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FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

washingtonpost.com

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Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#541

Post by nikdaheratik »

webXL wrote: post #534
tbabb wrote: post #279

Picture this: The "Google Search" package with Comcast is $8/month. Or, you can get "Comcast Search" for free! Comcast search is shitty and conveniently doesn't "find" results that conflict with Comcast's business or political interests. But hey! The free market and invisible hand will sort everything out! /s

Buyer beware and you get what you pay for. Didn't your parents teach you that? No? How about your school? Hmmm... What did they teach? Are they going to be able to filter facebook posts/ads "that conflict with Comcast's business or political interests" too? Out of youtube videos? Developing and maintaining that technology starts to get very expensive. If their political interests are really that nefarious, then I hig…

They can't filter the posts, but they can make it so that the data coming from those sites end up coming in at such a slow speed that they're pretty much unusable. And that would be just fine under the new regulations.

> Why not address the real-world "nefarity" which is lobbying governments for special favors at the expense of the competition?

Exactly who is lobbying for special favors here? From what I can tell, it's the big telco companies and not anyone else. The only people that stand to gain from this are the shareholders of AT&T, Time-Warner, etc. It's like people forget the BS that Ma Bell pulled at the end of the last century so we gotta relive it again.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#543

Post by nikdaheratik »

bluetidepro wrote: post #159

What I don't fully understand is why isn't larger tech companies like Facebook, Netflix, Google, Twitter, Amazon, etc. making a big fuss about this on their sites to warn their users and help fight against it? Are they not as worried about this? Does it actual benefit them in some ways cause they can box out smaller competition since they can afford to pay ISP's or something? For example, if Facebook saw this as a re…

It's because potentially the ISPs could try and force both the tech companies and the consumer to pay more or have their service downgraded. They already tried that with Netflix before these regulations were added in the first place.

And Facebook (to use an example) is already under alot of heat for the stuff the Russians pulled in the last election. They gotta deal with the current administration for at least the next few years regardless of what happens with the FCC. So they can be vocal about this in some ways, but not in others.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#544

Post by jimktrains2 »

jedberg wrote: post #524
opportune wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These ISP companies use legal shenanigans, coupled with the unavoidably large startup costs of creating a new/competing ISP, to effectively run regional monopolies. Google kind of gave up their master plan for Fiber after they were litigated in multiple jurisdictions essentially over bullshit that they were legally within their right to do, such as use shared lines - and that was Google, which had a ton of cash to th…

> I'm not sure what most of the anti-net neutrality side's supporting arguments are My friend was a lawyer for an ISP and now works for the FCC (I promise she's a good person otherwise). The main argument is that small ISPs can't compete if Net Neutrality exists, because they can't build a network big enough for every customer to stream Netflix and YouTube. If they could have most of their customers blocked from thos…

> The main argument is that small ISPs can't compete if Net Neutrality exists, because they can't build a network big enough for every customer to stream Netflix and YouTube. If they could have most of their customers blocked from those services, they could afford to offer it to the few that want to pay extra for it.

I find it hard to believe that the electrical grid, water, sewer, and natural gas systems all are able to make due but the poor ISPs rolling in cash can't.

Meanwhile, these same ISPs are working to make competition illegal or impossible.

This isn't an issue of providing better service. This is an issue of making more money by squeezing the customer every way they can while making recourse impossible.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#546

Post by shmerl »

webXL wrote: post #535
shmerl wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Places with a lot of people? It doesn't depend on numbers. Depends mostly whether there is some other ISPs besides the coax provider (which are the most widespread).

So we should have a one-size-fits-all law? You're not that unimaginative, are you?

Anti-trust laws are pretty much universal and we already have them. A lot of NN related abuse could be prevented if our legal system would have actually applied them, but it often doesn't.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#547

Post by jimktrains2 »

rubicon33 wrote: post #166
fokinsean wrote: post #18

Tweet in article: >On December 14, the FCC will vote on Chairman Pai's plan to repeal President Obama's heavy-handed Internet regulations and restore Internet freedom. I love how these laws are veiled with patriotic sentiments, e.g. "Internet Freedom". Just like the "Patriot Act", it is reasonable to assume anything with these sort of labels will likely be an encroachment on your freedoms. Also >"The job of the FCC i…

> "If you like your cable company" I've never once, in my entire life, heard anyone say they like Comcast.

