I put in my 2 cents worth at the FCC web site.

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There is one simple solution. Don't forget that it is us paying them.!!!

So what is we just said bye bye to our providers! Just go for the dail-in internet form a couple of month?

We must NEVER forget that we, as the customers, are more powerful than any company out there! All we need to do is unite!!

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There is nothing to be worried about. There always was and always would be other options. In same way it is in times and places where access to Internet network is either unacceptably expensive or not technically advanced, reliable or secure to provide acceptable data connection link or it is not for whatever the reason connected to content of your real interest. Such problems were there (believe or not) all the time, not just now. If you realize this, you may now think about it a little bit deeper.

Basic principles of needs to data exchange didn't changed much and Internet itself have no chance to change that, no matter who rules it. Internet was intentionally evolved to the effective and (from end user perspective) simple tool which may be used by almost by anyone for almost for anything. It have it's pros and cons. It's potential may be used as any other tool for good or for bad, depends on intention of the tool's user. Internet's destiny was set in a moment when it was officially "accepted" by governments and put to hands of certain companies. It newer was and newer will be really free since then. Everyone in it will be trying to get most from it until they can, until other people will let them, until there is something or someone who can be used. It's natural to humans.

It's too late for the Internet anyway. People simply let it turn away to much from it's initial purpose, from reason why it was created. 90% of it is junkyard, and the rest will turn to trash too or will be simply buried under that garbage so deeply that at the end nobody would like to take any efforts to dig for it from here.

Just keep the current Internet to corporates. Let them to cripple it as they wish. Let even other people to use if they still believe that Internet is what "they" rally want. If you don't like it, don't use it. Create your own way, your own network, or join to already existing ones. If your way would be interesting enough, don't be afraid, people with similar thinking will come sooner or later. You may get even support from open-minded companies. And do not worry those selfish corporates and government will come right away and whole process will repeat.

Even now you may use any of data distribution methods/networks which there are already for more than 30 years besides to the official Internet itself, just were not intentionally publicly "advertised/approved" by corporates or governments (for completely obvious reasons).

Maybe you haven't fully realized it yet, but it is not problem to transfer 100TB of data from one continent to other in less than 24 hours, without explanations to anyone, without using single bit of the Internet network, regardless the weather or politic climate.

It's your data, your life, your choice. Not a big deal if you really think about it.

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In a teacup net-neutrality is about controlling content.

If I control the price of access I control what you access.

having the internet turned into a junkyard by everyone with something to sell or

say I can live with.

This is what filters are for.

AS to alternatives to the isp's I highly encourage this the internet works best

when information flows around any blockage.

you may be right in that letting the current isp's kill the current internet can

speed the adoption of other more robust means of communication.

It just seems a lot easier to try to save what we have now.

as you say in the end it will make no difference information will flow regardless.

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The US used to be a land of competition. It is now referred to as a "mixed economy", with business still privately owned, but subject to regulation in the most minute details. Most of the ISPs are built on the remnants of the Cable Television or Telephone systems. These systems were never competitive-they were licensed monopolies. Making their "franchises" subject to the local governments was supposed to enforce the discipline lost by removing them from the competitive marketplace. Unfortunately, it has not turned out quite that way.

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I sometimes wonder what would happen to the world if the internet just disappeared...

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rOZZ
Music
Pictures

And that's one of the core problems. People are still thinking about everything like about competition.

Competition with who? About what?

You can compete with your "neighbour", whatever it means. Right, it's your decision. It may be someone you will never know, your enemy, your friend or family member. Right, it's your decision as well.

But at the end, you compete with everyone including yourself or friends. Such approach always ends with sad fact that some day, someone (with approach like you, but in fittest implementation) will "compete over you" no matter how much you try to "save" it. It may be someone you will never know, your enemy, your friend or family member. Right, it was your decision.

What is the real outcome? What is that benefit you can get from this?
Oratorical questions on which I do not need to hear an answer. I used to it. I used to not to be part of it.

Every ecosystem will sooner or later somewhat learn how to act to preserve itself. And US economy system is quite young.

Here in Europe ISP are also remnants of the Cable TV or telephony companies. It's technological advance. Such companies had to transform to ISPs. They do have majority in totals, but they do not have monopolies. They are trying really hard to keep illusion about that they have. But they don't. They have licences to sell stuff. Stuff that people do not want to buy anymore for their prices (because they do not have to). They also trying to make their "franchises" subject to the local governments. But it is not too easy as in US as there are always at least two other political groups waiting just for this, prepared to launch counter campaign using this mistake and angry citizens as a whip.

