I am opposed to ‘net-neutrality’.

Microsoft looked scary, the government tried to hurt them for us, but they weren’t really all that scary to begin with.

IBM looked scary in the 70′s… it wasn’t. Telecoms look scary now, but they will respond to market forces when the time comes.

The BIGGEST cost in infrastructure isn’t the fact that we ‘let them use our streets and tunnels’ or whatever… it is the manpower to dig the trenches.

If google gets hurt by TW… Google and someone else can team up and kill big markets that some telecom needs. besides that eventually the manpower will have to be rehired to update the coax or fiber.

The government could potentially hurt the tech development that is required for us to advance speeds and tech by allowing useless competitors to steal market-share.

Monopolies aren’t bad if they are temporary and don’t have the government pro-actively killing their competition. Lines laid by someone are their private property. There isn’t much standing in the way of someone else laying their own lines except money… if the demand arises then people will pay for it.

I understand that the internet is neat, and you are affraid… but don’t let the government try to manage who offers service. Smaller markets in Europe have had some sucesses with their open-access and other versions of neutrality, but the US is also a very unique animal, HUGE rural spans, and there are tons of economic forces that should be considered when comparing apples and oranges of European and US internet connectivity.

Why doesn’t someone troll the companies trying to astroturf political agendas? Take a ton of money and go all Yes Men on them.

The solution is to equate net neutrality with privacy. Tell people that, if net neutrality is defeated, everything they do online will be watched by AT&T and friends. That is what deep packet inspection and throttling amount to, in the first instance at least. I ask people if they like the idea of their service provider monitoring everything they do online. EVERYTHING! That’s pretty easy to understand, and appropriately repellent. Remind people that even private-browsing/porn mode starts with a warning that AT&T and their telecom friends can still see what the browser is doing. Tell people that without legally binding net-neutrality, telecoms will be watching their online activities all the time. Leverage people’s desire for privacy. When internet users hear this they usually get the idea, especially those who enjoy ‘private browsing’…

http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/6814399.html

.~.

My point is that we all have equal access to those copper/fiber loops…and everyone pays the same price for those loops – loops being the government subsidized component of the telco companies. The FCC didn’t just give access to the loops, they also ensured access to all the central offices to place equipment to run those loops; thus causing the breakup of a monopoly and allowing for competition in the telecommunications industry.

Since then (1997) the prices of telecommunications has plummeted and allowed for the most magnificent explosion of communication and technology. Bandwidth, the only commodity that matters in telecom, is significantly more available and quality than could have been ever imagined; considering the Internet (as we know it) didn’t exist 15 years ago – we haven’t gone anywhere but up as an industry in quality, capacity and availability.

Here’s the thing. Residential telephony in densely populated areas is not a good business to be in. Mobile telephony is widely available and more commonly replaces a ‘land line’ in the year 2010. People, in those demographics, born after 1995 may live their entire lives without a “home phone line”. Love it or hate it, those are the very lines that we subsidized…those soon to be worthless lines.

Worthless?? Yes. When you consider the cost to maintain that copper and fiber telco infrastructure, it’s staggering. Then, when people don’t pay to use the infrastructure – or, this is important – the ammount those people are willing to pay is less than it costs to maintain the network…then the telco companies that are legally bound to maintain the networks are screwed.

Yeah yeah, screw those guys blah blah blah. Running these puppies isn’t easy, flat out. The incredibly vast infrastructure to maintain a worldwide network is super, super, super expensive. Outages are measure in seconds now. We, as consumers, rightfully have high expectations; those expectations are not easy to meet – at all.

When the subsidized network is a burden, we have to prop it up with taxpayer money…right? Because, someone has to pay for it. We want the bandwidth for cheap or free, no limits…how does that make sense? Who pays for it? I think you are mistaken on the profits side – telco companies are almost frantic to figure out how to survive when all you need is a pipe to the cloud – that doesn’t generate a lot of revenue FYI.

Any fantasies about bandwidth bottlenecking or conspiracy is comical. This point really shows a lack of understanding. The network is measured in milliseconds and is commonly a source of pride among carriers to have that be the smallest amount. So prideful, we pay our customers back when we perform less than our own projected goals. The concept that the telco carriers are coordinated is just too technically disprovable.

You have to understand that for every packet of information on that internet created by a common user – specifically non-business class users – there are billions of packets created by business class users. Those users, the businesses, have stricter requirements and thence pay for a premium class of service…and it is watched c-l-o-s-e-l-y…I assure you, by those customers paying those premium prices.

