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FCC to Propose Regulating Internet Service as a Utility for Stronger Net Neutrality Rules
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Rhetoric doesn't take the place of sound reasoning and a level head. The simple fact is that the internet as it is now is best left alone. It's working perfectly, as intended, doing its job. But the ISPs, enjoying a monopolized position, want to take this system, and squeeze as much money out of it as they can. Money they'll be getting by providing no extra services or boons. It'll be at our expense.
So with the sudden potential rise of internet service costs for the average consumer and small businesses, possibly to the point of being prohibitively expense, they feel the need to regulate exactly what can or can't be done with the data passing through the pipes.
End result? Basically a lot of people trying to mess with an already nearly perfect thing. There is no socialism vs. capitalism, tyrany vs. freedom. Just people trying to game a good thing, and the desperate response to keep them from doing so.
If the cable and internet providers were not PROTECTED with GOVERNMENT regulations on who can supply internet services to your area there would be a free and open market, where I live I have three choices VERIZON DSL SATELLITE and COMCAST. Because the government ONLY allows them in the area.
Why should the developer have to? Just because the developer got the consumers on an ISP to use his product, why should the developer have to pay for PRIORITY to get there? Net Neutrality isn't about paying for throughput.
The ISP should have to handle the throughput. They are the ones selling access to the Internet and not the internet themselves. All the ISP has to do is follow open standards to help deal with the throughput. The ISPs do not get to decide who gets to come through. They aren't the gate keepers.
And I remember when I had to DIAL up to different BBS boards -that was the internet LONG ago - most had to be paid for to log in. Then we got companies like AOL and you could connect over the "net" but most sites were still pay to enter. Now most sites are FREE to enter. The market caused these pay to use sites to die.
If we get this government intrusion it will mess everything up, sorry but that is how government works.
No, it's about companies paying for priority of their content over other companies that cannot pay. Read my post on page 7.
On one hand, you're right. I've said many a'times in this thread that a good supply of healthy competition would make net neutrality a moot point. No one would dare jack up their prices and slow down traffic if the ISP down the street could just undercut them, and get their business.
But unfortunately, cable, fiber, etc. are, as others have said in this thread, a natural monopoly. You can't have every ISP in the nation stringing their own wire up on the pole to get a line to your house. The costs to do so would be astronomical, and the end result would be an ugly, dangerous eyesore.
So what do you do? The best solution to me would be to lease the lines out to any ISP that wants access to them, but there are a few problems with that. For one, it's not fair to the company that invested a ton of money stringing it up, and two, who knows what kind of havoc that'd bring on local bandwidth and traffic.
So what other solution do we have? Regulation. Make it so that local, monopolized ISPs have to provide a base standard of service, and isn't allowed to block or slow down data on a whim.
...and that's net neutrality. The simplest half-first-step solution to a very complicated problem.
I would not call satellite a valid alternative for board band Internet. But you still have 2 choices which is more than the rest country.
Google et. al. stand to make a ton MORE money in an environment WITH net neutrality, and they're willing to fight tooth and nail to get it. It's no surprise that the biggest proponents of net neutrality are a core constituency of the dominant political party in California.
Wheeler has specifically said he won't seek to regulate consumer prices. However, it's through "forebearance" which does mean that a future FCC could do just that.
This isn't a "corporate interests vs. people" battle. It's a battle between competing corporate interests. It's a little bit like the battle over Dodd-Frank's provisions limiting the fees that banks charge on debit card transactions. While billed as "consumer protection," what it really amounted to was a $4 billion annual transfer of profits from a handful of banks to Wal-Mart.
The problem with this is that without any form of regulation on what the ISPs can do, "the market" as we know it now doesn't exist. It's in the hands of a few big players, who allow the smaller players access to their monopolized customers at their own discretion.
The internet is the only true example of a free market as preached by the hardcore libertarians. Anyone can hop on it, and do their thing without any overhead, or bowing down to a bigger figure. They got something to sell, they can sell it to you, quickly and efficiently. But rather ironically, to maintain this anancro-capitalist wunderzone, it needs government protection from those who provide access to it, lest they abuse their position.
That's the issue I believe. I think it's a failure of local state governments that have caused the federal government to have to come and step in. The state governments do it because they can get incentives to help boost their budget short falls.
I'm not saying this is communistic, I'm a big capitalist myself, but I have a hard time seeing much of any way out other than the FCC proposal that has a realistic chance of getting passed. My personal wishlist would be to wipe out monopoly's that state governments have allowed and to open up access for any ISP on internet pipes.
From what I've read, by separating the service from the pipe, the UK has decreased ISP costs, increased speeds and ISP's that maintain the pipe have increased revenue my maximizing their pipe utilization. Now it's hard to say if this would happen in the USA because of the vast coverage needed compared to Europe in general, but it's really the only case study regarding separation of service and pipe.
No it isn't really a natural monopoly. Fiber optics don't take up as much space as copper wires, and it is entirely possible for multiple competing interests to occupy the same space.
The problem with a government-sanctioned and regulated "natural monopoly" is that it is essentially central planning. It should be done only when there is no real alternative (e.g. basic infrastructure such as roads, sewers, etc.). But technology is rapidly evolving, and the desire by regulators to push prices down over time to commodity levels tends to either stifle investment, or favor certain companies over others based on currying political favor.
What net neutrality really means is that companies like Google and Netflix want to put out as much data as they want, whenever they want, and don't want to pay any more than anyone else for it. Wheeler is attempting to square the circle by invoking Title II to keep the tech sector happy, while forebearing on price regulation at first, likely to undermine the arguments that the telcos will make to the courts when they fight the proposal (yes, economics is not supposed to matter to courts, but it does).
