Proposed “Internet Freedom Act” permanently guts net neutrality authority
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
We need some grownups to represent us.
If you spend ~$50/month on home internet access, and $50/month on cell phone access, that's $1200/year for internet connectivity.
How much do you spend on hardware per year? Do you buy a >$1200 laptop per year? How much money does Google make off of your info?
The ISPs are rolling in cash. They have terrible customer service. They typically have no competition in their markets and they refuse to innovate.
Yet, we give ISPs soooo much money. If there was proper competition, would we be spending such ridiculously high fees on the internet access we get?
Politics isn't the sole problem, lobbying in the company interests instead of the customers is the other problem.
There has to be strict federal laws to outlaw lobbying and any type of incentives for all federal employees including the politicians. No gifting, no promises for the future (job), and so on. If such an occasion has occurred, both sides must be punished and the company must be stripped of its ability to do business in the country. The politician must be banned from holding the office and any company that they were involved with for life.
How about we start with removing all free healthcare from the congress, they pay the same as the rest of us and they must go through the healthcare system just like us. If they have a problem, fracking fix it.
I don't believe it to be wrong, I have parroted this fact many times myself. But I just realised that I don't have any evidence of it either.
All these agreements are public. Go down to your local city hall or courthouse and ask for a copy of the franchise agreement.
Point being, part of the evil is Comcast. The other part is your elected local politicians...
It specifically noted it was non-exclusive, but I assumed that was the exception rather than the rule.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7709556
If you have more interest in understanding the issue, there's plenty of good assessments. Everything from the explosion of wireless, to hdtv, to local municipalities, to mergers, and technological limitations are to blame.
That does not mean I am opposed to or deny the value of markets.
As a matter of personal ideology, I'd say: let's build a nationwide public system with a federal/state partnership, and import regulators from Scandinavia to run it. But that's not one of the choices.
I don't want to oversimplify the issue and don't disagree that everyone in politics would prefer if better broadband infrastructure just happened and all they had to do was show up and cut a few ribbons without investing any political capital. But I think you're being a tad disingenuous here. You are too smart and well-informed to buy this argument if I were to make it to you.
At the same time, I inserted the caveat of importing regulators from Scandinavia for a reason. Public infrastructure in the U.S. (outside of NYC/Chicago) mostly sucks and is poorly run. I say this because I've walked the walk: I used to commute on Metro North every day from Westchester to Manhattan, then on SEPTA from Wilmington to Philadelphia, then on Amtrak from Baltimore to DC, then (briefly) on the D.C. Metro. Metro North was fantastic, but the others are worse than Comcast.
The basic problem is that I don't have the choice to vote for Stockholm's fiber system run by Swedes. My only choice is between Verizon (which is actually pretty damn good in Maryland), or the same folks who run the D.C. Metro.
For example, in a lot of areas, the issue was simply local regulations and getting approvals from the local governments. It's hard to build a large metro ring when 1 of the 5 towns you need to go through won't approve the easement expansions necessary.
Or, as another example, should you continue to plow ahead with your fiber to the curb strategy when market forecasts are showing internet connected phone usage growing by multiple thousands of percent within the next 10 years?
No, it's a popular uban legend based on a misunderstanding of agreements between telecoms and the government. A telecom, IIRC Verizon, promised to upgrade their network to 45mbps access across their footprint.
People are now interpreting that to mean they promised to build build a FTTH residential network (capable of 45mbps) to each home for prices similar to what you pay for DSL or cable internet.
But that is a total misread.
Really, Verizon was promising to upgrade their Trunk lines (T-Carrier) from T1 to T3. A T3 line is 44.736 Mbit/s. And they weren't promising to deliver a trunk line to each house for 60 bucks a month. They were expecting to charge thousands a month. This was basically a service for businesses and datacenters. Not for residential use.
And they actually did do that upgrade.
I signed up with my internet provider on the assumption that all traffic would be treated equally, and I will be very upset if I notice degradation in service because I'm not using my connection in a preferred way.
I will keep saying it until people believe me: you can't separate out "politics". Overwhelmingly, whether people think something is "politics" (or "political" or "politicized") is reliably predicted solely by whether it affects them or people they identify with, rather than any kind of Platonically-ideal classification of topics.
