FCC Favors Net Neutrality 255
dkatana writes: Yesterday, FCC Chairman Tom Wheeler said net neutrality is high on the agency's agenda, and a set of rules will be proposed beginning of next month. He also talked about reclassification of internet providers such as Google Fiber as Title II Telecom Companies. If Google and other fiber providers are given pole access, it could be the beginning of a race to deploy fiber-to-the-home to many cities and towns, where the cost of digging trenches has deterred many initiatives and protected the monopolies of the entrenched telecom providers. Advocates for net neutrality believe that Title II classification would allow the FCC to protect Internet services by regulating against paid prioritization.
A related article suggests one side effect of the internet becoming a public utility will be higher costs for internet access.
Seriously? GOOD NEWS? (Score:5, Insightful)
Today is not 1 April!
Hard to believe what I'm reading here. I was starting to grow cynical.
Anyhow, just wanted to post to say this appears to be a good thing. Very, very exciting.
Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's all PR talk until they actually do anything about it.
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And this article reads as alarmist, against net neutrality no less. It's not the most reliable of sources.
Without having been there myself, Wheeler may only have talked about considering the reclassifying, and he may or may not have said anything about exceptions to the regulations after reclassification.
It's far too early to celebrate, especially considering the unreliably biased source. I'd definitely wait and see.
Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS? (Score:4, Informative)
They already did something. Unfortunately, the courts agreed with Verizon and made them un-do it.
reference [informationweek.com]
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Note that the new taxes would be about $6 per month. Balance that against price reductions due to added competition and it should work out nicely for consumers. You do believe in competition as a market force, don't you?
The rest of your complaints are more related to a lack of competition than classification as a telecommunications service, so you should add them to the cost of not taking this action.
All the way back to Smith it has been understood that providing a level playing field to build a market on i
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Google is in favor of title II. Apparently they believe it will help them to enter the market so they can challenge the incumbents. I'm fairly sure that is the result of in-depth analysis and not due to consulting the magic 8 ball.
Currently, many people have a complete monopoly situation in broadband. It is literally impossible to reduce competition in those markets. Others have 2 choices. It is nearly impossible to reduce competition there. Do you REALLY think title II will drive Comcast or AT&T out of
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Be careful what you ask for.
Most /.ers probably are not old enough to remember the days when all telecommunications were regulated under title II. Let's just say that costs were higher, innovation was essentially prohibited, and service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today.
"So, the next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."
Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's the current situation in monopoly land of US internet. True that future may not change it, because it's not an anti-monopolistic action.
But nice red herring.
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Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS? (Score:4, Informative)
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You can still get a dial-up connection and relive those glor
Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS? (Score:5, Informative)
Be careful what you ask for.
Most /.ers probably are not old enough to remember the days when all telecommunications were regulated under title II. Let's just say that costs were higher, innovation was essentially prohibited, and service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today.
"So, the next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."
I'm old enough to remember. My families phone number was two letters and 5 digits, and I was a small child when the first direct-dial long distance call was made. I had relatives that were still on party lines.
You are correct in that phone service was expensive compared to today. Long distance calls back then cost far more per hour than almost anyone's hourly pay. However local land-line service was cheap and included in-home service for phones and wiring. Some people went for decades between outages. The primary cause was someone knocking down a pole and breaking the wires.
But today's lower costs are almost entirely due to technological advances and not to de-regularization.
When de-regularization happened, home phone rates went up as telco businesses sprang to to cherry-pick businesses to serve.
(home phone rates in the regulated days were subsidized by higher rates charged to businesses, much like electric rates are set)
However, the good thing about de-regularization was that those new telco businesses now competed on the basis of features, and business phone service competition drove innovation. After that, then home service rates went down (that is, down in inflation adjusted dollars)
But look at the things invented during the regulated phase by Bell Labs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B... [wikipedia.org] in the 50's, 60's 70's That is a list of eveyrthing. transisters, lasers, MOSFET, molecular beam epitaxy, Ritchie and Kernigan worked at Bell Labs.
As for "service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today", I do not think that is correct.
My only service requests (and my parents) had been establishing new service when moving, and it was always excellent.
