The point being that the market would sort these things out naturally… which is why it’s never been a problem… and if it ever actually becomes a problem, we’ll revisit it at the time, but otherwise I’m happy to see less and less unnecessary regulations over absolutely everything
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Maybe they’ll use some of their new resources to regulate the up front price gouging and secret rebate scheme in pharmaceuticals instead
I get all of my ideas from occupy democrats and infowars
Well that will save a lot of money for the 1% which is all I care about
In all seriousness though, this is the end of the internet as we know it. The porn is gone, forums like ours are crawling with the thought police now. Pregnant women are being forced by rich white men to carry their babies to term. AR15s are being handed out to mentally ill people. The westboro Baptist church is now in charge of the whole internet. God help us
BTW - Netflix and Youtube account for pretty close to half of the total internet traffic.
They are vile. Period.
And it’d be completely unreasonable for an isp to charge an extra couple bucks for the video streaming plan for people who want to use Netflix, Or offer a couple dollar discount to people who don’t demand that capability if that’s what keeps them competitive, and if they don’t strike that balance right, then they’ll lose business to the competition…
Now if only we had a functioning system like this in pharma…
There instead he fda picks winners and losers and is easily influenced by power players and does absolutely nothing to protect consumers from the rebate racket
Obama gave us net neutrality and he gave us ObamaCare, which begat big Pharma that we know today.
One down, one to go.
The ObamaCare was never sustainable from the start.
Well in fairness there were a lot of problems in pharma before Obamacare… that said, it did seem that they went as far out of their way as possible to avoid helping that situation with that legislation
Packages, plans, and rates have zilch to do with the principle of net neutrality. “The internet isn’t free” is a red herring. What’s at stake here is the ability of powerful companies to restrict, sometimes with bias, what consumers have access to. Your ISP may decide that The New York Times is too liberal, and suddenly it takes forever to load on your computer, or you don’t have access at all. As one Canadian commentator said, “The sky won’t fall. You’ll just see less of it.”
My understanding is that you are incorrect. The concept of neutrality is that all data must be treated exactly the same by ISPs. So under net neutrality I also can’t call my isp and say “hey I have young children and I’d like porn, smut, and filth free internet service” they’d just not be able to help with that at all under neutrality would they?
Neutrality means they are required to treat all data exactly the same. The internet seemed to function just fine for me before these regulations.
So in thomas’s Netflix / Comcast example Comcast could also conceivably now tell their customers “we are going to charge you an extra dollar a month to have Netflix access because it uses 30% of our bandwidth” but at this point it’s just competition that’ll rule the day…
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They would. What they can’t do is throttle or block content to all users, unbeknownst to those users.
Maybe the American understanding differs from that of most of the rest of the world. The last link below (ScienceNordic) seems particularly level-headed to me.
I may be missing something. Are we not talking about the American recent decision of the FCC?
Or perhaps you are discussing the concept itself as potentially applied world wide?
We are. As are the linked articles. They are not talking about packages or fee schedules made available to individual subscribers or consumers.
@Beacher
I don’t understand your previous comment then.
No disrespect intended but if this is the American FCC decision then would it not be the American understanding of such which is relevant?
Difficult. That depends on how strict the net neutrality laws are. My country used to have very strict laws till the EU issued somewhat softer net neutrality regulations. The national railways, for example, trying to provide a safe environment for children, used to block porn and other stuff on their free wifi network. Nope, said the authorities, you cannot do that because of net neutrality. Blocking websites that consume lots of data, like youtube, was a difficult issue too.
There are one or two small ISPs that used to offer filtered internet only. Everyone who bought their service did that voluntarily. Nowhere in this country are they the only ISP and they’re more expensive then regular ISPs. So nobody can say there was a lack of choice. Due to net neutrality they had to create a complex system in order to continue providing some sort of filtered internet despite there being no risk of them ever becoming a monopoly. That’s ridiculous in my opinion. If people voluntarily want to buy internet from an ISP that explicitly states they offer filtered internet only, they should be able to do that. Seriously, why would I care? This should be possible in a free market.
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I was being facetious, since some people were focusing on pricing rather than on what a provider chooses to restrict or not provide without letting the customer know about it.