Meanwhile those opposed have been able to come up with analogies that while false and misleading, are easily understood.
What is the best way to explain the concept that can be quickly understood by those that are non-technical?
"Get Facebook, Twitter, and Google for just $9.99/mo!"
"Add on the video package and get Netflix and Hulu for only $24.99/mo more!"
"News junkie? Get BBC, NY Times, CNN for $7.99/mo."
The reality is of course much more nuanced than that (what's more likely is we'll see these sites being offered bandwidth cap exemptions and faster loading; not outright blocks if you don't pay up), but it conveys the message in a easy-to-digest fashion for the lay person. They're used to this already with their cable packages.
Example: http://i.imgur.com/rL33yEm.jpg
Keep in mind, Wikipedia benefits from non-neutral networks in some developing countries where Wikipedia doesn't count towards the bandwidth cap.
It's a pretty complicated world.
Wikipedia is only on offer for (disingenous) good will.
This puts say, Hacker News, in a very bad position.
As well as any new startup that wants to compete against the major players with billions of dollars.
Already there are people strong-armed into AT&T's DirecTV Now, which is zero-rated on AT&T's wireless network. With the pitiful bandwidth caps on mobile data, how can Netflix possibly compete with that?
It's coming too, because it is a great deal for ISPs (more money! Huge kickbacks for the senior management!), and a great deal for megacorp incumbent media companies who don't have to worry about any of those pesky upstarts screwing up their monopolistic business models. No more Netflix like services appearing and eating your lunch, you can effectively cut them off at the ISP.
I think things like net neutrality can have market solutions if we divorce the last mile operators (to become a utility) from customer ISPs, who merely operate a contract with various backbone networks to connect their clients to servers they want.
With last mile paid by taxes, ISPs are only dealing with the cost of backbone transit rates, where there is vibrant competition (and the market seems healthy). This competition to make a good transit deal (to get a cut from clients) is healthy as well, and is how much of the world operates. I think that switching off the US rent-seeking model to something like that would be a long-term solution to issues like net neutrality.
Change the incentives to change the behavior.
The real explanation is we should use the free market to solve our problems, and government for the portion where a market cant properly operate (ie, the last-mile netwotk).
The the access provider for both the copper and fibre network (right to the customer premises) is a regulated wholesale only provider, which is required to provide open access to its network on a non-discriminatory basis between all access seekers (retail telecommunications companies).[0]
This almost entirely resolves the net neutrality debate in New Zealand.
[0] This is a slight simplification: Chorus is the network owner for the copper network, and about 70% of the fibre network. The other 30% of fibre network is also built, owned and operated by wholesale only providers on a comparable basis.
The model does work pretty well.
I think we could do with a bit more government investment in infrastructure, because government is really the only entity that can drop a trillion dollars, then wait 40-50 years for its returns. (Well, them and pension funds, but neither has exactly shown great financial prudence lately.)
I just... Have a hard time articulating why infrastructure is important, because it's just so glaringly obvious from my perspective that it is. I mean, we see infrastructure everywhere in nature -- from the layout of bacteria mats to ant colonies. The idea that our society can be vibrant without having to perform those basic functions is absurd.
So it makes sense that the lives which depend on the services should control the final delivery network when it's not possible to deploy more than one or two -- eg, FTTH should be utility, cellphones should be a market; roads should be (largely) public, etc.
If the US's power is its people, then infrastructure is what allows us to maintain and focus that power.
Private doesn't even have to be a problem if competition is maintained. In Sweden there's a mix of public, privatized-minority-government-owned, co-op and private providers and competition is quite healthy.
But that's because Sweden has open carrier fiber network, while the wireless network is carrier specific.
Im not against regulation -- competition is what brings out the best in us, but games are only interesting if the rules are reasonable.
I completely agree with this.
> But couldn't a lot of that be addressed by requiring a certain number of different spectrum owners?
I suppose it could, but is that not the case in the US? I believe it only works if you can expect that cartels won't exist, which unfortunately is not a safe assumption. It's also an expensive barrier to entry for new actors.
Community owned last-mile utility is what has worked on electricity, phones, and forementioned fiber in Sweden. Anything else has proven to somehow fail to be competative. I feel comfortable in drawing an assumption off that. I wish more people agreed or that I was proven wrong.
Likewise games stop being fun if the rules can't enforce a reasonable playing ground.
