reduce your shower pressure to a trickle.
We have the National Association of Regulatory Utility Commissioners to prevent this from happening. I don't see politicians screaming about water neutrality ever. It needs to be extended to internet service.
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I would rather have the poles and the wires/fiber in the community be owned by the local government and allow ISPs to compete for the service.

To expand why:
water only comes in 1 flavor. Electricity is standardized and only gets supplied in a single way. Internet connections aren't that simple. If someone wants a gigabit connection compared to someone who just wants 5mbit, the amount they should pay should be different. I wouldn't like to move to a usage model as there's very little difference in costs between the usage on that 5mbit connection compared to the person who has gigabit. Therefore metering is a bad solution between the differences.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
Make it illegal for local governments to make deals with isps that limit competition and make it illegal for collusion between isps that keep competition out of areas like they currently do.

Also make it legal for municipalities to compete with private companies if they wish to create a isp. Look at what google fiber did to the specific areas it was deployed in. Now give me a reason why the changes in those areas to increase speed and decrease price wasn't happening in all the areas.
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I agree with all of that. The poster I was replying too seemed to be indicating we need less government regulation, i.e., we just need the magical free market to solve everything. But as for the google fiber example...

Hypergreatthing said:
As soon as google announced they were deploying in a certain market, the ISPs who would be affected by competition raised their game and lowered their prices to stay competitive. Literally in every single instance this happened. If it's too expensive, why did the current ISPs become competitive with google fiber almost immediately?
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Comcast and AT&T have sued Google or used other tricks, such as denying access to utility poles via private consortiums, in almost every market Google tried to enter. So assuming they can enter--great, more competition. Google was big enough to win in some areas, such as Atlanta, but ultimately they gave up on expanding. The current state of affairs makes it very difficult for anyone other than a massive, hundred-billion dollar company to get into the ISP game--and even Google eventually gave up.

Also I'm not really sure that getting more ISP's involved is necessarily a good "organic" safeguard against the pitfalls of a non-net-neutrality world. Comcast could still take advantage of a completely unregulated market to limit your access to its content if you choose to use Google Fiber, for example, so how does Google operating in your area help you if you cannot watch or listen to media controlled by the vast Comcast/Universal media empire? Same deal for AT&T, Verizon, all these companies. Like HBO? Better buy Time Warner cable then (who owns HBO)! Uh oh, looks like you're using Google Fiber, sorry, enjoy your 320kbs buffering of Game of Thrones. These companies are not just ISP's, they hold vast swaths of media content licenses and in a "free market" could use that leverage to deny or limit that access unless you use their ISP.
 
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Hypergreatthing said:
Make it illegal for local governments to make deals with isps that limit competition and make it illegal for collusion between isps that keep competition out of areas like they currently do.

Also make it legal for municipalities to compete with private companies if they wish to create a isp. Look at what google fiber did to the specific areas it was deployed in. Now give me a reason why the changes in those areas to increase speed and decrease price wasn't happening in all the areas.
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How are you going to get people that make the laws and benefit from it to make it illegal. Vote them out? Another douche bag takes his place. Left or right they don't care about the consitution.
 
NeghVar said:
Our protests over SOPA and PIPA made a difference
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protests_against_SOPA_and_PIPA
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I thought they managed to pass it finally with some 5 letter bill.

Its how SOPA wasn't well received and became PIPA, then that became something I can't even remember, they just kept repackaging the same crap until it passed.... CISPA?

https://www.slashgear.com/worse-than-sopa-cispa-bill-passes-27225004/

It seems that has become CISA

http://www.thedailybeast.com/evil-internet-bill-cispa-is-back-from-the-dead-now-cleverly-titled-cisa
 
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illram said:
I agree with all of that. The poster I was replying too seemed to be indicating we need less government regulation, i.e., we just need the magical free market to solve everything. But as for the google fiber example...



Comcast and AT&T have sued Google or used other tricks, such as denying access to utility poles via private consortiums, in almost every market Google tried to enter. So assuming they can enter--great, more competition. Google was big enough to win in some areas, such as Atlanta, but ultimately they gave up on expanding. The current state of affairs makes it very difficult for anyone other than a massive, hundred-billion dollar company to get into the ISP game--and even Google eventually gave up.

Also I'm not really sure that getting more ISP's involved is necessarily a good "organic" safeguard against the pitfalls of a non-net-neutrality world. Comcast could still take advantage of a completely unregulated market to limit your access to its content if you choose to use Google Fiber, for example, so how does Google operating in your area help you if you cannot watch or listen to media controlled by the vast Comcast/Universal media empire? Same deal for AT&T, Verizon, all these companies. Like HBO? Better buy Time Warner cable then (who owns HBO)! Uh oh, looks like you're using Google Fiber, sorry, enjoy your 320kbs buffering of Game of Thrones. These companies are not just ISP's, they hold vast swaths of media content licenses and in a "free market" could use that leverage to deny or limit that access unless you use their ISP.
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The free market and or less or more government regulation is a matter of prospective. The fact that there's local government regulation that limits competition to an area could already be considered too much regulation. Of course i'd heard they sign these agreements for kickbacks of sorts, so i believe that's already illegal.

