And our mistake here is not finding a way to explain it that doesn't require reading a book.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak
The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.
But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all.
This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It wouldn't take much market research to see it's a terrible idea.
Plus the huge technical challenge of filtering at the ISP level... this would be a huge boon for encryption and VPNs as well.
No American ISP for the ~20yr timeframe before the FTC regulation was passed a few years ago had ever offered such an arrangement. Not to mention no ISP in any other country has offered anything close to that either. Plenty of American ISPs have said they have zero intention of doing it either.
This would be a boon to any ISP who DIDN'T do this. Competition, the technical hurdles, and obvious lack of business sense, etc has always been an adequate counter-balance to this idea.
So I'm a bit confused why this is generating so much FUD over such a highly hypothetical and hand wavy scenario... as if the only thing stopping them from doing it was this three year old FTC regulation.
Also, for everyone, billing would become more complexified, obscured to extract more money from consumers and thwart cost calculation and comparing with (the few remaining, if any) competitors.
Edit: I meant to imply that 4G would be more expensive. After checking briefly, the best offer I'm finding starts at $30/month for 5GB.
Fellow Americans, does it exist?
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...
That could change though as more providers are rolling out fiber. (AT&T just rolled out Fiber to the Home in my neighborhood, and Comcast says they will do the same soon.)
> Even these numbers overstate the amount of competition, because an ISP might offer service to only part of a census block. The percentage of households with choice is thus even lower.
This is especially true with DSL @10mb - it’s common for DSL providers to have lower speeds for some customers due to distance limitations. Also, is 2 providers at 10mb really enough ‘choice’ to force the market to do the right thing here? Especially considering that those 2 providers are likely one of only 3 or 4 national ISPs...
I am a huge proponent of market freedom and market choices, but the system we have now has embedded natural and regulatory monopolies and duopolies - that’s the opposite of a free market.
And Google's competition heavily incentivized that rolling out fiber. Imagine what the threat of a new entrant offering unthrottled internet would do to these hypothetical plans?
Why not create regulation in response to real scenarios that have actually happened instead of hypothetical ones that are already have plenty of other drawbacks?
http://www.businessinsider.com/verizon-netflix-youtube-throt...
Your other points hold up equally poorly: there are no unsolved technical hurdles in throttling or blocking specific sites or services -- as evidenced by the fact that they can and have already done so. As for "marketing" and "business model" and it being an "unpopular idea", these again fall back to the issue of consumer choice: in an effective monopoly, it doesn't matter a whit whether the populace dislikes the idea. It's not like Comcast is winning any popularity contests as it is.
And the current FTC regulations in question didn't do anything in regards to that issue you linked to?
It's the flip side of the same coin. Without net neutrality, ISPs will be able to charge content providers like Netflix a toll to not be throttled out of viablity -- who will then presumably pass the costs on to end consumers -- or the ISPs can directly charge end consumers an extra toll for access to the full internet. (Of course they'll do both, after some experimentation to find the best profit::outrage ratio.)
> And the current FTC regulations in question didn't do anything in regards to that issue you linked to?
...they kinda did? In that Verizon had to back off and wait for net neutrality to be repealed before they could try again?
(I assume you meant FCC, not FTC, in all of this. The FTC, of course, doesn't have any authority here until after the common carrier regulations are lifted. So, roughly a month from now.)
The FCC adopted NN principles in 2004 and did reactive, case-by-case enforcement of the principles without general regulation up until the federal courts stopped that approach in 2010. The two regulatory packages in 2010 and 2015 were largely based on the actual things that had been observed in the 2004-2010 period. That is, while they did consider and seek to preempt some new violations of the same principles, they were very much reactions to real scenarios that happened.
Comcast didn't count movies streamed through there service against the monthly cap. They did count movies streamed through netflix.
Competition surely can help, but currently there is no competition in a lot of places. It's basically monopoly / oligopoly situation, with collusion and market division to boot. So increasing competition is a good goal, but it shouldn't block preventing monopolistic abuse with legal means.
Monopolists also created a lot of blockers that prevent increasing competition. Such as local state laws that ban municipal networks which could solve this very problem.
Places with a lot of people? People who have been harmed by what NN is intending to fix?
> Monopolists also created a lot of blockers that prevent increasing competition.
Facilitated by government. If government was responsible in the first place, why not just undo what they did?
Yes and yes. I've lived all over southern California, but never anywhere that had two broadband providers available at the same address. Parts in cities; I'm not talking about little desert communities, or something. I have however been inconvenienced by various ISPs' content-based packet filtering policies.
