Net Neutrality ???

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Does anyone understand anything about this issue at all ??? Will it be bad or good for this site?

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Bad

erin's picture

It probably won't keep us from hosting the site but it sure discourages us from paying for faster hardware if the ISPs at the other end and various middlemen can throttle back our speed to give more bandwidth to big companies who will pay for it.

I can see why this is necessary though. Lots of big internet companies have been going broke and not being able to pay dividends to their stock holders under the current rules where anyone who can get on the internet is treated equally. End sarcasm.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Raise the Prices?

So, essentially, the speed will go down and the price will go up? Right now my Internet only is about $60. If it doubled, I would disconnect. Perhaps our only hope is to get Trump out and undo some of what he's done?

Oversimplification

Yes and no.

As usual, it depends. If the website you are talking to has paid for speedier delivery of their packets then you will likely get faster service from them.

It's a money grab by your internet provider. They now get to choose whose packets get priority handling through their network based on how much they get paid. Right now supposedly there is no such system as all data gets equal treatment.

Let me explain

No, your speeds won't go down.

Here's what net neutrality means. Right now internet service providers have to treat every website equally, and deliver all their content at equal speed. ISPs hate this, and for the past 10 years they've been railing against it.

What they want to do, and what they will be able to do, if net neutrality is repealed, is throttle sites that don't give them money. Or just if they feel like it. Verizon owns Yahoo.com, and if they want, they can make all yahoo content deliver faster on their service, while google load into an eternity on their website. You want to look at Facebook without loading for hours on end? Facebook has to pay Comcast more to deliver their content faster.

It's a two tiered internet, where companies that can pony up the dough get to go through, and every one else gets screwed.

Including, yes, this site.

On the bright side, 4chan, reddit's r/theDonald, and Stormfront are all screwed, and they're some of Trumps most vocal supporters. Look forward to the Pepe frogs screaming as their heads explode.

Think of it as this

Imagine a freeway with 6 lanes in each direction.
Each lane carries a charge per mile. Lane 1 1$ , Lane 2, 2$ etc etc
Want to overtake that 18wheeler that is crawling up the hill ahead?
That will be $3 for the overtake.
The Rich people who can afford it will pay the 6$/mile and enjoy life in the fast lane.

The Internet as we know it was not meant to be like that.
The rest of the world will look on with increduiliarity and think that the USA has gone mad. Well, we knew that after Nov 2016 but this move confirms it.

It is likely that your ISP/Cable Company will start to introduce plans where access to Facebook etc is super speedy but you pay top dollar for it.
Sites like this are not going to be on any ISP's packages so it will more than likely get slowed down by your ISP. Note that the internet backbone won't get slowed down.

Want to stream the Football game on Thanksgiving? That will need our 100$ Super Sports package?
Then they will have you by the short and curlies even if it is the only game you watch in a year.

You can solve this (for the time being) by getting using a VPN to a place outside the USA and then coming back as a foreign connection. This would bypass your ISP until they get wise to VPN's. However many companies with people on the road use VPN's so a lot of businesses might get even more peed off with Mr Pal than they already are.
Not good times to be in the USA. My condolences people.
Samantha

VPN

I have never tried to set up a Virtual Private Network. Would I use it all the time? Almost all my use is reading stories, though I do watch some movies. Oh, I DID have a thing, though I don't know what it was, that let me watch a UK program. I suppose I will need to figure this out now.

One company I looked at is $100 a year.

Gwen

Trump is not the issue

shadowsblade's picture

The ISP's Comcast, ATT, verizon, sprint, any cable net provider, any DSL , any fiber optic that is out that you use ahs been bribing and talking to polititions for the last 10 years---dem or rebp
and they want it for profit!
simple

this has been coming for years and the scary list on the net is a bit excessive right now....but I think it will get messy, then all blow over once they mess it all up and the gov has no choice, but to stomp right in a kick the morons to the curb or the net will suffer.

They did it to ATT when I was a kid and I knew I would see it again!

Proud member of the Whateley Academy Drow clan/collective

No they're really seeking the throttling for a multitude...

Of reasons, most of which DO stem from profit. There are more bandwidth hogs than those you mention...XBox Live, Playstation Network, Steam, GOG, to name a few. That being said, bandwidth is a fraction of your ISP/Cable provider's actual cost. The bread and butter of their cash flow was getting your eyeballs on the Cable commercial ridden content and serving as the Gatekeeper. With the latter they can serve you fake news, ignore news that is inconvenient to report on to their advertisers or news with only PART of the whole story being reported.
Before you think that me using the fake news tag means I'm going to cite breitbart or others you couldn't be further from the truth. The news sites I watch/listen to range all over the place but ALL of them are accredited...Der Spiegel, NHK, France 24, Arirang, Al Jazeera English, RT, The Intercept, Democracy Now, etc. FOX News is not on my list but neither is MSNBC. Regarding the latter I had issues with their underreporting/lack of reporting on TPP, among other things. I understand why the parent company did it but don't expect my respect after that or even my caring to watch you.
Oh and to those that LOVE NPR I can cite multiple circumstances where they have been COWED by financial interests or other circumstances.

More worries

erin's picture

What I'm more worried about is that this change in the law would allow ISPs at the consumer end to arbitrarily refuse to carry any content they objected to for no reason at all.

