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 Galas wrote:
I think this is one of those issues where people should forgot who is from team red and who from team blue and try to cooperate to avoid this kind of dick move from the Telecom monopolys to the customers.

That doesn't really work here. One of those teams has completely sold out on the issue and is actively at the heart of a misinformation campaign that claims Net Neutrality is anti-Free Speech (somehow), ant-Free Market (somehow), and anti Innovation (somehow). All nice phrases that millions of people have been conditioned to accept as absolutely must haves with no critical thought process whatsoever applied to what they actually mean. Outside of establishment politics, take a look at some of the responses to the FCC's public requests for comment sometime. It's littered with copy pasted "thanks Obama" comments, preaching the evils of "tha gov'ment" and the importance of "freedom" and it's sad. Really really sad.

it is a dick move from Telecom monopolies, but their business. Dick moves is what they do. It's a certain team that's supposed to be on the side of the people that's sold out but what else is new? They've been corporate shills for decades.

EDIT: To be fair, I've seen lots of crossing the line on this issue. How much time you actually spend on the internet seems a much strong signal as to how you feel about Net Neutrality than typical party affiliation. But there's still a stark contrast here when you consider that when Congress took up a bill to end Net Neutality it was slammed into the ground so hard it was painful to watch. Five years later, the legislature has been completely bypassed, with blatantly in the pocket appointees throwing the policy out the window while the chorus of "Freedom" cheers the flag in jaw dropping obliviousness.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

Removing Net Neutrality=BAD.


They've been trying for years, and now the corporate fat cats and politicos are going to get their way. Let's see how long that lasts when the word gets around, and voters start putting the pressure on.

This becomes problematic when the "voters putting the pressure on" are the ones who have put the corporate fatcats and politicos into a place where they feel they can get away with this trash.

There are people legitimately defending the removal of Net Neutrality as a "good thing".

LordofHats wrote:

 Galas wrote:
I think this is one of those issues where people should forgot who is from team red and who from team blue and try to cooperate to avoid this kind of dick move from the Telecom monopolys to the customers.

That doesn't really work here. One of those teams has completely sold out on the issue and is actively at the heart of a misinformation campaign that claims Net Neutrality is anti-Free Speech (somehow), ant-Free Market (somehow), and anti Innovation (somehow). All nice phrases that millions of people have been conditioned to accept as absolutely must haves with no critical thought process whatsoever applied to what they actually mean. Outside of establishment politics, take a look at some of the responses to the FCC's public requests for comment sometime. It's littered with copy pasted "thanks Obama" comments, preaching the evils of "tha gov'ment" and the importance of "freedom" and it's sad. Really really sad.

it is a dick move from Telecom monopolies, but their business. Dick moves is what they do. It's a certain team that's supposed to be on the side of the people that's sold out but what else is new? They've been corporate shills for decades.

Kanluwen wrote:

 oldravenman3025 wrote:

Removing Net Neutrality=BAD.


They've been trying for years, and now the corporate fat cats and politicos are going to get their way. Let's see how long that lasts when the word gets around, and voters start putting the pressure on.

This becomes problematic when the "voters putting the pressure on" are the ones who have put the corporate fatcats and politicos into a place where they feel they can get away with this trash.

There are people legitimately defending the removal of Net Neutrality as a "good thing".

The very fact that we're discussing this here, and people from across the political divide are in agreement here that getting rid of Net Neutrality is a bad move, is proof that people don't knee-jerk buy into BS narratives anymore.


I've already been in touch with the offices of my Senators and Representatives. We need to act and get the word out to people who are not in the loop.

There are already lawsuits in the works against this. It will be interesting to see where they go.

It's a matter of ignorance. I've seen people comment that they don't know what Net Neutrality is, but if George Soros supports it then it's clearly a liberal conspiracy to bring about a one world government.

Most people I imagine have no idea how the internet works, they only know that it does and they like that. It's not that people falling in line with the BS narrative are stupid, they just lack the requisite knowledge to know its BS. There's an important difference there, but that's still buying into bs. Most people I imagine have plenty of mess in their lives, but political culture in the US is such that we are compelled to have an opinion even if its so shallow and poorly thought out as to constitute non sequitur.

