I’m disputing that they already have money to cover the costs
Federal subsidies to telcos were not intended to provide Internet service for free, but to reduce costs.
You could argue that a subsidy should reduce prices relative to what they should have been, had no subsidy existed.
But you cannot argue that pricing should be decoupled from consumption as a result of that.
Like, what kind of costs exist? Lines, network hardware, putting up the tunnels and poles that hold up lines, the network admins who deal with issues on them. Your ISP can’t just push a button and instantly provide 1Tbit bandwidth capacity at no cost to themselves to every subscriber.
The infrastructure over which that data travels isn’t free. If you have a resource and it has any kind of scarcity, you want to tie consumption to the cost of producing more of it.
You can reduce the transaction cost – reduce hassle for users using Internet service – by not having a cap for them to worry about, but then you decouple the costs of consumption.
Soft caps, like throttling, are one way to help reduce transaction costs while still having some connection between consumption and price.
But point is, if one user is using a lot more of the infrastructure than any other is, you probably want to have that reflected in some way, else you’re dumping Heavy User’s costs on Light User.
While I don’t dispute your broader point that people can have some rather broadly-ranging views on what constitutes fascism, I do wonder if that specific user might be trolling.
I believe that you and the above poster are violently agreeing. He’s just a titch more sarcastic.
Over the past few days, I’ve had waves where kbin.social gets really hammered, but then it performs fine after that. Someone suggested that it might be when users here in the US have their peak activity times, that it’s getting hit much harder then.
isn’t tagged as NSFW,
I don’t think that that’s it. I’m on kbin, and at least some of the images that some people were complaining about on kbin were blurred, so there must have been some sort of NSFW indication associated with them.
I mean, I did too. But you can see why Reddit is grouchy about that. I mean, I have written a lot of content and posted it to Reddit, and maybe that has value that they can monetize. Or maybe there’s some value that they can get from data-mining my activity on the server side. But they haven’t been making money off my eyeballs directly, or data-mining information available on the client side, and I imagine that that’s frustrating when they go crunch the numbers on their costs and revenue.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Donald_Knuth
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Donald Knuth’s webpage states the line was used to end a memo entitled Notes on the van Emde Boas construction of priority deques: An instructive use of recursion (1977)
One imagines that it might have some negative effects on people in Russia, not all of whom are trolls.
It may also have secondary effects on people outside Russia if the leadership wants to do something that people outside Russia don’t much like, but where public opinion in Russia is a constraint on them. If Russia builds a system that is aimed at constraining the public’s view of the world, then presumably the views of the public will shift towards whatever the people who are presently running the government in Russia prefer.