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Comment by mbesto | Hacker News Reader

> On top of that, there are articles going around like these: https://www.freepress.net/blog/2017/04/25/net-neutrality-vio... …listing situations that have taken place where it’s claimed that net neutrality was violated.

I wanted to take a moment to discuss these arguments honestly

And then the author doesn't address AT&T blocking Skype, Comcast blocking P2P, Telecoms blocking Google Wallet, and on and on.

This is basically an article of whataboutisms. "ISP's aren't the problem with Freedom of Speech, companies are". Ya but if a private company (Facebook, Google, etc) blocks dissenting opinions, we can simply chose to read/visit another site. That's the point. If your ISP blocks a site, you don't have the choice to get another ISP.

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Let us not forget Level3 and Verizon having peering relationship issues in high use markets.... sigh

Consumers do suffer when lastmile carriers don't work to find solutions, however the solution is for customers to complain to their provider. The more people who complain the faster it'll get fixed, NN absolutely won't solve that, and to be honest I think it could make it worse.

> Ya but if a private company (Facebook, Google, etc) blocks dissenting opinions, we can simply chose to read/visit another site. That's the point. If your ISP blocks a site, you don't have the choice to get another ISP.

ISPs aren't the only kind of company that has high barriers to entry and tends toward a natural monopoly/duopoly.

There are only 2 major search engines (Google and Bing, DDG uses Bing), only 1 major video sharing site (and 2 minor sites), only a few messaging services, only 1 major link sharing site (HN is great but not competitive with reddit).

Worse, most of these services are owned by the same few big tech companies.

> "And then the author doesn't address AT&T blocking Skype, Comcast blocking P2P, Telecoms blocking Google Wallet, and on and on."

The thing is AT&T and Comcast ended their blocking of Skype and P2P voluntarily once their actions were exposed. Turns out American customers generally don't like censorship. Made for a very bad public image. These ISP's probably then realized it was more profitable to NOT block packets.

Sure, and you don't have the choice to get another ISP, because of, as the author notes in his article, the problem of regional monopoly created by local gov't regulation.

The two are not connected other than by the word "regulation".

You can still have local governments not give ISPs local monopoly over laid cables, but you can also have net neutrality, which says that companies shouldn't be messing with the traffic that passes through their pipes. The two aren't mutually exclusive.

Also, some have mentioned in other similar threads that sometimes the monopoly is (sort of) natural because no other ISP even wants to lay the cables in a certain area. I do believe that to be true, but I don't think it's "case closed," either.

Many other countries have solved this issue by either mandating that whoever is laying the cables would then have to license them to competitors (which could also bring them their return on investment faster), or they could have a public-private partnership, where the government invests alongside the initial company that is laying the cables, to reduce its costs, and then similarly they license them to new competitors later on.

You can either have regional monopolies or the ground constantly being torn up by companies wanting to lay their own cables, resulting in a clusterfuck for any other construction effort, and there's only so much space in the ground for cables anyways, not to mention that it's not practical for new players to enter the market given the costs of laying cables, putting them at a competitive disadvantage.

Sure, only 21 states codify telecom monopolies into law, but in the rest without those laws, how much more choice is there? Let's not count the states where the government paid for dark fiber which is leased to the corporations to provide service for customers, because that seems to be taking the correct route. If that were to happen in other states, it would necessarily require either (1) taking over the telecom infrastructure and leasing it back to them, or (2) expensive buyouts of the telecom's infrastructure. It seems simpler and cheaper to regulate a monopoly in this case.

EDIT: Correction: the laws in these 21 states don't codify monopolies per se, but they make it impossible for cities to build their own infrastructure on some absurd basis that the cities are anti-competitive with respect to corporations:

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkvn4x/the-21-law...

EDIT2: Ignore any argument I was trying to make, as I may or may not have contradicted myself based on my mental shortcomings with regard to concentration and lack of medication.

I'll briefly address this having worked on multiple sides of this argument; Your examples were all sorted out pre-NN. The Skype/GWallet issues are more related to mobile carriers having control over your mobile devices than anything else. Your carrier controlling your device is not something that would be sorted out by NN, and for the most part "the market" has sorted out a lot of phone control issues.

