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Comment by olodus | Hacker News Reader

The whole thing is a bit sad. We could have a real discussion about net neutrality. We could talk about how 5G probably will need different kinds of connections with different latency or reliability and that if you are building a normal Web service you probably don't need all that while some other services obviously do. And such specific improvement maybe should cost a bit more.

But no. Because all ISPs will use non net neutrality for is to push more expensive subs on people without really offering something better to them. Or push out competition of their own services. Who in general would support Ait the way he behaves? He is so obviously a corporate ISP spokesperson, even without looking at his resume.

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Looking at resumes, you would've thought Wheeler would be an awful FCC chairman, but he turned out ok. Which makes Pai even more frustrating because you look at him and think "I know he has ties to the industry, but he could choose do his job if he wanted to."

>The FCC's mission, specified in Section One of the Communications Act of 1934 and amended by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (amendment to 47 U.S.C. §151) is to "make available so far as possible, to all the people of the United States, without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, national origin, or sex, rapid, efficient, Nationwide, and world-wide wire and radio communication services with adequate facilities at reasonable charges."

Imagine having that mandate and going out of your way to take the position that you don't have any authority over internet connections.

That mission takes 2nd place to political party loyalty. The FCC runs against its own mission right down party lines.

Pai is too corrupt to do the proper job. He only serves his ISP masters. Wheeler was doing the right thing for a change.

I'm still anti-NN because I hate how disingenuous and alarmist the pro-NN crowd has been. I don't think adding more regulation will fix anything.

But at least now we'll get to witness the power of federalism with regulatory comparisons between states.

Reasons:

- general opposition to regulation, because compliance costs burden smaller firms more, raising the barrier to entry

- does not address the root problem, lack of competition

- reduces choices for consumers

Lack of competition is caused by onerous local regulations which incumbents use to raise the barrier to entry. See: Google Fiber

Because NN does not address the root cause, and in fact the support for NN has not resulted in any significant support for addressing the root cause, it can only serve to further enforce the status quo or makes things worse.

Some examples of failed predictions / misleading statements made by NN supporters:

- Most Americans have less than 3 ISPs. This may be true depending on how you restrict which ISPs you're referring to. Mobile carriers cover almost the whole US, so there's 3 or 4 right there.

- ISPs will produce different packages for internet access. This hasn't happened.

- Speeds will reduce. This hasn't happened.

Being upset by "alarmism" when you haven't learned the facts and why it's worth being alarmed about is a disturbing trend.

That is a vacuous and irrational accusation that you have butted with weasle words. Are you attacking OP or "the world"? What are you basing your assumption on that she hasn't learned the facts?

I don't know what parent meant but I would personally say that fits OP to a T. All of OPs claims of "this hasn't happened yet" have happened outside of the US where there is no NN.

Please add evidence to the comment. A lot of your statements are vague rhetoric that could be flipped in the other direction.

Edited

>general opposition to regulation, because compliance costs burden smaller firms more, raising the barrier to entry

In your favor, I'm aware of at least one regional co-op ISP in Minnesota that either shut down or sold out due to the reporting/compliance overhead that Title 2 placed on them. This isn't a conspiracy theory, this is simple organizational dynamics - larger corporations are able to absorb larger regulatory burdens that smaller players cannot.

This is something that NN advocates seem to have a very hard time accepting. The law that was shot down wasn't "net neutrality", it was classifying ISPs whole of Title 2 (which is a ginormous blob of legislation, minus a couple of "forbeared" provisions) which had a specific form of net neutrality as one of its many provisions.

>reduces choices for consumers

This, I don't get. How so? What choice is being meaningfully restricted by the requirement that you don't discriminate based on source or destination?

>Most Americans have less than 3 ISPs. This may be true depending on how you restrict which ISPs you're referring to.

Mobile carriers are not realistic internet providers for daily home use because of draconian bandwidth caps and other forms of fuckery (like restricting video streams to 480p) even when "unlimited", and that's not getting into the latency/reliability issues that make things like online gaming difficult.

Most people will have a telephone company and a cable TV company to choose from, with a smattering of third party DSL carriers (that still require the telephone company's lines), and some very niche options like fixed wireless (see latency/reliability) or satellite (high pings and bandwidth caps).

----

I do think it's interesting that most of the doomsaying has yet to come true. I don't think there's any demand for these tightly segregated services NN people seem to think we'll get, or else we would have seen meaningful, industry-wide pushes in that direction, and as for speeds, they've only been increasing.

