Comcast Hints at Plan for Paid Fast Lanes | Hacker News Reader

Comcast Hints at Plan for Paid Fast Lanes

arstechnica.com

122 pointsivanech123 comments

I think the idea that Comcast is going to change their pricing model around tiered access is patently ridiculous

- They are already extracting near maximum value from monopolistic pricing

- Services like this were tried before Net Neutrality, and they failed pretty dramatically

- Bad PR could lead to future litigation

- Most Importantly This process has only shown that it could be completely reversed again with the next administration. So they don't want to rebuild future revenue models knowing that the rules can be reversed again in 4 years at the drop of a hat.

The whole thing is really about Comcast's ability to shake down other companies to pay for their infrastructure improvements. It's really expensive to sell a $5 a month plan to a million users. It's really cheap to get $500 million dollars out of Netflix to pay for your line upgrades. And for the next 4 years, they have a blank check to shake down companies in the background.

> They are already extracting near maximum value from monopolistic pricing

Source? If push came to shove, e.g. if I were threatened with a price rise or disconnection, I would pay up to 10x more, maybe even more, for my Internet.

You must be very unusual then, because as I pay for our family to have access, and between unlimited data mobile and low-tier fiber, it's about $300-$350/mo. There is no way I could ever pay $3500/mo. I would sooner simply go back to the 1990's, reading books at home and occasionally using Internet cafes for surf time.

I depend on the Internet for my income. I'd feel the pinch. But if I had to pay the equivalent of my rent a month, and had literally no other choice, I'd bite.

Where do you guys live? I WFH all the time and only pay $35 for internet and $35 for cell.

Somewhere that Comcast doesn't have competition. I'm guessing you're on Charter or Time Warner.

I'm on Comcast. But there is some competition. Plus, we can live very comfortably without cable and on 55mb/s.

I'm in an area with competition. Comcast doesn't offer a 55mb/s plan. They offer a 25mb/s plan starting at $75/mo which is their only plan that doesn't force you into buying television as well. That's right, the internet only plan forces you into buying television and all the fees that come with it.

Well, that's cellular (Verizon) + fiber (Fios), which includes "rental" fees and the like, for a family of three. So not just straight access.

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

Under monopoly pricing, then they could already be charging you 10x right now if they thought it would make them more money. Repealing net neutrality not required. If this is about price discrimination, there are better ways to extract extra value from richer clients.

But I do want to point out that their monopoly power actually shrinks if you include WiMax based ISP services. Their coverage in the boonies is actually pretty good and pricing is competitive. Even if Comcast is the only real physical option, I often use the threat of switching to negotiate better deals.

Where on this planet can you get 300Mbit service* over wireless?

*Actual real 300Mbit/s that you can watch multiple 4k streams over all day like you can via HFC.

You underestimate Comcast’s ability to fail spectacularly.

When the economy was crashing in 2008 they were neck and neck with Countrywide in a consumerist poll for worst company in America. Countrywide won, but barely, and they basically broke the global economy.

Comcast will do every single thing they can to destroy the internet and turn it into Cable TV packages once the Trump administration deregulates the industry.

In a few years when we have a new administration we can put the band aids back on.

Unpopular Opinion (but similar): If the ISPs win and the rules get rescinded, I think we are looking at their ultimate poison pill. An egregious push like this ends up stoking an unprecedented backlash at about the time that we see a bit of a swing in midterm elections that create less conservative leaning legislation and we finally get rules written that promote localized community broadband and essentially the end of their monopoly. As stated, I think they are pretty much making money like a monopoly now and as they push further I think they are gonna get "Ma 'Bell'd."

Another unpopular thought:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/tenth_amendment

I think net-neut advocates who really think there's a dark star in the offing for the web should be pushing utility-style muni networks. They're wasting time and money trying to shove the FCC into their view of the marketplace here, and shedding longer-term credibility by refusing to countenance two realities:

1) Broadband is becoming a more competitive industry, not less

2) FANG have parochial business motivations too re: their pro-net neutrality, and they are no more angelic than Comcast's.

Defocusing on national rulemaking and incubating muninet successes in rising cities would do more for their desired outcome.

> https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/tenth_amendment

The internet is textbook interstate commerce, and therefore not subject to the 10th amendment. You're getting internet from an ISP who's likely headquartered in another state, who's delivering content from a provider in a third state, and routing that traffic through a half-dozen other states. It would be an absolute mess if every state could say what constitutes "network neutrality" and the ISPs had to deal with different laws at every routing hop.

You are right, but that isn't at all why I referenced 10A.

