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Title II and free internet:
Jemcrystal
Member UncommonPosts: 1,989
Title II is basically where the government is deciding if your local internet provider can charge whatever they want to whoever they want and butt out all the competition; no safety laws to stop them. For us that would mean only the rich and famous could look up mmorpg's online. Any thoughts on this?
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Comments
Better access or worse access to the Internet is mostly about getting ISPs to build out more bandwidth capacity. They want to keep paying customers happy outside of a handful of people using ridiculous amounts of bandwidth or otherwise causing trouble. Whatever capacity they build, they want to put to the best use possible. Once you've laid your cables and so forth, there's no advantage to leaving them idle.
So the critical question is, what will encourage ISPs to build more capacity:
1) Letting them charge whatever they want and manage their services however they want, doing whatever they can to make money subject only to laws against fraud and so forth, or
2) Having a bunch of government regulators constantly putting their fingers in everything so that in order to do things that are profitable, they constantly have to stop and wait for permission from some bureaucrat.
I think that option (1) will mean more bandwidth gets built than option (2). We aren't entirely at option (1) today, but Title II regulations will move us a long way away from option (1) and toward option (2).
In the short run, regulations to protect consumers might work out just fine. But in the long run, vastly less capacity will be built precisely because it will tend to be less profitable if you have to run everything past government bureaucrats and wait for approval than if you could charge whatever you wanted for it. The experience of the Internet so far has been that, outside of a handful of corner cases from people who will use arbitrarily large amounts of bandwidth, the way to improve service is having more total bandwidth available rather than intelligently reallocating who gets how much bandwidth. Title II regulations are a bet that that's going to abruptly change.
The ideal situation from a consumer perspective is that you've got your choice of several ISPs who all want your business and will all try to deliver the best service possible at the best prices possible to get and keep your business. In that case, if one ISP does something obnoxious that annoys you, you can fire them and switch to a competitor. That's far more valuable than hoping that some bureaucrat cares about the same things that you care about and is aware of what affects you with your particular ISP. Title II regulations will keep us much further from the ideal of perfect competition.
If you think the will regulate themselves you are delusional, they regulate themselves just like oil companies that change prices at the pump whenever they feel like it or when they expect most profit.
There is nothing wrong with the current system where all content is EQUAL and everyone get's the bandwidth they pay for. What you endorsing here is essentially a move from a free and democratic internet to a cartel of the ISPs. No thanks.
If oil companies can charge whatever prices they want, then why do prices ever go down? Why isn't gas $10/gallon? Or, for that matter, $50/gallon? There are no laws stopping gas stations from charging that much. What does stop them is that no one would buy it if they charged that much because it's so much cheaper to buy from a competitor.
If companies make a profit by providing me a good product or service at a good price, I say that's a good thing. I like getting good products and services at good prices.
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In my personal situation, I had Comcast for a while, and it had some problems. I switched to Verizon and the problems went away. My Internet service is much better because there was the option to switch. It's highly probable that both Comcast and Verizon offer better service here than they would if there weren't competition, as they know that people very well can switch and sometimes do. More competition is better for consumers than more regulations.
How is the internet free if you have to pay to access it? Pay to use services on it? Seems to me, it hasn't been free for a very long time and the ISPs have had us by the balls since it's inception. You going to drop your internet because they raise the price... when they are the ONLY provider in your area? I think not. It's been that way ever since the internet became a household word.
That's why the solution is more providers in more areas. ISPs will build more capacity in more places if they think it's profitable to do so and not if they think it isn't.
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The title meant free as in speech, not free as in beer. So long as it costs money to deliver Internet access, someone is going to have to pay for that.
Domestic oil companies do not set the price of oil...international government owned oil companies do in the OPEC nations. Their actions are what determine the market prices of the oil. In other words, you picked a market that is a monopoly and try to compare it to one that is constrained by competition and then say they are the same.
Topics like this are always flooded with the opinions of people that do not actually know history and are mostly anti-government, because, government. They tend to spout out the most asinine bull based on spam emails they read, or extreme biased political sites that are actually run by some smoe with no actual education what-so-ever and heavy ties to PACs or party think tanks.
If you do not have a clear knowledge of the history of our phone system, don't give your opinion on this because anyone with even a partial knowledge of that history will tell you that you are wrong and that the internet should be under Title II as even Level 3, an ISP and network provider (one of the worlds largest BTW) went on record early last year and showed from their own business records that other ISP companies are LYING their backsides off with their arguments against Net Neutrality and even went so far as to write an open letter to the FCC telling them why they not only need to enforce TItle II but also include a provision barring ISPs from implementing data caps on home and business connections.