> > reduces choices for consumers

> This, I don't get. How so? What choice is being meaningfully restricted by the requirement that you don't discriminate based on source or destination?

Let's say an ISP offers a plan allowing their users to have full-speed access to partner video steam providers, and slower access to their main competitors. This plan is half the price of their main plan, which gives full-speed access to everyone.

The plan I described would be illegal, as I understand it, under NN. This means that that choice had been removed as an option for consumers. There are many consumers who would use this plan: people who do very little video streaming at all, people who use their partner's video streaming service, and people who use very small competing services which fly under the radar of their throttling. Those people now have to pay more because a choice that would have benefitted them is illegal.

But that's deceptive; it's cheaper for the consumer because it's a plan subsidized by the partnered video streaming services. But in the long-term, that reduces choices in different areas, e.g. fewer video stream providers because the providers that can't afford to pay off ISPs find it harder to gain an audience. Something already exacerbated by the network effect.

And ISPs that have those plans have an additional guaranteed income stream, whereas smaller ISPs that can't get income from partnered websites have less money to compete with and a higher hill to climb.

Additionally, ISPs aren't falling behind in speeds, available plans, and costs because they don't have money. They're profitable. They have money. What we need is a combination of NN and municipal ISPs that provide actual competition.

> This is something that NN advocates seem to have a very hard time accepting. The law that was shot down wasn't "net neutrality", it was classifying ISPs whole of Title 2 (which is a ginormous blob of legislation, minus a couple of "forbeared" provisions) which had a specific form of net neutrality as one of its many provisions

It was something like 700 forbeared provisions. There were only 8 pages of regulations in the 2015 Open Internet Order.

If you recall seeing Pai and some members of Congress waving around a 400 page document and claiming it was the 2015 Open Internet Order, what they were waving about was actually 8 pages of the Order, plus a long analysis of the legal history of net neutrality, responses to comments, analysis of the FCC's authority to regulate, and things like that.

The open internet order and the title 2 reclassification are two different things. After they were sued and lost the ability to enforce the order, they moved forward with reclassification.

I believe you may be thinking of the 2010 Open Internet Order. That was the net neutrality order that was struck down in court. The court said that Section 706 did not provide sufficient authority for the regulation, but Title II would if ISPs were reclassified.

The Wheeler FCC set about to restoring net neutrality consistent with the court's ruling. Wheeler proposed doing so without reclassification by basically keeping those things that the court had not had a problem with and dropping those things that needed Title II. The main such thing dropped was the ban against paid prioritization. In that proposal, he also asked for comments on reclassification.

The comments overwhelmingly supported reclassification and he went with that, issuing the 2015 Open Internet order, which reclassified ISPs under Title II with most Title II provisions forborne and imposed net neutrality.

I would venture to guess that the majority of the HN crowd is pro-NN.

You are correct in that the real problem is that, starting in the 90s, municipalities traded exlusive rights for quick rollouts. The "onerous local regulations" are what created the unfair monopolies in so many cities. In San Francisco, you have AT&T still offers 10Mbit DSL because the only other game in town is Comcast (or MonkeyBrains).

Mobile/Wireless ISPs and fiber providers are not in the same universe when it comes to where we want to go. If you are talking about crossing the digital divide to get marginalized groups of rural people connected to the internet then, yes, wireless is an answer. If you want to start building the next generation of infrastructure that will support the next generation of technology then we need to be rolling out fiber to as many places as we can.

To do that we need to undo the regulations that prevented the appropriate competition from growing alongside the lazy incumbants, and, we need to protect the internet as it is today with net nuetrality regulations.

Just because we haven't seen an ISP charge for different packages doesn't mean that it won't happen. It is legal after all. Why wouldn't a free market take advantage of that? Especially when I can only choose between Comcast or 10Mbit AT&T DSL?

There needs to be a transitionary period. Open up all the municipalities to new broadband companies. Wait 20 years, then sunset net nuetrality.

General opposition to regulation

- NN is not a cost regulation as far as I know. It's preventing companies from doing something, not requiring them to do anything extra.

Lack of competition, reduces choice

- These are the same thing and NN is not meant to be a solution to the lack of ISP competition. I think you're right that local regulations are the root case of that though. NN is meant to prevent reduced competition of services that rely on the internet, particularly those that require heavy data use. Would someone be able to start a Netflix today and compete with the media services owned by the ISPs?

Less than 3 ISPs

- Mobile service is not a replacement for home internet service. Even with tethering most households would go way over their mobile data caps if that's all they used.

