FCC Adopts New Historic Internet Rules

Only thing I know about Verizon is that I have a 4G phone that has zero coverage everywhere I go !

Checked 333 Brahan 78215 San Antonio Texas for availability of Grande, your selected service provider does not service that area...

Do not try to redefine "availability" as something it is not. Availability is not serviceability.

I read that as "Balrahn". I was like.. "Cool, a mythic address!"

Comcast: We'll sue to slow down the web

Called it !

Ohh for those wondering about wireless... don't use it. Cellular 3G/LTE data technology relies on something known as carrier grade Network Address Translation (NAT). That is VERY bad for connections as your public facing IP address is actually a private class non-routable address that your carrier is then masquerading behind one of only a few public grade IP's. This works fine for internet browsing over a stat based TCP connection, but anything with stateless UDP is going to be unstable and unreliable over such a configuration. The only solution to that problem is IPv6 and there is a hell of a lot of problems that it brings, way beyond the scope of this discussion. So ultimately everyone in the US have only two choices which are both state sanctioned monopolies. DOCSIS cable internet by a single provider, or DSL over another single provider. Seeing as DSL has serious line length issues your only real choice is DOCSIS as that is the only preexisting technology with high bandwidth capabilities.

There are lots of technical reasons why the current large ISP's in the USA are enjoying such large profit margins.

I know from my Verizon that mobile broadband is ***.

Bleh, here's to the kicking and screaming, dragging feet legal *** to follow. Nice to know that $30B we gave them is going to lawyers rather than actual growth advancements for consumers.

you can attempt to spin this any which way, but one word stands out above all others: RULES

No, the internet won't be the same, the people that want to rule you have had a victorious day.

I forgot to bring up the Municipal Area Network (MAN) angle. Currently local governments control access to the poles for electricity, telephone and cable just like they control access to the water pipes, gas mains and roads. Because data providers were not considered a "utility" the municipal government could not license a third party to put their own infrastructure on the poles. Some local regions employed their own democracy and made rules that enabled the city to run it's own competitive ISP. Now I'm not a friend of a government run entity but at least a local government entity is directly answerable to the voters who it services, similar to how the water and road service people are. The big ISP's started paying large contributions to politicians election campaigns in exchange for legislation that prevented the local governments from employing these tactics to offer some form of competition to the defacto monopolies. This new set of regulations basically throws all that out as all local governments are empowered to control access to their public utilities.

A MAN is not ideal and not free market, but it's better then a monopoly because unlike the monopoly, the municipal entity answers directly to the voters who also happen to be it's customers. Local government answering to voters is perfectly inline with the ideals of democracy.

Umm other way around there bub.... or have you not kept up with the state of things?

I have a solution for the short term fix:

Ok for those still wanting to argue against this, a brief understanding of what exactly "Net Neutrality" is.

The base concept is that data access providers, the ISPs, can not control which data the consumer gets access to. That all data must be treated the same regardless of it's origin or destination. This concept is based on digital information as free speech. Now this gets interesting because there are many layers to the Internet with ISP's being only one of.

Firstly realize that regional ISP's are the lowest and slowest layer of the internet. They represent the very last leg of transmission between the content source and the content consumer. Firstly you have Tier I providers like L3, AT&T, and Sprint they provide bandwidth in the terrabytes. They are the ones who own all the fiber crisscrossing our nation, they have run ridiculous amounts of backbone capacity and are the ones connection to other countries. Those of you playing FFXI must have all your data routed over a Tier I provider to Japan where it's routed from the Tier I directly to SE's data center. See data centers don't utilize regional ISP's, they get direct connections from a Tier I and pay in bulk rates.



Sometimes you have a Tier II intermediary provider that provides access to ISP's across the region. They purchase from the Tier I's and then resell to all the local ISP's or MAN's. Some very large ISP's, like COMCAST have direct connections to the Tier I's. This is what made the AT&T and Time Warner merger so contentious, AT&T is a large Tier I provider responsible for giving data to business's and data centers across the USA, Time Warner owns one of the largest regional ISP's. There is a very real fear that a merged company would be anti-competitive by giving it's own local ISP's favorable treatment over any third party ISP's that might arrive or just refusing service entirely.

In any case, you the lowly consumer are connected to a Tier III distribution ISP. They are responsible for getting packets of data from the Tier I's to you. They can not charge you more, or less for where your data is coming from, they can not privilege one type of data over another. COMCAST privileging data from their own competitive video on demand service over data from Netflix or Amazon Instant Video is anti-competitive. Legally speaking there is no different between them slowing down traffic from Netflix and them just blocking Netflix and forcing you to use them as your video streaming service regardless of cost. Also they can not charge content providers for access as content providers do not purchase bandwidth from ISPs, they purchase it from Tier I's. L3 has already stated and provided evidence to support their statement that ISP's were deliberately throttling data bandwidth to competitive services.

Net neutrality exists for the same reason consumer protection and truth in advertising exist, to protect the consumer from fraudulent bushiness's seeking to take advantage of the consumer. It prevents ISP's from leveraging their privileged state sanctioned monopoly into a practice known as "maximizing revenue streams", also known as milking consumers for maximum profit regardless of consumer satisfaction. And since they have a state sanctioned monopoly the consumer can't seek business elsewhere and vote with their wallet, which is the cornerstone of free market capitalism. After all, if a consumer can't chose an alternative supplier, is a really a free market?

Implying I wasn't being ruled by Verizon and Bright House

All this takes me back to the days of programming routers for CISCO.

(in high school)

The best part was after we were done we could play Team Fortress.

IDK King, its also a technical issue.

I am wiseassed enough to post something of this nature in tech support.

It's more of a political issue I think. FCC is the federal government not a media company.

It claims it is independent but the IRS claimed that too...

suuucks, Quake or gtfo!

We played Quake also I think. High school was a long time ago !

Anyways dealing with CISCO was a pain in the *** of epic proportions.

I don't often fully agree with you but well said. On all your posts so far in this thread.

I enjoyed playing with the routers and switches, would have done better though if I had actually taken notes though :D

You really do have a perverted idea of freedom and free markets.

It doesn't concern you that the FCC didn't publish the rules for the public to read before they took the vote NOR will they publish the rules now that they have voted on them?

I mean I realize what you THINK net neutrality is, but until they fess up and publish what they've done, what are you really going on about?

2 things:

FCC regulations are public, they will be published at some point no matter what, but they are already published, the telecom act if 1934, Title 2.

They voted to reclassify ISP's as telecommunications providers, where previously they were classified as an information service to avoid classifying them as content providers. That's the rub, ISP's wanted to be classified as content providers so the could control the way they provide content and negotiate with content producers. They sued the government to get their classification changed, and they government said, "you don't want to be in a special category, ok, we'll reclassify you as what you most resemble." And, they most resemble telecommunications, so now they get to live by those rules.

It's very simple, and the "secret regulations" haven't been put in place or even agree upon, only that current regulations will now apply to ISP's.

They aren't required to publish them, they are not part of the legislative branch and do not answer to the voters. The FCC is a counsel of appointee's that have been vested with specific powers by congress and they only answer to congress. If you disagree with them then you can contact your congressional representative and ask them. All congressional representatives can get a copy of the proposed regulatory changes but otherwise proposed changes are not official and thus not public. Once they become official then they become published and you can get a copy yourself.

So, self admittedly we have no idea what the change will entail, or how we will all be affected by it?

Which is like every other agency regulation change in existence. This is a case of the lesser of two evils.

Lesser of two evils I'll vote for Kodos then !

So you're all cheering on a regulatory change that you know nothing about.