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Net Neutrality repealed

arg-fallbackName="Visaki"/>
"Interesting" isn't the word I'd use. Though I do find it telling that the republicans don't even really try to cover up the fact that these decicions are for Big Business and shafting the consumer. Luckily the EU still has Net Neutrality directives in place and it doesn't look like they'll be touching those in the near future.

But I do have a plan on now the US can get Net Neutrality back ASAP. Twitter just has to put a 6 hour delay on all of Trumps tweets and tell everyone that it has the right since there is no Net Neutrality (yes I know that's not what net neutrality means). After a day or two of yelling and screaming and bolstering from Trump he'll sign an executive order reinstating Net Neutrality.
 
arg-fallbackName="Akamia"/>
From what I understand, the FCC still has to defend the decision in court. Congress can still stop this plan from working.
 
arg-fallbackName="Tree"/>
The more important question is, why is a net neutrality mandate even needed? You do realize that on the flip side you're setting the precedent that the government can regulate the Internet through an organization like the FCC? That's far more dangerous than one ISP acting in shady ways, which can be boycotted or out competed by other ISPs who DO uphold net neutrality because that's what the customer wants, not because some laws forces them to.

People are acting like there's this credible Internet doomsday-like scenario where people will be paying higher prices and only have access to 5 websites or something and will have to pay double for 10 extra websites and triple for 50 extra websites while the rest will somehow be impossible to access or only possible if you're rich. It's not happening and it's never happened with any other product or service in history where there was a free market with a healthy competition. Any ISP that attempted this would lose its subscribers and the idea that they can all collude to corner the market is even more ludicrous. It's like saying that all automobile manufacturers could suddenly collude to raise car prices by 1000% and you can only stop it by mandating it by law that they don't do that.

If you want net neutrality, remove the legal barriers that would prevent someone from starting his own ISP and boycott ISPs that offer crappy or incomplete services.

If somehow all ISPs manage to collude to do this, go offline. Permanently. We don't need half-measures and there was a life before Internet. I would be willing to go offline permanently if no ISP could offer proper services. I pay to access the entire Internet, not just little bits of it. If I want little bits of information, I can just go to an old fashioned library.

People will then say you can't go offline because you need it to find jobs or access your bank account. Really? People seem to have forgotten what life was before the Internet. Personally, I would not maintain a subscription for the sole benefit of accessing job sites and I can go to the bank or stock market broker myself. For jobs, I can just as easily leech a wi-fi without a password.

All or nothing, no half-measures.
 
arg-fallbackName="Collecemall"/>
Tree said:
The more important question is, why is a net neutrality mandate even needed? You do realize that on the flip side you're setting the precedent that the government can regulate the Internet through an organization like the FCC? That's far more dangerous than one ISP acting in shady ways, which can be boycotted or out competed by other ISPs who DO uphold net neutrality because that's what the customer wants, not because some laws forces them to.

People are acting like there's this credible Internet doomsday-like scenario where people will be paying higher prices and only have access to 5 websites or something and will have to pay double for 10 extra websites and triple for 50 extra websites while the rest will somehow be impossible to access or only possible if you're rich. It's not happening and it's never happened with any other product or service in history where there was a free market with a healthy competition. Any ISP that attempted this would lose its subscribers and the idea that they can all collude to corner the market is even more ludicrous. It's like saying that all automobile manufacturers could suddenly collude to raise car prices by 1000% and you can only stop it by mandating it by law that they don't do that.

If you want net neutrality, remove the legal barriers that would prevent someone from starting his own ISP and boycott ISPs that offer crappy or incomplete services.

If somehow all ISPs manage to collude to do this, go offline. Permanently. We don't need half-measures and there was a life before Internet. I would be willing to go offline permanently if no ISP could offer proper services. I pay to access the entire Internet, not just little bits of it. If I want little bits of information, I can just go to an old fashioned library.

People will then say you can't go offline because you need it to find jobs or access your bank account. Really? People seem to have forgotten what life was before the Internet. Personally, I would not maintain a subscription for the sole benefit of accessing job sites and I can go to the bank or stock market broker myself. For jobs, I can just as easily leech a wi-fi without a password.

