Umm, curently, you don't pay anything to use the cables that are in the ground. If someone decided to put in fiberoptic cables, I would get the upgrade for free.

The companies that want these new laws are the ones who lay down the cables, not the people who host servers.

And roads currently exist that you have to pay to use, and get ticketed. In California they have these tollroads which we never had before. $3.50 during rushhour, $0.25 durning the middle of the night to use.

Everyone seems to assume that the companies are out there to screw you over because they can force you to, but thats not the way things work. Companies are just as prone to political preasure as governments these days.

$20 a CD with 9 songs is what was happening when Napster came out. Now you have iTunes which makes you pay the $1 a song anyways.

What? Your going to charge me to watch more TV channels? but TV broadcasting is free and it is my right to get the news!

I think the only people who would get screwed by these new laws they want are companies like Google or Yahoo, who are basically penalized for becoming popular. The more popular you are, the more your going to be told you have to switch the new lines.

But for the little guys, and small charities and small business, I think they are going to benefit from something like this passing.

The military paid for the original internet infrustructure, but now its the responcibility of private companies to upgrade the lines that we all rely on.

Apparently nobody cares about the other side... however here it is.

Lets say comcast supplies google with net access. Lets say that google is uing 90% of comcast's resources.

Now comcast has a new technology which allows information to be better compressed, or just move faster. They ask google to pay them more money so that google has access to this new technology.

Now the lines are 90% more free, all other webistes that comcast hosts gets faster access and less down time, and google pays the brunt of the new technology R&D.

There comes a point whre sometimes its better to allow people to make money. Take for example... IRE.. but muds are suppose to be free, right?

Pardon my ignorance, but I'm just now learning about this, so if someone who knows more about it can clarify.... Running my own website that gets about 2000-3000 unique visitors a day, would this potentially affect me/my website (ie: I'd have to pay for people to actually even be able to connect to it at a reasonable speed)? I'm just a little confused, is this mainly concerning commercial websites, or websites -everywhere-.

From what I've read so far, this sounds terrible, and I fully intend to spread the word. It's basically attacking our freedoms of choice. It'd be like if a city decided it only wanted Mcdonalds for fast food, and Burger King would have to pay millions of dollars just to open a store anywhere near the city.

It's not exactly something new, it's been tossed around for awhile. They just want to make sure they implement some laws and standards so that our freedoms aren't abused. It's that simple really.

I know it's not new, just that I am new to the issues, I guess. I'm just trying to get a grasp on what the impacts would potentially be if the telecommunication companies did start imposing higher prices for higher speeds.

I want to guess if it did affect personal websites, it would be through the web host, which would be bad either way.

odds are it would only affect places that get millions of unique hits a day, not thousands.

--It is amazingly difficult to find the opposing view for this on the internet...

Now THAT scares me.

ooh, found one...

http://www.dontregulate.org/

If the people laying down the fiberoptic cables did not charge the websites that use the increased service, guess who they will charge instead? Yay higher cable bills, just what we need!

Poor hotdog lemonade girl.

Er, apparently they don't get how the internet works. The cost of delivering data from backbones to your house is entirely paid for by you. The price of delivering data from, say, Google, to a backbone is paid for by Google. That's how it's supposed to work. Google isn't 'using' the cable to deliver content to your house; you are paying for the bandwidth to access Google and request content from them. A tiered internet service would simply mean that Google, besides paying their own bandwidth costs, is also going to pay for the costs of delivering from the backbone to the user - But wait a minute, the user already pays for that. The Internet is an absolutely fundamental component of business, education, and government now. The telcos may own the infrastructure, but there has to be government regulation, just like there has to be government regulation on every fundamentally important utility service - What if you had to pay a fee to ride on a 'fast lane' in a highway? What if your calls were limited to five minutes unless you were calling someone who paid a 'long call fee'? What if you had to pay extra for the water coming out of your tap to have lower levels of lead and arsenic? You can't let publically traded companies which are bound by law to do whatever they can to value their shareholder's assets as much as possible just run things which people depend on, every day, without regulation. This isn't taking control of the internet away from the people and giving it to the government; it's stopping the telecom companies from seizing control of a system that is simply too important to be left in the hands of a small oligopoly of massively powerful and profitable companies. If there was any real competition in the telco business, regulation wouldn't be necessary. The Internet will, eventually, return to an unregulated state as soon as wireless mesh networking becomes pervasive enough, but that could take decades.

EDIT: That little animation is wildly inaccurate, and has 'corporate astroturfing' written all over it, believe me.

I think you are all missing the point here.

