The FCC plan to undo its net neutrality rules
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Just reading this makes me angry. Has he ever heard of monopolies / oligopolies, or simply the place of government in regulating public utilities.
Apply his quote to water supplies and see what happens.
The point of my example was that as you leave government out of the tap water market and instead of getting more of it, you get less, more expensive and of lesser quality. Economics teach that in some industries, the government and a certain amount of regulation is healthy and good for the market; leaving actors to themselves just makes them tend naturally towards monopolies which then trifle innovation. Communications is one of those markets.
The U.K. and France have both privatized their water systems and it has worked fine. Conversely, U.S. water systems, which are mostly still publicly owned, are a total disaster: http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2015/09/epa_1_trillion_n....
Economics certainly teaches that some markets are susceptible to natural monopolies and government regulation is appropriate there. But it also teaches that making a kind of business less profitable will drive investment away from that business. The question is how do you regulate to balance those competing concerns. You have to protect consumers, but you also have to figure out how to get sufficient investment into the industry.
The U.K. does a good job balancing the interests. There is a single, regulated monopoly that owns most of the last mile (BT Openreach), but the regulations are designed so that the monopoly is actually very profitable. Most state and local governments do a terrible job balancing those interests with regards to utility companies. Regulated rates keep water and sewer bills low, but dramatically limit the profitability of water utilities. As a result our water infrastructure is hundreds of billions of dollars in the red.
Yeah, the situation is similar in Canada, the CRTC has forced the big ISPs to lease to smaller ones. It's led to some great reductions in our costs, we used to be limited by extremely low data caps - they're now much higher or gone for a bit extra. Speeds have comparably gone up about 10x in a span of a few years.
I don't even think they'd need to be nearly as aggressive with the net neutrality laws if they could manage something similar - the competition creates a much better environment to address the problems.
It's a matter of creating a competitive market instead of restricting or destroying one.
The US is still lagging behind on that realization and it's a common mistake to think that privatizing water supplies holds benefits for towns and consumers. Most often in these cases, deregulation brings benefits in the short term as private actors compete heavily to win public markets, but not in the long term when the market tends to an oligopoly / monopoly and private actors don't have any more incentive to push on innovation or investments.
The issue of lack of investment isn't a problem of too much regulation, on the contrary. These are markets with very high costs of entry where you need a strong regulatory framework to mandate a couple actors to a large enough market for those investments to be viable. You quote the example of communications, in France by law France Telecom had to expand its network to reach any citizen, whether 10km away from the grid or 10m at no cost for the consumer. This led to a great coverage of the territory and very high access to broadband for most of the population.
Take the example of the US, where internet access costs easily $100 a month, has just a couple actors sharing the market in each city, in a proper position of cartel, and where government regulation is nearly non-existent; and oppose this to most european countries where a 100mb symmetrical connection will cost you 30 EUR.... On the counter, what really disrupted the French Telecom market was the arrival of Free, which offered costs so low Telecoms had to find ways to match their prices.
It's a fallacy to think that these markets don't need regulation, but it's another one to think government can do everything ;)
Sources: http://in.reuters.com/article/water-utilities-paris-idINL6N0... http://thewip.net/2009/01/28/local-water-renaissance-in-fran...
> You quote the example of communications, in France by law France Telecom had to expand its network to reach any citizen, whether 10km away from the grid or 10m at no cost for the consumer. This led to a great coverage of the territory and very high access to broadband for most of the population.
There is no free lunch. More money spent covering more people means less money invested in improving infrastructure in urban areas.
France is not a great counterpoint to the U.S. model of regulating ISPs. According to 2016 OECD data, France does have higher overall broadband deployment (40 per 100 inhabitants versus ~33 per 100 in the US).[3] But the vast majority of it is DSL rather than much faster cable. According to Akamai's latest broadband speed report,[4] France ranks 52nd in the world in average speed (page 32). The U.S. ranks 14th (page 24). The U.S. has 42% of connections above 15mbps, versus just 16% in France (pages 25, 34).
https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-t....
> Take the example of the US, where internet access costs easily $100 a month, has just a couple actors sharing the market in each city, in a proper position of cartel, and where government regulation is nearly non-existent; and oppose this to most european countries where a 100mb symmetrical connection will cost you 30 EUR
The fact that you can get 100mb symmetrical connections cheaply in some places doesn't reflect "most of Europe." Fiber is available in almost every U.S. city I've ever lived or worked in (Atlanta, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, Wilmington, Washington, Annapolis--all except Baltimore and Wilmington, but even those have fiber in the surrounding suburbs). But that's not necessarily representative of the U.S.--you need to look at aggregate, not anecdotal data.
