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Comment by wtallis | Hacker News Reader

There are pros and cons to gun ownership; it both contributes to and harms the public good. Net neutrality is a more lopsided issue—the arguments against net neutrality are all about legalizing extortion and promoting a tragedy of the commons, or else they're non-specific arguments against regulation of any kind.

Taken on its own and rationally, the net neutrality issue is much less amenable to producing a permanent stalemate than gun control. Existing political factions can incorporate positions on net neutrality into their existing political stalemate, but outside of such a context it's pretty easy to see that holes in net neutrality like the one here are absurd—why should smaller monopolies have more leeway to abuse their customers than large monopolies?

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> Net neutrality is a more lopsided issue—the arguments against net neutrality are all about legalizing extortion and promoting a tragedy of the commons, or else they're non-specific arguments against regulation of any kind.

Not really. I think that's just your bias for net neutrality showing through.

In my opinion, because of the way internet providers have been allowed legal monopolies, net neutrality is going to be required for fair internet access as the ability for the market to determine winners and compete has been taken away by politics.

But if I was the owner of the pipes themselves? I'm not so sure I'd see it the same way. Try to think about it from another perspective. If you owned something that cost a lot of money to install that connects multiple houses together and then, years later, the government stepped in and explained how you could or could not make money off of it because everyone wants to use it, I'm not so sure you'd feel very positive about it.

Granted it's an imperfect analogy but just trying to show you that even when you think an issue is lopsided, it may not be and it can be difficult to let go of as many BIASes.

> If you owned something that cost a lot of money to install that connects multiple houses together and then, years later, the government stepped in and explained how you could or could not make money off of it because everyone wants to use it, I'm not so sure you'd feel very positive about it.

Who cares what the corporate owners feel? They're custodians of infrastructure that was built with substantial government assistance; they knew there would be strings attached, even if they expected in the near term to stay a step or two ahead of the regulators. They have every right to be disappointed when the government does its job and restrains their greed, but that disappointment has no bearing on what actually makes for good public policy. Those corporate owners you pity are taking actions that harm the public interest. The government is not solely responsible for creating the situation that requires a choice between making Comcast execs feel bad or letting Comcast wreak havoc on the Internet's economics. Comcast et al. are trying to expand the scope of their power over the utility infrastructure they manage; net neutrality regulation isn't about disallowing anything that the ISPs have a long-established history of doing, so don't imply that the government is pulling the rug out from under their existing business model.

Net neutrality is a lopsided issue. That doesn't mean that the clear right answer is a win-win situation all around. Every issue the government faces could hypothetically be dealt with in a manner that greatly enriches a chosen few, but the existence of those alternatives does not establish their validity or suitability for accomplishing the government's purpose of promoting the general welfare. If you want to call my position biased, you can't stop at merely pointing out that my preferred solution would be less than perfect for somebody, because that's true of every possible solution.

> Who cares what the corporate owners feel? They're custodians of infrastructure that was built with substantial government assistance; they knew there would be strings attached, even if they expected in the near term to stay a step or two ahead of the regulators[...]Net neutrality is a lopsided issue. That doesn't mean that the clear right answer is a win-win situation all around.

So what you're saying is that because they agreed to X terms from the government that they should have always expected for the government, later on, to add additional terms to it even in cases where they may not have accepted government assistance? You do realize there are some companies and situations in which infrastructure was entirely laid with little or no government assistance, right? I'm not saying that's common (as far as I understand it isn't) but those people paid a considerable amount of money to do that likely without expecting the government to step in and tell them what they can and cannot do with it.

You seem to have side-stepped my original point, however as I never wanted to argue which side is correct or who's side has merits. In your point of view the argument is lopsided and it's just black and white. What my respond should have shown you is that it isn't clearly black and white.

You would be better for it to try and see both side's point of view instead of completely dismissing one because "who cares what the corporate owners feel".

"In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him. I think it's impossible to really understand somebody, what they want, what they believe, and not love them the way they love themselves."

>You would be better for it to try and see both side's point of view instead of completely dismissing one because "who cares what the corporate owners feel".

In this instance the other side is largely a tiny fraction of the population. It would be like if the other side of the gun control argument was gun manufacturers instead of millions of Americans who own guns.

