Posted on 12/14/2017 10:36:00 AM PST by ColdOne
The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to repeal net neutrality rules, over the objection of Democrats in Congress, Internet activists and online companies.
FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, Commissioner Michael O’Rielly, and Commissioner Brendan Carr, all Republicans, supported the proposed rollback of the Obama-era rules. Democratic Commissioners Mignon Clyburn and Jessica Rosenworcel opposed the change.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonexaminer.com ...
There is a simple axiom about regulation. The more regulation, the higher the price becomes due to less competition. There are costs that are attached to compliance and they must be passed on to the customers or the company will not survive.
Here is an article from March 2016 that discusses that.
“After 1 Year, the Effects of the Net Neutrality Regulations”
http://dailysignal.com/2016/03/02/after-1-year-the-effects-of-the-net-neutrality-regulations/
In my opinion, the biggest trap in business today is for Lobbyists to buy politicians, write the regulations for them and the regulations prevent competition to function.
Long and short. Freedom Works. Open Competition with few and small barriers to new competition Works.
I can name you a large number of entire industries that have stagnated and/or died because of heavy government regulation. (Fascism is an evil term, but descriptive)
I saw a good article on this the other day, all this really does is transfer the oversight back to the Federal Trade Commission. So there is still someone looking at it.
I was astonished that San Diego, with Qualcomm as a major company, still only has DSL as their fastest Internet Provider.
Word has it Time-Warner and ATT both agreed to share the city on the agreement that neither upgraded to faster internet.
This is the liberal view of ‘neutrality’
Yeah, but no one is doing that though.
"I think the Commerce Clause did that for them."
Respectfully, please clarify what the commerce is in this example.
Given that electronic media didn’t exist when Constitution was ratified, I don’t see constitutionality of federal regulation of it.
Even if electronic media existed, feds still need constitutionally express powers.
I think we agree that Congress is wrongly letting non-elected federal officials get away with exercising federal legislative powers, wrongly nullifying voting power by doing so imo.
The best analysis I have seen about this is from The Truth Factory. The hosting cat is just a plus -
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oB3bfrmfT-I
Overall, this is one of the best channels I know. Serious analysis done with a light touch.
He may be mistaking when he singed up for some “deal” package they offer to get people to switch to them. Like get all three for 12 months for 25 dollars a month. But only if you get all three.
I haveAT&T, and haven’t had cable in years.
It’s probably a kick back to the local government. Comcast pays more to have the cable TV/internet monopoly with the city so the city doesn’t mind screwing the citizens.
But, but I like my high premiums and high deductibles. How dare you make me pay $20 co-pay for a simple Dr. Visit. /s
In simple terms, consider FedEx, UPS and the USPS. When you send a package, the cost is based on weight and volume in proportion to the resources needed to ship it. Net neutrality amounts to a government decree that flat rate shipping applies. The cost to ship a bowling ball or a post card is identical (even though the resources required to deliver are far from equal). Small e-mails are the postcards. Streaming 4k UHD movies are bowling balls. A movie monopolizes significant bandwidth for extended periods. E-mail and casual net browsing are bursty transfers with lots of idle time between uses. The kind of network infrastructure required to provide good service to those vastly different types of usage is significant. The ISP that provisions for 5,000 e-mail users and is suddenly saddled with 1,000 streaming movie watchers is going to have an angry customer base. Traffic can be segregated by type to utilize the network efficiently as provisioned. Want to watch movies? Then pay a rate for hardware that must be dedicated for hours on end to serve you.
I view it from four different ways:
1.) Liberals want it and push it. That is a non-starter.
2.) If I own internet infrastructure and there is no monetary benefit directly to me to upgrade/beef up that infrastructure when I can use other people’s infrastructure, why would I do it? For the good of “the people”? It is the tragedy of the commons in an Internet age.
3.) Any bureaucratic overhead imposed by government is a barnacle on the hull of progress in an industry. Any industry. If we want Internet access to widen and increase in performance, let capitalist money drive it. You want it to slow, break down, stagnate, and be subject to censorship, let in the government.