Almost 2/3 of the EU lives in: Germany, France, the U.K., Italy, or Spain. According to Akamai's data, those countries all have slower average internet speeds than the U.S. That is consistent with the OECD data, which shows that three of the five lag the U.S. in fiber deployment (counting the U.K.'s FTTN as fiber rather than DSL) and rely predominantly on slower DSL rather than faster cable technologies.
[1] http://everylittledrop.com.au/knowledge-center/the-cost-of-w...
[2] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/us-water-safety_us_56bcf....
[3] http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/1_2-OECD-WiredWirelessBB-2...
[4] https://www.akamai.com/us/en/multimedia/documents/state-of-t...
No, that happened in 1984. (https://research.ncl.ac.uk/media/sites/researchwebsites/goba... slide 11 or http://www.eaudeparis.fr/lespace-culture/patrimoine/).
> You quote the example of communications, in France by law France Telecom had to expand its network to reach any citizen, whether 10km away from the grid or 10m at no cost for the consumer. This led to a great coverage of the territory and very high access to broadband for most of the population.
>> There is no free lunch. More money spent covering more people means less money invested in improving infrastructure in urban areas.
The point here is that the regulatory authority creates a legal framework which favors investement in the grid, resolving one of the inefficiencies of the market (no interest in paying 2MM euros to connect a person who's distant in the country side), makes investments happen which would never take place under a fully deregulated environment. This addresses issues of digital inequalities which would push actors on investing only on people or products which can yield the higher profits. At term it hurts society.
I'll take your points on the OCED and Akamai rankings, and yes I provided anecdotal evidence, not a lot of time for research :) But my sense is that if you compare speeds delivered to prices paid, consumers are still much better off in Europe. The other point which might be hard to quantify is the little choice US consumers have when choosing their ISP. It's often one or two actors who offer the same speed, price points and whose situation of oligopoly allows them to forgo proper consumer support alltogether (TWC). That is the result of no regulation and I don't see how more of that will benefit consumers.
More sources on water remunicipalisation: https://www.tni.org/en/article/180-cities-take-back-public-c...
https://www.tni.org/en/publication/here-to-stay-water-remuni...
Before we had coax cable which required updates very often (DOCSIS versions) which usually required changing lots of equipment (not termination equipment/CPEs).
Before we had DSL which also saw lots of improvements over the years. (ADSL, ADSL2, ADSL2+, annexes, etc).
Also all these technologies require an uplink which needs to be updated from time to time.
These updates are very expensive, you can't imagine how much. A comparison with tap water is moot because, well, you don't need new, thicker pipes every 10 years.
Sounds like Pai should talk to someone on a cardiac pacemaker.
How? How on earth does letting ISPs milk more money out of their existing network incentivize those ISPs to expand that network? It's just so frustrating that these guys no longer even bother to pretend that their arguments make any logical sense at all. "We'll protect user privacy by eliminating these rules that protect user privacy!" "We'll boost competition and choice, by giving the existing entrenched players more control and power!"
This is just such a naked demonstration of regulatory capture. It boggles my mind.
Engaging on a level of logic with someone who is seeking an outcome and just says whatever they think will support their view. This is about the exercise of power.
And as has happened since Reagan, when the clownshow in office is finally shown the door, the D's get to clean up the mess, work towards fixing economy yet again, and the cycle of life is complete.
Sigh.
I come to this site because despite of being more liberal leaning, I can have calm conversations with people.
> spewing bullshit
> the clownshow in office
> D's get to clean up the mess
Regardless of how right (or wrong) the commenter may be, this type of language does not invite or encourage the civil and productive discourse that is strongly valued on HN. There are ways to express such opinions in a civil way, though it requires more effort. Given the current polarized environment in the US, it's difficult enough to engage in constructive discourse on political topics: on a forum such as HN with only text as the medium of communication it's even more difficult without using language used above.
I can imagine why someone might dislike 'clownshow'. Frankly, I find it accurate, or I wouldn't have written it, and I didn't use such terms in the past to describe pols I disagree with - it is specific to what I see as a historically bad outfit.
