FCC Chairman’s Proposal Will Radically Change The Rules Of The Internet

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There's a lot of misinformation being spread in these comments, and due to how well they are written, I would assume they are written by intelligent people whom I believe should know better. That leaves me to conclude that the communication industry has shills posting public comments to change public opinion.
 
I was checking Wired when this broke yesterday... I thought that Wired readers had lost their minds with all the negative responses. Then someone posted that DRUDGE had linked them and it all made sense. I'm no fan of big Government... but sheesh any consumer against net neutrality has no flippin clue what they're actually against, either that or they've so bought into the corporate line that their critical thinking skills have been obliterated on the subject.
 
There is just too much in this proposal, and really should be several separate bills and several topics for arguement.

For one, i do support net neutrality and open internet. The government can regulate this without forming their own municipal ISP. This should be it's own bill.

But we should follow the same rules for municipal internet as we do with gas, electric, water, sewage, and trash. If there is already a free market in the area, we can't disrupt the free market with a government competitor backed by taxpayer dollars, which can use taxpayer budget to build infrastructure and either not pay back the infrastructure costs, or stretch the payback period to many many years. It's impossible to directly compete with the government, especially when they don't seek to make a profit. This should be it's own separate bill.
 
I have to agree with junkeymonkey, I also live in a rural area (have lived in several in varying areas) and the lack of internet options is disgusting. Honestly I'd be happy just to see some sort of joint effort to expand the internet to the entire country and not just the metro areas. Being stuck choosing between dialup (incapable), satellite (too restrictive, they shut off your service after too much bandwidth consumption even when paying $100/mo with NO option to buy more let alone unlimited plans) and mediocre heavily shaped 3g b.s. mobile internet. No dsl, no fibre, no cable no nada. It doesn't surprise me we're ranked somewhere in the 30's from the top for internet speed.
 
Wheeler used to lobby for big cable and big wireless both as the top guy of both of their national organizations. All of his buddies run the cable and wireless companies. He's not going to stab them in the back now that he's on the FCC. I highly doubt the lip service Wheeler's currently delivering is anything that will make it to legislation. I'm sure he knows this and acts as if he's doing things for the good of the people knowing full well net neutrality is something no politician would support as they are all on the bankrolls of big cable and big wireless.
 

And people who petition for through-and-through neutrality where ISPs would be forced to upgrade networks at their own expense to avoid congestion at any cost with no ability to refuse traffic from peers that abuse their peering agreements are blissfully ignoring the costs and risks of achieving high quality of service through brute force.

I'm going to need more popcorn.
 


Government-provided municipal ISPs (funded from citizens) are already proving to be a better value than big cable while not boasting of record profits:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/id-2520155/fcc-investigates-municipal-broadband-battle-north-carolina-tennesee.html

ISPs shouldn't be content regulators. They should merely provide the bandwidth they sell to their customers.
 
Without an addendum that forces ISP's to actually provide the speeds they advertise all the way from consumer to service provider, this proposal solves nothing. For example, if Netflix is no longer allowed to pay for high-speed access to Comcast's network, and Comcast is prohibited from providing special services, Netflix simply gets throttled to unuseability. Nothing in the bill forces Comcast to upgrade their gateways to service providers like Netflix.
 
What I'm really hoping for, but not sure if this says anything about, is that it will end the local monopolies granted by cities to ISPs. Basically, the ISP pays a bribe to the city government, which then issues a "franchise" making Comcast, Verizon, etc. the only game in town, and they are then free to double the price and gouge away. At least that's how it works here in California, the stupidest state in the nation. If these cities and towns aren't MADE to stop, a lot of them have no incentive to do so, especially the smaller ones that can be easily bought off by, say, a quarter of a million dollar "franchise fee" that makes up a significant part of their budget, although at easily 4 times that expense to their citizens.
 

