Net Neutrality is under attack

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AT&T, T-Mobile, Verizon and Comcast are trying to sneak past Net Neutrality rules. They’re imposing bogus data caps (with throttling & fees if
[See the full post at: Net Neutrality is under attack]

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Woody, as an ISP I can tell you that “zero rating” is not an attempt to harm consumers. It is an attempt to help them, in fact, by getting big, rich, monopolistic content providers like Google and Netflix to pay their fair share for the huge amounts of bandwidth they consume, rather than foisting these charges upon their users. The “Battle for the Net” site is funded by Google, which wants the government to force ISPs to give it bandwidth for free.

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Interesting. I didn’t realize that.

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Wont those big monopolistic monsters offset those extra bandwidth costs by charging the consumer?

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I believe Brett Glass answered that question above.

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I don’t know much at all about this area, but the issues described on the battleforthenet.com site seem more complicated than “getting big, rich, monopolistic content providers… to pay their fair share.”

If they want any particular content provider to pay a “fair share”, then they should not be “exempting some services from those caps… but not others”.

Just treat every service the same, charge everyone the same (per unit of service provision), let it be a fair playing field.

The nonprofit group that takes credit for owning/creating the battleforthenet.com site appears to be quite separate from Google: https://www.fightforthefuture.org/aboutus/

Maybe Google is funding them, like it probably funds many other nonprofits, and maybe it’s just a sham charity for doing Google’s bidding, I wouldn’t know, but this issue seems not to be as simple as a Google-funded attack on the major cable/ISP companies in order to save Google money.

I’m no fan of Google, I hardly watch tv, I don’t have cable, but I do think access to the internet, for providers and customers, should be as fairly-distributed and fairly-priced as possible, since it’s like a public utility.

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I’ll take net neutrality and choose my ISP based on price and speed thanks Brett.

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Nobody is trying to force ISPs to give anybody bandwidth FOR FREE. Mr. Glass, “as an ISP”, you know darn well that WE, your customers, are ALREADY PAYING YOU FOR EVERY SINGLE BYTE we get from Google, or anyone else for that matter.

But you guys aren’t satisfied with that revenue stream. What *you* want is to DOUBLE DIP… to get money from BOTH your customers AND from services like Google. And by zero-rating certain services *you* choose, *you* want to encourage us to switch to those services with whom you already have cozy financial arrangements, rather than continuing to use Google.

No thanks. I’ll take net neutrality, I’ll choose my big, rich, monopolistic ISP based on cost and reliability, and I’ll choose the services I use based on what works best for me, NOT based on some artificial, non-competetive, economic strategy like zero-rating.

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Brett is definitely an ISP. A pioneer in small town ISP work – a real innovator.

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I also looked through the Fight for the Future website, as well as the other listed sponsors for battleforthenet.com. None of them seem to have any connection with Google whatsoever, unless one of the various supporting funds for Fight for the Future are owned by Google.

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