(08-23-2018 11:43 AM)thespiritof1976 Wrote: I'm dumb. Well, regarding this issue. Can someone explain it in layman's terms to me ? (Cause when most do it is like when I try to explain Star Trek to a non Trekkie)
Net neutrality in a nutshell.
Internet service is reverse post office/UPS/FedEx.
With USPS/FedEx/UPS the person wanting to put something into the system pays (buy a stamp or pay UPS or FedEx) and the person receiving gets the letter or package in their mailbox or on their doorstep.Now the customer may pay a shipping fee to the person sending but the sender is responsible for paying.
With the internet the receiver pays.
The receiver pays a fee either monthly flat fee or pays for usage. The sender pays to create a connection and opens the door (server) to send their content to any receiver either for free or restricts access to subscribers or approved users. If it were a mail analogy an ATT customer would pay ATT to go get to the sender and pick up the mail.
With net neutrality the status quo is maintained. Whatever you want from CNN.com or Foxnews.com or Google.com or Youtube.com you pay your provider to go get for you when your computer or app sends a request for the content.
Without net neutrality the internet provider still charges you to go get stuff but they can also charge the content provider to deliver their content and if they don't pay the provider can delay delivery or just refuse to deliver it at all.
Imagine that you have a friend who collects pocket knives and you find a cool knife you think your friend would like so you but it as a gift.
Under the current system you pay UPS $15 to send the knife to your friend. In a post-net neutrality style system you would still pay UPS $15 to send the knife to your friend. UPS would then call your friend and tell him that they have a package from you. For $5 they will deliver it tomorrow. For $2 they will deliver it in three days, for $1 they will deliver it in a week and if he won't pay they will deliver it in 10 days.
What has been happening is that a person who was a customer of let's hypothetically say Verizon paid to have high speed internet. They would then pay a subscription fee to Netflix to watch the programming. All worked fine. As Netflix became more popular it took up more capacity and people like Verizon hit on an idea. If Netflix users on Verizon had trouble getting a good reliable picture they would complain and Netflix would try to address it. Netflix would notice that Verizon customers were having problems so they would contact Verizon and Verizon would say that they were having network congestion issues and suggest that Netflix lease space on Verizon servers to mirror Netflix (ie. create a copy of all or part of their stored programs) that could get to the customer faster and more reliably. Netflix would then basically pay Verizon to deliver and Verizon was getting paid by the customer to deliver as well. There were claims that there was evidence Verizon was deliberately slowing down Netflix in order to be able to sell the access.
Without net neutrality the practice would completely legal.
ESPN could go to ATT, Verizon, Comcast, etc., and say we will pay you a whole lot of money to get our content to your customers 50% faster than anyone else offering sports news. Well there aren't many ways for them to get that sort of bump other deliberately slowing down ESPN's competitors. You are sitting at home wanting a score and it takes longer to get it on Fox, Yahoo, or Sportsline than on ESPN so ESPN becomes your go to for scores.
Some tech innovator comes up with a better solution for online word processing than Google Docs, Google runs and gets exclusive fast lane access and the better product dies because users hate how slow it is.
That's what net neutrality is all about.
