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

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Content providers and ISPs should have the ability to negotiate fast lanes to ease access if they choose.

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No, no, no. People who say this have not thought about the consequences, at all. Once you open the door to allowing one packet to be treated differently than another, the ISPs become the gatekeepers of not only the internet, but also a huge chunk of our economy.

Not only will small sites like TD not be able to compete with larger sites, but their only source of income will be compromised. Imagine the very likely scenario that ad companies will deal with ISPs for preferential treatment, or that ISPs will create their own ad companies and put them on the fast lane. Now the ISP's favorite ad company has a distinct advantage over, say, Google, and every site that uses Google ads will see a drop in revenue and will feel forced to switch to an ISPs ad company.

The same goes for ISP-backed video services having an unfair advantage over Youtube and Netflix.

This would be worse than a company abusing a monopoly position. This would be a company abusing a position of power over nearly every part of our economy. And you want to make it legal?

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Do the Republicans oppose Obama on every thing, no matter what?

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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.

I've got mixed feelings on "net neutrality" - but I can easily see that reasonable people can disagree.

I brag about Demco being so much better than entergy too, or at least it is where I live. Even in the worst hurricanes, I've never been without power for longer than 24 hours. Most times it's restored the same day. It's also cheaper.

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I've got mixed feelings on "net neutrality" - but I can easily see that reasonable people can disagree.

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This is pretty much where I sit. I can definitely agree that you don't want the ISPs controlling the content on the net....but do you want to hand that over the federal government instead? Are we choosing the lesser of 2 evils here?

I guess I'd need to see a bill or some such to see if I could truly get behind it.

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Any state legislator that can read the white paper on Lafayette's fairly successful deployment of LUS Fiber in the city and then still vote to restrict city run broadband is crazy.

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Not crazy, corrupt. The articles I've seen about defeat of these bill come with a heavy dose of lobbying from the cable companies.

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It's also the local government protecting revenue. I believe in net neutrality, while also realizing that it's not the optimal solution, and that the alternative right now would be murder.

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you're not going to get competition or innovation out of a "utility" - you're going to get "electricity" or "water" type service.

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I get as much water or electricity as I need, nearly all the time, at good prices. Sounds good to me.

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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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We don't brag about it because our utilities have pretty much been world-class for so long that there's nothing to really brag about anymore. This is not the case for our internet service.

And classifying ISPs as utilities opens the door for real competition. If that happens, then you or I could lease bandwidth from the ISP to form our own virtual ISPs and compete on price and service.

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I've got mixed feelings on "net neutrality" - but I can easily see that reasonable people can disagree.

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The "reasonable people" who oppose net neutrality have not put enough thought into it.

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It's also the local government protecting revenue.

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That article is hedged to the ISP 100%. It is damn hard for cities to get these companies back out to get new infrastructure to new neighborhoods. Guess what the provider wants....more money. So you can throw the money argument either way. Maybe the city shouldn't charge the provider so much for existing infrastructure rental, but the provider should work with the city on new additions.

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What innovation have you seen from a telco regarding home internet in the last 5 years?

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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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But, at least in the southern United States, water and electricity is almost always on; there are relatively few power surges, brown outs, or black outs; the water is safe to drink; both are relatively cheap and abundant.

As for broadband, even though technology costs drop pretty fast as they become ubiquitous, I am still paying more money for less bandwidth than I was 8 years ago (Baton Rouge vs LC), and now I have data caps to go with my slower, more expensive internet!

I mean, I have a $700 2 year old phone in my pocket that is more powerful than a $2000 desktop I built in 2002, but my internet speeds are nearly the same.

You ask if anyone has bragged about their water and electricity. Have you ever bragged about your ISP or cable provider? Unless you have FIOS or Google Fiber I bet you haven't.

Look at what ISPs have historically called innovation. Bundling more channels that you probably won't watch to drive up your cable bill is one of their big tactics. When Tivo came along many cable companies balked at issuing cable cards to force consumers to rent boxes from them instead. They rent out $100 cable modems at $10/month (at this point I would have paid $1300 for a $100 cable modem if I had rented it from them.) They gave us the great innovation of Pay-Per-View which allows you to pay $10 to watch a movie, while Netflix, operating under Net Neutraility lets you pay $8/month to watch an unlimited amount of their entire catalog. But the ISPs are the ones that innovate, right?

I love that everytime I have to call Suddenlink because something of theirs isn't working they pitch me on home phone service. Because I'm most likely to buy more of their stuff while I'm complaining to them how their stuff hardly ever works.