Hacker News Reader

It is absolutely conceivable that even in a non-monopolized market, net-neutral options would die or go on life support. Because people value price above all else, ISPs can reduce their prices well below their competitors by asking for payment from large incumbents (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, etc.) to prioritize their traffic and slow down their competitors. When the choice is between 20$ a month with high-speed access to most of the brands you already know, and 200$ a month for high-speed access to all websites, which one do you think will win.

Gym business is not exactly a monopoly. Yet almost all gyms have opted to make their patrons sign long-term membership contracts with auto-renewal that are almost impossible to cancel. Getting out of gym membership is only marginally easier than renouncing Scientology (OK, I am exaggerating a bit). Gyms are designed to discourage working out and necessitate payment [1]. Why don't we have ethical upfront gyms? There are some, but they are way more expensive and most people are not close enough to one to justify a membership. The market has spoken and it has spoken wrong. Same with Walmart's destruction of local businesses and the ever-shrinking legroom in airlines.

Market values price above all else. Unless net-neutral ISPs can manage to be cheaper than Facebook-subsidized ISPs, they will die rather soon.

[1] http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/12/17/371463435/episo...

I agree that net neutrality becomes much less important if there's real competition between ISPs. But for most of the US, there isn't. Monopolies and non-competitive duopolies are common. Yes, this should be fixed, but it's really, really hard, far harder than regulating neutrality.

No such thing in Portugal as well

Getting blanket downvotes for going against the hivemind so nevermind.

In other words: They have not used it for anything more than trying to kill their competition? Well, nothing to worry about then!

What? Where did I say something about killing competition?

What else is zero-rating possibly intended to do? Zero-rating is obviously selling below cost, and businesses sell below cost to kill competition.

> What else is zero-rating possibly intended to do? Zero-rating is obviously selling below cost, and businesses sell below cost to kill competition.

That's not the only scenario for zero-rating.

Not too long ago, getting international backhaul in Australia was absurdly expensive. So various smaller ISPs joined IXs, and then offered customers plans which had a certain amount of quota for your usual traffic, but traffic which was routed via an IX was zero-rated. This included game servers, FTP mirrors, usenet, and various internet radio services.

This is technically against net neutrality, but I don't see this as being a bad thing for anyone involved.

Well, what I meant was zero-rating of services, which is what this discussion is about (rather than based on actual operational costs).

And actually, arguably, that is not necessarily against net neutrality.

Net neutrality ultimately is about whether anyone can send traffic to the ISP's customers under the same, non-monopolistic, conditions. As such, making a geographic distinction isn't really that much of a problem, if it is not used to also implement other distinctions. The question is: Could anyone who would have wanted to send traffic to those customers bought transit on the open market at market rates in order to deliver traffic to within the reach of the zero rating?

It's a problem if you can buy special interconnects from the ISP in order to have your traffic zero-rated. It's not really a problem if the ISP says "any traffic delivered to this exchange (that is well-connected to many competing transit providers) is zero-rated".

What's complex about it? ISPs should be dumb pipes. They shouldn't care what you use them for any more than the electric company does. Seems pretty black-and-white to me.

And I disagree, because the average consumer would not want to pay for what it would cost if the ISPs priced that into their fees.

There’s no need for an ISP to throttle, they could just charge consumers the exact cost to build out as much capacity as they need. But that cost would raise rates to one that consumers don’t want to pay.

To me this is about idealism meaning the real world. In a perfect would I’d love for ISPs to be dumb pipes, but even in your example, Electricity companies don’t charge you like a dumb pipe and offer time of use pricing, pricing based on zones, discounts or rebates based on energy efficiency. Likewise different sites generate enormously different costs on the ISPs side, and consumers are benefiting from ISPs balancing being a dumb pipe, with not charging the consumers the price of a pipe that can carry every type of load at every time at perfect speeds.

Most ISPs are currently dumb pipes. The net neutrality fight is to keep them that way. The average consumer is paying for what it would cost, given that ISPs generally turn a profit.

I don’t know any ISP that doesn’t have some degree of throttling, and zero rating is becoming more and more common

Throttling has nothing to do with net neutrality, unless it's targeted at specific services.

And it is... video services specifically

Well, that happens and is a net neutrality violation. But it's a net neutrality violation because it distinguishes between services, not because of the throttling. There are plenty of perfectly "net neutral" plans that throttle your connection after a certain amount of traffic in a month.

I know that, I know what net neutrality is, I don’t want to discuss this anymore I got downvotes enough for one day.

Some ISPs do indeed throttle some video services, and that’s a violation. It wouldn’t vastly increase prices for them to stop doing that, though. They’re doing it to push their own video services, not to save money.

