U.S. citizens and residents have one day left to comment on the FCC's plan to kill net neutrality. Final comments are due tomorrow Wednesday, August 30th, by end-of-day Eastern time (UTC -5).
Once the comment period closes, the FCC is supposed to review the feedback and use it as guidance to revise its proposal. However, it probably won't hurt to also contact your congressional representatives, given the antagonism of the FCC's current leadership towards both the public input and net neutrality itself.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday August 29 2017, @08:19PM (3 children)
Yet another gross exaggeration that misrepresents the issue. Net neutrality didn't actually exist in law until 2015. YouTube and other video services thrived in that environment. Bandwidth [telegeography.com] and related networking technologies are continuing to get cheaper. H.265, VP9, and future codecs [wikipedia.org] are reducing the bandwidth required for a given level of quality of streaming video. And since a lot of the new video traffic is coming from smartphones, which get replaced far more often than desktops and laptops, smartphones will be quick to include hardware acceleration for newer codecs.
Some of these big ISPs agreed to keep net neutrality effectively in place as a condition in order to get their big mergers approved. So even if net neutrality disappears, they won't be able to do anything for years. After which bandwidth and networking technologies will have become even cheaper.
On the cable/fiber Internet front, you're not going to see significant slowdowns or weird pricing schemes. All of the action will happen with mobile bandwidth, where they have currently been playing around with degrading video traffic or zero-rating schemes like Free Basics.
The real issue is not net neutrality. It's local monopolies and lack of investment in improving networks due to non-existent competition. State laws banning municipal broadband worsen that.
Put down the Kool-Aid. It tastes sweet, but it ain't good for you.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Tuesday August 29 2017, @09:21PM
Some of these big ISPs agreed to keep net neutrality effectively in place as a condition in order to get their big mergers approved. So even if net neutrality disappears, they won't be able to do anything for years.
Why not? Because of some agreements made with a prior administration? This one can nullify those agreements and let the ISPs do whatever they please, and now they've got their mergers so the industry is highly consolidated.
State laws banning municipal broadband worsen that.
Yep, and we can expect more such laws, not fewer.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by canopic jug on Wednesday August 30 2017, @06:56AM
The real issue is not net neutrality. It's local monopolies and lack of investment in improving networks due to non-existent competition. State laws banning municipal broadband worsen that.
Put down the Kool-Aid. It tastes sweet, but it ain't good for you.
Actually I'd say both are relevant issues and they are certainly not mutually exclusive choices.
Yes, technically there was no net neutrality law until recently, however you gloss over the fact that it mostly just codifies the way the Internet was built in the first place. Those unwritten rules gave us the growth we saw in the 1990's and beyond. What's happening lately is that now that a handful of companies have gotten to the top, they are doing their best to pull up the ladder after them so that no new services or companies can arise independent of those on the top.
About the "drinking the kool-aid", cyanide is bitter and also the meaning of the phrase is a bit different than your use and refers to self-destructive, permanent commitment to an insane direction. The Internet Archive has actual recordings of the original event which the phrase refers to. The recording has really crappy quality due to the nature of the original recording medium and tapes being reused a lot back then. Specificallly on The Jonestown Death Tape (FBI No. Q 042) you can hear all the chaos [archive.org]: "die with dignity", "they're not crying from pain, it's just a little bitter taste", etc.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.
(Score: 1) by Alias on Friday September 01 2017, @01:32AM
The lack of last-mile competition is definitely important, but so is net neutrality. The internet largely developed as a network that was largely neutral in the net neutrality sense. Net neutrality laws were created in response to ISPs testing biased routing/throttling policies and telling their shareholders they planned to be non-neutral in the near future. Competition wouldn't be enough to prevent ISPs from being non-neutral. I can guarantee that money will make all last-mile ISPs, and probably all other ISPs non-neutral if they aren't common carriers. There is a reason common carrier status exists. It was created to ensure the phone network served the country's needs as communication infrastructure. This is every bit as relevant to ISPs as it was for the phone network back in the day.