"Clean up the mess" is "uncivil"? Sorry, that's silly, and another demonstration that politically correct language policing isn't just for lefty college-kids.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Bullshit-Harry-G-Frankfurt/dp/0691122...
Civility is important for discourse, but so is clarity of expression, and I do not consider it uncivil to express a firm opinion bluntly whether or not I agree with it.
Plus, it's condecending to at least half of the people in the U.S.
The parent commenter acts as though they know they're correct and every other person is wrong. The comment comes across very close minded, and not really in the spirit of discourse. They even hint that they don't see the point of discourse:
> Engaging on a level of logic with someone who is seeking an outcome and just says whatever they think will support their view. This is about the exercise of power.
The only thing it added was to discount other views and generalize "R's" as "clown" supporters, which just isn't the case. There was no other addition to the conversation.
Further, I dont even see a way to respond to that comment without seemingly defending the "clown"... Which would certainly lead to a more incendiary argument.
I just threw in some cheap shots, similar to what they were doing, in order to make a point.
Things are complicated because many tech libertarians are liberal-libertarians who support things like basic income, but that doesn't change the overall slant of HN. Also note most liberals are ostensibly pro-business, they just think the gov't needs to step in to regulate the free market.
Comments like the grandparent are an example of liberalism without any semblance of objectivity. He disagrees with someone, and, rather than think about why someone would hold those views (even if erroneous), takes for granted that they are irrational, illogical and driven by a hidden agenda.
Verizon's vision for Fios was to sell a bunch of value-add services like video calling and on-demand movies. When plain-old-internet services started providing those capabilities without having to pay Verizon directly, Fios deployments slowed to a crawl.
Interesting that Comcast is heavily pitching their home security add-on, as that's a service not yet broadly adopted over the 'net.
Let's say this succeeded and people jumped to Verizon for their internet and their media. What would happen to Amazon Video and Netflix?
Utilities and dumb pipes also have incredible societal value. In the first world, potable water is so cheap that you can use a gallon of it to make your pee disappear, and water-borne disease is almost nonexistent. Businesses try to avoid this miracle of efficiency by putting that water in plastic bottles, trucking it around the country, marketing the hell out of it, and charging a dollar or more per liter, but I don't see any reason to encourage that behavior.
The fundamental idea is that the amount of investment done in a venture is directly proportional to the profitability of that venture. If govt makes a regulation saying that Google can provide Hangouts service, but it cannot charge more for Enterprise Hangouts features, then Google has no additional incentive to expand the hangouts service than what it gets by having the business of consumer market.
If Uber/Lyft is previously not allowed to provide priority Corporate service to corporate clients (and let's just say they do it by letting the corporate Uber cars bypass the consumer Uber cars using their Map service) then Uber/Lyft are allowed to do that, then their increased profit margins will allow them to fund their autonomous car other operations to build the network faster.
You may disagree with the ethic of overnight delivery services of UPS, but at least not pretend that if UPS is allowed to charge more and deliver packets overnight then this allows them invest more into their infrastructure.
It does not in any way incentivize them to build larger or better networks. It does not incentivize them to invest in their infrastructure. All it does is let them make more profit off what they already have.
I mean seriously, if the whole argument is that they're not making enough money as it is: if a 97%[1] profit margin isn't enough money for them to build out their networks, just how much more do they need?
[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bruce-kushnick/time-warner-cab...
If they don't have overhead in their networks, they cannot offer faster service to some net traffic over other net traffic. The ability to sell faster connections to some services incentivises them to have overhead in their networks to sell, which means investment into their infrastructure.
If UPS slows the packages of Amazon down because they're accepting money from Jet.com then they would be violating their consumer agreement with Amazon.
If UPS provides faster delivery for Jet.com for higher fee, then Amazon's products would be delivered slower but cheaper, but Jet.com's products would be more expensive.
Remember, speed isn't the only thing people care about on the Internet. Features and costs matter too.
In a non-net neutrality world, faster == expensive, and there is no business model for ISPs where they can provide cheaper services AND provide faster delivery.
This is a model where average residential person is paying UPS to deliver all packages they ask for. But UPS has decided that jet.com must pay extra or their packages will be arbitrarily delayed vs amazon because UPS has invested in amazon. Then the customer cries foul because they thought they were paying for arbitrary package delivery.
The government tried to say packages should be treated equally by treating the package delivery as the USPS, but UPS has paid off the party members to ensure they can continue to double dip.
