[flagged]
E.g California with their Internet Consumer Protection and Net Neutrality Act.
Some of the large telecoms are on record saying that this made it not worth it to enact the changes they had planned.
WNYC On The Media had an episode on this recently.
There must be some law preventing it, because knowing companies, they'll do the basest things they can get away with, and I'm sure they'd love to do this.
This is what I mean, from Indonesia: https://www.traveltomtom.net/media/cached-resp-images/images...
I feel like this particular topic (while important) distracts from a much more disturbing possibility: blocking or throttling legal content for political purposes.
It has been pretty rare, but it's not unheard of. Given the number of companies that can block your access to a given site (DNS, ISP, backbone, webhost, etc), I think having some regulatory or statutory protections for online speech is in order. Net Neutrality (in it's 2015 FCC formulation among others) is basically that.
My Spectrum connection is 40% more expensive and 0% faster than it was in 2013. My Wireless spend is 20% lower and 2-5x faster.
Between the industry astroturfing and the splinterd advocacy, "net neutrality" is almost as meaningless as "fake news".
I have to disagree with this. There's a very clear meaning, and the 2015 FCC rules for wired connections put it succinctly.
No blocking or throttling of legal content, and no paid prioritization.
The wikipedia article has more information, but https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality
People were warning that without NN the internet as we knew it could be destroyed. The fact that it wasn't immediately destroyed doesn't make them wrong. It just means we didn't get the worst possible outcome.
What you refer to as being "manipulated" is more neutrally called campaigning and arguing one's case. I know the zeitgeist is to make it seem like ideas we don't support are a form of terrorism.
"Manipulated" is hiring temps to submit public comments to the FCC.
https://www.freepress.net/blog/net-neutrality-violations-bri...
But I think it's really silly to to look at an industry with documented abuse in the absence of regulation and to essentially ignore that and say "but what about the abuses within this specific time period?"
We know that under current broadband rules absent Net Neutrality, the abuses described above are legal. We've seen companies engage in those abuses. To the extent that the worst of that behavior is still illegal, it's only because individual states like California have picked up the fight, which broadband providers have fought fiercely to prevent.
But there's no evidence that broadband providers wouldn't repeat the same behaviors given the opportunity. Broadband providers do engage in behavior today that would be in violation of Net Neutrality rules, particularly around video throttling and zero-rating. The ongoing fight over Net Neutrality and increased customer attention might be limiting that behavior, but if anything that's evidence that increased scrutiny is good for the market, not that it's unnecessary. Companies have in the absence of Net Neutrality, taken advantage of the lack of regulations about as much as was feasible for them to do so.
There's a weird pattern on HN I'm noticing where people are holding a wild dog at bay with a stick, and other people are standing behind them saying, "I thought you said if we unleashed this dog it was going to maul us, you sure have egg on your face. See, there's no reason to leash the dog."
Your argument is that Net Neutrality isn't necessary, because consumers weren't abused to the degree that people were warned about once Net Neutrality was no longer in effect. Of course, companies have abused the market in Net Neutrality's absence, but you're only looking at abuses after 2018.
And when confronted with abuses that happened after 2018, your response is to say that Net Neutrality post-2018... was still in effect.
I'm not sure how you're expecting people to react to that kind of logic? But I don't think that asking "why weren't people abused in the absence of the law that was still being enforced?" comes across as quite as strong of an argument as you might be imagining.
----
I don't mean to be too snarky here, so to clarify and expand on the above: the existence of California's Net Neutrality laws are what people have been referring to when we talk about state-level regulations that kept the post-2018 landscape from getting as bad as it could have gotten. This is not a surprise, I literally brought up California's Net Neutrality rules in my comment above, and it's just kind of wild to me that you were apparently aware of them but didn't think to ask yourself whether or not they might have impacted the post-2018 commercial landscape.
To go back to the dog analogy, people are fending off the wild dog with a stick, and you're over on the side saying, "see, the dog hasn't attacked anybody, we don't need to leash it", and then the dog bites a volunteer firefighter and your response is, "well, clearly the stick didn't help, so that's even more evidence that leashing the dog is a waste of time." :)
You should of course be aware (having read through the link that you shared) that California was sued by both the industry and by the DOJ itself to try and repeal that law, so it seems fairly clear both that the industry viewed state-level NN as a constraint on its behavior and that the industry and administration of the time wanted those regulations to go away. It's reasonable to conclude that state-level interventions like California's helped curb industry abuse.
Nevertheless, as the article I posted above points out:
> When the Trump FCC repealed the 2015 Open Internet Order, it didn’t just eliminate the prohibitions against blocking and throttling and paid prioritization. [..] it also gave away oversight over the broadband industry. The FCC abdicated its responsibility to protect consumers and competition in the broadband market. That is the most important thing that happened on December 14th, 2017 when the FCC repealed the Open Internet Order.