I referenced it because, in the U.S., the residuary (or "police") power resides in the states. Large ISPs have tried to fight municipal broadband in the courts, but [the point I am making here] is that states and municipalities have extremely broad discretion in terms of what projects they can undertake. And building a local ISP is something they certainly can do.

> 1) Broadband is becoming a more competitive industry, not less

Would love to see a citation for this, most people (my view is US-centric) have the choice of 1 or 2 local broadband wireline providers: the cable company and/or the local telco. This hasn't changed since... ever. Having a third provider is very, very uncommon.

> The whole thing is really about Comcast's ability to shake down other companies to pay for their infrastructure improvements. It's really expensive to sell a $5 a month plan to a million users. It's really cheap to get $500 million dollars out of Netflix to pay for your line upgrades. And for the next 4 years, they have a blank check to shake down companies in the background.

I agree, that’s what the have in mind, but I doubt their greed will stop there.

Not to mention: https://xkcd.com/1865/

> It's really cheap to get $500 million dollars out of Netflix to pay for your line upgrades. And for the next 4 years, they have a blank check to shake down companies in the background.

This.

The consumers aren't the direct targets here, at least not for wired networks. The first targets would be the content providers. You want to push content to the millions of Comcast subscribers? Pay up. Naturally, the content providers won't get stuck with the bill and eventually roll it over to the customers. But that would be them billing you more, not the ISPs directly, which is easier for them.

There are known examples of this behavior -https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140718/06533327927/level....

In today's networks, a LOT of the traffic is streaming video, especially from YouTube and Netflix. Ten years ago it was BitTorrent, and back then "Fast Lanes" meant "Slow lanes for BitTorrent because it's congesting our network". The story here is that as the Internet matured and connectivity became a ubiquitous, off-the-shelf product, the money went into content. So content producers are fairy profitable, but the network operators feel like they've been left out - they're the ones carrying all of this expensive content, but they don't get a slice of the money.

That's not to say that companies like Comcast won't try to get more money out of consumers too, but that's trickier since the customers are used to a certain type of service and getting them to pay more for more of the same would be an uphill battle.

> They are already extracting near maximum value from monopolistic pricing

Not true. When you remove net neutrality, you open up new possibilities for price-discrimination for the monopolist and they can extract more revenue for providing the same service.

Simple illustrative example: Suppose for the sake of argument that almost all VPN users are willing to pay an extra $1 / month for VPN access. Then Comcast can make strictly more money by charging everyone exactly the same as before except VPN access costs an additional $1/month.

(Also, I know you didn't bring it up, but there are lots of important free speech NN issues as well as economic ones, for example, Comcast might easily decide to completely block sites like Wikileaks.)

If they truly have monopoly pricing, and almost all users were willing to pay an extra $1 for VPN, they are already charging you for it.

In fact, it would be worse for them, because if everyone is paying as much as they can bear for internet, and they have given some the option to opt out of an unneeded service, then they will lose money.

Assuming they have total monopoly power.

They are literally the only provider for a large number of Americans. Many Americans only have 1 provider. It's been proven numerous times that they raise rates if competition doesn't exist and lower them when it does. You'd literally have to be willfully ignorant of the facts to say that Comcast won't just add fees because they can. They've done it numerous times already.

That's my whole point. Comcast is already charging you for whatever they want. If they think everyone in their area will pay an extra $15 for Netflix, they will just raise everyone's price by $15. Bundling and tiering not required.

Ah, but what if only half the people want to pay an extra $15 for Netflix? If they raise everyone's price by $15, the other half will cancel service or go to a lower tier. So this won't work. However, without net neutrality, they can charge the Netflix-watchers $15 more and not charge the other people any more.

Sorry, my example was not clear enough.

Only a small fraction of people use VPN, so the monopoly price in a world with net neutrality basically ignores those people and charges the optimal price for everyone who does not use VPN.

However, in a world without net neutrality, the company is able to charge a different price to those who want VPNs and those who don't (this is price discrimination). So it keeps charging the old price to everyone else, but adds on a surcharge only to those users who want a VPN. In this simple example, it makes an extra dollar per month per VPN-user.

So the solution is removing the monopolist power, not implementing more government regulations of the internet.

1. I don't see that this follows. Would you suggest the same for water companies, electric companies, roads?

2. Unfortunately that isn't the choice we have before us. It doesn't make sense to make awful decisions on the premise that, in some fantasy ideal world, the decisions wouldn't be awful.

I think you mean unpaid slow lanes. A neutral network operates at maximum speed always. Prioritization really means deprioritization here.

Prioritization pretty much always implies something is less prioritized.

Where I draw the line is throttling when the network could support higher speed. Say the fast lane is using 20% of resources and the slow lane is only using 20%, then the slow lane shouldn't be artificially slowed.