All or nothing, no half-measures.

The reality for a shit ton of Americans is we only have 1 or 2 options. I have 3. And one of those is don't have internet. The other two either A) don't give a shit if my service works or B) Don't give a shit if my service works AND is terribly slow. I promise you they don't mind fucking me. There's no way people are going without the internet now. Not going to happen. You might be willing to step back 40 years into the past but the rest of us aren't. And we shouldn't have to.
 
arg-fallbackName="Tree"/>
Net neutrality is not about your ISP giving you a stable connection or being fast or even providing you good customer service.

It's about ISPs treating data equally. That's it. If it's slow and crashes constantly, but slow and crashing across the board, it still qualifies as net neutrality.

Anyway, where is this concern coming from? Why would ISPs do this when it would just lead to a mass loss of subscribers? Can you think of even a single industry this has ever worked? It is quite literally the equivalent of say all chocolate manufacturers suddenly deciding to only sell 1 gram of a chocolate bar for the same price you used to be able to buy 100 grams. Nobody, not even the most chocolate addicted maniacs, are going to tolerate that.

You're right about one thing, "there's no way people are going without the Internet now." But that premise rests on the Internet in the future actually functioning like the Internet we know now. Equal access to all data is what makes it superior to say the TV. You take that away, you take away the main reason people like me have Internet. I don't pay just to access 10 pre-approved websites from some tech giants, I pay to access ALL websites, on demand.

Which means you lose subscribers, which means you have to revert the changes pronto if you don't want to go bankrupt, no need to give the FCC powers that it shouldn't have for a problem the market can fix.
 
arg-fallbackName="Gnug215"/>
Tree said:
It's not happening and it's never happened with any other product or service in history where there was a free market with a healthy competition.

And therein lies the rub. The market in this particular area isn't very free, nor healthy.

Tree said:
If you want net neutrality, remove the legal barriers that would prevent someone from starting his own ISP and boycott ISPs that offer crappy or incomplete services.

If that happened first, I doubt people would be too worried about net neutrality going away.

Tree said:
If somehow all ISPs manage to collude to do this, go offline. Permanently. We don't need half-measures and there was a life before Internet. I would be willing to go offline permanently if no ISP could offer proper services. I pay to access the entire Internet, not just little bits of it. If I want little bits of information, I can just go to an old fashioned library.

People will then say you can't go offline because you need it to find jobs or access your bank account. Really? People seem to have forgotten what life was before the Internet. Personally, I would not maintain a subscription for the sole benefit of accessing job sites and I can go to the bank or stock market broker myself. For jobs, I can just as easily leech a wi-fi without a password.

All or nothing, no half-measures.

You make it sound as if life hasn't changed since "before the Internet". It has. It's practically a requirement by now where I live, and it's not like it's going to become less so.

It's becoming pretty similar to living without electricity.
 
arg-fallbackName="Tree"/>
Maybe it isn't free, I'd explore laws and regulations that prevent new ISPs from coming into the market - and get rid of those laws.

I don't think giving government the power to regulate the Internet is the solution. Particularly when I see no reason that this doomsday scenario would happen. ISPs have historically granted full access to pretty much anything before they were required by law.
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
Market forces, the predicted savior of humanity, shall descend upon the problem and fix it all with great equity and fanfare.

Or maybe we could just legislate and take control of our own destinies? Apostasy!
 
arg-fallbackName="Sparhafoc"/>
If we can just expect the ISP's to do what's right, to treat data equally, to contradict corporate stockholder demand and limit their own profits for moral reasons.... then what's the problem with having legislation to ensure that a few bad apples don't pollute the good name of all those morally upstanding corporate citizens?
 