> [...] and the fire department had no place to go. They can’t go to the FCC because the FCC abdicated their authority over broadband. They wouldn’t go to the FTC because they take forever to adjudicate complaints. So if Verizon throttles your broadband, there’s nothing they can do about it.
The repeal of Net Neutrality on the grounds that the FCC did not have the authority to regulate in this area effectively got rid of a broad class of federal regulation and recourse against abusive behavior; there was a rippling effect beyond just zero-rating or content-targeted throttling/blocking.
So while California's Net Neutrality enforcement was a good thing for the country overall and did help to curb abuses for the country overall, it is still not a full substitute for the federal government doing its job regulating bad behavior and protecting consumers.
It was the largest user of data, Netflix fighting ISPs to force them to give it extra help. You'll have slower video without NN, and they'll prioritize streaming Netflix as much as everything else. Useless for me.
I don't cheerlead for a video streaming service bullying ISPs. I don't have any love for ISPs either, but it's hard for me to see the fight as good vs evil anymore. The article you posted also isn't as clear cut. The firefighters didn't have unlimited data and ran out. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/08/verizons-throttling-fi...
>The 2015 order, by reclassifying ISPs under Title II of the Federal Communications Act, would have likely made what happened with the fire department illegal.
NN would not have helped. I found the relevant quote:
> 2015 Open Internet Order =/= Net neutrality
>Net neutrality doesn’t prevent cell service providers from lowering your speeds after you go over your limit. Net neutrality prevents them from discriminating against certain kinds of data.
So the abuses before Net Neutrality suddenly don't count? Discrimination against certain kinds of data is exactly what Net Neutrality prevented, and is the exact category of abuse that people point to when we talk about what Net Neutrality was originally designed to prevent.
Net Neutrality was not only about Netflix.
To be clear, while I have no love for Netflix, arguing that Netflix was bullying ISPs or fighting for extra consideration from ISPs rather than to be treated as a normal equal customer is pure revisionism. It is pure ISP propaganda. ISPs wanted the ability to discriminate against Netflix traffic. The fact that Netflix is itself a crummy company and could afford to pay changes nothing about that. It is unbelievable that Net Neutrality critics are now going to try to just reintroduce the argument that Netflix deserved to be throttled after it was so thoroughly and completely debunked leading up the 2015 rules.
But even ignoring that entire conversation, Netflix was far from the only service that was throttled or discriminated against before Net Neutrality was put in place. Anticompetitive zero-rating of partner streaming platforms, blocking consumer activity such as tethered Internet except for certain applications -- there was a clear direction that the industry was headed. It was headed towards data discrimination.
And if your argument is "NN was never really repealed, states had the same regulations", then I don't know what you're doing here also arguing that the repeal you don't believe happened wasn't a big deal. There's really no way to get around the fact that asking "what about the abuses after 2018" when according to you Net Neutrality was still effectively in-place at the state level post-2018 -- that is an incredibly disingenuous argument to make.
----
> NN would not have helped
> 2015 Open Internet Order =/= Net neutrality
The 2015 Open Internet Order was the basis for the new Net Neutrality rules, and a rejection of the 2015 Open Internet Order was why Net Neutrality was repealed. To argue that the two of them are completely separate misses the point of what anti-regulation advocates were arguing at the time and misses what the legal argument against Net Neutrality was: not merely that specifically Net Neutrality was unnecessarily, but that the FCC did not have the authority granted to it in the 2015 Open Internet Order.
From the link that you yourself just posted above:
> The FCC is Now Prohibited From Looking into the Practice of Throttling 4G Markets Services Down to Dial-up Speeds Despite Clear Public Safety Implications
> [...] There Still Might be a Violation of the Net Neutrality Rules, But We Have No Agency to Investigate the Question. That was the point of the Restoring Internet Freedom Order. It was to strip away federal oversight over the ISP industry.
And I find "Net Neutrality was different" to be a particularly bad argument because the current reinstatement of Net Neutrality is also not just about Net Neutrality but about a re-acknowledgement of the FCC regulatory power, and the legal arguments are going to once again center around whether the FCC has the authority to regulate broadband.
The two categories are intrinsically tied together, and people who are arguing "we don't need Net Neutrality" should be upfront that they are effectively also arguing for stripping FCC regulatory power in general, because that is the mechanism through which all of this conversation is happening.
----
> If your data is throttled or you have bad service you can get another one easily
Just to quickly touch on this -- I almost didn't address this point at all because it's just so clearly wrong, and I feel like anyone reading these comments can just look around them and ask themselves if they feel like they're spoiled for choice in regards to ISPs. This is just not a convincing argument to make, readers know that the ISP market is not competitive.
