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Ajit Pai is right

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101–110 of 316 posts

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#101
post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

prior to the rule change in 2014 did we have such a problem? I recall the days of my choices in a highly regulated environment of being ISDN or T1. Provided I could even get either at my home. The issue I have is one of perception. People are magically convinced that NN will grant them all sorts of benefits but no one seems to agree with what they are. I can almost guarantee one thing, continue as is and the rate bro…

> prior to the rule change in 2014 did we have such a problem?

Cable ISPs were only moved from Title II (common carriers) to Title I in 2002, and dial-up and DSL in 2005.

And yes there were problems, here's a list of related issues and breaches: https://np.reddit.com/r/KeepOurNetFree/comments/7ej1nd/fcc_u...

Not to mention the move absolutely destroyed DSL competition (as its opponents had predicted) as it ended line-sharing requirements.

Furthermore, the FCC had Net Neutrality rules in place until 2014, when the courts decided it didn't have the power to enforce these under Title I.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

prior to the rule change in 2014 did we have such a problem? I recall the days of my choices in a highly regulated environment of being ISDN or T1. Provided I could even get either at my home. The issue I have is one of perception. People are magically convinced that NN will grant them all sorts of benefits but no one seems to agree with what they are. I can almost guarantee one thing, continue as is and the rate bro…

I recall the days of dial-up & DSL internet, where I had multiple national ISPs to choose from, as well as several local ISPs... all of which operated over phone lines... which meant they were covered by Title II. This notion that everything was unregulated until two years ago is counterfactual.

Right! And the ISPs were subject to NN regulations that the courts deemed unenforceable in 2014. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._...

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#103
post #29

> There is no evidence of systemic abuse by ISPs governed under Title I, which means there are not immediate benefits to regulation, only theoretical ones False. They've tried in the past I believe. There was something with AT&T and iPhone users around 2010 (IIRC it was about Facetime)? There were more. Also the thing about Portugal and Euros. Yeah that graphic has been circulating for a while now, it predates this d…

I found this list https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio... MADISON RIVER: In 2005, North Carolina ISP Madison River Communications blocked the voice-over-internet protocol (VOIP) service Vonage. Vonage filed a complaint with the FCC after receiving a slew of customer complaints. The FCC stepped in to sanction Madison River and prevent further blocking, but it lacks the authority to stop this ki…

> AT&T, SPRINT and VERIZON: From 2011–2013, AT&T, Sprint and Verizon blocked Google Wallet

Just curious why this is a net neutrality issue? Carriers have a say whether or not they can block things on the Google Play app store.

I believe this specific issue was the carrier's controlled the Secure Element in the phone, and wanted to license access to Google. No idea how this is a Net Neutrality issue.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#104
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If the rules Ajit Pai wants in place were to be in place when Amazon got started its likely Wal-Mart could have paid to simply make them disappear for most internet providers by "buying" the right to e-commerce traffic. Isn't this covered by anti-trust laws?

only if walmart and ISPs are a monopoly, which by very technical legal arguments, they're not. having to pay off ISPs to the tune of millions for network access to e-commerce customers, prevents Amazon from ever getting started selling books in the 90s

>only if walmart and ISPs are a monopoly

This is false. Under US antitrust law, /monopolistic behavior/ (that is, behavior that tends to create monopolies), e.g. predatory pricing and very large mergers, is what's generally regulated. It's not actually illegal to be a monopoly per se, and you don't have to be a monopoly to fall afoul of antitrust law.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#105
post #15

> It is worth noting, by the way, that BitTorrent users were free-loaders, using massively more bandwidth than the vast majority of Comcast’s customers. I don't think that's how a service agreement works. If I'm paying for a certain bandwidth and latency, I should get that (to within reasonably improbable outages) if I use it 100% of the time or 1% of the time. If the ISP can't keep up, they should be penalized for i…

There's no free lunch. If you want to start metered home internet connections with overages akin to cellular data plans, keep pushing this argument.

