Haven't paid attention to the issues involved. What was the impetus for the legislation and what's the result? TIA.
Cliffs On Net Neutrality?
- Thread starter RutgersRaRa
- Start date
Wasn't legislation. Was an FCC ruling which maintained the status quo in that the FCC will continue to regulate the internet to ensure that we all get the same access to it. The big carriers were looking for approval to create "express lanes" in the information superhighway, for those who could afford EZPass.
NOTHING to do with a money grab for the government.
All the ruling does is allow the FCC to legally "regulate" how providers of internet services price and limit usage of the internet by internet users.
The ruling gives the FCC the authority that the FERC has to regulate utilities (which are monopolies). In my opinion, this is fully appropriate, since the providers of internet service are very close to being monopolies in most areas of the US - and easily are oligopolies, at least. The ultimate trigger was Comcast's bid to take over Time Warner, creating a true behemoth that would control over 35% of all internet service in the US. Comcast offered internet neutrality guarantees through 2019 or so ... in other words, in the scheme of things, for an irrelevant time frame.
The regulation will be MUCH lighter touch than the regulation of electric utilities, but will allow some of the worst potential abuses to be prevented.
Read an recent article (last day or two) from the NY Times business section on how mandated net neutrality played out in the Netherlands: Same cry of doom and gloom by the internet provider industry, but no negative effect on those companies' businesses in the end.
Bottom line: If allowed, monopolies or oligopolies WILL abuse their power over customers (and employees, for that matter) if given a chance - as will any for profit company. (not all companies, but in aggregate). It is simply in their nature. And this is proven throughout economic history.
jelly,
We have no idea what the new rules mean for the internet, because we have not seen the rules as they have not been published all we have is the word of the FCC chairman and a promise to use a "light touch" when it comes to applying title II to ISPs.
The issue with me is that we put a regulatory agency in charge of the internet which currently has no issue, no ISP charged for a fast lane, no fast lanes were created and no blocks were made by Comcast, Verizon, etc to block websites or promote their services over a competitor. All we had was the possibly that this might have been done by a company in the future. So now ISPs are at the mercy of the FCC and their promises.
Do you really all have faith that the federal government and the army of lobbyist, pacs and money will not attempt to influence the FCC to create rules in the favor of the highest bidder (i.e those contributing the most to a PAC?) Has anybody here ever been involved in bidding on a defense contract or other government contract? How light of a touch do you think they will have?
To give you a clue where this is headed Amazon just hired Jay Carney the former White House spokes man.
The winners here are the big content companies. This is the funniest part of the whole charade, the net neutrality people have just given the power of the government to Amazon, Netflix and Google over Comcast and Verizon. I suspect that the content providers want to be able to stream as much data over the last mile and not pay for it.
Now here is where the Internet differs from a utility: utilities such as a gas line carry a single uniform commodity, natural gas is natural gas, water is water. The internet carries signals and data from 100,000s or millions of entities: Including text video, etc. Some require more bandwidth and some require less, each of these entities are business trying to make money and compete with each other and get to your house. So treating the ISPs like a utility is fundamentally incorrect because there is limited bandwidth that the ISPs have to manage their bandwidth allocation among the multitude of different players while serving their customers. Title II puts the FCC in the middle of all of that.
We have no idea what the new rules mean for the internet, because we have not seen the rules as they have not been published all we have is the word of the FCC chairman and a promise to use a "light touch" when it comes to applying title II to ISPs.
The issue with me is that we put a regulatory agency in charge of the internet which currently has no issue, no ISP charged for a fast lane, no fast lanes were created and no blocks were made by Comcast, Verizon, etc to block websites or promote their services over a competitor. All we had was the possibly that this might have been done by a company in the future. So now ISPs are at the mercy of the FCC and their promises.
Do you really all have faith that the federal government and the army of lobbyist, pacs and money will not attempt to influence the FCC to create rules in the favor of the highest bidder (i.e those contributing the most to a PAC?) Has anybody here ever been involved in bidding on a defense contract or other government contract? How light of a touch do you think they will have?
To give you a clue where this is headed Amazon just hired Jay Carney the former White House spokes man.
The winners here are the big content companies. This is the funniest part of the whole charade, the net neutrality people have just given the power of the government to Amazon, Netflix and Google over Comcast and Verizon. I suspect that the content providers want to be able to stream as much data over the last mile and not pay for it.
