F.C.C. Is Expected to Propose Regulating the Internet as a Utility
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Y Combinator even published an open letter[4]. Quoting:
Title II of the Communications Act seems the most appropriate way to properly define broadband ISPs to be offering telecommunications. Speaking on behalf of Y Combinator, I’m urging you to adopt such a rule.
And here we are. It seems to me that the community has always been complaining about the different FCC approaches on the subject, and in favor of title II, until the FCC yielded. Politicians must think the tech community is a frustrating beast to work with.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7750036
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7057634
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7637147
[4] http://blog.ycombinator.com/y-combinator-has-filed-an-offici...
People that want FCC to classify ISPs as a utility got what they want, and are pretty secure that things won't change, so they stopped making noise. People that don't want it didn't got what they want, and are at the last moments they can do something before it's definitive, so they are making a LOT of noise.
"Walker shows how repertoires of participation originally developed by advocacy organizations, electoral campaigns, and social movements are commercialized by public affairs consultants who offer them as professional services ... The result is an increasingly “subsidized public” where selective incentivization and rational prospecting by public affairs consultants looking to mobilize support for their clients’ interests work to get people involved in particular political processes."
Spoiler alert: the tech community is made of people. And yes, they are frustrating beasts to work with.
Personally, I'd go from the assumption that suddenly-prolific "green" commenters have some special interest in the topic. These days -- since HN has become mainstream -- I'd lean towards astroturfing or some other monetary interest.
Official: http://blog.ycombinator.com/hacker-news-api
Unofficial: https://hn.algolia.com/api & https://github.com/karan/HackerNewsAPI
The reason they are concerned is that the cable companies and to a lesser extent wireless and DSL companies are doing this.
And why do they have the power to do this? Why don't people just vote with their feet and switch to a competitor?
Because they are all monopolies.
Every cable company in every city I've lived in the USA has been a locally granted monopoly with the city extracting massive amounts of money from the monthly cable bill in "Franchise" fees.
Every provider of POTS service to your houses and apartments is a regulated monopoly. And while they have to let DSL companies access the lines and long distance competition, the barriers to entry are still there, and the level of regulation is stifling making it hard to compete.
Every wireless carrier is a monopoly-- because they all have monopoly powers over bands of spectrum the federal government sold to them. And while multiple bands were sold, only 3 max bands were sold for mobile in any metro area, reducing competition. (The government claimed that they had to reduce competition to boost the prices that the spectrum sold for-- probably true-- monopolies are very valuable!)
So, in response, these companies engage in rent seeking, to cover the massive taxes they pay to the federal government but also to maximize the value of the monopoly they paid so much to establish.
And as a result, people get mad at this rent seeking and demand net neutrality.
And what do they propose as a solution? Regulation! Treat it like a utility!
Well, I worked in the electric industry. Another utility that is highly regulated, engages in rent seeking and is, a monopoly over its area.
People pay way too much for electricity in this country as a result. And we have a poor service level-- like the brownouts in California a decade ago that were created when regulations made it illegal to both make and sell electricity, literally prohibiting the provisioning of additional supply. (which naturally the left decided to characterize as "de-regualtion". How making it illegal to provide electricity by regulation is "de-regulation" I'll never know.)
Seeing a lot of green accounts? probably people who know their karma will be killed for daring to speak out against the leftist desire to regulate everything, despite the fact that, once again, regulation is the cause of the problem. (I consider granting a monopoly and prohibiting competition to be "Regulation", though an extreme form of course.)
Nothing better exemplifies the old saying "Government is a disease masquerading as it's own cure" then the calls for more regulation to fix the problems of regulation.
Most people won't subject their karma to the onslaught of down votes that daring to take a non-leftist position results in on this site.
But sometimes you have to take a stand.
And really, it's just astounding that people talk about net neutrality and pretend like these aren't government granted monopolies. Such denial!
In no city is the cable company actually a "locally granted monopoly." Every franchise agreement I've seen points out that it's non-exclusive.
Technologists have a fundamental misconception that leads to a lot of cognitive dissonance and confused reasoning: that building wireline infrastructure is a lucrative business that companies can't wait to get into, and would were it not for "regulatory capture" and legal roadblocks. But it's not. It's a business with large up-front costs, expensive maintenance costs, expensive unionized workforces, etc.
> Every wireless carrier is a monopoly-- because they all have monopoly powers over bands of spectrum the federal government sold to them
You're punning on the word "monopoly." Anyone who owns property has a "monopoly" over it. But that does not make them a monopoly. In most cities, you have 3-4 options for wireless service.
> Another utility that is highly regulated, engages in rent seeking and is, a monopoly over its area.
Most electric utilities are monopolies, because it's illegal to deploy competing electrical service.
Regarding wireless, you don't seem to understand how the industry is structured. While it's true there are many brand names on the shelf in walmart, there are only 3 actual providers in a given metro region. Virgin, for instance, uses Sprints network, which is a combination of deals done with the owners of spectrum across the country.
Nope.[1] Exclusive franchise agreements are illegal under federal law since 1996. There is no competition because the business proposition sucks. The only sensible play in most places is to try and target a niche market of wealthy neighborhoods that'll pay for the triple play. That is prohibited under most franchise agreements.
Four nationwide competitors isn't a monopoly any more than Pepsi and Coke are, who own almost all soft drink brands.
[1] e.g. http://www.wilmingtonde.gov/docs/1320/3716Rev1.pdf (Second whereas paragraph).
Does that sentence mean that it's illegal for a municipality to form co-ops, and then for example lay their own fiber and then share the costs equally?
If I want build a network in Comcast territory, there are very "new" customers. I have to go through an extremely expensive build out, and convince customers to switch. Meanwhile, Comcast can undercut me on price because they have already have infrastructure paid for. They can offer $1 internet to people trying to leave until I run out of money.
So yes, you are right that providers aren't currently monopolies, but they exist in markets distorted by being monopolies in the past.
edit: note that the Comcast/Time Warner mega providers grew themselves by buying up all the small ex-monopolies across the country - they didn't build out against them.
You and others keep writing that when it is demonstrably false. Witnesseth:
Wide Open West - A cable overbuilder that serves Detroit, Columbus, Cleveland, and portions of Chicago right alongside the "incumbent" cable company.
Wave Broadband - Its coverage area overlaps with Comcast in some (high net worth) areas of Seattle.
RCN - An overbuilder--the first one, actually--that serves New York City, Boston, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia.
You don't see many overbuilders because building a physical plant network is VERY EXPENSIVE. Verizon's former CEO lost his job to a board that saw how expensive the FiOS buildout was--even though it will return its costs 10 times through not having to maintain the old fiber--and how it dragged on quarterly earnings reports. Instead of spending all of this money, companies retreat to where they don't have to compete so they can soak as much cash as possible out of their existing assets.
Not true and this isn't how this works. I work for a small, competitive provider of communications services, including POTS service. While we're regulated, we're hardly a monopoly. Yes, there are barriers to entry, but they are usually driven by cost and scale. In many cases it's regulation that permits competition!
While the owner of the infrastructure probably could be considered such, they are required - by those same regulations - to allow third parties to resell the service.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/05/mozilla-offers-fc...
The EFF is in favor: If the FCC is going to craft and enforce clear and limited neutrality rules, it must first do one important thing. The FCC must reverse its 2002 decision to treat broadband as an “information service” rather than a “telecommunications service.” This is what’s known as Title II reclassification. According to the highest court to review the question, the rules that actually do what many of us want — such as forbidding discrimination against certain applications — require the FCC to treat access providers like “common carriers,” treatment that can only be applied to telecommunications services.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/11/white-house-gets-it-ne...
Google’s Austin Schlick (Director, Communications Law) says that Title II reclassification will help Google Fiber compete on a level playing field with cable and phone companies:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/12/google-to-fcc-if-...
This is a huge step forward for net neutrality, and it's based directly on work by people in “our” communities (Y Combinator, web businesses, tech non-profits...) who care a lot about protecting and growing the internet.
Without which, by the way, there would not be the startup culture we have now. (prior to the internet it was all semiconductors.)
YC people here are advocating literally killing the goose that laid the golden egg.
Do I sound like a shill for comcast? If so, you're not really listening.
Really? I didn't notice any freedom in places where the only choice are some colluded monopolistic ISPs which in addition write state laws which ban competition. It's not called a free market. It's the opposite of it. All that talk about the magic "invisible hand of the market" is a pile of trash when monopoly is in place and turns that hand into a suffocating iron grip.
Really? ARPANET and NSFNET were big free market bastions, were they?
You may have noticed the 'start' bit. The reason it was 'starting' is because prior to that, corporations did NOT want you to have computers that could talk to each other. That would weaken their grip on the market and ability to lock you in; when no computers can talk to each other, and your business depends on computers from Corp X, this is good for them: you can't go to anyone else. Printers, sockets, none of these are interoperable - you rely on them for everything.
As far as I understand, this is exactly what companies like GE did in those days. ARPANET was completely against everything they wanted, because it meant consumers were freed from their lock in. You could mix and match computers (perhaps cheaper, not-GE ones) with your GE machines, and you weren't beholden to their whims (oh, you need a better mainframe? Gotta upgrade all your machines so they can talk to each other!) And it's unlikely the 'free market' would have ever bore out the same result, and if it did, it probably would have only happened decades later.
Of course, good luck explaining this shit to a libertarian-infested hellhole like HN: they all believe they're on the cusp of Gettin' Big Bucks, so they don't want a market that allows competition, or a government that regulates anything they do. They want one that allows them to strangle competition with no repercussions or limits - they're just about to make it big after all as Uber Millionaires, and why do you want to steal their money!???!!
Like said elsewhere, Americans believe themselves to be impovershed millionaires, so they don't want to limit their future greatness. And of course, to build on what Carlin said: this is a part of the 'American Dream' because you have to be asleep (or braindead) to believe in it.
I'm not sure where you get this idea. Libertarians are pro competition, not anti. So they are actually quite negative towards monopolies and support their prevention.
Oh, but Libertarians don't like that (allegedly). Well then, their answer is simple: But if you don't like that, just move! Don't support that company! Bootstrap harder! Externalities don't real! That'll show those big mean old companies (nevermind the fact you don't have the money or ability to move or go without services like the internet, making the point moot).
At the end of the day, having dealt with many of them here in Texas, most libertarians are just dumbass 20 something white male Republicans who want to smoke weed and end the Fed. They're a joke, but they're a joke that exist on this site in quite a plentiful manner, as you can see. They don't care about the monopolistic control most ISPs have over their customers in plenty of places in the US. They only care that Obama doesn't get all up in their internet; everything else be damned.
No, libertarians are against excessive control over society, not necessarily corporations. I.e. if corporation is a monopoly, it itself gets excessive control over society, so as such libertarians support preventing monopolies. That's the logic behind it. I've never seen a libertarian who is supporting monopoly. It simply sounds like an oxymoron to me.
Now things are different. Comcast is a content company propped up by a cable monopoly. Title II? Hell yeah. But no price controls. Whatever it takes to get us to have the residential bandwidth of, say, Estonia.
That's exactly my point. No mainstream (even partisan) view is supporting monopoly. Such views are normally expressed by corrupted politicians and paid shills. Or you are suggesting that supporting corruption is now mainstream or that some party now is officially against free market even without being corrupted?