The old bandwidth-based pricing model has been inadequate for a long time. Net non-neutrality may be the only way to save it, which doesn't mean it's necessarily a worthwhile tradeoff. I think I'd rather have non-discriminatory metered billing than unlimited access to NBC News and RT but $0.10/GB to ABC News and NPR.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#106
post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

prior to the rule change in 2014 did we have such a problem? I recall the days of my choices in a highly regulated environment of being ISDN or T1. Provided I could even get either at my home. The issue I have is one of perception. People are magically convinced that NN will grant them all sorts of benefits but no one seems to agree with what they are. I can almost guarantee one thing, continue as is and the rate bro…

1. Where is the incentive to keep growing?

Probably the huge tax payouts that they get to keep growing and then keep the same fiber rolled out with tax money dark to falsely create a narrative that there isn't enough pipe.

2. What if they forbid some traffic?

Yeah, enshrining that they can't is the WHOLE POINT of enforcing net neutrality.

3. Unlimited is not warranted unless it's being paid for.

It is being paid for. The US of A has some of the highest cost of internet for the lowest level of service in the developed world. You know that there are services in small farming towns in Romania (fantastic country, great food, great people) that have better access to internet than some cities in the US?

4. Prior to the rule change did we have this problem?

YES, it's why net neutrality was put in place in the first place. It's like you willfully chose to not do any research into the topic.

This whole idea that the market in any way helps the consumer is fallacious. The market helps businesses, which can, on the whole, help consumers when regulated by a sane government that has the interests of the people at heart. We're so far into regulatory capture at this point that we should be rioting. You cannot have a market with a natural barrier to entry or high startup costs that can in any way can be competitive without government intervention.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#107
post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

Did I miss some new proposal that Ajit Pai has put forward? It is my understanding that "The rules Ajit Pai wants in place" were in place from sometime during the ninties or earlier, until 2015. That is, Ajit Pai merely wishes to undo a rule that was only in force from 2015 to the present. Am I mistaken? Because I think the world you say you don't want to live in is the one we actually did live in for most of the his…

He wants to undo a rule from 2015 that forces broadband ISPs to be regulated the same way that dial-up ISPs were in the 90s.

The rule from 2015 made broadband ISPs regulated under Title II of the Communications Act of 1934. ISPs that operate over phone lines already were regulated under Title II.

The notion that internet providers were unregulated in the 90s is outright false.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#108
What worries me is that this is the easy to notice stuff that is brought up (AT&T blocking Skype, etc.) what is really pernicious are things like network "optimization" where there is a huge potential for abuse.

Want to influence the next election? Delay requests for a particular party's website by 10s each.

Want to promote your new streaming service? Make competing ones timeout on every 10th request.

Concerned about journalists writing bad articles about your company and your abusive practices? Make their site take twice as long to load.

ISPs are in a position of immense power and in the US there is inadequate competition for a pure market solution/consumer choice. This is something that needs government protection.

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#109
post #36
post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

> If the rules Ajit Pai wants in place were to be in place when Amazon got started its likely Wal-Mart could have paid to simply make them disappear for most internet providers by "buying" the right to e-commerce traffic. Isn't this covered by anti-trust laws?

>Isn't this covered by anti-trust laws?

have you seen any enforcement of anti trust laws lately?

Re: Ajit Pai is right

#110
post #6

This person misses the entire point of the argument for Net Neutrality - Yes it can be convenient if you know ALL of the apps and or services you'd like to use, however the entire internet being visible means putting small companies you have not yet heard of on nearly equal footing - giving them the chance to compete against the giants of commerce and sometimes (yes, sometimes it happens) WIN! The beauty of the inter…

prior to the rule change in 2014 did we have such a problem? I recall the days of my choices in a highly regulated environment of being ISDN or T1. Provided I could even get either at my home. The issue I have is one of perception. People are magically convinced that NN will grant them all sorts of benefits but no one seems to agree with what they are. I can almost guarantee one thing, continue as is and the rate bro…

The "rule change" in 2014 mostly served to codify as regulation the de facto practice in the US and in response to a US Federal court ruling that through out the previous FCC position on network neutrality.

Prior to 2014, ISPs in the US frequently tested the boundaries of what they could or could not block, with Netflix seeing routine "slowdowns", with the resulting penalty being typically not much more than a slap on the wrist.

The "benefits" you dismiss are the environment the Internet has thrived within since since commercialization of NSFnet in the early 1990s.

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