For all those that say that net neutrality does nothing, and doesn’t matter, I ask this. If net neutrality never made a difference, then why is every ISP pouring a collective billions of dollars into stopping it? Why did they do the same thing about 5 years ago trying to kill it? Why did they do the same AGAIN 10 years ago trying to prevent it becoming law the first time?
If you can’t see how net neutrality affects the internet, then you don’t understand. As a general rule of thumb, if you don’t understand something just look at what big money corporations are doing. You generally want the opposite of that. They are not here to be your friend. They are here to try to take every dollar they can from you.
Sounds like people with voting. They love to tell you how it doesn’t matter, and yet republicans put tons of effort into making it more difficult.
Not every ISP! Where I live there’s an awesome ISP, Sonic, which is pro-NN, and last I heard only offers “best effort” service — which means there’s no throttling your link, no paid tiers; if the fiber and hardware can support 10Gbps symmetric, then that’s what you get.
Sadly, they’re not the norm. And sadly, not offered at my address.
Bandwidth is a finite resource. If everybody on your street wants that 10GB at the same time there’s going to be throttling.
But that’s a common sense type of throttling. Net neutrality is about not giving priority to certain types of content or websites over others.
Right — not immune to congestion at all. Unlike ATT fiber, where we had 300Mbps (symmetric I think)…but if you log in to the modem it reported a gigabit link. Starting a download, you could often get more than 300Mbps, but it would slowly fall in line with bandwidth policies.
With Sonic, my gigabit connection would get north of 900Mbps (iperf3), both ways, to a nearby university computer. I miss it.
Technically yes. But the odds on a properly built trunk line getting saturated by a random neighborhood aren’t great. Unless of course they’ve never upgraded that line in 20 years…
Its dependent on the cable quality and materials. Its not a harvest, you can expand it at anytime by replacing the cable.
Great comment. We have the same thing here in Australia with tobacco laws. The most recent change was to ban almost all branding on cigarette packaging. They’re not allowed to use fonts, slogans, logos, or colours, just the brand name in plain text on a standard brown-green box.
The logic being that branding makes a product more attractive to a consumer. Make it duller and less people will buy it.
Tobacco companies fought it tooth and nail. Kept arguing it wouldn’t stop people from smoking. Well then why are you lobbying so hard against it? Obviously the only reason they will ever fight anything is because they think it will hurt their revenue. So whatever they oppose, I support.
Tobacco companies fought it tooth and nail. Kept arguing it wouldn’t stop people from smoking.
They are right, people will not stop smoking only because the packaging is dull.
Well then why are you lobbying so hard against it? Obviously the only reason they will ever fight anything is because they think it will hurt their revenue. So whatever they oppose, I support.
Because they lost advertising opportunity.
People recognize the brand by the packaging before even reading the brand name. This way your country just make any type of advertising for the cigarettes useless. And maybe as a collateral effect some younger people will not start to smoke since they will not see the advertising, but as far as I know people don’t start to smoke because the package is cool.
It’s more subtle than that. Obviously no one who already smokes is going to say “Oh, the packet isn’t as pretty as it used to be, guess I’ll quit smoking now.”
It’s about the big, long-term picture. Companies spend money on branding and advertising because it works. You create the perception that your product is for a certain type of person, which makes them more inclined to buy it. By making cigarettes boring, you make them less appealing, and on average less people will smoke.
The proof is in the pudding. Social attitudes to smoking in Australia have totally flipped within a generation or two. It used to be something that everyone did. It’s now mostly seen as a gross habit.
Cable internet needs to opened to alternative ISPs, just like DSL in telcos.
I like how the author figured any cord cutting image will do. Ethernet is not the cord the term refers to.
He’s not even the FCC chairman anymore but this news still makes me want to punch Ajit Pai in the face.
