Net neutrality is in jeopardy again

without it they can just block/charge extra for things they cant read. making anonymity and privacy harder. but again, they wont have any new rigths that they don't have today.

The way I understand it is that ISPs can sell anonymized data from groups of users. Like: people who visit news.ycombinator.com generally also visit stackoverflow. I also don't know how an ISP would get your actual internet history if the website uses HTTPS.

Yes, I am a strong supporter of NN and I was appaled when the EU diluted it, but this reply is directed at your 'ISPs who are allowed to sell users' browsing history' part.

How is that by necessity a bad thing? People aren't anonymous in every day life and their internet anonymity is mostly an illusion anyway. Big brother can almost always find out who did what if they want to.

" These "rollbacks" of regulations make it orders of magnitude easier for any entity in a corporation or organization to track down people who attempt to expose their illegal actions / skirting of laws"

It also makes it orders of magnitudes easier for anyone to find out about a coorportions illegal actions / skirting of laws.

I agree with most of your statements. But in the long run there really are a lot of benefits to a non-anonymous internet that can't be denied (just as there are a lot of problems as well). For instance, full access to health and medical data for research purposes would be a huge benefit for mankind and the sick people themselves just as that same access would necessitate a major rehaul of the ligislation concerning insurance companies.

I don't see how removing anonymity is inherently by its very nature a bad thing. It seems likely it would be like everything else, you'd need to legislate the legality of certain things given that all activity is non-anonymous, etc.

In fact, since the anti-privacy law was put into law, removing Title II status from ISPs would allow the FTC to regulate privacy again.

Does it currently exist?

Do something significantly illegal enough online most anywhere and you will be caught. Other than very specialized internet usages that are outside the purview of the common individual, the only question currently is if the government can justify going after you, not if they can go after you. Right now if you point out corruption against a local government they likely won't go after you due to lack of resources, not technical limitations. Point out major corruption at a high enough government scale and you will be caught (especially given that one will have to go outside of legal channels to do so).

Aside from that, the danger of the internet doesn't seem to be free speech, but free thought. The bar is much higher and deeper. Droves are being manipulated, nudged and misled. That's happening, nearly frictionless, now. Even Orwell would blush thinking, "My, I really underestimated what was going to happen."

Mind you a lack of NN isn't going to help. But with NN or without NN the root issue(s) aren't NN.

You can, using just your skills and barely any money, compete with google and facebook this afternoon! (google and amazon will even give you a month to try for free) Your chances at winning are pretty low, but eventually someone will do it.

2) I think will only continue to be true for a short period of time. With products like Netflix and amazon, and with traditional television channels like HBO and ESPN starting to charge for streaming online, I think consumer attitude will shift as they realize that it's worth paying for content on the internet.

3) I'm skeptical is actually true and I'm skeptical that it's bad if true.

4) for most internet products the barrier of entry is smaller. You're only looking at one company. Compare to a company like Boeing, where it would take hundereds of millions to compete.

By giving them the power to selectively control what they're sending down the pipe, the monopoly problem will grow far far worse.

Net neutrality is not the cause of the problems you listed, and removing it won't solve any of them.

Many years ago your list wouldn't have included facebook, it would have included myspace. If FB was required to make a deal with every ISP in the US, do you think they would have been able to grow? Ditto for Google and Amazon.

> 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free.

I don't see how this is the fault of net neutrality. In fact, it's completely unrelated. We can have net neutrality and pay for content, many people do, viz Hulu, Netflix, iTunes Store, &c.

> 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country.

I have no idea what you mean or how this is related.

> 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million).

It's easier to do that than it is to make a deal with every ISP in the US. I really have no idea how this isn't doublethink.

Also, net neutrality is about consumers not being monitored by ISPs.

As for the massive monopolies, that was born of US businesses. US tech monopolies are not original. Monopolies are a traditional form of how the US does its business. Just because the founders and their employees where shorts and shirts instead of suits, it was sold as "radical and new" when it was in fact the same old game.

Now that these major monopolies have established a significant foothold, they find it in their interest to remove net-neutrality to prevent anything disruptive from occurring to their bottom-line.

Also in what world does giving ISPs complete control of which services can even function on the internet help the "little guy"? You'll just replace the relatively healthy tech market with a 0 innovation series of walled gardens managed by each megacorp ISP-MediaCompany union.

