California’s strict net neutrality bill is close to final passage
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Then, it should be an issue where leaders in the state and federal level are backed by the people and to make the incumbents like Comcast and their ilk back off and negate any moves to kill it off. Because we all know they will try and do just that through lobbying to protect their oligopoly.
This should really be a free market issue. I truly believe that one day, technology will be at a tipping point that bandwidth will be free.
Much like solar in the beginning, expensive to produce and not really producing a bang for buck. But now, it's a completely different picture.
I can't wait until telecoms companies are consigned to history.
SpaceX plan to use orbits at around 1110 km - 1325 km.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/02/space...
Latency may actually be better than fiber for long haul access, because routing will take place between satellites. The speed of light in vacuum is about 50% faster than the speed of light in a fiber (which of course we use terrestrially)
https://bigthink.com/robby-berman/elon-musk-quietly-plans-to...
EDIT: More details here on p2p, encryption, etc
http://www.alphr.com/space/1008632/Elon-Musk-SpaceX-Starlink...
https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/807fns/elon_mus...
I am very much looking forward to this. This would solve several problems for me.
Postscript: Iridium is LEO and doesn't require a fancy antenna. How come? Iridium is designed for voice; throughput is a few kbits/second. That's way too slow for modern internet. For mbit/sec speeds, you need a higher signal-to-noise ratio and an omni antenna like Iridium's won't cut it. You have to track the satellite.
This is part of their problem. They get the increased tax/regulation frustration as a minor cost to their goal of cable-ifiying the Internet.
I assume this means 'not mobile'
>(1) Blocking lawful content, applications, services, or nonharmful devices, subject to reasonable network management.
California will outlaw ISPs providing network level ad blocking services.
>(6) Zero-rating some Internet content, applications, services, or devices in a category of Internet content, applications, services, or devices, but not the entire category.
California will make T-Mobile Binge On type service illegal for cable providers to offer.
>(b) It shall be unlawful for a mobile Internet service provider, insofar as the provider is engaged in providing mobile broadband Internet access service, to engage in any of the activities described in paragraphs (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8), and (9) of subdivision (a).
And the will outlaw T-Mobile Binge On too.
Submitted without opinionated commentary.
Hopefully, yes.
> And the will outlaw T-Mobile Binge On too.
Hopefully, yes.
In the short term, I like those services. Hey, free streaming video! But in the enlightened self interest long term, I don't want my ISP deciding which services I can plausibly use. Imagine Verizon offered zero-rated Netflix, "but since you don't need all that expensive per-gigabyte data like our competitors try to sell you, we'll give you 2GB of data for free with your plan, but unlimited access to our wide variety of paid sponsors!"
Strictly speaking, yes. But free-market capitalism is also inherently at odds with ISPs having monopolies based on geographical area, which is the case for most of the US. Net neutrality regulation is an attempt to address the obvious issues with that, given the fact that the ISP monopolies are not going to go away any time soon. In other words, in an ideal free market, yes, net neutrality regulation would not exist; but we don't have anything close to an ideal free market in Internet access.
The solution to this is for the actual physical infrastructure that requires digging up roads to be owned by the city (or other local entity), so it only has to be put into place once, when the city is built; and for competing ISPs to either lease, say, fiber bandwidth from the city, or get a permit to pull their own cabling through already existing underground tunnels.
The problem is that every municipality that has tried this solution has been sued into oblivion by the ISPs, who want to prevent open competition by any means necessary.
Because there is such limited competition in the broadband ISP space (most people only have one choice!) the free market can't work to drive down prices.
Net neutrality is policing specific legal vs illegal behaviors, similarly to environmental protection laws. A "free market" doesn't really (at least not publicly) allow illegal services, because the action itself is illegal, both inside and outside the market offerings, so it is relatively orthogonal.
Certainly the maximization of profit (which has little to do with free market operations, but more of lock-in) would be helped if they were freely allowed to pursue any illegal activity in the name of profit. But it is the realm of the government, not the market, to decide what should be illegal for everybody including market participants, to mitigate predatory actions and destructive externalities.
But even if there was a highly competitive ISP market, some ground rules would still be needed to ensure that the large players don't mess with the small players somehow, just maybe not as strict.
