What cable TV thinks about Net Neutrality
- Thread starter nescafe
- Start date
jeremyp
Philosopher
That video is FUD. Net neutrality prevents telcos from charging twice for bandwidth usage. It's a good thing.
davefoc
Philosopher
The US is truly fortunate that we have the cable TV companies to point out how the silicon valley tech companies are stealing our money.
What would we do without the noble cable companies who, despite their monopoliy like business, have still fought tirelessly to keep cable rates low and to protect the American consumer?
This whole situation just brings a tear to my eye.
What would we do without the noble cable companies who, despite their monopoliy like business, have still fought tirelessly to keep cable rates low and to protect the American consumer?
This whole situation just brings a tear to my eye.
That's exactly what I thought when I saw the commercial the other day. I laughed out loud and said to my fiancee "Like cable companies are bastions of decency and consumer advocacy".
Zbu
Critical Thinker
- Joined
- Jan 29, 2006
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- 464
Indeed! I have stories from my dark time at one which would curl your hair. Like the time a certain company bought out tons of systems and then jacked their prices up while not maintaining the network even when our modems wouldn't work on the old system. And this isn't even touching what our techs did to some houses.....
Dark Jaguar
Graduate Poster
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My thoughts on this are that these people are painting the online "little guys" (which seem to be the majority of sites advocating net neutrality) are big controlling companies that want to eat your money. That picture is.... inaccurate.
I don't want to sound too libertarian, but I'm in two minds about net neutrality. It is, after all, effectively asking for the US government to meddle with how their citizens use the internet. This could just lead to a uniform level of crappy service where the providers get to say "gee, we'd like to respond to our customer's demands, but sorry, federal regulations have our hands tied!".
nescafe
Caffeinated Beverage
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- 862
Not quite. All it says is that ISPs should not do things like (for example) limiting bandwidth to Google because the ISP has a sweetheart deal with Yahoo, or preventing their subscribers from accessing websites that are critical of the ISP's policies.
I just want my ISP to provide me with a bit-pipe with such-and-such upstream and downstream bandwidth -- I do not want them to prefer or penalize traffic between me and whatever sites and services I choose to access without me being explicitly in the loop (preferably on a packet-by-packet basis).
As long as there isn't a monopoly, is that such a bad thing? I mean, it's not something I would want from an internet service, but if the ISPs think they can make money from it, why make it illegal?
Right, and I assume lots of people feel this way as well, so presumably there'd be a substantial business opportunity for an ISP that doesn't monkey about with your data in this way. So is there really a need to legislate?
davefoc
Philosopher
I don't know how internet delivery schemes will shake out over the next ten years or so. If it evolves into a situation where there are multiple ISP's for an individual then I am with you. Let each of the ISP's compete with whatever packages they want to market.
But right now that is not the situation for most of us. In my case I have only one source for high speed internet and I don't want that source to go all creative on me as they attempt to squeeze me for a few more bucks.
The long term answer may be to provide high speed internet to everybody and let the competition exist between the content suppliers. This is a paradigm that appeals to me but I think there are already signs that current suppliers will fight it. But the good news is there are signs they might lose. I know of a few towns that are on their way to offering free internet access in their downtown areas.
Agreed. This is why we need net neutrality. While I subscribe to the libertarian views for a lot of things, I simply can't support it in this case. Our government (US and states) has effectively supported the creation of the telco monpolies. They can't just step out now and let everybody fend for themselves. If the government had never tried anything, chances are we would have more, but smaller ISPs available (of course, who knows what the state of things would be?).
As it is, I have 2 options for high speed internet, both of which come from crappy companies nad offer poor service for a high price. If true competition existed, there would be many more choices for the average consumer. Until somebody fixes this mess, the government needs to enforce net neutrality.
On the subject of Net Neutrality, I think this article (sorry, you'll have to fix the link by restoring the missing . and removing some spaces... darn those limitations on posting links :/)
www theregister.co.uk / 2006/07/17/net_neut_slow_death/
is well worth a read.
It offers a diferent viewpoint on the debate, and (at least to me) underlines why politicians and the public at large are probably best left out of what is more of a technological question than the debate about free speech that this has turned into.
www theregister.co.uk / 2006/07/17/net_neut_slow_death/
is well worth a read.
It offers a diferent viewpoint on the debate, and (at least to me) underlines why politicians and the public at large are probably best left out of what is more of a technological question than the debate about free speech that this has turned into.
Ezekiel's link: www.theregister.co.uk/2006/07/17/net_neut_slow_death/