
NYC politicians’ one-word case for net neutrality: Skype - Libertatea
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2014/07/15/nyc-politicians-one-word-case-for-net-neutrality-skype/
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busterarm
Very excited to see my old friend Ben Kallos on the right side of the news
again.

I know a few folks from my high school and college years who've gone into
politics. He's the only one who was a cool, level-headed intelligent guy then
and still seems to be one now.

I need to see if he wants to play Diplomacy again.

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johnkpush
Bringing immigrants and the poor inexpensive, neutral broadband is the best
argument for net neutrality.

~~~
wmf
Unfortunately, it's possible that net neutrality will increase broadband
prices (or reduce service for the same price).

~~~
nitrogen
Conceivable, but far from proven. An apparent employee of a major ISP+TV firm
(username started with a "g") claimed that all company decisions were weighed
against hurting TV profits. If neutrality could eventually force them to
decouple those decisions, prices could go down and performance up.

Further, ISPs are currently profitable by a hefty margin, so they could
continue operating the same network at the same price, but neutrally WRT to
content.

Actually, I can't think of any reason why net neutrality would ever cause
prices to increase. All ISPs need to do is give customers a dedicated
allotment of priority/low latency inbound and outbound traffic, with the rest
of their "advertised speed" served as best effort. Then the customer can
decide what matters to them (or the application designers for less technical
customers), and that should be _cheaper_ for ISPs since they need no DPI
hardware and fewer employees deciding what to throttle for profit.

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codyb
I really like this as a NYC resident. It shows there are some people (I've
only lived here for about 9 months so I'm not too familiar with the political
scene) who are concerned about the residents of their city (local politics in
general seem to be more citizen oriented than national politics (to me,
however that could be an erroneous or anecdotal position I hold) but you could
certainly see the case where NYC could be a distortion of that generality) and
it's also an argument which goes beyond the "these companies might not have
made it" and gives a good concrete example or how millions of people might be
tremendously hurt by the proposed changes to net neutrality.

I know that I would feel tremendous emotional pain at the thought of not being
able to communicate with my family effectively and easily when all of the
technology is there and established. Hopefully some of the people who need
swaying can feel with their hearts instead of their wallets and ensure that
these millions will not feel that pain.

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mseebach
Wow, grandstanding much? There's no evidence ISPs have throttled VoIP or plan
to, but if they did it would be REALLY BAD for $key_voter_demographic.

Sorry guys, even if the end result is commendable, this is _literally_ just
FUD. If there's to be any hope of better politics, we need to reject this BS.

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kiram9
Back around 2006-2008 Comcast was suspected of massaging Vonage data to
degrade the connection when they were releasing their competing phone service.

See:

[http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121564856618241033.html?mod=...](http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121564856618241033.html?mod=googlenews_wsj)

[http://adamnoah.com/comcast-admits-to-blocking-
vonage/](http://adamnoah.com/comcast-admits-to-blocking-vonage/)

[http://www.wired.com/2006/03/comcast_throttling_vonage_users...](http://www.wired.com/2006/03/comcast_throttling_vonage_users/)

[http://gigaom.com/2008/07/09/did-comcast-just-admit-to-
vonag...](http://gigaom.com/2008/07/09/did-comcast-just-admit-to-vonage-
traffic-shaping/)

~~~
mseebach
And they were slapped around and stopped doing it, so it's great that
politicians are taking action in favour of consumers only 6-8 short years
later.

