they will listen.

The FCC insists its rules won’t upend fairness of the Internet. ISPs (Internet service providers) won’t be able to act in a “commercially unreasonable manner,” it says, or block any legal content.

“To be very direct, the proposal would establish that behavior harmful to consumers or competition by limiting the openness of the Internet will not be permitted,” Wheeler wrote in a blog post last month.

'Trust me' this is going to be great for you'! From a Cable Lobbyist!

The title of this should be changed imo, also. A lot of people do not know what 'net neutrality' means. Sort of like how they chose 'Chained CPI' to confuse people.

Freedom of the Internet should be how it is explained. I have talked to people who did not know what 'Net Neutrality' meant so were confused about the issue.

If Comcast decided tomorrow that it didn't want its customers watching YouTube, it could do that (though it wouldn't want to deal with the complaints). The FCC rule change is about the commercial relationships between the companies that Comcast buys its bandwidth from, Comcast, and people who build fiber infrastructure.

Legislators who now have nearly limitless "give me money and I'll do what you want" coffers?

it's "We The Consumers" now. They changed it for us, or for them really.

down the street just the other day and I stopped and talked with the corporation, yes, therefore we are all consumers, yep, "We the consumers." I think I saw an Amazon and a Google shopping in the grocery store the other day, yep, consuming some food, right along with me!
How insane the US has become!

This shit will just throw us right back into the dark ages. I think they might listen to names like Google and Amazon, because they sure don't listen to citizens.

It's too bad most people in the US are stuck with the Crapcastic overlords.

They were able to stream video and news ten years ago. In the US, we've always been at the mercy of these telcomm companies--our rates are shocking and the service is even worse.

On a side note, we've been thinking about moving to Korea. We both love the food and the people (a good start in my book). Do you find it very expensive overall? Is there a place you would recommend to visit or stay for a while? Don't mean to be nosey, but have been looking for expat experiences.

an out of control capitalistic financial system rigged to screw most Americans.

but I can choose between AT&T, TimeWarner, and Google Fiber. With GF I get just under 1 gbps speeds.

The speeds most of the time are half of what I pay for. Don't have the need for the big price tag of GF. Ask your European friends about their speeds for internet and phone and how much they pay. Then ask someone from Japan or Korea if you really wanna feel like a schlub. It's pretty eye opening. My European relatives were paying about $20 a month a decade ago for unlimited calls and data. The telcoms in this country have been making a fortune off of us.

he was appointed by the administration to do. Of that I have no doubt. I', sure he will be hailed as a hero in certain circles.

Just what far too many in this country don't have! If the rich and super rich keep making more money at the expense of the middle class and poor just where do they expect to make profits? Those who can't afford to pay for 'access' will simply move away from the internet and go elsewhere.

You MAY be allowed to live with your family, or you may be shipped off to some Oligarch's factory in Asia.

Or it may just be a version of the Hunger Games.

That is according to the company that hosts my company's e-commerce website. All that is happening is that a fast lane is being considered using "dark fiber" routes directly from high-capacity data-pushers, like Netflix, directly to your ISP, Comcast for example. Then Netflix's content is delivered from Comcast to you, the end user. This is supposed to increase speeds from services like Netflix by reducing bottlenecks and the number of trace route points from Netflix to Comcast to you.

My webhost says the hysteria is ridiculous and the Internet as you and I have always known it isn't going anywhere and will stay as is.

this approach, as you say, there are a few high-capacity data-pushers, like Netflix. If, that is done so as to not financially disadvantage the end user I can see a lot of merit in this approach!

So does Verizon, and they charge for and limit data, too.
My internet/tv/phone package is already a large utility bill.
We could have a lower package, sure, but with less internet speed
and slower u/l & d/l. So, don't be misguided by Comcast saying it's
only for Netflix.
It's for customers like you and me as well. It's happening today, and it has been happening for some time now.

direction. This has nothing to do with the speed levels you can purchase from your ISP.

You are saying it's fine if you are unable to make a decent connection at usable speed to a small website that can't afford to pay higher costs for "premium" delivery quality.

From a commercial/business perspective one of the great things about the Internet is it gives all businesses access to customers on equal terms, in terms of quality and speed. As a business guy you should be wanting to continue to have that, as an economic engine.

You are basing your defense of this on the belief that nothing will change, except some sites will get faster. Nope. Sorry. You give these providers an inch and they are going to take a mile. By loosening the requirements for open equal access, you are allowing them to sabotage the system in many ways for their own gain.

That includes screwing businesspeople like YOU.

What's to stop the ISPs from sloooowwwwwwing down delivery of non-premium content providers as an "incentive" to extort money from them?

And, as Internet use increases, more bandwidth is necessary. If the ISPs put all their investment into "premium" services, that means the rest of the Internet will get bogged down.

There's literally no legal question about that. It's black letter law: it's their network, and they don't have to route your traffic through it if they don't want to (they already block botnets and spam boxes this way). That has absolutely nothing to do with the FCC's rules change.

That's a problem I have with people using analogies from residential internet service (even I do it); it's fundamentally misrepresenting the issue here.

At any rate, the Supreme Court said 2 years ago that the Open Internet rules published in 2010 were not legal, so the chairman has to come up with something new.

will be endless.

Once it is legal to charge for faster performance, access to any improved faster technology will require an extortion payment. None of the benefits of evolving communication technologies will be passed through to the customer without blackmail payments.

