Net Neutrality

[hallsofvallhalla]

Getting scary!

http://www.cnn.com/2014/01/15/tech/web/ ... explained/

[Xaos]

There are very vengeful people that use the internet, and care about the internet. Irregardless of that, it seems changing speeds for people is discriminatory, and that case could be made,considering their target groups are going to be poor, rural, and small. Plus with all of the government push for small business, I don't see this coming to fruition.

[Callan S.]

Commercial entity/entities gets you hooked on its supply, then it starts screwing with that supply once your hooked?

Out of the blue!

[Jackolantern]

Irregardless of that, it seems changing speeds for people is discriminatory, and that case could be made,considering their target groups are going to be poor, rural, and small.

The scariest part of this is not what could be done directly to the end Internet users, but the smaller websites (which are about 99.999% of them). This article does not even touch on the scariest side of this, which is what a coalition of Comcast, AT&T, Verizon and several other major ISPs wanted to do in the earlier 2000's. There were documents found that essentially showed a plan to turn the Web into cable TV. You could choose different plans which included a few of the most popular websites (like ebay, Amazon, and Yahoo!), and then "gold plans" that included more popular websites (with bandwidth hogs like YouTube all being conveniently lumped into higher plans). But none of them had complete access to the general Web. No, you would have to actually pay separately to access smaller websites. Basically, every website in the world would have to pay a fee to each ISP to be added to their premium plans if the ISPs did not consider them important enough that they had to offer them. It would absolutely destroy the Web, considering that no one is going to pay specifically to access a website they have never been to before. It would lock the Internet into its current state, giving every major website a complete monopoly, and ending the Web's amazing ability to allow up-and-coming-websites to become something.

I don't see how this could possibly pass the Supreme Court.

I have to say, this is one situation where I am glad Anonymous is out there. They can seriously hurt a company's bottom line, and any ISP who acts on something like this would surely have to draw the biggest, longest and most voracious attack in their history.

[hallsofvallhalla]

and lets hope that happens. If everyone who had a comcast would have called in all at the same time and threatened to cancel it would have created a HUGE way of fear in these companies.

[Jackolantern]

Unfortunately, not enough people who use the Web today really think or even know about how it works. Many people, even if they did hear about this, and they think "Oh, it is just aimed at website owners", not even thinking about the fact that the Web is made up of nothing but website owners.

[a_bertrand]

What is even more worrying me is that people don't remember that internet is not only the web, but you have instead loads of different protocols and things you actually use all the time. Is not your PC synchronizing the time? Aren't your getting OS updates? Emails anyone? Etc.

Internet is not just facebook, yahoo and maybe amazon and google. Sorry, there is a lot more under it. Personally I do use it professionally too, as research institute we must basically collaborate with other institutes around the world. Without internet it would be basically impossible.

[Jackolantern]

I believe that "Net neutrality" is really aimed at the Web, making it a bit of a misnomer. I don't think it is really too much about the larger Internet.