Of course then there was that little bit of news last week about a certain ISP that made some 90%+ profit from its internet business...
The argument against Net Neutrality is all based in ignorance.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
That statement shows just how little you understand about the oil/gas industry. The price per gallon is set by many different factors acting together. The oil speculators have more to do with it than the gas companies do. Do they love it when the price per barrel is high? Oh hell ya they do! I grew up in the heart of the petrochemical industry and I could write volumes on how the price of gas is set and there would still be room to add more. Stop listening to politicians spewing lies and do some research, they will tell you anything but the truth to stay in power. That goes for all of them. They all lie and leave out key facts that don't support their agendas Because people are inherently stupid and lazy and won't double check what we're told by authority figures.
as far as the topic goes...
i'm not sure how I really feel about this. On one hand I agree with what you say in your second paragraph, but that assumes we actually do get the bandwidth we pay for. I watch my internet slow to a crawl and literally become intermittent during most evenings making playing MMOs difficult. Now before all of the supposed subject matter experts start asking stupid questions about equipment, type of connection, etc. I am an electronics tech by trade and know more about that than most. Throttling some to prevent upgrading equipment could be decreased with some regulation.
The problem with regulation by government is that while it may begin with all good intentions, it almost always ends up as a cluster f_ck because no government is ever efficient or effective over time. Name any government program in the States and I guarantee you can find more waste and fraud than what many have been imprisioned for, but it's legal because the government is running it.
I'm sorry, but I remember when they broke up Ma Bell... a benevolent monopoly I might add... the ensuing flood of *healthy* competition didn't cut rates, it increased them. Quality and service suffered. We now can hop from one leech to another at whim, but we aren't getting decidedly better service nor pricing... it's more a matter of which company do I detest the least.
Do we get cheaper healthcare because there are more providers? No. If they all choose to set the base cost astronomically high, you're stuck with it. That's what happens in a free market that goes unpoliced.
The reason you will see better prices without government intervention is because if a company ever drives their prices beyond reason another company can step up and charge less. For instance right now in canada we have Rogers and Bell as the main distributors however we also have a bunch of smaller companies who much cheaper and better plans and options.
For instance Rogers Base plans sit at 54.99 fior 10 down 1 up with a download cap of 25 gigs.
Tech savvy on the other hand.a smaller company in canada. has 34.99 10 down 1 up and unlimited download.
All the smaller companies have plans like this. they are killing the big boys because they believe they can charge whatever cause they are rogers. this is slowly pushing them out of buisness.
Had this been regulated we would never have gotten the option of using a different company because in order to start a buisness you have new regulations and requirements that would be nearly impossible to start under title 2. Believe me canada had a very similar bill get tossed up. and we chose to toss it out. Free Market capitalism works. people are just to jadded after years of Crony Capitalism to believe that anything can work without government intervention.
Because i can.
I'm Hopeful For Every Game, Until the Fan Boys Attack My Games. Then the Knives Come Out.
Logic every gamers worst enemy.
As much as the US loves capitalism there are somethings that it doesn't apply well to. This is not a mark aginst it... I'm just saying that there are situations where every system falls short.
1. Healthcare
If you need a triple by-pass you need one... You can't pick a diffrent provider, you can't shop around and you can't wait till the price goes down. You pay what they want get it.... or you die. AKA capitalism doesn't work. That's why medical costs are have gone up about 1800% of the rate of inflation over the past 20 years.
2. Utilities
Water, Electricity.... And yes Internet.
Anything that you need a large and expensive infastruture to maintain does not adapt to a capitalist system well. The companies with the big-backing and the goverment grants get their stuff in place, and then THEY can sell exclusive rights to said network. Or rent it to other companies who will then sell it to you.
AT&T used to own pretty much all the infrastructure in the US.... ALL OF IT. Which they took that money, and used it to build even more infastructure..... Good for the US, good for AT&T.... Bad for capitalism.
Then after they made HUGE amounts of money the goverment stepped in and made them sell some to break up their monopoly... That opened the door for everyone's favorite company comcast to get a piece of the pie. Now comcast is doing the same thing At&T was doing, screwing everyone in the a#S, but at the same time increasing the quality of internet in the US.
Do you want companies like comcast to be able to make their own rules, charge people 40$ a month to rent their modems, and make ports on your router available to the public? Or do you want the gorverment to step in force a bunch of regs on them, and decrese their profits, and their ability to expand their bandwidith.....
