Apple has major interest in the issue, Apple Music, AppleTV, FaceTime and iMessage.
But no matter what, it is a great cause to fight. Same thing apply to Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other steaming service.
Streaming services are exactly why net nuetrality had to be undone. The services have a dramatically negatve impact on other users of the internet. Network management requires the ability to throttle bad players.
Apple talks about quality of service but does little to assure that its services prevent network congestion. That is a problem.
All posters here forget that its the users that are paying the ISPs. And the fees are not cheap. Net neutrality are not fair to a lot of users in this respect. Netflix users half of the network traffic. But its subscribers are less than half of the internet population. So a lot of users don't use Netflix. In fact many of them use very little net traffic. Yet they are paying the same fees to ISPs. If the ISPs can force heavy traffic web sites to pay more fees, they can lower the fees to the poor users. And that should enable more people to get online. So the people opposing the new ruling is simply selfish.
Nonsense. When you use Netflix at home, you're also paying your ISP (often a hefty figure per month). Your ISP then covers its costs in moving the Netflix data with your and their other customers payments. As do the other ISPs.
You have reading problem. I do not use Netflix. I am paying the same heavy fee to the ISP as you that watch movie through internet for your own enjoyment. Is that fair?
No, you have a communication problem. I have no idea what the hell you are trying to say.
If you pay an ISP $75/mo for, say, 50gb of throughput, and I pay the same ISP $75/mo for the same, and we each do different things with our purchases data — then yes, it is completely fair that I watched a movie on Netflix for my own enjoyment.
Why should it matter whether it’s used for a movie, or music streaming, or porn, or web pages?
I pay Frontiers over $100/month. The contract does not say how much data I can use. Each month I use much less data than those people watching movies. You do not understand spend a lot of money on equipment in order to support high throughput. The movie watchers use this high speed, Therefore it is fair they should pay higher fees than those people that don't.
You live in an ivory tower thinking every people is like you. This is why your logic thinking failed.
All posters here forget that its the users that are paying the ISPs. And the fees are not cheap. Net neutrality are not fair to a lot of users in this respect. Netflix users half of the network traffic. But its subscribers are less than half of the internet population. So a lot of users don't use Netflix. In fact many of them use very little net traffic. Yet they are paying the same fees to ISPs. If the ISPs can force heavy traffic web sites to pay more fees, they can lower the fees to the poor users. And that should enable more people to get online. So the people opposing the new ruling is simply selfish.
Nonsense. When you use Netflix at home, you're also paying your ISP (often a hefty figure per month). Your ISP then covers its costs in moving the Netflix data with your and their other customers payments. As do the other ISPs.
You have reading problem. I do not use Netflix. I am paying the same heavy fee to the ISP as you that watch movie through internet for your own enjoyment. Is that fair?
No, you have a communication problem. I have no idea what the hell you are trying to say.
If you pay an ISP $75/mo for, say, 50gb of throughput, and I pay the same ISP $75/mo for the same, and we each do different things with our purchases data — then yes, it is completely fair that I watched a movie on Netflix for my own enjoyment.
Why should it matter whether it’s used for a movie, or music streaming, or porn, or web pages?
I pay Frontiers over $100/month. The contract does not say how much data I can use. Each month I use much less data than those people watching movies. You do not understand spend a lot of money on equipment in order to support high throughput. The movie watchers use this high speed, Therefore it is fair they should pay higher fees than those people that don't.
You live in an ivory tower thinking every people is like you. This is why your logic thinking failed.
Again, it's difficult to follow the thought you're trying to say.
Regardless of what you pay, I am certain there is a data cap. Read your contract. You have paid $100 for the data allowed to you. It doesn't matter if you didn't "use it all" and used less. Your ISP is smart enough to charger everyone an average amount to cover their costs. You're a fool if you think otherwise.
But it sounds like you're making more of an argument for metered-use billing. That's not related to the debate on NN -- that all bits should be treated the same, and the ISP should not be put into a position where they can charge more of one set of bits vs a different set of bits.
Apple has major interest in the issue, Apple Music, AppleTV, FaceTime and iMessage.
But no matter what, it is a great cause to fight. Same thing apply to Google, YouTube, Facebook or any other steaming service.
Streaming services are exactly why net nuetrality had to be undone. The services have a dramatically negatve impact on other users of the internet. Network management requires the ability to throttle bad players.
