Higher quality products! You obviously don't live in the US. You've never dealt with Time Warner, Comcast, or CableVision and used their "higher quality products" or paid their "low prices"@Deckard is right, you're a paid hack. I have Optimum for instance. I am FORCED to pay for their internet phone in a bundle even though I don't have a landline because of the way they structure their pricing. I rarely use that cable box to do anything but watch broadcast tV as my smart TV gives me everything I could hope for over the internet directly from the content providers. The ISPs want that revenue. They want to double dip. They are upset I am not watching Pay-Per-View. Even though I AM THE ONE PAYING FOR THE BANDWITDH these jokers are losing money because I don't use their EXPENSIVE and CRAPPY services. What are my choices if I want to use a competitor?? NONE BECAUSE THERE IS NO OTHER PROVIDER FOR INTERNET in my neighborhood. RussianLegend - where do you live exactly? Do tell us this magical land of high quality products and cheap prices spurred on by numerous competitors from ISP's.
Thank Goodness I have a local municipal fiber option. But more than ISPs, the biggest threat is from cellular providers. You can't escape them. We only have four of them and Sprint will fail soon enough and then we'll be down to three. And I guarantee that they'll be the first to take advantage of the new rules at the expense of consumers.
you don't have to trust corporations. There is and has always been regulations for ISPs throttling and blocking websites. Anti-trust laws. If throttling or blocking websites is making a marketplace less competitive and therefore customer demand is not being met, then the FTC can end the practice. That's the regulation. This has existed since 1914 (long before the internet).
What's concerning here is the passing of the buck. What you are saying here is when an internet provider throttles traffic, it isn't a communications issue but rather one of anti-competitive behavior. That in itself is garbage. It directly affects the ability to communicate, and therefore should be seen as a communications issue. Furthermore, what is also alarming is that it sets a precedent of a behavior where the FTC could easily just flip the responsibility back on the FCC, bickering back and forth all the while the citizens who use this utility, sorry, service, suffer. Again, if there were more ISPs, and more competitive practices in that sphere I might be inclined to agree with you on such legislation. But, if the end goal is to increase competition (and you know, support the beauty of capitalism that Republicans keep reminding me about) why not do this directly?
FTC regulated the internet just fine for the life of the internet. Here is their job description: The FTC is a bipartisan federal agency with a unique dual mission to protect consumers and promote competition. This issue obviously is in their wheelhouse. They have specific metrics and procedures they use to determine if a private business's practices are harming consumers and competition (FCC doesn't). As far as them passing the buck, the FTC has always been against net neutrality. if you want more competition you can;t possibly be for Title 2. Ma Bell was a monopoly for 50 years under TItle 2.
And here is why that doesn't work. We have just enpowered ISPs to control and restrict free speech. If Verizon decides it doesn't like Breitbart's values, it can now restrict access to Breitbart. Of course there is no anti trust oversight, because Verizon may not have a competing news outlet. Hell, if TWC decides it thinks OccupyDemocrats has gotten a little too radical, it can now shut them off. You simply have no idea how any of this works or what the implications of this are.
If Verizon decides they want users to only search on Yahoo, which they own, and not Google, they can block access to Google. GOOGLE.
As the internet gets faster and faster, and ever more reliant on speed as a whole it's hard to use historical data. Did ISPs care about throttling in the 56k days? Hell no. At that point it was all slow and very few people used it. The internet is becoming more and more of a service that connects us and is used by a larger amount of people today. Homework in classrooms is now largely contingent on internet as well. It is a really massive communication technology. Even in the last two years we have seen a greater reliance on the speed of the internet with streaming services dominanating the marketplace. Beyond Netflix and p*rn this could affect healthcare and other areas like it. Imagine having a smaller healthcare company who has their connection to patient records being throttled, or a bigger healthcare company who can setup their own express lanes for traffic with ISPs. This could squish out the little guy and let the giants take hold.
We have dozens of cell providers. Sprint is not going anywhere...they may merge, but thats here nor there. Tmobile has been going the opposite of this nonsense.... due to COMPETITION. Just a few years ago, the likes of you were rambling on how the big four were going to control data prices and force customers to pay more and more. Never the less, competition and technological advances have continually improved services. This whole consumer tiered nonsense is just a fantasy. No provider seriously considered it in the past. The consumer would not tolerate it and the means to put it in place would be extremely difficult. At this point, we are regulating for the sake of regulating. Idiotic.
Eh? Isn't America significantly behind the rest of the industrialized world in terms of cost+service from its cellular providers? We're basically in a quasi-oligopoly.
Since you are a resident expert on this, how exactly would an ISP regulate this behavior? Do you know how ignorant your example is? A small healthcare company will likely have their records in a server room in their building. How is an ISP going to regulate traffic that they can't see or touch? And even if it is off site or in the cloud, its going to be on a VPN connection, again, something an ISP can't see. And what exactly are they going to throttle? Keep the record from showing up 10 milliseconds later?
No airline thought of charging for carry on bags or "economy plus" before. The purpose of for profit corporations is to maximize profit. Everyone knows that this is a potential profit stream for ISP's. They wouldn't push for an end to net neutrality if they weren't looking for a way to monetize it.
