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Comment by brandonmenc | Hacker News Reader

From the article:

"There is an alternative to [Spotify], in getting outside of it, but only if we have net neutrality. If they really fuck with net neutrality, then I don’t know what independent musicians are going to do. Right now, you can go up on Bandcamp and you can put out your record, and they take their 15 percent cut, and you can make a fair amount of money selling a couple hundred CDs. You can do okay. But if that kind of freedom is taken away, then it’s going to be a really strange game."

This is some bizarre logic that has filtered down into the general population - that if ISPs are allowed to prioritize traffic, it inevitably leads to people not being allowed to sell zip files of their band's music.

It's a ridiculous conclusion to draw.

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Spotify could make the argument that they are willing to provide free unlimited music streaming to impoverished Americans (as an altruistic act of course) by partnering with ISPs (of course Spotify will still serve ads to these users). They would pump their millions of dollars as a large player in the industry into this effort, and music listening becomes de-facto based on the Spotify platform because they've invested in a deal that would bring free music streaming to the masses of impoverished and (musically) underserved Americans.

Smaller streaming services such as Bandcamp, with their selfish capitalistic intent on charging for their services directly, cannot compete with the pervasiveness and free-ness of Spotify services. People cannot fathom why they would pay to buy music when Spotify is so generously providing it for free (faster loading, free, and doesn't use up their data allotments!) included in their ISP plan.

Far down in the future Spotify realizes they don't have to improve their services anymore. They realize "hey altruistic act we did is actually a great indirect way to pay to make our competitor's services worse, instead of investing in making our services better."

By paying to prioritize their traffic at the network level, Spotify realized they can leverage their existing size, money, and power to simply hold down the competition at the ISP level rather than rise up above them in the product level.

It's not a ridiculous conclusion, its reality. Theres a lot of people who will not pay for the internet if they can get Facebook, WhatsApp, wikipedia, and BBC for free. That's what internet.org is doing in India, and it will crush services like bandcamp that exist because of an open internet.

Or t-mobile's free streaming plans - you pay for a couple hundred megs of data and your Spotify doesn't count towards that quota, so you can't download a bandcamp album because your plan doesn't allow for it. This isn't some crazy future we're imagining. This is the internet right now.

> It's a ridiculous conclusion to draw.

Not really. My guess is you're young enough that you never had to deal with AT&T in their prime. Packet prioritization is the very beginning of what carriers would like to happen. But once they get it, each succeeding step gets easier.

The basic view of a dominant carrier is that they should get a piece of everything that passes through their network. Everything. And because they're enormous, they really only want to deal with other enormous entities. It's most convenient for them to skim 30% of everything if they deal with just a few other players who are also monopoly or oligopoly players.

Try to imagine what the Internet would be like if Ticketmaster were in charge. Or if you'd like to read the history, When Wizards Stay Up Late, an origin story of the Internet, gives some of the flavor of how much AT&T squeezed everything.

Or you could look at the history of the answering machine. It was originally invented by AT&T, but they suppressed the invention out of fear that it would cut down on call revenue. [1] They fought tooth and nail against letting other companies sell them; it wasn't until 1956 you were even allowed to strap something to your phone [2], and they prevented people making electrical connections to the telephone network until 1968 [3].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answering_machine

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hush-A-Phone_Corp._v._United_S...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carterfone#Landmark_regulatory...

I'm pushing 40 and my mom was a lifelong GTE employee, and while I only vaguely remember pre-divestiture, I've heard all the stories - from both sides of the DMARC.

Even if they want to, I don't believe it's possible for ISPs to exact Ma Bell level control over their services, for a number of reasons - the main ones being that the landscape is not a monopoly, and that while consumers might not care about their mobile carrier throttling Spotify or Netflix, they won't stand for being served with a completely locked-down web across the board. That's just not going to happen.

I know I represent a minority position inside tech - of not supporting Net Neutrality - but I would support it if there were an actual monopoly, or if ISPs were rendering sites and services completely inaccessible, which they are not. Until then, it's just a slippery slope imo.

There isn't a monopoly yet. And "that's just not going to happen" is at best an argument from ignorance (I don't how X could happen, ergo X is impossible), and at worst a statement of faith.