I believe the following must be true for every ISP on the planet. Hardware crashes and/or dies - power surges, thunderstorms, vandalism, firmware bugs, old age, human errors - all sorts of stuff happen almost daily. It also has to be updated to match with ever-growing bandwidth and latency requirements. The same goes about the software parts as well, although when designed right and working solid it normally doesn't need updates - except for new features - for quite a while. Either way, all that stuff normally requires a reasonably big number of engineers and technicians, always busy either fixing things or building new stuff without introducing any actual innovation (just connecting new customers).
I'm not justifying $50/mo tag (honestly, I have no idea how overpriced it is, although I guess with a proper competition it would be significantly less), just saying that maintaining the real-world (=a world where all sort of stuff that shouldn't be happens on a regular basis) network must cost significant amount.
Alphabet's net income in 2016 was $19.5 billion, as much as Comcast and Verizon put together. Alphabet's return on invested capital and operating margins were significantly higher than either. There are various reasons to regulate ISPs, but "they make too much money" isn't a particularly good one: http://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corp... (telecom ROIC is among the lowest of any industry).
> If there was proper competition, would we be spending such ridiculously high fees on the internet access we get?
Is Google in a market with "proper competition?"
My point is that we pay ISPs as much as we pay for the rest of the computing infrastructure, that they are a major player, with tons of money and high profits, and terrible service. That they aren't acting like the big boys, even though they have the cash to.
ISPs are currently entrenched without competition. The current FCC fudges stats to wrongly state that there is competition in the ISP space, whereas in reality almost nobody has more than one broadband option.
An enormous difference, and one of which you are definitely aware, is the existence of legal monopolies for many network infrastructure providers, as well as lobbying of state governments to limit or prevent the building of publicly-owned network infrastructure in many jurisdictions.
I'm not locked in to using Google in any way other than by consumer preference. I use Bing as well but frankly I find it an inferior product.
Common myth. - Comcast made merely $2B in profits last year.[verified] - ATT made around $5B from wireline data last year. [unverified]
A lot of people think these are monopolies with the help of government without realising that a lot of companies including Google tried to bring disruption and have failed. Part of the reason why not many people are wasting their capital on wireline is because it is unlikely to give better results.
ISPs have terrible customer service because most of their efforts are going into keeping those wires and fibres intact. I would rather have a good working internet service and a bad call center rep than opposite.
Not to mention when you don't allow companies like Comcast etc. to bring cheaper labor from India, they will be forced to spend more hiring American college grads and spend more cash on their training etc. We have to pay for it in the bill.
I've never seen billions of dollars in profits dismissed so casually.
>ISPs have terrible customer service because most of their efforts are going into keeping those wires and fibres intact.
ISP's in other countries, even ones of similar scale to the US, don't have to chose between quality customer service and quality internet service. To call your argument facile would be overly generous.
Comcast has around 25 million customers [0], so that's around $65/year/customer. So if you cut that profit to $0, you can return $5/month on combined TV and internet to each customer. When people say "cable and internet are so expensive," they don't generally mean "if I got a $5 price cut I would be happy."
[0]: http://expandedramblings.com/index.php/comcast-statistics/
But that wasn't even my main point. My point is that Comcast is more interested in providing a return to their shareholders than they in providing effective and satisfying customer service.
What makes you think that? A huge chunk of an ISPs' operating expenses go to paying people to move dirt around, and the metal and plastic they put in the dirt. How do you expect to disrupt that?
The math is for you to see.
> It's also because they are really bad at providing it.
And how many ISP companies do you have experience running ?
> My point is that Comcast is more interested in providing a return to their shareholders than they in providing effective and satisfying customer service.
What is wrong with it ? Has worked well for Google.
It's not math.
>And how many ISP companies do you have experience running ?
Indirectly, 2. I worked for both my father's and my uncle's ISP's, both of which they owned and operated.
>What is wrong with it ? Has worked well for Google.
Alright, fair, you got me there.
Which are those countries ? India, China?
Part of the problem may be that those most hurt don't even exist, yet. Depending on how blatantly ISPs would exploit their position as gatekeeper of the last mile, it could doom any startup. Oh, your two-person team wants to run a ride-sharing service? Start by negotiating access fees with every ISP, in every market...
I guess the best hope is that former startups act somewhat altruistically: Apple, Google, Facebook, or Netflix may have the clout (cloud?) to stop this. Maybe thousands of calls and emails help, but it appears that Republicans consider this their rumspringe, and are probably emboldened by polls showing the ideological divide is so deep, policy is no longer relevant for public opinion.
