I_AM_ZUUL, on 19 January 2017 - 06:41 PM, said:
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So while the concept sounds all warm and fluffy... it practical application it is going to be horrendous and it will actually make lots of services worse. Netflix uses such a huge percentage of total internet use, that companies were able to get Netflix in investing in upgrading bandwidth support... but now Netflix traffic gets the same priority as all other traffic meaning that Netflix has already drastically scaled back in their infrastructure support since they will no longer be receiving priority on the infrastructure they helped pay for. So Netflix streaming will suffer... but further down the line growth they would have paid to use will no longer even be created, a side effect commonly referred to as the "Unseen Conquesences" by economists. That which can not be measured because the investment of capital went elsewhere.
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I know I shouldn't, but this particular point in general bothers the hell out of me, and is the main crux of the argument for Net Neutrality.
Bandwidth is a zero-sum game - for someone to have increased priority, everyone else has to collectively have
decreased priority because that is how 'priority' works. If massive companies like Netflix are allowed to buy increased network priority, then anyone who wants to compete with Netflix has to also buy the same or better network priority. Any company that buys this increased priority for any reason makes the rest of the Internet just that little bit worse, that little bit slower, less responsive, less reliable and less useful for everyone else.
Massive megacorps can afford to eat that hit in order to make their personal web systems run more smoothly, but Plucky Start-Ups that can't afford to pay the exorbitant, extortionistic SuperMegaUltraFees that telecoms will charge for "priority" usage will, effectively, be priced off the Internet. Netflix will never have to compete with a newer video service ever again because any newer video service, regardless of whether it's a better, stronger platform, won't be able to afford to pay through the nose for high priority network handling.
This is to say nothing, of course, of the individual Internet consumer's experience, which would become absolutely horrific. As a single individual paying for home Internet, your ability to connecto to sites with superhigh priority like Netflix, Google, Wal-Mart's online shopping center, or whatever else will be great! ...but
every other single use you can put the Internet to will be utterly awful because you are at the absolute bottom of the priority bucket. Your network requests and traffic get handled after absolutely everyone else in the world because all the corporations buying Me-First "high priority" traffic have ensured that you're going to be at the bottom of that heap forever. You do not
begin to have the pockets to pay for working Internet to your personal home.
The Internet goes from being a free playground that anyone and everyone can use equally to do anything they feel might work out to being, effectively, a virtual strip mall utterly and completely dominated by Big Business, with everyone else choked out and forced to fold because they can't sustain their smaller businesses or personal web tools or sites/blogs/whatevers in the face of extremely discriminatory network handling that panders to Big Corporate at the direct expense of
literally everyone and everything else.
Of course, the incoming administration is basically Big Corporate personified, so the end of Net Neutrality, at least temporarily, is unfortunately sort of a given. Hopefully when Trump and Co. push through all the ridiculous laws Big Telecom keeps trying to push so they can monetize every last one and zero and price the overwhelming majority of network traffic off the Internet doing it, the monumental decrease in the power and freedom will result in enough of a public uproar that Net Neutrality will be forcefully re-invoked, to stay this time.
Until then...well, don't get too attached to any of your non-Blizzard online games. Smaller companies like Piranha simply won't be able to afford the priority network handling needed to keep a game like MWO running smoothly. Nor will any amount of Awesome New Infrastructure that abolishing Net Neutrality will,
ostensibly, allow Big Telecom to build help in the least, since none of us will be able to benefit from that sweet new infrastructure without paying until we bleed for High Priority access. And that's if they bother building new infrastructure in the first place instead of just pocketing their profits and laughing their aszes off all the way to the bank.
Here's a hint: they won't. Building infrastructure costs money, and Big Telecom is not going to spend money. Spending money gets in the way of
making money, and making money is the only thing in the entire world that matters to the people who are, by horribly unfortunate circumstance, the guardians of all of humanity's collected and accumulated knowledge and our gateway to the world.
The Internet is a precious and irreplaceable resource that should be readily and easily available to absolutely everyone on the planet. You shouldn't be able to spend money to kick everyone else off of that resource or forcibly strangle your business competition...but that's the direction we're headed in now.
God f***ing damnit.
Edited by 1453 R, 20 January 2017 - 10:53 AM.
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