FCC aims to reinstate net neutrality after us Democrats gain control of panel
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[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4e/%2B_Smar...
When your new high bandwidth service counts against a customer’s data cap, but your Comcast owned competitor’s data doesn’t, how are you supposed to fairly compete?
Unless you can show examples of these servcices avoiding datacaps? And even then, in this case it's very likely that allow-lists were OK under NN, just not block-lists.
Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality, and for example has been regular practice all across Europe (which has "net neutrality").
Isn't it just shifting the goal posts after the original claims of NN campaigners were discredited and never materialized in any remote fashion after NN was abolished?
Let us not forget that net neutrality campaigning was primarily pushed by Netflix, who refused to pay Verizon for infrastructure upgrades as per industry standard going back decades.
The standard is that the disproportionate data user pays to upgrade the ports, equipment and/or line infrastructure. This is absolutely fair. A parallel is electricity capacity for homes and businesses, if you require more electricity than the local street infrastructure can provide you pay the power company to upgrade it to accommodate you. Only fair, the heavy users pay.
The movement carried water for deadbeat corpos. Netflix wanted to saturate internet links and balked at paying Verizon for new switches and pipes -- so they got their subscribers to complain.
UPS doesn't care if it is a Nike shirt or a Gucci shirt in a box, They just deliver the box where it is meant to go. Why should it be any different for an ISP?
So, opt-in versus required. Net neutrality certainly allows special pipes and protocols to be set up where desired, if you desire to stretch the analogy beyond its intent.
If you can make a reasonable argument that one kind of data or another creates a meaningful hazard for the pipe that carries it, please do.
UPS does not care what what they're carrying unless it shits or explodes. Anything meeting most of your criteria, they simply will not ship in the first place. Net neutrality specifically mitigates rent-seeking behavior, implying if UPS knew there was something expensive in the box, they'd shake you down for more money to ship it. The only time they do this is in handling hazmat.
They sort of do this in reverse though when it comes to damage claims. They'll first try to find a reason not to pay out, but once they know what's in the box, they angle to reimburse you the least possible amount of money for it. I can't tell you how many times we would lose/destroy priceless stuff like a signed baseball from some World Series and write a check...for the $3 it cost to buy a new baseball (TBF, especially with prototypes/historical artifacts, many such claims are dog-ate-my-homework fraudulent).
Here's an actual case: a container ship carrying designer leather products from Italy took on water and a claim was made for $100k worth of retail losses. We were never going to pay that, since there's no guaranteeing any amount of it would have sold at that price, and anybody that makes money from loss is either profiteering or committing fraud (see: coffin ship). The most we would have paid out was at the price the factory sold it to the designer for ($2-$10 per diem), but IIRC we denied it since no damage was reported along the way. They didn't insure anything, on paper $100k worth of product was lost, and they didn't give a shit-- in reality they lost $2k in drop-shipped crap stamped with an expensive logo. Designer goods are inherently worthless.
While I like NN there is a strict different between an ISP and UPS because of the digital/physical realm.
When UPS delivers a Nike shirt they have to deliver that specific shirt to that specific person. An ISP needent deliver a specific shirt that originated from Nike Factory to that specific person; they can give a "locally" stored copied of the shirt. This means that the ISP could locally store say the top 4 million songs and so the expense of delivering those songs is practically zero while transporting a song from LA to NYC covers significantly more miles of fiber.
An ISP that wishes to store a "local copy" of t-shirts or songs, in order to make more money, can store a Nike t-shirt just as easily as a Gucci t-shirt, and can store a Nikki Minaj song just as easily as a Gucci Mane song. Thus, nothing actually blocks the ISP from treating the two equally.
Alternatively, the ISP can store nothing, and just be a basic ISP. Nobody is forcing them to store anything, much less do so preferentially depending on brand. And if they personally choose to, to make more money, it's their responsibility to make sure they don't differentiate between brands, because that violates net neutrality.
Excluding some services from bandwidth cap is perhaps slightly less extreme than throttling specific services, which is itself less extreme than blocking those services outright. All are violations of net neutrality. The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it.
They do that.
If your plan has, say, a 1 TB cap with no services that are exempt from the data cap you can pick any 1 TB from any mix of services you want without hitting your cap.
If your plan has 1 TB cap but say Netflix is exempt from the cap you can still pick the exact same 1 TB from the exact same mix of services without hitting your cap.
If my ISP gives me 10GB from any service that isn't big_video_streamer but unlimited data from big_video_streamer it's immediately obvious that while they're not 'deciding' how I use their connectivity they're definitely 'coercing' me into going with big_video_streamer if I want to stream videos, which isn't their job as - ideally - a neutral conduit for traffic.
That's obviously and blatantly them putting their thumb on the scale. It'd be like if Burger King were to pay car manufacturers to make it so that the second half of the gas tank only works for driving to Burger King drive-throughs. That's not how cars should work and ISPs shouldn't pull the same kind of shit.
You said that "The job of the ISP is to provide network connectivity, not decide how I use it".
My point is that if you have paid for a fixed amount of data per month, and you are going to use under that amount when you decide entirely on your own how to use it, then whether or not the ISP also gives you some free data with usage restrictions doesn't change that.
If your ISP does not have any exemptions and then adds some and you miss the announcement you would never even notice, except maybe if you track your usage throughout the month to make sure you aren't going to go over and you notice they are reporting lower usage than you expect.
Yes, it is putting a thumb on the scale, but I don't see how this is really different than any of the other ways companies often give free access to third party products to try to make the company more attractive to customers.
That may be anticompetitive, but if so it should be dealt with under antitrust. Network neutrality should just cover things that restrict what you can do with the network.
...but with inducement to use a particular service.
>Network neutrality should just cover things that restrict what you can do with the network.
But that's what this is. It's restricting every kind of traffic except Netflix. All other traffic is limited to a monthly quota.
Erm... Exempting a service's traffic from a restriction is the literal textbook definition of 'against net neutrality'
Weird misinformation here.
Just to clarify for the benefit of the audience:
Net Neutrality is when a carrier treats all data packets as equal, without regard to origin, destination, or provider.
I believe 'fair' QoS is exempted (you're allowed to prioritise low-latency traffic such as VOIP) but only if you throw all VOIP packets into the same 'high priority' queue regardless of software, provider, destination, etc.
If you charge on a per-byte basis but exempt some traffic from those charges, you're absolutely violating net neutrality.
If you have a data cap but exempt some traffic from that cap, you're absolutely violating net neutrality.
Why should Verizon, Comcast and others demand payment from Netflix?
They are connecting customers to the internet, and should be peered to IXs that can feed what their customers need. Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network to lighten the burden on their IX uplink.
It will get untenable if every random ISP charges each content provider.