Also remember it isn't that a given company isn't paying for "priority" it is that they're going to be actively underprioritized unless they pay.
Wait... but ISPs CAN charge consumers for faster speeds. There are most definitely price/speed tiers of service. Net neutrality was about not allowing an ISP to artificially throttle the speed of individual services going over their pipes, not about throttling total connection speed for an end user based on price.
The complexity seems to be that ISPs have 2 customers - end consumers, and content owners (to keep it simple). Comparisons to UPS aren't accurate because UPS contracts with ONE party - the shipper - for service. ISPs are contracting with both ends, and unless one side is neutral, they will be allowed to sell one thing but not provide it arbitrarily because some other party didn't also pay up. I can pay Comcast for gigabit access, but it isn't required to provide it to me at all because it can throttle any service it wishes. It's contract with me is purely to the curb.
Imagine this scenario: I pay for access to a toll road that runs for a few miles through Houston, TX. However, because my final destination on my trip is Florida, and Florida doesn't pay the toll road operator a special fee, my car is magically restricted to 15 miles per hour. The toll road provider provider sold me a pass to access the road at full speed 75 mph, but can arbitrarily (and magically) limit my speed without notice or consent based on information that is really arbitrary to the toll road's existence: my final destination.
Of course it can make you more money! You can charge your competitors rent to stay out of the slow lane, and you can make your own subsidiary services artificially preferable to consumers (and therefore more profitable) by throttling the competition's bandwidth.
Your UPS analogy doesn't fit at all. UPS would have to own Jet, and Amazon would have to have no choice but to use UPS delivery for a large subset of its customers (remember that broadband service is an effective monopoly in large portions of the US). UPS would absolutely be able to slow down Amazon's packages, because that's what eliminating net neutrality literally means: ISPs are no longer required to treat all packets equally, they can pick and choose which traffic gets priority, and naturally they're going to prioritize their own, or those that have paid an extra tariff to get in the fast lane. Amazon's products would either be more expensive, because they're paying that tariff; or they'd have inferior delivery time. Either way, UPS profits, not because of the quality or speed of their service, but because they have the ability to degrade the quality of their competitors.
In a non-net neutrality world, faster != expensive (at least not any more than is already the case). Consumer choice == expensive. "Faster" would remain under the control of the ISPs, exactly as it is right now.
Build your own services and throttle everyone else's services unless they pay a premium (in which case your own services would be cheaper, but the profit they get from their own services must be higher than the profit they get from NOT selling the bandwidth their premium service uses, to third parties).
Let's put it this way, if a hotel builds a Jacuzzi, you're argument is that the hotel owner will only let their own family and friends use the Jacuzzi whereas they will charge anyone else more money to use it. But the time their buddies are using the Jacuzzi could be sold for a fee to the third party, so in order for them to rationally do this, they must gain enough favors that it justifies them to NOT make the extra profit.
In case of the ISP scenario, the Verizon Music better offer them higher profitability than letting it be used by actual Spotify and charging them. If they charge Spotify's $5 per month per user, then Verizon Music better bring them same or higher revenue or else running Verizon Music isn't worth it.
Business Model 2:
Invest in infrastructure and try to take over bigger market.
You're claiming "There is no way they will go for business model 2, they will go for business model 1". But you have no presented any reason why they would do that? We have reasons to believe that even when companies are very good at doing something internally, the parent company sells them off because it's a more profitable model.
There are two reasons they would do that.
The first is price discrimination. Suppose Spotify makes $2/month worth of profit but uses $0.05/month in bandwidth. Now Verizon can charge them $2/month for that amount of bandwidth and take their entire margin. Even if Spotify nominally continues to exist, they now have no margins to reinvest or use to attract new private investment, so they're walking dead. Which harms customers because now Spotify can never improve their service. And if Verizon does have a competing service (see also: TV and phone) then Verizon's service gets an insurmountable competitive advantage.
Which leads to the second reason, which is to extract monopoly rents. Suppose Spotify charges $10/month because they have competitors, so they can't charge more without losing business. But if they had no competitors then they could charge $25/month. Which means that Verizon can charge $25/month if they can get rid of all the competitors, which they can do by just charging them all unsustainably high data prices.
Hotels can't do this because hotels have real competition.
Some may stay and downgrade their service as they don't require as much bandwidth and some may leave Verizon entirely. It's not all roses for them.
