FCC revisited: Net neutrality changes are misleading and not benign, says Gewirtz

[remoandiris]

Meh.  AFAIK, the next person in the WH can put his peeps on the FCC board and they can change things, too.  IIRC, the policy being changed has been in effect for only 2 years.  Hard to believe life as we know it is ending if a 2 year old policy is over.  

[Dutch_12078]

Those regulations were put in place because the service providers were starting to abuse the long standing trust based system.

[Dutch_12078]

1 hour ago, Al F said:

What I don't understand about this issue is just why isn't the internet data treated the same as electricity or water coming to a sticks and bricks. 

The electric usage is often brought up as an example of equal access to usage.  However no one seems to want to say I have to pay more for the amount of electric I use. 

That is if I use more electric or water I pay for how much more I use.

On the internet, if I want to watch movies and consume hundreds (thousands???) of gigabytes of data in a month, shouldn't I be charged more than those of us who only consume 20-30GB a month? 

By the same token if Netflix is putting out millions upon millions of gigabytes a day/week/month shouldn't they be paying a lot for that amount of data?

Internet service providers are not classed as "utilities" like the electric and water providers. The industry has long fought against being given that label since it would greatly restrict the ways they could take more money from us. The net neutrality issue isn't about how much data we use, it's about the service providers having control over what we access and how fast we can access it. If a service provider that also owns a streaming service for instance, and wants to prevent us from accessing a competitive streaming service or just slow it down to the point of being unusable, now they'll be able to do that.

[Mark and Dale Bruss]

There have been comments that electrical cost is even among the users.  Sorry, there are special electrical rate pricing for large business users, kinda of what the anti-net neutrality proponents say for the Internet.

[RV_]

Mark that was a good explanation. What if an entire region had both their cable companies, like here we have one in Shreveport, and a different one here in Bossier City across the Red River, yet neither competes with the other, they stay on their side of the river. One more thing to add to it. Under Net Neutrality I Pay for my access to the Internet, and Escapees pay for theirs to host this website. Without Net Neutrality the cable providers can decide that Netflix must pay them a "toll" in addition to what they pay for their service with their provider.

What the ISPs (Internet Service Providers) can now do is make any competitor, like Sling TV, which I stream to get the basic cable channels, CNN, and HBO, pay extra until Sling TV costs the same as the cable companies. When they deregulated the ma Bell monopoly, they allowed smaller startups to use the existing telephone infrastructure. I think that would be a good idea for Internet. Then, service and cost become the major competitive differences. We are moving to the Denver area most likely this spring. Where we are moving they have a choice of three ISPs for broadband.

Put even more simply, if Chrysler was the first dealer in your hometown, then Ford would go to the next town so that no other car manufacturer dealers can compete in your city. That is what the big cable providers do.