But I really have no huge issue with an ISP creating a fast lane that gets 30% of resources even if the slow lane wants 90% and gets throttled to 70%. Priced based mechanisms are useful for allocating scarce resources.

>Where I draw the line is throttling when the network could support higher speed.

I have news for you : this is the service you're already receiving. All ISPs throttle user traffic to below their network's capacity.

I mean beyond any explicitly stated rate limit. Or do you mean something else?

I think they're talking about the trunk lines, which are mostly dark (unused). The bandwidth technology has outstripped demand by orders of magnitude. There's no traffic-related reason to 'prioritize' any traffic. The real goal is to charge rent on content they don't produce, just because its going over their cable.

Oversubscribing != throttling.

"fast lanes" is just a euphemism for throttling. It's still a protection racket.

Sounds entirely reasonable to me:

> [T]he Commission also should bear in mind that a more flexible approach to prioritization may be warranted and may be beneficial to the public. For example, a telepresence service tailored for the hearing impaired requires high-definition video that is of sufficiently reliable quality to permit users "to perceive subtle hand and finger motions" in real time. And paid prioritization may have other compelling applications in telemedicine. Likewise, for autonomous vehicles that may require instantaneous data transmission, black letter prohibitions on paid prioritization may actually stifle innovation instead of encouraging it. Commercial arrangements that entail prioritizing such traffic could ensure the low latency levels needed to achieve the high level of data quality necessary for such services to thrive.

VoIP really needs low latency. Buffering a Youtube video or downloading a torrent doesn't.

Selective prioritization could improve the former drastically, while having no noticeable effect on the latter.

Note I'm not taking a stance on the issue either way. Maybe it would be better to keep Net Neutrality and add provisions for latency-sensitive applications. Maybe it's better to nuke it and let the markets figure it out.

Either way, this is an important point and I'm surprised that the HN crowd doesn't discuss it more.

QoS is not net neutrality, and confusing the two is a common tactic of anti-NN shills who can’t make actual points.

I'd love to hear more about the difference between QoS and "prioritization", as they are calling it.

The existing rules contain an exception to the no-throttling and no-blocking rules for "reasonable network management." Here is how the Commission has defined that term:

> A network management practice is a practice that has a primarily technical network management justification, but does not include other business practices. A network management practice is reasonable if it is primarily used for and tailored to achieving a legitimate network management purpose, taking into account the particular network architecture and technology of the broadband Internet access service.

It's debatable what exactly this means, but providing higher QoS for traffic that needs it--in a way that does not discriminate between providers of those services--would seem to be a strong candidate.

> in a way that does not discriminate between providers of those service

Exactly. Anti-NN (broadly) wants to be able to discriminate on the basis of provider, not service.

"Provider" and "service" aren't always distinguishable.

Does that excuse provider-based discrimination in the cases where they are distinguishable? I'm pretty sure those are the overwhelming majority.

I take "legitimate network management purpose" to mean improving some metric of overall usage satisfaction. This is tricky, and already leaves a lot of room to maneuver.

QoS is decided by the user/service. Paid prioritization is decided by the ISP.

Every connection can have a max high-priority bandwidth and a max best-effort bandwidth, so people won't benefit from just marking every connection as high-QoS.

Any sane ISP either ignores or replaces QoS tags on ingress to their network.

Currently, ISPs strip/normalize the TOS bits on incoming traffic. ISPs could enable DiffServ (especially at the CMTS/DSLAM) and charge content providers to respect their TOS bits, allowing traffic like VoIP and gaming to get lower latency/jitter. But they don't do that.

Instead, ISPs are creating artificial congestion on their transit links (by leaving router ports unplugged) and then selling that bandwidth to content providers via paid peering to avoid the congestion. Basically "it would be a shame if massive packet loss were to happen... never mind, we already did it". So yeah, paid peering probably does have lower latency than congested and bufferbloated transit links, but it's not like ISPs are using any kind of QoS as the term is traditionally understood.

ISPs always talk about low-latency applications (think of the deaf people!) but then they don't do anything that would actually reduce latency/jitter.

QoS can't be implemented without payments to authenticate intent, but the argument would hold more water if the fees are merely transfer payments between users and Comcast gets $0 out of it, or ... Comcast has competitors.

Neither is true, so QoS basically should not be implemented and it's Comcast's own fault for being a rent-seeking monopoly.

People probably believe that the positive effects are on the more obscure or hypothetical side while the negative effects would be more severe and definite.

Sorry to the hearing impaired community for not prioritizing your latency needs, but Fox News buying up all the ISPs and controlling the news is worse.

The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical. Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call.