The question then is how to best regulate the allocation of spectrum. Because cell networks are relatively easy to deploy (on top of an existing fiber network, and relative to the work of the fiber buildout), it seems to make more sense to break regions (city or county) up in to 10 or so spectrum slices, and lease them out to carriers. Regions are free to choose to have some or all of that operate as a utility, I suppose, but I think a regular co-op or corporation likely performs as well, as long as you require that fundamental carrier diversity.
Then just a bit of regulation about unlocked phones (when you pay in full!).
The last mile isn't some nationwide open carrier network like Australia's planned NBN. In some places there are municipal open access networks, in some places it's co-ops of homeowners, but in many places it's all private networks (in every apartment I lived in in Malmö, it was all private fiber - either Telia, Tele2, Ownit, etc). But even though it was private it was better than what you can get in most US cities.
We don't need rules to enforce a neutral internet if we create a traffic system where 3rd parties can't see your destination before you get there. We don't need to have a debate or try to explain the reasons at all if we use better encryption and routing protocols.
This is all technically doable, I just feel like we haven't allowed privacy to be a high enough priority, and we won't really get net neutrality until we decide to make privacy more important than giving ISPs and government the ability to look at everything we do online.
"If Burger King pays someone to enable me to get there faster, then that's cool!"
(devil's advocate)
But now the reply could be:
"The customer is free to choose a different road company. And the road company is free to choose its business model. The free market will decide which road company offers the best price/performance ratio in the end."
(again, devil's advocate)
Adam Smith, the father of free market economics, was very clear about this. Markets must be well regulated in order to remain free and fair.
[1] Racketeering, often associated with organized crime, is the act of offering of a dishonest service (a "racket") to solve a problem that wouldn't otherwise exist without the enterprise offering the service.
I was thinking "What if gas stations could charge you based in the car you drove, and asked car companies to pay these 'fees'?"
Police: Sir, do you know what speed you were going?
Driver: Yes, my wife is in the back and she's about to go into labor.
Police: Let me turn on my lights and escort you to the hospital!
This is imperfect, obviously, but I think it gets close to the core issues fairly concisely.
Frankly, I, as a citizen, think you should be allowed to sell the pipe, what goes over the pipe, or what the consumer connects to the pipe, but only one of the three. I like that this has reasonably clear divisions and provides competing interests that keep the other parties in check.
Even more, how do we know that these telecom providers will only charge as much as is needed for the maintenance of the roads, and not just slap on more costs?
We can't even really blame the telecom companies for this, either, as they do have a responsibility to their shareholders to make as much money as possible, but in a monopolized market, as ISPs are in most cities in America, the government has to step in at some point to protect the consumer's interests.
Yes, because of competition or the threat of competition. This works for CPU vendors and toll roads; why shouldn't it work for internet service (which is rather fungible)?
> How many homes in America don't have access to Broadband internet? IN 2016?
I don't know; what are you trying to tell me? Are you saying it's too little or everyone has broadband internet?
> We can't even really blame the telecom companies for this, either, as they do have a responsibility to their shareholders to make as much money as possible, but in a monopolized market, as ISPs are in most cities in America, the government has to step in at some point to protect the consumer's interests.
Assuming a monopoly:
a) Wouldn't antitrust law work if the ISP tried to prioritize their own pages (like their streaming video services)?
b) If people wanted net neutrality the ISP would offer such a plan. But then you might say the ISP will price that too high. But why didn't they price normal non-neutral internet service too high then? The threat of competition forces them to price plans reasonably.
So, how BART works?
This seems like a good argument against NN. It makes me think that some traffic is much higher priority and should get special privileges.
Discriminating based on the type of traffic is arguably a good thing so long as it's done in good faith. Real time connections like VOIP and streaming ought to get higher priority.
It's the destination that really matters. Since UPS owns the roads and partners with Amazon, shipments from Jet.com are limited to 15mph while trucks carrying Amazon packages can go 60mph.
Or if you want something that's more like actual shipping a better example might be only UPS is allowed to deliver packages on the roads they own (like last mile ISPs), and because of their partnership with Amazon, only packages from them can have next-day shipping.
If instead you want the telecom natural monopolies to take more control of the Internet and change how it works to bias whoever can pay them more, then you're against Net Neutrality."
There hasn't been many largescale violations of it even when violations were legal.
Comcast blocking bittorrent is the only clearly bad example of a net neutrality violation I can think of. AT&T zero rating DirecTV streaming is the second but a lot of consumers see free and don't care.
