Obama wants to classify the internet a utility

[sonatine]

Also just to be clear I'm fully in favor of declaring internet a utility but I'm also totally confident that somehow, Obama will fuck it all up even worse and somehow illegal Mexican immigrants will get it for free regardless.

[tyde]

holy fuck tine


take a break

[Hockey Guy]

holy fuck tine


take a break

Fuck, your schtick is getting old. Why don't you go fuck off for awhile?

[sonatine]

Because he's entering that part of the bender where hes running out of things to do that dont involve staring in a mirror and weeping.

[tyde]

go fishing


do something that doesn't encompass sitting on your fat ass all day


clown


just one day man


see you on the dark side bitch

[tyde]

I'm a lot of things


fat is not one of them


boom roasted

[mulva]

go fishing


do something that doesn't encompass sitting on your fat ass all day


clown


just one day man


see you on the dark side bitch

i think we need your bet the ranch play for tonight.

[SrslySirius]

It's an extremely good thing and should have been done years ago. ISPs in the US have muscled out competition and are gouging customers. They have plans to make it even worse. Same thing happened with telephone carriers a few decades ago as I understand it, before Bell was broken up.

However, I doubt Obama's sincerity on this as he appointed the current FCC chariman, who is a former lobbyist for the cable industry.

How are consumers being gouged?

Look at how much data you get for a relatively cheap monthly payment.

As Sonatine and others have pointed out, we're paying a premium rate for substandard service. With things like the horrifying Comcast/TimeWarner merger and slow lanes being proposed, it seems that things will only get worse as they tighten their grip. I'm not typically a big fan of regulation either, but I think monopolies are an even greater evil.

If the price is reasonable to you, fair enough. Let's see how long it remains reasonable. As for the service being good enough, I can't agree. It's already being arbitrarily throttled. Marty's connection in his Mexican shanty is probably superior to mine. I don't know if he really said it, but there's that Bill Gates quote of "nobody will ever need more than 640 KB of RAM". Let's not adopt that attitude with internet speed. I remember feeling like a boss with my new 56.6k modem.

Who knows what new technologies may emerge while we lag behind. We'll weep as the Koreans and Moldovians get to enjoy Cmoney's virtual sex robots while we pay a monthly fee to use search engines.

[mulva]

don;t u think government regulation will result in faster and less expensive service? i do.. butafter writing that and reading it,..i have to lol.

[Dan Druff]

First off, I don't see what cell phones have to do with this discussion. That's an entirely different issue. Do data limits suck on cell phones? Yes. But that's because there is a substantially higher cost to carry data between devices and cell towers than there is carrying the data through wires from homes.

I don't know anyone who has a bandwidth limit on their home broadband internet service. If you do, you're in an extreme minority.

So this really becomes a question of:

1) Are the prices for our home broadband data too high?

2) Is it likely that cable companies will corrupt our internet experience in the future and restrict us from certain sites, or severely slow our access to the ones who don't pay them?

3) Will further government regulation on the matter result in a better experience for the consumer?


Let's look at #1 first. In my opinion, the price is not too high. Remember my example where I was paying $400/month to call my 50-miles-away girlfriend for an hour a day in 1994? That price was obviously way too high. Paying $40-$80 per MONTH for unlimited broadband data at speeds that are sufficient for everything except mass downloading is NOT too expensive. Would we all like the same data for $10/month? Sure, but that's not realistic, nor do we have a right to expect it.

Now let's look at #2, which is honestly the biggest issue to net neutrality proponents. They fear that the big cable companies will start extorting money out of major websites, and then slow down (or block) access to them if they don't pay up. You know... kind of how Time Warner wouldn't let any other company carry Dodgers games in 2014 unless they coughed up big money.

So is this a reasonable fear on the internet? I don't think it is. This is because large companies will indeed pay up if they have to, so your experience will likely not be affected. They are also not likely to go after smaller sites. For example, it is highly unlikely that I will be getting demands from Verizon to pay to get Pokerfraudalert out of the internet slow lane. Basically they will be going after the big data hogs and asking them to shoulder their share of the cost, which believe it or not, is fair. So what will the net result be? Time Warner/Verizon/AT&T/etc will make a little more money, and Google/Netflix/etc will make a little less. But to the consumer, it will be transparent.

Do we have to fear a situation where ISPs decide to enforce morality upon us, blocking porn sites, torrent sites, etc? No. We know this from 20 years of ISP history. They don't have a conscience. They don't have morality. They only want to make money. They do not make money by restricting their customers from accessing things they want. Time Warner couldn't give a shit if you want to download hardcore porn or pirate movies, provided that they aren't getting in trouble themselves for allowing you to do so. Any form of censorship like this is likely to come from the government itself, not the ISPs.

On the flip side, as mentioned earlier, one unfortunate side-effect of net neutrality will make it much tougher for ISPs to block spammers, DoSers, scammers, etc. Right now they can act unilaterally and decide to block whatever they feel is in everyone's best interest. Net neutrality laws will likely prevent this.

