Data caps are a neutrality issue if the service is zero-rating some content. As a practical example, imagine your ISP gives you 100GB per month as a cap, but their own streaming service is exempt from counting against that cap. 100GB is very easy to hit with a video streaming service so you’d be heavily coerced into using the ISP’s streaming service.
In post #40, sleestak provided some nice material from small ISPs complaining about the burdens of compliance with the title II classification. Small providers who struggle to serve their few thousand neighbors they see every day. They could ill-afford to screw their customers with throttling, and the cost of maintaining compliance was choking them.
The content of the letters was pretty vague. It would be helpful to see some specifics. What, exactly, did they have to do to remain compliant with net neutrality? What burdens was the FCC imposing on them? I mean, I am not understanding.
It’s funny how they didn’t explain how the cost of not caring about the content of their customer’s traffic was choking them.
How did restaurants and repair shops manage to advertise on the internet prior to July of 2015?
What has changed since?
If I’m understanding you correctly, your position is that, while net neutrality prevented ISPs from doing things you don’t think ISPs should be doing, you feel that there’s no evidence that they’ve ever done those things in the past, and the odds of them doing it in the future are remote enough that there’s no need for these regulations. And if it turns out you were wrong, well, we can just put those restrictions back in place, once it’s been demonstrated that this is a genuine problem.
Is that more or less accurate?
That does not appear to be his position. He seems to have said that net neutrality was overly broad and should not, itself, be reinstated: instead we should address each abuse specifically, as it becomes a problem. I get the impression that Bricker favors three thousand pages of fine-point regulations over five pages of broad regulation that accomplish almost exactly the same result.
So my ISP, which happens to be the only one available in my zip code, can now charge me more for faster streaming so I can watch the movies I’m watching now? What am I going to do when I have no other choice but use them? What incentive do they have to play fair? None. I guess I just pay them and hope that their protected area is dissolved.
Sure.
This analogy fails because the supposed danger is that the ISPs will exact payments from the content providers, as opposed to the customers, which they are already permitted to to by offering different speed tiers for different prices. So in your analogy, the taxi driver can charge more for higher speeds even WITH net neutrality rules in place.
The analogy also fails because the taxi market would punish such behavior by customers shunning those taxis.
This analogy fails because it totally misrepresents the scale of the privilege that it’s possible to apply. Assuming the average person can read at least 200 pages a day, it’s simply unrealistic to imagine a slowdown of that magnitude. And, as before, the market would punish such behavior.
More or less, yes. I’d say that broad prohibitions should be disfavored – indeed, ANY prohibitions should be disfavored in this space until it’s clear that the market is failing to address them. Every single “central planner” is confident that they can manage better than the free market, but they cannot.
How is net neutrality anything at all in the slightest way similar to “central planning”? Seems to me it is about as close to the opposite of that as you can get.
I don’t know what the results will be. I could certainly speculate that this leads to competition for better delivery of content, as opposed to the current scheme in which data that is hurt by latency must be treated identically to data that is resilient to latency. I could speculate that distributed compute architecture and distributed delivery architecture will emerge to supply the emergent demand for premium performance, now that premium performance can be incentivized.
But I don’t know.
Because I am convinced that just as the power to destroy a planet is insignificant next to the power of the Force, the power to predict optimal outcomes is insignificant next to the power of the free market to develop them. So rather than speculating on what good may come, I prefer to allow the market to work.
Net neutrality is requiring that apples and pears be sold at the same price. Net neutrality is a rule, not the absence of any rule. Central planners are the ones that make rules, as opposed to permitting the market to function. True “neutrality,” would be fine. Faux neutrality, which is an ordered pricing scheme that demands all data be treated identically, is central planning.
Yes.
But they could charge you more for faster speed last week, too.
Putting your reference to illogical and, dare I say, stupid, movies aside, I understand that you prefer to allow the market to work to ensure that consumers are afforded a service that many believe is almost a necessity in today’s world.
Have you reviewed the circumstances that led up to the FCC decision? Do those circumstances not meet your standard of making sure the market provides the best service to the consumer? Do you think that the lawsuits, ISP actions, and consumer reaction were not sufficient to overcome your aversion to regulation?
Sorry, but this is not what Net Neutrality is. Maybe you should start a “What is Net Neutrality?” thread.
The astounding thing to me is that you and your ilk fail to realize that a neutral internet is actually the greatest demonstrator of a free market in the history of mankind. It used to be that powerful entities could dominate the market with anti-competitive behavior, and those that were already powerful could shut out competitors and shut out innovation. One of the greatest practical flaws we’ve seen in capitalist societies is a relatively few powerful entities acting as gatekeepers to shape the market in an inefficient and anti-competitive way.
The internet changed all that by showing what a free market economy would look like in the absense of these gatekeepers. Every provider of products, services, or information could be equally accessed by any consumer out there. It became a great meritocracy, with the best products and services reaching to the top. Netflix killed Blockbuster when in a traditional economy it would’ve happened the other way around, to the detriment of the consumer, because Blockbuster would’ve been able to control the market by throwing their weight around.
The internet is an incredible demonstrator of pure free market economics, the best we’ve ever seen. And you don’t appreciate this one bit. You want to kill it. You want to go back to a poorer version of free market economics where a few gatekeeping entities get to extort, control, and shut out small innovative products and services. Suddenly Comcast, Verizon, and a few other companies get to act like the robber barons of the 19th century and decide who will win and who will lose in the marketplace. You want to kill what has made the internet such a revolutionary demonstration of the free market.
If there was any sense in the world, libertarians and free market advocating conservatives would be the people fighting hardest for neutrality to be protected, for the purity of the free market provided by the internet to be preserved. And instead you gleefully call for its destruction because you think that Comcast’s right to be a gatekeeper to all information, services, and products in the world is more important than a meritocratic and innovative free market. Or because you have an irrational, extreme aversion to the very concept of regulation that you’re willing to advocate something that you know will be bad for almost everyone. It’s sick.
No, it’s not anything like apples and pears being sold at the same price. Not at all. You have to think more in terms of shipping those apples and pears. It is more akin to putting rules in place for a shipping company that state they cannot charge more per cubic foot of trailer space for apples than for pears, or even refuse to ship apples altogether… in order to favor supplying apples from one of their own subsidiaries.
Precisely, if they know that people are sitting at home and watching CNN, ESPN, and what not on Roku or Sling, then Verizon or Comcast has every incentive to treat that traffic differently than logging on to SDMB, and I’m sure that’s what will happen. As I mentioned up-thread, I actually can somewhat sympathize with ISPs to a degree as internet-based upstarts are starting to encroach on what has been their turf. This reminds me in some ways of what happened about 15 years ago when P2P gave people the power to rip music. At least Comcast and Verizon aren’t suing consumers, but they’re definitely anti-competitive. I suspect they will get too greedy for their own good, but perhaps there’s a way that the disruptors and the traditional media can work out a plan to split profits. I wouldn’t begin to know how that would work - might not ever work.
Water and heat are necessities, streaming movies is not.
No, net neutrality is requiring that I have access to apples or pears. But if one provider only offers kumquats and the other only offers durians, I am out of options if I actually want apples, which are unavailable.
That might make sense if there was a fucking market in the first place. In my suburban neighborhood, there is not. And even where there is one, there will be, and I mean will be, collusion. Sure, we can address the problem when it arises, but it will be exactly like what happened Cordova AK, taking years (or decades) to resolve, to only sorta.
Not sure what is this “true neutrality” of which you speak. This pair of sentences is unparseable in any real sense.