ISPs will produce different packages

- This happens all over the world in places without NN. But since most of the major ISPs are also media companies in the US they simple zero-rate their own media. This has the same effect of reducing competition among online services.

Also your username switched around is Ajit P. That's a little suspect ;)

NN, as it was proposed, as implementation of Title II for ISPs, is a large bundle of regulations. Regardless, every regulation has a cost to compliance.

I explained how NN reduces options for consumers in a different reply.

5G is meant to be a replacement for home internet service. Its primary features: high bandwidth, low latency, etc. are specifically meant for that purpose.

The one example I saw of this was a Portuguese mobile carrier. I didn't see any other examples.

And zero-rating would be allowed under Title II.

> your username switch around is Ajit P

That's actually a pretty funny coincidence. Never recognized that before.

> Regardless, every regulation has a cost to compliance.

I don't buy this. Is there a cost to statutes against murder? What about trespassing laws? How about loitering laws? How about road laws, is there a cost to automakers for speed limit compliance?

while regulations CAN have costs for compliance (see FDA testing for an extreme example), they don't ALL have costs.

NN falls in the low to no cost bucket. "treat all traffic fairly" is a much easier algorithm and maintenance scheme than "Slow down netflix because we are partners with AT&T" or even "Slow down netflix because the user hasn't purchased the fast netflix plan". That is MORE costly to maintain for a network provider, not less.

About the only way to spin it as costly is if you talk about opportunity losses (IE, they can have higher profits with shittier plans).

I'd be more sympathetic if ISPs hadn't attained regional regulatory capture basically everywhere. If there were true competition in the ISP market then you could sway me to thinking NN could go. However, as it stands, most areas have only 2 competitors. In that case, either we need NN or we needs some trust busting.

> I don't buy this. Is there a cost to statutes against murder? What about trespassing laws? How about loitering laws? How about road laws, is there a cost to automakers for speed limit compliance?

There absolutely are cost to statutes against trespassing and loitering. Other countries with different laws have more freedom, for instance the “Right to Ramble” in the UK and other countries guarantees citizens the right to pass over privately owned woodlands and fields unmolested by trespassing law.

When it comes to compliance by a company, and not to your examples of statutes against murder, the company is absolutely going to pay lawyers to examine the regulation, promulgate internal rules about how to follow it, employees have to read the regulation, there may be mistakes causing fines to be levied. I don’t see how a regulation as big as net neutrality could not have costs somewhere.

Edit: and slowing down traffic doesn’t have to be a positive decision, YouTube and Netflix were slow on FiOS at one point because they hadn’t upgraded the necessary peering due to a dispute over who should pay for the upgrade. Under a net neutrality scheme, you now have to analyze the regulation to see if it forces the ISP to pay for the upgrade themselves for instance.

> - NN is not a cost regulation as far as I know. It's preventing companies from doing something, not requiring them to do anything extra.

This is not actually true. NN was a new thing that was added relatively recently that will require ISPs to basically bankroll the infrastructure for companies like Google/Netflix/Amazon etc. Especially ISPs that don't have Google/Netflix/Amazon as customers. These companies increase the bandwidth going over the ISPs networks to a subset of the ISPs customers. The ISPs either need to force all customers to pay by raising rates among all customers, adding data caps, or throttling data rates in peak times, if NN is in play. If NN is not in play then they can require that the content providers (Google/Netflix/Amazon/etc) pay for the increased data from these providers. The ones most at risk in a non-NN world are the tech giants that want to use the web as a the location applications reside (and they ran a very effective marketing campaign to convince average folks to believe that it would harm them).

If they are regulated as "common carriers" then that means they can't bill the source of the data for the data. This is a very bad trend that will just increase the cost of internet.

> ... to basically bankroll the infrastructure for companies like Google/Netflix/Amazon etc.

You mean like they already did? If Netflix was actually a problem for ISPs, we’d be hearing a lot more about it from others. Instead, all we hear is ISPs complaining about increased cost. What they fail to mention is that: the internet will continue to grow; ISPs will need to grow their infrastructure anyways.

> The ISPs either need to force all customers to pay by raising rates among all customers, adding data caps, or throttling data rates in peak times, if NN is in play.

Not true. Nothing in the Obama-era regulations prevented data caps.

> If they are regulated as "common carriers" then that means they can't bill the source of the data for the data. This is a very bad trend that will just increase the cost of internet.

Again, not true. Nothing about common carrier status prevents the current double dipping of charging the uploader and downloader; Phone services already charge the caller and the receiver both.

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