The americans will lose the internet at december 14 - in about one day.

I am pro net neutrality, but the FCC and ISP lobbyism - backed by the republicans will definitly win and there is nothing you can do about it. Also i expect this will affect all other contries as well, not immeditaly but slowly but surely.

Enjoy the last day of the open internet!

Just get a VPN, there's nothing they can really do anymore that will stop the internet from being really free. Even if this passes I don't think it's going to be a permanent thing. i'm sure it'll eventually get rolled back. John Thune, a republican (they are not all for it), is asking for supporters of net neutratlity to come up with a way to keep it from being repealed constantly like it has. I still have high hopes

Yep this is despicable! I do not know how they did not start burning people and destroying building by now.

Wouldn't just mean the internet would get slower. If you think of it on a global scale they can't stop the internet or it will just be replaced by a more efficient one.

In the end all they can really do is reduce speed. Considering that most of the internet is the "Free" part then, most people would just keep using services that provide them with access to the "Free" part of the internet.

If there is no service that does this then a new one will rise that does, that is how these things work normally.

Because there was no internet before the net neutrality rules, right? 

9 minutes ago, JTippetts said:

Because there was no internet before the net neutrality rules, right?

Exactly, worst case, the net will just convert back to an early stage. This looks more like a scheme to add extra details into contracts than to stop the internet.

Get this contract for supper cheap(terms and conditions apply). For small service providers this will be a foot hold in the industry, they could provide there users with access to the free net, so they can get all the customers who support net neutrality.

It could be used for propaganda maybe, American can only use American websites at full speed, that kind of thing.

In the end users still choose what providers they go with and who they pay. 

There's a good chance that net neutrality will be repealed. BUT, to be fair, I thought the same about Obamacare, and that Roy Moore would win as well. Neither of those happened, as you can see. So it's entirely possible net neutrality might not be repealed.

I'm not that optimistic on net neutrality not being repealed, but let's see what happens.In any case, there are means of challenging it. The courts are one likely venue. And as @iedoc mentioned, this probably won't be a permanent thing if it passes. Even if enough Republicans are behind it, there's a pretty good chance they won't control Congress in 2018. As it stands, they are already in a very tenuous position. Congress can easily make changes in this regard if the FCC won't.

It's not so much that Internet didn't exist before Net Neutrality, but rather that major ISPs that have a near monopoly on the business in some areas, can and will try to exploit this. How far it'll go, no one knows. The fact is that there will be a major backlash if ISPs try anything too stupid, but it can get pretty bad if we aren't careful. IMO it's the same as massive deregulation of banking: it's a bad idea and will cause problems since we trust certain people to be 'responsible'

In short, let's see what happens. My guess is it'll be temporary if repealed. 

15 minutes ago, deltaKshatriya said:

but rather that major ISPs that have a near monopoly on the business in some areas

This has happened a million times in history. Some one has a monopoly, pulls some radical move like this then suddenly there is a opening for competitors. A lot of the large companies, including Apple, started as competitors like this.

You can only push people that far and there is always someone looking for a way to make money.

1 hour ago, Scouting Ninja said:

This has happened a million times in history. Some one has a monopoly, pulls some radical move like this then suddenly there is a opening for competitors. A lot of the large companies, including Apple, started as competitors like this.

You can only push people that far and there is always someone looking for a way to make money.

Absolutely. I don't disagree with the basics of this.

That said, there are some caveats. I'm assuming you're American, based on this and previous threads. What part of America do you live in? I'm not sure if you knew this, but some parts of the US only have one ISP. And they have very different treatment from places where there is competition. There are data caps in those plans for those areas, and the customers are charged for any usage above those data caps. The only reason ISPs do this is because they know that the customers have no choice but to buy Internet from them in those areas.

Typically, yes, stupid things like throttling, etc. would easily cause competition to come in and blow the market ruler away. But there are cases where a thing known as a natural monopoly can exist. It's pretty much what it sounds like: the service/product in question is such that it favors only one or two companies/organizations providing it.This is typically due to high fixed costs, high barrier to entry, high initial investment, etc. The biggest example given of a natural monopoly is usually that of utilities. Water and electricity, for example. You can't have multiple electricity companies compete in one market for a particular area because of how impossible that sounds to implement in practice. Imagine having tons of electrical lines running around. The major reason is typically because of the high barrier to entry. Setting up an electrical grid is expensive. Once it's already set up, adding more customers is easy. It lends itself to being a natural monopoly. 

ISPs are very very similar and can/should be considered natural monopolies. There's a pretty high barrier to entry for becoming an ISP, since one needs to set up the internet infrastructure to service people. It's pretty easy for bigger companies to basically maintain market control in most regions. It's not that innovation is impossible, it's just tough and unlikely in this scenario. It certainly can happen, especially if someone comes up with an entirely new and novel way of reaching customers. The scenarios are much more limited in this case, however. 

ISPs are very similar to utilities and should be regulated as such. 

This isn't to say that ISPs will suddenly go nuts once net neutrality is repealed. However, the incentives come into place for small incremental changes over time that nobody will notice. Or even bigger changes in certain areas. That's my major concern with the repeal of net neutrality. 

Again, let's see what happens. This doesn't necessarily need to all happen. 

I think at the core it will be about corporate greed, not general evil-ness.  Based on the replies people have posted from their congress-critters, the defining difference is how they think of the Internet.

The ones who agree with the repeal tend to talk about the Internet access as a product.  You are buying a boxed product of a network connection. Companies can offer different boxed products for different needs. The ones who agree with common carrier tend to discuss the Internet as a utility, a system more like the postal service, electrical service, or pipes to the home.  Companies must offer standard rates for standard services, and not discriminate based on what or where they are carrying the materials.

Since they will be facing lawsuits, they may discover the previous administration's FCC may have bound them into regulating it as a utility.  The ruling from the SCOTUS in summer 2016 covered it very well.  There were a bunch of different cases against the FCC for telecoms saying they did not qualify to be regulated as a utility.  The SCOTUS merged the cases and then shot down all the claims. They didn't specifically say "Internet access is a utility", but they wrote that every major legal issue pointed to regulation as a common carrier and "the role of broadband providers is analogous to that of telephone companies: they act as neutral, indiscriminate platforms for transmission of speech of any and all users."  Note that phone companies are regulated under common carrier rules.

In another ruling this past session about someone being forbidden from purchasing unlimited internet access, they wrote that high speed access is "integral to the fabric of modern society and culture", and that unlike the ruling from 2007 that exempted mobile device Internet from the regulations, "In sharp contrast to 2007, the mobile broadband marketplace has evolved such that hundreds of millions of consumers now use mobile broadband to access the internet", and access must be treated the same as other common carrier access.

So we can thank the previous FCC for fighting this all the way to the SCOTUS in those cases.  With two rulings that reject all the "internet is a product" arguments and declare they fall under common carrier rules, it makes a legal challenge to the current FCC that much easier.  Being able to point out "The SCOTUS ruled in both 2016 and 2017 against that argument, stating this is a common carrier" will require judges to accept the view that they are a common carrier.  It is extremely rare for judges to go against recent SCOTUS rulings.