FCC plan would give Internet providers power to choose the sites customers see
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Parallels are then drawn to the Internet, where if we're not paying attention to what is happening now, then the free and open nature of the Internet today will slowly vanish and be replaced by only the big sites who can afford to be on the Internet.
[0]: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/apr/02/master-switch-... (book review, you can find the actual book on Amazon or wherever)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92vuuZt7wak
The problem is that ISP shills that make these decisions don't care about public opposition. They aren't elected officials.
But they do care most about making money from the public and no one has convinced me that filtering internet packages by website makes any technical, marketing, or business model sense at all.
This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It wouldn't take much market research to see it's a terrible idea.
Plus the huge technical challenge of filtering at the ISP level... this would be a huge boon for encryption and VPNs as well.
No American ISP for the ~20yr timeframe before the FTC regulation was passed a few years ago had ever offered such an arrangement. Not to mention no ISP in any other country has offered anything close to that either. Plenty of American ISPs have said they have zero intention of doing it either.
This would be a boon to any ISP who DIDN'T do this. Competition, the technical hurdles, and obvious lack of business sense, etc has always been an adequate counter-balance to this idea.
So I'm a bit confused why this is generating so much FUD over such a highly hypothetical and hand wavy scenario... as if the only thing stopping them from doing it was this three year old FTC regulation.
Why not create regulation in response to real scenarios that have actually happened instead of hypothetical ones that are already have plenty of other drawbacks?
http://www.businessinsider.com/verizon-netflix-youtube-throt...
Your other points hold up equally poorly: there are no unsolved technical hurdles in throttling or blocking specific sites or services -- as evidenced by the fact that they can and have already done so. As for "marketing" and "business model" and it being an "unpopular idea", these again fall back to the issue of consumer choice: in an effective monopoly, it doesn't matter a whit whether the populace dislikes the idea. It's not like Comcast is winning any popularity contests as it is.
And the current FTC regulations in question didn't do anything in regards to that issue you linked to?
It's the flip side of the same coin. Without net neutrality, ISPs will be able to charge content providers like Netflix a toll to not be throttled out of viablity -- who will then presumably pass the costs on to end consumers -- or the ISPs can directly charge end consumers an extra toll for access to the full internet. (Of course they'll do both, after some experimentation to find the best profit::outrage ratio.)
> And the current FTC regulations in question didn't do anything in regards to that issue you linked to?
...they kinda did? In that Verizon had to back off and wait for net neutrality to be repealed before they could try again?
(I assume you meant FCC, not FTC, in all of this. The FTC, of course, doesn't have any authority here until after the common carrier regulations are lifted. So, roughly a month from now.)
The FCC adopted NN principles in 2004 and did reactive, case-by-case enforcement of the principles without general regulation up until the federal courts stopped that approach in 2010. The two regulatory packages in 2010 and 2015 were largely based on the actual things that had been observed in the 2004-2010 period. That is, while they did consider and seek to preempt some new violations of the same principles, they were very much reactions to real scenarios that happened.
Comcast didn't count movies streamed through there service against the monthly cap. They did count movies streamed through netflix.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...
That could change though as more providers are rolling out fiber. (AT&T just rolled out Fiber to the Home in my neighborhood, and Comcast says they will do the same soon.)
And Google's competition heavily incentivized that rolling out fiber. Imagine what the threat of a new entrant offering unthrottled internet would do to these hypothetical plans?
> Even these numbers overstate the amount of competition, because an ISP might offer service to only part of a census block. The percentage of households with choice is thus even lower.
This is especially true with DSL @10mb - it’s common for DSL providers to have lower speeds for some customers due to distance limitations. Also, is 2 providers at 10mb really enough ‘choice’ to force the market to do the right thing here? Especially considering that those 2 providers are likely one of only 3 or 4 national ISPs...
I am a huge proponent of market freedom and market choices, but the system we have now has embedded natural and regulatory monopolies and duopolies - that’s the opposite of a free market.
Also, for everyone, billing would become more complexified, obscured to extract more money from consumers and thwart cost calculation and comparing with (the few remaining, if any) competitors.
Fellow Americans, does it exist?
Edit: I meant to imply that 4G would be more expensive. After checking briefly, the best offer I'm finding starts at $30/month for 5GB.
Where I'm at, it's Comcast or nothing. Most of the US does not have any ISP competition. It's usually 1 ISP to choose from, or if you're lucky, 1 ISP with expected speeds and 1 ISP over DSL.
I really wish I lived somewhere with multiple options, because if anything like this website bundle scenario did play out, I wouldn't have any choice in avoiding it.
The internet is more vital to everyone now than compared to 15 years ago. Every year more and more people are choosing to eschew traditional cable for Netflix et al.
With NN being repealed, it opens up ways for ISP's to promote their own content and shut out others like nothing that's happened before. This whole repeal smacks of anti-consumerism and pro corporate nonsense.
Competition surely can help, but currently there is no competition in a lot of places. It's basically monopoly / oligopoly situation, with collusion and market division to boot. So increasing competition is a good goal, but it shouldn't block preventing monopolistic abuse with legal means.
Monopolists also created a lot of blockers that prevent increasing competition. Such as local state laws that ban municipal networks which could solve this very problem.
Places with a lot of people? People who have been harmed by what NN is intending to fix?
> Monopolists also created a lot of blockers that prevent increasing competition.
Facilitated by government. If government was responsible in the first place, why not just undo what they did?
It doesn't depend on numbers. Depends mostly whether there is some other ISPs besides the coax provider (which are the most widespread).
Yes and yes. I've lived all over southern California, but never anywhere that had two broadband providers available at the same address. Parts in cities; I'm not talking about little desert communities, or something. I have however been inconvenienced by various ISPs' content-based packet filtering policies.
> Facilitated by government. If government was responsible in the first place, why not just undo what they did?
Part of it is that you're talking about every individual local government, with lobbying from the incumbent ISPs. A lot of those governments have contracts with those incumbents, giving them franchise rights in the city. They can't just declare those contracts void.
Beyond the local level, a lot of states have laws that make setting up a new ISP difficult or impossible (especially municipally-operated internet access).
I would love for you to use some of your training to supply your post with actual data or sources. Everything I see reported disagrees with so many of your assumptions.
Like your unstated assumption of some sort of fair and competitive market where they will lose money if they don't treat their customers right. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...
The internet is so vital to our modern world that it has become a human right in several countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access#Ensur...
The only time this has ever been done is in countries like Portugal to offer cheaper internet on limited mobile phone connections to people only who want Facebook/Twitter/etc for $5/m instead of a full internet connection for $20-30/m (typically also far cheaper than the US). It has never been tried to limit primary ISP internet connections.
Data requires actual numbers. I've repeatedly said in my comments I believe we should regulate things companies have done that are provably bad. Not hand wavy hypothetical things that sound like a terrible idea for any company to try.
Facebook. India. So-called free basics.
Charge internet companies for access to subscribers. Charge subscribers to access certain websites. It's a simple model.
>>No ISP for the ~15yr timeframe before the FTC regulation was passed a few years ago had ever offered such an arrangement.
Again, not true. https://www.theverge.com/2014/3/24/5541916/netflix-deal-with... https://www.theverge.com/2017/7/21/16010766/verizon-netflix-...
>>Plenty of ISPs have repeatedly said they have zero intention of doing it either (including a few this year). Not to mention no ISP in any other country has offered anything close to that either.
Why would you ever trust an ISP? If they were not going to take advantage of this new opportunity, then they should be fine with having the regulation stay in place. Also, wireless carriers which are in many ways analogous to ISPs already have started preying on consumers using this model https://imgur.com/yYobj7x
>>This has proven to be incredibly unpopular idea with the public for over a decade as well, whenever it has come up in the press. It wouldn't take much market research to see it's a terrible idea.
Market research and public opinion don't matter when you have no competition and have numerous state laws written for protection.
>>This would be a boon to any ISP who DIDN'T do this. Competition, and obvious lack of business sense, has always been a far larger counter-balance to this idea. Plus the huge technical challenge of filtering at the ISP level... this would be a huge boon for encryption and VPNs as well.
Again, there is little to no competition in most markets.
>>So I'm a bit confused why this is generating so much FUD over such a highly hypothetical and hand wavy scenario... as if the only thing stopping them from doing it was this three year old regulation.
It's not hypothetical at all, see above links. It's a big deal because it will ultimately be a huge wealth transfer away from consumers. You're not by chance Ajit Pai, are you?
Now, they explicitly are going to be unclassified, and we, the consumers, will be unprotected.
The hard part is giving people something useful and worthwhile to do about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Almon_Brown_Strowger
I've always loved that (admittedly apocryphal) story. It's one of the vanishingly-rare cases where someone successfully solved a social problem through purely technical means. Even if there's not a word of truth to it, it's a completely realistic description of what consumers can expect in a world without net neutrality. It can be considered a modern-day Aesop fable.
Once you've related the Strowger story, then you can speculate on how it might have unfolded if Ma Bell herself had owned the competing funeral home. That's basically where the Comcasts and Verizons of the world want to be.
All of the incumbent ISPs are charged with stewardship of public resources to one extent or another, if only because they require right-of-way access. The fact that many Americans have a grand total of one decent broadband provider to choose from is another factor that has to be considered, but often isn't.
Basically, net neutrality isn't a gift to the public, it's half of a longstanding bargain. The Trump administration proposes to unilaterally alter that bargain on behalf of corporate lobbyists who do not have consumers' interests in mind.
And it's not so much the wires, as the land the wires have to traverse. These areas are largely public rights-of-way already.
Some shippers (Standard Oil) wanted to monopolize the rails or at least they wanted rebates for shipping their freight. Others argued that the rails should offer the same rates to all shippers since they were using eminent domain in some cases to obtain property and they should exist as a shared resource.
We’d be renting Wi-Fi cards, access and with additional fees by the second and byte if they had their way.
The old AT&T was heavily regulated, and provided lifetime employment with generous benefits to its employees. It was the largest employer after the Federal Government prior to divesture.
I'm more and more convinced that this was always the plan. The primary effect of the Telecom Act of 1996 has been to extract hundreds of billions of dollars from investors. All of the CLECs and other competitive types of telcos that sprouted in the spring of that law's optimism have gradually been wound back into the monopoly. Ma Bell (still for the moment two "Daughters Bell") has paid pennies on the dollar for equipment, marketing, vendor agreements, customers, etc. as these erstwhile competitors have gradually succumbed to the monopoly's failure to substantially abide by (and regulators' failure to enforce!) any of the pro-competitive measures in that law.
In retrospect, it was inevitable. Therefore, it was planned from the beginning. Telco executives and bankers have personally extracted billions from all the mergers. Generations of citizens have swallowed the fiction that we ever tried telco competition in USA. Strictly regulated POTS has been replaced with totally unregulated "information services". Perennially-unprofitable operations like FairPoint and Hawaiian Telcom have been unloaded to fools like Carlyle. The inconvenient wall between local and long-distance is gone. The expensive nerds at Bell Labs got sold, so the world can look elsewhere for subsidized progress in basic technology. All in all, a pretty good deal for Ma Bell! Since it happened over the course of decades and Americans have short memories (and since the media that could remind us doesn't want to cross her), we didn't even notice it.
[1] https://mises.org/library/spectrum-should-be-private-propert...
However I did claim that the thought that EM spectrum should be privatized is not a mainstream one.
I imagine the more general idea that all public spaces and goods should be private is even less mainstream in the US, given the popularity of public roads, schools, parks etc.
