Net Neutrality, or lack thereof

fourteenwings

I don't understand how the middlemen in this case (Nobody ever gets up in the morning needing their ISP, we need the sites we go to through the service they provide) think it's a good idea to attempt angering both content providers and content consumers.

I guess the "fast lanes" are well liked by big sites looking to expand their space, but it really hurts sites that are not those ie the majority of the internet. And mostly:

1. If people don't like this enough (and they won't, because everybody uses sites that aren't Google/Netflix/etc) smaller ISPs will come in and take your customers by just... not doing this.


2. The service begins (theoretically) at a more expensive rate, killing any chances that anybody will want to switch over to it because it's cheaper.


3. There's no way this is a cost-cutting mechanism at all, so it's helping nobody but the ISP. And everybody just loves making middlemen richer for no reason right?

randomtropeloser

Yeah it's a load of BS, I really hope someone finds a way to start their own ISP that doesn't totally suck if the expected negative effects of this thing actually happen.

Bee

Keep in mind, in the majority of the States, the populace is way too sparse for any given area to be able to support more than one ISP.  The cost of stringing your lines out there is so high that if you have any competition at all you'll never make a profit.

This is why my home town's only provider charged inner-city rates for "DSL Broadband!" that peaked at a whopping 22 kbps all the way until just a couple years ago (when it worked at all -- it had something like 25% downtime, all of it midday).  To this day, it can still barely play a low-quality Youtube video, and many a WoW raid was cut short even though the traffic for that is surprisingly small.

Could their service be unseated?  Trivially.  But you'd be losing money until they were completely gone and you'd fully supplanted their customer base (years), and that would probably take decades to make up.

glennmagusharvey

This came up in political campaign news.

Later, during a question and answer session, an attendee asked [Republican U.S. Senate candidate Terri Lynn] Land what she thought about "net neutrality" -- the idea that Internet service providers should treat all data the same without favoring media companies willing to pay for bandwidth access.

"I think the Internet should be free," Land said. "It is a great source of information. I'm on Twitter and a fan of Twitter. I think that's a very important part of this. It's a way to actually interact with the community."

Asked to clarify her position, Land later explained that she was not proposing free national broadband access. "I think it's important that the costs don't go up so people can have access to the Internet," she told reporters.

sauce: http://www.mlive.com/lansing-news/index.ssf/2014/05/terri_land_dodges_auto_bailout.html

Blueeyedrat

^ We get a few Detroit channels on cable, and a large portion of the political advertisements are for that senate race. The most annoying one is where she asserts that her policies couldn't possibly be detrimental to women, because... well, she doesn't actually give an answer, she just sits there for 10-20 seconds and assumes that her counter-argument is inherently obvious.