

Marc Andreessen talks about the pros and cons of net neutrality - mathewi
http://gigaom.com/2014/01/15/marc-andreessen-talks-about-the-pros-and-cons-of-net-neutrality-and-the-need-for-innovation/

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john_b
The major providers like to pretend that they're in a wonderful competitive
market where, if only they were allowed to discriminate on traffic more, there
would be more competition, prices would be lowered, and investment in
infrastructure would grow due to the competition.

This is a nice rosy view of things, but it's just not accurate. They're de
facto infrastructure builders, and for their efforts they want a monopoly on
that infrastructure, with all the powers it comes with (e.g. favoring some
traffic over others). The problem is that everybody long ago realized that
infrastructure monopolies are a bad idea because they destroy both competition
and infrastructure growth. It's why major roads aren't owned by private
companies, it's why the electric company can't charge you more if they don't
like the brand of your TV, and it's why public transportation services like
trains and buses can't charge you more if you're partners.

Letting private businesses compete in various niche ways is fine as long as
they are (1) actually private and (2) actually in a working free market.
Telecoms in the U.S. are neither. They're so heavily subsidized and regulated
that they function more as pseudo-government entities who should be entrusted
with very serious business of maintaining public infrastructure. But they
should definitely be prevented from rampantly discriminating against their
customers to profit. The whole point of infrastructure is that it is a common
public good, available to everyone equally without discrimination.

~~~
alberth
>>" It's why major roads aren't owned by private companies"

In the US, many major roads are owned by private companies like Cintra [1] to
give one example, and they charge tolls [2] on those roads.

It's become common practice in many US states that any new highway
construction must have a toll on it and then the state sells the road to a
private company.

[1] [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cintra](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cintra)
[2]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_road](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll_road)

~~~
wavefunction
>>It's become common practice in many US states

I think it's unfortunately down to the incessant anti-tax rhetoric in the US.
It's a lot easier to get a private company to finance a toll-road with a
concession agreement than it is to pass bond measures or increase taxes.

~~~
crazy1van
I don't follow this logic. Toll roads allow the people who want to use a road
to pay for it. Tax-funded roads take taxes from all the district's citizens to
pay for roads that only some will use. Great if you use that road. Not so
great if you don't.

~~~
sowhatquestion
This is insane. By this logic, public goods don't exist. Tax-funded fire
departments are great if your house catches fire, not so great if it doesn't,
etc.

~~~
Jtsummers
Indeed. I have no children, why should I pay taxes to educate other people's
kids? Just because they're our future laborers working on and within our
common economy to keep things going after I've left the workforce.

~~~
glesica
Because better educated children are less likely to stab you and take your
cell phone while you're walking your dog.

Seriously, though, why are real estate prices higher in areas with better
schools? It's not because every person who lives there or might live there has
kids, it's because better public infrastructure creates better quality of life
for _everyone_. Good public schools might not impact you directly if you don't
have children, but they do attract better neighbors, create more cultural and
social opportunities (even for the childless), and generally produce better
quality of life for the communities they serve.

I really, really wish all the libertarians would get off HN and move to
Somalia or some other place with no functioning government where they could
finally be happy. I'm sure it would work out well for them, because good
governance clearly has no positive externalities.

~~~
Jtsummers
I left the /s implied.

~~~
glesica
Clearly I need to work on my sarcasm-detector... :)

~~~
Jtsummers
No worries. I probably need to cut down on my sarcasm, especially online, but
I've found it to be the most effective "shutup" tool in my bag when dealing
with this extreme mindset. As an example, two weeks ago I was at dinner with
some folks including a Catholic seminarian and a young USAF officer. The
seminarian was commenting on topics related to social justice, something he's
devoted most of his adult life to, and the need for government involvement.
Young officer says he believes taxation is "immoral", as it's taking money
from other people by force. My response, "But you're paid with tax
dollars...". I didn't have to continue that line of thought before he switched
topics. I guess the really unfortunate thing is that I've had to use that same
line on a number of civil servants and government contractors in this area.
They don't seem to appreciate the hypocrisy of denouncing the government for
taxing them, while being paid with tax dollars, until someone else calls them
out on it. And two days later they'll be ranting again.

------
jackgavigan
I had a bit of back-and-forth with Marc on this topic and I think he's
underestimating the difficulty of regulating a non-neutral 'net such that
competition (and, therefore, innovation) isn't stifled.

I can't help thinking that if, 20 years ago, Microsoft had struck a deal with
the major ISPs to prioritise packets being downloaded to Internet Explorer
over those being downloaded to Netscape browsers, Marc would have had a very
different take on net neutraliy.