My understanding of the argument is that EM frequencies in a geography are a limited resource and therefore are best treated as property with "homesteading" giving the initial claim to that property. (Which re-reading what you wrote, I think you understand)
The first time I heard that argument, I found it quite interesting. And in fact, I shared it because it appears not to be mainstream but well worth a look IMO.
I do disagree with your characterization of the general discussion. I think parks and radio frequencies on the whole are treated differently by the govt. There are govt owned frequencies of radio which would be like a public park but I believe this discussion is more about the regulation of the private radio frequencies. There are lots of private frequencies, they are just distributed and regulated by the FCC.
The question as I see it is would it have been better to let "homesteading" distribute the initial ownership or the FCC?
I don't personally subscribe to the homesteading concept due to the frequent historical problems with real-world examples of 'homesteading' resources.
On the one hand, I can recognize that the freedom to stake a claim on 'public' resources drove a huge amount of innovation and productivity in the American West. With it though came plenty of degradation, destruction and misuse as well. And one might even argue that it was only there to be homesteaded because the original inhabitants and their traditional cultures had been suppressed with force.
And the US Federal government has privatized public lands for things like military bases and Land Grant Universities just as it has with bands of the EM spectrum for emergency responders or other governmental uses. For the closest analog to public parks I'd look at the shortwave bands or ham radio operators. Even there, as in public parks, there are regulations on behavior.
It's an interesting discussion and in a more egalitarian world I might be more amenable to the view expressed by the original article. But today I look with deep suspicion on folks advancing the view that public goods should be privatized, due to what I consider a very irrational minority of people whose interests are purely selfish despite their claims to the contrary. Some folks wrap themselves in an ideology but really only seek to serve themselves.
Not to mention that many of the big players in silicon valley like to jump back and forth over the line of "is a provider" / "is not a provider". Twitter and Google and Facebook like to police the content on their systems, which is their right, but at the same time they like to hold up the DMCA safe harbor provision anytime someone finds copyrighted material on their networks. They have no problem banning unpopular parties from their networks while simultaneously profiting from clear copyright violations.
We should insist that net neutrality extend all the way to layer 7.
Let's not sacrifice the good for the perfect.
I think I must be misunderstanding what you mean. How could a "neutrality" argument possibly apply to my proprietary application stack?
Facebook etc want the control of a private operator but the protection of a common service, which seems wrong.
The latter isn't something traditional we're about to lose, but a novel goal for the future which is qualitatively and quantitatively different.
The open network existed as "normal" for maybe a decade.
Google has become the walled garden that they pretend they aren't.
That's like the difference between saying who's allowed on the sidewalk vs. saying who's allowed in the bar.
EDIT: In case it's not clear, this comment is pro-net neutrality. I am pointing out the absurdity of disallowing site owners from curating their own content.
[0]: https://staltz.com/the-web-began-dying-in-2014-heres-how.htm...
I find it absurd that some politicians support both the repeal of net neutrality and the restricting of willing communities to build out their own infra at the same time. I could intellectually entertain either option but never both simultaneously. For a political cohort whose brand has long included local self-determination and rural self-reliance, it's bizarre to me to see them take positions that don't even appear to be logically consistent. It's difficult to accept that they truly have the best interest of their constituents in mind.
[1] https://muninetworks.org/content/competition [2]. https://muninetworks.org/communitymap
The right wants isp/telcos to be able to bundle and offer more speeds/services. Assuming it won't censor.
The left assumes isp/telcos will offer services/bundles (tiers) but will censor its services/bundles. (Like it did with netflix.)
As most places have a monopolistic type access (or worse, no access) thats the primary cause for concern. Nobody loves their cableco. If we had a plethora of choices for internet access, that would be the cure for censorship.
But we don't. We are stuck at fighting censorship due to lack of access.
Even with some competition and access, it can take a while for unfavorable conditions to resolve, partially because consumers don’t really care about things like censorship, lack of access, (or in my example) bandwidth limits.
Markets are eventually consistent, but in terms of net neutrality I really don’t think we can afford to wait.
Ever consider that maybe they are more beholden to those who give them money than those who give them votes?
Then ... don't. If someone's actions contradict their words, don't believe their words.
Call your reps and let them know how you feel. If they think they won't get re-elected all the bribe money in the world doesn't really matter.
Before the unbundling, Telecom NZ basically had a monopoly on ADSL connections, connections cost a lot of money and had comically small caps (like 10 GB, which even in 2006 was not a lot). Now, in straight dollar terms, plans are cheaper, and uncapped plans are standard.
But any new services that threaten existing ones will be hard-pressed to compete.
Imagine I start a new streaming service. In order for my service to reach people, ISP's will charge me a higher price than Netflix, probably a _significantly_ higher rate. This will make it extremely difficult for my new service to reach enough people to make it an ongoing concern.
This is just another nail in the oligarchy coffin we are actively sealing ourselves in.
It will also allow ISP's to control and block content if someone pays them to do so. There are still anti-competitive laws on the books, but are any of them even being enforced anymore. We allowed the banks to become monopolies, we've allowed the AT&T fox back in the hen house.
If we don't fight back, we're going to become slaves to the digital age.
Huh? Did you forget already that both Verizon and Comcast throttled services like Netflix? They both argued they should get a cut if they were going to carry the traffic to their customers. Now they're getting exactly what they wanted.
1. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/07/veriz...
2. https://consumerist.com/2014/02/23/netflix-agrees-to-pay-com...
https://www.cnet.com/news/net-neutrality-netflix-reed-hastin...
So sure: Netflix maybe might not due to size and popularity. The next great thing will be, for sure.
Yes, they do:
On the other hand they partnered with Telekom (most popular ISP in Germany) for a service called "StreamOn". With that you can stream Netflix (and other partnered streaming sites) without affecting your monthly data cap.
It's like a vegetarian eating meat from factory farming every day.
> It's an issue that would have been more important to "the Netflix of 10 years ago," he said.
This is a highly politicized topic but it's hard to find rational discussion.
If I built a network I would expect to be able to charge whatever I wanted to whomever I wanted in exchange for the use of my network.
Is the answer that taxpayers helped fund the network so now feel they deserve not to pay twice? How much of the current internet infrastructure is paid for by taxpayers vs private corporations?
Any good sources you'd suggest reading on the pros and cons of each side of the argument?
2) The telcos never seem to reflect on the fact that the only reason people want broadband at all is because there are services that they want to access. So just by existing they're already getting their cut. It would be just as reasonable for Amazon and Netflix to ask Comcast for a cut of their revenue, since they're providing these attractive services that Comcast isn't paying a dime to provide.
I think this might be a better solution than a law that specifically mandates the price at which a hardware store can sell shovels, since I think that law would only address a very specific problem caused by a larger underlying issue.
I think the shovel case at least, when the market can sort something out then it's "better" to let it do so.
For Amazon/Netflix, at least on the surface, I would say that the ISP and the content provider can ask for whatever they want and whether or not they get it will be a function of how much each one needs the other. Perhaps ironically a very similar system to how internet peering currently works (the little guy pays the bigger guy for transit).
These monopolies aren't so bad by themselves; we have similar monopolies with power and water. But those are regulated so that their monopolies can't be blatantly abused. ISPs are trying to roll back regulations that, in the minds of pro-NN people, will allow them to abuse consumers using their monopolies.
The problem with what these network providers are doing is that they own both the lines and the content. For example, if your ISP is a shareholder in Hulu, they're going to charge way more for Netflix to stream than Hulu, so they can essentially use this new ruling in an anti-competitive manner.
I'm not sure what most of the anti-net neutrality side's supporting arguments are aside from the fact that the regulations are unfairly limiting ISP's abilities to make money. They will mention that these regulations are affecting the free market, but in my opinion other existing regulations are much worse about limiting the effects of the free market, except those would make it easier for ISPs to be competed against, not harder.
It seems like a lot of the disagreement hinges on the fact that ISPs have a monopoly and many people cannot easily "vote with their wallet" if the ISP does something they don't like. I wonder if focusing on making it easier for competitive ISPs to start up would do more towards bridging the gap between the two sides.
I think a lot of the anti-NN crowd is based on a more philosophical argument, that if the ISP built the infrastructure then they own it and they should be able to charge $1 million per day for access if they want (they would obviously not do that because nobody would pay it)
I wonder what is the biggest impediment to setting up a legitimately competitive ISP? Presumably the (ostensibly wasteful) cost of duplicating the last-mile infrastructure?
As an aside, do you have more info on the legal challenges to google fiber?
Fighting against properties of a service that make it a natural monopoly is usually not going to work as well as limiting the ability of the resulting monopoly to be leveraged. Either, of course, takes active regulation, and tends to be unpopular with both laissez-faire ideologues and the people holding the monopoly.
Why do you say it's more difficult? It seems like it would be more sustainable in the long run even if it's more difficult up front.
As such, it is always better to try and win over one more customer to increase revenue, even if that customer pays less than the cost of keeping their line in working order, both because the costs are mostly there anyway, and because it reduces the revenue of the competition, thus increasing the likelyhood that they will fail and thus make you have a monopoly again.
That's actually exactly the behaviour you see over and over when some smaller business (or larger business, for that matter, see Google Fiber) tries to build a network where the monopolistic incumbent so far didn't care to provide useful service. The moment that project is announced, you get really good and cheap connectivity from the incumbent. Given that they before didn't consider it to be a good investment, you can guess that they are doing it only to destroy the competition.
Also, the network operator that has the less-utilized network necessarily has to charge higher prices per user to cover their costs, which leads to a positive feedback of even less customers, leading to even higher prices, ...
Having two parallel last mile networks is effectively unstable. There is a reason why there aren't multiple water pipes and multiple electricity cables and multiple natural gas pipes in your house.
So, in practice, networks are built on public ground, or potentially using eminent domain. Neither of those should result in exclusive ownership of the market thus obtained.
My friend was a lawyer for an ISP and now works for the FCC (I promise she's a good person otherwise).
The main argument is that small ISPs can't compete if Net Neutrality exists, because they can't build a network big enough for every customer to stream Netflix and YouTube. If they could have most of their customers blocked from those services, they could afford to offer it to the few that want to pay extra for it.
The other main argument against it is that it's not fair that Grandma, who only wants to read email once a day and look at the kids on Facebook, pays the same as the kid next door who is watching Netflix while playing an RTS while torrenting three movies.
They're both decent arguments, and would totally make sense in a world where multiple ISPs could reach everyone's home.
I find it hard to believe that the electrical grid, water, sewer, and natural gas systems all are able to make due but the poor ISPs rolling in cash can't.
Meanwhile, these same ISPs are working to make competition illegal or impossible.
This isn't an issue of providing better service. This is an issue of making more money by squeezing the customer every way they can while making recourse impossible.
Hypotheticals can be checked by referring to other countries with different market structures.
Australia has a broader mix of ISPs and Telcos than the US, despite until the 90s being under the control of a single public system (Telecom), with a plurality of the current infrastructure owned by its privatised successor (Telstra).
They seem to do fine with net neutrality. Regular competition.
> The other main argument against it is that it's not fair that Grandma, who only wants to read email once a day and look at the kids on Facebook, pays the same as the kid next door who is watching Netflix while playing an RTS while torrenting three movies.
Charging by bandwidth and usage is well settled.
The point is that the ISPs don't want to segment the consumer market. Too hard: there's competition, which as we know is unamerican because it makes business haaaard.
