RoR: Forum

Maybe it is because I do not live in a major media market, but I have never felt like I have been the victim of an ISP's policy on internet access. The only problem I have had has to do with the government sponsored monopoly they have on my town.

Has anyone here had and experience on the web of the type discussed in the article?

Post 1

Friday, October 23, 2009 - 8:35pm

The issue, Lee, is that local carriers provide internet access and telephony based on profitability and shared use. You can buy "unlimited" local and long distance phone access from Verizon, but if you use that access to let all your neighbours call Pakistan via internet phone service 24 hours a day you will soon get a call telling you that you need to switch to paying commercial rates. "Unlimited" access doesn't mean you can use the full capacity of the local switch. The same thing happens with file sharing and so forth. Verizon carries its own television service via Fios over its fiber optic cables. If every one of its customers decides to log on to youtube to see some newsworthy event, traffic to youtube will be slowed so as not to interfere with Verizon's broadcast television service. Capacity is alloted at the rate that is most profitable. Just as with the water companies, capacity is designed to cover standard usage, not to cover record peek periods without a decrease in flow. To do that would require building a hugely expensive overcapacity which would at most times not be used. Fiber optic cables are the greatest capital investment of the last decade in this country. Content providers who support "net neutrality" are asking that their capacity be rationed out to "the public" as if they were a publicly owned natural resource.

Certain content providers want a high capacity at all times because they make money based on high speed data transfer. Think about watching movies on your modem. The movie provider doesn't pay your internet provider. During peak internet usage times it may happen that data transfer from the movie provider will be slowed to all users. That movie provider will complain that it is unfair that his capacity is slowed when download from, say, wikipedia aren't slowed, because wikipedia is mostly just low volume text.

The local carriers have built their networks and offered their services based on calculations of capacity and profitability. You signed a service agreement when you bought their service. Now content providers want to abrogate those contracts because internet access is a "right." They don't want to have to pay carriers a cut of their profits for the content they distribute. They want to distribute that content while the carriers bear the costs. When the carriers don't do this they call it "discrimination."

The threat of instituting net neutrality is a means of ensuring campaign contributions from phone and cable providers. The republicans are in on this. After Trent "MCI" Lott retired, John McCain became the largest recipient of bribes from telecom lobbyists. The FCC is corrupt to the core.

Post 2

Friday, October 23, 2009 - 8:46pm

Nope!

People can get internet access everywhere, to anywhere.

Never has Comcast told me, "sorry, you can't see this site until you visit this site first." Or, "you have to pay a premium to visit this section of the web." As long as I pay my bill, Comcast doesn't give a damn.

I don't even think the idea ever crossed their mind until someone in the government thought of it first.

Why some stupid companies like Amazon, Google, Skype, and Facebook think they're somehow better off with gateway providers under the government gun is beyond me. The problems are complete fiction. The potential for abuse is fiction.

However, if Comcast decided to offer faster service for a higher fee, that's their business. If some sites are only available at that higher speed, then that's their business, too, but it's amazing how any government regulation hog could think this would somehow unfairly benefit anyone. Who cares?

Post 3

Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 8:22am

I have to side with the broadband providers, and against 'net neutrality' advocates. In fact, I think the term 'net neutrality' tries to suggest something it is not.

Nevertheless, I do think the issues being discussed may be more complex than Ted or Teresa suggest. Providers, who are contracted to deliver certain minimum levels of service to their customers, can have their services compromised by "broadband hogs". However, if providers can selectively squeeze the baud rate on content providers they feel are clogging their systems, it is clear they as easily have the power to selectively squeeze the baud rates based upon other, less objective, considerations - e.g. don't like a politically conservative web service, cut its speed. So, whether abuse will occur or not, the clear potential for abuse is there. Still, I'm against regulation, any of which I'm sure will address the issue inaccurately, and poorly.

Of course users can always switch to another internet provider, but how well can one tell whether it is their provider slowing their speed, or the website itself that's sluggish (some are clutzy).

jt

Post 4

Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 9:10am

So if I am reading this right, 'net neutrality' is a solution in search of a problem.
The arguments have usually confused me because I could never see a reason why a carrier would want to restrict access to anything. It would not be in their best interest to do so.

Post 5

Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 10:03am

My understanding is that it is a made-up problem used as an excuse to create government control.

Post 6

Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 10:51am

I am not an expert on this topic. I don't know the technical details of how carriers respond to peak usage issues. My assumption is that if data transfer is slowed due to peaks in usage, carriers will slow down all non-premium traffic. For example, I would assume that Verizon, which offers its own TV service, would slow down its transmission of all internet data if volume issues were disrupting its capacity to provide its own TV service.

What I do know is that Verizon both reads its customers disclaimers and provides written notification in its user agreements that transmission speeds are not guaranteed.

Many adolescents and leftists may suffer from the illusion that internet access is a natural resource, provided by daddy or the state (is there any difference?), not an optional and innovative new service provided by hard working and risk taking private business enterprises at a real cost and under real world physical and economic limitations.

Were carriers actually slowing down or intentionally blocking transmission by competitors (or ideologically objectionable content providers) we can be sure that both those competitors and even the employees of the carriers would make such practices known to consumers. The original "net neutrality" mistake was when the founders allowed Congress to regulate interstate trade as an attempt to stop the abuses of the states. The proper solution was not to cede the power to regulate commerce to the Congress but to forbid such regulation entirely. It is local government-mandated carrier monopolies that provide franchised carriers with dictatorial powers. The appropriate response by government is not to get involved in such imagined carrier/content problems, but to get out of the way so consumers can solve such problems themselves.

Post 7

Saturday, October 24, 2009 - 4:49pm

Saturday, March 21, 2015 - 5:26am