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Comment by mrbabbage | Hacker News Reader

This is super interesting! Thanks for sharing.

I believe this is a good illustration of how most net neutrality advocacy is misguided. The (very real) problem net neutrality advocates are trying to solve isn't paid prioritization; rather, it's a lack of meaningful competition in the "last-mile" broadband market, and this market failure produces aberrant scenarios like NBC Comcast shaking down its competitors (eg Netflix). I'm hesitant to strongly support most mainstream net neutrality proposals because of situations like this, where network discrimination is net positive.

Anyway, I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.

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> The (very real) problem net neutrality advocates are trying to solve isn't paid prioritization

Well, duh, net neutrality has been an issue for nearly a decade, and paid prioritization is a much more recent focus of discussion. Paid prioritization can be a manifestation of the problem net neutrality is designed to address, but its never been the main issue.

> rather, it's a lack of meaningful competition in the "last-mile" broadband market

No, that's not the problem that net neutrality is trying to solve. That's a constraint on the solution space, given that there isn't a magic "make meaningful competition appear and remain" wand that can be waved. Certainly, there are reasons to suspect that if wishing for such competition would make it so, that would also go some way to solving the problems net neutrality seeks to address, but since that rests on a counterfactual assumption, its not really all that significant to dealing with real-world issues.

There's no magic, but there is an argument to be made that the time it takes to iterate on one of those decisions contributes to the difficulty. Instead of being able to just pass a regulation for a set period of time and then revisiting it, the target company raises a huge stink, sues, and gets their buddies to sue.

If we'd have had a few chances, this would be a solved problem by now. Now we have to fight to the death for every single attempt.

You're absolutely right. However, the probability that meaningful competition will break through the enormous barriers to entry that Comcast, et al have erected before they manage to irreparably damage one of the few remaining growth industries in the US (tech) is near zero.

Sorry to pick on you, but the responses of net neutrality advocates vis-à-vis competition sound like the standard strategy of the Foreign Office when dealing with crisis from Yes, Prime Minister.

"maybe we should do something about it, but there's nothing we can do", it's a natural monopoly.

"maybe there was something we could have done, but it's too late now", they already have a stronghold.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751831/quotes?item=qt0190692

Don't get me wrong, I'd vastly prefer competition. There just isn't much reason to be optimistic it will arrive.

I do have a horse in this race, my employer just struck a very non-neutral deal with a wireless carrier: http://newsroom.t-mobile.com/news/more-music-freedom.htm

How is this critique useful?

I've never seen a net neutrality advocate be opposed to competition. I also don't know a single net neutrality advocate who was in favor of letting the wide variety of early ISPs decay into the sad monopolistic situation we have now.

All they're saying is that given that we no longer have an effective marketplace to reign in in the oligopoly in place, we need regulation to limit the harm. They are basically saying we should extend our approach to the phone network to the broadband network.

Why is it also their job to fix the conditions in the US that led to this? Net neutrality regulations are relatively simple: if the FCC (or possibly Congress) makes it happen, it will be pretty straightforward. But the lack of competition in the US broadband market can't be fixed with small regulation changes. It requires a wholesale reexamination of current economic dogma, deep changes in our approach to business regulation at multiple levels of government, and probably changing entirely the way we fund elections.

I just don't see much discussion around the topic; that may be because it's obvious for everyone inside the topic that it's unfixable, but as an outsider who lives in a very corrupt country (among the developed) but which nevertheless has plenty of broadband competition, I just find it very hard to believe that it almost requires a political revolution to increase competition in that market - or that at least that's obvious to everyone.

Yeah, there's a lot of history here, so I can see why it's mysterious to outsiders. But as somebody who has been following this since a teen, I believe a proposal of "let's increase competition" will go absolutely nowhere in the US. A very quick summary:

In the 80s a judge broke up our national communications monopoly [1]. That came as the result of action starting in the 70s, when business regulation had some teeth. To aid that, the Telecommunications Act of 1996 created the notion of the Competitive Local Exchange Carrier [2], allowing local competition for phone service by forcing the local-monopoly phone companies to share their wires. But that came just as telephone service was starting to become irrelevant, and didn't touch the local monopolies of the cable companies.

