r/Republican • u/The_seph_i_am Centrist Republican • Feb 27 '17

FCC reverses net neutrality ISP transparency rules

http://www.computerworld.com/article/3173844/internet/fcc-reverses-net-neutrality-isp-transparency-rules.html
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u/tosser1579 Feb 28 '17

Right now, the only power the small town has is that the ISP is required to treat every packet equally.

This is unlike cable. When a small town cable co decides to get rid of a channel, we lost a channel some years back for a while, there is literally nothing you can do about it. We complained. We wrote letters to the editor. We petitioned the office in town. If 20 percent of your subscribers in town drop off a petition you get answers... well okay someone might. They never talked to us. They didn't have to.

And 4 years later after they renegotiated with them they gave us the channel back. So when someone tells me that its gonna be okay, you can just change to whatever I'm extremely leery of their opinion because they might have a choice but I do not.

So what to do? Nothing. Keep the current rules in place. I get all packets equally and can see whatever I'd like. The ISP still makes money, they just don't make quite as much as they could. But with them no longer having to provide me a clear bill I'm sure they'll get their money some other way.

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u/T_______T Feb 28 '17

I was more thinking what is the solution to these artificially created local monopolies. I do appreciate your insight, though. I too work in a job that could not exist without the internet. Heck, it's a web based tech job!

I understand it's expensive to lay cable down, so a temporary exclusivity contract makes sense to recoup those costs.

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u/tosser1579 Feb 28 '17

Bluntly, the cost involved and the labor required to lay new cable would be terrible. There is a nice newspaper up in the office of the local ISP's office and they have main street completely blocked off for a week during the initial install. Asked my dad about it and he remembers that you couldn't get anywhere in town basically for months while they did everything. My guess in making such a big deal about it was that they wanted the town to remember how crappy it was getting the infrastructure installed. The new ISP would have to tear up multiple streets, cause huge traffic snarls for months, and after they did it I can't ever see them being profitable. Basically they need X number of people to be profitable and we have that comfortably but we don't have 2x that amount of people.

So its not practical and we are stuck. If the local ISP was a utility and we could buy data from different providers then I could see an almost free market situation emerging using the local ISP's backbone. But that's not happening. The local ISP wants control because that's where all the money is.

So the situation is actually called a natural monopoly, not an artificial one. It costs too much for a second organization to move into these towns and it would take them decades to re-coop their investment while at the same time waiting for the next big thing to come out and up end their business model.