We did it boys

[Claeyt]

How is it a bailout

It's not. I was referring to other bad economic moves the government has made, giving tax money to failing companies just to keep them going.

You do realize that the letting the market do it's thing means that games like Salem and other indi games are then overwhelmed by larger gaming companies. Imagine if all of a sudden Salem was cut out of all the big gaming sites and only large scale companies willing to pay were allowed on them.

I think that letting the market do its thing is not the problem you think it is. That's a fundamental difference between our political beliefs, I suppose. I see no reason to think that larger gaming companies will crowd out smaller ones because it would be very stupid for ISPs to do that. They would lose money both because there are very few very large customers and because someone else will always step up with cheaper internet if there's a market for it.

The market is based on a utility that is owned and maintained by the federal government. The internet is not a free market economy.

ISP's are fighting everywhere to keep near monopolies on their control over areas for internet connections. We are now 18th in the world for total internet speeds. If you remove California we drop out of the top 20.

Why would it be stupid for ISP's to not charge more for faster internet speeds? Most internet traffic is already going through large companies like Netflix, Large Online Gaming companies and Facebook. If you are not attached to these companies then you will pay more for your customers to have faster connection speeds.

[DarkNacht]

someone else will always step up with cheaper internet if there's a market for it.

This may be true where you live but in many areas its not, at least not for high speed internet, everywhere I've lived it operates on a government granted monopoly. Its the same as a power company, you don't get to chose which one you buy power from, if you want it you have to buy it for the one company that serves your area.

The market is based on a utility that is owned and maintained by the federal government.

Shut up Claeyt, you have no idea what you are talking about and are only undermining net neutrality by spouting your ignorant misinformation. You are a blight on any discussion you try to engage in.

[TotalyMeow]

The market is based on a utility that is owned and maintained by the federal government. The internet is not a free market economy.

ISP's are fighting everywhere to keep near monopolies on their control over areas for internet connections. We are now 18th in the world for total internet speeds. If you remove California we drop out of the top 20.

Why would it be stupid for ISP's to not charge more for faster internet speeds? Most internet traffic is already going through large companies like Netflix, Large Online Gaming companies and Facebook. If you are not attached to these companies then you will pay more for your customers to have faster connection speeds.

The internet is not a utility. I know there have been some court cases trying to make it into one, but actually making it one in practice will not be good for consumers. I don't know what these 'total internet speed' rankings you mention mean, if anything; my internet speeds have been all I've needed of them for years now. If we're starting to have some problems in that area that I haven't noticed, perhaps they are due to the increasing government interference.

Yes, of course ISPs will fight to keep as much market share in an area as they can. That's a good thing. That's why we don't need artificial 'net neutrality', because competition will keep them honest. And it's certainly not stupid for them to charge more for faster internet speeds, I never said it was. I've been paying more for a higher tier of internet for a long time, and I know for a fact that tiers of speed and data usage have existed at least as long as broadband has. I'm saying they would be stupid to crowd out their smaller customers in favor of larger ones, which is what you are claiming will happen. It won't happen, because these business owners are not idiots and they like to maximize their profits, which means maximizing their customers, which means making sure there is enough 'bandwidth' for everyone.

[DarkNacht]

TotalyMeow, for many of us internet is a utility, there is no completion, there is the one company that the government has approved to provide cable and that is it, and we do see ISPs reduce the speed from companies that need high bandwidth if they don't pay up, especially to companies that offer competing services. This can be seen if you look up the chart of netflix's speed for comcast's users when they decided to shake down netflix a few years ago, they enter negotiation and the speed goes flat despite speed increasing on all other cable carriers, then when netflix rejected comcast's deal the speeds fell through the floor, you couldn't even stream movies without incredibly long load times or turning the video quality down to minimum, then when netflix caved and handed over a big pile of cash the speeds went back to normal. I would have loved to vote with my wallet and go to another service but there aren't any, there is just comcast and no one else because no one other than comcast is allowed to string cable in my area. **** like this is basically cable companies going to businesses and saying 'nice data you have there, It'd be a shame if something happened to in.'

[Claeyt]

The internet is not a utility. I know there have been some court cases trying to make it into one, but actually making it one in practice will not be good for consumers. I don't know what these 'total internet speed' rankings you mention mean, if anything; my internet speeds have been all I've needed of them for years now. If we're starting to have some problems in that area that I haven't noticed, perhaps they are due to the increasing government interference.

Yes, of course ISPs will fight to keep as much market share in an area as they can. That's a good thing. That's why we don't need artificial 'net neutrality', because competition will keep them honest. And it's certainly not stupid for them to charge more for faster internet speeds, I never said it was. I've been paying more for a higher tier of internet for a long time, and I know for a fact that tiers of speed and data usage have existed at least as long as broadband has. I'm saying they would be stupid to crowd out their smaller customers in favor of larger ones, which is what you are claiming will happen. It won't happen, because these business owners are not idiots and they like to maximize their profits, which means maximizing their customers, which means making sure there is enough 'bandwidth' for everyone.

The Internet is a utility by law and by use. It's major parts are physically owned by the government. It's distribution is let out to large corporations like Comcast and they invest billions in distribution networks to users.

but...