But if Netflix connects directly to Verizon, Comcast, etc, it's not inheriently unreasonable for Netflix to pay for that connection. Verizon, Comcast and many other telcos and cablecos are national transit ISPs as well as residential ISPs, and paying a transit ISP to get packets to the ISP's customers (and peers) is totally normal.
If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in New York, they're using Comcast as a transit network. If Netflix connects to Comcast in Los Angeles and wants to deliver traffic to Comcast customers in Los Angeles, they're not, and getting the traffic between their house and the IX in Los Angeles is what Comcast is charging their own customers for.
Do you or your customer get a discount when you're both only connected with a transit ISP? No, both parties pay for connection to the transit ISP (even if it's the same).
Traditional wired telephone networks are almost always caller pays (although cellphones in the US are caller pays toll, callee pays for wireless segment), but IP networking has always been both end points pay. It's not some new thing Comcast (or whoever) invented in 2006 or whenever.
If you want to connect to customers behind ISP A, you typically need to pay an ISP that's connected to ISP A, or pay ISP A, or qualify for peering with ISP A. If you and ISP A are both paying ISP B for that data, then there's motivation for you an ISP A to peer; if not, ISP A says we're happy to take your traffic through peering with these ISPs or you can pay us for a direct connection. Maybe a bit less cost for 'paid peering' vs a full transit connection.
In the old days of dial-up, all you needed to start an ISP was two T1s, one for your uplink, one for your modem pool. Once you got a little bigger, you'd look to see what content networks you could peer with to reduce your transit budget. After the move to broadband which has a bias towards only two, maybe three companies running wires to homes, and the FCCs abandonment of mandatory line sharing from the telecom act of 1996, we run into the situation where there's a handful of residential ISPs nationwide, and they almost all run transit networks, and there's no longer an economic incentive for them to peer with content networks --- they can justify peering with most other transit ISPs, so there's no cost savings from peering; and they have no competitive need to offer better service.
The solution isn't mandating 'neutral treatment', it's mandating competitive local access markets via mandatory line sharing[1], and splitting up the national transit business from the last-mile business, ala 1984 AT&T.
[1] But with tighter regulations, so that incumbents can't cross-subsidize retail prices to be lower than wholesale pricing as was common in the early 2000s before mandatory line sharing ended; building out new wiring where line sharing was infeasible was another common loophole. It'd be way more competitive if the wiring providers weren't permitted to offer retail services, but that might be a bit too meddlesome.
You don't need transit for local traffic, the destination network is already in the same IX as you are. Transit is the thing that carries traffic from one IX to the others.
> Do you or your customer get a discount when you're both only connected with a transit ISP? No, both parties pay for connection to the transit ISP (even if it's the same).
If you and your customer are both in the same IX you don't use a transit ISP at all.
> If you want to connect to customers behind ISP A, you typically need to pay an ISP that's connected to ISP A, or pay ISP A, or qualify for peering with ISP A. If you and ISP A are both paying ISP B for that data, then there's motivation for you an ISP A to peer; if not, ISP A says we're happy to take your traffic through peering with these ISPs or you can pay us for a direct connection.
Paying Cogent (or Comcast) to carry traffic from one IX to another is normal; otherwise you would need to run your own fiber or have a presence in the other IX and it allows you to avoid that cost.
But if you do have a presence in the other IX, what are you paying them for? It's just a monopoly rent because they control the only network path to their residential customers.
Netflix should have either demanded their middleman pay, moved to a different middleman, or offered to sign an agreement with the companies directly.
Let's put it another way. Let's say Netflix's bandwidth middleman hosts both Netflix and a critical telehealth operator. Should Verizon shake down or throttle the telehealth service, potentially putting health at risk, in order to prop up entertainment content streams for a deadbeat company? Of course only Netflix gets throttled, they're degrading the rest of the internet and not paying for upgrades.
Netflix being able to degrade the internet for other services traversing the same lines while refusing to pay (again, industry standard) is greed.
>Netflix even offers to put caches on the ISPs network
We don't want to pay, but give us free rack space to solve this problem?
It certainly sounds exactly as if it is. It is preferring one service's data over another.
What, in your perspective, is the difference between "I'll charge you more for A than for B" and "I'll charge you less for B than A"? Or a difference between "Charging more for a 'website' such as Yahoo" vs "Charging less for a 'service' such as Netflix"?
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Further, all the utility analogies you provide feel inapplicable to the point of being disingenuous. The "Heavy users pay" is "I need a bigger pipe" and is the segregation of internet service tiers by bandwidth ($10 for 100mbps, $100 for 1gps, or whatever). The "I will then, on top of that, charge you extra for arbitrary content that I don't produce, and you will have no choice as I have an effective government approved monopoly", has limited parallel that I'm aware of.
A person using more electricity will pay more. A person needing more bandwidth will pay more. Those are valid analogies in my mind. Other shenanigans such as IPSs blocking certain websites, injecting ads or weird stuff into your pages, asking more money for certain websites (or less money for other, which is equivalent), imposing their own DNS, spying on you, etc, are fairly unique to this industry I think.
It has limited parallel because it's nuts. It'd be like BMW/Toyota/whoever charging you an extra monthly fee if you want to drive your car to work and otherwise the car just refuses to go there. For a slightly closer analogy, the car would be leased rather than owned, but it's an extra clause in addition to the mileage limit.
Exempting your own and partner services from a data cap that effectively limits use of other services is functionally the same thing, but with only one package available that is mandatory for purchase.
> Exempting services from data caps is not against net neutrality,
IIRC, it would have on generally violated the most recent set of US net neutrality regulations and violates the broad principles articulated for net neutrality, whether or not it violates specific regulatory franeworks existing in Europe.
It's also largely outlawed in Canada, the EU, and California.
You can't find or subscribe to a zero rating plan in the EU any more.
Except in Portugal where the equivalent of the FCC has so little power the telecoms do what they want without any fear.
I had some Nest cameras in addition to Streaming and ended up taking them down because I kept going over.
As inconvenient as it is, honestly I think data caps are fair pricing. The load difference between a light internet user and a heavy user is orders of magnitude of capacity for the ISP to deal with. Having a flat price for internet sounds similar to having flat price for electricity or water - where your grandma (who turns off all the light switches whenever she leaves a room) would pay the same for electricity as a frat house mining bitcoin in the cupboard.
Sure, customers pay for speed. But residential internet is overprovisioned based on 'reasonable' usage patterns. Thats a good thing - internet would be much more expensive, or forced to be much slower otherwise.
Data caps are not fair pricing in a competitive environment but it seems that way when you have a duopoly of competition that collude on plans, pricing, and messaging.
So Sonic bundles in a voice line that no one uses - but that gives Sonic the right to get onto poles (owned by incumbents) at fair prices, and they can complain to the state and feds if they don't get that.
If we'd gotten classification right from the start (looking at you Michael Powell), that kind of chicanery would be unneccessary.
Still I'm paying $75 a month, fees and taxes included, for a 10Gbps symmetrical connection with no data cap. Happiest I've ever been with a broadband connection.
