
Net Neutrality’s Holes in Europe May Offer Peek at Future in U.S - SREinSF
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/10/business/net-neutrality-europe-fcc.html
======
PeterStuer
It is quite simple realy. If I pay x€ for y GB/Month, the ISP should not
dictate what over the top services I spend that budget on, nor favor its own
services (or those of 'partners') by selective exclusion of that traffic from
limits that other are held to, or by hindering traffic from the non-partnered
services in any way.

Now for the 'complicated' part. In practice it is not difficult to create a
situation where everything is degraded. You just under-provision on a choke
point. If you then sell alternative routes, or allow edge caches beyond the
choke point, you technically didn't 'hinder' any traffic, you just provided
such a lousy service to begin with that any not otherwise enabled service
provider doesn't stand a chance of offering a decent experience on your
network.

But just pointing to a technical situation where it is hard to write a general
'rule' that in any arbitrary case can unequivocally objectively and
automatically say whether a certain criterion was fulfilled, and then saying
that because it is hard or even impossible to specify the whole regulation
should be scrapped, that is disingenuous. The spirit of the regulation can be
perfectly fine, even though case-by-case judgement may be required to
determine compliance.

Those that will say 'but you can vote with your wallet', I can see where you
come from, but the reasoning is flawed. In practice telecoms is not an open
market, and many households have near 0 meaningful choice. Strong economic
network effects are inherent, and lasting competition has only been present
under very strict regulation.

~~~
dilap
Yeah, healthy competition and choice of providers seems like the real solution
to me. Solve that and NN doesn't matter, plus you solve a bunch of other
problems as well.

NN just feels like a distraction, driven by incredibly manipulative and
overhyped propaganda.

~~~
rectang
Deregulatory actions are only ever used in service of entrenching telecom
monopolies. The part where we actually get meaningful competition never
happens.

Even though I wish for minimal regulation, I can't trust the deregulatory side
to provide it. Because that side is infected by people like Ajit Pai who
filter out any deregulatory actions which might threaten the monopolists.

~~~
rayiner
What additional deregulation would you like to see in the U.S.?

~~~
rectang
For starters: Removal of state and local laws favoring incumbent telecoms over
municipal broadband, Google fiber, or other market entrants.

If "deregulation" advocates were actually serious, they would have pursued
those actions _first_. Instead, they pick the old telecoms as winners.

~~~
rayiner
The majority of states (comprising the vast majority of the population) have
little to no restrictions on municipal broadband. Here in Maryland, for
example, there is no such law and the governor is actively promoting municipal
broadband. But few municipalities are pursuing that option. I'm not aware of
any states which have laws "favoring incumbent telecoms over ... Google fiber,
or other market entrants." Can you point to anything specific?

> If "deregulation" advocates were actually serious, they would have pursued
> those actions first.

They did! Two years before Congress deregulated the industry in 1996, it made
it illegal for local governments to grant exclusive cable franchises. Then in
the 1996 deregulation, it required non-discriminatory access to utility poles
and ducts.

The biggest impediments to deployment these days are at the state and local
level: permitting requirements, onerous franchise license terms, etc. Congress
could (and in my opinion, should) completely preempt these things, but that's
a hard sell. Municipalities use these franchises as a vehicle for all sorts of
social agendas ("wire up public buildings!" "wire up disadvantaged
neighborhoods!"), and as a revenue source (taxing 5% of gross revenue). Google
got most of these things waived in Fiber cities, but it was a move strongly
opposed by the public-interest types:
[https://techliberation.com/2012/08/07/what-google-fiber-
says...](https://techliberation.com/2012/08/07/what-google-fiber-says-about-
tech-policy-fiber-rings-fit-deregulatory-hands).

~~~
philipodonnell
Also:
[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkvn4x/the-21-law...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/qkvn4x/the-21-laws-
states-use-to-crush-broadband-competition)

~~~
rayiner
Most states, including many of the most populous, New York, Maryland,
Massachusetts, New Jersey, Illinois, Georgia, Texas, etc., have no such laws.
Many of the states that do have such laws don't have restrictive ones (e.g. in
Washington, you just have to be a city with the power to make your own
ordinances).

If municipal broadband was something that would actually happen in the absence
of these laws, why don't we see these networks popping up in all the places
without such laws?

