GOP net neutrality bill would allow paid fast lanes and preempt state laws
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
>“(2) may not impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management.
Seems like what NN proponents want, isn't it?
>“(1) IN GENERAL.—Except as provided in paragraph (2), nothing in this section shall be construed to limit the ability of broadband internet access service providers to offer specialized services.
>“(2) PROHIBITION ON CERTAIN PRACTICES.—Specialized services may not be offered or provided in ways that threaten the meaningful availability of broadband internet access service or that have been devised or promoted in a manner designed to evade the purposes of this section.
Ah those might be a problem...
[0] https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-bill/4682...
So the FCC could still potentially prevent prioritization that would degrade broadband internet service.
Of course, I am not a lawyer.
So, the devil is in the details, and the FCC seems to have the power to write those details, if I understand correctly. Even if the present FCC writes sub standard details, a future FCC could re-write them.
The bill explicitly prohibits the FCC from writing rules fleshing out the details, and restricts the FCC to adjudicating specific cases (such adjudications are subject individually to review by the courts, so inasmuch as someone is empowered to define general standards, it's the course through case law, not the FCC, whose adjudications do not create binding precedent.)
The FCC is that of essentially a trial court, not a rulemakers, under this bill.
Why don't we provide feedback to our representatives and work with them on how the Bill can be improved by providing more guidance on rules and penalties?
Any rule which restricted anything not restricted by the bare law would expand obligations, and is thereby prohibited.
No the exceptions are huge. Netflix is throttled based on network they slow everything on that network down so this explicitly allows one of the known examples of throttling that actually occurred.
"availability" here does not cover performance. Specialized services will likely subtract from the performance of communication with the rest of the internet, but this clause only cares if the impact would be a more thorough loss of connectivity. As long as the ISP continues to offer a neutral tier of service at some level of performance and price, they can devote the bulk of their bandwidth to providing non-neutral service.
To me, if I am paying for a 50mpbs Internet access, and I am only getting 25 or 30, because the rest is devoted to "specialized services", then they are threatening the meaningful availability of the service I am paying for.
If however I am paying for 50 mbps, and getting 50-55 mbps, and my ISP is offering an over priced Voip package, I don't think it is interfering in a meaningful way (obviously this ignores latency, which is also an important factor, for simplicity of the example).
So, fast lanes/bundled packages?
> “(2) may not impair or degrade lawful internet traffic on the basis of internet content, application, or service, or use of a non-harmful device, subject to reasonable network management.
look at the very end.
"subject to reasonable network management"
I think that is an extremely broad term to be put in place; recalling the argument ISP had for throttling was to maintain network quality.
So much for "States' rights", huh? Fucking hypocrites.
A man is known by the company he keeps, as the old adage goes. Anyone who supports Republicans in any shape and form is also a fucking hypocrite and a liar.
Just because the Republican party is traditionally associated with states' rights doesn't mean they should always have to give precedence to states.
Allowing states to enact their own regulations in this case would be incredibly burdensome to internet businesses, there's a good reason for net neutrality laws to be uniform across the whole country.
And there were plenty of people who voted for President Obama but voted for Trump. 13% of 2012 Obama voters voted for Trump in 2016.
http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-h...
I strongly agree with the rest of your post.
I think you could easily give supporters in this realm, that aren't quite aware of the worst case scenarios people fear about net neutrality repeal, food for thought using news as an example. Comcast for instance owns NBC Universal. If Comcast, often the de facto Internet provider in some areas, decides to favor vertical integration in news and "prioritize their outlets"... let's just say that the news outlets NBC Universal owns tend to be exactly opposite of the "parallel news system" outlets you are talking about. :)
Think of it as QoS based on a list of sites provided by the ISP.
White-list only after the first few gigabytes is already happening. It's called zero-rating.
There is no such thing as "surplus bandwidth". How much bandwidth there is is as much the decision of the ISP as what gets prioritized or throttled. If you make it illegal to throttle below available bandwidth, they will simply reduce available bandwidth (or even simpler, fail to increase available bandwidth).
