Join the Battle for Net Neutrality
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Indonesia doesn't have net neutrality laws. That's the screenshot of Indosat (Internet Provider)'s app where you can buy data plan from. But as you can see, they sell data plans ala carte, per application in this case. If your favorite app is not there, you're shit out of luck and have to use the more expensive universal data plan.
Not only that, last year, the biggest home internet provider (Indihome), and the biggest mobile internet provider (Telkomsel), which both are owned by the government, banned Netflix under the guise of "Netflix hasn't rated nor censored their contents based on our country's rules". The truth is that both of them are selling their own movie streaming service. Indihome has partnership with iflix, and Telkomsel with HOOQ.
Now, if you buy new prepaid number from Telkomsel, this is the kind of data fuckery you will get. https://i.imgur.com/wb6gMBo.png
Why would an ISP want to prevent some small, unrelated startup from gaining exposure?
In other words, are these ‘walled garden’ plans aimed towards people who would otherwise buy a regular data plan or are they aimed at people for whom the choice is a walled plan or no plan.
In the end, it's just another revenue stream where, if they play it right, the consumer still pays the same, but the content providers also start paying. This means more money from the same bandwidth.
You say that like there's a hard line between them. No matter what it's "aimed at" it will hit people who want to save a buck and think they only need Facebook. Except that when there is a critical mass of people who no longer have the choice, Facebook's practices can become much more abusive because it becomes that much more difficult to leave. You have to convince everyone you know not only to use something else, but to use something that requires a more expensive data plan.
Moreover, consider what you're asking for, even if only lower income people subscribed. You want to take away the benefits of competition from the people with the least means. Talk about the poor get poorer.
So, under net neutrality your only option would be the "more expensive universal data plan"?
For one, Chinese ISPs are state owned (China Telecom, China Mobile, China Unicom, Great Wall). They do not have much of a profit motive outside the typical corruption of people at the top. Even with these state owned ISPs there are multiple choices for each address as these companies share infrastructure. The sharing of infrastructure in itself is similar to local loop unbundling, which does not exist in the US.
Another thing is that the tech community thrives at the behest of the government. Every time something happens it is generally due to changes in party policy that shift favor between companies.
Partitioning services is also not necessarily good. For example, large American ISPs generally have regional monopolies if not duopolies. They also own TV channels and movie studios. What is to prevent them from offering packages of their own services that are zero rated while charging extra for others (say, Steam or a new streaming service)?
I'll note that the FCC also regulates what can be said. Anyone remember when they investigated Stephen Colbert for his remarks on Trump?
The UK does have net neutrality. The UK internet is still loosely censored. I understand that a monopoly might mean a non-neutral net could be privately censored, and therefore functionally similar, but this is a distinct issue from state censorship.
Do we have any protection of that? As best I know (which isn't much), UK net neutrality is more along the lines of a polite understanding than anything enshrined in law.
(And it seems to be wobbling - cf. Three now offering you free data for Netflix/Spotify streaming, etc.)
Until an ISP starts preventing universal access nothing needs to be done, zero-rating (while bad for competition) does not do that.
A good question would be why aren't the competition petitioning the government to outright ban zero-rating? Current EU law has zero-rating loopholes, it'd be up to a post-brexit government to close them. Perhaps it's not popular with current ISPs and their customers? I don't think a large survey on net neutrality has been done in the UK.
I've never managed to connect anti-globalization with no net neutrality.
Please explain how you made that connection.
I am a fierce proponent of net neutrality, and I don't understand how you can reasonably conclude that I must therefore be pro-globalism.
Or how you can say that someone who is anti-globalist is probably also anti net neutrality.
That's the connection I don't understand. How do you make it?
Of course, a non-neutral net ends up with the ISPs as natural monopolies instead, but these are local and a lot closer to the state in most places.
How well this is linked to populist anti-globalism is not clear. The issue is obscured in America because the big players are American, but I think it plays better in Europe where privacy concerns about exporting data matter.
China is not a democracy so it is irrelevant that they are the leading economy on the planet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...
That doesn't say that they don't want to block anything, it's just that they are fighting what they don't like on the Internet using different means.
To elaborate on that with one specific example from Bosnia, there was a case in which a government wanted to cut the access to a site spreading ISIS propaganda in a local language. They've successfully shut down a top level domain they were using, after which they've switched to a *.wordpress.com domain. That lasted a really long time (years I would say), but a court order managed to shut down that one as well (individual reports to WordPress, including mine, did not). And after all of that, they've arrested the founder of the website.
EDIT: Here's a screenshot of WordPress' response to me when I reported the website: https://i.imgur.com/suHPZeF.png
Many do argue that the FCC shouldn't have the authority to regulate the internet, and often argue that idea to subtly change the subject.
If someone argues to abolish something, they should either argue in favor of a replacement, or argue that that thing should not exist at all. Unfortunately, I haven't heard even a flawed version of either argument.
Another faux argument I hear is the classic, "I am libertarian, and therefore must be against regulation of any form, and you can't change my mind." Obviously, that isn't an argument at all, and abusing libertarian ideology to look like an argument like that is seriously disappointing to any serious thoughtful libertarian, such as myself. This problem isn't specific to libertarianism either, but it is very popular in that community.
The core tenet to every position (not argument) I have heard against net neutrality is simply a position against regulation. The problem is that in the United States, we need to regulate ISPs, for several reasons:
1. There isn't enough competition: There are 6 ISPs in the US that control the majority of the market, and the majority of Americans are left with only one choice for >20mbit internet.
2. Net Neutrality is necessary to cultivate a free market of businesses that use the internet. Without net neutrality, the already centralized market of ISPs would cultivate centralized markets for each type of business that uses the internet.
TL;DR It is totally reasonable to be wary of regulation, or of the implementation of regulation. It may even be reasonable to consider net neutrality to be worthless or unnecessary in a truly free market, that has real competition between ISPs, but that isn't today's reality, so we would need to tackle that problem first.
The most convincing argument IMO is that it hurts people's internet access by sniffling innovation. It happened in India when Facebook tried to provide free "basic internet" access to poor rural Indians [1]. It was blocked on the ground of net neutrality since although it would provide access to very useful sites (weather, news, wikipedia, and yes, facebook), it was a sort of walled garden. Considering the alternative of no internet access or limited internet access, I think most people would agree that basic internet could have been a life saver to these people.
The other strong argument against net neutrality is that it's a trojan horse for internet regulation. When you have a legal framework for a regulatory body to tell and ISP you have to provide equal aaccess to "legitimate" content, I don't think it's too much of a stretch to consider that the natural extension of this is to tell the ISP they must block all "illegitimate" content
I think their walled-garden approach, if it received an overwhelmingly positive or at least unquestioned reception, would have set an even more dangerous precedent.
Governments don't (AFAIK) set up internet services as social welfare for the poor in other countries. Facebook doesn't have any borders. Unless they're actively told to keep their rabid growth in check, they will just keep going.
Nothing directly against Facebook here, but I definitely think it's better that the poor and uneducated throughout the world are not normalized into a Facebook(TM) world of knowledge. We've seen what's happened with a much milder and more open situation in the United States (and elsewhere) quite recently.
I disagree. The argument isn't sound anywhere.
For an ISP to limit its users to a subset of the internet causes several problems:
1. It forces users to use one set of services. That means a user with Facebook-only internet has no hope of avoiding Facebook and its abhorrent data-collection.
2. It prevents competition. Google+ would be unable to compete, since it does not exist on Facebook internet.
3. It stifles free software. The vast majority of free software projects have little to no budget. If they must pay for competitive bandwidth, they face an uphill battle against proprietary products produced by wealthy corporations.
4. It favors centralized networking. If all of your users are constrained to a subset of the web, that likely means they cannot connect directly to each other. This totally rules out mesh networking, bittorrent, private voip, etc. On a non-neutral web, users will be constrained in their ability to run there own servers. This is already a problem with many ISPs disallowing public IP addresses.
> Key findings include the following: 10 percent of all Americans (34 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps service. 39 percent of rural Americans (23 million people) lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps. By contrast, only 4 percent of urban Americans lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps broadband.
Majority do have broadband access but it’s still a problem for some
https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/reports/broadband-progr...
In other words, I want to be convinced that:
1) There is a problem here at all. The regulation that is being repealed was only introduced 2 years ago; how did we get along before that?
2) This problem can be solved by this regulation (not all regulation achieves its goals, and sometimes it is even counter productive).
3) Regulation is the best/only solution for this problem (what other solutions to the problem described in 1 have been proposed, and why are they not suitable)
I think serious answers to these types will be far more convincing than the typical simplified arguments along the lines of "What if comcast creates a competitor to netflix and prioritizes its own streaming service".
TL;DR: I think some libertarians are not so much against regulation as they are skeptical of it, and are willing to be convinced that certain regulations are good, on a case-by-case basis.
