Net Neutrality already attacked in Portugal | Hacker News Reader

Net Neutrality already attacked in Portugal

meo.pt

39 pointsLeRieur67 comments

As Ben Thompson of Stratecherry said here:

https://stratechery.com/2017/pro-neutrality-anti-title-ii/

There are the Euros and Portuguese you would expect, but in this case perhaps it was the language difference that introduced its own issues: Congressman Khanna seems to have missed the text at the top (under ‘+ Smart Net’) that clearly stated that the packages were for an additional 10GB/month of data; in addition to what, you may ask? Simply scroll down the page:

So to recount: one Portugal story is made up, and the other declared that a 10GB family plan with an extra 10GB for a collection of apps of your choosing for €25/month ($30/month) is a future to be feared; given that AT&T charges $65 for a single “Unlimited” plan that downscales video, bans tethering, and slows speeds after 22GB, one wonders if most Americans share that fear.

The Verge had a story about this topic on Nov 22. I think they show whit clarity what happened.

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/22/16691506/portugal-meo-in...

Your reasoning does not add up. On the one hand you are saying that American ISPs are worse than those in Portugal and on the other hand you are saying 'never fear' they are only charging extra on the high end connections. Shouldn't you be saying: "Look, in the US ISPs are already overcharging and throttling connections, even for high prices plans. In Portugal the prices are a lot more reasonable, but even those less evil ISPs are already chipping away at net neutrality, only imagine what will happen in the US"

Do you work for the anti-net neutrality lobby? It seems as if you are trying to lull people into a false sense of security with regards to the threat against net neutrality.

> In Portugal the prices are a lot more reasonable

According to [1], the average monthly net salary in Portugal is €846 ($993), or €1,158 ($1358) gross. For comparison, [2] lists median US individual gross income as $32,140 yearly ($2678/mo, not sure what the net works out to).

Accounting for income disparity, the Portuguese prices are not as reasonable as you think.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_countries_by_... 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...

I didn't say they were reasonable, thisisit seemed to say this.

> So to recount: one Portugal story is made up, and the other declared that a 10GB family plan with an extra 10GB for a collection of apps of your choosing

Which is still terrible. If I create a slightly better social media, video, or image platform, it's possible people won't use it because it's not part of their 0-rate plan. That is a problem, and one of the main problems with the lack of net neutrality.

Moreover, what happens as datacaps go down in relative or absolute terms and people are forced to use predominately "packaged" services instead of the ones they chose?

There is no reason whatsoever why sending 10GB of data to one IP would be more expensive than sending it to another. So if they are offering 10GB for free if you connect to one service they’d be able to offer it for free for connecting to anyone.

If they refuse that means there is no competition. It also means they are meddling in content so they are no longer common carriers and are responsible for what happens on the line.

>There is no reason whatsoever why sending 10GB of data to one IP would be more expensive than sending it to another.

This statement is false. It most certainly is more expensive to send packets to places like Australia than to Europe (Australia has 20x higher transit pricing). You could claim the cost is pennies either way however that doesn't address the fact that some packets are more expensive than others.

https://blog.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-costs-around-the-world...

The cost for transferring these 10 gigabytes to Australia is about $0.04, while a closer destination would be cheaper. So while technically you are right, realistically these costs don’t factor in the price.

Were your edge router towards one IP was at capacity, but your edge router towards the other IP had excess capacity remaining, you could choose to either upgrade the router or drop packets. This is the situation at many ISPs and datacenters, and it's sad when management decides to drop packets.

We have this in the UK too.

But I don't see this as an attack on Net Neutrality, you're just charged differently for what you use. Nobody will stop you using Facebook when you have a Music subscription, nothing is throttled.

> But I don't see this as an attack on Net Neutrality, you're just charged differently for what you use. Nobody will stop you using Facebook when you have a Music subscription, nothing is throttled.

Doesn't the OP show that you need to have the social media subscription to use facebook, implying it'd be blocked otherwise?

