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Comment by weberc2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm not opposed to NN, but your phrasing piqued my curiosity:

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.

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Different types of food require different handling, etc. The grocery store is not a dumb pipe for food. It's a distributor. For products that dont require special handling (eg, refrigeration), a food shipping company is a more accurate analogy. They should not be charging by much other than volume/weight.

It's not quite the same though. It would be more like if the store said you could pay $50 to enter and fill a cart with whatever you want, but you can use as many other carts as you want but only for their store brand items.

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?

My thoughts are that the proper solution would be to outlaw regional monopolies, and that a store is entitled to whatever pricing model it sees fit.

That would be ideal. Then competion would sort it out.

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.

The problem with that is that the current internet architecture inherently favors monopolies.

I was just in Lima, Peru. This is what you see if you're on Facebook on someone's phone (I was tethering), and click a link that takes you outside of Facebook:

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?

Any viable competitor will necessarily have the resources to strike a similar deal. I think your argument boils down to "is unfair that Facebook has more resources than a competing startup", which is no truer without NN (in my mind, anyway).

Facebook competitor may be unlikely, but newspapers striking local deals with Facebook vs. newspapers which don't, is likely.

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.

I don't think I made any such fallacy. I'm simply not convinced by your claim that NN favors competition. In particular, you seem to think Facebook can strike a deal for free with ISPs in a way that a competitor could not. Obviously such a deal is available to both the incumbent and the Challenger, but it's more likely that the incumbent will have the resources to afford it. In this sense, it's merely a matter of resources, and your pro-NN argument could be applied to any industry with a strong incumbent (it's not really about three internet, you just think wealth and success are bad, or something like that anyway). In other words, your argument could be applied to Apple paying for adverts that it's competition couldn't afford.

The fallacy is "it's just a matter of resources, so those resources will advantage them in some other way if not this one". It's a bad argument.

It is not bad per se, but it is not what the internet is. The moment they start charging based on content is the moment that it becomes something different.

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.

Ahem. I think public roads sometimes have, e.g., limits for heavy vehicles or various dedicated lanes. ;)

My actual point is, analogies just don't work.

Roads have the limits of the infrastructure and the law, not "limits" determined by the current operator of the road (that can be bypassed with payments, and thus not limits in the same sense).

The grocery store analogy doesn't work. The road or electric grid analogies are perfectly apt.

Oh, oh, this is good question!

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.

Grocery stores are directly selling things to you, and they cost different amounts based on their costs to the grocery stores, handling requirements, etc.

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.

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