Net neutrality makes internet more expensive for everybody so Torrent and Netflix users can be subsidized.
It looks right, but it is WRONG to "defend" it using law and force.
It looks right, but it is WRONG to "defend" it using law and force.
Instead - The major concern about losing NN is that instead of just paying for volume of data, I'll also be required to pay based on type and/or source of that data, and that the entities providing the data will also be required to pay based on type and/or destination.
Do you think this concern is not valid? Why? Do you think this concern and there is a better way to address it? What?
If defending it using law is wrong, what would be a right way to defend it?
And if "free market" is part of you answer, can you talk about the handling of last-mile connections?
Finally, I just straight up don't understand what you mean by "defend it using... force". Can you explain?
It's a common refrain from some types of libertarians. The basic logic is that all laws are morally equivalent to holding a gun to someone's head, therefore it's immoral to pass laws regarding anything that's not worth killing over.
Say you get a fine over some law. Doesn't matter what, but let's say it is a minor fine over a law you disagree with. So you refuse to pay it. Now perhaps it ends there, with the law not being fully enforced (with sometimes does happen). But what else could happen is that you are summoned to court concerning the fine. Now the punishment for the fine includes a court summon. So in protest of the fine being wrong, you choose to not go to court or go to court and refuse to court order to pay the fine. Either way, the court will either drop it (unlikely at this point) or you could be arrested for refusing a court order (you don't go to prison for a debt, you go to prison for refusing a court order to pay a debt, which seems to be an important distinction for some reason I can't see). Now you either submit to being arrested, or violence will be used against you.
Under this reasoning, that original law is backed by violence. Either a law ends up not being enforced or being enforced with an eventual threat of violence. There are cases where there is little chance of it ever having someone protest it.
One example people use to counter with that seems to work at first is government restrictions on limiting licensing. For example, take a law that says government has to approve a license for some activity if it doesn't given a definite disapproval within a week of application. In this case, breaking the law would be done by someone at the government either refusing to give approval at all or giving a no after the deadline to give a no has passed. One likely result is someone who didn't follow the law getting fired, but in this case it is the government overriding itself and eventually following the law. But assuming that every manager approved of violating the law such that no one was fired and the office in question maintained its stance, then the party that requested approval will have cause to sue the government. At which point the court will make specific orders (such as demanding testimony or demanding certain actions be performed), and any person directly disobeying those will now face possibly being arrested, which is when violence comes into play. Or the court could choose to not make any demands, at which point the government is choosing to not enforce the law. A practical example of this is to look at the individuals who refused to give marriage license to same sex couples. Either someone higher overrode them and someone else (representing the government) gave out the license or they were sent to jail (with the threat of violence if they did not obey).
Why is it bad that ISPs charge us based on type/source of data? Should grocery stores charge us by volume (mass?) of food instead of by type/source/etc? If aggregating costs is indeed more moral, why should it be enforced by law (as opposed to the food example)?
Providing robust answers to these questions should strengthen the NN position.
Then the local government comes in and says that they are the only store allowed in town.
Now, is it fair to General Mills that they have to compete with the store brand cereal when the store brand is effectively free and there is no way for General Mills to get their cereal to you any other way?
But the FCC doesn't have that authority and it's a nonstarter in congress. So the stop gap is to force the government granted monopolies to play nice as a condition of their monopoly status.
https://s22.postimg.org/lilkrmo4x/Screen_Shot_2017-06-21_at_...
What do you think your chances of competing against Facebook, or Facebook-based businesses, are, when clients see this before accessing your site?
It's a huge, huge fallacy to claim "this thing would happen regardless, so who cares how difficult we make it for it to happen". Your mind is wrong.
I'm proud of India for rejecting Zuckerberg's ploy, and I wish Peru was wise enough to do the same.
Right now is like a public road, with free and equal access for every body, and thus, an economy can be built around it. If you change it to the store model, it morphs from an economy to a business, and businesses are not capable of supporting an entire economy built on top, so it won't.
My actual point is, analogies just don't work.
The grocery store analogy doesn't work. The road or electric grid analogies are perfectly apt.
And actually, I think an unusual answer is:
Grocery stores kind of suck, actually. I know I'm not able to get the best need/product fit, because of all the presentation that goes into it (display case arrangement, psychology of product locations...).
You can pay the grocery store to make me think your product is better, instead of having a better product. You also have to get your product into the grocery store in the first place, which is a serious hurdle.
On the other hand, 90% of everything is crap, and you actually need special skills to navigate the free-for-all street markets... which still have a lot of the same problems.
Under such a view, it's not that NN is great, it's that everything else (that's known) is worse.
