The FCC needs to stop 5G fast lanes
cyberlaw.stanford.edu
cyberlaw.stanford.edu
The biggest single reason why the USA's (and to a lesser extent Canada's) internet is shite is because of the monopolies that exist.
In the EU there are similar offers for "enhanced" access, but its not speeding up/slowing down apps, but giving "free" access, as in not counting to your data cap.
Instead of making the FCC stop fast lanes, the FCC should either be breaking up infrastructure from retailers (ie allowing regulated priced access like openreach) or splitting up operators and fining ones that dont provide proper access.
Actually many places offer choice between cable and DSL variants. But once there is fiber in the ground it actually doesn't make much sense to go with anything else, so choices disappear (only for connection type, not ISP). With fiber it's much cheaper to provide high speed access (and there is a much clearer update path).
This isn't a schoolyard playground. We don't have to play fair and treat these megacorporation with kid gloves. When the shoe is on the other foot, corporations don't play fair with us. "Fair" doesn't even come into the picture when they are in the conference room deciding their prices and terms. So why should the government treat them fairly when it comes to a regulatory solution?
And no cross subsidisation.
(I meant “fair to competitors”, but I think you thought I meant “fair to the infrastructure owner”.)
Speak for yourself, but I live on the west coast and my Internet connection is great.
Edit: downvoters, what are the problems with U.S. internet?
You're saying your Internet is fast enough for you, and that's fine and probably correct, but you're still getting slower speeds for higher prices than you should. You're also likely better situated than much of the rest of the country.
And what is your solution to that?
It never makes sense to me when people say how the US ranks last among developed countries on a bunch of metrics. Of course, that just means the US is indeed... less developed than those countries. If it's not fair to compare the US to Somalia, it's not fair to compare it to Sweden either. It just is what it is, somewhere between the two development extremes.
It’s also entirely factual to say that in comparison to other developed countries, the US lags in internet.
> other countries roughly in the same range as the US.
The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developed_country
I’m not sure how you can possibly argue that the US is not “developed”.
> The same range of what variable? How do you measure/define this?
Feel free to take any of those lists and compare the US to countries around them in those lists. The countries might differ slightly, but the notion of what is a “developed” country has been firmly established for a long time now.
The U.S. is considered developed only because it’s extremely rich. However, the general state of its infrastructure, education, governance, media, etc. is more typical of a developing country in many ways.
That’s my point: all these lists of things the U.S. is worse at than every developed country are collectively what it means to be developed, more so in my mind than just being rich.
Wtf!? Yes!
Now I'm curious what you thought developed means.
Anyway you're ignoring income. Seattle is around triple the median of France for example. You need to compare cities of similar size and income.
My current service is 130 a month for 200/20.
Its getting replaced: 50 bucks a month for 10gig fiber.
It's going to cost me 800 ish bucks to set up to take advantage of that (routing, switching, nic's)... I will still come out way ahead before the end of the year.
Competition has its benefits.
$40/month (if you don't rent a modem/eerio, which, why would you) for 10 gigs up and down, not to mention excellent customer service.
But I will happily admit that they're a bit of an outlier and the offerings in much of the country are complete shit.
Actual speeds are more like 5/7. But I’m happy!
Even if you deliver, surely you know that such a connection is an extreme, extreme outlier?
https://www.sonic.com/residential/internet
Looks like the prices must vary by location. They don’t have a price there.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/689876/average-mobile-sp...
Most people in urban areas can get deals like 300-500Mbps for < €30/month. I have symmetric 1Gbps and pay about the same, could get 8Gbps for €80 but have no use for it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_by_In...
My provider is SFR (the only one giving access to optical fiber in the small village where I live).
EDIT: I'm talking about home internet. For mobile internet, I pay 19.99€/month for unlimited access (5G), but I haven't done a speedtest.
The ISP that I currently use - Comcast Xfinity - is also the only cable provider in this area. I can get some mobile and satellite options, but they are all more expensive for lower speed and higher latency.
For me, internet is great (both wired and wireless). For wired, I have a choice of cable and FTTH in my apartment, both cancelable month-by-month and without any bullshit fees ("taxes and surcharges", yeah, believe it or not I also pay taxes and I don't make it your problem, ISP!) beyond the sticker price.
No idea if this is due to competition, regulation, or both; I suspect that at least the "no bullshit fees" part is due to the latter, as I can't imagine major US corporations all somehow collectively dropping them in one region but not the other.
I also don't doubt that it is significantly worse for somebody living elsewhere. Data caps seem to still be a thing for wired access in some places.
once you get outside of truly major metro areas, internet access tends to go to shit.
i've got 1G fiber internet in Seattle now, but in Everett ~25M shared access comcast is the best you can do in a lot of places. and it isn't like you need to be surrounded by cows and horses to have bad internet, you can have the boeing factory just down the road, but you're living in a ~100k population city as opposed to a tech hub.
London: look for a good offer, phone up a few ISPs, get a quote, work out if we have spare capacity in the building (we did) boom, 1 gigabit install inside a month.
Redwood city: 6 months. we had some sort of shitty T3 line installed as a stopgap. It never reached SLA. I had to phone the NOX, get a report. I then phoned the EMEA president of $large_International_network_provider to complain personally that I had to do the work of half his fucking company to get dailup++ installed. I left before they managed to get actual fibre into the building.
Santa Monica: "we cant install fibre as the previous engineer reported seeing eyes under the building" Try and use a different company. Turns out that there is only that company in santa monica (Can't remember which) Ok, order an upgrade to what we already have. "line is bad needs replacing" cue me having to _fucking fly out_ and manage the fourth attempt at upgrading because the company are such useless fucking pricks.
domestic wise
I am in the suburbs, they've just rolled out fibre to the house. I have 900 meg down with 100(might be more) up for £50 a month. Thats the pricy version with a fixed ipv4 address.
I can get a less fancy version for £30.
> In the EU there are similar offers for "enhanced" access, but its not speeding up/slowing down apps, but giving "free" access, as in not counting to your data cap.
They do that because speeding up/slowing down apps is illegal and they are using loopholes in the law to get around that.
Why do these have to be in contention?
Regulations are a critical factor in ensuring competition in markets. Without regulations monopolies quickly come to power because your power and influence is not linearly (or sublinearly) correlated to your size (even excluding lobbying power). A free market is a ,,well'' regulated market. A laissez-faire market is only free in passing.
I for one, would rather not rely on the assumption of magic.
We know what we want and it's achievable directly. Let's not Rube Goldberg it.
I never claimed. I simply pointed out that claiming something illegal is not being done by corporations due to increased competition is inherently a BS argument. It's not being done because it's illegal irrespective of the competitive landscape.
Not to turn this into a pissing contest, but Canada's internet is far more shite and far more captured by an oligopoly. Independent ISPs are harder to find than competition up here in the North.
The mobile space is more challenging. A number of those co-ops and government ISPs were running mobile service back in the mid 2000s, but they never found the customer base and most of them eventually shut it down, Tbaytel and Sasktel being the exceptions.
That said, many of those ISPs have more recently turned to reselling Big 3 service, so you can still at least minimize how much the Big 3 take, giving the small guy at least some of the cut. Maybe some day they can take that small cut and build out their own network again? But, you get what you choose to become a customer of, I suppose.
That's cold comfort to the overwhelming majority of people who aren't served by such ISPs. Population of...
Saskatchewan (Sasktel): 1.1M
Bruce County (Bruce Telecom): 66.5k
Thunder Bay District (Tbaytel): 146k
Prince Rupert, British Columbia (CityWest): 13k
That makes up a total of 1.3M, against Canada's population of 37.0M.
Moreover, looking at Sasktel's website[1], their prices don't look too competitive. They're asking for $105/month for 1G (promotional offer, regular price $150), which is actually worse than what corporate ISPs offer, eg. $110/month for 1.5G (promotional offer, regular price $130)[2].
[1] https://www.sasktel.com/store/browse/Personal/Internet/Inter...
But is actually warm comfort as it shows a proven model that anyone, anywhere in Canada can also do. It's just a matter of whether or not the people actually care if they are a customer of an independent, or if being a customer of a major is just as good or better.
> Moreover, looking at Sasktel's website[1], their prices don't look too competitive.
Sure. Nobody said owning your own business allowed it to operate for free. Publicly-owned and co-op businesses are not a panacea. But they are independent and free of a major private business, which is the topic at hand.
Saskatchewan's population is ~80% rural, and Sasktel doesn't operate outside of Saskatchewan. It isn't terribly surprising that it costs more to service rural areas, and without much in the way of an urban base to help subsidize the operation. But this does indicate that other providers are operating within reasonable margins. Indeed, Canada is a very expensive place to do business in, and not just in telecom. You are never going to see cheap internet compared to other countries, or much of anything, without radically upheaving what the country stands for.
But quite relevant as they provide a proven, working model that can be used anywhere in Canada. That's the beauty of public/cooperative ownership – all people have to do is do it.
> here in Quebec it's either Videotron or bell
What about CoopTel, Sogetel, and Téléphone de Courcelles?
Also a part from sogetel, those are either very small or regional. Even sogetel is regional and doesn't really provide services outside small villages and cities. That's not bad, but it's not enough to say that Canada's market isn't deeply uncompetitive. Even the US has tons of cooperative and WISPs that follow a similar coop pattern.
The vast majority of people can do the same. What do you think public/cooperate ownership is, exactly? It isn't something that magically comes down from space by aliens or sent to us by god. They are by the people. All the people have to do is do it!
> Also a part from sogetel, those are either very small or regional.
So? They still exist in Quebec. The question was really trying to ask why you didn't mention them?
If you like their model, and want to see them grow, then you'd think you'd be preaching their existence to high heaven. The only way small businesses can grow to cover the nation is to have people talk about them. No business has ever swept the nation in secrecy. Yet here we are, even after we started talking about them, being told that they shouldn't be talked about because they are too "insignificant".