In fact, the massive monopolies can already pay for better internet speed for their services by paying for better (physical) access to the ISPs network.

2) I'm not sure what causality you are implying here. Is it that if websites were forced to pay off ISPs they would have no choice but to charge users for content, and users would in turn get used to it?

3) Without net neutrality there is room for exactly one app - the ISP provided app, since everything else is blocked. Currently there are people in my country (which is dominated by WhatsApp) that are using Telegram, Signal and Line, so it seems like there is some competition to the giants (and many people abandoned WhatsApp when it was bought by Facebook). You can imagine what would happen if Facebook was allowed to pay off local ISPs to block everything else (and since "everyone uses WhatsApp anyway" you can bet they'll all agree to it).

4) As shown above, net neutrality reduces the barrier of entering into the market because without it there is the additional barrier of paying off the ISPs to allow access to your service.

Therefore, I suggest that the best course of action we have right now to alleviate these problems is to strengthen net neutrality :)

> 1. Massive monopolies which essentially control 95% of all tech (google, facebook, amazon, microsoft, apple, etc)

Facebook and Microsoft are able to leverage network effects. A social network were your friends aren't is not very good independent of the features, similar with Microsoft and the available software. I dont't think, that there is an effect from net neutrality at play here.

> 2. An internet where every consumer assumes everything should be free.

This is mostly about the absence of a good micro-payment system, plus the internet forces in many relevant areas everybody to compete with free. (The free newspaper is just a click away, same with youtube etc.)

> 3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country.

Is that the case? In cases were you can leverage scale effects certainly, Google has the largest database of websites and as a result the best search engine. Similar for facebook. However, is the relevant metric youtube or is the relevant metric number of people who can live from youtube. Same with Amazon market place and ebay. (Not really arguing either way, I am not really sure what the answer is.)

> 4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million).

Compare that to the barriers of entry for a shipyard or hardware manufacturing.

> I think there's still a lot of potential to open up new markets with different policies that would make the internet a much better place for both consumers and entrepreneurs - especially the small guys. I'm just not 100% sure maintaining net-neutrality is the best way to help the little guy and bolster innovation. Anyone have any ideas how we could alleviate some of the above mentioned problems?

Yes, however no net neutrality should benefit the large guys. I can put a video on my server, but I can certainly not negotiate with all the ISPs that they should deliver my video. So in the absence of net neutrality youtube has an additional lever to compete against me. I don't really see any scenario where absence of net neutrality benefits the upstart competition instead of the incumbent.

However, the platforms we see today look in many ways more similar to either infrastructure or states than to competition, so an rather interesting question is, how does one ensure that they are not evil. (To borrow an old Google slogan.)

By your definition, they're not monopolies, they're just big companies, they're all competing with each other and the occasional new-comer.

Net neutrality helps everyone, especially the smaller companies, by making sure there is free and equal access to customers and other companies without being charged, profiled or otherwise blocked based on who you are or how much you pay.

* The cost to enter the market is effectively nothing.

* The opportunity cost to switch new services is, again, nothing (change the URL).

* The opportunity cost to switch established services is not nothing (network effects, all friends are on Facebook, etc).

* The cost to acquire network effects is not nothing.

The later effects have nothing to do with the Internet. In any economy where window shopping options is free and competing is free, then whoever owns the collective opinion on your product domain is going to get a winner take all situation. Capitalism in general is like this - the more of a market you control, the more easily you can displace the competition through your own influence. That is why you get many natural monopolies.

Consumers expect web based content to be free because the marginal costs of their usage is effectively nothing (the per-user costs of running a server with a billion users requires many zeroes). Websites, and digital information in general, are non-scarce resources. Once made, making copies costs nothing. That is a much bigger rabbit hole though, and is generalized into broader problems of cognitive dissonance in people trying to put scarcity into non-scarce resources.

The only way to make the Internet - or more specifically, tcp/ip and http - more small guy friendly is to promote browsers to make content discovery easier at the browser level. Otherwise people will go to the silos they are familiar with / the ones they are told about.

Google et al fight for net neutrality because getting rid of it only makes ISPs richer at the cost of consumers and website hosts. The only possible state of being without net neutrality is paid bribes for service - Comcast will demand huge sums of money from Google et al or will throttle their services so their customers stop using them and use their own in-home products instead. And given the opportunity ISPs won't be some charity giving small business free rides - they will slow down or cripple the Internet for everyone except those who pay. The customers Google wants are a captive audience of major ISPs - without competition in the ISP market, and without net neutrality, every website operator needs to prostate themselves to the demands of ISPs to have their websites reach their audience, and the customers have no say in that relationship because they don't have a choice in ISP.

