Posted on 10/27/2010 7:21:21 AM PDT by Mobile Vulgus
Oh, Net Neutrality sure sounds like a great idea. Why, Net Neutrality supporters only want what's best for "the people," right? They only want the Internet to be a playground for all, free of the influence of evil corporations, and they want fees to be reasonable for the lowly masses, right? Turns out, not so much. Fair pricing and open access is the least of what Net Neutrality supporters really care about.
The latest wrinkle in the saga of Net Neutrality pretty much proves that Net Neutrality supporters really don't care much about a free and open Internet as formulated in most people's minds, nor do they care if corporations offer the Internet in a "fair" manner. No, what Net Neutrality supporters want is the end of ownership of intellectual property. What they really think is that anything that appears on the Internet should be wholly free of any capitalist ends whatever. That includes anything you create, by the way. They aren’t just against those evil corporations. They are against anyone making money on the Internet. That means you too.
Net Neutrality pushers don't care who creates what. They don't care if inventors and artists create something that they might want to make a living , they don't care if it is even possible to make money from your own intellectual property, your own programming, your own YouTubeesque video work, your own art, music, or computer coding. They want your hard work to be free to everyone and they want to make sure you cannot earn even single a red cent from your own efforts.
This is a most un-American idea...
My understanding of Net Nuetrality is that someone that uses the Internet just to send an email to their grandkids once a week would have to pay the same amount as someone that downloads ten HD movies a day. Is that correct?
That's not my understanding of it.
The big ISPs want to charge the web sites (Google, FR, etc) another fee to get their content to you. They want to charge both sides of the connection for the data traffic on their pipes.
Currently, they just charge you for your internet connection. Obviously, the larger web sites also pay for larger bandwidth into their facilities, but there would be another charge on top of that for preferential traffic.
net Neutrality is the gov't inserting itself into the debate to regulate that activity.
So we're kinda caught between a rock and a hard place--gov't interference and regulation on one side, more charges on another side.
No, what they’re claiming it is, is that your ISP can’t discriminate between different sources of content that you choose. Let’s say you subscribe to Netflix for streaming movies, but your ISP offers their own competing version. Under NN, the ISP wouldn’t be able to look at the source of the packets and prioritize their own service over Netflix. Sounds like a good idea in principle, but probably not worth opening the Pandora’s box of allowing goobermint regulation in one of the few areas they’ve left alone till now.
Yeah, it started out as a sort of “consumer protection” idea, but has long since morphed into NN supporters wanting complete control of the Internet given to the federal government and all “capitalism” removed from the Internet. This, of course, will kill the Internet because there won;t be much reason to do anything on the Internet if no company can make any $$ doing it. Innovation and new technology will be strangled and the Internet will become a waste land of nothingness.
I’m pretty sure that is not the actual choice, but if it were, I would definitely choose “more charges.”
No, this is the left hijacking the term “net neutrality” for their own agenda, warping it into something that is no longer net neutrality.
Remember, we’ve been operating under the basic concepts of net neutrality for years. It’s how the business on the Internet grew to what it is today.
I hope you're right, but it's what I have been finding when reading all the discussions about it.
I don’t think you are right. The left is the one that made up the phrase “net neutrality” and they are the ones that have been pushing is since day one. They have defined it and directed it, so I don;t see how this is any “hijacking” of the issue.
“I believe their (the NNers) ultimate goal is to control content. If I were to embark on such a task, I would first try to get my hooks into the distribution side of things. That’s what I’m seeing.”
Exactly right!
Most ISPs sell their product by bandwidth, not by amount downloaded. So you probably want to contract for the low-tier service of 768 kbps if you only do email. The guy who wants to watch online HD movies all day will need to contract for the higher tier of service, such as 4 mbps or 10 mbps.
The problem is that even when an ISP advertises 10 mbps to 100 people, that ISP usually can't actually handle 100 users using that 10 mbps at the same time. They rely on most of them not using their contracted bandwidth. But when too many customers actually start using what they contracted for, the ISPs started to call that abuse of their networks and began shutting customers off.
Notice my emphasizing of "contract." Think if you leased a car at 1,000 miles per month mileage, and the dealer started penalizing you if you actually drove close to 1,000 miles per month because the dealer hoped to sell a higher-priced, under-mileage car at the end of the lease.
But that's not really a net neutrality issue. It's simple consumer protection. Net neutrality would be if Time Warner Cable didn't like you downloading those HD movies, instead preferring you to use their movie service, so they downgrade your ability to download those movies unless the source of those movies pays TWC. This of course breaks the model of payment on the Internet, where you pay your source, you pay your ISP for your bandwidth, and the source pays its ISP for its bandwidth. Now it's your ISP wants the source to pay it for the bandwidth to you, which you've already paid for.
Net neutrality existed long before they came up with that phrase. This became a big issue when certain telcos started saying they wanted to change the way the Internet works, leveraging their ownership of the last mile to do it.
bflr
“Net neutrality existed long before they came up with that phrase.”
You are describing two different things. Net Neutrality has ALWAYS been a socialist-based power grab. What you are talking about is a different issue.
No, that's what net neutrality originally meant: The NETWORK must have NEUTRALITY towards the traffic running on it and its source and destination. Security measures and reasonable management for efficiency are always assumed to be okay (that was even in the proposed FCC rules).
Basically, here's the principle of net neutrality in operation: If I contract with my ISP for X service, and you contract with your ISP for superior Y service, we should be able to talk at the level of X service. That is the neutral case.
Without neutrality, I contract with my ISP at X service, Netflix contracts with its ISP at Y service, but my ISP provides me only inferior Z service when connecting to Netflix because Netflix didn't pay an extortion fee to my ISP ("We own your customers in this area, ya wouldn't wanna have them complaining their movies are low quality now, would ya?").
“finally”? Hell, we’ve always known that communists support this idea that the government should control ideas and no one is allowed private ownership. Let’s not forget they demand private service companies to provide equal service to everyone regardless of costs. That is purely a communist idea.
Who is demanding that? I pay for my broadband. I pay more than others who have the "light" service, and less than others who have the "turbo" service. Net neutrality does not affect this.
If the amount of data being downloaded is affecting the ability of the ISPs to profit, then they should switch to a pricing model that also takes download amounts into account. This is how my cellular data is metered (although I don't have a cap, but I hear that's coming soon). But no, their first instinct was to simply cut off customers who downloaded "too much" using their contracted bandwidth (and they wouldn't disclose what "too much" meant), or to inject fake packets into their customers' communications in order to disrupt connections (that idea should make any decent network engineer foam at the mouth).
I think of it one simple way. All it would take is for a few companies to decide they want to charge Free Republic to get to their customers, and most FReepers would be cut off. Kos and DU would of course be spared, or their deep-pocket backers would pay. Net neutrality would not allow this.
Long ago there was the saying "never argue with someone who buys ink by the barrel." Those with the financial means were better able to exercise their First Amendment rights, better able to get their message out. That changed with the neutral Internet, drastically lowering the cost. It will change back with the non-neutral Internet.
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