Supporting companies against excessive regulations in general and supporting monopolies (i.e. preventing antitrust restrictions and supporting aticompetitive market capture) is not the same thing. The first should serve freeing the market. The second serves only reducing its freedom, nothing else.
Also, consider that exactly the same companies who are against enforcing Net neutrality are perfectly fine with the politicians which write for them state laws which ban competition. I.e. blatant excessive regulation, and very unhealthy one with that. Those are the same companies and politicians which at the same time scream about how bad regulation will be if Net neutrality will be enforced. Hypocrisy much? Or may be they simply are against regulation which weakens their monopoly and pro regulation which strengthens it?
As you can see it has nothing to do with partisan or "mainstream" views on regulation in general. It's about greedy monopolists and their bought corrupted bureaucrats. Who in their normal mind would voluntarily support such a thing?
Smart people are less predictable than those they have been marketing to previously. The biggest downside to this decision comes from the following line:
"But Tom Wheeler, the F.C.C. chairman, will advocate a light-touch approach to Title II, they say, shunning the more intrusive aspects of utility-style regulation, like meddling in pricing decisions."
To me, this is proof they are still in bed with the ISPs (which is not surprising), yet it seems they're claiming to do this for the benefit of the country. I'm not sure I believe that what benefits the massive ISP/entertainment conglomerates is by proxy beneficial to the rest of us. The state of the video broadcasting industry, for example, would be one piece of evidence to my skepticism of this theory. Over-the-top linear broadcasting via the internet has been possible, at least technically, for a long time now. And we have the bandwidth in this country to pull it off. The roadblock are the major cable companies who are making far too much money in their complete dominative ownership of the infrastructure to deliver video (currently), as they do not want to lose that business. So even if television stations wanted to move to deliver completely over the internet (and apps), they would not be able to due to contractual obligations. Plus, the cable companies have so much money they can literally buy out anyone who tries to compete with them. It's not enough of a monopoly to be illegal, because these companies don't own each other (yet), but there's definitely a lot of collusion and back-room deals happening.
So, while it's not surprising to me to find this little difference in the laws between electricity/gas/water delivery and internet service delivery, it does make me feel a bit sad inside. Because I know, deep down, this law is made for the Comcast/Cox/Charter's of the world, not the people who use the service. Again, we are reminded that the loudest voices in politics are that way because they are the richest.
That said, the idea is correct...the Internet should be a utility, something you definitely need to have but also need to pay for. It's the next logical step to allow the government to provide more services over the Web, which is cost-effective for them, a better experience for us, and ultimately makes the government a much cheaper beast to run. Almost everyone wants the government to cost less, especially with the debt we accrue every year as a country...
The established players are quite often in favor of regulation, since it stifles up-and-comers who might out-compete them.
By the time the internet is destroyed by regulation, those advocating for its complete nationalization will have forgotten that their ideological brothers are the ones who advocated its destruction.
You have seen this happen recently with obamacare-- the government regulated the healthcare industry into the ground, and now nationalized health insurance as a "solution", which is already not working.
Thus we have the old cliche: If you're not a liberal when you're young you have no heart, if you're not a conservative when older, you have no brain.
Have a heart, protect rights, libertarians agree with you, but learn from the history. IT has never worked.
There's a huge difference between "the internet" and "the internet delivery business". There is no free market in the ISP business as it hasn't been a competitive market since the days of DSL.
The idea that deregulation would suddenly allow good citizen corporations to destroy evil actors is laughable in most circumstances.
In other words, regulation is a necessary "evil" to make unsustainable behavior illegal.
Because single payer works really well in other countries and has done for years, a fact that libertarians like to sweep under the carpet.
Obamacare isn't about extra government regulation and it never was. It was about taking an existing oligopolistic market and making purchase mandatory in exchange for a couple of minor concessions.
>Have a heart, protect rights, libertarians agree with you, but learn from the history. IT has never worked.
Oh god...
"Light-touch" is a buzzword at the FCC. It refers to not killing investment into the market with FDR-style regulation. There's very few economists who would come to the defense of government price controls.
> Over-the-top linear broadcasting via the internet has been possible, at least technically, for a long time now. And we have the bandwidth in this country to pull it off. The roadblock are the major cable companies who are making far too much money in their complete dominative ownership of the infrastructure to deliver video (currently), as they do not want to lose that business.
The cable companies certainly do not want to lose the video business, and it would be disastrous for everyone if they did. If you look at these companies' SEC filings, video service is what justifies building the pipes in the first place. E.g. Charter, the largest "pure cable company" runs a loss, but without video service it'd be losing $1 billion a year.[1] See also this analysis of Verizon's FiOS build-out: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/19/a-bear-speaks-why-v... (concluding that VZN won't make up their investment for any type of customer, but triple-play customers will come closest).
[1] Page 40, 42 of their 10-K: http://phx.corporate-ir.net/External.File?item=UGFyZW50SUQ9N.... Getting rid of video would cut $2 billion of programming costs but $4 billion of revenues.
A lot of tech people think they're too smart to fall for propaganda but there are other people making a lot of money proving you just have to find the right spin.
If that's the worst thing you can think of, we're in good shape.
Whether you agree with the assessed level of negative externalities or not (I don't, actually), the tax hasn't "destroyed" anything. Smoking still exists. Fewer people get sufficient utility from smoking to go on doing so, but that's the point of the tax in this case. Too many people were smoking previously due to market inefficiencies. Now the "correct" (again, I believe the externalities were lower than many people believe they were) number of people are smoking.
Needless to say, not evey tax is destructive, just as not every driver is a deadly menace who needs to be gotten of the road a.s.a.p.
Have you been on the interstate recently? ;)
Electricity is electricity, water is water, natural gas is natural gas.
But Internet traffic isn't a homogenous substance.
Bytes.
As for the water, once delivered it is used for drinking, for washing, for cooling, for watering...but it travels, unmolested, as water being commonly carried.
UDP and TCP is what I want my ISPs concerned with, not what I'm doing with those packets.
I guess you're just going to define it a utility, ham sandwhich is also a utility.
Utility, or usefulness, is the (perceived) ability
of something to satisfy needs or wants.
I agree, they regulate a bunch of stuff. I suppose that's a carte blanche to regulate anything it sees itself fit to regulate?
A utility is a platform that is standard/common so that more useful platforms can be built on top of it. Utilities become part of the stack of economic production. A utility could be seen as an economic standard.
If wireless and radio are utilities then so is broadband and wired.
In fact, if you were to believe Comcast, there are already regulatory fees and taxes associated with my internet access (non-TV).
In a light-touch regulatory framework, this could lead to innovation leaps. If anyone is familiar with the economics of Coase (generally credited with devising the spectrum auction scheme), would love to read some good counter-points.
http://www.treasurydirect.gov/govt/reports/pd/gift/gift.htm
I'm sure it's already on your to-do list, of course.
How they think this won't make them poorer as well shows they aren't really thinking it thru.
Unwillingness to do the former does not equate to unwillingness to do the latter.
When someone misuses their money, you shouldn't react by giving them even more. Really, is this such a radically-offensive position for me to take?
I think it's specious for him/her to ask other people to pay more money when the existing funds are being managed so badly. Clearly he/she wholeheartedly approves of the current Federal budget, but it's not valid to assume that the rest of us feel that way. It's just another case where people cut the government some slack that they'd never grant to a corporation.
I was co-founder of a VOIP startup in 2003, and a significant percentage of our time and resources was spent dealing with how the service was going to be classified for purposes of the Telecom Act. A bunch of the states were wanting to regulate VOIP providers as telephone companies, the FCC was on the fence (the pulver / fwd decision wasn't out yet[1]). Almost everyone was advocating for VOIP to be classified as a interstate information service so that we could avoid the onerous outdated state-by-state telephone company regulations. We got what we wanted (VOIP classified as a information service), but then a few years later we ran into the problem of ISPs blocking/interfering/throttling VOIP connections. The FCC in its first net neutrality foray went after some of the companies (See e.g. Madison River[2]) for blocking VOIP. However, the interesting thing was they could only go after Madison River under their Title II authority because Madison River happened to be a DSL provider and subject to Title II authority. When they went after Comcast for Bitorrent blocking of course they lost[3].
If we had been subject to Title II and regulation as a telecommunications service almost all of the states had regulations they would have applied to us included such gems as: * tariff filing * price caps or approvals * required interconnection with legacy carriers * requirements to use legacy telecom protocols * surcharges for stuff like E911, relay service, universal service, etc. * obtain state approval before offering new services or products or discontinuing services or products * obtain state approval before opening a new facility * provide notice to the FCC and the state of network changes * intercarrier compensation * mandatory build outs (to offer service you have to offer service through all of area X) * required the use of specific accounting methods and cost assignment and reporting rules that make the tax code look simple and friendly * countless other stuff down to things like how much and what kind of UPS capacity we would have. Do we really want to open the door for every ISP to have to get approval from some government agency before it can interconnect to another network, put in a switch or open a new POP? They might not do it now, but once the regulatory framework is in place, it always seems agencies are willing to enact a new regulation a lot quicker than they are willing to get rid of one.
As an aside one of the things the ISPs were publicly saying around that time was that they didn't have the technology to block or degrade VOIP even if they wanted to. Of course now this sounds absurd, but some policymakers were buying it. We actually traveled to DC and ended up demoing for several of the FCC commissioners how easy this would be to do (along with how hard it would be to detect) with a couple of lines of code. On one of these trips we ended up in an elevator with Kevin Martin [4] who was chairman at the time. He said his opinion was it was a mistake for the VOIP providers to race to get classified as an information provider to avoid the state regulation, taxes, etc., because it was going to end up permitting the ISPs to block/degrade the service. I don't know if I agree with him, but I see his point now. In the end VOIP providers ended up subject to a lot of the regulations anyway (as "interconnected VOIP providers"), but without the protections of Title II[5].
I think something does need to be done about net neutrality but I think the best solution is to encourage competition and more/smaller ISPs instead of giving the FCC carte blanche to regulate the Internet as a utility. Dane Jasper of sonic.net has laid it all out much better than I could[6]. It is essentially giving up and saying we are going to live with Internet access being run by monopolies like the power company. It puts us back to the Bell System in 1982, and that makes me sad.
[1] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/FCC-04-27A1.pd...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_St... and https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-05-543A2.pd...
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality_in_the_United_St...
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Martin_(FCC)
[5] http://www.fcc.gov/encyclopedia/voice-over-internet-protocol...
[6] https://corp.sonic.net/ceo/2014/11/12/neutrality-is-just-a-s...
What do you think we have now? A robust ecosystem of carriers?
Also, your post sounds a lot like you don't want Title II because you'll have to comply with regulations and you don't like the current system because instead of complying with regulations you found a loop hole and then the ISPs found a loop hole to throttle you. This whole post sounds like why it's bad for you and provides no reason why it would be bad for the vast majority of people.
No, not at all. I think we pretty much have a duopoly with the cable company (Comast+TW) and the phone company (AT&T) as the only realistic choices for the vast majority of consumers.
