Quote from: Mr Psychologist on February 27, 2015, 10:35:15 AM

Quote from: HurtfulTurkey on February 27, 2015, 10:29:42 AM

Quote from: Mr Psychologist on February 27, 2015, 10:24:21 AM

Quote from: HurtfulTurkey on February 27, 2015, 10:21:36 AM

Is there any evidence that service providers will, or ever did, throttle speed or prices for access to certain sites?

http://www.cnet.com/news/netflix-reaches-streaming-traffic-agreement-with-comcast/

This is the thing that comes to mind <.<

If anything, that's evidence of the market's ability to self-correct. Netflix is a competitor to Comcast, yet they reached a deal to provide non-preferential partnership wherein Netflix pays a fee for the use of Comcast's infrastructure.

I'm worried this FCC decision has done little except cement the existent monopolies.

It seemed more like Comcast extorting Netflix so that it's customers (Netflix) won't be having throttled/shite connections giving a borderline useless service <.<
Netflix then has to pay a premium to Comcast so that it's customers don't cancel their subscriptions because they get awful quality video.

Netflix streaming accounts for 35% of all U.S. web traffic. [Sauce]

Comcast was forced to either (a) build new infrastructure to support the growing Netflix traffic, (b) not build new infrastructure, slowing everyone down or (c) throttle Netflix streams so that the other 65% of traffic isn't slow as fuck.

Welcome to being an ISP, Comcast. When the network usage demand outweighs what your current network is capable of delivering, you expand and update your network to meet the needs of your customers.

When streets get too busy, you don't charge people money to keep them off it - you add more lanes.

I build a toll road. You pay me to drive your car on it. My road is designed for many small cars mainly, each contributing. Then a bus company (let's call it Netcar) comes along and offers to give tons of people rides for a small fee, and these buses don't have to pay a toll for each person. Eventually, these buses take up over a third of all traffic on the road, but I'm not getting paid for its usage. In addition, my toll has been forced to be lower and lower every year. Each year, it costs 30% less to use the road. So now I'm making pennies and 1/3 of my traffic isn't even paying to use the roads. Now, other companies come along and want to use the stuff I built to run their bus companies and use my infrastructure to build more roads (I already have the asphalt and trucks ready). To account for the massive increase in usage and the decrease in revenue I'm getting, I'm forced to restrict the buses and charge more for the cars. People say this isn't fair, and when other companies with very little investment use my equipment to build more roads and offer the same or lower prices, the customers accuse me of wringing them for cash. When I go to the government about it, they pass a measure that allows those other companies to use my roads, my equipment, my infrastructure to run their business, all without chipping in for my initial massive investment which laid the foundation for all of the roads for everyone. That's legal because now it's regulated, meaning I lose the ability to charge different users (like the buses or other high-use vehicles) more than I would a little car, and I lose the ability to make faster lanes for those that would like to pay for it (although this is largely hypothetical now).

Heavyhanded analogy aside, this isn't the cyber-liberty battle that it has been talked up to be.

I build a toll road. You pay me to drive your car on it. My road is designed for many small cars mainly, each contributing. Then a bus company (let's call it Netcar) comes along and offers to give tons of people rides for a small fee, and these buses don't have to pay a toll for each person. Eventually, these buses take up over a third of all traffic on the road, but I'm not getting paid for its usage. In addition, my toll has been forced to be lower and lower every year. Each year, it costs 30% less to use the road. So now I'm making pennies and 1/3 of my traffic isn't even paying to use the roads. Now, other companies come along and want to use the stuff I built to run their bus companies and use my infrastructure to build more roads (I already have the asphalt and trucks ready). To account for the massive increase in usage and the decrease in revenue I'm getting, I'm forced to restrict the buses and charge more for the cars. People say this isn't fair, and when other companies with very little investment use my equipment to build more roads and offer the same or lower prices, the customers accuse me of wringing them for cash. When I go to the government about it, they pass a measure that allows those other companies to use my roads, my equipment, my infrastructure to run their business, all without chipping in for my initial massive investment which laid the foundation for all of the roads for everyone. That's legal because now it's regulated, meaning I lose the ability to charge different users (like the buses or other high-use vehicles) more than I would a little car, and I lose the ability to make faster lanes for those that would like to pay for it (although this is largely hypothetical now).

Heavyhanded analogy aside, this isn't the cyber-liberty battle that it has been talked up to be.

The Internet isn't a road--it's the most important thing to have ever happened to freedom of speech.

The Internet isn't a road--it's the most important thing to have ever happened to freedom of speech.

That's a category error if I ever saw one.

Even if I were to concede freedom of speech as a valid benefit of the Internet--which is true--it's also a service. You are entitled only to what will keep you from dying. You don't get to stand on Walmart's roof calling for a Communist revolution if they don't want you there; private actors are not obligated to facilitate your freedom of speech.

Quote from: Kupo on February 27, 2015, 12:42:03 PM

The Internet isn't a road--it's the most important thing to have ever happened to freedom of speech.

I'm not talking about the internet any more than I'm talking about the idea of travel. I'm talking about the physical infrastructure of communication companies.

FCC literally has nothing to do with the internet, and everything to do with broadband internet access. This is not about free speech.

The Internet is not a form of travel. It is not in any way comparable.

The FCC has to do with any form of electronic communication within the US, whether you like it or not. That is the authority given to it by Congress.

Quote from: Kupo on February 27, 2015, 12:42:03 PM

The Internet isn't a road--it's the most important thing to have ever happened to freedom of speech.

That's a category error if I ever saw one.

