Net Neutrality

[Pali]

So this has recently become a significant news topic due to the FCC announcing that it intends to roll back net neutrality rules.  For the unfamiliar who are too lazy to Google, "net neutrality" is a term used to encompass the principle that the internet should exist on a level playing field - for example, your service provider cannot, under current law, allow faster access to another MUD's forums than FL's should that other MUD pay your ISP for such preference.  Under the new proposed rules, that could very well be the case, and anyone annoyed at Battlefront 2's pay-to-win nature should be far more angry at this, as it literally will make all web traffic effectively a pay-to-win game.

 

This post is intended to serve two purposes: the first and most important (and therefore least likely to result ), to spur a reasoned discussion of the topic.  Does anyone here think that what the FCC is doing right now is a good move, or serves its mission to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges"?  If so I ask why, and who will benefit in your mind beyond the handful of major ISPs (and various major websites/businesses able to afford preferential access)?  Any discussion of the topic should remain civil and impersonal - attack ideas, not people who hold them.  My personal opinion is that this move has a near-zero benefit to the general consumer, and only benefits those ISPs and content providers that are already near the top of the food chain: a new start-up website or real-world business isn't going to be able to pay for preferential access speeds unless it has money to burn from the start (and startup ISPs already can't compete with established ones in the vast majority of cases, as established ISPs over much of the US have effective monopolies able to price out start-up competitors), and that low access speeds for smaller sites will effectively force users to congregate at already high-traffic sites, creating a self-reinforcing loop of consumer and business activity that benefits none but those already at the top and actively hinders the progress of those who start far below it.

 

The second purpose is to provide a handful of resources one might use to register their displeasure of the FCC's current stance.  Common Cause has a petition that can be signed, as does Battle for the Net, and this petition is held on the White House website.  There are many other similar petitions currently in existence, and I strongly support signing any I've linked to or those others (or all) to register your displeasure at the US govt. offering the internet up for sale to the highest bidders.

 

edit: A couple minor edits of spelling, typos, and phrases re-arranged for clarity's sake, as well as the question posed via the green text.

[Aidon]

The problem, in my opinion, is that there is no competition amongst ISPs for a specific customer. In most places, you have 1 or 2 options, usually one DSL provider and one cable provider. This monopoly makes the lack of net neutrality problematic. If there were hundreds of providers I could choose from, then sure, maybe google subsidizes one for $5/month where their traffic is faster, and amazon subsidizes ones, and it becomes a competitive market, or you can go buy the unsubsidized one for full price. But so long as there are only a handful of opportunities in every market there's no meaningful competition to make this work. 

[Pali]

I hadnt considered it that way before, but you're right - in such a marketplace removal of net neutrality wouldn't be nearly as problematic.  Of course, creating and maintaining such a market would require anti-trust laws orders of magnitude stronger than current, which wouldn't please the giant ISPs behind the FCC's push here.

[f0xx]

I live in a relatively small town (60k people) in Eastern European country which many would consider third world, yet I can think of at least 6 ISPs (cable) that are available to me, and I am sure there are at least that amount of smaller ones that I am not aware of.

In the house I live we have 2 PCs connected to the internet and they are using different ISPs.

Although there's been a trend in recent years where bigger ISPs (especially mobile operators) buyout smaller ones...

[Erelei]

I have only two choices. Satellite Internet  (yeah right) and AT&T DSL (which sucks ass).

I don't even have the choice of cable, which is far cheaper, and 3x as fast.

[Pali]

23 hours ago, f0xx said:

Although there's been a trend in recent years where bigger ISPs (especially mobile operators) buyout smaller ones...

That's been happening in the US for a long time, so the vast majority of the US has a situation like Erelei's - two or three providers at most (with many places having only one), each offering a different kind of service rather than competing versions of the same service.  Charter has an effective monopoly on cable where I live, AT&T the same for DSL, and the handful of other options are all terrible.  Comcast and Charter alone account for over 80% of all cable subscriptions in the US, don't really compete with each other but instead have effectively divided the country between themselves and called a truce, and startups face saturated markets that are already dominated by their behemoth competitors.

[f0xx]

How much do you pay per month?

My monthly fee is 10 Euros (that's the highest fee and speed possible).

The other PC is on much lower speed and pays about 7 Euros for internet + cable TV.

[ajwetton]

 I dunno how much pali pays, but I have charter, and granted i have enough bandwith that I am never lacking but my internet alone is 65 US a month. 

[Pali]

$60 a month for my internet, so pretty comparable to @ajwetton.  If I wanted cable TV along with that, a package contract would likely cost around $20 a month more, though 1-2 year deals are commonly offered - for a year I signed up for the package deal because it was actually cheaper than just internet (and ironically never once used the cable TV during that year).  The trick, of course, is that if you don't alter your contract as the deal expires, you're automatically signed up for a package that will run $100 or so a month.

[ajwetton]

Yep, same, when I got my apt in STL 5 years ago, our net was like 30 or 35 a month for an introductory offer for a year then it went to 65, I haven't seen much in the way of packages locally to make me swap anything. But yea we're pretty much on the same page for price. Our two providers here is AT&T which is so crappy in this area that I can't use it for normal gaming, Im sure I could MUD but its terrible. And so that leaves me with charter. 

