Net Neutrality.....

[EVOL!]

If you like your internet you can keep your internet.

 

Net neutrality is just a catchy name. Like the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or the, Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act.

 

Heaven forbid the people who spent the money to lay the cable should be able to decide how to profit from it. If you don't like how they use it, lay some cable. Instead of trying to profit from someone else's infrastructure (ie. netflicks and other broadband choking companies).

 

Or maybe just confiscate it like Venezuela.

 

Do you realize how ridiculous this sounds? Lay some cable? Do you know the massive tax breaks we gave telecom companies to lay fiber to wire up this nation and they reneged on this? They owe us. Also, we are not talking about some consumer item or a fast food restaurant. Uninhibited internet access is a required part of our economy. The genie is out of the bottle.

[EVOL!]

Amen!!!

 

Neutrality is a smoke-show, the reality is "cash-cow" to tax out of the affordability range of the little guy after the big boys find a way around the wealth redistribution scheme to fund the social engineering desires of the elitists that infest the legislative branch of government...

 

When the Gov. overlooks the fact that the penalties and taxes they will soon impose on the big providers get passed onto the consumer; it will be those of us that don't get rich on the insider-trading, malfeasance, and corruption requisite for a career in politics, who have a problem paying exorbitant fees and prices for access...

 

This is a very bad thing!

 

These people need to be stopped! It is a gluttonous insatiable appetite for power and money that drive the current congress! We are in deep trouble until these folks are tossed out on their heads and replaced by no-name little guys like us, period!

 

You are slinging a lot of mud here. I'd like to hear your solution?

[zigzag]

Give up EVOL! There's no net positive in the evolution of this discussion.

[10K-DB]

A drunken chimpanzee missing 9 fingers is a more logical choice than the American FCC.

LMAO,,,

[Searcy]

If you had survived cancer prior to having to obtain coverage this would mean a decent chance for a reasonable life expectancy where none existed before!

 

And if you already had a condition AND had made sure you had good coverage you can look forward to having your policy canceled and a new one issued that no longer covers your condition until you meet a massive deductible. This can shorten life expectancy by discuraging the sick from seeking help due to unability to pay for specialist coverage. And if you chose to not buy coverage... well then you're a criminal.

 

Hope and change baby...

 

Now, back to Net Neutrality. Nick Gillespie wrote something interesting on the subject last week.

 

http://reason.com/blog/2015/02/26/3-charts-that-show-the-fcc-is-full-of-ma

 

The typical nightmare scenario that gets trotted out goes something like this: Comcast, the giant ISP that controls NBC Universal, will push its own content on users by simply blocking sites that offer competing content. Or maybe it will degrade the video streams of Netflix and Amazon so no one will want to watch them. Or perhaps Comcast will just charge Netflix a lot of money to make sure its streams flow smoothly over that "last mile" that the ISP controls. Or perhaps Comcast will implement tighter and tighter data caps on the amount of usage a given subscriber can use per month, but exempt its own content from any such limitations.

 

It's worth noting—indeed, it's worth stressing—that essentially none of these scenarios has come to pass over the past 20 years, despite the lack of Net Neutrality legislation....ect

 

 

It's also important to note that FCC commissioner Ajit Pai, calls Net Neutrality a "Solution That Won't Work to a Problem That Doesn't Exist"

 

[milod]

I think from an entirely non-political perspective, but one of more than a few years' experience...

 

Nobody really knows the long-term effect of federal control of the Internet any more than the "Obamacare" patchwork mess of mandatory and/or federally-mandated health insurance - or even the Gun Control Act of 1968. Or... perhaps as apt a comparison, that of telegraph and its cables long before telephone, but after a burst of world-changing inventions in the 19th Century.

 

My reasoning is that culture changes regardless, and some of this stuff affects those cultural (and, yes, political) changes both directly and also through unintended consequences.

