Democrats to push to reinstate repealed 'net neutrality' rules

They gave the internet away to evil corp. There has been no good news since then, except maybe for this recent push by Dems.

ISPs like verizon and att should be disbanded. Theyve proven to us once and for all they cant be trusted. We need national free highspeed inet.

Not that they didn't do it before, but they'd always say sorry and stop for a while when someone noticed.

Likely they've already doubled down on demanding payment from companies like Netflix for not throttling them.

They aren't going to rush it, they care about PR up to a point... But companies like Verizon and ATT will absolutely frog boil consumers, small businesses and innovators under the current laws... Their histories make that pretty clear.

That's because the legal battle isn't over yet. If you were planning to take advantage of no more net neutrality, would you do it while a legal challenge is pending? The last thing you'd want to do is give the opposition evidence in favor of their position.

And that just a single company.

I'm especially mad, because I am a Dish customer and don't have HBO since November.

Some might argue that lower speeds for higher prices were creating "meaningfully poor experiences" for users, but I think there is one important distinction. Let's imagine an upstart competitor comes in and offers some perk, such as lower prices for higher speeds. And the local monopoly ends up matching these offers, as they did in the case of Google Fiber. Is this action perceived as a 'de-crippling' of their system, or as an upgrade of their system? In reality it's almost certainly the former, but in practice it's going to be perceived as the latter. That means they actually gain public props for anti-competitive behavior following what is effectively price-gouging.

By contrast if some company is actively and outright blocking a site, then de-crippling would not be seen as an 'upgrade', but instead as what it is -- 'de-crippling.' And so it's likely that the competitor would be the one gaining the public props (and subscriptions). And in reality, it's possible that our incumbent monopoly might not even be able to de-cripple themselves due to a contract with e.g. Microsoft.

This is within the "Moore's law applied to network hardware" range and is not unusual.

It's also somewhat misleading because of how they're measuring (mean download speed), because customers have recently been abandoning DSL for (faster) cable. But if a 10Mbps DSL customer switches to 20Mbps cable, it shows up in the numbers as a 100% speed increase even if the cable network is no faster than it was before, or is faster than before but by significantly less than the 100% they're getting counted as.

In other words, it's claiming the destruction of competition as a consumer benefit because the market share loss of the dying competitor brings up the average.

who would have thunk?

https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-states/ https://www.speedtest.net/reports/united-kingdom/#fixed

U.S. mean download speeds are twice as fast as the U.K., and mean upload speeds are three times as fast. (The U.K. data is about 9 months older, but it's a helpful comparison nonetheless.)

Please don't use fallacies like this in serious discussions. You can use this to support every side of every argument, without the need to provide any evidence or even logic behind it.

Netflix prices will increase not because Netflix is a monopoly but because content is expensive and is getting more expensive.

It's regulatory capture for the carriers, definitely not for content providers.

Whatever profit Netflix makes, it will be eaten up by the carrier oligarchy.

Moreover, with value chain consolidation like AT&T owning Hulu and things like that, we'll see carriers preferring some sites over others. Creating serious market inefficiencies.

Will you be happy when Netflix in your county is slow because they don't pay the extra tax, but crappy Hulu is cheap because it's being subsidized by their parent company?

Almost all roads are public roads.

Most electricity transmission lines are now owned by a highly regulated entity, separate from production.

For the same reason we have NN.

Edit: FYI Netflix and Reed Hastings are ardent supporters of Net Neutrality, which is evidence of 'what's good for their business'

I'm really curious what your definition of "monopoly" is.

I can't think of a single metric by which Netflix can be called a monopoly.

A comparable number of number have Amazon Prime Video and Hulu while trailing isn't in a david-vs-goliath situation.

Netflix has been struggling to keep licences, let alone licence shows exclusively.

Then you have groups like HBO-go who get a huge influx of users, when their flagship show releases. But, users quickly leave when they realize they don't like anything else.