Instead they want to segment the provider market. Far fewer of them to negotiate and there's zero competition. You, the ISP, have at any point in time monopoly control over the consumer who is using your infrastructure. Providers have no other way to route traffic over the last mile.
Nobody mounts this kind of lobbying effort from the goodness of their hearts. They see a gigabuck in it.
What? This logic is like saying, hey the only business model that should exist is one where we should only cater to those that pay the most (whether through ignorance or lack of options, etc).
>The other main argument against it is that it's not fair that Grandma, who only wants to read email once a day and look at the kids on Facebook, pays the same as the kid next door who is watching Netflix while playing an RTS while torrenting three movies.
It's not fair that grandma is going to be even more duped by the limited offerings of news and media that these companies will tighten their grip on through this move. Also the pipe is just sitting there. It's not like Comcast is manufacturing electrons and packets that get consumed by users.
Ask your friend to study other countries internet situations.
Limiting websites they can access is a violation of that agreement with the end user.
In many areas of the United States, there is only one ISP available. Part of this is due to the high cost of entry, but the ISPs also have a past filled with rather shady activity. Verizon was given federal money to expand their network, did a fraction of the work, and then used their influence to pocket the rest. Comcast will throw lawsuits at new ISPs in order to bankrupt them.
Because of this the ISPs already use their monopoly position to take as much money as possible via data caps and bandwidth. I believe Comcast is on record as saying data caps aren't needed, but no one can stop them. The reality is ISPs are some of the most greedy, unethical companies around that exploit their monopoly position for their bottom line. Either regulation needs to be in place or the government needs to incentivize and protect new ISPs.
Notice how almost none of the service areas intersect? Internet competitiveness in the US is measured by census zones, and they know that. So they carve up territory block by block, allowing them to be engage in "competition" without competing. (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/isps-dont-want-t...)
And here's one of the many, many court cases and lobbying efforts they've engaged in to keep rivals from getting a toe hold in their territory; https://www.theverge.com/2015/5/1/8530403/chattanooga-comcas...
But net neutrality is devious beyond the abuse of a local monopoly. It doesn't matter if there are ten ISPs available to any given consumer.
The problem is that creates a new monopoly: that of access to an ISPs subscriber. See my aunt-comment (to this) for the full argument.
Imagine there's no Netflix yet. People are using the web, and ISPs are selling tiny-bandwidth plans. Along comes a streaming movie service and people love it.
All of a sudden, ISP customers are saying "I want more bandwidth and I'll pay more for it."
Can the ISP say, with a straight face, that Netflix is costing them money?
Furthermore, the internet has now become a public meeting place. Many people communicate with each other solely through the internet and voice their opinions there. Giving cable companies the ability to legally prevent two IPs from communicating is akin to preventing mail between them.
Basically, because of the ways that the internet has come to be used and the basic expectation of privacy that people have when it comes to similar things such as mail, many people would consider it wrong to remove any semblance of privacy or fairness from the internet, which is what repealing net neutrality does.
That's because you're not charging your customers. You're selling them to that startup. The startup has no choice but to pay if they want to have a chance of reaching these potential customers.
That means ISPs will have to ability to milk every cent of value generated out of startups, limited only by their ability to measure it.
The normal mechanisms of a market don't kick in, because the customers will be unaware of what's happening. They're not going to change providers only because that provider is shaking down some startup they've never heard of.
Not only are you free to not to give money to these corporations, you are free to start your own non-profit service, with a similar legal structure. You have to appeal to investors' altruism rather than their self-interest. A big challenge, but not outside the realm of possibility depending on the market you 'd like to cater to.
Without the government giving them the right to do this they would never be able to negotiate with each individual land owner and networks would not be possible.
Wireless has the same problem: use of the airwaves, a public good no one can own. We issue licenses for them otherwise it would be a tragedy of the commons situation where no one would be able to successfully use them.
The internet (and most of its popular protocols) was invented and established due to public funding and released to the world for free.
So quite literally ISPs would not have a business whatsoever without free public assistance. As a result they owe us a lot more than the average business.
You, as a network provider, are already peering with other network providers, and so you're getting paid for (and paying for) the bandwidth that's getting used. What you're after is an extra slice of the pie from Netflix.
the big companies just don't want to be the _only_ ones paying.
But Netflix is already getting a better deal than start ups at many ISPs. Netflix gets free rackspace for their CDN servers. No start up gets that.
There is already a "fast lane" in many ISPs and Netflix gets it for free.
Now imagine that model with the threat of throttling that startup if they dont comply.
"Amazon EC2 and S3 now include prioritized traffic to the network edge through Amazon's deals with over a hundred local and regional ISPs. Just add traffic priority to any elastic IP or S3 bucket and for only $0.04/gb outgoing your traffic will take the fast lane to your customers!"
How will Digital Ocean, Vultr, ARP Networks, Linode, etc. compete with that?
What we're seeing here is the closing of the digital frontier.
That being said my personal preference is not for net neutrality but for changes to state and local regulation to allow for a lot more ISP competition. But due to the patchwork nature of state and local regs that's a brutal slog in the trenches. So we need net neutrality in lieu of more ISP competition. Either that or we need to somehow overrule state and local regs at the Federal level to allow municipal and small startup broadband. That's tough given the fact that the Fed doesn't necessarily have any authority there. They'd have to argue it's interstate commerce.
Or rather, that we're being sealed into, since this can hardly be called democracy.
Content is controlled and blocked by advertisers in the application layer already. E.g. youtube
That's the sad part: the new services that fail will fail quietly and we'll never know what we lost.
>On December 14, the FCC will vote on Chairman Pai's plan to repeal President Obama's heavy-handed Internet regulations and restore Internet freedom.
I love how these laws are veiled with patriotic sentiments, e.g. "Internet Freedom". Just like the "Patriot Act", it is reasonable to assume anything with these sort of labels will likely be an encroachment on your freedoms.
Also
>"The job of the FCC is to represent the consumer," he said in an interview. "If you like your cable company, you'll love what this does for the Internet, because it gives Internet service providers the same kind of control over content and price as cable operators have today."
I am confident there is not a single person who "likes their cable company". Who in their right mind would want their internet controlled like their cable is controlled? This image[0] is exactly what we get to look forward to.
I have called my reps, sent emails, faxes, and just feel so helpless about all of this.
[0]: https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/4252153/wh...
edit: It appears the article altered the above quote, and the second half is no longer the same.
If Comcast is going to try to charge me more to be able to access Netflix, I'm gone.
I would suggest to do this in combination with a VPN but 1) even with OpenVPN those are often insecure 2) they cost additional money 3) with these new FCC rules their bandwidth might get limited.
I don't know about Starbucks or the USA but many places here with open WiFi have, well, open WiFi (no encryption on connection) and they have abysmal speed. I mean we are talking about multiple customers, on 2,4 GHz WiFi, in the neighborhood (city) with dense 2,4 GHz coverage. What could possibly go wrong?
Plus, indeed here that type of business is just on cable or DSL themselves. Who'd be under the scrutiny of the same QoS shenanigans. Then again, we got net neutrality. For the time being. I really hope the USA keeps net neutrality. The feeling that such a civilized, rich, advanced country would lose such an important right fills my eyes with tears.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol
If you visit the US, you will find that most internet access sucks, but that public libraries are surprisingly decent. You won't be playing "Call of Duty: Kill Nazis 2017" on it, but it's perfectly decent for most uses.
If you can't get competing services in your apartment complex, get a lawyer and sue the owner.
[0] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-280908A1.p...
What alternative would you suggest?
It's far from ideal, but 4 (soon 3) competitors are better than the 1 choice I have for wired broadband.
I don't know why you think mobile broadband is in any way going to be better in the non-neutral net.
And while 4g service isn't a true replacement, it provides enough competition to prevent the AOL-ization of the internet. At a certain point, people would choose more expensive wireless over absurdly locked down wireline.
So while Comcast does have a monopoly in some areas, people would switch to Fios or Uverse or local DSL in the areas without monopoly if they tried anything too bad. Hypothetically comcast could try to monetize only in monopoly areas, but that would be a hard sell and it would be very transparent.
I challenge this assertion -> please document it.
90% has two providers of 10mpbs+. One of those is satellite, which sort of sucks, I'll grant you that.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/06/50-mi...
I was primarily a student then, and trying to skip around in Youtube/online video lectures was an insanely frustrating experience.
It's profitable and with their lobbying, they can protect themselves from competition. If cable companies had the opportunity to cut streaming services at the knees 10 years ago (and the foresight to understand how it would affect their market) you bet they would have.
This is as anti-consumer as you can get.
Because the cable companies are the ISPs, and without ISPs acting differently, there's less impetus for people to ditch their cable companies as cable companies.
Especially when the phone/cable/ISP firms can block or tax into submission services that compete with their phone and video offerings by virtue of their control of internet access.
That's why we need NN.
I actually think (and this should be done in addition to NN, not instead) is to encourage local city government to provide Internet access and even allowing smaller companies to lease the infrastructure to them. This would bring back competition again, and the money from leasing would cover cost of maintaining the network and maybe even bring income to the city.
I made a mistake by assuming an apartment complex built within the last 3 years would have fiber, boy was I wrong. I'll never make that mistake again.
People are not going to happily accept the old "bundling" cable TV model that they hate, having experienced the much more open internet model where you really only decide how much bandwidth you want to pay for.
I'm using a general "you" here. It's far more a pervasive presence in peoples' lives than cable tv was.
And I've commented as such already, it likely won't be restrictive and demanding all at once. It will be a progression likely starting with something like:
"Now that we are no longer bound by restrictive government regulations we can offer you new value-added-services that benefit you!
With [company]'s new Speed Boost(TM) packages, you can access your favourite web sites at a higher speed than your current base package allows starting at the low monthly fee of $5! (on a 2 year contract, $10/mo month over month)"
Once the customer base is accustomed, the language changes and becomes:
"Now with [company]'s new Choose What You Use(TM) bundles, we've retired our base packages and now it's up to you what you want to pay for of the internet! Another way we're saving you money!"
And so on. Marketing teams wouldn't let it look like: "Well, you're ours now, bitch." At least not that straight-forward.
Free alternatives, like being able to stream Youtube, could be in danger of fees too. Google might have some sort of bargain with the government to keep it charge-free (like selling more data on its users). But any other video provider without Google's deep pockets will be in trouble, like Vimeo, Twitch, VHX, or some other company that hasn't even started up yet but might not be able to afford the double-dip.
Would you be "fine" if someone stood in front of your house and intercepted all your Amazon packages and added a $5 delivery fee to each?
[1] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2010/12/comcastlevel3/
It allows the cable company to effectively tax the competition.
Any company Netflix buys transit from ends up using up all the goodwill of settlement-free peering agreements, doesn't want to actually pay for the traffic, tries to route around problem, and then gets frustrated when Comcast doesn't let them.
Also, Comcast isn't a transit provider. They're an eyeball network and should expect heavy inbound traffic levels. Also look here: https://www.peeringdb.com/net/822 Their locations are all in the states. Most settlement free agreements require diverse meeting points around the world. Right now the big providers are hauling Comcast traffic across the oceans. So their large market share in the US is already getting them preferential treatment from the other providers.
IIRC, the proposed net neutrality regulations would not change this scenario at all. The issue is the absolute leverage that would need to be granted in these agreements for this to be true.
In this hypothetically net neutral universe, what should happen when those peering points clog up? Comcast absolutely has to upgrade those links, regardless of price? Would not upgrading these links be throttling? Would they be obligated to renegotiate their peering agreements or risk fines?
