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[LordPorkins]

Holy shit. I had no idea it went through till a friend just casually mentioned it to me.

Hopefully if it gets really bad Anonymous will just hop on it.

[deathpunch578]

Holy shit. I had no idea it went through till a friend just casually mentioned it to me.

Hopefully if it gets really bad Anonymous will just hop on it.

I think a lot of them are threatening ajit already, what they will do I have no clue.

[Reelya]

Me an Ipsil were just giving a reality check. The types of horror stories being spread don't exist anywhere despite their not being net neutrality laws pretty much anywhere.

This is plainly because the consumer cost of data is in fact far, far in excess of the profits gained from sending you that specific data from a website.

e.g. say Netflix is $10 a month. That's the absolute most they could conceivably bribe your ISP per person. However, that doesn't make sense. Really, they'd only be able to afford about $1 per person, after overheads. And also, it only makes sense as far as it gains extra Netflix subscribers. e.g. throttling Youtube might increase Netflix users from 50% to 55% of your ISP users. So that $1 is now down to being able to afford 5 cents per ISP user in bribes. Plus, you have to also factor in that additional usage from Netflix's end is going to be expensive because all 55% will now be getting their Netflix shows in higher quality.

So, even for a subscription service it only makes sense that they could afford to subsidize you a few cents out of your $70 a month unlimited plan.

[LordPorkins]

Holy shit. I had no idea it went through till a friend just casually mentioned it to me.

Hopefully if it gets really bad Anonymous will just hop on it.

I think a lot of them are threatening ajit already, what they will do I have no clue.

Probably just Ddos the shit out of every company that tries to enact the packaging policy.

Edit:@Reelya For me personally, its less the specifics of the law, and more about the government attempting to wrangle what is probably the most wild, rebellious, and lawless "organization" in this world. The fact that they did that, especially in America, which Prides itself on its "freedom" (Which is mostly BS, but anyway) is pretty fucking scary.

[Zangi]

As for the FCC vote going through, it was a forgone conclusion. 
Voters are basically 5 people: 2 republicans, 2 democrats and the Head of the FCC.  The Head of the FCC basically has a policy of ignoring a bunch of inconvenient facts, so all they had to do was set-up the vote to get it through on majority.

Maybe it could bite them in the ass with a lawsuit and some judge doing a Stay on the measures.  One can only hope.

I think the main argument is like I added in an edit there.

If you're being charged for some amount of data per month, with overuse fees, they have no incentive to throttle anything because the value of the overuse fees far outweighs the marginal value of any individual website getting higher bandwidth to you. Netflix doesn't necessarily even want you to have unlimited bandwidth.

Or, for a capped plan they could have "free Netflix". However, consumers will exploit that: people will consume more of that material and less of everything else. So the effect would be that people don't buy as much extra data per month.

That's the real issue here: getting you to consume more data just isn't worth as much to the various websites as it is to your ISP. Or, if they block and throttle things, they lose out on money from people accidentally going over their cap. So they could however I can't see many scenarios where it would be mutually profitable to both the ISP and website vendor. Even if something is supported by advertising, in which case they could conceivably want to do this, the profits from the adverts don't cover the cost of the service data.

Assuming they decide to shift toward a mobile like policy, charging more for usage.  It is not the only way to skin a customer. 

Many ISP are already on unlimited data. 
Many of those ISP also offer TV/cable services. 
Many of those ISP also have a monopoly/duopoly over large swaths of areas.
They do have incentive to throttle and go after normal/fast-lane fees from the content provider and/or the customer.  Or to just simply promote their own content/shit on all the competitors/force content providers to the negotiating table.  That "free Netflix" might mean they are taking a chunk from Netflix, rather then charging the customers.  Which the cost will pass down to the customers anyways.

L2CapitalistPig

[deathpunch578]

Me an Ipsil were just giving a reality check. The types of horror stories being spread don't exist anywhere despite their not being net neutrality laws pretty much anywhere.

the repeal and new "laws" (you need to tell people how your fucking them over) go into effect in 60 days. once that happens, everyone is fucked

^this is why the net neutrality laws are necessary, not only that but most places have one or two ISPs, so when they decide to do corrupt shit you can't do anything about it.

[MrRoboto75]

If there was literally no difference to ISPs if NN was live or not they would not have gone through all the trouble to puppet the FCC and remove NN in spite of near universal public disapproval and resistance.

[deathpunch578]

Holy shit. I had no idea it went through till a friend just casually mentioned it to me.

Hopefully if it gets really bad Anonymous will just hop on it.

