Net Neutrality will die, so let’s take the profit out of killing it
cringely.com
cringely.com
> The concept of Net Neutrality is bound in the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are common carriers like the phone company. Phone companies like to claim they have no knowledge of — and therefore no responsibility for — the words that are carried over their phone lines. They serve Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Russian Embassy alike — just as long as both pay their phone bills. Tony Soprano and Tony Stark are the same in phone company eyes. And this is true of the Internet, too, at least for the next month or so, because the FCC under President Obama declared Internet Service to be a common carrier. That’s about to change, and with it the requirement that all Internet bits be treated equally. People who are willing to pay more will soon get measurably quicker Internet service. And big bandwidth users like Amazon and Netflix will have to pay more to avoid having their signals slowed down.
If the ISPs suddenly become not common carriers, do they then become responsible for all the content? If that is the case, then we can make non-net neutrality really expensive for them.
No, "common carrier" is an overloaded concept that implies some responsibility for the thing being carried in other contexts (e.g. maritime shipping) but does not imply what you're suggesting in this one. Remember, US ISPs were not classified as common carriers until mid-2015.
Nobody would care about being able to watch Netflix via zero tier if it’s faster to watch without it (which the isps would most certainly ensure).
I also think it’s nieve to assume that large tech companies want neutrality.
Sure, companies publicly say that they are for it but if they could pay to prevent new competitors (without the same capital resources) from challenging them it’s my hunch that they’d gladly do so.
They aren’t on our side.
Think what would happen if your power/utility company was driven by profit and not solely to provide a critical service.
Internet access should be de-privitized, the free market isn't going to fix this ever and this battle is going to just going to repeat itself every 6-12 months until they win.
I do think it might make sense to treat fiber as infrastructure, so that we could then have numerous competing ISPs everywhere that just need to light up the fiber that's already there. That seems like an improvement.
Prove that is part of it, or stop lying.
The only positive I can see coming out of this is SpaceX's global satellite internet system looks a lot more profitable in this environment.
You're right, and I don't understand why the discussion here seems to insist that the two options available are having either no NN or having the big, bad gubbmint provide internet services. Among the solutions that lie between these two extremes are private, for profit, regulated utilities.
For example, where I live our electric+gas services come from a company named Avista, NYSE:AVA[1]. It's shareholder-owned, for-profit, and regulated by the state[2]. In fact this private, regulated utility is so private that it's currently busying itself with being acquired by a Canadian company[3], after which it will of course still be regulated by the state of Washington to ensure that the corporation continues operating for the public good.
"Avista's purpose is to improve life's quality by providing energy and energy-related services, as well as certain non-energy related services. We do this by safely and reliably delivering these services at a competitive price and by helping our customers get the most value from their dollar, while providing our investors a fair return."[4]
Fair return, not maximum return.
Our nation's economy, infrastructure, and access to government information and services now rely on the internet. ISPs, whether private or public, need to be regulated in ways that reflect that fact.
[1] https://www.avistacorp.com/about/Pages/aboutus.aspx
[2] https://goo.gl/y54zFV [utc.wa.gov]
[3] https://goo.gl/Av1vx3 [investor.avistacorp.com]
[4] https://goo.gl/fGAAW8 [investor.avistacorp.com]
edit:format
Net Neutrality wouldn't have been an issue again in the first place, otherwise.
What would be wrong with an ISP co-op?
We're already seeing that Western countries too can be just as censorship happy (e.g. the UK where the government pressures ISPs, and is seeking to enshrine in law, the blocking of a huge assortment of content including such ridiculous things to block as female ejaculation)
Just imagine how easy and unescapable that censorship will be if the government is the ISP itself. We've seen repeated attempts in congress to illegalize encryption the government cannot easily break. District Attorney General Rod Rosenstein hinted just this very month that in wake of the Texas shooting the Trump administration will take a harder line against "unbreakable encryption."
Just imagine how stronger their effort against encryption will be once it's the only thing standing between them and completely blocking your access to information they'd rather you not have?
Let's just settle for net neutrality and incentivizing new cable lines and ISPs, rather than open the "nationalize the web" can of worms.
Another problem of public owned utilities is the ruling regime raiding the coffers for party funds, which forces the utility to jack the rates every year since they are a corporation that operates without any savings. They also parachute in a new regime crony every election to be the well paid CEO and fill the board with party hacks as well, ensuring the public utility never goes against the wishes of the regime (and gives their friends huge salaries in the +1m range). Public ISPs would have to operate at the city/local level and no higher for the public to retain any control over it and not have it turn into yet another fine collecting branch.
I love how we are facing a present, practical problem that is the complete opposite of this dystopian hypothetical that people damn near have a fetish over. Yet it still gets brought up as some kind of counter weight to current circumstances. And this kind of attitude is why we're here. We elected a host of representatives that basically ran on "gummit bad!" and when they start handing power over to private entities some of you still don't have the self-awareness to see how absolutely ABSURD it is to sit there and go "But if the government had all the power think about how BAD it would be!" -- all while willfully ignoring that we're still a republic. It's unlikely to be that bad. We're here because we choose to be.