Voice Federal Subscriber Line Charge Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 6.50 Voice Federal Universal Service Fund Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 2.62 Voice California 911 Emergency Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.30 Voice Oakland Utility Users Tax - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.46 Voice California Public Utility Commission User Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.08 Voice FCC Interstate Telecom Service Provider Fee - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.04 Property Tax Allotment Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.64 Voice Regulatory Recovery Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.29 Fiber Phone Service - 5103800838 - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.00 Fiber - Fusion 10Gbps - STI-0555086-8 59.99 Fiber Information - STI-0555086-8 - Data $49.99 Voice $10.00 0.00 Voice California 988 Suicide Prevention Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 0.08 Voice California Public Purpose Program Surcharge - STI-0555086-8/PAIR200 1.11
PS: I live in a built-up suburb in a large metro area where the cities are all touching, not in the sticks.
You can certainly say using 100% of that is excessive and not many disagree.
The question is what is excessive? 50%? 10%? For me it is 0.4% without up charges.
Additionally on the topic of costs bandwidth is by definition free. Pretty much everybody is okay with $0/gb pricing for network traffic.
Capacity costs money. How much capacity does an excessive data user consume? Certainly not 10x as you surmise, they are only one user.
Just look at their pricing for the answer, I can pay 50% more for unlimited data which means it costs them at most 50% more (certainly less since this is a scheme to earn more revenue).
On the topic of provisioning residential is hugely under provisioned as a cost cutting measure. This isn't all bad as there is never a time where everyone wants all their bandwidth. But blaming slow downs on high bandwidth users is silly when no one bothers to track capacity in these situations.
The reality is they just throttle you to keep bandwidth evenly split during high traffic time (as they should, everyone should share the bottlenecked line equally). Which resolved any capacity problems as much as they care to.
Bandwidth caps have always been a charge that isn't technically a charge and nothing more.
If it does not affect other customers, and if it does not exceed the ISPs peering agreements such that they must spend extra to serve that bandwidth beyond what would pay normally...
Then how is it "excessive"? But even if it was, then the ISPs are ethically obligated to publish what they consider to be excessive so that its customers can avoid any penalties and/or animosity. Network bandwidth is by its very nature a commodity whose demand will only increase into the future, after all, and some people are "getting there first". They shouldn't be chastised as troublemakers or gluttonous or whatever.
The user who uses 10 000x the bandwidth should pay more than the person using 10kx less bandwidth. Not proportionally more - a lot of the cost of connection is fixed. But some of it isn’t. The ISP at some point needs to upgrade their network links to handle the extra bandwidth going through their network. And I think it’s reasonable the person who’s using all that bandwidth pay more for the upgrade than people who aren’t using the bandwidth.
The nice thing about having a financial model around bandwidth is we don’t need judgemental words like “excessive” and “gluttonous”. You just pay for what you need. Simple as that.
Subscription fees should be set to cover the costs of bandwidth. Right now ISPs want to advertise unlimited service for a certain (already excessive) price and then complain when users actually use the service they're paying for as advertised. They've changed their ads many times over the years as a result of being called out for their word games (see for example https://consumerist.com/2010/03/02/comcast-unlimited-usage-d...)
If the ISP has a reasonably capable network the few users who are using tons of bandwidth will be more than made up for by the majority of users who barely use the service at all (the check email/weather/facebook/sports scores crowd)
Peering costs are effectively zero and so your costs are hardware to peer and bandwidth to the site. They already split bandwidth so we will consider that unimportant for this discussion.
You have a 10 Gb connection to a peer and that connection costs around $10k and lasts 5 years give or take.
So given a per year rate of $2k and 10% maximum utilization the entire bandwidth cost is ~$200/year.
Since that is 4.6 Petabytes that means it costs 4 cents per Terabyte of bandwidth.
Sure I could be off by a bit but an order of magnitude puts it at 40 cents per Terabyte.
Now let's compare Cox's price of $10/50 GB or $200 per Terabyte.
Even inflating the costs by 10x you are looking at 99.8% profit margin on bandwidth fees.
The difference is that to provide you with more electricity, the power company has to burn more natural gas, and pay more for that. When a data network is at less than 100% capacity, higher usage doesn't cost anything, the extra capacity is just lost. So to begin with, data caps that count traffic during off-peak hours are a pure scam; there is no reason for anyone to conserve bandwidth then.
Then you have the on-peak hours. Now, there are different ways to handle this. One is to set pricing that will deter usage, the other is to share the capacity. So you have a 1Gbps fiber connection but the uplink is oversubscribed and during peak hours you each get 800Mbps. People generally prefer this to paying more.
But some people want to have the 1Gbps per second all the time, so they should prefer metered billing, right? Still no. What you have instead is business service. If you want to be sure you have 1Gbps all the time, you pay a higher monthly fee and then get a higher class of service so that you do. Now the lower cost connection gets 1Gbps for 80% of the day and 500Mbps during peak hours -- which is a completely reasonable trade off for your grandma because she gets to save money and 500Mbps is still plenty enough. Whereas if you have some important need to always have the full speed, you can pay more and get it.
There is never any reason to meter it, and some pretty good reasons not to. It screws the people who actually need the guarantee if the metered pricing is ever insufficient to keep the network below 100% capacity. It also makes inefficient use of available capacity, because then you need to keep the network below 100% capacity, but that results in wasted capacity. And, of course, it creates a perverse incentive for the ISP when they can exempt their own services from the cap.
Though sometimes they do. Do you think the unmetered connection a data center buys is oversubscribed by their ISP? They pay for it not to be, and then they use the full capacity. It's still not metered.
Net neutrality as a policy concept was first specifically named in 2003, in direct response to actions beginning to occur at the time, and the FCC chair at the time adopted four network freedom principles that are the core of net neutrality as guiding principles (at the time for case-by-case action without general regulation) in 2004; the first action in which they were put into practice was 2005.
The regulatory debate kicked off in earnest in 2010 when the FCC lost a court case over its non-regulatory application of the principles against Comcast’s BitTorrent blocking.
If it's technically feasible not to limit the bandwidth for some services, it's technically feasible to at least reduce the throttling for everyone.
2) We're not in the NN system as it was repealed so the implicit idea in your post that the current system is from NN is false.
3) We wouldn't need NN though if we actually had anti-trust enforcement; zero-rating is a monopolistic practice. It's akin to having preferential treatment on rail lines so consumers can't get other's goods as easily.
well i guess everybody is entitled to their own opinion but i personally prefer the one that lets me use more data even though ideally i would be able to use more data for any online service and not just some of them.
>We're not in the NN system as it was repealed so the implicit idea in your post that the current system is from NN is false.
I definitely did not say the "current system" is from NN, and neither did the OP i was replying to.
"pre-NN" system is having a datacap where any additional bandwidth usage beyond that datacap is throttled or outright denied.
