Net Neutrality

[tue4t]

Just think about the way net neutrality is being framed in the very classic oppressor/oppressed model. It's all about preventing the "strong eating the weak" so that the weak have to take up arms against the strong. Which is why a failure to take up arms results in hysterical doomsday crying - they think they are about to get eaten. That's the socialism speaking.

[Okeefenokee]

They're laughing now, but when prisonplanet.com requires a monthly payment increase it'll be a lot of "oh noes, time for revolution against our alien overlords" talk.

Don't you have to pay to read articles on wapo right now?

[Okeefenokee]

[Okeefenokee]

How hard would it be to start a local ISP? Would it be possible to start in a single city and then expand out? Seems like a great opportunity....just do an ISP, no cable....I'm pretty sure it's possible to severely undercut the big guys who are saddled with paying network broadcast royalties/licenses.

Dude, what?

You have to run coax or fiber to every house in your market. The houses have to have hookups for it. The cable companies control that. They use the commons to run their lines, and they maintain a monopoly on that, and now they are trying to jack the consumers.

Then you have to have to deal with the companies who control the Internet backbone in America.

A big part of this discussion has been addressing that problem. Work to expand ISP choice took a big dive after 2015.

[Okeefenokee]

How hard would it be to start a local ISP? Would it be possible to start in a single city and then expand out? Seems like a great opportunity....just do an ISP, no cable....I'm pretty sure it's possible to severely undercut the big guys who are saddled with paying network broadcast royalties/licenses.

Dude, what?

You have to run coax or fiber to every house in your market. The houses have to have hookups for it. The cable companies control that. They use the commons to run their lines, and they maintain a monopoly on that, and now they are trying to jack the consumers.

Then you have to have to deal with the companies who control the Internet backbone in America.

I've dealt with WAN providers - that pretty easy.....what governs the right to run lines in city conduit?

Regulations. Trump's cutting them like it's going out of style. I think it was 22 removed for every one new at latest count.

[Okeefenokee]

I wasn't joking when I said Comcast made Netflix unusable in the Chicago market.

You are not going to have competition when the ISP can penalize any traffic it chooses. You already don't have competition between ISPs, since most Americans have only one choice of broadband.

And.. if they are not a utility, then we need charge them use fees for running their cables across the commons and also personally to everybody who's easement is used.

Just think of the changes in mobile carriers over the past ten years. There was no mobile neutrality. Ten years ago phones were flip phones and today my house runs on a hotspot that costs me five bucks a month for unlimited data. I've got two TVs streaming netflix right now and three PCs surfing the web.

[Okeefenokee]

LOL!

Maybe you should go ask Comcast and AT&T if you can have access to that.

That was my earlier questions - are the conduits muni or commercially owned?

It's a gray area. The lines are running across private property (easements) and the commons. But the cable companies have essentially lobbied for laws that lock those lines down for themselves. They maintain the lines and control them.

It's really not very different from the power utility in that respect. You might as well ask whether you can setup your own alternate power grid alongside the current one that the monopolistic utility maintains..

The only way you can realistically compete is to setup a wide area wifi service.

but plenty of places have competing utility providers. Texas has private vehicle registration companies that have you in and out in 20 minutes, so you don't have to go to the DMV.

This is a separate problem that plenty of places have a better handle on.

[Okeefenokee]

This is some serious chicken littling.
As if Facebook, Google, Twitter, etc, weren’t censoring before. Oh, now that the 2015 Obama rule is down we’ll have corporate censorship.

Shapiro mentioned that today. Youtube and twitter have been deplatforming wrong think for a while, and are ramping it up.

[Okeefenokee]

I didn't notice anything magical when NN went into place. My prices didn't go down, my service didn't get better. I'm not clear that it did anything, really.

Frankly, the more I hear the two different opinions, the more muddled the conversation gets. I suspect both sides are being hyperbolic to the extreme, making it confusing for the rest of us.

No need to re-create your giant walls of text (both sides.) I've read and understand them.

It's just hard to discern fact from opinion, since the difference between 2015 and 2017, cost and experience wise, is not really different for me.

Nor I, if anything it has gotten more expensive for less.

We dumped all land lines and went with mobile. Less bandwidth, but we have enough to do what we want, and it's way the hell cheaper.

[Okeefenokee]

Question:

We saw a few months ago how Google basically stole the Dailystormer domain and colluded with Cloudfront to take down a website they found objectionable.

What's to stop ISPs from deciding that somebody's content is objectionable and throttling all internet traffic to and from that site to the point where it's essentially unusable and unviewable?

Yeah, you might hate dailystormer and rejoice in their having their domain stolen from them to shut it down, but it doesn't have to be just Dailystormer. It could be anybody these corporations find objectionable, for any reason now. It could be this very forum, actually.

If it already happened with 2015 NN in place, why does 2015 NN repeal matter?