At this point, everything should be encrypted and ISPs shouldn’t even have the ability to discern what kind of traffic is going through their pipes. We’re a bit behind schedule on that...

But these services have no incentive to do that - they want to be detected, so that they can be zero-rated (or receive any other advantage). How would you prevent them from opting out of your encryption system?

I think you don't understand what net neutrality is?

Yes, electricity companies do charge you like a dumb pipe, exactly as ISPs should (and most are).

A dumb pipe does not mean that the ISP cannot count your traffic and bill you for it, possibly even at varying rates throughout the day. It only means that the ISP doesn't get to look at the contents of your traffic, just as the electricity company doesn't get too look at what you use your electricity for.

A non-neutral electricity company would be one that didn't charge you according to load on their network and generation facilities, but based on the application you use electricity for. Now, they usually do offer various plans intended for different types of uses--but mind you that that does not mean that you only get to use them for those uses, the contract is about load profiles and energy prices.

For example, you might have a plan for storage heaters. But there is absolutely nothing that forces or requires you to use the electricity for storage heaters. The contracts is simply about different prices per kWh during different times of the day. If you run a startup that produces gadgets at night using cheap electricity from that plan, that is perfectly fine.

Fetching email from gmail's IMAP server produces exactly the same load on an ISP's network as fetching email from some local email provider's IMAP server. Net neutrality is about not distinguishing between those. There is nothing wrong with offering a "1 GB/month, 1 Mb/s" plan that is well-suited for only receiving and sending emails. The problem is when they want to prevent me from using IRC instead, or they only allow specific email providers.

I do understand net neutrality, my example might have been poor though.

Electricity companies can’t (reliably) tell what you’re using the power for so in a sense they do act as dumb pipes (except they do care if you use it for commercial vs residential), but they don’t strive to be dumb pipes. To put it in terms of your space heater analogy, they can’t give you electricity that only works with your space heater, so they’ll give you rebates for using a specific space heater.

The goal is the same, the implementation just takes the limitations of granularity in metering electricity usage.

I know what net neutrality is, and I have no problem with a non-neutral internet. It’s not the same as a lawless unregulated internet. Right now zero-rating is what ISPs have taken advantage of it for. People argue zero rating means base prices must be encompassing the cost of the “free” service, but it’s coming with strings attached like reduced bandwidth or as a way to attract new users. While I do feel certain companies might be able to use zero-rating to reinforce monopolies, I don’t feel zero-rating inherently creates an environment where companies can’t compete.

If ISPs do take further moves to absurd it, those moves can still be regulated/blocked, but my experience in many other countries has been that it doesn’t progress further than that, certainly not to the 2 mock images shown in the article (the one real one has a subtle, but important difference, access isn’t blocked if you don’t choose one of those packages, you just pay the normal base rate)

That being said, I’ll refrain from talking about net neutrality on HN. This is the crowd that would have the most reasons to support it. After all, zero rating on Netflix doesn’t help a unicorn become the next Netflix, and there are plenty of people here who feel like all of this goes against the very spirit of the internet.

But it’s impossible to have a meaningful discussion when everything you say is immediately downvoted to ghost status. I mean I made that were barely more than a single fact got downvoted until they couldn’t easily be read anymore, and people are still mass downvoting my statements hours later.

> Electricity companies can’t (reliably) tell what you’re using the power for so in a sense they do act as dumb pipes (except they do care if you use it for commercial vs residential),

No, actually, they don't. That is what the plans are labeled as, but they really don't care about whether you are commercial or residential, that is the point that I was trying to make. What they care about is your load profile. Residential vs. commercial users on average have a very distinct load profiles (throughout the day and throughout the week), and that leads to different costs, which is why they want to bill you according to your load profile. Ultimately, if you happen to run a business that has the load profile of a typical residential user, they would often rather want to have you as a residential customer because that matches their costs. It's just that billing using load-dependent prices throughout the day has traditionally not been technically feasible, which is why the simplified distinction of residential vs. commercial plans was developed, because that matches reality well enough in most cases.

> People argue zero rating means base prices must be encompassing the cost of the “free” service, but it’s coming with strings attached like reduced bandwidth or as a way to attract new users.

How is that a contradiction? Yes, it comes with reduced bandwidth ... which still is being paid for with the income from the base prices, isn't it? And yes, it is being used as a way to attract new users ... while also hurting the existing customers, the new users, and their competition!? I really don't see how this in any way reduces the negative impact of it all, and thus why you even bring it up?!

