If you know people who aren’t grasping what the repeal of Net Neutrality means, try hitting them in the stomach. Figuratively, of course. Fast food giant Burger King has an awesome video that makes it much easier to understand the ramifications of an internet without Net Neutrality using hamburgers as an example. It’s only a couple minutes long, but that’s more than enough time to get the point across. This is one of the clearest, and most entertaining, Net Neutrality explanations we’ve seen so far.
Check It Out: Burger King’s Net Neutrality Explanation with Whoppers is Brilliant
@Substance, I love how local governments selling us out and granting monopolies that take away competition is the fault of capitalism and not government, what a laugh. The reality is most people have no choice for high speed internet. It’s a locally granted monopoly in most of the US. If we regularly had say 4 competitors in a location, I might feel differently about net neutrality, but there aint.
It’s a way bigger discussion as to why our local governments sell us all out so regularly. An interesting one to be sure, with highly varied answers depending on the location. But local corruption would be a part of that discussion.
That said, as much as I’m ‘pro net neutrality’ I think people need to stop freaking out to MAX VOLUME 11 on every damn thing. This sucks yes, but let’s have some perspective, it’s not the end of the world if you have crappier access to internet. We have crappy access to internet already compared to other countries and depending on what town we go to. Is it bad, should we want to fix this, sure. But everything is not THE END OF THE WORLD. Makes us all seem nuts when go to max stupid over every freak’n issue and dont show and ability to triage/prioritize harms.
It also lets government and industry manipulate us like the dummies we are. For example, all these loser state attorneys suing the FCC over this KNOW DAMN well they will lose, that it’s totally in the FCC’s purview to allow or disallow the net neutrality rules. It’s just a waste of tax payers money and time. This is clear law, and amounts to a bunch of loser state attorneys posturing for some political reason or another. If we had any sensible reaction here, we would take the money they are wasting on these LOOK HOW GREAT I AM bs law suits and use that to lobby the hell out of the senators that are on the fence on this, we have a way to make a permeant change on this, and get permanent legislation enforcing net neutrality. The FCC will then have to abide by that, and it will end the issue. The senate is close on votes on this, and it’s very doable, but instead we’ll waste millions on useless grandstanding by the states, that waste court times, that will likely be appealed all the way to the supreme court only to be thrown down for the BS it is. It’s like nobody learned f’n basic civics in this country. Pathetic.
@theledger, bzzzt. ISPs have not only planned it, they have implemented it in the past, and some are doing it now. https://boingboing.net/2017/10/28/warning-taken-as-suggestion.html
Hey Ajit Pai – when a decision you make is so stupid that a burger chain can mock you for it … well, unless you goal is to try to become more worthless than Ryan Zinke and Scott Pruitt … you need to evaluate whether you should be sucking up valuable air on this planet…
Old UNIX Guy
I still say somebody needs to dig into Pai’s finances. How much did he personally profit from this rule change. I expect a LOT.
With all the outcry over the need for net neutrality, a couple of very significant arguments are often overlooked.
Using the BK example video as an example, if a customer finds BK’s pricing and service unacceptable, they go to an untold number of competing fast food restaurants, probably within walking distance. That’s called “choice” and it’s a result of fair competition. In our current high-speed internet landscape, most people don’t have choice. They are locked into 1 or 2 vendors (usually cable and DSL). If there was more competition amongst ISPs, then it would be much harder – if not impossible – for ISPs to play games with customers like the net neutrality proponents suggest.
And whose to blame for so little competition in the ISP space? Often its the local governments and the kickbacks they receive from allowing the monopolies to perpetuate, aka crony capitalism. https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-just-cable-companies-and-blame-local-government-for-dismal-broadband-competition/
(Note the same arguments applies to cable TV as well.)
There’s already a lot of censorship being practiced on the Internet that affects the lives of everyone on it, and that’s the selective censorship being practiced by the popular social media platforms every day.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/10/27/facebook-censored-cross-your-countrys-government-and-they-might-censor-you-too-james-bovard-column/795271001/
https://www.dailywire.com/news/25744/bombshell-report-twitter-admits-censoring-ryan-saavedra
And yet these topics are always left out of the net neutrality discussion.
I ask that MacObserver please pay a similar amount of attention to these issues affecting our Internet lives that they already do with net neutrality.
This video is stupid simply because it raises the ire of people without being to point to any ISP that has planned anything like this.
In fact, Burger King all the time changes their prices based on their business costs. That is just business 101. What if it took BK twice as much time and energy to produce a Whopper over a chicken sandwich – do you think that BK would charge the same amount?
Nope. And yet people gladly pay the price difference all the time without batting an eye.
Where else in our society do you get things of unequal value for the same price?
Most of what I’ve heard for Net Neutrality are straw man arguments about what might occur as opposed to what in reality is happening.
The reality is that it’s content providers (Google, Facebook, Twitter) that are rationing content in favor of their own political leanings and what makes them the most money.
If you owned an ISP and discovered that 50% of your infrastructure cost was Netflix traffic, it would be smart business to charge Netflix an access fee or demand more from subscribers.
You can’t get something for nothing, at least not for the long term. Eventually a new equilibrium gets set. And when you have fixed prices, just like with rent controls and Communism, your quality of supply decreases. It doesn’t happen overnight but it will happen.
A couple of things I would like to point out:
These rules were put in BECAUSE Verizon and others were trying to do EXACTLY this.
“Where else do you get things of unequal value for the same price” is an absurd statement. The whole point is data is data, and it IS all the same value. Allowing ISPs to choke off some in favour of others who have deeper pockets, or they agree with politically, stifles innovation, and the economy. We all suffer.
Roads are an example of a public utility where everyone has the same right and drives at the same speed. You can’t pay extra to drive 100mph. One set of rules for everyone and everyone benefits.
“Straw Man”? that’s funny. You mentioned communism, which in the 21st century is the most vacuous straw man argument there is.
The reality is that most internet users do not have any choice. They cannot go across the street to another ISP if the one they are on becomes abusive. There is not for most customers a free market of internet service providers.
And if I ran an ISP and found that 50% of my traffic was Netflix what would I do? I’d charge people one price for 50GB/mo, another for 100gb/mo, another for 500gb/mo. that’s the ethical way of dealing with that. I would not spy on what they are doing and charge a fee if I didn’t like the content. It’s none of the ISP providers business what data their users are accessing any more than it is the water company’s whether I’m showering or washing my car.
Net Neutrality is about privacy. What I do with the quantity of data I pay for is my business, and not anyone else’s.