Similarly, this post also doesn't read as the beginning of a debate or a discussion; it reads as the end of one. All three of your demands taken together imply "Net Neutrality doesn't matter. If any regulation is not perfect then we should get rid of it", which is both a ludicrous position to hold on NN, and a facet of "I am against all regulation" which the intro supposedly distanced itself from.
An appeal to reason is all well-and-good, but using it as a sandwich for an obvious Nirvana fallacy, makes your points impossible to swallow.
Also I don't think it's fair to say that since I'm not convinced by what you consider reasonable answers therefore I'm the one who is wrong, instead of entertaining the possibility that those answers are not as convincing as you think, to someone who isn't already convinced.
1) There is a problem here at all. The regulation that is being repealed was only introduced 2 years ago; how did we get along before that?
Yes, there is a problem here. ISPs have already started overstepping the bounds by extorting money from Netflix. T-mobile has a plan out right now that gives you unlimited Netflix, but rate limits everything else. This is a violation of the principles of Net Neutrality.
Yes, there is a problem.
There wasn't much of one before, because the ISPs were very careful not to upset the balance. In the past five years though, they've started seeing what they can get away with. Net Neutrality regulation is a response to the ISPs testing the waters.
2) This problem can be solved by this regulation (not all regulation achieves its goals, and sometimes it is even counter productive).
Probably. It's fairly easy to say "all ISPs have to treat all packets the same." Then have yearly audits of internal routing infrastructure.
3) Regulation is the best/only solution for this problem (what other solutions to the problem described in 1 have been proposed, and why are they not suitable)
I don't believe regulation IS the best solution. Not so much because the regulation itself is bad, but because each set of people who get into power have a different idea of what the regulations should look like, so it ping-pongs back and forth ad-infinitum.
I think the best solution is for towns to build municipal fiber that competes with existing ISPs. The infrastructure could be rented out to local ISPs who compete on the publicly-owned lines. If Comcast wants to charge people out the ass for shitty service that rate limits (or hell, censors) certain websites, go for it...but there are 20 other local companies who give faster speeds for cheaper prices that support Net Neutrality.
The problem is, Comcast generally stops this kind of market competition from happening via propaganda campaigns and jamming through state laws that prohibit it. A municipality entering the market is still a free-market competition, so it should be an option supported by libertarians.
Many (including myself) have for years thought that this wasn't a problem. How did we get along before this?
But there are dozens of cases before NN was codified, where ISPs were blocking and slowing down traffic. One of the most high profile was how Comcast was slowing down Netflix in the NY Metro Area.
After the rules went into place, Netflix speeds just magically increased, and Comcast said it was a coincidence. Uh huh, sure.
there was a technical reason for the performance improvement; netflix started peering with Comcast: http://www.businessinsider.com/paid-peering-explained-2014-2
but let's consider the world where the pipes stayed the same size; suddenly the lawyers say you have to stop shaping Netflix traffic (shaping means randomly dropping TCP traffic in order to signal to both ends that congestion exists in the network and they should slow down sending). Lack of shaping means congestion and slowness for all content traversing the same pipe, not just the heaviest users. So people watching Netflix get a slightly better quality and less buffering, but it takes 10 seconds to load any website traversing that pipe.
In fact, if net neutrality regulation creates additional compliance costs it might actually reduce competition by increasing the barriers to entry for new ISPs.
2. I think most people would agree that the Internet should generally remain a level playing field for all businesses.
However, it's not clear that net neutrality regulation is necessary to maintain such a level playing field. It wasn't necessary in the past. Moreover, there is potential for consumer benefit associated with some kinds of content discrimination, which net neutrality regulation might unjustly prohibit.
The reality is that if the US broadband industry was competitive we wouldn't be having this argument. We should fix that first, then see if we still need net neutrality regulation.
There are short-term consumer benefits, in my country we have zero-rated services, where browsing certain sites costs no data. However this completely undermines the concept of the free market. Any competitor to the zero-rated service has a massive hurdle to overcome, either competing with free, or paying the ISP to have the same deal applied to their service.
And there are also cases of abuse. Mobile operators began charging roughly $2 per MB of data for any VOIP traffic, forcing consumers to use standard calls.
By refusing to subject ISPs to regulations, we subject the Internet to the whims of the ISPs.
How could this possibly be zero? If a town's ISP has a bandwidth of 100Gb/s and has a demand of 200Gb/s by their customers, they can:
- prioritize certain bits such as live streaming that can't be slown down without degrading user experience, unlike text (current solution)
- slow down everything as forced by FCC's Net Neutrality (which would make live streaming unwatchable)
- invest in bigger infrastructure and pass the cost down to consumers (which is not zero cost as you claim)
So there you go. Another fun fact, for anyone that has lived through the 80's and 90's, the FCC censored TV and radio to hell with list of words, topics and images that could not be used on public broadcasting as it was considered to be public utility. If the FCC considers the internet public utility in order to impose Net Neutrality, they will be granted the same power as they were on tv. If you think twitter censorship sucks, wait for what's coming when Trump or another administration decides to impose similar rules through the FCC with the excuse that it's now a public utility and that using bad words (against politicians or else) at a certain hour is bad for kids. Don't forget that the boss of the FCC is nominated by Trump. People love asking the government for more regulations even though they always end up paying a high price for it. Just be careful what you ask for is all I'm saying.
Yes it is.
> It wasn't necessary in the past.
There have been abuses already. I don't expect ISPs will dive into full-blown abuse immediately, but they will ease their way into it.
> Moreover, there is potential for consumer benefit associated with some kinds of content discrimination
Could you give an example, because I certainly can't think of any.
> The reality is that if the US broadband industry was competitive we wouldn't be having this argument. We should fix that first, then see if we still need net neutrality regulation.
Absolutely! That is exactly the problem I was trying to express. To abolish net neutrality while the market is in this state is clearly a bad idea.
Abolishing net neutrality will not do anything to promote a competition, so it's important that we start finding things that will.
Agreed, but net neutrality regulation never claimed it would. The concept of net neutrality accepts the fact that we do not (and cannot) have a free, competitive market for internet access, and tries to ensure that incumbents do not engage in anti-consumer practices that they wouldn't be able to do _if_ it were possible to have sufficient competition.
> 2. I think most people would agree that the Internet should generally remain a level playing field for all businesses.
> However, it's not clear that net neutrality regulation is necessary to maintain such a level playing field.
It's not, but no one seems to have any better ideas. Simply ditching net neutrality is nearly guaranteed to erode that level playing field. I'd be happy to entertain other ideas to maintain it, but no one seems to be presenting those, and the FCC is removing something useful without proposing an effective replacement (or any replacement at all, for that matter).
> It wasn't necessary in the past.
Wasn't it? Isn't the current net neutrality regulation a direct response to anti-consumer behavior by ISPs?
> Moreover, there is potential for consumer benefit associated with some kinds of content discrimination, which net neutrality regulation might unjustly prohibit.
The only benefit I can think of is short-term "lock-in" type behavior: stuff like Spotify streaming not counting toward your data cap. All that does is make Spotify more enticing and get users locked in, all due to an entirely synthetic advantage.
While this provides a short-term benefit to the customer, it provides long-term negatives as Spotify's competitors are forced out of the market, and new upstart competitors don't stand a chance.
Uncapped streaming is a fairly minor thing they could do (some streaming services already do this, and I'm pissed they're able to get away with it) and likely wouldn't hurt competitors enough to kill them, but unwinding net neutrality regulations would allow them to engage in crippling anti-competitive behavior, like making deals with ISPs to charge _their_ customers more for access to other streaming services.
> The reality is that if the US broadband industry was competitive we wouldn't be having this argument. We should fix that first, then see if we still need net neutrality regulation.
We can't. It is absolutely not in the public's interest to allow just anyone to dig up roadsides and bury cable, and radio spectrum is too scarce a resource to allow robust competition. Do you have any ideas as to how to get around that?
Realistically how much more of an issue will this be than it is now? In the UK, mobile providers already offer 6-month Spotify/Netflix/whatever subscriptions as a sweetner with your contract, which seems like the same issue to me but in a non-technological sense. New upstarts don't have the money nor the brand recognition to make that happen.
Netflix has become a part of the Collective consciousness, arguably on a similar level to googling something. Even with all the net neutrality laws in the world behind them I pitty the upstart who think they can go up against the current big players in the market (which includes content studios) and win. Spotify can't be said to have the same sort of recognition but Apple Music probably can, owing to it being featured on every iPhone and iTunes installation. New upstarts can't afford to release a smartphone to push their services, either.
It's capitalism. ISPs love short-term customer benefits, because the customers love them too. Once their customer base are fed up with their free Spotify sub, the ISP will have had 12 months to come up with the next thing. And so it will continue in theory until we all have huge data caps as standard anyway so none of this will matter. And then somebody will come up with a way to double the size of Netflix streaming video for a few more pixels and then we start again.
