Net Neutrality’s Holes in Europe May Offer Peek at Future in U.S
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Now for the 'complicated' part. In practice it is not difficult to create a situation where everything is degraded. You just under-provision on a choke point. If you then sell alternative routes, or allow edge caches beyond the choke point, you technically didn't 'hinder' any traffic, you just provided such a lousy service to begin with that any not otherwise enabled service provider doesn't stand a chance of offering a decent experience on your network.
But just pointing to a technical situation where it is hard to write a general 'rule' that in any arbitrary case can unequivocally objectively and automatically say whether a certain criterion was fulfilled, and then saying that because it is hard or even impossible to specify the whole regulation should be scrapped, that is disingenuous. The spirit of the regulation can be perfectly fine, even though case-by-case judgement may be required to determine compliance.
Those that will say 'but you can vote with your wallet', I can see where you come from, but the reasoning is flawed. In practice telecoms is not an open market, and many households have near 0 meaningful choice. Strong economic network effects are inherent, and lasting competition has only been present under very strict regulation.
Any examples?
Any actual real world examples of industries where "lasting competition" exists as claimed by the OP?
NN just feels like a distraction, driven by incredibly manipulative and overhyped propaganda.
Without NN, incumbents can raise barriers (e.g. zero-rating, etc) such that upstarts have no way to compete.
(From what I've observed casually in Mexico zero-rating is a pretty benign thing, basically giving super-cheap plans to people who don't care about the internet-at-large.)
Even though I wish for minimal regulation, I can't trust the deregulatory side to provide it. Because that side is infected by people like Ajit Pai who filter out any deregulatory actions which might threaten the monopolists.
If "deregulation" advocates were actually serious, they would have pursued those actions first. Instead, they pick the old telecoms as winners.
> If "deregulation" advocates were actually serious, they would have pursued those actions first.
They did! Two years before Congress deregulated the industry in 1996, it made it illegal for local governments to grant exclusive cable franchises. Then in the 1996 deregulation, it required non-discriminatory access to utility poles and ducts.
The biggest impediments to deployment these days are at the state and local level: permitting requirements, onerous franchise license terms, etc. Congress could (and in my opinion, should) completely preempt these things, but that's a hard sell. Municipalities use these franchises as a vehicle for all sorts of social agendas ("wire up public buildings!" "wire up disadvantaged neighborhoods!"), and as a revenue source (taxing 5% of gross revenue). Google got most of these things waived in Fiber cities, but it was a move strongly opposed by the public-interest types: https://techliberation.com/2012/08/07/what-google-fiber-says....
It's always easier to do what big telecom wants. So we have action on "deregulating" Net Neutrality which allows the telecoms to further leverage their local monopoly power, but no action which might actually put those monopolies in danger of real competition.
I'm pretty sure that "big telecom" never wanted to have their exclusive franchises eliminated, to be forced to provide non-discriminatory access to poles and ducts, be forced to provide universal service, etc. But Congress did all those things in the 1996 act. The cynicism misconceives the situation. The real problem is building a coalition to take away authority from state/local governments. It's hard to get republicans to say that state/local governments shouldn't have authority over the permitting process used for building wires in their jurisdiction. That's a quintessentially state/local issue. And it's hard to get democrats to say that state/local governments shouldn't be able to use these processes to advance various social agendas.
It's just a microcosm of a bigger problem, which is that while our federal government has joined with the rest of the world in deregulating large spheres of the economy, our state/local governments are hopelessly backwards, and for the most part Congress can't do anything about that. I was just in Tokyo and the loose zoning laws meant that even space under freeway overpasses was being utilized for stores and shops. You're just not allowed to do that sort of thing in the U.S.
First: meaningful competition for the telecoms. Only then, does it make sense to even consider rolling back Net Neutrality.
And if deregulation is powerless to introduce telecom competition, who can blame people for turning to more aggressive last mile unbundling instead?
> The biggest impediments to deployment these days are at the state and local level: permitting requirements, onerous franchise license terms, etc.