If so, I've got a killer startup idea. I'll get a modest peering agreement with comcast, then turn around and sell bandwidth to Netflix and Google for pennies on the dollar, and then turn around again and tell comcast that they have to renegotiate with me, at whatever price I want, or I'll get the FCC to bring them down. Then what? They're the ones in violation of the law, not me.
In practice, the proposed net neutrality regulations loosely say that the FCC can come in and act as a mediator in pricing agreements, when one party is (paraphrasing) "acting unfairly", which is a whole 'nother can of worms. For starters, it's completely out of whack with the intended scope of the FCC.
edit:
> As a consumer Im paying Comcast for quality access to all of the internet. Its their job to deliver on that.
No, you're not, and you never were, and it's bordering on dishonesty to make this claim. At best, you're paying comcast for the same quality access to anything that can reach their network at that same quality. Even that is arguable.
Since most ISPs have an effective monopoly there are no economic pressures for them to deliver quality service. So we need government to step in and treat them like the utilities they are.
Also, pretty sure Google doesnt pay for transit. They have a giant network footprint and push a ton of the internet's traffic. They are likely to be settlement free with everyone.
Almost certainly. Bad example, but the point still stands.
> The problem with a hands off approach is the lack of competition. I cant jump to another provider when the quality of my internet service does not live up to my expectations.
> Since most ISPs have an effective monopoly there are no economic pressures for them to deliver quality service. So we need government to step in and treat them like the utilities they are.
I don't know if I agree with that. Even in the most rural parts of the US you probably have a handful of ISPs available, just maybe not the type of ISP that caters to power users on reddit and HN. Between LTE wireless providers, satellite, DSL, cable, I think most people have a greater degree of choice than we realize. A lot of these options are not going to cut it if you like Netflix and/or torrenting, but for casual facebook, wikipedia, and emailing-- arguably the usage patterns of the majority of US internet users, any of these providers will work out just fine.
If what you're saying is true, why do we see such a dramatic difference in the quality of service across the board in the past decade? We went from terrible GSM to incredibly fast LTE. You can now buy 25 Mbit satellite internet without a data cap. You used to be lucky to get 16m/2m cable internet, now I see the lowest tier of plans with speeds of anywhere from 60Mbit to 100Mbit. If there's no competition, why do we see this progress? Why would they put money into increasing their speeds if the market didn't force their hand?
As a provider on the net I dont have many options to ensure you quality access to my content. I can't route around Comcast if theyre your last hop. I can pay Comcast for the privilege to send you content but I only get around 50 million subscribers and at 10x the price of a Tier 1. The Tier 1 will get me access to the entire internet.
Also with all transit pricing, the more you buy the cheaper it is. So the bigger players have an unfair advantage in economy of scale when dealing with the likes of Comcast.
I'd like to see where in the marketing literature it says this. Right on the pricing page it says Internet Access plans.
It doesnt say Comcast network access plan.
Also, I dont make Comcast oversubscribe their network. Thats a business decision on their side.
This is really what should be at the heart of these discussions, not abstract claims about who is throttling who.
My arguement is that ISPs should deliver the product they sell to consumers. If the consumers demand for Netflix goes up, the ISP should adapt to ensure proper bandwidth at peak. The internet on the whole and interconnection between companies is hardly static. Its constantly growing bandwidth wise and its really very simple to increase bandwidth to other providers. Technically its fairly easy without all the legal bits that get added in to peering agreements.
VZ was refusing to increase capacity to allow uncongested access to NetFlix (Netflix was willing to pay for the PNIs and the cost of the line cards to terminate those PNIs at VZ in addition to paying for their own gear). NetFlix started putting pre-roll into content sent to VZ customers to explain to them that it was VZ that was unwilling to do it. VZ threatened to sue. Netflix backed off and started paying for a better access to VZ subscribers by buying transit from VZ to use it strictly to access VZ. From that point on NetFlix' position on NN kind of "evolved" - it only kind of supports it.
All of this was with so call Net Neutrality on the books.
I said it before and I say it again:
Consumers do not give a flying f!ck about this fight - it is a fight between Comcasts/ATT/Verizons and Google/Facebook/NetFlix of the world about who gets to fleece consumers more wrapped in the talk about "fairness" and "freedom of to access information".
Just a few days ago we had someone working for small mom and pop NSP/ISP breathlessly tell us that it is NN that is preventing his ISP from offering grannies in a nursing home cheaper email only plans!
I couldn't disagree more. Sure, I don't care whether Netflix or Verizon wins, but I care deeply that there isn't a situation that raises the cost of competing against Netflix/Prime/Hulu to the point where it's impossible to enter the market. Netflix should be hard to compete against because they have better content, not because they have better access to internet subscribers.
Why are people buying high-bandwidth plans from ISPs? Because they want to use services like Netflix. Netflix is not costing ISPs money, it's giving them something to sell.
Imagine that taxi drivers want to charge the airport for overwhelming them with passengers and you'll see the absurdity.
Why should Granny have to pay more on her internet connection to subsidize your Netflix addiction? Because equal pay for equal access is that: a subsidy from light users to heavy users.
thats just silly, come on!
if that were the truth, and it isn't, then they'd need to increase the price for the monthly package or decrease bandwidth for consumer packages.
/Edit: going with your example: amazon doesn't have to pay to keep the streets in service, despite causing lots of (heavy) traffic through their deliveries. they pay their delivery provider. just like netflix pays for its bandwidth to their ISP
The issue here is that what comcast really want, is to sell Granny a cheap plan, and sell Netflix a plan, and google, and Apple (that app store and updates you know). Oh but wait, Netflix you are already paying a bunch to throw data on the net by the bucket? That doesn't matter… you have your last mile, and you also need to pay for everyone else's last mile as well. Oh, and Google, you also need to pay for everyone's last mile as well. It's just like a Winfrey episode: You can pay! you can pay! You can all pay!!
My electricity provider does not charge differently for setting up and maintaining the connection based on what I do with the electricity, they just charge me for what I use. Why should an ISP be treated differently?
I really just want my ISP to be like my datacenter: 95%ile bandwidth billing. Nothing else. No services. No filtering. No "speed boosts." Just a connection to other networks.
> I pay for what I use.
Unless you have a metered services, you are not paying for what you use in that sense. You pay for access, sure, but not for what you use.
> My electricity provider does not charge differently for setting up and maintaining the connection based on what I do with the electricity, they just charge me for what I use. Why should an ISP be treated differently?
The issue is not metered billing. I think most people would be OK with it; it'll suck for some but an honest effort to keep the 95% of usage at normal would go a long way, I thinks.
The issue is when you're being billed differently for what you consume, not how much. Would you be OK with electricity used by an LED bulb from company X was metered at 2 times that of company Y which is 2 times that of an incandescent? _That's_ the issue, not metered billing.
Nobody is saying that ISPs cannot charge for usage, only that they shouldn't be allowed to do so in a discriminatory manner: if, say, they wanted to set a cap or QoS shares they should be able to do that as long as it's applied to everyone rather than just the companies which don't / can't pay the danegeld.
You've got it backwards. Granny and can I both pay per byte. We can even pay surge pricing based on congestion.
The question is this: why should I have to pay more for bytes from Netflix than Granny pays for bytes from Ravelry?
Absurd for you, not for the carriers. And, unfortunately, they are the ones dealing the cards now.
Outrageous, for sure, but according to Chairman Pai's plan, carriers will be able to charge both consumers and content providers.
Oh sure. Suppose I'm about to found yaymoviesyay.com to compete with Netflix. I learn that if I don't pay Comcast, its subscribers can't use my site. Same deal for AT&T and Charter.
Before this rule change, my cost to do business was "hosting costs."
Now it's either:
A) hosting costs + payola to ISPs
B) hosting costs + cost of building my own last-mile network
A) Super incredibly unlikely
B) Ridiculously unlikely
C) Extremely, ludicrously unlikelyYup, and only because those same carriers are making competition impossible, if not illegal.
Imagine you're a startup trying to compete with Netflix, and on top of having to create your business and media content, your customers have to pay their ISP a fee to access your website (or have better bandwidth, or have it not counted in your allocated data plan). No one would be able to compete with them. Now replace Netflix with any <Google, Facebook, Uber, any incumbent really>... and yeah you get the idea.
When you control what people see, you control what people think. Dismiss that as tinfoil malarky if you will.
It is so sad we live at a time when one doesn't know if this is sarcasm or a genuine sentiment.
Because it's a monopolistic monoculture, and they can do whatever they want and get away with it. In this age, having corporate controlled information choke points is a feature that those who want to control what the citizenry think and say are no doubt in love with.
Because there is a lot of money in that model if you can make it so there is no where else to go. (But you knew that- you were speaking rhetorically. I am the voice in your head.)
This is what I don't understand. All of these businesses seem to be missing that point. Or, I am over-valuing it. Or something else that I don't understand or see. But, I have the exact same perspective and stance as you.
If I have to pay more to watch streaming video or play video games with my friends or download my Steam library or my Kindle titles, well, I'm very likely to just opt out of all of that. I am 36 years old and I have never once paid for a cable television subscription in the last 18 years that I've been on my own for _exactly_ this same reason. I am not going to pay for 3 separate and/or premium packages just to get access to the one piece of content that I actually want (sports programming).
If you have competitors to choose from, sure. If you don't? Or if all the competitors do the same thing?
HAHAHHAHAA, wow they're not even trying
Trump's administration is built to enrich 3 groups. 1. Himself 2. His family 3. Other Very Wealthy People
If you want better internet access, instead of begging the FCC for scraps get on repealing legislated monopoly rights for kinds of wires and/or unbundling last mile from ISP.
Then ask yourself why internet reform is focused on NN instead of provider competition.
More to the point, can you imagine how fast the knives would come out if the FCC announced this deregulation and also a federal universal broadband plan where they use taxpayer money to deliver fiber to the home of everybody in the country in order to insure healthy competition?
On a side note, what do you think the odds are that this plan will remove uncompetitive restrictions on ISP (especially municipal ISP) development at the same time? I mean it's all about competition right? If I didn't know better I'd say that the talk of "competition" was just a smoke screen to hide the fact that this is the "allow ISPs to hold your service hostage with no repercussions" bill.
I think people would be more confused than anything, since this FCC just voted to drastically restrict choice under the existing universal service find.
If you're really worried about the coax network then push for what I suggested: unbundling the last mile. It worked great for the phone network.
I'm not arguing that the proposed plan actually helps anything (although the smaller scale and unconventional ISPs that should be encouraged are harder hit by neutrality requirements and compliance obligations in general)
I'm arguing that tilting at the network neutrality windmill doesn't actually deliver much to end users. There's about a million ways an ISP can suck and network neutrality, if you can even get it to happen, kinda-sorta fixes one of them.
There's a real problem (shitty monopoly internet providers) that has a real solution (the entirely proven strategy of eliminating monopolies).
PS: People in areas where the indoor plumbing water isn't safe to drink use competing water companies, mostly those bring-your-own-container 25c water vending machines you see in front of stores in low-income areas. If they waited for regulation to solve their problems they'd all be dead.
While competition is by all means good, I also DON'T WANT ISP controlling what I can access and how. I want ISP simply just provide the service, and Title II does just that.
More to the point, the people writing the regulations need to consider everyone in the U.S. not just the happiest Internet users. There already is a fairly large divide between people who can and can not access decent Internet service and this policy will only make that worse.
Not to mention, there are areas of the country which absolutely could not support more than one provider. Why should they have to suffer non-neutral net?
