Ask HN: What is the “other side” of the Net Neutrality argument?

- It's more expensive for an ISP to stream data from Netflix than it is to stream data from their own servers.

- Net neutrality would prevent a philanthropist from providing free wireless access to Wikipedia (but nothing else).

- Packets for real-time streaming should take priority over others.

- ISPs will bypass net neutrality restrictions by switching to proprietary non-standard channels.

- What's the difference between Amazon providing free shipping and Netflix offering free streaming?

- Net neutrality is a distraction for the real problem that is lack of competition and artificial monopolies.

> It's more expensive for an ISP to stream data from Netflix than it is to stream data from their own server

Where to begin...

1) Almost by definition, if you connect to Netflix via your ISP, you are streaming content “from” at least one “server” belonging to Netflix, and at least one “server” belonging to your ISP

2) Netflix is an especially bad example for your point, because they provide free caching appliances to any data center with enough traffic. So most of the time you are streaming Netflix, assuming you’re accessing the most recently popular content, you are literally streaming it from a “server” on your ISP’s network.

3) Your ISP does not pay Netflix for every byte it downloads from them. That is, traffic from ISP <-> Netflix does not cost your ISP anything more than traffic from ISP <-> news.ycombinator.com.

On point 3, it’s important to note that an ISP does not pay per unit transferred over its network. The only costs to the ISP are the fixed capital costs of network infrastructure and maintenance. Beyond that they may have transit agreements with other ISPs (usually mutual but in some cases maybe paid). But none of these agreements charge the ISP per gb.

The ISP builds pipes with capacity and then charges you based on how much you put through the pipe (whether directly through $/gb pricing, or indirectly through capped plans). They make their margins with overselling and traffic shaping. True, streaming Netflix does not cost your ISP extra, but it does take up capacity in those pipes. The reason ISPs are concerned is because dominant content providers effectively limit the ability of an ISP to oversell its capacity, reducing margins. It has nothing to do with increased cost of serving bytes from Netflix vs bytes from somewhere else.

The main argument against the current net neutrality laws is that they are unnecessary legislation and that government should only intervene with rules when some harm has been shown.

The internet worked just fine with respect to ISPs not favoring content before the net neutrality laws were passed in 2015. Yes, there were some instances of push and shove between content providers and ISPS but overall not a big problem. After all the internet has exploded in reach and scale prior to 2015 without that law.

You could argue that ending net neutrality enables more precise pricing models that would reflect the underlying cost of provision, so that people who aren’t consuming substantial bandwidth with services like Netflix, Spotify, BitTorrent, et al won’t be penalized by an implicitly higher plan price (because plan prices are likely currently modeled on consumption behavior near the median/mean).

For the record, I highly doubt the ISPs would pass any savings along to customers but you did ask for the other side :)

The other side is that net neutrality is just a bandage around the more fundamental problem: that there is not much competition between ISPs in the USA.

The seemingly endless debate around "net neutrality" arguably benefits ISPs, who have little to gain by being "non-neutral" but MUCH to gain by maintaining their local fiefdoms.

> After all, the employees of the ISPs are humans and must also be benefiting from Net Neutrality, no?

Corporate policy is not written based on fully-informed democratic vote of employees. Its set by management who is paid to act as an agent of the shared (usually, purely financial for a large public firm) interests of the shareholders.

AIUI the basic argument against net neutrality is "government regulation is bad, capitalism is good, let the ISPs do what they want and have the free market sort it out". And of course this is worth a lot of money to the ISPs. But the big problem here is there is no free market for ISPs.

> But the big problem here is there is no free market for ISPs.

What is the average number of ISPs available to a home? I have no data, but I'm guessing it's not very many. Not enough that there is effectively a free market.

Exactly. I believe that, for most places in the US, it's 1 or 2, though I don't actually have any concrete data.

For reference we have about 15 ISPs in Denmark (however not all of them cover all parts if the country). For my 100/20mbit line I’m paying ~$47 USD.. with no caps, limits or whatever.

If there is an argument against Net neutrality thats based on a free market, doesnt that actually require you guys to have a free market in the first place?

I like your approach, so let's take a look at this from the perspective of a traffic lane, which is how it is often described.

What if your local roads had two lanes, a fast lane and a slow lane. Anybody who pays to drive in the fast lane gets to go faster, anybody who doesn't pay is forced into the slow lane.

All the busses and other gov't vehicles get to drive in the fast lane. Uber makes a deal with the gov't which lets them drive in the fast lane.

