Reviews:
 ·RoadRunner Cable
| reply to sivran
Re: lol said by sivran:That's uh, kinda the point. It's a bill to protect content providers from anti-competitive measures taken by carriers. Right. I think you missed the larger context. The poster that I was replying to was living in some non-Earth reality where network neutrality was already being enforced by government regulation. I was simply pointing out that there was a bill that had not yet been enacted.
In short (names here used just for example) it forbids Comcast from demanding money from Google when a Comcast subscriber uses GMail or any other Google product. It forbids TWC from exempting their own (hypothetical, I don't think they have one--yet) internet video service from their usage meter, while letting YouTube, Hulu, and others languish under their stingy caps. It forbids AT&T from deliberately dropping Skype packets while letting their own (or a partner's) VOIP product run free.
Or did you really want, say, dslr to become a pay-only site, because Comcast, TWC, AT&T, Verizon, and Qwest all demand that Justin pay not only his own ISP (nac.net), but them as well? That's what you're advocating when you spout anti-neutrality rhetoric.
These are all hypothetical problems that do not exist today.
To me it's foolish in the extreme to build up a big new government bureaucracy, write a whole new set of regulations, and burden the court system with the inevitable flood of lawsuits, to solve a non-problem.
If this ever becomes an issue, and normal competition doesn't take care of it, then existing laws such as antitrust can be applied. Don't be spun into urgent action by those trying to gain business advantage from regulations (*coff* Google *coff*).
This reminds me so much of the "There's trouble in River City! With a capital T!" scene from The Music Man. Whipping the crowd into a frenzy over a problem they didn't know they had, to make a few more bucks.
The last thing I'll say is: be careful what you wish for. It's really easy to have a whole raft of unintended consequences when you toss well-meaning but ill-defined legislation out there to a government bureaucracy. |
 sivranBack to Opera againPremium
join:2003-09-15
Arlington, TX
kudos:1
·RoadRunner Cable
| The problem with the whole "competition will solve it" idea is the lack of competition in many, many areas. When your only choice is between nothing, and a provider who violates neutrality principles, whatcha gonna do? With excessively low usage caps looming, the environment's ripe for abuses. Give it a few years and even Comcast's reasonable-today 250GB cap will seem stifling.
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In dadkins' memory, Think outside the Fox... |
Reviews:
·RoadRunner Cable
| said by sivran:The problem with the whole "competition will solve it" idea is the lack of competition in many, many areas. I didn't say "competition will solve it". I said "if competition doesn't solve it, existing law (such as antitrust) can be applied."
Besides, do you really think the big national ISPs will have different terms&conditions for different locations? I don't. |