If you're going to argue against a slippery slope, you have to say where the discontinuity is and why. Personally, I don't see one. Their used to be a vibrant ISP market. Now most Americans have at most two choices; many have just one. Comcast, the largest, is notoriously terrible along any axis you care to name: pricing, quality of service, reliability, customer service. There is no reason to think they won't get worse if they're allowed to.

I don't think they'll leap to a locked-down web. They don't have to. If they get pricing control, they can just keep squeezing small players and suppressing competition. It doesn't even have to be on purpose; it's just the easy way for them to make money. Even without that control we're seeing a lot of consolidation into large players. With it, we'd see a lot more.

My "that's not going to happen" is an argument that it's imo nearly impossible that people will accept a highly restricted web. That's where I see the discontinuity - consumers will demand a relatively open web, monopoly or not.

Your argument here is something I see often.

The conversation starts with talking about all of this possible content restriction, then it shifts into a discussion about consolidating ISPs and stagnating quality - but I fail to see how Net Neutrality will provide more consumer choice re: quality of service.

I think those are two different conversations.

As a disclaimer, I prefer an internet like the one Net Neutrality proposes, but at the same time I believe there are a lot of good reasons to prioritize traffic differently - and that the leap to content restriction is a big one. Because, why aren't they doing it now? Maybe I'm being naive.

Ok, fine, you don't see how it's possible. That's not an argument that it isn't possible, unless you also want to claim that you have a much stronger ability to predict the future than humans normally demonstrate.

But one way it could happen: It doesn't start with people accepting a highly restricted web. Instead, people just get gradually comfortable with things dying off or merging (which happens all the time) and don't notice that new things don't crop up to replace them except when owned by companies large enough to successfully negotiate with the gatekeepers.

For decades people have been happy with video being controlled by a small number of media conglomerates. For decades more they were happy with an oligopoly of 3 TV networks.

As to the "why aren't they doing it now", they were. They did their best to squeeze Netflix to pay for access to consumers at the same time consumers were paying for access to Netflix. This has now changed thanks to tougher rulings:

https://www.dslreports.com/shownews/Cogent-CEO-Interconnecti...

But they will certainly keep trying. It's a very easy path to revenue growth for them if they can get away with it. Plenty of money, and no need to do the hard work of finding new ways to deliver value. Plus the US right is partial to oligopoly and rentier capitalism.

> Ok, fine, you don't see how it's possible. That's not an argument that it isn't possible

Anything is possible. That's not an argument that everything likely.

> For decades people have been happy with video being controlled by a small number of media conglomerates. For decades more they were happy with an oligopoly of 3 TV networks.

And now, they are not happy with that.

The trend is that people want and demand choice, and rolling it back in any significant way will make consumers push back. The genie is out of the bottle, as they say.

Does the absence of Net Neutrality permit ISPs to charge on both ends of a Netflix stream? Yes. Does it inevitably result in me not being able to post a video of my band's new music? (the original argument) Highly doubtful.

It depends how you interpret non-neutrality:

1. Laws written to allow different "lanes" of traffic, with protections that prohibit censorship and don't raise the bar of entry for websites.

2. Providers mostly have free reign to slow/stop any data that crosses their network and charge anyone however they want.

Given Facebook's internet.org and similar "zero-rating" schemes, I'm not sure you can dismiss argument 2 so easily.

Or ISPs with a penchant for expansion can produce Spotify competitors (many mobile carriers already do have their own streaming music services) and favor those over competing services as included/complementary/whathaveyou services. It's not a particularly ridiculous end to walk out to, really.

Once they have their service they don't need to do any favors for other music competitors, such as Bandcamp, unless those services "partner to provide a premium experience." In this fuzzy future, they need not block it, just make that traffic part of the basic pipeline that gets regularly and frustratingly throttled.

Ridiculous other than that T-Mobile is doing it right now.

http://www.t-mobile.com/offer/free-music-streaming.html

People like streaming, and without net neutrality providers can inject jitter and loss into all streaming services (even ones you've set up yourself on e.g. AWS) that haven't paid the protection money.

The argument was that a service like Bandcamp, where you sell file downloads, wouldn't exist - which is a stronger position than arguing that streaming wouldn't exist.

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