Apple talks about quality of service but does little to assure that its services prevent network congestion. That is a problem.
OK, wizard69, I need a major information update here.
I thought that neutrality meant that all bits are equal. You seem to be saying that there is already some sort of "management", or differential throttling going on whereby if someone (a corporation?) dumps many billion bits on the web (as a stream) they get some sort of priority over my few email bits. Like I say, I thought all internet bits were equal end-to-end and that streaming was handled by software at either end to ensure, say, a coherent movie presentation.
Apple, Google, Facebook, Netflix and all the other tech behemoths that are benefited by net neutrality should just pool their resources and either buy an existing ISP or set up a competing network that is committed to maintaining net neutrality and running at a profitability level that keeps the other ISPs pricing behavior in line.
I am for small government and differ with many political positions Apple takes, but I totally agree with Apple on this. Even besides the important issue of it becoming harder for many businesses to compete, the content of the internet will also be at the hands of money making endeavours, instead of all content being treated equally as it is now.
We won’t see changes right away, but over time companies will make whatever changes they can get away with until the internet differs very little from the way network TV is.
I wouldn’t be surprised if this was even partially a move to control ‘fake’ news. If content is monetised by service providers the news can be better controlled than it is now. Information control in the name of market freedom... It’s not worth it.
I'm in favor of a "free and open Internet", but I'm not in favor of forcing other people to fund your (or anyone else's) access to said Internet via taxes. If anyone can figure out how to get on the Internet for free without an Internet Service Provider (ISP) then by all means, have at it.
Can municipalities in this country set up their own internet by laying cables? If not, why not?
I think life will go on without net neutrality. The free market system will punish providers of slow/bad/throttled service and reward providers that don’t abuse.
You’re implying that there’s competition in local high-speed (≥100 mbps), broadband internet provision? Where exactly (in the US)?
In two years time there will be a few uppity ISPs that try to do something stupid and a few high profile "OMG! The sky is falling, the-internet-is-over, dogs-and-cats-living-together" over-reactions, but all-in-all there will be no significant difference for the vast majority of internet users and sites in accessibility, speed, or costs.
If I'm wrong... fix it using the legislative branch and executive approval.
There's nothing to "fix". Let the market decide. It is not the function of the Federal government to 'take over the Internet' even if it is for a purpose you may particularly like or want.
All posters here forget that its the users that are paying the ISPs. And the fees are not cheap. Net neutrality are not fair to a lot of users in this respect. Netflix users half of the network traffic. But its subscribers are less than half of the internet population. So a lot of users don't use Netflix. In fact many of them use very little net traffic. Yet they are paying the same fees to ISPs. If the ISPs can force heavy traffic web sites to pay more fees, they can lower the fees to the poor users. And that should enable more people to get online. So the people opposing the new ruling is simply selfish.
Nonsense. When you use Netflix at home, you're also paying your ISP (often a hefty figure per month). Your ISP then covers its costs in moving the Netflix data with your and their other customers payments. As do the other ISPs.
You have reading problem. I do not use Netflix. I am paying the same heavy fee to the ISP as you that watch movie through internet for your own enjoyment. Is that fair?
Net neutrality isnt fair. It is all about greedy people trying to grt others to pay for the services they use.
What needs to happen is to have users pay for the bits transmitted. Effectively it is equivalent to paying for phone calls by the minute. This way heavy users would be paying their fair share and rightfully suffering for excessive use.
All posters here forget that its the users that are paying the ISPs. And the fees are not cheap. Net neutrality are not fair to a lot of users in this respect. Netflix users half of the network traffic. But its subscribers are less than half of the internet population. So a lot of users don't use Netflix. In fact many of them use very little net traffic. Yet they are paying the same fees to ISPs. If the ISPs can force heavy traffic web sites to pay more fees, they can lower the fees to the poor users. And that should enable more people to get online. So the people opposing the new ruling is simply selfish.
Nonsense. When you use Netflix at home, you're also paying your ISP (often a hefty figure per month). Your ISP then covers its costs in moving the Netflix data with your and their other customers payments. As do the other ISPs.
You have reading problem. I do not use Netflix. I am paying the same heavy fee to the ISP as you that watch movie through internet for your own enjoyment. Is that fair?
Net neutrality isnt fair. It is all about greedy people trying to grt others to pay for the services they use.
