How The "Net Neutrality" Coup Happened



Rexibit said:
There is a better way, it's call competition. Without competition, there is no reason for that company to spend extra money to develop or implement new technologies that will not only increase their customer's speed while decreasing their monthly subscription, but also increase the total amount of bandwidth the company has on their network.

Why should a cable or phone company run more lines or increase their infrastructure if they can just increase the price of their service each year for the same bandwidth, knowing their customers have to pay it?

The TVA in Tennessee does this. They've upped their prices 9 times since March. Yes, while they are mainly an electricity company, they sell broadband and cable lines, which increases everyone's costs. Hell, the CEO just got a $3m raise this year while some of their customers had to drop service because they can no longer afford it and are going without electricity. But, there is no competition in the area.

My point is, in order for our country to be on par with other nations and progress, these monopolies in power and telecommunications need to stop. They work hand in hand to stifle innovation.

There's no reason (other than the governments being bought off) for our country not to be able to have 100mbps connections to every home, if not 1gps, and pay what we are right now. They do it in Japan and other countries. Image what services could be provided if that speed was standard. You could be watching blue ray movies from your TV, and who knows what else.
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+1 if I had any left today.

Amazing to see such coherent and logical writing next to the emotional, degrading, logically devoid grunt like language that hellblazer spews.
 
greenleaves said:
+1 if I had any left today.

Amazing to see such coherent and logical writing next to the emotional, degrading, logically devoid grunt like language that hellblazer spews.
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You utter fool. Both you and Rexibit(and possibly others) accept blindly the premise Genachowski and the "net neutrality" posers put forward - that a problem exists and that they are solving the problem.

You're not asking yourselves the obvious question.

If they really manufactured evidence for the net neutrality "problem" and then funded several different groups to commission studies, if they explicitly stated that they had to make their activism appear organic and real, if this entire problem doesn't even exist in the first place, what law just got passed? I swear some of you are just plain retards sometimes.

What we just saw was a coordinated group of people who began a very successful campaign that purported to fix a "problem" that these same people created out of whole cloth. And none of the liberal retards here wonder why? What is their goal? How are they going to use this new law? What comes next?
 
hellblazer said:
You utter fool. Both you and Rexibit(and possibly others) accept blindly the premise Genachowski and the "net neutrality" posers put forward - that a problem exists and that they are solving the problem.
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I don't know why you are calling me a fool for pointing out that competition drives innovation and progress, which decreases costs for the customer and provider while enabling new services and new uses for old ones to happen.

I wasn't discussing net neutrality, just discussing one of the results for allowing monopolies to exist and go unchecked.

I'm with you on crazy stuff happening under our noses, but no one can deny that the carriers are a problem with messing with people's service - there's a reason there have been lawsuits against companies like Comcast.
 
Great summary on what this will do.

The Toilet of Neutrality

I am going to take a break from my usual cynical postings to discuss something very, very import, Net Neutrality. I do not think most people understand just how this could impact their lives directly. There are no words I can use to better express this point... THIS INVOLVES YOU.

Now there are many reasons Net Neutrality isn’t a popular topic. First off, the name is just stupid. If you are looking to support something, Net Neutrality just isn’t something that rallies the troops. The name needs to be sexier, or more frightening, or both! Maybe something like “Naked Megan Fox Anthrax Terrorism”. While a bit long, I think it is very intriguing, and I know I would open and email with that subject! Fine! We’ll just stick with Net Neutrality.

I am going to be a little crude here, but I think this explains net neutrality better than most places have. Net Neutrality is a toilet.

Now imagine you have a toilet, which I assume most of you do. Now imagine what you do with your toilet. You urinate and release bowel movements into it (see I can be professional about it!). Now imagine the company that owns/operates your town’s sewer pipes. They maintain them and make sure your little presents get from your toilet to the treatment plant, and don’t end up on your lawn or your car. They handle the movement from your house to them. That is why you pay a water & sewer bill. They move your packets.

One day the sewer company decides that too many people are using the toilet. It’s becoming cumbersome for them. So they have two options. One lay more pipes. Two they can start charging more. Option two, defers people from using the toilet as well as allows them to make more money. You can see right off the bat where this issue is headed. You’ll have some people pooping in buckets in the closet and others, with dispensable incomes, flaunting their high brow toilet use. It just gets worse from there.