Yes you can. Have the municipality be the one responsible for running fiber from reaidences to common access points. The the ISPs all have equal access and you can change ISPs very easy.
But again, politics and encumbent ISPs will prevent this.
I believe much of the opposition to it on my side of the aisle is based on the flawed assumption that any policy instituted during the Obama administration was a bad policy.
My preference would be that Congress passed legislation making net neutrality the law of the land, but in the absence of that, Title 2 classification with FCC forbearance is better than nothing.
The fringe refuses to see the massive risk of not supporting net neutrality by government.
In their minds, any form of goverment is evil, and if it didn’t exist, we’d all live in paradise, free from chemtrails and tax sheets.
After going through these arguments and others linked here, I can safely say it's all excuses and handwaves; a thin veneer over an anarachist misanthropy.
Which isn’t too different from other conspiracy circles actually.
But yeah it might be nice to make it just work well, without any respect for and to whom or what. All that matter is how. It should work well, how do we do that?
Some cities are deciding to build their own infra. Good. Now if only they'd explicitly adopt their surrounding rural areas and include them in the program. Because this same FCC is dropping the subsidies for rural internet and telephone.
That's just a silly argument.
If we are going there, let's first have the ISPs vacate all public rights of way and return all government subsidies.
I oppose net neutrality regulation. In principle, I don't think there's anything wrong with an ISP prioritizing certain kinds of traffic over others, so long as it does not have an anti-competitive effect.
For example, I don't see how Netflix paying Comcast to zero-rate Netflix traffic is fundamentally different from Amazon contracting with mail carriers to subsidize the cost of shipping for Amazon purchases, or even -- to use an example another commenter made -- an appliance manufacturer contracting with electrical utilities to subsidize the cost of electricity used by their appliances. So long as Comcast makes its zero-rating program available to all content providers -- including their own -- on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, I don't think there are any competition issues.
I've heard people argue that zero-rating makes it harder for smaller content providers to compete, since they won't have the resources to subsidize their customers' traffic. As I said in another comment, that's just the nature of business. Being big affords you certain advantages, like economies of scale. This makes it easier to compete on price. Smaller companies have to compete in other ways.
In my view, the real problem with the telecom industry in the United States is a lack of competition [0], a problem caused at least in part by municipal [1] and state [2] governments. With more competition, net neutrality would be a non-issue. Consumers would just stop using ISPs that unfairly discriminate between traffic.
[0] http://www.nationalreview.com/article/410353/net-neutrality-...
[1] https://www.wired.com/2013/07/we-need-to-stop-focusing-on-ju...
[2] http://broadbandnow.com/report/municipal-broadband-roadblock...
Comcast's customers are requesting the data; if Comcast were a second tier backbone, or an AS between two others, then it would make sense to charge for traffic, as it doesn't benefit. But the traffic going to Comcast is there to benefit its subscribers, without which, Comcast doesn't make enough money. The most bizarre thing is that if the customers were to upload the same amount of data back to the sites, then they wouldn't be charged, as the data was symmetrical!
Why would an ISP be able to charge other AS's for sending traffic to its own customers? If there were even a single competitor in that region, this dynamic would change completely.
I don't think there's anything especially wrong with this business model. It's similar to how a newspaper charges both readers and advertisers for access. The disadvantage is that you have to keep both parties happy.
Incidentally, if customers uploaded the same amount of data as the Internet services, Comcast wouldn't get transit fees but it would get additional revenue from the customers, so I think things would balance out.
Yes, but this is where your analysis breaks down: it's not a free market. The customers are a captive market.
> Similarly, Comcast provides access to customers, which the Internet companies who provide those services (and associated CDNs and transit providers) want and are willing to pay for.
The Internet companies are only willing to pay because they have no other alternatives. They only pay because Comcast has a monopoly and thus acts as a gatekeeper, and then only because Comcast has such a large market share that refusing Comcast would deprive them of a significant part of the market. Calling this "voluntary" participation in a two sided market is absurd. Blackmail is what it is.
When anybody else than Comcast tries this, they are laughed at and told to piss off.
> I don't think there's anything especially wrong with this business model.
There's plenty wrong. The subscribers have already paid full price and now Comcast wants more, this time from the Internet companies, without which Comcast would have nothing to sell.
> It's similar to how a newspaper charges both readers and advertisers for access.
This is just a bad analogy, again. Newspaper readers aren't paying full price for the newspaper, and they are not paying for getting access to the adverts.
> Incidentally, if customers uploaded the same amount of data as the Internet services, Comcast wouldn't get transit fees but it would get additional revenue from the customers, so I think things would balance out.
This just plain incorrect. Comcast wouldn't get a penny more from it's subscribers. Internet access is inherently asymmetrical. Were subscribers to use their upstream more, it would not result in any more revenues.
So, I put up a small SaaS that I want people to use. In your world, I now have to go knock on the door of all the ISPs out there to pay them for access to their customers?
The international postal network is a bit more analogous. Let's say you order something from Widget Industrie in France. They pay La Poste to send it to your door in the US. La Poste transfers it to USPS, and pays USPS part of the postage to handle their end of it. Now imagine that USPS leaves your package on the warehouse floor for three weeks because Widget Industrie didn't sign up for their "expedited service" plan. Widget Industrie has never even talked to USPS, maybe doesn't even know that USPS exists.
Of course, international mail is regulated and has had "mail neutrality" since the 19th century, so you don't have to worry about that.
If some company wants to provide specialized data services so that Netflix can send data through their service to customers, that's fine with me. But that's not "the internet." These companies should decide whether they want to provide "internet access" or just specialized paid data access. Back to the mail analogy, FedEx and UPS have much more flexibility in terms of how they operate than USPS does, but as a consequence they don't get to participate in the international mail system.
And indeed, this already happens. Many ISPs provide phone and TV services separate from "internet" services. Nobody is complaining that Netflix can't get into your cable TV package, even though it's all just digital bits on the wire these days. But they don't call it "internet service." When they call a service that, there are certain expectations.
I agree that a lack of competition is the major problem here. If any given ISP customer had a dozen services to choose from, this would all go away. But that's a vastly more difficult problem. Saying we shouldn't worry about net neutrality because the real solution is competition is like saying we shouldn't worry about social security because the real problem is aging. Yes, if we solved aging we wouldn't need social security, but that's not a realistic approach.
Can't have that if there is no competitive ISP you can change to, if you don't like this NN violating ISP.
> For example, I don't see how Netflix paying Comcast to zero-rate Netflix traffic is fundamentally different from Amazon contracting with mail carriers to subsidize the cost of shipping for Amazon purchases
This analogy breaks down immediately, because Comcast is already getting Netflix traffic for free. There is no toll that needs to be subsidized, no charge that needs to be zero rated. Comcast is just blackmailing Netflix for protection money.
> or even -- to use an example another commenter made -- an appliance manufacturer contracting with electrical utilities to subsidize the cost of electricity used by their appliances.
Another bad analogy. There is no "cost of electricity" equivalent incurred by Comcast. The Netflix bits are free to Comcast.
> So long as Comcast makes its zero-rating program available to all content providers -- including their own -- on reasonable and non-discriminatory terms, I don't think there are any competition issues.
You do realize that this effectively sets up Comcast as the gatekeeper to the Internet? Do you really want Comcast to be able to decide what's on your Interwebz?
That's even before we get into the fact that requiring to contract with Comcast before you can offer any online service is a barrier to entry and a competitive barrier.
The whole idea is absurd. This way lies the Balkanization of the Internet and Internet fiefdoms.
We already tried something similar and it was a shitshow. Remember how insane and difficult it was to offer premium and value add SMS services back in the days, when you had to cut deals with every single cell phone company before you could offer your service?
> I've heard people argue that zero-rating makes it harder for smaller content providers to compete, since they won't have the resources to subsidize their customers' traffic. As I said in another comment, that's just the nature of business. Being big affords you certain advantages, like economies of scale. This makes it easier to compete on price. Smaller companies have to compete in other ways.
So that's your solution? Screw the small guys?
Lets institutionalize a protection racket, so that only big players can offer service because they can afford to grease the right palms.
> In my view, the real problem with the telecom industry in the United States is a lack of competition [0], a problem caused at least in part by municipal [1] and state [2] governments. With more competition, net neutrality would be a non-issue. Consumers would just stop using ISPs that unfairly discriminate between traffic.
Now you are on the right track. However none of this helps with the immediate problems. Most people have a monopoly provider. You can't change providers if there are no options. Even if we start now, there won't be another option for years.
Meanwhile monopoly providers will use their monopoly to extract monopoly rents, both from customers and online services, best they can. We should not give them permission to gouge more by repealing NN.