The slow lane is set to an arbitrary 30km/h. You want to get to work, but it's 80km away. You could be there in an hour in the fast lane, but it's more than 2 in the slow lane. What do you do?

The gov't will tell you that the fast lane is great for prioritising traffic. Which may be true, but they've decided on the priority based on who has paid the most. Does that actually help you? They say, with the new system, we have all sorts of data on who travels on which roads and we can sell that data to pay for the system.

Ok, how do you benefit from that payment of a system which is actively preventing you from getting to work?

I don't know. Maybe I'm too close to the issue to see what the "other side" may be, other than $$$.

This is the most common argument FOR Net Neutrality, but I don't think there is any evidence to believe that this is exactly what ISPs will do if Net Neutrality ends.

I have a serious problem with the naming convention of “net neutrality.” It’s extremely confusing because it sounds like “net neutrality” is some abstract object up for debate. But in actuality, what’s up for debate is “anti net neutrality”.

The status-quo is net neutrality. If Congress/FCC were to do nothing, we would still have net neutrality.

In that sense, it’s confusing for non-technical, mainstream consumers to hear about the debate on “net neutrality” as if it’s a question of whether or not we should implement net neutrality. It’s already implemented simply by the absence of regulation.

This confusion, and all the convoluted technical discussion that goes along with it, leaves most people with little ability to discern who’s arguing for what.

Lobbyists and government regulators prey on this confusion. Their behavior is symptomatic of a much larger problem in US politics. Unfortunately the internet is now a hot target for the externalities of this political system.

The best move, as others have said, would be to do nothing. There is no need for regulation; the market is working.

Internet providers are like shipping companies. They charge you a price to deliver some volume of data/goods at a given speed.

- Should shipping companies be allowed decide what you can and can't ship?

- Should shipping companies be allowed to charge more to ship specific things?

- Should shipping companies be allowed to charge less to ship specific things?

- Should shipping companies allow stores to pay for shipping (free shipping)?

From my point of view, a curated internet would be much less noisy. I'd only be allowed to access to the content that I want to have access to.

Reducing the amount of useless and distracting information that I can see would increase my overall productivity. I realize I could just blacklist sites like reddit and youtube on my laptop, but when I have control over it, I'll just turn it off and browse anyway. If access came at a premium, I'd be much more selective of the information and content I consume through these distracting sites.

I don't think ending Net Neutrality is the best way of filtering the noise, but I think it is one (naive) attempt at doing so.

> From my point of view, a curated internet would be much less noisy. I'd only be allowed to access to the content that I want to have access to.

No, you'd only have access to the content that curator wanted you to have access to.

Ok, but the curators would need to provide a suitably large range of content in order to stay competitive.

They don't need to stay competitive because most areas of the country only have one option.

Nothing is less competitive than a government monopoly.

If something is going to be uncompetitive in any case, you strip the power to leverage that for additional control from the uncompetitive thing. Government road networks face no competition, but that's virtually never an issue because no one is leveraging that monopoly to restrict competition elsewhere, not to charge rents beyond what it takes to maintain he road network (or even sufficient to that end.)

Last mile connectivity is a natural monopoly, whether or not it is a government monopoly.

> Ok, but the curators would need to provide a suitably large range of content in order to stay competitive.

Assuming that there was robust competition or low barriers to entry so that new competitors could easily jump in, sure.

But that's basically nothing like the US ISP market.

Why do you think that the behaviour of corporations is a matter of belief? You "refuse to believe" that they want to "get more money", but profit is the raison d'etre of corporations. It's why they exist. Increasing profit is therefore the prime goal. Your refusing to believe it, in the face of the evidence of history, business logic, and political science, is analogous to the blind faith of flat-earthers.

And to think that the employees have any say in the policies is also hopelessly naive.

I've found snippets of Rand Paul's opinions on net neutrality, which basically sum up to "any government control in a market is bad".[1]

[1] Campaign for liberty's "The Technology Revolution" http://www.campaignforliberty.org/national-blog/c4l-introduc...

You can read Ajit Pai's statement here:

http://transition.fcc.gov/Daily_Releases/Daily_Business/2017...

> Today, I have shared with my colleagues a draft order that would abandon this failed approach and return to the longstanding consensus that served consumers well for decades. Under my proposal, the federal government will stop micromanaging the Internet. Instead, the FCC would simply require Internet service providers to be transparent about their practices so that consumers can buy the service plan that’s best for them and entrepreneurs and other small businesses can have the technical information they need to innovate.

