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Net Neutrality Explained

Unabogie

Philosopher
Unabogie
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Messages
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Portland, OR
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.c...comcast-toll-threatens-online-video-delivery/

Level 3 in essence operates a highway that connects to those ramps and handles traffic to and from individual Web sites. Comcast customers rely on the company’s on- and off-ramps from that highway. With nearly 17 million broadband Internet customers, Comcast is the nation’s largest such service provider.


The scuffle between the two started on Nov. 19, when Level 3 says Comcast demanded a recurring fee to “transmit Internet online movies and other content to Comcast’s customers who request such content.”
Three days later, under pressure from Comcast, “Level 3 agreed to the terms, under protest, in order to ensure customers did not experience any disruptions,” Mr. Stortz said.


Mr. Stortz did not cite Netflix in his statement. But just a week before Comcast’s demand, Level 3 announced a multiyear deal to support Netflix’s rapidly growing streaming service.


A recent study found that at peak times, Netflix represented 20 percent of Internet download traffic in the United States. That makes it a de facto competitor for incumbent distributors like Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which are eager to protect both the subscription television business and the emerging video-on-demand business.
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Ok, so maybe Netflix can afford to pay this fee, but can any smaller website owners? If not, then your innovative, original website is put at an immediate disadvantage against other, wealthier web companies. It's not about who has the best content or the best ideas. If you don't pay Comcast's fee, your content will be "managed" out of existence.
 
Unabogie said:
http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.c...comcast-toll-threatens-online-video-delivery/



Ok, so maybe Netflix can afford to pay this fee, but can any smaller website owners? If not, then your innovative, original website is put at an immediate disadvantage against other, wealthier web companies. It's not about who has the best content or the best ideas. If you don't pay Comcast's fee, your content will be "managed" out of existence.
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When an ISP is also a media company.
And is granted sole rights to provide fiber lines by local governments.
It can force other media companies to pay more to deliver content to its customers.
And stifle innovative competition.

It seems like there should be laws to prevent this kind of thing.
I wonder why they aren't enforced.
 
 
Upchurch said:
It's my opinion that anyone against Network Neutrality doesn't understand what it is.
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I fully get it.

In the context that it is a government-granted monopoly, I fully oppose it.

However, if there wasn't the monopoly, I don't feel it is a place the government should interfere.
 
BobTheCoward said:
I fully get it.

In the context that it is a government-granted monopoly, I fully oppose it.

However, if there wasn't the monopoly, I don't feel it is a place the government should interfere.
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You don't understand it. It's the total absence of interference from government or industry. It merely states that all content broadcast across the internet is treated the same by ISPs, regardless of content, data type, or origin. Are you opposed to this as I've described it?
 
Unabogie said:
You don't understand it. It's the total absence of interference from government or industry. It merely states that all content broadcast across the internet is treated the same by ISPs, regardless of content, data type, or origin. Are you opposed to this as I've described it?
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Exactly. It worked for the railroads and telephone companies. An ISP delivers bits. That should be there business model. The best bit deliverer should win in the bit delivery market. Who is sending the bits, who is receiving the bits, and what content those bits represent shouldn't enter the equation.

From the perspective of being the most competitive ISP they can be, these policies are absolutely stupid. But Comcast doesn't want to be an ISP. They want to use their ISP monopoly to push their media business. Their anticompetitive decisions only make sense if you factor in vertical integration.

Governments gave all kinds of advantages to Comcast (and the companies it has bought up along the way) to create the network it has. Now that they're violating the spirit of every deal they made with the public, it's hardly "government interference" to correct the problem.
 
Unabogie said:
You don't understand it. It's the total absence of interference from government or industry. It merely states that all content broadcast across the internet is treated the same by ISPs, regardless of content, data type, or origin. Are you opposed to this as I've described it?
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First I'm all for Network Neutrality but I suspect the argument is the government should keep their hands of companies god (of capitalism) given right to make as much money as they possibly can.

We the people will spend our money buying our Internet from a company that doesn't charge for Netflix.

You know, a company that will invest billions to dig up streets and lawns to run their own cables, parallel to Comcast's. In the meantime, we get to make Comcast richer.
 
delphi_ote said:
From the perspective of being the most competitive ISP they can be, these policies are absolutely stupid. But Comcast doesn't want to be an ISP. They want to use their ISP monopoly to push their media business. Their anticompetitive decisions only make sense if you factor in vertical integration.
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What was the logic behind the legal ruling decades ago that separated movie studios from owning movie theaters? I would say this is a sort of similar situation.
 
Unabogie said:
You don't understand it. It's the total absence of interference from government or industry. It merely states that all content broadcast across the internet is treated the same by ISPs, regardless of content, data type, or origin. Are you opposed to this as I've described it?
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If there was no interference from government then the companies would be free to make all their exclusivity and pay-to-play deals that they wanted. Or is that what you meant by "government or industry"? Net Neutrality is one of the governmental regulations I fully support. It's a bit strange when the government is needed to step in and prevent corporations from restraining, restricting and inhibiting speech and innovation.
 
Newtons Bit said:
If there was no interference from government then the companies would be free to make all their exclusivity and pay-to-play deals that they wanted. Or is that what you meant by "government or industry"? Net Neutrality is one of the governmental regulations I fully support. It's a bit strange when the government is needed to step in and prevent corporations from restraining, restricting and inhibiting speech and innovation.
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You don't get it. The companies that laid all that fiber optic cable did so in most cases by being granted a monopoly by the government. You see, the government can't have 100 different companies laying network cable under the same streets. There simply isn't enough physical space for it, and nobody wants to sit through never-ending road construction because every time some company needs to lay down or repair or upgrade network cables the street needs to be torn up.

So the government awards the contract to one single company, to avoid the above problems. But then other companies, like Comcast, decided to buy up all these other local companies that had laid cable. And now Comcast is huge, and they don't want to be just a company that rents out use of their cables, they want to vertically integrate. And they want to use their monopoly over the cables to drive their competition out of business, and charge people more money for less service.

This is why we need net neutrality. f you are really a free-market capitalist, you will be in favor of net neutrality. If you want government-granted monopolies to be able to use their monopoly power to stifle competition by pricing them out of whatever business said company decides to enter next, then killing net neutrality is the choice for you.
 
BobTheCoward said:
I fully get it.

In the context that it is a government-granted monopoly, I fully oppose it.

However, if there wasn't the monopoly, I don't feel it is a place the government should interfere.
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Whether it’s a government granted monopoly or not, leveraging dominance in one industry to control others needs to be curtailed. Consider railroads in the 1800’s, regardless of origin local industries could not survive without the railroad company, so if the railroad company wanted to buy them out all it had to do was refuse to transport it’s goods. Before it was outlawed this practice was used to quite literally steal other peoples businesses. This is more or less what some media companies want to do today with the internet.
 
Newtons Bit said:
It's a bit strange when the government is needed to step in and prevent corporations from restraining, restricting and inhibiting speech and innovation.
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That’s actually a fairly normal situation. In a great many cases economies of scale and price vs production curves are sufficient on their own to cause an industry to gravitate towards a monopoly, which invariably stifles innovation in that industry.
 
WildCat said:
If you are really a free-market capitalist, you will be in favor of net neutrality.
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*Ding*

This is an amazing example of political dogma not only being against one's own self-interest, but also working counter to the dogma itself. (This is, of course, assuming that a free-market capitalist is always against government regulation even in cases that it prohibits free-market capitalism.)

Network Neutrality hurts no one and arguably helps everyone. At best, you could argue that it prevents pipeline owners from artificially increasing their prices based on an advantage granted to them by the government (read "the people") in the first place.
 
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