Thanks, REPUBLICANS, for destroying the internet

Spaghetti Neutrality wrote:

Guise! I just realized that there's no law stopping grocery stores from not stocking my favorite spaghetti sauce. Or raising the price by $5 a jar. OMG OMG OMG! We only have 2 grocery stores in my town. This is cray-zee that bureaucrats in Washington can't prevent this. Where's our consumer rights?! This is bad. Very, very bad for consumers. All spaghetti sauces should be treated equally.

Thank you for the satire. The thread should end here. But you're point will be misunderstood and your intelligence will be insulted in 3-2-1.

So this travesty affects just Americans, right? If we in the rest of the world remain unaffected, I couldn't be bothered. We didn't vote for their current regime.

celery wrote:

Spaghetti Neutrality wrote:

Guise! I just realized that there's no law stopping grocery stores from not stocking my favorite spaghetti sauce. Or raising the price by $5 a jar. OMG OMG OMG! We only have 2 grocery stores in my town. This is cray-zee that bureaucrats in Washington can't prevent this. Where's our consumer rights?! This is bad. Very, very bad for consumers. All spaghetti sauces should be treated equally.

Thank you for the satire. The thread should end here. But you're point will be misunderstood and your intelligence will be insulted in 3-2-1.

A pisspoor analogy should never be called satire. The internet is a vital service to people. The electric company doesn't slow down your electricity if you use it for an appliance or in a way they don't like.

El Keniano wrote:

So this travesty affects just Americans, right? If we in the rest of the world remain unaffected, I couldn't be bothered. We didn't vote for their current regime.

You don't have Net Neutrality in Kenya to begin with, so the "travesty" is already affecting you (which is to say, it's not a real travesty).

Spaghetti Neutrality wrote:Guise! I just realized that there's no law stopping grocery stores

A tomato is like a cat?

UrIdiots wrote:

Congrats you have just helped turn ISPs into the MaBells of the past and contributed to the GOP march towards zero consumer rights and a modern day feudal system.

Well, ISPs are the telcos in most places in America, so...

Excluding the very difficult problem of access outside urban areas in America, the U.S. approach to providing Internet access is more expensive and slower than other industrialized nations. This isn't a technical problem. It's an industrial policy and economic policy issue.

We will see what this means in the near future. Maybe it really won't mean much. Maybe it is the start of monopoly controlled censorship followed by buying frenzy of ISPs to control the content that people can view.

All regulation is not bad and all regulation is not good. Too many people see this as black an white and assign no nuance to it.

The best comparison to this is utility companies because ISPs are typically a government allowed monopoly with at most 2-3 "choices" and usually only 1. Utility companies are heavily regulated so we all get power, water, gas, trash service, etc. at prices that are somewhat affordable. Can your utility company limit your power use whenever it wants based on HOW you use it? Would that be a good thing?

An ISP is also a bit like a paper company. Paper is used to print content that has NOTHING to do with the paper company. The ISP provides a connection to content which has NOTHING to do with the ISP in most cases. Imagine if the paper company could tell you what you were allowed to print on your paper after you buy it. Imagine if you were not allowed to go to a competitor of the paper company because they had a government allowed monopoly in your area? Starting to understand Net Neutrality issues yet?

This is being sold as "whatever is good for business is good for Americans because unregulated capitalism makes better products". When the EpiPen company was allowed to charge whatever they wanted because they had a monopoly, how did that work out for consumers? When the investment firms were allowed to get into the banking business and begin trading home loans, how did that work out for consumers?

The repeal of Net Neutrality should have been accompanied by a repeal of cable company monopolies. That would be real unregulated capitalism. That would probably help the consumer. Instead, what we got is a monopoly that can now charge whatever it wants for content that it controls access to, but does not actually make.

Anyone who believes that corporations will in any way look out for "the little guy" or act in the public interest and not do anything within their power to fleece anyone who isn't a shareholder out of as much money as possible to benefit said shareholders is an idiot. As shareholder owned corporations this is their mandate.

In competitive markets (no entry barriers, perfect competition, no externalities) the fact that there are other companies competing prevents this (to an extent). In the ISP sector this is evidently not the case, as is evidenced by the numerous people on here stating that they have at best two choices of ISP and the fact that the US has pretty much the worst internet service provision and infrastructure of all developed countries - and even worse than a number of emerging market countries.. Compare US internet infracstructure with the Baltics and be embarassed. How can this be explained? There's no need for ISPs in the US to innovate because they have quasi-monopolies or parners in oligopolies due to a severe lack of competition.

