I've sent messages to my representatives.

As far as the internet for free speech. You might find that your provider blocks specific leaning political websites that they don't agree with, or that maybe criticize them.

think of how electricity to your home works. it doesn't matter what you want to power, you plug it in, and a steady stream of power flows to that device, no matter what it is.

that's what net neutrality ensures, only for data, video streaming, websites, and so on. net neutrality simply says ISPs cannot throttle or block internet traffic based on the type or source of the traffic.

now imagine that the power company had the ability to detect what device you were plugging in to each outlet, and started coming out with plans -- "oh you have the basic power plan. it only covers lamps and appliances. if you want to power that xbox, you have to upgrade to gamer power plus for an extra $9.95 a month. also, we are having a little spat with Sony right now so we don't support powering Playstations or Sony televisions at this time. we're using our 40,000 customers as leverage against them. we also noticed you have a pinball machine ... we don't consider powering those devices a high priority, so you can only power that device after 11pm."

this is what the ISPs want to do with the internet. they want the ability to throttle and block internet traffic at their whim, so they can ransom bandwidth or access and extort both the consumers and content providers into paying them additional fees for privileged access to every corner of the internet. net neutrality simply says they have to treat all data and all websites equally.

the concept of net neutrality has been around since the invention of the internet. it was a core principle from its inception as a communication network for universities. early on in the internet's life as a consumer product, ISPs cooperated with the principles of net neutrality. there were several reasons why it wasn't a big problem before 2006 or so: partially, they simply didn't have the corporate infrastructure or technology in place yet to monetize the idea of throttling and blocking specific web sites and services. partially, the internet was still in a major "growth" phase, and it was basically all they could do to keep up with bandwidth demands. all focus was expanding speed and access.

in 2010, the Federal government and the FCC introduced legislation to codify this core internet principle, because ISPs had begun to monkey around with throttling and blocking sites and services they didn't like, and using their customers as leverage in order to extort other corporate entities. nerds on every side of the political spectrum had been worried that ISPs would eventually start violating the principles of net neutrality for years, and now it was actually happening. the FCC actually coming out and proposing and implementing rules to make net neutrality the law of the land was a tremendous win for every user of the internet.

and now the former Verizon lawyer who Trump appointed head of the FCC is dismantling it.

Hell,I thought all you Coloradans loves government interference and control.

it's funny. before the GOP decided it was against net neutrality, literally everyone who knew about net neutrality was in favor of it (well, unless you were a Verizon lawyer). it didn't matter if you were Republican, Democrat, libertarian, socialist, or a sovereign citizen weirdo. nerds were united at least on this one issue. now the GOP is working overtime to convince its constituents that net neutrality is somehow a bad thing. it's preposterous.

This is one reason why Washington should stay out of regulating the internet and creating rules over it.

By 'helping' they have screwed up several several industries in the last 20 years including mortgages, healthcare and college education.

Regulation makes things more expensive, stifles innovation and creates barriers to entry. These is so anti-Silicon valley/ High Tech, I can't believe people want the politicians to get involved. (i know, someone wants to make or save money on it)

The telecoms invested in the infrastructure and should be able to make money on it.

There are no more monopolies in telecom (except in very remote areas) so stop regulating it. People have more options than ever so let them figure out what they like best.

Restrictions/ preferences/ throttling can all be overcome by paying the provider more or changing providers. So for all intents and purposes this is regulating the price of services which is wrong.

So i'm not sure which words describe the side I'm on since the law/act/regulation Titles usually mean the opposite; but I am on the NO Regulations side.

I love these analogies but this one...um...toll roads?

I hate toll roads and the Indiana government is trying to implement some because we have been relatively free of them till now.

Coming back from Allentown I witnessed first hand how terrible toll roads can be. An awful fleecing of the general public.

Screenshot_2017-05-19-12-53-23-1 (resized).png

This thread will be locked soon. The mere mention of government sends them into convulsions.

