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FCC Democrats Set to Move on Net Neutrality, Broadband Subsidies

drenvuk 6y ago
The FCC is kinda crappy. what's to keep a republican controlled FCC from reversing their stance again?
- unityByFreedom 6y ago
  Public understanding of the issue. Nothing is wrong with Congress delegating authority, and I don't see anything wrong with policies changing from admin to admin. It gives us time to discuss it and see how the policies work while also allowing more experienced professionals to implement policy. This has its pros and cons and I know in general the tech crowd is wary of lobbyists-turned-government officials, however this is the best system we've got. I don't want Congress setting net neutrality policy, and people like Pai did take some risk with their positions, namely, he was unpopular for this admin.
akersten 6y ago
The two biggest priorities should be restoring net neutrality so ISPs can't balkanize the web into "social media package, $49.99/m", "streaming package +$29.99/m" _and_ banning of data caps. During covid lockdowns, a few ISPs "temporarily suspended" their data caps - and magically, the infrastructure did not collapse. So any excuse that data caps are necessary is completely invalid. They exist purely out of greed. It's insulting that these same ISPs took government broadband rollout money and pocketed it.
- ocdtrekkie 6y ago
  Nobody was ever doing that. The image in question was a crafted example of what someone imagines is possible. Data caps aren't necessary from a technical sense, no. But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets. Artificially limiting network speed is intentional crippling of service. Rather than pay for "very slow service", "slow service", or "fast service", providers should give everyone the best possible service their network is capable of... and then charge us for how heavily you use it. Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.
  - unityByFreedom 6y ago
    > Nobody was ever doing that. Zero-rating + data caps means you're paying more for some websites than others. Comcast/XFinity gives you unmetered "free" access to NBC, for example, while charging you for overages caused by your Netflix traffic.
  - cbozeman 6y ago
    > But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets. Ridiculous. Bandwidth is no different than electricity. Hell, it mostly is electricity. Meter it by the megabyte and let the customer decide. A flat connection fee per month just like your electrical service, and then you pay for whatever you use. If you stream from the time you get up until the time you go to bed, you'll pay for it. If you stream three movies a week, you'll pay for that.
    - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
      I'd be totally on board with a flat connection fee per month plus by-the-megabyte metering. I've advocated for it many times before. But in lieu of that, charging a 600 MB a month user one fee, and a 1.4 TB a month user a higher fee seems entirely legitimate to me.
  - akersten 6y ago
    > Nobody was ever doing that. It's immaterial to me whether ISPs had gotten around to creating their a-la-carte packages yet. I want it to be impossible for them to do so. Why leave the option open? > Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day. You do realize that ISPs already tier their offerings in such a way that this is a non-issue? Grandma would buy the 10Mbit/s package, the family would buy the 1Gig/s. I have no issue with that sort of tiered pricing. That's a perfectly fine division to make. But, slapping arbitrary data xfer caps on top of that is dirty double-dipping.
- NetOpWibby 6y ago
  I believe Xfinity has intentionally hobbled their data cap removal on their site. Every time I went to go through the process of paying an extra $30 for unlimited data, service was "unavailable." Complaining on Twitter got the result I wanted but I find that interesting. Or who knows, maybe I'm imagining things.
- nickysielicki 6y ago
  Just because the internet infrastructure right now can handle some consumers without data caps does not mean that it’s a good idea to permanently embed that as a principle. What happens when we have 4 people per home, all streaming uncompressed 8k VR video streams, and 200 homes in a subdivision? Sorry, Comcast, make your pipes bigger? Government says so? Sorry, Level3, hip-new-startup is pushing 400PBps, you can’t drop it! I don’t know what the demands of the internet are going to be in 10 years, and neither does anyone in Washington DC.
  - Barrin92 6y ago
    Is that a realistic scenario that cannot be solved by just building out capacity? I don't see this discussion in South Korea or whatever where everyone and their grandmother stream like crazy since forever. It sounds like completely invented scarcity. If necessary have the state chip in if the infrastructure is too expensive but do we really need to ration internet access?
    - unityByFreedom 6y ago
      > do we really need to ration internet access? No, we don't, it's a ploy for major ISPs to rake in more money without needing to invest in anything. Yes, of course ISPs need to make money in order to upgrade, and they already do that. The point of net neutrality is to ensure that ISPs and content providers are not stifling competition. If these businesses don't reconsider their zero-rating & data capping practices I wholly expect a future FTC's Antitrust to look closely at the ISP and digital content landscape.
    - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
      > Is that a realistic scenario that cannot be solved by just building out capacity? Have you ever wondered why most home internet speeds top out at 35Mbps? It goes back to legacy spectrum stuff, they never needed upload to get cable to you, so the reserved spectrum was small, on docsis 3.x it tops out at 35Mbps. The internet backend isn’t some wonder of engineering, it’s tubes held together with duct tape and bubble gum. A lot of old ways of doing things. There is a very real practical limit to “just building out capacity”. Because of exisitint equipment, legacy standards, etc. Running fiber to everyone directly, wouldn’t fix things. Beyond specs and standards, it would become a space, power, and heat limitation at these isps, and this is all totally ignoring cost.
- throwaway201103 6y ago
  Weirdly, my Comcast service has never been better than in the last year or two. Also cheaper as I dropped TV entirely. I haven't seen any hint of balkanizing the service as you describe, but of course that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. There's still a lack of competiton in most areas. My alternative to Comcast would be 4G via my phone.
- ryanSrich 6y ago
  Comcast/Xfinity is also blatantly manipulating their numbers. I’ve measured my traffic every month for the last 3 years. Some how, during December, I magically went over my 1.2TB cap for the first time (now that they are actually enforcing caps). I checked my network and my data was 987gb. Well below the 1.2TB cap that Comcast said I went over. Data caps are just atrocious behavior. Truly barbaric. I’m a hardcore capitalist, but I’m directly opposed to corruption, and that’s what cable and ISPs like Comcast are. Corrupt, archaic, welfare corporations that drain the soul out of society.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    > I’m a hardcore capitalist, but I’m directly opposed to corruption, and that’s what cable and ISPs like Comcast are. The nice thing about supporting capitalism and free markets is that it still is easy to object to monopolies. In a free market, I wouldn't care if $ISP sucks or charges extra for certain traffic, because if I didn't like it I'd use one of their 40 competitors.
    - ryanSrich 6y ago
      I'm not sure what your point is, are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? I have exactly 1 option for an ISP in a moderately sized US city, which feels wrong.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        I think I'm agreeing with you, at least in that I think our fundamental problem in many cases is precisely that we're already not operating in a free market; I would abhor regulation on ISPs if they were actually competitive, but when they operate as monopolies or duopolies I'm not nearly so opposed.
forrestthewoods 6y ago
Given that it’s been a few years of no net neutrality... what terrible things have happened? What bad things are happening today that will be stopped or fixed with new net neutrality laws? As a casual internet user I haven’t really noticed anything one way or another?
- gigatexal 6y ago
  See the post just above you.
- akersten 6y ago
  Quite a few ISP/media conglomerate monopolies like AT&T and T-Mobile are zero-rating their own streaming services' traffic, while still counting bytes for Netflix against a pathetic mobile data cap. Anti-competitive and unfair, but it's completely permissible in a world without net neutrality.
  - nostromo 6y ago
    Huh? T-Mobile has no streaming content service. They also give Netflix away for free with many of their plans.
    - unityByFreedom 6y ago
      You get Netflix for free with T-Mobile because they have a business arrangement. It's anti-competitive to the next Netflix.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    Wasn’t the NN claim you would be charged more for services? As I understand it, not charging you for a specific service would still be allowed under NN.
- metamet 6y ago
  Comcast, for example, could ban Zoom, WhatsApp, Skype, etc. if they thought it would be financially beneficial for them to do so. They could charge more for VOIP, or gatekeep certain traffic unless you pay more. And many people don't have the luxury of multiple ISPs in their area. Simply because these corporations haven’t abused their power yet doesn't mean they wont, considering it's perfectly legal for them to do so.
unityByFreedom 6y ago
Fantastic. Also, zero rating is allowing ISPs and content providers to stifle competition and artificially raise prices. We should reinstitute net neutrality, investigate zero rating, reconsider the subsidies, and encourage municipal broadband where it makes sense.
Anka33 6y ago
Go Go Communism!
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
volak 6y ago
Net Neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. The only argument for it is a fictional story based on photoshopped ads. Government should not be regulating internet content.
- boxed 6y ago
  Clearly ISPs should be regulating content. eye roll
- deathlight 6y ago
  As Ajit Pai likes to say: "a solution that won't work to a problem that doesn't exist". Four years seems to have proven him at least partly right.
unityByFreedom 6y ago
Was this just flagged off? It seemed popular until an hour in.

