REPORT: NET NEUTRALITY PREVAILS!!!

[Cowabungaa]

The fees don't seem like much of a problem, it's not like ISP's are already price-gouging you guys for a relatively shitty IT infrastructure.

Yeah, well, unfortunately, the fees are going to be on top of, rather than instead of, what we already pay. If my phone bill is any guide, my internet is about to get somewhere around 20% more expensive for the exact same service.

Isn't one of the intended effects of this bill that telecom companies will lower their prices? And isn't it supposed to make service, in the end, better for the consumer? To stop telecom from getting away with providing poor service for outrageous prices. Not to mention that, if throttling and 'premium' speeds would end up being a thing you'd have to start paying even more for the services that you want. A thing that's halted by net neutrality laws.

If, however, it's not meant to increase competition then I'd argue that this law needs supplemented to make sure that happens.

Your problem here is thinking this is going to reign in big companies and protect the little guy which couldn't be further from the truth. This is only going to exist to put more control of the internet into government bodies. These same government bodies are largely influenced by these same corporations that you already complain are growing too influential.

What you're saying makes no sense when you compare it to what we're seeing. What you're saying is that indirectly, this law is going to gives big telecom corporations even more power. But they're fuming at this, they're being shackled, they despise this decision. Yet you're saying this is going to help them gain even more control. That's completely illogical, why on earth would they go completely up in arms and throw tens of millions of dollars against this coming into effect if, according to you, it'll help them?

They hate this shit for a reason, and that reason is not that they gain in power.

 

[rgrekejin]

The fees don't seem like much of a problem, it's not like ISP's are already price-gouging you guys for a relatively shitty IT infrastructure.

Yeah, well, unfortunately, the fees are going to be on top of, rather than instead of, what we already pay. If my phone bill is any guide, my internet is about to get somewhere around 20% more expensive for the exact same service.

Isn't one of the intended effects of this bill that telecom companies will lower their prices? And isn't it supposed to make service, in the end, better for the consumer? To stop telecom from getting away with providing poor service for outrageous prices. Not to mention that, if throttling and 'premium' speeds would end up being a thing you'd have to start paying even more for the services that you want. A thing that's halted by net neutrality laws.

Well... not really, no. The best possible outcome from the just-passed arrangement is a continuation of business as usual, plus a layering on of whatever fees your state and local government feel like applying. Net neutrality is basically the way the system up until now has always operated. The argument in favor of the current regulatory change was not that it would improve the system, only that it would prevent it from getting worse, giving the FCC solid legal footing to prohibit practices like throttling. So, the theory goes, net neutrality doesn't make the internet cheaper now, it just keeps it from getting more expensive in the future. Additionally, there was some concern about ISPs effectively censoring sites they didn't like by throttling their loading speeds down close to zero (although we're approaching conspiracy-theory level stuff at this point). Of course, you can't prove a hypothetical, so we'll never know how much more expensive internet service would have gotten had the FCC not chosen to reclassify it, and the boogeyman of censorship still looms, only now the censor is the government, and not a telecom corporation. As I said in my first post, there aren't really any good guys here.

As an aside, I'm not sure what the moral argument actually is against a process somewhat like throttling. I'm of course opposed to shutting down sites for ideological reasons, but I don't understand why we should treat different levels of data consumption all equally. When I pay my power bill, I pay for the power I actually used. When I pay my water bill, I pay for the water I actually used. I don't know why we're so insistent that the guy streaming 4k video through 3 devices should be treated the same as the guy who uses the internet for email and facebook. Charging corporations money to have their content all delivered at the same speed seems a bit fishy, but what's the case against charging people different amounts for internet access depending on how much they actually use the network?

 

[the_dramatica]

ill leave this here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GvL8pkv9eTA