As to your list of problems, you forgot to add the FCC killing line sharing due to the Brand X case. If we had that, then we could theoretically have had competition even over a monopoly last mile infrastructure.
Sure, but that indicates a need for competition, not net neutrality. As I said in another comment, even if it prevents some of the worst abuses by incumbents, net neutrality regulation isn't going to create more competition.
> This analogy breaks down immediately, because Comcast is already getting Netflix traffic for free. There is no toll that needs to be subsidized, no charge that needs to be zero rated. Comcast is just blackmailing Netflix for protection money.
I don't think you understand the example. Mail carriers also get packages from Amazon for "free" in that sense. They don't pay Amazon for the right to deliver Amazon's mail.
It occurs to me that there is a difference in that the recipients of packages do not need to pay to receive them, whereas Internet users pay for access. There's no reason why mail services couldn't work that way in theory, though.
> You do realize that this effectively sets up Comcast as the gatekeeper to the Internet? Do you really want Comcast to be able to decide what's on your Interwebz?
If the market was sufficiently competitive, then Comcast wouldn't be the gatekeeper. If Comcast behaved badly, people would switch to a different provider.
Not every instance of possible bad behaviour needs to be regulated.
> That's even before we get into the fact that requiring to contract with Comcast before you can offer any online service is a barrier to entry and a competitive barrier.
We're talking about zero-rating, not "requiring to contract with Comcast before you can offer any online service". Those are completely different things.
> So that's your solution? Screw the small guys?
My solution is to increase competition, actually. My point is that we don't penalize big companies for being successful by taking away the benefits of being big, such as economies of scale. The "small guys" have to compete as well and shouldn't rely on the state to reduce consumer benefit in order to make it easier for them to increase their market share.
> Even if we start now, there won't be another option for years.
That's not necessarily true. For example, the FCC could do what Canada does and require ISPs to sell Internet access at fixed wholesale rates to resellers. Competition will spring up overnight.
There are many other approaches as well, such as blocking municipalities from entering into monopoly franchise agreements with ISPs, ensuring equal access to rights of way, and supporting municipal broadband.
> If the market was sufficiently competitive, then Comcast wouldn't be the gatekeeper.
> My solution is to increase competition, actually.
> Competition will spring up overnight.
You keep saying this, but I don't think you understand:
1) That businesses like this do not spring up overnight, even in the figurative sense.
2) The incumbent ISPs lobby to reduce competition (often getting laws on the books to make it illegal for municipalities to offer internet access), and are largely very successful at it.
3) Rural areas basically get fucked, because there won't be enough money in new competition.
4) In the meantime, we have nothing to protect customers. Let's say you're right, and we can somehow increase competition. No, it's not going to happen overnight. What's going to protect customers in the meantime, after current net neutrality regulation is rolled back? Nothing. Removing regulation that has been obsoleted by other measures is fine and the right thing to do, but there's nothing to replace it right now that will have the same effect.
> For example, the FCC could do what Canada does and require ISPs to sell Internet access at fixed wholesale rates to resellers.
So why is this kind of "anti-free-market" regulation ok, while net neutrality rules aren't? (Also, we tried this. Most smaller players that took advantage of it failed because, while the Comcasts of the US were required to _provide_ access, there wasn't really a way to require that they provide it easily, or provide good service and reliability with it. And I believe this ended up getting repealed due to... you guessed it, lobbying efforts from the incumbents.)
I'm just really getting tired of all this "increase competition" rhetoric coming from people who seem to think they live in a fantasy world where it's easy, or even possible, to get these sorts of things done, especially in the current political climate.
Per your second point regarding the imminency of a free market, is that not also a regulation being imposed upon ISP's? You're proposing regulation on the physical infrastructure whilst NN argues for regulation (or non-regulation as it were) of data. What is the difference in your opinion?
Actually, it's access to the last mile that's sold a fixed rates. The ISPs lease aggregated links to the last mile network depending on how much capacity they need. These ISPs have their own internet uplinks. There are ISPs that are just pure resellers but I'm not sure if this is regulated.
But even this had a net neutrality issue. The ISPs leasing out the last mile access started to throttle certain traffic (bittorrent and VPNs) for their customers AND the customers of the ISPs that leased the last mile.
Recently the fight was over access to the new FTTH connections.
True. I'm fine with not requiring NN in markets where there are at least four more equivalent or better options to chose from, one of which has to be following NN.
> As I said in another comment, even if it prevents some of the worst abuses by incumbents, net neutrality regulation isn't going to create more competition.
Again true, but that does not mean we should allow NN abuse in the absence of competition.
>> This analogy breaks down immediately, because Comcast is already getting Netflix traffic for free. There is no toll that needs to be subsidized, no charge that needs to be zero rated. Comcast is just blackmailing Netflix for protection money. > I don't think you understand the example. Mail carriers also get packages from Amazon for "free" in that sense. They don't pay Amazon for the right to deliver Amazon's mail.
I understand the example just fine, it's you that's got the wrong end of the stick.
Your first error is equating the mail carriers with Comcast. Comcast is not the mail carrier. The mail carriers are not the recipients of each piece of mail. Comcast, on the other hand, is the recipient of the bits.
A more apt analogy is that Comcast is the building owner with a mail room. The mail carrier drops off letters to the mail room, for free to Comcast. Comcast then distributes the letters to each tenant, who all pay Comcast for this letter delivery service.
Not a single building owner would get their mail delivered by the mail carriers, if they had a guard standing at the mail room door and if that guard demanded payment before letting anybody pass. In fact that would be a really quick way of ending up in court.
Your second error is thinking that the delivery of mail is the same as the delivery of bits. Each piece of mail requires incremental energy and manhours to deliver, whereas Comcast does not incur any marginal cost for taking delivery of and passing along the bits that their customers have requested.
>> You do realize that this effectively sets up Comcast as the gatekeeper to the Internet? Do you really want Comcast to be able to decide what's on your Interwebz? >If the market was sufficiently competitive, then Comcast wouldn't be the gatekeeper. If Comcast behaved badly, people would switch to a different provider.
Yes, that's how it works in theory. Too bad Comcast doesn't have any competition in most areas. What's your non-theoretical solution?
> Not every instance of possible bad behaviour needs to be regulated.
So, allow bad behavior until somebody comes along with billions of dollars and builds out a (hopefully) better behaved competitor?
>> That's even before we get into the fact that requiring to contract with Comcast before you can offer any online service is a barrier to entry and a competitive barrier. > We're talking about zero-rating, not "requiring to contract with Comcast before you can offer any online service". Those are completely different things.
Please explain how those are different things. How will I be able to stream HD cat videos to my users with Comcast without contracting with Comcast for zero rating?
>> So that's your solution? Screw the small guys? > My solution is to increase competition, actually. My point is that we don't penalize big companies for being successful by taking away the benefits of being big, such as economies of scale.
How is being able to afford to pay protection money an economy of scale?
> The "small guys" have to compete as well and shouldn't rely on the state to reduce consumer benefit in order to make it easier for them to increase their market share.
Wait, what?! How is consumer benefit reduced by abolishing NN? How is consumer benefit reduced by increased availability of online services?
>> Even if we start now, there won't be another option for years. > That's not necessarily true. For example, the FCC could do what Canada does and require ISPs to sell Internet access at fixed wholesale rates to resellers. Competition will spring up overnight.
You know, that's what we had with the Telecom Act of '96. The FCC decided we shouldn't have that after they lost the Brand X case.
Any other suggestions? Preferably some which can be practically implemented in a reasonably short time frame, such as years instead of decades.
> There are many other approaches as well, such as blocking municipalities from entering into monopoly franchise agreements with ISPs, ensuring equal access to rights of way, and supporting municipal broadband.
I'm all aboard with these suggestions, but even with all of these any improvement will take years, if not decades, and presupposes billions of capital and totally ignores the winner takes all of natural monopolies.
Soooo... you're in favor of net neutrality regulation, then.
ISPs should be dumb pipes, the end.
Note: The views of the mentioned organizations do not necessarily reflect my own views.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_Basics
[1] https://blog.wikimedia.org/2014/08/01/wikipedia-zero-and-net...
The big ones back-haul to a major hub and then enter in to several peering agreements. Depending on what service/site you use the "best" path will be over one of those peers.
However, this means that there is usually a middle-man-network in between you and the service you want and neither you, your ISP, nor the service can directly control the quality or speed of that network. If Netflix, Hulu and Google all end up with a "best" path on a single peer its going to be bad during prime time even though other services connected on other peers may operate normally.
One version of a "fast lane" (like the one that Comcast and Netflix negotiated) is to remove that middle man and directly peer with the service. This is only available to large services because they need a presence in these major hubs as it usually requires a direct physical connection between edge routers.
