AT&T’s fascinating third-way proposal on net neutrality | Hacker News Reader

AT&T’s fascinating third-way proposal on net neutrality

washingtonpost.com

20 pointspetethomas23 comments

And this is why you should switch to another ISP. Really. do it. Stop giving AT&T your money. They are out to screw you. Leave them right now. They are not your friends. They hate you and want your money. All of it. Stop giving it to them. They will use your money against you to extort more of your money.

Encourage your family and friends to do so.

Smaller ISPs will treat you better. They do exist.

I switched to one (sonic.net). I got a call a week after switching from them, "Hi, your internet speed is slow. We can do better. Can we come out there and fix the line noise?"

And they did. Faster than AT&T ever was - no data caps, and $10 cheaper to boot. Totally unprovoked, totally unasked for. It had been so long that I forgot what solid customer service looked like.

AT&T has been sending me junk mail offering me first $35, then $29 and now, $19/month for 12 months. Sorry --- my bar of acceptability has been set back to where it should be and you simply do not reach it. Your pricing points do not matter when I no longer value the services you provide. It's like McDonalds trying to sell a cheeseburger to a vegan.

>smaller isps will treat you better. they do exist.

That really depends on where you live. Some people have the choice between a single telco and a single cable provider, e.g. ATT & TWC or Verizon & Comcast. Some are limited to a single choice, usually because they live too far from a DSLAM and fiber is unavailable.

I had to go hunting big time to find that there even existed an option, in this case, sonic.net who had service where I live (culver city, los angeles). It's not like they had a prominent billboard campaign and youtube ads.

I had to read a bunch of forums, go through a bunch of reviews, dsl report web sites, etc. Finally found out that they do. At that point it wasn't a question of whether the company "sonic.net" did - it was "what can I get that's not comcast and not at&t."

Anyway, the point is, that I thought I was in the boat of "nothing. you are screwed", I really believed it - but I wasn't. Finally found them. Felt great.

So I say to you, keep digging - they are out there. And if there isn't, then a guy named Paul Cienfuegos has a formula for successful community rights movements http://communityrightspdx.org/ that's one of them. Fight for a municipal broadband - regardless of whether the state bans it.

What's the state going to do? Bring in the national guard to protect the rights of time warner by blocking a city truck from installing fiber? Seize city assets? Arrest the city council? No, of course not. They'll give you the finger and move on. Look into it - the "fuck you, we're asserting our community rights" seems to actually work.

I live in Orlando, FL. Our only choice for ISP is Brighthouse or to go without.

TL;DR: "Here's what AT&T's proposal looks like: In a recent meeting with FCC officials, AT&T's senior vice president for regulatory policy laid out a plan that would allow individual consumers to ask that some applications, such as Netflix, receive priority treatment over other services, such as e-mail or online video games. That's different from the FCC's current proposal, which tacitly allows Internet providers to charge content companies for priority access to consumers but doesn't give the consumers a choice in the matter."

Wait a minute. What's stops ISPs from forming cartels and "bundling" services, thereby destroying smaller competitors while the bigger players cement their position. Haven't we seen that with cable TV?

Isn't this just describing QoS, which is something any sane ISP is already running?

QoS at the ISP level isn't the same as QoS at the customer level.

QoS at the ISP level is probably just something like not letting torrent traffic completely saturate their whole network, so the mostly average user just trying to load a webpage gets a reasonable response time.

If people want QoS themselves, they should just do it themselves with a router that supports it. If ISPs start doing what at&t is suggesting, there _will_ be bundle-packs, they'll be priced differently and it'll still lead to this[1], but with more abstract labels or shuffling around to group companies with similar content(bandwidth consumption).

1. http://muncievoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/net-neutra...

Is that image for real?

No... Not yet anyway.

I remember seeing this image(or something extremely similar) years ago to show the negative outcome of net neutrality[1] efforts failing.

1.And the ideas in this article is what I mean when I use the term "Net neutrality" http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/netflix-has-replaced-goo...

"...would allow individual consumers to ask"

The customer will probably have to mail a certified letter to their ISP requesting priority. No way they'd make it easy.

This proposal sets up the same mechanisms AT&T needs to start creating packaged content so they can increase their profits. It just gives them a weakly defined excuse for when to pull the trigger that has the aura of being at the "request of customers".

As long as the last-mile monopolies are so firmly in place, this is not a free market. Strong consumer protections need to be in place.

Net neutrality is more than just "I want faster Netflix." (Or whatever service you're pissed about being slow at the moment.) If consumers demand Comcast prioritize Netflix and they're forced to comply, that's great for Netflix, but no Netflix competitor would be able to get a foothold in such a scenario.

That's nothing new, it's just killing Net Neutrality as they want. Slowing down services that don't pay the ransom, but now calling it public demand.

Lately I think charging per bit is the simple solution for all of this. Amazon does this. It gives them a great inventive to have a good network. If they slow things down, then you might send less bits, so they would get less revenue. There are of course a few potential problems. From the ISP perspective they need some way to figure out how to handle the peak load. Possibly select a short window every day where bits cost more? For users the biggest risk is variability from month to month, although we all handle that just fine in our electricity and water bills. The other trick of course is that absent proper competition the cost per bit may not drop as fast as it should, but I would say the competition part is sort of an independent problem.

This is the only way to align incentives. If I rent an apartment with everything included, I am less mindful of the lights being left on. Further, they should have a regulated cost structure where they can only charge a certain amount. This is communist you say? Well when the entire country paid for the fucking infrastructure it seems pretty fucked up to use it to charge us AND the people delivering the content you are selling to make massive profits.

What? This isn't fascinating at all. The article makes it sound like both sides are in favor of this. I'm not sure if the author doesn't understand the technology and is extremely naive, or if he's being deliberately deceptive. The proposal is completely unacceptable to any net neutrality advocate.

I don't really find AT&T's idea fascinating in any way. I think it's just them trying to get around the rules. I have no doubt that if something like that were set in place, they would apply enormous pressure on all their users to request priority for whatever they (AT&T & others) want. Most people who don't know anything about the internet will just do as they are asked because "It's for their own good" - as I'm sure AT&T will pitch it that way. I for one - want NO prioritizing. I DO want them to quit complaining about their infrastructure and just upgrade it.

How about we don't want fucking priority at all?

Optimal obfuscation: a theory in political economy that posits where there is policy transparency, propose something just complex enough that it will be difficult for opponents to discern the downsides.

Their proposal is functionally identical to ISPs being able to use fee-based prioritization whenever they want. AT&T has millions of customers. It would be trivial to get a few of them to request prioritization of anything that AT&T wants.

If you wanted to throttle certain apps can't you just do it locally? If your neighbours ask for favouritism toward certain apps that you don't want that's functionally no different from the ISP doing it for you without consulting anyone.

This is all about AT&T setting bad precedent. Once they have a precedent set that speeding up, or slowing down applications is normal, they'll start screwing with us. I guarantee it.

Why not end the last mile monopoly?

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