Any law attempted to pass, that is not these companies favor, will be a huge up hill battle. Big money can over power grass roots pretty easily.
But not when it comes to net neutrality laws? Like I said, if you're going to fight a big fight, the laws restricting competition are the ones to strike down.
The countries with the 10 fastest internet speeds all use Net Neutrality. It's an embarrassment at how slow our internet is. The USA has the highest rates per MB of internet speed. Companies actually have to install equipment and work at ways to throttle internet speeds. We don't need to install tier pricing for the internet. What to play online games? Only $10/month. Netflix? Just an extra $15/month. That's the direction the internet in the USA is headed.
Netflix charges you $10/month. No ISP charges you extra for it. But you do need to buy a big enough connection to afford the streaming requirements. That's the actual direction. The perceived direction is horseshit. Sorry.
You keep using the word competition. Basic economics has perfect competition and monopoly on the exact opposite ends of the spectrum.
So the government is restricting competition and making monopolies. Monopolies to a degree, anyhow. If you don't like monopolies, then we need to fix the government restrictions on competition. If you don't like your cable internet provider, you can get 30gig of data for $160 from AT&T wireless. That's a 50% price cut from just a few months ago.
The argument is to make them more like a public utility. A utility is just a government regulated monopoly, which is not ideal but is still better than an unregulated monopoly. The cost of entry in this industry is just to great, it will literally take generations for the markets to self correct overall. Thats assuming these companies dont lobby themselves invincible in the mean time. The alternative you mention is not feasible for everyone's needs.
If you regulate ISPs like public utilities, they won't bother to upgrade their networks at all. Where's the incentive? There's less profit in selling you a 100mbit connection for $30 than selling you a 10mbit one for $30. Don't like AT&T? Go T-Mobile, they have unlimited data and an LTE network. It is feasible for anyone. You can browse any site in the world with it, use any internet service, etc.
Profit and regulation are the incentives. Monopolies still react to demand, they just have a lower consumer surplus. As sly mentioned, many countries already operate in this manner and offer a much better product for cheaper than the US.
All that utility monopolies do is go to the PUC and get rate increases. Has the nation's electricity grid infrastructure been massively improved like running fiber in 100 cities would be? What other countries do doesn't matter much. They're riding on the coattails of our innovation. The statistics he cites would change radically if AT&T finished running fiber in 100 cities and after Time Warner upgrades everyone's internet service, etc.
The old "the US is the center of the universe argument." What good is paying for everyone's innovations if they get it for cheaper and better than we do? The 100 city announcement is such an obvious political extortion technique. Hypothetically speaking here, if the utility regulation went through and they were offered huge tax breaks to upgrade their infrastructure, do you think it would get done?
It is getting cheaper and faster here. You are comparing a very large nation with rural and urban populations against a tiny nation with people packed into a few cities (S. Korea, #1). The 100 city announcement was made to the shareholders, in the news, etc. They were on the hook, and they were spending the money and building out. Like I said, the fiber is pulled to the curb near my house. No ploy at all. I don't think the government should offer tax breaks because that stifles competition. It gives the big companies huge amounts of extra investment capital that someone trying to get a start won't have. And no, I think they won't do the infrastructure upgrades - look at the utilities that aren't doing infrastructure upgrades with tax breaks now. Competition is the win. The head of the FCC says so, and he's right.
Fast lanes is the biggest threat to competition and innovation there is for non telecommunication industries. If you want to innovate against products that require large bandwidth and you do not have the deep pockets of Netflix, Amazon, Facebook and the like to buy your "fast lanes" - you are basically screwed. You basically move the regulation from one place (the government) to a bunch of well entrenched, super rich corporations (Comacast, ATT, Verizon and the like) with location monopoly. The ISPs are already pretty much a monopoly based on location - in most places you are really limited to one provider that offer good speed and that's about it. It might be different in condensed urban environments, but most anywhere else, it is not the case. If it is a location based monopoly, regulate them the same way you regulate utilities (other location based monopolies).
This is a legit overview from both sides imo: http://www.komando.com/tips/249987/3-things-you-must-know-about-net-neutrality/all
There have always been fast lanes. Akamai has been selling CDN services for years. Premium bandwidth that is faster because the CDN server is located near the user vs. everything coming from the origin servers. Yahoo! was focused on "reachability" (24/7 access from anywhere) for the past 15 years and has better and faster access than 99% of the sites out there. There hasn't been any threat to competition at all. Like I said, people need to understand how the internet is connected in the first place to argue the benefits of so-called net neutrality.
She got it totally right. All of netflix and other bandwidth heavy data would come to an ISP's network through peering points. There is no incentive for the ISP to keep upgrading the speed of those peering points to allow ever increasing data being dumped into their infrastructure through these points for nothing in return. That's how it works, how it always works. So Netflix rightfully pays for a connection or hosting (as anyone has already done for decades, even this site) directly with the ISP. The data no longer comes through the peering points but instead through a dedicated connection. The traffic gone from the peering point makes every one of the ISP's customers have better experience to all the sites on the internet. The traffic coming from netflix is dumped onto the ISP's network, just not through the peering point. Netflix users get better service. Everyone wins, except for government sycophants who want to control everything.
There's a fun book called "The Myth of the Robber Barons" that talks a lot about government regulation (and who pushes for it) vs. what's good for the consumers/public.
Gee, If Sen. Al Franken and Obama are both in favor of something, I am opposed right there. The track record says that would be correct. Correct until further study indicates you need to change your mind.
I had the feeling this would be right. No need for the Government. Just a gut feeling, err and seeing Al Franken wanted to regulate.
In addition to CDN premium bandwidth, QoS has been a requirement of Internet routing since we've had telephony and video. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service They've been using QoS technology for almost 20 years now, and rightly so. If I am downloading a 600MB CDROM image and you are watching a video, your video packets SHOULD get better treatment than my download. If your packets don't get to you in a timely manner, your video stream will stutter and the audio break up. Same for audio. What's the downside? My download takes 10 minutes instead of 9. Like I care. I do care that my video works, though. Fast lane.
