Comment by Lukeas14 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Lukeas14 | Hacker News Reader

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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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