What needs to happen is to have users pay for the bits transmitted. Effectively it is equivalent to paying for phone calls by the minute. This way heavy users would be paying their fair share and rightfully suffering for excessive use.
Perhaps, then, I should also only pay for the channels I need? Why am I stuck with paying for other users’ viewing habits and suffering for their excessive use?
I think life will go on without net neutrality. The free market system will punish providers of slow/bad/throttled service and reward providers that don’t abuse.
That’s a bullshit argument! I only have 2 provider options, which is the average number most people have. But one of them is DSL which is also the 2nd option most people have, and it isn’t really a viable choice. So stop the f’n bullshit about “rewarding providers that don’t abuse” as most consumers don’t have a real choice.
You have reading problem. I do not use Netflix. I am paying the same heavy fee to the ISP as you that watch movie through internet for your own enjoyment. Is that fair?
Net neutrality isnt fair. It is all about greedy people trying to grt others to pay for the services they use.
What needs to happen is to have users pay for the bits transmitted. Effectively it is equivalent to paying for phone calls by the minute. This way heavy users would be paying their fair share and rightfully suffering for excessive use.
You're both talking about something that isn't really net neutrality. Net neutrality is about ensuring that the pathway of (legal) information from wherever you choose go on the internet gets treated in roughly the same manner as all the other information. It doesn't really have anything to do with bandwidth caps you may or may not have on your connection, or how much data you consume in any given time period. That's just conflating the issue. What it absolutely does do, is stop providers from creating 'fast' and 'slow' pathways for information through their networks. That means Comcast can't strike a deal with Microsoft to prioritize Skype video traffic while throttling FaceTime traffic to make it appear a less reliable service.
No sane consumer should be against this. There are arguments to be made that are more nuanced about what was passed in 2015 -- someone could say some of the extra rules on top of that core principle overreach, etc. But the core of what net neutrality is and what it means, is a system that we've basically had in place and enjoyed since the dawn of the Internet. it's just always been an honor system that people have done an okay job of sticking to.
So why regulate then, if everything was running smoothly? The "official" republican line on this is that "there was nothing wrong with the internet before", but, frankly, that is some really dumb revisionist history. These rules were codified because teclos started to act in bad faith, not because of some politically motivated over-reach (despite what they will say to the contrary (do your research)). The board has forever changed due to their actions, and large telecommunication companies spend millions of dollars rearranging everything in their favor. The honor system will no longer work, because the conditions by which it previously flourished are no longer the conditions of the law or the market. That ship has sailed.
it's only a matter of time until we start seeing major companies like AT&T and Comcast and Spectrum start to weasel their way further into consumer's pocket books. They will frame it as a boon for the user -- probably start by selling packages will offer 'BEST' speeds to popular services or bundling services they own with all kind of 'enhancements' (not counting against your data caps, or at a higher bitrate) and the public will eat it up, because your average Joe is going to think they're getting a deal. That 'deal' comes with a terrible cost though.
This approach gives the telecommunication companies the power to pick the future winners and losers of the internet, especially when it comes to high bandwidth activities. Not only can they demand extra money from services that use a lot of bandwidth (which I'm actually not wholly against within reason -- if a Netflix sub goes up a couple bucks a month because that pass that charge on to you, fine), but more insidiously it gives them the power to engage in anti-competitive throttling and even outright blocking of information. Why would you use a video chat service if it was always dropping calls, or a messaging service if your messages kept getting lost in the ether? It creates an environment where lesser used services and protocols can
be completely excluded and moved to higher-priced tiers (eventually we
could see 'developer' tiers for stuff like SSH and SFTP and RDP), and an environment that is far more rife for privacy and security issues (deep packet inspection, reflection, analysis, and logging is much easier when you don't have to worry about about keeping up appearances). This gives commercial interests that power -- and more. Most critically, it demotivates entrepreneurs to work in the space because their ideas can be ostracized from huge swaths of users, or worse, cloned and stolen by large corporations with many more resources than them.
It's a fundamental rethinking of what the Internet is, and how it has been treated from a developer perspective up until this point. When a packet is no longer basically a packet, things get a whole lot more complicated. This is bad for everybody except for the telecommunication companies.
This is not a partisan issue. This is a very straightforward issue made partisan by a government that appears to perpetually, and idiotically, govern by declaring whatever the other side of the aisle does as bad. The only silver lining here is that this repeal can, in time, also be
repealed when things go south. However, the longer it is in effect, and
the longer it generates revenue for these large corporations, the more
politically difficult it will become to undo.