I mean, the reason those things are impediments is because the state and local laws favor incumbent telecoms by imposing permitting requirements and allowing onerous franchise license terms. Aren't you kind of answering your own question here?
See, I don't think this is always true. In my city its more like "state and local governments impose these regulations because they're _paid by Comcast and that's ok because money=speech_".
Calling it short-sighted is letting them off the hook, IMHO.
"We didn't realize that this company paying us to put up barriers to competition would use those barriers to prevent competition later" is right on the verge of being ridiculous.
If municipal broadband was something that would actually happen in the absence of these laws, why don't we see these networks popping up in all the places without such laws?
Not all cities are building their own internet so that means we don't need to do anything is logic that I just don't follow.
My city didn't build their own. Last time it came up the news reported that it was because Comcast bribed the city council to charge unreasonable fees for adding cables to the existing poles and ensure that only Comcast could do the work on their own schedules. No one disputes that, but everyone who can do anything about it shrugs because Comcast is still paying them and its not illegal because money=speech.
But I guess because some other states with more broadband competition don't have as many restrictions (sense a link there?), and "all the places" that can haven't built their own broadband, I can no longer complain about not having any competition in my market and my leaders are removing laws that protect me from them but instead put in more laws that protect them from me?
If you're citing municipal broadband laws as something suppressing the development of competition, it's fair to point out that most people live in states that don't have such laws, yet we don't see municipal broadband emerging as a source of competition in those states.
The U.S. is a big place, and you can probably name anything and find it happening somewhere in the U.S. The question is, what are the things that are actually creating impediments. If states without municipal broadband laws aren't actually building municipal networks, then getting rid of such laws might be a moral victory, but wouldn't actually change anything.
> My city didn't build their own. Last time it came up the news reported that it was because Comcast bribed the city council to charge unreasonable fees for adding cables to the existing poles and ensure that only Comcast could do the work on their own schedules.
Do you have a link to the story? It seems suspect, because pole attachment rates are governed by formulas set by either the FCC, or by the state (if the state certifies that it regulates such rates). Also, most poles are owned by power companies, and they set the rates, not city councils.
Sounds great; I'd just like to have the new solution in place before dismantling the old one.
ISP's have a million and one other ways to be anti-competitive. Example, in New Zealand, one of the major ISP's runs 'Lightbox' a streaming competitor. If you sign up to any of their plans, you get free Lightbox.
This incentives the customer to not use other streaming services. You can talk about zero-rating all day long but no amount of neutrality regulation will prevent something like the example above from happening. What happens if Comcast decides that Hulu Plus will be free with their broadband? It has the same effect as if Comcast decided to zero-rate Hulu on their network.
For their to be real changes in the American ISP market, you need competition.
Destroying net neutrality regulations? Check. Destroying the regulations that protect the telecom monopolies? That can wait... forever.
curious, what is an example of this?
Yea i guess thats more of an example of inaction. I was looking for a specific regulation that helps telecom companies.
> current regulations that helps telecom monopolies that govt needs to destroy but it isn't
There are regulations at the state level. The federal government has the authority to stop these regulations. Yet they don't.
Whether the bad regulation was implemented by state or federal government seems rather inconsequential.
Maybe they could be sued like Microsoft was for offering IE with Windows.
That might of helped prevent, unproven, Intel from exploiting Anti-Competitive tactics since DELL and HP would of had to go through a distribution company instead of Intel.
Also, I'm having trouble imagining a small streaming service getting into the ISP business in order to reach a couple thousand people when they can reach hundreds of millions through the internet.
A small ISP getting into the streaming business to provide local content is less outlandish, but still seems rare; I think that's a reasonable price to pay, particularly given that the status quo makes it prohibitively difficult for small ISPs to exist at all, in many places.
Not treating traffic equally would mean they could eliminate Netflix as competition for their customers. That's worse. Same for mail, social networking, news, dating etc. Video is just more pertinent in 2017.
