Where has lack of net neutrality taken us? (right forum this time)

[lewdicrous]

27 minutes ago, mr moose said:

- snip -

Power is sought after, it's not really surprising that these things happen.

 

It feels like there should be something set in place to prevent such things from actually happening, but for someone to remove the very thing that got them to said position is highly unlikely 

[Guest]

47 minutes ago, mr moose said:

It's getting to the point where the PM means nothing.  Since 2007 every Pm, we've had has stabbed someone in the back to get the job. The only two PM's who actually got the job because they were the leader of the party during the election was Rudd in 2007 and Abbott in 2013.  Now that should scare a few people to think abbot is the only PM in the last 11 years who hasn't stabbed someone in the back for personal gain.

 

EDIT: that paragraph was two trains of thought rolled into one,  I should have read that Abbot is the only PM who got the job at an election,  and the only PM who didn't stab someone in the back for that specific job, he did however stab Turnbull in the back when they were in opposition.  Which means every PM we've had for the last 11 years is willing to be a Brutus for the top job.

Still better than the fuel tax here. PMs here either have charisma or don't get the job. Jacinda pretty much won in the elections due to that (As did John Key). Bill English would have done a far better job. 

 

Hopefully there is stability with Turnbull, although not much Australian news gets covered on TVNZ, so the best I get is from the Betoota Advocate.

[ivan134]

9 hours ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

It's certainly an interesting conversation to have though knowing the CS and how it's enforced I'm gonna just wrap up my comments with an article against nn
https://www.heritage.org/technology/commentary/repealing-net-neutrality-actually-good-the-internet

Heritage 

[DocSwag]

9 hours ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

It's certainly an interesting conversation to have though knowing the CS and how it's enforced I'm gonna just wrap up my comments with an article against nn
https://www.heritage.org/technology/commentary/repealing-net-neutrality-actually-good-the-internet

Honestly I'm not even sure the article raises that many points. The only one I see is NN makes it less easy to create different tiers. But even with NN aren't there already different tiers? E.g. Different connection speeds. 

 

Perhaps without NN we'd be fine if there was competition. But in a lot of places in the US, you only have one or maybe two isp choices.

[handymanshandle]

3 minutes ago, ivan134 said:

Heritage 

:shrug: Going through the points they made were good and solid, whatever your problem with it is seemingly your own.

 

Most of the sources you'll find supporting Net Neutrality, if you take a look at their political affiliation. You will see are overwhelmingly only one sided.

 

I will reiterate, Net Neutrality did absolutely nothing. Please tell me of how many of the "little guys" were being hurt or customers getting fucked over before the rule was put in place?

I'm well aware NN was supposed to in practice make internet to be regulated/treated as a utility. However it's not to the same extent like phone and tv are, internet is a luxury. I argue that actually telephone and TV are luxuries too, however telephones are a bit more important as should you have an emergency your cell phone or home phone is very handy in that situation. Indeed internet is just a luxury. It's very handy but in most cases do you really need the internet? I love it and I'm in a long distance relationship so the internet is very handy but once I moved that LDR into a regular relationship. I could live without internet if I had to. Now I wouldn't want to but, I'm just saying is that you can live without it. Though I'd say the role of a phone, especially for any emergencies that could rise up is far greater than the role of the internet. Title 2 as mentioned before by someone else is a ruling from the 1930s, obviously well before the internet and there's your problem it's almost as old as my now deceased great grandmother who died earlier this year (1931-2018). The example of the netflix throttling is misconstrued they did it themselves. https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-admits-throttling-video-speeds-on-at-t-verizon/

 

I know how you try to do shit but it aint gonna work.

1 minute ago, DocSwag said:

Honestly I'm not even sure the article raises that many points. The only one I see is NN makes it less easy to create different tiers. But even with NN aren't there already different tiers? E.g. Different connection speeds. 

 

Perhaps without NN we'd be fine if there was competition. But in a lot of places in the US, you only have one or maybe two isp choices.

Well that's the problem you're gonna have, it's expensive to lay new infrastructure and to try and tackle permitting. By all means I do agree it sucks in quite a few areas you only have a super small handful of ISPs to choose from. I wished AT&T had some fiber running here because from what I've seen is it's a very good deal.

 

But if y'all wanna hate on Comcast, you should take a good look at CenturyLink.

While I don't know if they have data caps like Comcast, this is somewhat tragic.

$50 or so a month from comcast gets you like 60mbps and depending on your area, they can deliver on that promise. It's just as asynchronous as ADSL, honestly better still. Because we paid like $60/month for 12/7 from CenturyLink and we got more like 14/0.8

[Alex Atkin UK]

I consider Net Neutrality quite simple.  I pay an "Internet" Service Provider, not a "bits of the Internet we feel like providing".

An ISP should not be able to suddenly for no reason throttle or completely block my website, just because they feel like it.  You wouldn't be allowed to suddenly build a brick wall over the entrance to someones business for no reason, so why should an ISP be allowed to effectively do the same?

It honestly shouldn't matter if they ever did it or not, they shouldn't have the power to begin with.

 

The suggestion that "the Internet is a luxury" is ludicrous, are roads a luxury too then?

