to be fair, other corps support net neutrality heavily, such as Google and Netflix, and they’re big money donors to the dems.
It’s less of a partisan issue and more of a “who bribed those in power issue”.
The folks who oppose net neutrality tend to be, universally, in the pockets of the NAB and NCTA. But what I’ve seen has been that opponents of net neutrality actually havent’ been the courts. It’s been regulatory agencies with politicians who have been bribed.
to be fair, other corps support net neutrality heavily, such as Google and Netflix, and they’re big money donors to the dems.
The biggest opponent of net neutrality is the NAB and the NCTA, and they donate just ad heavily to the democrats. Check out the party split here, and here, and you see a pretty even split down the middle. And they give exactly the same amount to both party’s national committees.
In many ways, the issue is so specialized that it has no real political ideology. There’s not much about either party platform that actually cares one way or another on this.
So the politicians just do whatever folks say who give them money… Because, frankly, none of the politicians really understand the issues on this front enough to have an informed opinion anyway.
To be fair, if you believe in as small a government as possible, you do so (hopefully) knowing there are trade-offs for the reduced taxes and increased personal freedom. So some conservatives will find the decision to be granting more authority to a governmental body than they’d ideally like. They may know full well that their version likely won’t be as good from a consumer point of view, but the added freedom makes it worth the cost. Mind, in a price-sensitive economy, that’s a tough sell to people who aren’t true believers; talking about lowering taxes, reducing bureaucracy, doing away with cronyism, and going after government corruption & largesse tend to be much more palatable ways to persuade people into falling in line.
Personally, I respect that point of view but in the end I find this particular argument lacking - an internet unencumbered by corporate interests is indeed a necessity for a large majority of the public to function at their best, and therefore it’s in the public’s interest to keep that venue as “pure” as possible.
It represents the federal government regulating large businesses to protect consumers and small businesses. There’s no way this wasn’t going to be a partisan issue.
You also forget the Koch brothers in foes of net neutrality- their regulatory arm, AFP, has been leading the efforts in red state legislatures- who are the biggest threat to everything good for consumers.
You also forget the Koch brothers in foes of net neutrality- their regulatory arm, AFP, has been leading the efforts in red state legislatures- who are the biggest threat to everything good for consumers.
Hmm… I wonder what their motivation is for opposing it?
I know that they give money to many of the same folks who the cable companies pay to shill their bullshit, but I had figured that was just coincidence in that the same douchebags who will take money to lie about one thing will take money to lie about whatever.
Why do the Koch brothers care about net neutrality? Are they somehow invested in internet providers?
They’re libertarians. It could be as simple as opposition to government regulation of any kind, particularly with regard to commercial activities of large companies.
Well Obama said it, so they have to oppose it.
Other than that, who knows? AFP doesn’t have to reveal anything about it’s donors to anyone, there could be a bunch of cable companies in there someplace. Or they likely know people. Or maybe they want to drive places that disagree with them out of the internet business. Being able to cripple the speeds to your competition on the internet could be a lot of fucking power in this day and age.
CNN says something you don’t like? Make their website load slow as fuck. But Fox has your back so they get the fast lane. That Amazon dude is getting lippy, we should cut his bandwidth, etc, etc.
It’s pretty partisan. All the Democratic FCC commissioners approved the rules. All the Republicans opposed it.
Fuck people who are against net neutrality. The only freedom that being against it gives is the freedom to get fucked over by monopolies due to zero competition in many areas. It is another great example of the best government money can buy.
The only way to fix this is wait until the generations that actually use the internet and email become politicians. Then even with bribes they wont be convinced to kneel to these scummy monopolies.
The only freedom that being against it gives is the freedom to get fucked over by monopolies due to zero competition in many areas.
But you’re forgetting the freedom to fuck you over, too!
And already Charter putting the screws to some TWC customers- upgrades here in our home town have been cancelled.
Just curious, but what is this? TWC was going to upgrade the service and Charter has cancelled that?
Charter has halted all the TWC Maxx upgrades that were in progress or planned while evaluating them:
Presumably Charter will resume the upgrades at some point (at least according to that article). While I’m generally skeptical of those kinds of comments, the Maxx upgrades in our area were part of TWC’s response to Google Fiber announcing they were coming. I don’t think Charter is any better suited to competing with GF without the upgrades either. They’re likely just taking the time to understand TWC’s upgrade procedures and making sure they’re in-line with Charter’s processes and maybe see if there’s any way to lower costs on them.
Yes, I’d guess that’s the case. They want to figure everything out. They certainly want to be able to compete with Google Fiber, and both Verizon and AT&T have all-fiber internet services too. Gigabit speeds is where everything’s headed.
Charter has a lot of integrating to do. The pricing and offerings between TWC and Charter can be wildly divergent right now.
So basically the areas with Google get the upgrades, and those that don’t have fiber get shit.
I wouldn’t go that far, though competing with Google does seem to be a priority. AT&T is rolling out Gigapower in selected areas in the St. Louis metro area. Charter’s 100 meg internet is the only competition and AT&T can do a full gig with Gigapower.
The problem is putting the fiber in. St. Louis is made up of 92 municipalities so it’s not the easiest place to get this stuff done.
There are a couple of competing companies starting to offer 1 Gig here in Madison, but nobody that services my relatively suburbian address. Stuck with the Charter 60meg for now (which has been really great so far).
I used to live in a shitty apartment building and the Charter internet there was terrible and slow, but in the newer building and neighborhood I am in, things are significantly faster.
You know, a full gig would be fun, but for most of what I do a much slower speed is fine. I don’t upload anything of significant size and I don’t really need to download any faster than 15 or 20 megabits. That gives us a seamless Netflix and Amazon Prime experience and that’s most of what we do.
CenturyLink keeps trying to get us to switch from Cox to their gigabit service in my area. 10 years ago, I’d have jumped without a second thought. However now I can’t really think of what I’d do with all that extra capacity. Cox already provides plenty, and they’ve grudgingly stopped trying to get us to sign up for TV/phone. I scare off most off the solicitors by asking what their dry internet price is. “We have a great deal if you bundle…”. No, tell me the dry line price. They leave.
For many folks now, I guess you need the extra overhead because everyone is streaming their OWN netflix while deathmatching in CoD and seedboxing from your personal PC. But heck, we still watch our crap TV together as a family!