With perfect competition you still have the problem that a large amount of capital investment is required (making it impractical to challenge established companies) and ISPs from a pure profit motive have little incentive to serve less densely populated areas. The theory behind granting the monopoly is that in exchange they have to serve everyone and submit to more vigorous regulation.
Not if the capital investment is made, as it should be, by individual localities who want to own Internet infrastructure, or at least the capital intensive portion of it, that they then lease to ISPs. But ISPs sue localities who try this.
If you mean, run the basic fiber (or whatever broadband hardware the municipality puts in) bandwidth supply as a municipal service, and let competing service providers rent bandwidth, that is exactly what various municipalities have tried (and been sued for by the big ISPs).
If you mean, have the municipality be an actual ISP, I think some have tried that (and been sued by the big ISPs); but I'm not that actual ISP services are a natural municipal service the way the basic high speed hardware/right of way is.
There is a long (although slowly being forgotten) history of vigorous regulation of the market used in the US to maintain competition and avoid a situation where a handful of large trusts control the entire economy. Do we really want to go back to Standard Oil doing whatever they want because nobody can do anything about it? Because that's the way we're headed.
No, it doesn't. A free market is a market in which all transactions are voluntary. Such a market is much more likely to exist in the absence of government regulation.
> Do we really want to go back to Standard Oil doing whatever they want because nobody can do anything about it?
You mean the days when Standard Oil obtained a de facto monopoly by selling oil cheaper than any competitor, and thereby saving us, the customers, lots of money? At least until the government stepped in and messed things up?
(For an even more egregious example, look up what happened to Alcoa Aluminum.)
The problem with internet services is that the infrastructure required creates a natural monopoly (ex: running fiber optic cables to each persons house), and there is a lot of regulation in many markets that ISPs are granted de facto monopoly power by the state itself in exchange for a guarantee of universal access for everyone in a given area, even if those customers are unprofitable/too expensive to service. If there was no monopoly at the ISP level, natural or otherwise, then there would be no need for net neutrality, as consumers would be able to choose alternatives and ISPs would compete on value. Net neutrality is an anti-monopolist regulation.
There are thresholds for when how markets operate starts to have effects that have sizeable socioeconomic effects. I don't think it's hyperbole to claim that the Internet is now an essential part of U.S. commerce with itself and the world. Whenever we talk about physical commerce, like stores or driving to work, we generally agree we need some form of government oversight and regulation so that the commerce can keep flowing.
For example if a highway has a wreck it can prevent millions of dollars being earned all across the board. This is in part why we have road safety standards, and standards for the vehicles that can be on it.
I think the internet is similiar in some ways. We now use it for work in lots of places. For government applications, and to buy and sell a significant amount of goods. Entertainment is included as services and goods.
When we consider commerce flowing freely we have to also consider the real bottlenecks to it in relation to monopalistic control. Is netflix's bandwidth actually a significant stress for Comcasts networks? If it is, is it because netflix's bandwidth is inherently too large for what Comcast can realistically afford, or is it because Comcast does not want to innovate and/or improve their infrastructure?
I was surprised when I found you can get a 1Gb/s dedicated line through Cogent or Hurricane Electric for about $150. This is transit network that has very low latency, and they're much smaller companies than U.S. ISP's. Residential internet is not dedicated, it's shared. I don't have the data on how much is actually used but I highly suspect only about 1/20th is used by most people overall, if not less.
I think as it stands right now, it's ISP's lack of competition leading to lack of effort to provide a good product. Given their position and lack of effort they are the ones who are actually hurting free commerce.
If they are hurting free commerce then what should be done about it? Well, as I originally stated, ISP's are in the business of infrastructure. You don't have realistic alternatives that do allow that commerce (In this case, bandwidth). So, do we just ignore commerce for the country being limited, or do we force the hand?
I think forcing the hand is a bandaid, but a true solution, competition, is much further out of reach. Any time anti-monopalization is brought up you get the same notions of 'free market' saying no, when monopalization puts down free markets.
Yes, but laissez-faire capitalism has been largely abandoned in favor of mixed market economies in the developed world for the better part of a century.
