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FCC Announces Plans To Repeal Net Neutrality


homersapien

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3 minutes ago, AU64 said:

I understand your view but I've witnessed far to many instance where government efforts to regulate a market place to "protect the consumer" has resulted in over-promise and under deliver. ....and you can go back to ATT and black dial telephones as a prime example...where government control stifled innovation and kept costs high...right up to the Affordable Care Act that requires people to buy insurance coverage they don't want or don't need...and now can't afford.

Thing is, the government was indeed trying to keep their touch as light as possible here, then their hand was forced.

3 minutes ago, AU64 said:

This "net neutrality" concept has only been in effect a couple years so nobody can say that it did anything except provide a bunch of high paying federal jobs and I 've heard the scare stories but guess I don't believe them.

Actually it's been in effect as long as the internet has existed. When the ISPs gained the ability to abuse the market is when the government was forced to step in. 

3 minutes ago, AU64 said:

Government's control of prices and access will only limit options or innovation....and a truism that's I've witnessed over the years is that you get what you pay for and people don't deliberately sell a product below cost. I'm still in favor of letting the marketplace decide. 

I'm not happy with handing control of the net over to the ISPs. I know it's a shibboleth among people like you, but sometimes things need to be regulated. Not regulating will have the opposite effect of your desires. 

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8 minutes ago, homersapien said:

Exhibit A.   :no:

Thanks for your usual meaningful contributions to this discussion....could not have done it without you. 

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2 hours ago, AU64 said:

Thanks for your usual meaningful contributions to this discussion....could not have done it without you. 

Actually you were "doing it" very well on your own.

Another 'slug for salt'.  ;D  

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On 12/16/2017 at 8:10 AM, AU64 said:

Government's control of prices and access will only limit options or innovation....and a truism that's I've witnessed over the years is that you get what you pay for and people don't deliberately sell a product below cost. I'm still in favor of letting the marketplace decide. 

In this case, the marketplace will no longer be able to pick winners and losers, the cable companies will.  Currently, thanks to net neutrality rules, people are free to choose which services on the internet works best for them (Netflix, Hulu, etc) BECAUSE everyone is on the same playing field when it comes to speeds.

Now, if cable companies are allowed to charge more of those companies to have better access to speed, is that really the open market choosing who has the best product or is that the corporation choosing for the consumer?

A large reason cable television networks like ESPN are hemorrhaging money is because of internet streaming services, making current traditional cable packages obsolete.  Think that won't change?  If not, you're kidding yourself.

All repealing net neutrality has done is line the profit margins of ISPs at the detriment of the consumer and free market.  Innovation on the web is currently coming because everyone is level.  Truly, the best products are winning out, but that is now threatened thanks little choice in ISP providers and the desire to yield higher dividends for a few shareholdets.

We now live in a world where the internet isn't so much a luxury as it is a necessity.  That needs to be protected.

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On 12/16/2017 at 8:10 AM, AU64 said:

This "net neutrality" concept has only been in effect a couple years so nobody can say that it did anything except provide a bunch of high paying federal jobs and I 've heard the scare stories but guess I don't believe them.

"Net neutrality" as a term has only been around for that long, but the concept has been around since the beginnings of the internet.  It's how the internet flourished and became the massive technological breakthrough, and powerful informational and economic engine it has become.  Effing around with it to the benefit of a handful of ISPs will only hinder that.

 

On 12/16/2017 at 8:10 AM, AU64 said:

Government's control of prices and access will only limit options or innovation....and a truism that's I've witnessed over the years is that you get what you pay for and people don't deliberately sell a product below cost. I'm still in favor of letting the marketplace decide. 

No one in gov't is controlling prices or access.  In fact, net neutrality is trying to prevent such a situation from happening - to prevent practical monopolies from controlling access and charging more or less depending on what benefits them.  None of them are selling this below cost - broadband internet providers are extremely profitable, partly because most of them operate in areas where they are the only practical option available (most communities only have one cable provider and DSL and other broadband options aren't nearly as fast as cable internet).

