Comments

Why

Why

All heil Jesus Frankenstein

You do understand I'm pulling from the actual state of affairs over here, right?

No, actually.

https://arstechnica.com/information...-one-25mbps-internet-provider-or-none-at-all/

https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/7gssiw/here_is_a_map_showing_areas_of_the_us_served_by_a/

In America there is a very large amount of places who only have one isp option; they essentially have a monopoly. The thing with a monopoly is that you can do basically anything you want with your prices without worrying about competitors; you only have to worry about keeping a demand.

You’ve made the argument that if ISPs actually lower speeds, people will just leave. The issue is, where are they leaving to? In this day and age, the internet is essentially a utility; you cannot function properly as a member of society without it, whether you need it for work, shopping, communication, paying bills, etc. You have to have internet. Which means that in areas (such as my own) where there is only one feasible ISP available, you just have to suck up whatever they give you.

ISPs in modern America fundamentally work to undermine capitalism and gain monopolies over areas so that the consumer can’t do jack about it. Your argument that consumers will leave and lose money for the ISP assumes that the consumer has a choice, that capitalism applies. If there were 20 ISP options available in every house in America, I’d agree with you, screw net neutrality, let capitalism do its job. But there’s not.

If you’ve studied American history at all, think of it like the oil tycoons like Rockefeller who made fortunes off of monopolies before the trust busting at the turn of the 20th century. In that case, the solution was to break up monopolies. In the case of the internet, this isn’t currently feasible in a reasonable time period, and so we have to resort to regulation of the monopolies, I.e. net neutrality.

Think about how this would look if it were electricity. Electricity is legally a utility in the U.S., and so is currently heavily regulated, even though it’s ran by private corporations. But if we did to electricity what we’re now doing to the internet, it would be like your power company saying “sorry, from now on we’re only going to give electricity to televisions with our special microchip, which is conveniently only on Samsung televisions.” People would be furious. But you know what would happen? You’d go out and buy a Samsung television. Your electricity company would lose an insignificant number of customers, if any, and would also make money from Samsung paying them to enact this policy.

And yes, ISPs absolutely would. They’ve already tried.

https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/net-neutrality-violations-history/

And that was when it was illegal.

Gene stop posting this in the discord, your joke wasn’t funny.

I thought it was pretty funny.

Relight my fire

Ok I would like to begin by expressing my surprise at the fact that I thought I'd never see a comment like this on the forums, especially not written by a staff. This really shows how this impacts many communities. I came back because I was really bred but wow massive has changed, a bit.

I'm no net nutrality expert but I found this comment humorous. I also find this point interesting and the example of phone carriers really represents the idea clearly.

They kinda did... But I like this concept. If you have to pay to use a website, an it's one of the only websites that does it, you wouldn't use that website necessarily.

The examples shown here are interesting. The figurative idea of electricity monitoring shows an extreme example but creates the foundation of a solid point. You're counter argument that many people have only one ISP choice is well supported and convincing. Though, I haven't read through your sources yet, I feel the general citation style works well for your point.

Based on the evidence presented, I feel that the removal of net nutrality is likely to be detrimental to the lives of many people and may reach outside the U.S. due to the international nature of many companies as someone previously mentioned. A large resource for most of the world could have an extra fee added. It came to me with concern when net nutrality was repealed and the debate here had convinced me that net nutrality is good. People may have multiple choices but "If they all do the same thing, they can basically do whatever they want." The idea that if companies can screw people over for extra money they will showed me concern. People with only one ISP option will be screwed, with no other options.
Maybe people will learn to not use the internet but hopefully they will not pass through congress.

That's my response. Sorry for the redundancy and aweful format I'm on my phone at a "pep rally" that err body is brig forced to go to and it's pretty earrapie in here.

Yessss, cry your salty tears into my giant mug so that I might present them to my father in exchange for the love he never gave me

aj pie is my dad

It actually creates competition in the market. See Free Market Economics 101.

Sometimes I wish I could care

Lmao no it doesn’t. It just enables monopolies and user exploitation, nice meme though.

Competition between the two ISPs in the area who probably have a deal with one another to keep prices artificially high, ye.

To those of you saying most places only have one isp, that is totally false.

Local isp's are popping up everywhere including my old hometown which is a super small town. Most major cell phone companies are also isp's now. There is way more than just one isp to an area and to totally shut out how markets function on this is just silly.

Let the market it do its thing. The United States government dabbling in the market creates more monopolies than these "evil" corporations.

Sleazy deals happen much more often between the government and ISPs. Why do you think 3 companies dominate the entire US for internet service?

In the years leading up to net neutrality, the FCC were only able to find 6 incidents of anti-competitive or abusive behaviour by ISPs, all of which were "relatively minor." There are already regulations in place to stop this nightmare scenario like the Sherman Act. This behaviour didn't happen on a large scale before net neutrality, and it won't happen now. It's literally all fearmongering by big companies because they want to avoid paying higher prices for bandwidth.

I know I'm late to this but... On average I get between 0.5 MbPs - 15MbPs, and never once got over 25MbPs (Netflix kills the internet!) So I'm not sure if you can get much slower than that!