131–138 of 138 posts
This brings to my mind some Sony Music executive defending their malware-enabling CD DRM - - "Most people don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care?"
That brings to mind a (probably unimplementable) thought I had around the same time: disallow people that do not understand what things are to make choices about it that affect everyone.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a balance of ignorance. I really do believe most people don't know and don't care about net neutrality no matter how beneficial it may be to them in the most immediate sense. At its core the net neutrality debate is a fight between media providers and transmission. It is clear to most tech literate people that net neutrality is a very good thing. Less clear is that media (including privacy) regulation is also a…
Fact is, Democrats get majority of telecom dollars https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=B09
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"artificial monopolies created by the state" I'm sorry, what? While I'm sure you're going to beat a drum about "regulation" and "free markets" it might be worth stepping back and actually assessing the issue from a practical, rather than ideological stance Utilities naturally gravitate toward monopoly. Would you want to have multiple sewer lines running to your house, because your upstairs bathroom costs more money t…
Actually, I really wonder why it doesn't work that way in the US. I worked for an ISP company that grew from a tiny startup, connecting just a few buildings, to a successful ISP that covered a significant part (almost all, I believe) of small (200K) city in Russia. I haven't really interacted much with our network builders department (worked on software, and left the company some years ago, moving to another city), b…
Things like this are not as much an issue in states like Texas that require only one permit to run cable anywhere in the state. Whether or not people would like to admit it, this is a case where we can see with our own eyes regulations are seriously hurting the ability for people to start up and compete, and is the only reason net neutrality is an issue in the first place.
Today I learned that US Citizens = Consumers
Unless you live completely off the grid, and are totally self-sufficient, growing your own food, making your own tools, etc. you're a consumer (in the economic sense) in some way or another.
It might seem petty, but its important to be specific when reporting scientific results even for pop sci. This article chops and changes between consumers and US citizens a lot which could cause confusion
Can someone point to the best ELI5 article, or tell me the best metaphor? I think I don't do a great job trying to explain net neutrality to family members.
What the comes down to is an argument on how much agency a company has to control their service if we've deemed their service "critical to the public good."
This take is probably unpopular, but since I haven't seen many of these points and there are some very big players (IBM, Cisco, Juniper, Intel, Ercisson, etc.) that are against net neutrality with some of this reasoning, I'll fill you in some points that you probably won't hear:
1.) Routing traffic does not have equal cost. Peering, load balancing, and other aspects of routing are complex and carriers have people whose livelihoods revolve around handling these issues. A web request to a backwater site a couple hops away from you has nowhere near the load implications that streaming a 2 hour 4k movie has.
2.) Net neutrality is a bad fix for the underlying issue; local/state governments make it exceedingly easy to get a monopoly going with pole attach and franchising rules. Without this monopoly, neutral connections are a constant danger to the incumbent ISP. It is much easier to break into markets with lax regulation like Texas because of how their franchising permits work.
3.) Net neutrality is largely a power play by advertising/media companies that have no appreciable revenue other than pushing content. Facebook, Google, 4chan, etc. need advertising because they have very little value outside it. This obviously isn't an issue if you're Cisco, Intel, or the like, because they have a product other than you.
Are ISPs really going to stop abiding by Net Neutrality rules? Wouldn't that offer a big competitive opportunity for an ISP that supports Net Neutrality?