I hear a lot of concerns about internet access costs. If that's the true problem, then let's enable more competition. The last thing I want, personally, is an internet provider as innovative as PG&E.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/06/13/netflix-slow-fcc-ve...
When was the last time an ISP actually truly did something innovative that has stood the test of time outside of offering faster internet speeds? Or multiplexing cable/telephone (aka more delivery of content aka a utility)?
Before answering, consider that the current head of the FCC is a former lobbyist for ISPs including Comcast and TimeWarner.
Or is the best response to increase competition among ISPs? How many people would choose the ISP that throttles Netflix?
By regulating the ISP as common carrier, you are actively encouraging competition, by forcing them to lease out the last mile to smaller providers who can give real service and actually have to compete. Net Neutrality is aimed directly at providing more competition on the last mile, where our current providers have failed so badly.
Why do you think we use cable for our internet and not phone lines? The phone system has been frozen in amber since the 80s. I'd be sad if the same thing happened to my internet pipe.
And how do we increase competition? The federal government could overturn local and state laws that make ISPs so expensive to roll out.
If Obama and many on HN are advocating for net neutrality, which is requiring a shift in the laws, perhaps that also means that CCD is up for change as well.
To me the heart of the matter isn't so much CCD is that ISPs would be treated as their name suggests -- simply a provider of Internet as a utility where packets go through unchanged. That they also own NBC or Hulu starts to complicate issues because their major potential is to multiply those businesses together while strangling alternatives. The opportunity is too great and allowing these mergers in the first place was a terrible idea.
The other issue is how to get them to actually compete in a meaningful way. Where I live, in SF of all places, I surprisingly have very little choice when it comes to the internet. Comcast is basically the only real choice as they blow away DSL speeds, and then that's that. No one else serves me as a consumer. And this is San Francisco! I think this is why municipalities are starting to get into the ISP business, which seems to be the only credible way to start actually giving these guys some kind of threat. That or Google fiber, but it's still pretty nascent. The US is just so big that without a meaningful way for high speeds to get distributed at a local level it's too expensive for anyone to enter. Either we need completely new technologies that allow people to enter at low cost, or we get local gov't somehow involved in facilitating basic infrastructure like water or power.
San Francisco is a city where red tape, bureaucracy and the people will not allow another local access provider build.
http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/ATT-Sues-San-Francisco-Ov...
If San Francisco decided to build a municipal fiber network, they would be sued into bankruptcy by the ISP’s.
Lobbyists are already making it illegal for local governments to address the problem by entering the fray themselves: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Municipal_broadband#Controversy
That's really the core problem. Coming from Europe, the US has terrible telecom infrastructure* that is controlled by vertical monopolists. Of course bad things happen then. Cities are difficult about letting companies add infrastructure (it's costly and disruptive to add cables to the ground, it's ugly and disrubtive to add cables to poles), and in some cases the telecom companies themselves have succesfully lobbied to prevent cities/counties/states from building that infrastructure themselves.
Ideally, you'd have a public infrastructure (wire/cable/fiber), that is then leased out at cost to the actual ISPs, kind of like the power industry in texas (wire's public, power plants are private).
But that would be too large a change which of course the existing monopolies are fighting tooth and nail to prevent, as it would break their vertical monopoly.
* and don't people go whining about "ah but rural this and distance that". Even the cities suck.
In that situation, if Netflix passes on ISP fees for users of that ISP, then the ISPs video offerings get more competitive. ISPs then have incentive to increase the fees even more. The outcome is that customers lose a competitor to good video services in Netflix.
On the other hand, if Netflix hides the ISP fees from their customers and averages it out to all their prices, then that essentially adds onto the costs in general and everybody's Netflix costs go up.
Currently, customers have no direct choice that they can act on which correlates to cost and thus have no feedback mechanism to correct the market to actually make it competitive.
That depends on the specific shape of the rules.
> Comcast had the Netflix slow down and it's currently legally required to follow net neutrality.
Comcast is currently legally required to follow one version of Open Internet rules -- a version that is weaker than many net neutrality advocates preferred.
It is not a pre-emptive response to a speculative future threat, but a response to actions that have already occurred. The Open Internet principles underlying the FCC's recent regulatory efforts in that domain were first articulated as principles that would be policy objectives to preserve (but that did not, at that time, need specific direct regulatory enforcement) several years before any direct regulation was attempted. The direct regulation came after several issues in which those principles were violated by ISPs, and in which the FCC had attempted to rein those in based on its ancillary authority rather than specific directed regulation, but failed [1].
The 2010 Open Internet Report and Order -- the first "net neutrality" regulation from the FCC -- was a response to both the violations of the Open Internet principles already occurring and the court decisions preventing the FCC from administratively enforcing those without specific regulation.
[1] Most notably, in Comcast v. FCC, 600 F.3d 642 (2010), see, e.g., http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast_Corp._v._FCC
tmobile will cap your 4G data on certain plans.
UNLESS you're using that data to access their approved partners.
that's clearly anti-competitive because a new streaming service now needs to negotiate with tmobile to be competitive on top of actually having a better service.
Their Music Freedom service gives you extra, free, data for music streaming separate from your plan for many major music streaming sites (and they have said they intend to expand to all legal music streaming sites). If objection is to be raised to that, I think it should be under antitrust, not under net neutrality.
What it comes down to is a question of whether or not an ISP can use their own network to offer services in addition to the service of "general internet connection". I don't see any good reason to disallow this), as long as these services do not interfere with the general internet connection service (and do not run into antitrust issues).
I think this is clearest in the case of cable ISPs. Most of these are also cable TV providers. Almost no one objects that your bandwidth for watching cable broadcast television does not count against any limits on your cable internet bandwidth, even though at the physical layer it is all coming from the same bandwidth pool. They do not have a separate TV cable and a separate internet cable running into your home.
If the cable company decided to use all of the cable bandwidth to run an IP network, and then run their broadcast TV service over that, would we expect them to suddenly start counting your cable TV service against your internet bandwidth usage? I doubt it. TV would still be a separate service from internet access--they just happen to be delivering both over their IP network now.
I see Music Freedom as being similar. T-Mobile runs a mobile device network. It includes an internet data service, and it includes a cellular phone service, and a text messaging service. Those all use the same physical layer (cellular radio), but I believe they have different network layers (and maybe different data link layers?). They are now also offering a service to access music from many streaming music providers. If they had somehow made this run over the cellular phone service part of their network, or the text messaging part, there would be little objection. Hence, I see no reason to object that they are doing it over the IP part of their network--if they keep it from interfering with the general internet access service, than that's just an implementation detail.
I think eventually the cellular voice network and the text messaging network and whatever else they currently run will go away. Each company will run just an IP network, and their logically separate services (telephone, messaging, internet in the case of mobile, and telephone, broadcast TV, internet in the case of cable/fiber) will run over that.
Unfortunately it seems the majority of tech-savvy folks and technology freedom organizations like the EFF draw a different conclusion.