Quote:
Originally Posted by Jeff '79
I'll admit that I am so ignorant on this subject that I haven't a clue as to if it is good or bad for me as a consumer.
Can you tell me if it is good or bad?
What I see through the forest is that now, ISP's are free to bundle "packages", like the shopping package, or the information package, a lot like cable and satellite companies do, and charge you for segments of the internet.
It would seem that it will not be "free" anymore. Ergo bad for the consumer.
Am I off the mark on this view?
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Hmmm, ISP's were free to offer tiered service and bundled packages prior to 2015, from 2015 to 2017, and after yesterday they still can. Hell, my cable company (CableOne) offers at least four internet packages.
100 Mbps/300 GB per month max at $55
150 Mbps/600 GB per month max at $80
200 Mbps/900 GB per month max at $105
1 GB at I don't know data cap or price, I've just heard it exists.
They were offering these plans the last several months at least, during the glorious days of Net Neutrality. They don't prioritize any one website over another, they just provide a pipe. They have terms and services that you can certainly break but your average consumer will never run afoul of those.
There was nothing the FCC Title II regulations did to stop anything I hear Net Neutrality magically stopped from happening because, well, that law was written in 1934. It was meant to put government oversight at every level of Ma Bell's monopoly. It was not meant to break up their monopoly, quite the opposite. It was to ensure it stayed in place. How that law is supposed to guarantee your Netflix is OK is beyond me. You could buy tiered telephone service back then. You could get a private line, a party line, or a business line and later you could get T1 service plans, touchtone or rotary plans, etc. All was fine under Title II.
What it did do when foisted on ISP's is make it very onerous for them to build new infrastructure. They literally had to get the sign-off of something like 17 government agencies including the DoD, the FCC, the FTC, State Department, the governor's office of any state they were building in, and they had to do this
every time. Now who does that benefit? Absolutely no-one other than perhaps the largest ISP's who can afford it I guess. It's why for the first time outside a recession the amount of money allocated to building the internet dropped, and not by a tiny amount - by almost $4 billion. In just under three years.
It's no coincidence that the greatest amount of internet censorship occurred over the last three years. Title II didn't stop outfits like Google (YouTube), Twitter, Facebook, or reddit from censoring the shit out of their content. Quite the opposite actually. But now that the FTC is back in charge of being the prime regulator of the ISP's, anti-trust law (Sherman act) and other laws may indeed be turned on the internet giants if they don't stop censoring ideas and entire swaths of political and societal movements.