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I feel like the decline of traditional television is behind a lot of the push to destroy net neutrality. The strategy being to first introduce some artificial

I feel like the decline of traditional television is behind a lot of the push to destroy net neutrality. The strategy being to first introduce some artificial scarcity on internet bandwidth through data caps, and then offer exceptions. Either the cost to the business to be on the exception list will be high, or the cost to the user will be high to override the data caps, with the cost of service increasing as oligopoly in a region allows. They can use this to steer people to the services that they back, like Hulu, or at least to make their own cable-box video on demand services seem more reasonable. If one were truly pessimistic, the categorization of content wouldn't stop at simply high bandwidth services like video. A separate limit could be applied to things like html, with websites indexed as to their type and views counted. Which could result in an online equivalent of Sinclair media's control of local television news as certain channels of information are more accessible because they don't count towards a cap. And anything untrackable like VPN use goes into a more expensive version of the existing bandwidth-based quotas. I believe it will not come to that last part, but less because I don't believe the telcos would attempt it than that I think it would incite people to legislative action. If it's introduced in slow increments, though, we might get closer to this worst-case scenario than many believe.

ClassyJacket 8y ago
Traditional television is behind the push to destroy the net in general. Look at us here in Australia - look up "NBN". we had a plan (that was already 10% complete and working great) to install gigabit fibre in 93% of homes. Then Rupert Murdoch handed the election to the Coalition, in exchange for them: - Immediately stopping work on the fibre network - Replacing the bulk of the remaining rollout with a VDSL system (ancient technology, my parents got it and instead of gigabit fibre their internet went from 13 Mbps to 19 Mbps - and this costs 2400$ per house to install) - Using loans and taxpayer money to expand the Fox cable TV\internet network to double the number of homes, and paying Foxtel hundreds of millions of dollars for the privilege, while continuing to grant them exclusive rights to broadcast on it on all frequencies they want, including the ones that are optimal for internet - Purchasing and decommissioning the Optus cable TV network which competes with it, replacing it with VDSL service It's a national tragedy, wasting fifty billion dollars and a decade, just for the sake of protecting a conservative TV monopoly.
- PinkMilkshake 8y ago
  Do you have any sources on this? I always wondered why NBN was such a disaster.
  - BLKNSLVR 8y ago
    You know not what you ask! I didn't post what you're replying to, but I'm also an Aussie who's been reading articles about the NBN disaster for its entire duration. Sources are difficult because the NBN has been on on-going project for over a decade now, so there's an absolute haystack to search through, and all the hay and most of the needles are strongly coloured by political ideologies. Whirlpool has what looks like a comprehensive timeline / article here: https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn I always found http://delimiter.com.au/ http://delimiter.com.au/ to be the best source of information around the progress (or otherwise) of the NBN. Here are a couple of semi-targeted articles that demonstrate the depth and density of this political quagmire: http://delimiter.com.au/2013/01/17/fact-check-the-nbn-wasnt-a-media-stunt/ http://delimiter.com.au/2013/01/17/fact-check-the-nbn-wasnt-... http://delimiter.com.au/2013/07/19/breaking-the-rules-how-nbn-cos-spat-with-turnbull-breaches-all-convention/ http://delimiter.com.au/2013/07/19/breaking-the-rules-how-nb... http://delimiter.com.au/2016/03/29/qa-panellists-agree-politicians-screwed-fibre-nbn/ http://delimiter.com.au/2016/03/29/qa-panellists-agree-polit... The whole issue goes back before NBNCo was created, however, to when Telstra, the government-owned monopoly infrastructure owner, was sold without being broken up into wholesale and retail arms, thus meaning their retail plans directly competed with those of their wholesale customers. The Australian Government at the time didn't see that as being a potential problem in the future, and yet here we are...
    - indemnity 8y ago
      There is an interesting comparison with what could have been. When I moved to New Zealand in the early 2000s, Internet access was worse than in Australia. “Broadband” was 256kbps ADSL at best, insanely expensive, with punitive data caps, and the monopoly telco had no interest in investing to increase service or drop prices. There were other ISPs but they had a hard time competing due to underhanded tactics by the monopolist as well as having to build out their own infrastructure entirely whereas the monopoly had inherited all its infrastructure from the taxpayer built state owned company that was privatised for a song. Around 2007, the government removed this monopoly power and broke up the company into infrastructure and service companies, with the infrastructure company having to provide equal access to any ISPs. Then the initiative to build fibre to the home started in 2008. Luckily, the government of the day did not compromise on the technical approach and it remained fibre to the home, not the node. Roll forward to today, and I have gigabit fibre to my home, with no data caps, for a decent price. There’s still a fair bit of build out to happen but the option now exists for people in most urban areas.
thankthunk 8y ago
> I feel like the decline of traditional television is behind a lot of the push to destroy net neutrality. It's the decline of TV, news and traditional media in general. Look at what the news industry has been able to do against social media/tech companies. Brow beat them into serving as spammers for their own news content so that news companies can make more money. The same thing is happening with TV. Youtube is now spamming traditional tv content at the expense of regular youtube content. I used to get variety of recommendations from programming to sports to "trending comedy". Now I get recommendations for things I've never watched on youtube - John Oliver, Late Night Shows, Saturday Night Live, CNN, etc. They couldn't compete in the new internet/social media environment, so traditional media is forcing the environment to change for them. It's been working for them in the short term, but will it work in the long term? I hope not, but who knows. The changes have been incremental, but people truly don't understand how much google search, youtube, reddit, facebook, etc has changed in the last 4 years. The internet/social media has gone from local/non-traditional media content to predominantly corporate content. And it's a trend that's going to accelerate as tech/social media is pushed to favor corporate content over ordinary user content.

