FCC’s Ajit Pai says net neutrality’s “days are numbered” under Trump

PirateMk1 said:

Then the problem is with your local government, either not letting them in or stupid deals. The expense is not my problem.

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Mr Person said:

So, the answer is that no you aren't going to honestly read this "contract" you say you have and determine whether:

1. 150 mpbs is the maximum possible rate, subject to variation depending on the factors I mentioned.

2. They in fact promised - impossible to provide - 150 mbps access to any site anywhere on the internet.




Of course the worst thing is how far this is off the point. None of that **** matters if net neutrality goes out the window, because the second that happens, they can (a) change terms of service for anyone on a monthly renewable, (b) change terms of service for everyone agreeing to a new contract such that no speed is guaranteed for a particular site (and that is in the unlikely case I'm wrong, claims to your lawsuits notwithstanding).

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PirateMk1 said:

Hogwash. The Industrial revolution was over 100 years ago.

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PirateMk1 said:

We are in the 21st century in case you haven't noticed and entrepreneurial attorneys rule the land. They sue anything that moves.

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Cardinal said:

They won't be in breach of contract if the thing you're suing them over isn't in the contract.

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PirateMk1 said:

It wasn't in our contract either. We rented a pipe and as much data as we could stuff through it. They are in breach because in order to generate business they are advertising and making claims of certain speeds. They must get really close to providing what they are promising. It is not MY problem the ISP oversold their network and cannot provide what was promised. Think of it as renting a pipe. That pipe has a certain width and pressure. You are renting the pipe based on that width and pressure. If the company fails to provide that pipe on a very consistent basis at that width and pressure then they are breach even if the contract does not state anything regarding width and pressure. If a ISP promises 150Mbs then they are obligated to provide that on a consistent basis whether or not they actually can. If they cant then they essentially committed fraud or negotiated in bad faith.

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Mr Person said:

How you the fact that period starting with the industrial revolution and ending in the first half of the 20th century was "over 100 years ago" make my statement untrue?

For those hard of reading, my statement was that you were either ignorant or lying when you claimed that the revolution in worker safety, child labor, and food safety (among a bunch of others) started with government law and regulation, and that it did not result from lawsuits as you claimed.






/facepalm

You need a cause of action in statute or in common law to sue. You babble about contract law. You are ignorant of the fact or are lying about the fact that without net neutrality, there is nothing to stop every last ISP from inserting provisions into any contracts (and changing terms of service on non-contract monthly renewals) allowing them to throttle you.

How do you not get that? When was the last time you bargained a max 50 mpbs speed up to a maximum 58 mbps speed using "competition"? You didn't. They hold all the cards. If NN goes, you have no power. You won't have a basis for suing because - DUH - nothing will prohibit them from throttling so long as the contract allows it. (It's not a negligence claim, is it? It's not intentional infliction of emotional distress, is it? It's not libel, is it?)

And what about market entrants? No, because of another earlier post you ignored. Market entrants into the cable internet are extremely rare and there are only a few market players, because owners of those who layed cable do not have to share use of their cables. This is unlike telecom industries, which do have to share use - they can charge, but they cannot outright refuse. That means that in an area like mine, no rural backwater, only one company owns the cables: Comcast. And because they don't have to sell access, they can refuse to sell space to any other company that might want to use their cables to function as an ISP.

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Mr Person said:

How you the fact that period starting with the industrial revolution and ending in the first half of the 20th century was "over 100 years ago" make my statement untrue?

For those hard of reading, my statement was that you were either ignorant or lying when you claimed that the revolution in worker safety, child labor, and food safety (among a bunch of others) started with government law and regulation, and that it did not result from lawsuits as you claimed.






/facepalm

You need a cause of action in statute or in common law to sue. You babble about contract law. You are ignorant of the fact or are lying about the fact that without net neutrality, there is nothing to stop every last ISP from inserting provisions into any contracts (and changing terms of service on non-contract monthly renewals) allowing them to throttle you.

How do you not get that? When was the last time you bargained a max 50 mpbs speed up to a maximum 58 mbps speed using "competition"? You didn't. They hold all the cards. If NN goes, you have no power. You won't have a basis for suing because - DUH - nothing will prohibit them from throttling so long as the contract allows it. (It's not a negligence claim, is it? It's not intentional infliction of emotional distress, is it? It's not libel, is it?)

And what about market entrants? No, because of another earlier post you ignored. Market entrants into the cable internet are extremely rare and there are only a few market players, because owners of those who layed cable do not have to share use of their cables. This is unlike telecom industries, which do have to share use - they can charge, but they cannot outright refuse. That means that in an area like mine, no rural backwater, only one company owns the cables: Comcast. And because they don't have to sell access, they can refuse to sell space to any other company that might want to use their cables to function as an ISP.

