How does Net Nutrality affect SE/XIV?

[Xtrasweettea]

Regional monopolies give some of us little choice. I absolutely loathe my current ISP because of constant price increases for the same service year after year. There are no other high-speed options in the vast majority of my state so I am stuck with this money-grabbing company that hasn't had adequate competition in years.

Funny enough, they are one of the main backers of the FCC repealing Net Neutrality.

There is no suicide for the company to commit because there are no options for us as consumers. The could do whatever they wanted. Our options would be to fork over the cash or have terrible internet.

Hi, Xtrasweettea who is an ISP shill* here to respond!

Two reasons for monopolies:
1) Regional (whether it be city, county, or state) governments allow them to happen. Those governments accept money from the ISPs, whether they be campaign contributions or paying taxes/fees to have their lines operating in that region.
2) Because they are “utilities” you can only have so many lines, switching stations, and routing stations within an area. Your local monopoly may happen to own all of the hardware and lines in the region. If no one else had set up that hardware or lines within the region, then there is no real competition. If another ISP wants to operate on those lines (example, Comcast being able to operate on AT&T lines and switching stations), then that ISP has to pay to do so. This is no different than how things work with the electric company. I bet you don’t have choices to which electric company you can purchase power from. The same concept with the Internet.

As for your last statement, yes, it is suicide if a company within the USA to try do those tiered based packages. Those types of plans work in countries and regions that do per-bit internet services instead of per bandwidth like here in the USA.

As for forking over more cash, well that is the crux of Title 2 of NN isn’t it?

What seems like a fight between “the people” and the ISPs is really a fight of corporation versus corporation. It’s ISPs versus .com companies (Facebook, Google, Pornhub, Neflix, etc.). As someone who actually deals with these .com companies at a business level, they are really greedy and selfish. They do not want to pay for the traffic they create for their services. The amount packets and sizes of the packets can actually bog down networks. The traffic Pornhub alone in 2016 was massive:

A petabyte is equal to 1024 terabytes, or a million gigabytes, which means a whopping 3,110,400,000 GBs were used. That’s enough data to fill 194 million 16GB USB sticks. End-to-end, they would span all the way around the moon. By contrast, only 1,892 petabytes were used in 2015.

http://observer.com/2017/01/pornhub-stats-data-2016/

That is one company’s data usage for only one function of their company in one year. That is not including the company performing their standard business transactions.

Imagine the amount of data Netflix and Hulu sent out in 2016? How many 16GB USB sticks worth?
Here is the thing with video streaming packets: they are large, they require very low chances of being dropped, very high requirement of perfectly being timed to delivery, also very low chance of causing poor quality. It takes some very high end equipment that eats up a lot of power to do this consistently. These .com companies don’t want to pay for it.

That is like me having a shipping and freight company, but me not paying my fair share of taxes in order to maintain and improve the roads. In scenarios like that, you get one of the three outcomes:
• in order to maintain the roads and improve the roads to handle the huge trucks, everyone will pay an increase on a tax (sales, property, gasoline)
• nothing will happen and a war of attrition will happen and the roads will fall apart. The goal is for the government to get my company to pay for road maintenance cause by me
• force my company to pay via lawsuit, which my company will probably pick up and leave if that happens since I am not getting any special treatment anymore.

That scenario is exactly the same thing with Net Neutrality.
• If the .com sites won’t pay for their fair share, then the ISPs will charge consumers more money since they are the end users
• If a law prevents ISPs from charging consumers too much, then a war of attrition will happen. The ISPs’ goal is to get the .coms to pay for their increased traffic. Though the .com people will never pay, instead the consumer will be dealing with degrading technology and lines. ISPs will just keep doing bare minimum
• A lawsuit goes against the .coms and the just get up and leave. They don’t even have to physically leave, they can change their headquarters to another country just by moving a few pieces of paper. Of course, they won’t need to leave, they have “friends” in all levels of government ready to protect them if that comes about. Of course, NN Title 2 was their baby.

This is what NN is actually about: corporations not paying their fair share. We all want corporations to pay their fair share, correct?

InB4: “Look how much money the ISPs made X year, <insert something about greed here>.” I will point to how much these .com companies have made. Most of that money comes from selling your personal information to other companies and the government.

*Yes, I do actually work for an ISP.