My experience with Comcast (and my neighbors) was shockingly bad. Bad as in refusing to take service requests, bad as in not showing up at all for service requests that had been accepted.and worst of all bad as in having service failures at all.
I have never met anyone whose experience was the opposite of mine regarding telco vs Comcast service, or even modern AT&T vs old AT&T. Service was one thing they did right in the old days..
Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS? (Score:5, Insightful)
As for "service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today", I do not think that is correct. My only service requests (and my parents) had been establishing new service when moving, and it was always excellent.
Another oldster here, and that was my experience as well. Ma Bell's service was excellent. Those phones they gave us could survive a gas explosion too, and still worked when the power was out.
What you did not have was a lot of choice. You had the phone they gave you (identical to all your neighbors), and as few features as they could legally get away with providing. I'm sure everyone having identical equipment down to the actual phones was a large part of how their service was so good. There were only so many things that could go wrong.
Also, if you had some kind of disagreement with them, too bad for you. Your only recourse would be appeal to those government regulatory bodies that people here love deriding. Perhaps it wasn't much, but it was slightly better than the alternative (nothing).
Most of what people complain about with "government"-run stuff is actually a feature of monopolies. A company's ultimate accountability to its customers is their ability to throw that company over entirely for someone else. But if you are going to have a monopoly anyway, not making it accountable to the people in any other meaningful way (eg: making it government run or regulating it) will only make a bad situation worse.
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Most of what people complain about with "government"-run stuff is actually a feature of monopolies. A company's ultimate accountability to its customers is their ability to throw that company over entirely for someone else. But if you are going to have a monopoly anyway, not making it accountable to the people in any other meaningful way (eg: making it government run or regulating it) will only make a bad situation worse.
++, that is the crux of the matter and the answer
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Lilly Tomlin for the win. It's amazing how kids just don't get how bad the the phone company was. I always thought, "The President's Analyst" understated their power, and their inhumanity.
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Be careful what you ask for.
Most /.ers probably are not old enough to remember the days when all telecommunications were regulated under title II. Let's just say that costs were higher, innovation was essentially prohibited, and service was even worse than you can get from Comcast today.
"So, the next time you complain about your phone service, why don't you try using two Dixie cups with a string? We don't care. We don't have to. We're the Phone Company."
Strawman much? Your argument seems to want to blame Title II for the evils of a monopoly. Google wants that status so that they can do what only the ILEC's are allowed to do right now. That's a huge change in this monopoly game.
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I'm pretty sure the absolute lack of competition and not the fact that phone carriers are Title 2 common carriers had more to do with that.
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Because the internet has been broken so far?? In what way do you think this will make it better?
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The internet is 'broken' because internet startups can't afford to invest in solutions to provide the same response times and connection speeds that established players can.
The 'problem' can be explained like this: imagine we are talking about actual packages, not packets of data, and instead of your ISP we are talking about the post office. The argument for 'parcel neutrality' would be that the post office can't offer overnight delivery because doing so will distract them from the timely delivery of my fir
Re:Seriously? GOOD NEWS? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, the argument would be more along the lines of: Amazon pays UPS to ship a package. UPS hands it over to the local post office to deliver. The local post office calls Amazon and tells them that Amazon can either pay them money directly or the package delivery will get purposefully slowed down. Meanwhile, packages from Local Post Office Shopping Dot Com - which competes with Amazon - gets instant free next day shipping without needing to pay anything because the local post office wants to promote their services above competing ones and drive up the price of competing services.
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if internet access is under government control on government poles
How are you getting internet access today without it flowing through trenches dug in government controlled streets, on wires strung along government controlled poles or through frequencies cast on government controlled radio spectrum?
"A related article suggests..." (Score:5, Interesting)
.
The authors of that related article: "Grover G. Norquist is president of Americans for Tax Reform. Patrick Gleason is the organization’s director of state affairs."
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Re:"A related article suggests..." (Score:4, Insightful)
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Don't be a Dick.
You can't argue with what Norquist is saying...by making it a Utility, it will inherit all the bullshit utility taxes.
To what extent? Who knows? Don't look to the Feds to investigate and make a definitive statement before they do anything.
Re:"A related article suggests..." (Score:5, Informative)
I don't know what your cable/internet bill looks like, but I'm already paying "bullshit utility taxes" on mine.