Why is it that the people who complain about the "Big 3" most are the ones who seem most happy to keep on using their service?
That's also in breach of EU net neutrality laws. A Dutch ISP lost a lawsuit over this for providing free Spotify traffic. I don't remember which one, I think it was T Mobile (now called Odildo or something lol)
And of course, it is clever marketing. Even here we are talking about it.
Maybe it's just because I'm old and remember the clusterfuck when the EU decided one TV company couldn't hold the rights to all the football matches.
(They divvy the rights up in such a way that you can't see a single competition on just one service, let alone just one team's matches.)
But those lanes should:
- Be general categories of use
- Only be created by regulation
- Be freely accessible to any app
- Not involve any app-ISP paymentThey should simply qualify for it on the basis of their use case.
E.g. "video streaming" or "real-time telecom"
The internet infrastructure was built with certain utilization and speed in mind. Instead of owning up to the fact that it’s not as good as it used to be, these companies are selling quality of service products. Otherwise it’s too much of a publicity hit if they admit it.
"Unlimited" plans have always irked the hell out of me, because they rarely are.
I think capped totals (ideally without overage charges and with slow-lane bandwidth until reset) are perfectly fine.
But I'm 100% against named exclusions that don't count against a cap -- that's unfairly preferring an existing incumbent, and doesn't benefit the consumer in the larger/competition sense.
That's a complete different game than that between end-customers, ISPs and service providers.
https://broadbandnow.com/Tennessee/Chattanooga
Pretty ridiculous and disingenuous to call it "monopoly".
You can say that as many times as you want, but you don't have any evidence or even an explanation.
If there were ten power lines and ten water pipes to your house would say each of those twenty companies had a monopoly?
Repeating something isn't evidence of anything.
The provider you're talking about is the utility company. You might not know why the utility company provides the internet either. It's because before that they couldn't get the other companies (AT&T, Comcast, Hughe, Verizon) to offer good speeds and reasonable rates. The utility also doesn't take a profit. Mind you, those other companies still operate and no one is holding them back. They just decided that the profit margins weren't worth it, though they did lobby against NoogaNet.
It's not a monopoly. It's a city coming together and saying
Fuck you, give us good internet or we're going to build our own internet w̶i̶t̶h̶ ̶b̶l̶a̶c̶k̶j̶a̶c̶k̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶h̶o̶o̶k̶e̶r̶s̶
This is an interesting problem to me and seems to be quite a prolific issue. I think it is because everyone feels like they are a tiny meaningless cog in a giant machine. But this confuses me. Even tiny cogs play an important role. Even if your function is redundant, that redundancy is built in for a reason. I hear the common sentiment "you're replaceable" and I think people take this to be "perfectly" fungible. But you may be a replaceable worker, but that also doesn't mean replacing you is easy. They usually gotta look for someone new, pay them more, and then train them (this is why I'm also really confused why companies won't increase existing workers' salaries against new hires. Because your current workers likely have significantly more utility than a new worker. You lose money by doing this. Not to mention essentially give away your work practices to competitors, weirdly leveling the playing field).
But it infuriates me when there are things that are universally hated, have relatively easy solutions, AND no one does anything. Be it a boss/manager who just says no to pressing a button that enables functionality where all the work has already been done and tested. Or simply voting in a new politician when everyone hates the current one. Or how 1 in 4 Americans dislike both Trump and Biden. How the early primary states will not even use their advantage to push towards a different candidate because we're playing this stupid game of chicken where people act like the primaries aren't actually the BEST time to vote or signal for a different candidate. I just don't get it...
And I've always been a fan of government directly participating in the market. (Even though I generally like weaker/smaller governments.) They can set a baseline. Gov is always participating, regardless, since they do regulations and all that, so I don't buy those arguments. But there are many more things becoming natural monopolies as advantage is provided by scale. A government actor essentially is able to set pseudo regulations by participating. USPS helps make FedEx and UPS better, but now they get so many cuts that UPS uses them as last mile deliverers despite operating in the region. Still, USPS ensures mail gets to people who would otherwise not be able to even get mail. I don't see why we don't have similar services from broadband and telecommunications. They are essential services these days. Plus, it would create a lot of good quality jobs as not only those people needed to maintain the systems but even all the contractors to do the initial buildouts.
Oh, we already know how this one works. People generally like their elected representative, because that's how they won in that district. The district has e.g. a large employer, and the representative makes sure those jobs for the people in the district aren't lost. Even though that's the very thing people in other districts are complaining about, and in order to get that one thing the representative had to betray the citizenry in 250 other subtle ways to get votes from 250 other districts.
This is why federal legislation was originally meant to be limited in scope and require approval from both the House and the Senate, the latter of which was meant to be appointed by the state legislatures and thereby more inclined to reject that kind of populist vote buying and expansion of federal power. But we changed all that without thinking it through and now we suffer the consequences.
This is definitely part of it but not all of it. There's more. I hear people complaining about the exact people they vote for.
I think another part of the problem is simply parties. We vote along lines rather than actual beliefs. I actually believe we'd be better off without them. Or at least affiliations on ballots. Like how we do judges. Hand out a booklet, let people vote by mail and take their time. But don't give people the super lazy version. Some friction is good, too much is bad.
The issue I see is it just makes tribalism very easy. And it's very easy to abuse this. Even countries with more than two parties only effectively have two either via major parties or through coalitions. America just has their coalitions under two big umbrellas (Biden and AOC in the same party? Trump and Romney? Those would be different parties in many European countries, but under the same coalitions)
The two party system itself is caused by first-past-the-post voting. In that system if there are more than two parties, the two most similar parties split the vote and both lose, giving them the incentive to merge together instead of running against each other, until there are only two left. Score voting/approval voting fixes this.
There's much more complexity to it all, but yeah, voting systems are important. The cardinal systems are just about better embedding preference while minimizing the capacity to hack. But they still assume rational voters. These cardinal systems may make strategic voting less effective, but they don't prevent them. A major benefit to be though is transparency, since it is easier to understand the tallying. Especially when it is (parallel) column sum and argmax. Much easier to understand than multi-round elections. (Could you imagine the Arizona recount with RCV...)
But again, you can build more representation and transparency into the system but it doesn't remove the human component. Where name recognition is a major predictor in winner. Where people are not investing time to vote. This takes a much larger cultural shift to have things like giving people time to research their candidates. But a single extra day off is probably just going to be used to catch up on all the more immediate issues we have. We're all constantly playing catch-up and truth of the matter is that politics is much more abstract than these things and so it gets de-prioritized. Voting systems won't fix that (obviously I still actively advocate for cardinal systems though. I'm a firm believer in addressing problems from the bottom up)
Isn't it? FPTP makes it all but impossible to sustain a third party because of the vote splitting effect. Even when there have been new major parties in the past, they replaced one of the major parties instead of coexisting alongside them for any significant period of time. The most viable districts for minor parties like the Green Party are the ones where the least similar major party is completely out of the running and then the minor party serves the role of the second party rather than a third.
> Where people are not investing time to vote.
But these things are related. If you have a two party system then you typically either have a clear choice where you know without doing much investigation which party you favor, or you don't align with either of the major parties and then no party satisfies you and your choice is basically a coin flip. Neither of these promote investigation because either the choice is obvious or the choice is unsatisfying and equivocal.
Wheres if you had e.g. four viable parties, there would much more likely be one that does closely represent your interests, and another that could come close, giving voters the incentive to at least pay enough attention to distinguish them.
I guess it depends how you are using "cause." Is it a causal variable? Sure, I wouldn't push against that. But I want to stress rather that it is a pressure rather than the only contributing variable. That there are more variables with similarly strong pressures, such that by fixing voting we shouldn't expect to have a stable system with multiple parties overnight. Unfortunate as is, things are never that simple. Even more unfortunately, not being transparent about this seems to have the effect of making more progress because people will reframe things as "well we were promised x would fix y, and it didn't, so why should we expect z to be any different?"
But I want to be abundantly clear, I am very in favor of changing to cardinal systems and it is one of the few things I take very seriously when it comes to politics. It is hard to know me and not know about approval and star. You could call me annoying lol. But I want to also make clear that while this is an important step, it isn't the end. It is especially important to remember that democracies are not stable equilibria, but unstable. We will always need to take care and never get lazy. It's unfortunate, but that is the price of freedom. Luckily with most things, effort is low to maintain systems if you are consistent. Unluckily, we're really bad at maintenance and think it is best to fix things when they are problems rather than fixing things before they're broken (a much cheaper solution in money, time, and effort). We've been fooled by "don't fix what ain't broke." That's actually the best time to fix things.
> But these things are related.
I agree. And that's part of an even larger coupled system. The tyranny of coupled systems is that you can't solve the problem by solving one equation at a time. You have to solve them together.
I'll give you an added incentive for cardinal systems that you might not be aware of. They're also REALLY good for analysis. Much better than ordinal actually. Reason being exactly why they are good for voting too actually. It is all about how we embed information. Cardinal (with exception of approval) has the benefit of non-fixed distances being placed upon candidates. While this doesn't have infinite resolution, it can allow us to express how much more we like someone than someone else. You probably know this part but it needed be restated. The analysis part comes down to looking at all these interactions beyond who just wins an election. You have a much better idea about where your voters actual preferences are. You do likely have to end up doing some proxy estimations here (such as most of winning candidate A's voters who did not pick them as their primary candidate picked candidate B. This suggest A should shift more towards B's policy for proper representation! Not only do we pick a better candidate, but we have a clearer picture of where the actual public preference is. This can, and should, be used even down to a regional level to help candidates become the best representatives they can.