> Facilitated by government. If government was responsible in the first place, why not just undo what they did?
Part of it is that you're talking about every individual local government, with lobbying from the incumbent ISPs. A lot of those governments have contracts with those incumbents, giving them franchise rights in the city. They can't just declare those contracts void.
Beyond the local level, a lot of states have laws that make setting up a new ISP difficult or impossible (especially municipally-operated internet access).
It doesn't depend on numbers. Depends mostly whether there is some other ISPs besides the coax provider (which are the most widespread).
I would love for you to use some of your training to supply your post with actual data or sources. Everything I see reported disagrees with so many of your assumptions.
Like your unstated assumption of some sort of fair and competitive market where they will lose money if they don't treat their customers right. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...
The internet is so vital to our modern world that it has become a human right in several countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access#Ensur...
The only time this has ever been done is in countries like Portugal to offer cheaper internet on limited mobile phone connections to people only who want Facebook/Twitter/etc for $5/m instead of a full internet connection for $20-30/m (typically also far cheaper than the US). It has never been tried to limit primary ISP internet connections.
Data requires actual numbers. I've repeatedly said in my comments I believe we should regulate things companies have done that are provably bad. Not hand wavy hypothetical things that sound like a terrible idea for any company to try.
Where I'm at, it's Comcast or nothing. Most of the US does not have any ISP competition. It's usually 1 ISP to choose from, or if you're lucky, 1 ISP with expected speeds and 1 ISP over DSL.
I really wish I lived somewhere with multiple options, because if anything like this website bundle scenario did play out, I wouldn't have any choice in avoiding it.
The internet is more vital to everyone now than compared to 15 years ago. Every year more and more people are choosing to eschew traditional cable for Netflix et al.
With NN being repealed, it opens up ways for ISP's to promote their own content and shut out others like nothing that's happened before. This whole repeal smacks of anti-consumerism and pro corporate nonsense.
Facebook. India. So-called free basics.
Charge internet companies for access to subscribers. Charge subscribers to access certain websites. It's a simple model.
>>No ISP for the ~15yr timeframe before the FTC regulation was passed a few years ago had ever offered such an arrangement.
Again, not true. https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/24/5541916/netflix-deal-with... https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/16010766/verizon-netflix-...
>>Plenty of ISPs have repeatedly said they have zero intention of doing it either (including a few this year). Not to mention no ISP in any other country has offered anything close to that either.
Why would you ever trust an ISP? If they were not going to take advantage of this new opportunity, then they should be fine with having the regulation stay in place. Also, wireless carriers which are in many ways analogous to ISPs already have started preying on consumers using this model https://imgur.com/yYobj7x
>>This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It wouldn't take much market research to see it's a terrible idea.
Market research and public opinion don't matter when you have no competition and have numerous state laws written for protection.
>>This would be a boon to any ISP who DIDN'T do this. Competition, and obvious lack of business sense, has always been a far larger counter-balance to this idea. Plus the huge technical challenge of filtering at the ISP level... this would be a huge boon for encryption and VPNs as well.
Again, there is little to no competition in most markets.
>>So I'm a bit confused why this is generating so much FUD over such a highly hypothetical and hand wavy scenario... as if the only thing stopping them from doing it was this three year old regulation.
It's not hypothetical at all, see above links. It's a big deal because it will ultimately be a huge wealth transfer away from consumers. You're not by chance Ajit Pai, are you?
Now, they explicitly are going to be unclassified, and we, the consumers, will be unprotected.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger
I've always loved that (admittedly apocryphal) story. It's one of the vanishingly-rare cases where someone successfully solved a social problem through purely technical means. Even if there's not a word of truth to it, it's a completely realistic description of what consumers can expect in a world without net neutrality. It can be considered a modern-day Aesop fable.
Once you've related the Strowger story, then you can speculate on how it might have unfolded if Ma Bell herself had owned the competing funeral home. That's basically where the Comcasts and Verizons of the world want to be.
All of the incumbent ISPs are charged with stewardship of public resources to one extent or another, if only because they require right-of-way access. The fact that many Americans have a grand total of one decent broadband provider to choose from is another factor that has to be considered, but often isn't.
Basically, net neutrality isn't a gift to the public, it's half of a longstanding bargain. The Trump administration proposes to unilaterally alter that bargain on behalf of corporate lobbyists who do not have consumers' interests in mind.
And it's not so much the wires, as the land the wires have to traverse. These areas are largely public rights-of-way already.
The hard part is giving people something useful and worthwhile to do about it.