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China does not have net neutrality. Almost everything coming into the country from outside is utterly filtered to hell and back. They do have a vibrant tech economy though. So they have their own Google (Baidu). They have their own Twitter (Weibo), WhatsApp(WeChat), Amazon(Tao Bao). So in the future of no net-neutrality, we'll see ISPs being value-added resellers of their own regionally partitioned versions of these services, probably developed by various ISVs. It will be a bit like the BBS days I imagine. It goes along with the Trump political theme of anti-globalization.

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Comparing China to the US is a false equivalency.

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)?

Yeah... China's restrictive internet wouldn't be saved by "Net Neutrality". One of the foundational principles of the PRC is regulating what can be said. The medium is irrelevant.

I'll note that the FCC also regulates what can be said. Anyone remember when they investigated Stephen Colbert for his remarks on Trump?

They have their own services in China, but it's not only about foreign traffic. Put up a site and you'l find that it doesn't work too well in other regions of the nation, with ISPs throttling each other's traffic.

So without net neutrality, the internet as we know it really is broken. Great.

>China does not have net neutrality. Almost everything coming into the country from outside is utterly filtered to hell and back.

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.

> The UK does have net neutrality.

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.)

We don't need to have it enshrined in law as right now little to no ISPs outright prevent access to popular services but as you said zero-rating is slowly creeping in.

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.

Well, it can always get worse. If this thing passes and Time Warner wins in court and gets to buy AT&T..

> It goes along with the Trump political theme of anti-globalization.

I've never managed to connect anti-globalization with no net neutrality.

Please explain how you made that connection.

With no NN, you need to make deals with every ISP for your online services. It is only cost effective to do such deals in your main markets. Thus we Balkanize the Internet.

I was not making myself clear; the top comment seems to imply that there's some sort of natural connection between anti-globalism (in the popular sense of the term) and a rejection of net neutrality laws.

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?

Neutral networks converge on natural monopolies, globally. So a neutral net ends up with Facebook and Google "on top" in every country. This is globalisation in the Naomi Klein sense: the same brands dominating every market.

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.

Wow, thank you - I've never heard that argument before.

I'm not sure I know of an intelligent right-leaning person who thinks monopolies of any kind is a good idea, but I can see the argument being used in a "stepping-stone" sense towards a Republican ideal less regulated environment that would "naturally eradicate" monopolies.

I can see it used like that, but I've never heard of it. Of course, that might be because I'm not from the US.

Also, I don't necessarily agree that ISPs are closer to the state in most places, but that's not worth talking about because as far as I can see, neither of us agree with the argument anyway, you only enlightened me to its existence.

But like you said yourself, how this is linked to populist anti-globalism is not clear.

The original poster said, > "It goes along with the Trump political theme of anti-globalization."

So that's really the question at hand. At this point, it feels to me like the original poster is just virtue-signalling, which baffles me.

> ISPs are closer to the state in most places

Depends on the structure, but a lot of them are inheritors of telcos, which were often nationalised and/or subject to state control, surveillance and censorship. I was thinking particularly of BT and its heir Openreach, which owns all the wires. While they may be privatized the oversight is a lot closer than that of SV startups.

Owning a lot of physical infrastructure and needing to dig up roads requires having a good working relationship with the authorities, at least. Whereas to be Facebook you don't even need a local presence in the country.

Or there are the various US telcos which effectively lobby for either direct monopoly grants from cities or laws against city-level broadband. This kind of thing: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-al...

Indeed, I've read on and off about ISPs lobbying local US government bodies for probably a decade or more.

I'm not sure what we are discussing, or if there is any point of contention between us that I can't see.

Perhaps you're not as much replying to me as simply being informative for posterity. In which case I'll thank you again, and stop writing now as to not drown out the information with drivel :-)

They also aren't a democracy, so not really relevant.

What does the system of government has to do with what is relevant to an argument like this?

China is not a democracy so it is irrelevant that they are the leading economy on the planet?

China is not a democracy so it is fundamentally irrelevant how they legislate their internet policies, correct.

That is not a question of net neutrality, every contry have blocked websites, for some reason or another.

Citation needed, because I sure as heck know that my country didn't.

May I ask what country that is?

Bosnia & Herzegovina. Serbia also doesn't (but their government uses other mechanisms for online disruption, including DDoS, bot armies, and breaking into websites it doesn't like). And neither does Montenegro. I can't guarantee that the same is true for Croatia as well, but I think that's the case there too.

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

Question: it is my understanding that "hate speech" is banned in Bosnia & Herzegovina. If they don't ban websites. Do they arrest or fine whoever uses "hate speech" online instead?

The netherlands, which is one of the countries known to have some of the best net neutrality laws does for example have the pirate bay blocked, and it have been through the courts multiple times. There are many other countries with net neutrality who also blocks sites like the pirate bay.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...

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