ISPs can’t find any judges who will block California net neutrality law

In New Orleans, Cox has offered “gigablast” (yes that’s what it’s called) Internet in some areas while AT&T offers fiber. Now they often don’t overlap, which isn’t wild given they are incrementally upgrading a large area section by section, so I can easily see wanting to be first to an area your competitor isn’t offering a comparable product. But here’s the rub: Cox also offers 5mb down/600kb up in some areas of downtown New Orleans. That is unusable Internet. No one would get anything but AT&T, who hasn’t laid fiber in that area yet, but gives you 25+.

That’s not competition, that’s the appearance of it.

It's pretty wild - it's absolutely a federal concern because it is utterly impractical to enact & enforce state-by-state... but they (Pai & co) know that.

An effective method for defeating geographic internet monopolies is to force ISPs to rent out their lines at fair prices. This is the status quo in the UK, where competition forced internet prices to lower. That this common sense pro-consumer policy is not pursued by the Democratic FCC commissioners is evidence of some lesser level of regulatory capture of their side as well.

Really? Some highly developed countries have fairly expensive Internet as well. Not sure the US is much of an exception, if you consider not just the cheapest countries.

I don't think anyone noticed back when Obama Care (ACA) was passed and challenged at the Supreme Court. When deciding to hear the case they said it was not a tax, but when they actually debated the issue suddenly it was a tax.

Lol what? I can get 5-10Gb/s fiber in my town for $120-$200/month.

If I want 1Gb/s fiber it’s $55/month.

If I want 100mb/s it’s $20/month.

To your point it’s about regulatory capture. Not all states and localities have that issue, it’s almost entirely to do with several corrupt states that get targeted.

People say this, but we had net neutrality for years and it never improved the reach of broadband into rural areas. It mostly benefited cities.

I would like to see a version of net neutrality that doesn't just do the bare minimum in terms of encouraging broadband development in rural areas, starting with the FCC redefining broadband so their little map is more accurate to how slow the speed and dismal the access really is.

Downloading bandwidth is free. The person who is uploading is the person who pays.

Largely it comes with the idea that use = cost, and that infrastructure has limited capacity and is therefore zeroish sum. For example, a common idea is that we should tax trucks more than other cars because they cause a large amount of damage to our roads. Following that logic, the companies that encourage users to consume more bandwidth should be charged a price for that since they're the ones making money on it, and we don't want to raise costs on users.

This is not 'Net Neutrality'.

If data providers like Netflix want 'special service' then they can pay for it.

'Net Neutrality' is more like Carriers cannot charge more for email, than for games, than for messaging, than for something else.

Carriers should be able to charge whatever they want for whatever QoS (Quality of Service).

If Netflix wants more bandwidth with lower latency, fine, they can pay for that.

But Carriers cannot arbitrary charge 'more' to Netflix because they are 'richer' or because of the type of content.

Federal legislation needs to go further and separate content form data networks.

AT&T has a vast Content Empire that is in direct competition with Netflix, this is a gigantic conflict of interest.

AT&T can sell bytes of data at a quality of service. That's it. Maybe phones - so long as those phones can work on any network and other phones work on it's network.

Content? No way.

Same with cable distributors.

And more difficult to articulate but Apple shouldn't be able to compete with those in the App Store, for example and by law be very 'neutral' there as well: they have to treat everyone the same.

Also, kinda obviously, government emergency services (911, weather alerts, etc) being zero-rated just make sense.

I don't want zero rating to let FB subsidize plans that allow free access to FB. I think we can find some uses that avoid dystopia.

There are definitely circumstances where it makes sense to give users free access to data, just like how it makes sense that you can call toll free numbers.

The opportunity for abuse is probably large enough to warrant that we can’t have nice things.

Here's an anecdote. Over 10 years ago, I worked for an ISP company in Russia. That was before they went draconian on the 'Net (beyond SORM-2, I mean) - I left around the time Russian government started to mandate blocking websites. Just to clarify - that was an age of rapid growth and users had a choice of ISPs (I had 7 possible to pick from), so providers had competed really seriously.

Which is why net neutrality wasn't a thing - on the contrary, providers were incentivized to set up local FTP servers. Uh, y'know, for warez, though, of course, officially ISPs just "didn't knew" what users were doing there - but that was before streaming services; even Steam was quite a novelty at the time. Those FTPs had faster access speeds (traffic shaping was turned off for their IPs entirely, so up to 100Mbps when 10Mbps connectivity was the norm) and unaccounted traffic. It was mutually beneficial - providers had saved (a lot) on uplink utilization and customers had exchanged content at much faster speeds. In '00s there were even citywide LANs communities, which were torn down only because of malware onset. Those were wild times.

Doing some funky shit like throttling certain traffic meant your users would be gone (people tolerated for a short while, then voted with their wallets). But we had to do this twice. First time it was disaster management, when the first uTP implementation happened. Users had updated their uTorrents and it was buggy and caused very high packet rate (and this is UDP we're talking about), so our edge routers started to choke on this UDP BitTorrent traffic. We had to identify those packets and push a rule that dropped them entirely. Second time was also about BitTorrent - in an university dorm, where we contracted to set up WiFi coverage - I don't remember the details but we had really struggled ensuring fair bandwidth distribution, as someone torrenting made network barely usable for others (because of radio interference, not bandwidth limitations), but we had to tune it down to make it work somehow.

Another story from those times. We had started to receive tons of complaints that YouTube was performing poorly. We've spent days trying to figure out what the heck was wrong there, and realized the problem was only manifested through one of the upstream providers. They had no clue either, so the temporary solution was to push a a bunch of excessive AS-PATH elements in BGP announce to deprioritize routing YouTube traffic from that direction, then wait until someone upstream figures it all out.

