http://ipower.ning.com/netneutrality

so they say its all true, but who knows. The thing that really is kind of creepy to me is the screenshot with the pricing for "basic" or "blogger" versions of the internet.

Anyway as far as I can tell there are 2 basic sides to the neutrality thing.

People for it (keeping the internet as is without ISPs controlling it)

and the People against it who think that in order to keep a neutral internet, there would need to be more rules in place thus making it not neutral... or something like that

It isn't broken.

Why are we trying to fix it?

The ISPs could make much more money if they "fix" it.

That's retarded. No one will subscribe internet access so they can access a select set of major cooperate sites. That cuts the usefulness and appeal of the internet down by 90%. If all the major ISPs started doing that, anyone could start up a new company with unlimited access, and have a massive market share within a year. That just not how competition works. It would be one thing if it started like that, but taking away features that consumers expect is even worse that raising the price. You just can control a market with a unsatisfied user base that is looking for an easy to implement alternative.

Besides, this isn't what net neutrality is about anyway. It's about equal bandwidth priority. Either way, though, no one will put up with internet access that only gives good access to major sites. Moving to that kind of model is like saying, "Please take away my market share, I'd rather have higher sort term profit margins."

I would be ecstatic if this actually did happen, because I could easily make a KILLING by investing in a start up unlimited access ISP. Every investor would know that as well, further guaranteeing the success of any start up companies. The thing is, all the current ISPs know this as well. The savings to be made by joining some kind of "screw the consumer" pact, are nothing compared to staying out side of it and picking up all the pissed off customers.

Wrong, wrong wrong wrong. Wrong Wrong wrong wrong!

Hahaha, that's that "Greatest Paladin in the world" dude, and the hot chick he uses to promote all his videos.

I wanted to go to the net neutrality rally a Parliament Hill (I use a smaller local ISP that actually organized buses and stuff from Toronto) but I had just started a new job. Something that's incredibly bull**** in southern Ontario right now is that Bell owns all the phone lines. I subscribe to a non-Bell ISP, but my DSL still uses Bell lines. My major gripe is that BELL has decided to restrict my bittorrent usage (I have a 25/25 cap before 1 am now). My ISP is against the cap but Bell imposes the restrictions anyways. It seems like a really huge violation of privacy that they are inspecting traffic (determining what traffic is bittorrent) and slowing down a service that they aren't even selling.

Post the video.

Seriously...how are you supposed to just "start" an ISP? You could be a proxy for an existing ISP, but you'd still have to absorb the fees. If they even chose to let you do that.

How the hell am I going to get broadband access through some startup?

I have two options for broadband: ONE cable company or ONE phone company.

They can get away with this because people will pay more to keep their broadband.

From what I understand there could be some good from not having net neutrality.

Yes but the traffic on the websites would be insane.

Not to mention you wouldn't be able to play games.

Oh snap, I forgot about the online games.

I love how these US companies like to create these laws without realizing that they could screw thier own subsidiaries (because the only companies with the power to influence lawmakers are the huge megacorperations, as the smaller ones are either subsideries already, or do not have enough money to be campaign supporters) out of money from the international market.

I mean, if they make it so someone not on their service is disadvantaged, and dont do anything to make sure that people who are from other countries arent affected (which they wont do, becuase it requires actualy effort, which will be the thing that comes to their minds BEFORE the fact that people in the US not on their service would just take advantage of it by spoofing their IP address to one that looks like it is from outside the US), then said people from other nations may just stop using those services.

Also, you have the online game aspect which could cause problems for people playing from overseas if their signal needs to pass through a router for one of those companies at any point.

So, basicly, they are in danger of harming their own buisness if they are allowed to do this stuff.

Yeah, well. That's why we're not terribly worried about it. It might happen, but it wouldn't last long. I'd expect all those premium services to slowly go out of business.

And as for illegal things - like copy protection and gun laws, it doesn't stop the criminal. All it does is hinder the honest user.

What I meant by illegal JM was that there are almost certainly places where these policies, or the methods used to enforce them, would be illegal.

Like the EU, which has very strong privacy laws, strong enough that they resulted in the information sharing law between EU ISPs and the US government a while back to be unconstitutional, so something that is only the policy of a company that is enforced by monitering traffic would quite likely be illegal in the EU.