If there is more than one way to achieve the exact same result at exactly the same cost, it's completely pointless to make one of the ways illegal.
Everyone gets the same coverage except premium customers. Then degrade that base degree of coverage. Boom.
Regular customers will just see their quality drop for the same price. Web sites will have to pay for the bandwith their customer already paid for to their ISP.
It's going to suck.
Hope this never happens in France, but our leaders love to copy the worst decisions taken in the US so...
I interpreted this as meaning that although you pay for 10mb/s Internet, Comcast can offer a special package that allows you to stream Netflix in 4K.
The effective bandwidth of the internet looks like an hour glass. As things fan out to individual users you may have capacity for 100+mbps but no way to consume it because upstream there is a bottleneck. In many cases that bottleneck exists at the edge of an ISP or farther upstream of it. Direct peering increases the capacity of the ISP's "edge" but only for the services available on the peer. Co-location puts those services on the internal side of the bottleneck, again increasing effective capacity, but only for the services that are co-located in the ISPs datacenters. Almost all major providers (google, akamai, netflix, facebook) offer some form of co-locatable server however, those cost money to deploy and maintain.
It doesn't have to be "actively" slowing down traffic to be degraded. If ISPs can go faster, and they choose not to unless you pay more, that is a form of degradation. One of many forms the degradation could come in is ISPs failing to build out faster networks until people are paying higher prices. Service can be allowed to degrade over time by simply not doing anything unless you pay more money.
If Netflix did not have PNIs to Comcast, Comcast internet would have been unusable for everyone.
[Edit: Post more downvotes]
Guess what happens to the Netflix traffic when the best route to Netflix is over Comcast transit?
Only under the assumption that Comcast makes no attempt to do their job properly and uphold their contractual obligations by implementing reasonable QoS measures and upgrading their capacity. You can't point to Comcast's extortionist refusal to upgrade their links to the outside world and say that it's Netflix's fault; that was just their abusive tactic to force Netflix to deal with Comcast directly on Comcast's terms. Verizon did the same thing.
You've missed my point. There are some ways an ISP can go faster that are not neutral AND not malicious/extortive. If google puts a GGC on your ISPs network, youtube now has an advantage over hulu. There is no equivalent internal-deployment that can give a truly neutral increase in capacity.
To conflate this with active degradation (throttling or blocking) means that you would have an ISP be unable to host any service until they can guarantee _all services_ equivalent access (presumably at the ISPs expense otherwise they would price out everyone but the big players).
Before you immediately chose "neutral hosting" realize that it is untenable for every random small website to be able to legally demand any ISPs host their services for free in order to guarantee a level playing field with Google and Netflix. The only tenable solution is to make it illegal to collocate services which will be a far worse hit to the experience you have on the web than any throttling or blocking has ever been.
This is not as simple as you would like it to be.
> If ISPs can go faster, and they choose not to unless you pay more, that is a form of degradation
This is assuming intent and over-simplifying. Is a small regional ISP without the capital or credit necessary to expand now anti-NN by default? Are they extorting their customers by default? Not all ISPs are Comcast and Verizon. If you cannot escape your circumstance and see the bigger picture of how and what the internet is and who "ISPs" are then you are just being selfish.
We need laws or regulations to address the fact that ISPs are actually forcing content providers to deploy in-network CDN nodes with the ISPs through extortive refusal to upgrade the links between the residential ISPs and the ISPs serving Netflix et al. Some deployment of local CDN nodes makes sense on its own and benefits both parties, but it's not like video streaming is actually latency-sensitive or anything.
This is a textbook lobbyist argument -- something which is technically true without doing the math.
A 10Gbps port on a switch is maybe $100. Say it can service a hundred customers, so $1/customer, and has a lifetime of two years. So $0.04/customer/month.
These are very conservative numbers. In reality it doesn't even cost that much.