 

On the Internet, soon after U.S. Sen. Larry Pressler left office in the late '90s, I asked him specifically what was his biggest surprise on any legislation he'd been involved in. One of the more obvious bits of that legislation was the Telecom Act of 1996. Only a few years later he said that when the bill was being prepared, nobody had a clue how the Internet would jump from being what we'd now call a "geek" specialty to being the huge and, even 15 years ago, growing commercial property it became.

 

When I did that interview, I was on "dial-up" access to the Internet. Now I have "broadband" and can get videos I want as well as certain sorts of advertising I not only don't want, but that also eat up my use of that broadband.

 

I'm not certain how much more bandwidth is taken up with streaming music and movies that might be with just a "normal" web surfer caught inevitably by countless megabytes a day of streaming video advertising.

 

And... I'm not certain how it might turn out were that video advertising to be illegal.

 

I really think we're just beginning to come to accommodation with this new medium. A lot of "experts" either got rich or got ruined a bit over a decade ago.

 

The videotape recorder lasted in homes for perhaps 20 years and look at the howls it brought from copyright holders, artists, etc. When's the last time you've heard such a fight? But now we have the same fights over not only the potential copying and/or watching/reading/listening to content we had back then.

 

Again, this ain't a value judgment, but how does one look at a major change in how "we" live? Steamships and telegraph revolutionized travel and communications almost entirely. In fact, at one point Robert Fulton and Samuel Morse (steamboat and telegraph "inventors") concurrently graced an issue of U.S. currency.

 

The phonograph allowed distribution of "music" as never before... etc., etc., etc.

 

Bottom line to me is that when there's a major change in technology, it takes a while for its uses and its commercial viability to be explored and exploited - along with various political legislation governing it.

 

Unintended consequences are likely regardless.

 

I'm getting increasingly unhappy with the cost of my home telecommunications service. With my "handheld device" service, it's more money than I made in a month as a lab technician in a major printing plant some 50 years ago - and a far, far larger percentage of my income today than telephone was at the time. Radio and television initially were "free" on the airwaves albeit governed heavily by regulation as was telephone communication with a government-approved functional U.S. corporate monopoly.

 

So with all those changes... I'm not sure that any of us, regardless of opinion of consequences, might do much better than a guess as what's might happen here.

 

I also note that although in theory electric wiring might also carry significant bandwidth for telecommunications, that entire idea seems to have been dropped in favor of fiber. It's all rather interesting to watch.

 

m

[jaxson50]

I'm 64, if anyone would have told me when I was 25 that there would come a day when we would willingly lay down $130.00 a month for phone service and an additional $120.00 for cable TV I would have laughed them out of the room.Today it's nothing for tech savvy people to buy bundles for the family to each be connected all the time with some dohickys in thier pocket. Some would say this is a good thing. They never lived without being connected every minute of the day. I pity them.

[milod]

Jax... I've five years on you and mostly agree... although I'm one of those "connected" folks and your price tags for those services is less than mine.

 

m

[L8_4thesh0w]

Bandwidth speeds are regulated. You purchase a plan to pay x amount of dollars for x amount of usage. If you reach that amount before the given period is over, your service is throttled back. You can then pay x amount over and above to increase your regulated bandwidth.

 

I'd rather be able to rent a fiber optic cable and pay a flat rate. Then the FCC could would should only charge us once and bandwidth should be equal for all, limited only by the capabilities of a users cache and storage.

[milod]

Well, there are various arguments there, depending...

 

In a sense, bandwidth is a matter of how much "stuff" can go concurrently along a given "wire" or bit of the "radio" side of the electromagnetic spectrum. So technically it's not speed, it's how much "stuff" you can get that takes up the overall capacity of the system.

 

So technically it's not speed per se - that's at the speed of light, roughly, as long as it's on electric wires or fiber.

 

When we speak "speed," it's more a matter of how much "stuff" we can upload and/or download in a given amount of time.

 

I look at it this way to try to get the geekspeak out of it: Imagine a one-lane path, then a line of guys carrying water in a bucket, one bucket per man, each in a row walking on that path. You can only get up to X number of water buckets at your house in a given point of time. If your neighbor contracts with the water bucket service, some of those guys carrying buckets up that one-lane path are going to have to go to your neighbor's house, lessening the amount you can receive from work on that pathway.

