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Comment by anotherbrownguy | Hacker News Reader

It's unfair to ISPs (some of it is their own doing like introducing "unlimited data" purely based on the assumption that most users wouldn't use their data at the same time, which companies like Google and Netflix capitalized on by building high bandwidth services on top of it) but since Google and Netflix are capable of manipulating consent of internet users and will not let FCC rollback "net neutrality", ISPs will have to stop innovating, keep giving terrible service and pass their costs to consumers.

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I just want to point out that this view isn't necessarily wrong, but it's one-sided and reads like talking points from an ISP lobbyist.

You can view Google and Netflix as "capitalizing on ISPs". You could also view it as the ISPs customers demanding more bandwidth from their ISP that they pay.

ISPs like to talk about their "innovations", but what does that even mean? Personally, I want them to provide me with a high bandwidth link to the internet at low cost. The less they do, the happier I'll be.

What innovations do you expect to happen if net neutrality is rolled back? I expect that every ISP will threaten to deprioritize traffic from every content provider unless they pay up. I believe it'll lead to a worse internet experience overall for internet users and raise barriers for new content providers to be able to compete on the internet. That's not the kind of innovation I want.

It's been well established that terrible service and high costs are related to how much of a monopoly the ISP has in the area. Many areas of the US only have 1 or 2 choices of ISP. This shouldn't come as a surprise to any free market capitalist. Why would an ISP upgrade a network or lower prices when it has no competition? Low competition means that consumers lose. When Google Fiber wants to expand to an area, the established ISPs fight hard to make sure they can't compete. If they do reach an area, that area immediately experiences network upgrades and reductions in prices.

A company doesn't just "pass their costs to consumers" and tack on a set percentage for their own profits. A company's job is to increase the profits for it's shareholders. If a CEO is not doing everything legally within his power to increase the profits for shareholders, he can be replaced. Prices for services and money spent on maintenance are set based on what they've determined will net them the maximum amount of profit. If they managed to extract even more money from content providers, what motive do they have to lower prices or upgrade service for customers in a monopoly area? None. None whatsoever.

Sometimes the government has to intervene in a market (like anti-trust laws) in order to create a fair market for companies to compete. And that's OK and every free-market conservative should recognize that fact and agree that it's a good idea if they just think about it for a while.

I am against NN but even from my point of view the innovation argument is 50% duplicitous.

I don't expect big monopoly ISPs to implement these changes with content providers in a way that doesn't disrupt end users' access. But I still don't think we should have universally outlaw this for all ISPs for all time, present and future, including nice little ones answerable to the people of a city or region. The other duplicity is that this is not an ``innovation''. Please Mr. Lobbist. Governments have been taxing economic transactions at both endpoints (buyer and seller) for millenia and the evil tax man has always triaged the taxed at some level where it is no longer economical to collect.

If elected democrats (when NN was introduced) really wanted to help the consumer they would have done something to break up the monopoly ISPs, not this moral signaling rule says Google et. al. are less monopolistic than you so were going to pick their side. If republicans actually favored free markets they would follow up ending NN by doing the same.

> Sometimes the government has to intervene in a market (like anti-trust laws) in order to create a fair market for companies to compete. And that's OK and every free-market conservative should recognize that fact and agree that it's a good idea if they just think about it for a while.

No thinking required in this case, opposing government sponsored monopolies is obvious and shrinking those that must exist to the smallest possible size is too. Conservative federalism. Some conservatives have favorable views of private monopolies though (stating this as a fact, not a personal opinion) and presumably they have thought about it.

ISPs are always free to throttle all services. Or (gasp) stop lying about so-called "unlimited" plans.

Don't worry, that is exactly what they'll end up doing. Hope you have alternatives.

Net Neutrality is the idea that ISP cannot target only specific addresses/services when they throttle your connection.

I know what Google and Netflix want to tell you what it is but I also know what it actually is (https://www.fcc.gov/document/restoring-internet-freedom-noti...).

That's actually a fun read. Just loom at this section where they are making an absurd logical Yoga move to get ISPs classified as "information providers" and not a "telecommunication provider":

    In contrast, Internet service providers do 
    not appear to offer “telecommunications,” 
    i.e., “the transmission, between or among 
    points specified by the user, of information
    of the user’s choosing, without change in the 
    form or content of the information as sent 
    and received,” to their users. 