And yes, there's a whole list of individual token offenses ISPs have committed that people will spam out when you point this out, but it doesn't change the fact that the fears and horrors propping up this movement on a large scale do not exist.

> The funny thing about this is: All of the negative effects are hypothetical

No they aren't; many of them are things that the FCC responded to in if years of enforcing net neutrality principles through case by case actions, such as mobile and fixed broadband ISPs blocking services that competed with their offerings, and blocking other lawful services or content, sometimes for political reasons.

> Nobody offers "fast lanes" now, is planning to introduce them in the near future, and nobody offered fast lanes before the regulation was put into place. And yet, it's the top net neutrality supporter panic call.

“Fast lanes” have gotten blown out of proportion because of discussion of a possible weakness in an earlier draft of the 2015 order. They aren't actually a concern for the non-neutral net, they are a concern about a potential end-run around a net regulated for neutrality but with a loophole. Unfortunately, a popular distortion side that that draft was designed by enemies of neutrality rather than people trying to save it who might have designed the draft insufficiently tightly, and so “fast lanes” have become associated with the goals and plans of the anti-neutrality camp rather than just a potential weakness in a no-longer-relevant pro-neutrality draft regulation.

I mostly blame John Oliver for that.

Although, in point of fact, edge provider preference much like fast lanes exists in the form of zero rating, which is occurring in the mobile broadband space. It's not precisely the same thing, but had much the same issue.

Viewed with a more holistic approach, I understand a lot of those case by case issues, and have a lot less panic about them. It's easy to paint a pile of different events with a broad brush, especially if you already view a group of companies as inherently evil by default. (I get why the net neutrality propaganda campaign has been so successful, it's super easy to convince people to hate Comcast and Verizon, we all already do.)

But for example, the paid fast lane situation... does not currently exist. The whole "you might have to pay for the social media package to see this tweet" nonsense? Not only doesn't actually exist but has no chance of even remotely existing.

Paid fast lanes sort of do exist, but the content providers are the ones paying. This is worse in some ways because it is invisible to consumers but it's better in the sense that consumers don't pay for infrastructure they don't use.

I agree the bigger issue is lack of competition. Why isn't there equal outcry about that?

Comcast has a very slow lane for all BitTorrent traffic (they effectively blocked it back in 2007/2008) until the FCC died them to not do that.

You’re argument is probably false. The fears are real we’ve seen ISPs provide tired bandwidth in the past. Everything except BitTorrent traffic was in the fast lane and BitTorrent traffic was in the slow lane.

FWIW, Comcast's statement clearly indicated it would not throttle or block lawful content. If you're being honest, you should be able to agree that most BitTorrent traffic is not lawful. As of 07/08, I think maybe the most common use of legal BitTorrent was that some Linux distros offered their ISOs over it.

Today this might be a bit more interesting of a case since a lot of software patchers from major protocols now use the BitTorrent protocol to patch software. I believe Star Citizen does, Blizzard games may as well. Windows Update at the very least now uses a similar system, though I don't know if it's specifically BitTorrent based or not.

> FWIW, Comcast's statement clearly indicated it would not throttle or block lawful content. If you're being honest, you should be able to agree that most BitTorrent traffic is not lawful.

Most BitTorrent traffic may not be, but that's a matter of content not protocol. Most of the people physically located in the death row wing of a particular prison may be condemned convicts but if a government says it's not going to kill anyone not duly sentenced to execution and just drops a bomb on that wing, killing mostly condemned criminals, but also a few correctional officers and service workers, the action would be clearly out of line with the commitment.

Sure, but again, the example given is ten years old, when there was almost zero legitimate BitTorrent traffic, and it was unreasonably difficult for ISPs to combat illegal traffic in other ways. (Of course, I suspect net neutrality supporters would be far angrier if Comcast were to inspect the contents of the BitTorrent content to determine if it's legal or not.)

If you're going to throttle a protocol to keep your network optimized for legitimate users, crippling a piracy protocol seems pretty practical, wouldn't you say?

Net neutrality supporters don't generally agree that ISPs have a proper duty to block even illegal content, only that it is not problematic (from an NN perspective, some may have problems in some cases for other reasons) if they do so provided that in doing so they do not block any legal content. If they can't discern illegal content they should just leave it alone; they are generally protected from liability for it specifically because it is not their job to police it.

What do you mean by token offenses?

"Fast lanes" as a general product aren't likely going to be offers on the company home page, they're going to be in the private peering agreements they have with larger companies. This has already happened. [Netflix had to pay Comcast](https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-com...), and [Comcast throttled their VoIP competitor Vonage](https://www.wired.com/2006/03/comcast_throttling_vonage_user...). Vonage and Netflix started working again but the why was never made public. It seems likely that paying for fast lanes was involved. These aren't the cold hard facts we'd like to have about what exactly happened, but they're clear violations of Net Neutrality that were resolved ambiguously.