Their ideology says that government regulation is bad and free markets are good, with essentially no wiggle room for nuance. This implies that ISPs are being hobbled by government regulations, and that freeing them to do as they please will benefit us all.
It doesn't matter whether or not it's true, it's what they believe, and they're approaching it from a perspective that's impervious to facts.
https://act.eff.org/action/tell-congress-don-t-surrender-the...
I'm still a little bit jealous about what the city of Stockholm did. They started to built a dark fiber network, which ISPs can use to get to their customers. The result is, more competition and lower prices. Essentially net neutrality on layer 1.
They are some of the biggest companies in the world and they just seem to be rolling over at this. What gives?
They may have added costs, but to them, that may be worth it if it artificially filters out possible future competition.
More accurate headline: "GOP’s “Internet Freedom Act” preserves 2015-era FCC Internet regulation status quo"
Another headline: "GOP’s “Internet Freedom Act” temporarily prevents FCC from enacting 3-2 partisan Internet regulations, unless a future Congress changes things"
Yet another headline: "GOP’s “Internet Freedom Act” shifts authority for Internet regulation from unelected bureaucrats, who may not even have the power to regulate here, to elected officials in Congress, who do"
Keep in mind that "Net neutrality" has become a partisan issue. The current 2015 rules were passed by a 3-2 party line vote when the Democrats controlled the FCC. (They're currently being litigated, with U.S. Supreme Court review likely.)
Now that the Republicans control the FCC, the 2015 rules are probably going to be repealed by a 3-2 party line vote. Even if Congress does nothing.
Whatever you think of the reasoning behind "Net neutrality" regulations, it makes little sense for hundreds of pages of regulations to be enacted when the Ds win and repealed when the Rs win. It means regulations applying to a multi-billion dollar industry bounce back and forth every 4 or 8 years. It makes more sense for Congress to come up with a lasting solution that isn't subject to regulatory bounce-back, and this is what the bill being described in the article seems to do.
It makes more sense for Congress to come up with a lasting solution that isn't subject to regulatory bounce-back, and this is what the bill being described in the article seems to do.
From the article:
But from what we know about Lee's bill so far, it appears the proposal wouldn't impose any type of net neutrality rules to replace the current ones.
Wherein lies the so-called "lasting solution"?
What're the reasons / justifications for why the current laws and rules are wrong or insufficient?
I think big money realized fairly late in the game that the Internet's decentralized structure makes it difficult to perform rent-seeking, so any legislation that tends to centralize the Internet is viewed as a pro by these people.
In other words, it's the same effect you see in every other field -- special interest lobbyists for large corporations want to rewrite the rules to suit them, at the expense of ordinary people's privacy and a democratic Internet
Of course, today there is enough excessive bandwidth that voice traffic doesn't need to be prioritized. But what about an application where an expert doctor is controlling a robotic surgical instrument from cross country? Would a special service class for those packets be allowed under net neutrality laws?
But the real reason, is that as soon as there is additional bandwidth available, technology finds a way to consume all of it and then some. So the ISPs want to be able to de-prioritize some heavy bandwidth users (such as bittorrent), and/or give higher priority to traffic with paying users like Netflix (for a toll fee, of course), or their own video services.
Tmobile is certainly violating net neutrality with it's binge on and free music streaming features. But it's generally good for the consumer.
All the arguments for net nuetrality sounds like slippery slope fallacies to me. "They'll block everything except their own AOL like service!" No, they very probably won't.
I'd rather have a wait and see approach. If the ISPs become abuse, then we should apply net neutrality.
But I see no reason why we shouldn't then apply "OS neutrality" to apple and google. Or search neutrality to google and bing. Or social networking neutrality to facebook and snap.
Facebook and google actually do the sort of stuff people are upset that ISPs might do.
How to regulate operating systems, search engines, or social networks, if at all, are entirely separate questions. Most American households have only one option for high-speed Internet service; nobody has to move to a different city to use a different search engine.
The Voices app will let you call your reps directly,
That's not even adressing the issue that ISPs have so much data they could probably run their own blackmail ops and similar dirty tricks if donations weren't enough.
The less federal regulation over ISPs the better.
What is your perspective as a free-market advocate in this scenario?
E.g. innovation like this and other things we can't even imagine yet: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/nov/17/elon-musk...
How do you feel about the effect killing net neutrality would have on small businesses that can't afford the fast lanes that their larger competitors would use?