>Also, your post sounds a lot like you don't want Title II because you'll have to comply with regulations and you don't like the current system because instead of complying with regulations you found a loop hole and then the ISPs found a loop hole to throttle you. This whole post sounds like why it's bad for you and provides no reason why it would be bad for the vast majority of people.
If that is what it sounds like I'm sorry because that was not what I wanted to convey. I wanted to convey that Title II regulation may solve the net neutrality issue in the short term, but may set a framework and precedent that will subject all ISPs (and the Internet) to other harmful regulations which could ensure we never move beyond the duopoly we have now. Remember cable companies and AT&T are masters of guiding agency regulation and state laws (see for example the state laws banning municipal fiber projects). They are probably going to lose this round because of the public outcry and their outrageous behavior regarding net neutrality, but we should be very weary of what they will be able to do with the new regulatory framework.
I don't have anything to do with the VOIP company anymore, my only skin in the game is as a ISP customer whose only choices are Time Warner and AT&T for internet access, both of which offer what I consider crappy service and speeds. Although I actually spent several months and a bit of money looking to put together a local fiber ISP in my area, but in the end shelved (or put on hold) the plans due to a (mostly state/municipal) regulatory environment that was heavily tilted in favor of incumbent companies who were cable cos or telcos.
The history of telecommunications regulation tells a sorry story of glacial decision-making focusing on yesterday’s problems, inhibition of innovation, and, worst of all, what economists call “rent-seeking”—businesses’ use of the regulatory process to put their competitors at a disadvantage.
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/531671/are-we-really-sa...
Besides, there's very little innovation in the actual IP layer anymore -- though, perhaps you could point to some? It's basically (by sheer domination) not displacable at this point. Hence QUIC and such things which could probably be done (even) better at a lower layer, but which for all practical purposes are dead in the water if they don't function above IP. (In the case of QUIC at the IP/UDP layer.)
The only reason these companies have power to shape traffic is the federal and local governments have given them monopolies.
EDIT: Btw, love how two commenters pounced on my post immeditaely even though we're in a 280+ comment thread. How's that astroturfing going for you?
I think it's unfortunate that anti-intellectualiosm has become so prevalent that you feel comfortable with a post that consists of nothing more than the word "bullshit" and an assertion that I must be astroturfing. Labeling the argument without a counter argument and then labelling me.
Can't you do better?
In my particular country of residence, industries (including ISPs) are regulated quite heavily, and I hope I might be forgiven for thinking that this might have something to do with the rampant lack of monopolies in the ISP sector (in my particular country).
(I readily acknowledge that my original post was perhaps a little hasty and inflammatory, but one gets tired of this shit.)
This has got to be the height of irony. See my posting history to see why you're Oh So very wrong.
Goodbye, I'll stop replying or acknowledging you from now on.
> How's that astroturfing going for you?
Personal attacks are not ok on Hacker News. Please stop.
There aren't one or two ISPs because of regulation, there are one or two ISPs because the barries to entry are discouragingly high. It's fantastically, stupefyingly expensive to run that much cable. There's a reason we as a country have paid for so much of it.
Wireless broadband and satellite are inferior goods and don't replace hardline connections. Even so, you seem to have this curious idea that spectrum usage isn't rivalrous...which is not exactly borne out by reality.
Infrastructure and Internet service used to be separate businesses at one point, the barrier was created when infrastructure owners were allowed to kick the other ISPs out. I had dozens of ISP choices when I signed up for DSL in 1998.
This stinks of deregulation to me.
Setting aside innovation at the IP level, has your internet access improved over the years? Even in the Verizon/Time Warner duopoly I'm stuck in, I've gone from 768kb DSL to 10mb cable, to 75mb fios. Companies are driven existentially towards profits. When that doesn't mean creating value for the customer, then you typically don't have to look far to find rent seeking, monopolies, and misguided regulation.
I feel like many of the most fervent net neutrality supporters don't know what it means, and just feel like it is going lower their cable bill. Rude awakening ahead.
Well, except it does. It has everything to do with NN. If you can't choose your ISP unless said ISP has agreements with, oh I don't know, the WB or Netflix or HBO (or whatever) then the competition has been stifled, or in terms your sponsors might understand better: freedoms have been curtailed. So, in short: Stop trying to mislead people.
You don't need to be angry about it, no one is astroturfing, and no one spat on your mom. - grab a cold danish beer and enjoy one of your 5 broadband providers. Wish I had either option.
I have had good and bad internet service in my life. The least reliable was at my somewhat rural childhood home from TWC.
The best is my current connection from that most reviled of companies, Comcast. I have had no service interruptions, and I get a reliable 50Mbps at all times of day (I check regularly with speed tests and checking Torrent activity).
The reason my internet service (and customer service experience) has been so good here is that I have two viable alternative providers, a high speed DSL carrier offering similar speeds and rates in the city, and a local fiber provider (recently introduced 10Gbps connection - yes you are reading that correctly).
While I would prefer to have no rate limiting based on usage or content, I don't view this as some inalienable right. There is a price I'm willing to pay for that service, but there is also a price low enough where I'm happy to accept rate limiting. I'd like to have the choice.
The problem seems to be that the competition which gives me the service I'm happy with and the regulation regarding whether I am even allowed to reason about my preferences as in the above paragraph keep getting tied up with one another.
To me the biggest benefit comes from having multiple options in providers. A legal monopoly who can't do rate limiting can still give me awful service. Many providers who can rate limit will most likely give me service I'm happy with, even if the plan is rate limited.
The history of utility regulation is rife with cases of legally enforced monopolies.
So in short, competition isn't necessarily always good and doesn't always produce better results. In addition, de-regulated industries aren't necessarily free from government intervention and are opened up to market manipulation and exploitation.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis
Not all deregulation produced good results. On the contrary, a lot of it produced bad results, because it was often intended for selected interests and not for everyone.
Here is a good overview: http://economixcomix.com/home/tpp/
Most states have deregulated power and didn't have similar issues.
I am fully aware of the concept of a natural monopoly (econ major here), but the fact is that the majority of cable providers were granted exclusive franchises by municipalities. You may object to the source, but I am at work and don't have time to track down other support for this statement. Hopefully we can both accept the facts even if you object to the reasoning[3]. The article is talking about cable television, but since the incumbent ISPs are the same firms as the cable television providers, I hope you can agree that the analysis, regardless of your agreement or disagreement, is at least relevant.
Finally, there are many areas with multiple cable companies/ISPs (I live in one, and recently moved from an area where Verizon made a large FiOS investment and is competing very effectively with TWC - I do know that they've put a stop to expansion on FiOS). It is clearly possible to see competition in this area. The fact that many/most municipalities offered exclusive franchises and that we now see many monopolies in this area is only proof that many people _believed_ cable service to be a natural monopoly, not that it is. The fact that we see areas with competition in this sector is a strong piece of evidence that natural monopoly is not the case.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southwest_Airlines [1]http://southwest.investorroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=1975 [2]http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa034.html
The knife-twist comes when they decide to impose data limits with essentially punitive caps designed to quash competition, or dramatically "monetize" your accustomed use of their product.
I don't think that making them a utility is a great answer either; this opens the door to taxes that are disconnected from use and politicizing connections based on content. I think the long-term resolve to keep bandwidth competitive will be lost when governments see it as a cash cow (of course you don't mind another penny per gigabyte, because it pays for roads/schools/whatever).
A structure that encourages (or even requires) competition would be best, I think. Maybe neutrally administrate that last mile and share it between all parties (sorry, TWC and Comcast, you had your chance, now we've nationalized your build-out because you couldn't play fair).
If they are forbidden from rate-limiting me, they still have many dimensions by which to potentially decrease my happiness with their service. If they are my only option and they are forbidden from rate-limiting me, then they are likely to change their behavior in a way I will not be happy about along one of those other axes.
If regulation must occur, then I would prefer to see it happen in a manner that increases rather than decreases my choices. Forbidding a certain pricing strategy does not increase my choices. If regulation must occur, then I'd like to see something along the lines required sale of excess infrastructure capacity. This could happen in terms of utility pole access (the majority of which are not owned by telecoms to my understanding[0]), or through sale of excess bandwidth in an ISP's network.
[0] This is based on my recollection of readings I have done in the past, no current links. The question then becomes if the poles are not owned by ISPs (in general - in some cases they are) then why can entrants to the market not lay their own lines? This would be viable in proportion to the size/density of the market.
After suffering under Comcast's Netflix throttling last year, I don't want to hear utopian talk about encouraging competition. I want laws that fix the problem today by making those damn QoS firewall rules illegal. Of course I also want regulations and incentives to encourage broadband competition, but in the mean time net neutrality is a important stop gap.
[1] http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/02/17/monopolizin...
The thing with regulation is that it is pernicious, and once created becomes very difficult to get rid of.
Let's walk through a hypothetical: Rate-limiting becomes illegal today, and simultaneously some arbitrarily effective incentive is put in place that will provide opportunities for new entrants to the market within 5 years.
Now fast forward a few years. New entrants are trying to compete in the market place. One proven effective way to gain a foothold in a market with entrenched players is to offer a loss leader. Say a new firm figures out that it can gain a lot of customers with a specific strategy - a cheap plan that is very restrictive on total bandwidth, except for Facebook, Twitter, and Netflix. For a huge number of people this would be a great deal - limited bandwidth for most things, but unlimited for the services they use the most. Unfortunately for this potential entrant to the market, their most effective tool for displacing an entrenched competitor has been deemed illegal.
A regulation that solves a short term problem may limit our options in the future negatively.
If there must be regulation, I would prefer to see regulation that does not limit my choices. Given a low enough price, I would be very happy to have a throttled internet connection.
Again, my point in the parent was not to brag or say hooray for me. My point was that I have great service because I have choices. In proportion to the limits of my choices, there are limits to my happiness with the service.
I do not intend to speak for you, but I'd like to rephrase your sentiment - not to argue with you or your experience, but to put it in the context I am interpreting the situation in. You aren't upset because Comcast offers _a_ plan that throttles Netflix, rather you are upset that you did not choose that plan. While in the short term eliminating that choice may improve your situation (or maybe Comcast offers worse service or raises the price or otherwise adjusts its behavior in a way that makes you feel worse off), in the long term it is impossible to make people better off by reducing the options which they may consider.
We could more than make up for this hypothetical disadvantage by regulating the big players to share their last mile infrastructure like we've done with cell towers and land lines. A MUCH bigger issue than ISPs startups is that the next Facebook, Twitter, or Netflix will never even get their chance because they can't compete on an Internet that doesn't offer net neutrality. Netflix paid off Comcast for their "high speed track". But no small startup could have afforded this extortion.
> The thing with regulation is that it is pernicious
Yes, regulations and big government suck. I get it. But how do you propose to fix the deeper problem that we're mostly all living under a monopoly? How long will this take?
> You aren't upset because Comcast offers _a_ plan that throttles Netflix, rather you are upset that you did not choose that plan.
Yes, I don't have a choice. Thanks again for the reminder. So what's you solution again? You remind me of my family in Florida calling to today to tell me how bad the snowstorm is outside my house. Wouldn't it be so much better if we all lived in Florida with multiple broadband ISPs to choice from?
