Net Neutrality is about people/entities having their content prioritized based on how deep their pockets are; it's not about the content itself. People are concerned that those who can't afford to pay up will be effectively censored by having service providers (who swear up and down that they would never do that, which we can totally believe because companies never lie... right?) throttle their sites to the point that users will give up in frustration.

More importantly, you aren't fundamentally understanding profit motives here. A company would rather get $5 from someone a month than drive them away by charging $50 a month. They aren't out to screw poor people; they want what little money they have, and as much as they can get from everyone else.

That's not the issue. The people paying $5/month will still be paying $5/month.

It's not even about fast lanes; those already exist. It's about relegating low payers to "slow lanes". The concern is that the $5/month plan will result in a web site so slow that impatient users will give up and go elsewhere.

People who pay less get less? Gee, that's never happened before and by "never happened before" I mean "has happened every second of the day for the past several millennia."

That's the way it is now and no one's objecting. What they are worried about is that they'll actually be penalized for paying less.

In other words, they're already getting less for paying less. What they're worried about is what providers might do in the future (again, the providers are currently saying that they wouldn't do what content creators are worrying about, but who's to say that they're telling the truth)

I seriously do not understand this argument and never have. Worried about getting even less in the future? As innovation makes everything cheaper and information spreads faster even at the lowest ends, for some never-explained reason people are going to get fewer crumbs compared to now? Can you point out in history when this has ever happened with technology? You can buy a disposable phone now for $20 that would have blown away everything 10 years ago because 10 years ago that technology didn't exist. The slowest ISP speeds 10 years from now will be faster than anything you can get now.

I do not understand why, if there is such apprehension about what business does, that people then turn to the most inefficient, customer-unfriendly, solution-ignoring behemoth on earth - The State - to solve their problems? Bureaucrats cannot do this faster or better than the marketplace.

You get what you pay for.

Every attempt to rule otherwise ends in disaster.

If it weren't for double standards, liberals would have no standards at all.

"Bias in Net Neutrality" at http://www.scragged.com/art... shows that shows that whole thing was a scam. Their goal was to give government control of the Internet so that President Hillary could shut down web sites she didn't like.

Opposing Net neutrality with nonsense rhetoric was a real disservice to the country.

You did not read the article. The FEC changed the coverage of the Internet from Title I Communications services which are lightly regulated to Title II. It gives the FCC very broad regulatory authority including the ability to dictate prices if it deems this necessary. Title II could allow the commission not only to enforce complicated rate-making schemes via tariffs and price caps, but also to impose technical mandates, wholesaling obligations, or literally anything else lobbyists can dream up and ask for.

That is why the phone company had to get special permission to offer picture phone service decades ago. Nothing could be offered without governmetn permission which included setting the price.

Under Title II, the FCC could shut down an y web service it wanted to. PLEASE read the article before ridiculing the proposition.

Well I did after a comment like that and not surprisingly it's total nonsense.

come on Robert, that is BS and you know it. Net Neutrality is the way the internet was formed and operated since its inception until the ISP monopolies realized that they could probably make more money by tiering the content speed based on price, rather than just build up the infrastructure to accommodate everyone at faster speeds. Hillary had nothing to do with it, nor did shutting down web sites. If anything the ISPs would love to promote their own 'partner sites' at higher speeds to encourage consumers to patronize them, rather than competition.

Please read the article, and you may want to look at the law it references.

The FEC changed the coverage of the Internet from Title I Communications services which are lightly regulated to Title II. It gives the FCC very broad regulatory authority including the ability to dictate prices if it deems this necessary. Title II could allow the commission not only to enforce complicated rate-making schemes via tariffs and price caps, but also to impose technical mandates, wholesaling obligations, or literally anything else lobbyists can dream up and ask for.

That is why the phone company had to get special permission to offer picture phone service decades ago. Nothing could be offered without governmetn permission which included setting the price.

Under Title II, the FCC could shut down an y web service it wanted to. PLEASE read the article before ridiculing the proposition.