The first makes it possible for anyone to be almost perfect in finding and using the best service in any field. The second makes it so that more users makes a service better.

I'd argue that this has led to overall better services, though at the cost of centralized powers.

If ISPs could charge web sites for fast lane treatment and such, Google, Netflix etc. would have the largest bills to pay.

They'll argue it as a moral point to drum up grassroots support, but in reality its just a business item for them. If the roles were reversed they'd push for the policy that let them charge other companies more.

>3. An internet where there's only enough room for a handfull of players in each market globally i.e. if you have a "project-management app" there will not be a successfull one for each country much less hundreds for each country.

I'm not sure either of these have anything to do with any particular policies, rather than just the nature of all maturing industries. Consolidation is always the tendency as an industry matures. Some policies try to slow or mitigate it, for example as Federal restrictions on radio station ownership did until the Telecom Act of 1996 ended that [1]. But the natural endstate of any complex system is increasing concentration of critical resources of the system into fewer hands.

4. Huge barriers of entry for any new player into many of the markets (no one can even begin competing with google search for less than 20 million).

What exactly are the barriers to entry for search? Unlike social networks where reconstructing a social graph comparable to Facebook's is a major barrier to entry, what's to keep consumer eyeballs from just using another search engine as their default? Not much network effect there, seems habit and laziness are the only real barriers, but as far as barriers go those are the easiest for a competitor to break through. For example, I use DuckDuckGo for mine, and it's fine in all but a few edge cases.

[1]:https://futureofmusic.org/sites/default/files/FMCradiostudy0...

Post hoc, ergo propter hoc fallacy.

Just because NN was in place, does not give hardly any information how the events you describe would have played out.

The monopolies you mentioned have very little to do with NN. Someone already gave example how Facebook replaced MySpace, similarly Google, replaced Yahoo, AltaVista etc, I suppose Amazon did not replace anything, but started e-commerce (and currently creating other markets, like cloud computing), but it is getting higher and higher competition.

Apple and Microsoft existed before Internet and are just using their old position to leverage their existence, but the fact they face competition.

> EDIT: another question :) If net-neutrality has absolutely nothing to do with the tech monopolies maintaining their power position then why do they all support it? [https://internetassociation.org/]

Simple, because it expands powers of existing monopolies making them relevant. Perfect example is Netflix. They providing service to stream movies. They pay also pay large amounts of money for Internet access and ability to send content to their users. On the other side users similarly are paying for Internet access to be able to receive the content.

You would think it's double paying (and it kind of is), but it's normal, why users should subsidize Netflix costs or why Netflix should pay for users' access (since they are not only using Netflix) they just pay for their access to the network.

But, regional ISPs (in this case Comcast) started having "problems" where packets from Netflix were dropped, because "Netflix was sending too much data to them", ignoring the fact that that data Netflix was sending was requested by ISP's users who were already paying ISP to do one thing and do it well (i.e. deliver data they requested).

Things were kind of bad for the users (and users couldn't also switch their provider because at most they only had just another option which was equally as bad), until Netflix reached deal with Comcast where they pay Comcast to deliver the content (something that Comcast users are already paying for).

Net neutrality is trying to make sure this kind of manipulation is not allowed.

The thing with Netflix already happened but could easily be translated to other companies. For example (I'm borrowing it from here [1], I think you should watch it it explains the core issue very well IMO) Microsoft could pay so Bing has always fast access at cost of Google. Don't you want as a user to not have any company dictate you what you can access or not? Similarly those Internet companies also don't want to pay extra on top of what they already are paying. That's their interest. The only companies who would benefit from lack of NN are handful companies that deliver Internet to end users (especially companies like Comcast, TimeWarner/Spectrum, AT&T, Verizon etc) and lack of NN would give them huge power to bully anyone else.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak

Where can I find this proceeding to lodge a comment?

Does anyone else have this issue?

https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/filings/express

you can also submit via API: https://www.fcc.gov/ecfs/public-api-docs.html

I find it hilarious that so many people have forgotten why there is such good access to internet in this country in the first place. The US government made a deal with the devil (the telecoms) to run copper to every back assward town and county across the heartland. This has proved to be an awful deal, however, there would be no internet outside of the metro areas if not for the big scary government.

