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Comment by RyanZAG | Hacker News Reader

As someone from a country without net neutrality, I have to say this hasn't happened. Generally you get very cheap or free plans that are sponsored by Facebook or others that give priority to Facebook, but ISPs are always happy to take a little bit more money for an unlimited plan that gives you full access. And at least in my country, they're not unreasonably priced.

Even without net neutrality, your single monopoly ISP could triple their prices and there would be nothing you could do about it. The fact that they haven't seems to show that net neutrality probably isn't going to affect you all that badly. No sane company is going to block Google Wallet or Netflix.

Feels like net neutrality isn't the problem - it's Spectrum that is the problem. If repealing net neutrality gets your country to fix your real problem, then I'd say it's going to be a massively good thing in the long run as top parent on this comment chain implied.

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>No sane company is going to block Google Wallet

Verizon, then, is insane. http://money.cnn.com/2011/12/06/technology/verizon_blocks_go...

It's not entirely clear whether they blocked it from being installed on their carrier locked phones, or if they blocked it from communicating with Google servers at the network level. Back in 2011 it was relatively uncommon to buy unlocked phones, particularly for use on CDMA networks. It sounds to me like they just blocked the phone from installing the application, rather than anything that net neutrality would prevent.

There's no legal reason that a carrier has to allow you to use an unlocked phone on their networks. My cable ISP doesn't allow me to bring my own modem, for example. From what I can tell, the net neutrality rules wouldn't have changed this situation at all.

edit: This article[1] is extremely informative; Verizon was not blocking anything at a network level, they were disabling the OS from accessing the necessary "secure element" (TrustZone) in some of their carrier locked phones, which made the Android APIs that Google Wallet relied on cease to function. Due to this, Google chose to not show the app on the Play Store to customers on Verizon because they didn't want people to try the app and have it fail.

So in conclusion, this "blocking" (if you can even call it that) is completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand about net neutrality.

[1]: http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/05/01/a-brief-history-of-v...

yet that is one big example that even the ACLU has been spreading around.

No wonder people have been confused.

The level of disinformation with NN is staggering. The perils and draw of confirmation bias does not discriminate based on political orientation.

http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/05/01/a-brief-history-of-v...

Just read the article.

They blocked Google Wallet on Verizon phones, so not completely comparable as, say, throttling Nexus.

As a side note, their competing mobile payment platform was called ISIS. I'm guessing they rebranded since then.

They re-branded themselves to Softcard and then dissolved.

How long did it stay blocked? I bet they unblocked it as soon as customers complained.

Definitely an interesting example though. Nothing like that has ever happened in my country without net neutrality, but then we have a fairly competitive market where a single carrier trying that would lose their customers very quickly.

> How long did it stay blocked?

Nearly 2 years.

> That's crazy! I'd have cancelled and swapped ISPs after a week. Guess people didn't really care?

The vast majority of people in the US only have access to a single broadband ISP. I live in NYC and only have access to one. My other options are slow DSL (under 15Mbps download and under 1Mbps upload), dialup, or using a hotspot that is generally limited to 15GB download (3 Netflix movies) for $90 a month.

That's crazy! I'd have cancelled and swapped ISPs after a week. Guess people didn't really care?

EDIT: After reading more replies, it seems like you guys actually have no choice. Serious red flag that it sounds like net neutrality was covering up. I think you will be better in the long run with it removed, but you all need to get active and fix your ISP problem and create a free market.

In many regions in the U.S. you don't have any other ISPs. Cable & telecom companies have de-facto monopolies in most places; your only competition is often a reseller that uses the exact same pipes as the local telecom and so is subject to the same throttling.

Internet speeds are also ridiculously slow. In the heart of Silicon Valley, I'm on 5 MBPs/sec, even though the equipment can easily do gigabit. (How do I know this? Because if you pay several hundred bucks a month, they will upgrade your speed to gigabit without anyone coming out.)