Although the proposal looks reasonable, this indeed is a valid concern. Wheeler created something that is actually beneficial to the consumer, therefor Congress will be compelled to oppose it, which of course Wheeler knew when he wrote it. Still, across the board, people are finally waking up, and they're not happy. Government needs to get something right, and I think they know it. Unpopular ISPs are low-hanging fruit compared to Big Food, Big Pharma, the EPA, TSA, NSA, DHS, and the Military-Industrial Complex. They might well be "sacrificed" if it will let the bigger games go on a little longer. We shall see.
 
I kept wondering why it has taken the FCC so long to address this issue. I think it has to do with the fact that the NSA approached these ISPs months before 911 to gain back door access to spy on Americans. The government lied about why they decided to spy on Americans... it was not because of 911 but 911 did give them a great excuse to cover their tracks. Cheney literally gave these guys a key to the White House and special treatment. They even offered huge government contracts as an incentive to get them to cooperate. Oh I know some of them say now that they really didn't feel it was right but I think they lied too. Even the stupid ISPs understood if they signed on they would get special access to those at the White House. These guys didn't do it to be patriotic to protect the nation they did it because they understood they could make more money with the feds looking the other way on their bad deeds.

That is when our cell phone and dsl bills started to really climb. There was really no push back from the FCC. Hey also at anytime if the feds pushed them too much these ISPs most likely would have been able to leak what the NSA was up to. They must have kept documentation regarding the whole NSA as an insurance policy for better treatment. Cheney made a deal with the ISP devils and Obama rubber stamped it.These ISPs got a really big head and not only did they not want interference they wanted one of their guys appointed to the head of the FCC to make sure that any of the good guys at the FCC were kept in line. These ISPs got greedier and greedier and then they wanted to dismantle net neutrality of all things. I can see why the felt they could get away with just about anything. I do think that local ownership of ISPs would be a good thing since the good old boys in Louisiana at CenturyLink have a good old boy mafia type mindset about service for customers. The head of CL is now being investigated for insider trading and he loves to boast how he made his home town give a ton of concessions to them for them to stay. Nice guy. CL was getting so many complaints that they created this corporate complaint department and I spoke when them and the guy had no real telecom expertise or I doubt he had any degree at all but what he did have is he was an ex vet and he liked to intimidate the caller and yelled at me. That was his specialty. I left a message for his supervisor and never heard back. I am fed up with their strong arm tactics. Local ownership would make the whole process more accountable. CL has lied and lied and yelled at me and laughed and it has been just awful. I am sick to death of these companies. No good options. I would in a heartbeat switch to a local ISP run by municipality. My only choice right now is Comcast or CL and well CL is cheaper is all. If these changes do occur there will be literally a flood of people leaving these big heartless ISPs. CL made like 12 BILLION two years ago and I have had two rate increase in the last two years and my service is worse, downthrottled. They haven't upgraded my dsl lines but use the 40+ year old telephone lines. I pay 49.99 for 7MB and I get to watch Netflix bumped from 4 dots to two dots within like a minute after watching a show. I HATE CenturyLink. Who knows maybe this whole Snowden thing helped us all since the cat was out of the bag and now the ISPs lost any leverage they had. They will now have to play nice since there will be real competitive options down the road. CenturyLink NEVER admitted they were downthrottling and told me if I upped my plan that would solve the slow downs which is not true. Then they blamed my equipment and said I needed to replace my router and modem which would have run me about $200.00, the equipment works fine. They would say they checked my lines and it was fine. But what they didn't realize is that I had a network extender (set on no updates) and when they would briefly stop the signal to downthrottle the modem/router but leave no trace of what they were doing my phone calls would get disconnected. That is how I put two and two together. I hope CL just dissolves since this company just treated us like dirt. I will not forgive or forget. Americans are ANGRY and if these proposals don't pass I can guarantee you those who try to stop it will be called on the carpet by tons of folks.
 

There is no throttling here; merely Netflix getting bitten in the ass for their decision to rely heavily on a single transit provider to reach many major ISPs and that transit provider insisting on delivering traffic all the way to the ISP by abusing their existing peering agreements, ignoring alternate routes it could divert traffic to and relieve congested peering points.