Here's an excerpt from another point in this thread:
>If regulation must occur, then I would prefer to see it happen in a manner that increases rather than decreases my choices. Forbidding a certain pricing strategy does not increase my choices. If regulation must occur, then I'd like to see something along the lines required sale of excess infrastructure capacity. This could happen in terms of utility pole access (the majority of which are not owned by telecoms to my understanding[0]), or through sale of excess bandwidth in an ISP's network.
This is definitely an "if" for me though. It seems that the majority of ISP monopolies we see grew out of the exclusive cable franchises offered by many (most?) municipalities when cable TV was becoming a thing. Since public rights of way were/are (depending on current status of these franchises) and pole access can be granted without adding new regulations, and permission from the city is all that's needed to bury wire, it would seem that these are the best first steps. If it turns out that the advantage granted to incumbents by their past franchises are too great (i.e. we do not see improvements in ISP service/quality), then the idea above of mandatory leasing of excess infrastructure capacity starts to make more sense.
The government failed to protect most of us from living under a broadband monopoly. It's a bitter pill to swallow but the only solution is regulation. If you want to sunset net neutrality rules after 90% of Americans have a real broadband choice, fine. But until that day comes, internet startups and broadband customers alike need net neutrality regulations.
Access to utility poles, granting rights-of-way to lay wire, or if positive action must be taken, enforcing excess bandwidth leases all address the issue much better.
As I began the thread with, the rate-limiting argument that makes up the thrust of the argument of net neutrality is at best a red herring.
Edit: Also, I did not suggest in my hypothetical that a startup ISP would broker a deal with major web companies, only that they might offer free bandwidth to consumers for those services as a loss leader. I further did not intend to suggest that without rate-limiting we would see no ISP startups. I was suggesting that disallowing the practice removes one tool (out of multiple tools) that a new entrant could use to effectively compete with an incumbent. Removing effective tools of competition can hurt consumers.
I don't understand why it is an either-or proposition. Seems to me the correct action is to do both.
Further, I think it's fairly obvious what I think of our government's likelihood to get any regulation regarding ISPs right. I prefer to limit the surface area of potential mistakes.
Finally, I haven't seen evidence of significant rate-limiting in areas with multiple ISPs. If this is the case, then increased competition on its own gets us both what we see as the ideal solution, whereas making rate-limiting illegal only gets you part of the way to what you want.
I am using personal pronouns conversationally, not in belief that you and I are the only people with either of these positions.
How does any paid app compete with any free app?
Why do we have netbooks when a a Raspberry Pi costs $35 and (the 2 at least) can do everything most consumers do on a computer?
Your question carries with it the assumption that an ISP should be responsible for ensuring the success of application and website developers. Would you make the analagous argument that cable (television) providers have a responsibility to ensure high production values of television shows? Would you argue that a road-crew is responsible for the quality of your destination? These are all means of accessing something, and the content you get via the means of access need not be the purview of the provider of the means of access.
Furthermore, my hypothetical is only to show a possible consequence of limiting the bargaining choices of multiple firms in a market with competition.
To go a bit broader, your question makes it clear that we have very different views on net neutrality. I view rate-limiting as entirely neutral. There is a price at which I would be happy to accept a rate-limited connection. There is also a ceiling at which I would not choose a completely unthrottled connection. I would not like a rate-limited connection to be my only choice, but depending on price, I would also not like a completely unthrottled connection to be my only choice. Ultimately, though, my stance comes down to choice. I want more choice. By limiting the terms which I may legally choose to enter into a contract with a service provider, I am made worse off.
Indeed, to take the analogy even more literally, you'd practically be saying that it wasn't a certain governor's responsibility that drivers suffered from his decision to arbitrarily close bridge lanes as a political move.
To be fair, obviously roads are maintained by the government and thus form a monopoly, while you're arguing that these decisions can be positive only in the presence of competition. But I find it hard to see why such dysfunctional maintenance would be encouraged in any situation.
I would argue that you are putting a negative spin on the analogy, so I'll put the corresponding positive spin on it to balance out.
For the road crew, we expect them to give us ready access to the places we most want to go. Imagine a highway - we would judge it a poor highway indeed if there were no exits within 10 miles of a large city. Similarly we do not expect the highway crew to give us equal access to some rural area, even though someone might one day build a fine resort out there. We don't judge a road by how well it gives access to things not yet built, but how well it gets us to the places we want to go.
Using that spin, we should actively encourage ISPs to make paid fast lanes, akin to a tolled expressway, with preferential access to the most common web destinations.
I do not agree with that conclusion. What I do think is that focusing on whether or not a company is allowed to perform any sort of rate-limiting ignores the much bigger issue that competition has been historically stifled in the ISP sector. Many (most?) municipalities offered exclusive franchises to cable (television) providers which made competitive entry illegal. Those cable providers are now our locked-in ISPs. If we must have government action, it seems to me that the best course is to allow freer entry into the market - this looks like allowing competitors rights-of-way to lay wire, allowing access to utility poles (based on my recollection the majority are not owned by telecoms - I should be fact checked on that, though), and dissolving any exclusive franchise agreements. Rate-limiting, as I started this entire thread with, is just a red herring.
(Final pedantic point - road work is done by a multitude of private firms contracting for the government - it is monopsony not monopoly.)
To step back a bit, what I posited was only a hypothetical to show how such a choice might limit competition down the line.
To step back even further, your post makes it clear that we have an ideological difference here. I do not view rate-limiting as inherently bad. There is a ceiling above which I would not be willing to pay for a completely unthrottled connection. There also exists a price at which I would be happy to take a throttled connection.
My general preference would be for an unthrottled connection, but my preferences do not exist in a vacuum. The price difference where I would choose the throttled connection would have to be quite large, and the throttled vs unthrottled rates would also come into play.
Further, some of my favorite websites would not be much affected at all. This site, for example places a miniscule load on my connection and minimal data transfer in a month.
I don't generally frequent multimedia sites. I utilize an RSS reader for blogs, so that bandwidth is also fairly minimal (especially if I choose to omit images). Email is text for the most part. A website could compete very well with minimal bandwidth for any of these purposes.
Furthermore, you assume that the bandwidth would be throttled always, and I've gone along with that. There are other rate-limiting strategies that might be chosen. One might be a data transfer cap, beyond which the bandwidth is throttled. Another might be peak-hour throttling, in which case my late-night browsing would be unaffected (and I do a lot of that).
One plan that would be pretty tempting for me is unlimited Netflix and Pandora with a reasonable data cap (I haven't tracked my monthly transfer rates lately so couldn't say what would be reasonable here).
Further, I've not suggested that this be the only plan available. I merely suggested it (hypothetically) as a manner in which a new entrant might gain enough market share to establish itself as a player. The more ISPs there are, the more likely one is to offer service you like. The more you restrict the terms an ISP may offer, the harder it is for them to compete.
I hope this thought process helps clear up where I am coming from.
Finally, I ask whether you consider toll roads immoral, or whether you hold your cable (television) provider responsible for the (production/acting) quality of the television shows you watch, or if you want to stick up for HBO and how downtrodden it is by NBC? The provider of the means of access has no moral imperative to provide equal access to all content.
In your hypothetical, if an ISP could come with an offering that would hurt the ecosystem (by favoring X against Y, and hence not allowing the Internet to be a leveled playing fields) but offer some savings for its customers then I would be against it. It's far more important to maintain a leveled playing field than save a few pennies here and there.
However, looking at other developed countries and their offerings, we can certainly conclude that what we get now is the worst of both worlds -- expensive monthly cost and throttling -- so there's plenty of room for improvement (cheaper service) while maintaining net neutrality.
As I have made clear, and as I think is fairly obvious to anyone who has moved between various ISP markets in this country, I believe that the quality of internet service is positively correlated with the number of providers in an area. I have cheap and reliable internet with three ISPs. None of the three throttle their connections in this market, and one has just introduced 10Gbps fiber to the home. The fiber provider is actively expanding, but even if you don't live on a street with access, you can get cheap reliable service from either of the remaining two.
I think it would be better for any individual in the US who cares about their internet access to move their markets in a direction from one ISP to more ISPs (like the area I live in) than to pass a law enforcing net neutrality and forbidding any kind of rate-limiting.
I do care about ISPs being able to offer me as many types of service as possible, and me being allowed to choose the service I prefer. Again, my general preference is for unlimited internet, but my preferences are bounded by costs. Another hypothetical: Suppose I am willing to pay $15 for internet access, and the only service an ISP is willing to offer at that price is throttled in some way (data cap, certain sites slower, whatever scheme). If you eliminate this as an option, then you have eliminated my access entirely, because $15 is my limit. In this way, marginal customers may be harmed by net neutrality.
I am not convinced by the argument that the internet will be ruined if some internet service contracts are rate-limited in some way. The biggest threat to the next (Google|Facebook|Twitter) is not any ISP, but (Google|Facebook|Twitter) existing and having a large network effect for its services. And to be honest I have not seen much more argument beyond this point. Even if I were to accept this argument, I think the pathetic internet connections that some people in the US have (there are people still on dialup and <5Mbps isn't that rare in rural areas based on my experience) would provide a bigger impediment to the-next-big-thing reaching all of its potential market than any rate-limiting. Multimedia content, especially, is awful on a slower connection. And no regulation of rate-limiting will do a thing to increase speed and reliability of networks - at absolute best it has 0 effect.
Forgive me if this is a misinterpretation, but you seem to jump from my hypothetical of _one_ ISP out of >1 in a market offering _a_ plan that is rate-limited in some way (what if it is just a data limit? This does not favor any portion of the web over another.) to there being no un-rate-limited service contracts available. I find this incredibly unlikely, primarily due to the huge unpopularity of rate-limited plans among a vocal minority of internet users.
Finally, I am quite confident that two ISPs fighting for my dollars are more likely to offer me something I want than two ISPs fighting for a favorable interpretation of some regulation.
However, net neutrality is the bare minimum. We should also advocate for more competition, just not at the expense of neutrality. Imagine we would let a grocery store lax the quality control on their products. They could sell more for cheaper, but the number of people who would get sick (or die) would increase. In a similar way, allowing ISPs to fiddle with throttling would have far negative effects for everybody. (it's not a direct analogy so please don't try to break it, that's not the point).
The $15 price range you mention is very doable, with much faster speeds than we currently have AND without having to compromise on neutrality. Our worldwide ranking is pretty depressing -- compared to what we could/should have. All these foreign ISPs are able to offer cheaper and faster connections without messing with neutrality. If ISPs must segment their offerings in any way then let them do it by speed (which they already do) or by how much data you can download/upload per month, but not by compromising net neutrality.
What I'll leave it with is this: prohibiting rate-limiting at best does nothing to increase competition among ISPs (I have not seen any arguments against this), whereas rate-limiting behavior is something I've never seen in a market with multiple viable ISP choices (by which I mean that dialup and satellite are not close enough to broadband to count). As I started this entire thread with, rate-limiting seems like a red herring.
[0]http://www.centurylink.com/home/internetonly/ [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_subscriber_line
It is in every ISPs best interest to be the sole provider of service in an area because they will have a better adoption rate and thus remake their investment quicker. This is the whole basis behind Comcast's argument in favor of the Time Warner take over, they aren't reducing competition because they each have their own areas where they operate so they so don't compete in the first place.