He was just some high school kid with little cash when he started the business, and eventually got acquired by one of the 100's (1000's?) of successful local ISPs that replaced the big walled gardens, and gave average people access to TCP/IP.

This was all with "european style top down regulation" of the telcos (which was actually invented and practiced in the US until lobbyists killed it).

Famous last words. Free market caters to existing major players. Even the notoriously free financial markets are heavily regulated to prevent bigger players squeezing out smaller players. The idea that free market unregulated capitalism is the answer to everything has been shown as wrong many times over.

And massive government subsidies. In the early 90's, I lived in a region that basically could not get Internet. It was a dark time for me coming from a more urban area. A few years later every small community has been hooked up with broadband -- almost entirely due to government regulation and money.

I've said for a while that we could rely on a free market solution to the broadband market with one very large change from the way that things are done now. Last mile infrastructure should be publicly owned and customers should be allowed to choose any provider. Once that's the case, then you can have a truly competitive market that's more likely to give consumers choice. Short of that, heavy regulation is better than allowing monopoly/duopoly players to behave in whatever way they want.

Yes, Verizon v FCC [1] ruled that Title II classification is required for any sort of NN regulation.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verizon_Communications_Inc._v....

There's nothing specifically immoral about selling safe bottled water. But as soon as you induce people to buy it, in this case by degrading the tap water, you're doing something wrong.

Much like water companies, many areas either have no choice in ISP or can only choose between the big three who have very similar policies. Choice is in effect an illusion.

I don't think so. Water is a resource that can be stored. Bandwidth is a perishable good. If it's not used, you can't store the excess for use later. Billing based on peak usage or peak available bandwidth maps properly to provider costs, but billing based on usage doesn't.

The only reality-based and fair network management that residential ISPs can employ is rate-limiting during peak time. The stereotypical customer who only uses their connection to stream Netflix/YouTube during prime time is actually more costly than a heavy P2P user who transfers TBs of data in the off-hours overnight and in the early morning.

Bits on the wire are not a scarce resource.

If the government brings suit, and loses, will they/you continue to point to anti trust law?

"The real problem is X" is fine and good if working on X is anywhere in sight. Yes, X may be the real problem, but generations can be born, grow old, and die while you're waiting for X to be solved.

The FCC only has 3 people on it right now (2 R, 1 D), with 2 vacant seats.

Does anyone know of an example or a regulation against it?

I'm not sure what you consider innovative, but my local comcast connection has grown by about 10x in bandwidth over the last 15 years.

I know in china there are a handful of telecom companies with absolutely terrible peering between each other, so that companies have to buy CDN services which have points of presence in all the carriers. But that may or may not be an effect of their lack of net neutrality policy, since there's so much else going on there.

> * Average load times for the 1000 most popular webpages will decrease.

Absolutely possible if companies in the top 1000 pay for priority over other companies in the top 1000. Also possible if an ISP decides to make their own version of a top 1000 site, and throttles its competitors.

> * There will be fewer internet startups over the next 5 years than the previous.

When ISPs create an artificial barrier to entry such as paid prioritization, costs to start a business and become profitable will increase, which will absolutely reduce the amount of new startups.

Just because you are in favor of preventing route prioritization doesnt mean youre in favor of the bizarre absolute opposite of government "controlling content".

nobody (I know of) is advocating government control of content. That is a different discussion entirely from net neutrality.

If we dont depend on government for regulation we lose everything because no other system can arise within the confines of what we have.

Eliminating regulation will in no way eliminate local monopolies, only the opposite.

What alternatives to government regulation do you see in regards to data selling and paid preferential QoS? Other than "voting with your wallet" (which is largely impossible since most markets only have 1-2 ISPs) what can the average consumer do to prevent this? How will they even gain visibility? Do you know what information your ISP has sold about you over the last few years? It's definitely more than you think.

That's like suggesting that we don't need laws against fraud in functional healthy markets. Removing monopolies would not fix the privacy issue either.

However, it would probably eliminate the need for net neutrality. In the meantime, we need it.

And we need to keep privacy laws in place until such time that technology makes it impossible for ISPs to discover any details about what you are doing. Don't hold your breath.

