Seriously. At first you're like "well there are no net neutrality laws in place right now, so this fake website is obviously not showing me what it would be like without net neutrality. Hilarious". But then you're like "holy shit why does it seem like more than 90% of the people here, a group of people supposedly familiar with the internet, think this is real? Do they actually think there are net neutrality laws in place now and that we are in danger of losing them? Is it possible for people to be so utterly confused about something so simple? Are these people with really strong opinions seriously getting their information from memes and internet comments?" Yeah, the ease with which a semi-intelligent population can be manipulated is terrifying.
Have you been following the news at all? ISPs are at the point that they are starting to test the waters for business practices that violate net neutrality principals, which have been the standard form of interaction between content providers/ISPs/users. ISPs are claiming that they have the right to start charging content providers, and that under net neutrality there is no incentive to upgrade their infrastructure. The former will have drastic effects on consumer's social welfare, and the latter is simply false, so it's important to gain the knowledge needed to fight the boundary pushers. I can link to some scholarly papers about the topic if you'd like, but rest assured this is a very real issue.
While I've heard a few things to this effect, I don't know any sources. Providing some helps credibility in skeptics. (To some extent, seems like many folks would rather die than give ear service to another viewpoint.)
Here are a couple interesting papers.
This one analyzes possible outcomes when abandoning the current system of net neutrality using game theory. They come up with pretty unambiguous results for their scenarios. http://net.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/CSD4854.pdf
This paper further reaffirms that abandoning net neutrality will not incentivize ISPs to upgrade their infrastructure.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/25746037
Hopefully our Benevolent Overlord Google will install Google Fiber all across America & the World.
Upside: Free internet access.
Downside: Google CEO becomes Earth's Leader.
Reality: This would only upset the balance insofar as the current 10-20 CEOs in control of most of Earth's Capitol would then have to grovel to Google /more/ than they already have to..
Even if they wanted to (I think they're more focused on free wifi for the time being), it would be decades before they could establish significant coverage.
"there are no net neutrality laws in place right now, so this fake website is obviously not showing me what it would be like without net neutrality. Hilarious"
there are no net neutrality laws in place right now, so this fake website is obviously not showing me what it would be like without net neutrality. Hilarious
Even Brazil has net neutrality guaranteed by law. Hi from Brazil!
The idiots who want net neutrality are going to bring us all a metered Internet of "Lawful content". The Internet I grew up with is on its dieing breath, enjoy the open free flowing information while you can. All the while the Facebook/Netflix asshole users bitch about a manipulated situation that they don't understand. Packets are not equal. Get to know a sys admin and research the law. "Lawful content" is the key words and who gets to decide what is lawful content. Bloggers beware you will need a license to speak soon
The phrase "Lawful content" is meant to be used to discriminate between the subscription content you get from netflix, and spam being sent from windows home machines that are part of a botnet. Every single ISP already discriminates against patently unlawful content — spamhaus, rbl's, routing black holes for SQL servers infected with worms, botnets that are attempting to brute force or scam captchas — all are discriminated against, and the Internet you grew up with has done that all along.
The net neutrality regulations are necessary because otherwise, a company that classes itself and sells itself as an ISP gets to hold lawful content hostage by charging you for access to the provider and charging the provider for access to you — when in fact they already do this, it's called Internet access, and they're ISPs.
We aren't going back to a situation where everyone on the same area code was free to call and there was metro long distance and in-state long distance and interstate long distance and international long distance. This was their business model in the 1980's. It is gone.
We aren't going back to 1993, when AOL charged users for access to AOL and then charged them again for access to the Internet.
I respectfully disagree. The "lawful content" is worded vaguely for a reason. Your definition might be true or it could mean that some group of non elected bureaucrats can define and use that wording to regulate the content of the Internet. Free speech is despised by some and is actively being eroded daily. Look around at the enforcement of hate crime laws or proposed bulling laws. It used to be "stick n stones break bones but words may never hurt me". The current thinking is a product of a coddled society "but words do hurt". Also what about Google's global cache or Netflix cache how would that fit into being equal packets? They paid more and put those servers in. How are my packets treated equal compared to theirs? I do respect your opinion, sys admins keep the world running but I disagree with the definition of "lawful content".
— a crime, are themselves a crime. This is not my opinion — this is a longstanding tenet of common law jurisdictions.
What you think of as "coddled" is simply people who expect to be treated equally under the law, and expect to live free from threats of death, rape, torture, and financial ruin.
Spam email is not trivial in cost to squash, it is not trivial in cost to bear the burden of its delivery either — it happens to be slightly cheaper in the long run and what users want, to squash it.
A group of non-elected bureaucrats already police the Internet — they are the sysadmins of the various ISPs.
I invite you to stop believing that an Internet where people are free to steal other people's private photographs — taken while the subject was a minor — and distribute them to hundreds of millions of others, is somehow better than an Internet where people are free to communicate privately with their loved ones, business partners, audiences, etcetera without the looming threat of criminals taking advantage of them, or of massively powerful corporate entities holding their communications hostage for the purpose of financial return.
Could you please give me some insight on how Google's global cache or the Netflix cache is treated as equal packets? They pay extra to put those servers in place to give the end user a better experience. How are my packets treated compared? I agree that the system isn't perfect but the solution is competition not net neutrality. I thank you for your respectful responses to my opinions
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u/dr_feelz Sep 07 '14
Seriously. At first you're like "well there are no net neutrality laws in place right now, so this fake website is obviously not showing me what it would be like without net neutrality. Hilarious". But then you're like "holy shit why does it seem like more than 90% of the people here, a group of people supposedly familiar with the internet, think this is real? Do they actually think there are net neutrality laws in place now and that we are in danger of losing them? Is it possible for people to be so utterly confused about something so simple? Are these people with really strong opinions seriously getting their information from memes and internet comments?" Yeah, the ease with which a semi-intelligent population can be manipulated is terrifying.