I know absolutely zero about this issue...and quite frankly, I'm surprised it came up to begin with. As horrible as a lot of things are on the Internet, the moment you give the Feds permission to police it, they'll crack down on anything which doesn't further their cause. I'm all for things like terrorism and porn being removed, but at what point have we exchanged freedom for security?
Honestly, everything is just a huge shade of grey. Nothing feels right and no one wins aside from whom really makes the money.
I hate to sound nihilistic, but we're promised safety and protection but theres always underlying loopholes that could really jab at us hard. Kinda feel ultimately pointless at this rate.
If fiction were real, I'd say miracles would be welcomed right about now.
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?
Eh, D-. Might've been a B for the clever wording and harsh contempt for companies using consumers as casualties for disputes between them, but the lack of citations was poor.
It's heartening to see numerous posts from people who are opening their eyes to the broader scope and context of the issue once they see more information and start thinking logically. We're only a small group here, but when the entirety of the internet looks more and more like easily led sheep where whatever the "trusted institutions" state you should be upset about, everyone becomes upset about, and asks for their script as to why, it's good to see that in appropriate conversation, common sense and a healthy dose of skepticism of claims still prevails.
The more serious question ranging far beyond "net neutrality" is how to drill into that mass of hysteria known as the internet and restore that sense of fact finding and common sense. It's been reduced to "fact checking" meaning checking in with one of two biased institutions to tell you what the "facts" of anything are and people automatically trusting virtually anyone with more power than themselves.
@octane thanks for linking my post here, I'm glad to see it is helpful. And yeah, the whole "we're going to pay more for internet" hysteria is kind of odd.....as though we're somehow paying less than we were 2 yeas ago due to "net neutrality" (any price decreases have been in markets with tight competition, particularly where one of the fiber companies (Verizon, Google, or other) competes with big cable, and "unlimited" data goes back to dialup in the 90's.
It pays to look at the immediate catalyst for this whole debate raging right now (going back 2 years ago to the push for the "net neutrality" policy, through the present push against it.) The rise of streaming video. No ISP is planning to charge you more for a Nintendo Life package or even a Playstation Network package. None of them are going to throttle you for playing games. None are going to throttle your cheezeburger.com cat gifs.
What this is about is video streaming. The data networks were built to carry computer data, yes, including games. The rise of video streaming wrought havoc on their networks requiring them to spend fortunes in upgrades in a short space of time for data use where every residence rivaled a datacenter's former capacity. This is also what crippled the deployment of WiMax, as well as collusion from Verizon and AT&T (and some interference from the Chinese government rigging equipment prices to favor themselves by placing contracts through their state owned clearinghouse for the tech their manufacturers produced.) Wimax launched with 8MBit service which was FANTASTIC at the time. But it launched right when video streaming was coming into play and consumption of the full 8mbit for long duration was not what it was intended for. It was suddenly used like cable instead of like internet. Consumers want buffet pricing, and the video hosts don't want to pay for more than raw bandwidth.
So far that's all an industry dispute (until they pull in the lobbyists to use government to benefit themselves and solve their supplier disputes for them.)
Where it becomes a big dispute the public is dragged into is the "cord cutting" of cable in favor of video streaming over the internet happens to bite at the throat of the cable companies and their "package pricing" they've enjoyed since the 80's. And it just so happens that the same cable company is an internet monopoly in many markets too. So the plan of Google and Netflix to stream video at the cost of unlimited bandwidth and replace paid TV entirely, happens to cut the business lifeblood of Comcast and Warner: Cable packages which are cheap to supply and they can charge a lot for, and instead treat them as a utility that just supplies pipes for a fixed fee.
Problem is cable is a profitable business of luxury goods. Utilities are pretty low profits that don't excite shareholders very much and are led around by government. So Comcast in particular, and also smaller local cable companies, etc. are being told, via "net neutrality", they must give up their profitable luxury business and be reduced to a low profit commodity business. Worse, they have to cede the profitable part to Google/Amazon/Netflix......AND SUPPLY their usurpers with the infrastructure to take their business from them.
Now, nobody likes Comcast. Or any cable company. They're pure evil that have gauged for decades. So its an easy enemy. And for some bizarre reason people seem to love and trust Google because they give "free stuff" (they're selling you as a product, of course, but so long as they give you 3 square meals all is good?) So the Google good, Comcast bad motif is popular. The reality is both are bad. And they're both using us in their proxy war against each other.
So the "charging more" aspect of "non net neutrality" bears some truth: for video. They want to continue packaging TV services. So does AT&T. So does Netflix. And Disney. And they all want to sell you streaming packages that look a lot like old cable bundles. Or encourage you to use their own so you get "priority" treatment using Comcasts packages etc. But this is all about video. (And streamed games in the future if that ever becomes a mainstream thing.) It's about (anti-net neutrality) Comcast and cable wanting to preserve their TV payment model, and on the pro-neutrality side, Google/Netflix/Amazon wanting to be able to take the TV payment model for themselves.
