Inside the net neutrality dispute, and why it's important to Apple users

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  • Reply 41 of 255
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by TheWhiteFalcon View Post





    Well, net neutrality adds a 15.6% tax to Internet services, 

    Source, please. Without a reliable one, I'm calling "bogus" on this.

  • Reply 42 of 255
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by ascii View Post

     

    I don't think the argument from the right is that the free market would do a better job. The argument is that having a fast Internet connection is nice, but it's not as important as upholding indvidual rights. In this case the private property rights of the people who own the cables.




    Please remember that the cables use public property to go from place to place. Verizon, AT&T and their friends got permission to run their cables using the benefits of Title II (and various similar rules and regulation on utilities).

     

    So the public does have an interest. The cables are not 100% private.

  • Reply 43 of 255
    flaneurflaneur Posts: 4,526member
    cnocbui wrote: »

    Doesn't matter so much for the large volume data I am thinking about.

    Exactly. Even for FaceTime, we can get used to it. It's good discipline, and would select out narcissist motormouths like the one you just responded to.

    If Benjamin Frost agrees with you, that's when you know you're not thinking deeply enough.
  • Reply 44 of 255
    kibitzerkibitzer Posts: 1,114member
    Tallest skil was actually the calmest one here.

    Possibly. I might even concede that SpamSandwich and Benjamin Frost are not Ayn Rand Objectivists, anarchists or criminal psychopaths, but will reserve judgment on that for the time being. :D
  • Reply 45 of 255

    Free open market self regulation is always preferable to Government regulation.  However having said that, because of the lack of competition there is no free and open market in the ISP space.  Wether you want to blame the high cost to build infrastructure, or the long history of legal monopolies at the local levels killing competition, this lack of competition is a fact of life.  The ideal but unrealistic option is to generate competition in the space, and Google appears to be trying doing that in very limited markets.  I hate to say it, but I agree with the President's nuclear option of declaring Internet a regulated utility.

     

    Will the big companies stop developing out of spite?  Probably (Look no further than Verizon and their FIOS roll out fiasco to support this opinion), but hopefully smaller local ISPs can start opening up again.  Again history does not support this hope and the few cases where it does, it took decades of fostering to happen.  

  • Reply 46 of 255
    kerrybkerryb Posts: 270member
    Quote:

    Originally Posted by Tallest Skil View Post

     

    I’ve found that, in many cases, less control–not more–leads to greater success.




    In some parts of our economy that might be right but access to the delivery of content on the internet is too important for a monopoly to control. Think of your city or town's water system. Do you want private industry creating tiers of water quality or the local power company providing more energy to certain customers? Human nature is the strong will prevail at the expense of the poor and weak, societies succeed when all are considered of value and a shared responsibility is maintained the way a happy family succeeds. 

  • Reply 47 of 255
    dasanman69dasanman69 Posts: 13,002member
    Essentially Netflix doesn't create content or worry about delivery

    Yes they do, and yes they do since they signed deals with Comcast, and Verizon.
  • Reply 48 of 255
    dasanman69dasanman69 Posts: 13,002member
    kerryb wrote: »

    In some parts of our economy that might be right but access to the delivery of content on the internet is too important for a monopoly to control. Think of your city or town's water system. Do you want private industry creating tiers of water quality or the local power company providing more energy to certain customers? Human nature is the strong will prevail at the expense of the poor and weak, societies succeed when all are considered of value and a shared responsibility is maintained the way a happy family succeeds. 

    Yet a monopoly handled the phone calls of an entire country for decades. They were given the monopoly but not without having to adhere to certain service standards, to quality standards, and fee increases had to be granted, but first made public knowledge. All this was the reason why even the most rural of area had telephone service, not because they wanted to but because they had. With less regulation these companies are now picking, and choosing which areas to wire up, and which ones not to.
  • Reply 49 of 255
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    Like a petulant toddler. Denied what it wants, it lashes out with its fists and voice and throws a tantrum until it is either appeased (wrong) or ignored (right).
    Actually it is a business. A business stops building something if it suddenly realizes it might not be able to pay for that something. This in a nut shell is the problem with a changing regulatory environment, a business can be setup to make money under any set of regulations but it can't plan ahead if those regulations are in flux.

    In a nut shell it is far from childish and is expected behavior when the rules of the game may change on you.
    It’s high time to put legal teeth behind the “of, by, and for” on which our republic is founded.

    Which is exactly what the cable companies are looking for, a way to protect their property. In a nut shel they don't want to forfeit their capital as a result of some governmental decree.
  • Reply 50 of 255
    The center of the confusion about net neutrality occurs because "net neutrality" is not about you and me, the end user. It is about the relationship between the data intense content providers and the heavily invested infrastructure developers.

    Why would I (an internet provider) spend massive amounts of capital, fleshing out infrastructure, when content providers (like netflix), can clog the network with massive amounts of bandwidth and not have to pay extra for their heavy use... thus requiring the infrastructure developers to spend ever more money improving the bandwidth to accommodate. Someone has to pay for the infrastructure development.