Now here is where the Internet differs from a utility: utilities such as a gas line carry a single uniform commodity, natural gas is natural gas, water is water. The internet carries signals and data from 100,000s or millions of entities: Including text video, etc. Some require more bandwidth and some require less, each of these entities are business trying to make money and compete with each other and get to your house. So treating the ISPs like a utility is fundamentally incorrect because there is limited bandwidth that the ISPs have to manage their bandwidth allocation among the multitude of different players while serving their customers. Title II puts the FCC in the middle of all of that.
Either way the customer is going to get screwed and have to pay more money....
What worries me is the risk that the govt will attempt to regulate content.
What worries me is the risk that the govt will attempt to regulate content.
From what I understand the Net Neutrality issue would have not affected Joe Smith persay at home but the people that wanted to start up a .com. Right now a person from home can make a .com for the same price as the biggest company. If this bill would have come to effect you would have had to come up with a bunch of capital to make sure that your website actually had the speed to handle traffic.
So the issue was access to broadband (and speed) in order to prevent monopolistic practices that would be put into place if the large companies were able to allocate the speed at which new websites could operate? Is that essentially the issue as you understand it?
seels,
I'm not sure that is correct. Anybody can start up a .com and you buy hosting that connects to handles basic traffic. If you want to handle more traffic you have pay more, but that has nothing to do with an ISP, it has everything to do with either buying, renting network equipment and computers or renting it as a service from a provider. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with that.
Connecting to the internet and running a dot com requires more than the ISP and the ISPs would be crazy to attempt to get each .com to pay for speedy access, that would be a logistical nightmare, not to mention a technical mess.
I'm not sure that is correct. Anybody can start up a .com and you buy hosting that connects to handles basic traffic. If you want to handle more traffic you have pay more, but that has nothing to do with an ISP, it has everything to do with either buying, renting network equipment and computers or renting it as a service from a provider. Net Neutrality has nothing to do with that.
Connecting to the internet and running a dot com requires more than the ISP and the ISPs would be crazy to attempt to get each .com to pay for speedy access, that would be a logistical nightmare, not to mention a technical mess.
So now everyone should have the same download/upload speeds as everyone else??? Fios has 3 levels of internet speeds
25/25mbps, 50/50mbps, and 75/75mbps to choose from among their different bundle offerings. Will they be restricted to a specific speed equal to their 'competition' even if the competition cannot provide the faster speeds??
Fios Plans
Read this from article link below:
Actually Net Neutrality is not what using the internet will cost us, but what it will cost site we go to for the speed we receive it.
Example:say your ISP is Verizon, and you use both Twitter and Facebook. If
Twitter pays Verizon to "prioritize" its traffic, and Facebook does not,
you would likely experience faster speeds on Twitter: Its pages and
apps would load more quickly, and more reliably, than Facebook. (This is
what net neutrality supporters are talking about when they discuss
"slow lanes" and "fast lanes" on the Internet.)
The legal situation situation changed in January 2014, when the ISP
Verizon successfully challenged a set of FCC regulations designed to
implement net neutrality standards. A D.C. court gave Verizon's
broadband Internet service the leeway to disregard FCC rules regarding the blocking and/or "unreasonable discrimination" of Internet traffic.
What Is Net Neutrality And Why Should I Care?
Actually Net Neutrality is not what using the internet will cost us, but what it will cost site we go to for the speed we receive it.
Example:say your ISP is Verizon, and you use both Twitter and Facebook. If
Twitter pays Verizon to "prioritize" its traffic, and Facebook does not,
you would likely experience faster speeds on Twitter: Its pages and
apps would load more quickly, and more reliably, than Facebook. (This is
what net neutrality supporters are talking about when they discuss
"slow lanes" and "fast lanes" on the Internet.)
The legal situation situation changed in January 2014, when the ISP
Verizon successfully challenged a set of FCC regulations designed to
implement net neutrality standards. A D.C. court gave Verizon's
broadband Internet service the leeway to disregard FCC rules regarding the blocking and/or "unreasonable discrimination" of Internet traffic.
What Is Net Neutrality And Why Should I Care?
