341–350 of 452 posts
That's a little different than "FCC regulating the Internet." ISPs provide internet endpoints to consumers. They should be utilities.
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Yes they should. Usually, I don't like making the 'slippery slope' argument, but it is quite appropriate here. The dangers are real. We can allow nothing less than forcing IPSs to maintain complete neutrality on traffic type. In your scenario, an ISP will determine that an organization is using their internet connection for this high-priority operation. The ISP then realizes that they can essentially extort the surge…
You pay to guarantee availability. The urgency of netflix is not equivalent to a surgery. The netflix traffic is a threat to the surgery traffic. The ISP doesn't extort- the customer pays for service guarantees. This is already what happens today in MPLS vpns. Savvy technologists are going to demand guarantees that other tenants can't disrupt their service. This is in no way a mafia-like protection scam. There is a c…
In my scenario, the ISP purposely degrades the service unless you pay more. This isn't hypothetical as it has been proven they did/do to Netflix traffic.
Cloudflare isn't going to DDoS every site that doesn't sign up for their service.
The value of doing surgery successfully via the internet is high. Are you really that naive that you don't think ISPs will attempt to capture as much of that value as they possibly can?
Do you want to live in a world where an ISP determines the worth of your internet traffic and attempts to bill you based on the content, not the actual bandwidth used?
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Bottom line is that net neutrality comes out of the desire for people to be able to access any site they want without penalties due to traffic shaping or other shenanigans. The reason they are concerned is that the cable companies and to a lesser extent wireless and DSL companies are doing this. And why do they have the power to do this? Why don't people just vote with their feet and switch to a competitor? Because t…
> Every cable company in every city I've lived in the USA has been a locally granted monopoly with the city extracting massive amounts of money from the monthly cable bill in "Franchise" fees. In no city is the cable company actually a "locally granted monopoly." Every franchise agreement I've seen points out that it's non-exclusive. Technologists have a fundamental misconception that leads to a lot of cognitive diss…
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Why are there only one or two ISPs in your area? Because of regulation. Cable companies are government granted monopoly. The reason you don't have cable choice is that monopoly. Local phone service, similar thing, though regulations have opened up long distance access, only one company has the infrastructure. Wireless Broadband, similar thing, artificial scarcity created by regulation (spread spectrum would support h…
Your posts in this thread have had the woe-is-me scream of the right wing, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're not being disingenuous when you're being wrong. There aren't one or two ISPs because of regulation, there are one or two ISPs because the barries to entry are discouragingly high. It's fantastically, stupefyingly expensive to run that much cable. There's a reason we as a country have…
Infrastructure and Internet service used to be separate businesses at one point, the barrier was created when infrastructure owners were allowed to kick the other ISPs out. I had dozens of ISP choices when I signed up for DSL in 1998.
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> Every cable company in every city I've lived in the USA has been a locally granted monopoly with the city extracting massive amounts of money from the monthly cable bill in "Franchise" fees. In no city is the cable company actually a "locally granted monopoly." Every franchise agreement I've seen points out that it's non-exclusive. Technologists have a fundamental misconception that leads to a lot of cognitive diss…
The cable franchise agreements are exclusive. That's why you don't see two companies offering cable service. If they weren't you other companies would compete. Regarding wireless, you don't seem to understand how the industry is structured. While it's true there are many brand names on the shelf in walmart, there are only 3 actual providers in a given metro region. Virgin, for instance, uses Sprints network, which is…
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Isn't network usage also finite? I.e. wouldn't there be issues if every device connected to an ISP simultaneously tried to stream large data?
At any given moment it is finite, but it is always expandable, and not a consumable resource. Using more bandwidth helps push the expansion. If we had extremely high rates, and low caps, you'd never get things like video services, and bandwidth providers would never have incentive to expand the network. So the more use the better.
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>We like the Internet as it is today Who likes the way things are? I'd like it a lot better if it was more like in Japan, Korea, Latvia, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, France, ...etc.
Serious question - how do the median consumer bandwidth speeds in the US compare to France?
Thats the problem I see with classifying ISP's as a common carrier. Your not going to get 150Mbs everywhere your going to get 10 which means in the urban area's where you do have good access and some competition you will see stagnation ( forget 1Gbps in cities that are well above the average )
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I'd also add that there's at least a couple of suddenly-prolific "green" commenters here today... which is interesting (but definitely not conclusive) as to what exactly is going on. Personally, I'd go from the assumption that suddenly-prolific "green" commenters have some special interest in the topic. These days -- since HN has become mainstream -- I'd lean towards astroturfing or some other monetary interest.
We need a statistical analysis of HN userids, thread topics and posting times.
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The cable franchise agreements are exclusive. That's why you don't see two companies offering cable service. If they weren't you other companies would compete. Regarding wireless, you don't seem to understand how the industry is structured. While it's true there are many brand names on the shelf in walmart, there are only 3 actual providers in a given metro region. Virgin, for instance, uses Sprints network, which is…
> The cable franchise agreements are exclusive. That's why you don't see two companies offering cable service. If they weren't you other companies would compete. Nope.[1] Exclusive franchise agreements are illegal under federal law since 1996. There is no competition because the business proposition sucks. The only sensible play in most places is to try and target a niche market of wealthy neighborhoods that'll pay f…
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>As a libertarian who knows tech, I'm on the government's side here That's an oxymoron. The core reason internet service sucks for the vast majority of Americans is because state and local governments grant monopoly status to the ISP cartels. This move by the FCC does nothing to remedy that and consequently will not solve the problem. If they require higher "standard" of internet without doing away with the monopolie…
Do you think there is any such thing as a natural monopoly? Do you think the cost inherent in laying cables makes the entity that owns the cables a natural monopoly?
I am not aware of any.
>Do you think the cost inherent in laying cables makes the entity that owns the cables a natural monopoly?
No, otherwise the "natural monopoly" existed before the first company ever laid cables.