Take our site, KiNE Magazine, for example: we have no $$$. The only way we reach tens of thousands of readers is through the unfettered glory of the free and open internet for all businesses. Now, let’s say that the FCC allows the ISP cartels to charge for faster service: what happens to KiNE? Well, big regional media companies like The Denver Post, who owns The Cannabist, could pay a premium to have their content readily available to readers, while KiNE’s content loads more slowly and is harder to find.

Originally Posted by protonitron

If priced rise for Internet. No matter how the other companies try to keep prices high there will always be one or two companies you decide to screw over the others and sells for a lower price. New companies can be set up, maybe by the people who rose the price intitiely and these companies will pose as masiahs of the free Internet world while stealing all if the customers. Monopolies work by controlling prices to control customers. I Japan McDonalds made a large loss of profit for the first year or two because they were selling burgers for a price so cheap that profit was impossible, McDonald's used its profit from other countries to keep these shops open. This meant nobody when to any other fast good restaurants because McDonald's was the cheapest. Then when all the other restaurants had shut down and there was no more competition McDonald's brought prices up, this is how monopolies work, they eliminate all opposition, if monopolies work together they are not monopolies because there is more than one company. Greed will bring down this scheme. The point I am making is that a monopoly only works well if there are no other companies in that field, even if the few companies in the industry decide to work together they can't prevent new companies from starting and providing cheap internet bandwidth can they? (this is a genuine question: I have no idea about this stuff). There would probably be an increase of price but competition will keep it reasonable and the agreements will fail. I have never seen a human right: "right to free and fast Internet bandwidth" it is just something which happened and will probably happen again if it ever stops happening.

I hope thus makes some sort of sense. Thank you for reading.

Originally Posted by ImmortalPig

This seems kind of weird to me, 'internet express lanes' already exist, don't they? If I buy a gigabit pipe to the exchange, am I not buying an express lane?

Originally Posted by sid

It's not the same. This would, in a nutshell, give ISPs the green light to provide fast lanes to companies they have deals with, which should be read as "having a shitty base service and holding website speeds for ransom". To paraphrase some video that I watched the other day, while you're totally free to pave your driveway with whatever hi-tech pavement you want, that doesn't stop your ISP from plopping a gate on your driveway and choosing who they open the gates to and when. They're literally being given permission to perform legal extortion. If you want to look at it in a very extreme and apocalyptic way, think that ISPs would have all the permissions necessary to take a news site that's posting something they dislike and throttle them into becoming almost unusable to all of their customers (being completely unusable is actually protected by the FCC's new proposed rules, at least we've got that going for us). A more realistic scenario would involve Comcast striking a deal with, say, Netflix, and in response throttling Amazon Prime to drive its own customers towards Netflix.