I bet some of you are against the FCC when it regulates content on TV or film, or when government tries to regulate video game violence and sex with ratings. I just find it odd that some people are for government-regulated internet traffic, yet against government-regulated entertainment. They are inconsistent about government intervention.
People are so willing to cede their power to government, instead of using their own power. It's almost the same as with MMO premium subscriptions. Now imagine these same people clamoring for the government to make MMO subscriptions "neutral".
In a recent U.S. poll people said they want:
More government and less taxes (go figure that one out) and legalized pot.
So in a sense you could say the country is going to pot.
I bet some of you are against the FCC when it regulates content on TV or film, or when government tries to regulate video game violence and sex with ratings. I just find it odd that some people are for government-regulated internet traffic, yet against government-regulated entertainment. They are inconsistent about government intervention.
People are so willing to cede their power to government, instead of using their own power. It's almost the same as with MMO premium subscriptions. Now imagine these same people clamoring for the government to make MMO subscriptions "neutral".
What personal power am I ceding? I have basically 2 choices for Internet (phone or cable) and in many more rural areas's it isn't even that many. The government gave these companies the right of ways and in a lot of cases the cable to create these monopolies why wouldn't they put at least a few rules on how they do business? Internet is quickly replacing phone and mail service as a essential part of many peoples lives. I personally would rank it right below water, sewer and electricity on the list of critical services to my house. It's not a optional thing it's a requirement anymore so yea I am a supporter of the idea of Net Neutrality as by definition Free Market is horrible at delivering services universally to everyone. It's basic laws are built on excluding the outliers in favor of the most profit which is why rural Internet access in this country sucks so badly. The jury is still out on this iteration of it as I'm not sure how effective it will be overall but at least someone is trying something even if not prefect it is a step in the right direction.
I remember when AT&T was broken up. A lot of these same discussions took place but what was the result? Within 10 years we had massive competition, lower prices, and a enormous jump in services both landline and wireless. That event marks the birth of our modern communication world in a lot of ways. AT&T's break up wasn't the only reason for that but it was no small part of it either. Does anyone honestly believe we would be in a better spot without the governments intervention in that case? The government doesn't always help the situation but it's not always a curse either.
Originally posted by Quizzical The cost that consumers will pay for an item is inevitably linked to the cost of producing the item. If ISPs weren't allowed to sell a 50 Mbps connection without having enough bandwidth for all customers to be using the full bandwidth all of the time, that 50 Mbps connection would be awfully expensive.
If they instead had to call it a 1 Mbps connection and you could only get 1 Mbps, then most of the capacity they've laid out couldn't be used. If they had to advertise it as 1 Mbps because that's all that they could deliver to all customers all of the time, then how do you distinguish between a connection that tops out at 1 Mbps and one that will usually get you 50 Mbps but occasionally gets throttled to 30-40 Mbps? Surely the latter is better than the former.
And then there are Internet problems where even if your ISP is delivering the rated bandwidth but there's a bottleneck elsewhere, you don't see the speed that you were promised and it's not the ISP's fault. How many people can figure out that that is happening? How many would be able to figure exactly when their connection was being throttled if ISPs specifically tried to cover up throttling by prioritizing traffic from bandwidth test sites?
I take the view that, for the most part, the difference between 20 Mbps and 100 Mbps doesn't even matter. What matters is ping times and reliability. I'd much prefer a connection where every single packet gets through fast even though it tops out at 20 Mbps over 100 Mbps connection that sometimes suffers substantial packet loss or has packets delayed by multiple seconds.
That is exactly why I support metered pay-per-byte rather than pay-per-speed. I also agree, ping time and reliability mean more than raw speed, particularly when you are talking the upper tiers. Something like a base payment of $10/mo - which includes your first 2Gb of data. Past that, $2/Gb additional. I don't think Cell Phone Data plans are entirely bad or unreasonable in this regard. The average household uses approximately 30G of data month right now - that equates out to about a $70/mo internet bill, which is what most people are paying for their high speed ISP if I had to guess - and those numbers are just some arbitrary numbers I picked that work out for the average use at what I estimate the average bill to be - just to throw out a for-an-example. Best data I could find on average household use. It would also be a benefit for the cable companies - they would get their money if you watched content over their ISP end or their cable end - no more crying about "cord cutters".
