Topic: What's everyone's thoughts on the FCC planning to ruin the entire internet?

It's disgusting. We shouldn't have to pay a whole bunch of money just so that we can do what we please on the internet.

It's basically going to be as if EA is running the internet.

You're talking nonsense. The internet was around for roughly 30 years and it was just fine without the government having control over it. That you think all these terrible things are going to suddenly happen if they don't have the authority, even though none of them ever happened before, it just a result of an effective propaganda campaign. They invented a problem and fixed it by giving themselves control over the medium. If you think this was a good thing, then you haven't partaken in even a cursory study of history. But by all means, dispense more fearmongering that's based in nothing but fanciful lies.

@senshu I don't see how having to pay for a bunch of things and overall having less control over what you do on the Internet is a good thing.

Seriously, what exactly am I not getting here? Judging by what I've read, it sounds like we'll have to pay money to do certain things online and will overall have less control, and I don't see how that is a good thing.

@KirbyTheVampire - That's not a good thing. It's also not happening here. You're describing a fiction, a strawman. It's simply not true. Whatever you've read that said what you're saying here, it was completely bogus. None of that is true.

You want to know what the internet will be like when "net neutrality" is gone? Think back to any time before it was implemented in 2015. You'll be going back to exactly that.

@senshu Why exactly is everyone on the Internet panicking and planning protests and whatnot if this isn't a big deal?

Every news article is saying that broadband service providers will be getting power over what content consumers can access. Sounds pretty bad to me.

@KirbyTheVampire - And it's all absolute nonsense. They're propagating the same nonsense you are: you heard someone say it and took it as truth, but never stopped to question whether something so outlandish would actually be true.

Again: it takes us back to 2015. Were any of these horrible things happening back then? No, they weren't, and they never did.

@DiscoGentleman - Giving the government authority over the internet, and treating it as a utility, was in no way good for consumers. What problem was there with the internet before 2015 that you think "net neutrality" solved?

I'll just retreat to the dark web whenever they ruin the internet.

Umm, inrernet exists outside of the US as well. It's nonsense to say that it's going to ruin the internet. Instead, it's just going to make accessing content worse for people in the US.

@KirbyTheVampire Deep breaths.

So a little background here (plus you're in Canada? Doesn't this not involve you?) Anyway, remember the old days of the internet before "Internet 2.0" turned it into a corporate billboard of central control in the '00s?

First things first: The internet was designed to be a peer to peer network. The nature of the freedom the internet was supposed to provide, and for a brief time did provide, was that everyone, everywhere was of equal footing on the internet. I could be a server, you could be a server, servers, content, etc were distributed, they were everywhere and nowhere. Briefly in the 90's it moved to a simple client-server model. But with "Web 2.0" as the marketeers called it we have moved closer and closer to a regression to 1970's mainframe computing where "the internet" is a handful of "cloud providers" (mainframes) and everything else is merely a dumb terminal. "The Internet" has been badly damaged and regressive for almost 15 years. Worrying about "breaking the internet" now is like worrying about what would happen if you dumped a canister of uranium in the middle of Fukushima. That ship sailed a long, long time ago. What you call the internet now is an access terminal to oligarchic mainframes, and worse, a nest of tracking devices that log every thing you do, everywhere you go, even what you have interest in and report to a handful of tracking services that either want to exploit you for commercial gain, or sit on the history just in case you are ever a "person of interest".....be it a fugitive suspect to a crime, or a popular candidate for political or corporate disruption. "The Internet" broke by 2005.

Second, and maybe less importantly, Net Neutrality is as beautiful an Ingsoc quack-talk as anything Orwell could have imagined. There's nothing "neutral" about it. As with all things in US politics, follow the money. Who wants Net Neutrality? Who promotes it? Who funds, organizes, and promotes those protests you speak of? Google, AOL Time Warner, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix. Large content delivery providers. Why do they want it? It grants them effective control over how networks are used while the network operator gets no say over it. "The internet" was not built for watching video libraries in 4k, downloading 100GB video games, or other general media content. These companies that distribute this content wish to use the internet for that purpose. They forced it onto the networks and clogged them. That caused network operators to need to massively upgrade equipment. So far everything is fine. But at some point the network operators analyzing their business realized that so much of their costs were coming from a handful of content types. And upon catching wind that the network operators wanted to charge differently for the type of content that's consuming most of their resources, the oligarchs of silicon valley decided to fall back to their standard: Wield government as a weapon through their extensive lobby power to force their supply chain partners to accept their terms, and take on all related expenses themselves.