Monopolist incentives distort profit motives (or at least compared to the free market ideal). Net neutrality was what stopped Comcast (as ISP) from throttling Netflix traffic in order to dissuade people from voting with their wallets and cutting the cord to Comcast (as cable provider). Since Comcast is a monopoly provider in many of its markets--often by blessing of law--it can do tricks like that free of the threat that a new ISP will come and say "hey, switch to us, we won't throttle Netflix on you!"

You are a very patient person :) I just wanted to say that.

So then you are seriously disturbed about Alex Jones being explicitly censored, right?

He's not being censored. Last I checked, InfoWars is still up and his Twitter account is still active. What I am seriously disturbed about is the fact that people who were all about the rights of private businesses (aka bakers, florists, photographers, etc.) to refuse to do business with whomever they choose are now angry because private businesses (YouTube, Spotify, Facebook) are claiming that same right.

Yes, because one-man local bakery in a city awash with them is totally the same as a world-wide internet-based business with virtually no competition, right?

Ah, so whether or not you have rights is dependent on the size of your business? Good to know.

Knowing something is always better than knowing nothing.

It is also much better to have some basic reading comprehension.

You should try it some times. Both of those.

You know what else I'm going to try? The "block" button, because you've proved time and again that you're incapable of productive conversation.

Oh, the devastation!

;-)

Neither of you were really attempting to engage in productive conversation.

I've tried numerous time over multiple months to have a productive conversation with him. He's either unwilling or unable to do so.

Someone else can indulge him from now on.

Monopolies or businesses with massive market penetration are held to different standards than those without. You're basically dinging people for not being full throated capitalists versus socialists. This is what anti-trust laws are inherently about. This shouldn't be controversial, it's been a concept for over a century.

Caveats exist in all things. Like the pharmacy example for birth control. It's okay for the pharmacy to refer a person to a different pharmacy if they want birth control if the other one isn't unreasonably too far. It's not okay, if they're the only pharmacy in town.

It depends on the state; pharmacies in 8 states have to provide that medication whether they want to or not, and another 7 allow individual pharmacists to refuse but they can't keep the patient from getting the medication. Only 6 states explicitly allow pharmacists and pharmacies to refuse without accommodation.

Sure those are the laws, I'm speaking purely from a policy standpoint on the subject. Most people would agree or compromise that the pharmacy has a right to deny service of a non-essential medication so long as there are other pharmacies that a person can reasonably go to. The point of this example was to show a bridge of concept of the monopoly versus small business understanding of mandatory services. This matter is also similar in ways to how public accomodations are subject to stricter criteria for who they can turn away and why compared to other businesses. Or again, why telecommunication providers are held to different standards than other businesses.

But are they really monopolies?

For example, if YouTube won't host your content anymore, there's always Vimeo and Dailymotion (both fairly popular) as well as Wistia and Vidyard. If Spotify dumps you, Pandora's about to drop a podcast hosting service and Libsyn, Podbean, Buzzsprout and at least another dozen other companies already have them. If Facebook shows you the door, there's LiveJournal, Nextdoor, Tumblr, Pillowfort and a slew of others (on second thought, forget Pillowfort; they don't like controversial content of any kind).

I believe my initial characterization was: monopolies or businesses with massive market penetration (which I should used market share instead). Microsoft has never been a monopoly, it's never stopped people from thinking the anti-trust lawsuit against them was correct.

Fairly popular is highly subjective.

https://www.statista.com/st...

https://www.statista.com/st...

So Facebook an so on are not publicaly traded companies?

I said private, not "privately held".

I don't see how that's functionally different than who get's to publish their stuff on social media. For the websites it's having to pay up for the network infrastructure that they use. For the content creators on social media, they're paying up for the website infrastructure that they use. The websites are arguing that they shouldn't have to pay up extra to get preferential treatment; and the content creators are arguing they shouldn't have to create their own website or pay up extra for their content to go on that website.

As I pointed out earlier, the fast lanes already exist and if people have a problem with them, I hadn't heard. The concern isn't that they have to pay to get faster service, it's that providers will actively slow their service down if they can't pay for the upgrade.