The big thing to protect is always categories that don't exist yet.
Competition helps, but infrastructure markets are always suboptimal.
Right now Comcast cable TV is pretty close to free with their broadband, is that any different?
Overall Europe and NZ seem to have better broadband available at better prices than the USA. They also dont have net neutrality so you can't say that NN is definitely good.
I'd guess most people don't know or care. Still, millions wrote to object to the proposed repeal.
Is it possible that only a couple hundred people are making this decision for 300 million over the objections of millions?
I can only assume the entirety of the GOP given it's been part of the party platform since at least 2012: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/2aebc568-f1d2-11e1-892d...
This is total speculation, but I'm guessing that the rank-and-file of that party might have a different opinion if they understood and considered the specific issue in isolation.
I've been bombarded with pro-NN propaganda from most of my friends, and none of them are engineers, or programmers, or live even remotely near SV.
People on Conservative/Libertarian political sites are universally against net neutrality.
The vote issue is currently confused and anyone who doesn't like it can easily discount it as fraudulent: https://www.wired.com/story/fcc-must-investigate-fraud-befor...
It's a mess, but really most people at home have no clue what net neutrality is. No one is going to lose their Congressional seat because of their NN position, so they don't care.
Liberals and progressives, generally, are universally for net neutrality.
Chamber of Commerce conservatives, libertarians, and if-the-left-is-for-it-I'm -against-it conservatives oppose it. The rest of the right is almost universally for it and many want to take it further and apply similar principles to platforms like twitter.
Core movement Conservatives (far from the CoC Republicans) like:
* Ben Shapiro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yBrZ_CPgm7o
* Mark Levin: https://www.facebook.com/marklevinshow/posts/10153090598298832
* Erick Erickson: https://twitter.com/EWErickson/status/935686186198294529
Here's a Conservative Review article: https://www.conservativereview.com/articles/net-neutrality-a...
I have never seen any kind of thought leader on the right support net neutrality. I'd be interested in reading any links that you could provide.
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-echochambers-27074746
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tu32CCA_Ig
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mw2z9lV3W1g
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/02...
This is a common misunderstanding. A republic is not a democracy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_government_of_the_Unit...
That's a common misunderstanding. "Republic" and "Democracy" are not exclusive concepts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government#Democracy
"It's not about what the people want, because the U.S. is no longer a democratic country." ... I feel that this statement is logically faulty unless the "democratic" portion implies a pure democracy.
downvoted until invisible
>See, nobody wants it guys!
https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=danjoc
But I will highlight a few key points I've made recently,
1) Racism and death threats against Ajit Pai and his family are not acceptable. At all. Users making/upvoting death threats should be handled with zero tolerance and reported to authorities. NN supporters around the web are doxing Pai and harassing him at his home. Simply pointing this out on HN results in invisibility powers. Sickening.
2) Verizon throttles Netflix? Not NN. Netflix throttles Verizon customers? NN. This offends my sense of fairness. The biggest supporters of NN (Apple, Google, Amazon, Netflix, etc) are complete hypocrites. NN should apply to them too, or not at all.
3) The ISP owns the network, they can manage it how they want. If you want to manage the network, then you can buy your own network. My general belief is the government should not be legislating how we manage network traffic on our own networks.
4) People LIKE zero rating. T-Mobile Binge On is proof of that. Zero rating is not NN. NN supporters are arguing that zero rating is unfair to their startup no one ever heard of. From this vantage point, NN becomes a subsidy for small startups at the expense of the general population that wants unlimited video streaming on their mobile network.
5) Forcing cable companies into BGP peering agreements, at cable company expense, to provide a fast lane to direct competitors in video entertainment businesses... that's just "WOW. I can't even." It certainly won't end well for cable customers. That expense will be passed down to the consumer.
My ideal would be repeal of net neutrality - but with UK style competition of ISP services where an independent 3rd party owns the pipes and ISPs compete with whatever packages they want.