You have reading problem. I do not use Netflix. I am paying the same heavy fee to the ISP as you that watch movie through internet for your own enjoyment. Is that fair?
Net neutrality isnt fair. It is all about greedy people trying to grt others to pay for the services they use.
What needs to happen is to have users pay for the bits transmitted. Effectively it is equivalent to paying for phone calls by the minute. This way heavy users would be paying their fair share and rightfully suffering for excessive use.
You're both talking about something that isn't really net neutrality. Net neutrality is about ensuring that the pathway of (legal) information from wherever you choose go on the internet gets treated in roughly the same manner as all the other information. It doesn't really have anything to do with bandwidth caps you may or may not have on your connection, or how much data you consume in any given time period. That's just conflating the issue. What it absolutely does do, is stop providers from creating 'fast' and 'slow' pathways for information through their networks. That means Comcast can't strike a deal with Microsoft to prioritize Skype video traffic while throttling FaceTime traffic to make it appear a less reliable service.
No sane consumer should be against this. There are arguments to be made that are more nuanced about what was passed in 2015 -- someone could say some of the extra rules on top of that core principle overreach, etc. But the core of what net neutrality is and what it means, is a system that we've basically had in place and enjoyed since the dawn of the Internet. it's just always been an honor system that people have done an okay job of sticking to.
So why regulate then, if everything was running smoothly? The "official" republican line on this is that "there was nothing wrong with the internet before", but, frankly, that is some really dumb revisionist history. These rules were codified because teclos started to act in bad faith, not because of some politically motivated over-reach (despite what they will say to the contrary (do your research)). The board has forever changed due to their actions, and large telecommunication companies spend millions of dollars rearranging everything in their favor. The honor system will no longer work, because the conditions by which it previously flourished are no longer the conditions of the law or the market. That ship has sailed.
it's only a matter of time until we start seeing major companies like AT&T and Comcast and Spectrum start to weasel their way further into consumer's pocket books. They will frame it as a boon for the user -- probably start by selling packages will offer 'BEST' speeds to popular services or bundling services they own with all kind of 'enhancements' (not counting against your data caps, or at a higher bitrate) and the public will eat it up, because your average Joe is going to think they're getting a deal. That 'deal' comes with a terrible cost though.
This approach gives the telecommunication companies the power to pick the future winners and losers of the internet, especially when it comes to high bandwidth activities. Not only can they demand extra money from services that use a lot of bandwidth (which I'm actually not wholly against within reason -- if a Netflix sub goes up a couple bucks a month because that pass that charge on to you, fine), but more insidiously it gives them the power to engage in anti-competitive throttling and even outright blocking of information. Why would you use a video chat service if it was always dropping calls, or a messaging service if your messages kept getting lost in the ether? It creates an environment where lesser used services and protocols can
be completely excluded and moved to higher-priced tiers (eventually we
could see 'developer' tiers for stuff like SSH and SFTP and RDP), and an environment that is far more rife for privacy and security issues (deep packet inspection, reflection, analysis, and logging is much easier when you don't have to worry about about keeping up appearances). This gives commercial interests that power -- and more. Most critically, it demotivates entrepreneurs to work in the space because their ideas can be ostracized from huge swaths of users, or worse, cloned and stolen by large corporations with many more resources than them.
It's a fundamental rethinking of what the Internet is, and how it has been treated from a developer perspective up until this point. When a packet is no longer basically a packet, things get a whole lot more complicated. This is bad for everybody except for the telecommunication companies.
This is not a partisan issue. This is a very straightforward issue made partisan by a government that appears to perpetually, and idiotically, govern by declaring whatever the other side of the aisle does as bad. The only silver lining here is that this repeal can, in time, also be
repealed when things go south. However, the longer it is in effect, and
the longer it generates revenue for these large corporations, the more
politically difficult it will become to undo.
Superb post. Thanks.
To me, the real issue is the shocking lack of competition in the US. Politicians and regulators have been extensively lobbied and bought off by the pipe providers just about everywhere.