Competitive, non-neutral networks is something that much of the country already has, so it's a smaller, more regional fight you might actually win. You can try for neutrality after that if it means that much to you (but at that point nobody will care because NN is a non-issue in areas with a competitive provider landscape)
Network neutrality is irrelevant to areas that can't support more than one provider, weird rural providers and satellite internet are already exempt from neutrality rules (iirc because they aren't "broadband" in the FCC sense). Those places will continue to have sucky internet until someone wires them out of charity.
Freedom for whom?
I've never once, in my entire life, heard anyone say they like Comcast.
Long story short there's one person I like at Comcast, his name is Dev, hope you're doing well Dev, you made my commutes fun.
They can do good, they're just misguided.
It's an accurate characterization, it gives ISPs lots of freedom!
I don't think it's paywalled.
Wheeler, despite being a former industry man, definitely pushed for the consumer agenda despite industry pressure.
Except it's not, even. In the world of cable TV, the base cost is set by the content providers - the Disneys and such. With this, I guarantee you are going to see ISPs taking action on their own to tier websites and apps, pocketing the extra money, without input from nor payment to the sites which they intend to profit directly from.
But hey! The free market and invisible hand will sort everything out! /s
If anything, this FCC change will cement Google's dominance. They'll pay some rent to ISPs to maintain their priority lane, something an incumbent won't be able to do.
For example, if Facebook saw this as a real threat, even a basic banner at the top of their site could help warn and give action to those people who don't understand this or are not sure how to help?
I just don't fully understand why I'm only seeing people post about this on social media, but the companies used in majority of the examples of what it will effect are so quiet about it? Can anyone explain this further on why they are not making a big deal and informing their users to help fight this?
Same with all the big e-businesses
or
"Without net neutrality you might have to pay for a service that doesnt exist yet!"
And Facebook (to use an example) is already under alot of heat for the stuff the Russians pulled in the last election. They gotta deal with the current administration for at least the next few years regardless of what happens with the FCC. So they can be vocal about this in some ways, but not in others.
Digital fundraising for politicians is a very real and active thing. Would they be upset with if their side was suddenly hit with a 30s / page load penalty? DNS blackholed?
The deeply cynical part of me thinks that's exactly what they want.
This is actually pretty likely to happen.
Of course I suppose it'll be kind of funny to see God Emperor Trump usher in policies that make things like Gab and Voat unreachable. Top Kek!
THAT is the reality we're about to enter with this FCC change. Who gives a shit about Netflix being slower? Using that example to fight for Net Neutrality is a guaranteed way to lose.
the clipper chip was a clinton thing, the obama administration was for a long time on the fence, etc.
i will credit that the current administration is 'right', whatever that actually means these days..
So why would right wingers or anyone else with politically unpopular opinions want to train their ire at ISP's who have no history of political censorship, when censorship is happening right now, under everyone's nose. Where are all the articles demanding Google et al become neutral carriers of information or lose their Common Carrier status? In fact, we are getting the exact opposite, with article after article posted here and elsewhere basically demanding that big tech companies censor Fake News, i.e. propaganda you don't agree with.
But Net Neutrality doesn't fix the censorship of companies refusing services to people it doesn't like. In fact many people praise such censorship.
The proposed Net Neutrality argument is just consumer access to the net, not the person wanting to be a host on the Net. That aspect, it doesn't go far enough to provide an unregulated and uncensored free speech.
This deeply cynical view has already come true.
Lack of NN will allow ISPs to essentially implement censorship in addition to what we have.
We could still be using Altavista today.
It didn’t become necessary to “make it official” until the consumer access industry was consolidated, giving rise to the idea of “hey, we know our consumers are paying for the entire operation and netting us a healthy profit already, so where can we get even more profit?”
The first neutrality enforcement action was almost that long ago (12 years ago) over an ISP blocking access to Vonage (the telephone-over-internet service.)
The first FCC neutrality principles enforced by case-by-case actions were adopted in 2004. While the current Open Internet order is only a few years old, active, official FCC action in this area is not.
Until that happens, all this does is screw consumers. Honestly, internet service needs to be declared a public utility.
Muni service is a huge threat to them for this reason.
There are tiny competitors that work in this space (cough RCN, Charter) but they are functionally irrelevant (except for a few big markets for Charter) and most of them have gone out of business and consolidated to larger providers anyway.
Thats why internet service kept dropping in costs, more choices as more providers. Now you are lucky if you got more than 1 provider (or many in the USA, none)
Routing would be painful, but something like IPFS would encourage peers to cache content in order to ensure faster access to the content they want.
It could be done if only the barrier to entry for normal folks was lower. I'm thinking a dedicated piece of hardware in a form-factor like the Google Home where the setup would be as simple as plugging it in to the wall.
Servers would still be in datacenters, but the ISPs don't get to play price and speed games with their connections.
This is a design flaw in the Internet and most conventional network designs. There is an inherent level of trust given to network members and this works just fine for a research network between CS departments at Universities, but when my traffic must pass through 12 routers each potentially malicious to reach the edge of Google's network I have to trust each of those 12 routers.
Protocols like the ones that underly Bitcoin and IPFS place no trust in nodes. The IPFS whitepaper outlines a very abuse-resistant protocol whose concepts could be used to build another more resilient network layer.
The more towns get municipal fiber, the more Comcast's grip loosens, until they're forced to compete at a local level with local ISPs run by people you know and trust who support Net Neutrality.
If a local ISP doesn't support Net Neutrality, drop their ass and use one of the 20 other ISPs that rent the infrastructure from the city.
This is the real shift we need. Net Neutrality regulation will be ping-ponging in various parts of the government for the rest of time...which is a symptom of a much larger problem: the public currently doesn't own the infrastructure, and we need to.
That's not to say that this works perfectly everywhere but the framework is setup to be a lot more open than the workings of a private company.
Caching would only work for a subset of content, and anything large that is not cached would take exponentially longer to retrieve.
Mesh networking was mine. I really really wish this would happen.
All and all it says one major thing to me. We cannot rely on executive orders and pseudo-legislation to drive change. The reason why Trump has been able to roll back so many of Obama's legacy is that so much of it was executed via E.O; the one thing he cannot seem to roll back is Obamacare which was delivered via Congress. If we want net neutrality to become law we have to push for Congress to deliver it.
On the other hand, while the internet is approaching its 50th birthday for most of that time there was far less money involved and fewer players with monopoly status over it.
In the 90s, we had dialup and DSL from hundreds of service providers because DSL was subject to a similar neutrality provision which meant that the phone company had to resell access to copper at cost. That's a pretty huge difference: had, say, PacBell tried to steer pets.com traffic to a partner, every single one of their customers had the option to switch ISPs immediately without any loss of service quality.
Unfortunately that wasn't preserved for fiber and there has been massive consolidation in the industry, so most people have a choice between — if they're lucky — a massive cable company and a massive phone company. Many people live in buildings with exclusive contracts for only one company. In that environment, your choices are basically falling back to DSL if it's still available (increasingly not) or going without an increasingly vital utility.
I would be very hesitant to say our past experience is a good source of prediction for the modern market.
My parents and siblings are sitting around talking about how Trump is going to save America. My brother mentions how a guy in town (also a Trump supporter) said he's a fascist. I'm sitting on the other side of the table and my grandma is looking down at her plate not saying anything. She's about 80 years old at this point.
I can't help but think she knows we're about to go through it all over again.
Edit: I don't think Trump is Hitler but I do think we are losing freedoms. I'm also not trying to even argue that it's Trumps fault. This was just an observation about my surroundings. I felt it relevant due to the seeming zealotry of my family and their lack of questioning certain decisions and outcomes coupled with the fact that today it looks like we lost more freedom due to that mindset.
But what does that have to do with the FCC saying they will not use their authority on Internet service providers?
Like a fever, it's a sign that our country is sick. If we let the fever take over it will kill us. If we treat the underlying problem we can survive. We MUST solve the problem of wealth disparity or mark my words - it will be our undoing.
“Ask HN: How can we stop the plan to end net neutrality?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745057
We need grassroots municipal fiber campaigns across the country until Comcast et al are forced to compete with local ISPs on public infrastructure.
Then Net Neutrality won't be an issue anymore: the market actually will solve it. No need to regulate. You'll have 20 local ISPs to choose from, and chances are they will all support Net Neutrality because it'd be suicide not to.
This isn't an issue in places with real market competition. The best path to that is publicly-owned infrastructure.
Which is exactly why it won't happen even if they were given the option... Everyone would flock to the ISPs who didn't do this. Or to technology options such as encryption and VPNs to circumvent it, while still using the cheaper packages.
Selective internet packages has been an incredibly unpopular idea among the public and has been for over a decade.
I'm not sure why people think the only thing that has held ISPs back from doing this is a 3yr old FTC regulation. Not to mention no ISP in any other country has tried it either in the ~2+ decades broadband has been available.
The technical hurdles and push back from the tech companies, media, and public are being extremely underrated. This whole scenario is far more complicated than the ISPs making a greedy choice one day.
Regardless I'd rather we regulate actual threats rather than hand-wavy hypothetical ones.
Uh, how do you think these "nerds" are going to provide broadband? It's highly capital intensive to lay cabling so you're either going to piggyback off of someone like Comcast (who is going to charge you a lot) or you're going to piggyback off of someone's wireless which is also very expensive.
That was the solution in Canada to generate competition, as the laying of cables was subsidized already, it was never a free market, as I'm sure the telecom industry in the US was hardly a free market... not sure why it's such a crazy idea.
Why not focus on creating the basis for competition instead of centrally managing the intricacies of business... which has historically further limited competition.
And if two companies engage in monopolistic practices, such as colluding to offer the same packages, that should be the domain of antitrust courts.
It's not a _crazy_ idea (many have proposed such an idea) it's just not _possible_ in the United States in most areas.
I guess technically 48% is a minority. Sure is an awful lot of people, though.
(Yes, if you drop all the way down to DSL speeds then most people do have more than one choice of provider. Ever tried to stream video at DSL speeds? Or shudder satellite?)
[1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/08/us-br...
but given a new definition of "broadband", competition will increase significantly. Now you can not only choose between Comcast and DSL, but AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile/Sprint. See? Lots of competition!
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/09/ajit-...
It is also quite easy to detect whether someone is using a VPN, so I don't see why they wouldn't also dictate which protocols are permissible for each "package".
This would be in-line with the packages offered which require the users to install MITM certs and/or use provider-based DNS servers in order to ensure tracking of all online traffic (in exchange for a "discount", of course).
I wish I had your optimism. I live in the damn Bay Area and I have two choices for ISPs:
1. Comcast Cable
2. Dial-up....if I get my phone provided by Comcast
Every placed I've lived at so far on the East and West coast, even in populated areas, I have usually just Comcast and, occasionally, a terrible DSL provider. That's it. It's quite common across the USA to have little or no choice in ISPs.
The FCC has been enforcing neutrality principles since 2004, through case-by-case actions through 2010, and through regulatory orders in 2010 and 2015. Even in the brief window between case-by-case enforcement being struck down in 2010 and the 2010 Open Internet Order and the longer window between the 2010 Order being struck down and the 2015 Order, there was a clear regulatory direction which gave non-neutral activity a high-risk of being unsustainable and thus not worth investing in. There is very little competition in ISPs in most areas and very high barriers to entry; it isn't competition that has been controlling non-neutral behavior.
Not to mention the technical hurdles (encryption, VPNs) outside of the risk involved of convincing an executive board to engage in a PR disaster and expose themselves to the risk of Google competing with them.