Route diversity is a fundamental principle of the Internet and Netflix tried to ignore it by betting the barn on L3, and Cogent before that.
 


True but anyone who opposes this should have read the fine print.
 
This decision is the result of a few million concerned citizens making their desires known to the FCC and their Legislators. The power of the Net used to influence the net. The comment about government central planning is just a sign of ignorance.
 
If the vote passes, all that will happen is the current monopoly in your area will now have competition in the form of your local municipality. Your current monopoly will just lower cost in that area and provide the bare minimum service to compete with that municipality. It is a win for those still stuck with primitive internet. Imagine finally, having a choice.
 


There are other ways to go about driving competition. Like offering tax incentives to competitors like verizon, to lay down some pipe. In my area i can choose from several DSL providers and comcast as my cable provider. It would be nice to have verizon come in and offer TV service, but local municipalities are not offering them good enough deals to bring fiber optic to the area.

You fail to understand that the government municipal service is basically a non-profit which uses taxpayer money to build infrastructure. There is no way for the private sector to compete with that. They would be outpriced and underclassed in service. It wouldn't be a competition, they would simply take over the market and now the government is the monopoly.
 


You live in the country with a sparse population and miles of infrastructure. The taxpayers would never recover he money used to build infrastructure in your area, essentially the service provider whether it's private or public would accept the losses in rural areas as part of their business model.
 


You're lucky to have choice. A great deal of Americans do not. The ISPs have had 20-something years since they were de-classified from the telcos to do just that with some nice tax-breaks and subsidies along the way. In that time they have only solidified their local monopolies via legislation. You're a fool if you think the ISPs would let that potential customer base simply walk away from their product. Title II Net Neutrality legislation will indeed force their hands to make the neccesary infrastructure improvements, at the people's request or move on to greener pastures.

"It wouldn't be a competition, they would simply take over the market and now the government is the monopoly." - Because that is what happened to the telcos, right? When did att become a .gov again? Ohh, right, it hasn't.
 


You're a fool to think a private company can compete directly with a non-profit(the government). Businesses are in it to make money, when you have to spend millions of dollars to upgrade infrastructure only to have a dwindling customer base, and have to competed directly in price with a non-profit, that's a losing formula. There's no way to win unless you can offer gigabit internet speed or something above and beyond what the government can do. Essentially it's best to cut your loses and get out. Refocus and stick to their TV business.

Also, high speed internet is already available in these areas where these municipal ISP's started. What they're getting now is LUXURY speed internet. Apparently 25mbps is now slow and 100mbps is normal. I also hate how somehow people think 100mbps will all of the sudden make society more intelligent, they use false correlation and garbage logic to push their agendas.

No one is arguing that the non-profit government ISP with tax payer dollars can't do it faster and cheaper. That's simple common sense. The problem is disrupting a free market for luxury speed internet, changing the definition of broadband to 25mbps, simply to push agendas. If the government was truly interested in advancing society and offering internet to the masses, they would start from the rural areas and offer it to the less desirable customers.
 

That is assuming your non-profit governmental entity is managed properly while remaining as lean and efficient as possible.

Massive governmental programs often end up suffering from considerable administrative bloat, get infested with people who work the system to inflate costs, people who work union rights to get paid more for less work with little to no fear of getting axed, etc.
 
The part I have mixed feelings about is "This puts the responsibility of providing Internet service to the various city and state governments (as well as ostensibly the federal government) ". The issue with mandating certain public services is that it gets paid for by those who use it as well as by those who do not, as well as the possibility of driving services based in the free market to extinction (the idea of the only internet available being controlled by the federal government is not appealing in the slightest).
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Free markets do not work in the real world. Everyone LOVES to say "The free market wins, woo-frigging-hoo!" but the truth is that the free market in America usually comes down to monopolies and duopolies in X area.
We cannot trust the 'free markets' because they never have existed and never will exist.
 