Your volume downloaded is only loosely coupled to your download speed. A Netflix video, for instance, would "cost" the same from your ISP if you had 1Mb or 100Mb service = you'd just get it a lot faster on 100Mb service, and ISPs would want you to have the opportunity to use more data, incentivizing them to actually improve your service speed and reliability. And if you actually had to pay for every byte you transmitted - a lot of those "high volume" users who just leave their torrent server up all night may think twice about it (which is where the Hadron reference came in).
After all, we (used to, sometimes still do) pay for telephone by the minute, for electric by the kWh, water by the gallon, many toll roads are by the mile, etc.
All you can eat always sounds like a good deal (and it's a very "American" thing) - until you realize you aren't actually getting your money's worth.
I say this posting from my 3Mb "high speed" rural connection that sometimes struggles to hit 120kb. I've never even knowingly used a 20Mb connection (we have 5Mb at work, and that's 10 users and with a server running on it 24-7, and it's fast enough that I don't think twice about it). Even with that slow connection, I still average around 4G/day of traffic right now, because I have a lot of devices that sit connected and updating all the time between work. So metered internet seemingly would work against me, but if I could get a cell connection that would let me do that much volume per day, rather than per month, I would jump on it in a heartbeat.
I think the reality of it is that small ISPs are done.
There are anti-monopoly rules, but there are certain industries where competition isn't feasible - such as utility. You don't have to have 7 different companies running 7 different sets of power lines down your street, and 7 different phone lines, and 7 different cable lines, etc.
So utilities are more or less allowed to be a monopoly, so long as they agree to abide by some pretty heavy regulation to ensure they don't abuse that monopoly. That is part of those 1930's laws - you can be a monopoly providing an essential service, and we agree you can make a profit, but that profit gets limited (and if you make too much you have to rebate it or reinvest it), and you have to provide access to everyone. And if you get too big nationwide, we can still break you up (Bell breakup of 1982)
Cable got around that, because television was never mandated as an "essential" service, like electric and phone have been. And there was always the alternative of Over-The-Air television (which still exists, but it's been so hobbled it's hardly competition), and satellite TV providers.
Internet is shifting to be an "essential" service - which I agree, I believe it is. That doesn't necessarily mean lower prices, but it should mean better access, reliability, a standard delivery speed, enforceable and hopefully clear traffic rules, and that you won't be unnecessarily price gouged.
Except that the whole point is that when those utilities are run by a monopoly, they do tend to cost more, and it is practical to have more than one company providing power/gas/water etc, it works fine in the UK to have several power suppliers, on any given street in the UK you will see houses that have power supplied by not just 1 company, but often up to 10 different ones, but perhaps thats because in the UK a monopoly on those kinds of things is actually illegal, its the same with broadband services, there is no restriction and there are multiple broadband providers, no one company is able to have a monopoly on it, even in terms of television, Sky is unable to gain a monopoly because there are alternatives, if not in terms of satellite tv, but from cable and freeview, oh yeah, freeview, tv for free who would have thought it, as for telephone services, again, there are multiple companies providing it, in any area of the uk and no one company is able to gain a monopoly, competition means better service, which means even as someone who lives in the countryside, i not only have a choice of who provides the gas and electricity to my house, but who i use for telephone and broadband services, i used to use BT, now i use Sky, and next year i'll probably switch again, because, just like getting car insurance, its not a good idea to stick with the same provider for too long, its cheaper to switch and you inevitably get a better service because of it. And for the record, outside of a town even, small village in the countryside, i get between 4-6mb broadband, unrestricted as in absolutely no cap on useage, or throttling of bandwidth, if i'd lived in a town even that would be at least 20mb. And thats why the USA has such dodgy broadband services, because companies have a monopoly, no doubt they see what happened in the UK and are crapping themselves that it might happen there too, and where would they be then, they might actually have to provide a decent service in order to compete
I bet some of you are against the FCC when it regulates content on TV or film, or when government tries to regulate video game violence and sex with ratings. I just find it odd that some people are for government-regulated internet traffic, yet against government-regulated entertainment. They are inconsistent about government intervention.
People are demanding equal opportunity for watching all kinds of TV and film when they're against regulations.
People are demanding equal opportunity to look at all kinds of web contents when they're demanding net neutrality.
I think they're very consistent that they want to be able to watch and kind of TV, film or internet content. Whether that freedom is achieved through deregulation, or through regulation that forces ISPs to give equal treatment to all kinds of content, doesn't matter. As long as the result it being about to effortlessly watch anything you want most people don't give a shit about how that result is achieved.