If we move from digital to physical for example where the concept is a little more tangible, imagine you invent a new business of building monolithic prefab houses.....delivered all as a single unit rather than assembled on site. In order to deliver them, you need a trucking company as a vendor, and you need roads as a vendor. At first it goes ok, but your customers are limited to ones nearby....only the local roads can handle what you need. But your service gets popular....you decide you intend to take your business national. As you and your new direct competitor copying your business start ramping up competition, the trucking company, and the governments running the roads decide that your houses are taking a very massive toll on the roads, the roads need to be enlarged to sustain this new business, and a new fleet of trucks will need to be purchased just for the orders from your company and your competitor. In normal business, you work out a profitable way to pay the trucking company and government road contracts in a way that you can still profit. Imagine instead if you could just use your extensive lobby network in D.C. to force both the trucking company AND the state governments handling roads to simply absorb the costs.....they will continue charging you no more than they charge the guy with a Prius. Because why should you pay for what is needed to deliver your service, when you have the power to force someone else to pay for it? Meanwhile when they have to raise their prices 4x on the Prius guy to pay for what you want.....Prius guy gets angry....so they try to keep it as lean as possible. They build a road JUUUUST wide enough to get your trucks through. Except of it's really hot and the barriers swell....then you might not fit....and you might have to stop and start periodically. Better to do it in the middle of the night when no one else is using the road.

That's a convoluted but roughly reasonable physical world example. Basically the content companies invented a business model of using the internet instead of discs to deliver their content. They decided it was an excellent way to preserve their bottom line. But instead of charging their customers the real cost, and paying vendors the costs required to really deliver that content versus the costs of email, they decided to use government to declare that 4k video and email are the same thing and that network operators can't separate costs by content type. They decided to call this "Net Neturality" because "every bit is the same".......it's double speak. What it really is is a free ride for media companies by means of stripping another industry of the ability to control their product and sell it as other companies desire.

But it gets worse. Buried within "Net Neutrality" is a limitless set of central control. "Net Neutrality" that gives government power is little more than a glass door for Google/Amazon/Netflix/Facebook to have even greater control of the internet than they already have, via their revolving door puppets in the FCC and FTC.

As always, follow the money. These are the companies that want this. And they know they have "fans" (more like mindless sycophants) that will follow them and be "outraged" when told to be "outraged." Manipulating people to support/fight things they know little about beyond what the companies themselves have told them.....which is par for the course for those companies...that's their specialty.

Net Neturality is the opposite of Neutral. It realigns the structure to the benefit of certain industries, with most of the benefit going to the very companies promoting it, at the expense of other companies. This reflects nothing of the freedom the original P2P intention of the internet was to offer.

NOW.....

To play the other side a little here.....there are no heroes. The other side of the argument is the network operators, which themselves make up a powerful lobby as well. They seek to monitize their networks infinitely. Unlike the media companies, they have no interest in controlling your content or monitoring what you do, though some of them do actually monitize your DNS requests (that's a whole other problem.). However they have interest in charging you the maximum amount for the minimum provided bandwidth usage via whatever scheme they can come up with. The cable companies are infamous in their predatory billing, and the cellular companies are even worse.

Much of what we're watching in the back and forth is the media industry wanting an unfair advantage to deliver their product without paying for their supply chain versus the network operations industry wanting an unfair advantage to monetize the most valuable uses of its networks in a way that defeats what has (maybe wrongly) become common use of the internet.

Neither side should really be allowed to "win" because if either one "wins" we all lose. Without a third party with more reasonable interests (FSF and such don't really qualify as so much of their funding comes from the very companies that are pushing Net Neutrality for their own gains....FSF does a lot of good things, but it's sickening watching them agitate for this corporate cause....it's like watching an animal rights group pull the wings off a butterfly and burn ants with a magnifying glass) our only hope is to keep the two sides locked against each other and unable to budge the line.