Think about that for a minute, the CEO of the biggest ISP in America admitted that they do not compete with the second biggest ISP.
There is a finite amount of competition the infrastructure market can handle due to high costs of entry and diminishing returns on that high cost as more players enter the market in an area. There is a finite amount of customers an ISP can have in any given area, it may make sense to build out to a market if you are going to be the only provider but if you are going to be the second or third provider your customer base is going to be smaller and as you start cutting up the available customer base there is likely not enough there to spend the upfront costs of building the infrastructure if you aren't going to get the amount of customers you need to support it.
The ISPs are already monopolies regardless of net neutrality rules, net neutrality will just require a certain level of fairness in how they treat the traffic of the content that passes through them. I would support requiring ISPS to open their wires for lease by competitors but net neutrality seems like a great second option if that is politically unfeasible.
Is it wise, then, to grant unchecked, plenary power over the internet to the government in the name of trusting that those who currently exercise the F.C.C.'s power will exercise that power with self-imposed restraint? Lord Acton's dictum that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely comes to mind in considering the implications of this step. Once we grant that the F.C.C. has open-ended authority to do what it wants with the internet, where is the formal protection against abuse and who will exercise it. Certainly the courts will not. The Telecommunications Act being relied upon here certainly grants the formal authority to do this. Those who passed that Act did so 80 years ago and never contemplated that it would be so applied. But the courts will say, it was for Congress to make the law and for the appointed agency to administer it within the bounds laid out by the legislature, and that means this exercise of authority will be upheld. But so too will any attempt by the F.C.C. to impose detailed regulations over pricing, usage, and all sorts of other areas that those who favor a free and open internet clearly do not desire. Once this step is taken, all formal protections against abuses of this type are gone. What, then, is the remaining form of protection. It is that we choose to trust those who exercise open-ended power to use "restraint." They assure us they would never change the way things are. They will never succumb to the power and influence of lobbyists. They will never exercise so vast a power that is given to them without checks for any corrupt motive. After all, governments worldwide and throughout history have demonstrated that they can be trusted with unchecked power without abusing their citizens. And so we can all rest easily knowing that our benign government is and will always remain in good hands and will always keeps its promise. After all, who needs the formal protections of the rule of law when you can give all over to the discretion of leaders who will be wielding the very powers whose potential abuse we all fear. So, for those who want net neutrality at any cost, the end justifies the means and any fear in principle of giving unchecked theoretical power to an unaccountable governmental agency goes out the window in pursuit of the immediate goal of net neutrality and in trusting current leaders who tell us that they really never intend to use all those unchecked powers. I truly hope that is so but I am very saddened that people never learn the lessons of history about what can happen when political leaders suddenly find themselves with vast amounts of unchecked power.
The free internet we know today will be utterly dependent on their good graces. I for one am not so sanguine as others about where this may lead.
>The free internet we know today will be utterly dependent on their good graces.
That may be the single most uneducated statement about Title II I've seen to date. What SPECIFICALLY in Title II allows the FCC to restrict what content the ISPs provide to the public? Hint: there isn't any language whatsoever giving them that ability.
I started managing ISPs during the dialup era and played shepherd to a field of Livingston Portmasters. I migrated us to racks upon racks of Ascend boxes during the 56k modem wars. I set up ISDN PRIs and DS1 terminations. I turned up our DS3s and set up our first default-free peering. I left just before the DSLAMs went in.
At no point were we ever subject to Title II regulations. We priced however we wanted to price, we shaped traffic however we needed to (we virtually never did that).
See, for instance, http://www.techlawjournal.com/topstories/2005/20050805a.asp
In addition, back in the dial-up days, how did your customers connect to those modems? Through their Title II regulated POTS service.
I'm not saying that Title II didn't exist in the 1990s. It just didn't govern ISPs.
One thing to help clarify the debate if you're talking to somebody who opposes this move: do not confuse the issue of how the government should be treating utilities in general with whether or not the internet is a utility. We can have a grand old time debating the overreach of a regulatory statist society, but that has got jack squat to do with the issue at hand. Is the internet more like electricity, where you pay so much for a bucketful, and then you can do whatever you want with it? Or is it more like Star Wars, where George Lucas and Disney can charge us 17 times at 17 different rates for different versions of what is essentially the same thing? These are two different discussions to be had; do not let folks conflate them into one.
That's an oxymoron.
The core reason internet service sucks for the vast majority of Americans is because state and local governments grant monopoly status to the ISP cartels. This move by the FCC does nothing to remedy that and consequently will not solve the problem. If they require higher "standard" of internet without doing away with the monopolies, for the vast majority of people this will only mean a higher bill.
Do you think the cost inherent in laying cables makes the entity that owns the cables a natural monopoly?
I am not aware of any.
>Do you think the cost inherent in laying cables makes the entity that owns the cables a natural monopoly?
No, otherwise the "natural monopoly" existed before the first company ever laid cables.
> I am not aware of any.
I think, judging by your username (ancap), you are philosophically opposed to the concept, because the existence of natural monopolies would represent a failure of the pure free market capitalism you promote.
I doubt I will convince you, and I doubt anyone else here needs to be convinced that natural monopolies exist.
>> Do you think the cost inherent in laying cables makes the entity that owns the cables a natural monopoly?
> No, otherwise the "natural monopoly" existed before the first company ever laid cables.
This simply does not make sense, which is further evidence that you're opposed to the concept. The high fixed costs of the laying of the cables relative to the small marginal cost of adding a new subscriber once cables have been laid is what creates a natural monopoly in this context. The massive economies of scale which are only available to the company which already has the cables laid make it infeasible for a new company to lay its own cables; that's how a natural monopoly is enforced.
Therefore, it's nonsense to imagine the monopoly existed before the cable was laid.
You won't even try to provide an example? Perhaps it is not I who is "philosophically opposed to the concept".
>This simply does not make sense, which is further evidence that you're opposed to the concept. The high fixed costs of the laying of the cables relative to the small marginal cost of adding a new subscriber once cables have been laid is what creates a natural monopoly in this context. The massive economies of scale which are only available to the company which already has the cables laid make it infeasible for a new company to lay its own cables; that's how a natural monopoly is enforced.
You asked whether the cost of laying cables makes a company a monopoly. The question itself demonstrates "nonsense". If the cost of laying cables is an inhibiting factor for the first company, then it is also the inhibiting factor for any companies which follow. The cost of adding new subscribers is irrelevant. If the first company is not meeting the demands of the customer then the conditions are ripe for a competitor.
Well since we don't actually live in an anarcho-capitalist "utopia", governments tend to intervene sooner or later in dysfunctional markets. And I find that regardless of how bad things were beforehand, or how light the resulting regulation, the response from AnCaps is always "You touched it, you bought it!"
Nonetheless, the history of Standard Oil is a pretty compelling example of a natural monopoly.
>If the cost of laying cables is an inhibiting factor for the first company, then it is also the inhibiting factor for any companies which follow.
The difference is the potential ROI for each market entrant.
For the first company, the entry cost may be high, but since there'll be no competition, there's potential for decent profits.
The second company faces the same entry cost, but they also have to compete with the first company, so their potential profits are much lower.
As a result, those who might disrupt the market are much more likely to invest elsewhere.
I'm not even sure what that means.
>Nonetheless, the history of Standard Oil is a pretty compelling example of a natural monopoly.
I'd wager that what you think you know about Standard Oil is probably mythical and not based on historical fact.
>For the first company, the entry cost may be high, but since there'll be no competition, there's potential for decent profits. >The second company faces the same entry cost, but they also have to compete with the first company, so their potential profits are much lower.
And yet I know of cities which have half a dozen ISPs (none of them publicly owned). As I said previously if the existing company/ies are not satisfying customers, then there is room for competition. The second [or third, or fourth...] need not even compete on the same scale as the existing ISP[s]. A local entrepreneur seeing the need, could just wire up his neighborhood. I know of cases where this has happened.
Congress seems to be completely incapable of doing more than grandstanding, while the bureaucrats may wind up dramatically increasing their own power with a single stroke of their unelected pens.
It's no wonder we have many times more regulations than laws in this country... If I got to 'regulate' who I had power over on a regular basis, there are a lot of people who would suddenly find themselves inexplicably under Title Darren. Human nature.
While there may be too many regulations, it's a red herring to claim that simply because there are more, this is a sign of dysfunction.
It's certainly not pretty, but it's not unaccountable, and it seems to be moving things in the generally correct direction. We can hope, anyway.
Accountable in what way? Based on either 1) Doing something so horrendous that would require direct Congressional intervention, which has never (?) happened before? 2) Waiting until a completely new Senate or president is elected, which is basically a 4-8 year cycle?
In theory all of these folks are accountable, sure, but in actuality the entire gimmick here is that the bureaucrats can make all the tough choices while Congress grandstands and makes speeches. That way the work gets done and there's nobody really to blame.
Some parts of that system are pretty good! Some parts are not. But it's only accountable in the strictest sense. There is only an infinitesimal chance that any citizen could have any influence at all over these types of machinations.
This is only notionally true, and history is replete with examples of federal agencies declaring their own authority over things which were obviously not envisioned so. While congress could act to change that, they don't, so power collects.
What about in this case? Would you argue the Title 2 declaration is within or not within the FCC's mandate? If you agree it is within the mandate, then bringing up unrelated assumptions of authority is not relevant.
The Congress would win if they could override a veto. They would also win if the president decided not to veto.
So in this case it's the President vs. a divided congress and not a non-elected bureaucracy overstepping their authority.
This is just a replay of the idiots who decided to deregulate the banking industry. "The regulations are working so well, we don't need them anymore!!11" Cable internet service and "next generation broadband" should've been classified as Title II out of the gate. The exemption was idiotic, and is playing out exactly as everyone said it would when it was first proposed. Consumers get less choice, and poorer service for a higher fee because of it.
BRILLIANT LOGIC!
I have a sinking feeling that all this will result in is a situation where monopolies are given out to the existing players and no one is forced to do anything to upgrade the existing service.
This isn't like a water utility where the product has little variance. Even now in the marketplace there is huge variance in the quality of the product I can buy ( I am one of the lucky few with choices of providers ). I have a feeling my area is just going to get given a blanket monopoly to Comcast and I will have to deal with a crappy connection forever with no hope of another company ever gaining traction to replace them.
It's naive to think it would be anything but this. We like the Internet as it is today but for some reason we need to have the FCC control it in order to try to keep it the way it is.
I don't especially want the government involved, but doing nothing is not going to maintain the status quo. Destroying local monopolies that have sway over a global network is a much better move in my opinion.
That, and we don't like how the major telecoms exploit us all for huge profits off the backs of decade old taxpayer funded infrastructure they got through political manipulation and now sit on for free money.
The golden age of Internet access was in the late 90s, when over-twisted pair dialup was still a thing but the regulations meant the wire runners had to license it out at fair rates, so you would get a hundred ISPs offering you service for dollars a month. But that could never scale, and we ended up with DSL and Cable Internet without any of that open market aspect where we are all taken advantage of for corporate profit.
That is not to say that Title II is anything good. It does not solve the central problem that ISPs have no incentive to improve the networks, all it does is compel fixed rate competition, which is only good for keeping us exactly where we are, when the technologies already exist to give us so much better.
