I'll bite. There's a growing portion of people who realise that the internet we all love exsists only because of the investment those "evil" ISPs have been making since the mid 90s. And we don't believe any ISP would do anything other than continue to make a faster, cheaper, better internet experiance as time goes on.
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In fact, if you understand how politicians make money, it's pretty easy to understand why Net Neutrality was so frightening when it was applied in 2015. Until 2015, the internet was the fastest growing, most opportunistic industry in the history of mankind (still is for that matter).
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To make money, politicians (both D and R) take money from large companies in exchange for passing legislation/regulation that gives those donating companies some kind of market advantage. A legislative advantage for one company means a disadvantage for all the others and more importantly a disadvantage for the consumer.
Until 2015 the government didnt have any ability to influence the internet industry so politicians didnt have anything to sell. How interested do you think politicians would be in getting their fingers in on the largest market in the world??
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And if you were a politician that wanted to step into the market, what would your sales pitch be to the public? "Let thr government regulate the internet so we can give advantages to the highest bidders so they can have less competition and pass all the extra expense down to their customers" or "you need the government to protect you from the greedy corperations (and just ignore the fact that everything was amazing before we made up this problem that doesnt exsist)"
I'm certainly not suggesting that Net Neutrality supporters are unintelligent, not by a long shot! I think the angle the administration took to take away young people's Netflix was frighteningly clever and manipulative.
The thing EVERYONE needs to remember when dealing with DC is that it's ALWAYS about the money and power! ALWAYS!
Good stuff.
Of all the arguments, not trusting government is probably the most important.
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· 6 years ago
Princess has been reading a lot of FCC propaganda. What they didn't tell her was that the ISP didn't put up with the investments for nothing, the companies got monopoly and tax benefits (like AT&T ie) so it was actually the american TAX payer (so not the rich americans or the corporations) who paid for the infrastructure. Todays conflict is between the pure ISP (who pay for maintaining) and the content providers (streaming services) and cloud services who have not contributed Jack to finance the infrastructure but heavily benefit from it by using a lot of the total bandwidth, But instead of making the ISP and content/cloud providers come to a deal, the trumpernment rather has the small citizen pay for it while making huge gifts to rich people and corporations and openly bribing this a33hole Bob Corker by making him a personal million dollar tax gift. Way to go, land of the free!
Okay, that? That right there? That's the end goal. The entire purpose of a mass disinformation campaign is to obscure the truth so much, make it so difficult, on either side of the fence, to dig out the truth, that we start automatically distrusting the veracity of *all* media and thus revert to either burying our heads in the sand, or simply believing what aligns best with our personal beliefs.
Whoa, there. I generally research my shit, but me talking about the truth on this one specific topic doesn't fix the problem. Find yourself a couple of good journalistic review sources, suss out which news sources look like they're most reliable, and look for related news on the topic. I admit to sometimes cheaping out by just searching for the topic, knocking out anything with inflammatory language in the headline, and then cross-referencing the remaining sources against a couple of journalistic review sites.
WaPo did us prouder than I expected this year by quashing an attempted false lead about Roy Moore.
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· 6 years ago
*sigh* ok, let's try this: what is untrue in what I said above?
What? I didn't object to anything you said. My objection was to yimmye's "everyone's reading propaganda" instead of directly trying to straighten anything out.
@halfdeadhammerhead , the only truth we can know for sure is what we can observe and deduce from those observations. Is Obamacare good or bad? Dont listen to anyone, just look at your cost and coverage and answer the question. Same goes for internet, what changed in 2015 as a result of NN? Gun control, abortion, economic health..... the list goes on.
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The only thing i know for sure is that every place we get our information from has a bend of somekind.
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· 6 years ago
" Dont listen to anyone, just look at your cost and coverage and answer the question." - yea, cause there is only one person that matters, right? Smh...
Anyone else get a thick feeling of dread when they think about this? First our healthcare, then the DACA kids, and now our internet. I feel physically sick when I think about the future of this country. We aren't progressing, we're restricting
What about all the #not My President people? They taught me that I can just say something and it’s true. #not my weight problem, #not my governor, #not my debt, #not my dog crap in the yard
Equinox, have you ever considsred the fact that there are an equal amount of people in this country who view those changes as a huge relief? Or the possibility that those 63 million Trump boters might know something that you don't?