And now let's get to question #3: Will government regulation help? I cannot think of any time in recent history where increased government regulation helped the consumer get a lower price. Government regulation can SOMETIMES protect the consumer from scams or other directly unethical behavior, but it rarely results in a lower price. Regulation unfortunately brings a lot of red tape, bureaucracy, and added costs (and these are passed on to the consumer), as well as lots of language which prevents aggressive bargain deals for the consumer. Basically regulation always seeks to keep everything at one level, where nobody is getting a better deal than anyone else, and any price changes require a herculean effort. Regulation often takes the free market out of price determination, and artificially sets the price at a point far higher than it would be in a properly competitive and lighter regulated market.

Deregulation of airlines and telephones BOTH brought significant reductions in price for the consumer.

The reverse (adding regulations to existing internet access) will send the prices higher, and they will never come back down.

In short, you should never wish for more regulation unless there is a major problem occurring right in front of your face that the companies will not responsibly take care of. No such problem exists with American ISPs right now. We are getting our internet for a reasonable price, not being restricted, and achieving speeds high enough to do what we need to do.

One other note about internet speeds. There exists a processing limitation which will make it impossible for most people to take advantage of super-fast internet speeds in most cases. Even if you could receive data at heart-stoppingly fast rates, you wouldn't have a faster internet experience if your computer is not powerful enough to process everything it receives. This is equivalent to being at a restaurant where they bring your appetizer, main course, and dessert all at once. You won't be waiting for service, but at the same time, lots of food will sit untouched while you finish each course, making this blazing fast service useless. Same thing with internet access. While downloads are generally excepted from this (as your computer is barely processing the data received, and is mostly just storing it), most other internet activity, whether it's gaming, browsing, or streaming video, requires a heavy amount of processing which limits your speed anyway.

My attitude is to take a wait-and-see approach with net neutrality. If the cable companies start to get out of line, then take action. If it stays the way it is -- or if the only change requires large bandwidth hogging companies to foot their share of the bill -- I say leave it alone.

[El Gallo]

Their past and present actions prove without a shadow of a doubt that the cable companies will get out of line. Why wait for it to happen? Handle it now.

[sonatine]

In short, you should never wish for more regulation unless there is a major problem occurring right in front of your face that the companies will not responsibly take care of. No such problem exists with American ISPs right now.

Bottom line is this is where we see differently.

What American ISP's deliver is:

Shoddy

Over priced

Unsupportable

Archaic

Being protected by predatory monopolies to the detriment of the end user and tech innovation

Light years behind the infrastructure of other countries

[Corrigan]

Also Im about to set up a public Quake 1 server so come the fuck at me bros.

I played so much quake 1 back in undergrad circa 97-98. got very good.

used to play headsup on dm2, dm6, (can't remember all the levels) vs a top 10 in the world quake player who happened to be at my college - he would own me so hard.

[Corrigan]

quake 1 is one of the best multiplayer games of all time

[sonatine]

basically its the last truly excellent fps thanks to those ancient windows mouse drivers. carmack refused to get involved in quake II because the new windows mouse drivers introduced too much latency.


also word to dm6.

[gut]

RTCW FTW

[Corrigan]

also e1m7 was god for 8 people at a time blood baths

[sonatine]

also e1m7 was god for 8 people at a time blood baths

bash-3.2# ls -al REAPERBOT/
total 1000
drwxr-xr-x 8 _unknown _unknown 272 Nov 5 1997 .
drwx--x--x 37 _unknown _unknown 1258 Oct 14 00:45 ..
-rw-r--r-- 1 _unknown _unknown 582 Aug 19 1996 Autoexec.cfg
-rw-r--r-- 1 _unknown _unknown 1915 Nov 14 1996 B08chg.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 _unknown _unknown 1382 Jul 1 1996 Dedserv.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 _unknown _unknown 481376 Nov 17 1996 PROGS.DAT
-rw-r--r-- 1 _unknown _unknown 11385 Nov 14 1996 Reaprb80.txt
-rw-r--r-- 1 _unknown _unknown 1481 Nov 12 1996 Skinspec.txt
bash-3.2#


My body is ready.

[ltrainkoja]

Cable TV is such a robust tapestry of fails.

AGREE -

I don't even understand why anyone pays for it.

Anybody with a clue can stream pretty much anything they want, whenever they want, in high quality, with no ads, for free.

HBO, Showtime, any sporting event, etc.

HDMI cable 4 life - fuck cable tv right in the pussy

I want to get rid of cable because I basically just watch sports. what are the details to stream espn events for football and basketball-- I would quit cable asap if I can still get my sporting events-

[DRK Star]

Also just to be clear I'm fully in favor of declaring internet a utility but I'm also totally confident that somehow, Obama will fuck it all up even worse and somehow illegal Mexican immigrants will get it for free regardless.

Undocumented, sir.