Who likes the way things are? I'd like it a lot better if it was more like in Japan, Korea, Latvia, Hungary, Finland, Sweden, France, ...etc.
Thats the problem I see with classifying ISP's as a common carrier. Your not going to get 150Mbs everywhere your going to get 10 which means in the urban area's where you do have good access and some competition you will see stagnation ( forget 1Gbps in cities that are well above the average )
Why would you think this?
>a crappy connection forever
Or this? Just last week, the FCC raised its definition of broadband, against the complaints of incumbent ISPs.
I know that some percentage of the HN community seems to love government regulation and feels that capitalism is somehow evil, but te government has a long track record of being highly inefficient and mostly immune to market forces. If you don't like the drivers license office service, too bad, it's the only game in town; there's no incentive to improve it. I find it ironic that despite the Libertarian leanings of many of us here, there's some desire to implement more regulation, more restrictions and less competition. How does less competition improve anything? Without incentives, the market-driven pressure to make it faster and cheaper disappears.
I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of the consequences of regulating the Internet and presumably taxing it like a utility. There are significant unintended consequences.
The current state of broadband doesn't have any competition to destroy with regulation... last-mile internet should fall under a utility because it's already been tested in the market and there simply hasn't been any demonstration of competition because there is no direct financial incentive on the open market to overbuild on the last mile and compete.
How can competition be reduced from that as the starting point?
Now why, exactly, do you think that is?
On the other hand, I look at my other utilities and realize I have absolutely no complaints. Yeah, the power goes out from time to time, but that is just an inconvenience. As it stands, my internet is just as reliable as my power in terms of outages (not including the occasional speed fluctuation).
As long as it doesn't turn into a pay for use type deal and sticks with the current model of pay for bandwidth I suppose I'd be ok with this. There are just too many different moving parts for the cynical and rational parts of my brain to agree on.
Edit: Oh, and as long as censorship never becomes a thing.
1. Who built the Internet, landlines and lobbied for electricity in the countryside in the 30's ?
2. Right, because politics, money and stupidity are nowhere to be found in the `private` world.
Using more bandwidth helps push the expansion. If we had extremely high rates, and low caps, you'd never get things like video services, and bandwidth providers would never have incentive to expand the network. So the more use the better.
If you could use 100 times more electricity and water at the same cost (with no damage to the environment), would you? We might find uses for doing that, if those resources weren't relatively scarce.
If you give an average consumer a 10tb hard drive, will they use it all? Probably not even close. The amount of storage wasted by consumers is beyond epic, thrown away with the next system upgrade (someone want to count how much storage America has thrown away in the last decade?). That's the bandwidth context. We can keep boosting the amount of bandwidth for an exceptionally long time, at little additional cost over what the present infrastructure cost. You can go from 100mbps to 200mbps while not having to rebuild everything. Try doubling the output of or availability of water or electricity like that.
Put another way, bandwidth - like storage or processing power - is a hyper expanding resource; one in which we can even expand just by being clever while using most of the existing infrastructure. Water and electricity are nothing like that.
Humans could easily consume all the fresh water on this planet. We can expand storage, bandwidth and processing power to such an extent that we can never saturate the total capacity. In fact, in the first world, that has already mostly occurred for consumers with storage and processing power (and for the radical majority of all server side use cases). Will 99.99% of all web sites ever need a 1gbps pipe? Nope, and they also won't need 1tb of storage, or 64gb of ram, or a 16 core modern Xeon processor. Those sites will never have enough content to consume such resources, and certainly not in the next decade.
Also consider most discarded storage is a fraction of the size of what it is replaced by. So the fraction of waste is always small (compared to its absolute value).
Do I need to watch a late night talk show at 1080 on YouTube instead of 720? No, it has only modest impact on my experience, but I do it anyway because there's no cost associated to doing so. I can freely waste vast amounts of bandwidth (or storage, or processing power) with minimum concern, rather than focusing on conservation.
My phone is another marvel in that regard. It costs $0.50 per year in electricity, about 1% to 2% of what my desktop PC consumes. I can waste my phone's resources freely with very minimum concerns for the environment, especially relative to most other things in my house or life that use electricity.
Water and electricity will never have these properties. It's unlikely the average person will ever be able to waste vast amounts of either without concern.
To continue the analogy, people had "unlimited" water before, and they might use 10, or 100, or 400 gallons in a month, they're not really sure. And then TWC applies a cap of 60 gallons and wants double the money if you want 100 gallons. If you hit 200 gallons before for some reason, forget it. No one in your area is offering you that.
So people said "what's this caps, screw caps, no more caps!" because they were crazy caps, and you couldn't just pay a roughly linear rate for more data.
Comcast used to have a 250GB cap, which is more reasonable. But it's flat, for all consumer tiers. And you can't pay less for 100GB or a bit more for 270GB.
And various companies at various times have had "unofficial" caps.
I think pay-per-gig-used could be reasonable, but I understand why many people are dead against it, so far it's only been a way to screw them.
But do even the most tech-savvy have a reasonable intuition for how much bandwidth a computer uses while idle with a given set of applications running? How much a game of StarCraft uses? How much streaming video costs? (The last one is a trick question - it can change dynamically depending on your downstream speed.) It's just unreasonable to ask people to make good decisions about these things.
It is literally illegal to say certain words on television....
" In addition, a federal district court may impose fines and/or imprisonment for up to two years on those who are convicted of criminal violations of the law."[0] (Emphasis mine)
Dealing with ISPs (and mobile providers, for that matter) is a never-ending hell of time-sucking and abysmal customer service. Communications as a business has some unfortunate features that drive its pathologies. The overhead of the infrastructure is very high and the marginal cost for adding a customer is relatively low. When there's more than one option, there's very little practical difference to distinguish the competitors from each other. Whether it's wireless or wired, I suspect we're doomed to be subjected to this kind of bullshit until the businesses in question are treated and regulated as the basic utilities that they have become. I don't know anyone who's frustrated with their electrical or gas service.
Title 2 will make it so other companies have a chance to exist on the government sponsored lines. Once Comcast sees its lifeblood spilling into the streets, Im betting their CS will be as sweet as pecan pie.
But Comcast can't be.
Nobody really complains about the water company, but they sure do complain about rip-off artist plumbers.
Only because they're not paying attention. Electric and water utilities are limping along with century-old plant in many cases. They have little incentive to invest in less-polluting or safer technologies, and not much capital dollars with which to do it.
In this case, Verizon was just refusing to upgrade that path and wanted to force Netflix to connect with them directly (get them to pay more money in some way.
Is that the general problem Netflix had with Verizon? If so, how would Title II help this situation? Does Title II require these various companies to maintain the interconnects between their networks and other companies out there?
[0] http://blog.level3.com/open-internet/verizons-accidental-mea...
They don't realize the way that the Internet is provided is the essence of the Internet itself.
That's where this is headed.
It's also your duty to replace the pipes leading up to your own house off of the mains in most cases, so I guess take it up with your landlord.
Actually, it does. Water loss due to deteriorating infrastructure is becoming a significant issue as water supplies get strained. The EPA estimates that the average US water system loses 16% of their water during distribution, and about 75% of that can be prevented or recovered by maintaining and upgrading the systems.[1] Here in Texas this is a serious issue because our reservoirs are increasingly strained by population growth.
[1] http://water.epa.gov/type/drink/pws/smallsystems/upload/epa8...
And then I call into Time Warner spend more time trying to get them to understand what I'm talking about than I've ever spent on the phone with my other utilities.
i. I can't fire my power company, nor can I ever really expect to gain that ability.
ii. As nice and hardworking as the power company employees are, there's still only one main power run for the 1/8th of Oak Park that I live in, and any time a tree goes down in the alley along that run, or a squirrel detonates a transformer along it, I lose power for 6-8 hours. My block has a truly awful electric service uptime.
It's not poor customer service I worry about. It's a total lack of infrastructure investment.
Maybe the problem isn't whether Internet access should be regulated as a utility service but simply that utility services in the US are crap?
The same is true for many folks and Comcast or Time Warner - it's hardly unique to utilities. Here in Rochester, NY TWC is the only reasonable option for high-speed internet in most areas - the local phone company Frontier is crap, and the upstart fiber company is only in a few high-density spots thus far.
Meanwhile, your city and state governments can really give the power company a rough time if enough citizens are complaining.
Is that power run an overhead ComEd hasn't/won't bury?
Customers in Muskegon, MI were always shocked that we didn't know what local street they were talking about. How could we? We were in Pennsylvania.
I don't think anyone has run a truly local call support center, for anything, in decades.
You won't be kicked out of your house for canceling cable.
I don't have other options for all my other utilities, but so far they have overcharged me and screwed things up royally exactly zero times.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2015/01/fcc-chairman-mocks-i...
Honestly though, large utilities are a good case of a "natural monopoly".
I am. My water is clean and I've never had an outage. My power is reasonably cheap and quite reliable. The state doesn't allow either one to raise rates exorbitantly from year to year, either, and despite that both have made major upgrades to their facilities in the last few years.
(To be fair, we have less natural disasters.)
So, you're right that we're missing a lot of context - including the duration. A 30 min outage due to an accident is very different from a 3 day outage due to a storm.
And like you said, AC can be a big drain on the grid during the summer.
(Disclaimer: I'm not sure what the weather in San Antonio is like...)
(I'm in Austin, which is pretty close to San Antonio, but I see now is considerably hotter: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ewx/?n=100degreedays.htm ww.usclimatedata.com/climate/san-antonio/texas/united-states/ustx1200 )
It's just not a simple check and you're not going to find people to fix your internet with a proverbial wrench. When is the last time your water pipe had a virus? It will often taken digging into the problem with a fair bit of domain knowledge. And if Obama care (healthcare.gov) is any indication of the US Government's ability to manage or enact such things, I'd be worried too.
Every time this topic comes up, people like to try and compare it to the utilities services and you just can't.
A bad circuit breaker or wiring issues can make it look like problems that someone might blame on the grid, there are user-side config issues there too.
"And if Obama care (healthcare.gov) is any indication of the US Government's ability to manage or enact such things, I'd be worried too."
It would still be the ISPs responsibility to manage their issues, there's no isp.gov planned.
Fuck no! My appliances' fuses might burn out, my home breakers might be tripped, and my neighbor might dig into a powerline, but electricity is still "a utility".
It's a style of business relationship, with the regulatory, legal, and social expectations that come with it. The technology (and failure modes) are secondary at best.
I actually own two companies. One is an ISP and the other is a PCO (Private Cable Operator) where I provide Internet over DOCSIS along with CableTV. I also have had experience dealing with right of way like utilities for putting fiber in the ground, and public WIFI.
I promise you my support costs per man-hour are much higher than your electric company or water utility; not to mention a homeowner can do most troubleshooting their self. Any schmuck can flick a breaker and turn a wrench and at a minimum it can be explained over the phone what to look for or what to smell for.
but it's not so easy when you need to understand tools like Cisco routers, BGP filters, DNS (nslookup) outputs, some dude has a virus or, worst, a torrent... NAT, DNAT setup on some brain dead Linksys routers, the list goes on.
