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  • Author Author: rscasny
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Is Net Neutrality Important to You?

Late last year in the U.S., the Federal Communication Commission (FCC) voted to repeal net neutrality, the basic principle of treating all Internet data equally. There are more than enough opinions voiced on this, pro or con. How important is the net neutrality issue to you? Would you be interested in learning more (a deeper dive), implications, and what it actually means?

  • What concerns me more about this mainly has to do with price gouging and questionable marketing practices.  Many providers are basically monopolies in certain areas.  Your choices are ATT or Comcase or TWC.  If you don't want any of those, I suppose you could have a dial-up line running along at 24K.  My concern is say ATT saying, we will sell you internet but only if you buy our mid-tier TV package; or if you want 200 BPS service, you have to have our premium tier TV and Phone package, etc.    

  • If we want our info to be controlled than we will ignore what government regulators do.

  • in reply to genebren

    Not sure on your rationale there, people are currently protected from hacking via employing best practices, cdns and various network management means, limiting net neutrality is all about enforcing limitations to benefit commercial gain, not protect you from hacking.

  • I don't believe we currently have Net Neutrality.

    As suggested some ISP's have control over bandwidth and here in NZ we rely on several paths to get out.

    There are costs associated with these links and just like power, there are times when it is in demand and therefore the spot price climbs.

     

    The same with links and data, some lower cost contracts may have bandwidth shaping applied during times of high demand.

     

    Google has been smacked for it's search engine favouring paying customers, and I imagine this applies to others as well.

     

     

    SO while they can legislate to have Net Neutrality, the bigger issue of ensuring that happens is .......

  • ISP's have the power to block websites as well as slow them down. Anyone who's ever connected to a hotel or airport Wifi will know how that works.

    I can visualise a scenario where the ISPs say, "oh you need access to Element14, that appears to be a business website so you need our premium bundle to access that"

  • Net Neutrality is about bits being treated equally, no matter the source.

     

    Hacking and paying for things are a whole 'nuther topic.

     

    Imagine a conversation between say comcast (owners of CNBC.com) and foxnew.com or cnn.com:

     

    ---------------

     

    Comcast: say, nice network you got there, it'd be a shame if your viewers start buffering.

     

    Other network: our news uses less bandwidth than yours.

     

    Comcast: yea, maybe, but sometimes the network gets busy!

     

    Other network: we can help you work around your network issues

     

    Comcast: sure you can, a $billion a month will ensure your network issues go away

  • I think that net neutrality is important. Having said that, I also feel that protecting people from Hacking is also very important. There are people and forces that should be restricted from the net to keep others free and safe.

    Gene