In the end, the telecommunications companies will reap incredible rewards for having dragged their asses and suppressing internet performance for the last decade, to buy them time to construct a legal framework to extort a premium for service that other countries have taken for granted for years.

package would get one email and some browsing, but if you want Netflix, Hulu, etc., one would have to buy a tiered package with those services bundled with the basic. In essence, SOS as traditional cable TV. I used to be involved with marketing quite a bit, and I'm quite sure this is their game plan long term. To me, it's blatantly obvious what is going on. From a technical perspective this makes sense, but from a financial sense I think end-users are going to get royally screwed long term. And who protects the end-users, certainly not the US government who is often bought by corporate entities, and often one in the same.

so you have to take a somewhat premium package just to do normal activities. In the TV channel packages, they always seem to split up the 3 or 4 channels that everyone is definitely going to want, and only offer those channels together in the premium packages. It's sleazy marketing to bait you in with a "basic" price which nobody actually gets.

This is like Walmart not wanting to pay for the highways they transport their goods on, instead they want you to pay for it so they can keep their profits high.

while the rest of the small fish are stuck in freeway traffic at rush hour. It benefits those who can afford to pay more.

Getting it off the main freeway will make it easier for the small fish during rush hour.

When there's more money to be made in the express lanes, they would get better maintenance and service. The issue is about service providers controlling content by favoring the media services who pay more.

And that can be you and me via upped ISP fee's or via Billion Dollar Corporations who don't want to pay for traffic they generate. I prefer corporations pay for this, you notice all the names on the list are companies who provide streaming services, they know they are using the most bandwidth and they don't want to pay for it. And the bandwidth is only going to increase when they start streaming in 4k later this year and 8k in the next couple.

They dont generate the traffic you and I do. They put the content out there you are not forced to use it.

And the ISP's are not hurting for money.

Your isp is screwing you.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/07/29/your-isp-is-screwing-you-as-your-service-costs-go-up-their-backbone-costs-go-down/

Backbone costs are going down.

http://www.cringely.com/2011/07/28/bandwidth-caps-are-rate-hikes/

but they are much more likely to listen to these guys.

send them money. I'm just an annoyance in the way of their money gravy train.

That way we can keep our existing internet.

What this entire issue is about is who pays how much at the interface of those private networks and the "public" exchange points. And, frankly, it's nowhere near as simple a question as anybody makes it out to be.

Or, to put it another way, "network neutrality" isn't a policy, it's a slogan, and it can mean a whole lot of things, some of which are great and some of which are horrible.

what, and how are those costs distributed and paid for. I'll get yelled at, but I can see some of the issues the large providers are having, especially when bandwidth is consumed by a small number of major players.

The ones that the Supreme Court struck down a year later, which is why the current chairman is having to try a different route. The biggest problem here is that we're still using a law that was written in the 1930's for this...

The general public needs to build our own Internet for ourselves with whatever technology we have or we will never be rid of these controlling ISP's. We have to totally disconnect from their network.

followed up on it in a long time. It could possibly work in a small community, but on a wide scale ... no idea. I'm just mentioning this in passing, just have not followed up on it in a long time. And, when I last read about it, it was more for cellular communications.

To me, the Internet should be open and publicly funded. The problem is, the vultures contribute campaign funds and also generally work their way into areas of power to control things for their personal and corporate profit. We have a broken political system controlled by endless funds with vested interests that have little to do with the betterment of the country and "we the people."

At one time the Obama administration had floated an idea of free wifi for everyone. Certainly very doable, but then I heard little of it. One real problem is, in the US, TPTB has been infiltrated by those who decry public programs wanting everything to be in private/corporate enterprises and control. The problem with that is, all of the benefits go toward driving greed and huge profits for the few and often have little to do with benefiting "we the people."

The problem is that in practice that hasn't really mattered since about 2005 or so as the dark fiber has eclipsed them. This is a danger of not funding infrastructure...

which is a way the send text and images by radio transmission. It's a primitive and limited version of Internet but it doesn't require any infrastructure between computers. All you need is to buy the equipment, transmitter, receiver, etc and you're in business. The range of how far you could communicate with someone I gather would be limited by the capabilities of your antenna but the difference between being able to communicate with a couple of million people in your surrounding states and billions around the globe is really only a difference of degrees. And besides, though I dont know enough about it, I imagine there are ways to get around the range limitations of Packet Radio, namely points of contact rebroadcasting information into other areas within its range and so on...

The best thing about Packet Radio is it's already available...for a few hundred bucks you can set up your own station and start sending and receiving messages from others...you can create message boards and send pictures..not sure about video but I would be very willing to accept a downgrade in technological capability if it meant long range transmission of text and images was taken out of the hands of the Internet service providers.

There's no reason there can't be a text and image based version of DU over Packet Radio, for example.

That all said, I am not familiar with the security limitations of Packet Radio that may prevent it from being widely adopted.
Not sure how private communications like email and credit card purchases would or could be handled safely.

for cellular usage, just for phones.

To me, this could be very doable in the far future if enough people were setup for relaying ... in a simplest of statements, it's pretty much what we do now, of course, except it would be wireless/cableless. ... crossing great distances, now, that could be difficult. In a sense, it's almost back to ham radio, but a very modern version.

The catch with any of this is, IMO, even if the technology were flawless, one can be sure it would fall into the hands of greedy regulators backed by communication giants to make it unusable to skirt around the grasp of communication giants and their obscene profits. That all said, I think in the coming years we're going to see some significant changes in all of this. The problem in the US is, we now seem to accept monopolies as a way of business.

I don't see how it could be stopped other through regulation since, with packet radio, it's not like a massive infrastructure needs to be layed down. So it can't be stopped logistically. Really only politically. And that would smell to much of squelching competition.