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Does anyone here actually oppose Network Neutrality?

The idea that the FCC would then be in control of the internet terrifies me. The idea that Al Gore is in favor of NN terrifies me

The actual idea of NN seems very sensible to me, and if it could be done without the FCC or anyone else taking over, I am very much in favor
Who would you trust to ensure net neutrality?
 
Scaremongering about Al Gore aside, NN is what we have now. It is the status quo. Nothing needs to be done in order to implement it; it's already implemented. What's happening is that several companies want to change that, so they can find yet new fees to implement for sites to have their content delivered faster. That's why it's an issue.

If only that were true. Sadly, many ISP's have already started limiting bandwidth based on the protocols used by that bandwidth. After all, there's nothing illegal about it, and those contracts all read "Up to a kajillion bps", not "Usually a kajillion bps", or even "Normally a kajillion bps", or "As close as we can get to a kajillion bps".

Web surfing? OK. You can do it at 10Mib!
Reading your mail? OK. You can do it at 10Mib!
Skype? 512Kib for you. Doesn't matter if you paid for 10Mib.
BitTorrent? 512Kib for you. Doesn't matter if you paid for 10Mib.

Moves like that are why the concept of Net Neutrality got started. Later someone figured out that the same tech could limit Google searches to 1bps while allowing Bing searches at 10Mib, and that got rolled into the Net Neutrality bandwagon as well.

Rarely do people ask for laws about what someone might do, it's usually about what someone is already doing.
 
When corporations start trying tocontrol what can be done over a communications medium that was intended for public use, it is time for the corporations to go away. The infrastructures that government built or subsidized should never become the fiefdom of a parasite.
 
It seems like pretty soon a lot of cities in the USA will have free public wifi. What is going to happen then?
 
It seems like pretty soon a lot of cities in the USA will have free public wifi. What is going to happen then?
I don't understand. What does that matter?

Just because the wifi is free to the end user doesn't mean the ISP isn't throttling connection speeds in favor of hosts who pay the most.
 
I was thinking the wifi would be made on government servers...not sure really how it works
 
Having the service provider charge the same to everyone for the same amount of data

What do you think it is?
providing the same connection speed and quality of service regardless of the data being transferred and where its being transferred to/from
 
how can you deregulate the internet when it isnt regulated?

The land lines are. Right now, the wireless providers have to accept terms of use from land-line-based sites. iIf they try to put up a choke point, the FCC can stop them.

Unless McCain can place a prior restraint on the FCC.

I can see one further danger here.

Hypothetical case:

McCain gets his way with wireless. All of a sudden, half the sites on the internet get cut off from the first couple pages of a Google search because the wireless clients who have paid the big bucks get the traffic. Service starts to deteriorate. McCain repeats his blather about phone lines being so crappy because government gets in the way.

Now he pushes for and gets near-total deregulation of phone lines.

We're screwed.
 
most internet services are already deregulated: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_neutrality_in_the_United_States#Regulatory_history_of_broadband
some, like cable, were hardly regulated to begin with

mccain and others simply wants to pass legislation to keep it unregulated, and remove what little regulation there still is, opponents want to pass legislation to create new internet-specific regulation

as for you hypothetical, im not sure what your saying, websites arent hosted on wireless networks, and wireless internet doesnt account for enough traffice to swing googles pagerank that much

the google-verizon deal seems to me to be a way for ISPs to keep taking on more customers without actually having to increase their capacity, which is an even bigger problem with wireless devices, AT&T, Sprint, Verizon, they all want to sell lots and lots of smartphones and have people pay big bucks for the data service, but they dont want them actually using the data service because that means they cant sell the network capacity to other users and businesses (and i think its no coincidence Sprint, Verizon and AT&T are all tier 1 ISPs)

i agree there needs to be regulation to ensure everyone has access to the same internet, its actually one of the main reasons i didnt vote for mccain in 2008. if anything the aftermath of the removal of the old telephone-related regulation has shown that we do need regulation
 
Having the service provider charge the same to everyone for the same amount of data
No.
providing the same connection speed and quality of service regardless of the data being transferred and where its being transferred to/from
Yes.
Technically it's both.
Not really.

For a use case, imagine that one day Facebook takes 3 or 4 times as long to load than it used to. Meanwhile, MySpace is moving along at top speed. MySpace has essentially paid to restrict your access based on its criteria.

Now, consider that the Next New Thing in social media can hardly be used because it can't afford to compete with the deep pockets of those big boys. Innovations are artificially inhibited without network neutrality.

Imagine an incumbent who can pay to make a political challenger's website almost impossible to use.

Network neutrality is critical for pretty much everything now.
 
Yeah, but who the heck uses MySpace anymore. :D

I know. I chose them in my example because they are the inferior service. But, if they can make their competition unusable by artificially increasing load times, they have an artificial advantage that could increase their market share.

The only ones who benefit are those who buy and sell the tiered service. The people who use the internet and the innovators of new technologies lose out big.

I'm sorry, but you simply cannot trust ISP's to not sell tiered access to domains. That is a direct conflict of interest. Even if cities provide free wi-fi access, those cities are still buying that access from an ISP. This has to be regulated by a third party (FCC is the natural fit for this, but whoever) and/or made flat-out illegal or it isn't going to happen.
 
This is net neutrality:

When I go to Google, this is the header that Google sends out from their servers:

Host www.google.com
User-AgentMozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8Accepttext/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8Accept-Languageen-us,en;q=0.5Accept-Encodinggzip,deflateAccept-CharsetISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7Keep-Alive115Connectionkeep-alive
Referer http://www.google.com/

Here's the James Randi site:

Host forums.randi.org
User-Agent Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8
Accept text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language en-us,en;q=0.5
Accept-Encoding gzip,deflate
Accept-Charset ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7
Keep-Alive 115
Connection keep-alive
Referer http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?p=6309543

Under net neutrality, my ISP doesn't concern itself with these headers. Whichever packet comes in first goes out first.

If NN goes away, that packet from Google moves to the front of the line (as long as Google pays extra), while JREF has to wait at the end of the line. Or the JREF packet will be throttled.

If you value this site, support Net Neutrality. It's that simple.
 

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