Hacker News Reader

Comment by rdl | Hacker News Reader

Your examples are all safety (including public safety), or shared-resources (radio spectrum).

Fiber I lay in the ground isn't a shared resource, and no one's safety is impaired by prioritizing my on-network traffic over off-network traffic.

A more direct analogy is government regulation of something like how food tastes or how entertaining TV shows are.

There's some justification for regulating carriers who have an enforced monopoly in a region, but the problem is the monopolies are local government monopolies, and the regulation here would be national.

View on HN

> Your examples are all safety (including public safety), or shared-resources (radio spectrum). Fiber I lay in the ground isn't a shared resource, and no one's safety is impaired by prioritizing my on-network traffic over off-network traffic.

That's true, sort of. The fiber you lay in the ground isn't a shared resource, but the internet as a whole IS. Mediating my access to it without reasonable alternatives removes my stake in a shared resource.

> A more direct analogy is government regulation of something like how food tastes or how entertaining TV shows are.

I'm trying to interpret this charitably, but I must admit that my initial reaction is "that's absolutely ridiculous". This strikes me as a lurid, sensationalist comparison designed to appeal to anger rather than logic. If I am missing an obvious logical connection then I'd love to hear it.

If anything, I think a worst-case breakdown of net neutrality falls closer to having my personal choices regulated than government intervention does. It's not hard to imagine an example scenario where it is only profitable for my home to be serviced by an ISP which has political beliefs antithetical to mine. In such a case it would be perfectly legal for them to charge exorbitant rates to access this content, effectively controlling what I consume.

> There's some justification for regulating carriers who have an enforced monopoly in a region, but the problem is the monopolies are local government monopolies, and the regulation here would be national.

I think you're making this statement because of regulation requiring that providers service an entire market? I can't imagine how else to interpret the statement that "monopolies are local government monopolies", given that most people have a choice of one (two, if they're lucky) of {comcast, time warner, AT&T}. Simply lifting this regulation doesn't necessarily solve the problem - admittedly I'm speaking from a position of ignorance, but it strikes me as likely that there are many consumers to whom it isn't immensely profitable to provide service.

> I'm trying to interpret this charitably

I couldn't easily think of a non-public-safety, non-shared resource regulation that exists. (because most of those things aren't regulated). If you can think of a better example, I'm fine with using that.

> local monopoly

Local monopolies are because local governments restrict who can trench or otherwise install in an area. I believe there are local/state/federal restrictions requiring universal access. If it weren't for these monopolies you'd at least have two crappy cable companies in a region vs. one, and there would be competition. (In my market, sometimes apartment complexes and others do monopoly agreements with one or the other of the local carriers -- Wave vs. Centurylink vs. Frontier (dying) vs. Comcast -- which is an issue too, but much more open to commercial pressure.)

There are some national policies which restrict the total number of providers in the US market, but mostly it is restrictions at the local level which keep individual locations from having multiple of those providers. There are some inherent natural monopoly aspects here -- trenching has costs, etc. -- but a lot of it is a consequence of government policies.

(I want there to be open access to high speed, inexpensive Internet (with as uniform speeds across sites as possible) in as many places as possible; my disagreement with extreme NN policies is that they both violate private property rights AND are not likely to produce the desired result.)

> If you can think of a better example, I'm fine with using that.

Comparisons between regulation of telephone service and internet service seem like the closest analog, and there are certainly examples of the former. Early telephone network providers were forced to peer by government regulation, for instance. An even more closely related example is the regulation that cell network providers may not charge extra fees for tethering; that's actually quite close to the net neutrality argument, where the cell network provider is being forced to act as a "dumb pipe" and accept traffic at the same cost regardless of the source (though admittedly they have metered usage billing, which I would be totally fine with from my ISP if that solves the problem). That we as a society accepted regulation in both of these cases is not a sufficient argument for why net neutrality is necessary, but it defeats the argument that such regulation is unprecedented.

I think we're in agreement about what we want, and the argument that net neutrality will fail to produce this is reasonable since we aren't currently in the goal state. My fear of anti net-neutrality legislation is based on the fact that what we have now, though not ideal, is acceptable, and it's quite plausible that things could become much worse rather than better unless this is addressed very, very thoughtfully. I'm open to the idea that net neutrality as it currently stands is unsustainable, but that needs to be paired with a clear explanation of how revoking it won't lead us to the nightmare scenario I've described above in which a small monopoly of providers serve as unelected gatekeepers. As I mentioned earlier, if the answer is metered billing where the high costs of the long tail are amortized by the low costs of popular content, then that seems perfectly appropriate. You also gave an example in a sibling comment about net neutrality only being waived when consumers had access to a certain number of providers.

> Fiber I lay in the ground isn't a shared resource

I disagree, and you are trivializing serious issues that lead to this regulation.

There's a good reason there's a lot of regulation in this space: people don't like it when companies tear up their street (or yard or driveway) to install utilities, and complain to their local elected officials when it happens. Democracy really works at this scale. For every person that is willing to have their street torn up for a second (or 10th) time to install a competing ISP's infrastructure, there are 49 people that don't understand and will keep paying comcast, and 50 people that don't care at all, but they sure as hell care about backhoes and construction workers in their yard.

Honestly, the local officials preventing competing ISPs from operating aren't even wrong, even if you view it as short sighted to represent their constituencies accurately. It's monstrously inefficient and stupid to lay competing physical networks.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com