>you don't have the choice to get another ISP

Is this a problem that cannot be solved?

Not easily. In most places I have lived you have at most 2 options. DSL (if you are close enough) or cable. I guess anyone can do satellite but... shudders

Cable is like fiefdoms of old Europe and I'm they would like to keep it that way vs actually competing on the same lines

I live 15 miles from Google HQ and those are the choices, DSL/cable/satellite and I don't want to support the cable company so it's DSL for me.

If you're in the Bay Area, sonic.net was always great for me. Despite being DSL, it was pretty fast, good uptime, good customer service. I wish I could get them here.

Thanks, I should have mentioned I am using sonic.net. It is pretty good and I don't understand how but it's more reliable than AT&T (the second time I had to stay home from work and the AT&T technician didn't show up I had to switch to something else) when I assumed it was over the same copper wires to the nearest telco office and same telco office.

I'm pretty optimistic on the future of wireless technology. So far it has been pretty terrible, but amazing things are coming.

All you need to do instead is regulate or even nationalize the last mile infrastructure and then allow anyone to start an ISP and use that infrastructure to provide service anywhere in the country. If you do that you don't need Net Neutrality. It's not clearly a good idea because it creates a disincentive for ISPs to lay down last mile infrastructure and there's no way you'd be able to do it in the US anyway.

All in all net neutrality is just good regulation. It's basically disallowing ISPs from abusing their natural monopoly to extract rents from other companies. If you're going to regulate anything in this market at all that seems like a bare minimum.

Not really, at least in all the places I've ever lived in, there's only a single ISP available, you have no choice.

The only way this will get any better is by WISPs to become more common, which will take a lot of time and money.

> you don't have the choice to get another ISP

Patently false.

Of the several million developed US census blocks, 100% have multiple ISPs offering 10Mbps+. [1]

In fact, I daresay it is easier to switch your ISP than to switch your social network. The hooplah around NN is an effective distraction; ISPs aren't even close to being the monopoly to worry about.

[1] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344499A1.p...

At first I was wondering how I could turn your citation into a referral to an actual provider!

But thinking about the technicals, the unit of a census block is basically meaningless. DSL can easily achieve 10MBit+ when close to a central office. There will tend to be a CO close enough to somewhere in each census block, making that class of speed technically "available". But this is ultimately meaningless when it comes to the actual distances involved for most of the people within.

I'll concede that a census block isn't a perfect measure. There are 11 million of them in the US, and I don't know of a comprehensive study with better units.

They should have put "you don't have a REAL choice to get another ISP".

10Mbps would not be enough for me nor most of my (even non-technical) family members.

Beyond that, the ones that do offer faster speeds have a cap that I would go past pretty much every month. I even live in a fairly sizeable city. If I had another realistic option than cable, I would've already taken it.

The issue comes from the fact that a lot of ISPs are, for reasons above, basically monopolies. This is, by itself, a really bad thing™. Lack of NN just lets them blackmail everybody from both sides on top of having practically 0 competition.

EDIT: your link actually shows you're wrong. The graph on page 6 (which I assume you're referring to) shows that 100% have multiple choices of 3+ Mbps, not 10+. 10+ only has 97%. Sure, it's only 3%, but that's still not 100% and not "patently false".

In that document, they don't mention prices, anywhere.

Also, on that same page, they mention:

> A provider that reports offering service in a particular census block may not offer service, or service at that speed, to all locations in the census block. Accordingly, the number of providers shown in Figure 4 does not necessarily reflect the number of choices available to a particular household and does not purport to measure competition.

> 10Mbps would not be enough for me nor most of my (even non-technical) family members.

!!!

I won't say that is impossible to use that much.

But Netflix -- who, if anything, is pressured to overestimate -- advises only half that speed for streaming high-definition video. [1]

Twenty dial-up modems is more than enough to make for a workable internet, outside of 3+ HD video streams, downloading disk images, etc.

[1] https://help.netflix.com/en/node/306

I know of several homes where more than one Netflix stream is common, then throw in a Twitch/YouTube stream on top of that. Realistically, you don't always see speeds at what you pay for (especially during peak hours). At least I don't. So, I think it makes sense to pad your max speeds a bit.