BUT like all things, this too can be hacked. You can of course become just enough representative. This might be a helpful video to visualize this issue[0]. I should also add that of course voter preference actually lies along a much higher dimensional manifold than the one we are expressing with any proposed voting system. I don't actually suggest increasing the dimensionality because you have to balance simplicity and transparency. But there is a problem that distances are far more complicated of a subject than many actually like to believe. This is actually at the core of the Curse of Dimensionality (the furthest point becomes more difficult to distinguish from the nearest point, which is why it is generally discussed with kNNs, but generally this isn't always stated or remembered). It's also important to remember that operations may not always be well defined. I am mentioning this because the issue being discussed in [0] can be exploited in any dimension and any distance function we set. This can better illustrate the point I made about unstable equilibria. And you'll notice their suggested defense explicitly depends on the public coming together to act as a coalition and to treat policy setters (government) as an adversary. Which we both have agreed in the past is a core American ideal. It is why I am against labeling and any form of tribalism. But we must admit this is a difficult task, even if it is a core concept of what makes civilization possible in the first place: considering your neighbors. So I just want to always stress that. Don't just consider what is best for you, or for your family. But make sure to always consider those around you, especially those you disagree with, because they are the ones that can be leveraged against you (and you against them!) to have a worse outcome for everyone.
The tyranny of the modern world is that it is complex and interconnected. That we've solved most of the simple problems. So the dangers that are presented to us generally are due to abstraction and complexity. There are not more "first order" (if this then that) problems. And anyone trying to sell you that is either naive or deceiving you. Even if that person is ourselves (it often is).
I'm not sure that's the case, at least if you're willing to extend "overnight" to something like "over two or three election cycles."
If we were to adopt e.g. approval voting, the immediate effect would be that existing third party candidates who currently get ~1.2% of the vote would be able to get 20-30%, because voters would no longer have to be concerned about "wasting" their vote on a non-major party candidate they might actually prefer. In a small number of districts, like Libertarians in parts of New Hampshire or Greens in parts of California, the third party candidate might even immediately win.
Which in turn would change the nature of the very next election, because the media would have no excuse to dismiss a candidate who got 30% approval in the previous election when the losing major party candidate only got 32% -- or 29%. Then third party candidates get into the debates and have the opportunity to turn their 30% into 55%.
Moreover, it doesn't take a lot of seats to make a difference. Suppose the Republicans have 48 seats, the Democrats have 49 and a third party has 3. Those 3 seats are all either of the major parties need for a majority, so the third party would have a significant amount of influence.
> You can of course become just enough representative. This might be a helpful video to visualize this issue
Isn't this exactly the thing which is solved by cardinal systems? If you put candidate A, B and C or policy A, B and C all on the ballot together and have people rate them, there is no longer an ordering problem because you're not holding separate votes for A vs. B and, B vs. C and C vs. A. If Policy A gets a higher average rating than Policies B or C then it will always win when they're all on the ballot until voter preferences change.
The people choosing which candidates or policies make it onto the ballot have a lot of power, but that's always the case. Even if 100% of voters agree that Policy A is the best policy, if the only policies on the ballot are B and C then nobody can vote for Policy A. Obvious solution is to allow any policy or candidate onto the ballot that can gather a threshold number of signatures, instead of giving control over this to some manipulative autocrats.
Fundamentally, this is a problem with representative democracy in general. There's simply no way a single person in the House can meaningfully represent 750k diverse people (especially with crude grouping by location) in the first place. In US, the original design of the system explicitly recognized that: "the number of representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty thousand". The problem, of course, is that this wasn't sustainable as population grew, which is why it eventually became a fixed number of seats instead. Either way, even with 30k per representative, there's just no way one can well and truly vote on their actual beliefs in a consistent way. You have to compromise some of them for the sake of others, and then justify those compromises to yourself somehow. And the easiest way for our monkey brain to do that is to do the us-vs-them thing, and then justify the compromise by asserting that it is for the sake of "us".
I think that if we want actual democracy of beliefs, we need to seriously start looking into either more direct democracy (seems more viable with the state of instant communication these days), or else multi-level federated systems such as council democracy.
This leads to coalitions, not necessarily parties. And then the coalition changes as a result of elections, because a different combination of blocs can form a majority.
It also doesn't necessarily have to be the same set of people even within an election cycle. Suppose you have (representing ideologies rather than parties) 40 democrats, 40 republicans, 15 libertarians and 5 greens. The greens wouldn't have enough seats to do anything, and the democrats and republicans together could do whatever they wanted, but so could the libertarians and either of the democrats or republicans.
Then in the same session you might have a bill that eliminates mandatory minimum sentences favored by the democrats and libertarians, another that lowers taxes on small businesses favored by the republicans and libertarians, and a third that creates a new Medicare benefit favored by democrats and republicans.
Then in the next election one of the major blocs ends up with 48 votes, which is very different, because now a majority coalition is either them and anyone else including the smallest bloc, or not-them but all of the other blocs together.
> There's simply no way a single person in the House can meaningfully represent 750k diverse people (especially with crude grouping by location) in the first place.
There is no way for a policy to represent any plurality of distinct individuals, because they'll each want different things. But a representative can try to balance their interests as best they can, and an election using a less defective voting system than FPTP would actually impose consequences on pissing off significant parts of the district, because a candidate which is similar but different along that dimension could plausibly replace them in the next election.
> direct democracy (seems more viable with the state of instant communication these days)
Direct democracy is best when it's used to repeal or veto things or otherwise bind the government, acting as one of the checks and balances against corruption. Using it to create new crimes or spending programs leads to unchecked populism.
We have enough trouble with that as it is because we made it too easy to pass national laws without broad consensus. What you want instead is "laboratories of democracy" where different localities try different things and then everyone can see how each of them goes and make their own decision, and continue that way until the right answer is clear enough to achieve consensus and go through a much more deliberative process to pass a national law. Or, for that matter, just let each of the localities separately pass the law there is now consensus should exist.
There's no way for policy on one issue to represent a plurality of distinct individuals, but most issues are broadly orthogonal and not particularly strongly related in and of themselves. Any single candidate, however, is effectively a packaged bundle of policies on all those orthogonal issues. That bundling is the problem.
I think that any claim that representative democracy somehow does not also lead to "unchecked populism" has been disproven by experience of the past century or so. All this stuff about how it lets you have wise, even-handed leaders that "temper the mob sentiment" was ultimately just wishful thinking - it turns out that those kinds of leaders generally tend to lose elections to populists. If you're really lucky, you get someone who runs on a populist platform and then turns around and does the whole sage king thing.
We're in enough trouble as it is because we shoved most politics up to national level. On that level, any way to enact extensive policies will be problematic simply because broad consensus doesn't scale well to that level. I agree that the solution to that is indeed "laboratories of democracy" where highly localized decisions can be made tailored to the local wants and needs, and where people can easily vote their feet - somewhere around the municipal level is probably fine-grained enough for that, I think, although large metropolitan areas would need further breakdown (which is not a problem with multi-level federalism). But when you get to that level of decentralization, direct democracy works pretty well beyond just serving as a check on representative bodies, and can itself be made more deliberative with fewer people involved.
I also agree that it's generally too easy to pass "will somebody please do something?!" type legislation, but that is true in either representative or direct democracy, and so there need to be checks on that either way. Supermajority requirements & automatic sunsetting can help a lot there, especially if the sunsetting term is proportional to the amount of votes the law gets - so e.g. if it can barely pass, then it needs to be re-enacted every year, while something that has near unanimous support is kept around for decades.
The difference is that the majority coalition changes with every election, which prevents ossification. The positions of Democrats and Republicans are fairly stable over time; the positions of a majority coalition will depend entirely on its membership.
> Any single candidate, however, is effectively a packaged bundle of policies on all those orthogonal issues. That bundling is the problem.
The bundling is a feature, provided that similar but not identical candidates aren't suppressed by the voting system. It allows the candidate to find the compromise on each issue that best satisfies the district, or lose to someone who does.
> I think that any claim that representative democracy somehow does not also lead to "unchecked populism" has been disproven by experience of the past century or so. All this stuff about how it lets you have wise, even-handed leaders that "temper the mob sentiment" was ultimately just wishful thinking - it turns out that those kinds of leaders generally tend to lose elections to populists.
This happens when the representatives are all just proxy votes. The degenerate case is where you elect someone to represent you for the vote on a single bill and then elect a new representative whenever there is a new bill. Obviously that isn't going to act as much of a check on populism.
But now consider the original structure of the US Senate. Senators were appointed by state legislatures across staggered 6-year terms. In order to enact a populist federal policy, you have to capture a majority of state legislatures, then you had to hold that majority for six years to replace the majority of Senators. In order to enact a populist policy expanding federal power, you had to overcome the tendency for state legislatures not to appoint Senators favoring the expansion of federal over state power. It actually worked pretty well until the 17th Amendment broke it by causing Senators to be directly elected. After that populism was unavoidable whenever the majority party in the House matched the one in the Senate. By no coincidence did this then happen immediately.
Adopt a cardinal voting system so there are more than two viable parties and go back to Senators being elected by state legislatures and see what happens.
> But when you get to that level of decentralization, direct democracy works pretty well beyond just serving as a check on representative bodies, and can itself be made more deliberative with fewer people involved.
If you make the jurisdictions small enough then direct democracy works okay, modulo some constraints on what policies can be enacted so you don't have towns coming up with ways to abuse non-constituents, e.g. by imposing extractive tolls or fines on anyone who has to pass through. Or to pick an existing major problem, zoning to price out existing non-residents. But the hyper-local laws aren't usually the problem to begin with, because then people can viably vote with their feet and the jurisdictions are under significant competitive pressure. The main problem is what to do about federal laws.
My main point is about putting party affiliation on ballots. I have less of a problem with the existence of parties than I do as making it the only deciding factor in a person's decision to vote a certain way.
