Mark., on 28 February 2015 - 07:34 AM, said:
I would have to make a post so long that would it rival some of CharlesT's best efforts to respond with what is wrong with this new ruling. But, being the lazy guy I am I will just say you are naive if you think the main purpose of this is as narrow and righteous as it is being reported to be. If others start to chime in with some specifics I might add another 2 cents worth to bolster or refute those specifics. In the mean time there will be more to learn as the days unfold and we read and interperet these 322 pages of regulations that we would have had no advanced warning of if it wasn't for a whistleblower a few weeks ago. All I needed to raise a red flag was to hear about the secrecy and to know the people behind the movement to get this done and what they have said in the past about their beliefs and goals concerning the internet.
I have not researched the following yet but I might:
That this has been implemented in Europe and elsewhere and has led to highers costs and stifled growth and reinvestment.
They already have the power, Mark. All the shady spying shit they've been doing before will continue.
But I'm not going to deny that the 322 pages need to be made public, and that there's probably bullshit buried in them.
Here's the thing - the government doesn't actually
want direct control of these pipes. Technically speaking, they never will have full control. Why? They don't need it. Room 641A existed over a decade ago, so we know they could already get inside whenever they wanted. All they need is a "National Security Letter" and they can go anywhere secretly. There's a giant NSA surveillance facility being built in the middle of nowhere, Utah. They have psyops campaigns going on all the time, and anyone who's been viewing 4chan's /pol/ board for years saw them firsthand after the whole Pedowood scandal broke. Although I will say 4chan's successor, 8chan, which is community ran and moderated, has made their campaigns much harder.
The U.S. government doesn't want their behind the scenes shit becoming public, and to be honest, there is very little, if any extra control they can get by passing net neutrality. This is how their game plan works, and it's been successful for decades, even dating back to the old ECHELON system. They set up mass surveillance that runs
parallel to the network, which is brilliant and terrifying.
However, I will say that the telcos and cable companies made the mistake of shitting where they ate. We all know how America works - you can piss on the little guy all you want, and tell him it's raining. But you
can't piss on every single Fortune 500 company who relies on the cloud for profit, because they outnumber the fuck outta you. When Google starts deploying fiber lines just to prove you and all your buddies are
completely full of shit, you need to back off. These guys could have done some smaller, less dickish moves to prop up their dying CATV business and got away with it, but they drew the ire of literally every single high tech company who relies on
their customers to be profitable. By extension, the US government gets pissed off because A. They want the US to continue being a technological superpower and B. They want everything as cloud based as possible for data collection.
Keep in mind Tom Wheeler, the head of the FCC, is ex-Comcast, and has been changing his mind on Net Neutrality gradually for months now after outside pressures and Obama himself started honing in. He's seen all the sides of the argument now, and knows the fight is hopeless. Big Cable's lobbying dollars and influence can no longer compete.
This kind of shit happened to Ma Bell in the '82, but even worse. The large cable companies and telcos are no longer in charge of their destiny. They are now dumb pipes. Why? Because they signed their own death warrant.
Verizon's throttling of streaming video and their refusal to wire us an ethernet line to the ONT without spending hundreds caused us to switch. When we first got FiOS it was mindblowing, but they started fucking with it and ended up waiving our ETF without us asking due to hardware failure. We went through seven routers in two years - go load an advanced configuration into a Verizon router and wait. It'll overheat and burn out like clockwork every 3 months, eventually only becoming stable when a fan is blowing on it. Want to run your own equipment? Go fuck yourself! They run coax lines from the ONT outside your house to the router inside. The newer 802.11n router can't be wired in parallel to another and function as a MoCA bridge. If you have FiOS TV, you're fucked now, and have to use their equipment.
The tipping point was discovering that we were just as fucked despite having DirecTV. I was so sick of driving to the Verizon store, then spending 20 minutes on the phone so these pricks could "activate" the router on their network, and then manually reconfiguring everything because these pieces of shit
encrypted part of the exported router config file so a different unit of the same model couldn't import my old one.
The moment I heard Cablevision got better again I switched back. Best decision ever. 127Mb down, 37 up, unfiltered as hell. The only limit is 15Mb/s for certain protocols when uploading. Two phone lines. $130/month. That's so cheap it's retarded, it's like European cheap. I can use my own router (Asus RT-N66U) and every month that $130 goes towards a company who
supports net neutrality.
I went through this bullshit first hand. I was able to switch. Most Americans aren't. Until we get actual competition amongst ISP's, Net Neutrality is the only thing that is going to allow us to compete on the global stage. No more throttling, no more lies about data speeds, no more horseshit.