Netflix is ahead atm, because it is better (or less worse) and not because of monopolistic practices keeping themselves in front.

We're all here expected to go "Net neutrality? That sounds good!" and demand it, while not deeply inspecting what is actually involved, and by golly, we're doing it.

I personally find myself less than inclined to demand that Big Tech be allowed to pull the ladder up behind them, since I'm more in the "break 'em up hard" camp, which is probably basically the opposite, really.

Comcast: "Hey Netflix. It's important to your business that you are able to reach our customers right? Without us you'd go bankrupt. Pay us $<money> for the agreement because we're really starting to sweat around here."

Netflix: "Hi Comcast. Even though we generate a lot of traffic, our profit margins are low because we have a lot of licensing costs. Besides, that's not how the internet works. Your customers are the ones who want our goods. It's in order to access our services and others that your users even buy your services in the first place. They're paying you for it already. Without us you wouldn't have a business, because the free market would ensure that customers would get to us through a different company or route. We can't pay you $<money>."

Comcast: "Sorry, no $<money>, no deal."

Netflix: shrugs "Okay. That's too bad, but we'll just peer with your upstream providers such as Level3 and they'll deliver our traffic to your customers as usual, under the terms of your peering agreement with them. It will be a little slower but what can we do?"

Comcast: "Wait what? I thought the internet was like a truck, but it turns out it's more like a series of tubes?"

Comcast (which, let me stress, is merely an example here; this situation occurs with others as well), cannot extract $<money> from Level3 under the net neutrality model, because Level3 has a much more valuable network. If Level3 did not peer with Comcast, Comcast would not function, because Comcast users want to reach a lot of users and services elsewhere on the internet. Comcast might peer with someone else, but they'd always have to pay them, because the situation will always be the same: Comcast has the traffic demands of millions of users, but a relatively small amount of people outside Comcast actually want to send traffic to Comcast. Any other upstream peer will shove Netflix down Comcast's throat, because there is a single internet.

Without net neutrality (and I repeat, I'm talking about NN's actual meaning, not about the temporary US federal regulation that was in place for two years with the purported intent of protecting NN), Comcast can look at the traffic they are receiving from Level3, examine it and say: "Okay, customer, you can have these packets from Google but these packets from Netflix... Hmm, maybe later." This gives them leverage when negotiating with the likes of Netflix, protecting their business model (and, I'm sure, a lot of jobs they generate). They can pass this off as "free market friendly" because it's allowing ISPs to do whatever the hell they want. In that sense, it certainly is - it's free ISP market friendly. But what does it mean for the internet itself?

It means that, when a user pays for "internet" access from a commercial provider, they can no longer trust that to mean anything. If an end provider can make demands based on where traffic is coming from, and presumably block some of it, then from the customer's perspective all "internets" are different. The "Comcast internet", with no Netflix, would be different from the AT&T internet, the Verizon internet and so on, since the ISPs, who are free to do as they please, will provide distinct services from each other. Think about it. When one of the millions of users or companies connected to the internet someplace in the globe generates traffic, they have no easy way of knowing which networks that traffic will end up crossing. Before the moment a request is made and a server delivers a response packet/frame to a very specific IP address, the server did not know it was going to be doing that. When a small business puts content "on the internet", that content is available to every participant of the single, global internet who wants to ask for it.

These participants can be making the request through thousands of end-user ISPs. If a single of those ISPs could demand money for "traffic protection", so to speak, what's stopping all the others? Why wouldn't Deutsche Telekom AG follow suit and start asking businesses to pay them to ensure the business's traffic is delivered to german customers? What about Shaw? Talktalk? Telefónica? But if you're a small business, you can't afford to pay off all these people, so you have to pick and choose which target customers receive quality traffic from you, further eroding the fabric of the internet.

