FCC Moves To Kill Net Neutrality — Now What?

Yeah, gigabit is only in like 10 cities here, I believe. I wish my city had a microcentre too, and fewer Republicans! :p
 
This is probably another area where we will get screwed over by Brexit. I imagine that EU law would have protected us from some of this rubbish.
 
I don't remember there being any major problems before 2015 but in my view if services like Netflix are going to hammer ISP bandwidth with millions of users streaming 4K video, then I'd rather Netflix pay the ISP's for the excessive use of bandwidth and pass the cost onto Netflix customers than have ISP's raising prices for everyone because their network increasingly can't cope with all of the different bandwidth hogging services that they've been mandated to treat equally, it's probably the reason why ISP's have been suffering from over utilisation in recent times which results in slow speeds for everyone and not just users of those services.

If an ISP is going to heavily throttle Netflix purely out of spite and blackmail then all that is going to happen is people are going to move ISP's and they'll only be hurting themselves.
 
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Again you are missing the point. That’s fine if you have the choice of 10 ISP. A hell of a lot of people have the choice of one or two.
 
The Internet is a best effort traffic system anyway, no ones packets of data is guaranteed or prioritised presently so net neutrality is that. Therefore ending it means simply getting your traffic guaranteed by paying for QOS/COS within certain limits etc. It wont means your traffic wont be serviced necessarily but it isnt now either. So it wont be a first come first serve basis as it is now but it does not mean you will be worse off, just no better
 
viathinair said:
Yeah, was feebly using that + my personal situation (AKA relatively meaningless). On the latter, it's been years since I've been in the UK - how are prices? Is it possible to get solid 50Mbps for £26 (or less) like I do in the US? What about 1000Mbps (gigabit) for £60 or less?
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pretty much similar price for gigabit, though at the moment it isn't exactly common - I could have it because my apartment block is wired for it but I just went for the 100Mbps package instead - basically the companies offering FTTP will often want to wire up entire apartment blocks and get a bunch of people signed up at once rather than target individual houses
 
cosmogenesis said:
The Internet is a best effort traffic system anyway, no ones packets of data is guaranteed or prioritised presently so net neutrality is that. Therefore ending it means simply getting your traffic guaranteed by paying for QOS/COS within certain limits etc. It wont means your traffic wont be serviced necessarily but it isnt now either. So it wont be a first come first serve basis as it is now but it does not mean you will be worse off, just no better
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And if an ISP decide to charge you extra if you access ocuk forums? How can that not be worse off?
 
I don't think this would ever be as granular as allowing/slowing down access to specific websites, although I'm not sure about the likes of Facebook or Twitter, as I know from experience they consume a lot of traffic - but none of them are even close to Google. I think the vast majority of internet content will remain best-effort, simply because it would be too difficult to price/police.

It's always going to come down to the content providers, Youtube, Netflix, etc, along with stuff like online gaming - Blizzard, League of legends, and other big online games etc - all of which could be broken quite easily by an ISP in return for payment, by provider or customers.

The difference is that in some cases consumers may be better off - because you can bet your bottom dollar that these companies will pay off the ISPs to guarantee consumers access to their products.

Content providers and online gaming companies know that customer/player experience has to be at the heart of what they do - and they spent enormous amounts of money making sure their stuff works properly, in the wake of an ISP throttling/reducing access to their content - that's a direct risk that could seriously hurt them, so they'll simply pay - that could mean that their traffic is elevated from the best-effort class it currently sits in today, to an elevated class for paid content, which could equate to a better overall experience.

Is it right / wrong / fair / unfair? I think on balance it's probably unfair - because it's an easy way for an ISP to create a revenue stream by grabbing big providers and/or customers by the balls and saying "pay for access or die" when customers already pay the ISP for access to the network with their monthly charges, to me - it's an easy way to just make more money.
 
Saying "it's OK if an ISP that is also a TV provider requires streaming video services to pay them to guarantee delivery over their network" is fine if the streaming service is Netflix or Amazon, but it basically makes it impossible for a new player to enter the market.
 
Caged said:
Saying "it's OK if an ISP that is also a TV provider requires streaming video services to pay them to guarantee delivery over their network" is fine if the streaming service is Netflix or Amazon, but it basically makes it impossible for a new player to enter the market.
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It does, it makes it absolutely impossible - this is probably one of the reasons why Netflix has toned down it's neutrality support to a mere whisper in recent times - because it knows, one way or another that it'll get access to the networks - even if it has to pay for it, itself for that guarantee. Whereas any challenger to it's dominance will have the huge disadvantage of having to grow extremely large pockets first, to even get a look-in.

I think we can pretty much be assured, that the original intentions behind the internet, open communication and access to information are being thrown under a bus in return for $$$$$$$$ but I shouldn't really be surprised considering what the last 24 months have shown.
 
Interesting the mobile SMS market in the US is that both the sender and the receiver are charged. Unlike the UK where the sender bears the cost.

It will be interesting to see if international content is charged higher.

Also where youtube etc makes advertising money, it's likely that the ISP will now want their own cut of this. Google the same, same with Amazon.

Previously Google threatened to make their own mobile network when the mobile operators tried it on. I see the same being true for ISPs. It's in Google etc's interest to ensure they're not being held to ransom for their advertising revenue.
 
humbug said:
Net Neutrality is what stops ISP's from cherry picking Internet content and blocking your access to the rest, ISP's are desperate to formulate a business model like that of Pay Per View TV, only with the Internet you can have it both ways, Internet content creators pay the ISP to stream their content to their customers who in turn also pay the ISP for 'per view access' to it, another example of profit for the select few uber alles, government's also love it because in that way they can also control what information you have access to.

http://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2017/11/27/net-neutrality-repeal
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All these streaming/torrent sites are not actually blocked at all, they are simply not indexed properly in the DNS provided by the ISP.

So i do not believe any measures in the future will be done that cannot be circumvented with relative ease.
 
Well like Brexit, slap on a few things that sound good and people will mindlessly vote for binning it.

"Net Neutrality promotes terrorism!"
"Neutrality pushes ISP pricing higher!"
 
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