Econ 101, I'm out.

Fixed for ya...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-12-16/big-con-truth-behind-net-neutrality-and-why-sky-not-falling

Any quote from the Russian influenced zerohedge has no credibility.

WeWillSeeSoon wrote:

The repeal of Net Neutrality should have been accompanied by a repeal of cable company monopolies. That would be real unregulated capitalism. That would probably help the consumer. Instead, what we got is a monopoly that can now charge whatever it wants for content that it controls access to, but does not actually make.

I agree with you. The net neutrality debate is not as simple as regulation=bad, no regulation=good, since there are already some regulations inhibiting free competition in the public utility realm. The debate on NN is about whether even more regulation is better or worse.

There are so many on this message board who have a reflexive anti-corporation attitude that shows complete ignorance of how markets and economic competition actually works. There are also the people who think since Trump is the president, everything his appointees do must be horrible. For those people, they need a basic education in economic principles. Even though NN isn't a straight forward issue, the lack of basic economic understanding requires that the arguments against regulation be stated more simple and strongly than would otherwise be the case. These millennials need exposed to the basic concepts their education and main stream media lobotomies have prevented them from hearing. The main idea people need to realize is that companies don't preserve monopolies on their own. Monopolies are sustained long term, only by government regulations that protection them.

Here's why I don't think a repeal of NN is a problem;

In 2017, ISPs aren't really a monopoly on the internet, much less all information. Even in areas where their is only one ISP, there are still wireless options for internet access. Any ISP monopoly position is already undermined. Furthermore, the internet is not the only source information. There are still all the old mediums for information (TV, radio, books, etc). So getting so hysterical over NN repeal is a bit of an over reaction. Also, there are a few examples of ISP throttling certain content, but when this happened consumers where outraged and so the ISPs stopped doing this. The market force of consumer demand is already in place to strongly influence ISPs to not throttle content. For this reason, NN regulation is just not necessary, and only works to create more barriers to start up ISP providers.

Celery,

You say that people (millenials) need to broaden their understanding to multi faceted realities (I know I said this much more eloquently than you, but this seems to be your point despite poor grammar). Then you present two very one sided and simplistic arguments.

You say that monopolies ONLY exist due to government regulation protection. If an ISP is allowed to control content, what is to stop a company from buying up most or all access to internet content in a given area? Would the government be enabling this type of monopoly? The answer is yes, but by de-regulating in this case. Government regulations typically intend to limit monopolies. Not in the case of utilities because infrastructure is far too expensive to replicate, but in that case regulations cap pricing. With ISPs, NOT regulating means opening the door to monopolies and censorship.

Then you say that ISPs are not really a monopoly (yet), but make no mention of the percentages of information acquired via ISPs vs other sources nor how available those sources are (others in this thread have). Net Neutrality repeal is therefore just fine.

An ISP providing Net Neutrality involves them doing absolutely nothing to data passing through their servers. To throttle data from specific sources, they have to actually do a lot of work. You say this is somehow less expensive for them than doing nothing. Please expand on this for us, especially how it works against a smaller startup ISP. Thanks.

Game, set, match!

Q: where are all the 'free market' scum (read: liars) to explain why so many people only have ONE choice for an ISP?

carlyle whaling wrote:

Q: where are all the 'free market' scum (read: liars) to explain why so many people only have ONE choice for an ISP?

Because local governments regulate away competition

Not really the answer you were looking for, huh?

Congratulation on your good grammar and multi faceted realities. Unfortunately, you do not understand the fundamental principles (not multi faceted realities) about market competition and consumer demand that I was attempting to elucidate. I'm sorry I can't explain it more clearly for you. If you would like to read an author who can clearly explain the "multifaceted realities" of economics, please read Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell.

WeWillSeeSoon wrote:

We will see what this means in the near future. Maybe it really won't mean much. Maybe it is the start of monopoly controlled censorship followed by buying frenzy of ISPs to control the content that people can view.

Independent ISPs that are left are either in areas the majors won't possibly enter because they can't make a profit, or leasing access from a telco (aka monopoly)

The few places in the country where the citizens are interested in public Internet infrastructure are involved in a very difficult battle with the telco monopolies.

I'm not sure how net neutrality matters if large swaths of municipal governments already prevent competition by limiting the ability of competitors to lay pipes etc.

People act like monopolies exist because overhead is too high. There isn't much evidence of this provided the regulatory barrier-to-entry isn't large.

Let's not forget wireless internet, etc.