The Glade 4.0

Best I can tell, neither answer is good. Either the government starts fiddling around with the internet, or the ISPs get together (essentially collusion) to put up caps and charge higher prices for the meager bandwidth you're allowed.

I lean toward Net Neutrality more than casting my lot with the ISPs, but honestly, without far more regulation with which I'd be comfortable, they'll still continue to find ways to **** over customers. They're an industry that wants to charge money and essentially not provide their service, or provide as little of their service as possible. Add to the pot the fact that they're quickly snatching up content providers (Warner, NBC Universal, etc.) and it quickly becomes a very volatile mix, one entirely hostile to the consumer.

Here's a question for anyone that wants to answer:
What is the Internet?

A related question:
Who owns a network? Either in general, or specifically.

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Www. Tin foil hat. Com

Christ the manpower to cover the internet to do your doomsday predicition would be huge.

Anyway, companies should be able to set up their pricing how they choose. Hell Verizon never offered a competitive phone package until deregulation and Comcast entering the market. The only thing I feel (the being typed from the belly of one of these levithians) is that if I'm paying for say 6mb service, that should mean a full throttled 6mb 24/7/365. Not 6mb down to 4 up to 7 etc. Price it appropriately and leave it at that. As to limiting traffic, that's wrong. I've paid my fee to go on the information superhighway, I didn't pay for a guided tour.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Who owns the lines that bring the service to you? How are these physical devices maintained and upgraded to meet new tech and demand? Noone "owns" the internet, but people do own the big ole servers where the traffic passes.

So do you want to compare the physical with the conceptual internet?

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Internet speeds have risen greatly over the last 2 decades, thanks to these ISPs. Xequecal thinks ISPs are going to suddenly suppress the Internet down to a 2 Gig cap per subscriber, and not only that, but they'll engage in widespread censorship? That is completely ridiculous. It's more unbelievable than Elmo's econocalypse.

You guys are ignoring a huge profit stream motivation. Charge both ways. Consumers pay for bandwidth and providers pay to be allowed on your network. How much will Time Warner blackmail Google for to allow it on their Roadrunner service?

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Who owns the lines? Whoever paid for them. Who paid for them? It depends on what lines you're talking about.

No one owns the "Internet", but there are owners of networks. Now what is the Internet?
Let's just focus on the physical, especially since "conceptual internet" is a phrase without meaning, except that it seems to be a company in Australia.

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Well according the France, the Internet is a human right.

I don't mind letting the free market route its own path across the internet, if and only if there is strong competition at every stage of the game. Unfortunately, there is not. It is very difficult for small providers make a go of it, they still rely on the big ones to sell them the infrastructure they need. The infrastructure providers are not competing with each other, and often they are also the ISPs. In the absense of strong competition, regulatory interference is pretty much a necessity.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

ISPs have become infrastructure providers, service providers, and content providers. This is not conducive to the free flow of information, or free-market consumer choice.

Well, "the France" are strange in a number of ways.


Canada has its own problems. In the US, there is strong competition everywhere except last mile. That's the sticking point. There are two major last mile providers (Telco and Cable), and a few (wireless of different stripes, satellite, and power line) minor ones.

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Agreed.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Haha, oops that was a typo.

On further thought this is espectially funny to me since this will be almost the exact opposite of how television works today. The cable company pays the providers for their programs but in the future the providers will have to pay to be on the network.

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Maybe you should look at Internet pricing and corporate practices in, say, Canada, where the government actually did pull out of net neutrality and regulating the telecoms. Both Rogers and Bell Canada now have plans with 2 GB caps. Overall, you generally get one-fifth to one-tenth the download speed and bandwidth caps in Canada that you get in the US for the same amount of money. Also Canadian ISPs have pretty much all started killing P2P services, these are often throttled all the way down to 256kb max.

http://www.rogers.com/web/link/hispeedB ... faultPlans

Look at the Lite plan. $36/month for 3Mbps down and a 15GB cap. For that price in the US, Comcast will offer you 20Mbps down and a 250 GB monthly cap.

I'm going to try and relate this to a physical scenario.

Let's say I have an amazingly well-off art gallery. I own my building (server), pay my utilities (bandwidth), and create everything in my store myself (content). My store is sitting on Broadway in San Diego, accessible to anyone in the county. One day, without notice, the city puts a toll booth in front of ONLY my entrance, because my store is much more popular than any of my neighbors. I can do nothing to remove this toll booth.

Is this fair?

That depends, can you create a magic portal to Broadway in NYC?

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Yes.

Lenas, you use that as an example, and yet you are asking the Gov't to give themselves regulatory control? A bit ironic, don't you think?

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Then that's as fair as anything gets.

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The only thing I want the government to do, is to keep everything the same. I think we can all agree that the gov is pretty good at doing nothing.

If the end result of keeping NN means that I have to pay higher fees to access tier 1 network lines, that's fine. What I DON'T want is having to pay an extra fee every month to access Youtube, Wikipedia or the myriad of websites I already own and maintain. I guess that translates to me being okay with a higher price of entry, but once you're in, you should be able to get anywhere.

I might be confusing the two laws, but let me ask you this. As a content-provider how would you feel about a cable company coming to you and saying your website won't be available on our network unless you share some of the cost of the bandwidth? In other words you have to pay your hosting service for their bandwidth, pay the cable company to offset the bandwidth being used by their customers and when you go home you have to pay them again twice (once as a user and once as a provider) to access your own site?

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I'd say that's the cable company's problem. If they can't provide unlimited service, they shouldn't offer it. If they want to cap their bandwidth it's up to the consumer to decide if their offerings are worth it. I'm fine with capping totals, but site-specific bandwidth use and charging is crazy. As a consumer, I already pay my cable company extra for speed increases, I would have no problem doing the same for bandwidth increases so long as the caps are reasonable and price scaling is uniform.

I don't want that either, Lenas, but I think that once you let the Gov't have some direct control over something it sees that more and more control needs to be taken.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

I'm one of the last mile guys and to be honest its the promises of politicians that is cementing providers with their fifedoms.

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A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill