A Note about Net Neutrality and Why We Support It

[Ken L]

Because Comcast and AT&T have your best interests in mind

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...-in-nashville/

Government mandated monopoly? How about government mandated competition scuttled? More than 96% of Americans have 2 or less ISPs to choose from. Free market only works if there's competition, we don't have free market power because it's cost prohibitive to lay wire, giving the wire layer a natural monopoly. That's why they're a regulated utility business.

[Marswipp]

Of those of us wanting to keep the Net Neutrality rules, our biggest concern is "anit-consumer" practices. I'm sure it would be real fun for the megacorporations and the rich if they lost the common population through every fault of their own.

[ArteF]

So at its core when you subtract the informative misdirection net neutrality is a power grab in so far as deciding via policy who has the keys to the internet.

How it does this is by shifting regulatory power to the government over the speed by which data travels across networks. The sales pitch is that it levels the load time for websites.

There are a few positions on it but basically it boils down to those who:

Believe that "big corporations" will destroy the internet by favoring some sites over others. So high volume sites would be able to pay more for extra bandwidth.

And the opposing view to this is to say that it is ultimately internet communism and wont work for similar reasons.

So if you have an area that has a heavy amount of wifi usage for an event or some other kind of reason. A carrier might decide to pump up the bandwidth in that area so its customers don't have to wait 10 minutes for a web page to load, that's actually how the system worked before net neutrality.

After net neutrality in that same scenario the government makes it illegal to do that.

As Margaret Thatcher once said; "It isn't that you simply want to rich to be poorer, you want the poor to be poorer as well."

I think both views are valid, one more than the other and in the end I cannot support Net Neutrality. Reason being that more government means more bureaucracy which means more ways and reasons for things to go wrong as well more time taken to correct them.

I'll also add that anyone who pays attention to legislation, especially federal legislation will know that once a law is passed you could shake heaven and earth before it is undone. Typically the governments answer to something that is borked in the law is to add more law.

[Ken L]

Believe that "big corporations" will destroy the internet by favoring some sites over others. So high volume sites would be able to pay more for extra bandwidth.

Do you understand the underlying technology? There is no 'extra' bandwidth, those sites get a 'speed up' by throttling others who can't win the bid war.

And the opposing view to this which is to say that it is ultimately internet communism and wont work for similar reasons.

Internet communism? This reminds me of someone reading Web MD and thinking they're an expert... It essentially prevents rate limiting based on the content of the traffic. ISPs can freely instead offer plans based on consumption of bandwidth rather than pricing of content types, and using a 'big-sticker' lure in prices. This method however lets them over sell their capacity as I've mentioned earlier, leading to brainstorming of ways to increase profit without increasing the bandwidth physical infrastructure. Now you're probably going to note that there is a theoretical cap to transmission assuming an optimal network. That's what South Korea has nearly achieved with Gigabit connections for their citizens for bargain bin prices in USD.

So if you have an area that has a heavy amount of wifi usage for an event or some other kind of reason. A carrier might decide to pump up the bandwidth in that area so its customers don't have to wait 10 minutes for a web page to load, that's actually how the system worked before net neutrality.

Again, you demonstrate a lack of understanding about the technology. Googling information is not an excuse to generalize 'bandwidth' with 'economics'; this is why you don't let economists or 'technology investors' in the engineering bay to talk shop. Wifi works by multiplexing with multiple end points to transmit down a single wire; it can only talk to one user at a time, but switches quickly. You plug a single cable into your router, and you broadcast N connections. You can utilize multiple wires and routers but it all connects centrally at some point as is the nature of the system and it's only a matter of where these connections occur, locally, or deep in the fiber backbone (best case). For the arena situation, Wifi is limited by frequency range; there has been discussion about opening this band, but that's besides the point as most devices only transmit and listen to a certain band.

To the heart of the issue after informing you of some of the 'tech', is that the more you connect over wi-fi, the slower it gets by nature of the medium of transmission. You can't just jack it up, and it never has been prior to NN. Don't make s**t up, or quote from technologically incorrect articles (I've developed wifi electronics). Prior to NN, I assume 2005-2010, the Wifi-tech was slower over all, so the only way to 'speed it up' was to increase availability of nodes, and make each router handle fewer users. They did not throttle other traffic or prioritize it as that would mean throttling the surrounding local area: Ie: the town or city it is in to clear 'congestion' on that point in the network skeleton.

This means the speed was gained by adding more reception, more towers, more accessibility. Though admittedly at high congestion, the bottleneck is higher up the chain at the municipality level so it "feels like" from someone at a cafe that their connection is being de-prioritized when in actuality there's 1 million or so new connections at the football game.

I'll also add that anyone who pays attention to legislation, especially federal legislation will know that once a law is passed you could shake heaven and earth before it is undone. Typically the governments answer to something that is borked in the law is to add more law.

Net Neutrality isn't even a law by the way... It's a position held by and enforced by the FCC by title 2 provisions; in other words, regulation. It can change by the administration, no legislation has reached either legislative chamber (and survived).

[Moon Wizard]

Please let’s keep conversations civil. There are always better ways to phrase responses, when you believe someone has misinformation.

Otherwise, while this discussion has been good; I think everything useful has been discussed. I’m going to go ahead and close this thread.

Thanks,
JPG