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I'm not telling you what to think, im just encouraging you to seek to understand what it was that rubbed 63 million Americans so raw that they were willing to put an egotistical bully in the whitehouse in hopes of changing the direction our country was on. Still, those people are steadfastly standing behind his ever embarrassing shitshow and putting up with being called every steriotype in the book when they tell someone they support tax cuts, small government, draining the swamp, the dismantling of Obamacare, free market or controlled imigration.
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I promise you, there is genuine and warranted concern for where we were headed with Obama and Hillary. Be leery of anyone promising to provide for you without asking for anything in return.
It won’t be a quick death. It’ll be slowly changing the streaming speeds. It’ll be blocking certain websites without warning. It’ll be charging more for faster internet service for certain providers while slowing others down.
It will be an internet explorer paced death.
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· 6 years ago
Also this person probably isn’t from the us and so they are unaffected for now
Who here enjoys toll roads? Who wants to pay a toll every time they drive on a new street? That's what the Internet will be like. I already pay a flat rate to access the Internet, nothing extra for downloads or certain sites.
Yeah. We got net neutrality in 2015 for two reasons. 1) We kept getting shit happening like an ISP in North Carolina in 2004 suddenly deciding they were port-blocking all VoIP communications, Verizon blocking text messages based on content in 2007, and, in 2012, AT&T blocking consumers from using FaceTime unless they bought a specific super-expensive plan, and 2) because ISPs WANTED it because they kept getting sued for antitrust violations because a lot of them function essentially in a regional monopoly. When regulated and provided as a utility rather than a consumer service, antitrust laws do not apply. I am wondering how long it will take for the antitrust suits to kick up again....
@pokethebear the EU has a basic structure for net neutrality, with some countries, like Slovenia and the Netherlands, where I live, who have stronger net neutrality rules. China has one of the most sophisticated internet filters, they completely control and censor what people are allowed to see. Not something I’d look forward to if my country decided to repeal net neutrality (though China’s censorship is mandated by the state).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_law
Wait! Guest who was talking about toll roads....
you're right! Tolls suck! Tell me, who operates these tolls and financially benefits from them? Who takes a higher % of your money when you make more? Who takes $.45 from you every time you pump a gallon of gas or takes 8% of almost every single purchase you make! Who takes proportionally more money from you ever year if you buy a bigger house or a more expensive car?
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I can do this all day, but my point is that fear of stupid fees for more usage is a play out of the government handbook thats as old as taxation itselfe! And you guys seriously think that same government is going to pull a 180 when it comes to the internet?
You think this time, they're looking out for the people and dont intend to get a piece of the larges $pie on earth?
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You guys are falling for the bait in a scary way! Those fees and levels of service you fear look a LOT more like a government run system than a corperation.
You're worried about Verizon charging for people who want to use a lot of bandwidth?? What about those people who cant get their GPS to work because another person is facetiming their dog and chewing up all the bandwidth? What if the torrent downloaders are limiting my ability to stream Adel :). Who exactly is entitled to all the available bandwidth???
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Is it really "unfair" to pay more if you use more. Would you be ok with your neighbor downloading so much porn that you cant get Stranger Things to stream any better that 144p or would you demand that the company you pay for service do something to make sure your internet works the way it should?
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deleted
· 6 years ago
The problem is not that you pay more if you use more, it’s that you pay more if you use certain websites. To go back to your toll road analogy, imagine a toll road you previously paid a single fee for to get where you need to go. Now all of a sudden you have to pay extra if you want to take certain exits where previously you did not. That is what people are upset about. This analogy isn’t that good, but it’s the best I could come up with right now
Yimmye, i guess that exactly my point. People are afraid the internet will end up being run like every government entity. But their ironic fix to their fear is to let the government control it. When the kicker is that there was never even a problem in the first place.
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The government is convincing the people that the government needs to save the people from the government.
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It's quite clever actually.
Other than some fake graphs floating around the internet, i haven't seen the issues you speak of, but it really doesnt matter. There's multiple problems in every business and every market. Don't confuse correlation with causation. And even if net neutrality put a stop to some undesirable corperate behaviour, it would have been corrected on its own anyway.