~~~
billiam
Exactly. I think that the woeful state of US broadband and wireless
infrastructure today is the strongest proof of the failure of a poorly
regulated private sector that effectively has captured telecom governance.
That sunny world of virtual worlds and holographic telepresence will happen in
Singapore a lot sooner than in the US if government allows the Internet to
look like Cable TV.

I consider Andreesson to have zero credibility in this matter, for reasons
stated above and more. Why not allow rich and powerful corporations to control
access to US consumers? Our smartest consumer startups, denied US consumers,
will start to build Twitter and Pinterest and other services for consumers
outside of AT&T and Verizon's control, and we will be more and more irrelevant
as a market and a technology innovator.

~~~
rayiner
It's weird to me to blame the "state of U.S. broadband" on the telecom
providers, and in the same breadth compare it to Singapore, a city-state where
all 5 million people live in a single urban area of 270 square miles (i.e. a
bit smaller than New York City with a population density a bit higher than San
Francisco).

The state of broadband and wireless in the U.S. is proof only of the fact that
it's much more expensive to build infrastructure to a huge, sparely-populated
country with large suburban, exurban, and rural populations. Half of South
Korea lives in the metro area of the largest city. About 30% of people in
England live in the metro area of London. About 25% of people in Finland live
in the metro area of Helsinki. Only 4% of the people in the USA live in the
metro area of New York City. Beyond that, more than half the population of
metro London lives in the city proper. For a typical U.S. city like Boston or
DC or Atlanta, its more like 15%.

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calroc
There are no "cons" to net neutrality. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous at
best and duplicitous at worst.

The idea that we won't get enough bandwidth in the future unless the telecos
et. el. are allowed to play gatekeeper makes no sense to me.

~~~
roin
CON: The more money I think I can make by owning network infrastructure, the
more I will invest to build it now.

That's not to say that net neutrality is bad or wrong on balance, but no cons
at all?

~~~
calroc
Faulty frame. Try it with other basic infrastructure: "The more money I think
I can make by owning ROAD infrastructure, the more I will invest to build it
now."

See the flaw?

~~~
roin
I do not see the flaw. The statement in quotes, while a simplification, is
correct if a private company is making the decision. If a government is making
the decision (typical with roads, not with broadband), there are a ton of
other factors, although in an ideal world they would also try to do a similar
NPV calculation. In any case, the government doesn't own broadband.

~~~
calroc
Bandwidth is infrastructure, like roads. It should be managed by civic
authority for civic benefit, not exploited to increase private wealth.

Do you actually want to deal with a biased pipe?

~~~
roin
No I don't, and that is a big pro of net neutrality. But that doesn't mean
there are no cons.

~~~
calroc
Okay, what are they? And I mean cons from the POV of users (and hosts are
users too in this sense) not from the POV of an unnecessary commercial
organisation overlaid (overlain?) on the infrastructure.

I'm not being snarky here, I'd really like to think a new thought.

(To be fair, or just contrary, I kinda feel that all the porn and ads might
due with a little reduced service, but I'm not megalomaniacal enough to think
that I should get to decide for everyone else..)

------
Zikes
So the argument seems to be that the more money these companies believe they
can make, the more likely they are to build infrastructure that will
ultimately reduce the costs for consumers.

This is a highly idealized view, which does not mesh well with synonymous real
world systems like cable TV and cell phone networks. Those two examples alone
prove to me that these companies would prefer to collude to keep prices
artificially high than to use their monopolistic infrastructures to provide
cheap and high quality service to consumers.

Besides which, America has already paid $200 billion to these companies in the
name of infrastructure improvement, and all they did with that was take the
money and run.

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protomyth
What is the technical definition of net neutrality? I look at a lot of these
articles and they seem to imply people are using the same term for multiple
things.

