Yes.

And it isnt about the speed. Its the content available to you at all.

Everything you see has already been precensored now.

You dont even know what you arent seeing...including on reddit.

Yes. Smaller, independent websites will now be charged out of existence and the internet will further consolidate.

The current chairman of the FCC is a corporate shill who previously worked for Verizon, and he literally joked about being a puppet. Tell your friends.

Thats a claim.

It could happen or not happen but you haven't provided any explanation or evidence one way or the other.

It should be interesting that all the largest internet companies were FOR net neutrality laws, that net neutrality laws are a new phenomenon that the free internet grew up without, and that net neutrality gives the government more control over the internet.

None of this means your wrong necessarily, but the issue is definitely not black and white.

Lets clarify a bit.

1) the largest ''content producing'' internet companies are for net neutrality laws, because it gives the most consumers access to their material. the ISPs, internet service providers, are the ones against net neutrality, because they want to be able to control consumer access to content.

2)net neutrality has existed since the 80s. the Title II regulations were put in place in 2015, and merely forced the telecoms to adhere to the rules created in the 80s.

3) the title II regulations, no repealed, gave the FCC the ability to force the telecoms to follow the existing laws. the government was successfully lobbied by the telecoms, and those regulations were repealed. the telecoms now have direct control over your content. the government never did.

hope that helps.

net neutrality has existed since the 80s

Common carrier laws and regulations were around in the 80's... sure... but that isn't net neutrality. Net Neutrality is when common carrier laws are applied to the internet... which didn't happen til 2015.

hope that helps.

I understand your side of the argument just fine. I was pointing out that there is another side to the issue that people should consider.

the subject is discussed at length in my diatribe below. killing net neutrality eliminates the ability of content producers to exist in a free market. it's sad, because the internet was the only truly free market to this point- starting a brick and mortar store only lets you serve a local region, and you have to vastly expand before reaching farther. a website can reach the whole world at once, or it least it could before the ISPs got their way.

There's no evidence that ISPs will block content. They didn't block content the whole time since the internet was created til 2015 when it was determined to be a common carrier.

they absolutely did, to the tune of multiple lawsuits spanning 2002 to 2009. these companies are well known for doing this stuff.

Evidence for this?

so, this is a yes and no thing. Technically, the FCC voted in december to repeal the enforceable net neutrality laws. The actual repeal action was to take place in april after a notice of proposed rulemaking in february. However! Ajit Pai has, for some reason, failed to enact the repeal in the given timeframe.

As of right now, it is believed that this delay is to buy time to create a permanent legal solution that hands power to the ISPs. The reason for this is because the latest solution for the elimination of net neutrality is for municipalities to create their own local internet services with tax dollars. as expected, these tend to be both more powerful than what the telecoms are offering, as well as cheaper, because they arent being operated for profit. the difference is staggering.

Anyway, the telecoms are working with ajit pai to try and develop a blanket legality that would prevent state law from interfering with their newly found control, and further block municipalities from creating their own internet services.

Im gonna throw out a quick 411 on this subject, just so anyone coming in who doesnt understand the nuts and bolts can follow more efficiently.

SO! The quick and dirty version: Back in the 80s, the telecoms got angry that the first dialup modems were taking up the available lines. they tried to jack up prices for people accessing BBS/early internet, but got slapped down by the FCC, who modified existing rules that were established in the 30s regarding the federal phone regs, forcing telecoms to treat all customers equally. this is considered the birth of net neutrality.

In the 90s, the government commissioned the existing telecoms to create a national fiberoptic network that would support the future of data transmission. The telecoms took billions of taxpayer dollars, along with various taxbreaks, over the next decade and a half, and never produced anything. when their feet were held to the fire in 1998 and again in 2004, they justified their actions saying that first DSL and then cable internet were more than adequate to meet consumer needs without building the fiberoptic network they promised. The national fiberoptic network plans were eventually dropped in 2014, with no action taken by the telecoms and over 400 billion in taxpayer dollars spent.

As the internet grew in popularity and momentum in the 2000s, various telecoms made attempts to try and bend or even break the existing net neutrality regulations, usually settling out of court after the fact. The biggest guilty parties were comcast, verizon, and at&t, who were all caught throttling their customer connections to try and force them to either change services, websites, or even buy new hardware. the vast majority of these lawsuits settled out of court.

