Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

No. I'm saying that alterations to the status quo are inevitable and usually beneficial, and that artificially depressing them with regulation tends to have a negative effect.

The telegraph altered the status quo for horse-based communication. The telephone altered the status-quo for the telegraph. Satellite communication broke down barriers to land-based telephony. Wireless and VoIP technology then displaced that.

All of these technologies were created by private companies, and paid for by consumers and businesses. Federal regulation of the telephone industry is largely responsible for the very complaints which subscribers voiced in the 1970s and 80s about high cost and poor quality of service (both technical and customer-service.)



Using legislation to enforce the status quo results in stagnation.



The internet is indeed critical infrastructure in the 21st century. But it is quite different from a highway or a utility, for many reasons:

• It is built and maintained almost entirely with private and corporate funds absent any government involvement, without easements or taking by eminent-domain, and without subsidy.
• It is highly decentralized, and the pieces which make it up are nearly all privately-owned.
• It is interactive, unlike a utility. The people who use it also contribute to its growth and evolution.
• It is constantly in a state of change and development, unlike a road or a water-main.

Morello

False, you and I (taxpayers) contribute significantly to last-mile broadband rollouts through grants and subsidies given to ISPs. https://www.ntia.doc.gov/grants-combined

The important pieces - backbone/backhaul connections - aren't usually managed or owned by ISPs at all. Level 3 doesn't care what traffic is on its network - it is consumer ISP companies that are trying to throttle and limit this traffic. The companies whose infrastructure was funded in part by.... us.

If anything this negates the only remotely logical argument against net neutrality - that we should prioritize traffic on a bandwidth-limited system by who is willing to pay the most. This bandwidth restriction doesn't exist, because - as you said - we are adding capacity all the time.



"Net neutrality" legislation isn't enforcing the status quo or preventing innovation of any sort, unless you consider the removal of current features to add back later for a fee innovation.

Wireless won't be a replacement for wired connection as long as artificially low bandwidth caps remain in place, especially as more of us move to streaming video services to replace cable.

vitamin j

iTrader: (5)

There's no reason Cockmast or CenturyLink or anyone else can't sell 5G internet access for the same price as wired. It'd probably be cheaper for them anyway, no modems and a single tower instead of a huge physical network. Also it's way easier for a competitor, like Google, to install 5G towers versus trying to wire an entire neighborhood for fiber which is what they're doing now. That means more competition. Right now you can already buy 3G or 4G ISP service and it's the same price or cheaper than the cable/phone lines.

TurboTim

iTrader: (9)

True. I'm in central NJ, sorta population dense here. My only option for internet is, in order from fastest to slowest:

tethering my wife's phone's wifi
Comcast
DSL @ 7mbps
3 house's over's unsecure wifi

So really only one option, comcast. We were fine with DSL up until a few months ago when the connection started going to ****. Multiple Verizon visits and they sorta gave up trying to fix the phone line. Went with comcast 3 days ago...and my internet went out last night.

Isn't Elon supposed to give me internet from space?

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

unverified test. Comcast denied. story from 2007 and nothing came of it. nothing burger.

iPhone CELL PHONE.

Verizon WIRELESS

TELEPHONE.

alternative headline: 7th inning stretch

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

yet you used them interchangeable when you provided "proof" internet ISPs were ******* us in the *** hard with big double sided ****** and the government HAD to swoop in and protect us from big bad corporations!

sixshooter

iTrader: (12)

Isn't it a former Verizon chief running the FCC proposing some of this? I think I thought I may have heard that somewhere.

Morello

They're restricting access to internet services. The device on which you access the internet is of no consequence. What's your point?

I don't want my internet service provider limiting access to internet content, regardless of whether it's wired or wireless internet. This has nothing to do with whether or not wireless is a viable alternative to wired internet in the current market - again, what's your point?

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

8% of the US population cant stream 4K ****!

Morello

Fixed. Let's stop pretending here. You wanted evidence of past shady practice, it's there. The internet has been a great tool for the last 25 years - you'll have to forgive those of us who wish to protect it.

For what it's worth, I've yet to see any arguments in favor of repealing net neutrality beyond "gubmint bad! corporations good!"

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

and: gubmit good! corporations bad! is a good one?



also new flash: wireless networks weren't protected by net neutrality, so about those links you used to as proof...

that's why it mattered that I pointed that out.


the Netflix thing was a throttling issue, and a B2B solution that benefited consumers without gov't intervention.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

Ryan_G was talking about "The Internet," not internet service providers, and compared it to a roadway.

Going to your last point, this is actually an interesting comparison. In many major cities, there are two (and sometimes three) separate classes of highway. There are the regular roads that are free* to drive on, then you have the tollways, and in some cities you also have express lanes which run above or between the regular freeway. The latter two categories of service are available to those who wish to pay extra to utilize them.

And nobody seems to have a problem with this.


The same goes for bus service. In NYC, for instance, the local bus costs the same $2.75 per ride as the subway, but those who wish to reach the outer boroughs faster have the option to pay $6.50 per ride for the express bus, which runs non-stop from Manhattan to the more remote destinations.

And nobody seems to have an issue with this.