Yup. People whined and moaned about corporations and monopolies, then expressed sheer joy when control of the internet was essentially given to one of the largest, most corrupt and incompetent monopolies in the world: The Unites States government. I can't think of one thing they've touched in the last twenty years which hasn't gone completely to shit.
At least with individual corporations, we had a choice to switch providers if our internet was being throttled. With the government in charge, any throttling or censorship they enact is completely inescapable, and we also have very little recourse available.
I'm sorry, but anybody who thinks this is a good thing really isn't playing with a full deck.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
Torrents...most of the data included in a torrent is going to be pirated or copyrighted data for the express purpose of sharing said data on the internet. Why would the FCC have an issue with blocking Torrents? Sure you can drum up excuses and some may say the data they use them for is legal but c'mon, can we dispense with the pretense that torrents/nzb files are used by people that are what...backing up their own data? Pirated music, pirated tv or movie programs, porn, documents and software are what people are using torrents for. I'd have no issue with people being blocked for using torrents and nzb files. People have a very warped sense of entitlement that includes breaking the law and not even thinking twice about it.
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
Originally posted by Stone_Fountain Torrents...most of the data included in a torrent is going to be pirated or copyrighted data for the express purpose of sharing said data on the internet. Why would the FCC have an issue with blocking Torrents? Sure you can drum up excuses and some may say the data they use them for is legal but c'mon, can we dispense with the pretense that torrents/nzb files are used by people that are what...backing up their own data? Pirated music, pirated tv or movie programs, porn, documents and software are what people are using torrents for. I'd have no issue with people being blocked for using torrents and nzb files. People have a very warped sense of entitlement that includes breaking the law and not even thinking twice about it.
Torrents are used, among other things, by WoW players updating their game. At one point some ISPs throttled World of Warcraft because of that.
Lets be honest, we all enjoy the free ride of torrenting movies and TV shows but we all know one day it will come to an end. Its lost revenue for businesses and that means less taxes. So one day the big foot will come down to stop it or at least slow it down lol
I think the reality of it is that small ISPs are done.
There are anti-monopoly rules, but there are certain industries where competition isn't feasible - such as utility. You don't have to have 7 different companies running 7 different sets of power lines down your street, and 7 different phone lines, and 7 different cable lines, etc.
So utilities are more or less allowed to be a monopoly, so long as they agree to abide by some pretty heavy regulation to ensure they don't abuse that monopoly. That is part of those 1930's laws - you can be a monopoly providing an essential service, and we agree you can make a profit, but that profit gets limited (and if you make too much you have to rebate it or reinvest it), and you have to provide access to everyone. And if you get too big nationwide, we can still break you up (Bell breakup of 1982)
Cable got around that, because television was never mandated as an "essential" service, like electric and phone have been. And there was always the alternative of Over-The-Air television (which still exists, but it's been so hobbled it's hardly competition), and satellite TV providers.
Internet is shifting to be an "essential" service - which I agree, I believe it is. That doesn't necessarily mean lower prices, but it should mean better access, reliability, a standard delivery speed, enforceable and hopefully clear traffic rules, and that you won't be unnecessarily price gouged.
Except that the whole point is that when those utilities are run by a monopoly, they do tend to cost more, and it is practical to have more than one company providing power/gas/water etc, it works fine in the UK to have several power suppliers, on any given street in the UK you will see houses that have power supplied by not just 1 company, but often up to 10 different ones, but perhaps thats because in the UK a monopoly on those kinds of things is actually illegal, its the same with broadband services, there is no restriction and there are multiple broadband providers, no one company is able to have a monopoly on it, even in terms of television, Sky is unable to gain a monopoly because there are alternatives, if not in terms of satellite tv, but from cable and freeview, oh yeah, freeview, tv for free who would have thought it, as for telephone services, again, there are multiple companies providing it, in any area of the uk and no one company is able to gain a monopoly, competition means better service, which means even as someone who lives in the countryside, i not only have a choice of who provides the gas and electricity to my house, but who i use for telephone and broadband services, i used to use BT, now i use Sky, and next year i'll probably switch again, because, just like getting car insurance, its not a good idea to stick with the same provider for too long, its cheaper to switch and you inevitably get a better service because of it. And for the record, outside of a town even, small village in the countryside, i get between 4-6mb broadband, unrestricted as in absolutely no cap on useage, or throttling of bandwidth, if i'd lived in a town even that would be at least 20mb. And thats why the USA has such dodgy broadband services, because companies have a monopoly, no doubt they see what happened in the UK and are crapping themselves that it might happen there too, and where would they be then, they might actually have to provide a decent service in order to compete
There's an enormous difference between providing service to dense urban areas and sparsely populated rural areas. When you have to run your lines ten times as far between houses, it costs ten times as much per house to build out your network. It's pretty rare to have a true monopoly on Internet in the US, but when the choices are cable modem, satellite, DSL, and dial-up, they're not really on equal footing.
