241–250 of 674 posts
Tweet in article: >On December 14, the FCC will vote on Chairman Pai's plan to repeal President Obama's heavy-handed Internet regulations and restore Internet freedom. I love how these laws are veiled with patriotic sentiments, e.g. "Internet Freedom". Just like the "Patriot Act", it is reasonable to assume anything with these sort of labels will likely be an encroachment on your freedoms. Also >"The job of the FCC i…
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the times were extremely different, and the rules can't hurt
The times were three years ago.
Net Neutrality is a response to that overstepping. If the ISPs had just continued making ridiculous amounts of profit without upsetting the balance this never would have happened.
When do we get to the point where we recognize that the internet is officially holding up massive portions of industry, commerce, education, and communication. And that it should maybe not be in the hands of a few conglomerates?
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OK, I take the bait: Netflix and it's customers were harmed by traffic being throttled and customers being held hostage.
In what way are customers "held hostage"? If you sign up for an internet plan that promises not to throttle certain sites and then that provider throttles those sites, you can sue them. If you sign up for an internet plan that makes no such promises, why would one expect anything different? This may sound like a harsh reality, but it's called "taking personal responsibility" and "voting with your feet". Switch to ano…
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That's fine. Then I can decide if I want to pay that price for Netflix or not. I also have Amazon Prime video, and Youtube, and etc. so I have several competing choices.
It would be more interesting if Netflix passed it on to subscribers specifically from the ISP that charges them. Then you can as a consumer make a better decision factoring in the increased price of goods with one ISP over another.
"Net neutrality" is one of the most Orwellian terms in modern usage. It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst. Who was being harmed in the first 20 years of the internet without these regulations? Whose lives have been made better? Compared to what? Net neutrality advocates are utterly unable to give conv…
Those regulations existed for most of that time because ISPs then were dial-up over phone-lines, and the phone-lines were under Title II, so de-facto all internet was.
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This is plainly false. Most households have multiple internet providers.
In Ontario, there are three major internet providers: Rogers, Bell, and Telus. For the longest time, their plans (all of them) had bandwidth caps, something that would be unheard of in the United States. They used to be extremely ungenerous, about 100 GB a month or worse. ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/how-internet-use... ) The other internet providers, Bell and Telus, had an opportunity to distinguish…
I think that if you are in a market with caps, and you go offer a subscription without a cap, you end up with a bunch of subscribers who will saturate their line. So it makes more sense to slowly compete on increasing the caps, quite like we see in the mobile industry as well. Plus, network capacity goes up (hence I said date context matters).
Personally, I got nothing against caps, as long they're clear and the subscriber is informed about it beforehand. A FUP has a cap as well. If you download 24/7/365.25 on broadband then many ISPs will complain. Not all, but many will. Although nowadays less than say in the 90s or 00s.
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That's fine. Then I can decide if I want to pay that price for Netflix or not. I also have Amazon Prime video, and Youtube, and etc. so I have several competing choices.
It would be more interesting if Netflix passed it on to subscribers specifically from the ISP that charges them. Then you can as a consumer make a better decision factoring in the increased price of goods with one ISP over another.
That's why we need NN.
I actually think (and this should be done in addition to NN, not instead) is to encourage local city government to provide Internet access and even allowing smaller companies to lease the infrastructure to them. This would bring back competition again, and the money from leasing would cover cost of maintaining the network and maybe even bring income to the city.
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And when they don't, a lukewarm middle-of-the-road comment will inevitably rise to the top, contributing nothing to the discussion other than perhaps a milquetoast industry anecdote.
Has the word 'milquetoast' recently increased in usage by several orders of magnitude? I seem to be seeing it a lot. I suppose words go viral like any other meme.
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> It's unlikely popular and profitable services will be hindered by the lack of net neutrality. Huh? Did you forget already that both Verizon and Comcast throttled services like Netflix? They both argued they should get a cut if they were going to carry the traffic to their customers. Now they're getting exactly what they wanted. 1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/veriz... 2. https://consumeris…
What is the actual reason they shouldn't? This is a highly politicized topic but it's hard to find rational discussion. If I built a network I would expect to be able to charge whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted in exchange for the use of my network. Is the answer that taxpayers helped fund the network so now feel they deserve not to pay twice? How much of the current internet infrastructure is paid for by taxpay…