Even if I were to concede freedom of speech as a valid benefit of the Internet--which is true--it's also a service. You are entitled only to what will keep you from dying. You don't get to stand on Walmart's roof calling for a Communist revolution if they don't want you there; private actors are not obligated to facilitate your freedom of speech.

On the contrary--they agreed do so when they let me sign their own contract, and when they decided to operate within the US. They want to have governmental authority without any of the accountability, essentially--but they can't have it both ways.

You are entitled only to what will keep you from dying.

That is an egregious slippery slope.

Those are literally the only three options they had.

That is false. That was a manufactured scenario, and you fell for it.

Quote from: BrenMan 94 on February 27, 2015, 12:50:41 PM

Those are literally the only three options they had.

That is false. That was a manufactured scenario, and you fell for it.

Maybe telling me what the actual scenario was would change my mind.

Quote from: Mad Max on February 27, 2015, 12:39:00 PM

See, this doesn't quite work because ISPs don't charge content providers for access - they charge customers. Comcast will still make the same amount of money whether their customer is sending grandma an email, or streaming Netflix 24/7

Except sending an e-mail doesn't use nearly as much data as streaming Netflix for 24 hours, which is the problem.

Building off of Turkey's post:  A better analogy would be a toll road that charges per vehicle owner.  The average person owns one vehicle, and pays a $4.00 toll each day to use the road, but then you have a person who owns a fleet of 10,000 cars, all of which use the road each day, and still only pays $4.00 a day to use the road.  By this point, the costs of maintaining the road outweigh the price of the toll × #vehicle owners, so you're stuck with two options:  Either raise the toll price for everyone to fund maintenance and the addition of more lanes (which is what has been happening in the U.S.), or raise the toll price for the one person that is causing exponentially more wear and tear and congestion on your road (which is what Comcast did to Netflix).

But the customers are allowed to use their data however they please. I've never had Comcast, so I don't know if they have any data caps and such, but you get 500gb/month, and you only send emails, fine. If you only stream HD movies and tv shows and burn through your 500gb in two weeks, that's also fine. If Comcast's network can't handle how customers use the service, that's on Comcast, not the customer or the content provider.

Quote from: Kupo on February 27, 2015, 12:58:47 PM

Quote from: BrenMan 94 on February 27, 2015, 12:50:41 PM

Those are literally the only three options they had.

That is false. That was a manufactured scenario, and you fell for it.

Maybe telling me what the actual scenario was would change my mind.

Well, the actual scenario is that Comcast and other ISPs are greedy and know they would get away with it as soon as net neutrality disappeared.

I'm not even sure what that means.

The ability to effectively censor a Web site or Internet service--is that not a power usually exercised by governments? ISPs wanted that, and they almost got it.

Not really, the crux of the matter is that services are not free and they never will be. You're never entitled to somebody else's labour except for insofar as it prevents you from abject poverty.

What?

This has nothing to do with free services.

We're not talking about the idea of the internet here.  We're talking about data traveling over a broadband network.

These networks make up the backbone of the Internet.

While I generally find myself agreeing with net neutrality, the government simply isn't to be trusted to be truthful or to have suffered a sudden attack of integrity.

We all have our interests, by which we operate, and the FCC is no different.

Quote from: Kupo on February 27, 2015, 01:31:10 PM

This has nothing to do with free services.

By labeling broadband internet as a utility, the FCC is declaring that all infrastructure is open for use and the owners of that infrastructure may not discriminate against companies that use it by charging them money, limiting their access through paywalls, or speed throttling. Basically, the government waited until the infrastructure was developed by private money,

All the romanticized hype about low internet costs and free speech are literally irrelevant to what happened.

In what universe is free speech irrelevant to the Internet? Free speech and Internet costs were the primary concerns of this entire debate.

then decided it was theirs to regulate.

You make this sound like net neutrality is some newfangled concept. The term itself has been around since at least 2003, and the founder of the World Wide Web has explained that the Web was designed around the concept of neutrality. It's literally one of the central tenets of the Web, and it's worked pretty well so far.

While I generally find myself agreeing with net neutrality, the government simply isn't to be trusted to be truthful or to have suffered a sudden attack of integrity.

We all have our interests, by which we operate, and the FCC is no different.

What reason do you have to believe that? Not even WikiLeaks or The Guardian has been blocked by the US government. The same administration that vigorously supports mass surveillance and relentlessly prosecutes whistleblowers has yet to prevent public access to two of the most game-changing leaks in US history, even to the detriment of the government's own interests. You have very little ground on which to base your opinion.

...versus corporations who are under no obligation to grant anybody rights. Corporations can't simply be voted out of office or impeached. They could easily block those sites because it's good for business, and there's little that the average person could do about it. Getting rid of net neutrality would have allowed the ISPs to block sites and services unscrupulously.

In reality, this doesn't change much for consumers, if at all.

If you're going to make statements such as this, you don't understand what this is all about.

Here's a basic explanation of what net neutrality helps to do and prevent.

And here's a hypothetical scenario to help get you started:

Evidence that most people speaking loudly about this don't know what was actually going on.

That's exactly you.

That picture is also wrong. It's ironic that so many people conflated this with cable bundles, given that cable is also a utility. There's no reason that services like Netflix couldn't be split up and bundled separately, exactly like cable bundles, which are also regulated by the FCC.

1) If you think it's wrong, then you're failing to grasp the basics of the issue here. It's a scenario, but not the only one.
2) I don't think television falls under the FCC's Title II Classification, but I'm not sure about that.

Quote from: Kupo on February 27, 2015, 03:06:01 PM

What reason do you have to believe that?

I know you're not trying to say the FCC or the administration are somehow virtuous, as opposed to self-interested.

I'd sooner entrust my rights with the government than corporate America.