Net Neutrality

Net neutrality boils down to whether to regulate ISPs as a public utility.

As with most things, proponents both for and against make all sorts of red herrings and hyperbolic proclamations about the inevitable disasters that await us down either path.

It's just a bunch of distractions and manipulation to avoid talking about the real issue at hand... Whether or not to regulate ISPs as a public utility. Which, of course ISPs don't want due to the increased costs of compliance.

While I believe everybody should have equal access to information on the net, the vast majority of all Internet traffic is Netflix, YouTube, and porn. None of which constitutes a "public good."

Users don't need blazing fast 5G Internet to read scientific articles, or to look something up in an online encyclopedia. Doesn't matter if the connection speeds are throttled or not.


TL;DR While I support the idea of net neutrality from a philosophical basis, on a more practical level I don't feel too much of a bleeding heart for somebody having to spend a few more seconds buffering John Oliver clips on their Obamaphone.

 

Unfortunate since @Greyfox is pretty much correct on this one.

 

its a shame we cant all agree that we should have faster more reliable internet access at a reasonable cost with no censoring or throttling of content by multibillion $$$ corps or gov.

it seems that we would rather turn this issue into yet another cacophony of virtue signaling and a required belief to join one side or the other.

...I think what it all comes down to is that so many of us have yet to accept The Touch of His Noodly Appendage and realize he boiled for our sins...

 

Praise FSM.

 

This, at least, I can agree with.

I personally have no issues with internet speeds. And I would gladly trade something faster for the knowledge that I don't have to trust multi-billion dollar companies to have my best interests in mind.

Spoiler: They don't.

 

No, that's merely what we are currently fighting about. Net Neutrality is the idea that your ISP is neutral with regard to the sites you visit and doesn't do anything to influence them.

Wrong. ISPs are against Net Neutrality because they want to charge the sites you visit for allowing you to connect to them. There are no increased costs to compliance and current internet service charges are ridiculously inflated.

That is incorrect. There are plenty of studies showing that downticks in access speed have meaningful effects on site traffic which of course drives down ad revenue.

It wouldn't be a "few seconds" it would be straight up back to 1995. You should care about the ability of ISPs to outright blackmail popular internet sites into paying for "prioritization" (ie, ISPs actually performing the service their customers paid for) like what happened to Netflix a few years ago. You already pay too much for internet service, and for most of the country you have no choice about who your ISP is. Are you really that eager to pay even more because every internet service you use has to jack up prices to stay profitable? We're literally having this conversation on the forum for a crowdfunded MMO - do you think Portalarium will enjoy having to fork over a few thousand dollars a month so that we can actually play this game?

 

I think the difficulty lies in expecting networks to be "faster and more reliable" while simultaneously expecting a "reasonable cost."

Personally, I switched from Verizon to Google Fi and am very happy. $20 a month for unlimited calls and $10/GB for rollover data. It's fast and reliable. Not quite as good as Verizon, but about 1/2 the cost.

*shrug* not sure why I would need or want the gub'mint to step in on this one.

 

Let's start with this: you very obviously do not actually understand anything about this issue at least in part because you live in an area with multiple broadband providers (including Google) and it isn't a huge problem for you. Your situation is not universal.

The cost of running an ISP is not a factor in any of this - ISPs do not need to increase prices to maintain their networks and if they did, Net Neutrality would have no effect. This is about ISPs blackmailing internet companies into paying for reasonable access to customers.

 

What "happened to" Netflix is that they built an incredibly successful video streaming service that came to dominate Internet traffic in North America. Netflix represents 35% of all Internet traffic in North America, and if you add in all the other video streaming services, this accounts for 70% of all Internet traffic.

Problem is that Netflix isn't the one delivering the content. Verizon, Comcast, TimeWarner, AT&T, etc. are. And they have costs associated with continuing to build and maintain their networks in order to deal with the increase in traffic.

To the consumer, this means either their Netflix bill is going to go up, or their ISP bill is going to go up. But somebody has to pay for it, and that somebody is the user.

Sorry, but I don't see a problem with expecting users who blow through more data in a day than I do in a whole month to actually pay more for the service.