Then Comcast, AT&T, Google or anyone else frankly begins offering "True unlimited full access internet" and eats Verizon's breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Meanwhile someone creates a VPN service to get around the blockade.
https://www.theverge.com/2014/6/4/5778770/netflix-warning-me...
https://qz.com/688033/netflix-launched-this-handy-speed-test...
https://bgr.com/2014/06/11/netflix-video-streaming-speed-tes...
I would agree with you only if everyone had a choice of that many providers, which is not the case! In my current neighborhood in Boston I have a whopping selection of either America's favorite company Comcast (with bandwidth caps and horrible outdated infrastructure and service) or Verizon DSL (max ~3Mbs down on a good day and only when it doesn't rain). In my previous neighborhood it was only Comcast as it was too far from Verizon's DSL switch. Neither one of those companies have any incentive to improve their networks. Zero. They have a comfortable duopoly and killing net neutrality will only reaffirm their horrible exploitative positions and allow them to start turning the internet into something reminiscent of cable TV, which is their ultimate goal: full control over content providers.
You seem to be intentionally forgetting that these ISPs have segregated themselves such that they do not have to compete with one another. In most of the US, you get one choice of fast internet (Verizon or Comcast or Time Warner) and one choice of slow internet (whatever DSL you can find) - you may not even get satellite or dial up anymore.
So, when Verizon says "Screw you Google and Netflix and Spotify", their customers don't go "hey Comcast/AT&T/Google, c'mere", they say "how much do I have to pay you to make the pain stop... for now..." (The customers of all of these horrible ISPs have been screaming the "hey [other ISP] come to my area" line for literally decades, but the ISPs don't listen because they have either agreed explicitly or implicitly not to push into one another's turf to maximize everyone's profits.)
This is why we need net neutrality. If the market was competitive, it'd be a different story altogether. But it is provably not (hell, they've used the fact the markets are not competitive to try to convince the FTC to allow them to merge with other ISPs because "it would not reduce overall competition, since they do not compete in such-and-such markets"), and despite the government drowning AT&T and its many children with hundreds of billions of dollars over the past few decades to build high speed networks for everyone, they still organized their networks in such a way to maintain monopoly powers (albeit in smaller, more fragmented markets).
ISPs in America do as little as possible, collecting the biggest check as possible, and use the massive profits to squeeze competitors out (like they have successfully done with Google giving up the ghost of expanding even in Mountain View California where they are headquartered and as they are scaling up to do to municipalities creating their own networks like Chattanooga). They're consistently rated as the worst businesses in America, but they are infrastructure, so we pay them anyway. And now they're learning that more profits exist in content than it does in carrying the content fairly, so they want to be the source of the content too. And that means killing net neutrality to making themselves the sole arbiters of the market.
[0]https://community.openvpn.net/openvpn/wiki/TrafficObfuscatio... [1]https://github.com/jlund/streisand
The idea is further that, not only does it make pragmatic sense for so favorably positioned an ISP to act aggressively in defense of that position, but such ISPs have been observed to do so, as for example with AT&T's successful defeat of the recent municipal broadband expansion bill in Tennessee. AT&T's position is that taxpayer money should not be used to fund competition with private industry, which all sounds very fine and upstanding, except that the private industry has already stifled any possibility of competition by means of the sort of monopolistic activity which US governments spent much of the early 20th century working to restrict, in order to prevent the unsavory outcomes that such activity has been observed to produce in direct proportion to the degree in which it's successfully pursued.
So, sure, they can charge high rates for traffic if they want, in addition to charging more or less whatever rates they please simply to provision backhaul in the first place. They can impose a $20/month, or higher, charge for reliable access to video streamed from services other than those they themselves run. They can do whatever they're able to get away with - and in an environment of permissive and favorable legislation and no effective private competition, they get away with a hell of a lot.
In case it matters, I'm really not progressive, and I understand business reasonably well - I've been in private industry my entire career, with no one doing me any favors, and if I didn't have at least a generally accurate idea of how things work, I wouldn't be able to support myself. In particular, I find the current attitude held by the federal, and many state, governments, toward small business enterprises, absurd and execrable - and I've seen the onerous burden such an attitude inflicts on people who go into business for themselves. But the current attitude toward large business is a whole 'nother matter entirely, and I see nothing of value to our polity as a whole in the results of such gross permissiveness. Expanding such permissiveness still further strikes me as very much the wrong thing to do.