NN is not going to change any of that, regardless. Cost and Service are two very different animals. Other countries keep cost down by having denser population, government subsidize the cost and regulation that force government, carriers and utlities to work together instead of against each other.
If ISP's had a very simple way to created these tiered services, then yes, I could see them doing it. Its not easy. If they only had a gate agent to stand there and check every packet of information going to one single destination, then yes. No one has yet presented a plausible way for an ISP to create tiered content services for the consumer. The whole tiered content system would be negated by a VPN tunnel from the home router to some VPN service anywhere in the world.
Portugal says hello. https://qz.com/1114690/why-is-net-neutrality-important-look-to-portugal-and-spain-to-understand/ That said, I don't think the concern is so much consumer-tiered nonsense. I think the more likely route would be to give the larger content providers priority. If Netflix can pay a fee to get faster transmit speeds to the end user, then startup competitors are at a disadvantage. End user doesn't really notice (since they don't miss the startup that never existed as a result) so you don't have a big revolt, but it does stifle innovation and favors already established companies. We know providers have already throttled various services n the past, so the idea that no provider would seriously consider it doesn't hold up.
We dont have dozens. We have four. MVNOs don't count, they are simply resellers of the networks of the four carriers (I guess 5 if you count US Cellular but they're a bit player). There's nothing stopping the four carriers from cascading any mandates or internet traffic priorities onto wholesale purchasers of data. The FCC rules on MVNOs have been utterly useless thus far. And using TMobile is a rather poor example. They were on the verge of violating net neutrality before the FCC issued commentary and clarification. Their initial binge on feature was forced onto content providers with no option for the provider to opt out. They only changed that after complaints were filed with the FCC. TMobile pioneered zero rating before everyone else did. And if it wasn't for net neutrality, then TMobile would have succeeded in MANDATING slower netflix unless you paid a higher subscription price. That is exactly what everyone is scared of. Plus today we are seeing Verizon and AT&T attempt to purchase content providers (especially AT&T) and there's nothing preventing them from prioritizing their own content at the expense of others. It's absolute collusion as ISPs continue to buy up content providers. It would be one thing if we enforced a separation between ISPs and content providers but now that we're ok with mergers between the two, ending net neutrality just creates incentives for all kinds of anti competitive behavior.
Access to data is critical, and in some situations can be life or death. This notion of 10 miliseconds, where do you get it? Watching the initial slowdowns of Netflix by verizon, we weren't seeing minor differences in playback, we saw one model that works and the other doesn't. When you give ISPs the power to set the speed it could be much longer than that. If VPNs become the soul source of protection ISPs could look to block encrypted traffic for the same reasons they can slow down service as well. Then, they can enact a tiered system that allows for VPN access, but obviously at a greater cost to the consumer. ISPs can see large exchanges of heavily encrypted data and block it as shown by Golden Frog in its case against verizon. Again, a small healthcare company might not be able to afford the top tiered plan to allow for encrypted traffic. Furthermore, it has a direct effect on the exchange of data by connected devices and the reach of healthcare to poorer areas. Telecommunications based healthcare is a powerful tool to reach poorer and low income areas, and that traffic isn't always hidden. A slowdown would affect the quality of care and the ability to monitor. Edit: Also, what is to stop them from slowing down VPN traffic for all service providers except for a select few... and if it happens to be that this select few charge you more and have common business interests as the ISPs, then so be it. They can see who you are connecting to in the case of secure VPN connections, just not what is being sent (as in the particular VPN server) .
I'm a DirecTv Now subscriber. I only have one internet provider and that is Cox (other than cellular and satellite options, which don't meet my needs). DirecTv/AT&T and Cox are obviously competitors. Does anyone think Cox won't try anything to get me to use their cable service instead? They already charge me $70/month for internet. Anti-trust may stop that, but maybe not until after I've gone through a long period of waiting while Cox throttles me. Maybe what I'll see is just an additional fee added to my internet bill and it doesn't violate anti-trust laws. What I do think is most likely is that Netflix, Amazon, and others will end up paying a fee to the ISPs for preferential speeds making it harder to compete and raising our costs on that end rather than our internet bills that way the ISPs don't look like the bad guys.
You're assuming that content providers will have the option to pay fees. ISPs can simply charge the consumer more to get netflix, prime video, etc.. at full speeds while prioritizing their own content. So in your scenario, you may have slingtv but you'll only get that at 360p because your ISP has slowed it down so you can either pay extra to get it and other services at 1080p or you can subscribe to directvnow and get it at full speed. We have accepted that ISPs can be content providers. Ending net neutrality accelerates that process. There will be an arms race for ISPs to merge with content providers will simultaneously de-prioritizing traffic from content that isn't directly owned. This all hurts the consumer more than anything else. And anti-trust is irrelevant now. The ISPs are buying content providers, it passed anti-trust review. Net neutrality was the backstop to prevent anti-competitive behavior and that's gone.
My Electric company notified me, said if I wanted to run my normal appliances my normal tier would be fine but if I wanted to run X-Mas lights or pool pumps, I have to upgrade to the next tier. Water company too. Swimming pool, gardening, watering lawn, they are in the next tier from basic.