2014 was a big year for Net Neutrality, and specifically associated lawsuits, and not all were telecom losses. One lawsuit in particular stood as a red flag to the industry. After the city of Chattanooga, tenn. decided to create their own municipal internet, the city of Nashville decided that they would follow suit. Nashville quickly found itself in court against At&t and Verizon, who made the argument that since their proprietary equipment was attached to the city telephone poles, the city should not be allowed to access those poles without their permission, even for reasons unrelated to telecom hardware. Somehow, Nashville lost this lawsuit, and subsequently control over their utility poles. similar suits quickly followed in colorado and california with wins for the telecoms, starting to tip the scales in their favor.

In response, in 2015, the chairman of the FCC (tom wheeler at the time) used the plethora of lawsuits involving the telecoms to completely alter the nature of the internet as it pertains to billing. He reclassified internet service as a utility, which forced the telecoms to fall back under the same laws that originally enforced net neutrality in the 1980s, This was known as the Title II restructuring, and essentially gave the FCC the ability to regulate the telecoms directly.

When Trump took office in 2017, he appointed Ajit Pai, former verizon lawyer and lobbyist, to the position of FCC chairman. Pai quickly announced that he would be repealing the Title II reclassification, and while he followed federal procedure to the letter, he ignored the millions of responses the FCC received resisting the idea. His policy passed in december of last year.

Net Neutrality previously guaranteed that every person connected to the internet was entitled to the same service- ie, a man in new york and another in LA can connect to a website in dallas, and will see the exact same data at the exact same speed, despite all three areas using different service providers. There are 3 (three) potential changes from the elimination of net neutrality. first, your ISP can now choose to block content they dislike. For example, maybe you like going to MSNBC for your news, but your ISP prefers CNN. the former may load more slowly for you, or may not load at all, or may just immediately load CNN instead. AT&T has already been found guilty of this in multiple cases since 2007. Second, they can now charge you to access different sites. While that may not seem too different from now, it actually is. imagine paying 70$ for your internet connection, then being told its another 15$ to be able to access netflix. even worse, netflix is also told it will cost them 15$ to allow you to connect. the ISP has made 100$, and you had to spend almost as much because you still have to pay your netflix subscription on top of the 85$ you spent to access it. Change number 3 involves paid prioritization, which again sounds similar to what currently exists (pay for bandwidth) and again, isnt at all. So where we see this happening is usually with carriers offering package deal connections. for example, if you currently connect via AT&T through your phone, streaming direct TV will cost you nothing and gives you faster playback than if you attempt to stream netflix. under net neutrality, they should both play at the same rate, but now one has paid to take priority over the other, forcing the latter to send over a longer period of time. It impacts the consumer by once again forcing a change in their preferred service as their original choice may be more time consuming or fail to function as well.

Guys, hopefully this gets you up to speed on all this stuff. its pretty serious and the loss of net neutrality will set the USA back decades, if not more. the is a real, bonifide conspiracy FACT that ALL of us should be well versed in and united for.

Sadly, our efforts to fight the telecoms, which really started back in 2014, have all been dashed. 2017 saw a HUGE grassroots effort to save net neutrality, with millions of people contacting the fcc directly to share their feelings on the subject. Ajit pai ltierally threw out the data, claiming it had been corrupted by bots, and passed his own agenda.

The current battle is being fought in a slightly different way. Originally, it was hoped that congress could pass a law that would force the FCC to restore net neutrality, but the cause seems to be divided directly on party lines, with republicans supporting the ISPs. Incidentally, they have all taken thousands of dollars in donations in return for betraying their constituents. The names and numbers can be found on reddit.

As a result, there are currently three areas of focus. States are trying to pass their own net neutrality laws that reject the FCC policy. So far, 3 have succeeded, but it is being contested by the ISPs. The second area is being fought at the municipal level, with ISPs trying to claim ownership of city poles. The final area is focused on washington, the FCC, congress, and the lobbyists. The FCC in conjunction with congressional republicans and the executive office, is trying to create hard laws "restoring internet freedom". These are buzzwords to get people to back handing power directly to the telecoms. This policy, at a federal level, would block states from forming their own laws, and stop cities from comtrolling their own internet, forcing both to do business with ISPs, while limiting the creation of new competition.

If you guys really want to fight this thing, write to your congressman and let him know youre voting him out of office in november if he refuses to support the peoples interests in this cause. Its the only remaining solution at this point.

Net Neutrality is/was such a farce and Trojan Horse. Notice how all the Companies for it, never mention removing the regulations on the books making it near impossible for new competition to come onto the scene. Nope, not a peep.