I think a lot of them are threatening ajit already, what they will do I have no clue.

Probably just Ddos the shit out of every company that tries to enact the packaging policy.

the thing is, anonymous is calling the attack destructive, they've Ddosed a lot before, they just called those attacks. whatever they're doing is going to be big

[RedKing]

In local news, Dan Johnson offed himself after the story re: him sexually assaulting a 17 year old broke.

This is a trend I can support.

EDIT: I see his widow has already said she'll run for his vacant seat, saying "these high-tech lynchings and half-truths cannot be allowed to win the day".

A few reactions:
1. Eww. His body's barely cold and she's literally using it as a campaign platform. That's one stone-cold woman.
2. "Half truths"? That implies that there's something to the allegation.
3. "High-tech lynchings" is the exact phrase coined by Clarence Thomas to describe the Anita Hill hearings decades ago. It's virtually a dogwhistle to the right-wing base.

[Reelya]

That "free Netflix" might mean they are taking a chunk from Netflix, rather then charging the customers.

Except the marginal value to Netflix is too low to make that worthwhile. The marginal value to Netflix is exactly the additional extra subscribers they will get, then take only the profits per each new subscriber, and minus the additional operating costs they will incur by having to provide more data to everyone else. e.g. say half the ISP subscribers already have Netflix, then you'd be lucky to e.g. get another 5% of people paying $10 a month for Netflix because it has free data. Netflix is likely making about $1 in profits per subscriber, if that. Then divide that by 20, that's how much free data they could afford to subsidize per ISP subscriber, perhaps 5-10 cents worth per month per customer. Any more than that, and the additional costs will exceed how many additional subscribers they're picking up.

Also, for cable companies that also act as ISPs: them not charging for local server data is not the huge problem you make it out. Content on a local server shouldn't count as data. External bandwidth is an entirely different resource to local content bandwidth. If you penalize cable companies that give non-metered status to local content then that's going to push more of the users onto the public bandwidth instead. So, sure, more people will use Netflix then. However, the main result of that will be slower Netflix, as a higher proportion of the ISP subscribers will be using the same finite amount of external bandwidth. Nobody would get better service from applying strict Net Neutrality to all data in this scenario, and I suspect this is actually the cable companies main argument / issue.

[Maximum Spin]

Networking experts generally agree that "net neutrality" is actually harmful to consumers.

[EnigmaticHat]

Networking experts generally agree that "net neutrality" is actually harmful to consumers.

[citation needed]

My impression has always been that the steepest resistance to net neutrality has come from the tech sector, and a couple random google searches seem to back that up.

[Reelya]

The rules that were implemented were only passed near the tail end of Obama's second term. The idea that some radically terrible hellscape is going to be unleashed any day now because we've gone back to 2014 rules seems ... alarmist.

This is really the main point. These are recent rules that are being challenged. Things aren't suddenly going to be any different to how they've always been. The fearmongering is about examples that makes almost no business sense whatsoever. The only examples that do make sense are like I said: for cable companies that serve shows off local servers. If you treat those as "internet" and say they can't charge more or less for that, then it hurts consumers, since the cost of delivering content cannot be reflected in the price. And when prices cannot reflect costs, you get market distortion, which ends up costing everyone more.

[RedKing]

Networking experts[who?] generally agree that "net neutrality" is actually harmful to consumers.

[citation needed]

ftfy

In other harassment/molestation-related news:

Texas Republican, J.D. Hogg impersonator and human-Hutt hybrid Blake Farenthold has announced he's not running for re-election after a former communications director came forward and told the House Ethics Committee (already investigating Farenthold on news that he spent $84,000 in taxpayer money paying to settle a sexual harassment suit from ANOTHER communications director) that Farenthold regularly called his staff "fucktards" and when said communications director was about to go on leave to get married, told him (in front of a number of other staffers) "You better have your fiance blow you before the wedding, it'll be the last time" before proceeding to joke about whether she'd be able to wear a white dress.

Several other staffers have corroborated the incident. Farenthold denies the whole thing. Except for calling his staff "fucktards", which he said was done in jest, rather than anger.

What a fucktard.

[RedKing]

Let's not forget that this is the same guy that someone figured out owned the domain blow-me.org, and was caught in this infamous picture at a Texas night club in 2009:

Spoiler: SFW, but not really safe for anyone (click to show/hide)

I'm still feeling like Texas and New Jersey have some kind of secret legislator exchange program, because this guy just screams Jersey Shore, not Gulf Coast.