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The regulations are too new to have done much in the way of price or access impact.  In our area at least local government is the hindrance through the practice of granting franchises which limit competition. For decades various agencies regulated rates to "protect" the consumer....and kept them high...and limited innovation and access. Consumers do far better in deregulated markets...and innovators provide more options.

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8 hours ago, Brad_ATX said:

In this case, the marketplace will no longer be able to pick winners and losers, the cable companies will.  Currently, thanks to net neutrality rules, people are free to choose which services on the internet works best for them (Netflix, Hulu, etc) BECAUSE everyone is on the same playing field when it comes to speeds.

Now, if cable companies are allowed to charge more of those companies to have better access to speed, is that really the open market choosing who has the best product or is that the corporation choosing for the consumer?

A large reason cable television networks like ESPN are hemorrhaging money is because of internet streaming services, making current traditional cable packages obsolete.  Think that won't change?  If not, you're kidding yourself.

All repealing net neutrality has done is line the profit margins of ISPs at the detriment of the consumer and free market.  Innovation on the web is currently coming because everyone is level.  Truly, the best products are winning out, but that is now threatened thanks little choice in ISP providers and the desire to yield higher dividends for a few shareholdets.

We now live in a world where the internet isn't so much a luxury as it is a necessity.  That needs to be protected.

You don't think the market place will respond to this change?  If Comcast decides to restrict access or charge customers more, a competitor will enter the market to counter Comcast.  What they do does not happen in a bubble unless they have a government protected monopoly.  If the government  stays out the market will punish abuse.  This is a proven fact throughout history. I knew Net Neutrality was bad idea when people used it as a reason to go after T-Mobile's Binge On service.  They wanted to eliminate a very consumer friendly offering.  

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8 hours ago, Brad_ATX said:

We now live in a world where the internet isn't so much a luxury as it is a necessity.  That needs to be protected.

Sorry Brad but I worked for Southern Bell when I first got out of grad school at AU and saw what "protecting" the consumer was like. ...that was in Center Point.   We had 4 party and 8 party phone service, could take a month or longer to get phone service in newly developing areas, color telephones (if you didn't like black) cost an extra dollar per month forever, and of course you could also rent a curly phone cord for another dollar per month.....and you could not buy your own telephone....just rented one from the phone company.  If I recall,  dialing downtown Birmingham had an extra charge.....all of this and  much more thanks to the state Commission that was in place to protect the consumer.

Please protect me from government agencies and people of good intent who are trying to protect me against my will.  Meanwhile, I'm thinking that people who perhaps did not live through the era of "consumer protections" just don't know or understand what they are asking for. 

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47 minutes ago, AU64 said:

The regulations are too new to have done much in the way of price or access impact.  In our area at least local government is the hindrance through the practice of granting franchises which limit competition. For decades various agencies regulated rates to "protect" the consumer....and kept them high...and limited innovation and access. Consumers do far better in deregulated markets...and innovators provide more options.

Then deal with your local government's issues rather than making broad blanket statements about any and all government regulations.  As with most things, categorically rejecting something because it's "government" or "regulation" is short sighted.  This is one of the few regulations that actually had the impact of keeping competition alive and not benefiting a few powerful ISPs over everyone else, or permitting already entrenched internet companies and sites who can potentially pay for "fast lanes" and other prioritizing of their traffic over newer competitors.  We know this because this is how the internet had operated since its inception, until Comcast and others started to do things like shakedown Netflix for more money and indicate plans to have "tiers" of service for various websites and services, which resulted in the FCC codifying rules about treating all traffic equally and so on.

The thing that is hurting consumers in this realm more than anything the government is doing is the defacto market monopolies the cable companies engage in.  They mostly refuse to overlap with each other, especially in more rural communities but even in many cities such that your options for TV/internet are limited to one cable provider and a satellite provider such as DirecTV or if you're lucky, AT&T Uverse.  But in most areas it's satellite or cable.  And thus internet is either cable or DSL or satellite.  But cable is the only one capable of speeds most people need and want.  DSL and satellite might crack 6Mbps downloads while cable will give you anywhere from 30 Mbps to 100 Mbps or faster.  As a result, over 50% of the country only has one provider in their area.  That is the "free market" at work.  Cable companies would rather not compete with one another if they don't have to so they can keep prices high.  