Yeah you definitely have bigger problems than net neutrality. I'm in the middle of Africa, 30km from the CBD of a small city, and I have 1gb local / 100mb international fiber with no caps or throttling for the equivalent of ~$85/month. Plus I can WhatsApp the tech support if something goes wrong and they'll drive over and fix it within 30 mins or so.

I also have a choice of about 8 different ISPs offering me fiber lines to my door who seem to be in a price war with each other at the moment.

I don't have net neutrality though. But surely the problem you're facing is ISP/government monopoly related, not the net neutrality bit? Or do you think it's something else causing the ISP issues there?

It's totally ISP/monopoly related, but convincing the government to keep net neutrality regulations is generally viewed as easier than convincing them to break up monopoly telecoms. It was hard enough getting them to block the AT&T/T-mobile merger. The last time a company's been threatened with being broken up was Microsoft in the late 1990s, and they got off with a slap on the wrist (albeit one that made them reluctant to enter new markets, which opened the door for Google & Facebook, and Apple's resurgence, in the early 2000s).

Is that 100 up as well as down? How's the roundtrip latency to get a packet to a US server and back? In any case you have better internet than me for cheaper, and I'm two miles from downtown Bellevue, WA USA not out in the sticks of a flyover state. :(

Generally speaking though I'm also not particularly sad that this NN regulation has been repealed, I agree with the assessment that our problems are not from NN, lack of NN is merely one of many unpleasant possibilities with the current system so even if it was fully fixed there's still all the other problems, most of which have no workarounds. Lack of NN has a workaround. The fact that many employees at many businesses require using a VPN to work from home means that most ISPs will have no choice but to accept extra money to give those people unthrottled / uncensored lines that they take for granted right now as part of the base fee.

Speaking of flyover states, I'm in Kansas and have symmetrical gigabit from Google Fiber. They've recently moved in and I think that if net neutrality is really an issue, competitors like Google will be able to handily out compete the existing companies that already exist here. I tried to get AT&T Fiber for almost a month before finally giving up and getting Google Fiber.

Symmetric gigabit at $85/mo is oversubscribed by a factor of 10

Have you considered that maybe your internet is bad in the heart of silicon valley for the same reason your public transit, housing, etc., is bad? Symmetric gigabit is ~$80/month where I live, and I'm having 2-gig installed in a couple of weeks for $150/month. We've got all our utilities on poles, zoning variances are a breeze to get, and nobody cares that my house never got its final inspection. But we've got lots of Trump lawn signs around so people in Silicon Valley would never stoop to moving here.

Just as a counterpoint, I'm also in the heart of silicon valley. I have 125Mbps internet, with a few other options available, at a not-unreasonable cost.

I recently redid our garage to create a laundry area, and the inspector collaborated with me to identify the most efficient (and safe and legal) way to implement the plumbing, drainage, and electrical. It was neither confrontational nor onerous; I truly got value from a helpful, knowledgeable person that wanted the project to succeed.

We have more jobs than houses, our local schools are some of the best in the state, I have 3 parks in walking distance and a network of bike paths that run through the city. Miles of protected open space, with trails, farms, and facilities are all nearby.

I'm more than happy to pay the taxes to live here and to support the regulatory regimes that protect all of the above.

Certainly considered it - I'm a political moderate, my political views are generally a mishmash from both parties (really all parties, I've been known to vote Libertarian and Green as well, sometimes on the same ballot).

But I'll say that my sister lives in Houston, TX, which has a basically diametrically opposite political philosophy. And it's fucked up in entirely different ways. Traffic and public transportation both suck here, but public transportation is basically nonexistent in Houston, and at least we don't have people shooting at each other because of road rage (which actually happened in my sister's neighborhood - some woman with a small child in the back seat cut off a guy in a pickup truck, so he pulled out a handgun and opened fire). Our house prices are ridiculous, but at least we can drive ten minutes and be in well-preserved, well-maintained open space preserves, while Houston's public parkland exists but is nowhere near as easy to get to or enjoy. Our Internet sucks, but PG&E is pretty reasonable and actually fixes outages fairly rapidly (even if it does have a tendency to burn down Santa Rosa), while my sister's electric bill goes through half a dozen companies, each of which tries to extract as much money from the customer while providing as little service as possible.