 

The water bucket company can attempt to regulate how much water you and your neighbor(s) get, by charging more for how much water you buy. In theory too, it could charge more if you want all of your buckets delivered at 7 to 10 p.m. for evening bath time. But it's much simpler simply to say, once you use up x amount of water delivered by bucket brigade, they'll cut you off.

 

The option to getting more water is for somebody to pay to make the path multiple lane. Of course not only does that cost more, it also costs more for the capacity of more buckets, and the capacity of loading the buckets with water in the first place.

 

Our question here, is how can/should water bucket companies meet increasing demand for water when some homeowners use ten times as much as others, and therefore also slow delivery both to themselves but also to the smaller users.

 

Yeah, that's all a simplified allegory, but essentially that's what we're buying.

 

You maximize a path/pipe at a certain point, and that means less water/content can be streamed at a given speed. Yes, we're improving technology to allow more "stuff" to travel on a given path - and in some cases to allow more than one sort of stream of bucket-carriers on the same width of path. But always there is a limit.

 

Two things bother me personally:

 

1. Most "solutions" end up with a huge political content. That increases as more corporations use the potential and more carriers play with numbers to see how they can maximize profits before customers howl - either business or residential. That's ditto with cell phones, btw.

 

2. Whenever the political folks and their tame techies figure a solution, it's probably in ways already obsolete.

 

That's why, although I have some pretty strong feelings on this or that being "right" that may or may not mesh with "your" idea of what's "right," I've seen too much of this sorta stuff over the years to think that any specific "solution" will work more than in the short term, especially since technology changes so rapidly.

 

I remember using business radio because it was the only option; then bag phones that worked a bit better; then analog phones of various sorts that were too doggone big for a pocket, then analog flip phones and then increasingly powerful and more easily carried "smart" phones. I also know that at a point when bad stuff happens in a given area, the "bandwidth" of cellular wireless communications brings system slowdown or functionally, system failure. In theory, that could happen with even landline fiber if demand exceeds bandwidth. And that's something we've known about since everyone recognized that if 50 fire trucks were sucking water from 50 fire hydrants around a 10-block area, the folks in the non-burning buildings still were hit with much-lowered water pressure. Same game.

 

m

[L8_4thesh0w]

 

1. Most "solutions" end up with a huge political content. That increases as more corporations use the potential and more carriers play with numbers to see how they can maximize profits before customers howl - either business or residential. That's ditto with cell phones, btw.

 

2. Whenever the political folks and their tame techies figure a solution, it's probably in ways already obsolete.

 

m

I'm in total agreement. I do believe however, in the case of fiber optics, if we've already paid for it, we should get the benefit of using it.

Optical is the reference standard for A/V connections at present.

[milod]

We still have to fill the buckets.

 

And frankly, even with fiber, we've had some difficulties with too much stuff with too little bandwidth in the area where I live. That's been a constant difficulty and challenge toward ongoing upgrades.

 

m

[L8_4thesh0w]

They've updated with all the larger "ped" boxes in my area two years ago but they are all empty.

 

They're nowhere near ready to replace the wiring yet... too many trunk lines to swap over before that happens.

[Gibson Artist]

And if you already had a condition AND had made sure you had good coverage you can look forward to having your policy canceled and a new one issued that no longer covers your condition until you meet a massive deductible. This can shorten life expectancy by discuraging the sick from seeking help due to unability to pay for specialist coverage. And if you chose to not buy coverage... well then you're a criminal.

 

Hope and change baby...

 

Now, back to Net Neutrality. Nick Gillespie wrote something interesting on the subject last week.

 

http://reason.com/blog/2015/02/26/3-charts-that-show-the-fcc-is-full-of-ma

 

The typical nightmare scenario that gets trotted out goes something like this: Comcast, the giant ISP that controls NBC Universal, will push its own content on users by simply blocking sites that offer competing content. Or maybe it will degrade the video streams of Netflix and Amazon so no one will want to watch them. Or perhaps Comcast will just charge Netflix a lot of money to make sure its streams flow smoothly over that "last mile" that the ISP controls. Or perhaps Comcast will implement tighter and tighter data caps on the amount of usage a given subscriber can use per month, but exempt its own content from any such limitations.