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Get ready for more perhaps. That's all he's saying.
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don't know what your cable/internet bill looks like, but I'm already paying "bullshit utility taxes" on mine.
Yes, because your cable company wants you to say that, so they pretend that they are passing on those costs directly to you, and call them out as bullshit line items on the bill. I guarantee you if those taxes disappeared tomorrow, you would not see your bill drop by that exact amount. A good economist could probably even give you a good estimate of how much (if any) it would be.
If the cable company was honestly passing the entire cost on to you, they wouldn't care enough about it to complain by putting it
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Yes you can. You can argue with pretty much everything Norquist says, because he is an idiot who thinks the world would be a better place if there were no government.
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Really, not even better overall for the rich and corporations, though many people never seem to think it through. I encourage libertarians to move to Somalia to see the total-libertarian dream in action. No effective government! No regulations! No enforcement of taxes! A dream come true!
Yet somehow anti-tax libertarians are not flocking to this paradise.
Re:"A related article suggests..." (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. I have no huge problem with providing links to opinion articles from ideologues. However, please label them as such, rather than just slipping it in as a "related article". Simply adding "from Grover Norquist" would be fine.
FWIW, Mr. Norquist is the guy who coined the phrase "shrink Government down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub", and is famous for trying to get politicians to sign "no tax increases no matter what happens" pledges. He also once said in an interview that if it was a choice between everyone's grandmother being eaten by ants, and a tax increase for only the wealthiest 2%, "we console ourself with the fact that we have pictures". A joke answer to a joke question, but a pretty telling one.
So you know going in for sure and certain that he's going to be against the government involving itself in any way, and in particular against anything that might possibly raise a tax somewhere. It will really have nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand outside of those two points. The only interesting part is how he gets there.
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Well, to be honest, having lived in California the liberal bastion of taxing everything for the benefit of the government and just about nobody else, I would classify the alternative as "Tax everyone into indentured servitude of the state, including grandma and force her out on the streets. She will be eaten by ants anyway, but we won't have pictures".
The reality of liberalism is that they think taxes are a right of government and a good thing, rather than what they really are, a necessary evil.
All taxes ar
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Well, to be honest, having lived in California the liberal bastion of taxing everything for the benefit of the government and just about nobody else, I would classify the alternative...
That's my point exactly. When posed with that ridiculous hypothetical, a typical anti-tax person would act like Kirk taking the Kobayashi Maru and try to find a way to weasel their way around the (again ridiculous) question. But the heart of that question is one of priorities, and reframing the question leaves that ultimate priority question unanswered. Grover realized this, and didn't want there to be any doubt in anyone's head about his priorities. Everyone's grandma dies.
FWIW, this was a Colbert intervi
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I have to admit, that before I ever read anything by (or about) Norquist, I wasn't inclined to take him seriously. But that happens when someone shares the same name as a Muppet.
Then I read his stuff, and now I don't take him seriously at all.
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Is it safe to assume you prefer the party that told you 'we have to pass the bill, to see what's in it', that couldn't be bothered to read bills they were cosponsors on, and admonished fellow politicians to 'never let a crisis go to waste'?
BTW, all the preceding statements were made by actual elected officials of the Democrat party (Rep. Pelosi, Rep. Conyers, and Rahm Emanuel) - Grover Norquist is a commentator brought on shows to be outlandish, not for striking compromises with his opponents.
Re:"A related article suggests..." (Score:5, Interesting)
Devil is in the details. There are many many government regulations that stifle competition, do nothing for the consumers and simply serve to entrench lobbyists, big businesses and vested interests at the expense of customers and the public... In the history of government regulations it is right to be cynical that this is what you are going to get 99% of the time.
Then there are simple, focused, easy to understand and easy to implement government regulations that really can help create more choice in the market and reduce fraud.
If there were any other way but for government regulations to bring us back towards a free market in Internet Access providers, then I would choose that. But in this case we have to have government regulations to counter balance the government regulation of the rights of way along our streets and the government regulations and licensing of our EM spectrum which create local monopolies and reduce consumer choice in the first place and you can't simply open up the spectrum, our streets and our poles to whomever wants to run a wire or transmit a signal otherwise we would have chaos and nobody would have reliable service, so we are stuck with government regulation to try and fix the problem of local monopolies and an un-free market.