"current system" is having a datacap but certain services are not counted towards that datacap, and all other services are throttled or outright denied once the datacap is exceeded.
>We wouldn't need NN though if we actually had anti-trust enforcement; zero-rating is a monopolistic practice. It's akin to having preferential treatment on rail lines so consumers can't get other's goods as easily.
rail lines are not equivalent to ISP zero-rating.
Datacaps are a policy adopted by ISPs of treating bandwidth as a consumable resource when it is in fact not a consumable resource. Datacaps are idiotic and arbitrary[1] but they predate the FCC's decision to repeal net neutrality by at least half a decade.
Offering an exception to a datacap for a given service would be akin to the train being able to carry additional cargo beyond its capacity with no increased fuel consumption or inertia but only for a specific class of cargo.
[1] if ISPs actually cared about their stated goal of reducing network congestion then they would weight traffic based on overall network congestion so that consumers are incentivized to download more data during non-peak hours but i digress.
I'm somewhat dubious on the idea that their Cricket More plan is actually unlimited, but I'm pressed for time and can't read their more dense terms of service around the plan, but I'm assuming they have a congestion clause buried in there, despite what the linked FAQ claims
[0]: https://www.cricketwireless.com/legal-info/mobile-broadband-...
It works with video because all video sites automatically adjust quality based on throughput so they just figure out when you’re streaming video and then throttle. But most websites don’t automatically change image quality based on throughput and pages load more quickly and are harder to shape…
>Cricket compresses all images that are embedded in web pages in either of two industry standard formats (JPEG and GIF), regardless of the source or content of the web page or the application used to view it. Cricket strives to compress web page images to provide a high quality user experience where the average consumer should not notice a difference between the source image and the compressed image.
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoContract/comments/tn4733/qci_leve...
https://utilitiesone.com/comparing-mobile-virtual-network-op...
If a music streaming service participates to label its traffic, that data is zero rated for eligible users.
If a video streaming service participates to label its traffic and limit bandwidth (advertising says 480p, but I think it's really a bitrate cap), then data is zero rated for eligible users. On plans with a high speed data cap, users can opt out of the bandwidth limiting and get potentially higher quality streaming (depending on network conditions) but the data usage will be charged against the cap.
There's no charge for providers to participate.
I don't know how zero-rating music streaming helps with spectrum; that's probably more of an inducement to use data, but music streaming is low bandwidth, and maybe there's some magic to accumulate those packets and send as a batch rather than one at a time and therefore save some framing bandwidth.
For video it's clearly a bandwidth thing. If you can reduce to the target, that's good for their spectrum management, so you get a carrot. Also, it encourages bandwidth sensitive streaming (which many services were already doing), so that if the conditions are poor for a particular user/cell, video bandwidth will be responsive and reduce automatically.
"If you are a streaming service provider click here[1], send us an email and we'll get back to you to begin the process. T-Mobile will review all submissions to ensure identification of video stream and technical requirements, including optimization for mobile viewing."
They do have a requirement that "Only lawful and licensed video content is eligible for the offering" And that you be capable of making the stream identifiable as video content and do adaptive bitrate streaming (target of 1.5 Mbps)
The only public documentation for service providers I found was in the consumer faq [2] under "I’m a streaming service provider – how do I learn more?"
It's quite probable that they won't engage with a home media server, because you're operating under fair use rather than an explicit license, or because there's too many individual home media servers and some home media servers serve media that's unlicensed and also not within the scope of fair user. But it doesn't hurt to ask and see what you get back.
Alternately, a paper from 2016 [3], suggests you could make your content available in a form that appears to be one of the supported services, and likely get mischaracterized as that service and have your data zero-rated as a result. Not sure if anyone is still running video over http in 2016, but it's worth a try. It should be apparent if it works, as when it does, T-Mobile will limit streaming bandwidth to 1.5 Mbps.
[1] bingeon@t-mobile.com
There's a benefit to the video providers, the carrier, and users, if this is done in a reasonable way. And I think T-Mobile's approach is the most reasonable way I've seen (at least from what's been said publicly)
Fewer cell towers per user is surely cheaper assuming each user is consuming the same amount of content.
If radio spectrum is so scarce, how are Mobile and Verizon selling unlimited 5g home internet service?
That's an ideal example of the limitation. A single tower with a wide range can't handle the same volume of devices in the area. So by using 5G it's just closer and closer to home, with fewer people using it at each point.
No question that it solves the last mile problem for these companies though. It's a lot easier to run fiber to an access point at the edge of your neighborhood than it is to run it to every house in that neighborhood.
Verizon still does it, except for in California.
I'm not sure if they still do this zero rating or not now that they no longer own the TV service.
> The anti-discrimination rule applied only to fixed broadband. Id. According to the Commission, mobile broadband warranted different treatment because, among other things, “the mobile ecosystem is experiencing very rapid innovation and change,”
I have to agree with the other posts. The disaster scenarios we were told would happen didn't happen. Now people are pointing to things completely unconnected to the repeal of net neutrality as evidence that it caused problems.
I uncritically trusted the claims of activists when the debate first started, but in the years since I've begun to feel foolish for doing so. It seems clear a lot of them are peddling misinformation. This whole thing has lead me to question some of the extreme doomsday scenarios people are pushing in other areas as well.
[1] https://www.cadc.uscourts.gov/internet/opinions.nsf/3F95E491...
Misinformation.
Under all previously proposed NN rules, throttling is always allowed for network congestion and mobile actually does have a legitimate network congestion issue.
I personally would rather T-Mobile make a promise about the speeds for the first 25GB rather than say "UNLIMITED*" and make that asterisk any time they feel like it.
Likewise, they could always make allow-lists in throttling, they just couldn't make block-lists.
Nothing in your example would be better under NN rules as actually defined.
Data isn't being treated as just data.
> Streaming Spotify and Apple Music won't count against that soft data cap. Streaming other music services will count against it. Video streaming over YouTube, Netflix, etc is capped at 480p levels. If you pay an additional monthly fee, you get upgraded to "Unlimited Plus" which will increase your soft cap to 40GB a month and your video streaming quality to 1080p. It'll also bundle in Netflix's basic level and give you 6 months of Apple+ for "free".
What they are saying is, even in times of low/no congestion, select services are not being counted against a consumer's data cap.
The alternative is that everyone has data caps
> Bandwidth is finite and if you have a little more money, you should be able to pay for it.
That's fine, but there's a difference between paying for bandwidth and having different rates for bandwidth depending on the destination.
I'm limited to standard definition streaming, yet can stream 1080p just fine on mobile data.
https://www.androidauthority.com/freedompop-sim-card-unlimit... for instance (but that's old)
So do the ones in California Europe India and Canada.
There is leewway for a reasonable ment, but those measures can only be used temporarily during times of congestion and have to be as application agnostic as possible
If you know of a counterexample I'd like to hear it. In particular, California network neutrality says they can't discriminate against services or devices.