For a few years I paid extra for a DSL connection simply to not use Comcast. I truly hate them.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#548

Post by elihu »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #69

It's unlikely popular and profitable services will be hindered by the lack of net neutrality. But any new services that threaten existing ones will be hard-pressed to compete. Imagine I start a new streaming service. In order for my service to reach people, ISP's will charge me a higher price than Netflix, probably a _significantly_ higher rate. This will make it extremely difficult for my new service to reach enough…

> But any new services that threaten existing ones will be hard-pressed to compete.

That's the sad part: the new services that fail will fail quietly and we'll never know what we lost.

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#549

Post by khedoros1 »

webXL wrote: post #500
shmerl wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This would be a boon to any ISP who DIDN'T do this. Competition, and obvious lack of business sense, has always been a far larger counter-balance to this idea. Competition surely can help, but currently there is no competition in a lot of places. It's basically monopoly / oligopoly situation, with collusion and market division to boot. So increasing competition is a good goal, but it shouldn't block preventing mono…

> Competition surely can help, but currently there is no competition in a lot of places. Places with a lot of people? People who have been harmed by what NN is intending to fix? > Monopolists also created a lot of blockers that prevent increasing competition. Facilitated by government. If government was responsible in the first place, why not just undo what they did?

> Places with a lot of people? People who have been harmed by what NN is intending to fix?

Yes and yes. I've lived all over southern California, but never anywhere that had two broadband providers available at the same address. Parts in cities; I'm not talking about little desert communities, or something. I have however been inconvenienced by various ISPs' content-based packet filtering policies.

> Facilitated by government. If government was responsible in the first place, why not just undo what they did?

Part of it is that you're talking about every individual local government, with lobbying from the incumbent ISPs. A lot of those governments have contracts with those incumbents, giving them franchise rights in the city. They can't just declare those contracts void.

Beyond the local level, a lot of states have laws that make setting up a new ISP difficult or impossible (especially municipally-operated internet access).

Re: FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see

#550

Post by jimktrains2 »

vaishaksuresh wrote: post #326
barrkel wrote: post #297

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast is like the road, not taxis; the last mile is where all the expense is in consumer internet. And congestion charging is a legitimate thing. Why should Granny have to pay more on her internet connection to subsidize your Netflix addiction? Because equal pay for equal access is that: a subsidy from light users to heavy users.

I don't get what you're saying. How am I making Granny pay more? There are bandwidth caps and data usage caps, I pay for what I use. If I'm paying less than the cost of the resources I'm using, charge me more. Why does Granny or Netflix have to pay comcast for what I do on the internet? My electricity provider does not charge differently for setting up and maintaining the connection based on what I do with the electr…

> There are bandwidth caps and data usage caps, Actually, commercial ISPs don't really do bandwidth caps and datacaps are simply laughable as a means of controlling congestion. (Honestly, they're literally not a means of controlling congestion.)

I really just want my ISP to be like my datacenter: 95%ile bandwidth billing. Nothing else. No services. No filtering. No "speed boosts." Just a connection to other networks.

> I pay for what I use.

Unless you have a metered services, you are not paying for what you use in that sense. You pay for access, sure, but not for what you use.

> My electricity provider does not charge differently for setting up and maintaining the connection based on what I do with the electricity, they just charge me for what I use. Why should an ISP be treated differently?

The issue is not metered billing. I think most people would be OK with it; it'll suck for some but an honest effort to keep the 95% of usage at normal would go a long way, I thinks.

The issue is when you're being billed differently for what you consume, not how much. Would you be OK with electricity used by an LED bulb from company X was metered at 2 times that of company Y which is 2 times that of an incandescent? _That's_ the issue, not metered billing.

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