The fact that the ports go to different places is irrelevant in the aggregate, because there is no need to add a port when the existing links to that peer aren't at capacity. And it's not as though the fact that Netflix and Google have separate ports would allow a 100Mbps customer to get 100Mbps from each of them at the same time.
Colocation is independent of this. If anyone with traffic could get peering at cost (i.e. ~free), they might still do it or might not, but then the ISP would have to charge market rates for space and power instead of monopoly prices because they're really charging for gatekeeper access to customers.
and assume that the two edge routers are just switches
and we would use a consumer level 10gbps port
and that the switchers are already in the same rack in the same facility
and that that rack in that facility has direct access to our distribution PoP
and that there are no firewall rules that need to be in place on that port (they can be in the DMZ sure)
and that we don't need to monitor that connection
and that we don't need that connection to be redundant at all
and that we aren't going to use a routing protocol like BGP on that port (we will just hard code routes)
and that we don't want any guarantee that you and I will operate that link at any SLA
and that we don't want to guarantee that both parties will give notice in a timely manner before termination
and... and... and...
So, which textbook are you copying from? You put out something that is technically true without considering any of the practical realities.
(edited for readability)
Do the actual math. Show me something with an aggregate cost of more than, say, $1/month/customer.
Especially using realistic numbers rather than the "10Gbps port for a hundred 100Mbps customers" ones I gave to make a point.
You first. You made a claim which was woefully inaccurate, I called you out in an admittedly childish way and now the burden of proving you wrong is on me?
Here is my ballpark, Both sides will want redundant fiber connections between two edge routers at 10gbps. SFP+ 10g from cisco is ~60 bucks. We need at least 4 (2 on each side), plus a reserve of 4 for faster recovery from failure. In addition, lets assume that we amortize some cost of the _edge router_ for this service. A refurb 16 port SFP+ module for 10g fiber is around $6000 and we will need 2 of them in 2 separate chassis on EACH SIDE and lease Colo space for it but we will amortize it. So, $6k + $1k for the chassis + $800 for the supervisor card. to lease space for this: $1000k/month per chassis(5u at 200/u in a major market carrier hotel) / 16. We need cabling too but lets assume thats commodity.
up front costs so far:
$60 (sfp modules) * 8 = 480
$7800 edge router * 4 / 16 = 1950
so $2430 for equipement (amortized)
1k/month/chasis = 4k/month / 16 = 250/month recurring
100 customers over 2 years = 1950 + 6000 / 100 / 24 = $3.31/month/customer before we even talk about monitoring/maintenance/legal/etc
I have not even begun to dig into the practical costs, and I'm at 3x your target. Your move.
Which is still using the numbers where equipment only lasts two years and you're expecting 100% continuous usage from all customers. And even using all these ridiculous numbers it's still only $3.31/month per customer. If we adopted a 10:1 oversubscription rate (which is still conservative) it would be $0.33/month even with you setting money on fire, having the ISP pay for both sides, and using full double redundancy rather than some kind of N+1 or N+M.
Peering is just not a major cost for ISPs.
The ISP doesn't pay both sides, but someone pays somewhere. So, if we are talking about the "cost of peering" it doesn't serve to talk about it from only one side.
You can get more than 16 ports in the 5u unit, so rent is probably under-amortized but not by the two order of magnitudes that would make up the difference between my estimate and your original.
Peering is not a major cost for ISPs because ISPs don't have a lot of peers. As more services want direct peering relationships, there are some overhead costs which go up to manage the explosion of peering relationships.
My initial objection was that you over-simplified. I feel pretty fine resting on my argument as is. You may have the last word. I cede all my remaining time to whomever wants it.
But we're talking about the cost of peering paid by the ISP, because the ISP doesn't have to cover costs paid by somebody else and no one else is objecting to paying their part of it.
> You can get more than 16 ports in the 5u unit, so rent is probably under-amortized but not by the two order of magnitudes that would make up the difference between my estimate and your original.