We need competition in the Markets, not more red tape and regulations at the hands of the Government (who we all know are colluding with said Corporations).

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. We live in such an ass backwards world. SMH.

Actually, net neutrality was what allowed competition in the markets. If you created a better version of google, it had to be given the same accessability for consumers as the existing google. if yours was better, you would eventually take the lead in the market. With net neutrality repealed, the content producing companies are now forced to pay the ISPs for consumer accessability. this basically means the guy with the deepest pockets will be the one that corners the markets. it also means that startup websites can no longer succeed without massive financial backing to help drive consumer access.

Net neutrality was the protection that gave us the free market of the internet.

I'm not talking about website competition, I'm talking about ISP competition. If one ISP throttles (or censors), you leave that company, for another that won't, which forces the previous company to change practices or go out of business. That's a Free Market, and something we do not have, but, desperately need.

the ISPs have been against net neutrality from the start, because they want to maximize revenue. the big problem there is that they have successfully lobbied the FCC to further deregulate them so that they can monopolize regions and quash competition. you are absolutely right in that its a huge problem. however, for the time being it seems like municipal internet may end up being the solution. paid for with tax dollars, operated at a fraction of the cost of the ISPs, and literally 10 times as fast. look up info about Chattanooga and similar municipal broadband projects.

OH! also, lest i forget, AT&T and Verizon are currently being sued for collusion because they intentionally make it hard to leave for better service. so yeah, this is sort of being addressed.

We actually dont. As i mentioned above, america has been left far behind the rest of the world. sadly, this extends far beyond internet service. america has tumbled down the charts in everything from quality of life to life expectancy. We sold our country to big business for literally nothing in return, but the rest of the world is doing a lot better. Its important to remember this, and recognize that we are only in a glass bubble of our own making, and despite what our politicians tell us, we COULD have it better.

Yes, the Internet as we knew it is dead. No more Cyber Wild Wild West, the frontier is closed and the NSA knows if you're a dog.

Net Neutrality threads make my eyes bleed because it's always the same ill-defined vacuous hypothetical talking points. Nobody talks about what is the End Game.

Here is the End Game. This is what the Evil Demon-possessed Telecom Executives want in the long run.

Gutting Net Neutrality isn't just a Wall St conspiracy for Verizon (STORMBREW) or AT&T (BLARNEY) to scam a few more percentage points in revenue by forcing the most popular Internet information service providers, such as Youtube or Netflix or Reddit pay more to the telecos for access to the tiered backbone fast lane.

While it's horrible that these Internet fast lanes will become impossible barriers to entry, and convert Google and Apple and Facebook etc into defacto monopolies, since only they are big enough to be able to afford ATTVRZN's fast lane, and forever lock out any smaller competitors from leap frogging them. I hope you like Youtube as it is, because you're going to be stuck with it for the next 50 years.

Beheading Net Neutrality goes way beyond freezing Youtube as it is today and jacking up Google's transit fees.

The Telco's nasty, soul sucking shekel grubbing empty Wall St suits want to destroy the one thing about the Internet that makes them dinosaurs.

The Telcos want to convert the Internet away from ala carte price models. Like cable TV.

Every website will be like a cable TV channel. Want to surf Wikipedia? Sorry, you need to upgrade to a package that includes it. Want to watch old shows on Youtube? Sorry, those videoes have been locked away in the Disney Vault, but next year you will be able to purchase access during a one month limited time window, and it'll only cost you 3x what you paid for it last time 2 years ago.

Telcos are zombies for maximizing revenue while doing as little as possible to benefit Ye Olde Consumer.

Remember when Steve Jobs told AT&T execs they were "dumb orifices" when he was launching iPhone?

As long as the telcos can't price discriminate, they will actively lobby and scheme and backstab to destroy the Internet, so they can charge more for all of your data going through their dumb pipes.

But worst of all, where the fuck is Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft et al in fighting back against the telcos like they used to do 10 years ago? Have the Silicon Valley Oligarchs gone Galt?

I think Silicon Valley suddenly becoming pussies about defending the Internet is due to Snowden.

Nobody fucking trusts one word from any Internet Billionaire's lying pie hole no more. Everybody knows those CEOs were selling their data all along.

When's the last time you even saw Larry Page or Sergei Brin? Googke doesn't give a shit about the Internet, because they locked down their Fiefdom and are now too busy coding AI for the Pentagon's drone "kill boxes" and trying to manipulate information for population scale mind control to forcibly promote insane and disgusting extreme Leftist ideologies.

