Net Neutrality as it is pushed is a bad thing - but that doesn't mean all the ideas in it are bad.

Like most things, its never a black and white issue. However, when any "regulation" over-reaches and goes beyond what is needed - it should be rebuffed. That is what occured here.

The issue isn't dead, but issues will be corrected and you will see it again.

What was the actual law proposed? Was it longer than something like:

"All packets must be forwarded, and in the order received." ?

I'd wager it was. Probably included pork, too, lol. At 1000 pages.

Imagine having our access to Subsim deliberately slowed down or even limited to a particular geographic area because Neil doesn't pay his IP an extra fee. Imagine a big company with deep pockets paying an IP to squeeze the connection to their small competitors.

This is what Net Neutrality was trying to avoid.

Yeah, and healthcare reform was supposed to be "deficit neutral" and "bend the cost curve down."

Oh, and all negotiations were supposed to be on CSPAN (all of the above per direct statements by the President).

It will do none of the above, and we were instead told by the Speaker that it needed to be passed so we (the People) could see what was in it.

Again, what was the text of the law? Was it longer than what I posted above? If it was, it likely did a lot more than you say was the goal.

tater, you twice asked what the wording of the proposed law was. Why don't you research it and read it for yourself?

If you are really interested in the wording of legislation, it is best to go to a reliable source instead of asking on a video game forum. :D

True, I was being lazy, though. I assumed that anyone who cared that passionately about it (I never really paid attention to it) would know the law by heart.

Well yeah, but however failed or misguided the effort was, it does not mean the need for reform doesn't exist.

Looks like a typical, government mess from what I can find. Vague wording that gives exemptions for "reasonable network management." Without actually having any real requirements for what that means, and later they added "guidelines."

Here's a quote I found at arstechnica:

Seems like a reasonable opposition. If they have the precedent to regulate, then we are stuck with a situation where we are at the whim of some random appointee. Get a bad one, and things go south fast.

Passing bad, counter productive reform is not better than doing nothing at all.

First, do no harm.

What was passed does rather a lot of harm.

Well I guess we'll see then Tater. The need still exists.

It'll do harm to me, our insurance cost—including all the new taxes—will more than double. :)

I got news for you, our insurance costs were on their way to doubling already long before the Democrats went on their latest pork spending spree.

As I said - there are good and bad points to the Net Neutrality proposal.

The reason that FIFO won't work is because there are reasons for legitimate traffic to be prioritized or throttled.

Simple FIFO means that - were it to be law - an ISP would NOT be allowed to assist in shutting down any type of DDOS attack, for example. Nor could an ISP note that a group of 500 users are sucking up the bandwidth with "file sharing" which is resulting in reduced performance for other users. It limits the ability of an ISP to control what is on their equipment - which in the case of file sharing - lets say they want to cut out certain protocols due to legal issues. They couldn't legally do so.

Now the flip side - lets say this never goes forward in any form, then could one company limit bandwidth to certain customers? Sure they could. However, in a free market - that is what creates movement of customers. Take Subsim - if the hoster is getting shafter by Sprint due to a deal where google is faster than anything else - the hoster (and not Neal himself) is going to take his customer base to another firm that will gladly take those customers. Yet the free market can't guarantee availability of that service everywhere - so there does need to be SOME guidelines.

This is why there are valid points on both sides.

True, but this will be worse. I'd bet that Krauthammer is right, and the next step after adding trillions of entitlement spending they'll ask for a VAT.

Maybe so but I think the Democrats would be committing political suicide. They already didn't get the lift in the polls that they expected after passage and it would just be the final straw.