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Court Backs Rules Treating Internet as Utility, Not Luxury

Um, right. Gravity is a weak force of nature. Maybe soon the government will declare gravity a utility and regulate it. We can only hope.



Well, I accept electrical service as a public utility. It's something that, with few exceptions, all homes need. Obviously, internet access is no where near the necessity as electricity or water. Clearly they are on different levels. And it was a true free form of communication among the people. Government does not like that sort of thing, you must know.
They see it as a source of money, power and control. Exactly why we have a Constitution to protect us from government.

And, tell me again (if it's even been said), what was the problem that was so bad that the government needed to swoop in, declare that it has the power to do so, and start throwing down regulations?

And note the word "start", which is what this is. Government will never stop, there will be more and more of this. That's like predicting the sun will rise in the East.

While water and electricity are certainly more vital than internet access, in 2016 is just as basic and integral to our society as a phone line. If you want to participate in our economy, it's essential. Applying for a job? Many companies take electronic resumes and communicate electronically with existing and prospective employees. Lack of Internet access makes a lot of opportunities more difficult, if not impossible, to achieve.

Last-mile Internet lines also suffer from many of the same physical infrastructure issues that plague water and electrical delivery. You cany really have competing water or electrical lines, nor cable lines. Extremely high barriers to entry, duplicated and redundant infrastructure, the issue of tearing up streets to install and maintain them, etc.

Wireless access bypasses some of those problems, but not all of them. Furthermore, it has its own issues with bandwidth. Two signals cannot compete on the same frequency, and the available frequencies are finite.

The brewing problem was selective throttling. An ISP slowing down access to certain pages for no reason other than I haven't paid whatever extra subscription price they demand. (under net neutrality, throttling for legitimate network health or user experience reasons is still allowed) if I've paid for 10mbs, and their network allows them to deliver 10mbs from either YouTube or Netflix today, why should YouTube be slowed down just because I hadn't paid the "fast YouTube" fee they want?

Now, most libertarians respond with "because free market." Here's the thing. It's not really a free market. There's virtually no competition, for the reasons above and many more. And there's a bigger picture to think of: innovation and entrepreneurship, the backbone of a solid free market economy. NetFlix and YouTube have the cash to work something out if it really comes down to it. But what about DeuceFlix, a novel startup with the chance to be the next big thing? I can't handle the kind of fees they can.

You sure you want Comcast to have the power to stifle that?

"BUT GOVERNMENT BAD" is the laziest argument on the planet. You're perfectly fine with utility regulation for water and electric services. Are they horrible? Power grabs? No. I don't criticize government actin just for the sake of it. Show me a specific proposed action the government is taking and I might oppose or approve of it on its own merits.
 
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There is a difference between prioritization in a network and speed bumping it, like I have explained. Prioritization traffic does not purposefully slow down Netflix to 300MB/s on your 500MB/s connection

It might. It really depends on the prioritization policies that are instituted.

and then force you pay an extra $5/month if you want to stream Netflix at 500MB/s.

Do you have a single citation that bears this out?

That is what net neutrality is about. In the case of Netflix what Comcast was purposefully throttle Netflix speeds until they paid millions to Comcast, at which point their content was delivered at normal speeds once again. That was not illegal then but it is now that net neutrality is being enforced.

Here's one that I found.
For the last several months, Comcast Internet customers have complained about a drop in quality of the Netflix streams being delivered to their homes, and Netflix’s own data showed a massive decline in connection speeds starting in October. But today, the two companies announced they have reached a “mutually beneficial” agreement that will hopefully turn that trend around.

Much like Netflix’s ongoing standoff with Verizon FiOS, the drop in speeds wasn’t an issue of the ISP throttling or blocking service to Netflix. Rather, the ISPs were allowing for Netflix traffic to bottleneck at what’s known as “peering ports,” the connection between Netflix’s bandwidth provider and the ISPs.

Until recently, if peering ports became congested with downstream traffic, it was common practice for an ISP to temporarily open up new ports to maintain the flow of data. This was not a business arrangement; just something that had been done as a courtesy. ISPs would expect the bandwidth companies to do the same if there was a spike in upstream traffic. However, there is virtually no upstream traffic with Netflix, so the Comcasts and Verizons of the world claimed they were being taken advantage of.
https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-comcast-to-end-slowdown/

I draw your attention to:

"speeds wasn’t an issue of the ISP throttling or blocking service to Netflix. Rather, the ISPs were allowing for Netflix traffic to bottleneck at what’s known as “peering ports,” the connection between Netflix’s bandwidth provider and the ISPs."

That's a key point here. I was telling you about the high speed connection between the ISP and Netflix to deliver the streaming video? Apparently Comcast's “peering ports,” were insufficient with the demand, and suffered from congestion. I figure they needed an expensive upgrade, and Comcast wasn't willing to pay for it all without some support (read $s) from Netflix to do it.

You appear to be seeing conspiracies where there are none. It was more a matter of who's going to pay for their fair share of the bill to build it to what it needed to be to serve up the demand, which was probably much more than estimated. Unfortunately, sometimes it works out that way in big time networking. Hard to estimate demand for a service that doesn't exist which takes off like wildfire.
 
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