You're a fool to think a private company can compete directly with a non-profit(the government). Businesses are in it to make money, when you have to spend millions of dollars to upgrade infrastructure only to have a dwindling customer base, and have to competed directly in price with a non-profit, that's a losing formula. There's no way to win unless you can offer gigabit internet speed or something above and beyond what the government can do. Essentially it's best to cut your loses and get out. Refocus and stick to their TV business.

Also, high speed internet is already available in these areas where these municipal ISP's started. What they're getting now is LUXURY speed internet. Apparently 25mbps is now slow and 100mbps is normal. I also hate how somehow people think 100mbps will all of the sudden make society more intelligent, they use false correlation and garbage logic to push their agendas.

No one is arguing that the non-profit government ISP with tax payer dollars can't do it faster and cheaper. That's simple common sense. The problem is disrupting a free market for luxury speed internet, changing the definition of broadband to 25mbps, simply to push agendas. If the government was truly interested in advancing society and offering internet to the masses, they would start from the rural areas and offer it to the less desirable customers.
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You are a fool to think that private companies cannot compete with non-profits of ANY form, governmental or public-sector. They can and do compete rather well with non-profits on a regular basis in the real world.
 


When people talk about the free market today, they typically mean free market with anti-trust/monopoly laws in place. So as to better stimulate competition and innovation. (It sounds contradictory, doesn't it? A market free of government intervention... only with government intervention. But ironically the purpose is to effectively keep any one group from becoming so massive as to effectively become a government of their own... in terms of power and influence)

Also... I think you should take some time to look over your last sentence. "We cannot trust the 'free markets' because they never have existed and never will exist". What I think you probably meant to say was something along the lines of "we cannot trust the principle of a free market to keep our economy fair, productive, and innovative because it is inherently impossible for a market to be truly free". Your sentence, on the other hand, indicates some very strange and circular reasoning - this has not existed, therefore it is bad, therefore it should not exist, therefore it has not existed, therefore... (rinse wash repeat). I'm probably being overly picky here, but the meaning was a bit difficult to get to.

Just because a *totally* free market doesn't work doesn't mean we shouldn't stick to the principles. I believe that less government involvement in the market inherently means a fairer competition... with the exception of anti-trust/monopoly laws. Come to think of it, monopolistic practices are basically the economic equivalent of spawn-camping.
 
Why are they allowing the throttling of Skype and other VoIP services? They have the same right to exist as MagicJack has a right to exist with voice and makes an excuse to use your cell phone or land line. Republican Tom Wheeler was a lobbyist for the cable and wireless industry prior to his current position and was chosen by a Democratic President and Senate to head the FCC. It took a lot of donations from the cable and wireless industry to buy his election and have the industry rule upon itself. He stood by and let Netflix pay Time Warner for better network connections instead of making all ISP's fix their backbone issues. He opened up the idea to kill net neutrality and only back peddled when 100 companies protested but didn't make the companies fix their backbone issues. Who cares if you get 1Gbs up/down service if their congested backbone gives you 2mbs download speeds when it could be 100 mbs or have a small maximum monthly allowance that would throttle or charge double for internet service. I see a tremendous difference in download speeds at home and at work on the same websites tested at the same time. I am basically paying more for a faster internet service but get the same old download speeds because of the lack of infrastructure upgrades where the ISP's hit the backbone of the internet. This is like tax payers paying more for a six lane freeway with a 100 mph speed limit but just a mile away they close 3 of the six lanes and traffic slows down to 2 mph even though on the other side of the closure you have 40 open lanes with a 1000 mph limit. It is fraud if they don't upgrade their infrastructure and there should be some sort of a class action lawsuit for these ISP's that don't upgrade their infrastructure to adequately handle their increase in customers. Over charging their customers with a crippled infrastructure not capable of providing advertised speeds based on conditions not out of their control is false advertisement.
 
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