Hugs,
Erin

= Give everyone the benefit of the doubt because certainty is a fragile thing that can be shattered by one overlooked fact.

Perfect example

Sorry Gwen, I am not putting you down by any means.

But like it or not, tech rules the world.

People who do not spend time educating themselves about 'geek' matters will inevitably find themselves being the victims of corrupt money and politicians.

People make fun of geeks and nerds but the last laugh seems to be geeks who suck money and information out of users of their tech and they are laughing to the bank.

Dickens was right: 'Beware this boy!'

internet as a public utility

The major players want to remove net neutrality at the same time that they want internet access as a replacement for older technology. So, they want to replace landlines with fixed wireless. They want the have their cake in eat it.

What the big ISPs want to do

What the big ISPs want to do is charge the content provider (i.e. Facebook, Bigclosetr.us, etc) AND the subscriber for access to the content. They claim that this is because it costs too much to upgrade their networks to support all the new traffic, especially from Netflix, Amazon Prime Cideo, etc.

The reality is that the subscribers fee should be enough for access to the content in the first place, and the network upgrades. What they want to do is make it impossible for anyone to compete with them. If you are a Comcast or a Verizon you can go and demand big fees for content providers to get access to their customers, letting them charge a little less for the ISP service to customers. Smaller, competing local providers don't have the customer base to demand that, so their fees will be higher because they're not double dipping. Eventually the smaller ISPs will go under and the big boys (who are paying for this abuse of process) will be able to do and charge whatever they want.

A lot of people are worried about a tiered Internet where there will be packages to pay for faster access to some sites. I can see that maybe for high bandwidth sites like Netflix, etc, but in general I expect that won't happen. Mobile Internet (wireless, cell, etc) may be different and there may be tiers there, but there already are today with different packages for different bytes per month.

What will happen is that the ISPs will charge a lot to content providers for interconnection fees or transit fees or the like for access to their subscribers. Netflix,etc will have to charge more, and that will make the providers bundled TV packages seem more attractive.

It's all about control. The ISPs, most of whom also have bundled TV and landline options, want to make sure that the OTT (Over The Top, i.e. people who don't own the wire into the house, but provide competing service over it) providers (Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, etc) do not have a more attractive offering than the bundle, because the providers make a huge profit charging for the bundles that most people never watch. It's basically free money. The ISPs are also not as profitable as they used to be, although in general they still make huge profits, and they see Facebook and Google making huge profits from THEIR customers and they want to get a cut of that.

Also, don't believe the ISPs when they say that the FCC was wrong to do this and they want Congress to write the law, which will make it "valid". The reason they are saying this is to appear to be pro-net-neutrality. The reality is they pay so much to Congress any law produced won't be net neutrality at all, it'll be legalised profit generation for the ISPs. It will further entrench their rights to shred consumer rights and deter effective competition.

And we all get screwed in the process.

Japanese/Korean/European Drama's will be frozen out as those bundles don't include that content. This reminds me that Korean Drama's are the true competitor to Hollywood given their production values, subsidized by all of those countries in East Asia that pay for broadcasting rights in their respective countries. This is one way to take a bite out of Hollywood's profits/bribery funds that are Congresspeople to oppose Net Neutrality.
This involves getting KBS, MBC, SBS and others to reorganize their profit to shift from not just the OTA/Streaming model entirely to selling DVD/Blu-ray or at the very least comparable DIGITAL copies to the latter. I mean I want to own "1% Of Anything" with Kim Jeong Hwa but the price for the legitimate Korean DVD is over $100. Price it like Hollywood TV shows. I mean Hollywood doesn't make the money they use to from it but it still makes for a substantial additional revenue stream as compared to their dogged stupidity of relying on the rental market.

Internet "Sun Spots", seriously!

I spend more than 12 hours on my computer daily; something that is perhaps not unusual for the fauna of this site. Over the last week perhaps I have noticed that Youtube, Facebook, Google searches, CNN and perhaps several other pages have been disturbed, or otherwise not normal. Is this maneuvering to get ready for other more major changes on the Net? Or, perhaps this is a concerted effort by hostile entities to disrupt commerce? I believe that whatever the Russians, and others were doing before the election is still going on and without interruption.

Though I suspect that some of what is happening is done by prepubescent, bored teens who drink cough syrup to get high and still have not discovered sexual desire?

Sadly, the internet will likely always be a roiling witches cauldron, and oddly it seems likely that the chaos will be the instrument of technical advancement?

I wish that I could comprehend the mechanism of those things I see happening, but I am simply an aspiring wordsmith who seeks to weave romantic and funny tales about unlikely and mostly misunderstood protagonists who go on illogical adventures.

International aspects

How would this affect international traffic or is this just US traffic that would be affected?
If international traffic is allowed unimpeded, would the content providers just move their servers off-shore (like a digital tax haven)?
If not, would international providers also be expected to pay the ISPs? And as for multinationals, would their business data be affected? Could any of this contravene current agreements? There must be some agreements in place regarding the terminating links for data in and out of the country.
Interesting times indeed

Net neutrality...

Who wins anything from preserving net neutrality? Every user of the internet, especially low budget high volume sites, but all users definitely.
Who wins anything from abolishing net neutrality? ISPs and network companies only.

There is literally no reason for anyone to favour the net neutrality abolishonists if they are not themselves gaining money from one of the big ISPs.