Juniper MX240 supports 80 10GbE ports in 5U. Cisco's product search is lame but I expect they have something similar too.
> Peering is not a major cost for ISPs because ISPs don't have a lot of peers. As more services want direct peering relationships, there are some overhead costs which go up to manage the explosion of peering relationships.
That isn't necessarily true either. Only the major transit providers and CDNs like Level 3 and Akamai and the major players like Google that are so big they're effectively their own transit provider/CDN have any interesting peering.
All the smaller players get connected through one of the transit providers, because Joe's Website only wants to hook up from wherever Joe's servers are, not at every carrier hotel in the world like Google does. So they pay a transit provider to handle that and the ISP only has to deal with the transit provider.
The problem comes when the ISPs want to charge major transit providers monopoly rents for peering (which they would have to pass on), or refuse to upgrade the links to them when they're saturated in order to force their big customers (like Netflix at one point) to pay monopoly rents for peering directly.
> My initial objection was that you over-simplified.
It's supposed to be a simplification. The point isn't to make a full accounting, it's to compare orders of magnitude. Even using your numbers with unrealistically conservative assumptions about everything, they're still a single digit percentage of the typical customer's bill.
This isn't the party of small businesses and tax cuts any more. This bill is a handout to large ISPs at the expense of the economy, and the tax bill last night raises my taxes so people making 100k+ more than me can see a tax cut. I'm done with them.
If Clinton were POTUS and Russian ties like had been found to the Trump administration, she would have been impeached already. But it's their man, so let's look the other way. Same with State's rights.
And Trump is the magnification of the GOP.
We need to hold them accountable!!!
States in fact do not have that right if the federal law implicitly or explicitly preempts them. It's a corollary of the supremacy clause.
That's a tricky question. At a high school civics class level, no they cannot create new law because only Congress can. But the reality of the modern regulatory state is that Congress has delegated much of its law making powers to specialized experts in executive branch agencies, including independent agencies like the FCC. So they can adopt regulations that have the force of law but are not statutory, though only to the extent that Congress has authorized them to do so.
Those regulations are for all intents and purposes laws. However, a federal agency's regulations cannot preempt state law on their own; they can only preempt to the same extent that Congress preempted state law in the statute delegating authority to the agency.
And yes, states can regulate where their laws don't conflict with federal laws or regulations. But there's a limit. Congress can enact laws which implicitly preempt state regulation because the federal regulatory scheme is so complete that it "fully occupies the field" leaving no room for supplemental state regulation. In which case, states cannot regulate.
I would be surprised if a court held that the feds have field preempted internet regulation, given how much it ties into areas of traditional state primacy such as property law. But who knows these days.
The FCC being able to pass and remove regulations in an area means Congress has created federal law governing that area and assigned to the FCC regulatory authority in that area.
Further, even with no federal law, dormant commerce clause concerns come into play.
The sway of ideologies should be balanced with a willingness to judge issues on their own merit.
Allowing states to enact their own regulations in this case would be incredibly burdensome to internet businesses looking to operate in multiple states (so all of them), there's a good reason for net neutrality laws to be uniform across the whole country.
We should not be ridiculing people for not being ideologues. We live in a time when we need people to not be ideologues.
Inconsistency in the application of one's proclaimed first principles should be criticized unless and until the inconsistency is justified with reason and evidence.
Not all of them. Just the ones that want to lay cable in that particular state. Most internet companies are only concerned with deploying physical infrastructure to a handful of data centers, and leaving the rest of the connectivity up to their ISPs. ISPs providing major backbone links would be subject to the hassle of different state regulations, but ISPs providing last-mile service only need to care about the laws of the states their particular customers reside in.
It has never meant what the words taken together would naively seem to mean.
If I wanted to run a server (web/smtp/etc.) on my consumer level broadband account, I was not allowed to per TOS. For me, real "net neutrality" would've let me do this, but it's never been the case. I have to jump up to "Business" level account.