Besides has any company have tried to push TV-style packages, where they throttle websites depending on your package... and the FCC regulations stopped them? This is the scenario I keep reading about as what will happen if these regulations didn't exist. But I've yet to hear of an actual ISP trying this...
Typically with regulations you have the industry pushing back against them because they want to do certain things. But I'm not seeing that here, multiple ISP have already claimed they have no interest in engaging in this type of throttling and I personally don't see how this would ever fly even if they did.
Yes, cable companies have taken advantage of their political pull and monopoly positions to do some shady stuff but I'm very skeptical they could ever pull anything like that off in the internet. That's a whole different ball game than the tightly corporate controlled finite-content TV market and the tech industry and the public have clearly stated they won't sit idly by, regardless of regulations.
Not while paying a Comcast (and other ISPs) tax to reach existing users, which then funds Comcast (et al.) staying ahead of them.
Yes, some monopolistic ISPs have engaged in specific minor throttling. What they haven't done is alienated their entire customer base by throttling the entire internet into packages. Which is an entirely different beast... and what we're talking about.
Alternative scenario is that the major ISPs for a given area would conveniently move to this pricing model around the same time. The best example of this happening in real life, in a similar industry, is how Verizon and AT&T cell carrier offerings often move in sync in term of pricing and features, and not always to the benefit of the consumer.
ISPs do this too. So does McDonalds and Burger King. And most other industries with oligopolies.
Just because pricing shifts in sync doesn't mean they will all take a major risk in changing towards TV-style packages (Social media package to get Facebook/Twitter or Streaming package to get Netflix/Amazon Go!) also in sync.
And it would have to be in sync. The only way it could work is if one takes a risk and customers don't immediately flock to the other one before they do it too. It's going to be incredibly unpopular and I highly doubt it will be synchronized without some illegal antitrust laws being violated before they realize it's not a good business decision.
Besides I'm not against the idea of having regulation if they do try it. I'm just not convinced anyone will, successfully.
imagine having to pay your ISP extra money for the privilege of using a privacy-oriented search tool like Duck Duck Go over Google... and none of the money you pay goes towards Duck Duck Go.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/how-phones-changed-the...
Except we’re already using toll roads. Instead of having free-ish municipal wifi, we’re already paying upwards of $100 per month to one of the cable/DSL duopolies in each city.
The question we should be asking ourselves is, does it have to be this way? What are the alternatives? I see two possible futures:
1) Work towards keeping the internet free and open through civil discourse, working at city, state and national levels to keep our elected officials honest in how they represent our interests.
2) Roll out the darknet - use onion routing, mesh nets, blockchains and other p2p technologies to effectively circumvent the internet, under the assumption that it’s been compromised.
There is a third option, which I think is the least likely but is all anyone seems to talk about. That’s the status quo option - the loss of net neutrality leading to a doubling or tripling of prices every decade or so, poorer a la carte service like with cable TV, maintaining the illusion of second class netizens as only consumers, and so on. But I think it’s not going to happen because technology doesn’t stand still. Look at what smartphones do today compared to even a decade ago. Technology will always.. find a way as they say.
So I don’t know about you, but I am deeply concerned that the loss of net neutrality will lead to option 2. I don’t think that corporations have the foresight to know the lengths that technology will go to to give people what they want. And I think we in the tech community only barely graze the surface of how far the intelligence community will go to track everyone as more and more people go dark. So what we are really talking about here is dystopia.
Maybe we need a new phrase for net neutrality. Net freedom? Net survival? I don’t know.
There's certainly lots of artificial barriers to entry to competition, but Google managed to overcome these in a number of regions. Yet somehow Google Fiber was ultimately a failure. It's already been downsizing and put all further expansion plans on hold. So what happened? You could write a novel there, but the most basic point is that not enough people signed up. After 5 years of operation Google managed a whopping 68,715 television subscribers and 453,000 broadband subscribers. They found that in poorer neighborhoods people would, inexplicably, not even sign up for the free option! That factoid alone, which is really hard to even conceive of, I think emphasizes how much of a bubble we all, including Google, live in. They responded by sending out grants to digital literacy groups.
Nobody seems to really like Comcast/Time Warner, yet people apparently are not sufficiently incentivized to swap carriers when the possibility arises. If the doomsday scenarios do come to pass, this could hopefully change. Ultimately the power is with the people, but most are not yet willing to speak with their wallet. The time when things will finally change is when this happens, or when a new competitor (perhaps satellite/balloon internet) enters the picture.
Honestly, I wish our societies would do way more experimental policy i.e. do away with policy like Net Neutrality on a smaller scale for instance, for some cities, counties or states and analyze, evaluate, and iterate. Test it, have the states and/or cities cooperate. Why not? Its like taking a step in gradient descent you're trying to find a local minimum and you have to try things to know what direction to move in.
Why does it seem almost all major policy in the US (and the world for that matter) is either let's force it down on everyone from a federal level or just let states decide but have no strategic plan for evaluation, test, and iteration going forward?
[1]. https://www.forbes.com/sites/washingtonbytes/2017/07/12/brin...
Selective throttling has worked great to make my t-mobile mobile data usage seamlessly switch between email, websites, and video on an “unlimited” plan. They even doe sample my videos to 480p to save bandwidth unless I vpn.
So there’s one non-trolly example of innovation that has made my life better that net neutrality would prevent.
I do not buy the doomsday scenarios. We started with AOL internet and moved to a freer internet over time, all without net neutrality.
no, we started with 'the real internet' and then AOL showed up.
You're right of course. Economies are chaotic dynamical systems. Precisely, what I meant was "there is a high probability that I will suffer less from immediate externalities associated with this policy than those living in the US.". Thus, my risk in the near term is lower, and my assumption is that if it doesn't work that in the long term my country won't copy the mistake. I could be completely wrong here as well, but anyway my main point was about policy methodology.
Sure, you won't initially have to pay higher prices for un-throttled traffic, but don't think for a second that there won't be knock-on effects on innovation and consumer choice that affect everyone on the internet.
I think you've under-considered the political aspect of centralized control of online media by incumbent players of a similar political bent in the US and the effect that has beyond the US, as well as the degree to which the money to be made in the US—and thus US market conditions—effect globally-available internet services.
ISPs will start charging content providers to be on the fast lane. Now if you are a big co this both good and bad. Bad because you have an additional fee to reach your users. Good because it is a small fee to block out the small guys still in garages who could completely take you out.
This is not about increase in monthly internet bill. It is about kissing goodbye to the kind of innovations we have seen with neutral internet.
But also bad because the ISPs are also your competitors, and not only will you need to pass the additional costs on to your customers (making your service less competitive), but they'll also.b able to use the money to subsidize their competing service.
It does Google no good if startups that might compete against YouTube have a harder time, but Google is forced to subsidize competing ISP-operated streaming video services that already exist.
As a non-american, what can I do to help you?
I'm from the UK, and I'm fairly worried that if this happens in the US, we'll be next.
I obviously don't have a US representative to call. Is there anything I can do to support the net neutrality fight?
(Will donate to EFF if I can think of nothing better)
I'm not sure how things work in the UK, but if you guys have publicly-owned/municipal internet infrastructure, then I wouldn't worry about Net Neutrality.
If your infrastructure is owned by a few big companies like in the US, then my recommendation would be to start fighting for public control.
As far as helping people in the US...Net Neutrality is a loaded term now. We need to stop convincing people why Net Neutrality is a good idea and start convincing them why municipal broadband is a good idea. Maybe approach it from that angle.
Well the EU seem to have a decent (if slow moving) record on consumer protection (PSD, PSD2, roaming, data protection, etc.) so maybe lobby your MEP
> I'm from the UK
No, wait ...
For the past 7 months a group of volunteers has been building and scaling out Resistbot. Almost 5 million faxes and 1 million e-mails have been sent on behalf more than 1.4 million citizens. Super easy and low friction to have your voice heard - simply text RESIST to 50409, or Resistbot on Messenger, Viber, Telegram, we will find your officials, and help you craft your letter. It's important to note that the more personalized your letter the more effective it'll become, so avoid using templatized letters.
Then, more importantly, actually voting people out of office who support this.
We're actively trying to drive for better engagement through targetted alerts regarding town halls in your area or helping you with voting ( https://resistbot.news/find-your-polling-place-620d1ea5faf7 ). Resistbot is more about helping get people engaged through low friction than be the alternative to showing up and having a face to face conversation with your officials.
When the mobile internet was first getting it's roots most of the American mobile providers offered unlimited bandwidth. Once the network become constrained and consumers started overloading the networks with streaming content the industry moved to tiered bandwidth plans. Years later a few companies (possibly t-mobile leading the charge?) saw this as an opportunity to win customers and started offering all you could eat again. In order to compete it seems most if not all of the providers have an unlimited plan now.
I think the same thing will happen with internet providers. At first you might think that it won't be possible because there are locations with zero provider competition. But I don't think competition is all that far away. Mobile internet is starting to get fast enough for many use cases and there's all kinds of innovation in internet delivery (balloons, planes, sat, etc.) Eventually someone is going to use unfiltered access as a competitive advantage and an opportunity to win customers. The industry will have to follow to compete.
Sadly this is going to get much worse before it gets better. But here's hoping!
Hypothetically speaking, there is a "regulation" that prevents me from killing my neighbor and taking their home/land. And removing that regulation would technically make it cheaper for me to purchase said land. But I doubt many people would be on board with those sorts of changes to solve a cost problem.
“Ask HN: How can we stop the plan to end net neutrality?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15745057
Is there anything meaningful a non-american can do to help?
As for affecting policy, that is a more interesting challenge.
The 2010 and 2015 Open Internet orders were a replacement for case-by-case enforcement.
Netflix and Youtube are probably safe from such actions now, but what about the much smaller services that try to compete with Youtube or Netflix, or podcast platforms, and so on?
Also this recently happened in Portugal, where technically there are some net neutrality rules now, but the current Commission canceled the previous Commission/Neelie Kroes' proposal to ban zero-rating. And since that meant they were allowed to do this sort of stuff, they went right ahead and did it:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DNGlrABUIAAr9RO.jpg:large
This is way more likely to happen in the U.S., where internet companies have local monopolies.
Actually no, all three incidents you mentioned (Netflix being slow on Comcast, Netflix being slow on Verizon, Youtube being slow on Comcast) were caused by peering issues. These are not net neutrality issues, contrary to Netflix's massive PR campaign to convince you otherwise.
The actual issue was Netflix opted not to peer with Comcast/Verizon, and instead funneled all their traffic through Cogent and Level 3.
Net Neutrality is a response to that overstepping. If the ISPs had just continued making ridiculous amounts of profit without upsetting the balance this never would have happened.
When do we get to the point where we recognize that the internet is officially holding up massive portions of industry, commerce, education, and communication. And that it should maybe not be in the hands of a few conglomerates?
This means Netflix has less money for content investment which helps their competition i.e. the same ISPs.
I blame the tech giants: Google, Apple, Amazon, Neflix, they should have done more to prevent this.
Looks like they don't care about it anymore now that they are the winners.
If companies want to do away with net neutrality they also have to lose the legal protections that being a common carrier give you .... just wait until the family of someone who died in a terrorist act sues you because the terrorists used your ISP .... because you're responsible for ALL the content on your wires
Is it because net neutrality is now a good thing for the big tech encumbents? I mean this stifles innovation aka the little guys who’d they have to buy or compete with. Though overall it stifles innovation period!