This issue is lopsided in that destroying net neutrality would harm almost everyone to benefit a few thousand people.

>In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him,

It's easy to understand the goals of for-profit corporations. They exist to maximize profit. There is nothing else to understand. They will support any legislation that will increase their profit and oppose any legislation that will reduce it.

> In this instance the other side is largely a tiny fraction of the population.

You're correct but it's irrelevant. A smaller representation does NOT make an issue lopsided in justification.

This is all highly contextual and will only lead to further, circular arguments.

> This issue is lopsided in that destroying net neutrality would harm almost everyone to benefit a few thousand people[...]It's easy to understand the goals of for-profit corporations. They exist to maximize profit. There is nothing else to understand. They will support any legislation that will increase their profit and oppose any legislation that will reduce it.

This isn't true. There are many people, not part of the corporations that are constantly referred to, that also do not want net neutrality as it gives the government control over vital, information sharing infrastructure. Remember Prism?

Not only do I see the issue as not lop sided but I see each point as being a series of trade offs. I do not see an outcome that is great for everyone in any of the available directions.

>You're correct but it's irrelevant. A smaller representation does NOT make an issue lopsided in justification.

The issue is lopsided in terms of cost benefit analysis. Nothing more. The benefits to the shareholders and employees of a few corporations are vastly outweighed by the detriment to the rest of society.

Regulations change and companies have to adapt. The risk of changing regulations is part of the cost of doing business. Sure we should try minimize onerous regulation, but often there is no other viable alternative.

A hypothetical situation to illustrate this point:

A company buys land from a local government with permission to use it as a mercury disposal site. 40 years later the federal government passes a law that no new mercury can be dumped within 10 miles of a town of more than 10k people. The company has to close down the site. Sucks for the company. The owner thinks it's not fair, but the cost benefit analysis wasn't even close. In the end I'm not terribly concerned that the people affected by the disposal site weren't empathetic to the owner's plight.

>This isn't true. There are many people, not part of the corporations that are constantly referred to, that also do not want net neutrality as it gives the government control over vital, information sharing infrastructure. Remember Prism?

How does making it illegal for ISPs to favor traffic from some sources over others enable the government to take control over information sharing infrastructure?

Do fair housing laws give the government control over vital shelter providing infrastructure?

This is just a Republican talking point. There is no innate reason that net neutrality regulation should harm individual privacy. Net neutrality doesn't mean government take over of the internet.

> The issue is lopsided in terms of cost benefit analysis. Nothing more. The benefits to the shareholders and employees of a few corporations are vastly outweighed by the detriment to the rest of society.

We're arguing past each other (I had already addressed this but I digress).

> How does making it illegal for ISPs to favor traffic from some sources over others enable the government to take control over information sharing infrastructure?

Never said it would enable the government to "take control over information sharing infrastructure". Net neutrality govern by the FCC gives them powers over the internet itself that can affect not just our country but other countries as well.

This is a common talking point by the EFF folks regarding pros and cons of net neutrality.

> What my respond should have shown you is that it isn't clearly black and white.

And you completely failed to do so. All you showed was that there exists somebody who doesn't want net neutrality. You didn't even show whether they have any non-selfish reasons for that opinion. You showed the existence of opposition, not the existence of reasonable or viable opposition.

The merits of a side's arguments must be considered when judging whether an issue is largely one-sided, because it is always possible to construct unreasonable arguments against something.

I'd like to know roughly what you would consider to be sufficient justification for calling a politicized issue one-sided with respect to its public policy soundness.

> And you completely failed to do so. All you showed was that there exists somebody who doesn't want net neutrality.

That shows it isn't black and white. You can't have a group of people who has differing opinions than yours and simply write them off. There are various ways of weighing ones position. Maybe it ends up being morally wrong for a large amount of people but that still does not make it "black and white".

Very, very, very little of life is actually black and white. When you show an inability to see something from another perspective you will fail ever convincing them of your side.

> You didn't even show whether they have any non-selfish reasons for that opinion[...]You showed the existence of opposition, not the existence of reasonable or viable opposition.

Irrelevant. To many on the other side your point may not be reasonable or viable. Does that mean they are equally able to say the issue is "black and white" in their favor? No.

> I'd like to know roughly what you would consider to be sufficient justification for calling a politicized issue one-sided with respect to its public policy soundness.

