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Sounds like your market isn't free.
Here in the UK it's somewhat different; up until the 1980's the landline network was guberment owned, but when they privatised it, they enforced a policy of allowing other companies to use the hardware.
A better example would be mobile. Mobile started in the 80's without legacy regulation pretty much. We ended up with at least 5 independent hardware bases, offering actual competition everywhere.
Things slowed up a little after the 3G band auction, due to the large amounts bid, but now they're racing each other to provide 4G.
Locally, I only get 2G or Edge, but I don't have to pay anything towards 4G unless it reaches me and I upgrade.
How is this harming me?
It isn't. I 'have' a 3G contract, but by mixing and matching rural land-based hotspots, I can get around 3G scarcity by factoring in no-cost WiFi links.
This is for all mobile devices.
Fixed internet is going to become very much a supporting technology in the next few years, as conventional ISP's who attempt to control the flow will be totally outflanked by mobile.
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Your analogies are poor.
And your comment about mobile is flat out wrong.
First mobile will never be as fast. Nor does it have the bandwidth.
Second, and more importantly, you are ignoring entirely how your mobile traffic actually flows. Despite marketing claims mobile traffic, moves over the same hardware as land lines. It isn't magic.
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My analogies are great.
And 4G is much, much faster than cable.
Get your facts straight.
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Simon O'Riordan from UK wrote: And 4G is much, much faster than cable.
My cheap home cable has 50 meg down and 10 meg up. And I could pay more and get more.
How much speed exactly do you think "4G" has? Do you think you have an option to get more bandwidth?
How much bandwidth do you think a google farm has?
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From Wikipedia 4G article (you'll like that, it's not-for-profit).
"In March 2008, the International Telecommunications Union-Radio communications sector (ITU-R) specified a set of requirements for 4G standards, named the International Mobile Telecommunications Advanced (IMT-Advanced) specification, setting peak speed requirements for 4G service at 100 megabits per second (Mbit/s) for high mobility communication (such as from trains and cars) and 1 gigabit per second (Gbit/s) for low mobility communication (such as pedestrians and stationary users)."
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We all already pay for Internet services with our monthly access fees. There is no business need to charge anyone more than what they are already paying. It is the consumer that initiates Internet activity, so the charges are presently where they ought to be. They should be able to charge for bandwidth, not content. That is what neutrality is all about. If they can charge based on content or who is providing the content, big providers may be able to pay or fight the charges, but anyone wanting to start a business will not be able to without finding big investors. I have a number of websites which may or may not take off. Without net neutrality, I could not do that. Google and Netflix and Amazon all relied on net neutrality to get started. For a while, Verizon blocked Google Maps on cell phones, only allowing their own Navigator on their network, in spite of it not performing as well. I had no choice except to refuse to use any mapping service at all and to call and send emails to complain. I could not move to another carrier, because the other carriers' signals did not serve all of the places where I needed to get and receive calls. If they did, I would switch in a heartbeat. The Internet has become too necessary for communication. It needs to be treated as a utility.
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I sincerely wish you every success with your websites. And when they do, I will claim that 'they are a utility'.
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Before something can be classified as a utility, it has to meet some rules, as Internet service has already met. If my websites ever become such a basic necessity to life and a free democratic society as to qualify as a utility, I won't mind. I will be playing the piano and gardening after you take them over.
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I don't need no rules man. I'm the gubberment.
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A better analogy would be airline travel. The net neutrality supporters want everyone forced to fly coach. They don’t want anyone being allowed to upgrade to better service like business or first class.
After all, travel is a public right...
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"After all, travel is a public right..."
Quite. A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step. Unless you'd rather pay for a flight.
Oddly, overall Concorde was a commercial success. Just.
But it lost money when flights were first charged at cost. People didn't like bog-standard service on a supersonic flight. It was only when BA made it a premium service with all the bells and whistles at a greatly increased price, that passenger numbers rose and money was made. Somewhat non-intuitive. 
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I think you got your facts wrong.
A better analogy would be:
Your electricity provider suddenly deciding to stop providing electricity to your freezer unless you pay a "freezer fee" because they struck a deal with the local fast food chain in delivering them more business. That's where the ruling stands, and enables verizon to do, and that's what net neutrality is trying to prevent - Unrestricted access to your desired content/destination .. over the subscribed service (at the bought speeds)
As for speed, well so much for the free market here in the US. We've been paying providers premium fees for "high speed" connection which in fact are limited to cable speeds back in the 90s.. sure I might have 20Mbps down, BUT with only 700kbps for upload, this connection becomes useless for anything else than mild browsing and consuming video content. Backups are impossible for example, and online gaming becomes horrible, since you have to UPLOAD quite a lot of data to the other ends. And to why we don't have better? Well, a couple of years ago, verizon struck an exclusivity deal with the local county which bars other providers to run cooper for the next 20 years..
Even better, if you look at the NYC area, you will notice that verizon and comcast have a mutual love.. where you have verizon, comcast refuses to run cooper and vice verse.. Time Warner (the only other smaller provider) is going bankrupt for not having capacity to compete with the other two... And the others, jack up the prices as they see fit. In cases as such, government regulation is a must.
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I think you got your facts wrong.
If you pay for electricity for your freezer, they cannot turn off the power. That would be theft.
Property isn't theft incidentally.
