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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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Of course it is, but that game started a century ago (historians: feel free to provide a more accurate time), just look at the food industry, the drug industry, the adult industry, the alcohol industry, the amusement industry, the taxi industry, the financial industry, the telephone industry (which is of all of those examples the most closely related), holy crap this list never ends.
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My recollection of the 70s is that the drug industry was largely unregulated. No, wait. Nevermind. Turns out I don't remember the 70s after all. 
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Almost the entire mass media in the United States has been taken over by a few conservative owners who severely restrict what is allowed to be presented to the public in what manner. People who rely on mass media for information are screwed, and way too many of them do not even know it. The Internet is the only way we can have anything close to open and free public discourse in democratic society, and losing network neutrality would put an end to that.
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In most cases these "property rights" are monopolies granted by various levels of government. I live in an AT&T monopoly area. If I want internet access, I must buy it from AT&T. When it comes to internet access, most people simply want a fast connection to the internet, just like any other commodity. ISPs and the various backbone providers are effectively commodity providers and they don't like that. It costs them the same to send a byte from Point A to Point B whether that byte is part of an email, a video, a VOIP call, or an IM.
They want to use their monopoly power to make even more money. For example, several years ago the FCC had to smack down a small Telco/ISP because they were blocking all VOIP calls coming into their network unless they were going to a customer of their VOIP product. These companies will do all they can to protect their monopoly power. Just take a look at municipal Wi-Fi. When these monopoly companies were dragging their feet on providing municipal Wi-Fi, some cities got fed up with it and decided to build their own. These monopoly companies immediately went to the State government and in many cases, managed to get laws passed prohibiting cities from building their own Wi-Fi because, they claimed it was unfair competition. Imagine that, a monopoly complaining about unfair competition.
Edit: removed extra word.
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"now we have industry A asking why every other industry isn't subjected to the same draconian practices"
The phone companies are. The oil companies are. Gas companies are. Electric companies are. Water companies are. You can't ask why other industries aren't subject to practices when other industries ARE subject to these practices.
If phone companies are subjected to these "draconian practices", why aren't the other telecoms?
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It's all about separation of concerns if you allow me to use that metaphor.
Content suppliers shouldn't own the roads and thereby create an unhealthy monopoly.
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You're speaking, I believe, two two separate issues. An unhealthy monopoly is certainly a fair conversation to have in this context. Roads, however, are built and maintained (here in America) by tax dollars, not for-profit companies.
If we want to use our taxes for Internet infrastructure, that's also a fair conversation to have, but at present it's the private and public corporations who have invested time and money building this infrastructure, which is where I start wondering about the right to take control of someone's property.
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