I'm not sure I would call many if any issues one-sided. That's just not how life works and is incredibly rare.

To be fair, your "arguments against net neutrality are all about legalizing extortion" already sounds a bit "ultra biased".

What if someone wants to start an ISP, and charge less for a lower QoS band? Is that legalized extortion?

(Not to say it would be a good idea, I agree that it is a slippery slope)

What do you mean "charge less for a lower QoS band"? Net neutrality has nothing to say about an ISP that wants to offer both 10Mbps and 100Mbps plans, or business-class plans that offer an SLA for a higher price than ordinary residential plans.

This hypothetical company wants to drop packets from lower tier customers first, when congested, and oversubscribe their fiber to reduce costs.

That sounds like something that could be badly implemented, but there's nothing unreasonable about the idea in general. Oversubscribed services are par for the course. If your neighborhood's uplink is saturated during a period of heavy usage, do you really expect each customer to get 1/N share of the bandwidth, or do you expect the customers paying for the 100Mb plan to get up to 5 times more bandwidth than the customers paying for the 20Mb plan? Either way, it's obviously not suffering from the kind of unfairness that gives preference to certain usage patterns over others, and it doesn't involve any extorting of upstream content providers or other form of double-charging for services.

That still doesn't sound like it would violate net neutrality. NN is about not discriminating based on content. In this case all content is still treated the same. Now, if they throttled everything except a few 'vital' resources, then you'd have an issue.

Continuing the hypothetical :)

Let's say we need to drop packets from my lower tier. We'd prefer to keep a good experience for those customers if possible, so it would arguably be preferable to drop lower utility packets rather than grind everyone in that tier to a halt.

If 90% of the packets were coming from streaming video, the ISP could drop them all without affecting that tier's ability to access their bank accounts.

That is really the crux of the issue, because it is very close to reality.

I think you've taken the hypothetical far beyond plausibility. If you think you need to drop 90% of a customer's traffic because of congestion internal to your network, something has already gone badly wrong. I don't think it's realistic to hypothesize that you have a functioning and profitable ISP that enforces strict priority of higher-paying customer traffic over lower tiers rather than proportional or equal allocation of available bandwidth.

But setting aside the question of whether anybody would sign up for such a shitty ISP, you don't suddenly need to throw out 90% of a customer's traffic unless you're suddenly hit by a DDoS that you can't mitigate in any saner fashion. Congestion that bad will build gradually, and you'll have plenty of RTTs to send congestion signals to your customers. If a customer is running an application that is so unresponsive to congestion signals that they end up using 10x the bandwidth your backhaul has available for them, then that customer can have no reasonable expectation that any other applications remain usable. Any sane video streaming service would have lowered the resolution and then dropped the connection entirely as the congestion developed and packet loss increased.

Ignoring even that, you still haven't come up with a situation that requires non-neutral traffic management. AQMs like Stochastic Fair BLUE and Cake will automatically identify the unresponsive flow(s) and probabilistically drop those packets at whatever rate is necessary to alleviate the congestion, converging on 100% drop probability as the flow continues to behave like a DoS, while well-behaved TCP-like flows are minimally impacted (aside from a degree of congestion signalling necessary to keep their total bandwidth usage within the limit of what's available). SFB and Cake don't care about where the traffic is going other than to identify what flow it belongs to. They don't care what kind of traffic it is, they just care about how it behaves. They're neutral algorithms, and they provide a reasonable solution to the unreasonable challenge you've posed.

I think you slightly misunderstood the hypothetical (well, I stated it poorly). In this case, the network is congested and we need to drop packets from a low tier. In the low tier, 90% of the packets are (hypothetically) video streaming. It doesn't need to drop 90% of the packets, I'm just characterizing the traffic in that tier. This is also fairly representative of evening traffic in the US from a residential ISP.

The ISP cannot fully rely on all parties behaving well, unfortunately. The question is: Can the ISP drop packets from this low priced tier that it knows are likely video streaming, even well behaved video streaming, over other packets? Is that acceptable, or "legalized extortion"?

Obviously it would selectively drop DOS traffic first, as you mentioned, but we are past that point.

> The question is: Can the ISP drop packets from this low priced tier that it knows are likely video streaming, even well behaved video streaming, over other packets?

