I haven't noticed any negatives yet either (to my surprise).
Saw some good news though - last year internet speeds increased nearly 40% in the US.
https://www.recode.net/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafban...
Saw some good news though - last year internet speeds increased nearly 40% in the US.
https://www.recode.net/2018/12/12/18134899/internet-broafban...
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.
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.
Yes, of course. Why else would a communications company and a content company merge? It only makes sense if the can leverage each-others natural advantages. With strong NN regulations, AT&T would need to provide everyone with same opportunities they are providing Time Warner.
Why else would a communications company
and a content company merge?
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.
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.)
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.
I think a public option is great but it’d also be excellent to support smaller local ISP’s by forcing big telcos to sublet the last mile of coax and fiber to competitors.
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.
And it was easily detectable and your average consumer can figure out who to attribute it to. Remember when Comcast was finally caught injecting poison packets to sabotage Bittorrent connections?
There are far subtler ways to be evil and maintain some plausible deniability against the average consumer, you don't need to sabotage every operation, just enough. Government lawsuits are partly about giving weight to the concept that something screwy is going on.
> This would enable a competitor
Like that competitor to Comcast, who rapidly -- oh, wait, that didn't pan out. Don't ignore barriers-to-entry, which are hugely significant in the ISP market.
P.S.: In addition to the "direct intervention" side, there's also cases of spying and misusing privileged information. While that's on the decline due to increased HTTPS, the legal front is just as important as the technological one.
Probably easier to pull that style of thing in under existing fraud legislation than tie it to anything net-specific. Even if there is no objective test, it is reasonably easy to make that sort of lie illegal. Free markets rely on companies being honest about what they sell, and I expect there would be pretty broad support for a law that says companies can't lie about what their products are (if there isn't such a law already).
If Comcast wasn't making it clear that they were sabotaging BitTorrent, that should be illigal by virtue of them willfully accepting money while not providing the service.
There is no cheap way to enter many/most/all of these markets. This isn't a world of cheap VC cash, because there is no chance of winning a lottery. Google of all people couldn't make this make sense. Sure, they would have had a better pitch if they were competing with incumbants who did things like block Google Search. Except it's even more trivial to unblock Google Search than it is to offer better service. This gets worse when you consider the possibility of not outright blocking, but intentionally slowing services.
So yeah. If Google couldn't make Google Fiber work, there is no way any new competitor is going to spring out of nowhere. The reality of the competition hasn't changed - incumbants are at a massive advantage even compared to most incumbants. Infrastructure is a massive barrier to newcomers, and any competitive aspects that can be used to differentiate one offer from another can be trivially and immediately matched by the incumbants. And in practice most all of the offers are difficult or impossible to really compare to each other in pratice, so most consumers have to rely mainly on the marketing materials and subjective experiences.
And again I've left out a whole other side of the issue, namely the relationships between ISPs and services.
This is just an awful system to rely on tradional markets. It uses expensive infrastructure, and the products are indifferentiable in any meaningful way over any period of time.
The same applies to ISPs. Why do you think they are pushing for net neutrality ? Do you think it is out of the goodness of their hearts ? Without net neutrality Google might invest billions into building out a global, fast Internet infrastructure. They may have no choice but to do it, because it is strategic for them to own the entire ad delivery pipeline ( Computers/Phones/Tablets, Operating Systems, ISPs )
Or was it important to them that they win? They certainly seem to have with Chrome at least. Does any company intentionally enter a space just to compete? Would google rather not absolutely win in the infrastructure as well?
> Would google rather not absolutely win in the infrastructure as well?
Probably, but it is up to it's competitors to try and prevent that.
If Google has no competitive advantage because of their other businesses it should not be a problem. But if it competes unfairly, fair competition laws should be applied
Either way, the customers could stand to benefit from increased investment
Let's now imagine Comcast blocks Google due to payment from e.g. Bing. First off it's entirely possible that Comcast could not unblock Google even if they wanted to, since this would undoubtedly be breach of contract with Microsoft. But more importantly, this is something that would be perceived as a actively malicious action by the customer. They see the company is engaging in unreasonable behavior at the behest of third parties that visibly and meaningfully worsens their experience relative to other ISPs. Our critical point from above is no longer true!
This offers an opening for new competitors even if Comcast is able to unblock Google, because of the newfound ability for customers to compare services in practice. Compare this to slow speeds or high prices. These are not going to be seen as actively malicious and so the incumbent monopoly matching a competitor's prices is something that will be seen as a positive for the incumbent monopoly, as opposed to a non-negative.
----
So see how barriers to entry are not the fundamental problem here we can go reductio ad absurdum. Imagine we take something with very few barriers to entry - selling burgers. But let's apply so many rules and regulations that burgers become effectively identical -- same meat, same ingredients, same cooking, same standards of quality/freshness, same spices, etc, etc. You'd rapidly trend towards monopoly once again simply because the only way companies could compete would be on price and factors outside of the burger itself. But the biggest burger company would be capable of making burgers cheaper, faster, and more rapidly than anybody else - which means they would 'win', or be able to win if necessary, on every single competitive factor. In essence they become impossible to compete against and in simply trying to ensure high standards, you have created a monopoly.
You need to go ahead and look up 'Monopoly' on Wikipedia. [1]
I don’t have to imagine it. I lived it for years. As the “for years” part hints, it persisted. I moved out of that place years ago but from what I hear it’s still like that.
You have a nice theory but it doesn’t seem to match the real world.
who would have thunk?