I want people banding together over ideas rather than labels. While this may be the intent of parties, we can observe that in our current form, labels are more important than ideas. So my point is about adding a rather minimal amount of friction between the two. So that we can better distinguish labels from ideas.
This is hard. Start here: https://madned.substack.com/p/thin-pipe-part-i
The problem is the activation energy and a bunch of people who will oppose you no matter how useful something is.
The problem with unregulated broadband isn't the lack of regulation in the abstract, it's the lack of regulation over a sector that has 2(±1) choices per household and no easy path for new entrants.
Except none of it happened. It turns out there's actually kind of okay competition in this space. Maybe not as much as there should be, but prices have stayed reasonable, broadband access is expanding, and people by and large don't seem bothered by data caps when they're subject to them, and they have access to reasonably priced, uncapped plans.
All that said, I certainly won't say no to reinstating net neutrality, since I don't think you can argue it'll make anything worse. In fact it might make competition easier. But it's not the existential pillar to online existence that we seemed to think it was.
Helps that I was seeing the whole thing from the outside as a non-US-resident.
Their goal was to avoid excess, so maybe they could argue that net neutrality wasn't a good idea anyway, so they could gradually introduce new revenue streams from apps/platforms.
If ISPs are playing the long game, they're being incredibly patient about it.
They actually are, and this is how politics and lobbying work. In 2017 it made no sense for US ISPs to run ragged over net neutrality when the 2020 election was looming and far from predictable. Even less once Biden gets elected.
Plus there was the credible threat of state-level laws, which are even worse from the ISPs standpoint since each might go farther than the FCC rules in certain ways.
The California law passed and was a really big deal.
If you're looking for a controlled experiment of what the world looks like without net neutrality rules, just look to countries where there was never any such movement or credible threat of them.
Across Africa, for example, 1GB of mobile data can cost 10x more if you're accessing the normal Internet, vs. a mainstream service like WhatsApp or Youtube.
ISPs use net neutrality violations for price discrimination to extract more from white collar workers who need access to the Internet beyond WhatsApp-- which is fine until you think about the effects on any new WhatsApp competitor.
For example, it's the norm across Africa for providers to offer plans with radically lower per-GB costs for WhatsApp, Youtube, and other mainstream apps, as a way to price discriminate and charge a premium to tech and white collar workers who need access to the actual Internet. In such countries you would expect TikTok adoption to happen more slowly than expected.
Whereas if you want to build something based on IPFS or just host your own website out of your home/business, ISPs have the incentive to thwart this, because then they couldn't double dip anymore. See also cable companies explicitly designing slow upload speeds into the most widely deployed versions of DOCSIS.
So then you're creating a bias towards centralized closed-source services instead of open standards and self-hosting.
> "Mobile carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon that have been degrading video quality for mobile users will have to stop."
This is literally what the article is about. It's happening now, it's been happening, it will continue to happen unless the laws get restored.
2. "Net neutrality" is a term that doesn't have a precise meaning, and I'd rather not get into a fight about what it really means. That said, in the context of this discussion about the net neutrality fight in 2017, and whether the doomsayers' prediction came to pass, I think it's fair to compare to the pre-2017 net neutrality regime. In that context it's not clear whether "degrading video quality for mobile users" would be illegal. For instance "network management" was explicitly allowed, and only "pay for priority" would be banned[1]. Moreover there was a court case a few years before where FCC fought to prevent bittorrent being throttled, and lost the case on appeal.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_S...
If you repeal the law against burglary and then burglary doesn't immediately skyrocket, would you say that we shouldn't have a law against burglary? Of course not, because regardless of how often it happens, you'd like it to never happen and would want to prosecute it any time it does regardless of how often.
"Not with a bang but a whimper."
Public sentiment was pretty high and we actually had network neutrality for the first 40 years of the Internet not to mention the over 100M people who live in states that adopted laws.
https://www.ncsl.org/technology-and-communication/net-neutra...
lol. This is better attributed to you getting used to the shitty situation you, and everyone else in your country, is dealing with. Your speeds are shit and you're paying too much for them, and those "not bothered by data caps" just don't know better anymore.
None of what you've listed would be fixed by net neutrality.
I could have five but what would I even do with it?
The other big factor is the threat of new FCC rules, state laws, or federal law. As long as net neutrality advocates can pose a credible threat of passing rules that, from the ISP's point of view, are more restrictive than the status quo, ISPs have to think twice before engaging in what John Oliver famously called "cable company f*ckery".
The free access also came with a limit like bitrate and video resolution.
If you want to have ISP-level competition, one of the better ways to do it is to have the government install cable trenches along the roads which the government then owns and provides cheap access for anyone to lay cable. Once the trenches exist, wiring a neighborhood with fiber is then far less expensive and makes it feasible to have multiple competitors.
Canada is basically just three big resource companies propped up by a massive housing bubble that traps newcomers in debt slavery in a form of reverse colonialism where they trick immigrants to become serfs paying rent so people who bought homes in the 80s (after working for like 6 months) can keep flipping it to the next wave of immigrants and blame them with the media owned by the very oligarchs that are supposed to regulate the real estate industry (lol!).
They don't even bother using or valuing the skills and experience these immigrants bring - you've got surgeons from the UK working as cashiers, immigrants without income so all they can do is start businesses or become traders, all to line the pockets of the ultra-rich oligarchs who get everything for cheap and flip at insane markups. They have every Prime Minister wrapped around their little finger, letting them monopolize everything and then screwing over everyone that comes to this miserable piece of land.
Take this one famous billionaire in Vancouver - I'm not gonna name names, but this dude practically owns all the salmon in BC, along with Aboriginal monopolies that were handed out just because of what has been described in anthropology textbooks as "white guilt". Then there's another billionaire from Ottawa who has a monopoly on the legal drug market - guy ended up getting choked out with a wire, and the RCMP just called it an "accident." Oh, and let's not forget the billionaire who somehow scored the exclusive rights to run the only online casino in BC. The list goes on and on.
There's no such thing as a free market in Canada - it's just a banana republic country club for the rich old Canadians at the top. Actually, I'm not even sure if the casino guy was born in Canada, but he definitely looks like he could be.
So yeah, to a lesser extent makes no sense here as somebody that has decades of experience with that country. At least America still recognizes the value of some free market and competition with or without a housing bubble.
It was an absolute shitshow. Actually, a shitshow would have been cleaner.
Immediately AT&T rolls out gigabit internet, but not everywhere. I was in one of the small towns with gig and the previous renter had AT&T. AT&T literally cut the lines into the apartment instead of disconnecting them, causing me to have a $50 install fee (the technician was clearly also annoyed).
Then Google, AT&T, and Comcast got into a big fight and it got political. Politicians would talk about how Google coming in was preventing competition (I shit you not) and attacking the little guys. Then a judge ruled that Google couldn't operate on telephone polls because Google would "cause danger to employees" and "be a union violation" (not the unions saying these things, it was AT&T. Obviously this made people think the unions were blocking things and continued to get mad at unions)[0]. So basically one of a Comcast and AT&T technician had to be there while Google would place in fiber and you know how it goes.
It was a literal circus and the whole while it was politicized and misinformation was spreading like wildfire. Big Tech screwing over the little guys. Big Tech coming after the public utilities (never happened). Unions making everything impossible. Something about Big Tech and liberals/trans/gays taking over at some point. Like the on the ground conversations that would happen were mindbogglingly dumb. It actually was hard to figure out what was actually going on because every person and news article would have a unique story to tell. But the weirdest thing to me is about how nearly everyone I knew was a self-proclaimed Libertarian who hated government yet was licking their boots ad propping them up because they didn't want those gay/liberal/furry/godless/<insert random insult> techies rolling in decreasing competition and destroying the free market. That's when I truly started to believe that there's no such thing as a Libertarian (or any other cleanly encapsulated idea, but Libertarians are in your face), it's just a label. Because I watched anti-government free market devotees bend over backwards to protect monopolies and not even have a clue of the cognitive dissonance. It also made me really pay attention to how this happens more often than we care to think (including how we ourselves do it).
[0] https://www.tennessean.com/story/money/2017/11/22/judge-rule...
But yes, I mostly agree. Most of the people I know who would identify as libertarian, suddenly become much more comfortable with government action when the government is wanting to do something they like, or is even run by their person. Once "the other side" gets in control, they seem to rediscover their libertarian principles. Seeing this was a good reminder to me that we should look at actions, not words, when deciding who to vote for.
Truth is that people say they believe a lot of things but don't act as if those beliefs are true. I think people like labels more than beliefs.
A common one is how common it is to say that all politicians are corrupt. I know people that say that like it's a catch phrase and then when we talk post voting they vote in incumbents. ¯\ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯
there were such offers. about 10 years ago, but they are illegal EU-wide.
Spoiler: it has gotten way way worse. Not better.
This is counter-intuitive but here's how it works:
In a competitive marketplace ISPs have tighter margins and look for every opportunity for cost savings, so if throttling a high-bandwidth application only affects a small percentage of customers, and only a tiny tech-savvy minority of those affected will accurately attribute the effect to ISP throttling, it will incur only the tiniest competitive pressure on the ISP, so the ISP will do it to increase profits.
We actually saw more net neutrality violations in competitive EU markets than in the US, until EU-level net neutrality rules passed.
Another way to look at the limits of competitive pressure is from a startup's point of view: if your startup is offering a new videoconferencing service, how will competition help you when a rogue ISP breaks your service for 10% of your customers by throttling your service but putting Zoom in a fastlane? Your customers will not think "oh, I'd better switch to a better ISP," when ~10% of call participants are unintelligible. They will think, "oh, this new service sucks, I'm going to stick to Zoom."
Competitive pressure on ISPs does not protect nascent startups with small userbases from ISPs. And yet, everything we care about on the Internet started as a nascent startup with a small userbase.