Simply there do not have a support (or quiet tolerance) from regular people, customers, end users.

People are doing ISPs to themselves. They use knowledge what they learn in schools. They are creating and maintain non-profit organizations, they buying large Fibre based connectivity directly as large ISPs or large business companies, and sharing it trough their own networks. In cities they build fibre/metalic cable networks. On country side they use Wifi or create custom radio relay/laser beam p2p devices. They are using free channels, or buy licences for guaranteed ones. They are getting unlimited internet connectivity for less then 4 dollars/month/100Mbit. In smaller cities where "big" ISPs lost this fight already, they are creating a completely free hotspots in cooperation with local schools, libraries, and local government. They are volunteers, they are students who practice their knowledge in real world, their are doing it for fun. For having the internet for free if they actively participate or just for maintenance fee. Some of them are even paid as regular full-time technicians, or par time lawyers if needed. If such communities met each other on their areas of coverages, they usually cooperate with each other, creating failovers, load balance, sharing knowledge, connectivity, purchasing more equipment for VoIP, TV streamers etc. They do not have a need to compete or doing business...

"Big" ISPs Companies with too many headquarters offices, lawyers, and other bureaucracy stuff, simply cannot compete to this. There is very limited space for their main interest - profit. They have absolutely nothing to offer. And in rare cases, some of the "big" companies or GSM operators became customers (or so called sponsors) of such non-profit organisations when their own infrastructure became to old, to costly or insufficient in particular area.

I know what you may think. No, those people do not need to be employees of such company. They do not need to pay to much for something what they can do by themselves, so they do not need to get much money from employment at first place. And even if they would be the employees, they certainly wouldn't get that share of profit of such company...

You do not need a regulation from government. You are the regulation.

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Excellent thread! Sent my comments off this morning.

It's such a shame that monopolies can ruin society through their own greed. Government is failing if it cannot put a check on these companies. . . .

Actually, and ironically, it's governmental intervention into economies that gives rise to such monopolies (living in Australia all my life has proven this trait to me) through either licensing arrangements/agreements/favours/and so on ad infinitum.

At this site - http://ari.aynrand.org/issues/government-and-business/regulations/Justice-Department-should-let-US-Airways-and-American-Airlines-merger-proceed#filter-bar - paragraphs 6 through 12 sum it up succinctly, as do the closing three . . .

When digital technology arrived I thought (no doubt, naively) "here is the means to do hands-on and immediate 'democracy', vote with the push of a button!"
If the giants like Verizon want to control content, it's a two way street, why not just switch off our computers for a day, week, a month even, and watch their revenues trickle to a halt?
Impractical, yes - but nothing is achieved without a little pain and discomfort.

To me, as an outsider looking in (to the USA), I am amazed that such content control doesn't breach multiple levels of the First Amendment; the right to free speech is a two way street . . . 'filtering and siphoning' what type of content is delivered to me is a curtailment of my rights and free choice . . .

as usual, I'm running late - Its July 15th 2:19AM.

And, my ISP can not get a connection to the dockets.
I can get to http://www.fcc.gov/comments
but then selecting 14-28 to http://apps.fcc.gov/ecfs/upload/begin?procName=14-28&filedFrom=X

nope, nada, nix and null.
(go .gov, Go!)


Oh well, I'll try again later (while living:)

Best wishes to all that were able to comment.
may we all live in a multi-value system.

Jay

PS,
I tried Mozilla, IE9 and Google chrome.
Chrome said: Message from the NSAPI plugin:
No backend server available for connection: timed out after 10 seconds or idempotent set to OFF.

Too bad smoke signals did not work so well at night.
Or teletype at 56.9 baud.
---------------------------------edit--------------------------
Now I get it:
See the link to Philly....
By Bob Fernandez, Inquirer Staff Writer
Posted: June 28, 2014

The huge volume of e-mails and public comments over the proposed rule creating Internet fast lanes and slow lanes crashed part of the Federal Communications Commission's aging computer system earlier this month, an agency official confirmed Thursday....

Still down..

My thanks to John Oliver and staff.
Go John! GO!

FCC extends deadline for net neutrality comments after site problems

Enjoy but the deal has already been reached in the back rooms.

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Done. Comment filed as suggested - and just in the nick of time too!

A ZD Update on Net Neutrality Hearings with Interesting Links.
http://www.zdnet.com/fcc-delays-net-neutrality-commentary-deadline-after-overwhelming-response-7000031633/?s_cid=e589&ttag=e589&ftag=TREc64629f

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I Desire Peace and Justice, Jim Scott (Mod-Ret.)