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10 minutes ago, Howard Roark said:

You don't think the market place will respond to this change?  If Comcast decides to restrict access or charge customers more, a competitor will enter the market to counter Comcast.  What they do does not happen in a bubble unless they have a government protected monopoly.  If the government  stays out the market will punish abuse.  This is a proven fact throughout history. I knew Net Neutrality was bad idea when people used it as a reason to go after T-Mobile's Binge On service.  They wanted to eliminate a very consumer friendly offering.  

If this were true, over half the country wouldn't only have one cable provider in their area.  Cable companies have been gouging customers for years but most can't do much about it.  They could get TV from a satellite provider maybe, but they still have to get internet through the cable company unless they want to go back to circa 2005 internet speeds.

 

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When I lived in Nashville, a market that had over 500,000 people in the city limits and 1.3 million in the metro area - a city which didn't have multiple layers of gov't bureaucracy since they merged city and county government decades ago to improve efficiently and eliminate multiple overlapping or redundant layers of gov't, almost the entire city of Nashville had one cable provider:  Comcast.  If you lived in some of the outlying suburbs you also had one provider:  Charter.  Less than 5% of the town lived in a neighborhood on the edge where they could choose between the two providers.  

Montgomery is one of the few places with two providers:  WOW and Charter.  But drive 10 minutes out of town to Prattville or Wetumpka and you're back to one provider - Charter (formerly Brighthouse).  The only internet option out there other than Brighthouse/Charter is HughesNET (satellite internet) which might hit 3 or 4 Mbps and AT&T DSL which might hit 6 Mbps.  Good luck running all your connected devices on that while watching Netflix or Hulu or trying to "cut the cord" and use SlingTV or PlayStation VUE.

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1 minute ago, TitanTiger said:

Then deal with your local government's issues rather than making broad blanket statements about any and all government regulations.  As with most things, categorically rejecting something because it's "government" or "regulation" is short sighted.  This is one of the few regulations that actually had the impact of keeping competition alive and not benefiting a few powerful ISPs over everyone else, or permitting already entrenched internet companies and sites who can potentially pay for "fast lanes" and other prioritizing of their traffic over newer competitors.  We know this because this is how the internet had operated since its inception, until Comcast and others started to do things like shakedown Netflix for more money and indicate plans to have "tiers" of service for various websites and services, which resulted in the FCC codifying rules about treating all traffic equally and so on.

The thing that is hurting consumers in this realm more than anything the government is doing is the defacto market monopolies the cable companies engage in.  They mostly refuse to overlap with each other, especially in more rural communities but even in many cities such that your options for TV/internet are limited to one cable provider and a satellite provider such as DirecTV or if you're lucky, AT&T Uverse.  But in most areas it's satellite or cable.  And thus internet is either cable or DSL or satellite.  But cable is the only one capable of speeds most people need and want.  DSL and satellite might crack 6Mbps downloads while cable will give you anywhere from 30 Mbps to 100 Mbps or faster.  As a result, over 50% of the country only has one provider in their area.  That is the "free market" at work.  Cable companies would rather not compete with one another if they don't have to so they can keep prices high.  

Prices are high because consumers will pay the price and to a great extent, the cable companies are mostly just the pipelines.....ESPN and SEC channel are a substantial portion of my total bill each month....and while I grant that those are where my eyeballs spend the most time, it would be nice not to have to pay even a modest fee for the other stuff.  My observation of government regulations over the years is that no matter at what level they occur (local, state or national) regulations have a tendency to freeze technology and service levels and make it difficult for any innovation to take place.    I don't for a minute buy the idea that somehow the federal government is going to do anything via net neutrality to help those 50% of the country that has only one provider......and mostly if the local and state governments quit messing with it, the market place will solve that problem.  JMO.