Supplying Internet to people is an endless battle of convincing them, at times, it's their machine. You just don't have this with utilities that are either on/off, flowing or not. Rolling a truck to investigate, I just don't find as many skilled IT people as you do plumbers and electricians and it cost more to train IT people too.
We have one property that is Section-8 housing (don't ask). We supply them CableTV along with Internet. Learned the hardware this was a mistake. You have the I know it all type who will yell at my techs. even has his own cable modem running Linux, you have the crybaby type who complains her internet is too slow and pleads for us to come fix her computer, then you have the old people who don't know how to turn on a computer. These issues don't exist with utility companies. You don't have to educate end users about how water flows through a pipe, or how to flip a circuit breaker...
See with utilities, it's not that hard to figure out what the customer is complaining about REALLY. With IT/Internet, you have things that can become problems for other people. Someone running a torrent in apartment 1B, for example, can cause someone in apartment 1A to call and say the Internet is out. Of course we have ways to track this, but the equipment is expensive and it cost considerably more to teach someone how to configure a Cisco router for traffic profiling, how to look at SNMP reports, MPLS bandwidth reports, etc...
Please tell me how gas, electric, or even water has a challenge nearly as close or as costly on a per/person basis?
Yes, networks are complex and require skilled techs to keep running, but that's completely irrelevant to the F.C.C. classifying Internet access under Title II. ISPs will not have any notable new burdens regarding customer service/support/troubleshooting, but will have restrictions on being permitted to engage in a few predatory practices.
I've dealt extensivley with at least 7 ISPs in the US, and not a single one would even consider helping even a business customer troubleshoot their own equipment.
If you are supporting peoples privately owned equipment you are going WAY above and beyond what any service provider i have dealt with in the US is willing to do.
"From 2005-2006, 20% of US outbreaks of virus and bacteria in water were caused by old, dirty pipes"
http://www.premierwatermn.com/water-quality/water-contaminan...
>A bad DNS can make it appear your Internet is out in one way
broken wire in the power system between your house and the pole (is your neighbor digging?)
>while a broken cable inside the house can make it look broken another way
i think thats pretty direct. a broken wire in your house makes it seem like the power is out.
>a virus on a computer is another
I could have a device flipping my circuit breaker, or corrosion on wires. My faucet could have any number of bacteria.
>When is the last time your water pipe had a virus
http://www.fair-safety.com/fair-outbreaks/view/county-fair-w... 1999
>It will often taken digging into the problem with a fair bit of domain knowledge
like electricians and plumbers?
The government regulates the utilities pretty tight, but there is also little to no room for competition in those spaces anymore either. Which is one thing that's improving service in Google Fiber markets.
Going back to the days before cable, when high speed was whatever the regulated its a utility phone company decided I was allowed to have
There is no free lunch and regulation will just mean normalization at best, to the lowest allowed numbers. People below the allowed numbers will eventually be put on a schedule where their area will be upgraded, after meetings and such mostly all not public. You might get lucky and see movement in five years.
Where they really need to be acting is mobile data. This is where the real thievery is going on.
I am all for having no fast or slow lanes, but if regulation comes out dictating speeds you can guarantee the lowest allowed levels will be met with gusto
What did you get, and what did you want instead?
Yeah, well my internet speed has been stagnant in all the areas I spend decent amounts of time for basically the last 5 years anyway.
Except where Google Fiber threatens to come in.
So, we can revisit this question when Google Fiber is a choice for 80% of the US.
And, Google fiber might be exempt because it won't be a cable provider. That would be an interesting thing, now, wouldn't it?
I'm very torn on this - I want net neutrality, but I have zero faith in the ability of a bunch of unelected bureaucrats to write 10,000 pages of regulations that will make things better.
My electricity is stable and reliable, and any power outages I've experienced have been brief, and exclusively due to exceptional weather events.
I'm also a Comcast customer, and I would say that I have some sort of partial or total service interruption (internet is completely gone, or set top box stops working) on average, once every other week or so. These outages are usually relatively brief (a few minutes), but at least once a year I lose one or both services for 6 hours or more. Plus the internet speed varies wildly from "high-end dialup modem" at the low end, to "significantly less than the advertised value" at the high end. Needless to say, I have never actually experienced the advertised speeds.
If I got the same service from my utilities as I did from Comcast, I would end up brushing my teeth with raw sewage about once a month, and trying to toast bread would occasionally cause a power dip that would brown-out every other outlet in my house. I probably wouldn't be able to shower some nights because the cold water pressure would be unusably low, and I would have to reset every clock in my house a couple times a month. The one similarity is that I would still be unable to shop around for better service, because Comcast is the only option in my area.
If you want a TLDR, it's that I would figuratively kill to get Internet service that's even just half as good as my utility service, because right now my internet service is much worse than that.
Shouldn't you be looking at water restrictions which the utilities blame on drought? This is the most similar type of event to the Comcast outage which you are describing. Both could have been prevented through better planning, capital expenditures, and forethought. If this is the comparison, both Comcast and many water providers fail, though the internet providers have gradually improving products, while the utilities do not (as far as I know). Most industries' products do not fall from the sky, yet they still manage to provide an adequate supply.
I work partly from home and, while not quite "utility pumping sewage" level of crisis, a badly-timed internet blackout at my apartment can be a serious problem for the whole team.
Now, my Internet being slow...that's not uncommon at all. I've also had them randomly charge me an extra $50 "by mistake", as well directly and repeatedly lying to me about what services/packages are available.
I'm in central Austin, and so ready for Google Fiber. My parents live out in the middle of nowhere, and Internet outages are quite common for them, easily exceeding power outages.
In contrast, I've had several 30 minute to 2 hour power outages, and lots of power outages lasting less than a minute.
On the other hand, a short internet outage would not necessarily be noticed, because there's not a big change in ambient noise when the internet fails, nor do i have to reset the time on my appliances.
I'd consider that comparable to a utility pumping sewage.
I do not understand the desire to compare problematic internet service to sewage-pumping through the potable water supply. Are you desperate for superlatives which will make the internet service providers look bad?
It's clear that Parent is saying "Comcast delivers shitty service" -> "water utility delivers shitty water".
It's a (possibly unintentional) pun, and I'm quite certain that Parent was able to get their point across regardless of technical inconsistencies.
But don't let that stop you in your quest to nitpick on the internet.
I'm not nitpicking, I just think the comparison doesn't make any sense unless one is trying to make Comcast out to be some sort of villain spewing sewage through everyone's taps. An internet outage is rightfully characterized as similar to a power outage or drought. The latter two are caused by poor planning and capital investments by power utilities, and the former is caused by similar behavior by the ISP. Both are fairly common.
The single time I had a problem with how it was billed, I called the state regulator who worked with my telco to sort out how taxes were being calculated. It turned out that they were billing me correctly, but couldn't explain it over the phone.
I replaced my landline with an Ooma (a VOIP phone which let me port my old landline number) which sounds WORLDS better, lets me manage personal blocklists, aggregates community blocklists to automatically filter incoming calls from telemarketers, political parties, etc, sends voicemails to my email, integrates with Google Voice, can ring on multiple phones or devices, and other such things. It's in a completely different class of service, and it costs a fraction of what my competing local offerings do.
However, your VOIP will not work during a power outage, during an internet outage, or any other time the VOIP company's servers are down.
Landlines work during power outages, during internet outages, and they provide around 5 nines of uptime (that's less than 6 minutes of downtime a year).
Those are the things your $35 a month buys you. How important that reliability is to you generally depends on your health. I know more than a few folks who would never give up their landline, because they have medical conditions which depend on reliable access to 911.
That leaves only VOIP provider outages as a concern, and I've yet to experience one of those in a few years.
When I had a landline telephone, I was completely happy with it. It was inexpensive and reliable, and if I was unsatisfied with my service I could choose from several other providers. I could use my own equipment with it, all of the consumer electronics were interoperable with any service provider, and I never had an outage (to my knowledge; I didn't get a lot of phone calls). I had a wide variety of options for dialup internet at the time, either through my phone provider or other competing providers. This was in a small town in northern Idaho, too, and it wasn't exactly known as a telecommunications hub or city of industry.
I am unhappy with my cable TV service, which is provided by the same company as my cable internet service. My cable provider is the only one in my area, and has no incentive to do anything other than take slightly more of my money every year in exchange for performing zero upgrades or service improvements.
This is just a single data point, but only one of the two companies I mention above is subject to Title II regulation currently, and it's coincidentally the one that I had a good experience with.
Then at year 4, for whatever reason, it started to have issues. At least once per month.
How I miss those 3 blissful years when it Just Worked.
Define "clean". It may be sanitary but most tap water in the US tastes (and smells) like swimming pool and has tons of other trace amounts of harmful substances in it like benzene, pesticides, styrene, trichloroethylene, pharmaceuticals, etc:
http://water.epa.gov/drink/contaminants/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water_quality_in_the_...
If you want "clean" water you need water from an aquifer (like Fiji) or water that goes through a reverse osmosis treatment process. Even then it's not going to be perfectly clean, but it'll be a hell of a lot better than the vast majority of tap water out there.
Those two links seem to contradict your point that tap water isn't "clean" since they point out that it is, in fact, very clean.
I come from a country where that is not the case and water had to be boiled before you could consume it. Oh yeah, and it wasn't fluoridated so I had multiple teeth rot away before I was 10 years old (luckily I moved to Canada before most of my adult teeth really started growing).
I'm also really curious where you get your water since most bottled water comes from "municipal sources" (i.e. it's tap water).
If you actually read the links you would see that "clean" is simply defined by the EPA as "what we allow by law". And that there are many chemicals known to be harmful to humans that aren't regulated or monitored at all... not to mention the fact that tap water in many towns and cities across the US regularly has chemical levels that exceed the EPA's defined limits (and many scientists argue that these limits are too high as it is).
Here's another link: http://www.nrdc.org/water/drinking/uscities.asp
>I'm also really curious where you get your water since most bottled water comes from "municipal sources" (i.e. it's tap water).
There are several dispensers in my area that provide reverse osmosis (plus carbon) filtered water (water source is usually local tap water) and it costs about 25 cents a gallon or a dollar for 5 gallons. Most Walmarts have one, back by the beverage section.
It's also pretty easy to find inexpensive bottled water that's RO filtered, you just need to look on the bottle and it'll tell you where the water is from and how it is processed/filtered, if at all.
>Oh yeah, and it wasn't fluoridated so I had multiple teeth rot away before I was 10 years old (luckily I moved to Canada before most of my adult teeth really started growing).
Correlation does not equal causation.
I argue that with competition, electric companies could innovate their distribution, ie bury the power lines, and the price of water would be cheaper.
Yes. Do you remember what happened in California when power was deregulated and Enron was causing brownouts?
Compared to my private utilities (phone and home internet) I freaking love my public utilities.
It's also worth contemplating if the brute fact of the matter is that public goods & natural monopolies (cable companies, cell towers perhaps) should be regulated as a utility. Particularly if the preferred mechanisms for interacting with a government in the US require/highly suggest the use of a computer or cell phone. If that assumption is being made (and it is), then it's not just a luxury, or even a popular service... it's becoming a common utility.
So, I'd be okay with that service.