Complying with the law would imply that any 5G plan could work with any 5G device, so people could use their $10/month tablet add on plans for home broadband and laptops / tethering.
Similarly no company would be offering bundles or degrading streaming bandwidth on a per-service basis.
For what it's worth, Comcast is also obviously in violation of the above rules, as are the AT&T business 5G terms of service (which specifically say you can't use the service for residential services, such as streaming video, but you can use it for things like video conferencing.)
It could just be that the law is not being enforced.
It's enforced by the California AG, and you can complain to them directly.
I didn't know about the AT&T business plan limitation. If it's a mass plan, that's a violation. Enterprise plans are largely exempted.
ISPs aren't run by complete idiots. They knew this current switch back was a likely possibility. If they had rushed to implement service tiers, it would have given even more ammunition to the net neutrality debate.
Now they can say "See we had a chance for a few years to do it and didn't, so we need to pass laws to make sure net neutrality is illegal to protect our freedom." They'll pay some politicians to push something like the "Internet Freedom Act" and then they'll be good to go.
It seems to me that simple market economics offers a compelling alternative. The more they screw the customer, the more room there is for new or existing competitor, be that something like Starlink or one of the many micro-ISPs being able to grow a bit. You need to create some economic model where these tiers are both profitable and don't expose you to a reasonable fear of competition. That seems quite difficult to do.
The only reason the internet hasn't gotten significantly worse is because we DID have net neutrality for a while, and they knew it would come back once Democrats had a majority on the FCC.
[0] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/01/eff-confirms-t-mobiles...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Internet_Consumer_P...
Not working out for them so far:
> Ninth Circuit ruled unanimously in January 2022 that California's net neutrality law may continue to be enforced and cannot be overridden by the FCC as, current as of the decision, Internet services were classified as information services
One is the double charging of services. Buy service XYZ on the internet then the ISP says 'hey you buy or special package or ABC is throttled'. That is the one most people think of when they hear net neutrality. Or 'we have not cut a deal with XYZ no data for you'.
Then there is the 'stop the cap' ones. Where 'hey here is a nice unlimited service except when you use more than X data then its not'. 'want more data pay for more on top of your "unlimited" plan'.
Then instead of passing laws to do it right they pretzelled the existing laws. Made some up and said yep thats good. Each "side" of the argument has had control of both houses and the presidential. Yet none of them got it done. Instead we are going to end up with more rubish and no real laws. Just made up interpretations that can change on a whim.
ISPs also charge content providers to peer, getting paid three times for the same data.
The two are not set in stone
Give it a few years of throttling youtube to 480p if you don't have a premium plan and regular consumers will get used to more
I've seen the margins ISPs make on these connections, and they went from acceptable but good to absurd, its not like they were starved by net neutrality either.
The cell phone companies around here also all have some form of blurring video for some streaming providers, and bundling subscriptions to other video providers.
Comcast definitely weaponized data caps with absurd overage fees, and also didn't invest in backend network infrastructure until they were under 3MBps average video streaming speeds on their 100MBps plans.
This is almost certainly related to Comcast's handoffs to content providers, and not their backend which had plenty of capacity for commercial customers.
That is exactly what sensationalized propaganda looks like in this case. You are doing it right now.
A concern from consumers is that services will be restricted or rendered unusable by throttling selectively driving customers away from services.
A concern from Service Providers is that they will have to make deals with ISPs to ensure quality of service.
They're valid concerns on all sides and without Net Neutrality we've seen service restrictions, though they're advertised as benefits (e.g. free OTT messaging on flights from certain providers). We've also seen ISPs bully providers like Netflix into paying to deliver traffic their customers are paying to access (double dipping). It hasn't been the doom and gloom that was hyped but has definitely impacted services.
Under net neutrality I expect we'll see a degradation of cellular services or forced consent agreements as WISPs will not be allowed to downgrade or shape traffic otherwise.
It cuts both ways and I will be surprised if it makes much difference.
The anti-network neutrality thing is just a money grab.
Here's a good-enough traffic shaping algorithm:
Each user gets their traffic put into two queues. High bandwidth flows go into a the low priority queues. Low bandwidth (video conferencing, interactive) flows go into the high priority queue. You round robin between all the users' queues at the local node level. If the trunk line is saturated by a few users, then their queues will be long, causing their flows to backpressure. Everyone else's queues will have ~ 1 packet in them, leading to no backpressure and negligible latency.
It's extremely difficult to do better than the solution I just sketched. It is stateless, and it is also very easy to approximate in hardware. It even handles the "I want to torrent and VOIP at the same time" problem.
NN harmed ISPs' incentive to innovate. I have since gotten faster speeds at cheaper prices. What would the NN crowd say if they had gotten their way, something vague about evil corporations and their profits?
Probably nothing because you would still get faster speeds at cheaper prices just like you had for the decades prior even though the regulatory environment was more strict. Without supporting evidence you might as well be claiming that the rooster crowing causes the sun to rise.
Places with common carrier setups do much better on average, as do US ISP's that focus on building out networks instead of spying on users and regulating traffic content.
Verizon FIOS back in like 2014-2018 was in a constant pissing match with Netflix over who would pay for peering. Netflix wanted to pay for their half, and have Verizon pay for their half. Verizon wanted Netflix to pay not only the real costs of both sides, but a huge fee to offset "excess traffic". When Netflix (and Google, etc) decided to not pay, multi-megabyte speeds dropped to a few kilobytes a second. Hopping on a VPN to route the traffic around Verizon got speeds back to normal.
ISPs should be forced to peer with whoever wants to pay for peering.
This is just another name for the "Section 230" issues you claim to care about.
One that I remember in detail is interconnect fees. Some companies like Netflix operate at such a scale that they're constrained by physical reality as much as network policies. So to provide good service, it's often necessary to deploy additional physical connections between the ISP and the Netflix CDN.
Separately, such connections are widespread foundations of the Internet itself. In that context they're typically settlement-free, with providers on both sides working cooperatively to get the bits where users want them. For Netflix, providers typically require a fee to interconnect, because they wouldn't otherwise want to accept the maintenance costs of this link which serves no purpose other than providing Netflix.
So Netflix pays a fee that other organizations with an interconnect don't have to pay. Is that a net neutrality violation? Netflix argues yes - they say it's just a backdoor to discriminate against Netflix traffic. But you can see why ISPs would be concerned about a rule that they can't charge random CDNs for plugging in stuff to their servers.
Instead, we’re going to do is further entrench local monopolies, since only the large guys will be able to afford to comply with regulation.
You literally can’t force corporate Americas to act beneficial to their consumers of incentives are misaligned. It takes literal FDA-levels of regulation to accomplish that, and even that has failures while generally making the entire process expensive while consolidating things down to just a few market players.