As far as negative effects in general, beyond fast lanes, there's more than a few examples:

* [AT&T blocked FaceTime](https://www.savetheinternet.com/att-facetime) * [Verizon blocked Google Wallet](http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/06/technology/verizon_blocks_go...) * [Verizon throttles video](https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/07/verizons-throttl...) * And [a lot more](https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio...).

The violations are often subtle, and haven't always affected everyone, but the negative effects of the lack of NN are not hypothetical.

As I suggested, if you look at these incidents individually, there's very different perspectives you can glean:

Netflix gets free colocation from ISPs through Netflix Open Connect. (Hilariously, Netflix claims it "offers this for free to ISPs", whereas if you realize it is colocation, it is obviously Netflix should be paying for it.) Net neutrality cripples ISPs' negotiating position with Netflix (since it prevents ISPs from controlling their traffic in other ways), which protects their special treatment, ironically, since only Netflix has the market share to dictate terms to ISPs. If you made a startup video competitor, you'd have to pay for the service net neutrality guarantees Netflix gets for free. ISPs must host Netflix's boxes for free, or get hit by a deluge of upstream Netflix traffic.

FaceTime is an excellent example of a reasonable reason a provider may wish to get involved in content for performance reasons: Everyone switching to video chat would have a massive and immediate impact on that ISP's network traffic. With "unlimited data" models, ISPs don't necessarily get increased revenue to offset massively increased bandwidth use and network congestion. It's understandable why AT&T moved here. I actually prefer a pay-as-you-go data model, because it incentivizes carriers to provide neutral data as fast as possible: The more you use, the more money they make.

Verizon blocking Google Wallet stands in a long line of incidents where good PR has reversed the blame. ;) Google refused to allow competitors' payment systems from using the secure element in phones... a market Google has monopoly control of. Eventually, Verizon's hardline stance on being able to offer a competing service forced Google to rework Wallet to be more fair, and not get an exclusive security feature everyone else was prohibited from using. Of course, Google just moved to kill their competition another way: They bought out Softcard/ISIS and turned it into Android Pay. (And kicked Windows Mobile Softcard users to the curb too, hurting a second competitor in the process! Efficiency!) NFC payment competitors to Android Pay on Android phones like Samsung Pay only exist today thanks to Verizon's hardline stance.

Prioritization is only necessary or useful when bandwidth is scarce and your endpoints would use more than you have if they could. The best solution for all of the applications listed is more capacity, not prioritization.

What, then, does their eagerness for prioritization tell us? It tells us that these companies would like to stop investing so much in increasing capacity, and instead squeeze as much money as they can out of their existing infrastructure.

They're going to make things worse (or let them gradually become worse over time) just so they can charge extra money to people who need something better.

Beyond that, prioritization is not in conflict with net neutrality. If my ISP wants to offer me a premium subscription that prioritizes my traffic over normal subscribers, that's fine. Where we run into trouble is when they start doing this for other people who aren't their customers. If they want to charge me more for better service, that's fine. If they want to charge Netflix more to provide me with better service, that's not fine.

Comcast has $5 billion USD on their balance sheet in cash. They can afford to add more capacity.

Of course. But they'd rather have even more cash if they can.

They also have about $120 billion USD in debt. Not exactly the healthiest company in the world financially speaking.

> Prioritization is only necessary or useful when bandwidth is scarce and your endpoints would use more than you have if they could. The best solution for all of the applications listed is more capacity, not prioritization.

This doesn't make sense to me. Sometimes there can be large spikes in network traffic. In theory, if your network has enough capacity to handle _all_ the traffic at low latency during normal load, then the prioritization has no effect anyways. It's only there for when you are low on capacity.

I'd love for someone to correct my understanding here.

>Either way, this is an important point and I'm surprised that the HN crowd doesn't discuss it more.

But right now all latency-sensitive applications should be operating just fine. I regularly play online first person shooters, and that is a latency-sensitive application if there ever was one. So that strongly suggests, seeing how I'm on Comcast / Xfinity's cheapest plan, that all lanes are fast lanes right now.

Accordingly, that means if you were to

>nuke [net neutrality] and let the markets figure it out

that's actually just letting a monopoly extract more profit from their network by intentionally degrading the quality of some connections unless paid more money.

I don't really think I need to say more, if this was a fair and competitive market where giant ISPs weren't lawsuit-happy in order to keep out competition, or they weren't able to do that successfully, sure, maybe the market would figure it out, and eventually the ISPs that offer true net neutrality would probably have traffic because no consumer is interested in paying more to be able to use the internet in specific ways.