    For one, broadband Internet users do not 
    typically specify the “points” between and 
    among which information is sent online. 
    Instead, routing decisions are based on 
    the architecture of the network, not on 
    consumers’ instructions, and consumers 
    are often unaware of where online content 
    is stored.

So instead they're classifying ISPs as "content providers", when any plain reading of the law can only result in the conclusion that a "content provider" is supposed to be a third party such as a newspaper's website or HN.

It's a truly ridiculous argument. Users of telephone service don't specify the routing of their calls either, yet somehow that fact is sufficient to transform an ISP from a carrier to a "content provider".

This idea is the problem with net neutrality.

The reason people support net neutrality is that ISPs are monopolies even more so than Google, Facebook, etc and we understand that monopolies are unfair, corrupt, renters, etc. Therefore it easy to be blinded into supporting rules that purport to punish ISPs, even if the rule itself is illogical and loaded for unintended consequences.

Reasonable people can oppose Net Neutrality for the economic illogicality of an enterprise not being allowed to negotiate prices with its customers.

What people want is laws punishing monopoly ISPs. No one cares if Google has to pay a fraction of their ad revenue to help pay for serving them bloated ad data they didn't even ask for.

> [..] economic illogicality of an enterprise not being allowed to negotiate prices with its customers.

See, that's where your argument makes no sense. ISPs don't want to argue prices with their customers. They want to extort businesses that have never decided to be their customers.

And you're assuming peoples' motives in the face of these people telling you that you're wrong: I actually don't have grudge with my local ISP. What is scaring me shitless is a future where the internet is just Cable TV, and where the chance to have an idea and get it out there essentially unhindered is dead, because selling your fun little game or whatever would require you to sign agreements with every single ISP in every single market that you want to target.

This isn't about google. Google, Facebook, and Amazon are large enough that throttling them or blocking them would lead to a customer revolt. The large fish will be the last to ever pay.

This is about the business you and I don't yet even know about, because it doesn't exist, or because it's small. No customer will ever complain if their ISP blocks your new idea, because they will never know about it.

> See, that's where your argument makes no sense. ISPs don't want to argue prices with their customers. They want to extort businesses that have never decided to be their customers.

In every willing exchange of data, both the transmitter and receiver are the ISPs' customer.

> And you're assuming peoples' motives ... because selling your fun little game or whatever would require you to sign agreements with every single ISP in every single market that you want to target.

> ...Google, Facebook, and Amazon are large enough that throttling them or blocking them would lead to a customer revolt.

> This is about business you and I don't yet even know about, because it doesn't exist, or because it's small.

This argument is clearly all about our mistrust of monopolies. You clearly don't trust ISPs as a whole, presumably because there is naturally no competition. If you and I don't know a small site exists yet, how is the ISP gonna know? And small businesses aren't going to be targets, for the same reason the IRS doesn't target the small fish with its big guns.

Setting the economics aside, if one is worried about ISPs ability to target free speech by surcharging a particular site, then how is getting the federal government more involved the answer?

http://gizmodo.com/the-secret-deals-that-mean-you-have-to-wa... The big fish already do pay because ISPs hold their customers hostage. They've "opened new revenue channels" by realizing that they can just pay a small amount for lobbying efforts so FCC and friends will leave them alone to make a larger amount from content sources.

Thanks for finding this. This is exactly the point, we can reduce lobbying corruption by scrapping such economics-defying rules.

This is completely orthogonal to real anti-trust legislation against the hardwired ISPs, which both parties seem to be incapable of.

Net Neutrality didn't officially exist for the first 3 decades of the Internet; I never thought making it official policy fixed a big enough problem to make it worth the cost. A lot of data volume coming out of Google and Facebook are profitable ad images we didn't specifically request. Why shouldn't our ISPs be able charge them for this data? End user bills could fall as low as $0! But the mechanism for doing so has to be blunt and "discriminatory": you can't realistically tell what percentage of data from a domain is of a particular type nor can you keep track of, and contact, every tiny data serving domain out there.

Internet traffic changes hands between ISPs and backbone carriers before reaching destination.

What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements?

If someone from Malaysia accesses your site, you would have to have agreement in place for the entire route. Or think other way, anyone can start extorting money from site owners at any point in time.

It's bad for you as a end customer.

It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal.

> What if every carrier of traffic that your traffic rides on has different prioritization agreements?