Call/email your reps people, be they D's or R's or literal fascists or actual communists.

There's broad bipartisan support for net neutrality, and that needs to be rammed home.

Because feth paying $4.99 for Email, $22.99 for Streaming, $12.99 for Gaming, $7.99 for Browsing, $299.99 for file sharing, all on monthly minutes plan to boot.

From what I have read municipal broadband won't be an option as there would also be some laws that make this harder (to protect the "ISP's investment" or something like that), and Netflix already once paid a fee for access a few years ago.

 Ouze wrote:
Impossible, all the candidates are equally bad.

Yep, best to take a position of absolute cynicism. What could go wrong?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Galas wrote:
I think this is one of those issues where people should forgot who is from team red and who from team blue and try to cooperate to avoid this kind of dick move from the Telecom monopolys to the customers.

I think the opposite. Things like this happen when there is a disconnect between politicians as personalities, and the actual policies they support.

One of the best approaches to defeating net neutrality is if Republicans can be legitimately threatened that they will be branded forever going forward as the party that killed the internet.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 LordofHats wrote:
That doesn't really work here. One of those teams has completely sold out on the issue and is actively at the heart of a misinformation campaign that claims Net Neutrality is anti-Free Speech (somehow), ant-Free Market (somehow), and anti Innovation (somehow). All nice phrases that millions of people have been conditioned to accept as absolutely must haves with no critical thought process whatsoever applied to what they actually mean. Outside of establishment politics, take a look at some of the responses to the FCC's public requests for comment sometime. It's littered with copy pasted "thanks Obama" comments, preaching the evils of "tha gov'ment" and the importance of "freedom" and it's sad. Really really sad.

Most of the comments to the FCC wanting an end to net neutrality are bots. There's been 100,000 comments from a single bot account.

https://www.cnet.com/news/fccs-net-neutrality-feedback-pages-are-being-flooded-by-bots/

Thing is, the bots are pretty transparent, many of the claims are identical. There's no effort here to convince anyone this is a real campaign. The campaign is just there to drown out genuine statements by real people.

 sebster wrote:

 Ouze wrote:
Impossible, all the candidates are equally bad.

Yep, best to take a position of absolute cynicism. What could go wrong?

I'm certain he was being facetious. Although you might have been doing the same. It's... I mean, it's genuinely hard to tell anymore.

 daedalus wrote:
I'm certain he was being facetious. Although you might have been doing the same. It's... I mean, it's genuinely hard to tell anymore.

We both were.

Ouze and myself have made a few comments on dakka about how absurd the 'both sides' argument is.

Fair enough. It's been some time since the last time I spent much time in OT. You both seemed fairly level headed in most cases years ago, hence the surprise motivating my comment.

Carry on then, gentlemen.

 sebster wrote:

 daedalus wrote:
I'm certain he was being facetious. Although you might have been doing the same. It's... I mean, it's genuinely hard to tell anymore.

We both were.

Ouze and myself have made a few comments on dakka about how absurd the 'both sides' argument is.

I would agree that the 'both sides' argument is absurd, but probably not for the same reasons you do.

My rationale is that there are no "sides" in U.S. politics, when both parties and their politicians are bought and paid for by many of the same people and groups. Anybody that still buys into the false duality of U.S. politics is naive in my opinion.

And it isn't cynicism when it's the truth.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 ProtoClone wrote:
It's really hard for me to talk about this because it makes me so mad, so scared.

My wife and I have our own business that has a big reliance on the freedom the internet has right at this moment.

Our business is a dance studio, small, but doing well. Without Net Neutrality we would lose the ability to advertise our events to a broader audience. We would lose the ability to scout out potential dancers to come be special instructors, and have gala shows were participants can showcase their own abilities.

The strength of our signal would be reduced and so would the abilities of our community members.

This will take out the legs of small businesses. You will either have the money to survive this or you won't.

Maybe, but I wouldn't be so sure.

