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comment by johnnyFive
johnnyFive  ·  2321 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Net Neutrality repealed. Quick, someone smart, explain the consequences!

Others have replied, but I'll add my $0.02 (which is worth about that much).

1, 3, 4

Lawsuits will doubtless ensue in the short term. Beyond that, things get fuzzier.

I think this will be bad for consumers overall. ISPs have to be a tad careful; they need to not piss people off enough that they actually get worked up about it and revolt and/or elect more regulation-friendly politicians. Whether they already have remains to be seen, but the ISPs evidently decided it was worth the risk.

kleinbl00 mentioned that ISPs want to go after Netflix, but I think he understates the effect on consumers. The ISPs didn't spend this much money on lobbying and risk the consumer backlash without some expectation of a payout. Netflix getting charged more is the least of our worries; that actually happened already, back before the FCC's now-repealed Title II classification. But it's inevitable that those charges will get passed on to us. And somehow I don't think that the ISP market is going to suddenly become cheaper or more competitive. Plus, it's going to make it that much harder for a competitor to Netflix to enter the market.

Plus, the landscape has changed. Comcast has an ownership share in Hulu, and I expect we'll see some kind of prioritization. At least initially, I imagine it'll be more like what AT&T did, where they had mobile data caps except for specific services. So at least at the beginning, it'll be stuff like that.

Cable companies are worried. As The Consumerist pointed out back in 2015, traditional cable service is on its way out. Not only that, but (based on those numbers, at least), those cable subscribers were much more profitable. So they have to find a way to recoup those losses somehow, and they're going to find increasingly subtle and numerous ways to do it here.

They're betting that despite the backlash online, too few people actually care to reach a critical mass that could force changes.

2

I doubt much. ISPs don't have any real reason to be worried about cryptocurrency, and I'm not sure that big businesses in general are unhappy about the idea of a non-government currency.