FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

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raevol
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

Post by raevol »

Faelian wrote: 19 Dec 2017, 21:48 The question then is, why won't more investors create ISP companies to compete with them.
You can't. The current ISPs have monopolies in place over the areas that they control, and if you try to set one up, you get sued into the ground.
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Faelian
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

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raevol wrote: 19 Dec 2017, 21:53 You can't. The current ISPs have monopolies in place over the areas that they control, and if you try to set one up, you get sued into the ground.
How come? How can a private company get preferential treatment in terms of just being allowed to function? I know law is not perfect and there are plenty of lobbyists that make it hard to do anything against them but that honestly sounds like mafia.
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raevol
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

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Faelian wrote: 19 Dec 2017, 21:58 that honestly sounds like mafia.
Welcome to Americaaaa! :D
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Jemolk
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

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raevol wrote: 19 Dec 2017, 21:59
Faelian wrote: 19 Dec 2017, 21:58 that honestly sounds like mafia.
Welcome to Americaaaa! :D
Again, QFT! Corporations are the mafia around here, except without the redeeming qualities of Al Capone and company. Welcome to the one place on the planet where the debate on economic policies is held solely between ancaps and oligarchs.
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Faelian
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

Post by Faelian »

raevol wrote: 19 Dec 2017, 21:59 Welcome to Americaaaa! :D
Land of Great Opportunities!

But really, what kind of law prevents other people from setting up ISP businesses?
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Jemolk
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

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Faelian wrote: 19 Dec 2017, 22:04
raevol wrote: 19 Dec 2017, 21:59 Welcome to Americaaaa! :D
Land of Great Opportunities!

But really, what kind of law prevents other people from setting up ISP businesses?
Well, first off, and perhaps worst off, if you don't have enough money to defend against a lawsuit, it doesn't even matter if you'd be guaranteed to win, because you'll lose everything down to your shirt in the process. If you have enough money, you can drag out a losing lawsuit long enough that it will bankrupt the person you're suing before they ever get a chance to countersue and collect what they're owed.

Second, there is literally nothing you can do in this country to hold the decisionmakers in a corporation personally liable for the actions of the corporation. This means that even if they break the law in a dozen different places at once, there's zero chance of them facing so much as a fine to come out of their own personal funds, let alone jail time. The one exception to this is if you fuck over other rich people, a la Enron or Bernie Madoff. And even then, Madoff only suffered house arrest in his multi-billion-dollar mansion. If you only screw over working folks, you might even get massive bonuses and bailouts on the taxpayer's dime like with the "too big to fail" banks and their executives in '08.

Third, ISPs actually lobby state legislatures and also give legalized bribes (bankrolling campaigns) and quite probably the illegal kind too, like actual kickbacks, to enact laws that actually ban municipalities from setting up their own local internet services. There is, of course, no conceivable benefit to voters from these laws, but they pass anyway.

Fourth, ISPs actually own the fucking infrastructure. When that happens, without government oversight and major regulation, well...good luck.
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AnyOldName3
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

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Running the cables is reasonably expensive, and you need to have a permit to do it in the US. Theoretically, the US government pays for the cable to be laid (so ISP investment has never come from ISP profits, but instead from tax, meaning US ISPs have the tax burden of a nationalised industry but the at-time-of-use cost of a private industry) but once cable exists, it's hard to justify spending taxpayer money on a duplicate set, and also the incumbent companies can claim that they'll do a better job because they already have stuff and experience. That means that smaller ISPs aren't going to get any subsidies and have to eat the cost upfront. There's also the issue that even if cities and towns liked people digging up roads to put cables underneath, they still have to authorise it, and it's likely that the existing ISPs pay fees for the right to have their cables there, and can threaten to stop if they get competition, cutting the money that town/city has to spend on things like parks and fixing potholes (or potentially the amount that specific government officials have to spend on prostitutes and sports cars).

tl;dr: shit's expensive, and you also need government help. Existing ISPs have the power to stop you getting that help and if the government did anything against that, they'd get called communists and never get voted for again.
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

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AnyOldName3 wrote: 20 Dec 2017, 00:05 Running the cables is reasonably expensive, and you need to have a permit to do it in the US. Theoretically, the US government pays for the cable to be laid (so ISP investment has never come from ISP profits, but instead from tax, meaning US ISPs have the tax burden of a nationalised industry but the at-time-of-use cost of a private industry) but once cable exists, it's hard to justify spending taxpayer money on a duplicate set, and also the incumbent companies can claim that they'll do a better job because they already have stuff and experience. That means that smaller ISPs aren't going to get any subsidies and have to eat the cost upfront. There's also the issue that even if cities and towns liked people digging up roads to put cables underneath, they still have to authorise it, and it's likely that the existing ISPs pay fees for the right to have their cables there, and can threaten to stop if they get competition, cutting the money that town/city has to spend on things like parks and fixing potholes (or potentially the amount that specific government officials have to spend on prostitutes and sports cars).

tl;dr: shit's expensive, and you also need government help. Existing ISPs have the power to stop you getting that help and if the government did anything against that, they'd get called communists and never get voted for again.
Two points bolded for emphasis. The latter is especially important. The U.S. is probably the clearest example out there right now of capitalism turned toxic, but try to do anything about it and half the bloody country dismisses you on the basis of the USSR and specifically Stalin, who they hold up as an example of communism having been flawlessly implemented for some unfathomable reason. Propaganda most likely.
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

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There's a reason it was called the USSR, not the USCR - they never actually had communism in the Soviet Union, just a form of socialism. It wasn't even an inherently broken form of socialism (after all, it mostly worked for over forty years), but your Stalins and the like tended to send their critics to gulag before working out if their criticism was intended as constructive or to discredit the leadership and gain influence. It can't have been the corruption that broke things, as the US has lots of that, too, and isn't dead yet.

Back to Net Neutrality (as I don't want to derail the thread too much). Here in the EU (well, I'm in the UK, so unfortunately not the EU for much longer) we still have net neutrality, but I keep seeing mobile carriers saying various streaming services (e.g. Spotify and Netflix) don't count towards data caps on certain plans, which on the face of it, is illegal, and while it sounds nice, is actually quite insidious as it allows network providers to push their own services or ones that pay them fees. Apparently, though, that's not actually how it works. Under the EU's rules, it's legal to supply an internet connection where specific types of traffic don't count towards data caps, so, for example, music streaming could be exempted, and it shouldn't matter where it's streamed from. I see two issues with this, though. Firstly, how do you tell what is and isn't music streaming? If one provider's agreement with a record label is that their DRM must force the music to be encrypted end-to-end, you're not going to see a nice GET request to provider.com/songid.mp3 and then be able to exclude the response from the cap. Also, what stops a provider making everything except one type of traffic not count towards the cap and then making the cap really low, effectively blocking that one type of content? It's possible, I suppose, that there's some clause banning this, but I don't see how it could be completely loophole-free.
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raevol
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Re: FCC Repeals Net Neutrality.

Post by raevol »

I'm glad there's a lot of people on here who know a lot about this, some of you are a lot more informed than me, even if I already agree with your points!
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