Maybe, at first, it will have something to do with "you can't throttle Web services," but it will morph into "you MUST throttle this particular Web service, it spreads disinformation, which makes the Net less neutral."
It is what always happens. It is more reliable than gravity.
The US government does this sort of thing all the time.
This carveout is necessary due to the nature of network management, but it creates an interesting scenario. That term was used literally dozens of times, but also defined absolutely nowhere. This now gives politicians the ability to interpret it, as they see fit. For a company that runs afoul of the powers that be, suddenly it's a standard that can't be met. For those in favor, anything can be accepted as "reasonable network management."
And this is how corruption and tyranny typically works works. The cases of a somebody going completely rogue, or a politician doing something after being handed golden bars or a bag of cash - do still happen. But, by and large, the system is big enough, and complex enough, that if somebody with enough power wants to screw somebody - they can do it legally. And if somebody protests inequitable or unfair treatment, just call it a whataboutism.
On occasion it still does happen, but it tends to be because the mutual risk/reward ratios are changed. One of the most common bribes cops are found taking is sexual stuff. That may have a much higher value for the officer than the bribe price would, and a much lower risk for the briber since they can be overtly flirtatious without ever making it clear (from the point of view of a criminal prosecution) they're offering to exchange some sexual favor for a way out.
By contrast in the government scenario the risk for both parties is effectively zero since much will go on without a single word even needing to be said. When various government agencies were pressuring Twitter to censor all sorts of things, they never made a single overt threat - yet they simultaneously spoke both threateningly and demandingly. It's the same sort of relationship. The people making the "requests" of Twitter had a million ways of going after Twitter, or the people in charge of it, and Twitter knew this. So they played ball. Even if you got access to every single email, you wouldn't be able to prosecute anybody over it. It was all completely legal, which creates a near infinite risk:reward ratio.
"Literal FDA-levels of regulation" demonstrably does not accomplish that. The FDA was fine with what the Sacklers/Purdue Pharma were doing; lawsuits filed by states and others got something (not enough) done about it, but the FDA and their regulations were no help.
If anything, this will help small players, since it prevents big ISPs from using their market leverage to negotiate favorable terms with service providers, and doing that levels the playing field.
For instance, there was a time when you could only get high resolution Netflix through large ISPs, since they'd forced Netflix to sign some CDN deal by messing with transit pricing.
Okay. Net neutrality died and ISPs didn’t immediately turn the internet in to subscriptions to different cloud providers.
The fact is that they CAN, and to be so deliriously ignorant as to believe that “it didn’t happen yet, so it will never happen” is just… what is happening here?
Is this thread just ChatGPT bots?
Regardless of if Microsoft, google, Amazon and ISPs have not yet managed to cooperate in to cable style subscriptions to what parts of the internet you get, we are WAY better off enshrining to law that they cannot do it.
What is happening here is see you are disingenuously misrepresenting the opinion of those who disagree with you, and then dehumanizing them by comparing them to robots. Both of these are gross and should stop.
The actual argument is something like this:
1. ISPs are profit seeking monopolists who will do anything to increase their profits (axiomatic, at least on HN)
2. ISPs have had the opportunity to "turn the Internet into subscriptions for different cloud providers" in the United States for not just the last six years, but rather throughout most of the life of the Internet.
3. Despite ample opportunity (especially for mobile carriers who were exempted from most of the requirements), they have never taken the steps to do so.
4. Therefore, it is likely they have decided that this kind of extreme siloing is not in the best interests of their profits.
It's not too hard to imagine why point four would be true;
- Most users are loyal to products, not companies. Most use products that are owned by or hosted on entities that compete with each other. This would severely complicate any kind of negotiation between the ISP and provider of the services.
- The result would be a product that is confusing from a customer standpoint. Nobody knows whether the product they interact with is hosted on Azure or GCP or AWS.
- Managing it sounds like a logistical nightmare (so, expensive).
- It opens a new venue for competition (which contradicts point 1) that a competitor automatically wins by virtue of simply doing nothing.
- It's almost certainly sure to result in expensive legal involvement from interests with the money to make the process painful.
- Even if every prior issue did not exist, this concept is legislatively contentious. As in, the rules are likely to change in four years. The rules also are different state by state.
Putting myself in the shoes of the CEO of the most greedy ISP imaginable, I don't see how this siloing idea is going to make my company enough money to make all of that worth it. It seems like a great way to fail to show quarterly growth, which is the last thing I want in my position
The FCC was acting under net neutrality principles in broadband actions starting in 2004, when its initial non-regulatory enforcement approach became legally problematic, it immediately turned to regulation around the principles (the most recent to be repealed was the last if series of regulatory packages, with lawsuits over the orevious ones each shaping the next one.) And by the time the last repeal was finalized state level NN regulations were already coming into play, as well as the clear likelihood that federal rules would be restored with the next Democratic-majority FCC.
Aside from maybe the period between the 1996 Telecommunications Act and the FCC articulation of net neutrality principles as a guiding rule for case-by-case action in 2004, I’m not sure what time you are talking about, there hasn’t been any period where there was a clear, stable situation where it amde any sense to make long-term decisions to structure business in a way that had a major conflict with neutrality.
The first real net neutrality enforcement action was when FCC chairman Michael Powell under George w bush stopped Madison River from blocking a VoIP provider. Powell used Title II.
It took about a month from complaints to action because the FCC had clear authority.
That's why an agency needs clear authority.
If the FTC would have had to act, it would have taken 2 years and the FTC would have had to approve him that that provider had some sort of monopoly power.
“It’s not profitable to do so” can be true for a given time horizon and untrue for another, or if circumstances change.
It didn't die, it temporarily stopped being the federal rule with the clear likelihood that it would be restored with the next Democratic administration and with a number of states adopting NN regulations.
Mobile customers didn't get away scot free though. This did enable mobile service providers to offer more tiered plans, which on average raised prices on worse service via caps and throttled speeds. Some people may still be "grandfathered" in to old unlimited plans, but a lot of people either paid more, got worse service, or both.
The argument against net neutrality is that it might stifle innovation. Well, we had net neutrality for many years and innovation didn’t seem all that stifled. Hence, what’s the harm in bringing it back?
(For the record I don't agree that this is unimportant, but you're arguing against a straw man.)
Political capital is limited. Instead of wasting it rehashing this bandaid, why not campaign for something like municipal internet that would fundamentally solve the problems of ISPs?
Since Congress won't do anything at the national level, this is going to be re-hashed out by the FCC every time the president's tie changes color.
Are these plans legal in California, or is the California law not sufficiently specific to rein in this kind of thing?
> The change will extend beyond California, since, AT&T said, “the Internet does not recognize state borders.”
However, if you really do believe this is a civilization defining piece of regulation, Why leave it to the FCC? It seems like people on both sides are happy to leave this super duper important decision to a bunch of unelected bureaucrats. Everyone loves executive overreach when its their side that does it I guess.