Utilities? Let's look at electrical power. Heavily subsidized, heavily government regulated. And beyond the fact that it's mostly a pay-as-you-go service, you also get charged more based upon the capacity of your service. Want a 200A main breaker in an area in which gas or oil are the predominant sources of heat? You're going to pay a higher connection charge and a higher base service charge.

And nobody seems to have an issue with this.



Lots of folks here have been talking about limited competition among ISPs. And I'll grant you, I'm spoiled to have lived in cities in which I have a choice between several different providers. If you live in an area with only one broadband option, then you probably have only one option for Cable TV as well; usually the same one. Why aren't people complaining about the fact that your cable provider charges you more money if you want to receive all of the various Sports and movie channels, while your neighbor, who is satisfied with the base tier package, pays a lower rate?

And nobody seems to have an issue with this.





So explain this to me: if we assume that all of these doomsday scenarios are true, why is it any different for an ISP to charge more to people who consume huge amounts of bandwidth sucking down videos from Netflix?

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

The demand for bandwidth always exceeds the supply of bandwidth.

If you genuinely believe that "the bandwidth restriction doesn't exist," then, well, I don't know any polite way to say this... You don't really have a good understanding what you're talking about.

Laying new fiber and buying new routers costs money. Someone has to pay for that, and not merely the last-mile portion.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

well i think Verizon should put fiber in places that makes zero financial sense (8% of population coverage), so that Comcast can use it.

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

Interesting to see the Internet compared to a road...

In early America the towns were responsible for all roads within the town limits. Each able bodied male was assessed a 'Road Tax' that was comprised of 3 days labor provided to the town to maintain the roads. Most maintenance was done after planting and before haying to ensure availability of labor.

If the male didn't provide his 3 days he was fined $1 per day by the town. He was also able to hire another male for $0.62 per day which provided jobs for those men who didn't own a farm or who otherwise wanted to make money.

As the towns grew and commerce expanded beyond the immediate area private enterprise stepped in and developed Toll roads or Turnpikes where the goods or people being moved were assessed a fee and commerce expanded into the adjoining communities and beyond.

As the cost of maintaining those roads grew thereby increasing the tolls to cover it the farmers got pissed seeing more and more of their profits going to the owner of the toll road and banded together within the towns to expand the public road system from town to town thereby allocating public money [taxes] for commercial gain [farmers] insofar as the general public benefited.

And then came the trains...

I'm aware there are private takeovers of public road systems in areas of the US with mixed short term results.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

So, is the solution here that the US government should annex all hardware related to the internet which is located within its boundaries, or that it should enact a new tax to fund the construction of a new internet which will eventually displace all commercially-owned networks?

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

No, actually if there was a point to my post it’s that whatever is done by private aka. commercial enterprise or public monies will be supplanted by some still unforseen technology that will render it moot in the future.

I read town meeting reports from New England in the 1700’s that talked about the debate of using public money to finance the roads, which actually came about because the commercial toll road providers sucked at commercial ventures and could never charge what it took to maintain the roads and so they “proposed” to turn the roads over to the towns. Back in those days you actually went to jail if you couldn’t pay back debt so it wasn’t accepted to fail at business like it is today. The concept of “county jails” [we called them the county farm] originated as a place to put debtors.

I’m a firm believer in public/private enterprises where it’s in the publics interest.

Don’t know if my reply makes sense or not.

And along came the trains...

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

Or, I guess to answer more directly...

Maybe it’d be in the public interest for the government [the people] to own the backbone, if you can actually define it in a materialistic sense, much like the highways. Let the commerce develop at all points along that backbone or the exits of it. But then, we’d all owe royalties to Al Gore.

Very much like the European rail system. At all points/terminals there’s commercial activities but the backbone [railbed] is owned by the state. The German system even allows other carriers/lines to run on the system. The terminals are hubs of commercial activities.

When I buy my electricity and natural gas I buy from providers not even remotely close to me. I pay a transmission fee to Duke Energy for the use of their lines but everything is aggregated into one bill from Duke. I have no idea who pays who prior to the Duke lines....

EDIT: The fact I can buy electricity from Canada [hypotheticaly] and natural gas from a company in Texas while living in Ohio stems from a law enacted for the benefit of the public good and commerce as a whole benefited as a result.

Must. learn. to. type. better. and drink. less. wine.

Art

.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

An excellent point, actually. For this is exactly how the internet as a whole (and the world wide web, as a modern-day proxy for the internet) have functioned since their inception.

There was a time when online service providers did strictly limit their users' access to information. Comuserv, Prodigy, AOL, Delphi, and all other such companies were built upon a model of funneling their users into their own proprietary services and information centers. Over time, consumer demand forced them to allow access to Usenet and the Web, and eventually, their users began to defect en masse to generic ISPs which acted as true gateways to the internet, not walled gardens with small windows looking out onto it.



Getting riled up about a few service providers talking about offering preferred service packages in the present day is a very short-sighted view of the history of the internet, and demanding government regulation to combat it will have disastrous ramifications in the future. It is the fundamental nature of the internet to be unrestricted, and it does a splendid job of this in the absence of government interference.

If you want to know how well granting the government regulatory control over content on the internet works, ask a Chinese person. Just try not to get them jailed for talking to you about it.