U.S. Appeals court kills Net Neutrality

In its ruling against the FCC’s rules, the court said that such restrictions are not needed in part because consumers have a choice in which ISP they use.

“Without broadband provider market power, consumers, of course, have options,” the court writes. “They can go to another broadband provider if they want to reach particular edge providers or if their connections to particular edge providers have been degraded.”

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U.S. Appeals court kills Net Neutrality

This is completely ridiculous, most people in the US do not have options for multiple broadband providers, of the ones that do is this any better than the current system where we get all sites equally for a set rate? The alternative this leads us to is ISP A offers Google, then has a gaming tier for +$50 where traffic on gaming ports isn't slowed, and an email tier where you can access email providers for an extra $15 while ISP B focuses on multimedia and offers access to Youtube, then for $20 enables Netflix, and $15 for Hulu.

reply to post by Aazadan


That is pretty irritating and have to wonder what the heck the court was smoking when they decided that consumers had "multiple options" at their disposal. Locally, as a gamer, I have two options. 2 competitors does not a healthy market make.

This will absolutely kill small businesses that depend on web traffic for customer acquisition. Do you think that is one of the goals? I do. This about two things: Control of the internet and consolidation of profits.

Imagine what happens when you want to sell the awesome product you designed, that you make in your little factory by the American workers you hired. You won't be able to afford outbound access through the internet, so you'll be forced to sell through Amazon and pay Amazon their premiums.

We need to stop this Communism creep.

WhiteAlice
reply to post by Aazadan

 

That is pretty irritating and have to wonder what the heck the court was smoking when they decided that consumers had "multiple options" at their disposal. Locally, as a gamer, I have two options. 2 competitors does not a healthy market make.

Telcoms's and the recording industry have been lobbying for this for awhile. Telcom's want to get rid of it because the biggest threat to things like TV service is where they make their money is their internet service which offers the same thing as TV but in higher quality at a lower price, in addition to plenty of other things. To a company that wants to maximize their ad revenue this is great. The recording industry however (you know, the people behind PIPA and SOPA which sought to accomplish this same thing) want it because now they can pressure ISP's to block downloads of videos or P2P networks unless a fee is paid to the recording industry, regardless of the actual file being downloaded or shared.

The real irony I thought was in the related news article it linked to the EU pushing for Net Neutrality in every single country.

ScientiaFortisDefendit
This will absolutely kill small businesses that depend on web traffic for customer acquisition. Do you think that is one of the goals? I do. This about two things: Control of the internet and consolidation of profits.

Imagine what happens when you want to sell the awesome product you designed, that you make in your little factory by the American workers you hired. You won't be able to afford outbound access through the internet, so you'll be forced to sell through Amazon and pay Amazon their premiums.

We need to stop this Communism creep.

I wouldn't call this Communist, it's closer to Corporatist or perhaps unchecked Capitalism (which taken to it's logical conclusion results in 1 company providing everything). That's neither here no there however. This will kill businesses and it will remove our access to information. I wonder if TOR can stop this since the packets are encrypted, or can the ISP's simply say reduced/no service for sending encrypted information? Wouldn't that be a comforting thought if we had to send all data in plaintext?

reply to post by WhiteAlice


Well I thought for gamers there was only one true option. right ?? and thats comcast right? I mean they are just the fastest right? I am not a comcast cherrleade there just the fastes even though they are expensive to expensive. There is a great comedic skit south park did of this situation where the comcast guy is taking calls from people and people are sayig how horrible and expensive comcast is and the guy is just getting off on it because he knows there is nothing they can do. There not not gonn ahave comcast. what are you gonna do??

reply to post by Aazadan


I agree with you, but I think it is both - the control aspect of it is very authoritarian, but it is being placed in the hands of the large corporate players. Startups that rely on the internet as a means to do business have just been legislated out of existence.

I'm sure it will be near impossible to get on ats too

Was bound to happen sooner or later, and unfortunately the time is ripe for it..

Nice known ya all ATS... soon we shall not be allowed upon because AT&T or Comcast doesn't want you to be..

Looks like corporate Amerika wins again - get ready to really start paying a premium for the garbage coming from our telecoms.

vkey08
Was bound to happen sooner or later, and unfortunately the time is ripe for it..

Nice known ya all ATS... soon we shall not be allowed upon because AT&T or Comcast doesn't want you to be..