Net Neutrality being gone doesn't necessarily give big businesses the incentive to squeeze small business websites. It gives them incentive to squeeze their real competitors. Google would have no benefit to forcing your dance studio to pay extra to load your website a few milliseconds faster, since what you are talking about doesn't really rely on instant fast internet. A little lag in streaming a video isn't going to sink your business. And if its not a live video you wouldn't even really notice the difference.

Only a larger business which relies on fast live streaming of data would be affected in an appreciable way, because as mentioned earlier if the providers really clamp down they'll alienate their customers and be forced to ease off(either by legislated regulation OR simple market pressure). And a business which really relies on having truly fast data will simply pony up the money.

From what it sounds like, your business relies on free-ish advertising. The truth is any growing business will eventually have to start paying for adds, or allowing other ads to be placed on your website. Irregardless of Net Neutrality.

Our business does rely on a more DIY form of advertising but we still rely on being accessible.

We rely on our videos of performances to sell our product, the studio. If people are unable to access our content because someone can't afford the paywall, we lose out.

We hold two major events a year that relies on being able to snag a big name instructor to teach and perform. We put a lot of money into paid advertisements for these. Once again, if someone can't afford the potential paywall, we lose out.


NN being gone does give them this incentive and is the incentive to allow it to pass.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:
I would agree that the 'both sides' argument is absurd, but probably not for the same reasons you do.

My rationale is that there are no "sides" in U.S. politics, when both parties and their politicians are bought and paid for by many of the same people and groups. Anybody that still buys into the false duality of U.S. politics is naive in my opinion.

And it isn't cynicism when it's the truth.

Here, in a thread about the end of net neutrality being driven by Republicans, you are attempting to claim both sides are the same. It is amazing. This is a policy difference.

 sebster wrote:

 oldravenman3025 wrote:
I would agree that the 'both sides' argument is absurd, but probably not for the same reasons you do.

My rationale is that there are no "sides" in U.S. politics, when both parties and their politicians are bought and paid for by many of the same people and groups. Anybody that still buys into the false duality of U.S. politics is naive in my opinion.

And it isn't cynicism when it's the truth.

Here, in a thread about the end of net neutrality being driven by Republicans, you are attempting to claim both sides are the same. It is amazing. This is a policy difference.

Policy differences don't mean crap in U.S. politics. It's all a sideshow when the money wants something to go a certain way. It doesn't matter which party brings it up or backs it.


And for the record, there are Democrats on board with getting rid of Net Neutrality, and Republicans who are pro-Net Neutrality. So, stop painting this as the tired old "Democrats versus Republicans" false duality.

Hyper normalization is the new norm. It doesn't matter if your party killed the Internet because the other party would have as well but just wanted to hide their agenda behind nice guy flappityfroo. Anyway, the Internet was just another tool the moneyed cabal used to influence our thinking, so it's just as well.

In a survey by Mozilla firefox, they encountered that 87% of the democrats and 78% of the republicans they surveyed were in favour of net-neutrality. The survey was only to 1.000 people, so it isn't a really big example, but... I think in general this is a typical case of the politicians going agaisn't even what their voters want.
And thats the only hope to stop this from reaching a point of no return.

This is pushing way too hard into a US Politics territory. Reef it back to talking about the +ves and -ves of net neutrality, not which party is doing what, or how entrenched the sides are, etc. That kind of chat will see this locked up right away and warnings issued.

What I want to see: Posts like the one Galas has right above mine

What I don't want to see: Most of the rest of the page above that.

Let's review shall we,

2005 Madison river communications was blocking VOIP
and Comcast was denying access to p2p services

2008 At&t had skype and other voips blocked

2011 metropcs blocked all streaming except youtube

2012 at&t tried to block access to facetime unless you paid more money

2013 vorizon stated they want to favor some content over others and that pesky net neutrality is in the way

The number of people who want something is the least of concerns for those trying to pass this stuff. It's about who pays them more. 82% of americans want bump stocks banned, the nra doesn't, which way does congress vote? Without the help of the tech companies that rallied the last time this was tried, and net neutrality will be over. the only numbers that matter in politics are the number of dollars they receive in bribes, errrr I mean campaign donations.

