FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sets course to dismantle net neutrality rules

[SvennoJ]

Zkuq said:

vivster said:

You might not understand the initial goal of the ISPs here. It's mostly about lowering and prioritizing bandwidth of end consumers, i.e. US citizens. They won't constrict bandwidth to the datacenters. To get more money from companies for increasing bandwidth to their premises they don't need this ruling. They can do this whenever they want, even with net neutrality in place. That's what contracts are for.

Any company who cares about international traffic will have datacenters across the world anyway. So even if US ISPs reduce bandwidth from every IP that does not originate in their network, it won't have any effect for anyone else but US citizens. Also they will have to deal with the beef from directly connected ISPs.

No, I'm pretty sure I do understand it. Even the article pretty much says net neutrality prevents ISPs from charging extra for extra speed: "Without the rules in place, ISPs could essentially force companies like Netflix to pay a toll to avoid throttling video feeds." And I would assume it's also possible to charge extra for traffic going from the US to outside the US, which leads nicely to my remark about datacenters. Of course your point about a lot of datacenters being outside the US is probably true. Anyway, if companies such as Netflix have to pay extra to avoid throttling their videos, in the end all consumers are going to pay for it in subscription prices.

Could it go so far as with mobile data? Internet traffic divided up per content, like paying out the nose for sms messages. Extra fee on downloading games, pay separate for access to adult content, online gaming fee, cloud streaming fees. Basic package only includes email and basic browsing.