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Internet Service Providers Try to Stop Net Neutrality in Court | Cord Cutters News (cordcuttersnews.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 272 points 5 months ago (4 children)

For all those that say that net neutrality does nothing, and doesn't matter, I ask this. If net neutrality never made a difference, then why is every ISP pouring a collective billions of dollars into stopping it? Why did they do the same thing about 5 years ago trying to kill it? Why did they do the same AGAIN 10 years ago trying to prevent it becoming law the first time?

If you can't see how net neutrality affects the internet, then you don't understand. As a general rule of thumb, if you don't understand something just look at what big money corporations are doing. You generally want the opposite of that. They are not here to be your friend. They are here to try to take every dollar they can from you.

[–] [email protected] 70 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like people with voting. They love to tell you how it doesn't matter, and yet republicans put tons of effort into making it more difficult.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Not every ISP! Where I live there's an awesome ISP, Sonic, which is pro-NN, and last I heard only offers "best effort" service

which means there's no throttling your link, no paid tiers; if the fiber and hardware can support 10Gbps symmetric, then that's what you get.

Sadly, they're not the norm. And sadly, not offered at my address.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago

I heard if them 10 years ago, and told them if they ever expand into Ohio, call me. Even at 2am. I WANT to give them my money!.......but I can't......

[–] [email protected] -2 points 5 months ago (3 children)

Bandwidth is a finite resource. If everybody on your street wants that 10GB at the same time there's going to be throttling.

But that's a common sense type of throttling. Net neutrality is about not giving priority to certain types of content or websites over others.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago

Right

not immune to congestion at all. Unlike ATT fiber, where we had 300Mbps (symmetric I think)...but if you log in to the modem it reported a gigabit link. Starting a download, you could often get more than 300Mbps, but it would slowly fall in line with bandwidth policies.

With Sonic, my gigabit connection would get north of 900Mbps (iperf3), both ways, to a nearby university computer. I miss it.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Technically yes. But the odds on a properly built trunk line getting saturated by a random neighborhood aren't great. Unless of course they've never upgraded that line in 20 years...

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I feel like I'm not making myself clear. It doesn't matter how large and great is the last mile infrastructure to the neighborhood. The ISP itself has limited capacity; their pipe to the internet is only so big, and all their customer bandwidth runs through that pipe.

ISP capacity does NOT cover every single one of their clients using 10 Gbps at the same time by a long shot. Most ISP can maybe cover 5-10% of their total advertised speeds at any given time. That's why they say "up to". They can do 10 Gbps simultaneously for a handful of customers here and there; if everybody starts using the internet at the same time (evenings, the weekend) the speeds drop dramatically. If any significant portion of their customer base ever happened to use the internet for anything serious at the same time it would be a shitshow. Every ISP bets on that never happening.

So getting back on topic, this kind of throttling typically does not fall under net neutrality. It's not discrimination based on where the data is coming from. You could argue it's deceptive practices or false advertising but that's a different kettle of fish.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

How many terabytes is a single customer or group of customers moving that saturating their upstream would be more than a few minutes a month?

It's not really deceptive, and backup systems and other enterprise type of things can and are configured to run off peak.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Its dependent on the cable quality and materials. Its not a harvest, you can expand it at anytime by replacing the cable.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

The upstream bandwidth of the ISP is limited. Expanding the capacity to the curb won't improve that.

Good cables will get you good bandwidth with your neighbors — if that's something you find useful.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Great comment. We have the same thing here in Australia with tobacco laws. The most recent change was to ban almost all branding on cigarette packaging. They're not allowed to use fonts, slogans, logos, or colours, just the brand name in plain text on a standard brown-green box.

The logic being that branding makes a product more attractive to a consumer. Make it duller and less people will buy it.

Tobacco companies fought it tooth and nail. Kept arguing it wouldn't stop people from smoking. Well then why are you lobbying so hard against it? Obviously the only reason they will ever fight anything is because they think it will hurt their revenue. So whatever they oppose, I support.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Right. Because it is always about money, and if their sales figures weren't going to go down, then it seems like they'd end up saving a ton of money by completely cutting out their entire advertising budget. No need to even design a logo.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Tobacco companies fought it tooth and nail. Kept arguing it wouldn’t stop people from smoking.

They are right, people will not stop smoking only because the packaging is dull.

Well then why are you lobbying so hard against it? Obviously the only reason they will ever fight anything is because they think it will hurt their revenue. So whatever they oppose, I support.

Because they lost advertising opportunity.
People recognize the brand by the packaging before even reading the brand name. This way your country just make any type of advertising for the cigarettes useless. And maybe as a collateral effect some younger people will not start to smoke since they will not see the advertising, but as far as I know people don't start to smoke because the package is cool.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

"Really guys, we just want to spend more money than we need to! This won't stop people from smoking, we just really want to spend more money to design logos, packaging, advertising, etc."

Come on, dude...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (2 children)

It's more subtle than that. Obviously no one who already smokes is going to say "Oh, the packet isn't as pretty as it used to be, guess I'll quit smoking now."

It's about the big, long-term picture. Companies spend money on branding and advertising because it works. You create the perception that your product is for a certain type of person, which makes them more inclined to buy it. By making cigarettes boring, you make them less appealing, and on average less people will smoke.

The proof is in the pudding. Social attitudes to smoking in Australia have totally flipped within a generation or two. It used to be something that everyone did. It's now mostly seen as a gross habit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's true in pretty much every developed country over the past 2-3 decades lmao. The US still has branded packaging but the social attitude towards cigarettes has also completely flipped from being something everybody (including children) did to being seen as gross. I don't see how this arbitrary law is shown to have any effect whatsoever.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

I literally just googled "cigarette plain packaging effectiveness" and there's tons of articles analysing it and they all conclude that it has made a difference 🤷🏼‍♂️

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

It’s about the big, long-term picture. Companies spend money on branding and advertising because it works. You create the perception that your product is for a certain type of person, which makes them more inclined to buy it. By making cigarettes boring, you make them less appealing, and on average less people will smoke.

Fine, but if that the point, a more honest (intellectually) thing to do would be simply ban cigarettes advertising. The way it is done seems to me something like "I want to ban this but I don't want to be the one that do it".

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

We're way ahead of you mate, all tobacco advertising was banned in Australia 30 years ago. Plain packaging is just the latest in a long line of moves designed to de-normalise smoking, and the tobacco companies have fought against it every step of the way.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Yeah, the third amendment to the us constitution basically never comes up, but if the military and police demanded we repeal it you bet your ass I’m fighting them on it

[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago

Cable internet needs to opened to alternative ISPs, just like DSL in telcos.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I like how the author figured any cord cutting image will do. Ethernet is not the cord the term refers to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

It’s the ISP cutting the Ethernet by opposing net neutrality so they can force you to use their overpriced cable TV service. An inverted mockery of the traditional “cord cutting”, just as the image depicts.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

He's not even the FCC chairman anymore but this news still makes me want to punch Ajit Pai in the face.