Read my previous post. The problem is that service providers are also content providers which puts them into a conflict of interest. Hence the problem we're having now with throttling and filtering. They don't do it because they hate the open internet. They do it for profit reasons. The more people they can filter to their own content services, the more money they make. There merge between the two is pretty awful for consumers.

This is where net neutrality falls on it's face. It doesn't recognize the root cause of the problem. Instead of throttling, they just put caps and then tell you, well if you use our owned content service, we won't count it against your caps. Since this is a positive reinforcement and not a negative, it's not considered a net neutrality issue.
So basically until the root problem is solved, they'll just continue to look for loopholes because exploiting loopholes means more profit. It's that simple.
 
Content providers who also are ISP's and who favor their own content is precisely the problem net neutrality tries to address. You are referring to "Zero Rating" and the FCC was investigating this practice to determine if it did in fact violate FCC rules. Guess who ended the FCC's investigation?

And again, just because there is perhaps a gap in the net neutrality framework (one intentionally created by the guy who wants to destroy it, no less) that does not mean we should just scrap it altogether. That just means we should plug that gap.
 
illram said:
Content providers who also are ISP's and who favor their own content is precisely the problem net neutrality tries to address. You are referring to "Zero Rating" and the FCC was investigating this practice to determine if it did in fact violate FCC rules. Guess who ended the FCC's investigation?

And again, just because there is perhaps a gap in the net neutrality framework (one intentionally created by the guy who wants to destroy it, no less) that does not mean we should just scrap it altogether. That just means we should plug that gap.
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That's not getting to the root of the problem. Content providers should never be the same as service providers. You should get the government to break them up as it's anti-competitive business.

It's the same concept as car manufacturers should never own bridges and tolls. Because eventually some asshat will come up with the idea of only charging other manufacturers tolls and giving a free pass to their particular brand as a way to drive up sales.
 
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PaulP said:
The issue really isn't as simple as it is being made out here. Net neutrality (or what is being called "net neutrality") is really only necessary because the government has allowed some ISPs to become virtual monopolies via regional agreements. Where I live, Comcast has a lock on cable broadband, leaving only Dish TV and DSL as competition. If we had real competition in the broadband market, we wouldn't need government regulation to force ISPs to play fair and deliver a quality service for a good price. Trying to fix government overreach by imposing additional government regulations is probably not the best way to solve the problem.
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The real solution is to fix this with the free market.

Break up the ISP/Cable TV markets. It's a conflict of interest for a single company to be providing both.

If there is only 1 ISP available, then it should be declared a monopoly and be subject to heavy government regulations and price controls.

Cable TV already has competition in most places due to Satellite TV.
The big problem is Internet access, and the monopolies that have been setup by local governments.

In my case I don't even have a choice of DSL. It's the local cable provider or use my cell phone.
 
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Hypergreatthing said:
I would rather have the poles and the wires/fiber in the community be owned by the local government and allow ISPs to compete for the service.

To expand why:
water only comes in 1 flavor. Electricity is standardized and only gets supplied in a single way. Internet connections aren't that simple. If someone wants a gigabit connection compared to someone who just wants 5mbit, the amount they should pay should be different. I wouldn't like to move to a usage model as there's very little difference in costs between the usage on that 5mbit connection compared to the person who has gigabit. Therefore metering is a bad solution between the differences.
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With water, you usually pay for usage and pay for the size of the connection. Someone with w 1" pipe will pay more than someone with a 3/4" pipe
 
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nutzo said:
With water, you usually pay for usage and pay for the size of the connection. Someone with w 1" pipe will pay more than someone with a 3/4" pipe
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The problem i have with that is that it really doesn't matter if you have a 1/2" pipe or a 4' pipe. It depends on how much you use because there's a limited amount of water and there's a cost to providing it.
Internet doesn't work like that. Once the hardware is in place, whether it's coax or fiber or anything in between, sending data hardly costs anything. The ISP pays for a certain amount of connection speed with the backbones and whether it's used or not it still costs the same. Even if no traffic is being passed along, the main cost of electricity to run the switches and routes is almost the same as if it's congested.
So from that standpoint, metering internet connections is silly. Data isn't finite.
 
Hypergreatthing said:
That's not getting to the root of the problem. Content providers should never be the same as service providers. You should get the government to break them up as it's anti-competitive business.

It's the same concept as car manufacturers should never own bridges and tolls. Because eventually some asshat will come up with the idea of only charging other manufacturers tolls and giving a free pass to their particular brand as a way to drive up sales.
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Using the Sherman Act to bust up Comcast or Time Warner or any of these mega-corporations would be great. I'm sure the Trump DoJ will get right on that.

In the meantime, we have net neutrality, and we shouldn't cast it aside just because there is another speculative option that may or may not also accomplish our objective (that will also never happen). I'd be all for trying to do that in addition to maintaining net neutrality in the meantime, though.
 
It's really strange for me. I'm an AT&T DSL customer, I have about the shittiest speed in all the speedtest thread, 2.5 down, .4 up. It costs over $50 a month, but there's really not anything else I can get other than satellite. Now get this - I also have DirecTV, AT&T recently bought DirecTV. But my internet connection is too slow to stream the DirecTV on demand titles, I have to record them to the DVR overnight and watch them later. So no chance of me doing much streaming from a competitor's service, I can't stream from their own service. About the only way it could get any slower would be to disconnect the fucking thing.
 
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