Right now, giving more power to private entities is going to cause far more problems than the government having/had power is/did or maybe even ever could.
Never in the history of this country have we had a problem in where the government has too much power and private entities have too little. Not once. The U.S. government has only had its scope of responsibilities expanded due to the misconduct of private entities over the course of our history. Yeah, governments CAN be bad and they CAN do bad things -- in general. But right now what we have is, in a glorious stroke of irony, people running the government who hate the government.
Basically, TL;DR, the whole censorship boogeyman is just rhetorical misdirection and is completely, utterly, and frustratingly unproductive.
I find this statement suspect in the current U.S. landscape.
NSA in an AT&T closet should not be happening. It would be the default situation for everyone if we all had government ISP.
I suspect the American Indian might disagree. I don't recall them being hunted down and massacred by a corporation. Also, black Americans before the 1965 civil rights act might have something to say on the topic of government power vs private entities. As would imprisoned Japanese sent to internment camps. Newspaper editors imprisoned for speaking out against Lincoln during the Civil War probably had a different point of view, as well. Shall I continue?
1. Indians weren't citizens. I mean I could stop there, but it's also pretty hilarious that you think the actions taken at the time were somehow not without popular public support. Government as an entity had nothing to do with the expansions, to put it lightly.
2. Yeah, like when we stopped the government from enforcing such laws and gave more protections to people (via the government), all exclusionary practices totally vanished. Totally wasn't a societal problem at that point either. It took the power of the government to alleviate unjust practices, but the power of government wasn't needed to keep them as "virtues" within the society that implemented them in the first place. Something something government, right?
I mean for 3 and 4? Really? You're going to try to use Constitutional powers as an example of the government having too much power?
And no, please don't go on with an aggravating lack luster response like the one you've decided to put on display, I've only responded for the people reading this thread so as to not fall into such disingenuous misdirection.
Southern California Edison reporting in! Bilking consumers for all their worth!
Hell, I would donate my time as a lawyer to helping out.
Something like that would allow communication across the countryside and allow communities to interconnect irrespective of the existing monopoly infrastructure.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Internet_service_prov...
If we mandated separate ownership for last-mile infrastructure and heavily regulate that to ensure open access to all ISPs, then we can have a market with healthy competition and let consumers decide whether they care about neutral networks. Ideally, that last mile infrastructure would be owned by communities/municipalities who'd contract out maintenance and pay for it with open access fees added to ISP bills. Then any ISP could connect to the municipal network and serve any customer without ever having to install anything at the customer location.
Free market competition works well in an environment where its hard to build a durable advantage and customers can easily switch to competitors with a more compelling offering. Separating the part of an ISP that gives a durable advantage from the part that doesn't would allow us to lean on the free market to handle the rest.
Yeah, the big players don't realize this is stupid.
Who says they won't get fleeced by the ISPs?
Having your business rely on a monopolist that could antagonize you will most likely backfire.
"Oh but they are the incumbents" who do you think is easier to extort, the small startup or the bigger company? I hope Fb is charged for all their auto play videos
And, if you have a valid work use case, simply get the "Enterprise" package for your home network, where the exorbitant cost is covered by your employer!
And what if you're NOT a tech worker who has an employer to cover the "Enterprise VPN" tier? Good luck with that.
What the US needs, is competition. Monopolists can afford to screw their customers, competitors in an open, transparent market can't. Let ISPs advertise that their connection to Youtube/Netflix/etc is not throttled like it is with Comcast/etc, and chances are many people will switch.
Competition cannot occur without low (or ideally 0) entrance costs. The investment required to lay cable, let along bother to run your ISP, is such that there will never an open market.
Wireless ISPs would immediately collapse if they had to serve the amount of Netflix traffic wired internet connections use in an evening. They simply aren't a viable alternative for the population at large.
The solution nobody needs, effectively. It's already economically sound to run cable/fiber in dense population centers, because the number of customers you reach with every mile of new cabling is huge.
Don't get me wrong, Webpass is very cool. But it's point-to-point and requires you to build a lot of infrastructure on the top of buildings, which requires a lot of permissions, which isn't always easy to get. The wireless ISPs that do exist outside of urban areas have to use cellphone networks, and they are not ready for the amount of data transfer required. Yet.
The existence of wireless connections does not change the fact that broadband last-mile service is a natural monopoly.
Not OP, but I recently lived in a rural area and had 3 options for Internet:
* Mediacom cable with permanent 20-50% (or more) packet loss
* CenturyLink DSL at 1mbps (not a typo)
* Local wireless company, 7mbps, no packet loss
My position is that municipal fiber is the way to go, but give wireless ISPs credit because they're helping a lot of people get on the Internet who would barely have connectivity otherwise.
That is (oversimplified, but not wholly inaccurate, I think) how they do it in South Korea, where the average home has only one physical data line but a choice of three big ISPs to service it. By some sort of wacky cooincidence, South Korea also has the best broadband access in the world.
