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FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

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Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#671

Post by jpadkins »

xiata wrote: post #502
innguest wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll answer you because you're asking explicitly, but see warfangle's reply to my post making fun of me. What warfangle etc don't understand is that was exactly the excuse for the FCC to get into the Radio business. Oh no, it wasn't to require licenses! It was to protect people from warfangle's "chaos" that he paints so vividly but that never happened in actual reality, you know, the one we live in. Maybe it happens…

The FCC frequently stop pirate radio stations since they were not granted a license to broadcast and were causing harmful interference with those who DO have a valid license. Please step outside your bubble and understand what the FCC does. And a citation for you, cheers mate: http://www.fcc.gov/maps/fcc-enforcement-actions-against-pira... If you wish to test them, please setup a pirate radio station and you will be…

I think you just proved his point. Bye bye thepiratebay or anything else the US government calls a 'pirate' website.

Oh yea, be sure to pick up your public web service license so are not causing harmful interference with those that DO.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#672

Post by 72deluxe »

QuantumRoar wrote: post #422

Congratulations to all the people who've put so much effort into this. It's a good day for the internet. I hope some day something like this will happen in Germany as well.

Out of interest, what is the situation like in Germany with regard to the networks?

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#673

Post by 72deluxe »

daughart wrote: post #220
strictnein wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're stating that you think the US government can create 700 new Internet regulations and not mess things up? I'm stating that I think the US government is mainly made up of morons, especially in regards to technical issues. The cynicism is from the fact that there are 300+ pages to do what would apparently be a fairly simple change, so there's more to it than just the "Net Neutrality for everyone!" bit.

The Affordable Healthcare Act was gigantic and created by morons, but by most metrics is improving the American healthcare system. The argument that the government can not act in a way that improves things, even if it is not the perfect solution, is contrary to fact. EDIT: I treat down-votes in the absence of a counter-argument as up-votes.

Not being in the USA, could you summarise the Affordable Healthcare Act and the problems with it?

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#674

Post by mfukar »

oceanstone wrote: post #486
tptacek wrote: post #473

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comments like this are what make musings about astroturfing so toxic. I don't know what it is about us message board nerds that makes this so hard to grok, but you cannot suggest that someone is a shill without overtly calling their integrity into question. Questioning someone's integrity is intrinsically uncivil . Don't be uncivil.

What I'm hearing is you'd like to make the topic of astroturfing "off-limits", because you feel its discussion is "toxic".

That's exactly what "message board nerds" do: focus on the gestalt rather than the substance. Call people out as not p.c. to silence an opinion.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#675

Post by 72deluxe »

dang wrote: post #474
chetanahuja wrote: post #76

Wow.. This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign for the anti-NN advocates. The main gist of the the new regulations is the classify broadband access as a utility under Title II of Communications act. This has long been generally agreed upon by reasonable people as a good thing... and a necessary thing seeing how there's virtually no competition in broadband access for most people in the US. Reading commen…

> Wow.. This thread has turned into an astro-turfing campaign HN users need to stop accusing their opponents in arguments of being astroturfers. Astroturfing may or may not exist, but sincere disagreement is common. It degrades the discourse badly when sincere disagreers are accused of being shills. It's not that astroturfing isn't a problem. It's that the collateral damage of firing off such accusations indiscrimina…

True, else it degenerates into Slashdot with the word "shill" being thrown around everywhere.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#676

Post by lmm »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #661
pdabbadabba wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This "we haven't even seen the rules yet" line is really just a meaningless talking point promoted by NN opponents. In the world of government regulation, is is absolutely the norm for regulations to be voted on before being made public. But that does not mean the process is not transparent: the Commission has been conducting an open proceeding for months (years, really) where they have explained their proposals to t…

>In the world of government regulation, is is absolutely the norm for regulations to be voted on before being made public. It's mostly irrelevant what the 'norm' is. Either the process is actually transparent or it's not. Dropping xxx pages after passage is not really transparent. In fact, the 'norm' is usually what we want to be moving away from. The problems that we are trying to solve exist in the 'norm'. It used…

We don't have to fix everything at once. And if someone is making a big fuss about the transparency of this particular regulation, while ignoring the hundreds of regulations that are passed every year in the same way, then it's right to ask whether they have ulterior motives.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#677

Post by nknighthb »

gojomo wrote: post #668
nknighthb wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are fortunate to live somewhere with high-quality DSL, and not have anyone else using your connection. These things do not hold true for the majority of people. I expect you're also tolerating much longer startup times than most consumers tolerate. Vudu is not providing meaningful HD. The way you get 2.25mbps "HD" is by providing a 720p or 1080p stream of very low quality. 2.25mbps is not capable of providing eve…

Netflix HD streams start in about 5 seconds. If you can download 1 hour of HD in 1 hour and 10 minutes over 4Mbps, that is still "plenty" in my book – especially since 90% of the USA have multiple options for that bandwidth. If one provider is out front with more bandwidth for impatient cinemaphiles – good for them! Let them charge more, in more ways, as a motivation for competitors to upgrade. The ability to satisfy…

5 seconds is beyond the tolerance point for most consumers. 3 seconds is getting into annoyance territory. You're mostly OK below 2.