I don't know who you are or what your background is, but let me give you some reasons you should listen to me. I've been using the Internet since the 80s -- professionally since 1994. I was giving corporate seminars on how the Internet worked back in 1995. I wrote a best selling book on Internet commerce in 1997. I know my TCP packets from my UDP packets, I run my own servers, I've overseen hundreds of web projects with budgets up to 10 million dollars.

I can tell you what the Internet will look like if Net Neutrality is removed, because I've experienced it in two different forms: in the 1980s and just two weeks ago in China.

In the 1980s there were commercially developed alternatives to the Internet - AOL and CompuServe being a couple of the big ones, but other telcos had gateways too like MCI. They were awful, slow, expensive, and limited. If you wanted to send an email from CompuServe to AOL, it cost you $1. For each email. In the 80s. Each little walled garden allowed you to see and do only what each telco wanted you to see and do. There were no pioneers. No small businesses. It was only because of the Internet's success with the openly developed World Wide Web protocol that the telcos were forced to shut down their walled gardens and switch to providing Internet access.

The second place I've experienced what an unregulated Internet will look like is China. I was there just two weeks ago. The Great Firewall of China blocked my access to many services including Netflix and ALL Western news sites all because the Chinese government didn't want me to see them. Oh also the air quality in Beijing when I was there was 905 and in some places 999 (just a reminder that the effect on people is unknown above 500, and 300 is considered so hazardous nobody should be outside), because they don't regulate their air quality you know. On TV they weren't talking about the air quality problem. And if you think food is safe in China, put "poison baby food China" into a search engine you trust. Right now there are a lot of choices. But you better do it fast before access is blocked due to the removal of Net Neutrality regulations.

We all have to remember that corporations in the USA are legally required to put profit ahead of anything else, except the law. Remove regulations and they will be legally required to profit on us any way they can. Is that really the kind of world we want to live in? Is profit so important that it Trumps clean food, clean air, free access to all information?

You aren't seriously saying we should get rid of regulation and go back to what things were like for people in the 1600s, are you? That you're actually cool with "caveat emptor" as the average person's primary defense against corporate greed? You don't think we should regulate food, air quality, and access to information, building codes, highway speeds, healthcare? Before regulation, people died routinely in car crashes (seat belts, mandatory crash tests, airbags), died in fires due to no building codes, were poisoned by pesticides, slowly choked to death in the London industrial smog - I could go on for hours citing examples.

Profit is good but we /must/ have regulation, and the Internet is no exception. The Internet has always been highly regulated ever since it was designed and paid for by our government (specifically DARPA and public universities).

If Net Neutrality is removed you can say goodbye to Pinside. Anything you like that isn't directly produced by a major telco, it will be GONE. Telcos will slow all traffic going to places like Pinside so that only the hardcore or very rich will be able to pay to use them. As a result, this community will die. Just for a moment think about that.

The reason you have things like free email and an incredible Internet filled with such treasures as Pinside are due to the efforts of tens of thousands of people like me. All of us who brought you these amazing things are LITERALLY SCREAMING that it is all going away if we don't stop this. No exaggeration.

Um, no.

Just a reminder, Nixon was the guy who allowed hospitals to operate on a profit motive. It's all gone to hell since then. Hospitals should never be operated for a profit. I'm sorry, it's simply wrong to profit from people's disease and sickness. As a result of the profit motive, our healthcare is a joke compared to other countries. A Thai friend of mine flies back to Thailand for his cancer treatments, not just because they are less than a tenth of the price, but because they are BETTER.

Please cite examples of regulation stifling innovation. I don't see it happening. I experienced a highly regulated Internet contributing primarily to most tech companies today.

Please explain how government regulation destroyed mortgages. As I understand it, a lack of regulation led to subprime mortgages being offered by banks, which nearly destroyed our economy and sent us into a depression in 2008.

Please explain how government regulation has led to a massive increase in higher ed costs. Cite references.

