Doesn't Team Internet include Cisco, Intel, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and IBM, and other tech companies who came out against the NN regulations that were passed yesterday? Or does Team Internet just include Tumblr and Etsy?
Proponents of this FCC Title II reclassification have argued that this action will not curtail investment in network infrastructure and that Internet bandwidth will continue to improve unimpeded. After all, if they do not argue that, they would concede one of the points presently being dismissed as FUD hawked by the anti-Title II people such as myself: that reclassification will reduce innovation and ultimately hurt end consumers in the long run.
So an underpinning assumption of pro-Title II is that investment in networks will continue unabated and network bandwidth will continue to increase in spite of Title II regulation. Why, then, are the hardware companies that stand to profit from this unimpeded continued investment concerned? Is it because the regulation will require them or their customers to disable support for IPv6 Quality of Service flags on packets? That seems like a fairly trivial configuration change. It seems more plausible that they fear their customers (ISPs and backbone providers) will see less incentive to upgrade to the next generation of network gear to continuously improve the aggregate performance of their network. After all, the hard part of network R&D is steadily increasing bandwidth/performance at prices the ISPs and backbone providers can afford. Implementing IPv6 QoS bits isn't going to show up as a significant line item in the R&D budget or Intel, IBM, Cisco, and Qualcomm.
So yes, these companies were lined up to build the bogeyman "multi-tiered" Internet, assuming such a thing was ever going to come to pass (aside: we'll never really know if such a thing might have ultimately been a boon for consumers, because we took away the opportunity for the market to experiment with that preemptively). But more importantly, these companies were and have been lined up to continuously build the always-evolving "next" generation of Internet network hardware, full stop. And for some reason they are worried that their profits are now in jeopardy.
I for one find that a bit alarming. I want network companies to get rich selling my ISP ultra high-performance network gear because that ultimately improves my bandwidth. I don't want to still be at 30 Mbps five or ten years from now. I don't want asynchronous connection speeds to persist through my lifetime. I want more hardware and network innovation, not less.
All that said, I don't suspect much of anything to happen in the next few years because network R&D isn't a fast-moving process in any event. But in five or ten years, we should be able to assess whether the pace of innovation has been curtailed. I worry that in 2020 I'll look back with a tinge of regret.
1. Allow network providers to continue to expand their network, while growing their own services on top of their own network which will compete with third party services. If those other services compete heavily with their own, they will enact tiers or reduce reliability so that their service is better/cheaper/etc.
2. Regulate network providers, while still allowing them to grow services on top of their own networks and allowing third party services to compete more fairly. Network expansion may be slowed due to the loss of service revenue, but new service business risk will be lowered as they won't be competing unequally with their own (or customer's) network providers.
We got into this mess because networks were classified as information services in the first place. We wouldn't allow the oil companies to own the car business, nor would we allow the electric companies to own the appliance business.
Why should we think this would work any different?
Utility companies get public access across the country to install their cables and pipes. They're using vast public resources. Customers often have few or no choices.
In my opinion, the only reasonable option is regulation. I don't typically like regulation, as I think it hurts small business. But the tradeoff here is that some business will be hurt, while many more businesses should flourish.
There has been a building fear of some coming changes, presumably related to implementation of Quality of Service on Internet packets. QoS was originally considered a good idea by many of us. Now we seem to be collectively convinced that it would certainly be used for evil. But we've not yet seen how that might play out. It looks like we maybe never will.
Option #2 sounds like new legislation and not Title II of the Communications Act of 1934.
Regulation is not always bad, but Title II is broad and current promises of forbearance should be taken with a heaping serving of salt. I feel that whatever rational or irrational fears were building, this was not an urgent matter despite what appears to be a massive amount of astroturfing by Netflix and its kin to spin the current Internet's tubes as ensnared at every opportunity by nefarious ISPs. I want a better ISP like anyone else, but Netflix is no angel here. Whenever a big business (e.g., Netflix) campaigns for the rules to change in order to smite its enemies—especially when painting it as a do or die, time-critical matter—my opinion of them is tainted.
Time and deliberation should have been taken to create the proper legislation for the situation at hand. The US has developed what I see as a dangerous and wrong-headed distaste for legislative deliberation, what with Congresses being labeled "do nothing" and frequent complaints of gridlock, as if those are bad things. They are in large part evidence of no consensus, which means subverting the legislative process is likely a mistake.
A great side-effect of deliberation in the legislative process is that the market sometimes creates a superior solution in the meantime. In many cases doing nothing and allowing things to find a way is precisely the right course of action.
If they are part of the regulatory package, they are as concrete as the Title II classification itself. They aren't "promises", they either are or are not part of the regulation.
Forgive the extreme metaphor, but if you were suddenly allowed to uses weapons in a hockey game, certainly there would be a flurry of activity as new weapons and armourments are developed, and whoever built those products would benefit. But it would be a disaster for the players, and ultimately for the sport.