It's the new capitalism. If a competitor offers a better product than you at a lower price but you have deeper pockets don't attempt to compete, just buy legislation that forces them to shut down.

reply to post by American-philosopher


Locally, I also have FIOS available which has been more reliable than Comcast ever was (though FIOS in my area may have oversold, which is a bummer). So nope, even for a gamer there's two options here. I just chose the one with the better customer service and stable price.

reply to post by Aazadan


Just want to say great post, Aazadan, and I agree that it's not Communism in its paper form but Capitalism. One thing that I would point out though is that really, the way that I saw Communism being practiced back in the late 80's in Moscow had the same kind of disparity that we see in the US here today in that those at the top had very nice private garden homes while the majority of others lived in ghettos. In that sense, both Communism and Capitalism, despite having very opposing ways of doing things, really end up looking rather similar in execution after all is said and done. Says something about human nature and its love of greed.

To much agreement must play play devils advocate.

Lets say (if this becomes the new tend in the US) ISP' start charging 25 to 50 dollars more for full access. If this service is leaps and bounds better (e.g. faster speeds, less connection issues, higher quality streaming, etc) than the current one will people still be all up and arms over this?

I highly doubt this ruling will change much of anything. The ISP' cannot risk creating an environment where the first competitor to offer a service at a lower prices will corner the market.

I'm so sick of these corporatist pigs.
Maybe this will piss enough people off to vote out the status quo.

ETA maybe not since this thread isn't 50 pages long yet... wtf.

Openeye
To much agreement must play play devils advocate.

Lets say (if this becomes the new tend in the US) ISP' start charging 25 to 50 dollars more for full access. If this service is leaps and bounds better (e.g. faster speeds, less connection issues, higher quality streaming, etc) than the current one will people still be all up and arms over this?

I highly doubt this ruling will change much of anything. The ISP' cannot risk creating an environment where the first competitor to offer a service at a lower prices will corner the market.

Sorry but that isn't the case here - the telecoms (Verizon, AT&T, et al.) will charge the Web sites directly to allow web surfers to access their sites at higher rates. If the Web site doesn't play along, then the telecoms will throttle back access to their sites. So if ATS doesn't pay up, all of us members here might see much slower load speeds, outages, etc. This might not be a big deal to small blogs etc that don't have much in the way of membership or bandwidth usages, but imagine you're a small book seller like Abe's, trying to go against the big dogs like Amazon.com that can afford to pony up, they'll crush any competitor out there just in terms of getting access to their site. Imagine a smaller blog service like Squarespace trying to go against Google's Blogger - they can afford to pay or work out deals with the telecoms to get faster access and more bandwidth, and keep the smaller player from even getting a foothold.

Another big negative and one that has been happening - illegally - is telecoms throttling back Bittorrents, in favor of their OWN video services. With this, the telecoms (and Hollywood via the MPAA) can now make access to bittorrent services a thing of the past - an entire sector of the internet that was reasonably free of Big Brother corporatism GONE. Oh it'll still be there technically, but good luck getting any kind of usable speed or access via peer-to-peer services.

This also bodes ill for TOR.

Openeye
To much agreement must play play devils advocate.

Lets say (if this becomes the new tend in the US) ISP' start charging 25 to 50 dollars more for full access. If this service is leaps and bounds better (e.g. faster speeds, less connection issues, higher quality streaming, etc) than the current one will people still be all up and arms over this?

I highly doubt this ruling will change much of anything. The ISP' cannot risk creating an environment where the first competitor to offer a service at a lower prices will corner the market.

Removing net neutrality cannot create better service (unless there's fewer people on the network, which means more bandwidth for those who are), it can only reduce or eliminate service to certain areas as an incentive to not use them

The ISP's have no risk, the cost of fiber is prohibitively high. The way our current networks were built, is the government built them for billions of dollars and then gave them to the ISP's. These companies do not have the revenue to build the networks themselves, even expansions to the network today are done through subsidies that reduce/eliminate the risk of the ISP in laying down lines. The government however will not lay down more fiber, this was a one time thing and they stopped doing it after the ISP's screwed them over.

There is no risk to them for reducing service but there is a huge revenue stream in dividing up your service and selling service a la carte.

Your basic service lets say 768k down 256k up (note, this isn't even considered a broadband connection anywhere in the world other than the US, which considers anything above 56k as broadband) for $20.
Then you can add an additional 256k down and 32k up for every additional $3 you pay.
No file transfers and no encryption will be allowed with basic service, then you can add $10 to allow https and other encryption technologies
Lets say $2 to gain ad free faster service to specific webpages (say this list is made up of Alexa top 500 sites)
Then you can pay $4 to gain access to a non top 500 site.
For an extra $30, plus a $10 RIAA fee (because you're going to deprive them of profits) you can gain access to P2P on the network.

This is what's coming, and there is no competition that can do anything about it because most ISP's function as local monopolies due to the cost of fiber. It's even built into their business model where internet companies carve up territory for each other and seek to not compete for market share.