Hopefully, we get regulations that are really focused on making for a better free market and not just stamping the marketing label "Net Neutrality" on whatever we end up with. Best we can probably hope for is a compromise that gives us slightly more choice and a bit more competition, but the complexity of regulations will probably still mean that the days of small ISPs able to run some wires and connect to the Internet and compete on price and service are not coming back.
Support What You Sell (Score:3, Interesting)
All we need is a simple rule that says if you sell it, you have to support it. Prohibit the bullshit "Up to" marketing and make them specify what bandwidth you will have ALL THE TIME. Full Disclosure.
Then, they HAVE to support it by expanding their infrastructure as needed. if they don't then the consumers should receive pro-rated refunds of their monthly fees.
Re:Support What You Sell (Score:4, Insightful)
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But what if you're selling a product that, because of lack of regulation, negatively impacts a competitor's product? You don't have to support it because YOUR customers aren't impacted. Your competitor might not even be able to track the cause back to your service, but if they do what will be the priority of fixing your product so that your competitor isn't impacted?
One might say that lawsuits would fix this, but what if it is Verizon or AT&T negatively impacting Some Tiny ISP? The tiny ISP isn't goi
Re:"A related article suggests..." (Score:4, Informative)
There was this [arstechnica.com] article that was pretty comprehensive and fair...
Internet as a public utility = higher cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
Hmmm - really? Anyone recall the POTS Long Distance war??? Sure drove down pricing there, same thing will happen with Internet providers.
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Yeah, that related article stated it poorly. Its conclusion was only "Internet as a public utility will likely result in new taxes". It ignores the fact that supply and demand drive pricing, and overall cost.
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Except Taxes are not driven by supply and demand.
Re:Internet as a public utility = higher cost? (Score:5, Insightful)
Nor are prices when you have next to no competition such as the current situation with ISPs in most markets.
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That was because anybody could get into the fray. For that to happen you have to separate the last mile and transit and/or allow more players to build out. They tried badly with DSL.
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They actually tried fairly effectively with DSL. That worked well enough that all of the telcos have been pushing fiber partially so that they don't have to allow competitors access. Europe has higher-speed DSL, but it's not deployed in the US since it would cause competition.
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No, it won't. That was a result of decoupling the service provider from the physical medium. That isn't included in this discussion and won't be a part of the upcoming proposed changes.
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The reason AT&T had a monopoly wasn't because they were unregulated, it was because the government had granted them a monopoly and kept other people out of the market. Long distance and other services opened up because of de-regulation.
What the FCC is proposing is to regulate internet providers more. It's exactly the opposite direction of what happened with the phone s
Yeah right... (Score:2, Informative)
Don't worry. Verizon and its buddies are filling up those bribe bags for the incoming Congresscritters as we speak.
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public utility means higher costs? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not if we get real competition and municipal services out of the deal. Whatever happens will be sure to protect the incumbent interests, so all this talk right now means little to nothing.
Re:public utility means higher costs? (Score:4, Insightful)
If it was a truly regulated public utility it might work. Right now the system we have is the worst of both worlds. Take a look at what happened to wireline voice services. POTS is and always has been a tightly regulated product, with requirements for reliability, up-time, and a mandate to serve everyone regardless of how rural or unprofitable it might be to reach them. The result was affordable wireline voice service that's available virtually everywhere in CONUS. Service that is now being killed off by two factors:
1) The emergence of wireless.
2) The emergence of wireline competitors (the cable co) that don't have to meet any of the aforementioned "must serve" or reliability metrics.
Item #2 is the one that gets my goat. The cable companies market their voice product as "phone" service when it's really anything but. It doesn't meet the five nines of reliability that POTS has; they can't even keep it working during power outages. It's not available everywhere. They get to cherry pick profitable markets and swipe the very customers that the ILEC most needs to maintain their infrastructure, all the while delivering a considerably inferior service that leaves many consumers high and dry at the very time they most need reliable communications. Is it any wonder that Verizon and AT&T want out of the landline business so badly? Would you remain in a business with huge legacy costs and regulations that's forced to compete with outfits that have neither?