But it is worth addressing that this also misses one of the key points of Net Neutrality; that it is not just about consumer throttling, but also about anticompetitive effects on the Internet as a whole. For example, zero-rating is broadly speaking something that consumers like. But it's prohibited under Net Neutrality because it harms the market and makes the market less competitive and unfairly privileges ISP-partnered services.
If you are a company getting throttled or blocked from entire swaths of your customer base on the decision of a middleperson, you can't actually just choose to get a different ISP.
So again, the ISP market is not competitive, it's just very obviously not. But importantly, I do think readers should take away that Net Neutrality is about more than whether or not consumers can buy an Internet package that includes fast Netflix streaming,and that phrasing it this way is a large oversimplification of what the rules are designed to protect against.
It says "clear safety indications" as if firefighters not buying unlimited data and expecting to get unlimited data under fires is normal. It's emotional marketing. The manifest v3 matters more than NN to me because it affects my life. I fail to see how any action is needed now. If this is the best case scenario, I really don't care if firefighters bought limited internet, expected unlimited during a fire and sued.
I'm not against net neutrality, but it seems like making a law to prevent juices from being sold as more than 70% distilled water, yet the market is already passed that part and uses real fruit juice concentrate and regular water. It was useful then, and after it was repealed nothing bad happened and the firefighter case was a bad case.
There's two sides to this: Net Neutrality, and the mechanisms through which we get Net Neutrality. To tackle the latter first, this will give the FCC more regulatory power over the ISP market in general, which is in great need of regulation. Some of the improvements that are not strictly related to Net Neutrality but are related to the FCC's ability to regulate are issues like price transparency (https://www.fcc.gov/broadbandlabels), as well as classifications of what minimum speeds can and can't be advertised as broadband (https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/broadband-speed-guide).
These are both sorely needed regulations; ISP advertising is pretty awful right now, hidden fees are so common that they're basically a joke. And minimum speeds for broadband classification play right into that -- both because it will force ISPs not to deceptively market subpar services, and because broadband classification plays heavily into ISP-exclusive contracts that get struck with individual cities where ISPs will promise to wire certain parts of the city or to bring broadband access, will renege on those deals, and then will sue or push back at efforts to hold them accountable. The second is much less obvious but plays heavily into the reason why the modern ISP market is so uncompetitive today. Improving that situation would be great.
Moving on to the Net Neutrality side of things though:
> The antidote to net neutrality seems to be more ISPs
A competitive market would help in a lot of ways, yes, and dismantling ISP monopolies via open access to wiring, one-touch-make-ready laws, etc... is important and should be something that we focus on.
However, Net Neutrality is also about increasing competition on the Internet itself. A highly competitive ISP market where you launch a streaming service to compete with Youtube and then need to negotiate with every ISP to keep it from getting throttled puts you at an unfair competitive disadvantage.
Think of it this way: I want to get rid of Google monopolies in the browser, I want us to have lots of web browsers to choose from. However, if all of those browsers decided that they weren't going to load websites unless they were paid or were going to throttle websites that didn't pay -- the fact that I can switch to Firefox as a user doesn't change that it would be anticomptetitive for Chrome to demand websites pay them to help reach customers.
And this isn't a tortured analogy, it's somewhat direct to what was happening in the mobile market. T-Mobile in particular was famous for zero-rating its own services and making it so that its partner services didn't cost data. So of course that creates a less competitive Internet; it privileges T-Mobile's streaming/entertainment services by literally making it more expensive to access other services and by degrading their quality and speed.
But of course, that's just degrading experience. If you want to look at the end game, look at the proposals Facebook had for India with Facebook Basic's which was genuinely an Internet package that would only work with a subset of websites including Facebook. Facebook pitched this as a way to ramp up ISP production in India. The Indian government pitched it as a way to monopolize a fledgling market and to cement Facebook's dominance as a social network within India permanently, and they shut down Facebook Basics hard -- using Net Neutrality as the justification.
I would argue that a competitive Internet is better for consumers, although admittedly you might not always directly see the benefits instantaneously.
But I would also argue that before the 2015 rules, the Internet was headed in a direction that (while not as flashy as some of the doomsday predictions) was not that far off of them. We were headed towards data discrimination and Internet tiers, and the fact that we haven't seen those is down to the fact that consumers banded together and showed collective outrage in the form of encouraging this kind of regulation, then the fact that Net Neutrality was passed and this regulation barred ISPs from continuing in that direction, and then the fact that after it was repealed, somewhere in the neighborhood or 5-7 states passed their own versions of Net Neutrality that continued to block ISPs from going in that direction.
