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Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by ado__dev on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @05:02PM (#40057167)
RIP Internet of old. The Internet is truly going to shit from all angles. Squeezed by ever rising costs to get on the net. Bombarded by ads on every single page (trying to browse the net on a mobile device and most sites take up 40-50% of screen real estate on ads). Subs on top of subs for every single service. We really are entering a dark era.
Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by gamepsys on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @06:40PM (#40058178)
We must be on different internets. The one I'm on is having a golden era.

* My current ISP offers greater than 1000/1000 fiber for a smaller monthly payment than my first home broadband connection in 2003. Adjust for inflation it's probably 1/2 the cost while being over 50 times better. It's incomparable to the dial up before then.

* I don't see a lot of ads on the internet. If I see an ad on a website I either upgrade my adblock or I stop going to that website.

* I don't have a ton of subscription services. If you were to tally my subscription services and weigh them against what I previously used for competing services I am saving a ton of money. Cable TV, DVDs, and CDs were expensive.

* It's so casual and fun to jump on a voice call with a group of friends to play a game, or someone shares a screen of an anime and we have a little movie night. It's so easy to see what games my friends are playing. It's so easy to watch any movie I want, or listen to any song that I want, or play any game I want. The tools to have fun online are way better than ever.

* It's possible to learn about anything I am curious about. You can do everything, from getting a highschool level lecture to read the latest research from the top researchers. I often find experts willing to answer my questions, even though I am coming in as a complete stranger.

* I absolutely love the move towards more independent publishing. The number of interesting people I follow on twitter, or youtube, or watch on twitch is insane. Before the internet media felt like a monoculture with everyone watching the same 40 channels on TV every night. I'm subscribed to indie newsletters instead of magazines. I'm watching Starcraft 2 tournaments instead of the superbowl. Some of this was around before the internet, but it's much more now and the long term trend is looking great.

* I can get involved in so many interesting conversations, and I rarely have problems finding interesting conversations to listen in on or join in on. People from all walks of life, with all kinds of perspectives.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by squigz on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @07:09PM (#40058438)
While I agree with you that the Internet is not in such a dark place as some people think, I will play devil's advocate and make a couple points in regard to what you said:

- If the industry gets its way, adblockers will become illegal or practically unusable.

- I get the impression you don't shy away from pirating. For those that don't engage in it, for one reason or another, it's a lot harder to e.g., watch any movie they want. What service is it? How much? Is it available in your country? Is something you saw was on there last week still there? Etc. This also generally applies to most other forms of media (games, music, etc)

- Screensharing for movie nights and such is slowly becoming more difficult, as more services implement DRM which disables capturing video (or even screenshots?!) from a stream

Again, I don't agree that the Internet is dying, or it's become a "monoculture," or anything like that - but we do have to be wary of the direction some groups would love to take it.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by namrog84 on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @07:49PM (#40058789)
Screensharing might be more difficult or impossible in some contexts compared to pirated screensharing.

But at the least some providers are helping it with "watch together" offerings. Although at moment its pretty limited and not great experience. But it's not like they aren't making progress toward improving that (though glacier and painfully slow)

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by squigz on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @07:55PM (#40058838)
Yes, I can't wait for the only option to watch things together is blatant piracy or paying for every person I want to watch along with
Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by gamepsys on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @09:59PM (#40059626)
> we do have to be wary of the direction some groups would love to take it

100% agree, and this has been true since I've been a netizen.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by NoPicklez on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @08:22PM (#40059031)
I couldn't agree more with this.

Internet pricing really hasn't changed at all all that much and my speeds have improved drastically from the "internet of old". Not to the speeds your getting but enough to show a dramatic improvement from what was before (50/50mbps).

Apart from the quality of websites themselves with ads, what we can do with the internet has improved immensely.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by TheAceOfHearts on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @07:14PM (#40058486)
Re: StarCraft 2, if you're a big fan of the game consider supporting GSL. I don't think they're doing that well financially and there were claims that this might be the last year the event would be running.

I think aside from GSL, the only major SC2 tournament still standing is ESL which got bought by the Saudis.

Personally, I watch ASL, the major Brood War tournament. But even though that has more Korean viewership than SC2, it's still declining in public interest and increasingly becoming unsustainable.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by thefz on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @02:26AM (#40061136)
Agree with all that you said, except one thing: sports.

I follow one and the missus another, and inevitably both have their rights bought by different companies so (at least) two subscription services are required for following live events.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by tester756 on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @05:37PM (#40057514)
Consider using Firefox + some kind of adblock
Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by spartanatreyu on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @07:10PM (#40058446)
Firefox and uBlock Origin on Android are amazing.

Sometimes I'll randomly open something with Chrome by mistake and just seeing 70% of the article filled with pop-up ads makes my brain just shuts down thinking about regular people.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by lupire on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @07:29PM (#40058635)
Except that Firefox + uBlock renders many, many websites and apps poorly.
Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by bsjaux628 on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @08:40PM (#40059141)
And still a better experience than chrome with ads, plus I almost never encounter a website with problems
Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by hedora on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @08:50PM (#40059211)
I haven't hit any real problems with Firefox. Maybe it's the sites I visit. Mostly news, shopping, and tech stuff.

The only real exception I can think of is that Google Meet's audio quality has recently been worse under Firefox than under Safari's. My guess is that the issue is on Google's end (since Firefox used to be fine), or that maybe Safari has access to some special microphone APIs.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by gordonfish on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @08:45AM (#40063856)
Since you mentioned Safari, I assume that you're on MacOS where Firefox and other alternative browsers are effectively hindered at the framework/API level there, as such browsers have problems there that don't occur Linux or Windows.

For example, the audio in FF outside of Apple sounds real clear and overall great in my experience.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by tarxvf on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @10:42PM (#40059871)
I can't think of a single one where Firefox and uBO cause issues.
Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by MathMonkeyMan on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @11:12PM (#40060045)
It renders them correctly, just not always exactly the same as Chrome. It's hard to blame devs for not testing on a browser with so little market share.

Some Javascript or maybe Canvas heavy pages run much more slowly on Firefox and are almost unusable on Firefox for Android. I find that this is rare, though.

I'll keep using Firefox + uBlock + Personal Blocklist + Dark Reader + Disable Javascript + Disable CSS + Tampermonkey + Old Reddit Redirect + CORS Everywhere + Consent-O-Matic + Hide YouTube Shorts + Load Reddit Images Directly + ...

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by asadotzler on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @11:22PM (#40060097)
I find that 99%+ of sites render far better in Firefox with uBlock Origin than with Chrome. Pages render prettier, faster, and more readable. The 1% of pages that render worse are still faster and generally more readable if not quite as pretty. That's a trade I'll make any day.
Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by gordonfish on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @08:39AM (#40063797)
I have yet to encounter a site, that wasn't broken server side in some way, that didn't render usefully.

Please cite some actual examples.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by spartanatreyu on Wednesday April 17, 2024 @08:43PM (#40071775)
Have you got any examples, because this has not been my experience at all.

Not even in the slightest.

Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by xinayder on Thursday April 18, 2024 @07:14AM (#40074957)
Unfortunately, Firefox on Android still has a long way to go. I have to resort to using Chromite (Bromite fork) with NextDNS for adblocking, otherwise the browsing experience on mobile is not really good.
Re:ISPs can charge extra for fast gaming under FCC's Interne... by screamingninja on Tuesday April 16, 2024 @06:04PM (#40057807)
Try NextDNS: https://nextdns.io/