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PirateMk1 said:

Whatever you say boss.

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Cardinal said:

You can sue them if they are in breach of contract or for false advertising, but if they don't advertise the service and if it's not in the contract, then what?

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Mr Person said:

I should have trusted my intuition that you had nothing to say....

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jonny5 said:

High prices leads to more supply. Basic economics.

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Mr Person said:

Nobody claimed that.

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USViking said:

Hm.

So all those street thingys I see every day which I thought were Fords and and Toyotas are really Rolls Royces? Thanks for straightening me out on that!

And most of those houses all over town which I was sure had to be worth less than $250,000 (Greensboro NC prices), are really worth over $1,000,000? No wonder I could never afford them! But, er, why aren't there more real mansions than anything else?

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Cardinal said:

Net Neutrality is coming to an end, folks. We're past the point of bickering over what Net Neutrality means, whether it constitutes "Hitler for the Internet" (or whatever), and infinitely boring lectures on tcip sockets and ssl protocol. You no longer even need to have an opinion on whether Net Neutrality is good or bad. It's just ending.

Here's what it will mean for you.

1. Your internet use is about to get a lot more expensive.

Right now, your broadband provider is regulated as a title II utility, which means that it must treat internet as an equal playground, no different than gas, electricity and telephone. It can't play favorites between all the websites you go to. With that barrier eliminated, your isp (internet service provider) will be able to pick and choose which sites you can use. It will do this by throttling sites or putting in pay walls for sites that are not offered as a part of their own packages.

So how will you personally notice this difference? Have you noticed that nearly every app and game you download these days has "pay to play" features? Oh, you want another life? That'll be another $1.99. Another fireball spell? $1.99. You want to track your favorite followers on Instagram? $1.99. The equivalent to that will be: "Oh, you want the news package not already offered by Time Warner? That will be $29.99/month. You want to view entertainment not already offered by Time Warner? Another $29.99/month. You want to participate in Debate Politics? That's part of our Forum Package for $29.99/month. Anything not offered as an exclusive package of your isp will be another item you pay for.

2. If you live in rural areas, your internet will (probably) suck a lot more than mine.

Little publicized over the years have been the attempts, a lot of them quite successful, of isps in lobbying state congresses to prevent local towns from setting up their own internet service as possible alternatives to the only commercial internet provider in town. The FCC shut these attempts down where they could, but with a new FCC hostile to such regulation you will no longer be able to choose between Time Warner (for example) and whatever you elect your town council to set up as a choice.

I will be somewhat less affected than you because I live in a major metropolitan area and have a wide variety of choices available to me. Oh, don't worry, if you hate me because I'm a city person, the internet will still get worse for me. It just won't be quite as bad for me as it will for you.

3. Data caps!

Right now the internet provided in your phone package is not regulated by Title II, which means that you're familiar with data caps. As net neutrality is phased out you will see these data caps applied to your regular internet use. This means that all your movie watching, game playing, music listening and file sharing will come to a full stop after a few gigabytes. Anything after that will cost extra at worst, or simply throttled to death at best.

Unless you're using your internet provider's own internet package, of course.

4. If you're a small business owner with your own website, your traffic and business will decrease.

This is actually a subset of the first item on the list. Since everybody's internet providers will be charging extra to use internet sites outside their own packages, that will be considerably less traffic that goes to your site.

FCC’s Ajit Pai says net neutrality’s “days are numbered” under Trump

FCC?s Ajit Pai says net neutrality?s ?days are numbered? under Trump | Ars Technica





To those who see Net Neutrality as a beast that you are happy to finally see slaughtered, can you explain how the end of NN benefits you personally?

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apdst said:

The government isn't going to control the internet? That can only be a good thing.

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Cardinal said:

Well at least you can rest assured knowing you can still get your internet from your wifi instead.

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apdst said:

The government isn't going to control the internet? That can only be a good thing.

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natsb said:

"Gloom, despair, agony on me. Deep dark depression, excessive misery." - HeeHaw


Why does that HeeHaw ditty seem like it should be the liberal theme song?

The Internet grew, expanded, and brought information to people across the nation without Government interference. Then the Government stepped in because of hypothetical "might", "could", and "what if" scenarios projected by the above mentioned liberals. And now that the Internet innovations will once again be free of big brother's stranglehold we hear "Gloom , despair, agony on me..."

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Cardinal said:

You can google a youtube video but you can't even google the relevant information to understand the topic?