Such a policy is not necessary for the ISP to deliver good quality of service. Content-neutral traffic management is good enough, and often better than poorly-designed discriminatory traffic management policies. There's no real upside to permitting ISPs to engage in this kind of discrimination.

Are you claiming that, for any fraction x of traffic that must be dropped, overall subscriber utility is completely independent of what type of traffic is dropped?

This is not a violation of network neutrality. You are allowed both to treat different types of traffic and different groups of customers differently.

What you aren't allowed to do is treat traffic of the same variety differently depending on whether the endpoint paid you money.

The people being extorted aren't even your customers they are people who want to do business with your customers.

it seems to be rather against the very spirit of a system that 1) routes traffic in the manner it does 2) specifies access in the manner it does 3) has a history and culture as such

in short: it's against the internet itself...

is the internet biased?

I think the issue is rather like a court case: sure, there are 2 litigants, but in the end one is determined to be "correct" and the other loses...

if a famous data scientist publishes a research paper and I stand up naked on my desk and shout "peanut butter sandwiches!" at the top of my lungs, the peer review committee has no obligation to include my response in the process surrounding the review of said paper.

If a doctor or car mechanic gives a diagnosis in the field of their expertise, their opinion will be given more weight than if I ask a passerby their opinion on my illness or automobile.... i could go on and on making examples where 2 or more "sides" may appear wishing representation and where they don't necessarily warrant/merit it.

one has no obligation to represent litigants as holding an equal stature in validity, it's the a-priori presumption of the possibility of such that allows people to initially listen and nod, before one makes them aware of how bat-poo crazy one is, lol

> if a famous data scientist publishes a research paper and I stand up naked on my desk and shout "peanut butter sandwiches!" at the top of my lungs, the peer review committee has no obligation to include my response in the process surrounding the review of said paper

This is definitely the most unique argument I've heard in favor of net neutrality

Charging more for something that costs more to the ISP isn't a net neutrality issue. Net neutrality is about charging for things that cost nothing to the ISP, but are worth more to the consumer.

>Net neutrality is about charging for things that cost nothing to the ISP, but are worth more to the consumer.

That's certainly not what it's about. Business charge people all of the time based on what they think the customer will pay, regardless of what it costs them (see most "limited edition" versions of games, DVDs, etc).

The reason net neutrality is important is because many ISPs are effectively monopolies so there is no competition to keep them in check.

I'm in favor of net neutrality.. but lets be serious.. there are users who are far more "using" of their bandwidth than others. And any given company should have every right to sell/filter as necessary those users. But as to what content they filter, imho that's a different story.

But the two get muddled quite a bit.. and what happened between Verizon and Netflix is an outright shame, but I can kind of see both sides regardless of where I stand personally. The trouble is where to draw the line, and what lines to draw from a legal standpoint.

Drawing only from what I got from the article, they're only requiring these companies to be more transparent to their customers, and I'm all for that. I think the 100k customer break was probably reasonable, but even the 250k break won't affect the really big players in the space.

My bigger fear is where individual states are legislating against local communities/cities offering broadband.

> there are users who are far more "using" of their bandwidth than others.

Neutrality doesn't prohibit charging for utilization.

> And any given company should have every right to sell/filter as necessary those users.

You've been misled. Filtering isn't necessary. If a user is contributing to congestion on an oversubscribed line, you can drop some of their packets to reduce their usage to a fair share, without having to single out any specific types of traffic. ISPs don't have to be non-neutral in order to keep their service running. This is true at any scale, which is why having an exception for smaller ISPs is completely unjustified and is nothing but a foot in the door for those who would dismantle net neutrality entirely. Raising the pointless threshold is just a step toward that anti-consumer goal.

You want these companies to profit. If they don't profit they won't build out infrastructure. I think you should be much more grateful to ISPs for the service they provide instead of angry for chargin what is in your opinion too much

This isn't about the overall pricing, though since ISPs are a natural monopoly they do require regulation to keep their pricing fair. The end result of both effective competition and regulation of non-competitive markets should be minimally profitable companies.

This is about ISPs having unfair power to manipulate a market that isn't even part of their core business. Traffic carriers shouldn't have control over the competitive landscape for content providers.

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