The telcoms are using public land to deploy their infrastructure and receive numerous government subsidies. They should be permitted to profit from this, but never forget that the government (and therefore WE) own the land. Also there are numerous examples of cheaper, faster, better government ISPs. They are typically sued out of existence by telcos.

You're joking that there are no telco monopolies, right? How many cable internet providers are their in your neighborhood? In mine there is one. That's the definition of a monopoly.

conservatives think of China as "communist" but really right now it represents the unregulated utopia the GOP thinks it's working towards. if you love walled-off internet, air that turns your lungs black, and products full of lead and other poisons, by all means continue to rail against regulation in all its forms.

i mean just look at what all those overly restrictive, wasteful bureaucratic safety regulations have done to the auto industry:

highwaydeaths (resized).png

this video really says it all:

it's a 2009 Malibu vs. a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air. check out the 50-second mark of the video. both cars experience massive front end damage, but the Bel Air's passenger compartment compresses like an accordion, while the Malibu's passenger compartment stays completely in tact, thanks to government-mandated crumple zones and safety features that are the result of years and years of government crash testing, research, and regulation.

i get being against most government regulation on principle, but there is another side to that coin.

Amen.
Corporations are sociopaths as a whole. People are quite comfortable making short sighted, terrible decisions which wreck lives and economies as long as they hide behind some group mantle(for example....see the entire history of the human race). The price of freedom is eternal vigilance. So, get on the phone and call your reps.

Are we living on the same timeline? I see history repeating itself, at least from my distorted perspective. All of these horizontal mergers and buy outs aren't to lower your costs and give you more options.

Here's a fun fact, in 1994 my home state of Pennsylvania granted Verizon 2.1 billion dollars to roll out fiber to every household by 2015. 1994! They met none of their deadlines and the deal stood despite not living up to a fraction of the contract. I live in a densely populated area and I'm fairly certain I still can't subscribe to FiOS, which wasn't even a blip on anyones radar for another 10 years. Not that I'd want to, I'd have Google Fiber by now at a fraction of the cost with orders of magnitude better speed.

I'd be hard pressed to believe other local or state governments didn't pay telcos to build out infrastructure. Much like rich sport team owners that threaten to leave a city if they don't fund a new stadium, these tactics basically boil down to extortion. But the most ironic part of your infrastructure statement is that Verizon was actively trying to subvert their own copper lines to force customers onto their wireless networks by not fixing existing infrastructure!

(Sources: http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/30544 https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/verizon-workers-can-now-be-fired-if-they-fix-copper-phone-lines/)

Will this affect me if I run a VPN?

good question. a VPN would get you around any throttling, but ISPs could then throttle or block all VPN traffic, and label all VPN users as thieves, saying they only use the technology to access web sites and services that they haven't paid the ISP for access to -- similar to how the MPAA and RIAA tried to destroy all peer-to-peer file sharing services on the premise that they could be used to share copyrighted content.

the ISPs would probably see using a VPN as equivalent to stealing cable.

Yup.

ISPs can detect VPN tunnels, and can easily throttle those or block them entirely.

They could also throttle VPN providers or require VPN providers to pay additional fees for using certain networks or services.

Why would it not? A VPN connection is identifiable. Just make encrypted connections that don't connect to the power players default to the most expensive or most throttled tier. Problem solved(from their point of view).

That's a good point, and I could see the argument ISPs could make for it.

There's a lot of lobbyist money flowing through Washington from the telcos.

https://www.opensecrets.org/lobby/indusclient.php?id=B09

There's also certain leaders who might applaud them being able to trump free speech and censor unfavorable criticism.

It would absolutely be used in terms of censorship, I don't think there's any doubt of that.

That is the most ridiculous statement I've ever read on pinside

you're right, it is ridiculous that i would mix up "its" and "it's" like that. i corrected the error, thanks for pointing it out.

Have you been to China? Or are you just joking?

Yes, I brought a working VPN to China two weeks ago. Guess what? It didn't work because China knew about it and blocked it. Oh, Netflix blocked it too.