arg-fallbackName="Dustnite"/>
I'm a network administrator so I'll tell you why this is bad from my perspective and why the arguments for repealing net neutrality are myopic at best. Let me start with the "cons" of net neutrality as I've seen made:
  1. More regulations would create slower access. This argument fails because it assumes that the reason (the US in any case) has much slower access than other developed countries is directly related to Title II of the FCC regulation. This is false mainly due to the fact that since the dot com boom of the 90s the US has not heavily invested in it's fiber optic infrastructure (or infrastructure in general). ISPs don't get to control this as this is mainly done by the LEC or local exchange carrier. ISPs buy in to the LECs to get their service out to areas and generally are traversing lines that the government paid for. If the plan is to give control of Quality of Service to the ISPs in the hope that bandwidth infrastructure will improve, there's absolutely no incentive for ISPs to invest in that because it just hands the money to the LECs.
  2. Priorities could be assigned by the ISP. They absolutely could, that's the problem. Right now, any traffic that goes into the internet is considered "Best Effort" or if it gets there, it gets there; if it drops, it drops. The problem you get with ISPs controlling priorities of streaming service and start applying QoS to various applications is you kill the very thing repealing net neutrality is supposed to enable: innovation. New companies with similar product are not going to be able to compete with the big names like Netflix, etc if they can't afford to be marked for fast lane traffic.
  3. Questionable content thrives in net neutrality. That's true, so what? When you enable free speech unfortunately the good also comes with the bad. We do our best to mitigate the absolutely abhorrent like child pornography, drug and human trafficking, etc. and these efforts are more or less effective. What we DON'T do is throw the "baby out with the bath water" by letting our ISPs decide what content is delivered to us.
  4. Free internet access would likely go away. I've seen a couple people making this argument online and I don't follow how net neutrality repeal logically follows into this argument. If anything, the opposite is true. Once the ISPs have full control over what data and traffic goes where who's to say they don't start taking away free wifi access? In any case, the ISPs short of city provided wifi don't generally control this type of access as regular businesses provide it as they see fit.

Honestly, this repeal is just a bad idea all around that 83% of Americans are against but unelected officials like Ajit Pai can walk in and just do whatever they want. This kind of shit needs to stop.
 
arg-fallbackName="Dustnite"/>
Tree said:
Maybe it isn't free, I'd explore laws and regulations that prevent new ISPs from coming into the market - and get rid of those laws.

I don't think giving government the power to regulate the Internet is the solution. Particularly when I see no reason that this doomsday scenario would happen. ISPs have historically granted full access to pretty much anything before they were required by law.

The problem is even if there are laws on the books to make it hard for new ISPs to form, the main issue I see going forward is that it's more profitable to be the local exchange carrier and do none of the vrf or customer interaction and just collect money from the ISP to run their services. There are PLENTY of mom and pop operations doing that and in fact I do it as well because it's low maintenance and highly profitable.

There's several good arguments for keeping net neutrality and mostly all bad ones for repealing it.
 
arg-fallbackName="Gnug215"/>
Tree said:
Maybe it isn't free, I'd explore laws and regulations that prevent new ISPs from coming into the market - and get rid of those laws.

I don't think giving government the power to regulate the Internet is the solution. Particularly when I see no reason that this doomsday scenario would happen. ISPs have historically granted full access to pretty much anything before they were required by law.


Yes, but this isn't just a matter of new ISP startups jumping into the market. This is infrastructural. The ISP market would probably have to have big anti-trust breakups before coming close to being considered free and fair. But hey, that's happened before, like with Ma Bell.

And sure, you argued that one could easily live offline, because we did so for many years before, but the exact same thing could be said about the telephone.
The fact of the matter is that Internet connectivity is becoming as close to a utility like electricity as it can get, and it's only getting closer.

Like I said, where I live, it's pretty much a requirement to function in society, and the government and everyone else are only moving closer to making it an absolute requirement.

So in my view, it's obvious that government should regulate this. Or well, not just "the government", but society. They shouldn't quash it with red tape and over-regulation, but we have to hit a good middle ground, and always be vigilant.
 
arg-fallbackName="Tree"/>
The thing is, all of this has come out of nowhere.

Before giving the FCC the power to regulate the Internet, remember how they regulate TV or radio with regards to "indecent" content. Do you think they can be trusted? How are they going to uphold net neutrality when they can't even allow certain content to be aired in old media?

I would at the very least like to see evidence of ISPs attempting to change the Internet in these drastic ways. I can go back as far as 9 years and see content from people online warning about the impending dangers of ISPs not upholding net neutrality if we don't make it a law. None of it has happened, I can still go online, still access whatever content I want at the same speeds, actually at higher speeds across the board.