    Its a lot like heavy trucks on the road breaking up the asphalt. Who pays for the repair? The guy in the prius?

    This is exactly why ATT decided to delay their fiber development, until the dust settles and the issue becomes clear.

    I used to think that the Title II utility definition was appropriate for the internet, but that is a 70 year old regulatory instrument that does not fit the present situation.

    Some regulation is necessary, so that the quest for profit does not override the quality of service (and we end users are not screwed). But that regulation must be light enough to encourage both infrastructure development and content development.

    Both Service providers & Content providers need to know that they are going to be able to profit from their investments. Otherwise they will just close up shop.
  • Reply 51 of 255
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    solipsismy wrote: »

    Wait, so you two want ISPs to be able to block and throttle content as they see fit?
    A system that isn't managed eventual breaks down. Think about it this way, what would you think if your cable connection became unusable because somebody down the road had a porn obsession.

    Would you also want the USDA dissolved to let the free market handle what is considered safe to eat?

    What if a portion of the free market wanted dog meat on your local store shelf? There are two extremes here.

    As for treating the Internet companies as public utilities that might not be a bad idea if we can't force real competition. The problem is the public can not just steal the capital that already exists. If there is a real demand for demand for a public utility approach (highly debatable) then the public should be forced to buy that infrastructure at a fair market value. The idea of turning a private company into a utility by force should be concern to everybody.
  • Reply 52 of 255
    steven n.steven n. Posts: 1,229member
    "Until recently, these "roads" from content providers to the cloud and back down to the user have been treated like open pipes, completely unregulated. For years cable companies had no issue leaving these pipes wide open, as most of the content being delivered were static websites, images, Flash, and the occasional low-resolution video."

    Is not a true statement in any regard. I am saddened by the talking heads (like Obsma) that take positions when they know next to nothing about the subject. The idea that all BITS are created equal is a fallacy and for a great network QoS needs to be used to prioritize some traffic over others. Period. No room for discussion on this.

    Live streaming video and VOIP need higher QoS than an FTP download. Using smart QoS, it is possible to design and deploy a network that has far higher responsiveness at a significantly lower cost. The talking heads want to do away with smart network architecture. Sad.
  • Reply 53 of 255
    So Netflix screwed us? If Netflix,Apple, youtube refuse to pay then **** the ISP's, they only have power if companies fall for it
  • Reply 54 of 255

    You have to be remarkably thick to see this as a "free market" argument!  Opposing net neutrality is about as far from a "free market" as you can get.  You are turning the market into a protection racket, where the owner of the market has a monopoly.  Anyone who wants to buy anything has to use their market, and unless you're willing to pay them extra, they're going to make it extremely inconvenient for any members of the public to visit your stall.  They'll make the path deliberately narrow and circuitous, whilst placing obstacles in the way.  The more entrenched your position, the more able you are to gain favourable position in the market, with new entrants to the market will be unable to compete.  This will enable you to further entrench your position in the market.

     

    In this way, you will take one industry you've already messed up and allowed to become an effective monopoly in most places, and artificially transfer those barriers to entry and market failures onto the internet, which is potentially the greatest and most pure expression of the free market there has ever been.  

     

    Utter idiocy.

     

    The rest of the world looks at US with its mouths agape.  Corporate lobbying to corrupt politicians uses government power to entrench the position of established corporations and create artificial barriers which stop new entrants coming in, all while deludedly using the language of freedom and the free market when precisely the opposite is happening.  Because restricting corporate contributions in politics means interfering with freedom of speech, right?  Because anything which harms a big corporation must be socialist and anti-capitalist, right?

     

    Meanwhile everyone else uses government regulation to maintain a level playing field and restrict the growth of monopolies, because that's how you get capitalism working properly.

     

    Don't get me wrong, a lot of the corporate lobbying goes on in Europe too, but not like in the US, and not with such a turkeys voting for christmas complicity of the mainstream view of the public.

  • Reply 55 of 255
    markdo wrote: »
    The center of the confusion about net neutrality occurs because "net neutrality" is not about you and me, the end user. It is about the relationship between the data intense content providers and the heavily invested infrastructure developers.

    Why would I (an internet provider) spend massive amounts of capital, fleshing out infrastructure, when content providers (like netflix), can clog the network with massive amounts of bandwidth and not have to pay extra for their heavy use... thus requiring the infrastructure developers to spend ever more money improving the bandwidth to accommodate. Someone has to pay for the infrastructure development.

    Its a lot like heavy trucks on the road breaking up the asphalt. Who pays for the repair? The guy in the prius?

    This is exactly why ATT decided to delay their fiber development, until the dust settles and the issue becomes clear.

    I used to think that the Title II utility definition was appropriate for the internet, but that is a 70 year old regulatory instrument that does not fit the present situation.