It is trivially easy to block a VPN. They have IP addresses, they use a certain kind of protocol to connect. It takes maybe 30 seconds to block that IP address forever on the telco's firewall.

Brijam,
Your Chinese example is great. The government is regulating the internet and you don’t have access the way you like. So you are saying you don't like the government regulating the internet.

None of us are talking about health and safety regulations. These internet discussions are economic/commercial issues and in that space the less interference by the government the better.

The impacts of regulations and subsidies on the economy are basic economic principals, so I’m not going to site them here.

Corporations are not legally required to focus on profits above all else. That is a falsehood. The BOD sets the strategy of the company and can determine what to focus on.

Your statement that we must have regulation is false. DARPA focuses on Technical standards and administrative procedures that are needed for the internet to work. This is not the type of regulation I am talking about.

Pinside will not go away as the result of this passing or not passing. That is just silly.

Those thousands of people didn’t all work for altruism, more were motivated by, or working for people who wanted to make a fortune in the tech industry.

My comments on mortgages, Healthcare, and tuition were not aimed at regulations, but at the interference by the government in those markets. All three are highly subsidized by the government and have very distorted markets.

Mortgages crashed because too many people had loans that shouldn’t have. Sallie Mae and Freddie Mac (government entities, highly regulated by congress) created an environment the banks could manipulate for profits. I agree that’s bad. Then when the markets crashed congress bailed out the banks. This is worse because they should have been taught a lesson.

Healthcare and tuition costs are through the roof because we are all pass-throughs for government money. Prices are greatly distorted because of this. Again, a basic economic principal that most people conveniently forget.

You probably have a cable company, a telephone company, a satellite company, and a wireless company that are capable of delivering content to your home. That doesn’t sound like a monopoly, but I’m sure there are many rural places where these options are more limited.

Drunkbaby,
Another good example. Why in the hell were your PA representatives giving cash to a telco? That’s silly and they should stay out of it. Another subsidy that didn’t work as intended.

I also agree that stadiums and other non-essential construction should not be supported by the government.

It’s interesting that some of the arguments here are based on the same principals I am using, just not as consistently.

this is a deliberate misrepresentation of the argument. in China, the government acts as the defacto ISP and censors and throttles content as it sees fit.

in the United States, Net Neutrality prevents ISPs from doing the same. without Net Neutrality, ISPs would be free to implement their own versions of China's internet.

Of course, healthcare, higher education, and telecom access should all be subsidized public goods anyways, not competitive markets, which just leads to an increasing gap between a "low end" and "high end" of something that should be accessible to everyone.

does anyone remember what AOL's "walled garden" internet service was like before they allowed access to the WWW? you only had access to the content they wanted you to have access to. this is what will happen again if Net Neutrality is successfully dismantled.

Not at all. The Chinese government is controlling the entire internet in China and it is an extreme example, even if silly here , of what could happen when the government gets involved in internet regulation. Here you have choices, if you don't like the service you get, change providers. Or, pay for unlimited access.

This isn't a given for any of these three. Are you really saying that telecom should be subsidized today? We have universal access with very low costs, what needs subsidized?

By the way, the low end and high end of the other two areas are greater now than ever before precisely because of the government subsidies.

No it won't. They would lose all of their customers if they tried that. And it is a bad analogy too. There was no 'consumer' content on the internet then. There was technical and academic content but not what the AOL subscribers were looking for. And I'm obtuse?

Net Neutrality has zero to do with the government restricting internet access. it is the exact opposite. it is the government saying ISPs CANNOT restrict access to the internet.

this is naive. ISPs are salivating at the prospect of chopping up the internet and selling it back to customers piecemeal. and turning around and charging content providers for delivering content to their customers. there is NOTHING about this scenario that has ANY upside for anyone other than the ISPs themselves. for everyone else in the country, service becomes WORSE and MORE EXPENSIVE. to be in favor of dismantling Net Neutrality requires either blind party loyalty (since it's apparently a Republican thing now to be against Net Neutrality), or ignorance of the situation.

then why are they lobbying so hard for the legal right to do so? if they would never violate any of the principles of Net Neutrality, then why are they so against it?