Water is a finite, possibly scarce resource, and there are shortages in places in the US. If I lived in one of those places, I would sure as hell want some asshole filling his pool during a shortage to pay more than the rest of us pay for basic drinking water. Similarly, I would want companies that bottle that water up and sell it at a premium to pay more than everyone else.
Municipalities already limit outdoor water usage for exactly this reason. You can drink all the water you want but you can only use it outside to water your grass or fill your pool on odd or even days. Your analogy is saying that shouldn't be allowed, because internet.
It doesn't cost anything more to use it at maximum capacity than it does to just leave it on standby. (The end points MIGHT use a TINY bit more power, but we're talking on the order of cents per month for terrabytes/month of traffic; it's a rounding error.)
The ISPs already offer and charge accordingly for home, business and commercial accounts(all pay more for more volume & speed).
We seem to have no problem letting the other natural monopolies like electricity, water, sanitation, education, mail, roads, bridges etc etc etc be run by the government as part of the commons. But we freak out when the government runs the internet because big brother.
I might suggest that the real issue is not the bits whizzing around but who is watching. Which would mean that net neutrality is a smokescreen. Fix privacy with free https everywhere (among other things) and people might just realize that they don't need to pay 30% more for advertising and dividends on what could otherwise be a commoditized utility like everything else.
(This may actually no longer be a thing, storage heaters aren't used all that often anymore..)
As in, they can regulate all they want, but then they're legally liable for everything on their networks. So if a kiddie porn packet goes over it, they're complicit by virtue of not regulating it.
Obviously, I'd prefer net neutrality but I've never understood why that threat doesn't have teeth.
I also have never understood why, if a utility has right of way on my property, I don't have say over things like net neutrality. It seems like if they don't want net neutrality, I should arbitrarily be able to price the cost of them using my property, as well as damages from any removal. It's not like they don't make use of public lands.
... or the arguments against municipal broadband...
... or why ISPs are not subject to antitrust statutes...
With net neutrality, all websites you visit are equally fast and equally accessible. Without it, someone else is allowed to choose for you which ones are fast, and which ones are accessible. As a consumer of a web without net neutrality, you lose some ability to choose, and you may lose some access. It is fundamentally about the freedom to choose, not about payments or bandwidth numbers, but choice.
As many of us are burgeoning web site creators and entrepreneurs, lack of net neutrality gives advantages to existing businesses who have more money than their competitors. It allows bigger sites to drive traffic to them and away from competition. This will make it harder, not easier, to start new businesses that rely on internet traffic.
"What if your mail carrier had sole power to decide how quickly (or if at all) you got your mail?"
It's probably not a particularly accessible analogy for most of us here, but it's easily relatable across generations without getting bogged down in technical details.
It means Spotify doesn't count against your data allowance!
Less than 11 minutes.
The only internet path to Comcast ISP customers is through Comcast. Comcast shouldn't be allowed to use that monopoly to destroy their competitors in other markets like TV.
Or:
"If you think that Comcast, Time Warner, and other internet providers should not control where you choose to go on the internet, then support Net Neutrality."
Companies build private roads. To drive on those roads, they install a toll-booth at each entrance onto the road (like your house, office, warehouse, shops, etc) - every vehicle gets charged to enter the road network.
Large road companies usually come to some agreement that they'll join their roads at large intersections, but don't install toll-booths there, because it's good for each of them - after all, they still bill every car entering their road network, and better connections between road networks means more users of the road (and thus more revenue).
Usually when roads get congested, they make them wider, and where two road networks meet - each company pays to upgrade it's side of the road network.
This is how things have worked until recently.
Some road companies have decided that instead of upgrading their network, they'll make many of the lanes reserved for 'preferred road network users'.
Now, if you order from a store affiliated with the road company - things will work like they used to. But if you order from an unaffiliated store - that delivery will take much longer (or maybe not happen at all, if the road is too congested and the driver turns around and goes home)
Yeah, but isn't it in the private roads' owners benefit to reduce congestion, so they create HOV lanes? And what if they want to promote certain kinds of cars like electric and hybrid and therefore allow them to drive in the HOV lanes? Shouldn't they be allowed to?
Edit: Not that I necessarily agree, but this seems like a flaw in the analogy.
And the correct analogy for what they want to do is that the road company also owns a car company and is restricting the lanes you can use and charging higher tolls for not buying one of their cars, because they want to monopolize the car market.
Your electric bill.
Should your electric company be allowed to charge you or the manufacturer of <insert favorite device> more money to power <insert favorite device>?
It's fraud.