FCC won’t delay vote, says net neutrality supporters are “desperate”

I disagree. She was appointed for two primary reasons that I see from my admittedly limited perspective. One, to shore up support of the evangelicals. Two, because of donations made by her brother and similar people. Once in office, abusing her position to give favors to those who get her appointed seems little different to me than bankers donating and getting bankers cabinet positions and then those people doing similar things. (For example, I can almost guarantee if I did some digging I could find similar tax break schemes for their base under each admin) I feel like just because the neocons are slightly easier to hate on than bankers it causes a bit of willful myopia on the subject.

Read Tim Wu's recent piece. There absolutely will be legal challenges due to the process that has occurred. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/22/opinion/courts-net-neutra...

If the red states want to have a crippled internet let them. They’re all for states rights so let’s just have our states put in their own net neutrality (which will likely happen on the west coast in some form).

That's a good question. Net Neutrality is not about whether an ISP can charge you more for using more bandwidth. It's about whether an ISP can charge your more (or restrict your usage) based on which websites you communicate with.

One way to think of it is that we already have "electric neutrality" (not a real term), which is to say, you pay for the amount of electricity you use, but you're free to plug in any appliance you want. Losing "electric neutrality" would mean that, for example, your utility could charge you more or less for plugging in an Apple microwave than a Microsoft microwave. That would be insane. Can you imagine trying to start a company selling a new appliance if you had to pay a special fee to an electric company to stop them preventing your customers from plugging it in?

Net neutrality supporters want the internet to be treated like a utility. We are willing to pay for the amount of data we use, but we are not willing to let an ISP decide which websites should have their data made cheaper or more expensive.

An internet with net neutrality is one where you pay for access to the whole internet (perhaps per Gb or perhaps your ISP chooses to sell you a plan with unlimited data). An internet without net neutrality is one where you might pay $X for a connection that only talks to Facebook, and connecting to Gmail costs $Y more. A brand-new startup in a world without net neutrality is at a huge disadvantage if they aren't included in the package of websites that a customer buys. That's the end of the internet as we know it.

> if all it is is them charging customers more for using more bandwidth

It's not -- this is currently legal. Examples of what they can do if NN is repealed are: charge you extra per month to use SSH, VPN or other forms of encrypted traffic; and charge the guy down the street extra per month to stream Netflix (but Comcast video comes bundled free).

> what changes can we expect as ISP consumers if this happens?

It's hard to predict with much certainty. I see short term and medium term possibilities and likelihoods.

1. Short term, expect pricing changes that involve bundled services. Video is very likely first and biggest -- some video services strike deals with some ISPs to be offered at low cost while their competitors cost customers extra.

However this principle could easily be extended to any kind of websites -- music, social media, online banking, retailers, search engines, news sites, etc. For example you could picture a deal between CNN and Comcast such that all basic internet plans include CNN free but block Fox, NBC, etc unless the customer pays for a news upgrade.

2. There is also a near-term likelihood of extra charges for certain kinds of traffic -- SSH and VPNs top of the list because they can circumvent the other blocks; gaming; torrents; etc.

3. Censorship. This I think will start slow but is the biggest medium and long term threat. It could start with some politically unpopular sites like thepiratebay.org and wikileaks.org. Then I would expect it to creep in scope gradually, and soon the government will want to tell ISPs what to block like they do in Britain.

4. Messing with traffic in other ways, e.g. stuttering or buffering videos, dropping packets, changing contents of unencrypted connections to change text or insert/replace ads, etc. These things I see as possible but less likely, especially with encryption being more popular. However, I wouldn't be surprised to see these underhanded tactics employed against competing video services like Netflix, so that the customer gets fed up and switches to ISP Video.