That said, one of the real solutions does happen to be something that is ALSO a part of the full implementation of Net Neutrality, one that people such as yourself that advocate it tend not to notice: The end of the buffet model of internet. The end of "unlimited" for a flat fee. Yes, that's part of Net Neutrality....did you notice it? Instead, as a utility, the idea is to move to a metered connection where you pay for every gigabyte you use (rounding up to the next whole gig of course!), just as you pay for every watt of electricity and every gallon of water. So the guy streaming Netflix, or, shall I say, downloading 14GB of L.A. Noire, versus Skyrim which is entirely on the cartridge......is going to be paying more for internet than the guy checking only email and shopping on Amazon. And let's not forget the hours of Splatoon....those gigs will add up at the end of the month. But wait, what about gaming on Steam where downloading HUNDREDS of gig a month is normal?! That's going to be some internet bill next month! Those Steam sales might not be as appealing if your paying an extra $50-$100 that month on internet for it!

Why would Google and Netflix be ok with such a model? Because everyone will get mad at Comcast/Turner/Verizon at the end of the month, and nobody will be upset with little old Google and Netflix! After all.....they're just charging a lowly $19.99/mo.....it's that evil ISP charging all that extra money those greedy jerks! But somebody has to pay for the network capacity upgrades....and it's going to be the consumer. The battle is over which company the public will blame when the "cheaper" option than physical media turns out to be less control, no ownership, no resale value, and, ultimately, no cheaper.

Or did the protestors miss that that was part of Net Neutrality?

@________@

@NEStalgia Wow - that's an impassioned post.

For what it's worth I'd tend to agree. Situations such as this are rarely as simple or straightforward as they might at first seem - there is usually a second side to every story.

A 'partisan' (for want of a better word) net isn't necessarily better or worse than a "neutral" one - just different. The way you pay and who you pay would be different and some people would pay substantially more and some substantially less but society as a whole will pay pretty much the same it would have either way.

It's also unlikely that some of the basically understood tenets of the internet will be thrown out. That is any ISP trying to re-create the closed garden internet of the AOL era is highly unlikely to be successful (even if they can offer the best streaming and general entertainment service as bait).

That said I prefer the existing model. The ups and downs of that model are, by now, quite well understood by consumers and it allows users to decouple their entertainment subscriptions from their choice of ISP. A 'Partisan' net would have its own advantages (faster, more reliable streaming for a start) but it would have a lot of disadvantages that we perhaps don't fully comprehend yet.

@NEStalgia Yes, I am in Canada, but I figure a lot of things that happen in the US will inevitably happen to Canada as well. The two countries are practically joined at the hip. Obviously that's not a guaranteed thing at all, though.

That was an interesting read. So basically, if they get rid of net neutrality, you end up paying less money than most people if you just check your email or whatever, whereas with net neutrality, everyone pays the same fee to use the internet no matter how much they actually use it or what parts of it they use? Am I reading this right?

It's a weird thing. Basically everyone I've talked to and everything I've read is saying that this will ultimately result in people having to pay more money at the end of the day, so I assumed that that was the case.

Goodbye NintendoLife, it was nice knowing you.

@StuTwo Definitely, a true walled garden internet would never fly commercially in this age. Where the flip side comes in is, if the ISP can buy into content, can they offer their own content ahead of other content. I.E., say Verizon buys EA to get Origin as a rival to Steam. Could it offer better speeds, better prices, etc. for Origin users than Steam users? Could it offer Origin ONLY to Verizon customers? That's some of the types of content deals that are at stake in the debate.

I would say I prefer the internet we have now...but what we have is a top-down model. I prefer the internet of the 90's where it was distributed. The "real" internet is already almost forgotten, and anyone younger than having been a netizen in the 90's doesn't even know what a distributed internet looks like....which is pretty depressing. I can't imagine thinking "Google at the top of the internet, and a handful of cloud vendors is how it's always been." What a bleak present....

@KirbyTheVampire your internet is indeed much like ours, while the EU has mostly government run infrastructure for their internet (it's an easier job there...US and Canada even moreso have so much distance between points....our infrastructures have much bigger expenses and challenges versus densely populated Europe and Asia.) Though you have, what, Rogers and Telus as the main players I think? They definitely evolved differently from the cable companies here.