On balance I prefer the Californian system, though I'm open to compromise systems that combine the best of both worlds. (We're both initially from Boston, BTW, which is kinda in the middle of those two politically but fucked up in its own special charming way. At least the streets in both Silicon Valley and Houston are laid out in a grid, with more than one lane apiece and traffic lights in the appropriate places, and they can build a new public works project without the ceiling caving in.)

> and at least we don't have people shooting at each other because of road rage

Sorry, but yeah, you do. no major city is immune from crime, sadly.

> but at least we can drive ten minutes and be in well-preserved, well-maintained open space preserves

We can do that here too. I'm not in Houston, though, but Houston isn't representative of Texas. Neither is Dallas, though.

I found that I had more internet options when I moved away from San Jose and landed here. I had FIOS, Cox, Charter, wireless ISPs, even had that Clear service for a while. Now I live out in the cow fields and have Suddenlink for cable. My other internet options would be DSL or wireless. 200/20 down for $140/mo, business package with a static IP.

Most cities don't have poles, especially up here in the Northeast (snowstorms and such), so it's not like another cable company can come along and just string another wire to an existing pole.

> but you all need to get active and fix your ISP problem and create a free market.

I, for one, think this is excellent advice and eagerly await the United Stated dedicating itself to becoming a free market someday.

> That's crazy! I'd have cancelled and swapped ISPs after a week. Guess people didn't really care?

Lucky you, having a no-contract plan and alternatives that don't have worse policies.

I think this is true, but it also ignores the fact the U.S. does not have nearly as strong anti-fraud and competition law as in Europe.

> And This Doesn't Apply To Google Wallet

> The thing is, these rules don't even apply in the case of Google Wallet, because Verizon isn't blocking anything. Why'd I bother explaining them, then? So you can see exactly how they don't apply.

> Unlike the tethering app that requires root access, Verizon isn't actively preventing the Wallet app from being installed on phones. That's all Google. If Google wanted to make the Wallet app compatible for every Verizon phone in the Play Store such that you could download and install it, it could. There is absolutely nothing to stop that happening - but the app wouldn't actually work.

[0] - http://www.androidpolice.com/2013/05/01/a-brief-history-of-v...

All of the services you mention were founded in the US on NN principles. We wouldn't have services like Netflix or Facebook or Google if NN had not been in place.

What web services & startups have come out of your country recently that are house hold brand names? Can you name any?

You are missing the point entirely.

Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015. All three of the companies you mentioned were up and running prior to that. So net neutrality enabling them doesn't seem to be correct to me.

EDIT: As for my country.. c'mon, low blow. Most of the people in my country are having some difficult problems with simpler issues than video streaming. We're getting there though, hopefully!

> Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015.

You are off by 10 or more years, depending on how you count. Some modes of internet service were under regulations which promoted something like neutrality before they were regulated specifically as internet service rather than ancillary to telephone service, but the FCC adopted a formal net neutrality policy (the Open Internet Policy Statement) in 2005 which was enforced through case-by-case action without general regulations from then until 2010 when that approachbwas struck down by the courts; at the time, the FCC was already developing net neutrality regulations under Title I, which it adopted also in 2010. Those rules were struck down in 2014, with the court saying that rules of that style could only be adopted under Title II authority. The FCC then initially drafted slightly weaker rules under Title I (on the theory that they could avoid crossing the line requiring Title II reclassification), but after the robust public comment period on that draft adopted, in 2015, regulations under Title II.

Net neutrality has been FCC policy since 2005, and every enforcement avenue except Title II regulation has been foreclosed by the courts.

> Sorry, I may be incorrect here, but from what I understand net neutrality only came into effect two years ago in 2015.

The 2015 regulations were a replacement for 2010 regulations. The 2010 regulations were struck down in court on the grounds that they exceeded the FCC's powers under Title 1 of the Communications Act; the court told the FCC they would have to classify ISPs as Title 2 Common Carriers in order to enforce net neutrality.

