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The problem with that statement is the internet is massively, massively, MASSIVELY NOT a free market in any way shape form or kind.

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.

I don't think your 'small rural town' metaphor is solved by removing net neutrality. From the provider's point of view, who cares if someone is using up 1000 packets of youtube or 1000 packets of nytimes? They cost the same from the provider's stand point (unlike 1kg lobster vs 1kg of bread for a restaurant). Filtering by content doesn't change anything, network providers can already charge by amount of traffic. If they can't provide enough, they can raise prices, free market style.

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.

Right.

> 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.

But the person who makes the decision as to what ends up in the pipe (i.e. the end user, Netflix doesn't just spam people's routers) is the one who is already paying. Netflix isn't crowding anyone out (especially if they have a server within the ISP's perimeter), every bit of that bandwidth is requested by a user. Users crowding each other out is already handled by prioritizing based on how much they pay.

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.

Right. After reading yours and basically all other replies to my comment I understand that NN isn't supposed to prevent ISPs from limiting individual users' bandwidth or charging more per heavy usage.

In those terms I think I can support NN and take back my comments.

You're convinced!

Maybe your name is an acronym-alias for Ajit and something, and we're all now in the clear :)

Thanks for this. It's good when people can admit they've changed their minds.

I apologize for calling your opinion vapid in my other post. Thank you for taking the time to articulate your ideas in this post.

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.

Right, I understand that the telecommunications industry is not a free market in any sense.

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.

First, thank you for stepping up the level of discourse.

> 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.

> 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?

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.

Hmm. Not a bad analogy / question.

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.

The restaurant business is very competitive in any town with more than, say, 1000 people. Not so with Internet access. In Silicon Valley, for example, most cities have 1 or 2 providers of broadband (>25Mbps).

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.

> 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?

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.

ISP already can and do throttle based on volume, right?

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?

if you have one big consumer that is eating the major part of [the pipe] every day, making the others miserable, isn't it reasonable to limit that consumer's bandwidth somehow?

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.