I pay ~$250 a month for Comcast’s Triple Play (cable, internet, landline) where I live. On top of which, they foist ads on us. I just got the same thing in Paris — in fact, faster internet and higher quality cable — and guess how much I pay? 52 Euros a month, or ~$60. The technology is superior too: no coaxial clutter, just a wireless box so that I can put my TV anywhere, not run cables throughout the place, and I can have however many TVs I want.
The difference? Paris has four companies competing for my business. The US has one.
We Americans are a pathetic bunch of sheep when it comes to what we pay for our communications and entertainment.
We Americans are a pathetic bunch of sheep when it comes to what we pay for our communications and entertainment.
And what else do you expect when a bunch of technological illiterates can be whipped into a frenzy using a cute catch phrase (“net neutrality”) and a few million lobbyist dollars thrown at the dipshits on Reddit, Imgur, and Facebook? Slight of hand tricks to create a false dichotomy. There’s no “national embarrassment” emoji available on the forum; you’ll have to take the squiggle mouth as one.
since the anti-regulationers have worked themselves into a tizzy, let's again point out that it's about treating all bits equally and not being able to charge more for bits from targeted websites/publishers.
time to re-paste a little story about net neutrality:
Think about Netflix. It has unlimited streaming movies now. Comcast has streaming movies too, at $4 per movie. What if Comcast tells Netflix "unless you pay us the equivalent of $20/user per month we are going to put you in the slow lane and your users won't be able to stream." Netflix's streaming business will be crushed. Comcast, Verizon and AT&T want Congress to allow them to do exactly that, and this is why net neutrality legislation is so important.
This isn't a result of a fertile imagination. This actually happened 100 years ago. Imagine the year is 1900. I run a steel company and you run a railroad. I sell steel for $50 per ton and you ship it for $3 per ton. I have two major competitors. I come to you and offer you $10 per ton for shipping if you agree not to carry steel for the other two. That number will give you far more profit for far less effort so you say yes. You're happy. My two competitors cannot move steel from Pittsburgh to Kansas any other way (what, by horse and wagon?) so they go out of business, or a least their business is limited to local purchasers.
Then I raise my steel price from $50 per ton to $75. The steel buyers have to pay because they have no other choice. The competition is gone. I make huge profits. I'm happy. You make huge profits. You're happy. The consumers and my competitors aren't happy, but who gives a flying f*** about them?
This is the history of the railroad business in the late 1800s. This scenario played out again in the 1920s in trucking. Both times Congress mandated that any shipping company must charge identical amounts for all customers, based only on size, weight, and transit time.
We have 100 years of success with net neutrality. It's working pretty well.
....but but but regulations are baaaaad!! right? er.
I have lived the majority of my life without the Internet, cell phones, streaming TV, VOIP etc.. I am pretty sure that I would not die or suffer a unbearable life if they all went away tomorrow. A life centered around techology is only one way to live. If the value of the services offered does not serve you the way you would like them to, then don’t buy them. Listen now for all the heads exploding at this insane idea actually being offered as a solution. Businesses exist from profits and profits come from selling the customer what they want. If a business can convince their customer that their product is really what they want they will be more profitable. Just look at the size of the “storage industry” to see how easily we are sold things we don’t really want or need. This speaks to how the free market gets skewed. If we demand that the product offered is really what we want then the free market works. When we become sheep and buy what ever piece of crap is offered then we lose. For the free market to really work we must not settle.
since the anti-regulationers have worked themselves into a tizzy, let's again point out that it's about treating all bits equally and not being able to charge more for bits from targeted websites/publishers.
time to re-paste a little story about net neutrality:
Think about Netflix. It has unlimited streaming movies now. Comcast has streaming movies too, at $4 per movie. What if Comcast tells Netflix "unless you pay us the equivalent of $20/user per month we are going to put you in the slow lane and your users won't be able to stream." Netflix's streaming business will be crushed. Comcast, Verizon and AT&T want Congress to allow them to do exactly that, and this is why net neutrality legislation is so important.
This isn't a result of a fertile imagination. This actually happened 100 years ago. Imagine the year is 1900. I run a steel company and you run a railroad. I sell steel for $50 per ton and you ship it for $3 per ton. I have two major competitors. I come to you and offer you $10 per ton for shipping if you agree not to carry steel for the other two. That number will give you far more profit for far less effort so you say yes. You're happy. My two competitors cannot move steel from Pittsburgh to Kansas any other way (what, by horse and wagon?) so they go out of business, or a least their business is limited to local purchasers.