Stupid Trump.. the worst..a baby ..an egomaniac ..an embarrassment.. I could go on and on...
The 2013 uproar was with a pro-neutrality majority on the FCC, and was a reaction to what critics perceived as a too-weak implementation of neutrality. While certain people (John Oliver, notably) acted like the FCC majority was anti-neutrality, this was basically a disagreement between the loud public critics and the FCC over methods where the goals were shared.
The scenario is very different now.
The rules that are being repealed actually enshrined into case law a loophole that allows ISPs to edit which sites are visible as long as they inform customers they are doing so. This case law is now forever on the books even though the rules were temporary. [0]
This is really a battle between tech giants and telecommunication giants. Neither care about you.
[0]: http://reason.com/archives/2017/07/18/net-neutrality-support...
The FTC can regulate all areas business, the FCC can only regulate communication. If people stop turning this into a red vs blue issue we could actually get somewhere.
> The staff comment noted that the FCC’s proceeding also would restore the FTC’s antitrust enforcement authority related to broadband providers. The FTC has worked to prevent unfair methods of competition since its inception more than a century ago, and the agency’s activities in Internet-related markets demonstrate its ability to preserve competition and promote innovation for the benefit of consumers.[2]
FTC Commissioner McSweeny, in a comment opposing that endorsed by the chairman, points out that the FTC may lack the authority to enforce net neutrality at all:
>...ISPs are free to change their terms of service regarding nondiscrimination on their networks without violating the FTC Act’s ban on deception so long as they provide clear notice of changes. If these disclosures are truthful, there is no deception for the FTC to police. [3]
[1] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/advocacy_document... [2] https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/press-releases/2017/07/ftc-s... [3] https://www.ftc.gov/system/files/documents/public_statements...
I wrote the following comment on a net neutrality thread here about nine months ago, and some of the feedback was that it's unlikely, dystopian, a little hyperbolic:
"The ISP then starts selling premium bundles on the customer side -- Platinum Service will include Youtube, Netflix, Amazon, Apple (and get our bonus in-house streaming service at no extra charge!). Platinum-Plus, for another $14.95 per month plus fees, adds priority streams from your choice of up to three major sports content sources. And Platinum-Pro adds non-degraded VPN so you can work from home. Choice!"
This is going to happen.
[0] https://apps.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DOC-344614A1.p...
The problem is that it is working. It drives me up a wall to try to explain this to nontechnical conservatives. They actually think that this is a good thing that will increase the amount of liberty they have in their lives.
Well here you go, turns out politics affects real life, and even the tech industry.
No they are protesting to protect their wallet as well. If suddenly ISP's feel you should have to pay extra to use Google, that will have an immediately and direct affect on Google's revenue. That is why they are protesting.
That's just a weak observation, though. It might be interesting to seek data points for the subject.
I feel there's an INCREASE in the intersection between tech and politics, because tech has become more accessible both to the masses but also to the courts and politicians who write our destinies.
To wildly flag posts as political or (StackOverflow-style 'off-topic') is, arguably, morally wrong. I saw an introduction-type post by a new HN moderator a few months back who described his reasoning for reduction of political posts. Alas, the mission is in vain.
Thank you for your insights.
It would only affect international people if a company's servers only existed inside of the US, which exempts all large startups that have co-located servers.
It would affect all traffic of people in the US though since the ISP can charge services to pipe in to their lines and charge consumers to pipe out of their lines.
85. Need for the No Paid Prioritization Rule. The Commission concluded in the Title II Order that “fast lanes” or “paid prioritization” practices “harm consumers, competition, and innovation, as well as create disincentives to promote broadband deployment.”189 The Commission adopted this ex ante flat ban on individual negotiations to address an apparently nonexistent problem. The ban on paid prioritization did not exist prior to the Title II Order and even then the record evidence confirmed that no such rule was needed since several large Internet service providers made it clear that that they did not engage in paid prioritization190 and had no plans to do so.191 We seek comment on the continued need for such a rule and our authority to retain it.
ex ante: based on forecasts rather than actual results.
And that’s just LTE, 5g will increase the speeds and capacity another order of magnitude. I think the whole cable monopoly will come to an end rather quickly.
mesh networks or any kind of connectivity, enough to have basic web (mail, chat, irc, hn class websites).
anybody with knowledge is welcomed
ps: some articles recently popped up about Detroit hackerspaces doing just that. So far 3 small areas were built.
If net neutrality rules are thrown out, there should be more stimulus for small local ISPs - private or non-profit / municipal.
If government bends to the telco desire on this, it's not going turn around and go against them by sponsoring competition for them.
This is a simple tool that calls you and puts you through to your legislators, one after another.
I believe it if someone walks us through the incentive structure here step by step, or explains the natural-monopoly nature of this market or something. But just by implying it or pretending this to obvious I'm not convinced.
Its a talking point the ISPs have been using for the last few years, that they're "Pro-Net Neutrality, but want it enforced differently, legally." Its a propaganda tactic in that it is both factually incorrect, misleading, and is a response created to make the public lose interest in what sounds like a nuanced debate. ISPs arguments against net neutrality have all, repeatedly, fallen apart every time this has come to the political forefront; they simply do not have a leg to stand on in the US.
The only reason we're going through this again, is because Trump and the Republican Party put a stooge in charge of the FCC. This has, incredibly, somehow become a partisan issue with each political party taking explicit stances for or against NN.
Create a lobbying group, funded by a mix of regular people and businesses that push towards the ultimate aim of net neutrality being a part of national and international law.
I think a lot of people are sick of having to contact their representatives, or don't do it because it's a burden. I imagine many more people would happily throw a few dollars for someone to do that on their behalf, even if it was a recurring thing ($5 a month).
A million members making reoccurring contributions is beyond what is realistic, IMO.
It'll never benefit the consumer to go this way. Google and Netflix are allies of convenience at best.
There is not much that has driven Google over the past decade as much as preventing market power at other levels of the stack squeezing them out (it's why they've invested heavily in preventing anyone else from controlling either mobile OS or desktop browser market, and even taken on Windows in the consumer space with ChromeOS.)
Frankly, given their market positions, Google and Netflix only stand to win with anti-NN.
Google's Public Policy blog [0] seems to back up the no comment stance - their last comment is from 2010, dating back to the orignal implementations. Wired's research [1] appears to back this up as well.
And here's a Verge article on Netflix' opinion [2] that boils down to "it won't matter to us".
Verbatum: Even if the formal framework gets weakened, we don’t see a big risk actualizing, because consumers know they’re entitled to getting all of the web services.
[0] https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/search/label/Net%20Neutr... [1] https://www.wired.com/2015/02/google-net-neutrality/ [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/20/14960154/netflix-net-neut...
More recent coverage than your March article on Netflix: http://fortune.com/2017/06/15/netflix-net-neutrality-fcc/
And Google's current (and thus, more recent than your 2015 article) action page on neutrality:
https://www.google.com/takeaction/action/freeandopen/index.h...
https://www.battleforthenet.com/july12/
Still, good to see they're making statements in favor of NN. Action would be better.
Contacting representatives is not what the lobbyists are selling. Neither is taking them to dinner and buying them a filet mignon. What they're selling over those dinners is future donations to their election campaign and future cushy jobs after they leave the bureaucracy and go into industry. A private PAC can't offer that.
Some of these groups (like the NRA or AARP) can't offer as much in donations or future jobs, but they can offer a large group of voters, which has similar value to a donation to a campaign.
The belief that what's needed is a person to talk to your representatives is naive.
If Reddit is anything to go by, a lot of people are being asked to contact their representatives. For a number of people, it won't be their first time contacting a rep on this very issue, so it's clearly going to be an ongoing battle.
If sponsorship is possible, not just from big companies but smaller ones that ultimately rely on a free internet, I think $20m is just about doable.
Yes, you could argue that one candidate didn't know how to use email and the other couldn't operate her printer, but it was us who failed to make it an issue.
"Internet providers will be able to do X!"
Okay, so who can already choose what sites you see? Well there's your browser, Google could (and does) block sites, so could (and does) Microsoft. How do you find out about content on the internet? ISPs? No you probably find a link on Twitter, Reddit, Facebook, or by searching. Well those are all censored, they can literally decide what you do and don't see. Google's own CEO has even been quoted in video saying they're fine doing that.
What about at the infrastructure level? There are in reality two vectors to getting software on the most popular devices on the planet: phones. You've got to deal with Apple's store or Google's store. There're plenty of examples of apps being blocked for political reasons from both of these. They can literally choose what you're allowed to see, what software you're allowed to install ON A COMPUTER THAT YOU OWN. Google just killed a website, The Daily Stormer, by seizing the DNS, and any registrar can do this. Whatever you think about that website, we do have a fundamental freedom of speech in the US, where this site and Google operates, but that doesn't stop Google from just arbitrarily killing a site they disagree with. How about payment processors? There aren't many, they're mostly big companies, and they forbid you from using their systems to do certain things, most of which aren't criminal. They literally decide what you can and can't do at a business level, which indirectly impacts customers.
I could go with hundreds more examples just like this.
These things exist, they're abused, these aren't FUD, and the tech media turns a blind eye to much of it. Every single day.
This regulation is absurdly dubious in its value. The most common FUD are "but your ISP will be able to block what you see!" Maybe I want them to. Some person gets infected with malware, maybe I want that person's access to be restricted. Maybe I don't want to even be able to visit a machine known to be compromised. Google already does this in Chrome, to the benefit of most users.
How about "but they can shut down a competing service." No, no they can't. The citations where this has happened can mostly be explained by QoS, which is necessary to keep a network functioning properly, and is effectively illegal by NN. We have laws against anti-competitive behavior like this. Why do we need yet another? Those laws work. And if they are insufficient, maybe Congress should do something about it, and while they're at it deal with all those other examples of companies doing much worse.
At the end of the day, I'm so unconvinced that this is actually a concern, that I've started totally ignoring discussions about Net Neutrality. Is HN really so devoid of people who have ever operated a large network or dealt with issues of scale? I would expect that not to be the case, but requiring ISPs to overprovision and to bear the burden of infrastructural growth at whatever demand their customers make seems unreasonable at the very best. Don't cite AT&T and Comcast at me, fuck them, I don't care if they are shady shitty companies. What about new ISPs? What about the hundreds of small ISPs destroyed by NN, the ones you don't hear non-stop complaining about? What about the ISPs that can't exist because without hundreds of millions of dollars they can't afford to achieve a level of quality customers expect from hundred billion dollar ISP monopolies.
I want competition. I don't want my world to be ruled forever by Google, Apple, Comcast, and AT&T. I sure as hell don't want shitty rules in place that effectively ensure these largely unethical borderline sociopathic companies remain in their positions. I really don't want Net Neutrality, because it doesn't do what it says and fundamentally harms the internet in a way only hypothetically compared to the real evils these companies impart on us EVERY SINGLE DAY.
When you end all the abusive bullshit already happening on the internet, end the censorship, and break up these monopolies, when you put your effort into fixing problems we actually have rather than fighting fictional dragons, then and only then will I be again open to discussions about this topic.
It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.
Who was being harmed in the first 20 years of the internet without these regulations? Whose lives have been made better? Compared to what?
Net neutrality advocates are utterly unable to give convincing answers to these questions.
If you sign up for an internet plan that promises not to throttle certain sites and then that provider throttles those sites, you can sue them.
If you sign up for an internet plan that makes no such promises, why would one expect anything different?
This may sound like a harsh reality, but it's called "taking personal responsibility" and "voting with your feet". Switch to another internet provider.
