[TriLUG] Internet Neutrality

Mon Sep 11 11:05:40 EDT 2017

I'm fine with regulating the municipally granted monopolies.  That's kind of part of the deal.  What I am scared of is putting that regulation in the hands of the federal government.  There are many governments, from the people who grant the municipal monopoly, to counties, to states.  Each of those governments can be shown by their neighbors as having screwed up, by simple comparison.  (i'm sure it isn't THAT simple, but work with me)  The fed is not one of those governments.  >From the perspective of a US citizen, there can only be one. 

I see the fed as centralized money just begging for corruption.  It's much harder to corrupt a municipality in the long term and easier to expose.  Also the damage caused by one corrupt or ill-advised, or ignorant bureaucrat is more confined and cheaper to fix when that bureaucrat only affects a million people, or a thousand. 

In most of my life I have found that solutions applied to the lowest level of the system where the solution is effective are the best places to apply a solution.  It's much better to put automation at a low level where the resources are cheap than to try to run that solution from the top.  Also, the low level optimizations run even when the high level of the system is off line or paying attention to something critical. 

If the CATV provider is too monolithic to take direction at the municipal level, perhaps it is time to move your monopoly to a different provider? 

 Tadd

On Sep 11, 2017, at 10:42 AM, Bill Trautman via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org> wrote:

To pile on.... Many of these providers that 'we' have got their position
in the market by being allowed to create a regulated monopoly. Having
them now say we don't want regulation is the height of hypocrisy. There
are many services that would not exist if the existing monopoly based
providers had their way. Their concern is using that monopoly position to
extract as much cash from you and me as they can.

On Mon, Sep 11, 2017 at 10:36 AM, Brian via TriLUG <trilug at trilug.org>
wrote:

On 09/08/2017 07:37 PM, Tadd Torborg wrote:

I’m grateful that we have it here in the big city.

Respectfully, this sounds a bit like the "I've got mine" mentality. /I/
don't live in a big city, and fortunately DOCSIS (internet over CATV) is
available. My parents live in an area where DOCSIS is not, and likely
never will be, available, but DSL is feasible. If it weren't for federal
regulation, people that live in yet-more-rural areas would still be lacking
in electricity and telephone service because it isn't profitable to serve
them.

Aside: I've heard satellite internet mentioned a number of times as a
competitive technology to terrestrial services. With round-trip times that
physically can never be shorter than ~250 ms, it really isn't. If you
can't do VoIP over a particular mechanism, it's not a competitor.

> Personally I’m not so worried about [...]

It doesn't matter whether it's concern for popular video streaming or
access to back issues of 2600 magazine. The point of net neutrality is to
ensure that ISPs can't hinder, or boost, access to /anything/ for /anyone/
for /any reason/.

I’d prefer to look for competition and technology to fix this than to
grant power over our data to some agency that we don’t appear to have a
say in regulating.

Competition and technology would be the ideal way to fix this, but
existing regulations and monopolies have choked off both. "Hey, you have
this great idea for a land-based way of delivering terabit internet service
to folks over fish tank air hose? That's awesome! Oh, you want to put
your air hoses on our telephone poles? Now wait just a minute there,
bub..." This is precisely the thing that has interfered with the
deployment of competing services such as Google Fiber and municipal
broadband.

-B
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