Also, I think that Australia's laws regaurding trade would determine that access limitations determined by location would also regaurd this thing as illegal. (mostly because the major infrastructure companies have yet to employ nation-wide high speed coverage, and they would quite likely try to take as much time as they could to roll out the full access high speed stuff to all locations, seeing as they have some of the worst pricing systems already, it would not surprise me at all if they continued to try and screw us out of more money even though some of the methods they use have gotten them into trouble before)

So basicly, that video seems to be assuming that all nations have the same fair trade and privacy laws as the US, when realy, there are way more people in nations in which these policies would not be able to be applied then there are in places where they could (because I doubt that nations that censor the internet would allow a foriegn company to have any control on what their people can access).

Maybe not start, but you get the idea. It would be so profitable to be the one game with unlimited access, that you'd get enough investor money to make it happen. It's be like if all airlines suddenly started only offering flights to seven major cities.

I mean granted if everyone else tries to lock you out, you've got a big problem, but you'd have enough money to bypass them. What this site is talking about would basically kill off the Internet. We become so dependent on the Internet, that there could literally be trillions spent in making it work right again. I mean, great areas of infrastructure would have to be replaced, but it would happen.



You would pay forty bucks a month to access "hundreds of sites"? I sure as hell wouldn't.

It won't work because the United States isn't the only place that uses the Internet.

Well, yeah, they're just saying that US ISPs would basically lock in our proprietary section of the internet. That would have no effect on the rest of it.

I'm pretty sure doing that would violate a bunch of anti-trust laws, since they would be collaborating to reduce services so they don't have to compete. It's not going to happen. It'd screw everything up, and the ISPs would eventually have to capitulate or die.

yeah see except the lines, the physical lines the Internet runs on, are owned by the huge telecom monopolies who are 100% in favor of legislation that lets them retain their "can't get sued for transmitting child porn" privileges without having any of the responsibilities to go with it.

If you want to start your own ISP that's not encumbered by the policies of the existing telecoms, you need to get a pretty huge fleet of backhoes. You need to throw a gigantic wad of money at every podunk town, county and city for the rights to lay cable (which telecoms and generally a single cable provider have a government-granted monopoly over). You need to buy a fleet of ships to lay underwater cable, fields of satellite dishes and a few hundred billion dollars to get the Chinese to destroy some of AT&T's satellites because there's literally no more room up there for new ones.

This wouldn't be "fixing" the internet, this would be making an entirely new one.

Exactly. There are rather large barriers to entry which is one of the reasons pure capitalism cant solve this problem

Not to mention that, when the lines were originally installed, they were heavily-subsidized by the US government. Given the fact that telecoms and the US government both share the opinion that the established telecoms are entitled to massive amounts of free money for contributing nothing to society, I can't really see a startup even getting past the legal barriers.

No I wouldn't. Did I say I would? No, I didn't. I'd pay the lowest price possible, and find some way to get access to everything. How about Google Proxy?

Alpha1 : I wasn't responding to anything you said about legality at all. I was talking about the fact that their idea effectively ends piracy.

Rofl, somehow I could see jon actually doing that though.

That's what I said. You could do that with a couple of trillion. Really, it would take a while, but rebuilding infrastructure would make things way faster. The telcom companies would run into a lot of anti-trust laws before they could actually stop you.

God I love Dr. Cox... The man is my hero. (or the character at least)

oh thats it?

how can a person believe any of this

Let's take the companies who have the most to lose. How about Ebay, Amazon.com, Microsoft, Google, Yahoo, and Apple. Is that a pretty good list? Yeah, their combined revenue is $121.2 billion. I don't have exact numbers for their net income but statistically it would be around $30.7 billion.

They roughly equal the revenue of AT&T alone. And AT&T didn't even pay to have the cable laid in the first place - the US taxpayers did - so it's not like they have a huge mortgage to pay off. They didn't have to sell their supply of equity just to get the infrastructure set up. The current market-subsidized rate for laying cable is $58/m ($93,342/mi). Market-subsidized meaning they will charge you that much based on anticipated bandwidth costs. The actual cost of physically digging the cable is highly variable and it might not even be possible in well-developed areas where the trenches you have to put the cable in are all owned by the telecoms.


Either way, what you're talking about right there is a $7000 per person overhaul of the US communications infrastructure like it would be easy to pay off, or like investors would hop at the chance to throw money at it. How can you possibly believe this? It makes no sense. The market is not going to fix this problem.

