[ale] Republicans’ “Internet Freedom Act” would wipe out net neutrality | Ars Technica

[Byron Jeff]

On Sun, Mar 08, 2015 at 07:41:27AM -0400, DJ-Pfulio wrote:
> I lived in Houston before moving here - not in a baby-bell area. My phone was
> $11/month.  Moved to Smyrna - BellSouth - $26/month.
> 
> 'nuff said.
> 

Standard land line. How quaint!

VOIP and Google Voice has deregulated this market already. I have a
Callcentric DID with E911 service for $4.50 a month. Incoming calls routed
in via GV. By virtualizing my home number, I never have to worry about that
number being tied to a particular provider ever again. If I ever give up my
AT&T cell service, I'll do exactly the same with my cell number.

> Don't get me started about power issues where I lived in Houston.
> 
> Comcast needs to be broken up, but not in the same way that AT*T was. More like
> how natural gas has been deregulated in Georgia.

There isn't a direct correlation between the two. The primary difference is
the fact that natural gas is exactly the same no matter who's marketing it.
However with digital content, each provider offers different content that
has to be delivered. Comcast has comcast only content that neither Charter,
AT&T, or Dish offers. So instead of GNG, which can centralize all gas
delivery operations for every marketer using the same infrastructure, in
your proposed scenario each provider would have to have a connection to the
head end of the delivery provider and the delivery provider would have to
carry enough bandwidth to deliver every content providers content at the
same time.

Don't you think there will be a cost attached to that? One of the reasons I
finally turned off my natural gas service was the fact that GNG was
charging me nearly $40/month simply for the priviledge of providing gas to
my meter. No matter if it's 1 therm or 100, the base delivery and tax was a
$40+ base. Can you imagine how much a centralized content delivery provider
would charge simply for access?

How exactly is the market closed? Right now I can get Comcast (which I
would never do, long story), AT&T UVerse, Dish, and DirectTV. In fact in
the last 5 years I've had service with each of the above and except for
Dish I've kicked each and every one of them to the curb at one point in
time or another. There's nothing to preclude Verizon or Google from
entering the fray.

Comparing digital content delivery to natural gas deregulation is an apples
to gorillas argument, seems to me.

BAJ

> 
> 
> On 03/07/2015 04:24 PM, Jim Lynch wrote:
> > The Judge made my life harder.  Before his ruling, I picked up the phone and
> > called AT&T when the network wasn't working.  It got fixed.  Afterwards, I
> > called AT&T and after a bit, they told me it wasn't their problem, so I called
> > Racal Milgo and guess what?  It wasn't their problem either.  It took 2x 3x
> > maybe 4x the amount of time to get the network back.
> > 
> > Progress...
> > On 03/07/2015 04:14 PM, James Taylor wrote:
> >> Now you're making us all feel old....
> >> -jt
> > 
> _______________________________________________
> Ale mailing list
> Ale at ale.org
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo/ale
> See JOBS, ANNOUNCE and SCHOOLS lists at
> http://mail.ale.org/mailman/listinfo

-- 
Byron A. Jeff
Chair: Department of Computer Science and Information Technology
College of Information and Mathematical Sciences
Clayton State University
http://faculty.clayton.edu/bjeff