[US broadband Internet access] is now protected under Title II

After months of steady campaigning from various grassroots groups and individuals here in the US, the FCC reclassified the Internet under Title II. While it's not the ideal situation, it is still miles ahead of the alternative.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2015/02/26/389259382/net-neutrality-up-for-vote-today-by-fcc-board

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Better than the alternative. I'm surprised Comcast didn't win.

Oh, thank fuck. Would've been nice if the conditions didn't even exist for things going the wrong way on this issue, but hey, corrupt politicians. Yay.

This is good, but there's still a long way to go with many other things to do. Get speeds at least up to the rest of the world's standards and get prices down, make people secure and protect their privacy instead of having government agencies doing the opposite of that, etc.

I have this dumbshit uncle, he tries to act all sophisticated but he just takes the conservative side of every issue and it's obvious that he's not thinking for himself, but instead taking what a very narrow and controlled set of pro-GOP publications say at face value with an unquestioning bias. He even quoted that shithead Ted Cruise (thanks, Canada) that said "Net Neutrality is Obamacare for the Internet!". He asked me if "all you tech people are in favor of it?" and I replied that most "tech people" are in favor of it, and he found this surprising.

He didn't even understand what Net Neutrality is when I tried to explain it to him. He kept insisting that it was so the government could slow the internet down let the NSA spy on Americans more easily and block websites. He's brainwashed in such an Orwellian way, I swear. I don't know what's so hard to understand about it, the ISPs are the ones that want to slow it down and Title II would prevent them from doing that or charging extra for speed.

So many people seem to think bandwidth is "consumable" because that's what the mobile companies impose with their Internet connectivity plans. I was at a Verizon store one time where some woman was talking to the employee about their "data usage", getting it "explained" (misinformed) to her over and over. The whole situation with how many people are ignorant about tech in America bothers me. A lot of people even say "so what if the Internet sucks? We've lived without it before" unironically, without realizing that would basically relegate us to the status of a 3rd world country without modern global communication infrastructure.

Okay, I wrote way more than I intended to. Did you have fun trudging through my wall of text to get this far?

Gez said:

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George Takei posted about this on FB. People were so mad at "the government controlling the internet" that they tried to shame Takei for supporting anything the government does because he survived growing up in an American concentration camp in WWII.

I wonder if this will stick or if the Republicans will reverse it at the first opportunity. They do seem intent on dismantling civilization these days.

Ironically, the main reason one needs high bandwidth is that so many websites are bloated monstrosities. I did pretty good in the mid 90's with just a 28.8K modem. Granted, downloading big files took a while, but just browsing was comfortable at that speed. Even playing online Quake was reasonable, so long as I wasn't up against a server full of LPB's. I used Lynx a lot, but even browsing with Netscape was pretty good. Of course I almost always had javascript turned off, and very few websites required it (otherwise Lynx wouldn't have been an option...) It would be great if people took "graceful degradation" into consideration when they design sites these days. Ideally the web frameworks would automatically handle most of this.

JavaScript doesn't make the web slow: ad servers make the web slow. More bandwidth doesn't help that. I can sympathize with site owners who won't load their content if you don't let the ads display.

However, I can't sympathize with anyone who auto-plays videos. Every last one of those people should be tortured to death.

I really don't see why people have a problem with JavaScript.

Javascript makes things a lot more complicated. It removes freedom to use basic HTML browsers, because many sites have no graceful fallback to plain HTML+CSS, even though such a thing was commonplace 10+ years ago. It also tends to open a ton of connections to third-party servers and retrieve stuff... often more javascript, and typically the code is messy or downright obfuscated, so it's never clear what you're allowing to run in your browser...

If you think JS doesn't slow things down, try browsing one day on a crappy wifi link. I've been in such suboptimal situations for many months, and it wasn't fun. I ended up just not visiting many sites, and limiting my Firefox usage to essential things like my bank. The rest of the time was spent with text mode browsers or lightweight and non-JS stuff like Dillo.

That wasn't JavaScript; that was grabbing stuff from third-party servers. Ad servers are notoriously slow because those guys have no reason to care about speed. The "graceful" fallback version of that would be a web server that doesn't even respond until it has loaded what it thinks is appropriate ads.

JavaScript only makes things as complicated as the designers and codrs make it. Done correctly it can make things faster than waiting for a server to send back a new page.

If I have a reason to use JS why would I care about somebody who just wants a "basic" HTML browser? What does that even mean? Any browser that can run HTML5 is going to run JS at warp speed anyway. Designing for low bandwidth is a different thing. If your computer is old enough that this is somehow a problem then you're not in the target market and I don't care.