EDIT: https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/22/16691506/portugal-meo-in...

> But based on Meo’s website, this doesn’t look like buying cable channels for the internet. It’s an add-on to general-purpose mobile subscriptions, which let you access any service — including the ones above. The idea is apparently that if you’re into apps like Snapchat and Facebook (or... LinkedIn, I guess), you pay around $8 a month to specifically get more “Social” data, so you can use your regular allotment for everything else. It looks a lot like the “Vodafone Pass” service in the UK, where subscribers can pay for unlimited access to a similar stable of services.

This still seems awkward. I still don't understand why the endpoint being connected to matters at all. It's all data going over your lines. Essentially you're paying to "0-rate" a service, which just seems silly.

EDIT2:

Also, one of the main issues with not-net-neutrality is exactly this. If I make a slightly better social network, but it's not "0-rated" it's likely that people won't use it because it'll count against their quota. That's a problem.

> you pay around $8 a month to specifically get more “Social” data, so you can use your regular allotment for everything else

The problem with this is that this creates an incentive for the operator to lower the regular allotment so they can sell more of these packages.

> I still don't understand why the endpoint being connected to matters at all.

It doesn't matter, it's just a way of extracting more money from customers.

>>> you pay around $8 a month to specifically get more “Social” data, so you can use your regular allotment for everything else

> The problem with this is that this creates an incentive for the operator to lower the regular allotment so they can sell more of these packages.

The quote is from the linked article explaining the situation. I think 0-rating is a terrible idea for the reasons you said, among others.

I used to think the same but a little thought exercise proved me wrong, if you ask the question: what happens if the general datacap goes down, even maybe to 0?

I'm from Portugal and the different telcos/ISP's don't see others offering this product as a chance to offer a better product they see it as a missed chance to get more while giving less so they don't compete they collude.

And this is just looking at it as a consumer. If I was trying to break the market with a new video service I'm pretty sure that favoring Youtube puts it in an unfair advantage.

> what happens if the general datacap goes down, even maybe to 0?

Then I get a subscription with a bigger data cap.

The big problem with a lack of Net Neutrality is when there's a lack of competition and ISPs use their monopoly over their users as a product with which to strongarm the web services I want to use out of extra money. As long as they keep treating us as the customers and not the product, and make it clear what I'm paying for and what I'm getting for that, and I have to option to switch to a competitor that's more in line with what I want, then I'm fine.

It's true that favoring Youtube gives it an unfair advantage, but that's not as big a problem as treating paying customers as products.

>The big problem with a lack of Net Neutrality is when there's a lack of competition

You just summed up the exact situation in the US. Most areas have a giant ISP and some smaller ISPs serving more limited areas. There's effectively no choice for consumers though, since many of the smaller ISPs have to use infrastructure of the local ISP monopoly to deliver service.

Well, that's indeed a big problem, and very big reason why Net Neutrality is important. I live in Netherland and I have half a dozen broadband providers to choose from, including one that strongly believes in freedom of information, so I'm fine without legally mandated Net Neutrality.

It is quite simple realy. If I pay x€ for y GB/Month, the ISP should not dictate what over the top services I spend that budget on, nor favor its own services (or those of 'partners') by selective exclusion of that traffic from limits that other are held to, or by hindering traffic from the non-partnered services in any way.

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.

Portuguese guy here to clarify.

These are just addons to your regular package, they allow you to customize your plan according to your needs. The regular packages have different tiers that go anywhere from 500Mb to 10Gb of data included, which is more or less the same amount of data that the other ISPs in the country provide. There are no unlimited mobile data packages in Portugal, in any ISP, except the special plans for 4G personal hotspots. These addons just mean that if you pay more, the data from the services /apps that you use more often wont count to your regular data cap, to a limit of up to 10Gb per month.

