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FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

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101–110 of 206 posts

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the consumer (us) cannot seem to define what we want other than "everything" or point to how the 2014 change fixed issues that were common place. Where is the list of events that were fixed with the change that had not been previously identified and corrected as overreach by an ISP? Take a look at those pushing "net neutrality" and understand why. I am not saying they are not without merit but both sides have me…

>>> With lack of regulation new players came in with higher bandwidth and made it available to me increasing competition. Funny. In the UK, with it's massively regulated marketplaces, one has far greater choice in home broadband providers. The concept that all regulation by government hampers innovation and investment is a highschool-level understanding of economics, an Ayn Rand approach. In cases of monopolies, whic…

I was told that in Japan there is a strict separation between infrastructure and ISP services, which has allowed for a lot of competition between ISPs despite the fact that they all share the same infrastructure.

In capitalism, any market with a sufficiently high barrier to entry will always end in a monopoly in the absence of regulation.

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Metered usage is not a violation of neutrality. Varying prices or manipulating quality of service based on the endpoint's identity is.

So if I understand, they're disguising this as "Netflix eats up so much bandwidth" but really it's "we want an unfair advantage over Netflix"? Otherwise, I have no idea why republicans would support this.

In the case of Trump, no one knows if he would support or oppose net neutrality if he knew what it was. He thinks net neutrality means that websites will be required to be neutral in their content [1], which will be used to target conservative media.

[1] "Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media." https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/53260835850816716...

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#103
post #31

If ISPs are going to gut net neutrality, we need a way to introduce real competition into the market. I wouldn't care if Comcast wanted to sell me access to 5 websites for $99 or whatever crap they're trying to pull if I had the option to switch to a better deal somewhere else. Strong state and local laws protecting the right to form municipal ISPs would be a good start. Those seem to scare Comcast & friends the most…

The more they tighten their grip, the more star systems will slip through their fingers. What ever happened to the ~2003 promise of local WISPs and wireless mesh networks?

Wireless doesn't really have the bandwidth for anything more dense than a suburb (and even that's probably really pushing it). Approaches like microwave are also less reliable due to LoS/weather problems.

2.4Ghz is noisy in cities/apartments, 5Ghz doesn't penetrate well.

All that on top of the fact that there's still not really a standard, easily set up protocol for that kind of mesh ISP arrangement.

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#104
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Strong state and local laws protecting the right to form municipal ISPs would be a good start. Those seem to scare Comcast & friends the most. If corporate ISPs become significantly restrictive, I think we'd see a big upsurge in interest for municipal broadband. Yeaaah about that? The GOP is no friend of muni. Not that Democrats love it[0], but Obama's FCC did try to defend muni against state restrictions alongside…

If the red states want to have a crippled internet let them. They’re all for states rights so let’s just have our states put in their own net neutrality (which will likely happen on the west coast in some form).

So, where are all the jobs for displaced people who happened to live in a gerrymandered, rigged state?

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#105

I feel more helpless now than I did on November 9th, 2016.

Make sure you are registered to vote if you are in the United States. And vote in every election. Even something that seems small like school board has more implications then we know.

Not enough.

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#106
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YC is unique in the list that you give insofar as they're likely to not benefit from a repeal of NN, whereas the consolidation of money and influence in the big four has made the repeal of NN very attractive to them, and they're not inclined to fight it. Wall street, private sector don't care, they can reason about the repeal of NN and migrate to where the lopsided gains will accrete as a result. The money and market…

> Direct action is required [...] Go vote. I had so much hope for your last paragraph and then you just regurgitated the bullshit “go vote” mantra. If that’s what direct action means to you people then no wonder you’ve had this pushed down your throat.

Both/and

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#107

Honest question, what changes can we expect as ISP consumers if this happens? A follow up, if all it is is them charging customers more for using more bandwidth, how is that any different from any other fundamental resource like water, electricity, etc? Why should I pay as much money for my SSH and Hacker News as the guy down the street streaming Netflix all day?

Metered usage is not a violation of neutrality. Varying prices or manipulating quality of service based on the endpoint's identity is.