Many governments force you to use their online services and many businesses outright rely on the Internet, its certainly no luxury to them.  Its no luxury to my housebound mum either who has to buy everything online.

[AngryBeaver]

I think in this day and age the internet should be like any other utility service. Net Neutrality was a way of trying to keep the internet open and not ISP's restrict access or slow access to certain items. It also stopped them from taking payments from other companies to prioritize their data (fast lanes).

 

Since the removal of NN we are now seeing more providers (wireless especially) having multiple "Unlimited" plans and restricting the quality of your streaming videos. They then give you access to theirs at full resolutions. So this would be one area things have already started to change.

 

Then we have ISP's who were using certain traffic shaping software to de-prioritize BitTorrent traffic aggressively. The main point was to make all things equal when it came to net traffic. Look at the new California Net Neutrality bill. They are going to make it so big ISP's like comcast cannot 0 out their own services. So like now, if you stream on demand content from comcast it doesn't count against your data cap, but services like netflix, youtube, and amazon prime do. That means they create these 1tb caps and claim noone ever should need them, when cord cutters do use that much and are forced to pay either overage fees or another fixed $50 fee. This change would mean they would have to rethink their cap, because a lot of on demand users would quickly approach theirs monthly.

 

In the end the appealing of it didn't HELP consumers. The FCC has taken a new direction and it isn't a good one. They repealed NN, they have started enforcing a official complaint fee (even though they are already federally funded by our tax dollars). So all of this is to make it harder to complain about the big ISP's and is giving them more opportunity to hold their monopolies and nickle and dime us even more.

[handymanshandle]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I consider Net Neutrality quite simple.  I pay an "Internet" Service Provider, not a "bits of the Internet we feel like providing".

An ISP should not be able to suddenly for no reason throttle or completely block my website, just because they feel like it.  You wouldn't be allowed to suddenly build a brick wall over the entrance to someones business for no reason, so why should an ISP be allowed to effectively do the same?

It honestly shouldn't matter if they ever did it or not, they shouldn't have the power to begin with.

 

The suggestion that "the Internet is a luxury" is ludicrous, are roads a luxury too then?

Many governments force you to use their online services and many businesses outright rely on the Internet, its certainly no luxury to them.  Its no luxury to my housebound mum either who has to buy everything online.

Internet is a luxury in the sense that housekeeping and pest control are.

 

Roads are typically paid for by taxes, internet is not nor should it be.

 

 

I'm very well aware for many companies they've made their business online. In the US, I'm not aware of the US government only allowing you to do stuff online. As far as I'm aware most things aren't online only but you do have some online options.

[Alex Atkin UK]

So, not a luxury at all then!  As in a developed wealthy country having a clean house should hardly be considered a luxury.

[handymanshandle]

1 minute ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

As in a developed wealthy country having a clean house should hardly be considered a luxury.

Doing it yourself vs paying someone to do it

[Alex Atkin UK]

I'm just glad then I live in the UK then where the government mandated that the main telco MUST share their lines with independent ISPs at an affordable rental cost, and that Internet access is a legal right.

Its not like our broadband availability is great on a worldwide scale either, but with your attitude the US will fall into the dark ages and not be remotely competitive with the rest of the world.

[Fasauceome]

24 minutes ago, AngryBeaver said:

I think in this day and age the internet should be like any other utility service. Net Neutrality was a way of trying to keep the internet open and not ISP's restrict access or slow access to certain items. It also stopped them from taking payments from other companies to prioritize their data (fast lanes).

 

Since the removal of NN we are now seeing more providers (wireless especially) having multiple "Unlimited" plans and restricting the quality of your streaming videos. They then give you access to theirs at full resolutions. So this would be one area things have already started to change.

 

Then we have ISP's who were using certain traffic shaping software to de-prioritize BitTorrent traffic aggressively. The main point was to make all things equal when it came to net traffic. Look at the new California Net Neutrality bill. They are going to make it so big ISP's like comcast cannot 0 out their own services. So like now, if you stream on demand content from comcast it doesn't count against your data cap, but services like netflix, youtube, and amazon prime do. That means they create these 1tb caps and claim noone ever should need them, when cord cutters do use that much and are forced to pay either overage fees or another fixed $50 fee. This change would mean they would have to rethink their cap, because a lot of on demand users would quickly approach theirs monthly.

 

In the end the appealing of it didn't HELP consumers. The FCC has taken a new direction and it isn't a good one. They repealed NN, they have started enforcing a official complaint fee (even though they are already federally funded by our tax dollars). So all of this is to make it harder to complain about the big ISP's and is giving them more opportunity to hold their monopolies and nickle and dime us even more.

Do you have links to any specific articles or examples? this is the stuff I want to read about.

[Fasauceome]

1 hour ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

The example of the netflix throttling is misconstrued they did it themselves. https://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-admits-throttling-video-speeds-on-at-t-verizon/

one year later, they actually were being throttled

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/verizon-wireless-apparently-throttles-streaming-video-to-10mbps/

there's also some very recent data about youtube as well, far more worrying

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-04/youtube-and-netflix-throttled-by-carriers-research-finds

these are the kinds of articles I was looking for, looks like I had to back in time a bit to get related articles.