Now, no matter how congested their peers get, the "fast lane" service is working well. They have probably also agreed not to charge the actual "market" rate on that link's bandwidth as it is mutually beneficial and the ISP should pass those savings to its users by not counting the service against any data caps etc.
From the outside, this looks like extortion. The reality though is that both sides pursue these kinds of deals all the time because it benefits their customers and therefore their bottom-lines. ISPs push harder for them because services, like Netflix, are incentivized to find the lowest cost transport peer which is usually not the highest quality. When that peering link is bad, customers blame the ISPs not Netflix.
Netflix used to brag about how cheap and cut-rate their cost per gigabyte was. How do you think they got such a good deal? It wasn't by purchasing the best connection to their customers. It was become some sales exec at a tier 1/2 internet transport provider oversold their poor service. We should be just as upset with the overselling of transport over peers as we are about ISPs throttling but, most of the internet citizens don't understand how that works.
Another note, most of the times when people use VPNs to "prove" that their ISP is throttling network capacity for a service, they are simply routing over a different peer (the one that connects to their VPN). In ideal circumstances this is traveling over a sub-optimal path and should suffer a little bit. However, in times of heavy congestion it is like being routed around a traffic jam. It is "very hard" with current routing protocols on the backbone to do this kind of "flow around" for congested paths in real-time for everyone. Single users are manually implementing it by hitting VPNs.
But the offering of Wikipedia Zero clashes with the idea of net neutrality.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Free_Zone
[1] http://web.archive.org/web/20130704133456/http://www.google....
The common counter argument seems to be that "Regulation is bad for the open market" and that "Better options would come up if an ISP starts doing weird shit, if the market demands it".
It's interesting to me that the very same people seem to be pro Freedom of Press/Freedom of Speech (as a German, the US Freedom of Speech is something I'm not used to, something that doesn't align with my culture/upbringing), but feel different about this subject because it involves a "market"?
Definitely the bar to become ISP is too high, lower it and the problem will be gone. I don't belive that people don't want to become ISP just like that - something is wrong here.
On the other hand I have to say that sane regulations make sense, for instance mobile operators in Poland who own hardware infrastructure are obliged by law to sell bandwith to virtual operators when requested. That indeed lowered prices and provided better serivces including mobile internet. However, to have a full picture, I need to say that at the down of mobile telephony in Poland, initial investment and infrastructure was build by companies owned or controlled by the state, so, to some extent, infrastructure was payed from public money and later sold to 100% private entities.
The real reason we have few ISPs is that building facilities require large amounts of capital, returns are low and the incumbents have already built out the profitable markets.
Regulation is not the root of the problem. Sure, lessening the burden would help, but not solve the problem.
Documented abuses of net neutrality were few and far between and there really wasn't a precedent for the 2010 Act in the first place. Mobile phone carriers are not subject to the same net neutrality rules, yet I haven't heard of any of the 4 major providers deliberately throttling internet service.
That's Libertarianism. Everything done by government is bad, everything done by businesses is good. Looking at the actual effects is verboten.
But it's kinda weird to see you use 'verboten' - probably to make this sound "really bad",in some sort of authoritarian way - in a reply to a post that contains the words "as a German". That seems inappropriate.
* health care pre-payment with no residual value plan
The federal government could foreseeably take back some of that infrastructure by building it itself. The last mile is the most expensive part, so why not build a fiber backbone to every public school, and then let the municipal government's decide if/when/how they cover the last mile implementation?
That is a correlation expressed as a causation.
1) ISPs agree not to compete; and
2) It is expensive for new entrants to build infrastructure.
It would be ideal to solve NN with free market.
But the ISPs have monopolies that prevent competition.
Making net neutrality necessary today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incumbent_local_exchange_carri...
2) It is expensive for new entrants to build infrastructure. --> Yes, but if the ROI is sufficient, it can still get done.
3) Local / state government "franchise" agreements which grant incumbents monopoly (or near monopoly) status. --> the real killer. If the local government regulates you out of the market, it's game over.
First off, no: we don't allow any random company to dig up our roadsides to lay cable, and that's a good thing.
But let's say we did. So you want to attract competition by showing the newcomers that they can make more money than in the net-neutrality era by engaging in anti-customer behavior? How is _that_ good? Or are you expecting more competitors to come in out of the goodness of their hearts and "settle" for building a current-style (quite lucrative) ISP business without that behavior, making less money?
However that breaks down once you consider the fact that it's not practical at all. Not to mention that providers would have no reason to offer such cheap offerings, either.
Sure they might. Large companies with deep pockets subsidize the premise to their own benefit (whatever that happens to be). In your example, let's say instead it's $3 per month for just Facebook services (FB, Instagram, WhatsApp, etc). Comcast partners with Facebook on the effort, in which Facebook pays a few dollars per month to subsidize the user plan.
Facebook currently derives something close to $9 per month from US & Canadian members. They hit 45.6% net income margins last quarter, which is extraordinary. They're set to become the greatest pound for pound profit machine in world history, they can afford to use some of that margin to further lock in their monopoly by purchasing preferential access treatment in numerous ways.
Online services (Google, Facebook, ...) make just a few bucks per user. This is peanuts compared to what broadband costs. The fixed costs alone are tens of dollars per month.
"Called Free Basics, it provided only limited access to the Internet through a suite of websites and services that, unsurprisingly, included Facebook"
https://www.cnet.com/news/why-india-doesnt-want-free-basics/
Instead, ISPs want to leverage their almost-exclusive control of Internet access to unfairly crush competition.
Users can choose not the use Facebook. Many users cannot choose not to use Comcast, because Comcast is the only ISP in the area.
Lack of competition among ISPs make them different from web companies.
By definition you're devaluing the infrastructure. This is saying, infrastructure does not deserve to make money, only ads deserve to make money.
I'd rather ISPs not compete in web services and instead make money providing the pipes as it's an important job in its own right.
Your logic leads to bad incentives for ISPs, leading to long-term degradation in a important industry. Letting ISPs make more money will introduce more incentives to compete with them too. Why did Google Fiber fail? At least partially because there's no incentive for Google to fully invest in a 10% profit margin service while it's ad business has 60% profit margin.
End net neutrality, let ISPs charge internet companies fees, and we'll suddenly have ton more money in the industry, competition in the market and we'll see an end this era of shitty internet.
First of all, Google Fiber's strategy was not to make money but to push the industry to start installing new fiber-speed infrastructure, and it was successful (see the new ATT Fiber, etc.). Google did this because consuming it's services (like youtube) instead of watching TV are tied to having access to low-cost fast internet.
You're also not understanding that communications infrastructure is a natural monopoly. Infrastructure costs are the barrier to entry, meaning that even if ISPs make more revenue, they're still not going to have competition. ISPs are no more likely to invest in infrastructure without net neutrality than they are now, making your argument pointless.
Comcast etc. are already making money hand over fist. Removing net neutrality regulation will only allow them to engage in anti-consumer behavior in order to line their pockets further.
In general I wouldn't be opposed to that, except that we live in a world where you can't just decide to be an ISP. It's not in the public's interest to allow just any company to dig up the roadside everywhere to lay cable, and radio spectrum is a precious, scarce resource.
So that's the deal: we give them the privilege of being a monopoly, in exchange for legal mandates that they won't engage in certain types of anti-consumer behavior.
ISPs are a natural monopoly and therefore must be carefully and thoroughly regulated, just like any other utility. Their job ought to be to provide a regulated standard of service at a regulated price, no more & no less -- just like your water and electric utilities.
The “infrastructure industry” huh? The internet, of course, should be treated as a utility.
So it's not less ads, just that some of the profit from the ads would go towards the base infrastructure, which is a good thing.
Are all these comments fake/propaganda? I wouldn’t be surprised!
Edit .. see this top story now on the homepage here about the New York states attorney investigating iNternet fakery https://medium.com/@AGSchneiderman/an-open-letter-to-the-fcc...
I still do not see why there isnt the same uproar as there was previously that stopped SOPA. What's different this time?
The arguments against net neutrality are related to that; instead of limiting how much people use to keep the pipes open and fast enough so to speak, it's giving certain services preferential treatment, so that in the case of limited bandwidth those aren't disrupted.
Of course, it's a silly thing; most landlines, especially in the cities, will have fiber connections at least up until a local distributor box, and in some cases to the door. This has many gigabits of capacity, which should be enough for everyone.
The thing is that apparently, investments in bandwidth aren't being done enough. Google gave it a good try with their fiber service, but had to give up - probably underestimating how expensive it is, or they were blocked by the existing ISPs that didn't tolerate competition.
TL;DR, I think the problem isn't available bandwidth or whatever, it's competition, or the lack thereof, and investments, or the lack thereof.
Google gave up partly thanks to ALEC lobbying and laws, probably lobbied for via the incumbent regional ISPs.
Also since you're curious, Pai recently gave his views: http://reason.com/blog/2017/11/21/ajit-pai-net-neutrality-po...