The FCC is kinda crappy. what's to keep a republican controlled FCC from reversing their stance again?

unityByFreedom 6y ago
Public understanding of the issue. Nothing is wrong with Congress delegating authority, and I don't see anything wrong with policies changing from admin to admin. It gives us time to discuss it and see how the policies work while also allowing more experienced professionals to implement policy. This has its pros and cons and I know in general the tech crowd is wary of lobbyists-turned-government officials, however this is the best system we've got. I don't want Congress setting net neutrality policy, and people like Pai did take some risk with their positions, namely, he was unpopular for this admin.

The two biggest priorities should be restoring net neutrality so ISPs can't balkanize the web into "social media package, $49.99/m", "streaming package +$29.99/m" _and_ banning of data caps. During covid lockdowns, a few ISPs "temporarily suspended" their data caps - and magically, the infrastructure did not collapse. So any excuse that data caps are necessary is completely invalid. They exist purely out of greed. It's insulting that these same ISPs took government broadband rollout money and pocketed it.

ocdtrekkie 6y ago
Nobody was ever doing that. The image in question was a crafted example of what someone imagines is possible. Data caps aren't necessary from a technical sense, no. But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets. Artificially limiting network speed is intentional crippling of service. Rather than pay for "very slow service", "slow service", or "fast service", providers should give everyone the best possible service their network is capable of... and then charge us for how heavily you use it. Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.
- unityByFreedom 6y ago
  > Nobody was ever doing that. Zero-rating + data caps means you're paying more for some websites than others. Comcast/XFinity gives you unmetered "free" access to NBC, for example, while charging you for overages caused by your Netflix traffic.
- cbozeman 6y ago
  > But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets. Ridiculous. Bandwidth is no different than electricity. Hell, it mostly is electricity. Meter it by the megabyte and let the customer decide. A flat connection fee per month just like your electrical service, and then you pay for whatever you use. If you stream from the time you get up until the time you go to bed, you'll pay for it. If you stream three movies a week, you'll pay for that.
  - ocdtrekkie 6y ago
    I'd be totally on board with a flat connection fee per month plus by-the-megabyte metering. I've advocated for it many times before. But in lieu of that, charging a 600 MB a month user one fee, and a 1.4 TB a month user a higher fee seems entirely legitimate to me.
- akersten 6y ago
  > Nobody was ever doing that. It's immaterial to me whether ISPs had gotten around to creating their a-la-carte packages yet. I want it to be impossible for them to do so. Why leave the option open? > Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day. You do realize that ISPs already tier their offerings in such a way that this is a non-issue? Grandma would buy the 10Mbit/s package, the family would buy the 1Gig/s. I have no issue with that sort of tiered pricing. That's a perfectly fine division to make. But, slapping arbitrary data xfer caps on top of that is dirty double-dipping.
NetOpWibby 6y ago
I believe Xfinity has intentionally hobbled their data cap removal on their site. Every time I went to go through the process of paying an extra $30 for unlimited data, service was "unavailable." Complaining on Twitter got the result I wanted but I find that interesting. Or who knows, maybe I'm imagining things.
nickysielicki 6y ago
Just because the internet infrastructure right now can handle some consumers without data caps does not mean that it’s a good idea to permanently embed that as a principle. What happens when we have 4 people per home, all streaming uncompressed 8k VR video streams, and 200 homes in a subdivision? Sorry, Comcast, make your pipes bigger? Government says so? Sorry, Level3, hip-new-startup is pushing 400PBps, you can’t drop it! I don’t know what the demands of the internet are going to be in 10 years, and neither does anyone in Washington DC.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  Is that a realistic scenario that cannot be solved by just building out capacity? I don't see this discussion in South Korea or whatever where everyone and their grandmother stream like crazy since forever. It sounds like completely invented scarcity. If necessary have the state chip in if the infrastructure is too expensive but do we really need to ration internet access?
  - unityByFreedom 6y ago
    > do we really need to ration internet access? No, we don't, it's a ploy for major ISPs to rake in more money without needing to invest in anything. Yes, of course ISPs need to make money in order to upgrade, and they already do that. The point of net neutrality is to ensure that ISPs and content providers are not stifling competition. If these businesses don't reconsider their zero-rating & data capping practices I wholly expect a future FTC's Antitrust to look closely at the ISP and digital content landscape.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    > Is that a realistic scenario that cannot be solved by just building out capacity? Have you ever wondered why most home internet speeds top out at 35Mbps? It goes back to legacy spectrum stuff, they never needed upload to get cable to you, so the reserved spectrum was small, on docsis 3.x it tops out at 35Mbps. The internet backend isn’t some wonder of engineering, it’s tubes held together with duct tape and bubble gum. A lot of old ways of doing things. There is a very real practical limit to “just building out capacity”. Because of exisitint equipment, legacy standards, etc. Running fiber to everyone directly, wouldn’t fix things. Beyond specs and standards, it would become a space, power, and heat limitation at these isps, and this is all totally ignoring cost.
throwaway201103 6y ago
Weirdly, my Comcast service has never been better than in the last year or two. Also cheaper as I dropped TV entirely. I haven't seen any hint of balkanizing the service as you describe, but of course that doesn't mean it couldn't happen. There's still a lack of competiton in most areas. My alternative to Comcast would be 4G via my phone.
ryanSrich 6y ago
Comcast/Xfinity is also blatantly manipulating their numbers. I’ve measured my traffic every month for the last 3 years. Some how, during December, I magically went over my 1.2TB cap for the first time (now that they are actually enforcing caps). I checked my network and my data was 987gb. Well below the 1.2TB cap that Comcast said I went over. Data caps are just atrocious behavior. Truly barbaric. I’m a hardcore capitalist, but I’m directly opposed to corruption, and that’s what cable and ISPs like Comcast are. Corrupt, archaic, welfare corporations that drain the soul out of society.
- yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
  > I’m a hardcore capitalist, but I’m directly opposed to corruption, and that’s what cable and ISPs like Comcast are. The nice thing about supporting capitalism and free markets is that it still is easy to object to monopolies. In a free market, I wouldn't care if $ISP sucks or charges extra for certain traffic, because if I didn't like it I'd use one of their 40 competitors.
  - ryanSrich 6y ago
    I'm not sure what your point is, are you agreeing or disagreeing with me? I have exactly 1 option for an ISP in a moderately sized US city, which feels wrong.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      I think I'm agreeing with you, at least in that I think our fundamental problem in many cases is precisely that we're already not operating in a free market; I would abhor regulation on ISPs if they were actually competitive, but when they operate as monopolies or duopolies I'm not nearly so opposed.