[handymanshandle]

36 minutes ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

I'm just glad then I live in the UK then where the government mandated that the main telco MUST share their lines with independent ISPs at an affordable rental cost, and that Internet access is a legal right.

Its not like our broadband availability is great on a worldwide scale either, but with your attitude the US will fall into the dark ages and not be remotely competitive with the rest of the world.

Nice fear mongering

How was pre-2015 "dark ages"?

[Alex Atkin UK]

6 minutes ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

Nice fear mongering

How was pre-2015 "dark ages"?

As already pointed out, the whole argument came about when ISPs STARTED throttling/blocking sites.  It wasn't an issue before then because they were naturally obeying Net Neutrality because there was no benefit to them not doing so.

Net Neutrality is specifically about forcing ISPs to continue doing what they were doing before.

[ivan134]

12 minutes ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

Nice fear mongering

How was pre-2015 "dark ages"?

Guy who thinks net neutrality is a step in govt taking over the internet is accusing people of fear-mongering. You can't make this shit up. 

[TacoSenpai]

The real solution to me seems to enforce already established anti-trust laws and prevent local and state governments from entering deals or land grants with ISPs to grant them exclusive access to land to run their wires and build their infrastructure.  That to me would bring in more competition especially on a local level.

[handymanshandle]

5 minutes ago, ivan134 said:

Guy who thinks net neutrality is a step in govt taking over the internet is accusing people of fear-mongering. You can't make this shit up. 

You're misconstruing what I'm saying.

 

I was worried what implications NN could have if it would've been enforced.

 

You all are fear mongering that without Net Neutrality we'd head into some dystopian future where competition would be stifled DESPITE our existing anti-trust laws. 

5 minutes ago, LordOTaco said:

The real solution to me seems to enforce already established anti-trust laws and prevent local and state governments from entering deals or land grants with ISPs to grant them exclusive access to land to run their wires and build their infrastructure.  That to me would bring in more competition especially on a local level.

THIS exactly

[ivan134]

2 hours ago, DocSwag said:

Honestly I'm not even sure the article raises that many points. The only one I see is NN makes it less easy to create different tiers. But even with NN aren't there already different tiers? E.g. Different connection speeds. 

 

Perhaps without NN we'd be fine if there was competition. But in a lot of places in the US, you only have one or maybe two isp choices.

Even with places with competition, net neutrality is necessary. It's not just about tiered speeds, but access. Net neutrality mean if you pay for 50/50, you will get 50/50 no matter what site you're trying to access. Netflix is the most common example because they're in competition with ISPs that also provide cable, but it's not the only case. Let's say a news publication writes something negative about an ISP, they can't throttle access to that publication. It also helps level the playing field, in that large corporations can't bribe ISPs for priority. An up an coming small business, or Joe the blogger would not be able to compete with whatever arbitrary prices an ISP would set so that potential customers could access them.

 

Conservatives keep purposely misconstruing the argument to make it seem like NN is about everyone getting the same internet speeds, or fear-mongering that govt is taking over the internet, as if all the other things classified under title 2 have been taken over by the govt.

[ivan134]

2 minutes ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

You're misconstruing what I'm saying.

 

I was worried what implications NN could have if it would've been enforced.

 

You all are fear mongering that without Net Neutrality we'd head into some dystopian future where competition would be stifled DESPITE our existing anti-trust laws. 

THIS exactly

You purposely have you head in the sand.

1. NN is not new, classification was just changed
2. Evidence has already been provided to you of things ISPs were doing that prompted them to be classified as title 2 and all you opponents are just going "la la la la la, i can't hear you"

[DocSwag]

2 hours ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

Well that's the problem you're gonna have, it's expensive to lay new infrastructure and to try and tackle permitting. By all means I do agree it sucks in quite a few areas you only have a super small handful of ISPs to choose from. I wished AT&T had some fiber running here because from what I've seen is it's a very good deal.

 

So then what's the benefit of not having net neutrality?...

[ivan134]

Just now, DocSwag said:

So then what's the benefit of not having net neutrality?...

Muh free market

[handymanshandle]

Just now, DocSwag said:

So then what's the benefit of not having net neutrality?...

Treating ISPs like utilities stifles competition.

 

How many choices of electric and gas companies do you have?
Only one?
How many choices do you have for telephone companies aside from like AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile/Sprint?

Only a couple?

[ivan134]

3 minutes ago, pinksnowbirdie said:

Treating ISPs like utilities stifles competition.

 

How many choices of electric and gas companies do you have?
Only one?
How many choices do you have for telephone companies aside from like AT&T/Verizon/T-Mobile/Sprint?

Only a couple?

Yea, plenty of competition was happening pre-reclassification to title 2 

[handymanshandle]

Just now, ivan134 said:

Yea, plenty of competition was happening pre-reclassification to title 2 

Well if anti-trust laws were enforced, I'm sure we would've seen more competition.

 

But you realize, it's expensive to build that infrastructure. That's going to be a huge barrier to entry for any startup would be the cost to build infrastructure.