ClassyJacket 8y ago

Traditional television is behind the push to destroy the net in general. Look at us here in Australia - look up "NBN". we had a plan (that was already 10% complete and working great) to install gigabit fibre in 93% of homes. Then Rupert Murdoch handed the election to the Coalition, in exchange for them: - Immediately stopping work on the fibre network - Replacing the bulk of the remaining rollout with a VDSL system (ancient technology, my parents got it and instead of gigabit fibre their internet went from 13 Mbps to 19 Mbps - and this costs 2400$ per house to install) - Using loans and taxpayer money to expand the Fox cable TV\internet network to double the number of homes, and paying Foxtel hundreds of millions of dollars for the privilege, while continuing to grant them exclusive rights to broadcast on it on all frequencies they want, including the ones that are optimal for internet - Purchasing and decommissioning the Optus cable TV network which competes with it, replacing it with VDSL service It's a national tragedy, wasting fifty billion dollars and a decade, just for the sake of protecting a conservative TV monopoly.

PinkMilkshake 8y ago
Do you have any sources on this? I always wondered why NBN was such a disaster.
- BLKNSLVR 8y ago
  You know not what you ask! I didn't post what you're replying to, but I'm also an Aussie who's been reading articles about the NBN disaster for its entire duration. Sources are difficult because the NBN has been on on-going project for over a decade now, so there's an absolute haystack to search through, and all the hay and most of the needles are strongly coloured by political ideologies. Whirlpool has what looks like a comprehensive timeline / article here: https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn https://whirlpool.net.au/wiki/nbn I always found http://delimiter.com.au/ http://delimiter.com.au/ to be the best source of information around the progress (or otherwise) of the NBN. Here are a couple of semi-targeted articles that demonstrate the depth and density of this political quagmire: http://delimiter.com.au/2013/01/17/fact-check-the-nbn-wasnt-a-media-stunt/ http://delimiter.com.au/2013/01/17/fact-check-the-nbn-wasnt-... http://delimiter.com.au/2013/07/19/breaking-the-rules-how-nbn-cos-spat-with-turnbull-breaches-all-convention/ http://delimiter.com.au/2013/07/19/breaking-the-rules-how-nb... http://delimiter.com.au/2016/03/29/qa-panellists-agree-politicians-screwed-fibre-nbn/ http://delimiter.com.au/2016/03/29/qa-panellists-agree-polit... The whole issue goes back before NBNCo was created, however, to when Telstra, the government-owned monopoly infrastructure owner, was sold without being broken up into wholesale and retail arms, thus meaning their retail plans directly competed with those of their wholesale customers. The Australian Government at the time didn't see that as being a potential problem in the future, and yet here we are...
  - indemnity 8y ago
    There is an interesting comparison with what could have been. When I moved to New Zealand in the early 2000s, Internet access was worse than in Australia. “Broadband” was 256kbps ADSL at best, insanely expensive, with punitive data caps, and the monopoly telco had no interest in investing to increase service or drop prices. There were other ISPs but they had a hard time competing due to underhanded tactics by the monopolist as well as having to build out their own infrastructure entirely whereas the monopoly had inherited all its infrastructure from the taxpayer built state owned company that was privatised for a song. Around 2007, the government removed this monopoly power and broke up the company into infrastructure and service companies, with the infrastructure company having to provide equal access to any ISPs. Then the initiative to build fibre to the home started in 2008. Luckily, the government of the day did not compromise on the technical approach and it remained fibre to the home, not the node. Roll forward to today, and I have gigabit fibre to my home, with no data caps, for a decent price. There’s still a fair bit of build out to happen but the option now exists for people in most urban areas.

thankthunk 8y ago

> I feel like the decline of traditional television is behind a lot of the push to destroy net neutrality. It's the decline of TV, news and traditional media in general. Look at what the news industry has been able to do against social media/tech companies. Brow beat them into serving as spammers for their own news content so that news companies can make more money. The same thing is happening with TV. Youtube is now spamming traditional tv content at the expense of regular youtube content. I used to get variety of recommendations from programming to sports to "trending comedy". Now I get recommendations for things I've never watched on youtube - John Oliver, Late Night Shows, Saturday Night Live, CNN, etc. They couldn't compete in the new internet/social media environment, so traditional media is forcing the environment to change for them. It's been working for them in the short term, but will it work in the long term? I hope not, but who knows. The changes have been incremental, but people truly don't understand how much google search, youtube, reddit, facebook, etc has changed in the last 4 years. The internet/social media has gone from local/non-traditional media content to predominantly corporate content. And it's a trend that's going to accelerate as tech/social media is pushed to favor corporate content over ordinary user content.