Offering limited access to a set number of websites would make the Internet useless for most people. Imagine if all of the infrastructure and all of the intent just disappeared tomorrow, or to extend the analogy we had six months to a year to fix it. Unlimited Internet access is so important to everyone and to our economy, that we would borrow what ever it took to get it back up and running again. We'd have to- if we didn't we'd become totally screwed. This obviously isn't going to happen, it's simply what would have happen if all the other infeasibilities were surpassed and the ISPs were able to take it to the bitter end. It would really hurt our economy and our foreign debt, but it would have to happen. A lot of infrastructure would be able to be bought off from the old ISPs as their subscription rate dropped. And yes there would be money to be made of it like there was in building the internet in the first place. It's just money better spent somewhere else.

Imagine ISPs did what this website claimed. Google would instantly become useless, as well as many other websites. All you'd be left with are things like ebay, facebook, and stores. Imagine if cable companies decided to only show commercials. People will go to great lengths to get their cable back, but no one will pay for commercials. I mean right off the bat it's unreasonable because even if you save a bunch in bandwidth, you end up loosing everyone who won't pay 50$ a month for shopping and facebook, which is a lot of people and businesses.

Seconded, lets be a tad more realistic and assume that mostly unlimited access access is still offered at a premium. That's clearly against anti-trust laws, and with everyone pissed off about it, you can guarantee it will get very close attention. It only makes it worse that the ISPs are being monopolistic with infrastructure that, like you say, they may not be in the best position to claim as entirely private.

And even it they could get away with it, ISPs would only make more money on the very short term. As our economy collapses, people would stop wanting to pay money for something so useless, and the ISPs would eventually go down as well, and be forced to sell off their capitol to other companies. That would be bad for our economy, but it won't happen because ISP CEOs aren't that stupid.

I always saw net not-neutrality as meaning ISPs can charge websites fees to speed up their users' access to them. Websites that don't pay up (to INDIVIDUAL ISPs) will be extremely slow or even blocked.

Oh my god. That chick is so hot. And her accent is amazing.

This. ISPs want to double-charge for bandwidth. They want to sell bandwidth to customers and they want to charge the sites that are serving data across their lines. They want to inject ads into your webpage when it goes across their network. They want everybody to pay them more money for less service and they apparently don't feel compelled to contribute something to the market or society to get it.

I mean... you know, I look at companies like telecoms and record labels and spyware companies and I gotta wonder who the hell would denegrate themselves to the point of doing this kind of work? What kind of empty-skulled techie would voluntarily write a filter for bittorrent or find a way to inject ads into websites as they went across their network? I like to think that some day these people will be kept in zoos.

That's the case. The scenario the site proposes is patently ridicules. Even so it won't happen. You can't just form a giant monopoly and hold the internet for ransom. If they pull that, congress can just as easily make a law after the fact if they need to. Piss enough people off and all the lobbyists in the world won't save you.

No it's not. They're seriously already doing ad replacement and injection on websites. They tried filtering bittorrent via packet sniffing and traffic pattern analysis, then the bittorrent crowd started encrypting packets so ISPs are now broadly filtering and shaping any traffic it can't identify.

These people are ruthless, greedy, lazy and have an utterly vile sense of entitlement. If there's a way to do this from a technical standpoint (and there is) they will do it.


The fact that RICO and anti-trust collusion charges haven't stuck against the MPAA/film studios and the RIAA/music labels means it's incredibly unlikely that the US government, at least, will step in to do anything about it.

And if the US government doesn't stop it, that means no government will be able to. AT&T will just charge BelgianCo-brand Communications Flakes a hundred billion dollars to be allowed access to American servers over port 53. What? The root servers are on port 53? You don't say


Fortunately Obama seems to feel strongly about this issue, so there's a fairly good chance that AT&T is going to get curb-stomped come February.
I like McCain, but he doesn't really seem to understand the issue. He approaches the problem as though the carriers actually paid for their own goldmine instead of the American taxpayers paying for it as though it were, you know, an essential service.

I was talking about the whole pay a fee for a limited number of websites thing.



Comcast is getting a lot of flack for using bandwidth shaping. They'll have to stop when legit use of P2P use becomes widespread. The only way they can pull this off is with a trust.