From honest/informed actors, you're correct but the FUD campaign during the repeal was incredibly dramatic and exaggerated.
The net neutrality repeal took effect in 2018, its been 5 years
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/11/technology/net-neutrality...
[0] https://mashable.com/article/california-net-neutrality-can-b...
"I really don't get what all the fuss is about."
This is a bit like the Y2K bug. There was a huge amount of noise and fear-mongering, and millions of developers spent an enormous amount of time fixing code and preparing systems. Y2K came and suddenly everyone is sure it was all just drama for nothing. What was the fuss about?
The massive amount of "scare tactics" made it a mainstream conversation. The images of tiered internet were spread far and wide and it put everyone on alert. We can't A:B universes, but I suspect that if net neutrality was quietly axed and no one noticed or cared, we would absolutely have had services very much like the worst-case images imagined.
Because the mega streamers like Netflix, Youtube, and Amazon would benefit.
because they want more leverage in their negotiations with netflix, amazon, google, spotify etc. That's all it boils down to, how much one major corporation has to pay another major corporation.
There's a reason why they're only pushing for neutrality on the ISPs, if they were actually concerned about large corporations abusing their control over critical online infrastructure they'd be pushing to regulate other classes of "service providers" like google, amazon, cloudflare, etc.
Many of the people who are pushing for net neutrality are also pushing for this. It's such an easy strawman counterpoint to just say "If people really cared about educating children, why are they only pushing for better schools? They should also be pushing for better in-home care and childhood nutrition!" ... um, they are?
As for the legislation in the OP, they're not trying to accomplish that and TBH I really doubt the democrats[1] even want it to go further than the ISPs because they've been the beneficiaries of policies at companies like AWS that have deplatformed right-wing organizations[2].
[1] by which i mean the democrats that actually wield institutional authority in the american government, not every DNC party-member in general
[2] not that i agree with the organizations that are being deplatformed but there is a principle at stake.
Mine didn't. Verizon blackmailed Netflix and Google repeatedly for access to their network. YouTube and Netflix were unusuable for FIOS customers until they came to an agreement where Netflix gave piles of cash to Verizon.
Like most services in life, if you live a relatively upper class life in a competitive market, things like net neutrality are probably not gonna be very loud on your radar.
Because of the democrat to republican administration change in the past, the rules have changed regarding line sharing and infrastructure build out. In many cases, the big players, who were previously prevented from interfering with other ISP's build-out, are now able to actively make it more difficult (costly) for independent ISP's from expanding their network.
If this continues, its going to put smaller ISP's out of business. So IMHO, this is more important that forcing the big players to play by the net neutrality rules in regards to throttling services, Id go so far as to say they are using that as red herring to distract people from the real problem. If there is no competition, you don't have anywhere to go when an ISP suddenly decides to do something that is anti-competitive.
BUT We owe it to ourselves to go and look at all the fearmongering they were putting out about ending net neutrality and figuring out why it didn’t come to pass.
And hopefully learning from that for future policy debates.
Edit: also several states have net neutrality laws on the books, so if you are typing this from California it’s no wonder you aren’t seeing the end of the world: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/californias-net-neutralit...
Then Verizon came along and started blocking well-known VPN ports unless you paid for a "business" account. The FCC responded with "Net Neutrality" saying no, you can't just decide to block certain protocols, websites, or services for monetary reasons. QoS should be enforced when requested by clients or for technical reasons (eg VoIP), not to create class tiers to squeeze both customers and the services they use for money on both ends. If you want more money raise your price of service.
If you think the bean counters at the big telco and cable companies aren't excited by the idea of charging you extra to use a VPN, a VoIP phone, and hitting the top 100 websites on the back end then I don't know what to tell you. Absent any legal barriers they can and they eventually will. Most people don't have meaningful competition so you'll take what daddy Comcast deigns to offer you or you can go back to 2Mbps ADSL.
2015-2017 there was Net Neutrality. 2018-2023 there was not.
Empirically, the disaster that Net Neutrality claims to avoid, is hard to observe.
NN was originally imposed by the FCC because Verizon started blocking VPNs, requiring customers to pay for a "business" plan if they wanted VPN support. That was the first wide-scale break with internet tradition and it rightly freaked a lot of people out.
OP is making a claim about de jure net neutrality, you are making a claim about de facto net neutrality.
The only reason net neutrality wasn't already law or part of the peering or ARIN contracts to even be on the internet at all was that no one could imagine that ISPs would become monopoly/dualopolies that might try to block traffic to extract extra rents from from both their existing paying customers and the owners of the servers their customers wanted to connect with.
In retrospect it should have been part of the contract to get a netblock from one of the NRO organizations (like ARIN) that such conduct is prohibited.
And before anyone raises a straw man: the policy could have been clear that traffic-shaping for fairness, QoS, network health, or even non-service-specific transfer caps was allowed.
In some ways how ISPs handle transfer caps is similar: their stated reasoning is garbage. The cap does nothing to discourage high use during peak periods and punishes customers who do bulk transfers at midnight when the ISP's network has plenty of capacity. The real purpose of caps is to extract more rent for doing nothing.
The ILEC and Cable ISPs look back on the $1/minute long distance telephone days of Ma Bell with sparkles in their eyes. Funny for a service that entirely depends on the government giving them free access to my and your property for right-of-way.
I think they eventually cracked down on it, but it went on for at least a decade.
But net neutrality isn't actually what we need. What we need is municipal broadband. The major ISPs in the US are objectively awful. The best Internet access in the US are in places with municipal broadband eg Chattanooga.
A good start would be regulating ISPs as a utility.
1) Set a minimum 1th percentile download and upload speeds and 99th percentile RTTs, bucketed in 1 minute intervals over a 30 day period. If an ISP falls below that for more than 1% of customers, then they automatically lose any right of way exclusivity that they hold, and also are broken into a common carrier and retail group.
1a) Throttled / non-prioritized / blocked services count toward the SLA.
2) If a telco is not meeting the universal access requirements in an area, then their networks are automatically transferred to a telco that is meeting the requirements. The receiving telco must hold the infrastructure until it meets SLAs for 10 years. If all the local telcos fail, then ownership reverts to a locally-owned (no more than 100K subscribers) co-ops.
"There are two major parties in America - a conservative party, and a very conservative party".
Economically, maybe, but not really. I think Europe is a lot better about hiding their corporate interests than the USA, but I think it's still largely capitalism-for-real behind the socialism-for-show. I can't think of how that statement is true, unless you look at things USA Left wants that they are unable to get, then saying they're conservative because they didn't get them. Like socialized healthcare.
What part are Democrats conservative over Europeans liberals? Healthcare, no I don't think so. Immigration? No. Guns? No. Free speech? No. Low taxes and small government? No. Abortion? lol no. Democrats in the USA were so up in arms over a 15 week limit in Missippi that they took it to the Supreme Court and lost Roe v Wade, but most of Europe is happily swimming along with 12 week bans.