Then I raise my steel price from $50 per ton to $75. The steel buyers have to pay because they have no other choice. The competition is gone. I make huge profits. I'm happy. You make huge profits. You're happy. The consumers and my competitors aren't happy, but who gives a flying f*** about them?
This is the history of the railroad business in the late 1800s. This scenario played out again in the 1920s in trucking. Both times Congress mandated that any shipping company must charge identical amounts for all customers, based only on size, weight, and transit time.
We have 100 years of success with net neutrality. It's working pretty well.
....but but but regulations are baaaaad!! right? er.
“People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.” Adam Smith Wealth of Nations - 1776
Basic scientific research is funded by the government (it's socialized) as no capitalist entrepreneur would invest their money in a nonexistent product or idea. "Typically the private sector only finds the courage to invest in breakthrough technologies after a so-called “entrepreneurial state” has made the initial high-risk investments." The core of the Internet was totally derived and built from basic research. Only after the financial possibilities became clearer did individuals and businesses dive in (1994).
Fact-free assertion that "no capitalist entrepreneur would invest their money in a nonexistent product or idea". Private businesses engage in R&D and apply for patents on innovative processes involving basic research all the time. For example IBM has long been among the top patent generating companies. Many of these patents involve deeply technical research.
All posters here forget that its the users that are paying the ISPs. And the fees are not cheap. Net neutrality are not fair to a lot of users in this respect. Netflix users half of the network traffic. But its subscribers are less than half of the internet population. So a lot of users don't use Netflix. In fact many of them use very little net traffic. Yet they are paying the same fees to ISPs. If the ISPs can force heavy traffic web sites to pay more fees, they can lower the fees to the poor users. And that should enable more people to get online. So the people opposing the new ruling is simply selfish.
Nonsense. When you use Netflix at home, you're also paying your ISP (often a hefty figure per month). Your ISP then covers its costs in moving the Netflix data with your and their other customers payments. As do the other ISPs.
You have reading problem. I do not use Netflix. I am paying the same heavy fee to the ISP as you that watch movie through internet for your own enjoyment. Is that fair?
Net neutrality isnt fair. It is all about greedy people trying to grt others to pay for the services they use.
What needs to happen is to have users pay for the bits transmitted. Effectively it is equivalent to paying for phone calls by the minute. This way heavy users would be paying their fair share and rightfully suffering for excessive use.
Perhaps, then, I should also only pay for the channels I need? Why am I stuck with paying for other users’ viewing habits and suffering for their excessive use?
Do you all remember when ISP prices shot up through the roof with the advent and rise of streaming video?
Neither do I. Mine has gotten a lot cheaper, in terms of value—roughly the same price over the past 20 years, but the bandwidth is way up, many times over. And the companies don’t appear to be losing money, either. As technology progresses, the volume of traffic generated by a streaming video is likely to become less and less important, and it already seems to be within manageable levels now. So those of you who think your outrageous ISP charges can be blamed on those callous souls who stream video over the Internet, think again.
‘Free Market System” is a business marketing illusion of a self-regulated level playing field. Businesses are constantly looking for an advantage and they don’t consider a level playing field an advantage.
Comments
Apple talks about quality of service but does little to assure that its services prevent network congestion. That is a problem.
You live in an ivory tower thinking every people is like you. This is why your logic thinking failed.
Regardless of what you pay, I am certain there is a data cap. Read your contract. You have paid $100 for the data allowed to you. It doesn't matter if you didn't "use it all" and used less. Your ISP is smart enough to charger everyone an average amount to cover their costs. You're a fool if you think otherwise.
But it sounds like you're making more of an argument for metered-use billing. That's not related to the debate on NN -- that all bits should be treated the same, and the ISP should not be put into a position where they can charge more of one set of bits vs a different set of bits.
I thought that neutrality meant that all bits are equal. You seem to be saying that there is already some sort of "management", or differential throttling going on whereby if someone (a corporation?) dumps many billion bits on the web (as a stream) they get some sort of priority over my few email bits. Like I say, I thought all internet bits were equal end-to-end and that streaming was handled by software at either end to ensure, say, a coherent movie presentation.
I need enlightenment ;-)
You’re implying that there’s competition in local high-speed (≥100 mbps), broadband internet provision? Where exactly (in the US)?
