(April 27, 2014 at 10:07 am)CapnAwesome Wrote: I don't really understand the net neutrality scare. I mean the ideas that he's presented just don't jive with reality. It's borderline conspiracy theory. If internet providers were really going to do that, they would of by now. The market has done great with the internet, which is the ultimate source of free speech. I'd much rather keep it as is rather than give the government any control.
I haven't watched this particular video, so I don't know what this guy's beef is - however, to understand one of the issues behind the push for net neutrality, consider what has actually happened.
Some of Comcast's links to top-tier bandwidth providers are saturated a good part of the time. Comcast blames Netflix, and tries to shake them down for $, and threatening to throttle streams from Netflix to Comcast customers.
The underlying issue (that Comcast has grossly oversubscribed it's uplinks) remains un-addressed. In addition, there is suspicion that what Comcast is *really* doing is attempting to discourage use of streaming services in order to promote it's own On Demand (i.e. pay-per-view) service.
Netflix has offered to install a caching server on Comcast's network gratis to alleviate the uplink bandwith issues (as they will do with any internet provider of sufficient size), Comcast refused.
There are, I am sure, many other examples of abuse, but this one I am intimately familiar with, in that I am subject to a regional Comcast monopoly on high-speed service.