As far as 20 dial-up modems: I don't see where you get 20 from or even why that comparison matters. We aren't just using geocities and AIM anymore.

Sorry, 20 was a typo. I meant 200 modems, which is the equivalent of 10mbps.

"who, if anything, is pressured to overestimate" um, why would they be pressured to overestimate. They don't want to scare away customers who would think "well I'm not sure if my internet is fast enough..."

HD video streaming is surprisingly not the most bandwidth intensive activity. Facebook is actually more intensive. As is online gaming. And HD streaming is especially easy when its done by netflix which already has a network non-neutral setup https://www.beet.tv/2013/05/netflix-2.html. You may think "well, that 10Mbs is the same whether or not it is being streamed from next door or across the ocean", but you'd be wrong, due to the fact that low latency network connections are much more efficient at using that bandwidth.

> why would they be pressured to overestimate

Because it's an easy out if there are issues: it's not Netflix's fault; it's your internet.

Get to the airport three hours early; talk your accountant; have plenty of bandwidth.

The experience of a small portion of poor customers who cannot afford fast internet and have trouble streaming at full quality and realize that they are not streaming at full quality and decide to do something about it doesn't typically interest large companies. People have bad experiences all the time. My parent in laws bought and paid for digital HDTV, and had a set-to-box that only delivered standard TV format. They didn't even realize that there was a problem until I pointed it out to them. And they aren't even poor and uneducated.

It's not like someone who has <10Mbs connection and finds netflix to be crappy is going to lawyer up and sue netflix and win.

10Mbps isn't broadband anymore. Nor should it be classified as such. You can likely watch a single 1080p Netflix stream if that's all you're doing. Unless of course your laptop, desktop, phone, gaming console, etc happens to download an OS update at the same time. Or someone else wants to watch YouTube at the same time. And forget watching 4K anything entirely.

And don't forget that that 10Mbps connection is likely only 512K up, so you can mostly forget about cloud backups or uploading your video for friends to see.

Side note: Everyone downloads disk images these days. Windows' quarterly update files are 3GB which will take over 41 minutes to download at 10Mbps if you do nothing else at the same time.

That is including satellite. The latency of satellite internet is too high to really be considered as a viable alternative to other high speed ISPs. The bandwidth might be high enough to make Netflix streaming practical, but you are not going to be able to do anything that requires consistent real time communication.

I work for an ISP that appears on (some of) those U.S. broadband maps. They are incredibly inaccurate and far from being up-to-date.

Funny that my house in a block with around 300 other residents is only covered by one ISP, then.

My options are Comcast, Century Link, satellite, and some kind of mobile tethering or just using my phone.

Comcast is going to be the source of all of my problems if NN crumbles, so let's look at Century Link. I could be same amount of money to them, but I'd get like a 1/10 the speed if I was super lucky. As far as I'm concerned it's not a practical alternative at all given how we use the internet in my house and our financial limitations.

So then there's satellite, which is not a practical solution either. I'd probably end up paying more and have worse internet speeds than I would with DSL. AND I'd completely have to give up any sort of online gaming that I do. A great way to finally kick that WoW habit, but not really a practical alternative to Comcast.

Okay so what about mobile tethering? I already pay as much as I currently pay for Comcast each month for my cell phone and I've got like 3GBs of data total to use. Last month, with Comcast, I used close to half a TB. I'm not going to do the math for what it would cost me to do that with my mobile carrier, but it's more than I spend on all my other utilities combined, I'm sure. And that's, of course, assuming a carrier available to me is able to provide decent speeds or even allows tethering at all. So that's not a practical alternative.

So sorry I do not buy it. It's like saying "you don't need a water supplier! You've got Coke, beer, and coffee available to 100% of everyone!". Yes, technically those are liquids that consist of some water, but the price is going to be ridiculous, you're going to have kidney stones, and you're going to be fat.

Almost all US addresses have a choice between the local cable monopoly at 150Mbps+ or a variety of DSL companies at one tenth that speed. That's not much of a choice at all.

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