The appeal to paternalistic regulatory bodies to restrict the choices of other consumers (who may want to purchase cheaper, more restricted internet plans) is creepy.
That's not an option for most Americans, and part of the reason why net neutrality is necessary.
Most households have multiple internet providers.
OK.
The other internet providers, Bell and Telus, had an opportunity to distinguish themselves here.
But they didn’t. They had bandwidth caps too. There was a smaller ISP (TekSavvy) which offered 300GB bandwidth caps (still ridiculous by US standards), which they could offer as a result of a law requiring Canadian ISPs to resell infrastructure to smaller providers (meaning TekSavvy has access to all of Rogers’ customer base). Around 2015, Rogers started introducing plans with higher bandwidth caps, and bandwidth restrictions have relaxed (but they still exist).
It took pretty much a decade for innovation-stifling bandwidth restrictions to stop being a thing in Ontario, and arguably only because of a law (i.e. government interference) letting smaller ISPs use big ISP infrastructure.
I think that if you are in a market with caps, and you go offer a subscription without a cap, you end up with a bunch of subscribers who will saturate their line. So it makes more sense to slowly compete on increasing the caps, quite like we see in the mobile industry as well. Plus, network capacity goes up (hence I said date context matters).
Personally, I got nothing against caps, as long they're clear and the subscriber is informed about it beforehand. A FUP has a cap as well. If you download 24/7/365.25 on broadband then many ISPs will complain. Not all, but many will. Although nowadays less than say in the 90s or 00s.
In Chicago, I had Comcast and AT&T DSL. Neither was very fast, and Comcast was really expensive (something like $90+ if I wanted decent speeds). Again, very fortunate of me. I chose to go with AT&T because I was a poor college student. Trying to watch Youtube on that was a complete nightmare. I was also very unlucky if one of my online courses required watching an instructional video or a lecture.
So many options! Expensive and slow internet vs. cheap and really crappy internet. Both with data caps, awful customer service, constant connection issues, expensive+aging equipment--gee wiz we're so lucky.
How can you sue your ISP if there is a clause that you must go through binding arbitration instead?
How can you switch to another internet provider if AT&T is the only game in town?
Would you be happy if your electricity provider was free to block access to, I don't know, refrigerators?
We wouldn't need net neutrality if the ISPs didn't have a monopoly.
That means my speed options are 300mbps, 3, or 1.5 with 400ms latency.
Such great "options" if my cable provider decides to upcharge me now.
Oh man, I wish. I live in the heart of SF and the only option I have is Comcast. I suppose I could try Monkeybrains, but I'd have to get landlord approval and that may be an issue.
The point is, in the US, even in the tech capital of the world, we are still encumbered by private ownership of internet infrastructure.
It's fucking pathetic.
To be clear, I'm a supporter of Net Neutrality, but more so a more built-out municipal fiber system across the US.
Internet should've been made a utility a decade ago.
Do you watch Netflix? If you don't, that's ok, because most consumers do use it or a competing service. Internet Companies absolutely did try to charge Netflix extra, and in some cases throttled them. This was well documented.
I don't know if you're a corporate shill or just genuinely lack the ability to comprehend how bad this is. Spectrum, Verizon and their ilk have absolutely shown zero regard for consumers and there is no reason to believe that pattern of behavior is going to change anytime soon. If they can screw over their consumers for a dollar, they will, just like they have continually done so in the past.
I am attentive to Net Neutrality arguments because I care about an open internet, but I have yet to hear one that doesn't betray a total lack of understanding of how the internet actually works; i.e., peering. Perhaps counterintuitively, the FCC is right on the money about rolling back Obama's populist regulations.
My ISP doesn't have a right to throttle streaming video content because they want to sell me a $90 cable package.
I believe most of the cases where Netflix ended up paying were also to deal with the effect of the large traffic on peering arrangements. You have networks that have a peering arrangement where neither charges the other for transit for the other's traffic, relying on the fact that each is sending on average about the same amount through the other, so it all balances out. Netflix traffic greatly upset that balance.
I'm not sure that even now the Internet can really handle a Netflix-like service well. Netflix at least partly addressed the problem by putting their content in a CDN, often making arrangements to host their machines right in ISP data centers, so that the Netflix load would be coming from all over instead of just a small region.
That can work for Netflix, and the next few things that get big, but how far can that go? We can't have everyone that gets big putting machines in ISP data centers, can we?
People who will be harmed is anyone who doesn't want their media coming from sources controlled by large corporations such as TimeWarner, Facebook, News Corp., etc. Such conglomerates will get special deals that make it harder for more "alternate" media sources to compete.
It's not that these regulations didn't exist, it's that they hadn't been formalized as regulations. Net neutrality is how the Internet has worked for over 30 years, and is what made it such a success.
Stopping them from doing that was one of the reasons that first Congress and then the FCC took up the net neutrality issue about 10 years ago.
Those regulations existed for most of that time because ISPs then were dial-up over phone-lines, and the phone-lines were under Title II, so de-facto all internet was.
> It's a corporate welfare play by large tech companies
It was coined in academia in 2003; the concern was raised (without the term) at least as early as 1994, well before most of the “large tech companies” embracing it existed.
> to "solve" a "problem" that nobody can identify. It's pre-emptive, busy-body regulation at its worst.
No, while it was largely an abstract concern when the issue was raised in the 90s, and even perhaps when the term was coined in 2003; by the time in 2004 that the FCC defined it's “Network Freedom” principles concrete threats were visible, and for years before the first effort to adopt regulation (starting shortly after the Network Freedom principles) the FCC responded to numerous concrete problems with case-by-case actions, which provided the direct experience with real, existing problems on which the regulatory efforts of the two Open Internet orders was based. The idea that the regulation efforts were preemptive ignores the well-documented history f the issue.
But I never enjoyed speaking with people who watch TV. That's why I found the Ultrix and the Net in the 1980's back at Harvard. I live in DC and like cities for policed walkable streets (I don't drive), live jazz, museums, book clubs and small ethnic restaurant venues.
But our consumer Net has been been a waste of time just like roadside American life has always been.
This is like the film "China Town" with cable utilities filling in for water utilities. I know I'm an old man, but nothing has changed much despite our SFX propaganda fictions.
Your basic internet is only $50/mo, but you'll need to purchase the "hacker" package for an additional $25/mo to get access to the Ultrix forums.
Should an E911 call or tele-surgery packets really be treated the same as Netflix? Net neutrality forces the ISP to do that and that seems like madness to me.
We don't want every administration for the next 100 years to treat the internet as a victim of regulatory abuse, pushing it and pulling it towards their vision of "beautiful".
But the real issue here is that the need for net neutrality is a symptom and not the root disease.
The disease that needs to be solved is a complete lack of competition in the ISP market. Service providers could differentiate themselves by QoS.
You wouldn't need a net neutrality law if you had competition.
I don’t buy this argument because you not only need competition, you need a market with perfect information. Net neutrality buzzes on in the sidelines. I would wager that the majority of customers would not care if their ISP limited certain types of packets and would not attempt to switch ISPs (that is, if they even can switch).
So you can have net neutrality be removed, and nobody care that it was removed, but still be in a much worse position than before.
Similarly, the PATRIOT act was passed, and "nobody" cared. That doesn't mean that nothing changed.
And in your E911 example, there are already ways for this to be solved without requiring censorship or throttling of data on the public networks. You can already buy life-/safety-critical bandwidth that is "off-Internet bands", if you need it - the point is, this isn't lumped with the 'general public Internet'.
And it's origin/destination that ISPs demonstrably want to prioritize by.
Why not? It costs my ISP more to deliver certain packets than others. Sending a packet from San Francisco to San Jose is far cheaper than sending one from San Francisco to Sydney. Internet traffic costs are not the same across the world. Transit pricing in Australia is probably the most expensive in the world - it's roughly 20x higher than in the US. Why should ISPs be forced to pretend all traffic costs the same, when in reality it doesn't?
So, yeah, that transit cost is already accounted for in your monthly internet bill.
Also, it's not productive to try and pretend that the prices levied by ISPs have anything to do with their costs; like all capitalism-born companies their prices are based on what the market will bear. Municipal broadband providers have proven that cost is nothing but a red herring used to justify prices and a lack of innovation.
Technically yes, but in many cases the ISPs are essentially the same company as the network provider. Xfinity is the ISP and Comcast is the network provider. Uverse is the ISP and AT&T is the network provider. Same with Fios and Verizon. Network providers do not want to be ISPs for legal benefits.
>That transit cost is already accounted for in your monthly internet bill.
While true, this doesn't address the issue I have with the current pricing model. The current internet pricing model is similar to an all-you-can-eat buffet, with a limit to the rate at which you can grab food, and how many pounds of food you can take per month. The issue is, a person who takes 5 pounds of pasta pays the same price as someone who takes 5 pounds of lobster. Under net neutrality, ISPs can't price based off food cost, and can only price based off weight. This leads to unfair pricing situations, as exampled above.
It is possible to come up with more nonsensical examples with even larger cost discrepancies. Under your idea, should sending a packet across the street cost the same price as sending a packet to Mars? The first relies on $X0,000 of infrastructure costs, while the second relies on billions.
The idea that 'pricing based off a packet's source or destination should not matter' makes sense in a world where all packets (or food in this example) are free, however, in the real world all packets have a cost associated with them.
Oh well .. that's the america we live in now.
An operator like Verizon, for example, that runs phone service (including emergency calls) over the same lines as their standard internet service pretty much has to prioritize packet types differently. This is expected and understood by all parties.
The Net Neutrality that people are up in arms about is related to limiting traffic of the same class based on which endpoints are involved. For example, Verizon cannot throttle (or worse, outright block) HTTP traffic to Netflix/Hulu/Youtube to 1KB/s to drive users to their own competing service.
I recently moved to Texas and was surprised and rather impressed at their two-layered electrical market. There is one "power distribution company" for an entire region, regulated (I assume) by the state/county. I never do business with them, but they hook my building up to the grid and maintain the lines. Then I choose a power generating company from a wealth of plans and providers, based on whatever criteria I care about.
Doing something similar for internet service would be fantastic, but still requires neutrality from the last-mile infrastructure. Apparently in the UK they've managed something like this through something called local-loop unbundling, which I assume is part of why we don't hear so much about NN from over there.
I would love to see something like that in the US; ISPs will fight tooth and nail to prevent it.
You need regulation in markets like.
So in effect these messages would only arrive 33% faster. Not to mention the cost of having to monitor traffic and the additional charge to do so on the consumer in comparison to the "anarchic" TCP model we have now.
The last time we bad this conversation when Verizon first sued for the rules to be dropped. Level 3 showed that the apparent need to create these fast lanes were due to an artificial bottleneck created by isps to throttle Netflix. When the new rules passed, the version that went in still allowed for these fast lanes to be created, but only through the supervision of the chairman. Whichb was a win for isms, despite the internet community cheering.
Also included I the original title 2 is that you would not have a data cap and yo u would be charged for the internet you use versus a bulk sum every month. Articles around this time showed that after subsidies and tax credits to build infrastructure. It took TWC only a $1.24 to supply a custoomer internet access in which they charged $49.99. This included all operating costs.
On average, yes, but in the event where a malicious attacker completely DoSes the network with packets, the prioritized packets would be more than 33% faster than average.
The problems here come from ISP's that won't upgrade their infrastructure to support the demand, because they are trying to maximize profits, and see advantages to being able to charge/extort fees from actors they think can afford it (netflix for example) or they feel are competing with their own offerings.