This is about FUTURE technologies, not current ones.

There is no fight or debate over the current technology and methods of internet use.

There is a fight however, over the laying of new fiberoptic lines and the question of who is going to be using them.

It currently costs something lie $40 for DSL/Cable, up from the old price of $20 for dialup. The people who are going to be laying the new fiberoptic cables (i.e. AT&T, Comcast etc) would prefer to keep charging customers $40 instead of $80. (as very very few people will be willing to pay/afford the $80 for something that will only be affecting HDVideo) Instead, they plan to charge those $40 to companies like Google/microsfot and other companies that will be making quite a bit of profit from the better bandwith of the network.

Atleast that was what I heard the people against "net neutrality" argue.

Personally, I frankly don't trust the wisdom of the source "net neutrality problem", and trust even less a government who says Games are not covered by freespeech to regulate the internet.

Tiered pricing exists for UPS, Cable, Webhosting. Up untill now (or the near future) it has not existed for internet providers.

I don't know of any internet provider (save dialup) that charges you based on how much you actually use the internet, or give different packages to people to have different bandwidth.. that only exists for webhosting right now)



except for your arsenic example, which is an issue of health, those conditions are allready true.

If you take the 91 freeway in california, there is a "fastrack" lane, costs you $.75 to take it for 4 miles. (it bypasses the various freeway merges, but only if you pay)

Every tried using a payphone?

Where is the evidence of the "evil corporations"?

The U.S government might become China and regulate freespeach, that is just as likely as the companies that provide internet access, will restrict which websites you are able to visit.

Bzzzt! WRONG. This is about current technology and its use. Fiber optic networks will use the same old TCP/IP method of routing data as usual. Bandwidth will improve, sure, but it's the customer that will pay for his bandwidth, and the provider will pay for his side - Also, this technology has existed for well over ten years. The only reason it's coming into play right now is that it's cheap enough to be economically viable.

You see, Google/Microsoft/Whatever are paying for their bandwidth. You are paying for yours; YOU pay to transport data from the backbone to your computer. And that's the way it should be, because it's what enables you to choose which data you want freely. The telecom companies basically want to charge twice for the same service; that's not only a horribly slippery slope, it's immediately a bad thing since it stops free content from being distributed. I really distrust the legitimacy of that website; it keeps talking about 'the people' controlling the internet when, in fact, the infrastructure in question is owned not collectively by the people but rather collectively by the people who happen to own stock in telecommunications companies.

This is being called 'regulation' and 'regulation' is an ugly word. The regulation is simply that the infrastructure owners have no control over content. The issue at hand is, those companies have huge economic incentives to charge everything twice and use that kind of power to freely screw people over, specially since most of them are local monopolies or olygopolies.

Then the appropriate way to do tiered pricing would be to measure how much bandwidth you use (That isn't just doable, it's done - they have to know when someone exceeds their bandwidth use limit) and bill you accordingly. That would be fair; it would, however, be inconvenient for the telcos (Which can plan their bandwidth use more easily the way its currently done). It would also be cheaper, and we can't have that.


California doesn't count...
Seriously, I was unaware of that until now and find the whole idea to be a prime example of bad capitalism in action (There is such a thing as good capitalism, which is a plus since most other ways of 'organizing' an economy don't have a good side.)

I don't see how this relates to my example... In a payphone, your call time is limited to the money you pay. In fact, it's exactly like using a common phone, except that you have to keep feeding money manually instead of being billed. In my example, your calls would be cut off without warning whenever they exceeded a certain limit, unless you were calling someone who pays the hypothetical 'long call fee'.

Don't stereotype me; I'm not one of those nuts who are running around saying 'Corporations are evil'. American corporations are amoral; they aren't allowed to make moral judgements; they exist only to, within the boundaries set by the law, generate as much profit for their shareholders as humanely possible. They have no social responsibility whatsoever. This is exactly why they need to be regulated more or less, depending on how essential the service they provide is and on how much potential for damage they have. The profit of a major corporation (Which would have what, a few thousand shareholders?) simply can't be put above the well-being of all the people who depend on it for some major service - We've simply reached the point at which Internet access is a right, not a privilege; we're going through that awkward transitional phase phone lines and electricity both went through.

One of the reason a tiered internet is a dangerous idea is that it enables telecom companies to do their own censorship; net neutrality would ensure that whatever information is put online is avaliable to everyone, regardless of their provider; that is the most important thing. It ensures that there is The Internet, not a billion loosely connected intranets.

I'm completely convinced that Daganev's only purpose here is to argue for the sake of arguing. Of course there's always two sides to a story, but unless we're missing something huge... who cares about the other side?

