Net neutrality is about more than just blocking and throttling
brookings.edu
brookings.edu
Did they talk about efforts by governments to censor the Internet "for the {children,terrorism,morals}? Nope.
Did they talk about efforts by corporations to control access by adding proprietary DRM layers on top of the open protocols, a la Google WEI? Nope.
Nope, as the article states, "It is the conduct of the ISPs that is in question here".
Just like the last round of "net neutrality", I see Tom Wheeler's lips moving, but I only hear FAANG talking points coming out of his mouth.
The first time NN came up, there was a huge whataboutism campaign by them pointing at FAANG to redirect attention to them instead of the monopoly abuses from the ISPs themselves. And the misdirection worked in many case (as evidenced by your comment).
Does FAANG need to be looked at? Yes. But it’s not an NN issue, just regular anti-trust. ISPs are at a whole other level that needs regulation. They should not be able to sell all my DNS queries, monitor all my traffic, scan my internal network from their modems, or give zero ratings to their own bundled streaming apps. All of that is related to the fact that they are the sole available option for Internet service in almost all markets.
Only the last is relevant to net neutrality. From what I can tell, it’s not an issue—streaming is competitive.
Debating net neutrality seems a convenient way to avoid scrutinising the pricing and privacy problems at ISPs. In that sense, it seems more profitable—for the ISPs—to centre the debate around net neutrality versus their actual profit centres.
In summary, I’d much prefer an ISP customer bill of rights, and release of exclusivities granted to ISPs that didn’t meet their ends of the bargains, than this seemingly-performative debate about net neutrality, which is largely about increasing the scope of the FCC’s portfolio than doing anything meaningful for ordinary Americans.
> I’d much prefer an ISP customer bill of rights
This relies on a wholly imaginary choice between net neutrality and the the rights you would prefer. It's not dissimilar to the argument that is made in response to gun violence for instance. For instance "I'd much prefer we focused on the root cause of mental health than potentially infringing on the rights of honest gun owners."
In fact mental health is an important issue but there is no particular reason to believe that a government with a budget in the trillions can't do you know TWO THINGS.
This isn’t how politics works. Crowding out an issue with a filibuster is a valid political tactic. Net neutrality seems, to me, like that when it comes to ISP regulation.
Abandoning the actual for the fanciful nets us only a loss of both.
This sounds like a problem…
In other words, net neutrality is only a thing because of lack of competition. If all providers are bad, and you can't have or start a good one because of some barriers, then net neutrality becomes a topic. But it's not a solution for the core problem, it's merely a band-aid that tries to ignore the core issue. I'm not against it - it surely works for the interim, but it's important that NN is not in the focus.
I've worked for an ISP in another country, with heavy competition in early '10s, where many households had an option of at least 4+ different providers, and switching was as easy as calling a phone number (no long-term contracts or any BS small print). There and then, ISPs had to tread very carefully to not make their customers unhappy, or they'll start losing them in droves. Rate limiting and blocking was only ever employed to block malware or as emergency measure for network stability issues that would've otherwise caused worse outage.
(Later on, that country became a dictatorship, telecom became heavily regulated, competition had essentially stopped, and now ISPs do all sort of shit because they can or forced to - but that's another story.)
<conspiracy serious="no, but you never know">
It could be that Net Neutrality is a big telco distraction tactic, which they use to simultaneously banter with large services, while shifting public and government focus from stuff they don't want to lose (exclusivity agreements), towards "maybe we won't rate-limit Netflix after all, lol".
</conspiracy>
An individual state can often implement a lot without needing federal law changes.
> sparsely populated
Oregon is about the same size, population and geography as my country New Zealand.
Within a decade New Zealand (poorer country) has managed to roll out fibre to 85% of households using a public-private partnership model. Starlink serves rural areas.
In any case Oregon is about 3 million people in the portland metro and a million people spread over 90,000 sq miles or 10 per sq mile or about 4 per sq km
Portland is already working on municipal fiber as it should but keep in mind that US government projects a bit like the Russian military a lot of money gets soaked up between budget and result.