If you're serious about the "regulated utility" option then what you're really talking about is bringing back Ma Bell. That's the only way it's going to work. You can't have a marketplace where you have one or two regulated utilities that have to operate under onerous rules while more nimble competitors are allowed to swoop in without having to meet any of those same regulations. Google Fiber is a product that makes people around here salivate but they're cherry picking profitable markets one by one and leaving everybody else high and dry. Would you trade the ability to see exciting new upstarts like Google Fiber for a system where we have a regulated Ma Bell that's promised a small but steady profit and no competition?
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Why would you get "real competition" out of increasing government restrictions?
And municipal services are hugely inefficient and costly; they only seem cheap because they are heavily subsidized by home owners.
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By shifting the competition from infrastructure to service. Infrastructure can't have competition. It costs too much per customer, and without regulations that mandate full coverage, nobody will serve anyone except in higher-density areas. But you can have competition in the service providers that sit atop that infrastructure. It just requires two rules: a universal must-serve rule and a mandatory leased access rule.
This is a good thing.... (Score:5, Interesting)
And as it relates to any topic, a person writing a story or an article can always find a slant one way or another to meet their own political views or agendas.
As far as new taxes, have you looked at your bill recently.. all those lovely below the line fee's disguised as taxes of some sort, or regulatory recovery fees, you know things that should be included in the price because they are the cost of doing business, but instead are disguised as creative taxes and fees which are not mandated by any gov (state local or federal) entity, just so the company can keep it's base advertized price the same and claim they are not raising prices.
Under regulation, this would hopefully go away. Also, the feds have said they do not have to apply all of the Title II regulations (and they specifically call out the tax portions) to ISPs.
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$5 a month in taxes is worth it (Score:2)
On average, consumers would pay an additional $67 for landline broadband, and $72 for mobile broadband each year,
I dont mind this. Especially since it will help others who do not have broadband now.
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I agree. It's less than the yearly increases I saw when I was a Time Warner customer.
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I'm in. Enthusiastically. Only some kind of nutcase would think that is not worth it.
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"I don't mind this. Especially since it will help others who do not have champagne and caviar right now."
Public utilities cost more...WAHH! (Score:5, Insightful)
Okay, currently Google Fiber is $70/month for Gig service.
Now, say it goes up that $67/year that was quoted.
That means it's going to be $76/month (call it $80 just to be outrageous).
So, oh NOEZ! I'm now paying more for service!
When, before, my other options were $125/month for Comcast's 50/10 service and $50/month for 3M/512K DSL?
Oh! The pain! The pain!
If it was good enough to regulate the telcos (Score:2)
Higher? How Much? Worth it. (Score:2)
A related article suggests one side effect of the internet becoming a public utility will be higher costs for internet access.
OK, first, I'm dubious. But suppose it does go up. How much is it worth to have access to all the Internet offers? At $50/mo, we're hardly pushing the limits of what this stuff is worth. If we just have to pay a little more to get broader access, no content restriction by privateers, and competition for higher speed networks, I'll do the dance of joy.
related article my ass (Score:2)
related article....
go fuck yourself OP. go do it now. piece of shit.
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Judging by how the post was structured, that was Soulskill's contribution, not dkatana's.
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Pretty sure it was soulskill that added that gem of stupid
Net Neutrality is Corporate Welfare (Score:2)
I don't care if Comcast wants to negotiate more money from Google for a fast lane. Net Neutality lets big companies like Google and Facebook off the hook and passes the upgrade costs onto consumers.
The internet has worked just fine without these regulations. Once the FCC starts regulating it, don't be surprised when they start to grow their mandate into regulating trolling as bullying, and other unintended consequences.
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That's what the "common carrier" part of title 2 protects against.
Re:Net Neutrality is Corporate Welfare (Score:4, Insightful)
The internet has worked just fine without these regulations.
