“For example if you’re a Time-Warner customer and Time-Warner has beef with YouTube they might just slow the website down to the point that videos are impossible to watch. Or maybe, they just want to make some extra cash, so they charge you $20 more a month if you want to watch Netflix.”

Can you provide an example where companies where doing things like this – which would so obviously be against their best interest as content providers and make them *less* likely to get subscribers in the competitive world of ISPs?

I’m just curious what real-world examples you have that would justify giving the government the power to… well, as you pointed out, allow Donald Trump to take action against sites he doesn’t like? Or, as is much more likely to happen, prevent ISPs from providing *~most~* websites to customers at a much faster speed by offloading traffic from heavy bandwidth services (Netflix, Youtube, Hulu, Twitch, etc) onto a dedicated ‘lane’ that would only handle their traffic (and increase the speeds of their own sites, as opposed to having their traffic remain mixed in with and slowing down everybody else’s) for optional fees to the website (which would then likely be passed on to ONLY the subscribers of that service, such as Netflix, instead of every customer of that ISP, such as how all cable TV customers must pay ESPN’s exorbitant rates, regardless of if they use that channel or not)?

I mean, the internet grew up and became the wonderful thing it is now *~without~* government getting in the way and screwing everything up. What evidence do you have that government intervention is required, aside from hypotheticals that, again, operate against the ISP’s best interests?

“I mean, the internet grew up and became the wonderful thing it is now *~without~* government getting in the way and screwing everything up.”

The government it’s screwing everything up. They are protecting the status quo. Net Neutrality means to treat all data equally, as it has since the beginning of the internet. It’s the ISPs that want to change this.

Your understanding of this is seriously screwed up.

Comcast and Netflix were in the news for years because Comcast was trying to squeeze money from Netflix. Comcast did slow down access to Netflix for its customers for years until Netflix agreed to pay. Now ATT slows down Youtube and others to get similar money. These “ISP” providers do not have competition in most cases and they run video streaming services of their own that compete with sites like Youtube and Netflix, etc. These large cable providers and telecoms that became ISPs often have government help in keeping their monopolies which is why action is needed to stop them from abusing their monopoly powers like we clearly see them do.

The ISPs want to change things so they can provide a better product. Faster service for their customers using the same equipment.

The problem is that all data *isn’t* equal. Should VOIP traffic be given priority in the routers, through QoS? Or should it be forced to wait in line for the router to finish processing the Netflix data?

You don’t understand this well enough. Go learn what they’re actually trying to do here – protecting customers is nowhere in their plans.

The Comcast/Netflix situation is the perfect example of what I’m talking about. It’s not an example of a company charging you more to use a service they don’t like – quite the opposite – or an example of them shutting off access to sites to punish you.

Yes, Comcast used QoS and put Netflix at the back of the line – because their network in that area was being congested by all the video traffic. *~Everybody~* was running slow. YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, http, ftp, voip, gaming, it all sucked. Comcast didn’t have the money to do the upgrades it would take to fix that problem – we’re talking a lot of super expensive routers and fiber connections. They were losing customers like crazy – nobody wants to pay $80+ a month for internet they can’t actually do anything with. But even as they lost customers, the load kept growing, because more high-bandwidth video sites kept popping up that people wanted to use.

So they looked at their network and found the biggest data hog – video traffic. And they found the biggest part of that – Netflix. And they put Netflix at the back of the line.

After that, everything went faster again. They stopped getting calls 24-7 about how much their service sucked. Netflix was slow still, but that was going to happen regardless, and this way everybody else was okay again.

Then, not long after, Netflix came to Comcast and asked what was going on. Or maybe Comcast sent them a note asking for suggestions. The tech guys got together and looked at the problem. They came up with a solution – Netflix gave Comcast some money, and Comcast used that money to buy a few new routers and backend connections that are *~just~* for Netflix. Nobody else is using it. Now Netflix is running full speed, everybody else is running full speed, and the only people paying for it are the Netflix customers that went from $7 to $8 a month (instead of all the ISP customers going from $140 to $160 a month to afford the other equipment).

What Net Neutrality – and by extension, you – is trying to do is to take that option off the table for Comcast. The internet it will create is one where it’s slow for everything instead of the one huge data hog having its own lane. All in the name of stopping ISPs from being unfair to their customers… when in reality, they just want to keep their customers happy.

Comcast did not slow Netflix traffic down to extort money from Netflix. They slowed Netflix down because it was making everything slow on their network. And they worked out a deal with Netflix that let them improve a *small* part of their network to fix the problem, instead of overhauling everything and passing a massive price hike on to their customers – something they did not want to do.

I don’t… the AT&T zero-rate… what? Use critical thinking! If you have X data rate total, you can watch X amount of media. Say it’s ten. Doesn’t matter the unit. You have 10 data rate. You can watch 10 media. That’s it. You have to choose between AT&T media and Netflix and Hulu. It all comes out of that 10. Three for AT&T, three for Netflix, three for Hulu, one for something else.

Oh wait – the AT&T media doesn’t count towards your ten! Sweet! Now you can use *~FIVE~* for Netflix! And *~FIVE~* for Hulu! And as much AT&T as you want!

AT&T innovated. They found a way to provide more for their customers. And… you’re saying the other sites got screwed? People can visit their site more now, on the same plan, than they would have been able to without that zero-cost media. Or they could just not visit AT&T at all and have exactly as much of the other companies as they had before. The other companies aren’t ‘punished’ or disadvantaged – their customers have *more* access as a result, not less.

