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Comment by DiThi | Hacker News Reader

America needs to be able to create "virtual" ISPs with full and equal access to internet. Until then, the NN law is needed.

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But that's the problem.

NN laws are barking up the wrong tree, because your ISPs control not only the last mile, planning, backhaul _and_ exchanges, they can easily demand things not possible in the UK.

Take the netflix outage in LA.

Comcast basically said, You're pushing too much stuff, pay up or we'll throttle you, and throttle they did.

Now, in a normal open market, other ISPs would step in and say "look at us, we don't throttle" and customers would switch over, making it financially impossible to throttle popular services. But you can't do that in the US as all but the most dense markets are a one ISP town.

In the UK that sort of action is suicide, the ISP would either arrange for more peering at LINX or LONAP, or better yet arrange some edge caching (open connect in netflix parlance) nearer the customers to cut down on bandwidth sloshing around the backbone (which is expensive)

We don't have NN laws in the UK, which means that mobile providers like 3 (three.co.uk) can say that watching netflix doesn't use your metered bandwidth.

so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market.

so sctually what the US doesn't need is NN laws, it needs those ISP monopolies broken up and competition injected into the market.

Why not both?

How I dispise this meme. If you have real competition you don't need or want NN regulation. Monopolies are the problem and NN is a sub-optimal solution precisely because it's permanently one pen stroke away from being eradicated. If you switched the UK from a it's current competitive landscape to a monopolistic one you'd be getting greif from customers and all the businesses that would be shut out. In the US, you're only getting greif from customers and since they're not funding your next campaign you can just ignore them.

> precisely because it's permanently one pen stroke away from being eradicated

So NN is not a problem, just a temporary fix. And it doesn't limit competition (it costs nearly zero to comply). The problem are _other_ regulations. So why are some people so obsessed with removing NN?

I'm personally not obsessed with removing NN. I was just pointing out that you don't need to have it if you have proper competition. It's not the kind of thing that simply needs to be everywhere. If you already have it, fine.

Last mile connections are a natural monopoly.

The only realistic suggestion I have ever heard for how to break that monopoly is essentially an even more restrictive version of network neutrality: last mile providers are required to lease network capacity to anyone who wants it at reasonable and non-discriminatory rates.

> Comcast basically said, You're pushing too much stuff, pay up or we'll throttle you, and throttle they did.

It's more complex than that. And in any case Netflix gives CDN boxes to ISPs for free.

I wouldn't mind a similar thing to MVNOs for mobile networks. There are a lot of attractive offerings that run on the big networks but have different plans.

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