There have been some cities where the politicians got suckered into granting a monopoly of sorts to one company or another in the sense of, no one else is allowed to build a good ISP here. But that's a problem of stupid politicians, and in at least one state, the state legislature was pushing a bill making it illegal for cities to do that.
I bet some of you are against the FCC when it regulates content on TV or film, or when government tries to regulate video game violence and sex with ratings. I just find it odd that some people are for government-regulated internet traffic, yet against government-regulated entertainment. They are inconsistent about government intervention.
People are demanding equal opportunity for watching all kinds of TV and film when they're against regulations.
People are demanding equal opportunity to look at all kinds of web contents when they're demanding net neutrality.
I think they're very consistent that they want to be able to watch and kind of TV, film or internet content. Whether that freedom is achieved through deregulation, or through regulation that forces ISPs to give equal treatment to all kinds of content, doesn't matter. As long as the result it being about to effortlessly watch anything you want most people don't give a shit about how that result is achieved.
I don't want equal opportunity to use at all types of web traffic. I want good opportunity to use all types of web traffic that I care about. There are two important distinctions here:
1) There are some types of web traffic that I don't want. I don't like spam e-mails. I don't like malware on my computer. If an Internet company is able to filter out malicious traffic (with a suitably narrow definition), then good for them.
2) Access to everything being bad, but equally bad, is not a good solution. Even if some things worked really well and others only somewhat well, that sure beats everything working badly.
Originally posted by Torval The problem with metered payment is that it implies we've reached an impasse with regards to bandwidth. We haven't. We have the ability to process bandwidth. The backbone providers and the ISP haven't put a reasonable reinvestment back into the system. They were heavily subsidized, by the government, to get things rolling and once they did that they've essentially sat back and put the minimum back into the system. They built the system and engineered it to have bandwidth limitations. First because it's cheaper, but also it provides them a reason to charge for that bandwidth.Even with a metered solution they're not going to invest in wider pipes to generate more byte throughput. They're going to limit the resource and charge more for it per byte. If they made wider pipes eventually people question why they're paying so much per byte on such wide freeways.
Originally posted by Nanfoodle Lets be honest, we all enjoy the free ride of torrenting movies and TV shows but we all know one day it will come to an end. Its lost revenue for businesses and that means less taxes. So one day the big foot will come down to stop it or at least slow it down lol
I haven't felt the need to illegally download anything since Napster was a thing and I didn't know any better. It's become available legally for a reasonable price for me, and I'm happy to pay for stuff I enjoy (iTunes, Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, Hulu, etc - take your pick).
But you are right - a lot of people think any price is too much to pay, and feel they should still be entitled to view/listen/own. And for a lot of people, they don't have the disposable income. And I do believe the MPAA/RIAA/{insert evil villan here} have ruined their credibilty by blaming everything on piracy, going after piracy too aggressively, and not realizing that the root of the problem was a disrupting technology. Piracy existed long before digital computers.
Originally posted by Vrika Originally posted by Stone_FountainTorrents...most of the data included in a torrent is going to be pirated or copyrighted data for the express purpose of sharing said data on the internet. Why would the FCC have an issue with blocking Torrents? Sure you can drum up excuses and some may say the data they use them for is legal but c'mon, can we dispense with the pretense that torrents/nzb files are used by people that are what...backing up their own data? Pirated music, pirated tv or movie programs, porn, documents and software are what people are using torrents for. I'd have no issue with people being blocked for using torrents and nzb files. People have a very warped sense of entitlement that includes breaking the law and not even thinking twice about it.
Torrents are used, among other things, by WoW players updating their game. At one point some ISPs throttled World of Warcraft because of that.