> Metered usage is not a violation of neutrality

According to the document the FCC released trying to justify this stuff, ISPs can't always figure out how do that, so they need paid prioritization: "Without paid prioritization, ISPs must recover these costs solely from end users, but ISPs cannot always set prices targeted at the relevant end user".

See paragraph 252, which starts on page 142, of this document: http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...

Here's the full paragraph in case the FCC site gets slow (their file hosting wasn't designed for a world where people are actually interested in FCC documents):

FCC> 252. Efficiency. We find that a ban on paid prioritization is also likely to reduce economic efficiency, also likely harming consumer welfare. This finding is supported by the economic literature on two-sided markets such as this one, and the record. If an ISP faces competitive forces, a prohibition against two-sided pricing (i.e., a zero-price rule), while benefiting edge providers, typically would harm both subscribers and ISPs. Moreover, the level of harm to subscribers and ISPs generally would exceed the gain obtained by the edge providers and, thus, would lead to a reduction in total economic welfare. The reasons for this are straightforward. Some edge services and their associated end users use more data or require lower latency; this may be the case, for example, with high-bandwidth applications such as Netflix, which in the first half of 2016 generated more than a third of all North American Internet traffic. Without paid prioritization, ISPs must recover these costs solely from end users, but ISPs cannot always set prices targeted at the relevant end users. The resulting prices create inefficiencies. Consumers who do not cause these costs must pay for them, and end users who do cause these costs to some degree free-ride, inefficiently distorting usage of both groups. When paid prioritization signals to edge providers the costs their content or applications cause, edge providers can undertake actions that would improve the efficiency of the two-sided market. For example, they could invest in compression technologies if those come at a lower cost than paid prioritization, enhancing efficiency, or, if they have a pricing relationship with their end users, they could directly charge the end user for priority, leading those end users to adjust their usage if the user’s value does not exceed the service’s cost, again enhancing economic efficiency. And to the extent an ISP has market power, antitrust law would only allow such ISPs to engage in pro-competitive paid prioritization practices.

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#108
post #59

Is there really no alternative to using an ISP for a connection? Is it possible to build a decentralised and encrypted network on our mobile phones? I guess we still have to run traffic through mobile service providers...

We're a ways away from it being as powerful as our current internet solution, but it's called a meshnet. On a super basic level everyone connects to eachother via wifi. No ISPs or mobile providers are part of it.

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#109
post #2

After reading about Pai, it seems like he was hand selected to be the figure head with which the ISPs would finally take down Net Neutrality. This whole situation sucks, and no matter how much noise we make and activism we take part in, if Pai has the legal footing to ruin the internet, he will.

Are you writing this after having called the relevant representatives and senators for your state?

Re: FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

#110
post #2

After reading about Pai, it seems like he was hand selected to be the figure head with which the ISPs would finally take down Net Neutrality. This whole situation sucks, and no matter how much noise we make and activism we take part in, if Pai has the legal footing to ruin the internet, he will.

> After reading about Pai, it seems like he was hand selected to be the figure head with which the ISPs would finally take down Net Neutrality.

He's not. He's a generic Republican, appointed by Obama (since the commission is obligated by Congress to have no more than a simple majority of appointees from any one party).

The problem is, this is what all Republicans are like nowadays. Any other person that Obama could have appointed would be doing the exact same thing in these circumstances. And in fact, virtually every other regulatory agency and department is doing the exact same thing thanks to Trump appointees. They are un-interested in any semblance of reasonable governance, it's siphoning your money to their backers in the most direct and aggressive fashion, plain and simple.

Elections have consequences. A lot of prominent Silicon Valley figures backed Trump figuring it would be an easy tax cut for them, and this is the result. What's that story Trump liked to tell around the campaign trail, the frog and the scorpion?

Everyone fantasizes they'd be the ones to come out on top (Ayn Rand wrote a whole book about it!), but there is always a bigger fish. Welcome to laissez-faire capitalism, where buying the government is part of the game. Free Markets are not a stable social structure by themselves, they need government regulation to keep the playing field level.

The truth is not in the middle, and not all viewpoints have equal merit. We have one reasonable party whose positions you may or may not like, and one batshit insane party that begins tearing everything down as soon as they're in power. Shame it takes a lesson like this for people to realize that.

Sorry to be blunt, and sorry to bring politics into this forum. But that's the way it is.

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