So now everyone should have the same download/upload speeds as everyone else??? Fios has 3 levels of internet speeds
25/25mbps, 50/50mbps, and 75/75mbps to choose from among their different bundle offerings. Will they be restricted to a specific speed equal to their 'competition' even if the competition cannot provide the faster speeds??
Fios Plans
Cyrock,
I really don't care what Verizon did or didn't do if it wasn't illegal, and my understand is that it wasn't illegal. Verizon owns the lines and the business how they want to manage their own networks and how it affects their customers is up to them.
I really don't care what Verizon did or didn't do if it wasn't illegal, and my understand is that it wasn't illegal. Verizon owns the lines and the business how they want to manage their own networks and how it affects their customers is up to them.
There is much more risk of this being done by corporations than by the government.
As a utility, if there were some attempt to restrict/regulate content, it can be brought to court as a First Amendment issue. As simply a contract between users and companies, the companies can choose to restrict/regulate/throttle whatever they want - without any recourse other than whether or not they're violating their EULA - the choice would be to accept their restrictions or not use their service, even though there are no competing options on most areas.
If this bill would have come to effect you would have had to come up with a bunch of capital to make sure that your website actually had the speed to handle traffic.
What you said above is not correct IMO, because website speed and the ability to handle the traffic are two different things in the terminology that I am use to. Handling the traffic as I have always understood is the ability to handle the number of requests coming to your site and being able to process these requests. The speed of your internet connection is something different, but related, and the speed or bandwidth of your internet connection relies on a lot of other equipment and players other than the last mile providers (ISPs) all of which require significantly more investment to a site that would require it.
In other words if I set up an .com which requires a fast lane from an ISP then I've already had to come up with a bunch of capital to build out my own infrastructure to support those speeds needed.
Now any small business who sets up a dot com is not going to have to worry about fast or slow lanes, because the numbers of users they have, even if they number in the 100s or 1000s are not going to be effected by these fast or slow lanes.
Where you get into an issues is when you have large sites moving a lot of data, that requires fast speeds to avoid interruption in a service, think of streaming video etc.
My thought is that this Net Neutrality fight is more about the future of Television or streaming live broadcasts. Comcast, Verizon, etc make their money on providing internet and TV, if Netflix, and others start streaming live content such as sports, the incentive will be for people to cut out the TV out of their cable bills and just view these events over the internet. Now with Net Neutrality, live events can be streamed in direct completion to Verizon and Comcast, but the streamers will have the luxury or not having to maintain or build out their own cable systems, in other words the Content providers now have a competitive advantage over the ISPs.
What you said above is not correct IMO, because website speed and the ability to handle the traffic are two different things in the terminology that I am use to. Handling the traffic as I have always understood is the ability to handle the number of requests coming to your site and being able to process these requests. The speed of your internet connection is something different, but related, and the speed or bandwidth of your internet connection relies on a lot of other equipment and players other than the last mile providers (ISPs) all of which require significantly more investment to a site that would require it.
In other words if I set up an .com which requires a fast lane from an ISP then I've already had to come up with a bunch of capital to build out my own infrastructure to support those speeds needed.
Now any small business who sets up a dot com is not going to have to worry about fast or slow lanes, because the numbers of users they have, even if they number in the 100s or 1000s are not going to be effected by these fast or slow lanes.
Where you get into an issues is when you have large sites moving a lot of data, that requires fast speeds to avoid interruption in a service, think of streaming video etc.
My thought is that this Net Neutrality fight is more about the future of Television or streaming live broadcasts. Comcast, Verizon, etc make their money on providing internet and TV, if Netflix, and others start streaming live content such as sports, the incentive will be for people to cut out the TV out of their cable bills and just view these events over the internet. Now with Net Neutrality, live events can be streamed in direct completion to Verizon and Comcast, but the streamers will have the luxury or not having to maintain or build out their own cable systems, in other words the Content providers now have a competitive advantage over the ISPs.
Robert maybe I used incorrect terms becasue its not the number of people that hit your site (traffic) but the issue of the speed that the traffic moves or of fast people see it. If you don't pony up to the ISPs (which by the way it wouldn't be just Verizon you would have to pay every one out there) you would have to set up your website to handle the slower speed that the ISP will send to the customer. Basically unless you have the money you cannot have the interactive websites the others who have paid the ISPs can have.