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Take EA for example. They made a rather large business mistake recently, they corrected it on their own, lost a lot of business, learned some big lessons but ultimately adjusted their business model to deliver on customer demand (without the aid of all of government legislation). ISPs will do the same because i assure you, they know where all their money comes from!
Orrrr they'll just continue to get business because they provide a service without which participation in modern society is basically not feasible and because they operate in large regions of the US as monopolies.
Monopolies are a different story and there are plenty of applicable antitrust laws on the books for that so dont confuse the two.
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It's also important to note that there are only very small areas in the country (probably zero) that have an ISP monopoly, and those are extremely rural. Having only one available provider who offers 60mbs or more AND unlimited usage for less than $90/month is NOT a monopoly when there are at least 3 LTE carriers , one DSL, amd 2 satellite carriers that can deliver internet to your location but simply lack in quality, quantity, or price.
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You're using the ISP that you have because they offer the best value available. And you want someone to "control" them for you because you feel entitled to their service.
Oh, no, the monopoly thing doesn't apply to me, thank God. I live in an urban area. No, only about half of my relatives live in a rural area where they have only one ISP. Half of those are lucky enough that they can get around it through tethering to their mobile devices, but the other half are rural enough that cell phone data service is a pipe dream, because the investment for the infrastructure is a negative net present value for the corporation so it's not gonna happen. That, and my spouse's job literally used to be talking on the phone to people for whom his company had the local ISP monopoly, and creatively explaining around the fact that when they bought the licensing to that area, the company had removed a major component of the existing infrastructure because it was expensive to maintain, so service for that state was throttled to 1995 speeds.
So before the net neutrality regulation got pulled your family all had good internet? I dont follow how the two are related?
Also, there are two satellite internet companies tha work with line of sight to the sky, but thats beside the point too.
The big question to me is; do you believe that you or your family is somehow entitled to internet service? Do you seriously believe ISPs have an obligation to supply those people with internet service? Or that your husbands company should be forced to maintain an infrastructure that's a fiscal loss?
It seems to me that people view internet access as if it were a god given right.
"God-given right?" No. God gave us no rights. If you're going by the Christian Bible, as I recall, it's only because He realized it was a touch fucked up and decided not to do it again that He doesn't regularly demand human sacrifice, not because He decided we had the right to life. Human rights are a human invention.
The issue is that the US fails to realize that everyone, corporations included, is better off if the entire population has access to things that form the basic underpinnings of modern community, of which internet access has undeniably become one, at least if you'd like to get a job ever. If that can be reasonably accomplished by a capitalist setup, great. If not, we do shit like the mass subsidization of highway infrastructure and regional utilities. I mean, I'm assuming you don't whinge about the fact that your access to clean water isn't run entirely through a private corporation like Nestle, which argued once that access to clean water also isn't a human right.
You lost me on the religion part.
So you feel entitled to internet access?
To address your assumption: I have my own septic system and a well...with a water pump powered from an electric coop (a privately owned power company that is not a municipality). Also, my garbage is removed by a private company, i heat my house with propane i purchase from a private company (as well as wood that i split), and my ISP is a super small/local long range wifi company (also private).
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And i might ad that the quality, service, and price of EVERYTHING i just wrote above (except internet and garbage that were previously also private) is better than what i recieved from every public utility in every city that ive ever lived.
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So when you claim that governments can deliver better than the private sector, you're wrong, you're very wrong.
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Quick question: at what point did all the investment and infrastructure that ISPs have created stop belonging to them and start belonging to "the entire population"?
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In fact, if you understand how politicians make money, it's pretty easy to understand why Net Neutrality was so frightening when it was applied in 2015. Until 2015, the internet was the fastest growing, most opportunistic industry in the history of mankind (still is for that matter).
.
To make money, politicians (both D and R) take money from large companies in exchange for passing legislation/regulation that gives those donating companies some kind of market advantage. A legislative advantage for one company means a disadvantage for all the others and more importantly a disadvantage for the consumer.
.
And if you were a politician that wanted to step into the market, what would your sales pitch be to the public? "Let thr government regulate the internet so we can give advantages to the highest bidders so they can have less competition and pass all the extra expense down to their customers" or "you need the government to protect you from the greedy corperations (and just ignore the fact that everything was amazing before we made up this problem that doesnt exsist)"
The thing EVERYONE needs to remember when dealing with DC is that it's ALWAYS about the money and power! ALWAYS!