> My general understanding of HN culture is that it is generally capitalist
HN does not have a strong consensus on my economics. There is definitely a return-to-the-gilded-age faction, sure, but they aren't alone.
The problem is only in very large cities is there any internet competition, information asymmetry and deceptive advertising practices harm consumers, and having free and open access to information is in societies best interests.
Capitalism requires that everyone play by the same rules, that those rules be fair, and that there be competition and alternatives. Without net neutrality, a single corporation can dictate to an unprecedented degree what information you have access to for any purpose whatsoever with no recourse. This isn't because they're in the business of generating information, but because they put themselves between the producer and the consumer. It's not any different from the anti-competitive practices of the robber-baron era where Standard Oil owned the rail roads, then priced out competition from transporting their oil to gain a monopoly. We know from the past behavior and the current behavior of ISPs in other countries that the reason they want to end net neutrality is so that they can price out and block YouTube to gain a monopoly on video services, or to do the same to any other area they want, simultaneously making more money and the world worse off because of it.
I love businesses. But when Standard Oil charges certain companies one rate for train fare and themselves a different one, or when Bell charges you extra fees to connect to non-Bell telephones (or blocks them entirely), then you have a market failure and the government needs to step in and break up those companies and force them to be competitive. Without competitive markets, you don't have capitalism, you have feudalism.
I think internet should be sold per GB, at different tiers of speed/uptime/ping. This gives an incentive to companies to give you faster speed and provide levels of speed/ping that people would be willing to pay extra for.
Something like: Browsing tier: .1c/GB 1mb/s 500ms ping guaranteed Video tier: .3c/GB 100 mb/s 100ms ping, 99.9% packet delivery Video conferencing tier: 100 mb/s 50ms ping, no packet loss
etc... Don't focus on numbers but rather the idea.
I don't think you have a correct definition of what net neutrality, as a policy, is. See below.
> I think internet should be sold per GB, at different tiers of speed/uptime/ping.
This is perfectly consistent with net neutrality.
What is not consistent with net neutrality is pricing the same GB/speed/uptime/ping differently, depending on which endpoint the traffic is coming from/going to. That is what net neutrality regulation prevents, and all that it prevents.
The EFF seems to have changed its definition of NN and now includes throttling in it as their press release for the recent Verizon tiff when they throttled a fire department.
They are being really inconsistent in their definition, saying that the repeal of NN allowed the throttling to happen. I guess that isn't technically saying it falls under NN if you twist your head enough, but is certainly is conflating the two issues.
There's too much to quote here, but you can search for throttling to see what the rule would have banned: https://www.fcc.gov/document/fcc-releases-open-internet-orde...
I did. It bans throttling based on content. It does not ban throttling based on going over the usage cap in the plan you paid for, which is what Verizon did to the Santa Clara fire department.
On page 52: 122. Because our no-throttling rule addresses instances in which a broadband provider targets particular content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices, it does not address a practice of slowing down an end user’s connection to the Internet based on a choice made by the end user. For instance, a broadband provider may offer a data plan in which a subscriber receives a set amount of data at one speed tier and any remaining data at a lower tier. If the Commission were concerned about the particulars of a data plan, it could review it under the no-unreasonable interference/disadvantage standard. In contrast, if a broadband provider degraded the delivery of a particular application (e.g., a disfavored VoIP service) or class of application (e.g., all VoIP applications), it would violate the bright-line no-throttling rule. We note that user-selected data plans with reduced speeds must comply with our transparency rule, such that the limitations of the plan are clearly and accurately communicated to the subscriber.
Sorry.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/verizons-throttling-fi...
I assume that's the one you are commenting on, if not, feel free to post a link as the EFF has been putting out a lot of communications lately. :-)
I agree with you that the EFF's communication here is muddled. The point I would focus on in the actual incident (the Santa Clara fire department being throttled) is this one:
"Within the documents submitted by Santa Clara, it appears to be some confusion as to what exactly was Verizon selling to the fire department. Twice the public safety officials asserted they thought they were buying an unlimited plan and twice they discovered during the emergency they did not."
