This lobbying bs gotta stop (net neutrality fail)

[Silver_Rain_007]

This is not about Comcast slowing down third party router traffic. The specific problem at hand is any internet provider can provider tiered internet, giving varying levels of performance for different websites. Since you love deregulation, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from giving fantastic speed for their own websites, while delivering crappy dialup modem speed to new startup companies, and forcing them to pay through the nose if they want otherwise.

The internet providers are currently nothing more than a bit pipe. They want to be more, and this will let them strong arm their way into becoming more. They won’t do any innovating themselves (the reasons why would be OBVIOUS to anyone who has tried using comcast customer service) but rather just destroy all the innovators. Imagine you are a small company, and your site suffers terrible performance because you being fucked up the ass by these shitty ISPs. You might have written the code flawlessly but the ISPs can fuck you over and make your page load times slow as hell. Well, good luck attracting any visitors to your site. Good luck attracting any VC money. Paying your devs, testers, ops, in addition to all your datacenter costs are expensive enough as it is, let alone having to pay some horrible ISP to not screw over your website when your customers try to log on. This is going to destroy small internet companies which provide tons of jobs and make the internets the amazing place it is.

There is a reason the vast majority of people in tech are opposed to this. I worked at a startup, and it got acquired. Awesome Cinderella story. Everyone from the startup is opposed to ISPs taking over. Coincidence? Hardly. We just understand what’s at stake here. Government needs to do its job and keep shitty corporations in check. If it had kept AIG and those other shitty wall street morons in check, then none of this would have happened. If SEC had a pair of balls, it would have kept Bernie Madoff in check. Etc etc. I do not trust government, but I trust corporations far less. All deregulation does is make the insanely rich even more insanely rich, at the expense of everyone else.

Maybe this is where I think the problem is… If they really start giving their own websites preferential treatment to the point where the rest of the internet is unusable then people in a deregulated marketplace, would simply switch to a more convenient ISP. In a deregulated marketplace is doesn’t have to be option A or nothing. There’s option A. If option A isn’t doing its job, someone starts option B to compete. If A & B both don’t work someone makes C… the real trick here would be to deregulate the current regional cable monopolies and allow startup capital to be infused dynamically into areas of the country where cable service is underperforming for its customers…

Also, again in theory, if you spent billions of dollars laying the pipe and you want to promote your own internet businesses by opening some pipes for some extra speed that you don’t provide the competition, I’m not sure I see a huge problem with that. If a pharmeceutial company spends 3 billion dollars in R&D to develop a new drug that helps cure cancer, are you saying that we should immediately make a generic version of the drug available and tell the pharma company that spent its 3 billion dollars “Hey thanks for this great invention and all those sunk costs… but sorry! No money for you on this one!” What do you think that would do? THAT would stiffle innovation.

The pursuit of maximizing profits by any reasonable measure in a competitve marketplace requires service providers of any good or service to continue to improve and tailor their products to maintain a healthy advantage or to keep up with one’s competition. I don’t disagree with you that Comcast maybe doesn’t have huge incentives to be innovative in its approach (however, I would argue that a multi-tiered approach to internet subscription coupled with a unique pricing mechanism that may make for a more affordable yet more tailored internet experience would be an innovative product in this marketplace as long as they maintained an option for a wide open internet subscription plan). But the answer to the question as to how to get companies to be more innovative is to deregulate and for people with capital to invest into technologies that can grow and compete for the existing customer base.

The SEC couldn’t regulate Bernie Madoff because the SEC wasn’t SMART ENOUGH to regulate Bernie Madoff. The SEC wasn’t smart enough to regulate AIG. Once again that’s a matter of incentives. The really smart people aren’t the regulators. They’re the ones who get paid the big bucks to outsmart the regulators. That’s how it works. If you can make 500K as a hedge fund manager or make 70K as the SEC guy who audits their transactions… if you have a choice the choice is easy. You take the 500K. But the trick here is that there’s very few people who have the skills and the talents to earn that wage… and people who have those talents don’t tend to settle for less money just for the hell of it.