People like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t89WwcsOj9U
 
arg-fallbackName="Dustnite"/>
Tree said:
The thing is, all of this has come out of nowhere.

Before giving the FCC the power to regulate the Internet, remember how they regulate TV or radio with regards to "indecent" content. Do you think they can be trusted? How are they going to uphold net neutrality when they can't even allow certain content to be aired in old media?

I would at the very least like to see evidence of ISPs attempting to change the Internet in these drastic ways. I can go back as far as 9 years and see content from people online warning about the impending dangers of ISPs not upholding net neutrality if we don't make it a law. None of it has happened, I can still go online, still access whatever content I want at the same speeds, actually at higher speeds across the board.

People like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t89WwcsOj9U

Except that is hasn't come out of nowhere; the debate has been going on since 2005 and has been heavily lobbied by corporations since then. Why? It all comes down to actually putting Quality of Service configuration on regional gateways which again are controlled by the LECs, not the ISPs.

The FCC's only current control they had was in the Title II provision and do nothing to censor the internet and in fact cant. Why? Again they don't control the traffic and at best all they can do is "sniff" the traffic to look for stuff which is handled by the NSA and other government entities. With that said, how come you are in favor giving the ISP's the ability to do everything you're afraid of? The ISP sits between you and the LEC, the FCC doesn't. "Do you think they can be trusted?"

The problem we have at the moment is that monopolies exist at least regionally in the US for internet service. Net neutrality keeps the playing field even for smaller ISPs to operate as well. As soon as this repeal gets out of the courts intact, I expect to see companies like Comcast and Cox to start offering tiered services to grant faster access to streaming leaving the smaller companies in the dust since they haven't made those deals with the LECs already. If this was a different situation, I wouldn't be so worried but I've been in this business for 15 years and I know how they already operate. They don't give a fuck now, why would give anymore fucks when there is no incentive to do so?

As for "None of it has happened, I can still go online, still access whatever content I want at the same speeds, actually at higher speeds across the board." Hold on there buddy. It has to get out the courts before you start seeing any moves. Asking for evidence of something that hasn't happened yet is a bit premature, don't you think. We're all speculating on the probability of something happening. It's not like a magical switch was flipped and the elders of the internet were banished to Mordor... Doing a regional upgrade to all Best Effort configuration on all regional gateways would take more than 5 seconds, probably more like a 6-8 month deployment if I was doing a single state.

The question really is: "Why do we need this net neutrality repealed if there's no net benefit from doing so?" I've yet to see a good argument to the contrary and I gave you a few examples above. Care to add to the list?
 
arg-fallbackName="Dustnite"/>
I think I can sum up the issue succinctly:

I think that: The Internet is a public utility formed by the users and groups that inhabit the internet. The point of net neutrality is to prevent ISPs (and government agencies but they can't directly get in the way anyways) from dictating how one uses that utility. Repealing it allows ISPs to eventually to push tiered quality of service to fix a problem no one actually had. Your "internet speed" is not dictated by any of this, that's still governed strictly by how much bandwidth you pay for and how much data you're trying to download/upload. The main thing that will change is that ISPs will eventually have the ability to dictate was content you can access and at what stability. They could even choose to deny access to something if said company doesn't buy in. It's not like above such things as price-gouging or underhanded tactics. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/jun/04/price-gouging-cable-companies

Tree thinks that: The Internet is not a public utility formed by the users and groups that inhabit the internet. The internet is a privilege and therefore you are at the whim of the ISP who absolutely has your best interest at heart because they make their money off you to grant the privilege of internet access. Also, these monopolies will MOST DEFINITELY not screw over the smaller ISPs and competition will be better because reasons. Everything will just work out because these ISPs will TOTALLY NOT be looking at their bottom line and seeing that they have no accountability with the Title II provision going away.

Am I being hyperbolic with your position Tree? Perhaps. Please restate your position or provide a better argument of one I haven't discussed already. TBH, 83% of Americans don't want net neutrality repealed so why are these unelected officials going against the will of their constituents in the first place?
 
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