And yet another story is that we ran analytics (anonymized, we only looked at very coarse AS level traffic distribution) to understand where we talked to most and if we should peer with someone else to improve connectivity in those directions.

And, of course, we had blocked ports, such as tcp/25 or tcp/445. Would've been a disaster if we wouldn't have.

The morale of this is that as an ISP sometimes you have to violate neutrality in the interest of your customers, to ensure quality of service. Well, to think of it - QoS is inherently non-neutral since the whole point of it is to classify traffic and differentiate it. And sometimes it's hard to draw a line on what's fair and what's not. I mean, I questioned some things we did and only justified them as "well, I don't see any other options here to make it work". And I don't condone nor condemn those examples - just present them as an anecdote to say that there are always some nuances and sometimes things aren't exactly black and white.

Though when people speak about NN in the US they talk about shitty anti-customer moves like throttling Netflix trying to squeeze some money out of this.

Theoretically it should make access cheaper by allowing ISPs oversubscribe networks while still guaranteeing performance to certain customers but, in practice, I find it highly unlikely that savings would ever get passed on to the customer (instead converted into "shareholder value")

My understanding is most of these policies have always been targeted at the large streaming services that are putting the most burden on the networks and who often already have special interconnect agreements.

The claims that these policies would be aimed at small businesses seem largely to have not been realistic.

The whole situation with lying about what you’re ad spend is getting you seems like a much bigger small internet business issue.

Easy. If you operate a cell network, your bandwidth is extremely limited, so when it's congested, you throttle streaming video content so everything else is still fast. The same problems affect wired ISPs, but it's easier to run more fiber (often from a local office, not to homes) than to get more spectrum, install more towers, or create the next generation of wireless broadband.

The easiest, absurd case of cell networks falling over is at music festivals. They just don't have the bandwidth to handle thousands of people in a small area.

For example, there can be a lot of "lawful traffic" that is harmful to a network. T-Mobile's T&C say that these things are disallowed: "Uses applications which are designed for unattended use, automatic data feeds, automated machine-to-machine connections, or applications that are used in a way that degrades network capacity or functionality", "Uses applications which automatically consume unreasonable amounts of available network capacity". I'm sure someone here is going to "but fetching RSS automatically..." but I'm going to ignore those straw-man objections. If someone is doing something that harms the network and the enjoyment of other users, it does seem reasonable to restrict that.

Likewise, many ISPs deprioritize data if a user has hit a certain threshold of usage. It isn't throttling, but they give priority to users who don't use as much data given the shared nature of the connection. That seems reasonable to me. It allows heavy users to use as much data as they want while light users aren't impacted by their heavy usage.

Many mobile ISPs throttle types of content like video. That's certainly controversial, but has become common.

> It also prohibits requiring fees from websites or online services to deliver or prioritize their traffic to consumers

This always makes me wonder if that means that ISPs must deliver free transit. Most people aren't really aware of how money is paid to transmit things over the internet. For example, let's say that I want to transmit a video to a Comcast customer in LA. Can I hand it off to them in NY and say "it's your problem now since you can't charge me to deliver the traffic"? Or do I have to get it within a certain distance of the customer and pay for the transit myself? If Comcast won't advertise BGP routes non-locally if someone isn't wiling to pay them transit, is that a violation?

I know a lot of people say that they just want a "dumb pipe", but I think that's mostly because many companies are kinda scummy. We've seen ISPs do crappy things. But there is reasonable network management. For example, I've had friends who have worked at universities where 1% of the users end up consuming 50-75% of the bandwidth. They've done things like put BitTorrent traffic at a lower priority. They don't block it, but they do manage it so that the shared network works well for everyone. If a lab starts using a crazy amount of bandwidth, they don't want everyone else's usage to suffer. It's quite reasonable to manage traffic in good faith - and I think a lot of the no-management/dumb-pipe stuff comes from the fact that we've had some scummy ISPs.

He is full of funny ideas which are silly. Often including long debunked ideas on race, gender, class, etc.

Yes, he was born rich. How did you know?

If a streaming provider has massive connection at a shared upstream peering location as an ISP, but their competitor doesn't, the result could likely be that the bandwidth is better to that provider, while it's congested going to anywhere else on the internet (including competitors). Is this a violation of net neutrality, and if so, by who?

Some other situations I can think of that are less clear:

"Sorry streaming service, we can't host your CDN appliance because we already have an appliance from your competitor and our agreement with them disallows it"

"Sorry streaming service, we can't host your CDN appliance because we have no more physical space"

"Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, if you pay $$,$$$,$$$ to cover the cost of expanding our datacenter"

"Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, it will cost you $,$$$,$$$ per year"

"Sure we'll host your CDN appliance, it will cost you $$ per month per client IP"

Even if we did have peering neutrality on the books, this wouldn't outlaw edge CDNs. It would just prohibit Comcast from charging Netflix more money for the same equipment or access to their network than, say, YouTube.

Fairly confident it existed pre-Ajit Pai.

It would be an NN issue if ISPs were to try to charge customers a different price for content located on their CDNs, or prioritize traffic going to sites hosted in their data centers.

Torrent-like algorithms do this. They localize the content while maintaining neutrality of services.

My guess, instead of charging netflix to place a CDN in their data center, they may offer youtube / netflix et all free CDN space/power, perhaps even PAYING youtube to put their stuff inside their network perimeter.

The state of this country is a shame and we obviously need support for more parties with diversified political viewpoints.

(altairprime is correct btw. I just saw this by accident.)

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2022/04/isps-cant-find-a...

It would be nice if the mods/dang would update the link.