Because the sewer company is the only one of it’s kind in your town, they can pretty much rule unchecked, because you don’t have an option. You want excriment out of your house, then they are the only salvation you have.

The sewer company is now loving the extra money coming in. They didn’t have to do anything different to their pipes, and their revenues are increasing. As happens with most companies, they get greedier.

You wake up one morning, and find that the sewer company is now charging you different if you urinate than if you had a BM. Their excuse is that it is easier to transfer urine through the pipes than solid waste that could potentially congest the sewer network. From that point on you are paying two separate rates to transfer waste.

With all this extra money, the sewer company decides to invest in a little R&D. They have the technology to not only tell whether it’s solid or liquid waste, but what food product you consumed originally. The CEO of the sewer company now can tell exactly what you ate. With little haste, the company puts this information to use.

The CEO of the sewer company and the CEO of Burger Hut make a deal. Burger Hut agrees to pay for every flush of the toilet if the waste was originally a Burger Hut product. So you, trying to save a little money, decide that it’s actually cheaper for you to eat every meal at Burger Hut than to pay to flush the toilet. From now until the company reaches another deal, you can only eat from Burger Hut, unless you want to pay for the privilege of indoor plumbing.

So now let’s head back to the beginning. Instead of a sewer company, it’s an internet service provider. Randomly, let’s say Comcast. Hypothetically, let’s say Comcast is trying to make as much money as it can with as little advancements and improvements to it’s system. They decide, to charge you by each individual packet you are sending and receiving, similar to the old texting plans. Every web page you try to access is twenty-five cents.

They see that they are making so much more money this way than the old $45 a month plan, that they decide to charge you by what you are doing online. If you are watching a video it’s fifty cents. If you are IMing its ten cents a message. If you are illegally download... well you won’t be, because they will stop providing you with service.

Let’s take this one step further. Comcast now decides to partner with a content company. Any old one will do. How about NBC? And the type of partnership will be... let’s say buying it outright. So now Comcast gives every person who subscribes free access to all of NBC’s great programming like... well, all of it’s programming. With this amazing deal (which just seems amazing because you’ve been paying fifty cents per video) you just can’t watch programs from ABC, CBS, FOX, Viacom, or even YouTube. Well you can, if you decide to pay $3 per viewing. What are you going to do then? Are you going to pay $3 to watch the “Dramatic Chipmunk” or are you going just going to take the free option of watching only reruns of “The Sing-Off”?

If you are anything like me, the majority of my video viewing is done online. All of the network shows I watch, I watch on Hulu. In fact, I prefer it. I can live a carefree life, where I am not bogged down by network schedules and “primetime”. Even more so than the traditional networks, I watch a lot of new media broadcasts; my favorite being those from Twit.tv. Most of my video consumption is either Hulu or Twit. I am going to divulge a little secret. I watch about twelve hours of video between the two. The split is three and a half hours with Hulu and about seven and a half with Twit. Only one of the shows I watch with Hulu is NBC. That means in this hypothetical situation, I would be paying for ten and a half hours of video that I am now able to access for free by paying for internet access.

This is how it affects you. Are you willing to give up three quarters of Hulu? All of YouTube? All of the podcast you watch? Maybe I am being unfair. It’s exactly like renting movies from iTunes. You all do that right?

This isn’t 1999, or even 2004! Nearly all of us have high speed internet, and now huge corporations want to send us back to the 56k era where internet video and audio were just pipe dreams, because they don’t want to move forward. In this era of Web 2.0, we all know that you upgrade your machine, switch from myspace to facebook, and keep up with the times. Why can’t corporations do the same? There is a lot of money to be made in advancements and new ideas, but it’s easier to stay the same.

This affects all of you, everybody reading and every one who’s not. Just like in the sewer analogy, if you are willing to sit back and let the big corporations tell you what to do, they’ll just make you eat shit.
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LotsOfZeros said:
We can only hope for further advancements in technology to come along and somehow put corrupt businesses like Comcast on the endangered species list.
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-The problem with that thinking is that the companies that bring us this new tech could be just as bad or worse than comcast.

-Anyway, the tech exists elsewhere (like Japan and Europe) but bad laws are in the way. New laws usually don't fix old laws; they just add crap on top.

Our system sucks because we can't simply point to bad laws and say "replace that... It stinks."
 
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