Hiku said:
VAMatt said:
Net neutrality robs consumers and businesses of choice. It protects incumbent ISPs from real competition, as it requires all players to provide the exact same service.
It's like cable TV, essentially. We all want to be able to pick and choose the cable channels that we pay for. But, big media has bent over backwards to ensure that we have to pay for everything, even if we don't want it. Net neutrality ensures that we are subject to the exact same problem with the internet. I would gladly choose a slower connection to about 95% of the World Wide Web, in exchange for faster streaming and gaming network connection. But, under the current law, it is illegal for a company to offer me that. That is ridiculous. Likewise, I might be interested in starting an internet service provider that creates plans tailored to the needs of individuals, or various businesses. I am not allowed to do that. In this way, the current law protects the big boys from smaller startups.
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Ok, so your argument is that USA should give full authority to the telecom companies to discriminate against any part of the internet they want, in any way they want, because they could use this power to give us better deals? Because of "competition"?
Here are the problems with this blind trust in the giant telecom companies to do the right thing. Because yes, it is mainly about them. Because they have all but destroyed any prospect of meaningful competition in the USA. There is little to no competition coming from smaller telecom companies because their service either has to be leased from one of the bigger telecom companies, or can't reach the majority of the country. This is what the ISP landscape looks like in USA as of Dec 2013 (which was before the net neutrality law) for wired connections:
https://qz.com/186881/nearly-one-in-three-americans-have-no-choice-when-it-comes-to-their-internet/
The fact that 67% of the population only have access to two or less ISP options (you can take a wild guess at which ones those tend to be) even though there are currently 1,230 different ISP's that specifically provide wired connections, shatters any illusion about competition from smaller companies keeping those ISP's in check when they have such a monopoly.
This is also the main reason for why USA has some of the highest broadband costs in the world:
Other countries with net neutrality rules have no problem creating a more competitive and healthy market. Internet is not so much cheaper (and faster) in Japan because ISP's can restrict our services to just Youtube for $4.99/month... (P.S. They don't.)
However, we have examples from other countries without net neutrality and more competition among ISP's than USA where ISP's have begun shady practices with splitting up the internet into packages.
I'm sorry if I have little sympathy for the one guy who only wants access to one or two sites to save a buck (no one actually consumes the internet that way), when it means everyone else gets screwed over royally as a result. When the internet is sold in packages, full access to the entire inter, and without caps, will be considered a premium service that takes into account the prices of the separate packages. As opposed to being standard, as it is today in most countries.
But the giant telecom corporations are lobbying hundreds of millions to get this passed, to give us better deals? To invite more competition? It's not to recuperate their investments and then some? Right..
Ajit Pai was the head lawyer at the legal department at Verizon. He is not at the FCC to fight for the little guy, but for the giant telecom companies.
And we have proof of these ISP's ill intentions. T-Mobile for example was secretly throttling (slowing down) all video traffic, not just certain partners. https://m.windowscentral.com/it-turns-out-t-mobile-really-throttling-all-video-through-bingeon-according-eff
Oh and one more thing. You previously argued that "things were fine before this law, so we don't need it". Things being fine in the past doesn't mean things won't be bad in the future. It would be unreasonable to think so. But the reason things were fine before this law is only because of vigilant resistance. Not because ISP's didn't try. Because they did, since a decade before this law was passed.
"Internet providers have attempted to throttle traffic by type or by user (Comcast in 2007), have imposed arbitrary and secret caps on data (AT&T 2011-2014), hidden fees that had no justification or documentation (Comcast in 2016), and tried to give technical advantages to their own services over those of competitors (AT&T in 2016). These attempts were only revealed in retrospect once they were discovered and lawsuits filed. If the deterrents those lawsuits provided eventually had been part of preemptive rulemaking then these practices would never have been attempted at all."
The bottom line here is that there is already a gigantic problem with competition between ISP's in USA. Net neutrality won't impact the giant monopoly problem in the country, where competition is all but extinguished.
And even if that weren't the case, but it is, we shouldn't trust the 'good' intentions of the ISP's who lobby millions to get complete control over internet traffic discrimination and a lot of control over censoring. When the prospect of gigantic revenue growth increases, eventually the bigger corporations buy out or destroy the smaller ones, and the situation can turn out to be the way it is in USA right now. Where in spite of there being 1230 different ISP's, 67% of the population only has access to 2 or less.
I pay $20 USD per month for unlimited 100 Mbit fiber broadband. (Actually right now I'm paying $0/month for six months as part of a promotion.) And I had an even better deal in Japan. That's the sort of thing USA should strive for. Because splitting up the internet into packages combined with corporate greed is a very slippery slope. Especially in a country where market monopoly is a huge problem.
| It truly is textbook doublespeak, essentially the same way as the Patriot Act is the opposite of patriotism. |
Doublespeak is supposed to be deliberately ambiguous/misleading.
Which of these two terms is more ambiguous about the subject at hand? "Net Neutrality" or "Government control"?
If you want to argue against double speak, then don't do it by being worse. Because that was the only response you gave for two posts, before this one. I provided a lot more info about what net neutrality is in my opening post, than just the words "net neutrality".
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