How transparent are the companies that they are trying to regulate? Probably not nearly as transparent as the FCC.

It's not like the FCC took a perfectly functioning market that stood as a paragon of capitalism and decided to mess it up, because that's what government does best. They decided to take on an oligopoly that doesn't like to compete with each other, that in general just try to squeeze their customers, because they can since very little real competition exists. There are so many countries that have better telecom services than the US.

Very true, but not the argument.

*someone promised transparency.

Not being allowed to see the proposed rules from the get go is NOT transparency. In fact, it's as opaque as possible. This demand should be carried to the FCC.

Sigh!  Just another power grab by the federal government.  I'm sure all the new fees imposed on ISPs and passed onto consumers are for our own good. /sarc

While there is at least some truth to this statement, and it's not much, it lacks history.  The FCC is why there is very little real competition in so many markets.  The internet used to be dominated by title 2 carriers, and sucked horribly for it.  Cable was heavily regulated by the FCC in how much they could charge to prevent them from being competitive with broadcast for all but eight years prior to the 1996 act that finally deregulated them fully to their present state in 1999.  Until they outlawed it in 1992, local municipalities were giving cable operators exclusive franchises, setting up our current state of things where they're used to not competing with each other.  On the other hand, our wonderful government, which has laws against monopoly acquisitions and anti-competitive measures, allows companies like Comcast to buy up their competitors instead of making them build competing networks to expand into new areas, as if you can just get your local service from their national competitor that doesn't operate in your area.

Now we're going to give them the shaft again and that will somehow fix the problem we ourselves create by not enforcing existing laws and creating the setting we're now faced with.  A market dominated by a small number of companies used to being local monopolies.  We'll still have this after we make them common carrier, they'll just end up not making money so they don't bother upgrading to maintain their monopoly status.

If you want to fix the monopoly status, you give incentives to expand into existing markets, instead of just new markets, and stop letting the big boys buy up everything they "expand" into.

I just don't understand most of the points of view in this thread. Currently we have a cartel of enormous companies that have proved they cannot self regulate. It is also nearly impossible for anyone except for another enormous company to come in and even attempt to compete against them. Even if somebody won this week's huge powerball jackpot and decided to take all of their winnings and open up an ISP, even with hundred of millions of dollars in they couldn't compete. To compete against Comcast or AT&T or Verizon you'd need to have several billion in the bank. Very few industries have barriers to entry that high. 

Now government in the form of the FCC is trying to intervene, and everyone seems to be complaining that it could cause billing increases. Well if nothing is done, I can guarantee the ISPs will increase your bill.

No lie, in 2011 I paid 85 bucks a months (after all of the fees, including payment processing) for satellite internet in a literal combat zone. It was horrendous. Horrible latency, 50GB data cap. I think it was 1 or 2 mbps down and I forget what it was up, maybe 512 or 760 kbps, and it sucked. However, considering most of the province didn't have electricity or running water, I was thankful for what I had.

Four years later, in supposedly the greatest nation on earth I have a choice between comcast or AT&T. I currently pay about 80 bucks for cable internet, I get 20 down and about 10 up, and I have a 300 gb data cap. However, I have to bundle it and so with all of the taxes and equipment rental and everything I paying nearly $160 for decent but capped internet, an anemic line up of channels, and HBO. That's when I don't exceed my data cap, and unfortunately people in my house love youtube and twitch and netflix. My only other option is At&t with a lower priced plan, but it maxes out at 6 mbps down, and it has a 125 GB data cap.

There has to be a better way of doing things, and I think the FCC may be that better way. If this isn't the case for government intervention, then there simply won't ever be one. 

You pretty much described your problem.  Your market is served by two large monopolistic companies that have been allowed to buy up their competitors instead of expanding their own networks into existing markets.  We see a monopoly and we either hamstring it, or go the direct route and sell it off in chunks.  All we get are higher prices or lower quality.  A heavily regulated monopoly is still a monopoly, it's just one that functions more poorly and doesn't make any money.  Our country has a long, lustrous history of doing this.  It never works.

I prefer not doing the insane when it's already been sufficiently proven to be so in the case of our wonderful telecommunications market.  The FCC already regulates them under Title 2, how's that working for you?  If you could somehow get 56k out of your phone line 24/7, you'd still pay far more than a dollar a GB just on your phone bill.  Do you really think your $160 bundled cable bill is going to be a better deal than it is now if we regulate it more like we do your phone bill?  I'm just not that optimistic.

psychoak, mobile services weren't regulated under Title II. This decision put them under Title II. They were under Title III.

Putting it all under Title II should allow more competition in networking. Whether it does or not, we will see.

Hence the words "phone line" referring to land line service, not cellular.  Considering you can get cell service cheaper in most places, I can't imagine anyone is impressed with the cost and functionality of our Title 2 regulated services.

I was referring to that. 

Technically, you don't know what the government is planning to do because they are keeping their rules hidden from the public until well after the vote.  You have Wheeler making a blog post and basically propaganda outlets like Verge who tried to convince the public that there will be no freedom on the internet without government intervention.  