Proponents of your position have told me in the past that this is not a problem, because CDNs (or "cloud") providers have enough business volume to take care of paying everybody off, so a small business can put their website in the cloud and it will reach everybody, just like the old days. But centralization of control over the internet under a very small amount of cloud providers is already a problem, and that would only worsen it. If no business can make use of the internet without a middleman, the word "internet" loses its final shred of meaning. You can put your website up "on amazon" and it will reach <list of ISPs>. That's all.

Besides your point, but I get the impression HN is mostly a money-oriented community these days.

Of any statement that I've read this year, this is the one that most succinctly captures the entire spectrum of political life. Left or right, fake news to hacker news... Understand that statement and you understand how far we've come.

Net neutrality is a classic case of regulatory capture, the very thing people think it will suppress. If you think Google and Netflix are supporting NN because it's a right thing to do, instead of their profit motive, you're extremely naive.

In the years before the repeal there were several enforcement actions of net neutrality violations[1]

1. https://reddit.com/r/KeepOurNetFree/comments/7ej1nd/fcc_unve...

Do you have a response?

Of course that would be an unacceptable outcome. So why should we permit the same with the internet access?

A college student writing a paper on the FCC might only have access to academic articles opposing net neutrality because they can't afford the articles that express an alternate view and Comcast doesn't want her to see them.

The internet is about access to information. Net neutrality is about profiteering from that access.

Internet Service Provider as name suggests is a company that provides access to the internet. Net Neutrality goal is to make sure that's all they are doing. What you can access supposed to be all up to you, the user, not the ISP.

Someone also mentioned here mentioned that they are vary of placing regulation that would stifle innovation. This is wrong assumption for two reasons: 1) internet was this way until 2014[1], FCC was enforcing it, but after Verizon won lawsuit things changed 2) we had major acquisitions of media companies by ISPs, Comcast and AT&T, things are changing and the goal is to turn internet service into interactive cable. I don't live in Comcast region, but AT&T is doing this by offering capped internet (I'm taking about residential access) then zero rating services that are their own (HBO and Cinemax). At the same time they pulled these channels from Dish (they asked them to pay for more subscribers than they have) and jacked prices on DirecTV (also owned by them). They essentially want to turn HBO into a streaming service.

This is not technology innovation, this is flexing monopoly's muscles to generate more money.

[1] this is actually more complicated. The internet from beginning was under Title II intently because it was offered through telcos which operated under that regulation. In 2003 it was reclassified to Title I from telecommunication service to information service. This is where all started. The ISPs started using their position to throttle traffic, and in certain instances outright block it (reneger issues with VoIP?). FCC though acted in it and penalized ISPs which reverted their practices. After that happened to Verizon, they sued FCC and the court ruled that under Title I FCC has no control over Internet unless it reclassify it. At that point car was out of the bag. To get control back FCC reclassified Internet back to Title II. That was until 2017 when FCC reverted that change. We are now in untested waters where ISP can do pretty much anything and the only thing they have to worry about is being sued.

So the question I have is why did FAANG, Reddit, and all of tech media jump so heavily into panic mode regarding NN repeal? It seems very unlikely their priorities sync up with mine.

ESP when you consider that FAANG has been in censorship mode of content with little concern for obviousness since 2015, expanding their data mining, and swinging their weight into would-be competitors. Your article makes good points, and it makes me think my skepticism of the corperate directed outrage against NN repeal is justified.

And net neutrality would freeze in the sensible policy of not discriminating against the traffic that you're carrying.

I think that’s a problem of perspective. Republicans have always had big government establishment RINOs clashing with small government fiscal conservatives who feel they are too far left for fiscal issues and mixed bag on social issues. Bush era “neocons” get little love today (Romney for example). If you are truly on the center today (rare breed) you might be interested that the neocons hate Trump, and how the GOP establishment is begrudgingly stuck with him.

Polar opposite, if you find yourself agreeing with every socialist proposal and bemoaning yourself that Dems are too far right, it’s probably just perspective of how extreme left you are.

So... are Republicans less free-market than they “used” to be? Or does it only seem that way from your perspective? When you say Republicans, do you mean base, establishment, or Trump?