Other way around really. With Net Neutrality one of the core proposals is the metered fee for your usage...so the email checker would pay for less bits than the eShop addict. It's fair, pay for what you use. It'll also see backlash to digital distribution if you're actually PAYING for the distribution. It would work more like the cell phone industry....you get your 50GB/mo or so to use, or you 20/mo or whatever package you paid for, and every gb after that would cost, whatever....$1, or what have you. The price model specifics are undefined so far, every company would have their own pricing model.

Where the non-"neutrality" model would likely see a continuation of flat fee, unlimited use packages, but likely with "prioritized" providers, or "throttled" providers (I.E. in my Verizon-EA hypothetical, Steam would maybe be throttled to have slower downloads than anyone using the hypothetically Verizon-owned Origin.) (Just using gaming examples rather than the more discussed video streaming examples since it's more relevant here )

Truthfully I wouldn't mind seeing the metered connections (that come with Net Neutrality's vision.) As an opponent of forced digital distribution, I think you'd finally see consumer backlash on the digital model that tells people to pay for the distribution of the product instead of buying a disc/cart

But yeah, it's always more complicated than what the talking points on any issue from any side say. When they tell you you'll "pay more", for some people that will be true. For others it may be opposite. I'm guessing it would cost more for heavy streamers and probably gamers in at least some cases. Because right now everyone is sharing the costs, and the people that use the most are paying the same as those that use the least. But the underlying net service is weaker because the networks are pinching pennies to provide the minimum required network knowing they can't get a great return on it....most of that return gets gobbled by the costs of content delivery. If they could charge more to the heavy users (or prioritize their own services) they'd be more willing to spend more on building better networks to have more premium products to sell. Yet people could also get bargains out of finding the right packages.

Ultimately, under either model, there will be winners and losers among consumers, as with everything else. Under "Neutrality" the media companies are certainly winners....which is why they devised the whole argument to begin with. And Google, of course benefits from the "open" internet that they dominate because ultimately, instead of choosing between Comcast, Verizon, or other vendors "closed" internet, you instead just get "Google's Internet".)

Sadly what we really need, nobody with pockets deep enough will advocate for. And too little of the public understand the nature of the services they use, what they evolved (devolved?) from, and in the face of convenience, what problems they're creating to be of any help. So keeping them fighting forever is the best we can hope for. At least a middle ground may emerge from that.

Edit: But most likely the network providers would use that ability to go after the media companies. Charges on video data. Google and Youtube would be hurt by that. They would have to charge more to consumers....and consumers would be less tempted to adopt all their services. If they got their way the network providers would take the heat by being the one that has to charge more.

A large part of the debate is mostly that right now the networks are going in debt due to the boom in digital distribution and nobody wants to pick up the tab. Not the content providers the pushed the idea of digital distribution to begin with, not the networks saddled with building infrastructure to support it, and not the consumer that wants their convenient digital content but got used to someone else paying for half the delivery. Everybody wants their free lunch.

@NEStalgia I see. Well, lesson learned. Don't trust people online to really know what they're talking about, lol.

I apologize if I seemed a bit moronic in this thread, haha. I'm not super familiar with this kind of thing at all.

@KirbyTheVampire Hah, if everyone on the internet were like you, actually asking and discussing and looking into things, the world would be a very different place!

The majority, I fear, hear what they're told from a biased "official" source, then run with it as fact, to the point of insisting they are an authority on the matter and the world should listen to them, using as their evidence, the canned "talking points" or "canned facts" provided to them which are of course carefully written by whole teams of lawyers, marketers, and behavioral analysts to elicit exactly predictable responses and strawman defense positions, thus using public lack of knowledge and an odd sense of people needing to be "right" and championing some cause to further their own aims without ever understanding the huge complex arguments in between!

And all of those issues, like this one, if they were as simple as all the canned facts by the interested parties put forth (and slogans and chants by "protestors") wouldn't be issues spanning decades and a few hundred million dollars worth of an army of lawyers

Now that you've taken the "red pill" and know it's not so cut and dry, you can sit back and watch the people on both sides blindly defending things they know little about and haven't put effort into and wonder "how can these people not understand that they don't understand?

@subpopz Thanks for the info pertaining specifically to Canada!

What you describe there is definitely a part of what our "Net Neutrality" legislation has been but ours takes it further being mostly written by Silicon Valley to benefit their own aims. On the surface (and the points they talk about) are what you describe....but that's only at surface level.