 

It's worth noting—indeed, it's worth stressing—that essentially none of these scenarios has come to pass over the past 20 years, despite the lack of Net Neutrality legislation....ect

 

 

It's also important to note that FCC commissioner Ajit Pai, calls Net Neutrality a "Solution That Won't Work to a Problem That Doesn't Exist"

 

[/quote

A solution that wont work to a problem that doesn't exist. Gee, we've never seen this before have we? Looks for the man who created the intranet....

[retrorod]

What the government has done is keep equal access to all instead of the Internet bandwidth going to the highest bidder.

 

It means Comcast, Verizon and others can't sell faster speeds to giant corporations and slow down everything else. It's net equality.

 

That's pretty good IMHO.

 

Notes

 

Notes, you have drank of the KoolAde. To begin with, one usually gets what one pays for. If you rely on govt.... you get what you gets. Give me an example of what govt controls that has been 'smooth sailing' without headaches and a bunch of paperwork and has 'netted' you more money.

 

My sources say that Net Neutrality is a 300 page cluster-f**k of rules and regulations that nobody has been privy to... that has been passed by the FCC. It will cost users money, and censor content.

 

You like 'equality'? How about.....you MUST wear the same 'budget' Pic N pay shoes that I wear.....Got no choice...Your Government dictates "equality". Don't forget government is people....not a 'supreme entity'...of elites!

 

WE(tax-payers) fund this crap-hole regulation through our taxes.

 

You are giving up your freedom!

 

 

 

 

 

[stein]

I think there are 2 subjects here:

 

1) what do we want from the net, what we want to do about it.

2) Is the Gov the ones we want to put whatever "plan" in action.

 

I don't have the answer to the first, but one thing is sure, the answer to the second is a big, fat, NO.

 

If we look at anything, ANYTHING, that the Gov has either implemented, run, or regulated in the past 10 years, it has got less functional, more expensive, and made more problems than it has solved.

 

Where, in things that have been done WITHOUT trying to go with Gov control, they have thrived.

 

In other words, this "issue" with bandwidth and money: If we let the free market capitalism decide for us based on what we are willing to pay, who can make money and what services the money makers choose to offer us, we will all have a better and cheaper product down the road.

 

PUBLIC MESSAGE: It's not enough to vote. Please read the resumes before you do.

[zigzag]

Seems I heard the internet will be run like a public utility, like a power company, and regulated by the FCC. To the best of my knowledge, the power company is regulated by the FERC and does not receive public funds.

 

How will the internet be different in the way it is regulated and operated from other utilities?

[Searcy]

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5688747c-c192-11e4-bd24-00144feab7de.html#axzz3TPWywRgl

 

In documents seen by the Financial Times, EU member states are proposing rules that would establish a principle of “net neutrality” but still allow telecoms groups to manage the flow of internet traffic to ensure the network worked efficiently.

 

This is about what I expect from regulators. Establishing FCC control of the internet will insure that ISP and content providers will now go yo war with each other by hiring massive amounts of lobbyists to count the FCC to change the rules to better serve their needs.

[milod]

I can't speak for other nations, but the point on electric utilities operated differently from communications companies is quite different in many ways.

 

Another point is that the feds, not states, rule on communications issues, states on electric and natural gas issues, albeit under a general umbrella of federal regulation otherwise.

 

For what its worth, this "public utility" thing can really get strange. For example, the feds help establish wind farms - then sue the wind farms from another branch of "government" because golly, a windmill that size can and will on occasion kill an eagle or other bird of prey. My point here isn't a value judgment, but rather a recognition that there can be contradictory regulations among governmental departments that can bring interesting results.

 

I do think there are some special difficulties in this whole thing that should have been addressed long before now - and should have been foreseen back in the mid 1990s with the telecommunications act that should better have addressed "cable" etc.