As it stands, it's extortion being codified into law via bribery, disguised as 'the removal of heavy-handed Obama regulations in order to improve the network you've never had any issues with'.

A lot of games are low latency specifically because they worked with ISPs to reduce latency, or worked with a server provider that did so:

https://www.polygon.com/2016/2/17/11037220/league-of-legends...

As I understand, the monopolies like Comcast and Time Warner have almost no incentive to actually improve their infrastructure unless they have the ability to shake down the services that want speedier connections when they need them.

And this exactly how lack of net neutrality (combined with lack of infrastructure competition) messes up market signaling. A game then inflates its price, and all customers of the game pay a little bit extra because in some areas the ISP is shaking them down. The pricing pressure lands on the game company to resolve, in part with costs to customers which only have an indirect link to the transaction, not on the ISP that could actually resolve the problem with the direct parties involved.

Hi, what is market signaling?

It is how markets use prices as signals to decide what to produce and deliver efficiently. If the pricing of the good if ISP performance is actually hidden from the end consumer, then it muddies the customer valuation of both the game as a product, as well as an ISP as a product. By linking the prices of both in a hidden way, consumers don't have an effective way to make clear product choices which in turn signal to a company that it is producing the right thing (or the wrong thing). If the signals aren't clear, then the market becomes less efficient. The game company is no longer competes or is fully focused to make a good game, and the ISP is no longer competing to produce better network access.

That’s bullshit. I run a small telehealth company and latencies are not “just fine.” I spend much of my day dealing with internet connections for telehealth that are far from just fine, and it isn’t because of raw speeds, but the fact that “everything should be equal” is to ignore the fact that bandwidth is finite. Streaming YouTube is not as latency sensitive as telemedicine. Yet under NN — that traffic has to be treated equally. If I could pay a surcharge to have my traffic prioritized, I would, but under existing rules, real-time telehealth is if equal importance as some kid watching Kinder Suprise egg videos on YouTube, yet if an ISP wanted to prioritize real time traffic, under NN they couldn’t. Now, maybe ISPs could compete on offering things like “optimized for video conferencing or VOIP” or “optimized for large downloading needs” or whatever.

Not all traffic is equal and not all consumers have identical needs.

What the REAL issue is is local governments providing de facto monopoly power to ISPs thus preventing the sort of competition that would make a much more innovative and customizable product for consumers. My needs are more geared around real-time and less around large downloads, yet here in France where I live, all traffic is identically treated, supposedly.

There are unintended consequences with NN that I feel that people don’t understand. The internet isn’t the same as a phone call — some traffic has different requirements in order to be successful, while phone calls are all pretty much the same.

Like I said, the most latency-sensitive topic I can relate to is first-person shooters; in particular, I play the game CS:GO, where one shot can knock you out of a round. I play within a 40ms ping area, generally around 20-30ms of ping, and that seems to get me (from California) more or less the whole west coast of America.

I experience virtually no issues from my internet, and like I said, I pay $30 a month for this service. I don't use a lot of band-width, I simply use a consistent stream, and I see no reason why I should have to pay more for that right. It's an automaton wiring packets, not people scrambling to move data.

Back to you, though: what sort of issues arise from this extreme sensitivity to latency you have? Is 'telehealth' just a doctor skyping with a patient or do you have some kind of real-time devices that depend on communication over a distance? If the latter, how sure are you that your architecture isn't the issue, and some computations couldn't be done in a different link in the chain?

>the REAL issue is local governments providing de facto monopoly power to ISPs

I totally agree. Like I literally said in my comment, the whole calculus of this conversation would change if ISPs actually had to compete, but since they obviously don't, I can't possibly see how revoking net neutrality is a good idea. It simply lets them tighten their stranglehold in a fashion that costs everyone more money and extends the anti-competitive sphere they exist in into the whole realm of business that relies on sending traffic over the internet.

So sure, it's easy to say "telehealth has a real impact on lives and YouTube for children doesn't", but that doesn't mean eliminating net neutrality here and now is a good choice.

It makes more sense if you promise me X Mb/s download speed then give that to me, if you are not able then don't promise that speed, I should decide for what I need the speed, I should not have horrible speed for X protocol/site/app that I use 99% of the time but you have great speed for Netflix but we both pay same price. I want things to be fair, customers, websites, apps to be treated the same.

I hope this is an exercise in playing devil's advocate and not true naivety. Do you really think telcos care about these issues? They are a business and not a socialist government.

Other comments have stated their goal clearly: increase margins from existing infrastructure.