I agree with Vrika here - Torrents today have legitimate uses, and are used legitimately. My ISP had a blanket block on torrents for a long while, and when FFXIV (the first go around) came out, it used a P2P patcher - I couldn't update the game at all (until I VPNed into work and tunneled the traffic, anyway, at a hefty speed loss).
A lot of torrent traffic ~may~ be illegal, but that isn't because the technology bad, it is because it is effective.
And if you ban/throttle/limit/whatever torrents, something else will just pop up. Or probably already has and I just haven't heard about it yet. Torrents and piracy didn't stop overnight just because Pirate Bay closed.
Originally posted by Nanfoodle Lets be honest, we all enjoy the free ride of torrenting movies and TV shows but we all know one day it will come to an end. Its lost revenue for businesses and that means less taxes. So one day the big foot will come down to stop it or at least slow it down lol
This ^^
I am just as guilty as anyone for downloading torrents. It has been a nice free ride but I cant be surprised when it comes to an end.
The corporations and Govt. both see this as lost revenue & taxes, and that I believe will be the driving force behind regulation.
Its not just about torrent downloads. Look at the copyright fiasco going on with YouTube and its partners. Copyright protection is extremely broad language. Its not good language because it's such. Lot of room to legislate from or lobby for...
I bet some of you are against the FCC when it regulates content on TV or film, or when government tries to regulate video game violence and sex with ratings. I just find it odd that some people are for government-regulated internet traffic, yet against government-regulated entertainment. They are inconsistent about government intervention.
People are so willing to cede their power to government, instead of using their own power. It's almost the same as with MMO premium subscriptions. Now imagine these same people clamoring for the government to make MMO subscriptions "neutral".
No, it's just that most people aren't ideologically paralyzed.
It's not a simple matter of being for or against gov't regulation, all or nothing, for most people. People think some things should be regulated and some things shouldn't be. A person could be for more regulation on one thing, and less regulation on another.
I should remind you that subsidies rarely ever achieve what they promise on. For example in the 1800s there were massive subsidies in rail. However, they were based on miles of track laid. So instead of building efficient lines to serve the maximum amount of customers possible as any private business would do. They instead built inefficient lines serving the wrong communities and did not operate under profit since they mainly earned income from the subsidies. These companies would then sell their lines to a different railway and move onto the next. It wasn't until the supposed owl barons came in that the price of rail in the US became economical for those in the lower income brackets and were run efficiently. This of course without subsidies.
Another famous case was building a trans-Atlantic passenger shipping. The guy who received the subsidy only attempted to build 4 ships that only served middle to upper class. While the king of owl barons built economically, served even the poor and ferried much more people across the Atlantic without a subsidy. It also helped the mass migration of lower class people from Europe to the US.
The same thing is happening with the internet. In towns with more lax right of way fees have smaller ISPs laying down internet only lines and achieving speeds higher than Cable in the same price bracket. Once again without subsidies.
Originally posted by Nanfoodle Lets be honest, we all enjoy the free ride of torrenting movies and TV shows but we all know one day it will come to an end. Its lost revenue for businesses and that means less taxes. So one day the big foot will come down to stop it or at least slow it down lol
It won't be coming to an end anytime soon, especially not for the technically savvy.
Originally posted by Nanfoodle Lets be honest, we all enjoy the free ride of torrenting movies and TV shows but we all know one day it will come to an end. Its lost revenue for businesses and that means less taxes. So one day the big foot will come down to stop it or at least slow it down lol
It won't be coming to an end anytime soon, especially not for the technically savvy.
Hmm yeah it is like saying prohibition is going to make a comeback..lol
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Quizzical has it right in his first statement about why bandwidth usually gets throttled. It is also why the ISP's call their services "Up to 50MB/s" or whatever level they are talking about.
The reality of the situation is that there is a limited amount of infrastructure, waving a magic wand that ignores reality isn't going to solve anything. This is the problem with politicians getting involved in technical issues. They don't know what the hell they are talking about.
So the administration finds another issue that everyone complains about and says Abracadabra and magically the reality of the issue will go away? I think not.
Just like the free college tuition, free health care, free whatever the current popular issue is... Simple fact is There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. TANSTAAFL. We are going to pay for this one way or another, and I am guessing that people will ignore that part of it.
