General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: CUT THE CRAP! Your Month in Review from the most "progressive" administration ever. [View all]jeff47
(26,549 posts)The FCC can put ISPs under the same rules as telephone service, and ensure net neutrality.
The problem is those rules are designed over breadth of service, not speed.
The way ISPs currently upgrade their service is by competing for people who pay for very high speed service. Time Warner used to offer 50Mbps service for a crapload of money. Most people wouldn't pay the cost, but a few people will. That causes Time Warner to upgrade their network to handle the service. Which causes AT&T to upgrade their network to compete for those same high-profit people.
Once both networks have been upgraded, they start offering faster service to everyone. That really expensive Time Warner service recently changed to 100Mbps, while my "regular" service went from 10Mbps to 15Mbps for the same price I was already paying.
The telephone rules don't let the ISPs play that game. Which is why our plain old telephone service got upgraded every 40 years. We already have the slowest Internet service in the developed world. We don't want to make that worse.
Additionally, the "fast lane" proposal was limited to a 20% boost - non-fast-lane could run no slower than 80% of the top speed. If "normal" Internet service goes from 10Mbps to 100Mbps that's a huge win for all of us, even with that fast lane crap - 80Mbps is a huge boost over 10Mbps. Is that likely? Hell if I know. There's too many people spewing crap everywhere to find a reasonable analysis of likely speed effects.