Competition is great for keeping prices down and the US needs more of it. But to protect the long tail of startups and all the new ways people use the Internet from ISPs you need net neutrality laws.
1. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2700055. Key finding: Relying on consumer switching behavior to provide more comprehensive competitive discipline was insufficient for a variety of reasons, including the presence of switching costs.
As to why it has not happened yet: it is easier to corrupt a new infrastructure from the beginning than change one that is already entrenched.
They would.
The issue is that competition alone wouldn't fix it, because there is an information deficit. Some people will pick the lowest price and not realize that the ISP offering it is taking kickbacks from incumbent services to degrade their own competitors. And since this is always bad -- it's anti-competitive in the market for over-the-top services, so this is an anti-trust rule -- it should be prohibited regardless of whether there is competition in the ISP market. Because you need it in order to preserve competition in the markets for other services.
Don't assume that people only pick these plans because they're uninformed.
> And some people will pick the ISP where Disney's subsidizing the subscription to make Netflix look bad, and not care because they're only using the connection for SSH terminals and email
It seems unlikely that there are anywhere close to as many of the latter as the former
I'd be much happier if the government regulations gave me information to make an informed decision rather than forced a decision on me.
Suppose Facebook doesn't want anyone using their competitors, so they subsidize the cost on some ISPs that then block their competitors. The customers of those ISPs are 15% of the market, and they know the other competitors are blocked, but they want the discount. Then the other 85% of people have to use Facebook in order to communicate with anyone on one of those ISPs, and social networks have a network effect, so now everybody is stuck on Facebook even if they don't use one of those ISPs, because they know somebody who does. This is anti-competitive and so an anti-trust problem.
I'd rather have choice and transparency and see if the situation you've described arises. It sounds completely unrealistic to me and we don't have to make laws and regulations cover every single edge case right away, they can be modified as we go.
You've failed to understand the example. Nobody would have to change ISPs to use Facebook because Facebook paid off the ISPs for some form of exclusivity. It is Facebook's competitors who would struggle wity user acquisition because not only do you have to convince users to change ISPs to use your competing platform, but you have to convince all your frienda and family to switch too if you wanna be able to call them.
> It sounds completely unrealistic
You are incredibly naive then. This sort of thing regularly happens all around the you. Kickbacks, exclusivity and companies colluding for competitive advantage is commonplace, not unrealistic.
For the US, looking at iMessage's example, I'd say the trend would go the other way and Facebook getting way more power.
it is very hard to force trancparancy.
Transparancy (at least how I see it) is matter of culture.
For example, if you open up ISP accounting books to the public, creative people will find ways to hide things. Instead of line item “10M € kickback from facebook”, there will be “10M € sale to facebook”.
Instead: make it a utility, subject to regulation and codes as any other. I don’t need to be a plumber to ensure I get adequate sewer service, I don’t need to be an electrician to ensure that I get adequate electrical service, why should I need to be sysadmin to make sure I get adequate network service? It makes no sense. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it makes even less sense because those examples require less education overall than you would to detect bad faith behavior on the part of your ISP. if you don’t have enough water pressure for your shower to function, you don’t need to be a plumber to diagnose that. If your homes electrical service is so bad that you can’t run your appliances you don’t need to be an electrician to judge that. But how do you know if your given ISP is throttling Netflix without substantial IT in your background?
I don’t think it’s an outrageous opinion that any Tom, Dick, or Harry, who is participating in this market should be able to get the service to a reasonable standard of quality that they are paying for without needing to verify it independently.
To an extent, cellular is a natural oligopoly. Each carrier needs enough spectrum to have decent service. But it isn’t a monopoly.
But even if it were, it’s #199542 why HN commenters don’t understand what a “monopoly” is and why utilities that require physical infrastructure which are natural monopolies aren’t the same as cellular where there are three healthy competitors.
It's a natural monopoly in exactly the same way any other utility is. "It doesn't make sense to have more than one utility build towers everywhere to create the needed infrastructure." In theory if only one company did it you would only need one set of towers and costs would be lower. But a private monopoly doesn't exactly optimize costs either, and some utilities cost more to duplicate than others. It's much more expensive to have redundant roads than redundant cables running along the same set of utility poles or in the same cable trench, and cell towers are on that end of the range.
The spectrum is a red herring. You could operate live auctions to bid on spectrum in real time in areas of scarcity instead of allocating it permanently to particular companies. This would also give companies the incentive to operate more towers at lower power levels, because you'd only need to bid on spectrum in the same collision domain and lower power levels would cause that to be smaller areas with less contention, lowering their spectrum costs.
And what problem are you trying to solve again?
This is decidedly the case with ISPs today, so arguments over the pedantic definition of monopolies and whether it applies here are rather irrelevant.
What do you hope to gain by regulation?
Unfortunately, if consumers can’t make an informed decision, then there isn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that the government, which is full of technically incompetent bureaucrats, is going to somehow make the right decision for them.
I’d sooner trust an average 15 year old to regulate the Internet than literally any elected politician or professional lobbyist.
This is such utterly brain-dead individualist defeatist nonsense that I struggle to respect it as an actual position. Do you believe either the common consumers or the politicians understand vehicles? And like, even the broad topic of vehicles belies several specifics of interest to regulators like emissions and safety features. Of course they don't know all of that. They hire in people qualified to judge the effectiveness of those systems and to write the regulations that will then be enforced by agencies charged with that task.
Is this perfect? Of course not, no human system is or ever will be, but I would argue that based on the overall trajectory from the initial rollout of cars in the 1940's to the average consumer, where we started with brutally primitive machines that would kill people basically all the time, both pedestrians and their drivers/passengers, that spewed black vile smoke out of completely audio and emission unmitigated exhausts and were utterly terrifying at even their comparatively low speeds, all the way until today, when you can, as a consumer, purchase a car that manages it's own emissions within the bounds of reason, has numerous safety features to keep you alive, and can safely travel at speeds that well exceed the maximums posted on any highway without utterly flying apart, as an original Model T probably would have attempting half that speed, and you can do that all without knowing fuck shit about cars, ensured of the fact that you will get at least a decent product that will not harm you if used properly? That seems to me to be overall, quite an effective regulatory atmosphere. Not perfect, again, but quite effective. And that regulatory market is broadly practiced every day for probably hundreds if not thousands of products you have purchased without a second thought, because you don't need to think about them, because government agencies you know nothing about are working to ensure the safety of that market.
We have had this shit figured out for almost a century I would say. The fact that ISPs now operate such an utterly critical resource for our daily lives with near total absence of regulation in terms of the product they deliver, the quality of it, the usability, etc. etc. is frankly ludicrous. We're sitting here having arguments about which ISP throttles which sites worse and how to avoid them, when the solution is clearly: Do not give them the fucking option to throttle any website. If you pay for your Internet service, you should be able to access Netflix, YouTube, Mega filesharing, 4chan, Imgur and fuckin PornHub at will with zero thought to the notion that any of them will perform any worse than any other because they didn't put together a sweetheart deal with your fucking cable company.
The problem with that statement is, like anything else imagined by bureaucrats, is divorced from reality. Hence my point that I wouldn’t trust the government to regulate the Internet.
Internet providers peer with dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of other networks. They do so in some cases by paying money, but in most cases through something called settlement free peering, which came out of mutually beneficial agreements to connect at perking exchanges. In all cases providers have avoided passing the costs down to consumers, even though the economics are incredibly complex.
IMHO Leave it to the experts. No one is paying a special fee to access 4chan or Netflix. It’s a big fat, widely disproven lie that proponents of net neutrality made up and have been arguing for nearly 15 years now, one that never came to pass.
How many of them are throttling content to prevent competition in this hypothetical anti-net neutrality scenario? Exactly zero.
Which is evidence to me that Net Neutrality is a sham, what more people need is a free market. Not another government monopoly with some regulations slapped on.
Google threw in the towel on wiring more new cities about mid-way through the SLC build, which makes need think perhaps the biggest obstacle to your thesis bearing fruit, is upfront infrastructure investments…
Google wanted a monopoly.
The nice thing is that they can properly screw off, because now we have dozens of better options where I’m supporting the little guy instead of Silicon Valley Big Tech.
Whether a market would converge on providers violating network neutrality depends on the characteristics of the market and its customers etc. But if nobody would have violated it anyway, what's the benefit of not having the law? Whereas if you don't have the law and do have violations, that's bad.
These are very real things. Regulating them out of existence makes no sense.
Are there examples of what you are talking about with zoom etc? Because as far as I can reason: if an isp throttled something like that in a high competition market, they'd lose their customers. And if it was a low user / start up phase app it wouldn't provide any competitive advantage for an isp to throttle it.
I’ve read that ISP buys various links to to other networks at various prices.
So maybe something like: if facebookBar server is on pricier linkFoo and for that reason ISP buys cheaper version of linkFoo effectively downgrading facebookBar service (along with everything on linkFoo)?
If such scenario is realistic, maybe it could be due to valid financial stuff, not due to anticompetetive behaviour. (Just saying, some technically valid scenarios should be taken into account)
> And if it was a low user / start up phase app it wouldn't provide any competitive advantage for an isp to throttle it.
What we’ve seen in developing nations is internet that’s subsidized but only for certain companies (eg free Facebook, paid everything else) and people just use Facebook and have 0 access to the outside internet.
There are examples in the US at least, albeit less severe. It was (is?) common for cell phone companies to offer unlimited data cellphone plans, but they throttle video streaming to a lower resolution. Then offer “unmetered streaming of Netflix” (pick your VOD provider) while, again, degrading the video stream of other companies.
I’m pro-net neutrality but also I question if subsidized internet would actually be bad. If you can take a heavily metered or poor service, and subsidize it, then that could be the tool that helps bring internet to more people at less cost to those users. Advertisers would basically be subsidizing internet through these giants. The catch would be to find rules that don’t throttle competition which I don’t know if that’s possible.