I'm not even getting into the server side economics where the ISP's can charge a website in order to have a "quality experience", that was covered well above me.

reply to post by Aazadan

This is what's coming, and there is no competition that can do anything about it because most ISP's function as local monopolies due to the cost of fiber. It's even built into their business model where internet companies carve up territory for each other and seek to not compete for market share.

This is of course if the cost of laying fiber does not decrease correct? If things stay the way they are yes things could get bad, but we innovate all the time. This will just help push more entrepreneurs into the industry looking for better, and cheaper ways to distribute internet access.

Without the government using its guns to enforce its "morality" on private entities, we need people to actually use empathy and logic to guide their decisions. These companies should be able to do what they want, and be condemned or praised based upon their actions.

Openeye
reply to post by Aazadan

 

This is what's coming, and there is no competition that can do anything about it because most ISP's function as local monopolies due to the cost of fiber. It's even built into their business model where internet companies carve up territory for each other and seek to not compete for market share.

This is of course if the cost of laying fiber does not decrease correct? If things stay the way they are yes things could get bad, but we innovate all the time. This will just help push more entrepreneurs into the industry looking for better, and cheaper ways to distribute internet access.

Without the government using its guns to enforce its "morality" on private entities, we need people to actually use empathy and logic to guide their decisions. These companies should be able to do what they want, and be condemned or praised based upon their actions.

Even if the cost comes down, these are massive projects. There's also a physical limit to how much can be laid down along the road corridors in the highway system. You not only need to put this down nationwide (because a competitor won't be able to buy access to the backbone), but then you need the infrastructure in place to maintain and repair it. That's just for the national connections which are prohibitive already. Once you get into last mile connections things get even more difficult. There is one technology in the works that eliminates last mile known as white-fi or super wifi however it is vastly inferior to a wired connection because of the inherent weaknesses of a wireless signal. The main limitation here is speed, it sounds fast (800 Mbit) until you realize that bandwidth needs to be divided up among all the users. In reality you're looking at 10mb wireless connections (or this is what I heard the expected result was a year or two ago). In my town currently the basic cable service is 20mb for $30 and our DSL "competitor" is $20 for 6mb. That's nothing in an era where homes in more developed areas are buying 50mb, 100mb, and above connections.

The end result I'm getting at is a competitive connection is still going to require the last mile connections too.

It is very unlikely we're going to see a large independent breakthrough on this, that suddenly allows lots of smaller businesses to compete as ISP's but just for the sake of argument, lets say that does happen. The best possible outcome is that we get an ISP that practices Net Neutrality. There is no additional upside to this decision, at best (and it's a longshot) we get what we already had and at worst the internet is essentially destroyed.

reply to post by Aazadan

In my area (rural US) there is one choice for high-speed internet. When I lived in the city, I had two or three choices. Satellite internet is available almost everywhere but it is low-speed, like a fast dial-up connection. I hope you all enjoyed the peak years of US internet structure.

Who here will join me and try to start a net-neutral high-bandwidth ISP? Well, don't be foolish, we can't do that. US governments (at all levels) will not allow that. This is merely one tiny bump down the road of societal collapse because the US has converted from away from weak capitalism into a mixed economy. The death of capitalism, not the failure of it, has arrived. RIP USA.

Obamacare was the last nail on the coffin and this is simply a the corpse starting to smell bad. The real problems begin when the corpse starts rotting around 2017. We'll be lucky to have basic free speech on the internet much after that point.

WhiteAlice
reply to post by Aazadan

 

That is pretty irritating and have to wonder what the heck the court was smoking when they decided that consumers had "multiple options" at their disposal. Locally, as a gamer, I have two options. 2 competitors does not a healthy market make.

Two things they are somehow on the take and non that sat for that ruling have a tech back ground,same situation with Monsanto a certain justice's wife had connection to that company thus that tragic ruling.
Btw this is called croney capitalism,there is this push to deregulate everything so they can steal everything and go back to the period of lassie-fare capitalism where there are no boundaries and no rules too bad many Americans applaud that effort.

fractal2
reply to post by Aazadan

 

In my area (rural US) there is one choice for high-speed internet. When I lived in the city, I had two or three choices. Satellite internet is available almost everywhere but it is low-speed, like a fast dial-up connection. I hope you all enjoyed the peak years of US internet structure.

Even three choices doesn't give you a whole lot of options. It's not like back in the days of 56k (which depending on broadband options with net neutrality might become a thing again... maybe I can break out my old ISDN modem) where literally anyone could set up an ISP. Part of me is morbidly curious to see what happens, if using TOR the packets will be encrypted so the ISP can't single something out. But this goes back to what I said before, what if the ISP's start blocking encrypted packets? The NSA certainly wants them to do that. We could have a really screwed up internet really soon.