FCC Democrats Set to Move on Net Neutrality, Broadband Subsidies
news.bloomberglaw.com
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Data caps aren't necessary from a technical sense, no. But net neutrality supporters remain stubbornly ignorant of what they actually do: They raise prices for heavy users, rather than raising prices for everyone else. It's simply a fairer method of offering pricing brackets.
Artificially limiting network speed is intentional crippling of service. Rather than pay for "very slow service", "slow service", or "fast service", providers should give everyone the best possible service their network is capable of... and then charge us for how heavily you use it.
Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.
Zero-rating + data caps means you're paying more for some websites than others. Comcast/XFinity gives you unmetered "free" access to NBC, for example, while charging you for overages caused by your Netflix traffic.
Ridiculous.
Bandwidth is no different than electricity. Hell, it mostly is electricity.
Meter it by the megabyte and let the customer decide. A flat connection fee per month just like your electrical service, and then you pay for whatever you use. If you stream from the time you get up until the time you go to bed, you'll pay for it. If you stream three movies a week, you'll pay for that.
But in lieu of that, charging a 600 MB a month user one fee, and a 1.4 TB a month user a higher fee seems entirely legitimate to me.
It's immaterial to me whether ISPs had gotten around to creating their a-la-carte packages yet. I want it to be impossible for them to do so. Why leave the option open?
> Basically, by fighting data caps, you're demanding that a grandma who only checks their email once a day has to pay as much as a family of four who streams Netflix in 4K every waking hour of the day.
You do realize that ISPs already tier their offerings in such a way that this is a non-issue? Grandma would buy the 10Mbit/s package, the family would buy the 1Gig/s. I have no issue with that sort of tiered pricing. That's a perfectly fine division to make. But, slapping arbitrary data xfer caps on top of that is dirty double-dipping.
The only reason the major ISPs want this is because the old content providers are desperate to maintain their positions in the market. They think they can squeeze out competitors by joining forces with the biggest ISPs [1] and implementing zero rating and data caps. That way no one will be able to compete with them. You won't want to pay for your overages on the next Netflix when the current one has a free-pass arrangement with your regional-monopoly broadband ISP.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acquisition_of_NBC_Universal_b...
Well we do. A commercial user with a 3 inch water line pays more for the basic service than a house with a 3/4 inch line. And they both pay for gallons used.
The cost to setup broadband far exceeds the cost for varying amounts. If you use 1 TB and I use 1 GB, the cost to the ISP is basically the same. We already pay different amounts from tiers defined by the speeds we chose.
It’s entirely possible that there is a non-neutral ISP service that would benefit customers. Allowing Netflix to co-locate for free is one example. T-Mobile’s voluntary video slow down in exchange for zero rating is another.
It’s unreasonable to ban business models because it’s hypothetically possible AT&T would ban 99% of the Internet.
What you are referring to is "the freerider problem", like you, for example, have with public transportation or any publicly available good or service.
From the experience that public services in Europe had, it is fine to tolerate some amount of freeriders, since it makes most services run leaner and more efficient.
We're talking about total amount downloaded, not bandwidth. The amount of electricity ( read: cost ) used by Comcast is not affected whether I download frequently or infrequently. The reason it is affected, is because they oversubscribe their customers, so when everyone downloads at the same time it causes a bottleneck.
If I'm leased a 1 gigabit pipe, I want to be able to use the entire gigabit pipe for as long as I want. Limiting this with data caps is at best misleading to customers and at worse a scummy business practice.
And while we're here, lets do some math. An unmetered gigabit pipe downloading at the theoretical limit gives you 328.5 Terabytes of data in 1 month. Under Comcast's 1.2 Terabytes per month rule, that gigabit pipe you're leasing is equivalent to downloading 24/7, on a 4 megabit pipe!
Having the ability to download at 1Gibps for a few minutes a day is a lot less strain than downloading 24x7 at 1Gibps.
Such complex billing models are pretty common with electrical utilities. With many industrial consumers even installing Flywheels to reduce their utilization spikes.
Why?
>> Having the ability to download at 1Gibps for a few minutes a day is a lot less strain than downloading 24x7 at 1Gibps
It's not a strain on the hardware, its that the ISPs have to give you a dedicated pipe, which is what they're already selling.
>> Such complex billing models are pretty common with electrical utilities
That's false. For example, you do not get billed by how large your water pipe is, only how much water you use.