This is driven by greed and nothing but greed. As we have all learned, except for the greedy, putting all your eggs one basket is STUPID and fraught with danger. If one goes down the other will collapse as it will be unable to coupe with the extra traffic and to add insult to injury they will make them selves a PRIME TARGET to ALL HAKERS determined to take down the US infrastructure.

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"All man born has a right to life and no man born has the right to take that life"

Thank you Dr. Korpela for making me aware of this. I have submitted to the FCC website as you indicated. We need to keep this wonderful amalgam open to all in the face of increased restrictions everywhere on this planet. Thank you for being a light!

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I'm quite happy with such a proposal, because the rest of the world does not engage in such systems and this could have the potential to stifle the US technological economy. I hope that something like this does happen as the US has allowed monopolies to develop and Europe hasn't- ie if my ISP throttles me, I'll just switch provider, from which I have plenty to choose. As a result, there is potential for countries other than the US to become places to start technology businesses such as Netflix, because they don't allow such blatant monopolies to develop in the first place...

lets start a open source campainto boycotyour isp!
i was thinking we could use asearch engine loke limewire to look for other machines and establish a re-triangulate hack to reinforce connections to evryones proxy point then transfer as mutch of the data as possible in a stripped file simulation like opera turbo and fedoras YUM-delta-rpms combine
make the internet's traffic 90% user end and secure it with multiple tunneling layers of binary compliant encryption (use the connetionprogram to rotate the tunnel'e route+the encryption according to a mac address in each hop with a key added to the end so that data decrypts as it is trancieved between to points using 2 different keys)
i have some experiments to do in my lab now
Eric Korpela you inspire me
i might consider you for its name

RTFishall, I live in Colorado, and have for over 30 years. The story of csble providers in the 1990's is one of greed and desparation. For severral yeaers one never knew who you provider was going to be from one week to the next. Finally, many of them just gave up, and the state government stepped in and said " You can have Dish Network, or you can have Comcast" It was similar for our cell phones during that period.

The Internet is analogous to a multi-lane highway system. And as long as just motorcycles, automobiles and semis (emails and downloads) are on there, it will function. Granted, there will be the occasional congestion, but that will clear back up.
Now someone has figured out how to put entire trains (streaming video) on the highway. And we need a magnitude increase in the highways.
Another analogy might be the electric grid. You can have so much per interval (day/week/month), and additional usage will cost.

The Internet was never designed for something like streaming video. So multi-tier is a Good Thing. The trick will be getting it so it only penalizes the large consumers. I'd think some sort of base cap on streaming (video) data after which there would be a pro-rated fee. For example, a movie an interval, with additional movies during that interval costing an additional charge.
You want to watch movies all day? Fine. But you're going to pay for the additional load as well as help pay for new bandwidth.

And so as not to be hitting just on streaming video, let's call it "streaming", referring to any large load that requires some minimum response time.

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The problem is, that's not the situation that's happening.

In keeping with your highway analogy, every driver already pays for the infrastructure of highways through the cost of their driver's license, through the license plate tags, and through their state and county taxes. All of this, despite that no attention is given to how much a person actually drives.

Now, if the infrastructure cannot handle the load, then the money paid yearly by every citizen should be going into improving that infrastructure. Instead, what is happening is the construction workers who build the roads are now going to the businesses where we shop and demanding that they pay more money to offset the costs. These businesses now have an increased burden of cost, so they must raise the prices of their goods to offset their costs. This makes it all the way back to you and I having to pay for the infrastructure again.

Now, imagine if these construction workers were capable of messing with rush-hour traffic, a la Chris Christie in New Jersey. To make it seem like the roads are more congested than they really are, and to extort more money out of businesses and people alike, they close down roads and re-route traffic in the longest ways possible so as to make you think there's a bigger problem. They go through this trouble all because they don't want to buy a bigger bridge to other cities; they want to be your one-stop shop and keep you from getting where you want to go. What's worse is some cities/towns only have one construction company driving up prices because they're the only game in town and they know it.


This is the current problem as it stands. Net neutrality would make sure that no one can mess with the routing of traffic, or to treat some traffic differently than others. We're all trying to do things on the net, and we're all paying for access to it. Some of us are already paying more than others through buying faster packages from our ISPs (present company included).

Net neutrality isn't about an aging infrastructure that can't handle the traffic. Many internet companies receive kickbacks from the government to help improve their networks. People pay these companies a monthly surcharge for access. Net neutrality is about making sure these companies aren't allowing their greed to double-dip and charge twice for the same service.