forrestthewoods 6y ago

Given that it’s been a few years of no net neutrality... what terrible things have happened? What bad things are happening today that will be stopped or fixed with new net neutrality laws? As a casual internet user I haven’t really noticed anything one way or another?

gigatexal 6y ago
See the post just above you.
akersten 6y ago
Quite a few ISP/media conglomerate monopolies like AT&T and T-Mobile are zero-rating their own streaming services' traffic, while still counting bytes for Netflix against a pathetic mobile data cap. Anti-competitive and unfair, but it's completely permissible in a world without net neutrality.
- nostromo 6y ago
  Huh? T-Mobile has no streaming content service. They also give Netflix away for free with many of their plans.
  - unityByFreedom 6y ago
    You get Netflix for free with T-Mobile because they have a business arrangement. It's anti-competitive to the next Netflix.
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  Wasn’t the NN claim you would be charged more for services? As I understand it, not charging you for a specific service would still be allowed under NN.
metamet 6y ago
Comcast, for example, could ban Zoom, WhatsApp, Skype, etc. if they thought it would be financially beneficial for them to do so. They could charge more for VOIP, or gatekeep certain traffic unless you pay more. And many people don't have the luxury of multiple ISPs in their area. Simply because these corporations haven’t abused their power yet doesn't mean they wont, considering it's perfectly legal for them to do so.

unityByFreedom 6y ago

Fantastic. Also, zero rating is allowing ISPs and content providers to stifle competition and artificially raise prices. We should reinstitute net neutrality, investigate zero rating, reconsider the subsidies, and encourage municipal broadband where it makes sense.

Anka33 6y ago

Go Go Communism!

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

volak 6y ago

Net Neutrality is a solution in search of a problem. The only argument for it is a fictional story based on photoshopped ads. Government should not be regulating internet content.

boxed 6y ago
Clearly ISPs should be regulating content. eye roll
deathlight 6y ago
As Ajit Pai likes to say: "a solution that won't work to a problem that doesn't exist". Four years seems to have proven him at least partly right.

unityByFreedom 6y ago

Was this just flagged off? It seemed popular until an hour in.