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14 minutes ago, AU64 said:

Prices are high because consumers will pay the price and to a great extent,

This is simply not true.  When you compare prices in areas that have one provider vs those who have multiple ones you see the difference.  Before broadband internet became prevalent (dial up days, early days where speeds of 3 Mbps were considered fast), we used DirecTV for television and then had various dialup providers and then AT&T DSL for internet.  Why?  Because Comcast's cable rates were insane.  Even though satellite isn't cheap, even at full price after all the promos ended, it was cheaper than Comcast.  And that's because Comcast was the only cable provider in the area, period.  They didn't have to compete against Time Warner Cable, or Charter, or Knology/WOW.  You basically had to take it or leave it.

I was shocked at how different it was moving down to Montgomery with WOW and Charter having to go at it in almost every neighborhood.  We fully intended to stay with DirecTV but found that competing for customers in this area made both cable providers offer MUCH more competitive pricing.  Sometimes Dish or DirecTV had better promo offers but they were always significantly more expensive once the promos ran out.

Prices are high because consumers mostly don't have any other options to switch to.  When a company knows you have to take it or leave it, they don't have to budge much.

 

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the cable companies are mostly just the pipelines.....ESPN and SEC channel are a substantial portion of my total bill each month....and while I grant that those are where my eyeballs spend the most time, it would be nice not to have to pay even a modest fee for the other stuff.

And yet, magically that "substantial portion" of your bill manages to be significantly less expensive to you the end consumer when you have multiple cable and high speed internet providers in your area to choose from.

 

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My observation of government regulations over the years is that no matter at what level they occur (local, state or national) regulations have a tendency to freeze technology and service levels and make it difficult for any innovation to take place.   

And my observation is that while that can be true and sometimes/often is true, people who throw the baby out with the bathwater are guilty of lazy thinking.  Not every regulation is created equal.

 

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I don't for a minute buy the idea that somehow the federal government is going to do anything via net neutrality to help those 50% of the country that has only one provider......and mostly if the local and state governments quit messing with it, the market place will solve that problem.  JMO.

You're confusing categories.  No one argued that net neutrality is going to end the defacto monopoly situation in most areas.  But what it would do is prevent those monopolies from gaining even more power than they already have.  It's one thing if you live in an area with two or more providers and one of them started monkeying around with traffic.  If Charter starts throttling Netflix or charging you more for that tier of service to perhaps give an advantage their own streaming offerings, WOW and AT&T Uverse can compete against that by advertising zero throttling or tiers.  But if you have one high speed ISP and they do that, well, sucks to be you.  

The free market is a good thing, don't get me wrong.  But it's not God.  It's not some all knowing, all wise, magically always-right thing.  Many times, if not most, it is an effective mechanism for consumers.  But it's not in every single situation.  Or at least it isn't without some boundaries.

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I guess we are mostly talking philosophy and experience.   

I'm just saying that from my observations over my years in business and as a consumer,  that these kind of regulation are more hurtful than helpful and are damned near impossible to get rid of even when people realize the benefits are not being achieved.  The bureaucracies become entrenched.....and of course it is very difficult to quantify the lost opportunities due to restrictive regulations versus the perceived benefits.

To me it's a matter of whether a concept that has mostly failed will fail again....or a concept that has rarely benefited consumers will actually do so this time....against the odds.   I'm thinking...not. 

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7 minutes ago, AU64 said:

I guess we are mostly talking philosophy and experience.   

I'm just saying that from my observations over my years in business and as a consumer,  that these kind of regulation are more hurtful than helpful and are damned near impossible to get rid of even when people realize the benefits are not being achieved.  The bureaucracies become entrenched.....and of course it is very difficult to quantify the lost opportunities due to restrictive regulations versus the perceived benefits.

To me it's a matter of whether a concept that has mostly failed will fail again....or a concept that has rarely benefited consumers will actually do so this time....against the odds.   I'm thinking...not. 

I don't think philosophy and experience should be separated.  One informs the other, or at least they can and should.