 

Content should IMHO be "free" and variations of ad supported and pay sites ditto in terms of the end user, IMHO.

 

The problems of bandwidth, multiple corporate use of "wires," etc., IMHO are in such a legal mess in the U.S. that I think almost any "solution" will be as bad in its own way as no solution.

 

That said... I think likely the closest paradigm would be the traditional landline telephone set of regs that worked well into the era of "smartphones" and data up/downloads where one is charged more for more usage of bandwidth.

 

There's also a "need" unmentioned here to offer functionality of data and texts to emergency response dispatch centers. That's pricey, but can add to public safety - if it's not misused for various political reasons.

 

Before some additional equipment was installed in my town by the two major cable/internet/telephone packaging firms, one could easily watch one's internet speeds tank as teens and preteens got home from school. And in the past 10 years my price tag on what I get at home has roughly doubled with very little increase in my usage.

 

Still... if one's been around a while, we've far better service and options than during dialup when 2400 bps modems were the norm.

 

Thing is, providers need increasing equipment to handle increasing bandwidth usage and somebody needs to figure how to make it a fair playing field for everyone, provides, equipment and fiber owners, and the users.

 

Honestly, if I thought I had even a more specific philosophical answer to this, I'd howl it out to anyone.

 

But at this point in time I think we have had so much change, so fast, that any "quick fix" that takes much less than three to five years will have horrid unintended consequences and ... worse, in three to five years any legislation already will probably be obsolete.

 

So my only thought is that there perhaps should be an ongoing annual revision of whatever we have; and one should hope it ain't too overladen with political philosophy rather than practicality that keeps the user as the priority and the providers able to fairly and freely recoup their costs - as with a public utility.

 

I guess I'm somewhat cynical since I've seen far too much "politics" in this where one's political perspective tends to ignore what I wrote in the above paragraph.

 

m

[stein]

 

 

 

 

 

 

I guess I'm somewhat cynical since I've seen far too much "politics" in this where one's political perspective tends to ignore what I wrote in the above paragraph.

 

m

Singled out here for space...I don't think one of these could be singled out without regard for all written here.

 

My personal contention, my concern, is regarding the lack of wisdom we as a nation seem to have on deciding which direction we might TRY and go, and how to get there. Wether we know or not, the idea that we should depend on the gov to decide that is, and will be, our downfall.

 

I qualify the above in that, if our goal is to have a good info access at a low price.

 

I BELIEVE in a free market system for these things. Some may view capitalism as a flawed and evil entity, and anyone can easily point to greed as one of them, but I think many of this generation are forgetting that it is capitalism that is the best system for providing services/products at the best cost. And the internet boom, the growth, and what we have now is a real example of that.

 

In other words, if we let our wallets regulate, we have what we have, and there is hope for better and less expensive. More Gov regulation is a road to higher cost, worse service, and less access.

 

Obviously, there has to be some Gov involvement, such as emergency use, what band/radio frequencies can belong to who. And of corse, there IS a cost to this. And, WE have to pay the cost. (The idea there is ever a cost paid by "someone else" or absorbed by "others" is not a reality, though we often think that).

 

It's the regulation, the idea that if you can decide who can do what, how much one is allowed to charge, and the telling of others what they can and can't do, even as they may be designed to reduce cost, are what adds to the cost. In this case, deciding who gets to use what bandwidth and telling the providers what they must provide may sound like a good and more fair way to distribute the wealth, but the results of these actions will mean less wealth for all of us.

[zigzag]

That is a good post, stein. I think most people believe, regardless of affiliation, that the best government is one that governs least. The problem with government is that it is a self perpetuating entity and doesn't know how to shrink. We pay government to pass laws, that is their reason for being. And apparently it gets worse on the local level (on the fringes). And, government is slow.

 

My problem is that I've been in business for almost forty years, and though I've had to deal with inane and inconvenient government regulation, I've also had to deal with incompetent management and the MBA mentality that places profits as the number one priority, often to the detriment of product quality. Call it greed or call it stupidity, bad policy exists in in government and in business; the larger the entity, the worse it gets.

