3 ms·

More or less this, yeah. I'm not sure how people think they can just work around it when their gateway out of the last mile will have free reign to do whatever

by csydas 9y ago

More or less this, yeah. I'm not sure how people think they can just work around it when their gateway out of the last mile will have free reign to do whatever with the packets in/out as they see fit, and this will be supported legally (Well aware that rogue or otherwise just crappy actors can still do this now, but there are legal repercussions to doing so at the moment). Basically your choice is to find someone who doesn't do this, and hope that the path from whatever service or site you're wanting doesn't go through the pipes of an ISP that does want to throttle on its way to you. It's going to be a mess once this has ramped up to the full vision of the ISPs.

briandear 9y ago
And will competition result in more ISPs entering the market to serve customer desires? NN isn’t the issue — the issue is local governments that make deals with a single ISP to prevent competition. If ISP competition were possible, the NN becomes irrelevant because ISP’s want customers and customers would demand the services they want and shop around for an ISP that serves their need. We should be complaining about the lack of ISP competition, not NN. Remember the days when long distance phone calls actually cost a lot of money? That was the result of a Bell monopoly.
- csydas 9y ago
  I'm not sure how this is relevant; yes, more proper competition would be great, but we had that, for a long time, and the competition merged/consolidated. Merger after merger happened until cities were left with two competitors that made deals to stay off each other's sides of the tracks. The market naturally consolidated without government regulation allowing such things to occur. Besides, this is a tangential issue; it's related in someway, but such competition doesn't help consumers when it comes to what their ISP can and cannot do. Even without city contracts, it's really expensive in the US to start an ISP; we've seen countless stories about ISP start-ups here on HN which show the difficulty of such a venture, and it's why we don't see more of it. Heck, Google with its deep pockets could not make it work even in cities that were happy to bend over backwards for them. Even if we were to have more last mile ISPs, how does that help when the rest of the upstream is plagued with ISPs that are deprioritizing traffic based on their preferences? What good is it to have an ISP at the last mile in Seattle if the route to Seattle de-prioritizes this traffic? Net Neutrality is equally important to the striking down of the city-wide contracts ISPs have managed to get. This was a state by state thing and the story was the same each time; the ISPs promised far more than they delivered to the states, and the states just ate the bill while the ISPs fought in court each and every time. I don't believe for a moment that the ISPs should be able to use our Tax Payer money to have laid cable like this then bend us over a barrel for it. More competition would be great, but this alone doesn't solve the issue. How big of a price tag does a BenevolentISP have before it's an offer too good to refuse? Why even give them the power to use our money to screw us even further?

by csydas 9y ago

briandear 9y ago

And will competition result in more ISPs entering the market to serve customer desires? NN isn’t the issue — the issue is local governments that make deals with a single ISP to prevent competition. If ISP competition were possible, the NN becomes irrelevant because ISP’s want customers and customers would demand the services they want and shop around for an ISP that serves their need. We should be complaining about the lack of ISP competition, not NN. Remember the days when long distance phone calls actually cost a lot of money? That was the result of a Bell monopoly.

csydas 9y ago
I'm not sure how this is relevant; yes, more proper competition would be great, but we had that, for a long time, and the competition merged/consolidated. Merger after merger happened until cities were left with two competitors that made deals to stay off each other's sides of the tracks. The market naturally consolidated without government regulation allowing such things to occur. Besides, this is a tangential issue; it's related in someway, but such competition doesn't help consumers when it comes to what their ISP can and cannot do. Even without city contracts, it's really expensive in the US to start an ISP; we've seen countless stories about ISP start-ups here on HN which show the difficulty of such a venture, and it's why we don't see more of it. Heck, Google with its deep pockets could not make it work even in cities that were happy to bend over backwards for them. Even if we were to have more last mile ISPs, how does that help when the rest of the upstream is plagued with ISPs that are deprioritizing traffic based on their preferences? What good is it to have an ISP at the last mile in Seattle if the route to Seattle de-prioritizes this traffic? Net Neutrality is equally important to the striking down of the city-wide contracts ISPs have managed to get. This was a state by state thing and the story was the same each time; the ISPs promised far more than they delivered to the states, and the states just ate the bill while the ISPs fought in court each and every time. I don't believe for a moment that the ISPs should be able to use our Tax Payer money to have laid cable like this then bend us over a barrel for it. More competition would be great, but this alone doesn't solve the issue. How big of a price tag does a BenevolentISP have before it's an offer too good to refuse? Why even give them the power to use our money to screw us even further?