Hate Monopolies? Then You Should be Pissed About the Abolition of Net Neutrality

RaceBannon said:

I;m against most ideas by the left these days. It's a good gauge

A leader presents legislation and works with Congress to get it passed. You know, the shit you are already calling Trump a failure for but gave Obama an eight year pass on.

This free market type wants market decisions made in the light of day. Not by bought and paid for regulators

If it is such an awesome thing Congress would have passed it if the Leader of the Free World had used his awesome teleprompter skills to sell it to the unwashed

If it was an actual free market, I could accept it, but ISPs have virtually no viable competition in most markets.

GrundleStiltzkin said:

Or: The chinfrastructure companies want to maximize their chinvestments. Naturally. The content companies want to distribute for the lowest possible cost. Naturally.
I fail to see heroes and villains in all this.

False equivalency because the chinfrastructure companies and content companies exist in 2 completely different competitive markets.

ISP's, especially high-speed cable ones, are (and need to be treated like) utilities. Many markets are limited to a single high-speed ISP because of extreme barriers to entry for any competition... whether they're either too remote to be economically feasible to set up in infrastructure in or (in downtown Seattle's case with Comcast) there are historical landmark laws protecting the only existing infrastructure.

Content companies exist in a much more open market where the only real barriers to entry are the web hosts and search engines they have to work to get their content to pop up on searches.

So I'm of the opinion that it's not fair to let an ISP that has near monopolistic power in many markets to be allowed to do whatever they please to maximize their investments BECAUSE there's no competition to block them from abusing consumers and content providers without net neutrality.

The heart of the net-neutrality debate is whether or not Internet Service Providers should be able to charge different prices to different customers or if the rate charged should be fixed per unit the way electricity or water utilities work. Right now, ISPs have to treat all traffic flowing over their network the same. When you request to view a page on hardcorehusky.com your ISP has to transmit that traffic with exactly the same priority as your neighbor's traffic who is watching a movie on Netflix. What getting rid of net neutrality will do is essentially allow ISPs to treat traffic any way they want, prioritizing some traffic over other traffic or charging more for certain types of traffic.

Another way to think about this is to compare ISPs to electricity companies and the internet to electricity. Let's say Boeing and the power company cut a deal so that the power company charges prohibitively high rates for electricity on their grid that is consumed by airplane manufacturers. Boeing, a massive company that has been around for a century and has billions of dollars in the bank(or maybe they used to before they fucked up the 787) can pay the high prices but the upstart airplane manufacturer can't afford to operate because electricity costs are too high. So, to start an airplane company you would not only have to build the airplane but you would also have to first create your own economical supply of power which isn't possible.

HoustonHusky said:

The problem is the Internets is lots of thing including information...much different than electricity or phone service. You don't want anyone in charge of filtering that, but if you had a choice of the lesser of 2 evils would you chose the govt or private industry to have control of that? Up to this point it's been private industry and they haven't been able to control shite...I'm missing the evil event that happened that said this structure was wrong and we need govt to take over.

When one of the main people pushing it says it will allow the FCC and its political appointees to shape “media policy, social policy, oversight of the political process, [and] issues of free speech.” that should scare lots of people.

Great job missing the point. The government isn't taking over shit, net neutrality has been the de facto default for decades and the FCC is just now trying to get rid of it and let corporations take over. The definition of net NEUTRALITY is that there is no filter on information... all internet content must be treated equally.