You must understand that they can only sell you a 1gig pipe because they know not everyone will use it at the same time.
EVERY ISP in the world operates by oversubscribing their capacity. EVERY. ONE.
You want 1gig and removed data caps by law? Ok, get ready to be introduced to “boosted” bandwidth. You’ll get 1gig for the first 30 seconds of a connection then they will throttle you back. Already exists in some places including mine.
I’m telling you that literally not one ISP out there can actually provide the service to all customers that they are advertising concurrently.
Every. One. Over. Subscribes.
Your wish to not only not make that so. But also to increase the rating per customer is beyond unrealistic. You aren’t asking for a 10-20% bump, you’re asking for 150-170%. The economic model is not there, no one will pay it for what will appear to them to be a 10-20% bump or the same thing they have now but cap-less.
The post you're referring to is getting it. As per their reply:
"So they have to actually provide what they advertise"
It makes sense. Financial, practical, environmental. They aren’t going to stop it, because it’s literally the right thing to do.
If you think you are being charged too much for too little now, what do you think would happen if the ISP had to guarantee you bandwidth they know will never fully saturate?
A guaranteed not-oversubscribed connection would be a terrible consumer product.
This is precisely how it works in many countries without net neutrality. Here's a classical example: https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701871092441088/
The service pictured in that screenshot solely is offering zero-rating packages on top of an existing metered data package. Additionally, this is for a mobile carrier, not a home ISP. And finally, Portugal has net neutrality!
Snopes fact checked this claim as "mostly false": https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/portugal-net-neutrality/
Though, realistically, nobody is properly incentivized to make use of QoS/ToS (except internally to some networks), because ISPs aren't incentivized to implement anything until application developers label traffic, and consumers won't pressure application developers to implement anything until ISPs provide incentives to consumers.
Also, OS/API support isn't great at present, and application developers in most cases would just always label traffic as high priority. At least for phone apps, tagging traffic as high priority could be a an app permission that could be flagged/denied to the app at installation time (or later granted/revoked).
And there is a reason for that -- it costs about the same to provide that service.
Nearly the entire cost of operating an ISP is getting the wires on the pole, keeping them there against weather and drunk drivers, answering customer support phones, paying for staff and buildings and electricity etc. None of which costs any less for the person who uses 1/1000th as much data.
Charging the amount actually attributable to additional data usage would cause the difference to be so small that basically everybody would just pick the unlimited plan so they don't have to worry about it. But they don't charge the actual cost, they charge more. Because the point is to suppress usage of Netflix et al (the main reason nearly anyone would exceed the cap) in favor of cable TV and zero-rated partners.
It's also something you benefit from regardless of how much data you use, because when they go from DOCSIS 2.0 to DOCSIS 3.0 you get 1000Mbps downloads instead of 40Mbps whether you're downloading 40GB or 40TB.
Who told you that? ISPs run new fiber all the time.
They'll install it in places where it isn't, but that's a one-time cost, not a recurring upgrade cost. Amortized over the "indefinitely" that it will then be sufficient for, it's still negligible.
The bandwidth of a multi mode line is high. The bandwidth of the modems, switches, routers and data centers is much more finite.
You don’t really seem to understand the concurrency of transmissions, redundancy, and how much copper there still is. ISPs are adding fiber all the time.
Those are all the things they can upgrade without expensively replacing the wire on the pole.
The dominant cost of an ISP is not replacing their switches every five years. That often saves them money when newer equipment uses less power per unit data. And is typically necessary regardless because the older equipment falls out of support.
Complaining on Twitter got the result I wanted but I find that interesting. Or who knows, maybe I'm imagining things.
Sorry, Comcast, make your pipes bigger? Government says so? Sorry, Level3, hip-new-startup is pushing 400PBps, you can’t drop it!
I don’t know what the demands of the internet are going to be in 10 years, and neither does anyone in Washington DC.
It sounds like completely invented scarcity. If necessary have the state chip in if the infrastructure is too expensive but do we really need to ration internet access?
No, we don't, it's a ploy for major ISPs to rake in more money without needing to invest in anything.
Yes, of course ISPs need to make money in order to upgrade, and they already do that. The point of net neutrality is to ensure that ISPs and content providers are not stifling competition.