(How good? According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_South_Korea a typicaly 1000Mb/s line is $20/mo. I have one choice, Comcast, and I pay 4x that much for 1/100th of that speed.)
But competition is possible. I have a choice of many broadband options. It used to be (20 years ago) that cable and phone where the only options to get internet, but now both the phone company and the cable company have fiber networks, and there's a community fiber network that's accessible to many ISPs. Companies that own their own last mile may be required (or are incentivised) to allow other providers to use it.
Of course if only one company owns the last mile, then that company needs to be tightly regulated, government controlled, or required to share. But with the switch from phone or cable to fiber, everybody needs new infrastructure, and everybody needs to lay new cable. That also evens the playing field a bit.
It's bizarre to see the free market fail so hard in a supposedly strongly pro-free market country like the US.
If you use just a regular VPN then the traffic at the other side of the VPN will still be slow.
I think what he's arguing is that fully encrypted p2p overlay networks would be the next step beyond privacy VPNs, and would be more powerful. Basically if we "encrypt all the things" then ISPs will only see opaque encrypted traffic and will be unable to effectively implement really fine-grained traffic prioritization/de-prioritization.
What he suggests would be possible. People and services could join public ZeroTier networks and you'd have this flat "meta-Internet" where everything was encrypted and all traffic looked the same.
I don't think this is a silver bullet. ISPs can still make deals with big players like Netflix, Google, Facebook, etc. and offer them at a higher speed on the "clearnet." Other traffic would be relegated to the "other" category that would be slow-laned on non-premium plans. This applies to more conventional privacy VPNs and anything else just as much as it applies to ZeroTier.
It's always going to be worse than going direct.
First and last initials are AI.
Is there any doubt that no-tolerance of encrypted traffic will be baked into their ToS with proprietary encryption becoming the standard between the bundled endpoints?
Wouldn't the ISP's default in that case be to de-prioritize all opaque encrypted traffic?
How far can the ISPs go before Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook, just offer an always on VPN service to get around the ISP's blacklisting of sites you haven't paid to visit?
Android on Nexus and Pixel phones has a wifi assistant that secures the connection when you're connected to public wifi; which kinda sounds like an automatically initiated VPN.
It seems to me that if the ISPs are no longer common carriers, then they are able to choose what content they transmit.
That choice must surely come with responsibility, and they are therefore responsible for the content they transmit.
I suggest another way to remove their profits; flood them with illegal content and sue.
Generally laws concerning infrastructure are made on the basis of public policy outcome concerns. Having cable-style menus of internet access has negative public policy outcomes, and no good public policy outcomes. The open internet as it stands delivers economic benefits and provides opportunities for more equitable information and service access.
The internet has become critical for education, research, finance, and also for a whole host of frivolous things that we don't want to regulate away. It's become where we expect innovative products to emerge from and the non-existent barriers to entry are why that is so. It's also become an equalizer for access to information. Sure, the majority of the country doesn't take advantage of that, but enough of us have and the country has received real economic benefit from that access. The fall of net neutrality will end up preserving the access to the frivolous things (FB, Netflix, Twitter, Gaming) while restricting access to the parts of the web that have strong societal good associated with it (all the varied large and small services and sources of information that don't exist for click farming and ad pushing).
Allowing Facebook only packages would pretty much trap the poor and tech illiterate into an information ghetto. Right now they're simply voluntarily staying in said information ghetto, but there are no monetary or technological hurdles to them leaving. How is a poor student with the FaceFlix only internet package going to do research for their history paper? There aren't many posts on Facebook walls that would make for useful sources. But they can just use the library because we've decided no one needs the internet! Surely this won't result in a further bifurcation of education in this country.
I don't think that many on HN currently would be negatively impacted by a FaceFlix option being available, many of us have to have full internet access for work or would personally shell out for it anyways. The thing that would impact our community directly is that there would certainly be those who will never find their passion or affinity for technology because they'll grow up with a FaceFlix plan and never stumble upon that thing that piques their curiosity. They won't become our future classmates or coworkers or conference speakers, they won't make interesting new technology, and we'll all be poorer for it.
Same deal with the internet. When you pay your broadband bill, you're not just paying for the cables and routers between your house and Facebook, you're paying for the maintenance of "the internet", a collective thing which benefits you indirectly even if you don't visit most of it. And using an internet that prioritizes the routes to Facebook and Youtube would be a lot like living in a town where the only good roads lead to your job and the mall.
05/2011: "Paul: 'Right to health care' is slavery" https://www.politico.com/story/2011/05/paul-right-to-health-...
> “With regard to the idea whether or not you have a right to health care you have to realize what that implies. I am a physician. You have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. You are going to enslave not only me but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants, the nurses. … You are basically saying you believe in slavery,” said Paul (R-Ky.), who is an ophthalmologist.
10/2017: "The Problem of Doctors' Salaries" - https://www.politico.com/agenda/story/2017/10/25/doctors-sal...
> Policymakers have a number of tools to use to introduce more competition, weaken the doctors’ cartel and get their pay more in line with counterparts elsewhere.