This has very little to do with the Netflixes of the world they already have the capitol to pay up its the startups that don't have the money to start out in the same ballfield as the ones who do have the money.
the speed at which your traffic moves as you describe above will not be an issue for 99.9% of new .coms. 99.9% of dot coms will be able to live at whatever lower speeds the ISPs hypothetically could conceive (please note that in the life of the internet this has not happened) And my point is that when you reach the level of having to worry about paying the ISPs for the fast lanes you already have to spend a bunch of capital probably on an order of magnitude higher than you would pay for you fast lane.
Verizon, when they challenged the FCC's attempt to enforce neutrality under section 706, put forward the argument that it had a First Amendment right to decide what its subscribers do on the Internet. Think about that for a minute. Verizon wanted the ability to decide what services you could or could not use and the webpages you could or could not see. As a common carrier (Title II), Verizon, and the other ISPs, cannot do that.
Television is regulated under the Telecommunication act of 1934, but as a Title III service. The FCC has just reclassified ISPs under Title II. Under Title II of the Act
SEC. 223. [47 U.S.C. 223]....
(a) Whoever--
(1) in interstate or foreign communications--
(A) by means of a telecommunications device knowingly--
(i) makes, creates, or solicits, and
(ii) initiates the transmission of,
any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or
other communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or
indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another
person;
(B) by means of a telecommunications device knowingly--
(i) makes, creates, or solicits, and
(ii) initiates the transmission of,
any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or
other communication which is obscene or indecent, knowing that
the recipient of the communication is under 18 years of age,
regardless of whether the maker of such communication placed the
call or initiated the communication;
....
or
(2) knowingly permits any telecommunications facility under his
control to be used for any activity prohibited by paragraph (1) with theCommunications Act of 1934
55
intent that it be used for such activity,
shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned not more
than two years, or both
All I'm saying is that it's right there in the act and imo a reading of this could be applied to ISPs.
http://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf
SEC. 223. [47 U.S.C. 223]....
(a) Whoever--
(1) in interstate or foreign communications--
(A) by means of a telecommunications device knowingly--
(i) makes, creates, or solicits, and
(ii) initiates the transmission of,
any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or
other communication which is obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, or
indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or harass another
person;
(B) by means of a telecommunications device knowingly--
(i) makes, creates, or solicits, and
(ii) initiates the transmission of,
any comment, request, suggestion, proposal, image, or
other communication which is obscene or indecent, knowing that
the recipient of the communication is under 18 years of age,
regardless of whether the maker of such communication placed the
call or initiated the communication;
....
or
(2) knowingly permits any telecommunications facility under his
control to be used for any activity prohibited by paragraph (1) with theCommunications Act of 1934
55
intent that it be used for such activity,
shall be fined under title 18, United States Code, or imprisoned not more
than two years, or both
All I'm saying is that it's right there in the act and imo a reading of this could be applied to ISPs.
http://transition.fcc.gov/Reports/1934new.pdf
Will the ruling improve the speed and operation of this board? Weren't there a bunch of recent upgrades? Board still loads slowly and posting has gotten worse.
RUChoppin
Unfortunately the phone company hasn't innovated to the point where my phone sex is more real. That is the problem with regulated utilities. They do not innovate because they are not subject to market forces.
The Internet has been doing just fine without government intervention. It has been the driving force of the economy for the last 20 years. So instead of letting these companies compete and innovate they will all offer the same level of service and they will devolve to the lowest common denominator.
Does anyone really think that Google or Amazon or would have been able to develop into what they are today if they were subject to the same regulations as the Bells?
That's a pretty bad misquoting of the Act.
First off, that's the language from the 1934 Act, which has subsequently been amended in 1996.
Second, the section of the act that you are quoting is specifically titled "Obscene or Harrassing Telephone Calls in the District of Columbia or in Interstate or Foreign Communications"... and is focused at users of the utility, not providers.
I don't have time now, but I'll try to get into the the 1996 text later.
There have been attempts to do exactly what you're saying in the past (e.g. Communications Decency Act of 1996, Child Online Protection Act of 1998), and both were struck down by the Supreme Court on First Amendment grounds.
However, if an ISP wanted to do just that - filter all content of a certain type (or throttle it, or charge more for it, what-have-you) - there was no legal recourse to stop them. Your options were to either abide by their terms, or go to a nonexistent competitor (that is, there is usually only one cable internet provider in a given market).
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