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

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

#591

Post by username223 »

Fnoord wrote: post #504
username223 wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your ISP cracks down, you can always go to the local Starbucks or library to torrent movies. And since the few people who share the WAP all know each other, they can talk things out.

WAP, Now that's a term I've not heard in a long time, a long time [1]. I don't know about Starbucks or the USA but many places here with open WiFi have, well, open WiFi (no encryption on connection) and they have abysmal speed. I mean we are talking about multiple customers, on 2,4 GHz WiFi, in the neighborhood (city) with dense 2,4 GHz coverage. What could possibly go wrong? Plus, indeed here that type of business i…

WAP = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_access_point

If you visit the US, you will find that most internet access sucks, but that public libraries are surprisingly decent. You won't be playing "Call of Duty: Kill Nazis 2017" on it, but it's perfectly decent for most uses.

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

#592

Post by shmerl »

webXL wrote: post #585
shmerl wrote: post #546

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So a universal NN law is what we need to supersede the "universal" anti-trust laws? I fail to see the logic.

What else can you do, if the system refuses to use anti-trust properly?

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

#593

Post by Chiba-City »

_justinfunk wrote: post #167
Chiba-City wrote: post #103

I don't watch TV, cable or NFLX. I read newspapers, nerd papers, old Project Gutenberg philosophy books and watch YouTube lectures or instrumental music. Amazon is great for my never shopping habit. Hobbyist sites are better than magazines used to be for user product reviews. But I never enjoyed speaking with people who watch TV. That's why I found the Ultrix and the Net in the 1980's back at Harvard. I live in DC an…

Why did you type this?

I typed this to let younger folks know that plenty of older Netizens do not care one little bit about any consumers or programmers making money off consumers. I wrote the late 80's Harvard Ultrix manual and worked with Steve Crocker, Brad Cox, Mark Pincus (pre-Zynga) and many others. None of us let our kids near the consumer Web (or TV's). The faster our consumer Net dies on the vine the better. Wield code to automate solutions or feed better decision support. Folks coding to sell pizza, porn and distractions need better careers and motivations.

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

#594

Post by nerdponx »

ghewgill wrote: post #89

For those who don't understand why net neutrality is important, it is worthwhile to read about the history of communications (telephone, radio, TV). There is an excellent book by Tim Wu called The Master Switch [0] which investigates the history of communications (with an American focus), describes how each industry start out open to all (farmers using fences for telephone, independent radio broadcasters), and each o…

Imagine having to fork over extra cash to your ISP in order to access your Bitcoin wallet. So much for radical decentralization.

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

#595

Post by CamperBob2 »

rtx wrote: post #529
CamperBob2 wrote: post #522

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell them the story of Almon Brown Strowger, the 19th-century undertaker whose business mysteriously took a nosedive when the local telephone company hired an operator who was related to a rival funeral director. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger I've always loved that (admittedly apocryphal) story. It's one of the vanishingly-rare cases where someone successfully solved a social problem through pure…

Would it be any different than YC promoting its companies here.

No, because YC doesn't take government subsidies to act as a dumb pipe. They also aren't a de-facto monopoly in any way, shape, or form.

All of the incumbent ISPs are charged with stewardship of public resources to one extent or another, if only because they require right-of-way access. The fact that many Americans have a grand total of one decent broadband provider to choose from is another factor that has to be considered, but often isn't.

Basically, net neutrality isn't a gift to the public, it's half of a longstanding bargain. The Trump administration proposes to unilaterally alter that bargain on behalf of corporate lobbyists who do not have consumers' interests in mind.

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

#596

Post by sctb »

ghrifter wrote: post #439
dmix wrote: post #361

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all. This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It w…

Shh you are going against the hive mind of people that watch a fucking comedian and accept his word as gospel and that this removal of title 2 "hurts muh free speech" Internet companies didnt make fast lanes and shit for 20 years, removal of title 2 and suddenly they are? the fuck.

Could you please not do this and post civilly and substantively instead?

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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

#597

Post by ryall »

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…

I wouldn't call either of these "decent arguments" for forsaking net neutrality. They can both be solved by offering tiered pricing and data caps. For instance, grandma pays $10 a month for a Gb of data, Netflix Youtube kid pays $100 for unlimited. Same goes for small startup ISP.

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

#598

Post by cannonedhamster »

sharemywin wrote: post #68
ams6110 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are dropping cable due to the heavy-handed control and lack of choice. Why would ISPs want emulate that failing model? If Comcast is going to try to charge me more to be able to access Netflix, I'm gone.

you won't see it. they will force netflix to pay them more. And the charge will be passed on to all subscribers.

Why on Earth would Netflix have to pay for content served from inside their network. Netflix literally has red cache boxes inside all the ISP networks. If people stop streaming they won't go back to cable. The ISPs will all just move to metered internet.

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

#599

Post by jacques_chester »

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.

Hypotheticals can be checked by referring to other countries with different market structures.

Australia has a broader mix of ISPs and Telcos than the US, despite until the 90s being under the control of a single public system (Telecom), with a plurality of the current infrastructure owned by its privatised successor (Telstra).

They seem to do fine with net neutrality. Regular competition.

> The other main argument against it is that it's not fair that Grandma, who only wants to read email once a day and look at the kids on Facebook, pays the same as the kid next door who is watching Netflix while playing an RTS while torrenting three movies.

Charging by bandwidth and usage is well settled.

The point is that the ISPs don't want to segment the consumer market. Too hard: there's competition, which as we know is unamerican because it makes business haaaard.

Instead they want to segment the provider market. Far fewer of them to negotiate and there's zero competition. You, the ISP, have at any point in time monopoly control over the consumer who is using your infrastructure. Providers have no other way to route traffic over the last mile.

Nobody mounts this kind of lobbying effort from the goodness of their hearts. They see a gigabuck in it.

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

#600

Post by milankragujevic »

himom wrote: post #559
skywhopper wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're assuming that most people have access to more than one ISP (they don't), or that statements by ISPs about what they intend to do or not do are truthful (they aren't). Specifically statements promising they would never do anything that would break net neutrality rules, while arguing against the imposition of net neutrality rules, would not make sense. Why oppose something you have no intention of doing?

Very true. Rural folks have it worst: monopoly or no access at all. If a company like Sinclair also owned the broadband, only payola TV would work, YouTube access and bandwidth could a tiered add-on, they’d block whichever company didn’t pay the extortion protection money with no means of recourse. Also, for everyone, billing would become more complexified, obscured to extract more money from consumers and thwart cos…

Don't people have access to 4G? I live in a tiny village (1000 people) and have 40/6 home Internet via 4G that I pay less than $10/mo with a 200 GB data cap that you can prepay $5 for 100 gb more if you spend it. I'm not from the U.S. though.
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