Residential bandwidth? Come on now, there is no money in it. Cable companies are in the same territory as phone companies; essentially it’s just a pipe and then, turns out, doesn’t make much money. Money keeps the lights on and the circuits flowing…love it or hate it.

So when you think about it, there isn’t a good reason for a company to invest in residential services; least revenue to be gathered and most cost to maintain the infrastructure. Versus business class services who produce much greater revenue and are much more technically experienced; thence, easier to maintain and support.

I am tired of writing now…good luck with your tact on this one; I think it’s a house of cards to anyone who understands the industry.

If you eliminate business-to-consumer bandwidth, how many tubes do businesses use? Try as you might to pshaw the profit in consumer usage, the reality is if the internet was basically just for business purposes it would be a tiny market.

The reason there’s massive profit in the internet for telcos is because of consumer usage. Sure, businesses pay for premium service because they want to ensure they can serve their internet customers.

If this is the latest talking point by AT&T’s lobbyists, you can mark it down as FAIL.

Net neutrality, not net brutality!

The industry is hiring the same turfers who work with the Tea Party movement to carry their message to the people.

Makes perfect sense. You hear that tea baggers?

Are you SURE that’s not in there?
Because it sure seems like it is…

seems the quote have been cloned.

yet another example that the only way a free market can actually stay free is for a third party to ensure its status as such. One unaffected by popular opinion or such.

We could have 100 Mbps Internet at something close to South Korean prices if Congress, the FCC, and the courts didn’t separately make it impossible in the late 1990s into 2002 to force incumbents to provide wireline access at nondiscriminatory wholesale prices. The four national competitive DSL providers all died (Covad was reborn) because of the clusterfuckage around the issue.

Cory, you don’t go far enough in condemning the cheap sale of rights of way and other resources: telcos, at least, got on the order of billions of dollars over the last two decades in a combination of direct subsidy, tax abatement, and other state and federal forms to provide universal access that was never fully (or nearly) built.

The fact is that the telcos could be producing huge profits, there could be vastly faster networks, and we could all be paying less. That would all have been possible. It didn’t have to be socialism; it’s not socialism in any of the countries in which there are robust competitive high-speed markets facilitated by a level-playing field made by the government (often in the wake of PTT monopoly nonsense).

In the UK, BT was forced to split its DSL infrastructure division from its retail service. The DSL part has now brought service to what I think Ofcom (the UK regulator) pegs at 99 percent of the UK population, which includes places like the Orkneys and distant Wales and Scotland and rural England. Ofcom doesn’t classify “256 Kbps in either direction” as broadband like the FCC still does; I believe it’s a minimum 2 Mbps down, and moving higher.

As I understand it, 8 Mbps/1 Mbps ADSL is often *thrown in* to a mobile plan or satellite TV package in Great Britain. It’s just that cheap to offer.

As long as ISPs want to charge both ends of the line for preferential service, they can darn well shove their Net Brutality where the sun don’t shine. I like that term, we’re appropriating it and the ISPs can’t have it. Nyah nyah.

Dick Army is probably a better collective term for these folks than Tea Baggers.

These assclowns have to be reminded that the Internet is a TAXPAYER-funded technology and that they’re using TAXPAYER-subsidized hardware to deliver it to us.

Abusive fuckwad ISPs making craploads of money off of OUR technology need a serious regulatory beatdown.

I like #1′s call for “Network Neutrality, Not Network Brutality”. We should be sure to use it. Thanks for that, dipshits.

All that aside, My arguement for Net Neutralility is that I pay for my Internet, that should be enough… But is it?

because I pay my ISP, but they don’t peer with Youtube, they peer with someone else, who also has to upgrade their networks to carry youtube to me, but they don’t get any increase in subscribers for it.

It’s not a problem outside of the states, because everyone out here on the fringe of the web pays for all the traffic back to the core of the web so we don’t care where it comes from…

(you need that last bit so people know which side this sensible position represents)

Or, for more accesible terms, Ask A Ninja.

http://www.freedomworks.org/press-releases/help-us-defeat-net-brutality

Here’s their bullshit line:

Net neutrality, shrouded in a populist cry for freedom, is the first step toward greater government control over the internet that, ironically, would limit consumer access. Regulating the pipes could chase away investors otherwise willing to build the networks of the future.

You can find their support of the tea baggers movie on the homepage, of course:

http://www.freedomworks.org/

C’mon tea baggers! Join us and help screw yourselves once again through disinformation campaigns and your utter ignorance. Yay!