Regarding sustainable energy - a lot of government funding is already going to that in the form of research grants awarded to people in academia looking at those things. We can increase funding, but that's already happening. The surest way to kill those chances would be, for example, create a carbon tax which has the effects of getting government dependent on revenue coming from fossil fuel emissions, and introduces incentives to ensure that revenue source continues.
Regarding your last question - I don't know. Haven't done the research. But I have read enough of classical economics to know that it's probably not a big deal - or if it is an issue that it will be short-lived. If the consumer is sufficiently fucked then it is the corporation who will have shot themselves in the foot. Law of supply and demand in action
Rule by populism -- forget meritocracy or any notion of innovation.
Trump and his ilk don't have enough. They need more.
In the long run, the only barrier to competition is regulatory capture, which is much harder to overcome than short-term problems like there not being enough competition. Technical challenges are a lot easier to solve than regulatory challenges, which 100% of the time increase the barrier to entry by, among other things, raising the cost of compliance (have to pay more lawyers, accountants, etc to make any moves in the market).
Not true. There's the fact that for many places, they just can't support multiple choices for things like that. There's the equipment, which is extremely expensive anyways. There's running lines.
And, quite frankly, when you say that regulations should be removed, you're basically saying that those in less profitable markets, where there likely wouldn't be much competition even without regulation, don't deserve to have net neutrality.
Do you also feel that I should pay extra for the electricity used by my Air Conditioning unit or computer than I do for lights?
In fact, scratch that, I won't even have internet access, because the ISP datamines me. Now I'm out of work and homeless.
No bank accounts either. The only stuff near me are instances of corporate banks that datamine my spending habits all to hell. Same for credit cards.
When you figure out how to do this "just don't do business with companies you don't like" thing in a way that doesn't turn me into a homeless pariah, please let me know.
"Internet freedom Act" - Empowering Telecom Companies Act
"SOPA" - Criminalize Ordinary Internet Behavior Act
"Patriot Act" - Remove Guaranteed Rights In Favor Of Empowering Central Authority Act
"Affordable Care Act" - Essentially Romneycare
He makes some really good points and generally comes across as well-informed and well-intentioned. In this climate of crazy media hype it's good to keep an open mind and listen to the actual people working on policy.
>Net neutrality, if it means a free and open internet, is something that everybody agrees upon,
Meanwhile, in the Ars article, we have a sponsoring Senator who hates Obamacare saying:
>In the announcement, Cruz repeated his charge that net neutrality is "Obamacare for the Internet."
So not sure what you're trying to do other than misinform us.
Up until the mid 80s, telcos would only allow devices that they had approved to be connected to their networks. That's why you had acoustic coupler modems until then. The device that made an actual, electrical connection to the phone company's network had to be one of their approved phones. They maxed out at 1200 baud (most of the time much lower ~100baud).
Then with the breakup of the bells, and subsequent regulation forcing them to open their networks and allow unapproved devices as long as they didn't have a demonstrated adverse effect on the network.
So yeah, the FCC wasn't regulating AOL in the 90s, they were regulating the last mile: the Bells, GTE, etc. That's where the value in government regulation is, and that's where we want it now as well.
My ideal situation, IMHO, would be nationalized last mile, with a host of choices of companies handling the peering from the local office to the internet. You then pay the peering company, and they pay rent to the gov for the last mile. By reducing the barrier to entry (by making it so that any company can easily attach to last mile fiber) you increase competition. That's unlikely to in the current political climate however (to say the least).
There were three basic reasons for the super-fast growth of internet in the 90s, which I remember quite well as I was making a good living selling computers and networking services.
1. It got way easier to use. When I first got onto the internet it was (almost) all text-based and unix-like, and conceptually difficult for many people to get to grips with, until someone invented a thing called a 'web browser' that regular people could figure out more easily.
2. No taxes on internet business, which had nothing to do with net neutrality but led to a stampede of people looking to make a quick buck and keep more of it than they would in other lines of business.
3. there was huge market potential because lots of people in developed countries had enough disposable income to own a computer, and modems were relatively affordable. Lots of people were doing peer-to-peer networking or running bulletin boards. If you wanted to start an internet company int eh 1990s all you needed was enough capital to rent a T1 line and a buy a or lease some network switching equipment (which was also becoming suddenly affordable with the growth of ethernet), and people would use your service because there weren't that many services out there.
