Net Neutrality is at risk!Follow

Sorry if this is a duplicate thread, but to hell with it, this is important.

The FCC is currently making moves to turn over control of the Internet to big business, allowing ISPs to self-regulate legally now. This will end the concept of Net Neutrality as we know it in the USA, and will likely lead to similar rulings globally. It also means that corporations will be held ransom to pay off the Telecommunications giants in order to get equal treatment.

The FCC is taking comments on this now on their site:

http://www.fcc.gov/comments

Make your voices heard, please.

Sigh...



Fixed that for ya.




Yes. Please resoundingly oppose this new regulation that will impose draconian restrictions on everyone who uses the internet. Don't fall for the lies that you have been fed about this. Net Neutrality is not the status quo that the good guys are trying to protect, it is the new change that the bad guys are trying to impose on you.

Edited, Nov 14th 2014 2:17pm by gbaji

Like with healthcare practices? And the death penalty? And maybe the right to bear arms?

You don't think healthcare is about money and **** tons of it? Nothing you say is of any relevance to me now, if you're that stunned.

I'm not to worried about what happens in the US. Harper won't be in forever and then some Liberal or worse, NDP PM will get in and go overboard and regulate it to death in Canada.

If you're against ISPs having so much power you should be speaking up more about Bell, not US companies.

Great. So let's enforce existing anti-trust regulations. Heck. If we need to beef them up a bit for 21st century technology, that's fine too. But that's not what Net Neutrality is really about. Answer me this:

How does passing a law that makes it illegal to prioritize packets at the switch level resolve the problem you are talking about?


My issue is that the entire thing is a giant bait and switch. Are there problems with the current status quo? Yes. Are there occasional abuses by ISPs and other players in the business? Yes. Does the proposed Net Neutrality legislation fix this? No. This is why I keep asking people to talk not just about the problems, but the proposed solution(s). Saying "this is broken" and then "fixing" it with something unrelated isn't a great idea.




Yes. Wait. Spend some time getting to understand the proposed legislation and make an informed decision.



Except it's the version you're supporting that is "twisted". The fact that supporters of NN consistently fail to be able to even explain what NN legislation actually does is your first clue that you're being sold a bill of goods.

Read the three or four other threads on the same topic. Not like he's got a lot of variety.

Huh? I did:



The things people complain about most with regard to ISPs are how they can use their control of the wires themselves to give them a competitive advantage with it comes to content. My point is that there are a whole host of ways to deal with this that don't involve the kinds of draconian and frankly poorly thought out requirements that come bundled with "Network Neutrality". In most cases, existing legislation is already sufficient. And where applicable, existing civil court options are often sufficient as well. In cases where ISP actually are abusing their licenses, there are avenues to pursue. And in cases where they have done this, they've pretty universally been slapped down for it and have stopped doing what they were doing.

The system in place largely works. Let's allow it to work. And where it doesn't *then* we act. But NN is the equivalent of tossing the baby out with the bathwater. It's a gross overreaction to the relatively rare and minor problems we're talking about.

Yes we can. Turn the physical infrastructure into a utility and allow companies to purchase use at a percentage of the maintenance cost of the system plus administration costs and upgrade budget costs. Easy. Great system for public, great system for small business, great for the economy. You should love this idea.

I think you're engaging in a sort of wishful thinking interpretation of what a "utility" is, and how this would (or even could) play out. Do you understand that this is more or less how things are right now? Change "utility" to "licensed to operate the physical infrastructure in a given geographical area" and you haven't actually changed anything. Where we are right now is a natural progression over time. It's most cost and administration efficient to manage this in relatively large geographical areas versus small. That's why don't have a different cable company every other block. We used to (well, we did with phone and electricity lines), and over time, they competed in the market and merged, and otherwise did whatever made things cheaper and better for everyone, and the result is where we are now.

What you are proposing simply does not work. Not on any kind of scale, and not for any reasonable length of time. It's the equivalent of complaining that a stick is laying on its side rather than balanced on its end. Well. Laying on its side is the natural location a stick will settle to over time. You can keep propping it up on its end, but it'll move to the more stable position eventually. Same deal here. It's unworkable to try to divvy up physical infrastructure service into pieces as small as you seem to want.


And, at the risk of repeating myself, all of this ignores the fact that NN doesn't actually do even what you are proposing. And when attempts to more tightly regulate services (as a "utility" even), are actually made, it usually results in less competition, not more. Those networks in Europe that folks praise for their high speed and reliability? Run with much greater (or even complete) government control. And guess what? The huge number of small little service providers you imagine will appear in this model don't exist there.


I guess I just don't understand what you think will happen other than "magic". Do you really think that even if some local government stepped in and did this, that the existing cable and phone companies wouldn't still be able to buy the lions share of the control of the physical infrastructure? Barring the government creating anti-competitive rules (basically propping up the stick, er, setting aside portions of the infrastructure for just "small companies" to run), this wont work. And if they did that, the result would be bad for the consumer. Because if the only way to allow the little guys to manage X% of the infrastructure is to legislate it, then you've just tossed competition out the window. The customers of those little guys are going to suffer worse service and worse performance as a result. Of course, that wont matter because we all know that the percent set aside for this will be the folks in the poor section of town, where people don't have the time or money or influence to fight it.


The result of what you propose would be the ghettoization of the internet. It's a terrible idea. At best, it accomplishes nothing, and at worse, it makes things much much worse for those with the least power to do anything about it. The haves will still have good internet, and the have-nots will be subject to the whims of crappy services protected from competition by a well meaning but terribly flawed bit of legislation.

Oh. And it's still all meaningless because this isn't what's being proposed in the NN legislation anyway.

Edited, Nov 20th 2014 7:06pm by gbaji

Conceded

So you're saying that when people repeat themselves obsessively, it gets tiresome?