~~~
philipodonnell
There was a question about citing laws, that link cited 21 of them.

Not all cities are building their own internet so that means we don't need to
do anything is logic that I just don't follow.

My city didn't build their own. Last time it came up the news reported that it
was because Comcast bribed the city council to charge unreasonable fees for
adding cables to the existing poles and ensure that only Comcast could do the
work on their own schedules. No one disputes that, but everyone who can do
anything about it shrugs because Comcast is still paying them and its not
illegal because money=speech.

But I guess because some other states with more broadband competition don't
have as many restrictions (sense a link there?), and "all the places" that can
haven't built their own broadband, I can no longer complain about not having
any competition in my market and my leaders are removing laws that protect me
from them but instead put in more laws that protect them from me?

~~~
rayiner
> Not all cities are building their own internet so that means we don't need
> to do anything is logic that I just don't follow.

If you're citing municipal broadband laws as something suppressing the
development of competition, it's fair to point out that most people live in
states that don't have such laws, yet we don't see municipal broadband
emerging as a source of competition in those states.

The U.S. is a big place, and you can probably name _anything_ and find it
happening somewhere in the U.S. The question is, what are the things that are
actually creating impediments. If states without municipal broadband laws
aren't actually building municipal networks, then getting rid of such laws
might be a moral victory, but wouldn't actually change anything.

> My city didn't build their own. Last time it came up the news reported that
> it was because Comcast bribed the city council to charge unreasonable fees
> for adding cables to the existing poles and ensure that only Comcast could
> do the work on their own schedules.

Do you have a link to the story? It seems suspect, because pole attachment
rates are governed by formulas set by either the FCC, or by the state (if the
state certifies that it regulates such rates). Also, most poles are owned by
power companies, and they set the rates, not city councils.

------
dingoonline
"But the offer alarmed Swedish media companies, which warned that the deal
gave Facebook an advantage over competitors, and Telia an edge over other
telecom operators."

ISP's have a million and one other ways to be anti-competitive. Example, in
New Zealand, one of the major ISP's runs 'Lightbox' a streaming competitor. If
you sign up to any of their plans, you get free Lightbox.

This incentives the customer to not use other streaming services. You can talk
about zero-rating all day long but no amount of neutrality regulation will
prevent something like the example above from happening. What happens if
Comcast decides that Hulu Plus will be free with their broadband? It has the
same effect as if Comcast decided to zero-rate Hulu on their network.

For their to be real changes in the American ISP market, you need competition.

~~~
dalbasal
Well...if they are treating all traffic equally then the only advantage the
ISP has is bundling. That's a marketing advantage, but not a total competition
killer. Amazon bundles streaming with free delivery subscriptions.

Not treating traffic equally would mean they could eliminate Netflix as
competition for their customers. That's worse. Same for mail, social
networking, news, dating etc. Video is just more pertinent in 2017.

The big thing to protect is always categories that don't exist yet.

Competition helps, but infrastructure markets are always suboptimal.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
It wouldn't give an ISP advantage over other ISPs, but that doesn't matter
because ISPs are for the most part regional monopolies. It would give Hulu
Plus an advantage over other streaming video services, though.

------
spodek
Besides Pai and the top shareholders of some companies, how many people
actually _want_ this proposed repeal?

I'd guess most people don't know or care. Still, millions wrote to object to
the proposed repeal.

Is it possible that only a couple hundred people are making this decision for
300 million over the objections of millions?

~~~
figurehe4d
Had a convo in my CS class about it today. Literally a room full of 19-20
something males, many who are avid gamers, or want to make tech it into a
job... I was the only one who had anything to say about nn. People really
don't know.

~~~
amelius
Perhaps that's because NN has more to do with underhand business tactics than
with tech.

------
indubitable
The article mentions that, _" France has four major mobile and internet
operators and nine low-cost offshoots. Britain has more than 50._" I'd
appreciate if somebody could explain something here because that doesn't seem
to make any economic sense. Let's assume that France/Britain have absolutely
rigid and perfectly enforced net neutrality. That means internet service
providers can compete only on price/speed as everything else is supposed to be
otherwise identical. 13 different companies, let alone 50? How? Users would
simply pick the company with the lowest price for their desired speed. And the
cheapest service is going to tend to be the largest due to economies of scale.
The end result is a natural trend towards monopolization when companies are
allowed to only compete on price/speed.

