Net Neutrality Repealed by FCC

[Tony (admin)]

To read this post you may soon have to pay a $9.99 fee.

[Utahute72]

I gotta say I don’t really understand this issue. The news last night basically said that if net neutrality was repealed you would pay more for higher speeds, don’t we do that already?

[Utah]

I think the biggest downside will be to small websites like this. Companies can start to charge fees to be seen on their “internet”. 

And, the fees will quickly become similar to cable. 

[Tony (admin)]

The biggest problems are that companies like comcast could throttle or block services which they compete with.  They provide TV right? So they would throttle Sling or Hulu or whatever and make it unwatchable to either force you to buy their service, or pay an upgrade.  

[PlainsUte]

Yes, I think this is what they’re after.  They can give faster “lanes” to their own products and services that pay the carrier and put everthing else in the “slow lane”. For low bandwidth stuff it won’t matter but for things like streaming entertainment services, it will.

[MotherJabubu]

dammit now we return to the pre 2016 internet dark ages

[norm]

Well, actually, yeah. Plenty of companies were violating net neutrality before there were regulations.

It’s not some theory that it may happen, companies were already doing it, and cell phone companies are violating net neutrality principles currently by prioritizing traffic since they aren’t ‘burdened’ by the same regulations.

[EagleMountainUte]

Yeah basically we get cell phone coverage in our home. 

Corporations run this damn country. 

[MotherJabubu]

somehow all those were resolved without the NN regulation

[norm]

They weren’t all resolved though. That’s my point. The cell carriers pointed out in that list are all still doing plenty of prioritizing traffic. I wish I had the faith that they’d do the right thing, but unfortunately I think they’ve proven otherwise. 

[Duhwayne]

Throttling and extra fees to use Whatsapp etc. aside, now they can inject code into websites, pushing ISP popups into any page. Kiss privacy goodbye. Did we talk about ISPs now being allowed to sell your visited site history? You can’t delete history being kept at the ISP. With injected code, VPNs can’t stop that tracking either I think. No privacy, pay for service, tiered caps on data, what’s not to like?

[Italy88]

So stupid. First of all, I and many others left Utefans.net because of political posts like this. Creator of the site or not, I don’t care about your political opinion. Second, since you gave yours, here is mine. Free market capitalism works. Providers will compete, speeds will increase and cost will go down. 

[Tony (admin)]

HUH? This isn’t a mile-long ufn thread of people insulting each other because they don’t share the same beliefs. It’s potentially directly related to the site and its users. For the most part I believe in free market capitalism as well, except that in this industry there are very few providers, who have all previously violated the net neutrality concept.

[Utah]

Turn off this category. It’s so simple, it’s shocking. Just turn it off. Then all your problems go away.

[Tony (admin)]

I had it in misc but I’ve moved it to politics.

[UteFanatic]

Yeah, free market capitalism is great….until it’s not.  Without regulation, there would be about 3 companies in the entire U.S.  See the United States circa 1915 for a perfect example of what unchecked capitalism looks like.  

 

[SkinyUte]

Let’s give an example of what Net Neutrality actually does, shall we?

Comcast owns NBC News.

There is now nothing that could stop Comcast/Xfinity from putting a conservative news website like Fox News in the “slow lane” while prioritizing websites of properties it owns like NBC News in the fast lane. This would result in NBC News.com downloading exponentially faster than FoxNews.com would. That same principle would apply for any website or service. If they own Hulu, they can now significantly throttle Netflix. If they cut a deal with Sony for Playstation Network, they now can throttle XBox Live. Etc, etc.

And before you say “that would never happen!”, it already was…hence the net neutrality rules.

[Tony (admin)]

Right. In fact despite the law, I’m confident some of my services have been throttled for a while. I’m getting 100-160 megabits but somehow don’t have the bandwidth to stream SlingTV on my Roku? Really?

[SkinyUte]

The other problem is that while the idea of competing ISPs is great, the reality simply isn’t there. Where I’m at in South Jordan, I have two options: Comcast and CenturyLink DSL. I’ve actually been happy with Comcast, but if I wasn’t, it doesn’t exactly leave me with a host of other alternatives.

I’d bet that many areas are similar, with only one or two possible options.

[ironman1315]

^this. And even if you had options, most of the smaller companies are just piggybacking off of those two entities anyways. We can’t have open and fair competition this way. Internet is more of a utility at this point. Net Neutrality should win the day.

[Tony (admin)]

Right. I have two options at the moment: Crapcast and Century Dink. I will NEVER use Century Dink again. I can’t stand Crapcast’s customer service, but at least the product works most of the time (knocks on wood).  Praying for google fiber or something like that to come to my area.

[Utebeam]

Does the change in NN expedite the implementation of other services such as google fiber? I agree that in shorteerm situations capitalism struggles but over a longer period of time new entrants will come into the market if there is demand. Look at cable vs satellite, if those were both viewed as regulated utilities we might have cheaper service but I bet we wouldn’t have as many channels or dvrs.