looks like big business won again
http://gothamist.com/2014/05/15/net_neutrality_getting_more_dead_by.php
MFers.
FCC vote today; what’s everyone’s thoughts on this? I can’t imagine streaming House of Cards season 3 at anything less than lightning fast speeds…
I don’t see how the system is broken, so why do we need intervention? This is just about bargaining between ISPs and content providers. The latter needs investment from the former to improve services so they’re trying to get them to contribute.
The idea that “net neutrality” (or whatever this really winds up being…ahem…Obamacare) keeps big business in check is pretty absurd. Google and Netflix are the biggest beneficiaries of it and their combined market cap is roughly equal to the combined market cap of the top 5 ISPs (which have diversified businesses beyond Internet service).
Net Neutrality is hard to reconcile with my political beliefs. On one hand, I believe a company, the ISPs in this case, should be able to charge whatever they want for the services they provide. If they want to cap bandwidth and charge extra for additional data usage, do it.
But, that only works if it’s a competitive landscape and ISPs are nearly monopolies so customers get screwed. As much as I dislike the idea of the government telling private companies what they can and cannot do, in this particular case, I think the government has to step in until a more competitive market evolves.
tl;dr - Cable companies are even worse than the government.
I’d tend to agree with Sweep. I’m all for a company having autonomy for setting their own prices, but in this case the prices just go up with no real subsequent drop in demand. A pretty inelastic product due to lack of competition.
Although I’d agree with Inky in that is is kind of interesting seeing Netflix/Google playing victim when they are pretty big in their own right. However, they do operate in a more competitive environment.
I feel like a solid 95% of the people who I’ve heard say they are in favor of net neutrality don’t know much about it more than meaningless slogans.
There are perfectly good reasons to favor some kinds of traffic over others. I can easily name a few: online games, internet telephone, or video conference services; each requires fewer dropped packets than if I’m downloading a torrent file.
The other argument is that somehow some small company is going to get hurt by “non network neutrality”. There’s no reason that a small company that is using little bandwidth would need to pay for extra services on a content delivery network. The companies needing CDNs are ones that use huge amounts of bandwidth, like Netflix. And of course Netflix is the biggest voice in favor of net neutrality because they want to be able to reduce their costs.
Basically, when I hear someone talk about how important net neutrality is, I really think they’ve just bought into the Netflix koolaid
I think this depends on local markets (some have plenty of more options than others). But you also need to consider what higher margins for ISPs will bring: more entrants. We have already seen Google move downstream with Google Fiber, and wireless data speeds and reliability are improving to the point that cellular providers networks could become viable options. Locking in lower costs for content providers will likely either shift those costs to the consumer or result in lower levels of infrastructure investment by ISPs.
^Living in KC I can tell you about Google Fiber. First off, it’s awesome. Secondly, there were and still are, huge barriers to entry, even for Google. In most cases, they need to use existing infrastructure to lay their cable (telephone poles, underground pipes, etc.) and it’s not easy to gain access to those. So, the idea that new ISPs with smaller resources could enter the market is a tough sell. In many cases, you’re talking about laying your own pipe/lines which is just too cost prohibitive.
That said, Google is making KC a more competitive market for the other ISPs. Time Warner is basically giving their customers the finger (surprise, surprise), but AT&T just came out with a plan exactly like Google’s. Same speed at the exact same price. For someone like me who lives in a part of the city that couldn’t come to an agreement with Google to use the existing powerlines (stupid local government officials), I now have the option of getting essentially the same service from AT&T which is in my neighborhood.
So, yes, competition will increase but so far it’s been from existing players and I don’t really want to wait for new ISPs to pop up while I’m staring at XHamster buffering.
I think part of the reason that people are concerned is that this FCC decision might affect scalability of certain products or businesses. If you have a low margin business model, or a business where revenues will be delayed for some reason (like many new technology companies), your growth might be hampered if bandwidth requirements grow faster than revenues.
With that being said, I do believe many people protest anti-net neutrality legislation without actually being informed on the issue. Even if net neutrality has positive effects, these effects are probably not as significant as they are made out to be.
I would be concerned if, for instance, Comcast developed a video streaming service and prioritized their own traffic over Netflix. However, there will probably be another antitrust law that addresses this.
can you PM me soem good torrent sites. thanks
^You’ll have better luck just googling “game of thrones torrent” and seeing what pops up. Google is a better “torrent site” than anything else you’ll find.
Isohunt used to be great. Bummer. Or you could go back to using Limewire. The old version still works. Let me know how long it takes for the feds to bust down your door though.
What about KAT?
^Yeah, aside from when TPB is working they’re probably the most popular.
I used to go to TPB, SumoTorrent, isohunt, and KAT individually looking for whatever, but then it dawned on me I could just google it and have the search engine check all the sites for me. Google’s never let me down.
I don’t think they’re selling browsing history with your identity attached, so I doubt those plans will work. I think it’s more like they’re selling browser history for millions of people in semi anonymous blocks so marketing folks can look for correlations between interests.
From a total free marketers perspective, we would want to say that the less regulation there is on ISPs, the better. However, as you put it, they’re worse than the governement, they’re monopolies in a lot of the areas they work in, and work to keep competitors out.
I’d think that net neutrality is important so long as there isn’t an actual free market with multiple players competing on offerings to begin with. Putting all the burdens on the subscribers to these services (to move to an area that offers the services they want, for instance), which are, lets be real here, utilities, and also having fewer regulations protecting them, isn’t a good thing. Sure, there being so few players in the space now is partly (largely) the governments fault. But unless you’re going to change that, then make some reasonable regulations about how these utility providers should act, and it seems to me that the way in which you’re using the tubes being treated on a flat, “neutral” basis, is reasonable. Not that government does any better providing services (look at flint for example), but ISPs could still probably make fine enough money. Shit, I think it’d be a better regulation to make the ISPs get fines or reduce your charge if they don’t provide the speeds they claim to be offering. They throttle the shit out of people.
But it wouldn’t be illegal to do so, presumably.
No, I think giving out account / identity information would still be considered illegal. Not sure though.