For the same reason politicians in cities that threaten cutting programs always talk about "closing public libraries and pools" to make the public angry....while not mentioning the city hall employee pension program that costs 3x more ....the net neutrality types talk only about preventing ISPS from throttling content and not about the mucky stuff behind the curtain. Not sure about canadian law....but the "Net Neutrality" they pushed here was bigger than a Manhattan phone book.....and it was vile.

One thing about US law to keep in mind is we have lovely Orwellian names for most of our legislation. If we had a bill to reduce the amount of dogs in the world by eating all dogs, worldwide, registered as pets we'd call it the DOGLOVE bill (Dining On Genuine LabradOr Value Enhancement act) or something And then a group of internet protestors would be angry at people who are against DOGLOVE. Canada may be the same, not sure on that.

Yeah we do have tiers as well here already. And so far I haven't seen any real issues with VPNs here...they're popular enough (I actually use one for gaming to deal with a NAT issue that popped up.) I'm noticing more WEBSITES are actively blocking them though. And MS Office aps don't work.....sometimes legislating the networks helps nothing as the technology vendors/platforms just find ways to end run around it, unfortunately. Office throws out the baby with the bathwater though......it doesn't even work with CORPORATE VPNs....learned that the hard way.

No, our Net Neutrality (written by a lobby group, forget the name they gave themselves, consisting of Google, Apple, MS, Facebook, TW, and a handful of other tech vendors) didn't restrict tierd internet, did promote metered internet, and was "flexible" as to what kind of streaming bundling was ok (I believe they were going to ignore mobile carriers for their bundling/throttling.) Flexible of course means "will make exceptions for friends, campaign contributors, and special contractors for Intelligence".....but the kind of things described in your net neutrality made up the first 5% of or so. The rest was very very heavy handed control of everything in the usual ways that help reinforce the status quo and prevent any competition or table flipping on the rules as they are via subtle manipulation. Of course they only publicly talked about that first 5% or so.

It doesn't need to be said that our legislative process is very, very, very diseased right now. Not sure how tainted Canada's is, but here we're to the point that VERY few bills are actually written by legislators...they're merely "sponsored" by legislators, and are usually written by armies of lawyers representing interest groups where a legislator tries to bring their legislation to positive vote....usually without actually understanding it themselves. Our "Net Neutrality" wasn't written by government. It was written exclusively by the half of the industry that would have the most to gain from it, via a "non-profit" they set up featuring lobbyists and lawyers from the top names in tech. Then they took their self beneficial cudgel to their nearest legislator whose campaign they all contributed heavily to, and said pretty much "sell this." The people in government voting on it know less about what's going on than anyone in this thread does. They do as they're paid to do and pretend to do so with conviction (they're lawyers by trade....even if you know your client is a serial killer you protest his innocence like you mean it...it's your job.) They, however, know little about business and even less about tech, no matter how much they pretend to.

As for the FCC, so much of it is a revolving door of executives from media/network/communications companies. A commissioner this week, may be a CTO at Microsoft next week and then a commissioner again in 10 years. Pai, the chair leading the anti-Neutrality cause is a former...forget if it's Verizon or Comcast lawyer....I believe Verizon. So his background certainly favors whats good for carriers. OTOH, Wheeler, the former chair when the Neutrality stuff was rammed through, was heavily connected to Google directly and through political affiliation.

Someones hands are in all of their pockets....Canada I'm certain works the same as all governments inherently do....but I'm not sure they've dug into you QUITE as deep yet....we're the juicier target, and once they get us it's always easier to force your hand.

(And whatever we do, lets' not invite PlywoodStick.....then this thread will REALLY get derailed into cynical anarchist politics! )

@NEStalgia I definitely always try to take the red pill route on everything, which is why I went on various forums and other social media and didn't just look at the news, but found that basically everyone was saying the same exact thing as the news articles. So when I kept hearing how Americans would have to essentially pay more for less internet across the board, I figured it must be the case.

I suppose a lot more digging is necessary on issues like this than I assume, considering how we live in an overwhelmingly blue pill society.

@subpopz I agree 100%, but even if certain things won't happen anytime soon, that doesn't mean they won't happen eventually, especially since our countries are so closely connected. But clearly I was misinformed on the whole thing anyway.