ISPs are providing a service to their users: the internet. Their users pay for internet access (not just a certain subset) and they decide that they want to use the bandwidth for Youtube or Facebook. 5mbps on a "cable in the snow" is 5mbps regardless if it's coming from Youtube or Netflix or some indie company.
I mean you might decide to pass on a "low-cost" alternative in most industries as there is often an implied "low-quality" qualifier attached. But with strong net neutrality, this is not supposed to be the case. They state a speed, they state a price. Everything else is identical. So what gives? I find it disappointing that the NYT did not even bother to even consider this obvious question since it seems to cut to the core of this issue!
Mostly you're choosing the top pure of connection and the customer service.
Network performance may vary between ISPs (ex https://gigaom.com/2013/01/02/youtube-sucks-on-french-isp-fr...)
Most French ISPs throw in TV and home phone for free, so depending on which ISPs you pick, you'll get different set of channels.
You can also bundle mobile phone service etc.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_broadband_providers_in...
OpenReach has to provide equal access to other ISPs by law, so the playing field between them is very even.
The only major outlier is Virgin Media, who own the cable (as in cable TV) network covering some built-up bits of the county; their fibre network is entirely separate.
Its only the last mile that they provide at any scale. the rest is arranged by the ISP
Incorrect. Virgin´s backbone is fiber and they own their own last mile. BT has been delivering FTTC and FTTH for some time now.
FTTC literally stands for "Fiber to the Curb"
Virgin use Coax for all its last mile stuff, save for some testing.
Of course the backhaul is fibre. but the local loop/ last mile is essentially all copper.
Openreach sells products only to ISPs, it won't deal with consumers at all. The main products it sells to ISPs are:
* ADSL last mile to a customer (in most places ASDL2+ but in some places it's plain ADSL because they never upgraded) at the maximum speed the line will do
* VDSL capped at 40Mbps down / 10Mbps up over last mile to a customer [in most but not all places, unless line is too long]
* VDSL capped at 80Mbps down / 20Mbps up [ditto]
* FTTP at 330, 500 or 1000 Mbps to the customer's premises. [ Only if there is actually a fibre, most won't have one]
* Line rental to make a physical line work with any of the above.
* Backhaul from the customer's exchange to your preferred POP where you take over the Internet access
A small ISP buys the line rental, backhaul, and one of the actual last mile packages, bundles that up with maybe some webmail and telephone support, and sells that as an Internet service for a nice margin. They need a POP somewhere vaguely sensible, with enough bandwidth to service their customers, and that's them done.
Bigger ISPs might arrange to have their own fibre at some exchanges, they don't buy backhaul from those exchanges, they pick up customer traffic themselves, but they buy everything else.
One interesting thing that you can see as a result of Openreach was that the true "line rental" cost Openreach were charging to make the line work was falling slowly over the years. But the _advertised_ line rental price had been rising enormously, because ISPs hid it in their small print. They'd say "Superfast Broadband only £5" and then in tiny print "(plus £20 pcm line rental, offer expires after 12 months, normal price £28 per month)"
This isn't just reserved to UK ISPs, afaik the situation in Germany is kinda similar. Fun tidbit about the monetization of features: When ADSL just became "a thing" it introduced higher latency compared to ISDN.
Quickly people figured out that certain ISPs could toggle something on called "fastpath", which would reduce the latency quite a bit if you called the support hotline and asked for it.
Took a couple of months until one of the major ISPs (Telekom) started charging 5€ monthly extra for it on the lower speed ADSL tariffs, luckily that stopped being a thing with VDSL.
The low-cost operators usually provide about the same thing as their parent major operator, but with very reduced support, no brick-and-mortar offices you can go to when you have a problem, and less bundled services.
Anecdotally, my observations align (at least on our recent visits).
That is the key point, net nuetrality is a moot point because if an ISP were to do something like charge for iplayer (BBC catchup service) which was mooted a few years ago, they'd all move to a different ISP.
Because we have for the moment a roughly open market.
