FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sets course to dismantle net neutrality rules

[vivster]

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.

Again, ISPs have the power to raise their prices whenever they want, they don't need to abolish net neutrality for that. Now if other ISPS that are not connected to the datacenter would basically try to strongarm a company into paying them for basically not fucking them over, that's different story. That's also a crime and is called extortion. Don't forget, if laws care about anything it's protecting companies. To add to that it is a gigantic PR disaster for whatever ISP does this and it will lose customers for that and may even face law suits.

Abolishing net neutrality is not a free pass to break any law you want. It's only designed to fuck over end consumers directly by charging them more under the guise of "increasing" their speed.

As little as there is, there is still some competition among ISPs in the US and they'll be very careful who they fuck with.