Eventually, AT&T basically put itself back together [3]. And that happened because the climate for business regulation had shifted; anti-trust enforcement has now withered away to the point that it's ok with oligopoly and near-monopoly. Why? Well, I think that's partly a US shift to managerialist thinking, aided by billionaires funding plenty of think tanks and professorships that just happen to promote then notion that billionaires and their companies should be able to do as they please.

This is all compounded by the insane US campaign finance system, where we end up with legislators that are very strongly pro-money. There is a lot of talk about supporting "free markets", but very little interest in healthy markets, ones where competition is a meaningful check on the action of dominant players. We had a very competitive ISP market, but it's basically gone now, and surprisingly few mourn it.

So basically, the whole political tide of the last 30 years in the US has been away from the kinds of governmental interventions that would restore real competition in the broadband market. It's so bad that 20 states have laws against municipalities providing broadband to their own citizens. [4]

So yeah, I'm just not expecting meaningful pro-competition action in the next 10 years. Net neutrality, though, is an achievable short term goal, because that's basically defending the status quo.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakup_of_the_Bell_System

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Competitive_local_exchange_carr...

[3] Stephen Colbert sums it up here starting at 2:23: http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/eamlaf/bears---balls--...

[4] http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/02/isp-lobby-has-alr...

I know all that history, though. But around here we went over a similar transition (single public carrier got broken up not that long ago), and it's hard to argue we're any less pro-money. I just don't find the argument that it's impossible that convincing.

Ok. It's not my job to help you understand US politics, so I can live with you not being convinced. If you would like to take some action based on your theory that the change is possible, I encourage that.

Even in a competitive market, Comcast wants to, and can, vertically integrate with NBC then punish its competitors for the same reason Apple wants to vertically integrate content/software/hardware and push out anyone that competes with any part of that stack. There's a huge, technical, advantage to having the content company also own the network: pushing caching nodes to the edges of the network, consolidating redundant data flows on the backbone, taking advantage of multicast, etc. It's not all that different to the advantages of vertically integrating iTunes/iOS/Apple Ax-based hardware.

> It's not all that different to the advantages of vertically integrating iTunes/iOS/Apple Ax-based hardware.

It's different due to the fact that Internet is a "utility" now in the same way gas, electricity and water are (isn't it considered a human right in the USA now?). An Apple iPhone is not in any way a utility, and its functionality can be made up, 1:1 (fanboyism aside, thank you) by another device. iTunes (the store) is not a utility, and its functionality can be made up, 1:1, by purchasing CDs or using Google Play / Spotify / Rdio. iTunes (the app) is not a utility for obvious reasons.

Yes Apple locks you into an ecosystem, however that ecosystem is not a fundamental "requirement" to function as a business. There's simply no replacement for the Internet and, in a lot of places, there's no replacement for $ISP.

It's different due to the fact that Internet is a "utility" now in the same way gas, electricity and water are (isn't it considered a human right in the USA now?)

No, it isn't, and no, it isn't.

I disagree. Rather than Internet.org giving free access to wikipedia and facebook, they should just give people 100mb free data and let them decide what is best for them.

This is different to giving free access to Wikipedia. You can download Gigabytes of Wikipedia articles every month without paying for it. A better alternative would be to enable users to choose, say, five domains that don't count. But then clever users choose one web proxy site and get all their internet for free...

I don't think you'll be guzzling gigabytes of data on the low end phones people use in the poor parts of Africa that we are talking about. If they did, I doubt internet.org could afford to give it away.

We are not talking about broadband providers, but GSM/Edge internet on what is essentially feature phones.