The real answer is they're really not analogous enough to compare this way, even if comparing them yields interesting thoughts.
ISPs are like mail services: a letter is a letter is a letter. A package is a package is a package. And a packet is a packet is a packet.
I'm not well-informed enough to say much, but imagine you have a local link in a small rural town that only support some absolute number of packets or whatever: if you have one big consumer that is eating the major part of that every day, making the others miserable, isn't it reasonable to limit that consumer's bandwidth somehow?
Then if some law is enacted to prevent you from limiting that consumer, then you'll either make the lives of the others miserable or you'll be forced to spend more on your link and luckily pass the cost down to all your consumers. Right?
Please correct me if I'm assuming things wrong (I'm likely doing it).
> The major concern about losing NN is that instead of just paying for volume of data, I'll also be required to pay based on type and/or source of that data, and that the entities providing the data will also be required to pay based on type and/or destination.
I don't understand what is the problem of that. In every other situation of life you pay for the "type" of the thing you're consuming. When you go to a restaurant you don't pay for volume of food, but for the types of food you're asking. There are indeed restaurants where you pay for mass of food, but you don't have all the expensive options available. I can see a world where you would have to pay a little more for Netflix and a little less for sshing to your VPS.
If there was actual competition for broadband internet access, maybe net neutrality would be superfluous. However, there is basically zero competition in the internet access market (at least in the US), so the hypothetical "free market" can't do shit.
> I don't understand what is the problem of that. In every other situation of life you pay for the "type" of the thing you're consuming. When you go to a restaurant you don't pay for volume of food, but for the types of food you're asking. There are indeed restaurants where you pay for mass of food, but you don't have all the expensive options available. I can see a world where you would have to pay a little more for Netflix and a little less for sshing to your VPS.
I don't pay for access to specific sites, I pay for access to a network.
The internet is, structurally, a buffet, in your restaurant analogy. Paid prioritization is basically going to an all-you-can-eat buffet, paying for entrance, only to discover that all entrees other then the rice are charged individually.
The issue with removing net neutrality is that it enables censorship and removes 'the free market' of the internet. The internet provider doesn't like your political blog? Well now they can wall it off under a addon package just like cable TV. Facebook makes an exclusive deal with the internet provider? Now Twitter is locked behind an addon package or completely unavailable.
You might say, "well people will just use a different internet provider!". The problem with that is that many places in the USA only have one, maybe two providers to chose from; So it's not like a restaurant where they can just go somewhere else.
You might say, "well more internet providers will be created if no-one likes the current ones!". But its very expensive to create a network of fiber optic cables. Billions of dollars, maybe trillions. A start-up can't just 'interrupt' the market. And usually when a new internet provider is created, they have to lease the big-company lines just work. And you can bet if they make that deal with existing companies they'll have to accept big-company's traffic policies.
> A start-up can't just 'interrupt' the market
...like they can on the Internet. Unless... Even on the Internet... They have to fight themselves into a preferable "package" as created as the result of no net neutrality.
Mass of food is a false equivalence; cost of food per kg varies widely based on food, but cost of transmission of bulk traffic (the only kind ISPs are proposing to charge the entity on the other side of the connection for) is largely identical to the ISP. The cost may vary depending on where it comes from (network wise, not precisely geographically), but ISPs are already able to deal with that by having different sized links to other ISPs.
In those terms I think I can support NN and take back my comments.
Maybe your name is an acronym-alias for Ajit and something, and we're all now in the clear :)
I too am a proponent for free markets, but I have to point out that the telecommunications industry could care less about free market principles.
For the last hundred years telcos have consistently lobbied the federal government for regulations that lock out competition. They pretend regulation prevents them from performing as well as they could, but the last thing they want is a minimally regulated market with a low barrier to entry.
The only reason we're even having this conversation is because there was a small window of opportunity in the 90's to pass smart Telco laws that both regulated and deregulated divergent aspects of the industry. First, because the incumbent telcos enjoyed monopolies for nearly 50 years, they were obligated to lease parts of their networks to resellers like local ISPs.
Had this not happened, the larger telcos and service providers could have choked the early Internet and giving us networks like AOL/MSN instead.
If you truly believe in the virtue of free markets, you need to understand that powerful politically connected companies do not and they can be some of the biggest opponents of free markets while they pretend they are.
But imagine that you think NN is wrong (I no longer believe that), but since it is better than the current state of non-free-markets-plus-telcos-doing-anything-they-want, you defend NN.
That just makes things worse, since it shifts the focus out of the real underlying problem (markets aren't free) and tells everybody the problem is this other one (no NN being enforced).