I agree that corporations without a competitive marketplace can govern themselves inefficiently. Imagine if in an evolutionary sense humans had no predators throughout the course of their history. Would we be the species we are today if we didn’t need to overcome those obstacles? No. Much the same way in a competitive business, you either govern yourself effectively and pursue profit maximization or you die. When regulations artifically raise the barriers to entry for new competitive firms, all that is done is that a little more monopoly power is given the companies who already exist and then without the threat of serious predators or competition, they get lazy or abusive. If you don’t trust corporations, then I think the better choice is to trust that when they’re all fighting each other, then they’re fighting for you and your interests because they want your business… they need your business to survive and when faced with the prospect of someone out innovating or out hustled.

So, in the end, I would argue again, in favor of deregulation so that we can lower the costs associated with entry into the market space to encourage competition. Yes, I’m (almost) always in favor of deregulation.

Now, with that being said, I just want to say Fishjie, you’re a pretty cool guy. I mean like with so many people on this forum, I find that almost no one agrees with me, but I commend you for being able to articulate your views so well. It’s always fun when you and a couple other people post.

P.S. Everyone have a Merry Christmas.

[highlulu]

This is not about Comcast slowing down third party router traffic. The specific problem at hand is any internet provider can provider tiered internet, giving varying levels of performance for different websites. Since you love deregulation, there is absolutely nothing stopping them from giving fantastic speed for their own websites, while delivering crappy dialup modem speed to new startup companies, and forcing them to pay through the nose if they want otherwise.

The internet providers are currently nothing more than a bit pipe. They want to be more, and this will let them strong arm their way into becoming more. They won’t do any innovating themselves (the reasons why would be OBVIOUS to anyone who has tried using comcast customer service) but rather just destroy all the innovators. Imagine you are a small company, and your site suffers terrible performance because you being fucked up the ass by these shitty ISPs. You might have written the code flawlessly but the ISPs can fuck you over and make your page load times slow as hell. Well, good luck attracting any visitors to your site. Good luck attracting any VC money. Paying your devs, testers, ops, in addition to all your datacenter costs are expensive enough as it is, let alone having to pay some horrible ISP to not screw over your website when your customers try to log on. This is going to destroy small internet companies which provide tons of jobs and make the internets the amazing place it is.

There is a reason the vast majority of people in tech are opposed to this. I worked at a startup, and it got acquired. Awesome Cinderella story. Everyone from the startup is opposed to ISPs taking over. Coincidence? Hardly. We just understand what’s at stake here. Government needs to do its job and keep shitty corporations in check. If it had kept AIG and those other shitty wall street morons in check, then none of this would have happened. If SEC had a pair of balls, it would have kept Bernie Madoff in check. Etc etc. I do not trust government, but I trust corporations far less. All deregulation does is make the insanely rich even more insanely rich, at the expense of everyone else.

damn… so eloquently put.

[Dances_with_Ninjas]

Once again… if people will truly dissatisfied with their internet experience and felt that Comast (as an example) had not been improving their product in line with their competition, people would switch!

I’d like to point out that outside of major cities, there usually isn’t more than one broadband provider in a given area, so you’re stuck putting up with these shitty monopolies if you want to access the internet at all.

[Silver_Rain_007]

I’d like to point out that outside of major cities, there usually isn’t more than one broadband provider in a given area, so you’re stuck putting up with these shitty monopolies if you want to access the internet at all.

Come on… put that into the context I put it. I was saying that as the whole point is to deregulate so we can get rid of regional cable monopolies by introducing competition by reducing unnecessarily high costs as barriers to entry. The way you get rid of monopoly power is to introduce competitive firms against it, not to have government regulate it and further increase barriers to competition since new companies don’t have the resources or expertise to be in compliance with said regulatory requirements…

[Pertho]

Come on… put that into the context I put it. I was saying that as the whole point is to deregulate so we can get rid of regional cable monopolies by introducing competition by reducing unnecessarily high costs as barriers to entry. The way you get rid of monopoly power is to introduce competitive firms against it, not to have government regulate it and further increase barriers to competition since new companies don’t have the resources or expertise to be in compliance with said regulatory requirements…

No you fucking cumquat, he just put your hypothesis into context. There are already a shitload of places that have random blanket monopolies on both internet and home phone service and they all pretty much get shitty services. Now you are going to have to shop around for random regular services. Really the economy is better off with the communication companies unable to stop the pipes than if they get control because it makes an open space or 99.9999999999% of the public to make money with it. Online space is retail space that is not in the hands of real estate companies and we are better off for it.