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Comment by EPWN3D | Hacker News Reader

I was definitely someone who wrote the FCC (futilely) in support of net neutrality in 2017, and I figured the inevitable outcome of the FCC decision back then would be skyrocketing broadband costs, fast lanes, etc.

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.

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AFAIK the actual reason most of these things did not appear is because of many states passing their own net neutrality laws, such that it would be a regulatory nightmare to offer services in violation of net neutrality without coming under fire.

The California law is particularly strong and had a huge impact.

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".

That's because the internet went to shit and actually very little happens outside of major platforms anyway. This type of traffic shaping would just cement it as-is, making it almost impossible for a new platform to come up.

Tiktok would beg to differ. Starting a new social network is hard, but bandwdith/net neutrality is the least of your problems.

This is some research it would be cool to see: was TikTok adoption measurably slowed in countries where net neutrality violations were common?

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.

One of the issues here is decentralized services. If you're starting a new centralized service, you can pay a CDN which itself is already paying the danegeld or is too big to degrade without the ISP's customers blaming the ISP. That's a tax but if you're state-funded or VC-funded you can just eat it.

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.

I know there’s a gun pointed at my head, but listen, nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine.

Sounds like your position is one where no empirical evidence could convince you otherwise, because even if the apocalypse did not come to pass you would use the "gun pointed at me but they didn't pull the trigger" excuse.

Huh?

> "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.

Mobile ISPs like T-Mobile are quite open about wanting to offer plans that privilege certain services over others.

> I know there’s a gun pointed at my head, but listen, nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine.

1. If your claim was that the net neutrality doomsayers from 2017 were correct, then your original comment of "[...] nobody has pulled the trigger yet, it’s fine" does a terrible way of conveying that. Any reasonable person reading that comment would interpret that as you conceding that the the doomsayers' predictions have failed to pass, but nonetheless refuse to admit the predictions were incorrect because it was only a matter of time before the predictions would become true.

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...

Your link has a definition of Net Neutrality in the first paragraph. If you recall, one of the big points that groups like Comcast kept trying to make was that they weren’t just a dumb pipe for the internet, and instead had enough value-add for consumers that people would choose them over a competitor with the same internet service. And NN would prevent them from offering these competitive services.

We can turn this around though, can't we? If the ISPs have no designs on violating network neutrality then why do they oppose it?

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.

It's been 7 years, but any day now we'll wake up to broken online video, random timeouts, paltry data caps, and skyrocketing costs.

> Mobile carriers like T-Mobile, AT&T and Verizon that have been degrading video quality for mobile users will have to stop.

"Not with a bang but a whimper."

This is like the folks who compare the covid death rate with treatment, mitigations, and vaccination to prove we could have let it run its course in 2020.

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...

This is like the folks who think the rapture is coming, any day now. just be ready, its coming.

I’m constantly having buffering videos across many websites and paying significantly more for this shitty service than nearly anywhere else in the world pays for something significantly better.

Looking at the rising prices of streaming services and their increased enshittification via ads even in paid subscriptions, I find it hard to take the "prices have stayed reasonable" claim at face value. It's not just about the price of the internet access itself, but also about the price of the services that actually make said access useful and valuable.

Yeah, the discourse around the Net Neutrality thing was intense. I was one the few people who argued it wouldn't change much, and I remember being struck by the state of near-internet-apocalypse people were predicting at the time.

Helps that I was seeing the whole thing from the outside as a non-US-resident.

I have to take the L on going with the flow there. It's impossible to build a case that repeal of net neutrality was apocalyptic.

That the potential of a future FCC reinstating it precluded ISPs' baser instincts?

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.

That repeal lasted five years, with virtually none of the visible effects people predicted. By contrast, when the Trump administration started tearing down environmental regulations, mining companies jumped on the occasion within months.

If ISPs are playing the long game, they're being incredibly patient about it.

> 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.

Much as I agreed with net neutrality, I could see that it was being driven mainly by big tech lobbying for their profit margins. This is also why the attention and outrage was way out of proportion to the actual impact.

> 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

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.

>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.

Sorry officer, not intimately familliar with your american laws!

I pay $50/month for 300/30 in the middle of nowhere. Symmetric gigabit is available for $80ish/month in small cities around me. Unlimited phone data is widely available and fairly priced. It's not impossible for things to be acceptable for the vast majority of use cases just because some predicted apocalyptic event which was hyped up by certain large players (and not out of the goodness of their hearts) didn't come to be.

$90/month for 25/2.5 Mbps here. I honestly never thought we'd see that kind of speed. In late 2015 it went from 512 kbps to 10/1 Mbps on a new system. Four years later (2019) they upgraded it to the present speed with no increase in price. It's all wireless and since we're in AT&T telco territory there is no chance of them doing anything (the phone lines have been in the ground since the late '70s), so this independent telco built out as a WISP almost 20 years ago. They're looking at doing their own FTTH in this area.

Wow, that is very expensive

I'm afraid to tell you what I pay for starlink for speeds much lower than that. Still very grateful as without starlink is have 20 M down and still pay $75 per month for it

Better than Hughsnet which was the only option for a long time other than cellular.

You, and everyone paying those absurd prices, is getting ripped off.

I've got a symmetric gigabit.

I could have five but what would I even do with it?

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