In my case (I'm with another ISP), I pay 4€ per week and have 5Gb of "regular" data to use per month, plus another 5Gb just for video platforms (like Youtube and Twitch), and then there are several apps like Facebook, Whatsapp, Instagram, Skype, Spotify, etc, that don't consume any data from the plan, they're free to use. They also provide a premium Spotify account for free, which is nice.

For me, as a client, this is actually good, even tough it's far from neutral. I never go over the data cap, and I rarely use Wi-Fi even when I'm at home, because the apps that I use more often are "free" and I still have 5Gb of data to use on whatever else I want. If anything the problem in the original link is that that particular ISP is charging for something that the other ISPs provide for free.

It's also important to notice that Portugal has a communications regulatory authority (ANACOM), similar to the FCC, but that actually works, and defends the interests of the consumers. Just today they announced that all the ISPs will be fined in excess of 1 million euros, and face a possible class action law suit due to increasing prices without an explicit permission from the costumers.

So yeah, where actually doing good here.

>Portugal has a communications regulatory authority (ANACOM), similar to the FCC, but that actually works

Oh, that's very debatable

Very, very, very debatable. Example was the monopoly that former PT Telecom, now Meo/altice had for many years.

19 minute old account, assuring everyone that nothing bad is happening.

It's already 22 minutes old by now, we can trust it.

Reading your comment feels like licensing software from Microsoft. I just pay a fixed monthly amount for unmetered data, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

>because the apps that I use more often are "free"

Can you imagine that these apps being zero-rated might make it less likely you'll try competing services (that aren't zero-rated)?

I understand that it seems like "free" data, but you are still paying for the service. The ISP is coaxing you into using specific services by limiting your use of everything else.

That example shows zero rating, not "pay $5 to access certain websites", as most people assume once it circulates through the NN debate. Still problematic, but not as quite as those who share it make it seem. "Pay $5 to use social media" and "pay $5 to use your data plan for anything you want and have additional data specifically for social media" is not the same.

It's still terrible. Just slightly less terrible for consumers, but perhaps even moreso for small businesses.

> Still problematic, but not as quite as those who share it make it seem.

It's anticompetitive. What if I made my own social media network tomorrow? Could someone get additional data for it at discounted rates? No.

It creates another barrier to competing with the incumbents.

Nope. That's a bad argument - they're mostly the same, and in some ways zero rating is much worse.

At my trailer, I get "Water Service". I don't get:

     "Drinking water service"
     "Dishwashing water service"
     "Washing machine service"
     "Bath/shower service"
     "Pool/jacuzzi service"
     "Toilet water service"

And upcharging/downcharging per "type" of water isn't done, at least on residential. Now, there may be rates of peak times where water/volume is more expensive for everyone. But that's not watching what devices the water goes to.

And, Zero rating would be like saying "Pay X/month extra and Bath/Shower water is counted as zero". Uh, no. Water's water. Like like how data's data.

Now, about why Zero Rating is worse - you start up a fledgling business that does something novel with a Zero Rated service. Well guess what? All those entrenched players with Zero Rating get an "In", and your new service is pretty much screwed until you can figure out how to get on that list. Zero rating is yet another barrier preventing new players on the Internet.

It's not done yet. It is coming in the near future.

It’s funny that this all comes from a misunderstanding based on language differences. A data cap on your web use is pretty common in mobile phone providers. With these packages you can surpass the data cap (10gb) for select services (that you can select your own)..

Say you use a lot of spotify but you don’t surf that much this is ideal.

Nothing gets blocked or censored, it’s just that you can buy additional MB’s.

Depends on how big is the data cap. Sure, if your package is 10GB, it's fine, but what if the data cap was 250 MB and you could surpass it with a "Netflix" package?

Assuming that package is cheaper and the people who choose it are only interested in Netflix anyway, it's fine. What matters to me is that paying customers are treated as customers, and that we get to choose what we want, rather than ISPs secretly throttling stuff behind the scenes in order to coerce extra money out of Google and Netflix.

I don't want to be ammo in their trade war.

> What matters to me is that paying customers are treated as customers, and that we get to choose what we want...