"What's the point of paying $100 a month for Facebook and Instagram? I get that on my phone anyway! I don't want Verizon's $100 a month TV plan, I want house of cards."
As the ISP mostly has sunk costs and slim margins if even 5% of its user base leaves in a certain market that will render them insolvent or force them to raise prices, causing more departures, and higher prices still...
The point is while they don't always have direct competition they do have a decent amount of elasticity of demand.
A big cost for ISP's is customer acquisition, even if they change back their policies it will be years, maybe decades to recover. I think if an ISP did this on any large scale it would be suicide.
I guarantee you Comcast has made the same calculation, too, down to the fractional cent. Whatever vig they charge, if they do, will be scaled accordingly.
Also keep in mind they would still be subject to anti-trust regulation, they really can only take it so far before getting broken up again.
So... just to make sure I'm following, this is the outcome you're arguing in favor of?
From: NetflixSupport@Netflix.com
Subject: Comcast is increasing the monthly cost of Nextflix
"Dear Valued Customer,
Here at Netflix we endeavor to offer the highest value for your entertainment dollar, it is with that in mind we regret to inform you that due to sweeping and punitive fee increases brought on at the sole discretion of Comcast we will be forced to raise our prices 425% next billing cycle. Customers of other ISP's will enjoy the same low price that we have always offered, in fact we are offering our service at our cost to Comcast customers at this new rate. Please contact Comcast customer service at 1-800-Comcast if you would like this issue resolved as it is out of our hands.
Have a great day"
Its very surprising that people argue about these businesses in the hypothetical.
America has only a few Telecom players. They will remain a few telecom players because fundamentally telecom has deep barriers to entry.
And these players have a long history of hugely anti consumer moves, laziness, deceit, cabal like behavior.
I really do not understand this, and hope someone can shed light on it.
Why do people talk about these firms, and trust them to act as model businesses.
1) Are many americans unaware of the history of malifide actions by telecom firms? (colluding to drive down prices during auctions, not building the network they were given tax breaks too, already existent rent seeking behavior and attitudes)
2) Is there some other principle that they believe these firms will follow, that overrides the obvious business incentive to cheat?
I don't get it.
http://www.theverge.com/2017/4/26/15439622/fcc-net-neutralit...
Even if there's a lot of money to be made providing better service than Comcast, who will receive approval to dig up the ground and place new cables?
Well then why introduce more regulation like 'Net Neutrality'?
Hangouts has the infrastructure cost of a server and UPS warehouses and vehicles. An ISP has the infrastructure and maintenance costs of a buried or hung line to every single home it serves. Unlike an App or shipping company, it takes literal years to take a hard wired ISP to any sort of fruition. Building an ISP also means serving a concentrated market, where the bigger ISP can lower their prices until your new ISP goes bankrupt.
If you really wanted to break up the regional monopolies, you would force competitive bidding for all last mile connections and let companies do their own backbone infrastructure. It would introduce actually competition to a market where most consumers literally have no choice.
The fact that Google Fibre exists only reinforces the assessment that you must be this big to enter the ISP market in the USA.
The minimum cost of a transportation venture is extremely cheap -- a working vehicle and its operating costs (petrol, insurance, maintenance). Of course, it won't be as profitable as UPS and such a venture won't be able to out-compete UPS nationwide but there certainly are small local courier services that provides faster and cheaper service than UPS for limited use-cases.
There is no equivalent of a public national roads network for ISPs -- stringing up fibre is expensive as all hell and involves having to get permission from land owners, municipalities, and utilities. National-scale incumbents (who can easily afford to throw a few million dollars here or there to put in fibre of their own in a new region/market) currently are not subject to real competition from local ISPs (who don't have a comparable ability to throw cash around).
And while you might say that it allows them to fund things faster, it also allows them to simply give more money to executives and shareholders.
Please don't also pretend that giving them more ways to make money at the expense of the internet as we know it means that they will invest in their infrastructure. In fact, history shows us that they most likely will not.
To be honest, I'm unsure about the whole "make it worth more and they'll invest more in it" argument, but I do think that abandoning net neutrality has a chilling effect on small startups. Or small bloggers, or small anyone.
Pai's position is that there is a healthy amount of competition in the isp space(he points to things like mobile competition and network development as evidence) and net neutrality is at best not needed and at worse harmful to innovation.