There is no free market that can “decide” when it comes to high-speed, broadband internet provision in most of the US. See post above. Or https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-broadband-still-no-isp-choice-for-many-especially-at-higher-speeds/
What needs to happen is to have users pay for the bits transmitted. Effectively it is equivalent to paying for phone calls by the minute. This way heavy users would be paying their fair share and rightfully suffering for excessive use.
No sane consumer should be against this. There are arguments to be made that are more nuanced about what was passed in 2015 -- someone could say some of the extra rules on top of that core principle overreach, etc. But the core of what net neutrality is and what it means, is a system that we've basically had in place and enjoyed since the dawn of the Internet. it's just always been an honor system that people have done an okay job of sticking to.
So why regulate then, if everything was running smoothly? The "official" republican line on this is that "there was nothing wrong with the internet before", but, frankly, that is some really dumb revisionist history. These rules were codified because teclos started to act in bad faith, not because of some politically motivated over-reach (despite what they will say to the contrary (do your research)). The board has forever changed due to their actions, and large telecommunication companies spend millions of dollars rearranging everything in their favor. The honor system will no longer work, because the conditions by which it previously flourished are no longer the conditions of the law or the market. That ship has sailed.
it's only a matter of time until we start seeing major companies like AT&T and Comcast and Spectrum start to weasel their way further into consumer's pocket books. They will frame it as a boon for the user -- probably start by selling packages will offer 'BEST' speeds to popular services or bundling services they own with all kind of 'enhancements' (not counting against your data caps, or at a higher bitrate) and the public will eat it up, because your average Joe is going to think they're getting a deal. That 'deal' comes with a terrible cost though.
This approach gives the telecommunication companies the power to pick the future winners and losers of the internet, especially when it comes to high bandwidth activities. Not only can they demand extra money from services that use a lot of bandwidth (which I'm actually not wholly against within reason -- if a Netflix sub goes up a couple bucks a month because that pass that charge on to you, fine), but more insidiously it gives them the power to engage in anti-competitive throttling and even outright blocking of information. Why would you use a video chat service if it was always dropping calls, or a messaging service if your messages kept getting lost in the ether? It creates an environment where lesser used services and protocols can be completely excluded and moved to higher-priced tiers (eventually we could see 'developer' tiers for stuff like SSH and SFTP and RDP), and an environment that is far more rife for privacy and security issues (deep packet inspection, reflection, analysis, and logging is much easier when you don't have to worry about about keeping up appearances). This gives commercial interests that power -- and more. Most critically, it demotivates entrepreneurs to work in the space because their ideas can be ostracized from huge swaths of users, or worse, cloned and stolen by large corporations with many more resources than them.
It's a fundamental rethinking of what the Internet is, and how it has been treated from a developer perspective up until this point. When a packet is no longer basically a packet, things get a whole lot more complicated. This is bad for everybody except for the telecommunication companies.
This is not a partisan issue. This is a very straightforward issue made partisan by a government that appears to perpetually, and idiotically, govern by declaring whatever the other side of the aisle does as bad. The only silver lining here is that this repeal can, in time, also be repealed when things go south. However, the longer it is in effect, and the longer it generates revenue for these large corporations, the more politically difficult it will become to undo.
To me, the real issue is the shocking lack of competition in the US. Politicians and regulators have been extensively lobbied and bought off by the pipe providers just about everywhere.
I pay ~$250 a month for Comcast’s Triple Play (cable, internet, landline) where I live. On top of which, they foist ads on us. I just got the same thing in Paris — in fact, faster internet and higher quality cable — and guess how much I pay? 52 Euros a month, or ~$60. The technology is superior too: no coaxial clutter, just a wireless box so that I can put my TV anywhere, not run cables throughout the place, and I can have however many TVs I want.
The difference? Paris has four companies competing for my business. The US has one.
We Americans are a pathetic bunch of sheep when it comes to what we pay for our communications and entertainment.
....but but but regulations are baaaaad!! right? er.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_top_United_States_patent_recipients
Neither do I. Mine has gotten a lot cheaper, in terms of value—roughly the same price over the past 20 years, but the bandwidth is way up, many times over. And the companies don’t appear to be losing money, either. As technology progresses, the volume of traffic generated by a streaming video is likely to become less and less important, and it already seems to be within manageable levels now. So those of you who think your outrageous ISP charges can be blamed on those callous souls who stream video over the Internet, think again.