The Internet Is About to Become Worse Than Television

[villager]

Without network neutrality, Tumblr could cut a deal with your ISP — let's say it's Comcast — and its blogs would load really quickly while that home server blog might take minutes to load pictures. It might not even load at all. You can see why people in the freedom-of-speech obsessed United States might not be happy with chucking network neutrality. It privileges some speech over others, based on financial resources.

At the same time, ISPs would love to end network neutrality because they want to charge more to major players like Netflix in order to support their streaming content. Now, it looks like the FCC is thinking seriously about letting ISPs have what they want.

Over at Slate, lawyer Marvin Ammori sums up:

The FCC is going to propose that cable and phone companies such as Verizon, AT&T, and Time Warner Cable are allowed to discriminate against them, giving some websites better service and others worse service. Cable and phone companies will be able to make preferred deals with the companies that can afford to pay high fees for better service. They will even be allowed to make exclusive deals, such as making MSNBC.com the only news site on Comcast in the priority tier, and relegating competitors to a slow lane. The FCC is authorizing cable and phone companies to start making different deals with thousands or millions of websites, extracting money from sites that need to load quickly and reliably. So users will notice that Netflix or Hulu works better than Amazon Prime, which buffers repeatedly and is choppy. New sites will come along and be unable to compete with established giants. If we had had such discrimination a decade ago, we would still be using MySpace, not Facebook, because Facebook would have been unable to compete.

The chairman believes he can help us in one way: He will make sure all these highly discriminatory new tolls are "commercially reasonable." Will that matter? No. Commercially reasonable deals won't be measured by the market. If Amazon is paying twice what eBay is paying, the FCC will only make sure each price is reasonable, not that the prices are nondiscriminatory.

He adds that this "reasonable" pricing will hardly be reasonable, unless your company is insanely rich:

So, according to the FCC, when Verizon discriminates against a startup, we shouldn't be alarmed, because (while being discriminated against), this startup can hire a lot of expensive lawyers and expert witnesses and meet Verizon (a company worth more than $100 billion) at the FCC and litigate this issue out, with no certainty as to the rule. The startup will almost certainly lose either at the FCC or on appeal to a higher court, after bleeding money on lawyers.

<snip>

http://io9.com/the-internet-is-about-to-become-worse-than-television-1569504174

[TreasonousBastard]

1. How much worse could it become...

every webpage is already 200 pages of code that barely loads and keeps browser coders up all night keeping up.

All this is just about who gets to sell me streaming video, not about whether or not I can get anything useful out of the mess. Or if any of those streaming videos are worth watching.

[defacto7]

2. Well it looks like

all my connections are going to be slower and I don't give a damn, it will be my choice. I will choose whoever and whatever is NOT in the financial fast lane just because I won't participate in this Internet takeover. I don't need it. I can go back to text browsing for that matter because that's how I used to do it. I mean it. Life doesn't revolve around Verizon or Netflix and I don't have to allow them an extra dime.

There are times to take a stand no matter how small.

[AverageJoe90]

3. We need to keep fighting this any way we can.

[quadrature]

4. email and other low bandwidth stuff will get thru...nt

[jtuck004]

5. New Experiment Shows What Internet Lag Would Be Like In Real Life

http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/trending-now/new-experiment-shows-what-internet-lag-would-be-like-in-real-life-192126164.html

[snot]

6. This seems appropriate:

". . . Napoleon . . . said that it wasn't necessary to completely suppress the news; it was sufficient to delay the news until it no longer mattered."

– attributed by PRWatch to Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (New York: Lyle Stuart, 1991), p. xvii.

[Doctor_J]

7. This might turn out to be the worst 8 years in history for consumers and little folk

with Heritage Care already done, if this goes through and they finish off public schools and pass TPP, the US will have stopped being a democracy and begun being a corporation.

[villager]

8. Bush's 3rd & 4th terms -- complete!

n/t

[Doctor_J]

9. I guess it would be cool to be part of the 1%,

and have your every wish carried out by the government. However I don't think I have to stomach to put thousands of lives at risk, or deliberately inflict pain on a few million citizens, just to make another 10 mil when I already have 200 mil. that's probably one of the reasons I am still a working stiff, hoping to make it to Medicare age.

[yurbud]

10. somehow, smaller countries like Chile and Venezuela have figured out how to undo

corporate kleptocracy.

The only question is how bad things have to get here before people take the car keys away from the spoiled, morally degenerate, inbred trust fund babies driving our country off a cliff.