It's fine to have a general rule of thumb, but one must also have the ability to see where that rule falters and make adjustments.  We have rules of our house for our children, but I don't raise my children sticking to a list of hard rules with no regard to experience on the ground - the specifics of a given situation and confluence of circumstances.  Sometimes the rule has to be suspended or altered to work with the nuances of what has actually happened and why.  Or if I see that a rule is causing unintended negative consequences (it's not producing the results I meant for it to in some situations), then as a mature, responsible adult I should take in these experiential datapoints and make adjustments accordingly.

I don't see being generally "anti-regulation" as any different.  Let your first inclination be to regard more regulation with reluctance, but have the ability to adjust, suspend, relax, etc that view when data on the ground tells you that it might not be the best approach in a specific scenario.

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1 hour ago, Howard Roark said:

You don't think the market place will respond to this change?  If Comcast decides to restrict access or charge customers more, a competitor will enter the market to counter Comcast.  What they do does not happen in a bubble unless they have a government protected monopoly.  If the government  stays out the market will punish abuse.  This is a proven fact throughout history. I knew Net Neutrality was bad idea when people used it as a reason to go after T-Mobile's Binge On service.  They wanted to eliminate a very consumer friendly offering.  

It's not that simple.  In most cities, there are limitations to how many cable providers are allowed to use the current infrastructure.  If I remember correctly, just a few years ago in Auburn there was a massive to-do so that a second option was finally available to customers.

Also, the T-Mobile thing is very different as it's more about data usage and not an ISP carrier.  Two different things.

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1 hour ago, AU64 said:

Sorry Brad but I worked for Southern Bell when I first got out of grad school at AU and saw what "protecting" the consumer was like. ...that was in Center Point.   We had 4 party and 8 party phone service, could take a month or longer to get phone service in newly developing areas, color telephones (if you didn't like black) cost an extra dollar per month forever, and of course you could also rent a curly phone cord for another dollar per month.....and you could not buy your own telephone....just rented one from the phone company.  If I recall,  dialing downtown Birmingham had an extra charge.....all of this and  much more thanks to the state Commission that was in place to protect the consumer.

Please protect me from government agencies and people of good intent who are trying to protect me against my will.  Meanwhile, I'm thinking that people who perhaps did not live through the era of "consumer protections" just don't know or understand what they are asking for. 

No offense intended here, but that is a very different situation than the issue of net neutrality.  All net neutrality basically means is that the cable companies don't get to pick winners and losers on the web, consumers do.  It seems as if you're letting one experience from 30-40 years ago inform you on a modern problem that bears no resemblance.

Not saying experience is bad mind you.  But this example doesn't show how repealing new neutrality rules would benefit the customer in any way.  The internet, innovations that have come with it, and its permeation into our lives needs to be better understood and respected by the current admin, which I think is tough considering it's been widely reported that POTUS doesn't even use simple things like email.

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2 hours ago, AU64 said:

The regulations are too new to have done much in the way of price or access impact.  In our area at least local government is the hindrance through the practice of granting franchises which limit competition. For decades various agencies regulated rates to "protect" the consumer....and kept them high...and limited innovation and access. Consumers do far better in deregulated markets...and innovators provide more options.

You really don't understand this. :no:

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1 hour ago, TitanTiger said:

The free market is a good thing, don't get me wrong.  But it's not God.  It's not some all knowing, all wise, magically always-right thing.  Many times, if not most, it is an effective mechanism for consumers.  But it's not in every single situation.  Or at least it isn't without some boundaries.

 

In fact, the issue of Net Neutrality is one of the best illustrations of that point that there is.

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27 minutes ago, Brad_ATX said:

No offense intended here, but that is a very different situation than the issue of net neutrality.  All net neutrality basically means is that the cable companies don't get to pick winners and losers on the web, consumers do.  It seems as if you're letting one experience from 30-40 years ago inform you on a modern problem that bears no resemblance.

Not saying experience is bad mind you.  But this example doesn't show how repealing new neutrality rules would benefit the customer in any way.  The internet, innovations that have come with it, and its permeation into our lives needs to be better understood and respected by the current admin, which I think is tough considering it's been widely reported that POTUS doesn't even use simple things like email.

