You were saying — The lefties that support it think that if they force companies not to offer higher tiers of service, then they’ll have no choice but to simply offer everyone connections with super high dedicated speeds and they’ll reap the benefits.
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Net Neutrality does nothing to prevent someone from charging more for higher bandwidth. That’s been done for quite a while and I actually pay for higher bandwidth. I’ve got several choices, and although I could pick something less than a megabit down, I picked 16 megabits down, and have to pay more for it. That’s never been the issue with Net Neutrality.
I’ve noticed that the people who argue against Net Neutrality seem to think that it applies here, but that’s never been mentioned and has never been the argument and one will always pay more for the increased and “higher speeds” (i.e., more bandwidth). Nothing will ever prevent that from being done.
You’ve got the wrong argument there...
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And then you were saying — Businesses pay more for the same peak speed rating because they want guaranteed bandwidth all the time. My speed is blazing at 3am but I accept that if I hop on at peak times I might get lag.
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Again, that’s a false argument. If I wanted *guaranteed* bandwidth, and the consumer version of what I have is not really *guaranteed* — then I would expect to pay more. And..., I *will* pay more — which will have absolutely nothing to do with Net Neutrality. I would be paying for a different kind of service, altogether, and it would cost me dramatically more. I know, because I’ve checked on it. But, in practice, I’ve got such high bandwidth right now, for what I pay, it makes no sense for me to go to the other type of service.
There’s nothing in the Net Neutrality concept to prevent these other types of services where businesses would get *guarantees* for bandwidth, of which the “consumer versions” do not get. It’s another service, altogether. That can still be sold with no limitations from Net Neutrality.
It’s another bogus argument that you’re presenting here...
It’s not “higher” bandwidth. It’s the fixed channels net “neutrality” forces out of existence.
Right now I have my X peak bandwidth. During times of heavy usage, it decreases, and I personally find that acceptable. I see a $40/month connection that is sometimes laggy as a better deal than a $1500/month fixed pipe T1. I watch some TV online and accept the lower resolution, buffering, and skips.
Down the road, the internet will be much more integrated with your TV. At that point I won’t be watching a short video on my computer, I’ll want the resolution, quality, instantaneousness, and 99.99% reliability of an actual TV (it’ll probably be through my TV as well).
The only way you can do this is to create a pipe or lane for specific data—the kind that has to get there right this second or else the next frame in the high-def movie you’re watching won’t be there and the movie will stop/stutter. That means it takes priority over stuff like web page requests, emails, and other data whose arrival isn’t critical to the tenth of a second.
Net “neutrality” absolutely bans that under the guise of class-warfare rhetoric. Because if I’m able to buy an internet package where a chunk of speed is dedicated to streaming hi-def movies, my poor email will have to live like a third-class citizen and therefore I need to be protected from myself and barred from buying that service.
Of course, hi-def video streaming is just the first and biggest impact. As the internet develops (or is kept from developing once gov’t gets its hands on it), there are countless other services that we haven’t even thought of that this would bar. If someone wants to offer videoconferencing using the web instead of pricy phone line setups, net “neutrality” will say they’re discriminating by not offering “access” to the internet, when it’s not supposed to be internet access to begin with.
Ditto if you want to make, say, a cheap shopping appliance that lets you connect to web retailers but can’t handle someone trying to pull massive torrent files through it. These are just simple ideas I can think up, but the point is all the much better future ideas will be DOA since a bumbling government body will be forcing the lowest common denominator on everyone. Instead of the option of a passing lane, everyone will be stuck in the same gridlock.