Net Neutrality Was a Terrible Strategy

I actually have a better idea.

Give ISPs a choice. They can choose to be blind to traffic. Or they can choose to be liable for it. No in between.

You want to open the Pandora's box of inspecting the content of packets? OK, you're now liable for malware probing your clients, and for malware probes coming from your clients! If your network is helping generate a DDoS attack, you can be sued for it.

Or you can avoid liability by simply being the network equivalent of a common carrier. You didn't generate or alter the packets, you're not responsible for their content.

The carriers shouldn't even have any visibility to what is being carried, beyond what is necessary to route it to its destination.

Just like I don't want snail mail carriers opening my letters (even if it is strictly for the purpose of deciding whether or not they are important for speedy delivery).

There should be a protocol in which as much as possible is hidden. Even things like port numbers. From the traffic pattern it will usually be obvious whether it is bulk or interactive and such, and it has to be addressed, but beyond that, what protocol it is using, what port number and all that should be shrouded from prying eyes. If I have two connections going to the same host, it should not be possible for a wiretapper to tell which packets belong to which connection only "host A sent some blob to host B".

I was curious about the idea of the Internet as a public utility several years ago, so I did some research. Specifically I looked into just how something is determined to be a "public utility" in the first place. Why is my water line regulated and the price of the water pegged to the cost of providing the service? Why do I get a letter explaining any proposed rate increase with a (required) explanation of how it arises from an actual increase in the cost of providing the service? Surely it wasn't always that way, not for water or electricity or anything else. So how did they go from being private services controlled by companies to public utilities generally either run by municipalities or privately owned utility companies answerable to a public utilities commission?

It turns out the answer is fairly simple. Although each utility followed its own path historically, it all boiled down to one question: Is the benefit society as a whole would derive from the cheap, ubiquitous availability of the thing greater than the damage which would be done to society by the elimination of competition and extraction of profit from the thing?

I think that question is a very easy one to answer for Internet access. The benefit to society would be incalculably greater than the damage done by eliminating the profit of Comcast and AT&T and Time Warner and whatnot. Just for one, we could close every physical government office in the nation and save billions by permitting the workers from there to work from home while citizens access everything via the Internet. So long as Internet access is a luxury, you can't do that. Then you have businesses. We don't charge restaurants 100x as much for water because they make soup with it, and "business connections" that transfer no more data than a home with a few teenagers shouldn't cost any more either. And if the cost was based on the cost of providing the service, then like everything in tech it would shrink with amazing rapidity.

The term "Net Neutrality" was a very poor choice to describe the situation. The majority of people have no idea what the term is referring to without reading the details. In hindsight, something simpler like "Keep the internet free" or "Fight for the internet" would have been much more effective to rally up non tech individuals who have no idea what we are fighting for. Just my 0.02

The article makes some good points. The problem the article illustrates is that the interconnection points that comprise the hardware of the internet are commercial property that costs money by commercial companies who derive profit from those piped.

A valid solution is to regulate both the network providers and the content providers. The network providers should not be allowed to selectively throttle connectivity to targeted sources. At the same time the content providers should not be allowed to exploit their users with malicious script execution pushed through online advertisements and excessive privacy violations.

If the online advertising industry weren't fixated upon stalking users and harmful negligence perhaps there would be less incentive for the network providers to throttle that content. There would certainly be a lot more bandwidth. I will just leave these here:

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15703061

* https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/11/an-alarming-numb...

* https://www.engadget.com/2016/01/08/you-say-advertising-i-sa...

* https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/news/cybercrime...

The interstate highway analogy isn't really excellent either. "Slow lanes." So bandwidth = speed limit. Now instead of ISPs dictating your speed, it's the government. The interstate has speed limits. Drat, foiled again!

The argument here is against capitalism. The owner of the network dictates what happens on that network. To take a argument directly from HN, if you want (Net Neutrality | free speech), go build your own (network | Facebook).

The author even makes that argument. "The clear solution is to appropriate the means of distribution, the cables and airwaves, and develop mesh internets."

Guess what, now you're an "evil ISP" who is traffic shaping on your own equipment.

Are we going to have Net Neutrality for Facebook and Twitter too? Do we limit what they can do on their services? Classify them as a public utility?

The article echoes something I've been thinking lately, which is we won't win unless we go on the offensive. We need to rally around collectivizing the entire infrastructure of the Internet as a public good. Clearly the corporate interests are going for the kill. We can't be fighting every year just to maintain the same ground - we need to tackle this problem at its root.