re: Obama's plan to save the internet draws bold reactions

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Terrible analogy if your trying to win the argument: toll roads, HOV lanes, bus, rail, take a plane etc.

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I'm not trying to win an argument, I'm trying to explain the problem in simple terms for your dumb arse. But I see your problem now. This is you this morning in a Poli board thread:

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I don't know enough about the technology to have a strong opinion but why shouldn't providers be allowed sell prioritized access to content providers?

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You admit to not knowing exactly what the frick is going on, and even claim to not have a strong opinion, yet you keep pushing here with a seemingly strong opinion. Your problem is that your brain can't look past your politics to see the economic implications of a non-neutral internet.

The internet is pretty fricking amazing, isn't it? Just think about all the innovations, the sharing of ideas, the communication, etc. that it has brought about. How many industries have been created on top of it? How many old industries have seen new growth thanks to it? Anyone on a shoestring budget can build the next big thing. And that is all due to the fact that the internet has, so far, been neutral and free. The open and neutral internet allows for truly unfettered freedom and competition. And now your dumb arse thinks it's perfectly fine to destroy that.

On a neutral internet, the power is in the hands of billions of users and millions of companies large and small. A non-neutral internet puts all that power into the hands of an extremely small group of companies.

Cox/TW/Comcast could put their own ad network on the "fast lane", and the millions (billions?) of sites out there that use other ad networks (like TD) would be fricked, unless, of course, they switch to the ISP ad network. Ah, competition is beautiful, ain't it? This would even allow the ISPs to lower their prices if they wanted, giving their customers the illusion that this is a great thing!

And then, obviously, the ISP video streaming services would be in the "fast lane", and Netflix would be fricked. Why is Netflix slow now? I don't know, but my cable company is bundling their video service for the same price, and it's never slow! And if Netflix were able (or allowed) to pay the new "fast lane" tax and offer equivalent service, they wouldn't be able to afford to compete on price against the companies they are paying the tax to!

Are you starting to get the gist of how fricked up this would be? Do you see the market-distorting power you want to put into the hands of the ISPs?

It's pretty easy really.

If ISPs want to get rid of net neutrality, then their monopolies have to go too. I suspect giving ISPs this power wouldn't be so bad if there was real competition in the field. Some ISPs would sell the fact they have no fastlanes and consumers would have popower to demand that arrangement.

As of now, the monopolies aren't going away and therefore neutrality is a bad idea. You can't have both.

I'm no a fan of Obama, but he has got this one right.

I'm for less government in general but all these ISP's want is control and another revenue stream.

The phone is a good example. You have as good a chance of a call going through when you dial a number as a multi-million dollar company. IE, your number is as good as theirs. What you say during the phone call has nothing to do with it. What you pay for the phone service has nothing to do with it. You have the same access to the network that they do.

If the ISP's get their way then your independent website could be penalized by not being as accessible, not showing up on searches, only be able to offer reasonable download speeds at a surcharge.

There is little to no choice in internet providers for most people, much like your electric company. The big players have a monopoly and they know it.

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so every single case highlighted in the first link the company backed down to customer pressure... interesting.........

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What "pressure" exists that the customer can put on the ISPs? We all know that money talks right? So the customer can just put pressure on the ISP by switching cable providers, right?



So that means the only thing left to do is have the people collectively get together and decide to collectively put pressure on the ISPs. You know what that's called. Government.

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You ever bragged about your utility company or water company? You want to know why that is? Because there is no incentive for them to provide outstanding service. 

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I've had pretty outstanding water service

I also have 24 options when it comes to electricity...

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No. Reasonable people can disagree on this one - you're not going to get competition or innovation out of a "utility" - you're going to get "electricity" or "water" type service. You ever bragged about your utility company or water company? You want to know why that is? Because there is no incentive for them to provide outstanding service.

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Yeah, let's de-regulate the water company. I can see it now, you'll be forced to rent your own water heater from the water company, and you can't just buy water alone, you'll also have to bundle in spigots for iced tea, milk, and Coca-Cola too.

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I don't buy the Devils advocate argument of what the ISPs will do in the future

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They're already doing it. Comcast shook down NetFlix and as soon as NetFlix paid the others ISPs started lining up looking for their's. NetFlix fought back fortunately and started telling users that congestion on the ISP's network was responsible for the buffering.

I have no problem with tiered service, if more data consumption means more costs then consumers should pay that. The problem is the ISPs are trying to charge twice for data that's already been paid for, and they want to hide that 2nd charge from the consumer so they can get more money than the market would otherwise allow.

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Do you know why such monopoly exists in the first place?

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Yeah, because the alternative is this:



Same reason we don't have a dozen local road companies building their own roads everywhere, a dozen local water companies laying their own pipes everywhere, and a dozen local electric companies putting up their own poles and running their own lines everywhere. Because that would be stupid and wasteful, and natural monopolies would arise anyway.

And the sooner a natural monopoly (or if government steps in on time to create one) comes about where infrastructure is concerned, the better. That's just the way it is, man. No need to blame big, bad government for stepping in where it's supposed to step in.

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Yes. Go to the poliboard. Even if the Obama says something they actually agree with, they will just say he is lying. It's quite comical.

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What makes you think the opposition is political?

Several people in this thread continue to state positions of genuine concern and you dismiss them out of hand. Who is being political?

Why should we discount our experience with prior government management of utilities?

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But the Internet cannot function as a public utility.

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First, public utilities don’t serve the public; they serve themselves, usually by maneuvering through Byzantine regulations that they helped craft.

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Utilities are about tariffs, rate bases, price caps and other chokeholds that kill real price discovery

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You know what also kills real price discovery? A market with only one seller.

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I would know; I used to work for AT&T in the early 1980s when it was a phone utility.

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Oh, well, if he would know then I guess it's settled!

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More utility follies? The first cellphone call was made in St. Louis in 1946 with AT&T’s Mobile Telephone Service, but the company let the innovation wither. It took until 1983 for Motorola to introduce the now comically unwieldy DynaTAC

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What?! I guess I should expect this sort of bullshite from a WSJ writer trying to write about technology. AT&T's "Mobile Telephone Service" was basically a walkie-talkie, only 3 people in a city could use the service at the same time, and the equipment weighed 80 fricking pounds. Not so "mobile", huh? Yeah, it took nearly 4 decades to make it portable. Not because of "utility follies", but because it was a gigantic technological leap made up of thousands of smaller leaps that took a long time to develop. And the DynaTAC is only "comically unwieldy" compared to today's phones. At the time, the DynaTAC was a technological marvel that was 40 years better than AT&T's "mobile telephone service".

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If the Internet is reclassified as a utility, online innovation will slow to the same glacial pace that beset AT&T and other utilities, with all the same bad incentives. Research will focus on ways to bill you—as wireless companies do with calling and data plans—rather than new services.

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So, if I follow his logic here, if we classify the internet as a utility, then companies will focus on ways to bill us, and his example for that is that wireless companies, which are NOT classified as utilities, do it? What a fricking hack.