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Comment by mediocrejoker | Hacker News Reader

So maybe these plans are serving a different market segment. Is there any reason to believe an ISP would get rid of all their regular offerings in favour of these site-specific plans?

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The big ISPs (in the US) haven't earned the benefit of the doubt.

That's fair but you also have to ask what's in it for them to screw their users in this way.

Why would an ISP want to prevent some small, unrelated startup from gaining exposure?

Google was a small, unrelated startup for a long time. Google Fiber was a real threat to the ISPs, but they already had a lock on municipalities and states. Some new upstart might find a way through that. Why risk it when they can just keep them from gaining traction in the first place?

> Why would an ISP want to prevent some small, unrelated startup from gaining exposure?

Once the startup takes all the risk to demonstrate market demand, the ISP can come in with their own offering and use the ISP monopoly to destroy the competition.

You mean like Google or Facebook?

It sounds like you aren't a fan of how Google and Facebook operate from that comment; I don't think allowing _more_ companies to act like that is a very good remedy to that problem

Telecos across the board are parts of massive conglomerates with fingers in every pie. There are virtually no "unrelated" startups.

Okay, so if they do this, then the government should act. Preemptive regulation has all the downsides of regulation (eg lower investment) but potentially none of the benefits. This isn’t the kind of thing that will cause immediate, long-lasting, harm if a few ISPs explore this route before being shut down by the FCC or Congress.

How would eliminating net neutrality increase investment? I think it will cause immediate, long lasting harm if ISPs, which are often incredibly large and serve countless people, force people to do this- imagine if you are poor and need the internet to find a job!

They did. Verizon was throttling Netflix for a long time. Title II regulation was put in place to address ISP abuses. Now they're going to come back, and probably get worse than before.

The lower investment argument seems totally backwards to me. If we kill net neutrality, that gives ISPs a path to further monetize their existing infrastructure without any additional investment via paid preferential fast lanes and such. However, with net neutrality in place, the only means by which they have to compete is overall service quality, which means they have to invest in their networks. It seems obvious that ISPs are lobbying for repeal precisely because it allows them to make more money with zero investment.

the current setup is not exactly working either - https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/11/22/the-mo...

there needs to be some action - not removing net neutrality rules per se, but the utility/monopoly status has to go so that local provider can compete without being tied in billionaire lawsuits for the control of every municipality

There have already been a variety of attempts by these corps to undermine net neutrality even while it's been illegal. They lost the benefit of the doubt a long time ago. The telecom giants are as consumer-hostile as it gets

https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio...

The Internet providers are have already tried to do this. Couple that with the fact that Internet provider are generally a monopoly or duopoly then there is very real harm if only a few explore this route. The following is from Reddit 6 months ago, link at the bottom. The original comment has links supporting each claim.

>This dude's ridiculous.

>... if you look at the Internet that we had in 2015, we were not living in some digital dystopia. There was nothing broken about the marketplace in such a fundamental way that these Title II regulations were appropriate. >2005 - Madison River Communications was blocking VOIP services. The FCC put a stop to it.

>2005 - Comcast was denying access to p2p services without notifying customers.

>2007-2009 - AT&T was having Skype and other VOIPs blocked because they didn't like there was competition for their cellphones.

>2011 - MetroPCS tried to block all streaming except youtube. (edit: they actually sued the FCC over this)

>2011-2013, AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon were blocking access to Google Wallet because it competed with their bullshit. edit: this one happened literally months after the trio were busted collaborating with Google to block apps from the android marketplace

>2012, Verizon was demanding google block tethering apps on android because it let owners avoid their $20 tethering fee. This was despite guaranteeing they wouldn't do that as part of a winning bid on an airwaves auction. (edit: they were fined $1.25million over this)

>2012, AT&T - tried to block access to FaceTime unless customers paid more money.

>2013, Verizon literally stated that the only thing stopping them from favoring some content providers over other providers were the net neutrality rules in place.

>Like, dude. If you're gonna be a corrupt piece of shit, at least makes your lies more believable. This dude wants 'after-the-fact' regulation as opposed to preemptive regulation. Fucking news flash, you piece of shit. This is already after-the-fact.

>6 month late edit: Replaced Sprint with T-Mobile in the Google Wallet example.

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/69dnox/fcc_chie...

"Our business is being regulated, so let's stop trying to make more money," said no business ever. A business is not going to stop making a good investment in their market just because there is regulation.

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