This has nothing to do with users. Users won't get charged more by the ISP's. What the Trump loss of Net Neutrality means is that the ISP's will charge large and small creators (Gaming Companies, App Companies, Software companies), creator distributors (Steam, Twitch, Netflix, YouTube) and search and social networks (Google, Facebook, Universities) more for faster service. Large companies like this because they're willing to pay for faster play, download, content. Small indi sites and non-profit sites such as indi games like Salem, Voat, Reddit.. etc... will find it harder to pay for similar speeds that larger companies will pay for. This means their content will be "throttled" if they do not pay for higher speeds for their customers to connect to. The large companies like Netflix and Steam will pass on their costs to their customers making the world we know now different. It will be a world of less choices, large companies with fast content and a world harder for small game dev's to grow in.

[TotalyMeow]

TotalyMeow, for many of us internet is a utility, there is no completion, there is the one company that the government has approved to provide cable and that is it,

Well, the government should butt out, shouldn't they.

[DarkNacht]

TotalyMeow, for many of us internet is a utility, there is no completion, there is the one company that the government has approved to provide cable and that is it,

Well, the government should butt out, shouldn't they.

Have you ever seen the mess that letting every company that wants to run their own, phone, electric, cable, ect? No developed country allows this. It doesn't provide a better service it just ends up making a ***** up infrastructure. The government needs to get out of a lot of things, but overseeing utilities is not one of them.
The other option is this

[TotalyMeow]

I wish I had time to really research this. I'll probably do so after the holidays. But from what I already know and a quick search of the internet to confirm, you're wrong.

Firstly, having the government regulate utilities like gas, electric, and power, hasn't done us any favors. Those services are stagnant and their infrastructure is a joke, because there is no incentive for people to invest in new infrastructure. In some cases, they're a deadly dangerous joke. The gas lines in Chicago and several other major US cities are pushing the century mark and are leaking so badly they need replacement now, yet there is so little money to repair them that they are literally waiting for people to call the utility to tell them they smell gas leaking out of the soil of their yards before those pipes are investigated and replaced. Power companies see solar power as more of a threat to their status quo than a useful new technology to be used. And so on.

Furthermore, the internet may be an essential service, but it should not be a public utility. There is a big difference there. Food is an essential service, but it is not a public utility. Its sale and prices are not regulated by the government. Sure, there are some places where your choice for groceries is pretty much Walmart, but even if Walmart is kinda sucky sometimes in the produce department, it still gets the job done and does it cheaply and efficiently and it's always possible to buy food. And it does so well because it's competitive. It's the same with the internet. Sure, there aren't a lot of choices in some parts of the country for who you will get your internet from but that is really changing fast, and it's changing because it's still competitive for companies to spend on internet infrastructure. True satellite internet is a thing now, not the stupid hybrid/cable crap they had 10 years ago, most places have at least one big cable company and some smaller options, a lot of places have things like Google Fiber, and internet cellular service is damn near everywhere. And it's only going to get better so long as the internet stays deregulated.

As for Claeyt's Netflix example, it has been hugely misrepresented. See, the amount of traffic a site like Netflix inflicts on an ISP is best described as a '*****'. Netflix was paying for some of it's traffic to go over Content Delivery Networks (distributed servers which I understand to be what most of the internet goes through), which comes with a usage fee, and then sought a better deal by paying for access to a certain amount of Comcast's infrastructure through a transit provider (no access fee per use) and then tried to push more data through it than it could handle, and then wanted an upgrade at no extra cost. Comcast said "No, go back to routing your extra through CDN and pay the usage fees". Netflix didn't want to do that so they bought ALL the available transit provider connections and it still wasn't enough. Eventually, the two companies negotiated a deal where Netflix would interconnect with Comcast directly.

Now, Comcast may have been employing some shady deals in there, but here's the thing: It's not up to the FCC to regulate that, nor should it be. We have a perfectly serviceable agency for investigating business practices that are detrimental to the consumer and to competition in the FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, and it has been doing a good job. But with the FCC ruling the internet a 'utility' the FTC no longer has jurisdiction and is powerless.

Furthermore, the FCC has used the argument that it is important to maintain the internet as an "open platform for free expression, political engagement, education, and economic opportunity", but has not, in any of its investigations, actually been able to identify any threat to said free expression.

[DarkNacht]

Find me a healthy functioning system anywhere in the world that has a half dozen companies all running their own cables with out it turning into a giant mess and I will support your side on this. Some areas in the US have some options but very few have enough for healthy competition. Very few places outside California, which has heavily subsidies it, and large metropolitan areas have more than one option and almost none have more than 2 and this is only changing at a glacial pace, yeah it can be sped up if the government dumps tons of money into it but that doesn't really solve the problem of the government mucking around in it and just costs the tax payers tons of money, and it is unlikely to be enough to create health markets any time soon. Stop regulating common carriers and and most people will be ***** over monopolies, or if they are lucky duopolies, we tried that it worked like ass.
And you are right the US utility infrastructure is **** in many places, but less government oversight has never fixed that, if you can find a single place that this has worked for a utility please point it out to me.
I wish deregulating utilities was the answer, I hate the government ***** with **** as much as anyone, but all the evidence that I've ever seen shows that deregulating utilities just leads to a decaying mess of an infrastructure. Please find me evidence of an open market successfully creating a healthy market to replace this type of utility, cable, power, water, sewage, or any similar service and make a system that functions better than than one that is just regulated well, like you see in some other developed nations.

[TotalyMeow]

I live in a very small town myself and I have at least four choices, two of which appeared in the last two years. Compare that to the dialup of 20 years ago and the internet and access to it is hardly advancing at a glacial pace.

I'd like to talk about this more but I'm currently posting from my phone on a country road in the middle of nowhere and this screen typing isn't for me.