The things they could do with this proposed law... bleh. It all sucks. Imagine ISPs blocking you from viewing competing sites, or charging you more so that when you've got Comcast, Verizon's page doesn't take ten minutes to load.

I think a lot of good points have been brought up here, and I'm pretty much convinced this is all a very bad thing.

Verithrax, where exactly are the curent fiberoptic cables laid that can reach my house?

Also, who is going to pay for it be placed?


Again, what is currently preventing a coporation from blocking websites you can access? where is the evidence they have any intention of doing so?

How much is ESPN.com paying comcast so that you can access the site?





The proposed law is to add rules that don't currently exist.

You have it backwards.

Who pays for new roads to be laid down, new phone lines to be placed, new electrical cables to be wired? The telecom companies are going to pay for the optic fiber cables - They could've done it years ago. It just so happens that now, it's economically viable for them to do so, or will be soon; for them, it's an investment in growth and a way of supplying the demand. They don't need extra money to do it; they don't even need loans or investments to do it, since they are turning up a large profit.

Legislation currently isn't clear; the telcos are waiting for legislation that explicitly allows them to be gatekeepers.

Zero! But you see,
That is how the Internet works by design!
It's supposed to be that way. ESPN.com pays their own costs to get their data upstream to a backbone; you pay your ISP to be able to use your ISP's lines to transmit a set amount of data, which includes what you download from ESPN.com. The cost of transmitting the datagrams from ESPN.com to you is extremely low; you pay for the part of it between the backbones and you, and ESPN.com pays for the half of it between their servers and the backbones. That simple. However, you only pay a little bit to cover your own usage; ESPN.com pays massive amounts of money to cover the usage of all their users. And most importantly, all of Comcast's users which download data from ESPN.com are paying for every last stray packet of it, and often more because very few people actually use all the bandwidth that is allocated for them. Together, ESPN.com's viewers using Comcast are paying for ESPN.com's 'use' of Comcast's wires; there is no such a thing as a free lunch.

We don't have fiber optic cables to each house, but we have fiber optic cables to each cable box. Four people share one. Our 'Net connection is friggin' awesome. Yes, it is our subscription fees that paid for it. No, they are not outrageous.



Freedom of speech laws. It's a big issue when public libraries install software filters. Some filtering systems have been ordered removed by the courts. Thus, it is reasonable to assume that corporations will not start blocking sites altogether.

Tiered service is already an option that is in place. That's not an issue. As a Cox customer, I could buy a slower connection from my ISP. I'm sure many hosting companies allow discounted rates for lower priority transmissions. These proposed laws would allow outbound ISPs to charge for bandwidth twice--both to the subscribing customer and to the service requested by the subscribing customer.


ESPN does not pay Comcast. You pay Comcast. I pay Cox. ESPN, however, does pay more for using more bandwidth.

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I don't get it. Don't all ISP's charge depending on download/upload speeds? With different rates having different priced packages? And... a lot of them seem to have download allocations that if you exceed you pay extra for.

Or is this different in America?

in america its one price for a set speed.

doesn't matter how much you use.

By download/upload speeds, most do. You definitely pay depending on the type of connection (dialup, DSL, cable, trunk line) you choose.

Download allocations for residential broadband accounts here in the US are typically so high that you never use it all.

Isn't that different packages for different bandwidths?

Ok, apparently some people are unaware that ESPN the TV channel had a big fight with comcast over having ESPN as a basic channel or not....

It was an allusion, pointing out that if Comcast was this big evil coperation which wants to stop companies from being accessed on the internet, they would have allreayd done that with ESPN.

All the future legislation that is being propsed, is -for- net neutrality ( which is kind of the opposite meaning of being neutral) The opponents to net Neutrality want the government to stay out of this.

I love how there are satements out there, like... multi-billion dollar coperations are lobbying against net neutrality, and thats why Congress didn't pass the bill.

Because Microsoft, and google are such poor companies...

Many people wonder why so much of the internet is free, and who is actually paying for it?

Well, at this point in time, the telecommunication companies, want to explore the business model of the newspaper and television industries, instead of the phone industries.

Neither business model which will actually affect how people use the internet, just how they pay for it.

Here too (My old ISP allocated 30 or 40GB for a 600kbps line). They probably don't charge enough per data to profit since they know that people won't use all the allocated bandwidth; however, the effect is that you will be overpaying, regardless. The reason is simply that there is no direct, simple correlation between bandwidth use and running costs; you can't say 'X Kb of data cost Y dollars to transfer' because costs don't scale linearly like that.