Since imposing NN will not solve all the problems, and may as well create some new problems, the next time a problem appears the State will be prompted to introduce a new regulation, and we'll be each time farther from the free markets. Regulation brings regulation.
I don't know if the above applies to this situation in particular or if we should oppose a measure that looks better just because in principle it is not the best measure.
> Since imposing NN will not solve all the problems, and may as well create some new problems, the next time a problem appears the State will be prompted to introduce a new regulation, and we'll be each time farther from the free markets. Regulation brings regulation.
You bring up a good point. It too bothers me that we've resorted to NN. We shouldn't have too, and we wouldn't if we didn't already have a nearly 100 year history of corporate socialism in the telco industry, where for nearly 50 of those years, the federal government literally picked one winner.
The problem is this: Money is really good at influencing politics and policy. You claim regulation brings more regulation. That's not untrue, but I suspect money in politics creates more regulation because nothing protects a market from competition than regulatory capture. Not only that, it cultivates entire industries that specialize in sucking on the government teat and rent-seeking politicians who make sure they contribute to their campaigns.
Our extremely polarized voting base (I don't blame the politicians) is current incapable of sending a common coherent message to their representatives based on common American values because they can't agree on a single fucking thing. These polarized idiots are simply too emotionally immature to realize they're being emotionally manipulated. Not only that, they're too clueless to tell their politicians that they want a telecommunications industry that's based on free-market principles because they're too busy parroting talking points rather than understanding how they're being played an manipulated by special interests.
Because there's not one fucking thing these right-wing and left-wing assholes can agree on, I'm not convinced we'll ever have a coherent telecommunications policy, let alone a solution to our growing problem of the influence of money in politics.
NN isn't ideal, but it's a lot better giving the telcos everything and asking for nothing in return. It will only embolden them to come back and ask for more. They literally have a history of asking for federal dollars to build next generation networks and then not following through on their promises. They are trolls who live under bridges. Don't empower them. Provide incentives for them to be competitive and opportunities for new companies to challenge them.
NN doesn't force ISPs to not have bandwidth caps on consumers. They are free to do this. The fact that most ISPs in the world are able to provide unlimited bandwidth should provide you some hint on how cheap bandwidth is.
> I can see a world where you would have to pay a little more for Netflix and a little less for sshing to your VPS.
Unlike a restaurant, ISPs are in the delivery business. It should not matter what is being delivered.
I think -
So first up, the "types" metrics don't analogize well. AFAIK, there are legit types of traffic - high bandwidth, low bandwith; burst, continuous; high latency OK, low latency required. Seems pretty reasonable to charge based on this (although, slippery slope and all that.)
These types then correlate to food items; the steak, the veggies, the pasta.
The first issue you run into is that "brand" is not "type". Classic: Hulu should not be a different type of traffic than Netflix; Bing vs Google, etc (if there are any other pairs like those...). The follow-up problem here is then actually enacting categorization; Netflix is subscription only, Hulu has ads, and I wouldn't be surprised if the tech resulted in importantly different kinds of traffic (according to above metrics).
The second issue is that it's not analogous, because I don't pay the restaurant to attend, and the chefs don't pay the restaurant to cook. Now, you could twiddle these nobs - "internet" is free, but all offerings aren't (and then Yahoo! News becomes the free bread...); or the ISP pays the sites it makes accessible (TV cable style, with all it's flaws).
So I think the real issue with the comparison is that it either doesn't compare (restaurants), or it does compare and the other thing, well, kinda sucks (TV cable), and NN becomes the fight to keep this great thing we've got from becoming this mediocre thing we tried to abandon.
I don't think anyone complains about paying more if they stream a lot of video online. But people ask for NN so they do not have to pay more if they stream from Netflix instead of Hulu.
> Then if some law is enacted to prevent you from limiting that consumer, then you'll either make the lives of the others miserable or you'll be forced to spend more on your link and luckily pass the cost down to all your consumers. Right?
Yes but the consumers of the bandwidth are the locals in that small rural town, not netflix. Charge the locals for using more bandwidth because they are the ones requesting it.
At least one problem with charging by type is my ISP doesn't know what type of thing I'm consuming. I'm streaming Netflix over SSH, but they don't know this. Do I get the high or the low price?
The "somehow" is key here. There is a neutral solution called per-customer fair queueing but most equipment doesn't support that so some ISPs end up using non-neutral "solutions" like just banning Netflix and BitTorrent.
Also, I want to caution people about reasoning by analogy since ISPs aren't analogous to restaurants or grocery stores or really anything else. A real argument doesn't require analogies.