Originally posted by Nanfoodle Lets be honest, we all enjoy the free ride of torrenting movies and TV shows but we all know one day it will come to an end. Its lost revenue for businesses and that means less taxes. So one day the big foot will come down to stop it or at least slow it down lol
I know I'm not alone in saying I don't care about paying for content, what I do care about is content that is unavailable to me, at all, in any legal form. Oh, I missed Ep 2 of "Show" on Hulu and it's gone. Now I have to wait for the season to end before I can get it anywhere. If the asshats running the business would actually sell their products they'd probably have less thieves.
Quizzical has it right in his first statement about why bandwidth usually gets throttled. It is also why the ISP's call their services "Up to 50MB/s" or whatever level they are talking about.
The reality of the situation is that there is a limited amount of infrastructure, waving a magic wand that ignores reality isn't going to solve anything. This is the problem with politicians getting involved in technical issues. They don't know what the hell they are talking about.
So the administration finds another issue that everyone complains about and says Abracadabra and magically the reality of the issue will go away? I think not.
Just like the free college tuition, free health care, free whatever the current popular issue is... Simple fact is There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. TANSTAAFL. We are going to pay for this one way or another, and I am guessing that people will ignore that part of it.
Yet the small telcos can give you 300/300 for $80 or even 75/75 for $35. I use these guys and their is no throttling, ever. Why can't the big guys dip into their profits and build a better network.
M.P.A. has already started up from reading around. Lobbing for exemptions for themselves. This goes beyond just torrents / pirating. If it were an isp on the grounds of a few hogging up to much bandwidth, I could understand. M.P.A.'s intentions aren't that. Go further than just torrents / pirating. Glad they can now lobby/bribe the last individuals who should be in control of the net.
Comments
In a recent U.S. poll people said they want:
More government and less taxes (go figure that one out) and legalized pot.
So in a sense you could say the country is going to pot.
What personal power am I ceding? I have basically 2 choices for Internet (phone or cable) and in many more rural areas's it isn't even that many. The government gave these companies the right of ways and in a lot of cases the cable to create these monopolies why wouldn't they put at least a few rules on how they do business? Internet is quickly replacing phone and mail service as a essential part of many peoples lives. I personally would rank it right below water, sewer and electricity on the list of critical services to my house. It's not a optional thing it's a requirement anymore so yea I am a supporter of the idea of Net Neutrality as by definition Free Market is horrible at delivering services universally to everyone. It's basic laws are built on excluding the outliers in favor of the most profit which is why rural Internet access in this country sucks so badly. The jury is still out on this iteration of it as I'm not sure how effective it will be overall but at least someone is trying something even if not prefect it is a step in the right direction.
I remember when AT&T was broken up. A lot of these same discussions took place but what was the result? Within 10 years we had massive competition, lower prices, and a enormous jump in services both landline and wireless. That event marks the birth of our modern communication world in a lot of ways. AT&T's break up wasn't the only reason for that but it was no small part of it either. Does anyone honestly believe we would be in a better spot without the governments intervention in that case? The government doesn't always help the situation but it's not always a curse either.
That is exactly why I support metered pay-per-byte rather than pay-per-speed. I also agree, ping time and reliability mean more than raw speed, particularly when you are talking the upper tiers. Something like a base payment of $10/mo - which includes your first 2Gb of data. Past that, $2/Gb additional. I don't think Cell Phone Data plans are entirely bad or unreasonable in this regard. The average household uses approximately 30G of data month right now - that equates out to about a $70/mo internet bill, which is what most people are paying for their high speed ISP if I had to guess - and those numbers are just some arbitrary numbers I picked that work out for the average use at what I estimate the average bill to be - just to throw out a for-an-example. Best data I could find on average household use. It would also be a benefit for the cable companies - they would get their money if you watched content over their ISP end or their cable end - no more crying about "cord cutters".
Your volume downloaded is only loosely coupled to your download speed. A Netflix video, for instance, would "cost" the same from your ISP if you had 1Mb or 100Mb service = you'd just get it a lot faster on 100Mb service, and ISPs would want you to have the opportunity to use more data, incentivizing them to actually improve your service speed and reliability. And if you actually had to pay for every byte you transmitted - a lot of those "high volume" users who just leave their torrent server up all night may think twice about it (which is where the Hadron reference came in).
After all, we (used to, sometimes still do) pay for telephone by the minute, for electric by the kWh, water by the gallon, many toll roads are by the mile, etc.
All you can eat always sounds like a good deal (and it's a very "American" thing) - until you realize you aren't actually getting your money's worth.