Where's Bill Gates to speak for the Internet like the Lorax for the trees? Bill doesn't give a shit, he got his half of the pie locked down, and he's too busy lost in vanity virtue signal vaporware like extincting all mosquitos to be bothered to make a strong public stance for Net Neutrality.

And Bezos is too busy building AWS for CIA and printing toilet paper over at WaPo to give a shit about Net Neutrality.

Don't count on Zucc either. Zucc is too busy defending himself from hysterical mobs who're accusing him of being a Russian Bot who is guilty of making Trump win. Zucc is on the hot seat, so don't count on him.

Which leaves Tim Cook. He doesn't give a shit about Net Netrality because Apple has enough cash laundered away in Bermuda to buy out every telecom on Earth, so Tim ain't worried about fast lanes for Apple services.

As you can see, there is nobody big and powerful enough to defend Net Neutrality, because they've all been neutralized.

Where do we go from here?

No help is coming.

Therefore there is only one solution: we to destroy the entire Internet.

See, that's not really the endgame at all. Lemme raise your mood a bit. First of all, while america has traditionally led the internet for its creation and support, it isnt called the ''world wide web'' for nothing.

America is actually an outlier in its internet operation, focused entirely on maximizing ISP returns for minimum infrastructure investment. in short, we have fallen MASSIVELY behind the rest of the world. Generally, other firstworld nations see the internet as the herald of the future, and treat access like a necessity, focusing on providing the highest speeds for the lowest costs. currently, btw, south korea leads the charge, with speeds about 80 times faster than the current legal minimums of the USA. to put this in context, the FCC just reduced speed requirements down to 3 mb/s for rural areas, and 10mb for urban. the average outside the USA is 2GB/s, and even the vastly restrictive china has made 1 gb/s widely available. south korea leads with speeds above 10gb/s .

Anyway, im getting off topic. The point is: our internet isnt in a vacuum. the rest of the world continues to advance while our ISPs treat us like shit and drain us for cash. we dont have to kill the internet. we just need to change the way we access it. creating local municipal broadband programs is one solution that bypasses the ISPs entirely- which is why they hate it so much. Creating state laws that enforce net neutrality accomplishes the same thing. This isnt a hopeless or lost cause. we CAN win this, and bit by bit, its happening. The big key is to get people to speak out for it in a way that the audiences eyes have glazed over.

I hate to break it to you, but a few youtube searches will show you speeches from most of the guys you mentioned about why net neutrality is important. the problem isnt them- its the audience. Trying to explain to your average plumber from michigan why his internet access is important is a really difficult task, especially when the guy he is voting for uses buzz words like ''restoring internet freedom'' (freedom, fuck yeah, must be awesome). The only way to win this battle is to educate people. make them aware of just how badly they are being screwed, and encouraging them to fight the best way they can- throwing out their senators and representatives in favor of ones that support an open internet.

Ive supported the NN movement since 2014. Its been painful to watch it fall, but i still hope that something positive comes out of it. Its all about getting the info out there and dispelling misconceptions.

Sadly, our efforts to fight the telecoms, which really started back in 2014, have all been dashed. 2017 saw a HUGE grassroots effort to save net neutrality, with millions of people contacting the fcc directly to share their feelings on the subject. Ajit pai ltierally threw out the data, claiming it had been corrupted by bots, and passed his own agenda.

The current battle is being fought in a slightly different way. Originally, it was hoped that congress could pass a law that would force the FCC to restore net neutrality, but the cause seems to be divided directly on party lines, with republicans supporting the ISPs. Incidentally, they have all taken thousands of dollars in donations in return for betraying their constituents. The names and numbers can be found on reddit.

As a result, there are currently three areas of focus. States are trying to pass their own net neutrality laws that reject the FCC policy. So far, 3 have succeeded, but it is being contested by the ISPs. The second area is being fought at the municipal level, with ISPs trying to claim ownership of city poles. The final area is focused on washington, the FCC, congress, and the lobbyists. The FCC in conjunction with congressional republicans and the executive office, is trying to create hard laws "restoring internet freedom". These are buzzwords to get people to back handing power directly to the telecoms. This policy, at a federal level, would block states from forming their own laws, and stop cities from comtrolling their own internet, forcing both to do business with ISPs, while limiting the creation of new competition.

If you guys really want to fight this thing, write to your congressman and let him know youre voting him out of office in november if he refuses to support the peoples interests in this cause. Its the only remaining solution at this point.