This situation is what ISP and corporates want... to get you to pay more for a problem you don't have. And them the power to shut you down and force you to higher tier level of "support".
Comcast pushed one step too far against Bittorrent (and was caught), but this is exactly the power that the big boys want and Title II weakens their argument that what they provide is a managed service not a pipe.
They are basically tempering with everyone's liberty to start a business on internet. Damaging US citizen capacity to create new internet opportunities and be able to compete with their favorites pets.
Why the f* are you talking about slow and fast lanes ? It is true, but most importantly is this passes on. Any service that would like to be taken seriously would have to pay his way in.
Why everybody has so gentle titles ? Fast / Slow lanes is very abstract.
Net neutrality was how the internet worked de facto from its inception through approximately the end of the dial-up days. It wasn't necessary to impose net neutrality de jure until home broadband was widespread and capable of eating into traditional cable TV revenue. It wasn't necessary to regulate net neutrality for DSL carriers back when local loop unbundling applied to them. But between 2000 and 2010, the net neutrality situation got worse than it ever had been, the regulatory efforts from 2010 to 2015 were half-assed at best, and the 2015 regulations weren't in place long enough to even establish enough judicial precedent to tell whether they could work long-term.
Partisan control of Congress definitely swings back and forth semi-regularly, but that's not what the history of net neutrality looks like.
100 people at 1Gbit/sec to the edge are 100Gbit/sec in the core to content providers.
[Edit: Downvoting 2+2 being 4 is stupid]
1 Gbit/sec is easily deliverable at the edge, even if it costs 5 thousand dollars to get it connected. 1 Gbit/sec of non-oversubscribed IP transit is at least $500/mo. A building with 100 apartments would require $50,000 a month in IP transit costs. This does not include costs of the long distance fiber, locations for PNI and gear that can do 48x 100Gbit/sec ports. So your Interwebz is going to cost you either > $600 a month or you get congestion and that congestion would be coming from the core, not from the edge
Even at 10Mbit/sec congestion will be at the core. Comcast currently claims to have 22.3 million internet customers. At 10 Mbit/sec it means 223.3 MILLION megabit per second that needed to be handed off to transit. It is not possible.
That's definitely not true in my specific case, and probably isn't true all that often in the general case. Deploying FTTH to existing paying customers who already have halfway decent infrastructure doesn't have a very compelling short-term return on investment even when the local government is doing everything they can to encourage it.
By doing that your municipality is preventing price competition on the physical last mile which means that Comcast has no need to upgrade service.
Still its nothing compared to the extortion racket, holding websites hostage .
I actually have no idea what was repealed.
But what if you come up with a brand new DIY site that you wish to host ads, have logins and accounts with monthly fees, etc. How will anybody ever see your site with tiered internet? Your new site is not be in any of the predetermined packages. You would have to go to the ISP and beg/pay them to get your site added to the 'DIY' package just to even get any traffic at all, let alone users. It totally destroys innovation and tilts the playing field towards the existing incumbents.
If we had reasonable spectrum regulation, various terrestrial WISPs would have replaced all of these horrible companies a long time ago.
Dear Netflix, if you want to service our customers you need to pay us a $10 million dollars a year.
Dear Customer with 30mbps service, Netflix takes a lot of bandwidth and we're just a poor multi-billion dollar ISP and can't afford to shoulder the burden. But if you pay an additional $9.99 a month we can probably scrape up the bandwidth to let you watch Netflix in HD ($29.99 for 4k)
Also see our other premium options. Have the freedom to pick which services are right for you! Hulu: $9.99 Amazon Video: $9.99 Apple Music: $5.99 YouTube: $7.99
What you’re describing just sounds like suicide.
Because it's not competitive at all.
As a site owner, you pay a service provider (or cloud hosting service or whatever) to offer you a certain amount of bandwidth to host your site.