~~~
twoodfin
Indeed. You can imagine pretty expansive definitions, and whatever definition
you come up with can create potentially undesirable incentives.

I don't know whether Comcast is using IP to deliver their video-on-demand
services to your cable box, but let's assume they are. That IP bandwidth is
above and beyond whatever you're paying for as a "broadband" connection, but
that's just accounting: It's all packets in the end. Is it "neutral" for
Comcast to be able to use that bandwidth to provide you with movies and TV
while restricting NetFlix to your capped/metered "Internet" bandwidth?

If NN would disallow such restrictions, then Comcast really is a low margin
dumb pipe provider. Some people love that idea, but it doesn't encourage any
of the existing broadband providers (maybe _sans_ Google) to keep spending
tens of billions of dollars to roll out faster and faster networks.

If NN doesn't apply to these services, then of course Comcast will simply
package up as much of their IP-based applications and content as possible into
proprietary interfaces with your TV and other devices while making the
bandwidth available to "open" IP applications commensurately smaller.

~~~
lhc-
Im not sure how the second case incentivizes them to build out their networks
either. They have barely done that for the last decade or so (consider how
expensive and slow internet access in the US is compared to much of the first
world), so I'm not sure why they would start now that they have even more
control.

~~~
twoodfin
"Barely done that for the last decade or so"? I don't think you remember what
broadband connectivity options were available in your typical American suburb
in 2004 or 1994. As rayiner pointer out in a thread a day or so ago, telecom
providers are some of the largest capital spenders in the nation:

[http://news.investors.com/technology/091913-671712-institute...](http://news.investors.com/technology/091913-671712-institute-
ranks-highest-us-corporate-capital-spending.htm)

------
Patrick_Devine
We could ultimately replace our internet infrastructure with something more
distributed which makes it difficult for ISPs to determine what traffic
they're carrying. Ultimately traffic analysis works right now because the ISPs
can detect where the traffic is coming from. In a more distributed internet,
that wouldn't be the case. If all packets are encrypted, it would also make it
harder to snoop and shape traffic that way.

Bit Torrent already does this with Message Stream Encryption/Protocol
Encryption, and it can potentially hide on port 80/443\. But why stop at just
Bit Torrent traffic? Why not build a new web out of something more akin to
this?

~~~
wmf
Hiding the source or destination of traffic (which is one of the major things
ISPs want to discriminate on) requires onion routing which will make things
~2x slower and more expensive. If we end up in a situation where a significant
fraction of Internet traffic is being onion routed I would consider that a
massive failure.

~~~
Patrick_Devine
I actually wasn't trying to suggest onion routing, but a more peer-to-peer
distributed internet, similar to the way bit torrent works. If a CDN was
spread across multiple sites instead of concentrated at one place (ala S3), it
would be very difficult for an ISP to track.

~~~
foobarqux
A distributed data store would achieve this and at the same time provide
inexpensive versatile cloud storage.

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pbreit
I don't know how Marc squares his free markets love with his presence at the
table being substantially enabled by the government (internet + UIUC + NCSA).

Surely people have not forgotten what it was like pre-neutrality (Compuserve,
Prodigy, Genie, AOL, et al)?

~~~
crazy1van
I don't really understand the fear. The Compuserves and Prodigys of the world
died because they weren't open and it didn't take a government dictate to kill
them.

~~~
bdb
Openness won in the early iterations of online services in part because there
was a neutral medium over which you were able to connect to your choice of
service: the PSTN.

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Jtsummers
Completely OT: Is there any reason why all their content is SCREAMING? I'm
stuck on IE 8 in the office, do they have some js or something that produces
normal text on non-outdated browsers?