So, maybe I just don't see it, but I hear this line all the time from progressives that are frustrated at Democrats for not doing all the hard left things they want. What am I missing? USA Democrats aren't conservative because they have a conservative party that opposes them.
What are USA Democrats so conservative at in their actual actions and desires?
I'll give two more examples. Voter ID is uncontroversial everywhere in Europe and Canada. Formerly government-run postal services have long since been privatized almost everywhere in Europe, while no one advocates doing so with the USPS (despite the TDS-driven hysteria over the so-called sabotaging of same in 2020).
Voter ID is controversial in the UK:
https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/voter-id-elections-act-frau...
https://www.politico.eu/article/punch-ups-at-the-polling-boo...
https://theconversation.com/six-reasons-britains-impending-v...
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/sep/11/voter-id-in...
https://www.unison.org.uk/news/article/2023/03/voter-id-is-t...
When did they stop? Gigi Sohn was nominated in 2021 and was repeatedly renominated until she withdrew this year. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigi_Sohn#FCC_nomination
Exactly there. Instead of renominating her to perpetual failure, they should have nominated someone else. When they finally did the work to find another candidate, they actually got results. That should have happened years ago.
But it didn't and that either means they're insane (as in doing the same thing over and over, expecting a different result) or the just don't care that much.
There ought to be a name for this fallacy, like "alternating dictatorship single color lump-government."
Pretty much from day-one the Biden administration was trying to get a new FCC member to the understaffed commission, however with the slimmest possible 51-49 Senate majority it only takes one "blue dog" Democrat (or one heavily reliant on industry donations) to block it all. [0] That state of affairs continued until the latest attempt finally passed this month. [1]
[0] https://prospect.org/politics/democratic-majority-at-the-fcc...
[1] https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2023/9/cantwell-applauds-sen...
They nominated the same person, over and over, who failed to get nominated each time. The failure is totally their fault if they nominate someone who can't get confirmed.
They should have learned to count votes and nominate someone who could get enough.
> That state of affairs continued until the latest attempt finally passed this month. [1]
When they finally nominated someone different, someone who could get confirmed.
But in the first place, net neutrality does nothing about affordability [2], subsidy fraud + corruption [3], deceptive pricing [4], and regulatory capture [5]. Net neutrality would be a relatively minor consequence of a competitive internet service market. In other words, net neutrality is a necessary outcome and nothing close to a sufficient condition.
[1] https://www.naruc.org/nrri/nrri-activities/net-neutrality-tr...
[2] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/04/what-low-income-people...
[3] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/19/senator-ted-cruz-pretend...
[4] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/fcc-says-too-bad...
[5] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/09/07/after-years-of-stupid-ga...
Seems like this back and forth could go on for some time. It would probably be better to come up with a solution that can supported across changes in control.
Given the discussion here it isn’t clear to me what the middle ground might be other than some scorched earth. Maybe net neutrality for consumer benefit only on a non discriminatory basis?
For example, a MVNO could not penalize any Internet traffic but they could offer a no capacity cap service as long as any other comparable service had the same access. Such a setup would probably be cause for a large number of lawyer billable hours which will make lawyers in both sides happy.
I'd be much more comfortable with treating information services as common carriers, which has an existing regulatory and interpretive framework to decide what that means - most of which can be directly applied to information services (internet access).
I get this is a somewhat unpopular opinion, but I don't trust the courts to decide cases which are highly technical in nature.
What a difference capitalization makes.
Or was it deliberate?
None of those things compete with wireline, on either performance or price.
Satellite internet is 2x-10x more expensive and requires expensive equipment. It has significant lag and greatly reduced upload.
5G speeds exist in small, limited zones. Cellular internet in general is slower, comes with tiny to small data caps, is more expensive, has more lag and reduced upload.
Here's what meaningful competition looks like. Next month I'll be able to choose from several fiber ISPs.
Backstory: We currently have one cable provider. Following the recent broadband funding, my neighborhood was just trenched for fiber. It's an open infrastructure and any ISP that wants to sell service to us - can.
This is how DSL used to work back in the late 90s-early aughts, until ISP lobbyists paid for enough elections to get those mandates unwound.
The same thing happened for my parents in rural Utah, just with FTTH instead. Unfortunately for them, they are overcharged enough that it's probably worth it at this point to switch to 5G.
A required condition of net neutrality is that the ISPs be considered common carriers once again. Common carriers are an exception to the legal paradigm of compelled speech. So the most you can say is that the government would be disallowing the ISPs from engaging in money-motivated censorship. If that falls under your idea of "government control over information" then you would be correct (but only pointlessly correct in my opinion).
[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/14/finally-close-to-having-...
Isn't it vastly more important to ensure free speech on the internet than the speed of your netflix stream. Seems like a misguided battle.
In a more steelman argument, you could probably discuss that another form of censorship could always come in the form of a tier that only includes "approved sources" or throttling anyone deemed as "misinformation".
If they can slow down your Netflix stream, they can also impair others' access to your self-hosted blog. I can't think of a more direct, fundamental threat to free speech than that. It's the same as the power company turning off service to your printing press.
Unless you're talking about having your "free speech" on whatever site or service you want. That's not free speech. It's more like communism.
> Highly doubt that ever happens
It would be a serious free speech violation. Best to make it illegal so it never does. If you're censored on literally all social media you can still host your own website or IRC server. If ISPs start censoring you it's game over.
Even one ISP slowing down specific websites by a bit would be very bad. Slowness tends to decrease traffic, and people would almost never notice. And then add in the fact that it's so difficult to change ISPs: spend an hour on the phone with the cancellation department, schedule an installation for the new service yada yada yada.
And with NN being championed by a lot of the same services that cut off the above-mentioned it seems less like something meant to preserve the freedom of the Internet and more like something meant to keep one group of corporations in control of it.
Side note: the Blocked and Reported podcast looked deeply into the allegations that led to that that site being initially shut down and they concluded they were bogus.
No, not immediately. But safeguards are important to the future, and we want to prevent this particular slope from getting any more slippery.
Some politicians tricked people into screaming about it, and I’m sure they were able to get some fundraising because of the screaming.
This sounds like one of the pregurgitated anti-neutrality mantra. Specifically, the one that ignores the many growing trends (caps, prioritization, purposeful peering congestion) before neutrality and how those trends mostly paused when neutrality was passed.
It also ignores what ISPs know - that not every administration has full-throated support for anti-consumer practices. That is, not every admin will provide the cover ISPs need to get consumers used to increasing mistreatment.
Better to keep the pause on consumer harms in place until a friendlier environment can be secured for the long term.
Meanwhile it's still safe screw consumers on other fronts. One is further entrenching ISP monopoly/duopoly positions by having lobbyists write state anti-munibroadband laws for paid legislators to pass.