Yes, I think monopoly-breaking and increased competition between ISPs is vital. But right now, we don't have that. In fact, we have generally have state/local governments protecting monopolies - there's no chance at a free market when competition is criminalized.

So at the moment, the question is "given these unbreakable monopolies, do we want them behaving well or poorly?" And that doesn't seem hard to answer.

Net neutrality is about each ISP, carrier etc treating each packet flowing through the network equally and not discriminating between its origin or destination.

If net neutrality is gone, ISPs and back bone operators can start asking for money for packets routed though their network based on who the packet is going to. You want to watch Youtube? Well, your ISP thinks its unfair that you are using the internet connection you paid for already to do that, they would rather you watch their own service. So, they throttle your connection to youtube, and ask money from both you and Google, to make it fast again.

The danger here is that Internet will be turned exactly what cable TV is now.

And if you do want physical world analogy, this is a better one: Imagine that starting next Monday the Yellow Cab Company begins charging all business to which a fare is delivered, since it is unreasonable for businesses to receive the benefit of customers and employees arriving at their sites in a safe and timely manner and for them to pay nothing. After all Yellow Cab Company spends time, gas, and quite frankly, expects them to pay their fair share of the fare. They may also begin billing all businesses passed on the way to a destination, as these business receive "free marketing".

If presumably technical people visiting this site have such a hard problem with net neutrality, I'd say the battle to keep internet free is lost.

Unfortunately, if that ever hapoens it won't be any time soon. ISP's just throw lawyers at new entrants to the market who can, through legal maneuvering, delay entrance by years and fighting them will cost a fortune. There were some successes by municipalities (who voted foe their own city owned isp) but many many more losses

So I'm on Comcast. Reluctantly. Now what if Comcast decided to charge more for access to HN?

Where's your free market god now?

To counter this, government at all levels have provided tax subsidies or outright payment to ISPs to expand into their localities. And regularly, the ISPs simply take the money and do nothing, relying on the fact that they are large enough that they can fight it out in court.

The end result is a nation of monopoly coverage.

Physical residential networks are, like all other civil infrastructure, natural monopolies. They don't work in a "free market" and never have. The insistence on the part of glibertarians that somehow this "regulation-free" mode will work for data when it hasn't for literally a century and a half of experience with other utilities is... frustrating.

If I had literally any other choice, I would never give Comcast another dime. Given the prohibitive cost of last mile infrastructure, I can't see how I'll ever have another option in a deregulated market.

Do you really think even if you had half a dozen good providers, they wouldn't play ball and snatch up premium data deals?

Who do you think is lobbying for this change in policy to begin with? All of our ISPs, uniting against a common enemy: the savvy consumer.

When you hear and agree with things like "but free market competition will save us!" you are buying directly into their propaganda campaign.

Where I lived before this, I had one ISP choice. And the local government had given them a legal monopoly, so the free market was incapable of offering me an alternative.

Even if the market arguments are sound in theory, net neutrality is happening in the world we actually have. That's a world where ISP competition is somewhere between "scarce" and "illegal".

Net Neutrality means you are the customer of your ISP, rather than the content provider.

This makes it a practical concern in addition to bad taste.

I. e. what happens when you want to name an airline "Virgin", or a morning-after pill "Plan B" and aren't Richard Branson.

Facebook -- though big! -- is one site on the internet and if you feel like you're not receiving news about things that are important to you there, you hop onto another site. If enough people stop using Facebook, Facebook will be compelled to make changes.

Breaking net neutrality laws makes it harder for you to find alternatives. Imagine you're stuck with whatever news sources your ISP picks for you. "Huffington Post, Reddit, and Twitter have decided not to pay us, so we no longer offer our users access to those sites."

If you could only access the internet through Facebook, you would have a point.

You don't.

> Furthermore, the FCC has historically engaged in content regulation. Anyone wonder why there's no more cartoons on broadcast television? Or perhaps why the FCC is investigating Colbert's Trump Jokes? If we're so concerned about content freedom, the FCC is not the organization to trust.

You mean the FCC under George Bush Sr, and the current Republican majority FCC that wants to repeal net neutrality issued by the formerly Democratic majority FCC?

The people distrusting the government running up the the election currently seems to trust the government a great deal.

You can't issue timeless blanket statements regarding any organization consisting of rotating individuals. Hell, even the two parties have switched places a few times throughout history.