Yes, absolutely. My water is clean, potable and available with at least 99.99% uptime. Same goes for electricity, which is only slightly less reliable (down for a few hours in a major blizzard several years ago)
If my electricity were slightly cheaper, that'd be nice, but it's still less than half my cable/internet bill. Power is already deregulated here, so if I really cared, I could shop around for a cheaper rate, or for electricity generated from renewable sources.
The US has painfully little competition in most areas, there is no debate about that. But new technology has been fixing that, albeit slowly, via increasingly expansive and competitive 4G, Satellite, and even improvements in moving data across copper wires or existing phone lines (not going to get you 100mb service, but quite plausibly "good enough" that you can realistically threaten Comcast with quitting service.)
I don't want to get in a libertarian vs flame war, but the fact is, it is far easier to regulate than deregulate when it becomes unnecessary. If the non-competitive market we have now is an artifact of old technology and installation costs, it would be a mistake to set up a regulatory infastructure we won't be able to roll back.
This can easily been seen as a power grab by plutocrats who want to start filtering and controlling the money making and informational aspect of the web, and while I am, of course, speculating about this outcome, I think in general, it has been on the back burner for years.
You know, to protect the children and all that FUD.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Act_of_1934
Radio works by beaming signals all over their coverage area. those signals are pushed to everyone. Whereas, a website isn't just sending its html to every IP and port it can find, it waits for a request and responds accordingly.
This seems to be a fundamental distinction to me, but one that would likely be easily obscured by politicking and misinformation campaigns if that were the ultimate goal.
Interesting thought though, as we do see the UK beginning to move towards this more hands-on internet regulation all of a suddden
Now, that's a very good point, but can't the very act of turning a radio dial be the 1930's equivalence of typing in a URI or clicking a link?
Wired magazine published an article in the 90's about the parallels between radio and the "new" internet, and it was filled with direct analogies between the two and how governments eventually took control and started regulating licenses and content, for the most part.
I am unable to find a link to that long article, but the ideas contained in it have stuck with me for a long time.
Free speech is a political principle but people pay lip service to it because they don't understand it and how important it is to a free society. If FCC starts to regulate speech on the internet (i.e. actual censorship which only the government can practice) by defining acceptable content and shutting down websites for so-called "hate speech", requiring a government "blog" license, etc. then it is game over for our freedoms and the future of the country.
That's a little different than "FCC regulating the Internet." ISPs provide internet endpoints to consumers. They should be utilities.
Fears about big companies are legitimate. I just fear what the FCC might do a lot more.
It all seems fine now, but the benevolent regulators in charge now might be replaced by less-benevolent ones later.
Something to think about.
No, but when unregulated happens to be a monopoly, you have a major major problem. Exactly what happens in many areas with big ISPs.
It's not like there is no antitrust law, but no one seems to care about it and monopolists simply get away with ignoring it left and right.
Everyone seems to think that this will just be exactly what we have now, but with more freedom and options. I don't think this will be the case.
It will open the door for any future governments to start regulating things like freedom of speech.
1) Surgery-over-IP would be designed within the limitations of the existing infrastructure, which is more than capable of handling high resolution real-time video.
2) Surgery-over-IP would be useful mostly in areas that are unlikely to have reliable high speed internet access (poor countries, battlefields, etc.).
3) Netflix traffic is streamed to the customer using a strategy that tries to minimize the number of hops it has to take (i.e. content delivery network). This reduces congested links for something that would be a point-to-point application like remote surgery.
We are still at the very beginning of the Internet. With all the connected devices that are coming online, the nature of network traffic at a macro level is going to change. We really don't know where it's going to be tomorrow.
All of the pro-net-neutrality arguments seem to ultimately boil down to a desire to avoid a "buffering" toast on any video. The practical reality is that the baby gets thrown out with the bathwater. Because "BUFFERING" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uKcjQPVwfDk
Usually, I don't like making the 'slippery slope' argument, but it is quite appropriate here.
The dangers are real. We can allow nothing less than forcing IPSs to maintain complete neutrality on traffic type.
In your scenario, an ISP will determine that an organization is using their internet connection for this high-priority operation. The ISP then realizes that they can essentially extort the surgeon/hospital.
This is a mafia-like protection scam. "Don't want to pay up? Gee, it sure would be terrible if that internet connection of yours was to drop out at the wrong time."
Don't think this scenario is possible? I would argue it is probable.
The ISP doesn't extort- the customer pays for service guarantees. This is already what happens today in MPLS vpns.
Savvy technologists are going to demand guarantees that other tenants can't disrupt their service.
This is in no way a mafia-like protection scam. There is a certain allotment of bandwidth available at any given time at any given link. You can allow for reservations so that some tenants cannot encroach upon your guaranteed bandwidth for that link. This shit is already happening all the time on amazon aws, azure, google app engine, etc. These are not new concepts.
Mafia protection is- pay us or we take you down. What I'm describing is- you pay so that a netflix premier doesn't disrupt your service.
I'm having a hard time understanding how you can feel a service like cloudflare is not mafia-like protection.
In my scenario, the ISP purposely degrades the service unless you pay more. This isn't hypothetical as it has been proven they did/do to Netflix traffic.
Cloudflare isn't going to DDoS every site that doesn't sign up for their service.
The value of doing surgery successfully via the internet is high. Are you really that naive that you don't think ISPs will attempt to capture as much of that value as they possibly can?
Do you want to live in a world where an ISP determines the worth of your internet traffic and attempts to bill you based on the content, not the actual bandwidth used?
Except that part of the government dedicated to vacuuming up and storing and analyzing every signal from every network-enabled device on the planet.
Taxation implies increased tracking and auditing of the good being taxed, in this context surveillance could be justifiable.
Perhaps you're unable to imagine these consequences, but your claim that they have nothing to do with one another is just ignorant.
The phone system is a utility, and it's certainly not the fact that it's taxable that makes the TLAs interested in wiretapping it.
What I'm proposing is that regulation is one way of legitimizing the role of surveillance. The government has a reason to be involved by virtue of the fact that it's made regulations.
I did a bad job in conveying that idea above. It's certainly possible my analysis is utterly incorrect as well.
explain the mechanism by which classifying internet service as a utility enhances the ability of the NSA to record that data.
It's pretty obvious, but if no one wants to think about it I can't make them.
It's purpose is to turn an unconstitutional program into a legal system for enforcing regulatory compliance.
If you don't like your current service levels now, just wait until the government gets involved.
Any 'utility' by government terms is highly regulated and has no market competition. Hell, they have to ask a judge before they can increase rates or change anything. Ha.
I cherish down-votes on HN, just like I cherish disagreeing with the idiocy that has plagued the progress of the US for decades, they'll keep swimming with the flow and wondering why things only get worse. It's like being the stern of the boat and wondering why wherever the country has been is shit, and looking at the bow as being to blame. You'll all get your turn at the bow of the ship, and I promise you it'll be far worse than your parents or grandparents.
Sorry, I know the Al Gore created the Internet for some people, but the it's just not how it went down.
AOL was responsible for getting more Americans online than any other company. There wasn't a mailbox in the US that didn't get an AOL installation CD at least 2 times a year.
These weren't people "switching" providers, these were people thinking "what is this crap and why do I need it?". There was a day when no one knew why they should even go online and AOL sold them on the idea. So, while what you say is true, you don't seem to understand the context of the time.
Maybe you can think of it as the iphone of smart phones or the facebook of social networks. Closed systems typically make things easier for the masses to adopt.
God do I feel old now.
It's easy now to forget what the internet was like even 20 years ago when things were just ramping up. There were huge government initiatives all around the world that made it viable for commercial ventures to use it.
Like a Comcast monopoly? You mean those market forces?
I suspect Comcast is just the best option in your location and you're dissatisfied with it. Bummer for you, and I sincerely mean that.
When industries get regulated by the government they get "protected". Protected from upstarts with new and better technology, protected from cheaper alternatives, protected from dissatisfied customers, and generally protected from all market forces.
If someone wants broadband at their house and the only possible provider is Comcast, then to them it may as well be called a monopoly.
No need to play here. DSL is not broadband. Luckily you didn't try proposing to call telegraph broadband as well. Pigeon mail anyone?
That's a bit more accurate. If somethings the only provider of a service, that's a monopoly. Plain and simple. There's no exceptions, there's no misunderstanding. The definition of broadband is 25/3, and Comcast is the only company offering that. There's no chance for upstarts with newer and better technology. There's no chance for cheaper alternatives. There's no chance of market forces. If you want to be an ISP in this city, you have to go through the city council who says no one but Comcast can lay cable and only utilies companies can use their utility poles. Guess what, if Comcast is Title II and everyone has access to their poles and conduits, well here comes the competition.
http://www.engadget.com/2015/01/01/google-letter-fcc-title-i...
It's close to it. Ask those who have nothing else to choose from in their area, and they'll tell you whether it's a monopoly or not.
Granted monopolies do not allow for market forces...
The ideal case would be the government owns the infrastructure, taxes (and use fees from bidding out access rights) pay for construction and/or maintenance, private companies to bid for the right to run services for the public.
It's just not profitable to lay a second or third network. It's a natural monopoly.
In fact, it's a coincidence that we have two networks in teh US. The telecom and the cable company.
Unfortunately, granting monopolies to information services is not illegal.....
The theory is crap. It's a way to give away public infrastructure to campaign contributors. It's corruption: pure and simple, and it worked really, really well for Comcast.
When some municipalities tried to build their own cable system, Comcast sued.
The simple fact is, getting approval to put your network somewhere is not only really expensive, but already heavily regulated, and this grants a de facto regional monopoly to companies like Comcast and Time-Warner in places where they have done so, because the startup costs of competing with them are unreasonably expensive and they can lobby to prevent competition. The market does not work efficiently in this particular area and no amount of idolizing market forces can change that.
Very true. How does adding more regulation make things better? Are you telling me that the new FCC ruling will make all those existing regulatory problems go away? If so, that might help.
But if we agree the problem is regulation, I would hope we agree the solution can't be more regulation.
It could. For example, the FCC could force companies to lease their last-mile infrastructure out to competitors, which could add meaningful competition to the ISP space.
The difference is that your ISP may get better, but my water and power won't.
The idea behind the whole net neutrality movement was to have "all you can eat plans" where all data is treated the same. What if now we get the "all data is treated the same" part, but not the "all you can eat" one?
Another issue: government spying. I know the ISP's/carriers have given the government virtually everything they've asked for, including direct access to the cables for the plain-text data + the recent cookie tracking inserted into people's traffic, but some of them have refused to do much of it, like Sonic, and I think Google takes a similar approach, fighting for users' rights, even if Verizon and AT&T do not. So what does it mean now that the government classifies all Internet under Title 2. What can we expect in terms of surveillance? And does it make it much easier to force all ISP's to comply with certain surveillance requests?
CALEA has existed for years and I haven't heard that Title II legalizes dragnet surveillance.
No, it does not mean metered Internet, which is already increasingly common in the US - though usually in the form of x GB for $y, with $z/GB overages. This has actually become incredibly common. There isn't a single ISP in my state that doesn't have data caps with metered Internet thereafter, or, in the case of my ISP, mandatory upgrades (though even then, the most expensive plan has a cap of 1TB.)
> So what does it mean now that the government classifies all Internet under Title 2. What can we expect in terms of surveillance?
Nothing changes.