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It's hard for me to imagine this comment having been made in good faith. Do you have any credible affirmative proposal/suggestion to preserve the essential qual
by not_kurt_godel 8y ago
It's hard for me to imagine this comment having been made in good faith. Do you have any credible affirmative proposal/suggestion to preserve the essential qualities of the Internet that government-mandated net neutrality achieves, or are you being willfully ignorant and myopic? When "independent hacker culture" finds a way to fund an 'independent' alternative national/global Internet infrastructure to the tune of hundreds of billions (trillion(s)?) of dollars, please do let me know. (Perhaps you've forgotten or never realized that that the Usenet/Slashdot of old you so wistfully refer to would never have even existed without ARPANET, a government-funded project.)
- ttoinou 8y agoDo you have any credible affirmative proposal/suggestion Freer markets
- KozmoNau7 8y agoIsn't that always the parroted "solution"? The current free market situation has created monopolies in many areas. How would you propose that "freer markets" would solve this? What we are seeing now is that people literally have to build their own non-profit mesh networks (as in NYC), just to get around the monopolies. If there was actual competition, that would have been necessary.
- ttoinou 8y agoThe current free market situation has created monopolies in many areas Such as ?
- KozmoNau7 8y agoCountless cities and towns where there is only one ISP, or a duopoly in cahoots to keep prices high and service low, and freezing competitors such as Google Fiber out of the market. This isn't exactly new information, if you haven't noticed the problem by now, you must have been living under a rock. There are hundreds of credible reports and articles about this problem.
- ttoinou 8y agoMore deregulation would provide the threat of having more competition later, so it would be a factor of development. There are others factors at play too of course, and net neutrality doesn't seem to be going in the right direction.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 8y agoSo, deregulating sewer pipes will cause a second set of sewers to be built, which will lead to more competition and cheaper prices? Last-mile networks are natural monopolies, building even only two networks necessarily causes half of the capacity to be unused, which is extremely inefficient, which is why it doesn't happen (among other reasons).
- KozmoNau7 8y agoIt makes absolutely no sense to build multiple redundant last mile feeds. It doesn't make sense for water, it doesn't make sense for electricity, it doesn't make sense for sewers and it doesn't make sense for internet connections. ISPs that own the last mile connections obviously don't want to share infrastructure with their competitors, because that would break their de facto monopolies. The only sensible solution is to regulate them into selling access to competitors. It has worked extremely well here, fostering genuine competition, based on pricing and features, not just simple access.
- not_kurt_godel 8y agoHow specifically are freer markets going to solve the problem? Free markets only work when there's competition. Seeing as nobody can replicate the essential physical infrastructure that ISPs/telecoms own, not even investors with billions upon billions of dollars (see: Google Fiber), I fail to see how your glib answer of "freer markets" is at all credible.
- ttoinou 8y agoFree markets only work when there's competition. A powerful (oligopolistic) corporation can set low prices / reduce margins in order to prevent other potential companies to enter into the market. And they are also pushed to innovate
- scarface74 8y agoSomeone can't just "enter" the internet service market. It takes billions of dollars. All the incumbent has to do is temporarily lower prices to keep people from switching and raise prices again once the new player goes bankrupt.
- ttoinou 8y agoSo if nobody can enter it how did it create itself in the first place ?
- scarface74 8y agoBecause cable companies and phone companies got local government approved monopolies like the electric companies and phone companies. They were thus guaranteed to have a return on investment. They also had to be given right of way privileges by the government to install cable. There were no incumbents.