Well I guess we all have our priorities.

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Cardinal said:

You can google a youtube video but you can't even google the relevant information to understand the topic?

Well I guess we all have our priorities.

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PirateMk1 said:

You are going to need to clarify your what if scenario here. Most ISP's I know advertise, and state various speed plans. Even the entrepreneur level stuff. Have gotten into industrial level stuff.

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Absentglare said:

You don't understand, at all, what's being discussed. If net neutrality goes away, it's not just the end ISP nodes that will be effected.

Here's a picture:

The ISP provides the DNS server down to the customer end node. That's not the only link where connectivity issues can arise, however, thanks to net neutrality, we haven't had much issue with the giant cloud in the middle, the actual internet.

When you suggest things like "you could just move to California" or "you could just switch providers," you're demonstrating a lack of understanding. That part in the middle of the picture, the actual internet, could no longer be a reliable path for communication. It doesn't matter where you are, there may be destinations that are simply unreachable.

What the dissolution of net neutrality is is the cumbersome and unnecessary restriction of informational freedom for the sake of ISP profits. "Net neutrality is the principle that Internet service providers and governments regulating the Internet should treat all data on the Internet the same, not discriminating or charging differentially by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or mode of communication."

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PirateMk1 said:

Excuse me but net neutrality is only a couple of years old. We have gotten along just fine with out it before then.

Here's the deal. The ISP is the face and has a pipe end. Yes? They are making certain promises about their pipe end. That it will flow so much data and so on. They have to make good on those promises. I sell things and services for a living so I have to deliver what I say I am. Same with the ISP.

Net neutrality is very recent. The internet has been running without it since the 90's and before. Here's another thing ATT is offering a direct TV package were the data the package uses is free and doesn't count against the current cellular data customers data pool. I personally think companies should be able to do that. Netflix can do a deal with ATT to do the same thing. Though to be honest cellular broadband is going to end up like cellular phones with unlimited data anyhow. You can already see it. They let that genie out of the bottle a long time ago. The thing is what everyone on the "net neutrality" side doesn't get is YOU are paying for a pool or a pipe at a rated speed. The ISP is obligated to provide that service as they advertised. They cant just throttle your connection wilily nilly. It is up to you to enforce that. I was part of the ATT throttling lawsuit. We won handily. Just saying.

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Absentglare said:

You're confused. We've had defacto net neutrality since the birth of the internet.

"The term was coined by Columbia University media law professor Tim Wu in 2003, as an extension of the longstanding concept of a common carrier, which was used to describe the role of telephone systems."

The concepts were in development long before the internet. The datacomm industry knows how to build an effective network.

Now, big businesses want to squeeze more money out of American consumers. So they will rate limit traffic, or increase latency on traffic they don't like (like how Comcast could throttle Netflix traffic to compel people to cancel their online subscriptions and buy cable TV from ... Comcast). Hell, they might just dramatically increase latency to force you on a "higher performance" plan that would be, from a technological standpoint, cheaper to provide (adding latency would require deeper buffers and more features, therefore more cost).

While net neutrality prevents the ISP can throttle downstream of the backbone, that's not the only place that throttling can occur. With net neutrality dissolved, they could throttle wherever they want. For example, if another ISP threatens Comcast's market share, Comcast could **** up traffic from the competitor, effectively forcing customers onto Comcasts product.

Now, you say net neutrality is a new thing, but you're completely ****ing wrong. It was in effect long before we had a name for it. It simply became important once ****ty companies like Comcast started exploiting the public for profit.

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PirateMk1 said:

Apparently you didn't get the gist of what I wrote, which is Comcast cannot do what you claim they can do without being in violation of their contract/promises. Lawsuits have already been fought and won over this matter. I was part of the ATT throttling suit. I know. Technically Google Amazon and Netflix can go to their ISP they use which probably is Comcast and say you keep throttling us we are going to sue the hell out of you on behalf of your clients. They have bought and paid for a service which Comcast is failing to provide. Comcast is trying to double and triple dip. All Netflix and Google and Amazon have to do is get that info to their Comcast customers and Comcast will be in a world of hurt.

This all boils down to providing the service you say you will provide, keeping your word. That's it. There plenty of precedent and case law on the side of the customer. I hate the term consumer, its derogatory as far as I am concerned.

As far as internet neutrality in a formal sense it has only been regulated by the FCC for a couple of years max.

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Absentglare said:

They can't sue without a law allowing them to.

The dissolution of net neutrality opens the floodgates for rampant abuse of the American consumer as well as dramatic (and undesriable) changes to both the architecture and the function of the internet as we know it.

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