News FTC: "Net neutrality is no big deal"

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/06/29/ftc_says_net_neutrality_no_big_deal/1

In utter proof that American policy makers really do think the internet is a big thing used to catch fish, the FTC has stated that net neutrality is not a big deal.

 

Buwahahaha xD - Ok, give this lady a prize. She gets the "most halucinagens taken in a single hour running up to a press release" award. Every ISP on the planet is already overcharging for bandwidth that they refuse to give you if you actually try and make use of their "unlimted" services. What complete an utter idiocy. This makes me feel so much better about the incompetancy levels of British telecomms.

 

i don't know if i laugh or if i crap my self.... no one is that blind and dumb.

 

We're all doomed over here. Good bye internets...

 

We're doomed everywhere

 

Bandwidth availability is determined, in the end, by how much the service providers are willing to spend on digging up streets and putting in cables.

It eludes me quite why this should not be paid for by the people who use it most.

Phil

 

No-one says that shouldn't be the case, it's just us net-neutrality proponents don't think that anyone should have to pay twice just to ensure their quality of service isn't retarded.

 

I wish I could vote, could we please get some technologically savvy politicians??! And no I don't mean hiring somebody to make you a myspace page.

We already pay a stupid amount for reasonable internet, I mean, the infrastructure is already in place, it follows the same lines as those that have been in place since the 70's (well cable at least) so I don't understand why I have to pay the same price again for TV and Internet, and whoever thinks the telco's won't gouge the consumer to an inch of their life if net neutrality goes the way of the dodo is on crack.

 

Quoted for truth

 

My girlfriend's family is already paying twice over for Comcast than what my family is for our TimeWarner service and it is a piece of s*it; their internet is always hickupping or it's down for a few hours and don't get me started on their TV service from them either (it gets countless communication errors and a b*tch to navigate through. The reason why I think it's the way it is: Comcast is the only provider in her neighborhood and they can only afford the most affordable package and because of this they constantly put up with slow bandwith and constant annoyances, yet my family because there are mutliple providers in our neighborhood offer us great, error-free service which you would have to pay an arm and a leg for where my girlfriend lives. I know the TV part has nothing to do with NetNeutrality, but it's still something I wanted to point out. Anyways, the internet should be neutral to whoever wants to use it. So what if you want to download tons of stuff and it takes up every last bit of your available bandwith, you paid for that service and they should charge you the same as someone who doesn't use it all up. I mean should they charge people more for watching more TV than their neighbor who isn't home everyday to watch it? The government needs to be smarter and be more for the consumer than for the service providers. The net needs to stay neutral. One word to describe why I think this has started popping up: BitTorrent.

 

No, this has started popping up because telecomms companies saw a way to make lots more money, namely by extorting big business into paying not only for its bandwidth from its own ISP, but paying every ISP it has customers with to not gimp its website in favour of other websites. If an ISP is legally allowed to say to a company like amazon "We're going to make your site take 1 minute to load each page, whereas your leading competitors have all paid up and are loading in 2.5 seconds" then what choice does amazon have but to pay up or perish? This is the only thing anti-net neutrality laws are for, to enable extortion of business in order that ISP's can make more money from people who can afford to pay the bribes. Extortion is illegal though, and thus net neutrality should be enshrined in law.

 

What if ISPs actually stopped *cough*illegal*cough* throttling and lieing in their speed advertisements? "You get a 4mbit connectionz!" and in the end if your lucky enough to get 100kb/s your my hero.

 

Providers will do what's best for business. If they charge more than people are willing to pay they will loose money because people will just drop the service. That's what free market is and that's why capitalism works. There is no concern here.

 

Problem is, if ALL companies do it, then what are you going to do? Boycott the internet?

 

sadly the Internet is like a service, like your gas, phone or electricity

however, your Internet connection seems very overpriced, hell i think i pay more for the Internet then i do for electricity

though i have to wonder if throttling certain things (for example P2P) when the connection is contended, to allow important (things that cant wait) things to go through (like games, or voip) then that's OK

its better then the current situation where a number of providers just throttle your whole connection at peak times to make sure they don't get contended

of course, the best solution would just be to have an infrastructure that supports the speeds people want when there is high demand
You don't see the national grid supplying you with less power at peak times because it cant handle the load

 

You're wrong. Net neutrality protects against extortion. Extortion is illegal even in lazzaiz-faire capitalism. Most people won't drop services, they will simply shop where is fast. It ammounts to nothing more than suited gangsters destroying businesses that will not pay the bribe, and it is a concern.

 

Yup, there are few enough players in the market, and the barrier to entry is sufficiently high, and internet presence is now so fundamental to almost any kind of business, that there is a real risk of the formation of price-fixing cartels

 

Last time i checked we are in the information age. Now what is that big thing that is the center of the information age? Oh yea the internet, well if that is the most important thing in the information age it is kind of like how important steel oil and coal were in the industrial age. The government kept a close eye on those things because if they got out of hand people would just keep paying b/c they have no choice.

If the internet is allowed to be price fixed then it could very well destroy the economy. This is because, one businesses would lose money and raise their prices, two companies will cut jobs to save money, three people will be spending more in internet b/c in todays world you half to have it(just like oil) and people will have less money to spend. With less spending the econ will go deeper into defect and the system repeats it's self, prices go up and spending goes down until a total failure occurs.

The problem is that congress is not smart enough to realize how important the internet now is to the survival of our nation. How can a nation remain completive in the future if it allows the technology that that future is based on to be killed.

 

I'm sure if companies start charging for premium services to get faster access to websites competing with their product, some internet company will realise that all the net neutrality advocates will hate this and supply a service directed to us with homogenous connection. The company would make such an absolute mint doing this that hopefully the other companies would need to change back.

 

money speaks louder than consumer complaints.