If ISPs were not dominated by federal-government-originated monopolies, then our traffic would have a variety of routes available to it, found by a breadth first search of ISP switches and DNS services, with tolls (effectively) charged at each step of the cheapest path. When possible, market forces are always a better solution than government force. If an ISP in Hawaii has no local servers for [big advertising-data company 1] and the cheapest route for that data is more expensive than [company 2 with Hawaii server], it should be legal for the ISP to negotiate directly with to subsidize the cost of using [domain 1] for its end consumers.

What is bad for the end customer is this federal/private monopoly control of ISPs. If cities, regional government entities, and private backbone viaducts controlled ISPs we wouldn't need net neutrality legislation and more importantly the president would have less legal clubs with which to beat ISPs who refuse any government demands. Net neutrality is the wrong solution to the wrong problem. The root problem is these large private monopolies that are under the thumb of, and also lobby federal officials.

> It's like the toll booth on the road charges you extra if you are going to the bank to do a withdrawal.

This is not the closest analogy. One possible analogy is like a gas station defraying the cost of the toll road, in exchange for the right to be built on prime land. Another closer analogy would be like the toll booth on the road charging you extra if you are coming from the bank driving a branded, armored cash truck, which has a quantitatively, provably large value derived from getting from point A to point B. Is this behavior morally ok? I think the answer has to be yes otherwise how can we justify any level of regressive taxation for public services? Indeed how could people trade effectively without taking into account the other parties' interest?

Not sure which analogy is closer to your intent, but to reason honestly by analogy we should get as close as possible to the same situation.

AT&T Uverse has instituted a 1TB monthly cap on residential internet service. Unless you also buy TV service, in which case it's unlimited. Clearly they're targeting customers who want to stream all of their TV via sling etc. with this.

Now, the AT&T small business-class internet (which I've just recently switched to) is still unlimited, though it does cost more.

"AT&T small business-class internet"

Charter/Spectrum has a similar "business" class service. Yes, it costs more. I get a lower contention ratio, no caps and fast state-side customer service. My complaints are poor upstream speed and frequent, brief, early morning outages when they service the network.

Maybe the word unlimited should just be expunged from the dictionary, because so many real-world uses of it are vulnerable to deconstruction.

Maybe running with net neutrality should be the next ISP innovation? It's clear that there's enough consumer market demand that they could make money from it, I don't understand where the ISP's tunnel vision of "only way to innovate is if net neutrality is killed" comes from.

If there is a law or federal rule, that usually implies there are not sufficient market forces behind whatever we still think should/shouldn't be done.

Or it implies that the public wants things a certain way and they are tired of battling it out with their idiotic providers (especially in a market where most people only have one option).

Market forces do not affect large telecoms.

You're version is more specific. Perhaps I was too general and clunky.

Consumer demand is not a factor. ISPs in the US have a monopoly over areas and can effectively prevent new competitors from coming in. There is no innovation. The only plan is to extract the most amount of money from customers while spending the least amount of money to maintain the system. Killing net neutrality allows them to extract even more money from both sides: customers and content providers.

Why not give good service and pass costs to customers?

Americans are already paying a shit ton for internet access. Any increase in price is artificial.

Because they think they still have an option to pass the cost to companies like Google and Netflix and then use that money to increase their business and hence have an opportunity to provide good service... which is much better than investing in better infrastructure and customer service and then trying to get customers to pay more. Once they realize that internet companies will continue to use propaganda and not let it happen, they will have to take another route... which will be to keep providing the same service and keep maintaining their monopoly.

Why?

1. They don't have to give good service. Most are monopolies.

2. They already do pass all costs, and all profit margins created, to customers.

3. They want higher profit margins than currently being squeezed.

4. They want more entities to pay them. New classes of customers.

5. Deeper the pockets and fewer the paying entities, easier it would be for ISPs. HBO charges the Cable providers, for long long time HBO didn't allow individuals to buy directly from them, subscribing through a Cable provider was the only option. It allowed HBO to have a simple money supply from big entities with deep pockets which were easy to control. HBO could simply terminate one cable provider. Comcast can simply terminate preferential treatment to Vimeo if they didn't pay. Much easier than sending 4th reminder and collection notice to 65 year old Mrs. Smith.

Because ISPs in the US have monopolies over their areas. There is no incentive to provide good service when you have no competition.

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