Ajit Pai's FCC is against net neutrality as a result.
The fact that Pai was Verizon's top lawyer doesn't help, either.
Oh, forgot about the big money players who want to exploit it for their own purposes and thus portray anything which interferes with it as end of the world; namely google and similar service providers. throw in big money investors like Soros and the Knight group and you can see this is being played just like politics, people putting their money where the biggest return is. The biggest return is having super large companies free reign to use the net how they want regardless how it impacts smaller providers and smaller ISPs.
Which side was I on? Can you tell? That is the issue. People are assuming too much.
oh, since 2014 broad band deployment has dropped. odd how that works.
Then there is a second lot who use peering agreements and CDNs.
Almost nobody is against a free internet. A lot of people such as myself are against the FCC being in charge of regulating it. Competition and the FTC's anti-trust authority have kept the internet free for decades and will continue to do so in the future.
The people pushing "net neutrality" want to transfer power to the FCC because the FCC will go beyond maintaining fair access to the internet. They'll next move into regulating content as they have done with television and radio. That's the real goal.
Net Neutrality is a mandate that ISPs cannot prioritize data from one website over another. It's a regulation to ensure that Comcast cannot effectively censor websites it doesn't like by hiding it behind a slow lane of sorts. We know that ISPs have attempted to throttle Netflix's content, which is what prompted the recent regulatory changes in 2015.
What evidence do you have that net neutrality will necessarily lead to government censorship of the Internet?
Why is net neutrality an essential component for the government to censor content?
Personally I am ambivalent about net neutrality. I, however, am deeply opposed to the existence of Title II, let alone it being used to regulate the internet. If advocates want net neutrality to be the governing policy of the internet why don't they advocate for specific legislation that does only that and doesn't give the FCC the ability to become a heavy handed regulator of ISPs?
Do you have evidence that they are not advocating for proper legislation, or are you just saying this to baselessly discredit advocates of net neutrality?
If I recall correctly, the invocation of Title II was a reaction to an unfavorable supreme court case. Perhaps this is not the most ideal solution, but if one believes that net neutrality is important to protect, it appears to be the only solution in the absence of such legislation from a do-nothing Congress.
Also, if you believe that the FCC is historically corrupt and regressive, why do you seem to trust the FCC to make the correct decision right now? Do you have evidence that corruption in the FCC has vanished?
They don't compete with each other.
Without net neutrality, they can prioritize, slow down, or block any site or content they want to.
Many people cannot simply switch away.
They have only one ISP to choose from.
You can switch away from Facebook whenever you wish.
Or put another way, for about 90%+ of the Web-Internet combo's active existence in the US consumer market, net neutrality has not been law.
The way I see it, and probably why Google et al don't seem to be throwing up a recent fuss anymore, is that the big tech companies and industry giants can cut deals with the major ISP's to avoid throttling or provide services/expertise to the ISP's. So the end result is turning Google et al into their OWN monopolies. (e.g. Comcast partners with Youtube to deliver streaming video!)
Now you get telecom monopolies AND service/content monopolies.
Truly the best of both worlds.
We had cars before seat belt laws why do we all of sudden need it?
We had cars before airbags why do we all of sudden need it?
We've has guns before gun control so why do we all of sudden need it?
Edit: People have been giving birth for a long time without doctors so why do we all of sudden need it?
Net Neutrality will just make it even harder for new players to compete because they will have large regulations to meet. The only way to improve is to make it easier at a local level for more companies to compete.
The only two that even remotely relevant are seatbelt laws and gun laws, the other two are not even laws.
For seat belt laws, there was evidence that such laws increased pedestrian injury rates and severity. Whos to say that outweighs the benefits of forcing a few people to wear seat belts that are already in their cars?
For gun control, to say this in american context is weird. The US barely has gun control so to say it like its absolutely needed is odd.
I think our biggest problem is that a lot of these issues don't have a leader a la the civil rights movement. Even Occupy, which built to some serious momentum, didn't have sustained vision and leadership to force the changes we might want. Plus, we (incl. me) are lazy and know it could be worse (NK, China) but we are slipping faster and faster and need to rally before it really is too late.
Therefore, shouldn't we fix something else instead? Like the way these laws are established?
The root of this problem and many others is that Congress and the executive are corrupt and have no particular interest in doing their job properly. Much of that stems from a bad electoral system. Fixing that is hugely important and would be highly useful. However, that fix is likely to take a long time. Certainly there's no hope of fixing it by December 14th.
First Past The Post Voting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s7tWHJfhiyo
Range Voting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3GFG0sXIig
Single Transferable Vote - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8XOZJkozfI
All last mile ISPs and wireless carriers are state-enforced oligopolies or monopolies. You can't build these things without some mix of federal, state, and local permission, and in many cases taxpayer funds helps subsidize the construction of these networks or tax breaks are provided.
Telecom is not a free market and never has been. Telecoms are not really private companies in any unfettered free market sense. They're closer to the status of majority-of-revenue government contractors like Lockheed or Raytheon. Add the revolving door they have with representatives and they're almost like state-owned industries.
Net neutrality is there to prevent a state-backed oligopoly from using its position to stifle competition in the free market. In other words it's a pro-free-market regulation that exists to protect the free market from interference by state monopolies.
I personally think it would be just as good to eliminate barriers to entry for broadband and wireless competition, but unfortunately on a pragmatic level (at least in the USA) this is orders of magnitude more difficult politically. So net neutrality is the best solution for now.
I have more choices for an ISP than I have choices for a cell phone OS. Should the government enforce app-store neutrality. I have less choices for search engines. How about search engine/adsense neutrality.
The truth is net neutrality is both underbroad and overbroad in its attempts to increase competition. Sure, a cable ISP shouldn't be allowed to block netflix. But net neutrality goes further than that and doesn't allow any paid prioritization, even if such prioritization isn't anti-competitive. On the other hand, net neutrality doesn't stop your ISP from putting data caps or just increasing prices on users.
Reducing barriers to entry is far better for increasing competition.
That's lovely for you, but here's the whole picture: In the latest FCC Internet Access Services report, 13% of census blocks with housing units (that is, empty census blocks are not considered) have three or more broadband providers. 37% percent have only one option, and 21% have no provider at all. Having a choice is not the norm.
https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344499A1.p...
Please give an example of paid prioritization that isn't anti-competitive.
Telecom networks also qualify as a natural monopoly to some extent. Allowing any startup to form a telecom and try to deploy their own infrastructure would look like this:
https://news.lovepattayathailand.com/wp-content/uploads/2017...
The lowest hanging fruit for real deregulation and opening of the broadband market would be to get the FCC to nuke analog TV and open the UHF spectrum for last mile Internet access with a policy that is very pro-competition. For example they could limit TX power in some bands to no more than what it takes to get ~5km range and require some kind of minimal few-hundred-per-year license to use them in a given geo-region. That would allow anyone to start a last mile wireless ISP using commodity hardware and a single fiber uplink such as to a data center. But since this FCC is the definition of regulatory capture I highly doubt this will happen either. Pai and his FCC is completely in the pocket of entrenched telecoms and this kind of move would threaten them more than any kind of net neutrality regulation.
Both the people in charge and those who put them there worship the production of money. Policies are selected based on whatever provides maximum revenue without other considerations, with the belief that a thriving economy requires this strategy.
If you live in a State that allows for some kind of “entrenched” statutes that are more difficult to change (the US Constitution is one such example), pushing for a right to net neutrality on that basis is probably the path of least resistance. Of course some nations, like the U.K., unfortunately have no such thing (all statutes repealable/changeable with simple majority).
That is what I would fix instead.
Not only are they removing federal rules, they want to prevent states from making their own rules. That seems an extra special kind of awful. "Big Government is overstepping its bounds with regulation, so we're going to have big government step in and prevent local governments from making their own choices."
But then again, Pai plan proponents keep saying this will spawn more innovation and improve utilities. That sounds pretty dubious and I haven't seen much proof. I don't recall any big innovation suddenly being stifled in 2015.
In my perfect world, the regulatory power would go back to the FTC but it would at the same time release a plan for opening up internet utility access so small players can compete with the big ones.
Be that time it'll probably be too late.
> On the one hand, I can see why monopolistic powers in the hands of ISPs would be bad, but I like that the order would restore "police" powers to the FTC instead of the FCC,
The FTC is not the correct body to "police" broadband.
> and I can't blame ISPs for wanting a piece of the $ pie.
I can. They are already getting paid. They should not be able to go back for seconds.
> And it's not like the internet was a horrible wasteland until 2015.
That's because network neutrality was the default state before. It's only now that is becoming feasible both from a technical and business perspective to violate network neutrality.
> But then again, Pai plan proponents keep saying this will spawn more innovation and improve utilities. That sounds pretty dubious and I haven't seen much proof. I don't recall any big innovation suddenly being stifled in 2015
Yeah, that's just a load of bullshit. CEOs have gone on record that NN will not affect business or investments.