If you get around the spin in that statement the argument is a fairly conventional one:

Government regulation inhibits technological innovation by requiring internet service providers to provide their services in the same way they always have. If regulations were removed new ideas could be tested in the market and no one can predict what new technological innovations may occur.

How is removing a regulation limiting freedom?

The real heart of this issue is not what Comcast or Verizon will do. If they did things that customers didn't like, and customers were free to leave (as they are now), then they would leave.

Rather the real heart of the issue is that customers may actually welcome the changes. Maybe most people would be happy with only having access to a few sites, or a slow lane for less cost. And the kind of folks who read hacker news would end up being collateral damage, and the original, global, universal vision of the internet will have been lost.

In my opinion the worst-case, dystopian scenario here is unlikely to happen. There are just too many people out there who really do value an open internet, and although there may be a period of adjustment, someone will enter the market to provide what customers want, though it may be significantly more expensive than before.

But I guess it comes down to whether or not you believe in the free market or not. The pendulum swings in american thought, and I'd say we're currently in the panic, distrust and pessimism side, but we'll head back the other direction in a few years.

They want to bring back the halcyon days of AT&T.

Big players get to control eyeballs and information dissemination. They’ll charge for the value generated by online services and reduce the chaos coming out of the Valley.

Read the Bellhead vs Nethead article from 90s wired.

Great question! First if you want to be more informed on the general topic of information distribution channels in history, such as the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, satellite communication and the internet, I highly recommend Tim Wu's book "the master switch".

As for the argument supported by the content distributors such as Comcast & Co (ISP) well it's fairly straightforward. They have been investing for years now in fiber optic cables around the USA and the world to ensure fast and reliable internet connection. It's probably important to note that these investment have often been made in private-public ventures where the US has invested lots of money. Now because in the current system (net neutrality) ISP have to open their fiber optics to anyone paying and cannot prioritize content transmission coming from their subscribers, they cannot ensure that all content will be delivered in time unless they always make sure there is extra transmission capacity in case their's a peak of transmission demand.

Until now, this has never been a problem because in the 90's, they invested so much in the infrastructure thinking it would be a goldmine that when the .com bubble burst in the early 2000 due to crazy investment in fiber optic, ISP's had to fill their lines to be able to pay for their investment. Now that they managed to fill them, they want to make more money without investing too much in infrastructure again because it's risky, time consuming, mega expensive (about a million a kilometer) and not as profitable as it could be without net neutrality. Another problem they are facing is that they are also becoming huge content providers, meaning you subscribe to an ISP and he will offer you TV programs, music, movies you can stream etc. When you pay for that service, they want to make sure you can stream without any buffering (because you paid for it right!) and they can't ensure that with net neutrality unless they always have a margin on the amount of information they infrastructure can handle.

Now this is where the real dilemma comes in: if you want to be able to pay for an ISP's content such as movies and don't want to have any buffering (which btw is almost inexistant today) then ending net neutrality would be a good option. On the other hand, if you want to subscribe to another content provider such as Netflix (if it doesn't belong to your ISP provider because they work with a competing company) then your IPS provider will not prioritize this content on their network and you will have a hard time watching the movie you also payed for! In short, this will tie you to your ISP, and if you don't have a choice of ISP's at home, then your access freedom to the market of content is reduced to what your ISP provider has to offer.

There is also a bigger fight at stake here. ISP's make their money by offering broadband and content to subscribers. The Valley make money mostly with advertisement. Advertisement is content that the ISP's have to "carry" which increases the broadband demand and reduces to IPS's ability to offer paying content to their subscribers, their market. In short, the Valley makes money off wide broadband offered by ISPs and do not pay for that as much as they should!

However, and this is my opinion, opinion you can find in the book i suggested at the beginning of this long post, it's not the right solution in this debate to let ISP's take control on the content distribution market by ending net neutrality. The harm caused by this change from the current situation would be much to great for users and the content provider market then the benefit these ISP would make. They arguments are valid but the solution proposed is flawed, especially considering that in the USA, you only have 4? ISP providers left for a 350 million american market. I believe our liberties are already reducing in terms of the information we are exposed too, it's not easy to find what you need out there (as you may have seen when searching information for this post) and we should not give the chance to huge companies or governments to interfere anymore because they may (and will) use it to their advantage when the time comes... and that the precise moment where We will need it the most!

Because it will ultimately lead to censorship, which will be very profitable.