The Internet infrastructure relies heavily on cooperation, and what Comcast did to Netflix was essentially weaponizing that cooperation. We don't need to wait and see where this goes, because history is overflowing with examples of that tactic being toxic for the broader ecosystem. The Comcast/Netflix play was a success, and we know that a game where those kinds of plays succeed is a bad game, so they changed the rules. This is why you're not allowed to cross check in hockey - sure, it's competition (and competition is what sport is about), but that particular kind of competition leads down a bad road for everyone.
So to me, this ruling says "compete, innovate, but not in this space: this space is destructive". It doesn't address what I see as an equally large problem - lack of competition at the last mile - but that's for another ruling.
My preference would be for something very light-touch at first since in my opinion we haven't seen much evidence of the weaponizing escalation you've illustrated in metaphor. We've seen Comcact and Netflix bring knives to what was expected to be a boxing match. In my opinion, the outcome was fine. Without the metaphor: the market worked it out. Given Comcast was in the middle, I assume many Comcast customers gave them a verbal lashing and some others actually voted with their wallet and switched to whatever the second option was for them (assuming they had a second option; see last mile problem). A few people may have even decided to stream video not from Netflix but rather Amazon Prime or other services.
Given Netflix's massive bandwidth needs, the metaphor is a bit more like Netflix's whole boxing team showed up to the boxing match, so Comcast's single boxer reached into his pocket and grabbed his knife. Then the Netflix team grabbed their knives (by way of drumming up the ire of their user community). And there was a bunch of blood spilled. But ultimately, I think this process is acceptable.
Going back a few messages, we had been talking about what can be taken away from hardware manufacturers expressing concern about this regulatory change. You had said of course they are concerned, for it is natural for them to worry that their next-generation hardware for a tiered-Internet is at risk of lower demand. My premise is that implementing a tiered-Internet (whatever that is) is not much of an engineering challenge at this point. I expect ongoing R&D for network hardware has been and continues to be principally about how do we make this stuff faster, cheaper, better because our customers (ISPs and backbone providers) always want faster, cheaper, better.
Now they are presumably worried their customers won't want faster, cheaper, better.
That gives me some concern. My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present. But will it be only a little bit better? Maybe even pretty much just the same? Maybe I will be totally satisfied; I cannot predict the future.
But are these hardware vendors the canary in the coalmine? Or are they shills for Comcast and the other evil ISPs? I'm not sure, but they are definitely an integral part of making the Internet work so their opinion should not be so broadly rejected.
Why does the legislation as opposed to the regulation need to be specially crafted to the modern internet, especially if the existing provisions of Title II, including the regulatory flexibility provisions, provide an adequate basis regulation specially crafted to the modern internet?
I'd also argue the above as a more realistic attribution of motivation than that they're worried people will just want less Internet. I don't think the hardware companies are shills, or that they're evil, I just think they're myopically focused on their next product cycle.
The point you raise about the size disparity between Netflix and Comcast is precient, but I see it from the other direction - what would Comcast and their partners start doing to market entrants with this kind of strategy? If I'm Google and I've got a comfortable relationship with Comcast, what's to stop me from asking them, as part of a larger deal, to severely degrade or outright block new entrants that might threaten me? We've seen lots of companies do this (Microsoft and the various computer manufacturers (Compaq et al.) in the 90's comes immediately to mind).
The trouble with this scenario is that it takes a long time to notice anything is wrong, and so you don't get much market pushback. Then 10 years go by and you realize that no one's challenged the incumbents in a long time, and it's not because they're any good at what they do.
> My future Internet connectivity was supposed to be way better than my present.
I don't think that's safe to say at all, considering it's been flatlined for so long:
http://blog.nprg.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Google-Fiber...
Which is why I don't think the light-touch approach is warranted in general anymore. There's clearly big structural problems here. Having said that, I think we'd agree that the above chart is mostly a last-mile issue. The NN thing is more future-oriented, which is riskier, but also hopefully avoids a situation like the last mile issue where things are so entrenched that it's hard to imagine fixing it.
This reminds me of the power grid discussion on HN, where the cool thing is hooking up independent solar arrays, and the boring thing is running the existing grid that we depend on for life. Now, having your house connected to both the grid and your personal backup makes jobs more dangerous for linemen -- already one of the top ten most dangerous jobs in the country. That was waved away with "well, if I were working on power lines, I would just assume they were always live anyway" by people who have never had an outdoors job, and whose entry-level salaries are where linemen top off at the end of a career.
People have abstracted away how much work it takes to keep society running. For the most part that is okay, because it gives them more time to specialize in their chosen field, but then they think because something has been abstracted away that it's easy to make some "minor change" without knowledge of the cost either in dollars or in lives.
Any home inverter that feeds power back to the utility is required by code to island itself when it detects a loss of utility power.
Also, I have a close friend who is a lineman, and has worked in every state between Illinois and New York. He says (over the beer we're having right now) that all lineman assume lines to be live, and they routinely perform service on hot lines without removing power.
Its not the newest fad we're after; we're excited by any prospect of the status quo shifting. History shows us technology getting cheaper and better at a constantly faster rate (I won't say exponential, but close enough). This is where the excitement comes from, perpetual destruction and creation with a higher quality of life the continual result.