There are parts that are controlled by a monopoly, but thats the people who provide the last mile infrastructure. They have strict regulations saying that they must charge a fixed price for rental of the infrastructure with no obligations other than to pay for the last mile. (they can choose to be a pure virtual operator, just skinning the service, or almost entirely run its own infra, save the last bit of copper)
Also, the people that run the last mile monopoly are not the people providing backhaul. That is mostly an open market too. More open than the last mile copper at least. Linx/lonap are all coops, where you pay a membership fee, and the cost of powering your equipment, any interconnect arrangements are up to you and your peers.
In short, we have a much more open market, but with no net nuetrality.
what america needs is competition, and the seperation of last mile, ISPs and backhaul. None of which you are going to get in present times.
I don't know specifically where you are, but it's true in most of Europe.
Is this better?
> Is this better?
That's a red herring.
By your own admission this isn't caused by LLUB but by misguided subsidization. It's a deliberate choice of poor example in a pool of much better options.
[1] You obviously can’t let the monopoly that owns the loop freely set the wholesale price of the loop.
And it's slower than Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and many others.
You can't blanket claim that LLU and rate setting is bad simply by ignoring examples where they work much better than the alternative.
Edit:
You might also want to include consumer prices with that comparison.
I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.
Here's Akamai's list of countries with the fastest broadband:
1 South Korea 28.6
2 Norway 23.5
3 Sweden 22.5
4 Hong Kong 21.9
5 Switzerland 21.7
6 Finland 20.5
7 Singapore 20.3
8 Japan 20.2
9 Denmark 20.1
10 United States 18.7
Our presence on this list is remarkable. If you were listing countries with the best of some other kind of infrastructure, say subways, we wouldn't even be sniffing the top 10. Nobody would look at the fact that Sweden or Denmark managed to have good subways and say "well, obviously we can do that too!" And we already know we would do a bad job implementing LLU: it was in the 1996 telecom act, and the FCC set rates too low and killed DSL in the process.
Also, it's not clear what LLU has achieved in a place like say Denmark: https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/media/publi....
60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are Telenor (the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those three account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system?
> I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.
Where I live, I only have two choices for fiber, but 100/100 is $40/month, gigabit is $70-80, and two-gigabit is $150/month. Also: did you or a previous homeowner pay a one-time fee to build the fiber to your house? In the U.S., the ISP usually eats the up-front cost and recovers it in the monthly charge. Finally, U.S. prices include implicit cross subsidies (to build fiber or cable in poorer neighborhoods) that Swedish prices do not.
I'll go with Sweden as it's the one I know closest. It doesn't... anymore, but it did for maybe 10 years from late 90s, and if Telia (the previously state owned and now privatized incumbent) which has a lot of the FTTH market would start being anti-competitive you can bet regulation will return.
> 60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are Telenor (the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those three account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system?
Yes? As long as all three has access to all customers (in the US the big ISPs have local monopolies so it's deceiving to look at them as many providers), there's at least some market forces available. But I also think DSL is kind of backwards to look at to begin with.
NN laws are barking up the wrong tree, because your ISPs control not only the last mile, planning, backhaul _and_ exchanges, they can easily demand things not possible in the UK.
Take the netflix outage in LA.
Comcast basically said, You're pushing too much stuff, pay up or we'll throttle you, and throttle they did.
Now, in a normal open market, other ISPs would step in and say "look at us, we don't throttle" and customers would switch over, making it financially impossible to throttle popular services. But you can't do that in the US as all but the most dense markets are a one ISP town.
In the UK that sort of action is suicide, the ISP would either arrange for more peering at LINX or LONAP, or better yet arrange some edge caching (open connect in netflix parlance) nearer the customers to cut down on bandwidth sloshing around the backbone (which is expensive)
We don't have NN laws in the UK, which means that mobile providers like 3 (three.co.uk) can say that watching netflix doesn't use your metered bandwidth.
so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market.
Why not both?