The thing is, the MPAA and RIAA don't abuse their position like this is suggesting. Copyright infringement is still illegal anyway you look at it, and most people don't care about the real things you can get them on. Their lobbyist money is still enough to counterbalance the small amount of ill-will they're getting from this. The ISP monopoly will make enough people mad that no amount of lobbyist money will save you if you side with them. Politicians will be forced to act.


The rest of the world would split with us before then. The EU would see to that.



I really don't think it'll happen either way. Even if they try to implement it, they'll make enough people mad that they'll have to back off.
The bottom line is, you can get away with a lot, but no matter what you own, you can't tick off all of your customers.

...uhm, trusts and cartels generally don't need to bribe government officials into granting them antitrust immunity like the RIAA and MPAA do.


No. See, this assumes the EU would slap down a European ISP for doing this. They wouldn't. The EU lawyers aren't nearly as liberal when it's not American companies that are facing the massive fines. Besides, the EuroISPA exists and the EU listens to them, and that's enough.

It's also ignoring the fact that most of the pipes out there are owned by American companies acting as multi-nationals. It's also also ignoring the fact that, even though the internet tries its hardest to be a fully decentralized network, so much information is routed over the big American backbones that what you'd really end up with by cutting them off is 10 to 20 smaller and less useful internets.

And, you know, no DNS.

This is also assuming that the internet would have any value without American-owned and American-hosted sites, which is to say that, no, it wouldn't at all.



...except what we're actually talking about is widescale collusion to guarantee that heavily-restricted internet connections are the only game in town?

If people can choose between "FOX NEWS DOT COM" and "no propaganda for me ;_;" guess what they're going to pick? Like I've already mentioned, there's zero competition in most parts of the United States and Canada, and like I've also already mentioned the market will not bear a brand new startup like the video suggests. Literally the only solution is to get the entrenched politicians out of government and replace them with... you know... us.

Jon'c, think about it, would the americal websites be able to survive without the international traffic?

But i do agree with you, the US government and major corperations seem to be in DESPERATE need of a good shakedown.

Also, does the US have any regulatory body that can give smackdowns to anticompetitvie practices commited by companies? Something along the lines of Australia's ACCC? Just a question. Because if they don't, then it is easy to see how this situation happened. When regulatory bodies get make money from the thing they regulate, then said regulatory body is useless. Regulatory bodies need to be totaly financialy independant of the thing that they are regulating to be effective and fair.

The whole point to begin with is that the only people who'd be able to survive would be the entrenched media companies. They desperately want to destroy the internet because the internet is their main competitor.

I mean, every fear-mongering story about how unsafe "the children" are ends up being about either the Internet or video games, both of which have virtually taken over for our generation. The media companies basically have like 5 to 10 years to destroy the culture we've created or else some day we will literally take them out back and put bullets into their heads.

The whole extortion scheme just reeks of the mass media. An extra $2000 to get you service delivered to a customer will bankrupt smaller companies, but what's an extra $2000 to Disney?


When you put it like that it just sounds dumb.

Campaign finance desperately needs reform. The problem with politicians like Mary Bono is that they actually are representing the interests of their constituents when they draft or agree to destructive laws because their constituents include large media corporations' employees (as well as the corporation itself as a taxpayer). It's the exact same way of thinking that creates guys like Ted Stevens, who for all intents and purposes dips directly into the pork barrel for campaign financing.

The way Ted Stevens and Mary Bono conduct themselves is exactly the same way that the CEOs and higher executives at most big companies act. They're self-interested sociopaths who make snap decisions now without considering the consequences. Why should they care? When the bottom falls out they'll all have retired. Why do you think Bush and his cronies play so fast and loose with American debt?



DOJ, FTC, SEC depending on the specific complaints.

The real problem is that it's not really anti-competitive since this is basically how the internet is run already. If you run a network and some guy is pushing too much bandwidth to you, there's nothing at all stopping you from delinking him. That would be for a Tier-1 ISP, which basically means you get hooked up to other tier-1s for free. Tier 2 means you pay for one or multiple uplinks. The problem is that Tier-1 and Tier-2 networks are all owned by jerkbags who would be in favor of this plan. If a tier-2 doesn't like it that pretty much sucks for them, because level3 and AT&T can both say "Yeah sorry you have hippies on your network so we're cutting you off" and there's absolutely no recourse for the tier-2 ISP whatsoever.