Net Neutrality

[K@th]

If they have no plan to do it, why are they upset there is a law preventing them from doing it? In general, I agree we are seriously over-regulated. I don't want to cut them with an ax, though - clean water is nice. Breathable air is nice. Before regulations, our waters and air were seriously polluted.

[Fife]

I guess I'll just keep refusing to "explain why neutrality is a bad thing" and "throwing out insults."

/shrug

Goodbye Net Neutrality; Hello Competition

The old rules pushed by the Obama administration had locked down the industry with regulation that only helped incumbent service providers and major content delivery services. They called it a triumph of “free expression and democratic principles.” It was anything but. It was actually a power grab. It created an Internet communication cartel not unlike the way the banking system works under the Federal Reserve.

Net Neutrality had the backing of all the top names in content delivery, from Google to Yahoo to Netflix to Amazon. It’s had the quiet support of the leading Internet service providers Comcast and Verizon. The opposition, in contrast, had been represented by small players in the industry, hardware providers like Cisco, free-market think tanks and disinterested professors, and a small group of writers and pundits who know something about freedom and free-market economics.

The public at large should have been rising up in opposition, but people were largely ignorant of what was going on with net neutrality. Consumers imagined that they would get censorship-free access and low prices. That’s not what happened.

Here’s what’s was really going on with net neutrality. The incumbent rulers of the world’s most exciting technology decided to lock down the prevailing market conditions to protect themselves against rising upstarts in a fast-changing market. The imposition of a rule against throttling content or using the market price system to allocate bandwidth resources protects against innovations that would disrupt the status quo.

Net Neutrality Supporters Should Actually Hate the Regulations They're Endorsing

First, the definition of "net neutrality" is incredibly hazy. You could almost say that more people agree that net neutrality is a good thing than can agree on any particular definition. The concept was first laid out by law professor Tim Wu in his seminal 2002 article, "A Proposal for Network Neutrality." Wu lays out hypothetical scenarios where ISPs block or throttle access to content for reasons ranging from cost to anti-competitive activities. His article attempts to distinguish content differentiation that he finds reasonable and should be allowed from those that he finds unjustifiable and should be prohibited. The article generated a fair bit of controversy even under this more limited framework—critics responded by pointing out some benefits of non-neutral Internet arrangements—but it was at least a relatively narrow and understood topic.

From there, the concept of "net neutrality" morphed into something that was both utopian and unworkable. If you type the phrase into Google, the top definition provided is the "principle that Internet service providers should enable access to all content and applications regardless of the source, and without favoring or blocking particular products or websites." Yet this definition stands in sharp contradiction to the vision outlined by Wu, who noted that "a total ban on network discrimination, of course, would be counterproductive." This kind of extreme understanding of net neutrality has been dismissed by early Internet pioneer and MIT computer scientist David Clark as a "happy little bunny rabbit dream" that would be both impossible and undesirable to implement.

Unfortunately, the unhinged understanding of "net neutrality" has since won the day. And it has fueled average people's nightmares about what the future of the Internet holds—even though it looks a lot like what we've always enjoyed. (After all, the OIO regulations were only proposed in 2015.)

[K@th]

Finally Fife weighs in!

Ok, so I read that I'm going to have companies to choose from in the near future, now that net neutrality is gone?

[SuburbanFarmer]

Finally Fife weighs in!

Ok, so I read that I'm going to have companies to choose from in the near future, now that net neutrality is gone?

Should we expect secondary internet providers in every neighborhood? Competing coax/fiber lines being laid across the nation?

No?.... hmmm.....

[Speaker to Animals]

So give all the power to the same group of people who literally stole internet domains and shut down all the websites of people they don't agree with.. Sounds like a great plan. I can feel the freedom already.

[Fife]

Lol, you Soros monkeys are well-trained, at least. I'll give you all that.

[doc_loliday]

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/w ... neutrality

This article is from a few years ago, but it's a pretty good write up of why the FCC is a terrible tool for saving the internet. They have a history of consolidating markets, rather than creating new ones. All of this isn't to say ISPs do what's best for the consumer, they clearly don't. To complicate things, sometimes the FCC does good, sometimes bad, and the same goes for ISPs, but the FCC can't give us what we want and arguably don't have the authority. I think competition is the real solution.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Lol, you monkeys are well-trained, at least. I'll give you all that.

Ok then, speak plainly. What sort of 'competition' do you see coming from this?

Maybe you get a buck-a-month discount on which ISP serves your traffic to the local exchange? Meanwhile, they both block whatever they want to, because 'liberty'?

[doc_loliday]

I don't see competition coming from this, but its really beside the point. Protecting net neutrality isn't a solution. We're just going from one bad idea to another.

[SuburbanFarmer]

I don't see competition coming from this, but its really beside the point. Protecting net neutrality isn't a solution. We're just going from one bad idea to another.

Ok then, what exactly is wrong with net neutrality? Nobody is seriously talking about disabling QoS, for one thing. "packets being equal" is a red herring.

But why would the coax/fiber lines be anything other than a utility - same as phone/power lines now?