Your argument is now circular. 90% of the US is fine because they have at least 4mbps, which is fine because 90% of the US has it. That doesn't work. In fact, I can turn it right around on you, as Wheeler recently did -- "When 80 percent of Americans can access 25-3, that's a standard.".

You have cinemaphiles exactly backwards. They are more tolerant of delays and long downloads than ordinary consumers, because they understand and expect that they will have to put up with such for maximum quality. Ordinary consumers want something that works like a TV channel or a website.

Raising the threshold for internet service to be classified as an advanced telecommunication capability is not a "federal rescue", it's the FCC doing what it's mandated by 47 USC § 1302[0] to do -- report on the availability of advanced communications capability, defined as "high-speed, switched, broadband telecommunications capability that enables users to originate and receive high-quality voice, data, graphics, and video telecommunications using any technology.".

You should also read the actual report[1], where they discuss exactly why the new level was chosen. Hint: They recognize households consist of more than one person.

[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/47/1302

[1] http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2015...

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#678

Post by jpadkins »

rhino369 wrote: post #311
r00fus wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As soon as it was deregulated, Verizon and AT&T began upgrades. But before then, they weren't going to build upgrades to networks that any competitor could borrow at wholesale value. Given the great intentions that such bastions of corporate ethics like AT&T and Verizon have, is it possible that they simple held out until the got what they wanted?

If so, it was a massive mistake on their part. AT&T and Verizon lost the ISP market to cable companies in the mean time.

which is actually better than spending billions and then losing the ISP market to cable + other ISPs using wholesale.

It's actually a rational move. Title II prevented them from competing effectively with the companies that were not under Title II, hence the rational decision not to invest in competing infrastructure.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#679

Post by QuantumRoar »

72deluxe wrote: post #672
QuantumRoar wrote: post #422

Congratulations to all the people who've put so much effort into this. It's a good day for the internet. I hope some day something like this will happen in Germany as well.

Out of interest, what is the situation like in Germany with regard to the networks?

Mostly depressing. Basically the Telcos are acting in the same way as the ones in the USA. But we didn't have such an uproar from the people without which, I assume, the new NN rules couldn't be established in the USA.

Politicians are influenced mostly from the telcos and seem to follow their line of argument. We do have some services that would violate net neutrality rules, like the circumvention of data caps sold by Deutsche Telekom (totally different from T-Mobile US) for users of Spotify.

In addition there doesn't seem to be much hope for the internet's infrastructur. Germany has one of the world's worst FTTH market penetration. It's literally non-existent. Telcos try to use the old copper lines and cable to avoid investing and they seem quite succesful in convincing the government that fibre optics is not necessary.

The last frustration came from a government agenda a few months ago. It states that until 2018 everyone should have 50MBit/s. But it doesn't state by which means or whether this applies to the downlink or peak speed or whatever. Many people fear that the telcos will meet the goal by simply putting up some LTE towers with data caps and "theoretical peak transfer rate" of 50Mbit/s.

The agenda's goal would be met, since it's formulated so vaguely. However, we are just postponing the necessary FTTH build-out, while the big telcos make stupidly high profits from infrastructure that has amortized decades ago.

There's also the issue with peering. Up until recently Deutsche Telekom was basically non-existent at the DE-CIX (Germany's largest Internet Exchange). Now they have a little band-width there. However, as Deutsche Telekom was once a state-owned company (still partially state-owned) and owns basically all copper infrastructur (ISPs can rent the last-mile), they are on a high horse and expect everyone to pay for peering, similar to Comcast.

So yeah, up until recently, Germany and the USA could have a shittiness contest when it comes to the inet. Now, the winner is more clear.

Re: FCC Passes Strict Net Neutrality Regulations on 3-2 Vote

#680

Post by keslag »

xrange wrote: post #636
kevinnk wrote: post #600

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not up to speed on Bittorrent, but are they specifically blocking Bittorrent, or is coming under the ruberic of "thou shall not run a server behind your cable modem"? Maybe try googling before you comment? Comcast would inject forged TCP rst packets to inbound bittorrent connections. It did not send these packets to people running servers or other peer-to-peer protocols. In fact, people complained that the rese…

Thanks for that informative link about the number of providers and the speed links. I wonder what the velocity of those numbers is, or how fast the average speed available is increasing. Also, I am enjoying my advancing years quite a bit. You kids and your making a federal issue about only having one provider of 25Mbps for your you-tubes, and your corporately produced circuses. Talk about a first world problem. Back…

Are you serious, there are developing nations with better internet than America. This isn't about how great 'murica is, it's about how because of a lack of competition, American internet is about to become a liability. My first modem was 600 baud, so cut the old man crap.
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