So NN is not a problem, just a temporary fix. And it doesn't limit competition (it costs nearly zero to comply). The problem are _other_ regulations. So why are some people so obsessed with removing NN?
The only realistic suggestion I have ever heard for how to break that monopoly is essentially an even more restrictive version of network neutrality: last mile providers are required to lease network capacity to anyone who wants it at reasonable and non-discriminatory rates.
It's more complex than that. And in any case Netflix gives CDN boxes to ISPs for free.
>In short, we have a much more open market, but with no net nuetrality.
Do you have no net neutrality (ISPs do un-neutral stuff)
or
Do you have no net neutrality regulation (the Government doesn't stop ISPs from un-neutral stuff), but get nn through competition?
You do have LLU where internet companies put their own DSLAMs in an OpenReach exchange, once again, this is because of heavy regulation. That has become less common of late as more people move away from ADSL to VDSL, where once again OpenReach have a monopoly in the streetside DSLAMs.
The move to Fibre though is an interesting one, as we now have several options (Depending on where you live) such as GigaClear, Hyperoptic and some business only providers. There's also rural fibre in the case of B4RN and boutique wireless providers where OpenReach has failed to install a decent service.
There's also Virgin Media, who provide last mile triple play over cable, but they don't have 100% coverage.
Finally, the government has given out large block grants to local authorities to help pay for rollout of "Super" and "Ultra" fast broadband to places OpenReach initially deemed financially unviable.
The thing about competition, is it only works when any part of the equation that is a monopoly, or near monopoly, is regulated as a utility.
It's basically a two-tier market: a few expensive name brands, and lots of low-cost, low-support brands.
- price and pricing structure
- coverage, most important for mobile and in low density areas
- mobile data
- speed but not so much, ISPs often offer you the fastest speed available, even for low tiers
- service level
And because most landlines are triple-play, VoIP and TV service are also a deciding factor.
Some ISP also provide bundles with additional service, like subscriptions, subsidized phones and other stuff. It is fine with net neutrality as long as there is no preferential treatment when it comes to internet service, though there may be issues with product tying laws.
To counter monopolies, large ISPs are required to rent their infrastructure to other players at a reasonable price.
They won't be identical, because every ISP will have different peering and transit arrangements. And depending on those arrangements the access speeds for netflix/hulu/youtube will differ. Traffic that's internal to the ISP's network will always be the cheapest. Which is why an ISP can subsidize streaming services if they are hosted internally. I have had this debate with some NN supporters, and they do not seem to appreciate this basic commercial angle.
I am French and switch operators every year (because they have those stupid offers with significantly cheaper subscription that only last 12 months and it only takes a couple of minutes to subscribe to a new one) and I have used tethering frequently with Free, Numericable, Bouygues and SFR without getting any warning or noticing any oddity in the content served.
Also, Orange has a bit more inertia than the others (it used to be the French public phone company France Telecom), but their support page says that tethering is part of the regular mobile subscriptions.
And this option was not in his normal subscription, although it was a subscription with quite a nice Data plan.
And this violates Net Neutrality because Orange is deciding what you can do or not with your paid bandwidth.
Edit: There used to be, can't find the link anymore...
In places where FTTH is available, a wonderful ecosystem of mini-ISPs has sprung up, serving different niches. Some focus on integrated multi-play (Internet/TV/Phone/etc.) setups, others offer affordable quick connections without the bullshit. Choice and competition are alive and well, despite (or because?) part of the infrastructure is publicly funded.
In theory the US has had a local loop unbundling policy since 1996, the issues so far as I can see them are:
1. I don't know that it applies to Cable
2. it's very hard to reach the local loop when line-sharing was unmandated when DSL ISPs were moved to Title I in 2005
3. in 2004, the Supreme Court voided some of the leasing rules
What kind of a sheep customer thinks, "Well I guess I'll just totally change the service I use because that's what my provider wants!" People like that need, if you'll excuse the gendered metaphor, a swift kick in the balls.