4.) Government should have no voice, none whatsoever in what network traffic goes where, because that is the first step in a long slippery slope of political censorship.
I have over 25 years in tech - mostly network engineering.
I see you fighting the good fight and I wish you luck.
Unfortunately, many people - some of them on this site - have blinders on when it comes to this and will refuse to listen even if you spell it out in crayon.
I got tired of trying to explain it and am hoping the “repeal” sticks for at least the next eight years so they can see how wrong they all were for themselves.
Excellent analogy of the situation!
In essence, what you describe is a price control.
Thinking conservatives know exactly what any kind of price control does to a market.
Correct.
More importantly, for your item # 1:
It’s not just “liberals” that want it and push for it.
It’s Facebook, Google, YouTube (Google), WaPo, NYT etc. It’s the pantheon of all liberal propaganda. Enemies of the American people.
It can substantially reduce their costs while forcing every carrier to allow free access...not a single dropped bit for any reason...under threat of penalty.
All the while they go about slaying their competitors.
My first dial-up was a 103 with rubber cups for the handset. The terminal was a used Heathkit H-9 (uppercase only, 40 char lines, 12 lines). I added a lowercase character generator, a pair of 2114 static RAM chips and a couple hours of wire-wrap effort to graduate to 80 character lines, 24 lines on the screen with upper and lower case). 1980 stuff. I did't have TCP/IP until 1985 when Phil Karn's "Net" code afforded a SLIP link and a friend at UCSD created an account for me to their ARPAnet. Simpson was working on PPP development with us at the time, but it wasn't ready for release yet.
I used gopher and archie too. Mostly to find developmental network software as I was actively writing new network protocol code from 1983 to 1987. After that, I just used the stuff in place. It was good enough.
Like most people today, I carry a fully outfitted smart phone (Samsung Galaxy S7). WiMax connectivity to my house provides 15 Mbps down / 7 Mbps up. I don't have to fix the protocol stacks in my home grown TCP/IP software anymore. Private business has poured a ton of money into building out the loosely knit "internet". It is a travesty to think the government could seize control via "net neutrality" and regulate how those businesses use their capital investment with their customers. I'm thrilled to see it go away. A local company is pulling 1 Gbps (symmetrical) fiber to the premises at a flat rate $49/month with no usage caps. The neighborhoods nearby have been provisioned. Mine will likely have to wait for Winter to pass before more fiber gets pulled.
That's wildly inaccurate.
My ISP is free to charge me per Gb transmitted, and on one of the services I use, Verizon 4g, that's exactly what they do.
There is absolutely nothing in nn to prevent charging more based on weight (in you analogy).
What nn prevents is UPS charging me more to ship a bowling ball I bought from Dick's Sporting Goods than they charge me if I bought the same bowling ball from UPS.
The problem here is that this is a thing that people think they should have at gigabit speed all the time, everywhere, and they don’t care how it gets there.
Who is going to pay to upgrade the infrastructure to faster speeds? Who is going to pay to extend the infrastructure into markets who don’t have as much of it? Who is going to pay to support that infrastructure, the people, the utility trucks, the repair equipment, the office buildings, the 24x7 coverage.
Market forces drive prices down and performance and availability up. The capitalist impulse to create wealth (real wealth, not frikking tax dollars taken from people like you and me) is what will drive that most efficiently and expeditiously.
And the problem is, those forces are largely invisible (especially leftists, who REFUSE to believe in the invisible hand of market forces that control how much of something is available and how much people are willing to pay for it) so the end result is, many people don’t care, even many here on FR. Someone else can pay for it. Who has the big pockets, the money that can be ‘freely’ applied?
What does that sound like? It sounds like the people who think the government can pay for it, and the government can regulate it. And when you look at the people who are lickety-split for this, they are the same people who view everything else in this same manner. People who worship government because they think it will provide this thing for them.
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