If these businesses don't reconsider their zero-rating & data capping practices I wholly expect a future FTC's Antitrust to look closely at the ISP and digital content landscape.
Have you ever wondered why most home internet speeds top out at 35Mbps? It goes back to legacy spectrum stuff, they never needed upload to get cable to you, so the reserved spectrum was small, on docsis 3.x it tops out at 35Mbps.
The internet backend isn’t some wonder of engineering, it’s tubes held together with duct tape and bubble gum. A lot of old ways of doing things.
There is a very real practical limit to “just building out capacity”. Because of exisitint equipment, legacy standards, etc.
Running fiber to everyone directly, wouldn’t fix things. Beyond specs and standards, it would become a space, power, and heat limitation at these isps, and this is all totally ignoring cost.
I agree there is a practical limitation but
1. We're nowhere close to it, but it turns out a few large entities running the show is not efficient and slows it all down.
2. Information Technology is one of (if not the) the most rapidly changing fields
3. The cost of bandwidth will abide by Moore's Law, which means the price of producing it should as well. Couple that with the fact we're referring to an immensely wealthy sector and the cost argument loses merit pretty quickly
New tech changes, ISPs and telcos aren’t actually built on new tech, they add new tech, but there is a lot of 25 year old hardware around that only gets phased out when the people that know how to run it start retiring.
The government has never dictated when network upgrades happen. States incentivize businesses with subsidies where they otherwise might not build. The businesses now operating on those networks are profitable and arguably anti-competitive, which is why subsidies are being reconsidered.
We should also remember that for a new Netflix to enter the market, they will then need to compete. And now that broadband zero-rating and data caps are coming into practice for the first time, it's an open question whether or not there is still room for competition.
On top of that, broadband ISPs already hold regional monopolies, compounding the above issues.
So you're arguing the correct approach is to give everyone pipes that are capable of doing that, but limit the amount of time they're allowed to really work them. None of that makes sense to me, am I missing something here?
I checked my network and my data was 987gb. Well below the 1.2TB cap that Comcast said I went over.
Data caps are just atrocious behavior. Truly barbaric. I’m a hardcore capitalist, but I’m directly opposed to corruption, and that’s what cable and ISPs like Comcast are. Corrupt, archaic, welfare corporations that drain the soul out of society.
The nice thing about supporting capitalism and free markets is that it still is easy to object to monopolies. In a free market, I wouldn't care if $ISP sucks or charges extra for certain traffic, because if I didn't like it I'd use one of their 40 competitors.
We should reinstitute net neutrality, investigate zero rating, reconsider the subsidies, and encourage municipal broadband where it makes sense.
This has its pros and cons and I know in general the tech crowd is wary of lobbyists-turned-government officials, however this is the best system we've got. I don't want Congress setting net neutrality policy, and people like Pai did take some risk with their positions, namely, he was unpopular for this admin.
They also give Netflix away for free with many of their plans.
Simply because these corporations haven’t abused their power yet doesn't mean they wont, considering it's perfectly legal for them to do so.
The fact of the matter is that none of your doomsday scenarios have happened. The fact of the matter is that last mile internet has become more competitive in the past 4 years. The fact of the matter is that most economists are against NN, and those that are for it are only for it because they believe that last mile internet access is monopolistic — something that is increasingly harder to argue.
Make a real argument. How is it more efficient to get the government involved? Why does the government have the right to claim authority over privately owned infrastructure? Why now, and if NN is so essential, why did the internet have so little trouble developing over the past 2 decades?
No, I’m sorry. I don’t think we should force ISPs to follow rules that would require dramatic overbuilding of their infrastructure. I think we should leave the internet alone.
I can’t answer these. I’d like to see someone attempt it, because I’ve been lambasted on this site for saying a version of what you’ve very cleanly stated.
It’s like everyone has forgotten the cute “save the internet” banners on the bug sites that loaded like 56k dialup progressive pngs did. No, that hasn’t happened at all.
If I was to make a piss poor attempt at your question, I would probably say that over the last two decades the scale of services didn’t increase so sharply, so what worked then might not work now... but it’s a halfhearted argument.
Also, if you want a less hypothetical scenario: in 2012 and 2013, AT&T blocked FaceTime.
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/j575gg/broadband-zero-rating...
The only argument for it is a fictional story based on photoshopped ads. Government should not be regulating internet content.