> In my perfect world, the regulatory power would go back to the FTC but it would at the same time release a plan for opening up internet utility access so small players can compete with the big ones.
Too bad we already had that, minus the FTC part. Fat chance of getting it back.
However, it is "merely" a symptom of the US political system not being sensitive to the citizens' wants and needs. Or no longer being a democracy by modern standards, if you want to be dramatic.
No. Stop saying this. It completely muddies the water on what's actually going on here. People DID vote for this. They voted for their reps. And they voted for reps of a very particular political bent.
Elections have consequences.
The electorate chose this. Freely and willingly. The electorate being completely unqualified to understand issues ranging from technology to healthcare to economics isn't really a fault of the U.S. political system at this point.
Stop giving the people that vote for these reps (and the President) free passes and address the root issue. They have voted this way for decades and will continue to do so and no amount of changing or tweaking the political system is really going to have any noticeable effect on the policies they will support. The U.S. political system is listening to the electorate. Stop pretending it's not.
I disagree with you.
In political systems that aren't effectively two party systems, parties that listen to what the population wants and needs emerge and get their share of the votes. These parties then get together and form a majority representing these needs in many ways. This makes listening to the population a winning strategy.
The US system is how much can you accommodate corporations held up against how little can you listen to the population and still get away with it. In a two party system, that is a lot.
I could write an example-scenario with two frozen pizza companies vs. 8 frozen pizza companies and which choices you'll end up with for dinner, but I think you get point.
It's called fair competition and America seems to have forgotten its benefits for the general population, both in politics and in business.
Pointing out people as idiots is not a solution. Pushing for systems that work, is.
Relatively it listens more to donors and lobbyists than the average people. That is part of the system because the system has laws that allow it.
When nearly every candidate for high positions is subject to these pressures, they're very difficult to vote away.
I'm not saying the electorate isn't unqualified, divided by wedge issues, or demands and is sold more attention grabbing issues than NN by the media, but it's not the whole story.
So while a large voting bloc did vote for these people, it's not the will of the majority. It's just that America's democracy is kind of broken (not completely broken, but it's getting there).
The scary images of tiered Internet packages from Portugal and Indonesia that are being passed around are also about zero-rating. They are really no different from mobile plans we have in the US, except that their advertising happens to be more brutally honest.
People like net neutrality as an abstract principle when it's described to them, but many people will gladly personally give it up to watch a TV series.
To be clear, I think this is a bad thing. I think zero-rating is anti-competitive. But there are people who love it. That's what it means to be against net neutrality.
However it is super duper lame that a ton of politicians blindly follow party lines. Sigh.
But leaving that aside, I didn't say all Republicans are against Net Neutrality. I'm sure some are in favor of it, just like you can find the odd pro-choice or gay Republican. But the Republican Party as a whole is against NN, and has been very vocal about wanting to get rid of it. Republicans said "If we get elected we're going to get rid of Net Neutrality," and then they got elected. So, you know, no surprise here.
Was it demanded by the electorate? A promise in a manifesto or something?
I remember the topic of NN coming up a few years ago and was largely defeated after public outcry - has public mood changed since then?
This is a case where a few companies really want to be able to change their pricing structures to increase profits, and consumers in general don't want that but also aren't particularly involved. So there isn't a big public outcry (except among HN readers <3) and these companies are lobbying the FCC hard to make "business-friendly" changes. It's called concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.
Also anyone can shed some light exactly on how much money the telecom companies paid in lobbying? Can we match that or double if it’s all just about money? I’d be glad to pay a payment of up to 1/10th of my monthly income if this is going to persuade law makers reject the lobbyists demands.
www.gofccyourself.com
https://www.medianama.com/2017/05/223-netflix-begins-directl...
In which case how does this law change anything? And what effect this might have on CDN providers?
CDN is different than throttling your Internet.
A CDN is like having a local power generator in your neighborhood, throttling your Internet is like charging your house more for electricity, because the electrical company prefers your neighbor.
https://voat.co/v/technology/2253983
I was wondering if you guys could address these guys concerns. We need everyone on the same side. We all want a free internet. Appreciate the help.
Here's my argument. I would be fine without any form of net neutrality IF consumers had a true choice of ISP. BUT, I've lived in 4 different states and 6 different cities in the past 12 years and have only ONCE had a choice between different ISPs. Comcast and their ilk have created monopolies in the majority of markets, therefore to enforce the free market it is necessary to force them to provide equal access to internet traffic.
I really don't understand how users there can support something that will probably result in them paying more for Internet access and limiting what they can access.
short answer:
These rules are 2 years old and did nothing good for the internet. the solution is to dissolve municipal monopolies. they do this all the time - everytime they corruptly assign a monopoly to provide a service like electricity, water, etc.
The problem is too much government and the left just wants to pile on the beaurocracy and centralize the decision making regarding the global internet in washington. Stupid.
Why shouldn't a medical monitoring company negotiate peering and higher guaranteed bandwidth so doctors can remotely with live data to ensure the safety of critical patients? [hint: ALL companies do this, it is physically impossible not to]
Because the government is scaring stupid people with the thought of higher netflix prices to grab more control of the internet that they have been illegally surveiling already. Meanwhile, they also scramble to add idiotic things like netflix taxes because they are just too idiotic and greedy. Oh not to mention the government's backwards attempts to prosecute piracy and weaken/criminalize encryption.
technical answer if you're up for some reading:
As an engineer, net neutrality is a totally misguided and unattainable. Companies that provide things like realtime communication obviously need to negotiate and guarantee lower latencies. Anyways, just like with labor and healthcare, some people just want to pretend that internet service doesn't operate under economic laws. They're always looking for some savior/excuse to abolish free enterprise like internet, automation, altruism, etc.
I like how reddit user /u/natermer puts part of it (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/GoldandBlack/comments/6mviva/whats_... ):
There are two major types of network traffic you tend to see on the internet. One is a 'elephant' type bulk transfers. These are big files, bittorrent, video streaming and such things. These types of things use a lot of the available bandwidth and can cause transfers that last many minutes to many hours. However they are latency sensitive.... It doesn't matter if it takes 1 or 10 or a 100 seconds for the packets to cross the internet just as long as you can move a LOT of packets at the same time.
The other type of data transfer you see are things that are very latency sensitive. Remote controlling of mechanics, remote monitoring, remote desktop, video conferencing, gaming, VoIP, and other types of latency sensitive protocols. These things use relatively little bandwidth compared to the 'elephants' but are extremely latency sensitive... meaning you want the transfer to go as quick as possible, but don't really need to transfer that much. The modern Internet works based on peering agreements. ISPs have multiple connections with other ISPs. many times these connections are almost ad-hoc as it depends on geography and other variables that makes some connections 'less then ideal'. These connections vary in quality, performance, latency, and cost.
If ISPs can route traffic based on protocol and provider then they can possibly save significant amount of money and improve performance for their customers. They can shuttle latency sensitive protocols over expensive links and allow bulk transfers to use massive amounts of cheap bandwidth to reduce their own and their customer's costs.
If you go 'full network neutrality' and treat each packet the same then you can have your VoIP call stuck in a FIFO buffer queue behind your Xbox's game download.. making it impossible to have phone calls.
For example: TCP/IP protocol is connection oriented and this is used for critical connections and there is a ack/nack response/reply conversation going on where clients validate and confirm packets. This means that every TCP/IP transfer is a two-way street... even if you are downloading you still have to upload some packets to confirm and continue the connection.
Bulk uploads from your home network can interfere with the acknowledgements and cause massive latency spikes and other issues unless you have a router that intellegently manages buffers and gives priority to different types of packets. You have a very fast network connected to a very slow uplink and your TCP/IP acks can get stuck behind a massive queue of bulk transfers.
This happens commonly when people are using bittorrent and they don't understand why they get fast downloads, then it throttles back to almost nothing, and then they get fast downloads again. This will continue in a saw-like fashion where you see fast performance, then massive latency spikes, and then slow performance, and then fast performance again.. repeating. Many people assume that this is caused by ISP throttling when in fact it's their own network equipment suffering from bad buffer/queue management. They will go out and buy new home routers only to see the problem get worse because the routers are as dumb as before, but now have even bigger queues and even more memory to (mis)manage. (there are VERY effective ways to fix this, btw)
I could go on and on.
Also keep in mind that the modern internet works through things called 'Content Delivery Networks' or CDNs for short. Bulk transfer of files from one side of the internet to the other side is expensive and high-latency. Co-located datacenters for webservers and small/medium business installations charge premium amounts for internet access and usage is metered on the server side. So most popular websites depend on CDNs to cache content and distribute it back out to the user in a way that is actually physically close to the user on the internet.
