The FCC could forever change how you use the internet

Why SHOULDN'T consumers pay for the bandwidth they use? If I eat 6 pancakes for breakfast, shouldn't I pay more than the person who only eats 2? To say that "You both ate pancakes, so your bill is the same" is ridiculous, as is the notion that I can't choose to order 6 pancakes if I'm hungry or that you can't decide that 2 is all you feel you can eat.

Regulation is the antitheses of freedom.

 

Wouldn't a better analogy be that you both paid for 6 pancakes, but one person gets them slower than the other?

 

Free markets will find a way to give everyone what they want. That’s how the USA became great. We don’t need government in everything we do.

 

Free markets presume everything isn't controlled by three or four monopolies, often with only one choice of provider in an area.

Anyone remember the last time they de-regulated telcos in the Clinton administration under the premise they would upgrade infrastructure to fiber-optic? Everyone with phone service in America has paid several thousands of dollars in fees to build that infrastructure (around half a trillion total dollars), don't know about you but I still don't have fiber to my house...

It will take awhile for the lawsuits to settle but you better believe the consumer will get screwed by this too, paying more for less.

 

So far as I can tell, as dystopian as the stated concerns may seem, the proponents of net neutrality don't seem to be too interested in planning or building the freely accessible "off-grid" alternative to the Internet that would pretty much be needed if corporate control over communication needs to be reversed. A lot of the rhetoric is obvious rehashed political & corporate sloganeering, which at this point only provokes me into assuming the "I don't care" position, even if I technically am in agreement. I am left thinking that the only meaningful downside to losing the battle over net neutrality is that streaming video and streaming audio services become expensive or unreliable - IF the ISPs really think that it is within their best interest to downgrade their own services. Streaming data is not important to me (would prefer simply to download the files and use them later), and I despise the advertising and snooping that is usually tied in with such services, so it's also a "no great loss" issue.

 

Don’t worry you will be paying to visits the TTR. Right now the internet is equal. Soon you will be paying to visit and research websites. This is a money grab, for the rich.

 

In the early days of cars we got along just fine without lane markings, stop signs, traffic lights, etc. 100 years ago we got along just fine without a global supply chain. The internet today is much larger and plays a more pivotal role in soceity then it did 20 years ago.

If the telecom companies don't want the ability to control usage, why have they soent so much to overturn the rules?

 

As a participant in a highly regulated industry, you have a first-hand look at what happens when lawyers and politicians write rules for an industry they know nothing about. Those rules tend to favor the large corporations as they are the ones with the money to lobby those uninformed rule makers who write those regulations, and the little guy is the one who is hurt. For us, it is a rigid and sometimes unworkable HOS, and now the whole ELD thing pushed by the ATA to force strict compliance to those sometimes unworkable HOS...and that's just one of thousands of examples of regulators causing unnecessary added compliance costs to THIS industry. Multiply that times every regulated industry, because it happens across the board. Do you realize how many millions of dollars (possibly even billions) per year corporations large and small spend on lawyers just to ensure they are obeying the ridiculous regulations that at times make no sense whatsoever for their operation? That cost is passed on to the consumer. Where a large corporation has the volume to cover those costs for a minimal price increase, the little guy simply cannot afford that extra expense because the market will not support the price increase necessary for such a small volume producer and competition suffers as a result. The regulations and cost of complying allow the large corporations to obliterate their competition long before the competition gets large enough to present a real challenge to their market share.

You cannot have a free market when the government is in the business of picking winners and losers.

 

Why didn't that happen before NN then?