To me, the thing that I don't want to see is some web sites being throttled (or blocked!) on broadband.

Considering most (wired) broadband is bandwidth-limited at this point, varying that bandwidth limit based on what site I'm talking with just feels wrong, and I'd love to see the practice banned, because as you mention, a lot of users have no choice in what broadband they can subscribe to.

Wireless broadband is almost all capped in the quantity that you can use, however, and the T-Mobile "free streaming" options mentioned give you something extra for "free." This is in stark contrast to blocking/limiting something you're paying for, and I would be fine with this limited exception in the wireless space.

But what I would like to see, since this is effectively a utility, is for that "free streaming" to be available on an equal opportunity basis: And T-Mobile seems to be doing exactly that by allowing customers to vote on what services to include.

What feels like unfair competition is (as you mention) Comcast shaking down its competition by way of not providing customers equal access. And until that last-mile competition problem has been otherwise resolved (Google Fiber everywhere?), I think we do need those regulations to prevent monopolistic behaviors.

The T-Mobile deal seems great at first blush. You get more stuff for free - yay! But, what if you're a startup streaming music service, and T-Mobile does NOT include you in their list of cap-free streaming? Good luck competing with the other providers.

Perhaps a solution would be to classify types of services, and then make ANY company in that service eligible for the cap-free streaming. So, if you're a startup in the music streaming space, you are automatically included along with all the others. Then the telcos could provide packages of free services without harming innovation and competition.

I get that. But streaming for free over mobile is far from the only way to compete.

T-Mobile is the third-largest carrier in the US. Probably a small minority of T-Mobile users even know about the free streaming feature. If your business plan requires that tiny market segment to bootstrap you, then you need a new business plan.

I just don't see it as a big enough differentiator to kill a new service, even if other carriers started doing something similar to T-Mobile.

A new streaming service doesn't need to rely on free mobile streaming at all to bootstrap; if its focus were mobile streaming, a better answer could be to pre-cache hours worth of streams when on wifi. I end up in dead areas frequently, and I end up in roaming areas where T-Mobile won't give me data at all. I'd love a service that would auto-cache exactly the music I like to listen to so I could play it when roaming.

I've heard Spotify CAN cache, but it's too expensive for my tastes. Something like a cacheable Pandora would be nice.

But my point is that while yes, it grants an edge to certain established businesses, it's not an insurmountable barrier. Not like Comcast throttling Netflix; if you can't use the service in its primary form, it's DOA. And T-Mobile seems to be adding new services pretty quickly: Even indie stations like Radio Paradise are on the list.

> But what I would like to see, since this is effectively a utility, is for that "free streaming" to be available on an equal opportunity basis: And T-Mobile seems to be doing exactly that by allowing customers to vote on what services to include.

That's not an equal-opportunity basis, as consumers can't (or won't) vote for a company that doesn't exist yet.

This raises the barrier to entry for startups even further, because now they have to get enough brand recognition to beat out established competitors in this vote just to reach some segment of the market[0].

As if the barriers to entry for startups disrupting music distribution aren't already high enough! :)

[0] T-mobile has a small market share, but what if Verizon did it? Remember that there are only four non-virtual carriers in the US, so if just one of the two big guys (Verizon and AT&T) does it, it'll dramatically tilt the odds away from startups even more.

See my comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8683425

I think since it has gained exposure through a public statement by the president, the business news has started to take interest in it. Now a lot of sense is starting to get expressed on the matter. The FT also had a good opinion piece recently: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/de089e8c-6999-11e4-9f65-00144feabd...

"Misguided" would be a mischaracterization. I doubt anyone advocating for imposing net neutrality on providers would pass up a chance for more competition. However, without that competition, a net neutrality rule is one part of what it takes to keep the US internet a good environment for innovation.

It's also complicated by the fact that competition in mobile broadband is much stronger than in cable broadband. Personally I would like to see net neutrality limited to cable broadband.

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