That's the problem. Since the internet first came to us via phone companies (which are under Title II), they treated internet traffic like phone conversations. No shaping, no priority, no throttling, just letting everything through equally. Then last January Comcast won a law suit saying that the FCC can't enforce that on them. So now Comcast is trying to change the internet. Net Neutrality is trying to keep it the way it is. So if you like how the internet worked for us so far, you're going to want Net Neutrality.
higher costs for internet access? (Score:3)
From what source? Industry? From what I can tell, Ruters just vomited up what the Progressive Policy Institute postulated. Usually "Think Tanks" are simply political shills, but this one is supposedly "independent" or so says their website and Wiki. However from the PPI article, they list about zero details as to how they arrived at their numbers other than to say "we calculated".
All I know from similar discussions on Slashdot, people have posted about various countries around the world that have moved to the treating of ISP's as public utilities, and there wasn't one that didn't offer better faster more inclusive internet service at much lower costs than the US or Canada. Unless the PPI is unintentionally identifying the corruption, and political influence leading to favorable legislation towards telecommunication companies to keep the status quo.
Of course the FCC wants net neutrality - (Score:2)
The arguments being made for Net Neutrality are not for Neutrality but control. The Pro "Neutrality" angle is a government dominated Internet, the anti-Neutrality angle is a corporate dominated one. There's not much of a difference considering how hard it is to tell the difference between the two. Real net neutrality is a level playing field without government protectionism (which we have tons of at the moment) and the ability to purchase whatever we want and there's real repercussions for companies that
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Likelihood of entrenched corporations creating said level playing voluntariliy? Nil.
Hence the need for regulation to create it.
HELLO!!!! (Score:2)
Pay for priority doesn't work anyway (Score:3)
If Netflix is paying Comcast for priority, they're not getting their money's worth. Lately we've had Netflix stalling and taking forever to load. If Netflix is paying for priority, they're getting ripped off. But, then again, why would Comcast treat Netflix any different than they treat any of their other customers?
When Netflix calls to complain Comcast would try to upsell them on subscription channels after hanging up on them three times.
Too Late (Score:2)
Re:The future and its enemies (Score:5, Informative)
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Google has never specifically asked for it. But to claim they will stop their fiber buildout if the reclassification happens is pure fiction. Their own policy statements say that Title II reclassification would make it easier for them to build out their fiber network.
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I've lived in one of those European FTTH areas. There was a lot of government spending on FTTH. For years, it couldn't be hooked up because the necessary hardware was too expensive, and when it could get hooked up, it wasn't any faster than other Internet access either. The whole thing was a gigantic boondoggle for unions, telecoms manufacturers, and the telecoms industry.
If you're talking about "cheaper" y
Re:The future and its enemies (Score:5, Informative)
If services like Google Fiber are made Title II, watch how fast those sorts of projects come to a screeching halt.
Oh really? [techdirt.com]
While Google's filing never specifically throws its support behind Title II, it does specifically point out how Title II rules could come with some significant benefits. Specifically, Google's director of communications law Austin Schlick argues that as a freshly-regulated telecom service under Title II, Google would gain access to utility poles and other essential utility infrastructure to aid expansion of Google Fiber. While the FCC has the right to forbear from these provisions, Google argues they really shouldn't if they value improved broadband services:
"In determining whether forbearance is consistent with the public interest, the Commission must consider whether forbearance would "promote competitive market conditions, including the extent to which such forbearance will enhance competition among providers of telecommunications services." Forbearance from allowing BIAS providers access to available infrastructure under Section 224 would have the exact opposite effect, maintaining a substantial barrier to network deployment by new providers such as Google Fiber, that telecommunications classification otherwise would remove."
Seems Google disagrees with your opinion of what they would think and do.
Nope. Read Google's short comment (Score:4, Informative)
Google did not say they support regulating broadband as if it were POTS. Their letter is pretty short - the first page pretty well covers their position, then there are 2 1/2 pages supporting it.
https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.do... [amazonaws.com]
If one page is too long for you to read, here's the one sentence summary of what Google said:
If you assholes have bureaucrats set our pricing under title II, you'd better also give us access to poles under title II.
It's like telling the dentist "if you pull out my tooth, use novacain" - that doesn't mean you want the tooth pulled.
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Google did not say they support regulating broadband as if it were POTS.
Which isn't anything I claimed considering in the first sentence of what I quoted said "While Google's filing never specifically throws its support behind Title II,". The point of what I linked is that the claim that Google would discontinue their fiber buildout if Title II reclassification happened is nothing but pure bunk and is not supported by any statements that Google has made.