If fair repartition of resources was their goal, why not make that an explicit part of the laws they want to introduce? Why do it in a roundabout way? Presenting a wall of 'possibilities' only serves to obfuscate their true goal.

Would you let 'the markets figure out' your water supply?

If net neutrality is lost, this could inspire a renewed invigoration of decentralized internet, e.g. Tor and P2P style. This may also inspire new ISP startups and create rapid innovation in networking.

The prospect of net neutrality being repealed definitely sucks, but great things can come from hitting rock bottom

ISP blocking of P2P protocols (notably Comcast and BitTorrent) was one of the acts that accelerated the net neutrality policy efforts; the technologies you point to are at least as likely to be early casualties of the non-neutral net as to take off under it.

Agreed. Instead, I'd hope for more interest in steganography.

I see a comment like this on HN quite frequently. A generic "maybe X will inspire a decentralized solution for Y". While I think this is typically fraught with user experience nightmares, I'm not sure how decentralization of ISPs would even work. Wouldn't that simply mean MORE ISPs, something that is almost impossible to do in the Untied States (and thusly one of the biggest reasons for needing net neutrality)?

"Decentralized ISP" generally means wireless over unlicensed frequencies which requires none of those pesky permits. Historically wireless has been fairly expensive and 10x slower than wired, but maybe next time (60 GHz?) will be different. Probably not.

First you gonna have to climb from the rock bottom while the entrenched monopolists (and the government) are trying to keep you there.

OTOH American people chose this, so it's not some evil corporations who are to blame, it's the people, your friends, neighbors, etc. People forget that sometimes.

Also IIRC there was a case in the 90s of an ISP not playing ball with the government WRT surveillance IIRC and it ended up out of business and IIRC the CEO in legal trouble.

How did we chose this? The person who appointed the FCC commissioner has no mandate. The majority of people didn’t vote for him. The FCC is on record saying that they won’t listen to comments from citizens.

We the majority have NO voice.

Trump Nov 12 2014:

"Obama’s attack on the internet is another top down power grab. Net neutrality is the Fairness Doctrine. Will target conservative media."

https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/53260835850816716...

  The person who appointed the FCC commissioner

If you're referring to Pai, that would be Obama.

> e.g. Tor and P2P style.

You are always going to be able to encrypt your data in a way that their filters do not understand. The problem is that anything the filters do not understand will go to the low priority queue. Your Tor traffic will get treated just like Netflix traffic, in the event that Netflix chooses not to pay protection money.

Or the packets might be thrown out entirely, only letting you use a certain set of port, ip ranges and protocols

I doubt they'll ever throw anything out entirely. 2000ms latency and 75% packet loss is as good as blocked and the PR team can keep saying they don't block anything.

I realize this is sort of wishing for the ability to create materials at scale with the tensile strength to make a space elevator but I wonder how far are we really from having "spooky action at a distance" connected devices. Removing the last mile leverage ISPs have now could help break this near monopoly they have over America's communications.

> "spooky action at a distance" connected devices

We have that; it's called radio.

If you're hoping for something spookier and more quantum-mechanical, then see e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-communication_theorem which implies that under quantum mechanics as currently understood, entanglement cannot be used for communication.

In fairness, Comcast didn't "hint" at any such thing -- this is based on Ars's conjecture based in what Comcast stopped saying.

They can correct the record any time.

Good propaganda campaigns only require that they are based on fact, like the fact that the line was removed from their stock statement. As long as you build your propaganda on a base fact, you can say almost anything you want with it.

Also in fairness, what trust has Comcast built with consumers? Why should I not believe that a company would attempt to make more money if possible?

Of course they are. They are a corporation.

The real question is what do we after net neutrality is repealed?

Do we try to break up the cable monopolies ? FTC lawsuits ? Start having Cities or States write laws enforcing neutrality ?

If you care about net neutrality you vote for politicians who want to legislate NN into law, and seeing the voting calls on NN (past and present) it's become a partisan issue.

Your best odds is to never vote for a GOPer if you care about NN. This can easily be reversed next election/presidential cycle.

Sure, but what actions to enforce or restore NN do we force democrats to campaign on.

Both sides are hugely pro-corporation (not counting the bernie fringe wing), we need to force them to run on specific issues related to net neutrality not vague notions.

I'm thinking an analogous to how many NRA republicans campaign very specifically and with specific actions they'd take. The NRA should be the model we coopt to protect NN.

At the very least the regulations in place granting local monopolies should be immediately rolled back. If a municipal entity wants to provide broadband, any lawsuit against that should be dismissed.

city and state isps

Which are, right now, nearly impossible. Due to lobbying efforts by the entrenched ISPs, municipal broadband is already illegal in many states. Here are two examples...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/05/north-carolina-s...

