221–225 of 225 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not really. We place super high priority on freedom from government influence. It's OK for a company to fuck you over but not the government for . Edit: I know the , but the debate about that is not particularly relevant here.
but not the government for . Here ya go, precious child. Edumacate yerself. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyrant 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Revolution
Also, could you please not post unsubstantive comments or flamewar comments of any kind? We're trying for better than that here, and need everyone's help.
This is why it would be better to pay by bit consumed, like most do for electricity. This would encourage carriers to build more infrastructure. It would also create an economic incentive for the ever increasing number of Internet connected devices to be more conscientious of data usage. Of course, we can't have that in the oligopoly situation in the United States.
Technically this means limited-data mobile connections should be the best in the world, because the carrier has an incentive to build good infrastructure? Let me check. IPv6? Nope. Public IPv4? Nope. HTTP interception proxy? Check! Peak bandwidth? Only a handful of mbps over LTE. And this is in markets like the UK and France where there is supposedly “competition”. This model doesn’t work, the carriers will still do…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We cannot escape the government. We can choose to ignore any or all companies. If I want to, I can lock myself in my house, disconnect from society, and subsist on my backyard garden. But there is no escape from the state. Even if I go completely off-grid and never leave my property, the state still comes banging on my door, demanding a rent payment for property I (supposedly) own -- i.e., property tax.
> We can choose to ignore any or all companies. Except you can't actually do that. There's a huge list of companies you simply can not choose to ignore. That's sort of why monopoly/oligopoly is so evil, and why strong independent antitrust action is so critical for preserving freedom. Yes, you can escape all companies if you live like a hermit in a prepper dungeon on your property (that you somehow purchased while 'i…
I agree that I probably understand "freedom" differently than most, but my definition demands nothing from my fellow citizens (which is what "companies" are made of). :)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm not sure that makes sense - bit consumed neither reflects the value of the service to the customer, nor the unit economics of the provider. You want a service level guarantee (99.9% available, with some extra wiggle room for peak hours and degradation. With electricity, you're paying for energy generation, plus grid maintenance. With internet, you're only paying for grid maintenance.
It reflects value to me. I want my connection to be as fast as possible. If I pay a fixed monthly fee, the incentive to the ISP is to throttle my connection at some point. If they have no unit economics, why do some ISPs throttle and cap after hitting a maximum?
The econ 101 solution to this is variable pricing based on hours of the day, to shift consumption to off peak hours. However, that's not attractive to ISPs for a few reasons:
1. Customers don't have a good understanding of how much data various activities use.
2. Just like airline tickets, you may be paying substantially more or less than your neighbor for the same service. ISPs do not want to add additional pricing transparency or control - they would much rather adjust the rate as high as they can regardless of usage, then lower it for individuals newly signing up for service or when existing customers threaten to cancel.
3. Many large ISPs also own media and cable TV businesses that are in direct competition with high bandwidth services like Netflix. Putting caps on that apply regardless of time of day directs users to their own offerings, which do not count towards the cap. It's also a hedge to gain revenue as cable dies, and extract rents from it's replacement.
4. If you run a gym, your best customers are the ones who show up least often - the same is true for the current ISP model. A cap is a good way to shed heavy users and provides a chilling effect on existing users who don't have a good grasp of computer networking.