Possible end to "net neutrality"

[Stavro]

4 minutes ago, Gregexplore said:

it seems that Telco competition Down Under is stronger than in US

 

That's because the Australian government paid for and built a high-speed broadband network, and since the government built it the utilities have to equally share access to it.

 

In the US they tried something similar, but instead of government building the network directly, they just gave a couple hundred billion to the companies themselves, with no strings attached. In the majority of cases, the networks were never built at all (the money went to unrelated projects), the few that were built are exclusive to the company that built them (FIOS, which is no longer being expanded nor maintained), and in the end the taxpayer has to foot the $400 Billion bill with absolutely nothing to show for it.

[Miss Bea]

We’d best prepare. If Satan can, he will zap the things we have come to depend on and enjoy so much. Whatever happens will be a temporary blip, but, we are spoiled. We still get our study material for the mid week meeting. (Some don’t, if you can believe that.) 

Our JW Site is as set as we keep it updated, so that will be there. As long as we can keep our devises charged. (I bought a solar charger) 

We don’t know about the ins and outs of the future, but, we do have the big picture. And we have the means to be prepared. As long as we do all we can to stay close to Jehovah  and his organization, we will be okay.

Thinking about the insanity of what this world could possibly do just gives me a headache! 

[nanceebgd46]

11 minutes ago, Miss Bea said:

We’d best prepare. If Satan can, he will zap the things we have come to depend on and enjoy so much. Whatever happens will be a temporary blip, but, we are spoiled. We still get our study material for the mid week meeting. (Some don’t, if you can believe that.) 

Our JW Site is as set as we keep it updated, so that will be there. As long as we can keep our devises charged. (I bought a solar charger) 

We don’t know about the ins and outs of the future, but, we do have the big picture. And we have the means to be prepared. As long as we do all we can to stay close to Jehovah  and his organization, we will be okay.

Thinking about the insanity of what this world could possibly do just gives me a headache! 

Yes it's true...a major migraine headache.   

[hatcheckgirl]

Oh yes, definitely! Corporations' greed will be unsatiated and power will go to their heads. Control of the masses by restriction of communication is a common theme in mankind's history, and could easily happen here too. What are the checks and balances?

 

I can’t believe they have done it, actually, in the 'land of the free'. But we are seeing strange things under the reign of this president.

[Miss Bea]

17 minutes ago, hatcheckgirl said:

Oh yes, definitely! Corporations' greed will be unsatiated and power will go to their heads. Control of the masses by restriction of communication is a common theme in mankind's history, and could easily happen here too. What are the checks and balances?

 

I can’t believe they have done it, actually, in the 'land of the free'. But we are seeing strange things under the reign of this president.

You remember in our study, I think, the Daniel book. Each country has its own demon. We,, the gloves are off, and they are running amuck. Now more, nice guy, democratic, and all that. We could wake up to martial law.

i just try to think of it as a spy novel. So, I,don’t have to reason on it. 

[Allabord4Jah]

One day no more JW.Org, JW.Broadcasting, no more JWTalk, and other sites like this one run by Jehovah's people.  I guess the end is "just around the corner" just wish that the chariot would move faster then its moving now.   My ISP is Verizon, and its supposedly High Speed Internet. but its really not.  The download speed is about 5.35 right now, sometimes it drops down to 3 or 4.  Then my up load speed is around .73.  I have DSL, and I know they're dying to get rid of it.  But if they go, am not going with Comcast.  I guess I'll enjoy what I can, and then back to my old fashion way of doing things, just to keep up with that chariot that's moving right along no matter what these demonic companies do and the one behind them all.  

I just thought of something, can we use RUKU?  Does it have to be connected to Internet?  

[New World Explorer]

4 hours ago, cricket246 said:

I could see Satan using this to maneuver certain things. First they start restricting news sites, only allowing those the government favors. Then perhaps if you use things like streaming video (Netflix, youtube, tv.jw.org streaming videos, etc.) they can charge more or slow your internet to the point you can't watch anything. Then, in the future, they can start blocking sites like JW.org. This world is spiraling downwards at a more rapid degree, especially in the past week...

Sounds like conspiracy theory LOL

[Allabord4Jah]

Hey Friends, I read something about VPN.  What exactly is this?  Is it a way to go around ISP addresses through the greedy companies?  Like TunnelBear, NordVPN and etc.

 

How does this work? 

[Tortuga]

I'd like to revisit this thread in a year to see how things turn out...

[Shawnster]

Me too.

 

They were talking about this on NPR today.  One of the comments compared this to the deregulation of Standard Oil in the early part of last century.  The commentator said (not an exact quote) "could you imagine Standard Oil promising not to raise prices (or whatever)?   Look at what history shows.  Then why would anyone believe the promises the big telecoms or ISPs are making when they say 'oh, we won't raise prices.  We won't do what you're saying."

 

It might take longer than a year to get this rolling but change is coming unless it gets halted by Congress.