I say this posting from my 3Mb "high speed" rural connection that sometimes struggles to hit 120kb. I've never even knowingly used a 20Mb connection (we have 5Mb at work, and that's 10 users and with a server running on it 24-7, and it's fast enough that I don't think twice about it). Even with that slow connection, I still average around 4G/day of traffic right now, because I have a lot of devices that sit connected and updating all the time between work. So metered internet seemingly would work against me, but if I could get a cell connection that would let me do that much volume per day, rather than per month, I would jump on it in a heartbeat.
Except that the whole point is that when those utilities are run by a monopoly, they do tend to cost more, and it is practical to have more than one company providing power/gas/water etc, it works fine in the UK to have several power suppliers, on any given street in the UK you will see houses that have power supplied by not just 1 company, but often up to 10 different ones, but perhaps thats because in the UK a monopoly on those kinds of things is actually illegal, its the same with broadband services, there is no restriction and there are multiple broadband providers, no one company is able to have a monopoly on it, even in terms of television, Sky is unable to gain a monopoly because there are alternatives, if not in terms of satellite tv, but from cable and freeview, oh yeah, freeview, tv for free who would have thought it, as for telephone services, again, there are multiple companies providing it, in any area of the uk and no one company is able to gain a monopoly, competition means better service, which means even as someone who lives in the countryside, i not only have a choice of who provides the gas and electricity to my house, but who i use for telephone and broadband services, i used to use BT, now i use Sky, and next year i'll probably switch again, because, just like getting car insurance, its not a good idea to stick with the same provider for too long, its cheaper to switch and you inevitably get a better service because of it. And for the record, outside of a town even, small village in the countryside, i get between 4-6mb broadband, unrestricted as in absolutely no cap on useage, or throttling of bandwidth, if i'd lived in a town even that would be at least 20mb. And thats why the USA has such dodgy broadband services, because companies have a monopoly, no doubt they see what happened in the UK and are crapping themselves that it might happen there too, and where would they be then, they might actually have to provide a decent service in order to compete
People are demanding equal opportunity for watching all kinds of TV and film when they're against regulations.
People are demanding equal opportunity to look at all kinds of web contents when they're demanding net neutrality.
I think they're very consistent that they want to be able to watch and kind of TV, film or internet content. Whether that freedom is achieved through deregulation, or through regulation that forces ISPs to give equal treatment to all kinds of content, doesn't matter. As long as the result it being about to effortlessly watch anything you want most people don't give a shit about how that result is achieved.
Yup. People whined and moaned about corporations and monopolies, then expressed sheer joy when control of the internet was essentially given to one of the largest, most corrupt and incompetent monopolies in the world: The Unites States government. I can't think of one thing they've touched in the last twenty years which hasn't gone completely to shit.
At least with individual corporations, we had a choice to switch providers if our internet was being throttled. With the government in charge, any throttling or censorship they enact is completely inescapable, and we also have very little recourse available.
I'm sorry, but anybody who thinks this is a good thing really isn't playing with a full deck.
AN' DERE AIN'T NO SUCH FING AS ENUFF DAKKA, YA GROT! Enuff'z more than ya got an' less than too much an' there ain't no such fing as too much dakka. Say dere is, and me Squiggoff'z eatin' tonight!
We are born of the blood. Made men by the blood. Undone by the blood. Our eyes are yet to open. FEAR THE OLD BLOOD.
#IStandWithVic
First PC Game: Pool of Radiance July 10th, 1990. First MMO: Everquest April 23, 1999
Torrents are used, among other things, by WoW players updating their game. At one point some ISPs throttled World of Warcraft because of that.
There's an enormous difference between providing service to dense urban areas and sparsely populated rural areas. When you have to run your lines ten times as far between houses, it costs ten times as much per house to build out your network. It's pretty rare to have a true monopoly on Internet in the US, but when the choices are cable modem, satellite, DSL, and dial-up, they're not really on equal footing.
There have been some cities where the politicians got suckered into granting a monopoly of sorts to one company or another in the sense of, no one else is allowed to build a good ISP here. But that's a problem of stupid politicians, and in at least one state, the state legislature was pushing a bill making it illegal for cities to do that.
I don't want equal opportunity to use at all types of web traffic. I want good opportunity to use all types of web traffic that I care about. There are two important distinctions here:
1) There are some types of web traffic that I don't want. I don't like spam e-mails. I don't like malware on my computer. If an Internet company is able to filter out malicious traffic (with a suitably narrow definition), then good for them.