The fast lanes existence is not the issue, it's irrelevant. It's about the arguments between net neutrality and content neutrality. The social media apps fast lane content they like as well, they also block or slow-down the proliferation of content they don't like unless you pay. They've gone and done the next step that Net Neutrality proponents scared everyone about the ISPs, which is they would RESTRICT content for those who they didn't approve of (for whatever reason). It's more like, they want to be the arbiters of content on the internet, not let ISPs be it.

The fast lanes existence is not the issue, it's irrelevant.

That's basically what I said. Fast lanes already exist and as far as I know, no one has a problem with them. They're a non-issue.

Content is also a non-issue when it comes to Net Neutrality. In the scenario that has NN proponents worried, it doesn't matter whether you're "red" or "blue"; the only important factor is how much "green" you have.

So (just as an example) Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann would be able to afford - and would get - premium service. Meanwhile, a small-time conservative blogger and a small-time liberal blogger would find their sites slowed to a crawl.

The censorship topic is a separate issue.

But Alex Jones has the money to pay. This is a censorship issue in line with what the tech companies argued to the populace what Net Neutrality was about.

Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, Google, and all other content providers have a Terms of Service agreement that you sign when you start using their service. If you violate those Terms of Service, they are well within their right to not allow you to continue use of their platform. Alex Jones had been warned several times, by several platforms to keep his content in line with their Terms of Service. He did not, and he was banned. That's not censorship, that's business.

So (just as an example) Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann would be able to afford - and would get - premium service. Meanwhile, a small-time conservative blogger and a small-time liberal blogger would find their sites slowed to a crawl. The censorship topic is a separate issue.

Net Neutrality was a scam run by high-bandwidth users like YouTube/Google to shift the costs of using their apps onto providers. All the free speech talk was horseshit to fool the rubes, as we've seen recently. They don't give a damn about free speech. Google is working on a version of their browser specifically designed so that China can censor content to its people.

Google is evil.

And you know they'll apply it here.

then use something else, pants-shitting Contard.

There is no hypocrisy here..
Net neutrality as others have pointed out is making sure the transport system of the Internet, which people have *no choice* to use, is not controlled so that certain content is unavailable or throttled.

Content owners like Twitter, Facebook etc are services that people have a choice to use or not, in exactly the same way as visitors to The Federalist, or any other content site on the Internet. The Federalist has a right to dictate what content is on it's site, and what it considers appropriate in Forums.. there is zero difference with Social Media platforms.

I think there might be some confusion here. Net Neutrality was the idea that ISPs (Comcast, AT&T) who own the "pipes" of the Internet should be forced to treat all data equally.

Net Neutrality is NOT the idea that content providers (Google, Facebook Twitter, Amazon, etc.) need to treat all data equally.

By repealing Net Neutrality, the Trump Administration gave the "pipe" owners freedom to control, throttle, accelerate data if they wanted to. They don't have to, and may or may not--but the "pipes" don't really have anything to do with Alex Jones, or any hypocrisy in any direct way.....

The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution. So it is with "Net Neutrality" and online censorship.

Weird people Republicans defend day in and day out:
Roy Moore
Alex Jones
Putin
Bill Maher
James Woods

What a list!

This sounds like fun. Let's try a list for Democratics:

Bernie Sanders
Octavia Whats-her-butt
Peretz Hilton
The idiot who runs the Daily Kos
Ariana Huffing-and-puffington
Putin
Karl Marx
Che Guevara
Mao

Anyone else want to play?

Was this list compiled by a 12 year old?

I mean Trump has literally praised Putin.......

Teddy Kennedy tried to shop.the whole U.S. to the Soviet Union.

What’s your point, Junior?

You tried to come up with a comparable list and the last 5 people on your list were a complete joke not even from the last 3 decades.

You really have to try harder.

By the way the Ted Kennedy 1984 meeting has been debunked over and over again.

Don't really care what you think about it, since you're the one who made a stupid claim to begin with. Besides, who cares how old they are, when democrats did and do support utter evil.

Regarding Teddy Kennedy--another Democrat we can use as an indicator of your moral compass--he did, in fact, write treasonous letters to the (then) Soviet leadership. The documentation is available.

The fact that you're unwilling to accept facts is unsurprising.

https://www.forbes.com/2009...