 

Just think about it.  If your ISP is owned by the same people that own CNN, then they would rather you go get your news from CNN's website than they would you going to Al Jazeera or RT News.  If your ISP is also a provider of television content, then they would rather you watch their content than say Netflix or something from another television provider.  If your ISP makes a deal with Spotify or Pandora, then they want you to use those services instead of iHeartRadio.

 

12 hours ago, Dove said:

It would still be less than what I'm paying now...

 

 

Dang!  How much do you pay?  I pay $60 a month for unlimited high speed Internet access.  I can go to any and all websites I want for $60.  Of course, Netflix and Hulu are 2 additional fees (but I don't pay for Hulu.  Manchild does.  We share his account and he shares our Netflix account).  

[hatcheckgirl]

Interesting comments made by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world-wide-web:

 

Berners-Lee, who is in Washington urging lawmakers to reconsider the rollback, disagrees and cites problematic examples in which ISPs have violated net neutrality principles. For example, AT&T blocked Skype and other similar services on the iPhone so it would make more money from regular phone calls. Verizon blocked Google Wallet from smartphones when it was developing a competing mobile payment service.

 

“When I invented the web, I didn’t have to ask Vint Cerf [the ‘father of the internet’] for permission to use the internet,” said Berners-Lee, who previously stated that the internet should remain a “permissionless space for creativity, innovation and free expression”.

 

These powerful gatekeepers, Berners-Lee said, control access to the internet and pose a threat to innovation if they are allowed to pick winners and losers by throttling or blocking services. It makes sense, therefore, that ISPs should be treated more like utilities.

 

“Gas is a utility, so is clean water, and connectivity should be too,” said Berners-Lee. “It’s part of life and shouldn’t have an attitude about what you use it for – just like water.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/15/tim-berners-lee-world-wide-web-net-neutrality

 

(and for those who, like me, get muddled between the "internet" and the "world-wide-web" think of it this way:

• Internet - From the definition in the Wikipedia: "The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that interchange data by packet switching using the standardized Internet Protocol Suite (TCP/IP)."
• WWW - This is an information space. The first three specifications for Web technologies defined URLs, HTTP, and HTML.  So in essence this is the web pages themselves displayed using the architecture of the internet.https://www.w3.org/Help/#webinternet )

[Stavro]

3 hours ago, Allabord4Jah said:

Hey Friends, I read something about VPN.  What exactly is this?  Is it a way to go around ISP addresses through the greedy companies?  Like TunnelBear, NordVPN and etc.

 

How does this work? 

 

A VPN is simply a connection to another computer, which handles ALL of your internet traffic in a way that's scrambled when viewed by your isp. They can see that you have data going over the lines, but it's impossible for them to know what it is.

 

The upside of this is that in a tiered internet service, you will never "access" Netflix, Youtube, Facebook, CNN, or other sites that require an extra fee, so you can theoretically get by on the basic plan.

 

The downside of this is that VPN traffic (in its current iteration) is trivially easy to detect and block, completely negating its usefulness. There are ways around this, but none of these methods are anywhere near ready to go mainstream.

Edited December 16, 2017 by Stavro

[vern]

some think that things won't get "greedy".... that it just makes it like it was pre 2014.... but why bother changing it unless there is some reason. lol
sorry but this guy that pushed the change looks dodgy to me.  depends on the writer.... some think it won't go anywhere.

[Stavro]

35 minutes ago, vern said:

some think that things won't get "greedy".... that it just makes it like it was pre 2014....

 

That 2014 date is commonly thrown around by a few media outlets and politicians that support the repeal, but enforcement actually began in 2005 with National Cable & Telecommunications Association v. Brand X Internet Services.

 

The 2014 decision of Verizon Communications Inc. v. Federal Communications Commission created a temporary loophole where ISPs were no longer subject to the 2005 ruling. In 2015, the FCC closed that loophole and reenacted the 2005-2014 enforcement.

 

The decision that took place yesterday was simply a reversal of Verizon v. FCC. (The FCC chairman is a former Verizon lawyer, clearly no conflict of interest there...) As of today ISPs are no longer "telecommunications" companies, thus the consumer protections no longer apply.

[hatcheckgirl]

4 minutes ago, Stavro said:

As of today ISPs are no longer "telecommunications" companies

 

Wow!  What are they then??? 

[Vinnie]

VPN stands for virtual private network.  Example: When your at the company office, you have access to your internal computer  network(intranet)  with an internal IP  address  ( not to be confused with the internet and getting an external IP address)  How do people gain access to their company's internal computer network when they are on the road or visiting another country or  from home or from anywhere around the world?  They use what is called a VPN connection that creates a safe and secure connection through the internet to their company's intranet and your computer is given an internal IP address

 

So, without getting into details, It looks like your computer is connected to your office network but physically it can be somewhere else, like at home, or another building, or  on the gulf course or at the beach  in another country.

