FCC plan would give Internet providers power to decide how you use your internet

[*TheLeonardLeap*]

(12-01-2017, 08:04 PM)JustWinBaby Wrote: Fair enough...But Netflix and Youtube alone are over half of internet traffic.  Add in other big names like HBO, Hulu, etc... and you are probably north of 70%.  So most of the other stuff simply isn't worth trying to gouge, while collectively still big enough as a group to matter - cable is struggling to much to squeeze and kill the little guys. And price gouging really isn't NN, anyway - that potential exists in every industry, and generally only happens when there's a lack of competition or collusion.

People have been talking about this for 15 years since a professor imagined the concern and coined the term.  It really hasn't been a problem.  Maybe more regulation will be necessary in the future, but why pile on a bunch of regulations that might be completely unnecessary?  It's almost as if the internet was broken before the brief NN period, and now the repeal has broken the internet again.

I view it kind of like pop-up ads. We had the internet before pop-up ads existed. There was nothing keeping them from happening, they just hadn't been thought up and implemented yet. Then one person did it, and huh, would you imagine that... it worked! So then EVERYONE did it and it got progressively worse and worse until we had a pop-up apocalypse.

If you had the chance to go back in time and implement a "no pop-up ads" law before pop-up ads became that huge problem they grew into for awhile there, wouldn't you?

It really will only take one or two cases of someone attempting to throttle speeds to funnel towards their product/their promoted content, and if it turns out to be a huge success, everyone else will begin to adopt it. There was that one case with Netflix, but there was never a chance for a follow-up in the market because Net Neutrality was implemented. If it hadn't been, we might have been in "pop-up" hell by now. I personally wouldn't care to find out.

The internet has become such a huge focal point of people's daily lives, shopping, keeping in touch with friends and family (I almost never text or call my friends on the phone anymore, I use programs like Discord/Skype  for their free text/voice/video chatting. I mainly only go to physical stores for food and clothing anymore. Many people use it for their livelyhood now, and it's pretty integral to free speech these days too.

I just think it's become too entwined and integral into our lives to allow Net Neutrality to be ended.