It was mostly. Basically in the USA it costs money to peer with people, and even more money to put edge caches inside the ISP's network (because that means the ISP can't charge for peering.)
This pissed of a bunch of rich web firms, so they poured money into pro net neutrality publications. (also a lot of anti copyright stuff as well, so they didn't have to pay content creators, but thats a different topic)
In the UK, peerings is much much cheaper because of LINX and other peering exchanges. moreover, having an edge cache inside your network saves you cash as you don't need to spend as much arranging upstream peering. (It might save money on transfer between last mile and the core network, but I'm hazy on the costs there.)
The overall net effect isn’t what you say it is though.
If you model it, how could competition work to protect a YC startup with 1,000 or 10,000 users?
You can't start an alternative ISP at that scale, so it's unthinkable that a new ISP would emerge just to serve that throttled startup's pissed off users.
And again, only a tiny minority of users would correctly attribute throttling-induced failure to the ISP. Most will attribute it to the new startup being janky.
Even or those who do correctly attribute it, what are they going to do? Convince everyone they want to use this new product with to switch ISPs?
You are right that net neutrality, and competitive markets (and thus low prices for consumers) don't really go together.
Most economists understand that ISPs in the US are a natural monopoly, you simply can not have more than 1 or 2 choices in most locations.
And when there is no possibility of competition, regulation becomes necessary.
(Regulations that make market entry harder push things into the monopoly direction, but that's far from 'natural'. See some of the recent troubles SpaceX has been having.)
See also https://siepr.stanford.edu/publications/policy-brief/net-neu... or https://www.cato.org/regulation/winter-2011-2012/economics-n...
> Network neutrality makes competition and consumer welfare dependent on law and lobbying, not natural competition. So you’ve chosen the area in which the telcos are strongest on which to fight!
Black is white. War is peace. Yeah, we know that.
> What makes you think they are? Especially if you take mobile broadband, paid 'public' wifi and satellite internet into account.
Neither mobile nor satellite (even Starlink) can compete for the main Internet connection for the majority of people. Around 50-70% of the US population has exactly ONE choice of a wired broadband ISP, and maaaaybe 2 if you count ADSL as broadband.
Less than 10% of the population has access to 3 or more wired broadband ISPs.
Btw, you can also do ethernet-over-powerline for the last mile. And there's tv cables, and the plain-old-telephone wires already in the ground.
If there's not enough competition, you should perhaps looks into regulation that's strangling that competition; instead of assuming blindly that more regulation is the answer to problems caused by too much regulation.
Because wireless simply is not enough. There is a pretty fundamental limit to it, called the "sampling theorem". You simply don't have enough available bandwidth for the cell wireless to replace the wired connections, even in moderately dense environments.
This is not a theory, btw. I had T-Mobile 5G "fixed wireless" connection and could immediately tell when major live games were on. It also became nearly useless during the Superbowl. And that's with T-Mobile limiting the number of subscribers (there's a waitlist for 5G home Internet in my area).
> If there's not enough competition, you should perhaps looks into regulation that's strangling that competition; instead of assuming blindly that more regulation is the answer to problems caused by too much regulation.
The main problem is morons who think that you can compete within the ISP market, and thus strangling regulations meant to improve it.
After all, don't we all have 10 different tap water and sewage providers?
I live in Singapore which is denser than basically any place in the US, and people are obsessed with their phones. Mobile bandwidth works just fine.
I suspect your underwhelming 5G experience could be related with cells in your area being rather big, so they had many people in them? If you have a higher density of people, you need a higher density of cells.
> After all, don't we all have 10 different tap water and sewage providers?
Try starting up a new tap water or sewage provider. I don't think the government will let you.
In any case, providing new 'last mile' connectivity whether with wires or with water pipes is hard to make work economically, if someone else is already there with an established service. (So in that sense I agree that last mile connectivity does have network effects. Though I wouldn't classify things binary into 'natural monopoly' or not; it's a spectrum.)
In any case, that's why I was emphasising the different wires we already have (cable tv, plain old phone cables, power line, and in some places optical fibre, etc) and the wireless options (3G, 4G, 5G, wifi, satellite, and the more directed exotic microwave transmission, etc). I probably missed a few.
If you can sort out the last mile, or you can piggy back on some already existing last mile, the tendency for what you call 'natural monopoly' drops a lot.
If there's insufficient competition in the US, perhaps don't blame 'nature'.
For 4k video? No, it doesn't. Also, Singapore is probably spammed with microcells so your phone actually connects to a 5G cell that is only a bit more away than your WiFi router.
I was in Singapore last week, and I'm writing this from China. And no, mobile Internet in both countries can't compete with wired broadband.
> I suspect your underwhelming 5G experience could be related with cells in your area being rather big, so they had many people in them? If you have a higher density of people, you need a higher density of cells.
It's both. The US favors low-density housing, as it's much more people-friendly than any other alternative. The other option is high-density Downtown hellscapes with scyscrapers. Both areas are not great for wireless.
> In any case, that's why I was emphasising the different wires we already have (cable tv, plain old phone cables, power line, and in some places optical fibre, etc) and the wireless options (3G, 4G, 5G, wifi, satellite, and the more directed exotic microwave transmission, etc). I probably missed a few.
Only cable is capable of 1G speeds. Phone wires realistically max out at ~30/10 Mbps up/down with VDSL. There is no Internet over powerlines in the US, and there'll never be because of RF leaks.
So your realistic option is either the coaxial cable or newly laid fiber. And fiber is often owned by the same company that owns the cable.
> Try starting up a new tap water or sewage provider. I don't think the government will let you.
Nothing stops you. There are companies that provide alternative water service, they are often used to fill or drain swimming pools. It's just not economically feasible, unless there are special circumstances.
> If there's insufficient competition in the US, perhaps don't blame 'nature'.
There are no countries that are similar to the US that have competitive "last mile" Internet. None.
All the more successful countries (e.g. Sweden) decouple the last mile, making it a state-owned (or a heavily regulated) utility. And then ISPs can just buy access to it and compete based on services/price.
Alas, the US presents a false dilemma here: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_middle_housing
> Also, Singapore is probably spammed with microcells so your phone actually connects to a 5G cell that is only a bit more away than your WiFi router.
Yes, and that's great. The density of cells goes up with the density of people.
> I was in Singapore last week, and I'm writing this from China. And no, mobile Internet in both countries can't compete with wired broadband.
The free government wifi we get here in many train stations and hawker centres regularly gives me 50 Mbps (on fast.com), and I never got less than 10 Mbps.
That's plenty fast for many applications, especially when it's free.
4G and 5G Mobile broadband is usually a lot faster than that.
> Only cable is capable of 1G speeds.
Singtel advertises that they have Gigabit mobile, and that's on 4G technology. 5G is going to be faster.
> There are companies that provide alternative water service, they are often used to fill or drain swimming pools.
Interesting. How do they get the water to you?
That's beside the point. Nobody is going to rebuild the entire US for better Internet.
> Yes, and that's great. The density of cells goes up with the density of people.
The problem here is the same. If you can get connectivity very close to consumers, you might as well just provide fiber to home.
> The free government wifi we get here in many train stations and hawker centres regularly gives me 50 Mbps (on fast.com), and I never got less than 10 Mbps.
See? Free handouts from government, not multiple competing providers.
> Singtel advertises that they have Gigabit mobile, and that's on 4G technology. 5G is going to be faster.
4G peaks at 100mbps per channel, you can use multiple channels for about 500mbps in total. But that's shared across _all_ users. 5G has better efficiency, so you can get about 2gbps in total for low-frequency (i.e. actually useful) bands.
That's why "1Gbps" mobile Internet borders on false advertising. You _can_ get that speed, but only if all the stars align. It also won't be super-reliable.
> Interesting. How do they get the water to you?
Tanker trucks. It is usually cheaper than municipal water sources because pool filling companies can reuse the water. They also don't need to purify it to drinking water standards (in fact, they can _not_, pool water has to contain fairly high levels of chlorine).
Huh? We have multiple competing providers for normal paid Internet services.
Btw, I called it 'government wifi', but I think it's actually provided by multiple competing companies (but I don't know how it's financed. I assume the government pays for it. You can research for yourself if you care , it's called 'wireless@sgx'.)
Hot take - Reliance Jio+Bharti Airtel, China Mobile+Telecom+Unicom, and NTT+KDDI are basically duo/triopolies yet were able to roll our 5G nationwide in just 2-4 years in India, China, and Japan while keeping competitive pricing, and make the US market look free in comparison.
The issue seems to be the relative lethargy of the FCC and regulators, along with issues around deprecating older infra.
This doesn't mean we should go all Reagan, but if this is streamlined at the executive level, it would really simplify everything.
New Zealand went from having a single provider for service and infrastructure, to having actual options. The breakup of the monopoly was imposed by regulation [1]. Following this there was a lot of taxpayer investment in fibre and while it’s been a flawed rollout, it’s made a hell of a difference. I’m on symmetric gigabit and have 2gb/s, 4gb/s and 8gb/s options if I pay more.
[1] under history section https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_New_Zealand
Before: One ISP. Spectrum $120/mo 1Gb down & 40Mb up.
After: New choices of 8 fiber ISP. Opts inc $35 250Mb/250Mb, $50 1Gb/1Gb, $70 2.5Gb/2.5Gb, $120 10Gb/10Gb.
ISPs spend billions on politicians to make sure (the most possible) Americans don't have choices. They get their money's worth.
ref: https://www.commondreams.org/news/2022/04/28/infuriating-tel...
Yet somehow, I'm paying $100 for 190mbit. The price and ISP (not the speed) are literally written into my apartment's lease agreement. This is an apartment managed by the same developer who owns every other apartment I can afford, so it's not as if I have any bargaining power here, either.