I want more bandwidth for Mastodon. I don't see Mastodon in the "social networks" plan. So my options are: 1) pay more for "general" bandwidth, 2) use Twitter instead. This is the choice that customers will have to make when evaluating new internet services and it's not good for anyone trying to compete with Google/Facebook/Microsoft.

Say you use a lot of spotify but you don’t surf that much this is ideal.

What if you listen to a lot of Pandora?

At least here it's the user deciding what to use and how much to pay for it. It's explicit that this is not full internet but limited.

The big assault on the internet is when you pay for full internet, and your ISP decides to throttle Netflix or Youtube because they don't also pay the ISP for your internet connection.

"Free traffic to MEO apps already included in your tariff" - and the music app costs 6.99/mo per user. That is one way to drive customer adoption I guess.

I don't really want this. I just want...bandwidth.

and look how cheap it is.

I am a Portuguese speaker (from Brazil) and I fail to see what the problem is or even how it undermines Net Neutrality.

You pay 4.99 euros, get 10Gb and also get free traffic in one of those uses that provide plenty of competition, no privileges for a specific provider. Seems quite a good deal to me. Kudos to Portugal.

Here in Brazil, net neutrality is protected by law. If I could get one of those Portuguese plans in here I'd jump at it. Quite better than what we have.

How do they determine what sites get the free traffic? If I start a social networking site tomorrow, how does it get the free traffic that Facebook gets?

Fair question, the page doesn't say it.

But it is important to notice that, for networking, they also have Facebook competitors like Twiter, Snapchat and LindedIn. This seems quite the opposite of privilege to providers.

It is quite possible they also have other sites less famous in Portugal (e.g.: HN, Reddit).

But that's exactly how it undermines Net Neutrality. It gives an advantage to the entrenched businesses because either smaller/newer businesses won't get the same advantages, or they do, but people won't know that (or don't want to worry about it) so they still stick with the entrenched businesses.

How can there be competition on the internet if people are encouraged to only use "approved" websites and platforms?

> But it is important to notice that, for networking, they also have Facebook competitors like Twiter, Snapchat and LindedIn.

These are all 800lb gorillas in the social networking space. If there was a new Facebook competitor it would not be on that list until it was relatively huge. Notice that ello, Mastodon, and other upstart social network are missing even though they've been around for a while now.

The problem is that now a new social network is not just fighting the network effects of Facebook (already a huge hurdle), but also economic incentives from ISPs to keep using Facebook, since you get cheap data for it. If this becomes the norm, I think it's only a matter of time until services like Facebook offer ISPs incentives to zero rate their traffic - especially on limited mobile plans.

Arguably the most problematic category there is not "social networks", but "video". The volume of traffic that streaming video uses on mobile dwarfs just about everything else. If I wanted to compete with Youtube on mobile how could I do it in an environment where Youtube gets special treatment from ISPs and I don't?

Sadly, in France too.

The CEO of Orange, the main ISP in France, Stéphane Richard, is against net neutrality:

Article in French: http://www.zdnet.fr/actualites/stephane-richard-orange-veut-...

Even if you bought every package possible, it's still cheaper than most packages here. You're not really helping your case here buddy.

It's not a matter of (absolute) pricing, but of (relative) preference. It's giving established players a significant advantage that puts independent actors in a weakened position.

So is there no network access at all other than these apps? I don't see that clarified on the page.

Personally, I wish Comcast (being the only high-speed option for much of the US) followed this model for TV, where I only want 2 channels but can't pay for less than 80 or so.

scroll down the page. those are addons to the basic internet package.

That's what it seemed like to me, but wasn't sure. So basically non-established players are actually free, but established players require additional money? i.e. the opposite of what the parent comment was saying?

It's giving you additional per-app data usage. So if your kid uses 8GB a month on Snapchat, you can pay extra to increase the data cap just for those social apps. Otherwise it would count against your regular data usage.