Off topic posts after my warning post will be removed, as they don't add anything to the topic. If you have an issue with how the US Politics topic is covered here, either discuss US Politics somewhere else or bring it up in PMs, don't whinge about it in response to a warning post to drop that topic

I'm sorry for bringing a political topic I just wanted to give my little bit of help and spread this a little more, for more people to notice. Even if this goes for the thread locked route, if somebody has taken some kind of action because of this I'm already satisfied..

 motyak wrote:
This is pushing way too hard into a US Politics territory. Reef it back to talking about the +ves and -ves of net neutrality, not which party is doing what, or how entrenched the sides are, etc. That kind of chat will see this locked up right away and warnings issued.

What I want to see: Posts like the one Galas has right above mine

What I don't want to see: Most of the rest of the page above that.

I'm not going to attempt any more conversation here, intelligent or otherwise. Having that been said, I'm going to deeply implore that, well, do whatever you want to this thread. Ban people. Delete posts. Do whatever feels good. Don't remove this though. This isn't about the US. Yeah, it's coming from the US. It's hurting literally everyone else that lives in the modern world. This needs to repeat everywhere it possibly can. It MUST be omnipresent otherwise it's going to lose effectiveness. I beg you to not let that happen. I peg those to post after me to not incite a lock. This isn't a fraction of a percent of the audience needed to make a change, but every fraction matters.

 oldravenman3025 wrote:
Policy differences don't mean crap in U.S. politics. It's all a sideshow when the money wants something to go a certain way. It doesn't matter which party brings it up or backs it.

I'll try to avoid the specifics of US politics in my response to this, and just talk generally about how political parties and policy work. I hope that is okay, if it isn't then I guess the mods will remove it.

Anyhow, when one party has the majority on the FCC and puts in place net neutrality rules, then the other party wins power and people it directly appointments champion an end to net neutrality and use the power of their positions to end net neutrality, then it is pretty clear the change in policy is due directly to one party losing power and the other party winning it.

 daedalus wrote:

I'm not going to attempt any more conversation here, intelligent or otherwise. Having that been said, I'm going to deeply implore that, well, do whatever you want to this thread. Ban people. Delete posts. Do whatever feels good. Don't remove this though. This isn't about the US. Yeah, it's coming from the US. It's hurting literally everyone else that lives in the modern world. This needs to repeat everywhere it possibly can. It MUST be omnipresent otherwise it's going to lose effectiveness. I beg you to not let that happen. I peg those to post after me to not incite a lock. This isn't a fraction of a percent of the audience needed to make a change, but every fraction matters.

I couldn't agree more that this is an important topic and relevant to the modern day, our site, and all of our users. I just wanted to be very clear that we won't tolerate US Politics like what had taken up almost all of the page above my post. It had started better earlier on and the thread can return to that I'm sure Or at least I hope

Having said that I'd had to remove an additional post. Stop it people, or else I will just close the thread

I'm going to ignore the political aspect, as much as I'd like to discuss it, and address only the technical side of political suppression via removing net neutrality. In short, it can't be done.

In longer form, consider the ineffectiveness of porn filters. They come in two basic types:

1) Ineffective and easily bypassed, because they depend on blacklisting specific sites/search terms/etc and there is way too much porn out there to get it all. Block www.porn.com and the site sets up a mirror at www.p0rn.com, or www.sports.com, etc. And that's on top of the ease of bypassing the filter entirely if you have a bit of technical skill.

2) Overly broad and restrictive of non-porn content, because they depend on whitelisting approved content and restrict everything else by default. You catch most of the porn unless someone is deliberately attempting to bypass it, but you also have a lot of people getting frustrated about not being able to search for their favorite sports team because that one time there was an article with the word in it and that makes the team a porn site.

So how do you stop political content, especially populist political content?

