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GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

arstechnica.com

141–150 of 156 posts

Re: GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

#141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not in the sense of: Dear Netflix, if you want to service our customers you need to pay us a $10 million dollars a year. Dear Customer with 30mbps service, Netflix takes a lot of bandwidth and we're just a poor multi-billion dollar ISP and can't afford to shoulder the burden. But if you pay an additional $9.99 a month we can probably scrape up the bandwidth to let you watch Netflix in HD ($29.99 for 4k) Also see our…

How would this actually work in the somewhat competitive and very low-margin ISP market? What you’re describing just sounds like suicide.

Same reason why ISPs pushed out data caps despite it being a 'somewhat competitive' market and people coming out hard against it.

Because it's not competitive at all.

Re: GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not saying it wasn't fraud. I'm saying that the argument has no place here when we're talking about a GOP-lead attempt to effectively destroy the internet as we know it. Any attempt to shift the debate towards 'both parties are bad' is the definition of Whataboutism and an attempt to avoid the actual topic at hand.

I was not attempting to avoid the topic at hand, as evidenced by my other comment ITT discussing the actual text of the bill. I'm sorry it came across that way. In my attempt to avoid partisanship I usually end up denouncing both "sides", as I think the money in the back room is what decides the law of the land, and which party happens to accept it for a given issue.

You don't have to like democrats to acknowledge the fact that while they have problems, they are orders of magnitude less horrible than republicans. In the current two party system, denouncing both is giving in to a ridiculous false equivalence, as there is a clear rational choice one could make.

Re: GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

#144
post #14

Correct me if I’m wrong, but haven’t we always had paid fast lanes available? At least for VOIP this stuff hasn’t seemed very uncommon.

No, you're right. The FCC's Net Neutrality rules excluded private offerings such as MPLS circuits.

Re: GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

#145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Any attempt to shift the debate towards 'both parties are bad' is the definition of Whataboutism I disagree. It's not deflection to look at your alternatives and comment on the fact that none are suitable.

Are you saying that Democrats unanimously voted in favor of the Republican tax bill and are also anticipated to for the Republican fake Net Neutrality bill?

No - I'm saying that for many people, a Democrat that would vote the way they'd like on this issue would also vote in a way that was opposed to their interests in other matters, some of which they might consider to be more important than NN.

Re: GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

#146
post #11

How is this different from me paying for more for faster internet?

Because the last mile is (sometimes) truly bandwidth limited. But the trunk lines aren't. Now they just get to extort money from us or artificially throttle us . Worse, they'll likely (as they have everywhere else) extort money for websites they have no connection to (like Facebook or Twitter) just because they can. Like an entrepreneurial thug standing outside a club and extracting an extra fee to let folks in. Or p…

It was a question of genuine curiosity. Thanks. How do the regulations or whatever it is that was repealed stop them from doing so?

I actually have no idea what was repealed.

Re: GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you saying that Democrats unanimously voted in favor of the Republican tax bill and are also anticipated to for the Republican fake Net Neutrality bill?

No - I'm saying that for many people, a Democrat that would vote the way they'd like on this issue would also vote in a way that was opposed to their interests in other matters, some of which they might consider to be more important than NN.

Yeah, like keeping birth control from women, and blocking sane gun control regulation, and siphoning more money from the middle class to the rich, and keeping gay people from marrying, and scrapping health care safety nets.

I disagree that that's comparable.

Re: GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

#148

Here [0] is the actual text (i.e. hosted directly by congress.gov) which arstechnica was so thoughtful to not link to. >“(2) may not impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management. Seems like what NN proponents want, isn't it? >“(1) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in paragraph (2), nothing in…

Normally a lurker, but I created an account specifically to reply to you.

> “(2) may not impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management.

look at the very end.

"subject to reasonable network management"

I think that is an extremely broad term to be put in place; recalling the argument ISP had for throttling was to maintain network quality.

Re: GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

#149
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But throttling is really hard to prove. They can always downsize some hardware to "prioritize" and "retarget their budget", but effectively they just throttle. Basically they can do whatever they want with the proper wording now.

Sabotaging their network just to throttle just doesn't make sense. Nobody is going to pay for a white-list only internet. That is fear mongering by the pro-NN side.

If you had sane competition, maybe. But you don't, so they can do whatever they want and you'll pay for it unless you don't want internet at all.

Re: GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws

#150

This is all I need to here. "SpaceX plans worldwide satellite Internet with low latency, gigabit speed.". We have to just bid our time and wipe out an entire class of cockroach enter prices.

That sounds great, but one expects FCC will be deployed to quash that as well. After all SpaceX would still use some portion of the over-regulated spectrum, and at those distances probably not wifi band.

If we had reasonable spectrum regulation, various terrestrial WISPs would have replaced all of these horrible companies a long time ago.

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