> So is there no network access at all other than these apps? I don't see that clarified on the page.

No, the 'regular' access goes out of your normal data cap, and of course they have every reason to lower that cap as much as possible so you're more or less forced to buy these packages.

This is just the first step, they are trying to get consumers used to paying for special data packages like this. The next step is to keep lowering regular data caps, etc.

You misunderstand 'the case' here. The case is that your music startup now has no chance of competing against Spotify, TuneIn, Play Music, or Soundcloud because it would go against your general internet data, not the music specific data bundle.

Many telecoms zero-rate their own phone service now, too, even though it's generally delivered over IP on modern phones and networks. Skype and FaceTime count against my data cap. No consumer I know would want a change to the status quo that phone calls are free. Why shouldn't this be generalized to other popular services? If consumers prefer the service and are willing to pay for it, especially in mobile broadband which is relatively competitive ecosystem with several vendors in each market, then why not let consumers make that choice for themselves?

General purpose internet service isn't going away - too many consumers and businesses depend on it, and, at least based on my last Comcast bill, are willing to pay through the nose for it.

Zero-rating your own services is something entirely different than zero-rating services of other companies though.

It is no different than a car manufacturer paying for their own highway lanes. If half of the highway lanes are BMW-only, would you still buy any other car? Free market resolve this by competition based on price, but if I wanted to start my own car manufacturing company, I wouldn't be able to compete because a smaller player in the car market wouldn't have enough funds to get the various levels of government to implement MyNewCarBrand Inc. Roads (TM)

Portugal have a minimum wage of 550 euros/month and an average wage of 850 euros/month or something like this. You can't compare absolute price.

Minimum wage is indeed about 550 euros a month (it’s 557 euros) but the average wage is more like 1130 euros monthly.

https://www.expatica.com/pt/employment/minimum-wage-in-portu...

That's gross average wage and it's inflated by Lisbon region that have crazy rents. One-bedroom flat costs 600/500 euros, more if it's in city center.

Completely besides the point. The point is about internet service discrimination.

In Europe you can get 1Gbps for 20-30 euro a month, so about half of what most Americans pay for 50 Mbps or less. But that doesn't mean all Europeans choose the 1Gbps option, because for many (in places like Portugal) that 20-30 euro is still 20 euro too expensive.

Whoever claimed that the threat to net neutrality was an economic one? The problem is that you give companies the power to decide what information people will have access to. And ISP can say: 'A review website that has many bad reviews about us? Lets throttle the global traffic to 1Kb/s. There, problem solved. A website with opinions about abortion that do not match the views of our CEO? Lets throttle those to 1Kb/s. Wait a minute, the KKK wants us to let customers access websites of members at full speed? Ok, lets do that.'

These also exist in Spain and I love them. I hope they don't remove them.

You love them because you are not a startup that plans to compete with other services or a customer who wants to use apps outside of the selected ones for which you can use dedicated data. What if one day you'd like to use a new emerging service that is better than WhatsApp|Viber|Any-other-app-that-you-currently-use but that is not in a bundle for which your provider has plans that give extra dedicated data? Will you make the switch and consume your regular data or will you stick with your current one that makes you use dedicated data for which you paid those extra €5?

I wouldn't purchase a bundle if I'm not going to use the services that are included. That would be really stupid.

When did HN turn into sensationalist clickbait stuff? Basically Reddit

Especially when it's posted by new accs

I totally agree with you. This whole thread sounds like an hysterical witch hunt, people condemning without understanding.

Ending Net Neutrality might be bad. But the deal offered by this Portuguese operator has none of the evils associated with it.

This is a site with a major focus on startups. If I wanted to do a video startup, plans that give cheap additional bandwidth to specific incumbent video services (YouTube) are yet another major hurdle to overcome if I want to be successful.

So yes, this kind of deal absolutely is "evil", as it will hurt innovation on the web in the long run.

The thing to do is flag it, like others did, and don't mention that you did.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Reply on news.ycombinator.com