My parents, who live in a remote area, but happen to be next to a major fiber line, pay even more than I do for less than 20mbit FTTH!
I think we have made a grave mistake obsessing over the word, "monopoly". It doesn't take a monopoly for anti-competitive behavior to absolutely ruin a market. Even if healthy competition thrives in a market, some participants will find a way to abuse some customers.
We shouldn't be so lazy that we point a finger at what's working, and pretend the rest doesn't exist.
I just looked up the price in my hometown in China: 1000 Mbps fibre internet + 3 mobile phone lines (105 GB data) + IPTV = 249 CNY tax included (30 USD / 42 CAD / 28 EUR)
The 1000 Mbps fibre Internet plan alone (no phones no TVs) I have in Canada is $65 + tax. And it's a discounted plan. The price on the ISP website is $100.
Also in China phone plans have fast lanes as well. SNS and video streaming data are treated separately (cheap or even free).
It was definitely cheap and affordable. But I always felt a huge speed bump (along with easy access to foreign web sites) when I went to Thailand or Indonesia for vacation.
A lot of that is because of the GFW.
MITM/TLS decryption/DPI has a massive performance overhead (and why the first question any agent based security product is ask is whether it is "in the path of traffic").
It's basically a giant version of Zscaler Private Access (ZPA)
The performance hit is a major reason why a lot of edge computing development has happened in the Chinese ecosystem (you can't guarantee stuff works with latency, so how do you solve that)
This is an older investigation (2017) by ThousandEyes about this - https://www.thousandeyes.com/blog/benchmarking-network-perfo...
Note that the infra has changed drastically since 2017.
If you do that, international commerce for China grinds to a complete halt (though ik one very large F50 that is in the process of completely decoupling in the next 2 years)
Especially because this kind of an en masse disconnection means completely disconnecting Chinese assets abroad from their mainland HQs.
Down the grapevine, I have heard some provinces testing that kind of a whitelist, but I'm not sure how true that is.
If an actual nationwide whitelist is implemented, I think that is proof enough that war be coming. Even Roskomnadzor didn't try implementing a similar system until the 2022 escalation.
It is also really hostile for foreign tourists. You'd be surprised how many people still go to China and have all their trip plans stored in Google docs...doh. Although if you come with a foreign SIM and use roaming, you circumvent the GFW automatically for some reason.
That's because when your SIM is in international roaming, traffic is routed by the local telco to a tunnel back to the home telco provider. This ofc decreases margins significantly (because those bytes are routed via fiber or satellite by a Transit Service) and is why roaming costs are so high.
> It is also really hostile for foreign tourists. You'd be surprised how many people still go to China and have all their trip plans stored in Google docs...doh
Oof. You'd have to be living under a rock to not know that Google is banned in China, but I guess some tourists just aren't tech savvy, so who am I to judge.
> China has to pay a cost for keeping it kind of opened but mostly closed
Not really. As an individual you are definetly paying a performance cost in the form of low latencies and speeds, but this is also why edge computing solutions (eg. Compute offloading, packet size optimizations, etc) are heavily researched by Chinese players compared to Western players. In isolation, it's a good forcing function for innovation.
That said, it is absolutely 1984-esque.
Also, a lot of these innovations seem to be a result of the Urumqi and Lhasa riots from 10-15 years ago as well as Tahrir Square, so clearly maintaining the political status quo seems to be top of mind.
It's bad for business, but China (and especially Xi) has seemed to have taken a very statist approach after the 2015-16 financial crisis.
We hosted an ACM conference in 2011 in Beijing. One of my friends came, first trip to China, really smart guy just finishing up his PhD in EECS at UCB, but OMG did he mess that one up. We had to use the guest wifi in my office so he could make offline copies. If you aren't used to it, and don't follow China closely, you could be very technical and still be caught off guard. Lots of people will tell you China is just a normal tourist spot like Japan, Thailand, or Indonesia, but it really isn't.
> Also, a lot of these innovations seem to be a result of the Urumqi and Lhasa riots from 10-15 years ago as well as Tahrir Square, so clearly maintaining the political status quo seems to be top of mind.
I was in Beijing for those. A lot of things blocked afterwards, we slowly lost more services that we had previously. I would say 2008 was a peak for Chinese internet liberalization (and well, lots of other liberalization, I also spent 6 months in 2002 so can compare), and then it just tanked from that point on to present. They made a show for the Olympics and then decided they didn't need to bother anymore. It doesn't help that Xi is much more assertive and autocratic than Hu was.
Until a couple years ago, it was fairly common to smuggle VEOM, Airtel, and Ooredoo sims in much of Xinjiang and Tibet, because the Uyghur and Tibetan diaspora largely uses WhatsApp to communicate as the Uyghur diaspora is largely in the CIS, Turkey, and Pakistan and the Tibetan diaspora in India, Nepal, and the US.
> OMG did he mess that one up. We had to use the guest wifi in my office so he could make offline copies. If you aren't used to it, and don't follow China closely, you could be very technical and still be caught off guard
Oh boy! That sounds rough, but also makes sense.
Did you have your VPN / proxy on? That might be one of the reason as Chinese internet is only fast for traffic within its borders. Traffic that crosses borders are super slow in terms of throughput AND latency (if not blocked altogether). If you have your VPN / proxy on, your request basically crosses the borders twice before it reaches the destination web server.
Another reason I can think of is the mobile ISP incompatibility. For some ridiculous reasons, most "foreign" phones' (iPhones exempt) do not have full radio coverage when connected to CMCC.
This is with a wired line from China Telecom, China Unicom internet is fine for text viewing, I don't I bothered much with video (and really, it is slower than China Mobile 5G, I guess this has changed now).
[0] for mobile, they are also in the top 15. For fixed broadband, they are 5th. https://www.speedtest.net/global-index#fixed
These ISPs absolutely should be forced to open their infrastructure to other providers, like in Europe, and for the same reasons.
Isn't that exactly how it always worked? Whatever public service works well is privatised (for some reason I don't get), and whatever is a source of cost stays public. Such that the taxpayer keeps paying, and some people get rich by screwing them.
Now many times I don't think it is a good idea (why in the world would one privatise public transports? "Public" is in the title...), but that is another question.
How exactly do more carriers competing locally even work? You slice the spectrum they are allowed and have worse service? Do you remember when t-mobiles spectrum allocation was so bad that you couldn’t get a signal inside of a building?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/internet-...
Also, many sparsely populated European countries have relatively good internet speeds (eg Iceland, Sweden).
[0] https://database.earth/population/europe/density
[1] https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/europe-popula...
[2] https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/european-countries-by-po...
[3] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/EN.POP.DNST?locations=U...
In this mode, video streams will be limited to 480p but will not count against your bandwidth cap.
Why to a lesser extent? In my experience Canada's was way worse than the US, which I honestly didn't think would be possible.
I think the more salient issue is the market simply doesn’t care about this stuff. As long as you can get on Facebook and instagram they are not mo rd by what’s going on behind the scenes.
In places like Florida however irrigation water is reclaimed and not treated the same was as drinking water and has totally separate plumbing and metering (and pricing).
Aren't you paying more for your lawn water then?
If your sewer bill is based on your water bill[1]: a gallon of water for drinking results in a bill for a gallon of sewage treatment, which you'll use. A gallon of water for irrigation results in a bill for a gallon of sewage treatment which you won't use. Caveats: maybe you pee on the lawn, probably you perspire, sewer pipes are leaky: some of your sewage escapes out, some of your irrigation water escapes in.
[1] this is common, but I don't think anywhere close to universal; even ignoring lack of universal municipal water and lack of universal municipal sewage. Flatrate by connection size is also common. Approximately zero households have individual sewer meters, but some commercial/industrial customers may have them so they can be billed on actual usage.
My municipality uses 75% of the water usage (minus the reading from the meter used for irrigation) as the basis for the sewer charge.
According to this, Florida uses 820M gals of reclaimed water per day although this isn't all necessarily used for irrigation.
https://floridadep.gov/water/domestic-wastewater/content/flo...
If you don't have the 2nd meter and your irrigation is running from your domestic water supply, then yes you're absolutely paying for sewerage you're not using.
Now I actually strongly support net neutrality and maybe ISPs don't really need a piece of the cake, but it is still interesting how the online companies have captured most of the profits, but are also considered the good guys in his scenario.
You can have multiple bad guys. Just because one of them is the worse guy doesn't mean the other one is good.
I pay my electric company (the ones that create the infrastructure to make an ISP possible and have massively innovated in the process) the same for kWh if it’s for a lightbulb or my work laptop
I’m genuinely curious if anyone knows of any.
5G --> 3GPP --> ATIS[1] --> includes every major ISP in the US
Equipment manufacturers are just one piece of a much, much bigger puzzle. Standards development towards at-scale adoption, global interoperability, etc. is just as important; consumers just see the end game of all that backend work, and to be quite frank, it's grossly underappreciated.
I pay my ISP well over $100 a month for their service. Far more than I pay outright to Google or Meta or Apple. Why should they try to skim even more off the top?
The ISP did nothing to earn any of the cake beyond provide me a pipe, and I already paid for that. I'm not defending Google's profits or calling them the good guys, I'm saying my prices shouldn't change because Comcast is jealous of Facebook. If ISPs get to tax Google and Netflix, they'll just charge me more, and I don't want that. If you sell shovels, you don't get part of the gold nugget profit.
Facebook, Google and the like do much much more than provide internet.
The problem with fast lanes is that it makes the internet an uneven playing ground for the distribution of services. It is completely changing the fabric of how they operate at the expense of the consumer.
A more accurate analogy would be if the cost was based on the brand of the faucet, or if electricity was charged differently for using your stove vs running your AC. Or if roads had a fast-lane to drive to Costco, while the rest share a jammed single lane.