Ugh the traffic analogy. x_x That does not work well with networks.

Imagine all the cars are the same exact size, and all go at the same exact speed. There is no fast lane, just, like you said, a dedicated lane. If your stuff is too big, it has to go into another car, and you don’t get your stuff until all your cars get to the end of the road. That’s a better example. You have four lanes of traffic. A bunch of people are all going over it, but Walmart has a thousand cars spread through all four lanes. All four lanes have to wait on the Walmart cars. And the Walmart cars have to wait on everybody else. It sucks. Traffic jams everywhere. One guy gets out of his car and cries on the side of the road at the inhumanity. You’re waiting forever to get all of your stuff, because maybe one car gets to the end of the road quick, but the rest is held up somewhere in the flood of Walmart trucks.

Switch it up – three lanes of traffic for everybody, and one lane just for the Walmart trucks. The three lanes of traffic doesn’t have to wait as long. Your three or four cars get to you a lot faster without having to be stuck behind a thousand Walmart trucks. And the Walmart trucks don’t have four lanes they can go through, sure, but they don’t have to wait on the smaller but still significant K-mart trucks slowing them down, either. It benefits everybody – and net neutrality stops companies from being able to do that.

Conservatives in congress aren’t going to inject anything into those rules. Conservatives are about smaller government and getting rid of those unnecessary rules. That’s part of what being conservative means. Republicans, on the other hand, and especially several of the ones we currently have, will totally do what you’re suggesting. A lot of them pushed the Net Neutrality bills because they had lobbyists in the bigger ISPs asking them to. Keep an eye on those guys – better for everybody if a small group of people in Washington aren’t making the decisions for how a business can and can’t be run, and instead the decisions are run by the people who run the business, and are actually affected by those decisions, wouldn’t you say?

(Psst – careful following that idea – it’ll lead you into conservatism.)

I was never aware how such a dark and cold world the internet was before Mr. Wheeler from the FCC saved us all, god bless government!

I should be able to do with my promised 50 mpbs WHATEVER THE HECK I WANT.

I’m already paying for my end, and Netflix is already paying theirs, and tiering agreements pay every entity between. Why should these leeches in the middle, who are already getting paid, get paid more?

That… no. A large load only refers to more than the equipment can handle. A pebble might be a large load to an ant; a boulder might be a large load to a dog, a mountain might be a large load to a truck.

If a medium ISP – one that’s maybe only in four or five cities, for instance – has the equivalent of dog-sized customer base, and the equivalent of dog-sized routers and lines, but the equivalent of boulder-sized traffic loads, then their service is going to be slow. They can try and buy truck-equivalent hardware to handle the load, but then they’ll have to pass that cost on to the customers, and trucks are more expensive to purchase and maintain than is a dog. If there’s an alternative – get another, smaller dog to handle a part of the boulder so the bigger dog doesn’t have to carry as much weight – then why not let the medium ISP do it? Who loses or is hurt in that situation?

Certainly not the customers who suddenly have alternatives to the big company ISPs – that’s who we’re concerned about, right? The customers?

You missed the point of my rebuttal, And decided to just continue running ur mouth using fucked up logic instead of actually comprehending.

Big ISPs should be upgrading their own equipment in order to shell out better bandwidth. Netflix is also doing it. To then say that the ISP should be able to charge Netflix, in effect subsidizing its own equipment costs is bullshit.

What YOU’RE advocating for is a closed internet, where you can only see what your ISP has struck a deal for you to see. And that’s pretty lame.

I don’t care what fucked up logical reasoning you have behind wanting that, but it’s not what we want for our internet as consumers or as internet content creators.

You paid for a data connection, bandwidth was the selling point. Service providers oversold their capacity. Instead of living up to their promise to deliver on bandwidth, cell-phone companies introduced arbitrary data caps, while cable-internet resorted to throttling media providers. The correct answer is to charge their customers accordingly to improve the network. Remember now, it’s the customers making the demands of the network. If service-providers are getting hammered from interconnection costs, those costs should be passed to their customers making those demands. By gutting net neutrality, service-providers can get by using aging infrastructure and blame anyone else for saturation. And you’re okay with this.

Do you even wonder why America, the birthplace of inter-networking technologies, is not in the top 10 globally for average connection speed?

No, we have him as president because the Democrat primaries were rigged to nominate one of the worst candidates ever despite Democrats clearly wanting Bernie Sanders, and because Democrat voters crossed over in GOP open primaries to nominate who they thought would be a sure loser. If you want to blame somebody for Trump, blame the Democrats – Republicans wanted somebody better than this, but Democrats dragged us down to this. Thanks for the assumption though, and revealing your bigotry. I guess you think I’m also a gun toting redneck who doesn’t understand what that new-fangled internet is all about?

DishTV (and Comcast, and TimeWarner, and DirectTV, and DishNetwork) do block out certain channels sometimes because they have disagreements with NFL and are throwing a hissy fit.

Oh wait no they don’t.

What actually happens is that NFL realizes it has a monopoly and tries to exploit it. They decide to charge ~enormous~ amounts for a handful of games after Thanksgiving. It’s to the point where every DirectTV customer would see their bill go up, regardless of if they watch those games or not. DirectTV says NFL is crazy, doesn’t pay the extortion money, and ISN’T ALLOWED to air those games – they have a blank screen instead.

If you want that to stop, perhaps go after the networks. Maybe put a regulation on them that limits how much they can go up on their rates (like TV providers have). But don’t take your frustration out on another victim – that’s pointless, and will just make things worse.