In other words, to me the key issue here is not throttling, but whether customers understand what they are buying. (As the article notes, it might not be Verizon's fault if there was a misunderstanding; that would need to be investigated.) If you buy a plan that says you get throttled after a certain usage point, that's what you bought; I don't see how that is inconsistent with NN since the throttling doesn't depend on what sites you go to. But the EFF then argues this:
"The FCC, however, could have proactively addressed this problem in the future and establish a federal rule applicable in all fifty states that ISPs are not allowed to throttle public safety services during emergencies. The FCC under its Title II authority could even go so far and categorically say it is illegal to try to upsell public safety agencies, or anyone, wireless plans during official emergencies as a matter of public safety. The agency would have good arguments as to why to set these rules, and thanks to Verizon, the evidence to demonstrate that threats to health and life are at stake in the absence of such rules. But the Restoring Internet Freedom Order abandoned those powers, so right now in America, firefighters don’t have a government agency they can turn to for help."
To me this is a different issue from NN, since the whole basis of the argument is that public safety agencies should be treated differently from other customers. I don't disagree with that argument, but I don't think it falls under NN either.
This predicates meaningful access to the internet on your socioeconomic status, further entrenching extant divisions. Educational material is increasingly being delivered in video form. What happens, e.g., to poor families have to choose between paying the electric bill, or buying food, or buying enough download capacity that their kid can learn?
But that's not even the real issue. The big problem with a non-neutral internet is the barrier to entry imposed on non-incumbent players. Netflix has the money (and customer base) to absorb any "pay to play" costs imposed by the end-user's ISP.
Whiz-Bang Startup Streaming Service doesn't, unless they take more funding, meaning the people who created the thing own less of it, and all of that additional money goes to the incumbent ISPs.
I submit that this is an intentional outcome of the policy.
Businesses such as Netflix enter peering arrangements to build out network infrastructure and server farms close to where the customer demand is. It's customers who are driving this, because the ISPs would lose them otherwise.
It prevents ISPs from charging you based on which sites you can access. Without NN an ISP can charge you $5/month extra if you want to access Hacker News, $10/month to access Netflix, and an extra $20/month to access Netflix at speeds that aren't effectively crippled. It can flat out refuse to serve you a website.
It always seemed to me the best of both worlds. Those torrenting and serving large amounts of data (Netflix, etc) would be paying, and they're also responsible for the amounts of traffic as well.
Bandwidth is data transfer over time, and there is no “bucket of data” that gets depleted when you transfer data. It’s not gas or water or something that you drain out the more you use.
Time is divided into time slots and that time is going to pass whether you put something in the packet or not. If that time slot was empty, it is wasted and you can never get it back. So you really want to be able to use all time slots as much as you can.
But ISPs want to be able to advertise fast speeds that make them look impressive, though they don’t want to you actually be able to use it because then they have to upgrade their pipes. So they play these tricks where they can claim you have fast speeds but then this magical bucket of data gets depleted every time you use it.
And the reality is that, as a customer who loads a 5MB site and then spends 2-3m reading it, I much prefer this model than if they sold me a smaller fixed data transfer over time.
That networks don't work like this is rather irrelevant, because it's a shared pipe. If they sold be a data transfer over time (say, guaranteed 256kps), that would be wasteful, because I couldn't take advantage of the higher speeds when other customers weren't using it too. A well-managed burstable connection is a much more efficient use of the resource.
Correct. I agree with most of your post.
> If that time slot was empty, it is wasted and you can never get it back. So you really want to be able to use all time slots as much as you can.
Yes. And you don't get that by having everybody with their foot down on the download pedal all the time.
Speed oversubscription is a thing, because a lot of the time people are using a trickle down of data, in some other periods they're using more.
NN is important and a byte from Netflix shouldn't be treated differently from a byte from some other site.
But I think having people differentiated by the amount of data they use per month (or at least having a big tier limit) could be something ""ok"".
Net neutrality does not prohibit charging by volume of usage, if anything, the inability to do backdoor (and possibly third-party) charges based on kind of usage and remote edge provider interacted with encourages direct usage-based charges.
> I think internet should be sold per GB, at different tiers of speed/uptime/ping.
Well, at least on the first two axes that is both possible and consistent with net neutrality. Charging by ping is problematic: ping to what endpoint?