Pez,

My original point many posts ago point is the ISP should be able to operate however they want, without the government telling them how to run their business. If they want to slow access let them slow access. If they want to charge more for tiering speeds, let them.

I don't agree your your theory on chopping up the internet, however, I am not ignorant nor a member of any party. I have been involved in both sides of the this topic, working for both telcos and for internet content companies.

Most of the arguments here ignore competition among the providers. The one who opens up and provides the most access at the best price will win. This is good for consumers in the long run. Walling off everything else will not work with today's internet consumers. Your AOL example is perfect again. It didn't work once there were other options and content and they closed it down.

Remember there is big money coming in on both sides of this argument, this is an example of what I wan to stop. Internet policy should not be determined by the bigger checkbook or the party in power.

The telcos are fighting for the right to run their business the way they want. I support that premise first.

The apocalyptic predictions are all unlikely, but it is almost a law of nature that the more the government is involved, the more distorted things become.

this isn't about offering speed tiers. they already do that, and that's fine. this is about throttling or blocking *specific content*. it's not like the ISPs are even the creators of this content they are looking to bar access to -- they are merely the middlemen between the consumer and youtube/netflix/Pinside/etc. they should not have any say which of those sites a customer has access to. that's all Net Neutrality does. it's not some onerous or complex set of regulation.

Just a Staff note to everyone participating.

The Pinside Staff does not consider this a political topic. Before this thread is closed, those that turn it political will be moderated and/or permanently ejected. This is an important topic and one that can exist in a civil manner.

I'll be personally moderating this thread for those that wish to start trouble. For those that wish to continue having a civil discussion on this very important topic, please continue.

Thanks.

Marcus

agreed -- Citizens United was a total disaster for the republic.

there is truth to the statement that there is big money from corporations on both sides. i'm not saying Google, Amazon and Netflix care more about people than Comcast. They don't. but in this case, those company's corporate interests do happen to coincide with the interests of the people.

This is absolutely not a political discussion. It is an economic one.

Pez, all I can say is I believe in the right to run your business how lever you want.

As a customer you have plenty of provider options to find the service you want and I don't see that changing in a free market.

I don't. Only Comcast where I live.

And that might be the only thing that will stop selective censorship.

In my view, one way that the internet could be improved is by increasing bandwith capabilities with something like fiber and reducing costs of access.

Removing the net neutrality rules does not directly do anything for either of those improvements.

I live in a major metropolitan area and I'm not overtly happy with the current offerings of any of my available isps. I take what I have because they the only options. I do not see this getting better with the removal of net neutrality.

I empathize with the argument that isps should be allowed to do what they want with their businesses. However, at the same time I think that getting rid of net neutrality will help only the isps and hurt everyone else. Deregulation does not inherintly bring prosperity to all. And I agree with others that have pointed out that removing net neutrality rules is a form of regulation.

Outside of the general "deregulation will lead to competition and innovation" argument, how will removing net neutrality rules improve the internet and the lives of those that is it? What about the internet needs to be improved and how will removing net neutrality help with that?

I'm not aware of the ability for <random provider X> to lay a fiber cable to my door. The simple physics of reality prohibit the ability of an unlimited number of suppliers from being able to break into that market. If Comcast, for example, decides to jump on this(which they are currently lobbying to do), I have zero other options. There is no other high speed access available to me. The solutions:
1) Allow everyone the right to lay down last mile connections. Physically and logistically nightmarish, if not impossible.
2) Force the natural monopolies to treat last mile connections as a utility. I pay for X bandwidth, no filtering. Works for me.
3) Have the municipal governments take over the last mile. Any upstream provider contracts with me for X bandwidth. Also works for me, but might piss off pure market capitalists(not that that makes a difference).
4) Allow walled gardens to be forced upon me.

I'll take 2 or 3. I don't think 1 is actually possible, and I'll fight tooth and nail to avoid 4.