Two years is eternity in the fast evolving tech world.
I’m leaning that the peeps will forget, adjust, same as with so many recent losses and threats.
The example to look back to is telephone company dergulation. It encouraged a competitive environment. But you’ll notice, the many then new companies now gone, often sold out to the bigger boys. With some exceptions, a make your money and run scenario.
Don’t want to lose Sling. Of course, many of the smaller providers like Sling or Cricket, eg, are already in subscription contracts with those big boys. They didn’t reinvent the whole wheel, just a portion.
Regardless of where one sits on the political spectrum, how can today’s decision possibly be a good one for citizens? Mindbogglingly stupid.
@Dave_N , I don’t want the government regulating the internet. But net neutrality merely treats all traffic the same so I think it is a logical response to a monopoly.
@romanigypsyeyes , have you considered going to all wireless? We use a hotspot unlimited plan which we can take wherever we go. I think AT&T still offers them, and Tmobile has an unlimited hotspot phone option with their One plan (you can use with a cellular ipad too) . IDK abut Sprint & Verizon. It costs $20-$25/mo above your phone plan. I find it too slow for 4K video, but fine for regular HD & browsing. It was a much better deal than the $90/mo we paid to Comcast, and is actually more convenient since it is portable.
If you are a student you are probably on university wireless most of the time. If you parents/friends/work have Comcast and will give you a login ID, you can use Xfinity wireless for free. That is our backup, and runs around 20-25Mb/sec.
AT&T disclaims that it throttles speeds - even on unlimited plans. Watching YouTube on my phone can be painful at the end of our billing cycle…
@TooOld4School my house is a weird dead zone so doubtful that will work.
I work from home the vast majority of the time- not at school. So does everyone else in my household.
We do get the xfinity wireless thing. It sucks here. It works really well in my uni town though- where it’s rarely needed. Of course.
Loss of net neutrality might lead to content-based speeds and pricing. Also look at consolidation and monopolies in the news media. Anti-certain-people-and-ideas speech might become harder to access.
This has absolutely nothing to do with net neutrality. If Netflix wants its service to be fast to Comcast customers, it needs a direct connection to Comcast servers. Comcast is and was free, under prior net neutrality rules, in refusing to establish a direct connection to Netflix, which slows Netflix to a crawl. This is slightly simplified, but net neutrality effectively only governs how ISPs deal with their customers, not ISP to ISP data flows or content provider to ISP data flows. Read up on ISP peering agreements.
@romanigypsyeyes , we put the hotspot on the top floor of the house next to the window closest to the cell tower, and use an external antenna too. It improved the speed to about 25-30Mb/sec with the latest Netgear hotspot. The original one (2 models old by ZTE) we had ran at about 3-5Mb/sec. Huge improvement, same tower, same carrier. It was a no brainer to dump Comcast. I don’t even notice the speed difference, although the hotspot needs to be rebooted occasionally. We mostly watch college sports so youtube tv streaming worked for us. We saved around $80/mo including having 2 hotspots - one we use for trips and one we leave for whoever is at home.
We get fewer slowdowns on streaming than on Comcast. I think Comcast deliberately de-emphasised their peering arrangements with Netflix & youtube despite net neutrality. I think it will get worse now that it is gone. An easy was around that is to use your university VPN - which is almost never blocked - which fixes most of the peering and slowdown issues.
Ro - regardless of what the agreements between ISPs and content providers are, ISPs are now free to slow things on my end to a crawl, and that’s what we are talking about.
Yup. And once they can, they will.
Love my hotspot. I am rural enough that internet is an arm and a leg in cost…really highway robbery by a small company. My hotspot does anything I want and 15 devices can use simultaneously…and I can throw it in my purse and use anywhere.
Yes, but why would they want to? Assuming Comcast wants Netflix to be slow, it’s far more technically efficient to throttle the Netflix to your ISP link than the link from your ISP to you.
Where there’s a will there’s a way. The question is not “why would they?” but “why wouldn’t they?” 
Because it’s inefficient and reduces their profits.
Nope. It is quite efficient if folks will be forced to subscribe to Comcast (or whatever monopoly ISP) TV offerings. They don’t give it out for free.
I have to give some credit to Comcast, at least they cleaned up their customer service in my neck of the woods. Try dealing with Frontier (Fios) - that is the real evil.
Comcast has already been doing this for years. Verizon too, but less so. If Comcast hadn’t been such a bully, we probably wouldn’t need those net neutrality rules.
Several years ago, they were not counting data from their own streaming service and deliberately slowing down Netflix so their service would look better. Let’s have a countdown to when that will start happening again.
You seem to be missing the point. If Comcast wanted to force people to subscribe to their tv offerings by throttling Netflix speeds, they would already be doing it. They could have done that under the existing net neutrality rules.
https://www.politico.com/story/2017/12/14/how-net-neutrality-loss-change-internet-212671
Not true, @roethlisburger ?
^How can there be “extraordinary new powers” when the regulations were only in place for two years? The sky is falling all the way back to 2015.