A more competitive market is something we might if we do well achieve in the next few decades. Net Neutrality helps now and will actually still be virtuous if we can move forward in other respects.
NZ is more closely comparible than you are suggesting. The majority of NZ is in cities with the other ~1 million[1] spread over 103,500 sq mi. Density is a distribution, and cherry picking a single density number is nearly always very misleading.
Oregon is often a fine comparison with New Zealand. Except I wouldn't want to try to compare which government is more functional (we have our serious problems too).
As a generalisation, while it is difficult to compare the whole of the USA with a specific country, it is often enlightening to find a comparible state.
[1] 3.4 million in top 20 cities or 3.7 million if including their greater urban areas, population 5.2 million.
Source? Surely the money came with strings attached?
> that the nation’s most important network has no public interest supervision
They sell DNS data, search term data, anything they can glean from your network activity in-transit.
We need data liability laws. Watch tho silos disappear overnight the moment they're responsible for damages incurred.
Correct me with real info if I'm wrong please.
Further down the page he brings up the “just and reasonable” standard from Title II. I want to know what behavior he (or the FCC) would consider unjust or unreasonable that isn’t in the realm of blocking or throttling.
It is the conduct of the ISPs that is in question here. Because telephone companies were Title II common carriers, their behavior had to be just and reasonable. Those companies prospered under such responsibilities; as they have morphed into wired and wireless ISPs, there is no reasonable argument why they, as well as their new competitors from the cable companies, should not continue to have public interest obligations.
what were those responsibilities and obligations?
They legally could. For years. They didn’t.
My point is that government regulation is likely to make costs go up, not down, and cause a certain amount of technological lock-in as well. The history of Title II regulation of the circuit switched telephone network is an excellent example of this, and is why the FCC promises to exercise a "light touch" here.
The last two times net neutrality was in the news (during the initial reclassification, and then the repeal), the main claim then was that it would/did reduce investments and innovation, and that was a lie[0][1][2][3]. So, knowing this, what are the actual risks you see today in treating ISPs as common carriers?
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/02/sorry-fcc-charte...
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/12/attverizon-lobby...
[2] https://www.wired.com/story/the-fcc-says-net-neutrality-crip...
[3] https://www.investopedia.com/insights/does-net-neutrality-st...
As an example, as long as a customer has access to a public option for comparable internet service, private companies would be exempt from "net neutrality" regulation and penalties.
Allowing ISPs to all have their own standards on who they block can be frustrating for both end users and site operators.
Does having a blade guard on a lawnmower mean there's a kill switch in agriculture?
Does having copywrite length codified in law mean there's a kill switch for books?
Coppright length is somewhat of a red herring here since it's unfair to begin with. No work deserves protection for life plus 75 years.
It is important to note that I am not saying that there should be indiscriminate crawling that breaks your site, just saying that robots.txt is not the solution.
I do prefer site owners being able to limit how their content can be used though. That's individual choice much like choosing a software license for open source code, and totally unrelated to net neutrality as far as I understand it.
Crawlers can and do ignore this file and its contents. It's much like a post-it that says 'no peeking in these specific places', giving away the location of sensitive information you don't want crawled.
It's a well-intentioned initiative but cannot in any way prevent abuse.
But if you think internet is bad wait until you have the case where a working mother can't heat her babies bottle but the rich ceo down the road is charging his Tesla.
I know this is coming because I sat in a talk at YOW last year which went over how great it will be to have smart transmission networks. I imagine the presenter (some ex head from Google's Borg project) was so privileged she can't even imagine someone being unable to compete with the ceo for transmission capacity.
Net hasn't been neutral for a lot less than 12 years.
California's law prevented the worst harms of un neutral net.
This regulation has not anticompetitive costs. In fact, it forces a level playing field so monopolies can't prevent competition.
The problem does exist. Look no further than your cellphone plan.
ISPs provide access to the Internet the same way your city and power company provide electricity and water. Tax dollars have gone into its building, and they've disrupted much of the country over their shenanigans.
In absence of good solutions, mesh networks will pop up.