Personally I think both options suck.... But that's the way the world works.
A shining example of what I mean.
Note how the poster makes a claim yet provides no actual information that can be used. No name of the company he is using, no price he is paying and in what location so it can be debunked because we all know its bogus outside of being "granfathered", something that will only be done to someone that was with the company for many years and more than likely was under contract when the change occurred. Then, uses such an example as THE reason why everything is A-OK everywhere!
The ignorance used in anti-regulation arugments is truly amazing, doesn't matter how much it flies in the face of industry facts that clearly show that internet connectivity rates have more than double nationwide in the last 15 years while American internet seeds have dropped compared to the fastest in the world, going from #1 in the world 15 years ago, to #13 today and all of those ahead of us have had government intervention in its building and maintaining.
Not even Communistcast claims that rates haven't doubled, or that American speeds are the fastest in the world...doesn't stop the ignorant from making asinine claims because OMG REGULATIONS RGONA DSTRY IT TEH FASCISTS COMMUNIST LIBERAL THUG WEAK JOBLESS UNIONIST HIPPY POTSMOKER ATHEIST TERRORIST LOVER AGENDA IS BAD.
Government bad, mkay?
So, brag on about how you and you alone have cheaper internet today than you did 10 years ago. In the mean time someone is paying $25 a month for a 500mbps connection in Hong Kong, $30 a month for the same speed in Seoul...all while Verizon saying its fastest Fios ever will do the same speeds for $310 a month. Oh yeah, America baby!.
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Your post is pure ad hominem and never gets around to making an argument over anything. If there's an argument to be made in favor of Title II, then feel free to make it. But don't just insult people who are against it and stop.
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Big businesses and generally just trying to make money and will favor or oppose regulations as they expect those regulations to affect their own profits. For example, regulations that increase your costs some but completely hamstring the competition allow you to raise prices or reduce quality considerably and people have to buy from you anyway because there's no alternatives. So just because one business is for or against proposed regulations doesn't mean that they're good or bad for that industry or for consumers.
check this piece out on it.
Phone calls are massively cheaper today than they were when Ma Bell was broken up. For example, check here, pages 280-292:
http://transition.fcc.gov/Bureaus/Common_Carrier/Reports/FCC-State_Link/SOCC/95socc.pdf
Long distance domestic phone calls tended to cost multiple dollars for a simple 10 minute call. International calls could easily be dollars per minute. And this is ignoring inflation; $2 in 1982 (when the breakup occurred) was worth a lot more than $2 today. How much do you pay for a phone call today? You probably don't even know on a per-call basis because your phone minutes aren't even metered anymore.
Admittedly, phone call quality has gone down. But that's for the very reason why phone calls are massively cheaper. It used to be that when you made a call, they'd have to have a dedicated wire for your particular call for the duration of the call. That means no interference from others, but it also means very expensive.
Today, basically everything has moved to VoIP. The physical infrastructure doesn't have to have a dedicated connection just for you anymore; it can be split between many people making many calls at once. And texts and general Internet usage, for that matter. All that on a cell phone that fits in your pocket and can connect from just about anywhere. Going over cellular networks means a considerable possibility of interference, which is why call quality has gone down. But the trade-off is that call cost is down by what, a factor of 100, perhaps? And that's in addition to phones getting massively more capabilities than before. I'd say that's worth it.
Deregulation of the phone system didn't pay off immediately. But looking back at it from 33 years later, things are hugely better now than they were then. Likewise, if we knew that the world were going to end in 2017, Title II regulations in the meantime might be a good idea. But I don't want to hamstring whatever ways ISPs might come up with to deliver better Internet service over the course of the next few decades.
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Health care is a different animal entirely. The system we have now isn't remotely close to a free market. There are many layers between the person who pays and the person who decides what health care is provided, which greatly muffles the market signals that provide efficiency in so many other industries. When you need health care and are looking for a doctor, do you ask how much it will cost or do you ask whether your insurance covers it?
You sir are a liar.
You have never worked or know anyone in the oil industry. The reason the price of oil gas has dropped so much is DIRECTLY because the Saudi's want to make to too expensive to extract tar sands oil and other forms of reclamation.
The New King came out and said Oil will never see $100 a barrel again. 1 man did that. Not an army of speculators.
You have no idea about laissez faire capitalism. Go actually learn something and find out why we have unions in American. Do you even know who Henry Frick is?
the only thing business can be trusted with is the pursuit of a larger profit margin by any and all means. The govt should heavily regulate every industry.
