Okay. Let them do it. But they lose their status as a carrier and become legally liable for all the content on their network – including every last bit of infringing material.
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Sounds like a good idea to me. They should make the uplink list price extortionate, or randomly close the sockets that from content analysis are transfering JPGs or style sheets, to break non-paying websites, then they can offer “discounts” to websites that advance their points of view. SSL should also attract a higher rate, since it can’t be monitored. Perhaps the RIAA and would pay to throttle the upload speeds of the BitTorrent protocol?
Data passing through a cable doesn’t damage the cable like a truck does a road.
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You make cancelling verizon service seem much more trivial than it actually is!!!
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This was knocked down back in the Telephony era as double dipping.
You buy service from Ma Bell to make long distance calls. When you call Grandma across the country (who may be on Frontier Telephone), you paid for the minutes used at a rate of $X/min. Grandma didn’t pay to answer the call. Granted that didn’t stop the telcos from trying to make it so that both ends had to pay for the long distance call. As Frontier wanted a cut to deliver the call to Grandma.
The government struck it down once before. This is basically the same thing.
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Good analogy. I’m going to steal and re-use that (probably without attribution 
)
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That’s right, but isn’t that exactly what cel phone providers do now: charge both the caller and the recipient of the call? What Verizon is trying to do is even more atrocious. Its triple dipping essentially: lets say a business uses Verizon as its ISP, and a user of the business’s website also uses Verizon. They are both paying Verizon. Now Verizon is claiming the right to throttle that business’s traffic unless it pays an extra fee. Verizon already gets paid on both ends. Now it wants extra money for the same service it has already provided. Not just that, but it wants to collect money from businesses that use other ISPs as well even though the end user is paying Verizon for the used bandwidth.
It amazes me that there are even a few defenders of this double/triple-dipping practice. This Verizon behavior is highly aggressive and clearly illegal. They are using the tactic Citigroup used in the late 90s – simply ignoring the regulations and using its clout to pressure regulators to make its behaviors retroactively “legal”. Citigroup joined with Travelers Insurance and Salomon (I believe) in clear defiance of the Glass Steagall act. It then got the Feds to overturn Glass Steagall. Its atrocious that a company can break the law and get away with it in such a way. But then again, we no longer enforce laws against large corporations.
This is no longer even about profit if you ask me. Sure, it is about profit, but its even more about power: large corporations no longer feel they have to follow the laws set out for their behavior. And why should they? They own the politicians, and have been shown over and over that if they do break the law the worst they will get is a slap on the wrist and they can go on with the same behavior. This behavior from Verizon is them flexing and mocking the FCC and Federal government. Given that most of our political class is on the take from these same corporations its a pretty safe bet for them to make. Its disgustingly blatant: I was just reading about how Diane Feinstein’s husband is selling closed post offices to his own and friends’ companies for tens of millions less than real value. They’ve already ripped taxpayers off to the tune of hundreds of millions. The theft and corruption is so deep they don’t even attempt to hide it anymore. I wonder what this country will look like in 10 years. I really do.
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Look, I’ll admit that it was a long phone call, with explanations to several people about why I was leaving them. But it was a joy to tell them I found a less expensive ISP with better throughput, so I didn’t mind telling anyone there who wanted to hear it.
But in the end, it was just one phone call. They even sent me a box so I could send their terrible clunky modem back.
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And while we’re at it, if they allow anyone to see any websites I’ve created or any comments I’ve made, I’m going to charge Verizon a fee for my content. If any goofy gifs I’ve made go through Verizon’s pipes, I’m going to charge them a fee and so should everyone else. Bring it on, Verizon. Bring it on.
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Verizon are well known scum. I don’t have a land line because they never installed one, but they were quite willing to bill me for one, and in dunning letters they were threatening to ruin my credit unless I paid.
I told them to call me.
Eventually, they stopped.
But I just encountered a strange ploy by ComCast.
This evening at 17:00 my internet stopped working.
I cycled the cable modem several times, tried disconnecting my router, basically tried everything but the modem was still refusing my packets (but my router was showing me that packets were flowing through it so it was live.)
After a few hours, and a few calls to their help line, I was “escalated” to their help service, and it was a bald faced ploy to get me to switch to some XFinity package for $129 a month. I just hung up on them.
Later I noticed that my internet connection had been magically restored.
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Nah, its time to do what they do everywhere else, (and they have faster and cheaper internet,) regulate the hell out of them.
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Personally, Who gives a shit? Fuck Verizon and ATT and whoever else is out there. When I’m home, I use a little pay-as-you-go 3g cell modem. If I want to watch or download anything large, I go to the library or somewhere where they have free wi-fi. I suggest more people do the same. Reduce the burden on these poor giant telcos.
verizonsucks.com … 2600 said it first… little did they know just how sucky verizon would actually become…
Aaaaah, the sweet, sweet smell of a freshly-laid plastic lawn…
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However, I’m afraid I’m going to have to levy a transport fee for that information entering your brain…
What the actual fuck? How is that even remotely legal?
Because he’d have to prove they did it.
“Service outages happen, sir.”
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Im glad there’s no Verizon in my country, seems like they’re the worst and will do everything to fill their pockets.
Sympathy to all Americans!
Aye, I used to work for a cableco (who shall remain nameless), and we were told every July/August not to disconnect customers who had moved house, but to set up automatic credits on the billing system and keep the accounts open, so as to improve the figure for the annual reports…
I’ve been saying for decades now that as you folks increasingly insist on using the Internet as inefficiently as possible – overloading it with all sorts of high-bandwidth stuff AND demanding low latency – it was going to be inevitable that ISPs would extend the concept of paying for quality-of-service from the “last mile” connection through the rest of the system.
And in fact this is nothing new. Game companies have been trying to negotiate for prioritized connections for years, to try to keep their latencies as low as possible.
“Bribes” would be a problem. But network neutrality does not necessarily preclude offering multiple tiers of service, as long as everyone has equal access to all tiers at the same prices and those prices are not unreasonable… and as long as basic service is adequate for most non-sloppy purposes.
