A Note about Net Neutrality and Why We Support It

[kylania]

The effects will probably be immediate. Companies like Verizon and Comcast have already tried pushing crap live even before the vote. They are just hovering their grimy fingers over the buttons waiting for it to be repealed.

[Ken L]

It won't be immediate. The only noticeable thing will probably be intentional throttling of video streaming services that will be phased in gradually. Hulu, and Netflix like services will have their bandwidth tanked or capped unless each company strikes a deal with each carrier. The difference will be subtle as a cut off would cause a flurry of customer complaints. If they all do it, then there's nothing that can be done... but the carriers will play against each other to advertise speed... if they have a competitor in that location. If there's only one fiber optic carrier, you could switch to perhaps a broadband carrier... which would make those throttled video speeds on fiber be your normal speeds on everything.. but hey, no content throttling!

Note that Net Neutrality was only recently passed in 2015, so from the dawn of the internet age till 2015, we've been fine without it. NN was only passed when carriers began to discriminate traffic based on load, and eventually spread to icing out competing services. If you recall Vonage, the telephone over IP service, it was throttled on carriers that also offered telephone packages to push consumers away from that medium.

There were a ton of fears that carriers were going to use their infrastructure to begin pricing out content akin to TV providers and channels. That never happened, but there was movement in this area as cellular wireless and traffic boomed as younger millennials depended on the technology. NN stopped those plans, and almost immediately it was challenged. Technically if they never intended to pursue this model, then NN would be meaningless, but the fact that they immediately challenged it is a sign they got locked out of a newly discovered cookie jar.

It won't be the end of the world, in fact, piracy has the most to loose as P2P traffic can be isolated and throttled to heck hence why many pirates are the most vocal. That's not to say that NN isn't good, but they stand the most to lose, as well as various black-sites. On the other hand the new derivatives market will give carriers a way to pump more revenue from existing infrastructure, sans investment in anything other than software and a few switches. Not to mention all the other before mentioned reasons of making "reachability" at the last mile a marketable commodity where prior it was simply getting a good server, and ensuring customers could reach you .

[Ken L]

Yep, FCC is moving to make it illegal for states to try to enforce their own net neutrality.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...utrality-laws/

And here I thought it was conservative to be pro-state rights.

[Andraax]

Yep, FCC is moving to make it illegal for states to try to enforce their own net neutrality.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...utrality-laws/

And here I thought it was conservative to be pro-state rights.

Yeah, that ship sailed a long time ago. It has been a long-standing view, among courts and the Federal government, that anything the FCC decides to regulate comes with an automatic prohibition against the states and local governments interfering. You don't want a city to restrict TV broadcasts or cell phone signals once that frequency has been sold and licensed by the FCC, do you? You want your cell provider to have to negotiate with *every* city, town, county, and state in their coverage area once the FCC has assigned them a range of frequencies to use?

[knucklehead]

The walled gardens Verizon and others love so much are going to be terrible, indeed. :/

If you want to visualize it early, just imagine if your internet experience was limited to your carrier's horrible home page portal and half-baked "alternatives" to legitimately useful services.

[Andraax]

The walled gardens Verizon and others love so much are going to be terrible, indeed. :/

If you want to visualize it early, just imagine if your internet experience was limited to your carrier's horrible home page portal and half-baked "alternatives" to legitimately useful services.

Yeah, because that's what the Internet looked like until 2015, when the FCC imposed "net neutrality"... Shame it's only been a vibrant, thriving place for two years. Seems like a lot longer...

[knucklehead]

It has been a long-standing view, among courts and the Federal government, that anything the FCC decides to regulate comes with an automatic prohibition against the states and local governments interfering.

It was a long-standing view that the internet was covered by Common Carrier until the FCC decided it wasn't positive about that in 2015. Everyone operated under that presumption until then, though.

We saw what happened when the FCC wasn't sure--carriers moved to extract premiums from service sectors they wanted to move in on, and they hadn't even been given a true green light on it. How silly of the FCC to decide now to upend the last several decades of free market practice.

[knucklehead]

Yeah, because that's what the Internet looked like until 2015, when the FCC imposed "net neutrality"... Shame it's only been a vibrant, thriving place for two years. Seems like a lot longer...

Learn your history.

Internet as common carrier was always assumed prior to the FCC waffling on the issue. Net Neutrality simply enforced maintaining the status quo after the providers started grasping at the *possibility* that they'd get to shape traffic and users' experience.

The "thriving, vibrant place" that's been around for decades now is precisely *because* of the things Net Neutrality simply reinforced in writing.

[Nylanfs]

<Twilight Zone theme>
Imagine if you will, an internet operated by EA

[dulux-oz]

<Twilight Zone theme>
Imagine if you will, an internet operated by EA

Thanks - now I'm going to have nightmares when I go to sleep tonight - and I'll have to pay a bunch of micro-transactions for each eye movement during REM sleep