 

So some savvy, programmers made a program that utilizes  VPN to be somewhere where they are not with preselected computer servers  to connect to.  Most of us already have the software on our computers to do this already on a computer to computer basis but it takes proper setup to actually make it work.   but that's another story.

[trottigy]

10 hours ago, hatcheckgirl said:

 

Wow!  What are they then??? 

 

Private businesses that can do whatever is in their best financial interests. They no longer have regulators watching them. 

[Ben Fenner]

Well it is Saturday and the internet is still running as it should, just like it did for two decades prior to net neutrality. I see nothing wrong with letting a business, in this case an ISP, decide what content they provide and what they will charge for that content. It is called the "free market". If someone doesn't want to pay what the market will bear they are more than free to not pay. That is their choice and they should not feel that gives them the right to whine about not receiving a product they freely chose not to purchase. As for the argument that ISP will either not provide ALL content or "throttle" content that is not their own that is a fallacy argument. I as a business owner should not be forced to provide the competitors product, nor should I be forced to provide the competitors product for a price power than what yields a profit to my business.

 

On a strictly secular view governments have never been able to successfully operate any business.

[Ben Fenner]

21 hours ago, Stavro said:

Imagine that your town has two grocery stores, one with poor quality food and high prices, and another with good food and reasonable prices. Now let's say that the owner of the poor-quality store buys the roads from your government, and imposes a toll on everyone depending on their destination. If you go to the poor-quality store, you have no tolls. But if you go to the competitor's store, you have to pay a hefty toll.

Now let's say that the government imposes grocery store neutrality and the store with the good food and fair prices must sell you poor food for higher prices to prevent the first grocery store from going out of business? No real difference.

[Thesauron]

 
Private businesses that can do whatever is in their best financial interests. They no longer have regulators watching them. 

It’ll be interesting to see what happens to sites and services large ISPs have no interest in allowing access to.

[Stavro]

38 minutes ago, Ben Fenner said:

Now let's say that the government imposes grocery store neutrality and the store with the good food and fair prices must sell you poor food for higher prices to prevent the first grocery store from going out of business? No real difference.

 

How does that in any possible way relate to what's going on here?

 

The "stores" in the example are websites, the ISP is the company that owns the road. For many decades, the road has been 100% capable of bringing anyone to any destination, and nothing at all has changed in that regard.

[Stavro]

1 hour ago, Ben Fenner said:

As for the argument that ISP will either not provide ALL content or "throttle" content that is not their own that is a fallacy argument.

 

https://www.cnet.com/news/telco-agrees-to-stop-blocking-voip-calls/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/10/eff-tests-agree-ap-comcast-forging-packets-to-interfere

http://fortune.com/2009/04/03/group-asks-fcc-to-probe-iphone-skype-restrictions/

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Windstream-Hijacking-Firefox-Google-Toolbar-Results-107744

https://www.wired.com/2011/01/metropcs-net-neutrality-challenge/

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/08/update-paxfire-and-search-redirection

http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/06/technology/verizon_blocks_google_wallet/index.htm

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/fcc-fines-verizon-125m-for-blocking-tethering-apps/2012/07/31/gJQAXjRLNX_blog.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/atandt-faces-complaint-over-iphone-facetime-blocking/2012/09/18/799c8650-0183-11e2-b257-e1c2b3548a4a_blog.html?tid=a_inl

 

Well, I've seen the light. Any claim that ISPs will block traffic is a "fallacy", and the dozens of times that they have actually done so are just a mass hallucination that we all experienced for some unknown reason.

 

Thanks for clearing that up...

[Stavro]

Here's an ISP from Portugal, which does not enforce net Neutrality. This page isn't a mock-up or edited screenshot, it's the actual sign-up page listing various websites that may be accessed under each add-on plan.

https://www.meo.pt/internet/internet-movel/telemovel/pacotes-com-telemovel

 

Look familiar?

[Thesauron]

Well it is Saturday and the internet is still running as it should, just like it did for two decades prior to net neutrality. I see nothing wrong with letting a business, in this case an ISP, decide what content they provide and what they will charge for that content. It is called the "free market". If someone doesn't want to pay what the market will bear they are more than free to not pay. That is their choice and they should not feel that gives them the right to whine about not receiving a product they freely chose not to purchase. As for the argument that ISP will either not provide ALL content or "throttle" content that is not their own that is a fallacy argument. I as a business owner should not be forced to provide the competitors product, nor should I be forced to provide the competitors product for a price power than what yields a profit to my business.
 
On a strictly secular view governments have never been able to successfully operate any business.

This is getting very political, isn’t it?

[Shawnster]

 

 

 

2 hours ago, Ben Fenner said:

Now let's say that the government imposes grocery store neutrality and the store with the good food and fair prices must sell you poor food for higher prices to prevent the first grocery store from going out of business? No real difference.

No. You are confusing the two. 

 

The internet = the road 

 

Specific websites = the grocery store. 

 

Net neutrality laws keep the road open to all traffic.  Lack net neutrality laws allow traffic to be tolled / fined/regulated at whim.