Cable/internet companies and whatever are far from perfect, but thinking the government, especially the unelected and unaccounatable FCC is better is beyond ridiculous.

If elected and accountable are criteria a for being able to properly manage a market or service, then yes we can rule out the FCC, but we must also rule out AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, and and the other big telecoms because they are no more elected nor any more accountable to an average citizen than the FCC.

I agree that there is a significant probability that these regulations won't spur competition and in time could come to represent just another barrier to entry due to regulatory capture. Though I think there is the possibility of this change causing some positive short term benefits for consumers. I would prefer something very simple, automatic, and easily verifiable instead of hundreds of pages of regulations that can easily turn into a beurocratic mess.

 However, something needs to be done about the competitiveness of the American telecom market. And until a real competitor to the incumbent s arises (maybe low earth orbit satellite internet I think Space X is developing), the only thing I can see increasing competition or at least consumer protections is some form of effective regulation. 

Over the past decade it hasn't been the FCC that's forced the corporations to act like robber barons, it has been the corporations that have done that.

Also, for beyond ridiculous is if my example had of been we needed Soviet style regulations that caused the Holodomor to improve competitiveness in U.S. restaurant business, then you'd have a point, but I don't think it's beyond ridiculous to ask for change in this situation.

I wrote the last part of my above comnment very poorly.  WHat I meant was this:

Proponents of net neutrality say without it companies like Netflix will be able to buy higher bandwidth, leaving others in the slow lane.  In fact the opposite is true.  Netflix fears that without net neutrality they will be CHARGED higher rates for the amount of bandwidth they use.  Now if your ISP has to update their infrastructure, with or without net neutrality and the law prevents them from collecting more from Netflix, from whom do you think they will go to collect more money?  It will be the users stuck with a bill of billions in new fees, inclduing new internet taxes.  

One more point.  I continue to use a land line phone in addition to my cell.  Since it's for incoming calls only I have the lowest grade of service, at under $6 a month.  On top of that I pay more than $8 in telecom taxes.  I am taxes at more than 100%!  People who choose to or can only afford lower cost internet service will be hardest hit by the new taxes.

And I agree.

It seems like the users will always be the one picking up the tab. However, why why Netflix or any other service pay? Don't all of these services have to pay for their own data? If I stream or download 5GBs from a company, don't they have to provide that 5 GBs to my ISP from their ISP? If so, don't they have to pay money to their ISP? If that is the case, then making sites or services pay is just an indirect way of making the users pay, except it obscures the price, and adds an extra unneeded layer of payments. Instead of a dollar of my money that I pay to Netflix going to my ISP, they should just charge me a dollar more. 

Most of the argument is bullshit made up by people with an agenda.  There's nothing sinister in Netfix paying Comcast for bandwidth.  Something to think about while wandering in obscurity over how your bandwidth is paid for, if you were to start hosting data, would you suddenly get a free connection?

Netflix utilizes CDN's.  A distributed network of infrastructure to pipe their content out without going all over creation.  This is both to improve the quality of their service, and to appease the owners of the infrastructure they'd otherwise move data through.  If they simply had a central location by which all video streamed, it wouldn't even work.  The service would require the surrounding infrastructure to be increased by an order of magnitude or more just to avoid permanent disruption.

ISP's are sending information back and forth through the backbone infrastructure.  They have mutual agreements with these backbone providers to send and receive information in kind, Level3 for instance does not pay Comcast for any overage they have in relative traffic, Comcast eats the shortfall.  When you do something like watch a movie, you're recieving massive amounts of information, but they're sending out very little in return.  It's a bad deal for them, supremely.  If they can get paid to operate the CDN directly, they gain money on the data usage instead of losing it.

Your traffic is paid for twice, this is always the case.  You pay to receive it, the host pays to send it.  There's nothing actually unusual about Netflix paying an ISP to get their service to you.  It's not all nice and neat, it's quite crooked of them to charge customers for bandwidth and then throttle it because they don't like the bandwidth being used, but the CDN system is necessary and rational.  If two neighboring networks both have large quantities of Netflix usage, and one is being paid for a CDN while the other isn't, the one with the CDN is making far more money for far less traffic than the one without.  They're also greatly increasing the load on any backbone infrastructure it travels through to get to that other network, increasing the cost and decreasing the reliability of connections through that system.

It's a simple matter of efficiency and margins.  Netflix is just distributing their hosting closer to their users, they'd still have been paying for the bandwidth, they'd just be paying someone else.  It's actually cheaper if they're not getting reamed by a greedy company taking them to the cleaners before they'll stop throttling it.  You get better service, your ISP gets a more equal revenue stream irrespective of content, and Netflix gets increased reliability, and normally reduced cost as well when they reduce the scale of their architectural needs and thereby reduce the cost of procuring it.  It's like buying a processor, you can get the bleeding edge, or you can pay half as much for ten percent less.

CDN's are the way of the future, unless you're just hosting some files on your personal computer, it's a massive benefit to pay a CDN operator to host your site in their distributed network if you have anything resembling high traffic.  It might even cost you more than just having a direct host would depending on how small scale you are, but it's a better service that entails a substantially larger undertaking than just having a T3 to your server.