There's no reason to believe that without persistent activism and regulation efforts that we would be where we are today. As far as I'm concerned, Net Neutrality was extremely successful, and while it's regrettable that the situation with ISPs is still a giant mess and while the repeal was an unfortunate setback, it still even in that limited form moved the Internet in an extremely positive direction.
----
> as if firefighters not buying unlimited data and expecting to get unlimited data under fires is normal. It's emotional marketing.
Safety issues are emotional, but that doesn't mean they're not valid. It's emotional because the situation is egregious. The consequence of firefighters getting their data throttled unexpectedly during a statewide crisis is that people literally die.
Now, if there was nothing deceptive or egregious going on and the government was just asking for charity, that would be something. But Verizon is not guiltless here, the deceptive part of Verizon's marketing is that the firefighting crew thought they were buying unlimited data because the regulations around throttling and marketing for "unlimited" are very lax. The drop in their speeds came as a surprise event to them in the middle of a crisis.
Having minimum speeds for unlimited data makes sense because otherwise companies can market unlimited data that is in practice fully limited because after a threshold is met it becomes unusably slow. When I talk about throttling here, I'm talking about dial-up speeds.
My assertion would be, if a company markets its services as unlimited, and then in the middle of a crises says, "well, by unlimited we didn't mean unlimited Internet at usable speeds" and then they sit back and kind of wink and say "guess you should cut a deal with us, after all this is an emergency, don't be petty peoples lives are at risk" -- to me that's a clear public safety issue, I don't think companies should be in a position to so directly exploit emergencies. The Internet is critical infrastructure for society and if companies nickling and diming people means that our Internet isn't reliable and that it falls over randomly during crises, that will (and did) have consequences for public health.
----
> I'm not against net neutrality, but it seems like making a law to prevent juices from being sold as more than 70% distilled water, yet the market is already passed that part and uses real fruit juice concentrate and regular water. It was useful then, and after it was repealed nothing bad happened and the firefighter case was a bad case.
This is what I'm getting in my comments above: if your position is that Net Neutrality was on the books post-2018 in California and would have stopped a real Net Neutrality violation, then you're not really in a position to claim that the market has passed that point.
It doesn't make sense for you to claim that Net Neutrality is unnecessary and as evidence to point to a period of time where by your own admission, Net Neutrality was being enforced. If you want to talk about what a world looks like with no Net Neutrality regulation, look at the period of time where there was neither federal nor state regulation. And what you'll see if you look at that period of time is egregious violations that seemed to be trending worse leading up to the introduction of Net Neutrality. You can even go further back into history and look at Title II classification around phone services, which when introduced arguably sparked one of the largest periods of innovation in Internet history.
And you brought up the California laws yourself; I don't understand where you think the evidence is that the market ever self-corrected itself around Net Neutrality. The market was regulated away from an abusive behavior and then aggressively lobbied to get rid of the regulations, and then when states introduced their own regulations they got together with the federal government and started aggressively suing to remove the state regulations. What part of that is evidence of a self-correcting market?
If you take a cookie jar away from a toddler and you put it on the top of the fridge, and then you watch the toddler spend the next 2 hours trying to climb the fridge to reach the cookie jar, would you be convinced if the toddler then came to you and said, "see, it's been 2 hours and I haven't touched the cookies, so you can put them on the counter again, you can trust me"? ISPs are like the toddler. Since the introduction of Net Neutrality they have done nothing but expend enormous resources trying to get rid of the regulation. If they now want to say the regulation isn't needed... well, it's just not convincing because I just watched them try to climb the fridge for 2 hours.
----
The other thing I'll bring up once again is that there is no version of this where the FCC loses just the ability to regulate Net Neutrality. Net Neutrality was dropped by the federal government under the assertion that the FCC did not have the authority to regulate broadband. And I just don't think anyone would find it convincing to look at the current state of the ISP market and to argue that regulation isn't needed. I mean, you talk about competition, a federal one-touch-make-ready rule or requirements around interoperability or price transparency would be great for competition; we live in a world today where ISPs sue municipalities and indie upstarts for trying to compete with them and blatantly advertise deceptive prices for their services. 5G and Starlink are not on their own enough to counter that. If you want that behavior countered at a federal level, then the federal government has to be able to regulate ISPs and call them out for things like deceptive advertising or anticompetitive privileging of their own services.
I'm still waiting for my better internet service too... That never seemed to materialize after getting rid of net neutrality.
Even under the fair market, you would hardly call it fair, taking money from your customers to give them access to service providers, and taking money from your customer's service providers to allow them access to your customer... it doesn't make sense.
It was a shakedown plain and simple.
Not saying you are wrong about cost increases in general, I think it probably had more of an impact on more up and coming services who might not have the funds to ship out a ton of edge servers.