And the argument that net neutrality harms innovation is a simply ridiculous inversion of fact. "Curse this level playing field! what would really help innovation is if we give carriers the power to throttle any new competing ideas out of existence!"
But then his article came out, and it was just filled with FUD and misinformation.
I doubt that he is a dull person, and that he reached the FCC by projecting an air of deep incompetence.
It follows that he knows full well that what he says is incorrect, and says it because he knows it will appeal to his core target. I assume this is his run up for either political position, or a cushy job in telecom.
Look at mobile providers for an example. Text messages cost almost nothing yet for many years each company charged heftily for text messaging which earned them a mountain of profit. And that's in a segment where there were multiple big players competing on relatively even terms.
Well, the obvious way to "preserve the core principles of net neutrality, such as the idea that blocking or slowing traffic should be off-limits" is to not get rid of the regulation that prohibits blocking or slowing traffic.
Yeah, and hopefully as much energy (and more) as was mobilized against the previous FCC for not being as vigorous as some wanted in the last round of Open Internet rulemaking will be directed into the public comments for the FCC actually reversing direction. But I don't expect it will matter as much; with Wheeler's FCC, the goals were clearly for neutrality and the debate was over the means; with Pai's FCC, despite lip service to the principles of neutrality, the real overwhelming goal seems to be to free ISPs to do what they want, so I'm not sure any contrary comment will have much weight.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/04/fcc-wants-eliminate-ne...
Don't you see what a difference this will make?
Naturally, ISPs (if they care enough to do so) can spin their money grabs as giving away popular services for free (often after said services paid them off) while simultaneously limiting data or bandwidth for everything else.
Anything but the dumb pipe ethernet grid is a money grab. Hell, fixed data speeds we have now are money grabs. The reality is that there is a variable amount of bandwidth in a given network, and if ISPs were not exploitative they would guarantee a minimum speed but allow users to saturate the network as much as they can, because that is how the reality of the network operates. As it is, you get somewhere between 0 and your cap speed and are artificially throttled at the cap through anti-consumer behavior they can get away with because there is no competition in infrastructure.
Of course, that also means it'll kill any competitors not willing or able to pay the same extortion, so in the end you'll have less choice, but at least you'll have saved money. Except you won't really save money because once the current administration allows further consolidation in the wireless sector, prices will rise with authority.
You might save a few bucks in the short run, but lack of competition doesn't tend to be good for markets - especially ones which can rapidly change like online services. Less choice generally means you're paying more.
Also of note, YC, TechStars and Engine Advocacy released their "Startups for Net Neutrality" letter to Pai this morning: http://www.engine.is/startups-for-net-neutrality
Investment increased overall.[1]
The FCC classified ISPs as "telecommunications services", same as now, until the mid-2000s. That's the framework that worked well for decades. The one Pai wants is the one that killed competition.
The FCC issued network neutrality regulations in 2010 because ISPs had started to violate the guidelines the FCC unanimously approved in 2005. They only invoked Title II after ISPs sued to block the 2010 regulations.
Privacy regulation wasn't a problem until Congress removed the FCC's authority, and they could easily give the FTC the necessary authority without re-re-re-classifying ISPs.
[1] https://consumerist.com/2017/02/28/fcc-chair-claims-broadban...
That's part of the reason why cable internet is so dominant. Dsl companies were required to let competition use their last mile. So nobody wanted to invest.
It was only after telecoms got the gIt assurances that the FCC wouldn't unbundle fiber that Verizon and att started expanding.
> Two years ago, the FCC suddenly changed course – even though there was no problem that the agency needed to solve.
There was a problem. The FCC enacted the Open Internet Order establishing Net Neutrality in 2010, Verizon sued the FCC in 2014 and the court said the FCC could only enact the order if Verizon was a Title II common carrier. The FCC reclassified so that they could enforce the Open Internet Order, like the court said it must.
You could argue that there was no problem that the Open Internet Order addressed but that happened in 2010, 6 years ago, not two.
Maybe it wouldn't touch Pai, but if it pissed off a huge block of his neighbors maybe he'd start to understand the idea.
Congressmen would be tougher, since they're always flying around. The idea is to bring the pain to people that surround Pai on a daily basis.
https://smile.amazon.com/gp/chpf/homepage/ref=smi_se_ssr_src...
Without that rule, the ISPs will invest money into new networks...but it will have negative consumer value and a lot of rent-seeking or pure extortion value for the ISPs.