[milod]

I think Ziggy really hit it...

 

At a small town local level the guys do a great job because their next door neighbor will get on them if they don't. That's true whether they're a small entrepreneur or the guys who pick up the garbage bins.

 

Once you get into larger organizations where there is a bureaucracy, I think it's human nature to protect the bureaucracy before all else, whether it's a business or government.

 

Ever notice that most "increases in staff" aren't productive workers but more folks to handle bureaucratic paperwork invented by ... bureaucrats who may have had little experience in making or selling widgets, fixing street potholes or clearing streets after a snow storm?

 

It would be nice to blame government, but "business" is just as bad. I think it's what happens as institutions get big enough that the bosses have an anonymity when it comes to the actual "customers," whether of government or a corporation.

 

m

[PeteWilson]

Amen!!!

 

Neutrality is a smoke-show, the reality is "cash-cow" to tax out of the affordability range of the little guy after the big boys find a way around the wealth redistribution scheme to fund the social engineering desires of the elitists that infest the legislative branch of government...

 

When the Gov. overlooks the fact that the penalties and taxes they will soon impose on the big providers get passed onto the consumer; it will be those of us that don't get rich on the insider-trading, malfeasance, and corruption requisite for a career in politics, who have a problem paying exorbitant fees and prices for access...

 

This is a very bad thing!

 

These people need to be stopped! It is a gluttonous insatiable appetite for power and money that drive the current congress! We are in deep trouble until these folks are tossed out on their heads and replaced by no-name little guys like us, period!

I agree with all you have said. "Net Neutrality" is a catch-phrase to sell this to the American People, just as "Hope and Change" was. Given the government's appetite for control, my fear is that the FCC will begin to regulate content. This would be a very bad thing. Controlling what people read and therefore think, is a tool highly prized by dictators and tyrants. My guess is that my fear is plainly stated somewhere in the 300 plus pages of this secret, up to now, regulation. I hope I am wrong, but history teaches me that I am not.

[PeteWilson]

That is a good post, stein. I think most people believe, regardless of affiliation, that the best government is one that governs least. The problem with government is that it is a self perpetuating entity and doesn't know how to shrink. We pay government to pass laws, that is their reason for being. And apparently it gets worse on the local level (on the fringes). And, government is slow.

 

My problem is that I've been in business for almost forty years, and though I've had to deal with inane and inconvenient government regulation, I've also had to deal with incompetent management and the MBA mentality that places profits as the number one priority, often to the detriment of product quality. Call it greed or call it stupidity, bad policy exists in in government and in business; the larger the entity, the worse it gets.

Thomas Jefferson, I think, said that most problems with government come with too much government, not too little. I respect his opinion.

[zigzag]

Thomas Jefferson, I think, said that most problems with government come with too much government, not too little. I respect his opinion.

 

Jefferson, Hamilton, Adams, and Madison all had diverse opinions concerning the same issues we discuss today, only they expressed them more intelligently and more eloquently. They were able to see the models and take them to their extremes, much like we do today. However, none were able to foresee the sophistication of the problems in our modern culture and modern government.

 

I don't understand the net neutrality issue well enough to discuss it intelligently, but I suspect that most of us are looking at the model and taking it to its extreme. Regardless of who controls the internet, it will require that they be sympathetic to the consumer, innovative, and responsive. While this job description might point more favorably to private enterprise, there is often no end to the incompetence or misguided priorities of men.

 

As far as the federal government is concerned, while it seems that for the past 50 years it passed laws that hurt free enterprise and over regulated business, what I see today is a fed that has been bought by corporations and is set to reverse regulation to allow for the pollution of our planet, encourage current trends in climate change, make the rich richer (and watch as the super rich horde money and keep it out of the system), further destroy the middle class, defund public education, watch as our infrastructure crumbles, and further trample on our personal freedoms in the name of national security and morality, all while creating a false enemy, and getting us deeper into wars.