Personally, I'm more saucy about the fact that I cannot get cable service without the lion's share of my monthly fee going to ESPN and Disney- two organizations of which I have absolutely interest in consuming their content. Why should I be forced to subsidize somebody else's fanaticism for sportsting and princesses? But I digress..

 

I definitely believe that the motivation is purely to create digital toll road. Even if only the big companies get charged for the extra usage, they would just push the cost to the user.

It is far more likely that the ISP will charge all content providers, not just the big ones. In fact I expect that the bigger users will get substantial breaks over smaller ones. The ISP's could even go as far as blocking content they feel is not good. They could block providers of birth control for example. Think it won't happen... Have you checked out paypal rules?

I firmly disagree with the lack of demand for good internet and the suggestion that allowing providers will result in better service. The fact is that consumers switch ISPs because of bandwidth and price. In my area time Warner has been devistated by Google fiber and that resulted in every tw customer getting 10x the bandwidth they had at the same price. That would have never happened without Google coming in.

 

Hmm... you seem to be highly confident that I have no idea what I am talking about... so let's see if I can find any information to back up my claims.

Well according to this article, it will cost about $56 billion dollars to upgrade our networks to 5G.

As for operating costs, according to this article: (emphasis mine)

So now that we've established that is does indeed cost money to build and maintain networks...

Do you have any counterevidence to offer? Or shall we just sling insults at each other until the thread gets locked?

 

I respect the intent of the op, but I think there are legitimate different point of views on Net Neutrality, including views that might not fall into either extreme of for, or against. For example, you can agree with it in principle in certain cases and not in others, and also not share the assumption that the FCC has authority over it.

I'd actually be happy with the conversation (!) But I guess my point is that the Community Guidelines restrict us from talking about political topics on the forums, and if we're following that rule at all, I'm not sure why we should make this an exception.

 

You are talking about mobile network towers. Which is mostly unrelated. Thus proving my point that you do not even a little bit understand this subject.

EDIT: I want to be clear, I'm not saying "You don't understand this" for the point of insulting you, I'm saying it as a statement of fact. You don't have any understanding of this subject.

 

You are welcome to suggest some resources to further educate myself on the matter. By resources I mean things like studies and white papers, not political propaganda or late nite tv clips.

 

A small example of someone (Comcast seeming pretty guilty at this point) using bots to spam the Net Neutrality comments.

 

I think the last point I'll make in this thread is this:

Like many political topics (ex: environment).

One side of this is backed by computer scientists (such as myself to be honest) and the other is backed by a politician. But once again, for some odd reason, people listen to politicians and discount scientists whom 98% agree. Stop.. ask yourself why you are listening to a politician for science, how can you rationalize that 98% of scientist in the world are all brainwashed?

Its so odd that people put so much trust in politicians that are bankrolled without a doubt by either big corporations, big corporate religions or billionaires.

go figure... The best thing I can do to try to convince you is this. In the 60's and 70's a scientist came out and said led is bad for us, led in gas is killing us and our environment. Corporations lined up against the poor guy... trashed his reputation. The brought forth false scientists to disprove it, spent millions and millions on campaigns saying led is great (hey, lets eat it). This is 100% exactly the same as these subjects today. But the science was still worked on and eventually proven that led is really a bad thing. Today, is there anyone that does not agree? Are you chewing on a led bar... if not... how is coal any different?

All these topics today are no different, you are on the wrong side of history.

 

Funny, people scoff at me when I say there are probably some big game corporations doing this right now to SOTA. but... ya know...

 

If Comcast was responsible for that then I feel sorry for them because they could not find a person smart enough to randomize the user name order, the post interval and the message. It is like they want to be caught. If the FCC contacted just one person that said they never posted, it would be criminal fraud and potentially cost them billions and the CEO could go to jail.

So I think it is not Comcast in this case.

 

Hmmm....

 

Studies and white papers about what? Net Neutrality isn't a research area, it's an argument about policy. If you're referring to what I said about the costs of maintaining networks, as I said, even if I'm wrong about that (I'm not), Net Neutrality doesn't stop ISPs from raising prices in any way shape or form. It simply prevents them from charging internet companies for letting customers access their site.