Disagree.....I just mentioned one issue....there are generations of problems right up until the banking problems where regulators forced banks to make loans regardless of ability to re-pay as a quid pro quo for bank expansion. 

Government regulations usually have open-ended interpretations and regulators frequently apply their personal feelings in matters of regulation...EPA and you name it.    Sorry ...but in my view this is just an attempted power grab by some folks with a political  social agenda and has nothing to do with access or price problems......or "protecting the consumer".    

Guess we are not going to agree on this one....but good discussion. 

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1 hour ago, TitanTiger said:

I don't see being generally "anti-regulation" as any different.  Let your first inclination be to regard more regulation with reluctance, but have the ability to adjust, suspend, relax, etc that view when data on the ground tells you that it might not be the best approach in a specific scenario.

That's fine...but there was little if any "data on the ground" that told me a couple years ago that the net neutrality was needed to solve some problem that could not be solved by market pressures.     Every time a regulation is killed off there are cries of despair.....deregulated natural gas which was going to make prices go through the roof for example....and now everyone is worried that prices are too low.  The market does not respond immediately to a problem but I still think it's the best means of dealing with imbalances....sometimes takes a while but my observation is that "quick fixes" or regulated solutions often have long term negative results. 

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9 minutes ago, AU64 said:

That's fine...but there was little if any "data on the ground" that told me a couple years ago that the net neutrality was needed to solve some problem that could not be solved by market pressures.

The data on the ground started when Comcast shook down Netflix for more money to stop throttling their traffic.  That was the warning shot.  It then became apparent what the dangers of the ISPs ending their voluntary net neutrality was.  If they'll do this now, what happens as more of the providers start adding on their own streaming services or buying existing ones?  What's to keep them from giving their own offerings the best speeds and redundancy while allowing outsiders like Netflix, Hulu, Sling TV and others to have less robust service, or extorting money from them to prevent streaming problems?

 

9 minutes ago, AU64 said:

Every time a regulation is killed off there are cries of despair.....deregulated natural gas which was going to make prices go through the roof for example....and now everyone is worried that prices are too low.  The market does not respond immediately to a problem but I still think it's the best means of dealing with imbalances....sometimes takes a while but my observation is that "quick fixes" or regulated solutions often have long term negative results. 

Like I say, that's fine for a general rule, but when you see problems or potential problems, and you know you don't have the requisite market forces required to prevent it from happening (such as robust competition on most markets), you can go off script.  All the net neutrality rules did was keep the defacto status quo that everyone had been honoring voluntarily in place up until about 2015.  It altered nothing, just codified what had made the internet great already.

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31 minutes ago, AU64 said:

Disagree.....I just mentioned one issue....there are generations of problems right up until the banking problems where regulators forced banks to make loans regardless of ability to re-pay as a quid pro quo for bank expansion. 

Government regulations usually have open-ended interpretations and regulators frequently apply their personal feelings in matters of regulation...EPA and you name it.    Sorry ...but in my view this is just an attempted power grab by some folks with a political  social agenda and has nothing to do with access or price problems......or "protecting the consumer".    

Guess we are not going to agree on this one....but good discussion. 

To me, this reads as a fundamental lack of understand of this specific issue.  But another question arises.  If our government is supposed to represent the people, why are they removing such a wildly popular regulation?  83% of Americans support keeping the rules as they were, including 75% of republicans.  Ask yourself, is this what you want your government to be?  I'm not saying all legislation needs to be popular, but the will of the people needs to be heard as well.

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/364528-poll-83-percent-of-voters-support-keeping-fccs-net-neutrality-rules

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4 minutes ago, TitanTiger said:

All the net neutrality rules did was keep the defacto status quo that everyone had been honoring voluntarily in place up until about 2015.  It altered nothing, just codified what had made the internet great already.

My very point.....defend the status quo....and deter innovation.   What would the net look like today if those rules were passed in 1998 or 2005?    Internet is a moving target and who is to say that it's has peaked out now?  

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