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/muni-...

Break up and nationalize the ISPs and run the internet as a state owned utility.

20 years ago I helped start an ISP. I would like to do it again.

We need a Telecommunications Act of 1996 all over again.

I keep thinking about what my ideal ISP would look like, then weighing the options. It's just so, so expensive to get one off the ground.

I've idly wondered about setting up an ISP company that would focus on buildup of community networks. A city could issue bonds to pay for the network as well as a build and maintain contract with the company. Part of the deal should be that the city is free to select a different company maintain the network after a certain point in time, but the city/community maintains ownership of the physical assets.

I think you should limit political campaign website access to subscribers that purchase the ultra-premium $500/mo. package

How does one start a municipal ISP, or advocate for the creation of one?

> For example, a telepresence service tailored for the hearing impaired...

It should be illegal to use children, handicap, illness and death to promote products unless all of your money goes to helping just those things.

Why? Why should the government have a say in how people promote products? Unless they are being fraudulent, why can’t the consumer simply use their own brains to decide what to buy?

You're right, I hate laws that try to fix problems like that. And I hate that "it should be illegal..." phrase. It should be illegal to use that phrase. I used it lazily to convey how exploiting emotions to sell products and views makes me angry.

> why can’t the consumer simply use their own brains to decide what to buy?

I wish I knew.

I am always a bit confused as to how the ideal Net Neutrality rules would work.

ISPs always have to make decisions about who to peer with, how many links to have with each other network, etc. These decisions are made with business motivations, and have a huge effect on QOS for various upstream services. You can't tell an ISP they need the exact same bandwidth for each upstream connection.

So what rules SHOULD they have as far as their peering and transit arrangements?

Hahaha... not long after https://twitter.com/comcast/status/933396998958567442

-- edit: this is in the article.. I saw it after..

The one thing that is good about this is that a lot of cities are now talking about rolling out their own broadband network. If Comcast does anything remotely as not adhering to the principles of net neutrality, then you are going to see even more cities talk about getting their own network.

I live in a city with municipal broadband. It's pretty overrated. Everything has to be managed by third parties, so it's more expensive than the national brands and service sucks.

Not saying it can't be done, but just saying it can be worse than the current alternatives.

They're one step ahead of you. Comcast & Co have already gotten municipal broadband outlawed by many state legislatures: https://www.publicintegrity.org/2014/08/28/15404/how-big-tel...

See previous HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15655548

And they can get their upstream connectivity for said network from...Comcast.

What happens when cities start banning “offensive” content based on the political flavors of the day. Imagine how much filtering happens at public libraries — when governments control the pipes, individuals have no alternatives.

Government should provide incentives for competition, not socialist collectivization. People here seem to have an unhealthy obsession with government. Have we learned nothing from the soviet era? We should be demanding smaller government. Government is what created the ISP near-monopolies.

What we need is competition. Government should be facilitating that. Would we want internet to be run like the NYC MTA? A profit motive is a powerful thing.

If they want to build a faster parallel pipe, and charge more for it, I don't see a problem with that.

The problem is that we, the tax payers, helped to fund the first set of pipes for them.

I feel like this should be part of the stipulation. If we repeal net neutrality and you're caught degrading the internet further than it already is, you should be forced to pay all of that money back to the public. This seems to be the only incentive that may work from within the new framework.

The existing ISP infrastructure is not something I opted in, even though I fortunately get to enjoy gigabit speeds via AT&T. I already have "buyer's remorse" but can I be given a clause, a lot like our "lemon laws" that state that if they, free from the shackles of regulation, make things arguably worse for everyone involved, that we can get some of that money back? I feel like there needs to be some sort of "upper bounds" to deregulation that to use a metaphor says something like "We'll give you the Wild West but it's still illegal to murder people." in whatever highly damaging thing "murder people" turns out to actually be.

I’m not sure what can be done. When my vote doesn’t count (the man who appointed the FCC chair didn’t have a mandate and didn’t receive a majority of the popular vote). The FCC has stated that they won’t listen to my comment. What power do I have? None!

I truly hope someone physically removes Pai from power as the people have no say.

So broadband speeds are now frozen for normal Internet traffic. Only paid traffic will see any upgrades from here on out.

Well that didn't take long

Does anyone else gets this feeling of being helpless in front of the corp mega-machine?

What can one do when is forced to deal with psychopathic corporations that lie straight into one's face? i.e. https://twitter.com/comcast/status/933396998958567442

I sometimes wonder if this type of policy would result in me using the internet less on a point of principle? I mean I watch netflix but could live without it

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