Of all the arguments, not trusting government is probably the most important.
WaPo did us prouder than I expected this year by quashing an attempted false lead about Roy Moore.
.
The only thing i know for sure is that every place we get our information from has a bend of somekind.
.
I'm not telling you what to think, im just encouraging you to seek to understand what it was that rubbed 63 million Americans so raw that they were willing to put an egotistical bully in the whitehouse in hopes of changing the direction our country was on. Still, those people are steadfastly standing behind his ever embarrassing shitshow and putting up with being called every steriotype in the book when they tell someone they support tax cuts, small government, draining the swamp, the dismantling of Obamacare, free market or controlled imigration.
.
I promise you, there is genuine and warranted concern for where we were headed with Obama and Hillary. Be leery of anyone promising to provide for you without asking for anything in return.
It will be an internet explorer paced death.
Look at this. I am not typing because I have written about it on 3-5 posts before. So please do visit the link.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_law
you're right! Tolls suck! Tell me, who operates these tolls and financially benefits from them? Who takes a higher % of your money when you make more? Who takes $.45 from you every time you pump a gallon of gas or takes 8% of almost every single purchase you make! Who takes proportionally more money from you ever year if you buy a bigger house or a more expensive car?
.
I can do this all day, but my point is that fear of stupid fees for more usage is a play out of the government handbook thats as old as taxation itselfe! And you guys seriously think that same government is going to pull a 180 when it comes to the internet?
You think this time, they're looking out for the people and dont intend to get a piece of the larges $pie on earth?
.
You guys are falling for the bait in a scary way! Those fees and levels of service you fear look a LOT more like a government run system than a corperation.
.
Is it really "unfair" to pay more if you use more. Would you be ok with your neighbor downloading so much porn that you cant get Stranger Things to stream any better that 144p or would you demand that the company you pay for service do something to make sure your internet works the way it should?
.
The government is convincing the people that the government needs to save the people from the government.
.
It's quite clever actually.
.
Take EA for example. They made a rather large business mistake recently, they corrected it on their own, lost a lot of business, learned some big lessons but ultimately adjusted their business model to deliver on customer demand (without the aid of all of government legislation). ISPs will do the same because i assure you, they know where all their money comes from!
.
It's also important to note that there are only very small areas in the country (probably zero) that have an ISP monopoly, and those are extremely rural. Having only one available provider who offers 60mbs or more AND unlimited usage for less than $90/month is NOT a monopoly when there are at least 3 LTE carriers , one DSL, amd 2 satellite carriers that can deliver internet to your location but simply lack in quality, quantity, or price.
.
You're using the ISP that you have because they offer the best value available. And you want someone to "control" them for you because you feel entitled to their service.
Also, there are two satellite internet companies tha work with line of sight to the sky, but thats beside the point too.
The big question to me is; do you believe that you or your family is somehow entitled to internet service? Do you seriously believe ISPs have an obligation to supply those people with internet service? Or that your husbands company should be forced to maintain an infrastructure that's a fiscal loss?
It seems to me that people view internet access as if it were a god given right.
The issue is that the US fails to realize that everyone, corporations included, is better off if the entire population has access to things that form the basic underpinnings of modern community, of which internet access has undeniably become one, at least if you'd like to get a job ever. If that can be reasonably accomplished by a capitalist setup, great. If not, we do shit like the mass subsidization of highway infrastructure and regional utilities. I mean, I'm assuming you don't whinge about the fact that your access to clean water isn't run entirely through a private corporation like Nestle, which argued once that access to clean water also isn't a human right.
So you feel entitled to internet access?
To address your assumption: I have my own septic system and a well...with a water pump powered from an electric coop (a privately owned power company that is not a municipality). Also, my garbage is removed by a private company, i heat my house with propane i purchase from a private company (as well as wood that i split), and my ISP is a super small/local long range wifi company (also private).
.
And i might ad that the quality, service, and price of EVERYTHING i just wrote above (except internet and garbage that were previously also private) is better than what i recieved from every public utility in every city that ive ever lived.
.
So when you claim that governments can deliver better than the private sector, you're wrong, you're very wrong.
.
Quick question: at what point did all the investment and infrastructure that ISPs have created stop belonging to them and start belonging to "the entire population"?