2015 was when official rules were put into place to protect Net Neutrality. But before that, ISPs had generally worked in a way favorable towards Net Neutrality. But then they started to act against Net Neutrality and then the rules were put into place.

So, you could argue that we've have net neutrality in principle since the internet existed (or at least up until 10 or so years ago when ISPs started to push back) but we have only had Net Neutrality enshrined in regulation for a couple years.

It appears that going forward we will have neither.

No. The entire history of the internet has been built and developed under NN principles. It was merely codified by the FCC in 2015. Companies regularly violated these principles in the past, and the FCC has previously intervened on behalf of customers. Now, there are no protections, with the FCC stating that it will no longer intervene for these violations.

> It was merely codified by the FCC in 2015.

And 2010.

And, more generally, in 2005.

My point was that the innovation from NN was a HUGE deal for the US economically and all the innovation came out of that, i.e. Netflix, Google, Amazon. If a country like yours has no NN protections then you probably won't see innovation like this in your country.

"We wouldn't have services like Netflix or Facebook or Google if NN had not been in place."

Facebook was founded almost a decade before Net Neutrality regulations were in place in the US.

That misses the point. NN protections were enforced even if they were not codified by the FCC, through the courts. Once they were hard coded it made it a lot harder for ISPs to cheat. That's all 2015 was about, making it harder for ISPs to throttle so we didn't have to sue every time. It wasn't about putting practices into place that weren't there before, it was about hard coding practices that were enforced for years so that it was simpler to enforce. That's all.

The new ruling by the FCC does the opposite. It encourages the ISPs to cheat in a blatantly obvious way.

The concept of net neutrality is as old as the internet itself. Are you saying facebook was founded a decade before the internet was invented?

>We wouldn't have services like Netflix or Facebook or Google if NN had not been in place.

I'm astonished at the FUD I've seen recently over NN. Netflix, Facebook, Google and the rest of the internet predated NN. NN started in 2015.

The current regulations around Net Neutrality have only officially existed for that long. Previous attempts at regulation happened before that, and the principles around net neutrality were how the Internet worked for a long time until ISPs began to go a different direction.

So, we've had lowercase net neutrality for basically the entire existence of the Internet. But the uppercase Net Neutrality has only been around for a couple years, but came into existence because we were losing the lowercase version.

exactly. before 2015, you had to pay Comcast extra if you wanted a package that included access to Google, and even more if you wanted reasonable speeds to get to your Facebook feeds

those were the golden days that created the internet. remember when Microsoft payed out to isps to close down access to altavista so they could get more users to use Bing?

Every example I gave in my comment you are replying to are things that a US ISP did prior to the implementation of net neutrality. Even during net neutrality multiple ISPs were caught artificially throttling Netflix to attempt to get payouts.

Ho! Amazing, thanks for clarifying. Your ISPs are pretty messed up. Are they government monopolies? I think your problems are far, far deeper than net neutrality, and just re-affirms my belief that net neutrality was a band-aid that needed to come off for you guys to wake up and fix your problems directly at the source. I wish you well in the fight ahead!

Well yes, most of the US's problem stem from the fact that Corporations Are People (when it suits them to be), and can thus give unlimited amounts of money to politicians because Money Is Free Speech.

It’s been getting worse and worse over the past few decades because of this, and we may be near the point of violent revolution. Except probably not because hey, who has time for that when they gotta put in forty hours a week plus overtime, or three part time jobs, just to barely fail to make ends meet?

What type of competition do you have among your ISPs? I think this is a fear in the US because many people are locked into a single ISP because of geography.

Tons of competition. I have a choice of multiple different fiber line providers, government copper phone line provider, a bunch of different wireless options, and then multiple different ISPs who run over those different fiber or copper lines or 4G towers.

Generally small towns would only have access to 1 fiber or copper line provider (generally Telkom our useless government supplier), but multiple ISPs running on that line so it's not that bad, but I live in the suburbs near a city so I have a lot more choice.

I wanted to add that I think everyone's case is different. I had a tenure in Chicago and all of the apartment buildings I lived in were locked to a single ISP. This is very much so a YMMV.

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