Net Neutrality means that if you were to start a compelling competitor to Netflix, as long as your technology was sound enough, and you could keep up with the bandwidth bills, you would be able to offer the service to your customers without any subjective political negotiation with ISPs and entrenched market leaders.
Making the Internet more expensive today so we can accommodate high traffic use is a smart long term strategy.
The first incentive ISPs should have is to be able to provide a high level of service for bandwidth demanding applications.
Over time these costs will drop as the bandwidth naturally expands because networking technology is subject to similar price/performance trends we see with transistors.
Here's the point: At some future point in time, torrent and video traffic will be negligible faction of the total amount of bandwidth available.
It's better we get there sooner rather than later, right?
So what do you think is the fastest way to get there? Do you want to incentive the mono/duopoly ISPs to nickle and dime over limited service, or do you want to incentive them to compete with each other to provide the best service that connects everybody to the whole internet?
We're going to get to the point where bandwidth is incredibly cheap and available soon enough. The question is are you really going to give up a common carrier network because you falsely believe it's going to get you here marginally faster?
If you believe that, you have no sense of history of the telecommunications industry. They've already pulled the "let me abuse my monopoly status and I'll give you better service" scam time and time again.
What will be taking the rest of the bandwidth? It certainly won't be idle or it won't get built out at all.
Part of the value of the network is how much bandwidth one can use in a month. The other part is simply the convenience of being able to send/receive lots of data in short bursts.
I'd argue most people don't need to consume lots of data to appreciate 1 Gb connection when it's available. I think you'll find most people are willing to pay a premium for convenience and optionality, even when they don't use it.
Now, if they're not using more total bandwidth, then your point stands. If the network is idle, it's more than likely not to get built out at all, but I'm not sure that rule applies to last mile networks.
Not much of a premium. CenturyLink offers 1gbps in my area. I only know one person who's subscribed to that level of service. Cost has been cited as the deciding factor every time.
Good point. I think I overstated it.
Some ISPs do this if you go beyond a certain amount per month. But if a tiny portion of users are hogging a massive amount of bandwidth (as is oftentimes claimed), it seems like an ISP could make a killing by offering cheaper bandwidth but charging for data usage, which would drive these high bandwidth users to other ISPs, which means you can provide your remaining users on average better bandwidth for a lower price.
This is a common claim that is rarely supported with data. Why does enforcing net neutrality increase downstream costs?
If you mean that it shifts costs (you pay more for Netflix because they have to pay Comcast for fair service), then sure. I don't see any evidence that net neutrality actually changes the underlying cost of net service, though.
There's a great counterpoint to your claim in the USPS. Their prices are regulated by congress. Those prices are pushed down artificially to the point that it's slowly bankrupting the USPS. So service is definitely cheaper than it would be without regulation. (Send a letter via FedEx and see what the free market charges for this service.)
Bandwidth usage whales are just those that constantly use the bandwidth they paid for - which, outside of those peak traffic windows, isn't actually costing you anything to provide, because you aren't saturating your bandwidth anyway.
If ISPs want to cut costs, they rate limit customers (globally or during their peak usage times). That reduces the amount of routing hardware they need and the amount of backbone bandwidth they need to buy. If they institute data caps or try to break the Internets P2P architecture, they are just destroying the intent of the Internet while still having the same peak bandwidth rates they always did. Their routers just run cold now at night because nobody is using them for anything.
Can you go into a little more detail about "given" here? I'm not under the impression that it's true.
Again, this is the typical scenario; there are certainly cases that don't fit this mold, but they would be atypical.
For example, almost everyone on earth will be of the opinion that fire is hotter than ice. Do we all suffer from group think? If someone believes that fire is cool, is he a brilliant free thinker, or just a moron that is about to get his hand burned?
It is well known and readily verifiable that net neutrality as defined by the previous FCC rules and as defined by the EFF allows for providers to charge more for people using more data. So no net neutrality would not require anyone to subsidize heavy data users.
I've phrased this bluntly for effect. If you say an idea is mistaken, then you've said the worst thing you can say about it. Censoring it only pushes inquisitive minds further into their camp.
If HN has become a place where mistaken ideas are no longer tolerated (in the sense that you can't lay out your reasoning without being attacked) then we've all lost something valuable.
I don't think we're anywhere near that point yet -- in this case, the downvotes were due to the flimsy nature of the comment -- but it's worth watching for.
You're being patronizing. Why do you assume that the OP is referencing this point in his "diversity of opinion" quote? A charitable interpretation would be "the subject of whether or not NN is a social good is a subjective matter, and we need more diversity of opinion on this topic".