Personally I would prefer neutrality over liability.
Having seen the degree to which spammers, scammers, and malicious hackers will abuse services to no end (often while carefully avoiding explicit violations of the law) I can assure you that you do not want this.
Forcing every company to host everyone only sounds good in theory.
Still, zero-rating and traffic shaping should not be used to favor apps, especially not on a pay to play basis, for all the same net neutrality arguments as ever.
Android 14 added 5G slicing upsell for consumer apps: https://source.android.com/docs/core/connect/5g-slicing#5g-s...
This is imminent.
I used to have major problems with one network one particular street corner where data throughput would reliably drop to zero on 5G, but calls still went through somehow (even though they're also data on 5G, albeit with a different QoS). Signal strength was always shown as full. A phone restart would sometimes, but not always, fix it – without moving anywhere!
Never happened again since switching away. 5G is a standard/protocol; it doesn't somehow inherently prevent bad network management.
Telcos typically downrate 2nd-tier data, so if it's there's congestion, we feel it most.
Then, when online commerce was restored to being under the purview of the FTC, all those special deals stopped. No ISP gave special fast lane access to any content service provider. Perhaps "net neutrality" is a lie, like "patriot act"? What we hear when we hear the term is not what lawmakers mean. We hear "ISPs must treat all traffic the same" (except for content with a DMCA takedown notice, of course) but what they mean is "move regulatory authority over commercial activity online from the FTC to the FCC." I'm curious why this, the crux of the matter, is never addressed in these articles. In any case, it seems to me like we get more net neutrality when the FTC is in charge of the commerce.
Commerce online seems to be much more neutral when the FTC is in charge, to me at least. I don't think it's a stretch to say that big multinational corporations like Alphabet want the FCC to regulate the internet for selfish reasons, and if I have to guess, I'd guess that it's because they don't want to fall under the FTCs regulations pertaining to anticompetitive behavior.
Reliance Jio+Bharti Airtel, China Mobile+Telecom+Unicom, and NTT+KDDI are basically duo/triopolies yet were able to roll our 5G nationwide in just 2-4 years in India, China, and Japan while keeping competitive pricing, and make the US market look free in comparison.
The issue seems to be the relative lethargy of the FCC and regulators, along with issues around deprecating older infra.
This doesn't mean we should go all Reagan, but if this is streamlined at the executive level, it would really simplify everything.
My argument is that the amount of litigation needed in coordination with the FTC, FCC, and others makes an opaque system.
The American system isn't truly a free market - it's increasingly ossified, with decisions immediately litigated following a regulatory decision.
This incentivizes larger organizations with the capital to initiate litigation and continue to be players at the expense of potentially disruptive upstarts (ie. Startups).
At the end of the day, some industries are suboptimal if following a New America/Warren style vision of antitrust.
I don't disagree with the notion of antitrust, but I think "consumer harm" is a better heuristic than an "open markets" approach.
If an oligopoly arises yet is able to keep inflation down and production high, so be it.
If a monopoly or oligopoly is abusing it's position to extract higher than needed costs, then it's time to use the DoJ hammer.
An "open market" approach can be diametrically opposed to "consumer benefit" as it can prevent the economies of scale needed for commercial players to meet their financial needs. Instead, a subsidy or PLI driven approach to build more players would be a much better option, and we've already seen the positive impact that has had via the CHIPS Act and the Inflation Reduction Act.
This is also the approach used by Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, and has helped minimize the amount of financialization compared to the US or the EU, and has helped maintain their commanding heights.
What kinds of limited applications will be given priority? The network operators’ own information systems; their own services; and their partners.
This is a threat to companies who are operating in industries that network operators could compete with. “Network neutrality” is meant to protect them from competition from network providers. And this is not right.
Regarding the high speed connections. There is only one issue in mind. Did the network operator install these new high speed lines as a network operator or as a streaming service provider? Nobody is expecting a streaming service to favor their competition. It's a complete conflict of interest though that such companies have multiple hats.
A similar situation occurred with transportation companies in the US. Rail companies were prohibited from operating buses because of a conflict of interest. Rail failed. Busses prospered. Until both industries failed. And now airlines prosper.
We are just one stone throw away from causing network operators to be bored with their jobs. And then abandon ship until some weak dipstick can’t get a job anywhere else and ends up with securing your boring network.
The cost is laying down a fiber network and sustaining it is there and it’s going nowhere. Somebody needs to pay for it. Current approach is to bundle various services under a service umbrella and try to stay profitable. I don’t know what will happen when the streaming boom cools down. It might cause some “network providers” to just bankrupt.
netflix users are going to complain and change providers if their tv show buffers at all, so it makes sense to prioritize that traffic - not for netflix's benefit but to avoid angry customers
Netflix does offer to give servers to ISPs to put in their datacenters. So if your ISP is seeing congestion on the IX links, it is entirely possible that Netflix still works fine (because the traffic doesn’t leave the ISP and is therefore not hitting the congestion). But that is not a “fast lane”
Other companies embed servers with ISPs as well.
BTW is mobile networking finally turning linespeed "bandwidth" back into true bandwidth? That's a glorious victory for language!
Politicians are very reactive, hesitant to fix a problem until they're unable to ignore it.
Obviously not a good way to govern, but it's the way things are now.
"FCC May Let Mobile Providers Speed Up or Slow Down Individual Apps and Website, Risking Open Internet"
> For example, would it be “unreasonably discriminatory” to create a 5G fast lane that includes the most popular apps in a category since it responds to consumer preferences?
What’s in it for the ISP if they can’t collect money for it?
> There’s lots of ways for ISPs to use slices for things that are not normal internet service such as a dedicated slice for a farming operation using remote controlled tractors, slices for telemetry data and oversight of autonomous cars, or providing a slice for a stadium’s video system at a crowded game.
Really? Will the ISP allow anyone to get such a slice under fair, reasonable, and non discriminatory terms? Or will this just favor companies with a cozy relationship with an ISP? Just because these industries aren’t direct-to-consumer doesn’t mean the same issues don’t exist?
AFAIK, most of the backbone and rural networks were subsidized with public funds to provide broadband internet. I find it disturbing that some private companies are trying to secure high QoS for themselves without paying for the infrastructure itself. It's like crony capitalism where losses are socialized while profits are privatized.
This is all marketing. All the speed tiers, all the add-ons, etc. are all marketing. There's no technical reason for any of it. 5G has huge bandwidth, and the fiber backhaul has huge bandwidth. The most that can be argued is that a saturated link needs fair queueing applied to it to give customers fair bandwidth while the company installs more capacity.
But you can't underprovision and then charge a premium for a fast lane if you are running the company on technical principles.
If you asked for justification, the carrier would say that tethering is usually used for business needs, and the increased use would be unfair to non-business users.
When Netflix first came along, ISPs wanted to charge them because of the high traffic usage. Some even slowed down their traffic. ISP networks were designed with a particular usage pattern in mind and things were changing. ISPs couldn't ask their customers to watch less Netflix and didn't want to put data caps etc. for obvious public relations reasons. What customers do with their internet connection is up to them, ISPs should never have a say in this. Just like the electric companies should have no say in which kitchen appliance I use. ISPs can sell different packages with various limits in speed quota etc. but favoring private companies with lucrative deals, or tracking the DNS traffic and selling marketing information about their customers should not be an option.
This needs to be controlled by congress. Directly.
It might even backfire and stifle the good parts of the proposal.
As mentioned by someone else, the title wording really appeals to conspiracy theorists.
In order to make this world one where I would consider living...
It is a day in, day out, lunch pail type job. Thousands of people banging on doors, until they get something done.
And then, keeping it done takes thousands more doing the same thing
DAY IN, DAY OUT, FOREVER.
Truth!
People ask, "How many times?"
Now they have their answer. We either give a shit and act, or we fund others who can act
, or
Our lives are going to be enshittified.
The lure of creating near infinite artificial value means Net Neutrality is a constant fight, ever present for the remainder of our lives.
Yeah, join the club. I don't like it either, but I can tell you Stewart is awful close to truth on this.
Lived experience. In his case, getting and maintaining services for 9/11 responders and then keeping that in place happened to be his heavy lift for the decade he was away from "The Daily Show"
Mine was a ton of activism last decade. Bumped into that "thousands of people" myself and saw the need first hand.
Those people need to eat and fund their work somehow, or it does not get done.
everyone will say more regulation, more competition... while drinking their municipal internet and using their municipal electricity
At least get a new trick.
I would understand if there's some profit motive behind this, but I'm not seeing it.
> However, there’s a huge problem: the proposed rules make it possible for mobile ISPs to start picking applications and putting them in a fast lane - where they’ll perform better generally and much better if the network gets congested.
> T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon are all testing ways to create these 5G fast lanes for apps such as video conferencing, games, and video where the ISP chooses and controls what gets boosted. They use a technical feature in 5G called network slicing, where part of their radio spectrum gets used as a special lane for the chosen app or apps, separated from the usual internet traffic.
> The FCC’s draft order opens the door to these fast lanes, so long as the app provider isn’t charged for them.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents, and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data. "
I wonder if net neutrality becomes law, will they have to stop paying for me to access those services? If so, that would be a bummer.
If a network theoretically prioritized phone calls, email and registered messaging platforms, or deprioritized bulk file-sharing during congested periods, that would be reasonable.
What I see here is ISPs trying to rent-seek and get big players like Netflix or big game companies to pay for being on the premium tier, while charging customers for the privilege as well.
And from a privacy perspective, ISPs shouldn't know what kind of traffic is on its network anyway. I'm on VPN as much as possible these days.
This already exists and is an example of a good use of priority. Cellular networks offer Voice over LTE and this is inherently prioritized over all other network traffic. This is done specifically for E911 but also implements special settings so calls can continue to go through even when coverage is very poor (and where VoIP apps would start to fail).