I wrote a book for consumers on how to use the exciting new world of the internet back in 1995. Sadly it's long out of print but you can buy my copy for a mere $1000 and educate yourself on what things were actually like >20 years ago instead of your ideological imaginings.
He talks about the "light touch" framework of the Bill Clinton era, which saw telecos profit immensely and never feed any money back into their system. I've know Comcast line who, back in the early 2000s, would tell me they'd take parts to their shop where people would resolder and reconstruct equipment that no one in the world manufactured anymore instead of just upgrading the lines.
Comcast sued the Electric Power Board in TN a few years later to keep them from offering Fibre to the home; a service that provided amazing speed at about the exact same cost.
He brings up AOL CDs versus Gigabit fibre, not talking about all the companies that are keeping that from happening.
There is still a bunch of dark fibre that hasn't been used. Telecos are still charging insane amounts for mobile bandwidth that's nowhere near saturated.
None of this stuff even touches network neutrality, which is simply saying "You pay for x quality of service and you get x quality of service, to everyone. We don't add a faster pipe just for Google. We don't throttle Netflix and give priority to YouTube. We won't throttle VoIP so you buy our VoIP service instead. Equal access, to the best of ability and equipment."
Even if he says Title II isn't the right framework, why gut it until it's replaced. If you say "we'll get rid of it and replace it," more likely than not they'll just git rid of it and telecos will do the same bullshit they've always done and run with it.
I think he's in the pocket of big teleco and is weaselling around giving them more power.
Even in the 1990s it was obvious that the copper network was obsolete and any additional money put into it would be a wasted investment.
> Comcast sued the Electric Power Board in TN a few years later to keep them from offering Fibre to the home
Chairman Pai specifically speaks about FCC initiatives to increase competition including opening up access to utility poles. It's a difficult issue because many utility poles/corridors are locally or municipally owned and the FCC has no jurisdiction there.
> Even if he says Title II isn't the right framework, why gut it until it's replaced.
The point is that it doesn't need to be replaced. It's a heavy-handed and unnecessary imposition of federal regulation on a market that needs to be as free and open as possible due to the speed of innovation in the tech space.
I'd be all for the "free and open" solution if we take it to its logical conclusion - that means franchise agreements, single-provider-multi-dwelling building agreements, and so on all become null and void at the same time.
This is nonsense. Because of the capital investment involved there are few "startups" in the ISP space. If there's technological innovation happening it's not filtering down to the consumer in the form of lower prices.
Here in Canada the effective price of LTE access per GB has continuously gone up in the face of "innovation" on how to structure billing for optimal revenue generation. Meanwhile Canadian ISPs fight any regulation that would help foreign entrants into the space with tooth and nail.
I'm generally amenable to the argument that robust competition is the best solution and that we should be aiming to reduce those barriers but... unbundling was very unpopular with the ISPs and didn't really work and is dead, and as you said the big last-mile problems are local.
Knowing that the FCC isn't actually successfully creating the robust competitive local broadband markets they say they'd prefer, doesn't it make sense for them to do what they _are_ able to do and keep the existing (already "light touch") regulations?
He says contradictory things. He says he supports an idea but doesn't support the act of enforcing it. His apparent ideology is in direct conflict with his actions. He either fundamentally misunderstands the situation, is majorly corrupt, or is simply malicious (which I doubt).
I support the idea of being faithful in your marriage, but I'm 100% opposed to the federal government enforcing this. How is that contradictory?
The problem is, there isn't another place for the regulation to happen. The FTC simply does not have the expertise or resources and the internet needs broad conforming rules to perform well, so a state-by-state solution would prove disastrous.
When you give a private entity the right to trample on individual rights, the individual's rights are weakened.
Why would they invest in improvements when they have no competition?
It's a total spin job.
But, despite all this searching, I have yet to find a meaningful argument in opposition. They are either vague or filled with misassumptions. I have yet to find someone (with a correct understanding of the concept) to argue that it actually helps consumers. Their argument always stems from the fear of over-regulation or a historical lack of net neutrality regulation that still allowed the internet to flourish (which is a nonsensical argument). They never challenge the technical rules themselves.
This interview (along with almost anything else coming from Pai) falls under this meaningless argument in opposition.
Oh goodie, I can't wait to pay extra for "professional-grade internet" because I want to access things like GitHub, and not just Facebook.
I'm not up for listening to a 50 minute interview with the guy, but if that quote is representative, he doesn't sound remotely well-intentioned.