This can dramatically lower costs, increase availability, and improve performance and user experience.
One of the ways CDNs do this is by having private networks running in parrallel to the public internet. Sometimes they are logical networks like VPNs or they are entirely separate physical networks.
Youtube, for example, depends on Google's private Fiber network for content delivery. When you are streaming videos Google uses as little as the public internet as possible. They have connections as local to you as possible that (ideally) connect directly to your ISP's network and streams data to you.
Other CDNs depend on collocated servers in the ISP's datacenter to cache data, stream video, and other things. Thus if you take a very naive approach to network neutrality and try to say 'all packets are treated as equal' you not only possibly increase the costs for yourself and others, but also you destroy the suitability for the internet to be used for low-latency protocols AND you will do NOTHING to help start-ups be competitive with big names like Google.
(2) No Canadian carrier shall, in relation to the provision of a telecommunications service or the charging of a rate for it, unjustly discriminate or give an undue or unreasonable preference toward any person, including itself, or subject any person to an undue or unreasonable disadvantage.
You can still manage networks and employ CDN. But you can't arbitrarily block content.
VERY bad video. Let me explain:
The video says shipping companies charge different fees with different speeds. And that net neutrality is like having all lines of the highway at the same speed.
That is NOT what net neutrality is about. It's about not distinguishing the content of the packages, or car passengers. No NN is like I try to send a package and deny it or charge me a fee because it contains nudes or because the receiver is black.
> If ISPs can route traffic based on protocol and provider then they can possibly save significant amount of money and improve performance for their customers. They can shuttle latency sensitive protocols over expensive links and allow bulk transfers to use massive amounts of cheap bandwidth to reduce their own and their customer's costs.
That's already done (except the provider part), it's called QoS. And it can easily be done without looking where do the packets go or what they contain.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU
tl;dw - For those who want to understand how closely the government is related to those who benefit from NO net-neutrality.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/3989...
Some more details here: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2017/10/usa-liberty-act-wont-f...
Funny how libertarian mythology doesn't really hold up to even the most basic of game theory applications.
They are fortune 500 companies that ONLY care about their bottom line. Every now and then, the bottom line accidentally aligns with the public good (like spectrum auctions).
When we give up our rights to corporations and captured agencies, we lose the individual freedoms that agencies like the FCC were founded to protect.
I think that, even if the FCC passes this proposal, we'll have been on record being massively against it. That will cost any representatives, republican or democrat, who support the current FCC.
America isn't about to forget the sub-par quality of its internet services, and this proposal isn't going to fix that.
My question is about 2015. Did we have NN before 2015? What changed then and how would it differ from before? I was always under the assumption we had NN.
We used to have competition for Internet services (dialup and DSL), now we don't (most people access the Internet through cable which is a monopoly).
The reason why we are losing NN now is because it's become feasible from a technical and business perspective to violate NN.
Pai's arguments are pure unadulterated bullshit. Abolishing NN will not increase investments or create competition. CEOs are on record that NN will not impact business or investments.
Calling Dial-Up and DSL "competition" is downplaying how shitty things were even in 2015. They are technically competition, but effectively and practically they aren't because the modern web doesn't even work with dial-up and in the many places stuck with the low-end of DSL it is next to worthless too.
There are lots of fellow hacker news readers (with significant karma) that don't know a thing about Net Neutrality.
Or: this thread is full of FUD bots to push against Net Neutrality
[0]: https://www.eff.org/
Maybe I could even strike a deal with Netflix/Amazon/Hulu/etc and try to do my own double-play/triple-play sort of thing.
Does anyone have any resources regarding getting 1Gbps bandwidth to the masses?
*I have no idea how much this would cost, probably more than I said.
Best argument against NN: Entrenching today's power brokers will not bode well for the future and will kill all of the smaller players.
Network neutrality is not Ma Bell style regulation. NN will not freeze things. Don't know which oligarchs you are referring to, but any NN laws are unlikely to stop them 'garching.
Killing NN is unlikely to kill all the small players. In fact they might rather thrive by using NN as a competitive tool.
I presume you don't believe in the existence of selective enforcement in industries where the government holds massive regulatory power? Why does it seem somehow that the most powerful incumbents are never punished, but smaller upstarts are crushed (or not even started) due to the regulatory burden? NN makes this worse.
Pai merely proposes to move things back to the way they were since the beginning of Internet Time to 2015, way back when the Internet was a Title I "information service", subject to much less formal regulation by the FCC. This is met with furious uproar.
His proposal would enable ISPs to make access to some content slower, or more expensive, than others.
His proposal does nothing to resolve existing broadband monopolies.
Many people like the way the internet works today and do not want Pai's policies to pass. We don't want more silos or limited access to content. People are making their voices heard because they feel strongly about this issue.
Net Neutrality is very important to a free and open Internet, but the kind of scaremongering I see going on is absolutely insane.
We won't win this fight with scary lies. Do your part and make sure your peers are educated as to the real consequences of this repeal. None of this "You must pay to view additional posts on this website" or "Imagine if EA were your ISP" nonsense.
It also serves the purpose of being something I can explain to less-technical relatives at the Thanksgiving table, and they immediately grasp the importance. If I started talking about Title II and common carriers and peering agreements it would have nowhere near the same impact.
Why on earth would you think this would not happen? Because the tiny handful of telecom and cable companies, already protected from competition by various laws and regulations, will decide to leave hundreds of millions of dollars on the table so that people like them more?
How about the fact that in the prior 20+ years it did not happen. Comcast was just as powerful five years ago, as they are today. The access market was just as limited in terms of competition, 5 or 10 years ago.
Your premise is that due to limited competition, it must occur. If that were how things actually worked, it would have occured before net neutrality in a very big way.
Second, you are right, Comcast would have loved to turn the Internet into cable TV five years ago, and as a member of the protected oligopoly, they would be in a good position to do so, except... oh yeah, net neutrality regulations prevent that.
Third, now that we are in modern times where most people do use the internet, it already has occurred where no preventive measures exist. There are examples in this very thread; click them.
It's not fair to look to the past to make predictions about the future here because the world was very different from a business perspective.
I'm not an expert, nor am I an activist, but I have been reading about people studying 4chan's tactics in a post prez45 world. How a culture of open dialog to extreme gave a small group of people a weapon. Erudite "rationals" considered this sort of thing to be stupid nonsense, but it trained an entire culture to be massively effective at steering people's emotions. Their ideas can move faster without the absolute need for sensitivity or maybe because of a pathological need to offend. The current interest is in finding ways to work that radical acceptance into progressive discourse. It's important but I don't think anyone has a playbook yet.
Targeted policy?
Hmm, good idea. Let's see... maybe we could have a policy something like If you are one of the few companies providing Internet service, and are protected by various laws and regulations that limit who may provide such service to end users, then you must not discriminate or charge differently by user, content, website, platform, application, type of attached equipment, or method of communication.
How about something like that?
That way, we could promote neutrality with regard to people's network access.
Common sense says that, as a corporation, if I have a regional monopoly on internet access I should exploit that to the point that maximizes profitability.
Exactly like a cable bundle.
https://www.meo.pt/internet/internet-movel/telemovel/pacotes...
Also, it looks like the same company provides gigabit internet for $50/mo:
https://www.meo.pt/pacotes/mais-pacotes/fibra/net-voz
Again, I support net neutrality, but it's still technically better than my Comcast.
If you scroll down there's also per/mb pricing with no services listed.
Last I checked, Portugal is in the European Union. Presumably it has the same net neutrality rules the rest of the EU does.
Of course, net neutrality is an issue of control and regulation. Losing net neutrality, mind you, involves private companies having less restraint and more control. What will they do with it? Reddit doesn’t know for sure any more than you do, and that’s the problem, of course.
The internet works similarly in that an electronic contract is formed when an ISP attempts to access content on web server. The client/ISP "requests" the content, and the publisher agrees and serves it up. But there's nothing stopping a collective "big few" from denying access to the content based on the host name of the ISP requesting it.
Ergo, if Verizon doesn't want to play "fair" with regards to content distribution, Facebook/Google/Twitter/Netflix/Reddit and whomever else could deny access to Verizon subscribers with an ol fashioned HTTP 403 or 401.
Yes, traffic drops, people realize quickly that they can't access any of their favorite sites, things must be broken, and switch companies.
Bundling seems to be the boogeyman de jour. But consumers in the US are used to universal access to the internet and would probably not respond well to such practices. And if we wanted to preemptively ban any type of internet connection except a universal one, there is no need to apply much broader and constricting Title II regulation to it.
I don't see how Google or Facebook fit in. By paying Comcast, I pay for them to build out their network and connect me to the whole internet. Why does Google's profits matter?
That is the opposite of Net Neutrality.
I'm afraid that this is the inevitable future we're going to be living in in terms of net neutrality, I believe it's only a matter of time.