[Pali]

1 minute ago, ajwetton said:

Our two providers here is AT&T which is so crappy in this area that I can't use it for normal gaming, Im sure I could MUD but its terrible. And so that leaves me with charter. 

Yup, we are in exactly the same situation then.

[Erelei]

I pay $80/mo for 24Mbps down (.. lol I get maybe 12 down) and 5Mbps up (I get on average only 2).

And I'm only allotted 1TB of bandwidth.

[English lad]

Virgin Media - Fibre literally to my Router.

£30 / month - Up to 200 Mbs down (is often capped at 50 Mbs down during peak usage hours - but i get 25% off my bill automatically if they cap it for more than 20 hours in a month).  The £30 also includes my phone line and Cable TV package.

And most of us in the UK moan about how our internet is miles behind what you get on the continent.

Every time i read about what people face in the US - I wonder how on earth people can be accepting of the Business Practices of ISP's over there.

[f0xx]

19 minutes ago, Erelei said:

I pay $80/mo for 24Mbps down (.. lol I get maybe 12 down) and 5Mbps up (I get on average only 2).

And I'm only allotted 1TB of bandwidth.

Well that's crappy.

My 10 Euros net me (up to) 100 Mbps (fibre up to my router) and unlimited bandwidth.

And what I pay is considered very expensive around here.

[Magick]

I've got the same Full-House package, EL.  Recently switched from Sky who were offering up to 30, but in reality getting closer to 9 down, 1 up on a good day.  Now my up is faster than my down was.  Which is nice.

We accept it because we really don't have much of a choice.  Comcast and the rest have divided the US and force out just about all other competition.  There have been occasions where these companies have lobbied to stop the advancement or placement of fiber through their areas so they can retain their choke hold.

In some of the more major cities such as LA or NYC, it's not as bad.  But once you start getting going rural, things tend to go downhill quickly.

So we're kind of stuck until someone can muscle in with a better deal than everyone else is shoveling.

.... but it's been a few years since I've been back home.

[Manual Labour]

We get ripped off in Canada and the US on Internet and cell phones. My co worker from France kept his french phone plan when he came to work here and he has 100 gig a month of local data (in france) and 25 gig a month roaming data (anywhere else in the world) and he pays 3 euros a month. He told us he has a special deal but that package is normally around 10 euros a month.

I have 6 gig shared with my wife a month and we pay almost $80 each a month for our phone plans!

I have fiber Internet that yields me between 25-50 down and 10-15 up with no throttling but that's another $65 a month and I am limited to 350 gig a month. After that I pay 5$ for each additional 25 gig if I go over.

Europe > NA when it comes to phones and Internet. 

[Fool_Hardy]

Middle America 90 a month buys a terabyte. Every 50 gig past gains a 10 dollar overcharge.

The D/U load speeds on any lines that travel through the air (on poles and not underground) will vary greatly regardless what your provider may tell you.

Its al about the noise. The wind blows, connectors are stressed, a gap forms, the 87v required to transmit the signals acts like a powered antennae and begins receiving trash signal from the air waves. Your modem then has to filter the trash, since your modem is so busy checking its inventory for trash, it is not devoting its full time to the task of D/U loads. This is why when I as a technician show up, and put that fancy meter on your line, I say, signals good. My meter ignores the trash, and only pings the SOC. In an underground area, most users never complain about slow speeds if they do there is Likely a problem between the feed and their outlet. So if you are fed on a telephone pole, internet will likely be slower.

[Tantangel]

My phone service is the cheapest out of the major phone companies in my area and I pay over $120 a month for it. The best one is also a good $30 more for having unlimited everything. Had I stuck to my phone before this one I only spent about $20 and tax for unlimited texting which is pretty much all I use, but that Company doesn't exist anymore and this was the cheapest I could find after that in my area unfortunately.

There are about 10 difference companies offering different levels of service, but the major ones are the only ones offering anything decent. The most expensive one has the best Customer Service, but it's also  $100 a month for 250GB for everything. We used to have a plan that was $60 for 100GB, but we kept going way over it for over 3 months so they bumped us up to the 250GB for $100 because of us going over. We never figured out exactly what was causing it, but we switched all of our videos on Netflix to the lowest settings, limited the amount of downloads/uploads we had on top of that. My brother had the same issue with them and they bumped him up as well to the same package and he lives alone and spent a majority of his time drinking and very little time accessing the internet. Both households have ample protection from other people being able to piggy back onto our connections so it's great how we are treated across the country in those terms.

Many of the companies around here are slowly being taken over by the larger ones, and yes there are cheaper means of gaining internet here, but most of them offer speeds not even close to what we have on ours, or much lower limits with higher price hikes at each new speed boost. The only one that's competitive has extremely poor Customer Service though and  it's just not great overall with everything factored in. My brother tried a few others we hadn't even pondered though and he realized many had hidden fees that that they didn't disclose and ultimately he just got rid of it since he hadn't been gaming for a while and already spent over $100 on a phone he could use to watch TV, Movies, and Netflix. So he stuck to that until a couple months ago before he went back to the same cable service he started with.