LEARN SOME HISTORY
I want there to be lots of competition everywhere so that if Comcast does try to do something obnoxious (and really, they're Comcast, so you know they're going to do something obnoxious even if you don't know the details), I can switch to a different and better ISP. Title II regulations will massively stifle that competition, leaving you stuck with Comcast and hoping that bureaucrats can force them to behave well enough for your service to be tolerable.
Most people don't even use phones to talk to people anymore, they use them to text, watch videos, play games and listen to music... the phone calls themselves are literally free because you're paying out the ass for the data plans. You can't compare the two anymore. What you call better is merely different. If tomorrow everyone decided that they only want to use their phones for actual phone calls, I can assure you, the cost will skyrocket by 1000% overnight.
Ad Hominem requires an insult. Telling a person that is not educated on a topic to inform themselves or not bother is not an insult.
And why is anyone required to repeat information that has been given 1000000s of times over the last 13 years? This is WHY I said what I said and it is also the reason why the FCC was finally able to do what they did. They went to the public AND businesses and were flooded to replies to the point it shut their website and mail server down. There can be no point made here that has not already been made a sickening number of times.
This isn't just beating a dead horse, this is beating the dead horse for so long its a skeleton. There are no points that should be required to be made to anyone anymore because the only people that need them are those that have ignored them by choice by either not wanting to be educated, or because they go against their anti-government principles and will ever accept them. The later I ignore because they are not worth speaking with...the former I addressed by telling them to go out and learn the topic first and then form their opinions...some insult eh?
"People who tell you youre awesome are useless. No, dangerous.
They are worse than useless because you want to believe them. They will defend you against critiques that are valid. They will seduce you into believing you are done learning, or into thinking that your work is better than it actually is." ~Raph Koster
http://www.raphkoster.com/2013/10/14/on-getting-criticism/
Well then, if you really want to talk about oil:
The problem with oil prices is that demand isn't very elastic. If gas prices were $3 last week and are $4 this week, you're not going to decide that's too expensive and so not drive your car at all. You might drive a little less, but for the most part, you pay whatever it costs.
In the short run, supply also isn't very elastic. If you've drilled a bunch of wells and can pump up oil and oil prices dropped, you don't just stop pumping oil and get no revenue at all. You sell the oil for whatever you can get for it and lose less money than if you were to stop selling oil entirely.
In the long run, oil supply is a lot more elastic. There are a bunch of places where you can and will drill for oil if you expect to sell it for $200/barrel but that you'll shy away from if you expect the price to be $20/barrel. But the time gap between deciding to drill a well and having commercial quantities of oil from that well available to sell is years.
In the long run, oil demand also changes considerably. For example, a formerly impoverished country industrializing and then having millions of people driving cars around greatly increases the demand for oil. Or a country finding cheap ways to get natural gas and deciding to burn that instead of oil to generate electricity decreases the demand for oil. But these things take years to happen.
Thus, oil companies have to guess what prices will be years ahead of time, when deciding where to drill. If too many guess that prices will be too high and drill too many wells, oil prices plummet years later. If too many guess that prices will be too low and drill too few wells, oil prices soar years later. In the long run, this does correct itself. But it takes years to do so, which is why oil prices fluctuate so much over the course of years.
If you want to consider phone calls as just a generic form of things that use bandwidth, the cost of the data for a long distance phone call before the Ma Bell breakup was on the order of $1/MB. How much do you pay for your data plan today? Does it cost you $10,000 for 10 GB of data? Or have bandwidth prices come down considerably since then?
"ALLOWING THE GOVERNMENT TO RUN THE INTERNET LIKE A UTILITY OPENS THE DOOR TO ABUSE. "
yea, the NSA could like spy on every mail or whatnot! hey... waaaait a sec.....
"I'll never grow up, never grow up, never grow up! Not me!"
That's pretty hard when cities give companies like Comcast exclusive right of way access to the utility corridors to our homes. In a lot of cases the cities paid for this cable to be installed and Comcast is just "leasing" it at very favorable rates.
This isn't the kind of business where a competitor can open a store next door and start dong better business than you do to compete, the barrier to entry for a Internet provider is huge and growing larger every year.
Question. Is the phone industry in a better more competitive space today with more options and faster technology advancement compared to what it is like before the breakup of AT&T and it's monopoly on cable to our homes? It's clear at least to me that we as consumers benefited a lot more from the government involvement in AT&T's monopoly than where hurt by it.