No, we won't. We'll just raise your price of connectivity. It's not going to hurt us. What you and the rest of the consumer world needs to realize is that when we buy something for $1000 and sell it to you for $1, we load around 2000 of you on it, so we both pay for it, and make a profit. Its what is called the "law of averages". The reason we oversell connections and then rate control ports/speeds/services is so that we can adequately provide service to every customer at an affordable price. If you want that $1000 connection, you should pay for it. If you want to be $1, then your going to have to live with the fact that we oversell it. What the FCC is doing today would be like them telling us back in the dial up days that we have to provide every customer with a dedicated line. I think everyone who has had dial up remembers getting busy signals every now and then. The reason for that was we oversold that too. We had to. That line cost us 10 times what we sold it for. That's why we loaded 20 of you on it. The law of averages dictates that not everyone will use the connection at the same time, so if we have enough surplus lines vs. the number of over users, we'll likely get very few busy signals. But they will occur. There is no way around that. Same goes for bandwidth. We buy a surplus of it, then oversell it. We do this keeping in mind that not every user will be using their connection at the same time, and not every user will be hitting their connection hard. BUT... At peak times, we have stops in place to insure quality of service is not diminished for all users just because one user wants to hog the buffet. We have the right to do this. It's in our contracts, our TOS (every ISP). We make this very clear to our users when they agree to use our service. Therefore, there is really nothing the FCC can force us NOT to do. I think part of the larger problem here is that the FCC, like the consumer, does not understand how our business model works. They also do not understand why we do what we do. Hopefully now, some of you do. We don't do this to screw with you. We do it to give you the best possible service for the lowest possible price (based on what the market forces that price to be). If we did not do it that way, you and no one else would be able to afford the service. If you want dedicated, all you can eat, unrestricted access and speeds on all ports at every time of day, including peak times; you're going to have to pay considerably more for it.
Congratulations ! Here is your belief... note who said it : "You know the one thing that is wrong in this country? Everyone gets a chance to have their fair say."-- President Bill Clinton
Does anyone realize that the ISPs will just network the home traffic trough crappier infrastructure even if they are forced to give porn equal speed ?
No, we'll just raise your rates. We don't like to provide crappy service. We like to provide the highest level possible. We do that with specialized bandwidth management tools the prioritize certain types of traffic. We only ever enforce limits with we need to, to insure that heavier users do not cause problems for other users. If we're no longer aloud to do this, we'll just have to raise prices. Either way, there's no legal remedy to enforce the FCCs rules. Again, we have (just like every other ISP) written this into our TOS and the contract which is agreed to when you use our service. This is not something new. Its something that's always been there and has always been in place to protect the ISP and the Consumer. We reserve that right to enforce limits on our network when we find our resources are being abused. Its no different than when a family of 5 walks into a buffet and buys one plate and proceeds to eat more than the family of 10 that paid for 10 plates.
That sounds like collusion/cartelisation to me. In legal terms, all acts effected by such behavior are considered void. You just invited government regulations by following bad business practices.
Its a pretty audacious power grab. Just think about the amount of federal funds they will be able to allocate to pay for the massive infrastructure and personnel costs required to police the wild wild west. I can see this toehold being used as a platform to launch a variety of other "regulation" measures, such as the decency in speech rules they already apply to broadcast and network TV. It also provides a perfect excuse for government based invasion of privacy under the guise of installing monitoring hardware/programs at ISPs. Shutting down someone like Assange should be simple as throwing a switch. Normally, the government creates regulation based on identification of a problem, usually based on complaints. Has anyone from the US heard the complaints? Its like the manufactured a solution to a problem that didn't exist at the behest of Google, who has been pushing for it. I watched the speech by the idiot in charge of the FCC explaining the need for this legislation, and it was so full of doublespeak, it was seriously hard to stomach.
I'm (Helvetii) not an attorney, I just play one on the Internet. Its industry standard, not collusion. "Collusion is an agreement between two or more persons, sometimes illegal and therefore secretive, to limit open competition by deceiving, misleading, or defrauding others of their legal rights, or to obtain an objective forbidden by law typically by defrauding or gaining an unfair advantage." For it to be collusion, two or more ISP's would have had to have gotten together to create the policy. That's simply not the case. The contractual language developed for ISP's was originally derived from decades old telecom contracts. The language and policies set forth have been in place for years and created by attorneys, not ISP's. We're not following bad business practices. We, like every other business have contracts, policies and certain legal ease that is meant to protect both consumer and ourselves. We're no different than any other business that regard. My suggestion for you is to read your ISP's TOS/AUP and any other service related agreement they have. It's not new, its not deceptive, its not collusion, its simply industry standard practice that has worked for 15 years. Force business to lose money and you'll find business raising your rates.
This is an excellent description, but I think you may be incorrect on one point. The "great recession" which the Democrats have engineered has led to a business environment which is extremely nervous regarding capital spending. This legislation may lead more to slower access times than to higher prices, because consumers are unwilling to pay more and businesses are unwilling to invest in such an unstable market. Where there is no return, there is no investment.
Its strange how ISP's work in US, over here we get 80% of the promised speed guaranteed across all posts, while browsing its usually higher than the guaranteed, maybe that why government hasn't started regulating them.
Right on the money as usual! Government regulation in the US tends to kill business. When that happens the consumer loses. I also wish people from other countries could try and understand the geography of the US. One of the things I've noticed about places like Korea (just one example) is the population is pretty much concentrated in one spot. Its pretty easy to provide an infrastructure capable of handling users over a small geographical range. Here in the US there are places that may never have Cable, let alone fiber or high speed internet. The reason is, they are so remote or far from the reach of a given provider that its simply not profitable enough for the provider to invest in reaching them. They'll never make that money back. In time, perhaps, but certainly not over night. Helvetii, here in the US, 99.9% of users get 100% of the usage they are promised. There's a small minority of power users and abusers that are at the root of the problem with regards to this issue. Just think if we ISP's did not have the bandwidth management tools in place that we do. If we were not able to regulate the flow of data from a few lone power users, all of our users would suffer. The reality is, most people just do not use, abuse of overuse oversold bandwidth. The few that do don't want to pay what it really costs for what they are using, then complain when they are rate limited. Keep in mind that we as ISP's have the power to see everything you do. Do you really want the government to have that kind of power? We sure do not. We'd rather your data and your usage be private; private as what you do in your own home. My suggestion to all who support government regulation of private business be very careful of what you wish for. You might find it comes back to bite you hard.
As Ronald Reagan said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.â€