2) Access to everything being bad, but equally bad, is not a good solution. Even if some things worked really well and others only somewhat well, that sure beats everything working badly.
Legitimate points, all.
I haven't felt the need to illegally download anything since Napster was a thing and I didn't know any better. It's become available legally for a reasonable price for me, and I'm happy to pay for stuff I enjoy (iTunes, Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, Hulu, etc - take your pick).
But you are right - a lot of people think any price is too much to pay, and feel they should still be entitled to view/listen/own. And for a lot of people, they don't have the disposable income. And I do believe the MPAA/RIAA/{insert evil villan here} have ruined their credibilty by blaming everything on piracy, going after piracy too aggressively, and not realizing that the root of the problem was a disrupting technology. Piracy existed long before digital computers.
I agree with Vrika here - Torrents today have legitimate uses, and are used legitimately. My ISP had a blanket block on torrents for a long while, and when FFXIV (the first go around) came out, it used a P2P patcher - I couldn't update the game at all (until I VPNed into work and tunneled the traffic, anyway, at a hefty speed loss).
A lot of torrent traffic ~may~ be illegal, but that isn't because the technology bad, it is because it is effective.
And if you ban/throttle/limit/whatever torrents, something else will just pop up. Or probably already has and I just haven't heard about it yet. Torrents and piracy didn't stop overnight just because Pirate Bay closed.
This ^^
I am just as guilty as anyone for downloading torrents. It has been a nice free ride but I cant be surprised when it comes to an end.
The corporations and Govt. both see this as lost revenue & taxes, and that I believe will be the driving force behind regulation.
No, it's just that most people aren't ideologically paralyzed.
It's not a simple matter of being for or against gov't regulation, all or nothing, for most people. People think some things should be regulated and some things shouldn't be. A person could be for more regulation on one thing, and less regulation on another.
I should remind you that subsidies rarely ever achieve what they promise on. For example in the 1800s there were massive subsidies in rail. However, they were based on miles of track laid. So instead of building efficient lines to serve the maximum amount of customers possible as any private business would do. They instead built inefficient lines serving the wrong communities and did not operate under profit since they mainly earned income from the subsidies. These companies would then sell their lines to a different railway and move onto the next. It wasn't until the supposed owl barons came in that the price of rail in the US became economical for those in the lower income brackets and were run efficiently. This of course without subsidies.
Another famous case was building a trans-Atlantic passenger shipping. The guy who received the subsidy only attempted to build 4 ships that only served middle to upper class. While the king of owl barons built economically, served even the poor and ferried much more people across the Atlantic without a subsidy. It also helped the mass migration of lower class people from Europe to the US.
The same thing is happening with the internet. In towns with more lax right of way fees have smaller ISPs laying down internet only lines and achieving speeds higher than Cable in the same price bracket. Once again without subsidies.
It won't be coming to an end anytime soon, especially not for the technically savvy.
Waiting for:
The Repopulation
Albion Online
Hmm yeah it is like saying prohibition is going to make a comeback..lol
Brenics ~ Just to point out I do believe Chris Roberts is going down as the man who cheated backers and took down crowdfunding for gaming.
Quizzical has it right in his first statement about why bandwidth usually gets throttled. It is also why the ISP's call their services "Up to 50MB/s" or whatever level they are talking about.
The reality of the situation is that there is a limited amount of infrastructure, waving a magic wand that ignores reality isn't going to solve anything. This is the problem with politicians getting involved in technical issues. They don't know what the hell they are talking about.
So the administration finds another issue that everyone complains about and says Abracadabra and magically the reality of the issue will go away? I think not.
Just like the free college tuition, free health care, free whatever the current popular issue is... Simple fact is There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. TANSTAAFL. We are going to pay for this one way or another, and I am guessing that people will ignore that part of it.
I know I'm not alone in saying I don't care about paying for content, what I do care about is content that is unavailable to me, at all, in any legal form. Oh, I missed Ep 2 of "Show" on Hulu and it's gone. Now I have to wait for the season to end before I can get it anywhere. If the asshats running the business would actually sell their products they'd probably have less thieves.
Yet the small telcos can give you 300/300 for $80 or even 75/75 for $35. I use these guys and their is no throttling, ever. Why can't the big guys dip into their profits and build a better network.