Removing the disaster net neutrality legislation returns us to 2 years ago where the internet can be a wild west of crazy payment schemes and experiments and it's worked out pretty well building an internet. The negative is subscription TV will be the piecemeal mess it always was, if not more confusing or pricy. But it also means the same competition that created netflix to begin with can create a new netflix that makes it all cheaper again. The net neutrality policy would have locked in a status quo forever and ever. That's what regulated industry is for, to maintain the current status indefinitely, while making it virtually impossible for any new competitor to challenge them (try opening a new phone company undercutting AT&T's Bell System in 1960 or 1970.)
Keeping the "net neutrality" legislation would have enslaved the internet to this horrid government control system of tight regulation like it's a 19th century telegraph line run by one company, and would operate under the perview of "government" which effectively operates on behalf of the largest lobby group paying it....in this case the "non-profit" created by Google, Facebook, Apple, Netflix, Microsoft, and a few others to push this agenda. It's "neutral" in the context of that horrid legislation, because it can be "controlled" by the masters who know best.
Also, metered billing was actually part of the net neutrality legislation. Despite the hysteria we were DEFINITELY going to see metered billing with net neutrality, and we "might" see metered billing without net neutrality. Now it's based on competition rather than policy.
But as always the companies find a way around. Even WITH net neutrality Comcast found the loophole around it already: They started implementing last year a 1TB "data plan", where over 1TB, you pay $20 for every 50GB over up to $200/mo. That's the "cheaper" internet the net neutrality people promised. "Utopia" in a controlled, planned system is never quite what was promised. "net neutrality" ensured that system and the current competitors would be locked in place forever. No "net neutrality" returns us to the competitive wild west were someone can, and always will, find a way to come in, undercut them, and replace them.
And the final thought as I had mentioned in my original post, what Google and friends have been telling people to defend by calling it "net neutrality" and hiding behind the definition of "net neutrality" to sell the idea was a bold lie at the start. Regardless of whether anyone defends the concept of "net neutrality" has little to do with the actual legislation in question. That legislation wasn't really about net neutrality at all but was an industry regulation program sponsored by one industry against another. Net neutrality simply defines that data can't be segregated by protocol or origin/destination as a network management paradigm, and that every packet must be handled identically to all other packets (which is kind of a silly notion ignoring necessity of QoS for voice and real-time data. Splatoon needs higher priority than loading NL for example...the extra few ms of loading this forum won't affect you like a few ms lag while an nzap is shooting at you.) But a real "net neutrality" bill that's actually about "net neutrality" could be a single page of legislation. As soon as a simple law described in a few paragraphs becomes hundreds or thousands of pages submitted by an industry group....the red flags should start going up in everyone's mind.
So the result: Google/Amazon/Netflix/Apple/Microsoft lost their right to control the internet in terms of data priority and pricing structure. Comcast/Warner/Verizon/Cox/AT&T gained more power to control the internet in terms of data priority and pricing structure. If you live in a market where multiple companies compete, you likely just won and the competition will keep your pricing the same or better, while services and startups remain free. If you live in a market where only Comcast, Warner, or AT&T exists, you likely just lost in the short term, as they will extort you because they can in their never ending war for vengeance against the streaming industry. In the long term you may have won however as competing companies that want to undercut them are more likely to emerge now. Under net neutrality, they would be the only game in town forever. Who would want to actually enter that business under those terms?
So between that and the Fox/Disney merge, you get your same internet, but get to decide if you want to stream comcast or DisneyFoxPixar or Netflix, or Sony, or all the packages for all the money. Which was going to happen either way but now Comcast can cut you a deal on their own service to lure you where under net neutrality they either couldn't or would just find another loophole to work it in in a way they can't be sued for it. In the meantime we'll try to figure out how to live with internet going back to looking like it did back when the PS4 launched.....which looks basically the same as it does today.
@NEStalgia: I'll be honest, I hadn't even heard of this issue until a few months ago. As usual, thanks for laying things out quite plainly! It's difficult to dig through the ever-increasingly large haystack that is the internet just to find a couple of needles of true knowledge (as exemplified by @Dezzy 's post).
I just fail to see how the internet is coming to its proverbial end when we're just basically back at the position we were at two years ago - which isn't really a change at all. I agree that the only real winners here are the corporations....So many people are just feeding the machine without knowing they're doing so.
So the result: Google/Amazon/Netflix/Apple/Microsoft lost their right to control the internet in terms of data priority and pricing structure. Comcast/Warner/Verizon/Cox/AT&T gained more power to control the internet in terms of data priority and pricing structure.
This makes it sounds like this particular decision will have been incredibly good for anyone outside of the US.
The whole world has to deal with the monopolies of Google and Amazon. Only the US has to deal with those ISPs.
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Topic: Net Neutrality
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