The problem comes when other ISP's implement their fast lanes and traffic from your site doesn't get equal priority to traffic from another site who has paid that specific ISP to prioritise their traffic when serving their customers.
So you end up having to pay multiple ISP's to prioritise your traffic on their networks. Your site could appear slow even if you've paid your own service provider for a high bandwidth.
The real issue is that we allow those ISPs to determine which semis are allowed to use a bypass. Public's ( even technologically advanced public's ) mixing of the two issues is why NN fight would continue to be lost.
To address your point, I do not see an issue for ISPs charging for PNIs as long as those charges are uniform. If I, JoesFlix, have 100Gbit/sec traffic to Comcast and Comcast says "In order to access EP-Bypass, traffic has to come from AS that has more than 90Gbit/sec traffic to us" then Comcast should not be allowed to prevent me from accessing EP-Bypass. Congestion is bad for business. Sane PNI rules are easy:
0. there's some access fee ( typically it is actually - you must show up in X places - how you get there is your cost )
1. we get even number of PNIs.
2. i order and pay for half
3. you order and pay for half
So you've got 30mbps internet? Sorry, Netflix is in the 256k lane so your speed doesn't matter. And this is Netflix's fault because they haven't paid us. Also Netflix costs $19.99 a month to cover the costs of paying your ISP. And now maybe your ISP wants to also charge you a premium on to of your normal bill to view Netflix.
It won't be a bigger pipe, this won't create a fast lane. It's just going to create a slow lane.
These companies are able to flaunt the laws of the marketplace by forcing consumers to pay more for a product despite the "physical good" becoming cheaper and cheaper every year for the ISP to produce.
To keep things simple, imagine an ISP with only one plan: 1 TB of data/month at 100 Mb/second for $50/month.
Note that at 100 Mb/second it would only take 22 hours to use all your allotted data for the month. Because of this they do not have to build their network out to where it can handle everyone doing 100 Mb/second all the time. In fact, building it out to where it could do 100 Mb/second all the time would be prohibitively expensive.
So they just build their network out to where most of the time, most people get their 100 Mb/second, but during some peak times there may be congestion and things may slow down.
Imagine now that it is during one of those congested times. I am trying to watch a video lecture at a free MOOC. You are trying to watch, say, Netflix. Bob is trying to download a video game he just bought. Alice is trying to do a major OS and XCode update on her Mac.
You, me, Bob, and Alice all bought the same service from our ISP at the same price, so it seems pretty reasonable to expect that we would be treated the same. We should share the effects of congestion equally.
If the ISP wants to bring supply and demand into this, they could offer service level agreements for an extra cost. You pay a certain amount per month and they guarantee, say, 90% of rated speed even during congestion. I think this would be allowed under net neutrality.
What they want to do with paid prioritization, though, so go to the MOOC I'm trying to use, Netflix, the place where Bob got the video game, and Apple and say "Hey...if you pay us $X per month, when our network is congested we will prioritize the traffic for our customers of yours".
There are two bad things with this:
1. Suppose that Netflix buys paid prioritization, and nobody else does. That means that during times of congestion you get good service, and the service for the rest of us gets even worse. Even though we are paying our ISP for the exact same service, you are now getting preferential treatment because a company that has no relationship with the ISP other than they and the ISP have some common customers was able to pay to give you preferential service and degrade ours.
2. It may discourage the ISP from building out more network capacity as demand grows. They may instead focus on getting paid prioritization agreements from the most popular internet services. That could mean that those who use smaller services that even if they wanted to could not afford to make prioritization deals with every ISP, might be doomed to perpetual terrible performance, as the ISPs only need to build out their networks enough to provide good service to those who use services that have paid prioritization deals with the ISP.
Essentially ISPs want to reverse their role. Right now, their role is to sell to us (the end users) access to the internet. They want to turn that around, and make their role be to sell the internet access to us. And they still want to charge us while doing that...basically they want to be the pimps of the net, with us as the prostitutes and the websites as the johns.
That's basically what the ISPs want to do.