"Restoring Internet Freedom" AKA Net Neutrality

Off Topic
#24

I recall reading articles that when Net Neutrality took effect, the investment in upgrading internet infrastructure slowed significantly since they didn’t see see how to pay for it. I’ve read just as many articles articles saying the opposite.

I do remember when the FCC forced teleco’s to offer discount rates for startup competitors that had no capital investment in the infrastructure that hurt investment.

We’ll see, but nothing is free and someone needs to pay for it or it collapses. But the someone will always be the consumer - just a matter of who bills us: Netflix or the ISP. Or maybe we’ll see a charge on our bills like electricity where the back bone carriers charge a transmission fee for their backbone.

Very complex system no easy clear answers in my opinion - which I’m not sure what it is.

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#25

Very simple - do ‘we’ want free and open internet or do ‘we’ want big brother government regulating the internet? Do ‘we’ want the Feds to do to the internet what they did to healthcare?

So when does the government ever make anything simpler and freer for its citizens?

The liberals want control and that is what net neutrality did? It gave the Feds more power to decide what we can and cannot do or consume. The ultimate goal of net neutrality was\is to control content. That means less freedom.

Question, from about 1995 to 2015, did anybody feel like they were limited on the internet? Then why would we need the Feds to regulate it?

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#26

Yes.

https://www.savetheinternet.com/blog/10/04/05/phone-company-helps-make-case-net-neutrality

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#27

Want some more examples?

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/fcc-fines-verizon-125m-for-blocking-tethering-apps/2012/07/31/gJQAXjRLNX_blog.html?utm_term=.274e91fb3d6d

Edit (removed a link that was a bit redundant and didn’t actually show a lot of value toward breaking of NN standards).

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#28

How about these?

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#29

Please cite an example of how NN allowed the government to control what you see on the internet.

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#30

Yah and Chicken Little ran around screaming the sky was falling too? I get it some orgs make money on government regulation. Look into their funding and you’ll understand more of their hand ringing.

Feds never do anything that doesn’t lead to a goal that ultimately reduces it’s citizens freedoms and a scheme to redistribute wealth.

Ask yourself, prior to 2015 and the so-called net neutrality(laughable), why did the Obama administration have Google, etal and Silicon Valley almost living in the WH? Who do you think wrote the net neutrality rules? Then ask yourself what’s in it for Silicon Valley?

There was no need for it and what happens if your provider is lousy? You take your dollars to a better one! The free market regulates their quality.

But being savvy, look into what net neutrality really was put forward by the liberals. It was about content control. Having big brother decide what we can consume and when.

Helps to realize that net neutrality was a sham just like Obamacare was.

#32

ROI on deployment of broadband is slow - too slow for Wall Street. Network Neutrality (NN) might have had truly some marginal effect because…

  • ISPs have to deal with competition from OTT IPTV/VoIP providers
  • ISPs can’t enter into deals with CDNs for dedicated pipes close to subscribers

… but neither of those are game-changers for the ISP business, really. The much-hated paid prioritization dispute between NetFlix and the ISPs prior to the Open Internet order ultimately involved trivial sums of money that did not dramatically effect either side’s financials.

That’s not it at all and never has been no matter how often it’s asserted. It’s about ISP’s with their natural monopolies (partially arising out of past .gov-mandated monopolies) engaging in anti-competitive behavior by manipulating connectivity between their subscribers and third parties.

As Adam has linked, there have been cases in the past when ISPs have indeed blocked/degraded services. Given that it’s only in the last decade that ISPs have become huge horizontally- and vertically-integrated conglomerates, both the ability and incentive to do so are greatly magnified vs halcyon years past.

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#33

I ask again.

Please show which providers I can switch to that have even mediocre customer service reviews.

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#34

They may be technically legal, but they violate the concept of NN, which is what is being debated here.

#36

Protecting their POTS business.

Some vague potential network management argument to be made due to the obscene noisiness of P2P protocols and the tendency of many users to leave them running 24/7. There’s also the reality that P2P apps are overwhelmingly used for piracy - but short of the content industry leaning on ISPs to snitch on users to them there’s no copyright liability on the ISPs part.

Mobile internet, subject to a broad network management exception in NN, but most likely an attempt to squeeze more revenue out of someone.

A reality of the internet - your provider almost certainly has DPI gear and is using it to analyze what’s going on on their network … ideally just in aggregate, but occasionally looking at specific subscribers to analyze why they’re using so much bandwidth or to look for malware telltales.

I see it differently. There exists the real potential in the future that a number of OTT choices previously available won’t be or will be a hell of a lot more expensive thanks to ISP’s erecting tollboths. Switching providers won’t change a thing due to the limited number of options, de facto collusion, and nice tight vertical integration eliminating alternative access.

#37

Of those only two are viable options of the most mediocre proportions. In my area we have TWC now Spectrum. A company with service so bad they had to rebrand themselves. LTE is too little for most business and P-t-P is too expensive for most homes.

If it were truly a free market you would not have just one cable provider in each area. They have selectively made regional monopolies for themselves.

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#38

This is what the FCC should have taken on.

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#39

I can agree that this is a huge money grab by the ISPs.

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#40

Confirmed. I had Verizon FIOS since it was available. I switched to Spectrum shortly after the Frontier transition. Frontier sent a mailer to my house offering service for about half the price I was currently paying. I called and was told it was only for new customers. So after 8+ years I cancelled. Now my downstream bandwidth is 300Mb but upstream bandwidth is a fraction of the 100Mb and the icing on the cake is the Wifi drops so often that my SSID is now named ThisWifiSux. I am in the process of replacing the Spectrum cable modem (which was already replaced twice) with my own equipment. Hopefully that will improve the experience.

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#41

I have been unable to get my contractually agreed to bandwidth from Verizon/Frontier for the vast majority of the time that I have been a subscriber. Anecdotally, I hear (from people more technical than I am) that the other option in my neighborhood is even worse.

With NN gone, I now fully expect that market forces will show that Frontier owned sites load at superfast speeds whereas streaming services are ‘inexplicably’ slower.

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#43

If my websites are trying to push to me at a certain bandwidth and I have paid for that pipe, why do they need to slow that connection? That’s what they are arguing for with the repeal of NN.

Once again: what is at issue here is whether NN is a good thing or bad.

Your claim seems to be that they should be allowed to slow down access to whatever content they deem to be in their best interest. You want me to pay for a pipe? Fine! I’ll even pay extra to have a faster pipe.

NN is a rule to say that all traffic is equal. I don’t want a profit-driven monopoly to have the ability to control what content comes through the pipe that I pay for.

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#44

I’m also still really hoping to hear from @Owen_Soccer22 how NN allowed the Government (or maybe just “liberals”?) to control what content was available or consumable on the internet.

#45

Isn’t that being the opposite of liberal?

#47

Not necessarily. It’s fairly clear that liberal vs conservative philosophy has liberals generally arguing for more government (big brother in this case) control via regulation and laws. Arguably they are for the common good, but not always or to everyone’s particular benefit.