Do you think the FCC has your best interests at heart?

If the government actually wanted to improve the quality of internet service, they would subsidize the rollout of fiber services that could compete with cable, rather than passing round after round of illegal regulations. Nobody in government cares about improving your internet service though. They care about obtaining more power through grandstanding that caters to some subset of the corporate giants lobbying them on this issue (on both the telco and content provider side) and the people who learned everything they know about economics from Last Week Tonight.

We are not just talking about the government allowing/not allowing data to be treated differently. We are talking about giving the government more authority to regulate the internet. One of the main reasons that net neutrality is not now in place is because the FCC does not have authority over the internet because it is classified as an information service. Changing that will have many ripple effects. Do we really want the internet to end up like the rest of the telecom industry? The government has never just "dipped their toe" into an industry. So to think that the regulation will stop at core net neutrality principles is to be ignorant of history.

And how is net neutrality less government regulation than what we have now?

I don't think comcast has my best interest at heart. But the only reason I have to even worry about that is because the government got involved in the first place. The solution to the problem is not to add more of the very thing that caused the problem. And in the short term the internet would take a hit getting government completely out, but in the long run would be exponentially better.

Absolutely! All of those things cost more than they should, are less efficient, and give worse service. With the exception of clean air.


The success of this country is not due to big government.

Agreed. Not to mention that one of the things Colbert points out as a problem, regulatory capture, is caused by the government having power and NOT the free market. Regulatory capture is just going to get worse the more government you have involved. The people in the government are not for the people. They are for themselves and their pursuit of power.

What do you propose should be done to prevent Comcast/Verizon and the like from throttling down internet speeds for services which compete with their own streaming products?

Screaming "more government is not a solution to government" is fun but isnt really a solution to the problem. I agree that the whole situation stinks but I dont see any way for net neutrality to occur without government intervention. The "free" market sure as hell isnt going to fix the situation.

Well no, we're talking about which version of property rights we prefer and who will get (relatively) more or less money. The government is going to be involved either way. They are the one enforcing the rules regardless of which contracts are chosen to be honored and which ones won't. As far as GOVERMENT INTERFERENCE! goes, it's pretty much "hands off my Medicare", except it's "keep the government out of my government enforced contract".

I don't see any reason to believe that a captured regulatory body is necessarily worse than having no regulations to begin with. I can see several reasons why a captured regulatory body is still better than no regulations, though.

I do like AT&T's decision to stall on their upgrade their fiber in cities because of this sudden uncertainty. Hat tip to the executive who thought of that.

Comptetion is the solution. Get rid of all the road blocks to competition in that industry. In the areas where you have a ton of competition like Google fiber, you don't have these issue. So this is a proven solution. I am not a fan of government subsidies, but given that this is a problem created by the government it might be a case for one.

First, I don't have to provide a solution. Given that government intervention is not a solution. You don't need to know the right answer in order to not give the wrong answer.

And the free market will fix the problem, assuming you actually give the free market a shot.

A captured regulatory body is far worse. You give massive corporations direct access to power instead of having to go the market to get it. The only way to get power through the market is to give the customers what they want. In that scenario it is a win win. And we are not talking about government regulation vs no regulation. We are talking about government regulation vs the free market regulation. And free market regulation is better 100% of the time.

It is a smart move. And you won't see this happening in markets where Google fiber exists. I wonder why that is?

It seems wierd to consider a change TO net neutrality as possible regulatory capture but a change AWAY from it not possible regulatory capture as well.

Because Google is for net neutrality and AT&T isn't.

For one thing, no, it isn't. Don't be naive.

You saying a captured body is far worse, doesn't make it so. The laws and regulations that a regulatory body is charged with enforcing are still in place and, in many cases (for example, environmental statutes such as the CWA) citizens can sue to force action. There is only so much that a captured agency can do, too, because the APA still exists and that allows for a modicum of transparency and resistance making it harder for regulators with bad intentions to do bad things.

Competition is great but this is in no way a free market so barring radical changes to the entire structure of telecom industry in the US, just screaming competition and free market isnt going to change anything. Google fiber seems to be going just fine under the current regulatory capture laden FCC, not sure why this would change with a modest adjustment to the regs.

Frankly, anyone who wants to start an ISP to compete with Comcast and the like is free to do so but the cost of building out a national network is somewhere north of $100 billion so the chance of anyone other than maybe Google doing so seems pretty slim.

My only interest in this topic is to prevent ATT and the like from throttling down my Netflix or Prime or whatever in order to steer my business to them. I am fairly libertarian ideologically but it is difficult for me to see a situation where the solution comes from anyone other than the government.

Right, because Google competes with them. No one is forcing google to be for net neutrality. The are because it is ultimately in their best interest with regards to competition. So we don't need government to force anything. We just need competition. The kind of competition that would already exist if the government didn't get involved in the first place.

I am not sure I understand what you are saying. Could you elaborate?

Right now you can actually access Netflix and Prime unthrottled through all (or maybe most) ISPs. You keep talking about how the government needs to solve some problem, but you are mostly talking about how to solve imaginary bogeymen.

No on is screaming anything. I agree we are in a tough situation. But we are in this situation because of the government. Google fiber is not doing just fine. It is having to move very slowly mostly because of local government getting in their way. I live in STL, and Google wanted to build fiber here. But the local government made is too difficult, like they do with most businesses.

The barrier of entry is high. But it is worse because of government. Get the government out of the way and you would see more competition. Not hundreds of companies, but enough to keep the balance of power.

I agree that I do not like the idea of ATT throttling my services. But government involvement is a band-aid that will only let the underlying cut fester and get worse. I am more concerned with what the internet could look like in 15 years if we open the flood gates.

If you want the government to get involved, have them get involved in promoting competition.

AT&T did it to throw a tantrum and to give policy makers something to point at to claim that with net neutrality telecoms can't upgrade their networks. Which is obviously not absolutely true.

Blanket solutions like "more competition" and metaphysical "government is evil to create this situation so it needs to get out to make the market a paradise" solutions point to more superficial ideology than a grasp of anything else. We've already had two threads on "the government just needs to get out of telecom". The origination of the problem isn't as simple as the government created it. It has to do with the nature of the telecom industry as well.

Net Neutrality can be the government is out of the market's way position and non net neutrality be the big government position. You just arbitrarily picked one to be defined as small government.

?

Everything from Bittorrent to Netflix to Facetime to Vonage to Skype have been throttled or outright blocked at one time or another by various ISPs. Verizon and Netflix being the most high profile dispute -where Netflix was eventually forced to pay Verizon up to end the throttling. The Bittorrent v Comcast case made it all the way to the FCC. All of this is well documented. The only reason the situation is not worse is that there were neutrality rules of sorts in place until earlier this year so ISPs risked running afoul of the govt if they throttled too much.

The ISPs have shown repeatedly that they are very willing to block certain services which are in competition with their own offerings. The biggest concern is not for Netflix and other current services but the effect that non-neutrality will have on the next wave of disruptive services. Why would Comcast or Verizon allow the next Netflix or Youtube to gain any traction??

LOL oh man COMPETITION IS THE ANSWER!

They will BLOCK OUT THE SUN with their millions of miles of cable wire

And we will buffer our videos in the shade

free market is the one that came up with the idea to throttle all this other stuff but it's the gov't fault? did I get that right?

Lets say we completely removed government regulation from the picture. Can 100 companies just go and dig up the ground along the road, in front of my house, etc. and install their own wires?