And we consumers are basically stuck between a rock and a hard place, with our only choice being "which one of these options screws us the least". Deregulation with the potential for price gouging and control of information, or regulation, with the potential for government abuse and control of information?
They also own content distribution... The TV. This is very low cost for them to run and make a ton of money off of. They are afraid the billions of dollars they will lose if the don't get to control the content that comes through them to their customers.
As far as labeling ISP as a utility is to help create competition so that laying down lines isn't as capital intensive. Building a data center for over 100,000 is as much as $100,000 that's the computer hardware, wires and renting out a building for a year. Putting in a proper AC unit is a little more. It's super cheap to build a data center. Your main costs are people, though if someone like me really wants to change the ISP landscape but can't because of all the regulations from utility companies owning the places where I need to lay down my lines.
I've looked into building an ISP and it is a lot harder than it seems, mainly with regulators from utilities and local governments.
Well, actually, there ARE a lot of parallels. Government action worsened and lengthened the depression
In 1921, there was an economic collapse even worse than the crash in 1929. The relatively new Federal Reserve largely followed the "old" playbook, did nothing, and about a year later it was over and has largely been forgotten by history.
In 1929, by contrast, the Fed basically engineered the crash in the first place by raising interest rates. The Fed Chairman at the time was intentionally trying to "pop a bubble," and even after it popped, he insisted on keeping rates high. Meanwhile, the Hoover Administration's response was to impose steep tariffs on imported goods in order to fund "stimulus." Of course that just made matters worse. Roosevelt came in, imposed price and wage controls, and initiated farm subsidies to regulate production (a continued bane of our economy that has somehow become a sacred cow). His administration was convinced that "overproduction" is what led to the crash. It turned out that paying farmers not to grow crops or to produce milk that was dumped into the ocean wasn't a good way to reduce poverty. FDR's own Treasury Secretary (Henry Morgenthau) admitted that the government just made matters worse.
Ben Bernanke didn't use these words, but he basically took the "George Costanza" approach in 2008, doing the exact opposite of the Federal Reserve in the 1930s. What resulted was a steady, but painfully slow recovery with booming stock prices, but $4.5 trillion of assets on the Fed's books that will eventually need to be sold.
It's possible, but very inefficient, even when considering buried cable or fiber. Every new ISP that wants to compete in a market will have to bury their fiber, likely on top of or alongside another company's fiber line. It'd be a nearly unending process, and would eventually create a mess that would be difficult to troubleshoot and repair. Ultimately, it'd create a lot more problems, while only solving a relative few.
If you want my opinion, I'd just say "screw it", and make the line itself a utility, run and maintained by the municipality, much like what EBP did here in Chattanooga. It'll probably raise local taxes by a bit, but the local government doesn't have any real vested interest in anything other than providing it, so you don't have to worry about them blocking or slowing down traffic by their own whims.
The money will be made by those who utilize it, like Netflix, Amazon, and so on.
...but even this isn't a 100% guaranteed full stop solution.
I brought up Netflix earlier on. The interesting thing with them is that they had set up their own peering networks, and had worked out a few deals with the other bigger peering networks and backbones to distribute bandwidth. It's not like they wanted to use everyone else's bandwidth for free. They're not entirely innocent, but they're not the sole cause of the issue, either.
Comcast could have signed onto Netflix's peering setup, but chose not to. Instead, they throttled them down, and demanded payment to access their network at reasonable speeds.
This is the one thing I think we should be attempting to avoid at all costs. Where a third party that provides a service we all want to pay for can be held ransom because another company controls access to us.
But the Depression-era regulations did NOT prevent massive stagflation in the 1970s, or the S&L crisis in the 1980s. Also, some of the reforms were necessary. Note that Dodd-Frank did not simply bring back the old separation between investment and commercial banking. To the contrary, all the big investment banks except for Goldman Sachs are now part of commercial banks. The Volcker rule attempts to limit "proprietary trading" but it is nothing like what existed under Glass-Steagall.
The government doesn't get to control the information on the internet. If the government does get to control it, Google would not support it.
Face it. Most governments look at the net as an untamed horse, even in the states.
Sure this round of legislation may not amount to wholesale censoring and is primarily aimed at 'fairness' but the day is coming when your ISP will dictate what you can find on the web in the US. This is already happening around the globe. Pretty sad honestly.
Sure this round of legislation may not amount to wholesale censoring and is primarily aimed at 'fairness' but the day is coming when your ISP will dictate what you can find on the web in the US. This is already happening around the globe. Pretty sad honestly.
Same with me. My went up almost $200 p/month to get a similar or maybe less of service.
Obama has been a very good president IMO after receiving a country in shambles. Obamacare has been not that great but if that can down the road make health insurance affordable and a reality to all Americans, I am OK to share some of the burn now. We'll see.
Even with how crappy our government can be, cable and telecom companies are still worse.
1. Basic POTS lines have a litany of taxes that nearly double the cost.
2. My gas rates vary wildly.
I think we need competition more so than regulation. I can't think of a single public utility I've ever been happy with. They are a necessary evil with ridiculously bad customer service, generally speaking. The current broadband providers have locked out competition which is where the focus should be, IMO.
Clarified for you. Government is far worse - since history has proven THEIR tyranny will eventually kill you. Your lack of access to "50 Shades of Sex" (or whatever that's called) and a telephone and internet will probably not kill you.
Why would the government need to tax internet bills or the rates go higher?
If anything the rates are too high in the US compared to the rest of the world.