It’s official. The Federal Communications Commission’s repeal of net neutrality rules, which had required internet service providers to offer equal access to all web content, took effect on Monday.
The rules, enacted by the administration of President Barack Obama in 2015, prohibited internet providers from charging more for certain content or from giving preferential treatment to certain websites.
Great news. This will enable honest, trustworthy, transparant, and customer-focused companies like Comcast to take control of the internet. This can only mean good things for American consumers, and will ensure that they remain free of the confusing and heavy burden of ISP choice. In turn, the “market” will remain carved up by at best two large monopolies, which is clearly the best type of market in the universe.
Looks like This action will bring back wardriving, and other means to acquire more neutral internet access. Also looks like a boon for municipal internet in the US
Edited 2018-06-11 23:30 UTC
Unfortunately not. There have already been cases where incumbents have successfully lobbied to legislate away municipal competitors.
I don’t have URLs for the original articles I read over the last 5 or 10 years, but a quick search pulled up this example from April 3rd of this year:
“Municipal Broadband Is Roadblocked or Outlawed in 20 States”
https://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblocks/
So what if they wouldn’t call it municipal and they wouldn’t make them publicly owned? Like, e.g. (and I’m no lawyer so bear with me), the city would create a company (in whatever legal form) that would be an ISP, headed by someone with close ties to the city, that would be only collecting as much profit to pay back the city the seed money and become independent, and provide the same services as the “municipal” “publicly owned” versions. Another version could be that a city would support/subsidize small in-city ISPs (let’s say ones with areas <N, or number of clients <M, etc so that they could provide services with lower costs, then incentivize the creation of let’s say a dozen of such companies in the city. Also, maybe they can’t regulate who sells internet services, but maybe they could locally regulate the pricing, putting a cap an ISP had to adhere to. Probably all this is stupid, I don’t know.
However, as much as I usually hate unnecessary government regulation, in some cases the government (in this case state and local) indeed should exploit the powers they have and stand firmly beside their population. It’s a cliche, but you know, if there’s a will, there should be a way, someone just needs to find it.
$$$$ – the public speech of the 21st century.
They say nothing of New York! 🙂
But alas, I see th issues that are presented. But Since this net-Un-neutrality issue is afoot, it presents the necessity for invention here in the US. or a push for similar resolutions. i say a good public mesh intranet would prdobably be in order.
It’s a boon for private VPN providers and the new Ma Bells of the US
Competing ISPs won’t be able to sniff existing municipalities.
How’s it a boon for VPN providers? They’ll probably do what Bell Canada did here (before we scared our Republican Lite government into forcing a change) and throttle any traffic not recognizably on their whitelist down to 30KB/s.
Edited 2018-06-13 02:09 UTC
You may be right. Although that would really suck for the person who works from home and is using his corporate VPN for business purposes, and not to hide from the Comcast’s Netflix and Xbox live throttle, uploading torrents, and porn.
If I want tiered broadband, and since these Republican jerkoffs want to charge internet like a utility, then I want actual usage based pricing. Small monthly fee, and Pay per Use.
The problem is that there are two reasons (other than bilking customers) to choose a given pricing model:
1. Per-unit cost plus markup (eg. electricity generation, water delivery, etc.)
2. Amortized maintenance and upgrade (eg. public roads)
Given that wires wear with weather and time, like roads, a flat rate for a given bandwidth level is the most natural way to price network connectivity.
In fact, per-unit data transfer with some credit bundled into the base monthly fee is actually detrimental to traffic management because it causes traffic to bunch up at the beginning and end of the billing period more than a flat-rate plan.
(The beginning because people have so much bandwidth left that they don’t feel a need to be cautious and the end because people are rushing to use up the rest of what they paid for before it resets.)
…and, if you don’t bundle a base amount of monthly credit into it, then you get the exact reason micropayments have invariably failed and flat-rate schemes tend to win out over a la carte bandwidth pricing when the buyer isn’t trying to stretch a tight budget. (There’s no amount of money that’s large enough to be worth collecting yet small enough for it to not weigh on the client’s mind, so people prefer to pay for the peace of mind of not having to think about it.)
Clay Shirky wrote an article about this effect back in 2000.
https://web.archive.org/web/20010203140700/