    Some regulation is necessary, so that the quest for profit does not override the quality of service (and we end users are not screwed). But that regulation must be light enough to encourage both infrastructure development and content development.

    Both Service providers & Content providers need to know that they are going to be able to profit from their investments. Otherwise they will just close up shop.

    Wow. Rational post. +10
  • Reply 56 of 255
    wizard69wizard69 Posts: 13,377member
    asdasd wrote: »
    His ill gotten gains is free and unfettered access to the Internet?

    Well yes, exactly in this case. Free access to private property is theft which is what would happen if the government suddenly imposed net neutrality on the owners of the cable to your house.

    In the bigger picture nothing in this world is free.

    In reality this is the big problem with the Internet net neutrality crowd - they want free access without paying for it. Even if net neutrality were to become a reality you would still be getting a bill at the end of the day. Further you would still be suffering from throttling. The fundamental problem here is that you won't have infinite bandwidth to most communities for the foreseeable future.
  • Reply 57 of 255
    dasanman69 wrote: »
    Yet a monopoly handled the phone calls of an entire country for decades. They were given the monopoly but not without having to adhere to certain service standards, to quality standards, and fee increases had to be granted, but first made public knowledge. All this was the reason why even the most rural of area had telephone service, not because they wanted to but because they had. With less regulation these companies are now picking, and choosing which areas to wire up, and which ones not to.

    And making phone calls is CHEAPER now than in the 70's. The forced wiring up of everyone, while nice for a few, substantially increased the cost to most everyone else. It is a ball ending act and I see lots of people trying to fix something that is NOT broken.
  • Reply 58 of 255
    normmnormm Posts: 653member
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by anantksundaram View Post



    The issue of 'net neutrality' (I hate that term -- it's like the 'Patriot Act') is complex, and there are valid issue being raised from both sides. Obama has some valid points, and Wheeler has some valid points. (Even the cable companies do, but they're the ones I trust the least in the debate.)



    For some posters here to revert to their usual, simple-minded left-wing/right-wing talking point crap is just plain idiotic.

     

    Completely agree!  This is basic infrastructure, and we need to get this right or put the US at a significant disadvantage.  Part of the problem seems to be that ISP's such as Comcast have a conflict of interest, since they own both the pipes and some of the content.  Other countries deal with this by not allowing one company to do both, which seems much less convoluted than trying to regulate the conflict.

     

    It also seems strange to prevent ISP's from providing fast delivery, when there are content delivery networks such as Akamai that do nothing else, by caching content at many places.  Are we going to make it illegal for ISP's to be paid to do the same (which in fact they already are)?  So congress is going to determine the technical organization of internet caching?  Are we going to make it illegal for an ISP to also run a faster network with more expensive hardware?  And are we going to make it illegal for ISP's to sell a finite amount of data transfer per month, with throttling if you go over -- which is exactly what some cell carriers currently sell?

     

    Calling this "freedom" or "neutrality" makes it seem like an obvious issue: of course we should require freedom!  What we need are regulations that limit the monopoly power the ISP's have been given, and require some general public benefits in return for the monopoly.  But slogans don't help, and congress shouldn't be designing the technical structure of the internet!

  • Reply 59 of 255
    Quote:


    If Apple paid Comcast for prioritization on its network, their customers could rent a movie and begin watching quickly, while Time Warner customers could still be waiting for it to buffer. 


    What if instead Apple used this same money to bring Internet access to their customers directly. I have always wondered why Apple is playing nice. With all the money Apple has why they are so reluctant to disrupt the status quo. Maybe I don't fully understand what would be involved, but if Apple bought Sprint or T-Mobile and began selling wireless access to the Internet for $10/mo. and used all that income to build out the network to offer better coverage and speeds. What would happen? My greatest fear is that while Apple seems to be, in some ways altruistic, they in fact value their relationship to their competitors more than their customers.

  • Reply 60 of 255
    Quote:
    Originally Posted by markdo View Post



    The center of the confusion about net neutrality occurs because "net neutrality" is not about you and me, the end user. It is about the relationship between the data intense content providers and the heavily invested infrastructure developers.



    Why would I (an internet provider) spend massive amounts of capital, fleshing out infrastructure, when content providers (like netflix), can clog the network with massive amounts of bandwidth and not have to pay extra for their heavy use... thus requiring the infrastructure developers to spend ever more money improving the bandwidth to accommodate. Someone has to pay for the infrastructure development.

     

    "Someone" is already paying for the infrastructure development -- namely, the ISPs own subscribers. The content providers don't proactively "clog the network with massive amounts of bandwidth." The ISPs bring all the traffic upon themselves by  providing internet service to their customers; all the traffic is being requested  and paid for by their own subscribers. They are already being paid by each subscriber to ensure that their infrastructure is capable of delivering traffic at the advertised speeds. And someone who wants a 50mbps connection already pays higher monthly fees than someone for a 25mbps connection. Who is not being paid?

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