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Same thing for internet connections.. If I pay for an internet service, they should not be able to tell me what websites to visit or not, or to ask more money off of me to let me do that, but the court decided otherwise.
There was never about property theft. It's about a company obtaining the power to tell you how to use their service for the sole purpose of squeezing more money off of you, hence the example of the freezer, what if your local electricity provider decided to change policies and tax you for your freezer, despite the fact you already pay for service? It would if it weren't regulated by the gov.
And as a side note, I am also against data caps. Bites are a virtual resource that doesn't run out. My monthly bill covers the service with the maximum speeds for both download and upload, which the ISP should be able to provide me, regardless if I use the service to 100% all the time or not, cause that's what I pay for. They know it and they still don't do it. They know that most people do not use their service to 100% not even for 2 hours straight, and thus instead of investing in infrastructure to achieve the quality of service, they overload the network segments with way to many contracts, which result in a crappy experience for everyone. And then, when people complain, they blame it on bittorrent or other streaming p2p protocols saying that those kill the network, without providing any evidence for it whatsoever. And even if people use bittorrent, so what? Isn't your over all connection limited to what your contract says? You can't go faster than that, cause it's a hard cap on your modem, regardless of what you download or upload. And even so, isn't the service meant to be used as that.. for data transfers.. cause, go figure.. it's an internet service contract? Why shouldn't I be able to use it to 100% all the time, but only slightly.. not to make the ISP uncomfortable..
On this front, no one gets a Ferrari.. We all get crappy fiats painted red and advertised as Ferraris, and even with those, if you go too fast, or too far, you have the Internet Service Police cutting you down, for "abusing" your "unlimited" contract..
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Very poor analogy. More like the boss pays for the toll road which is paved and you have to drive on the gravel road 'cause you can't afford the toll. Like roads, the communications infrastructure is vital to everyone, and that is why there should be regulations in place so that those who haven't had the good luck to be in the right place at the right time to make lots of money are not the only ones to benefit from vital infrastructure...
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Luck? LUCK?
Are you crazy? You think it's luck? And you think one boss is going to pay for an entire road and never rent it out? You don't get to be boss by being a terrible businessman.
Unless the state intervenes.
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I was under the impression that while speed is a factor of net neutrality, the overall idea was that all the data is treated equally and no types of data should be limited.
This could in theory be done for any type of internet connection by the ISP, throttling back gaming packets in lieu of allowing people to view streaming content, etc.
I don't like the idea of my ISP dictating to me how I can/should use a service that I purchase from them. When I pay for my cell phone service, they don't tell me that between the hours of 12 AM and 6 AM is the only time I can send a text message to a user on another carrier's network, but during peek time I can only send messages that are on the same network because they don't want to waste that bandwidth allowing me to converse with someone who refuses to use their network....
If the majority of my online activity is updating my Linux boxes, and that update process happens to use a protocol that is being throttled by my ISP, then what service is the ISP really providing me?
Also, what happens if the ISPs deem that a type of data is not acceptable on their network and block it off? Isn't that a type of censorship? I think this will very quickly turn in to a slippery slope of where does the ISP power stop...
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IMO, public service companies (*) should be forced into neutrality, as long as you pay for the service itself.
In the case of Internet, if I pay for a service, I don't want the supplier throttling speed (or block) because I browse a website of a competitor, or download legal content that does not fit the "moral values" of the supplier.
(*) water, electricity, gas, ... internet
I'd rather be phishing!
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And I guess the root of that issue is whether or not ISPs and underlying infrastructure are considered a public service company or just a regular for-profit concern.
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No problem with ISP making a profit.
I'd rather be phishing!
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Exactly; I'm a free market advocate, but I'm also an advocate that federal and state governments should provide infrastructure (roads being the most common example). That's not from an idealist perspective; I just don't see why we should have wasted resources of 3 or 4 lines going over the poles that are doing the same thing, just for different companies.
I think it's safe to say that internet connection has become part of the infrastructure of the US and other developed countries.
My $0.02: net neutrality is an important concept, and the barriers to entry for ISPs are way too high to encourage startup competition (not just capital investment, but also regulatory concerns), so I'm not convinced that the US version of the free market is adequate to address this dilemma. It sucks, but that's the reality we're in. I think at this point, while far from perfect, one solution would be service providers bidding on service areas, and those companies would have to meet certain standards (pricing, speed, uptime, etc.).
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Exactly my point, well put!
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Christopher Duncan wrote: (providing it doesn't break any laws)
It's simple then: make net neutrality the law.
Anyway, Net Neutrality sounds nice and all, but companies will use it as an excuse to double their prices. They're all like "what, actually provide full access to the internet? this is an outrage! I will get my revenge somehow".
That's what they did here, when Net Neutrality became the law. Well, some of them. Actually none of the dsl providers, as far as I know. The mobile ones sure did though, they were butt-mad that they had to allow WhatsApp (which obviously presents a serious threat to their way-overpriced SMS service) and prices went up.
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Don't get me wrong, I don't trust the average corporation further than I can throw an obese and mildly agitated warthog. That said, this is a slippery slope. Industry a suddenly gets governed by new laws that strip it of its property rights. Maybe that's a good thing, maybe it's not, but now we have industry A asking why every other industry isn't subjected to the same draconian practices, at which point people begin to wonder if or where it will end - should governments take over all businesses?
Mostly playing devil's advocate here, but "just make it the law" is the beginning of a dangerous game.
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