Packet-based systems are so efficient that some sort of QoS packet routing makes no sense technically in respect to the overhead of brand new networking schemes. Unbiased packet routing is doing just great streaming HD videos on Netflix to 100 million people worldwide, and will continue to do great. The more fundamental problem is that the bottlenecks are at the last mile and there is NO WAY that Verizon is going to lay two cables to your home, one fast lane for important traffic, and another slow lane!! Without last mile investment, there can not be any meaningful technical gains from violating net neutrality.
ISPs want to get rid of net neutrality in order to extort money from Google, Facebook, Netflix and others. Netflix is already paying an extortion fee to Verizon who threatened them with slower speeds if they didn't pay up.
The government's job is to insure that markets are fair and that effective monopolies don't abuse their power, through simple regulations. ISPs and Telco.s have regularly demonstrated for over a hundred years that they HAVE TO BE REGULATED...we would not have an internet or an inter-operable phone network if governments all over the world did force these companies to talk to other networks! The breakup of AT&T just over two decades ago (seems much longer!) was tremendous in spurring on lower costs and competitors in telecommunications.
An extra $20-30/month is a small price to pay to keep what little competition they have alive. I'd encourage everyone else to examine their choices here if they have any (which I realize for many is 'bad' or 'bad').
Comcast serves across the street from my house and told me it would be $76k out of my pocket to get service here. For < 1mi run of fiber.
I'm 100% in favor of making ISPs common carriers and making it unlawful for them to track their customers' habits. I've worked for two ISPs in my career. They should be happy with the business of providing internet to customers and compete on delivering better, faster, and more reliable service not on selling their customers' information or eyeballs to the highest bidder.
Second, you'd need corruption to be illegal. Since the people who benefit from it are the ones writing the laws, it's not, at least not in the particular ways they generally do it.
It's a large part of this administration's MO. Kill all regulation in favour of corporate growth. Trump talks about it all the time and he's taken direct action himself to achieve it. There's no reason to believe Pai is running his own scam here.
also read into what the EFF does.
Stay strong and hang in there.
You can also call, email or fax elected representatives (this one works at its best when you follow up e.g. with ACLU and their targeted campaigns) - or if you want, also run for an elected office. Surprisingly easy depending on where you live.
Or you can just talk with your family, friends and neighbors and explain to them that Trump is feeding them untreated sewage while marketing it as deluxe bottled water. Read up on the latest tweets of Donald Trump, check their validity (e.g. Snopes comes in handy) and show those who you talk to the facts. Sometimes it just needs someone from the "outside" to break a Trump fan out of the Facebook fascist filter-bubble.
YMMV depending on platform :)
Sadly, Firefox for iOS is just a wrapper around WebKit, so Firefox extensions do not work there.
Different A/B test group? Or could just be that the site is hot garbage, every time I reload the banner/overlay ad and top bar behave slightly differently, I can see how that could happen but I couldn't get it to do quite what you've seen after like 20 reloads.
Not to get too political but there are two groups: "the people" and "business". Watch every decision the current administration makes. It's helpful for "business" and hurts "the people". This is the opposite of what most people think it should be.
But that doesn't mean that people are thrown under the bus - that's a view without nuance. Governments recognise that business can only work when there is a certain degree of freedom to the people (a "double freedom" as Marx put it), and this is done mostly or even wholly for the purpose of ensuring this constant flow of capital. As such, the nuanced view is that while it is capital versus "the people" (wage labourers), to protect the status of capital, "the people" must be afforded certain freedoms, or things break down.
Just the current administration, or democracies around the world? It's a fact that capital rules economy and by extension our lives. Why do you think it would be any different under Obama, Hillary, Lincoln, Thatcher, Blair, Castro, Kim Jong Un or Abe? The kind of democracy we have is bourgeois democracy - in place to protect the intersts of those owners of private property, thereby to assure functioning also protecting to some extent those interests of the people, to afford them the freedom necessary under capitalism, but no more.
It's not an issue of people v business, it's an issue of capital, which rules every country. It's not even businesses, it's capital itself.
Evil and Evil-lite.
So, "create new jobs" is the new "think of the children" in politics. If you want to get anything done in the current political climate you just have to utter that magical phrase and everything is OK. Based on this, I'm going to view any policy that claims to create jobs with the same sceptical eye as I used with the children fear mongers.