Option 1 doesn't work at all. You'll never block every source of political content, no matter how hard you try people will find ways around it. And by definition a populist movement is going to have a vast number of people actively working to spread the message. And, unlike porn, a populist movement is going to have significant offline distribution of information. ISP A might block something, but ISP B won't and the people using ISP B will spread the message by talking to all their ISP A friends offline.

Option 2 works from a technical point of view, but the backlash is going to be massive. If an ISP decides that facebook and twitter are spreading too much political content they don't like and blocks access to those sites their customers are going to riot. Even people who don't agree with the other goals of the populist movement are going to unite against the ISPs if they keep getting a 404 message every time they try to log onto facebook to see their family's vacation photos. In fact, such broad suppression almost guarantees that the ISP in question will be destroyed as a company when all of their customers jump to competition that is not dumb enough to block popular content.

The only explanation for removing net neutrality that has a plausible motive from all parties, a possibility of success from an engineering point of view, and a possibility of avoiding an immediate and massive backlash is the cash cow milking one: the ISPs demand payment from major content providers, the major content providers pass the extra costs on to the customer, and everyone grudgingly accepts that netflix now costs an extra $5/month without getting outraged enough to push through legislative changes.

 Galas wrote:
In a survey by Mozilla firefox, they encountered that 87% of the democrats and 78% of the republicans they surveyed were in favour of net-neutrality. The survey was only to 1.000 people, so it isn't a really big example, but... I think in general this is a typical case of the politicians going agaisn't even what their voters want.

I'd be kind of curious to see this same survey done by the users of other major web browsers. People who use Firefox are already at least somewhat internet-savvy, as they had to actually go and get it. Would we get similar survey results from IE users? Chrome?

 Peregrine wrote:
The only explanation for removing net neutrality that has a plausible motive from all parties, a possibility of success from an engineering point of view, and a possibility of avoiding an immediate and massive backlash is the cash cow milking one: the ISPs demand payment from major content providers, the major content providers pass the extra costs on to the customer, and everyone grudgingly accepts that netflix now costs an extra $5/month without getting outraged enough to push through legislative changes.

Yes, the kind of censorship people are worried about doesn't seem likely - ultimately the big telcos don't really care about political stuff other than pushing for the party more likely to ease regulation in their favor. They're not going to block anything they don't already.

The real interest the telcos has is being able to feth over content providers via awful peering and interconnection agreements. Everyone gets to pay the backbone tax, regardless of who their ISP is, since Hulu and Netflix and so on now have to pay a little extra to not get throttled on their way to the end user. Sure, it's going to screw over end users, and of course, it's going to cut down on innovation since the big players now will be able to erect big barriers to entry, and sure, the public already paid for helping to build that infrastructure via low tax breaks, offsets and so on, but the important thing is AT&T getting paid.

I think the concerns are a wee bit overwrought here...

While I have no problem with net neutrality as a principle or concept... I just have serious concerns about Net Neutrality being justified to reclassifying ISPs as common carriers under the previous FCC ruling. Keep in mind, this doesn't mean it's the wild, wild west... this new ruling would effectively revert much of the oversight back to the FTC.

The biggest concerns to me ought to be focused on two things...

A) The vertical integrations in the industry... ie, the Comcast/NBC merger... and the proposed ATT/DirectTV/TimeWarner merger. When you have content providers who are ALSO ISPs... the incestuous nature of these companies should give us pause.

B) How powerful Google / Twitter / Facebook can be. (see this bloomberg piece that we may already be losing neutrality).

That linked article... Whembly. Is just... bad. Just by is introduction it shows is pretty biased, and it doesn't speak about the context and past of Ajit Pai as a lawyer of Vercom.
Yeah, Google and Facebook are titans. But without net neutrality they'll have even more capabilities to team-up with the Telecom providers to shut down any intent of fair competitiom agaisn't them.

I see that as a big red herring, to be honest. "Yeah, Telecom can screw us over but... see how Facebook and Google already do it!"

Good old what aboutism.

 LordofHats wrote:
Good old what aboutism.

Man... I feel like Net Neutrality is the Rick and Morty Szechuan sauce of political issues....