> While I do feel certain companies might be able to use zero-rating to reinforce monopolies, I don’t feel zero-rating inherently creates an environment where companies can’t compete.

Well, what do you mean by "can't compete"? Do you mean "are unavoidably destined for failure", or "have an increased risk of failure"?

The former probably isn't the case, but also is not a useful standard. Almost nothing that is generally agreed to be bad directly guarantees total failure. Does putting carcinogens into food mean that everyone will die of cancer? No, it doesn't. Do we still consider putting carcinogens into food a bad thing? Yes, we do. Why? Because it increases the risk of dying of cancer.

Now, if you do agree that increased risk of failure is a good enough reason to consider something bad ... isn't it obvious that having higher costs than your competition increases the risk of failure for a business?

> (the one real one has a subtle, but important difference, access isn’t blocked if you don’t choose one of those packages, you just pay the normal base rate)

What practical difference does it make whether access is blocked or prohibitively expensive?

Suppose we introduced a new law that requires you to pay a million bucks, not refundable, in order to leave the country (for travel or otherwise), except if you purchased the travel package for 100 bucks that allows unlimited travel to Australia? Would you also say that it's a subtle but important difference that traveling abroad was not forbidden and relations to other countries would not suffer, you would just have to pay the base rate?

> After all, zero rating on Netflix doesn’t help a unicorn become the next Netflix, and there are plenty of people here who feel like all of this goes against the very spirit of the internet.

I guess there are. But isn't that much more importantly against the spirit of a competetive market economy, and thus in particular against the interests of the customers?

> But it’s impossible to have a meaningful discussion when everything you say is immediately downvoted to ghost status. I mean I made that were barely more than a single fact got downvoted until they couldn’t easily be read anymore, and people are still mass downvoting my statements hours later.

Really, looking through which of your comments got downvoted, my impression is that's mostly for glaringly obvious errors in logic, primarily a failure to consider solutions to problems that are possible without a violation of network neutrality. The mere fact that there is a problem and an ISP that is not bound by network neutrality can solve that problem by violating network neutrality just doesn't say anything about whether net neutrality is a good idea, if you don't ever consider how the same problem might be solved with network neutrality.

This is accurate. Net neutrality is a band-aid on an open wound. This is not to say that net neutrality should be done away with - stopping a bad thing from getting worse is, after all, what band-aids are for. The problem is the wound itself. There is no where in the US where Comcast and Charter are competing. In fact, when you filter down to functional internet providers (10Mbps+) very few places have any choice at all. This is an effective monopolization, made possible through explicit cartelization. And where there is no open wound, the market does work, and net neutrality isn't really an issue. Australia, for example, legislates that any owner of the infrastructure must lend it to other providers at a set price. Where a lack of net neutrality is kept in check there by the market, a similar lack of would only be used in the US to achieve greater price granularity/discrimination at the expense of the consumer.

No, "markets would work it out" argument doesn't work here. ISPs are monopolized businesses in USA. There are only so many cables you can lay out and only so many players who have capital to invest all that money. When one player succeeds in this game they buy off appropriate amount of politicians to close doors for others. All the ISP "choices" in USA you see is just an illusion where some re-sellers re-brands exact same bandwidth under their fancy names and ads.

> When one player succeeds in this game they buy off appropriate amount of politicians to close doors for others.

Then what you're talking about is not a market at all. You're directly saying several times over that the problem is the lack of any semblance of a market, that the government is the specific problem.

Besides that, reasonably speaking, there are not only so many cables you can lay in the ground. That infrastructure non-problem has had an extraordinarily simple fix for decades:

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/natio...

> If you have a choice of two ISPs and one of them is net neutral, the other is not, which one are you going to choose?

I strongly favor net neutrality, but personally my decision depends on price and other factors too. For example, I always can pay for a $400/month for a net-neutral private T1 line with 1.4 Mbps, but probably I won't.

As for others: Few end users understand the technical basics required to grasp net neutrality, few are aware of the net neutrality issue, and fewer still understand the principle of freedom-as-in-speech and can grasp its impact. I've had many people ask me for advice on ISPs; not one ever asked about net neutrality. To function, the market relies on educated consumers with access to information; that's not the case here, just like consumers can't choose between airline safety measures.

Regardless, few ISP markets have more than 2 vendors and no vendor offers this sort of thing - can you name one ISP of any size that offers net neutrality? The barrier to entry is too high for a newcomer to break in and sell it, even if there was demand.

"Whilst I completely think net neutrality should be enshrined in law"

Oh it was. Then the European court over ruled it thanks to powerful lobbying.

That's what Comcast did in Canada. I think they have net neutrality now, though.