I'm a software engineer and usually very pro-free market. But I still wildly disagree with revoking net neutrality. It gives a LOT of power to extort Americans in a market with an extremely, almost impossible to cross barrier of entry, only a few providers (and only one in many places), who are absolutely awful companies. And just because nothing has happened YET doesn't mean it wont. Microtransactions didn't hit video games overnight. We had a decade or more of good games before they started sneaking them in. Now they're everywhere.
Its amazing to me that you guys who just got censored off of a big tech platform, and rant about big tech censorship, are entirely fine trusting the same companies that own MSNBC, CNN, Vice, ect with unprecedented control of your access to the internet. You think its bad right now where they're kicking us off hosting websites? Just wait until someone decides to just start putting places like this behind a ridiculous pay wall. If they give you the chance to access it at all.
Free market capitalism won't allow that to happen... If some company makes the mistake of putting up pay walls, customers will look for companies that don't. You used the example of what happened at T_D, and look where you posted this comment and where we are all at now. The_Donald.win.
Except for the problem that most ISPs run in monopoly markets. The ones that don't are usually oligopolies. This problem is on that is often enabled by city governments or other bureaucratic fuckery. Want to start up your own telecoms company? Good luck getting permission to run cables or set up your lines.
The free market can't work in this case unless you break down all the barriers that are preventing competition. So, some regulation is needed to ensure there can be competition.
Local municipal government rules are the ones preventing competition. Usually in the form of some kind of exclusivity contract regarding use of aerial poles.
"Regulation" is such a meaningless word these days. I think you'd be better off saying "some kind of government action needs to be involved in solving the problem". In this case changing their deals regarding aerial infrastructure as well as making trenching in streets cheaper and a more streamlined process.
Even with the mess that is local municipal trenching and aerial rights, SpaceX is going to have Starlink delivering internet to competition starved markets shortly. The free market finds a way.
And you don’t think the left will try to shut us down here too? They tried to shut down Gab, 4chan, Subscribestar, etc. Cloudflare has pulled their services from conservative sites before.
I just don’t trust Comcast and the rest to play fair, we’re too reliant on them.
Sure, and on the flip side, the government gets control and decides that based on your search history, what info you’re allowed to access, your speeds, etc. At least there’s some level of competition with privately owned ISPs, so unless they monopolize, you can move service if you’re experience any sort of throttling, discrimination, etc. Not the case when it’s all owned under one umbrella.
To use your own example, sure it may not happen immediately, it may not happen in ten years, but as socialism/communism and big government becomes more and more popular among the left, how long till a government controlled internet goes the way of China?
Software engineer here. There are other games with different revenue models that have come out in response to the PTW games. I.e. PoE. I don't see the government stepping in to save the gamers pocket books. Also, it's hardly the same.
And it used to be, that I chose my internet company based on the latency between my computer and the game server. Companies literally bought miles and miles of dark fiber just so they could have the fastest back bone and then companies would choose them for their internet. Which is exactly what net neutrality attempts stop.
Distributed computing should ring a bell. To get response times down into the milliseconds. Again exactly what net neutrality attempts to stop. Even this site uses a CDN.
Even if some isp decides to charge me based on what sites I access, at least I would have some sort of recourse thanks to the free market. But if the government has control, you're stuck. Ma Bell?
Microtransactions support a much bigger video game industry than we had before where we get continuous development on and support for a much wider variety of games many of which are awesome.
In the past, awesome games had to be scrapped or at least unfinished and never updated because the company couldn't survive long enough to provide the finished product.
If there aren't laws that prevent certain types of political discrimination by the isps, then we should pass them, but I don't think we want them run by the government top down
I'm a software engineer and usually very pro-free market. But I still wildly disagree with revoking net neutrality. It gives a LOT of power to extort Americans in a market with an extremely, almost impossible to cross barrier of entry, only a few providers (and only one in many places), who are absolutely awful companies. And just because nothing has happened YET doesn't mean it wont. Microtransactions didn't hit video games overnight. We had a decade or more of good games before they started sneaking them in. Now they're everywhere.
Its amazing to me that you guys who just got censored off of a big tech platform, and rant about big tech censorship, are entirely fine trusting the same companies that own MSNBC, CNN, Vice, ect with unprecedented control of your access to the internet. You think its bad right now where they're kicking us off hosting websites? Just wait until someone decides to just start putting places like this behind a ridiculous pay wall. If they give you the chance to access it at all.
Free market capitalism won't allow that to happen... If some company makes the mistake of putting up pay walls, customers will look for companies that don't. You used the example of what happened at T_D, and look where you posted this comment and where we are all at now. The_Donald.win.
Except for the problem that most ISPs run in monopoly markets. The ones that don't are usually oligopolies. This problem is on that is often enabled by city governments or other bureaucratic fuckery. Want to start up your own telecoms company? Good luck getting permission to run cables or set up your lines.
The free market can't work in this case unless you break down all the barriers that are preventing competition. So, some regulation is needed to ensure there can be competition.
Local municipal government rules are the ones preventing competition. Usually in the form of some kind of exclusivity contract regarding use of aerial poles.
"Regulation" is such a meaningless word these days. I think you'd be better off saying "some kind of government action needs to be involved in solving the problem". In this case changing their deals regarding aerial infrastructure as well as making trenching in streets cheaper and a more streamlined process.
Even with the mess that is local municipal trenching and aerial rights, SpaceX is going to have Starlink delivering internet to competition starved markets shortly. The free market finds a way.
And you don’t think the left will try to shut us down here too? They tried to shut down Gab, 4chan, Subscribestar, etc. Cloudflare has pulled their services from conservative sites before.
I just don’t trust Comcast and the rest to play fair, we’re too reliant on them.
Sure, and on the flip side, the government gets control and decides that based on your search history, what info you’re allowed to access, your speeds, etc. At least there’s some level of competition with privately owned ISPs, so unless they monopolize, you can move service if you’re experience any sort of throttling, discrimination, etc. Not the case when it’s all owned under one umbrella.
To use your own example, sure it may not happen immediately, it may not happen in ten years, but as socialism/communism and big government becomes more and more popular among the left, how long till a government controlled internet goes the way of China?
But that didn't happen. Your system was already divided up by big companies, this was a play by big tech to basically have free reign
What actually happened was the opposite. When your hypothesis is proven wrong, you change it, sticking to the same idea is insanity
Software engineer here. There are other games with different revenue models that have come out in response to the PTW games. I.e. PoE. I don't see the government stepping in to save the gamers pocket books. Also, it's hardly the same.
And it used to be, that I chose my internet company based on the latency between my computer and the game server. Companies literally bought miles and miles of dark fiber just so they could have the fastest back bone and then companies would choose them for their internet. Which is exactly what net neutrality attempts stop.
Distributed computing should ring a bell. To get response times down into the milliseconds. Again exactly what net neutrality attempts to stop. Even this site uses a CDN.
Even if some isp decides to charge me based on what sites I access, at least I would have some sort of recourse thanks to the free market. But if the government has control, you're stuck. Ma Bell?
Microtransactions support a much bigger video game industry than we had before where we get continuous development on and support for a much wider variety of games many of which are awesome.
In the past, awesome games had to be scrapped or at least unfinished and never updated because the company couldn't survive long enough to provide the finished product.
If there aren't laws that prevent certain types of political discrimination by the isps, then we should pass them, but I don't think we want them run by the government top down