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Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

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Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#251

Post by alexanderdmitri »

vog wrote: post #162

It is really a pity that in the US, net neutrality was never established by law, but "just" on institutional level. Here in the EU, things are much slower and the activists were somewhat envious how fast net neutrality was established in the US, while in the EU this is a really slow legislation process. But now it seems the this slower way is at least more sustainable. We still don't have real net neutrality in the E…

Out of curiosity, what laws does the EU have that are similar and why do you say it's not 'real' net neutrality?

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#252

Post by criddell »

apexalpha wrote: post #123
shawnee_ wrote: post #65

Net neutrality is fundamental to free speech. Without net neutrality, big companies could censor your voice and make it harder to speak up online. Net neutrality has been called the “First Amendment of the Internet.” Not just harder. Infinitely more dangerous. Probably the scariest implications for NN being gutted are those around loss of anonymity through the Internet. ISPs who are allowed to sell users' browsing hi…

I'm not American, so please correct me if I'm wrong but I have yet to see any proof of this whole 'sell your internet history' complaint that seems to be blatently copied by everyone without any research. The way I understand it is that ISPs can sell anonymized data from groups of users. Like: people who visit news.ycombinator.com generally also visit stackoverflow. I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual…

Back in the 1980's, Robert Bork's video rental history was disclosed during his supreme court nomination. As a result, the Video Privacy Protection Act was passed.

Why shouldn't there be similar provisions to protect my browsing history?

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#253

Post by Chaebixi »

billions wrote: post #239
KZeillmann wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure -- let's say free market is a solution? Free market only works if I have choice . Right now, my only choice for internet service is Comcast. Free market won't do a thing until I have actual choices here.

Government handed comcast monopoly over the wire to your door. Now we're sweeping the problem under the rug by policing what goes down the wire. The way to get more choices is to let anyone compete to be your ISP, by liberating the wire. Remember how long distance phone service improved in the 90's?

> Government handed comcast monopoly over the wire to your door. Now we're sweeping the problem under the rug by policing what goes down the wire.

> The way to get more choices is to let anyone compete to be your ISP, by liberating the wire.

While he's killing net neutrality, Pai is also doing what he can to limit broadband competition. So, thanks to him, we're getting the worst of both worlds: less consumer-friendly regulation AND less competition.

* FCC removes competition requirement from Charter-TWC merger conditions (https://www.theverge.com/2017/4/3/15161456/fcc-charter-merge...)

* ISPs who don’t want competition get good news from FCC chair: FCC to kill merger condition that required competition in 1 million locations (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/02/isps-who-dont-wa...)

* One broadband choice counts as “competition” in new FCC proposal (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/04/one-b...)

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#254

Post by FullMtlAlcoholc »

crazy1van wrote: post #218
FullMtlAlcoholc wrote: post #202

Why does anyonw want to give more power to Comcast or AT&T? Neither has hardly ever been described as innovative.. unless you count clueless members of Congress.

> Neither has hardly ever been described as innovative I'm not sure what you consider innovative, but my local comcast connection has grown by about 10x in bandwidth over the last 15 years.

Comcast tops out at 60Mbps where I live, which is basically Beverly Hills, a pretty wealthy area. Oh, the upload speed is a comcastic 5Mbps. It's $80, it's regularly throttled, and it has data caps (although I've gone over and not been charged.) If I had a 4K tv, I'd most likely be over.

This is a perfect example of how they stifle innovation by being another impediment/middle man in the move to 4K TV.

Previously, I lived in a ramshackle studio apartment in Venice that had Fios where I paid $50 for symmetrical 200Mbps.

I don't want or need my ISP to be innovative. I want a dumb, no BS pipe that offers a decent price without bundling, since I don't need tv or a phone

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#255

Post by chillacy »

mbroshi wrote: post #138

I am agnostic on net neutrality (ie. neither for nor against, just admitting my own lack of ability to assess its fallout). I read a lot of sweeping, but hard to measure claims on its affects (such as in the linked article). Are there any concrete, measurable affects that anyone is willing to predict? Examples might be: * Average load times for the 1000 most popular webpages will decrease. * There will be fewer inter…

To that end, I'm curious how the internet works in countries without net neutrality protections: https://www.thisisnetneutrality.org/

I know in china there are a handful of telecom companies with absolutely terrible peering between each other, so that companies have to buy CDN services which have points of presence in all the carriers. But that may or may not be an effect of their lack of net neutrality policy, since there's so much else going on there.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#257

Post by rocqua »

Adverblessly wrote: post #114
jfaucett wrote: post #16

Does anyone else find the internet market odd? Up until now net neutrality and other policies have given us the following: 1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc) 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free. 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have…

1) Without net neutrality, Facebook can simply pay your cellular internet provider to block all messaging apps but WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (does that still exist?). Then their (as you put it) 95% monopoly can permanently increase to 100%. The only way to compete would be to either outpay Facebook (good luck!) or start your own cellular company (good luck!). In fact, the massive monopolies can already pay for…

> Without net neutrality, Facebook can simply pay your cellular internet provider to block all messaging apps but WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (does that still exist?). Then their (as you put it) 95% monopoly can permanently increase to 100%.

It makes much more sense for FB to pay ISPs to make access to WhatsApp and Messenger free. That way the ISP doesn't have to deal with the angry backlash.

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#258

Post by mdpopescu »

super_mario wrote: post #89
weberc2 wrote: post #23

I wasn't impressed with this article; it reads like fear mongering. More importantly, I don't think the fix is regulation, I think it's better privacy tech + increased competition via elimination of local monopolies. Do we really want to depend on government to enforce privacy on the Internet?

This is not about government enforcing privacy on the internet. That is false analogy, but even if it were good analogy, it would still fail. Do you want government enforcing your personal security (also known as policing)? Would it not be better if guys who are richer and can afford more bullies, intimidate you and ask for money while you are trying to walk by their house/business etc? Net neutrality is about each I…

> Do you want government enforcing your personal security (also known as policing)?

As a rule, no.

> Would it not be better if guys who are richer and can afford more bullies, intimidate you and ask for money while you are trying to walk by their house/business etc?

Definitely. Rich people are both busy and fewer. Right now I have people who are poor (and not busy) intimidate me and asking me for money. Why is this better?

Re: Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

#260

Post by vivekd »

zmarty wrote: post #249
vivekd wrote: post #246

>The internet is not broken,” There is no problem for the government to solve.” - FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai This is sooo true. If internet carriers were preferring some kind of content, or censoring or giving less bandwidth to certain content, or charging for certain content - and this was causing the problems described in the mozilla article - then yes - we could have legislation to solve that problem. What gets to…

If you have no problem with net neutrality, how about we just let it be?

Because legislating every conceivable fear and every instance of mass panic will lead to an overly complex and overly burdensome legal system that hampers legitimate activity.

In the words of Cicero, "more laws, less justice"

When we start having problems with net neutrality, we can legislate against it. As we don't have any such issues, and there is no evidence that we are in imminent threat of net neutrality being dismantled, I see no reason for net neutrality legislation.

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