I'm flinging insults? How dare I? Who are you, my mother? I appear to have triggered thee. I'm sorry if I did. Also, please don't drag me back into this conversation. I was done quite a while ago.

6212595
does this affect anyone outside of america?

6213377
Agreed.
6213521
At worst it could probably set a precedent for other countries to follow or companies to push for, so not directly but eventually yes.

6213540
im surprised this hasn't gotten a greater reaction from the people. curious though, even if ajit pie is stopped and net neutrality remains, whats to stop another person in the right position to try and remove it again?

6213552
Not my area of expertise really. it's also 1:26AM so break pls

6213608
Fair enough, good night.

6213622
g'night

6213360

Pattern recognition? For what? Your "evidence" has no useful pattern. The status of the ACA doesn't prove whether Net Neutrality is bad. That Obama had something to do with current Net Neutrality doesn't prove whether Net Neutrality is bad. The status of the Patriot Act doesn't prove whether Net Neutrality is bad. Your Moral Equivalency does nothing to prove whether Net Neutrality is bad. If anything, the only pattern to your supposed evidence is that none of it has any association with whether Net Neutrality is bad for us.

You're not providing any evidence; you seem to be hoping to engender purely emotional reactions that are in your favor, something that is actively detrimental to the discussion about Net Neutrality.

A good sounding government policy turning out to be bad. That is the pattern.
Patriot Act
Affordable Care Act
And Now Net Neutrality.

Net neutrality is essentially a consumer safeguard against double‐dipping; ISPs have to give you the bandwidth you fucking paid for, nothing more, nothing less. They’re not allowed to hobble competitors’ traffic in order to make their own service more appealing. Those arguing against net neutrality are mostly useful idiots or hard line anarcho‐captialists.

6213007

The difference is that companies know that without a consumer base either by killing it off or due to negative perception the consumers leave they are up a creek without a paddle. Governments can always conquer other nations so they don't have the same self-interest in the consumer.

That is amongst the most facile arguments I’ve ever seen. Here, I’ll invert the statement:
“The difference is that politicians know that without a voting base either by killing it off or due to negative reception the voters leave and they are up shit creek without a paddle. Companies can always find another sucker so they don’t have the same self-interest in the consumer.”

And now that I’ve laid out the equivalent sentiment but for the government — and you know full well how that works in practice — hopefully I don’t have to spell out why.

6212706
6213521
If you use the English speaking internet, it will affect you. Additionally, everything that is hosted in the U.S. and every route that is faster by way of the U.S. (and you would be surprised just how often this is the case) is also at risk.

6214410
You seem to ignore that politicians are not all elected to their positions, ever heard of a king or queen, or prince? And that companies cannot always find another sucker, Precedition of the consumers.

6214410
While I can see traffic of certain kinds being preferred over other traffic being a factor not just from the client side, but also in delivering that data from a server side, unless the iSPs go to extreme measures (like dropping bandwidth to KBit instead of MBit) most sites don't use that much bandwidth (being mostly text).

I concur that high-multimedia websites may suffer here if they decide not to pay for extra bandwidth, and that for instance YouTube could be seen as adding a HEAP of extra advertising to make up for the additional costs of ensuring bandwdith availablinity for the website. Either that, or a more business oriented model, where you can watch 10 movies per 24 hrs for free, and need to subscribe (and pay) to get more access - I hope I'm not giving them ideas now :)).

So yeah, I see the pitfalls. I see the potential for disaster and ruin. I'm just not sure how it will affect me on either a personal or professional level in my web browsing.

Yes, I look up a lot of info, but that sticks me with the major websites mostly (Microsoft, Google, YouTube, HP, Wikipedia). Overall the sites common US people would request (a lokal plumber, stuff on sale at the local Target, your local community information page) aren't of relevance to me. Those kinds of sites I look up on this side of the Atlantic, and that falls outside the regulations of the US. Specifically those US websites I mentioned I can see taking a hit in available bandwidth seeing they may not be able to pay for the extra speed.

While this by no means is a censoring of the internet (atleast of what I read it's only about speed-per-website or more correctly speed-per-traffictype) it does make certain websites that are available faster more appealing to users. And as such it may well result in websites disappearing due to lack of traffic. So in a roundabout way it does promote censoring. Hell, Google does the same already with the sorting (and censoring) of it's webresults, making sure sites that have payed for advertising are popping up higher in the search results.

The big issue as stated above comes if certain guidelines are set forth that any party can indicate a speed-limit on either a website or content. If it's a global setting the ISP sets forth (all websites/traffic at that speed, unless you as the owner pay for more) that atleast is fair. But if you allow random people to either limit specific websites, or worse, specific website-content/traffic (such as left politicians managing a ban on all right-wing propaganda and vice versa, or bust Bittorrent traffic (which is also used for legitimate distribution of files, even if it's more well-known for illegal content) down to drip-speed on the instigation of the MPAA), that leaves it up to random chance. And that's NOT okay in my book.

One worrisome bit that may come to pass... Spammers and malware-spreaders gaining millions in revenue would have the money to make sure their unwanted stuff gets full bandwidth. And that's definitly a thing to worry about!

And who know. If an ISP can lower it's purchase costs for bandwidth to the internet, market-influence may see them lowering the rates for a slower connection. Tho I'm not holding my breath for that one.

I came here expecting to see people fighting about this, was not disappointed.