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Remember, Google isn't out to make profit directly through providing Internet service. They are an advertisement company, and just want to make sure as many people as possible have unfettered access to their ads.
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Re:Don't expect ISPs to bend over and take it (Score:5, Interesting)
You, dear consumer, will be the one taking it in the shorts.
Riiight. Because the current mega-ISPs are such great companies to deal with and are always looking for ways to lower the prices of their service, increase data caps, etc. Oh wait...
Take a very close look at ANY of your utility bills and tell me how many fees you are paying that have nothing to do with the thing you are using (the actual electricity, the actual water, etc).
Ok, just did. Everything in my utility bill had to do with city services I use. Nothing was an extraneous fee.
ISPs are going to pass the cost on to the customers. Period.
So nothing new. But at least in this case the cost will be for good.
And you can kiss the small, local ISPs goodbye because they don't have the resources to deal with this.
Except that the small, local ISPs are mostly wanting the Title II regulations.
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Look at your bill again. Here's what my APS electric bill looks like for this month for my warehouse space:
Customer account charge $4.16
Delivery service charge $3.33
Demand charge - delivery $0.00
Environmental benefits surcharge $0.97
System benefits charge $0.24
Power supply adjustment* $0.12
Metering* $34.82
Meter reading* $2.24
Billing* $2.48
Generation of electricity* $5.50
Federal transmission and ancillary services* $0.34
Federal transmission cost adjustment* $0.21
LFCR adjustor $0.52
Taxes and fees
Regulatory a
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There are some small, local ISPs usually in remote locations and according to the FCC those companies are in favor of the regulations as well. The GP is just some whoring shill.
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Perhaps you could enlighten us with the thinking behind that weird statement. When something similar was done to the phone company, we grew from a grotesquely overpriced Bell monopoly to the present vast array of providers. I'm getting unlimited voice, unlimited domestic long distance, unlimited texting, and unlimited 2G data (although only 2.5GB of 3G) on my $35 Virgin Mobile no-contract plan. And I have
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Wrong. That deregulation was regulation requiring that whoever owned the wire, had to rent it out to competitors. Thus, competitors were born and prices for long distance plummeted.
From 1999:
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Perhaps you could enlighten us as to why you think there is some kind of mysterious and sinister side to net neutrality.
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Re:Of course they did (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't regulating the Internet. It's regulating the people who provide access. There's a huge difference. And tons of Internet businesses and smaller ISPs are very much for this reclassification. The only people against it are the megacorps who seek to lose a lot of control and will no longer be able to extort money from competing content providers.
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Seems like there are more megacorps benefiting from net neutrality, than what we have now. I'm not worried about Google, Facebook or even Netflix passing the costs onto me, so much as I am the cable company. They WILL pass the buck if their cost of business go up. For Google, it just means a small dip in revenue.
Re:Of course they did (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm not sure I get your point. How are costs going to go up with net neutrality? Your pipes are laid. If you don't lay new pipes, you're not incurring any new costs.
Net neutrality is about what goes through those pipes. As an analogy, your sewer company wants to charge Pepsi money for your piss that's from Aquafina water, and charge Coca-Cola money for your piss that's from Dasani, or limit the flow rate so that your toilet gets backed up if you drink any of those products. And what's more, your sewer company is doing this because they have their own water bottle company that they want you to use. Net neutrality just says your sewer company must accept whatever liquid waste comes out of your house equally, irrespective of the size of your sewer pipe. If the sewer company doesn't want or can't handle so much of your shit, they shouldn't have put in such large pipes out of your home in the first place (fortunately, there are regulations and building codes that manage this bit for real sewer companies and sewer systems).
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You can't regulate the Internet, only the companies operating on it. The Internet is just a bunch of interconnected networks. If you create a completely separate collection of networks that's sufficiently large enough, you could also call it the Internet, say Internet 2 (oh wait, that's taken already).
I have no problems with regulations on how companies behave, especially when it comes to anti-competitive behavior. But it sounds like you do.
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And why will they go no where? If they go no where it is directly due to both the house and senate being GOP controlled.
Will this change your voting habits?