I mean you might decide to pass on a "low-cost" alternative in most industries
as there is often an implied "low-quality" qualifier attached. But with strong
net neutrality, this is not supposed to be the case. They state a speed, they
state a price. Everything else is identical. So what gives? I find it
disappointing that the NYT did not even bother to even consider this obvious
question since it seems to cut to the core of this issue!

~~~
KaiserPro
We don't have net neutrality, we have competition.

That is the key point, net nuetrality is a moot point because if an ISP were
to do something like charge for iplayer (BBC catchup service) which was mooted
a few years ago, they'd all move to a different ISP.

Because we have for the moment a roughly open market.

There are parts that are controlled by a monopoly, but thats the people who
provide the last mile infrastructure. They have strict regulations saying that
they must charge a fixed price for rental of the infrastructure with no
obligations other than to pay for the last mile. (they can choose to be a pure
virtual operator, just skinning the service, or almost entirely run its own
infra, save the last bit of copper)

Also, the people that run the last mile monopoly are not the people providing
backhaul. That is mostly an open market too. More open than the last mile
copper at least. Linx/lonap are all coops, where you pay a membership fee, and
the cost of powering your equipment, any interconnect arrangements are up to
you and your peers.

In short, we have a much more open market, but with no net nuetrality.

what america needs is competition, and the seperation of last mile, ISPs and
backhaul. None of which you are going to get in present times.

~~~
croon
Slight clarification: We have an open market explicitly because we have tight
last-mile regulation. If we didn't we'd all have local monopolies.

I don't know specifically where you are, but it's true in most of Europe.

~~~
rayiner
Some of Europe has tighter last mile regulation, but it’s not necessarily
better. Take France, for example. France applies unbundling to copper
telephone lines and fiber, but not cable. It subsidises fiber backhaul for
DSL. Overall, it’s got similar fiber deployment to the US (about 10%) but
overall much slower speeds (according to Akamai, 11 Mbps average in France
versus 19 Mbps in the US). But there is lots of ISP competition in DSL, like
there was in the US in the early 2000s. But most people don’t have access to
faster cable alternatives, because subsidization of the DSL network killed
competition.

Is this better?

~~~
croon
> But most people don’t have access to faster cable alternatives, because
> subsidization of the DSL network killed competition.

> Is this better?

That's a red herring.

By your own admission this isn't caused by LLUB but by misguided
subsidization. It's a deliberate choice of poor example in a pool of much
better options.

~~~
rayiner
It’s a direct byproduct of LLU. LLU eliminates market price signals over the
most expensive part of the infrastructure.[1] That requires governments to
exercise tremendous discipline in setting the wholesale price. It’s
politically popular to set the price too low, but that kills investment.
France tried to compensate for that through subsidies. But those, predictably,
killed the unsubsidized competition.

[1] You obviously can’t let the monopoly that owns the loop freely set the
wholesale price of the loop.

~~~
croon
> Government rate setting is such a bad idea, that our oligopolies might be
> better. (The US has faster internet than all the big European countries: the
> UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy.)

And it's slower than Sweden, Norway, Finland, Denmark, and many others.

You can't blanket claim that LLU and rate setting is bad simply by ignoring
examples where they work much better than the alternative.

Edit:

You might also want to include consumer prices with that comparison.

I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a
pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.

~~~
rayiner
(Sorry for the intervening edit.)

Here's Akamai's list of countries with the fastest broadband:

1 South Korea 28.6

2 Norway 23.5

3 Sweden 22.5

4 Hong Kong 21.9

5 Switzerland 21.7

6 Finland 20.5

7 Singapore 20.3

8 Japan 20.2

9 Denmark 20.1

10 United States 18.7

Our presence on this list is remarkable. If you were listing countries with
the best of some other kind of infrastructure, say subways, we wouldn't even
be sniffing the top 10. Nobody would look at the fact that Sweden or Denmark
managed to have good subways and say "well, obviously we can do that too!" And
we already know we would do a bad job implementing LLU: it was in the 1996
telecom act, and the FCC set rates too low and killed DSL in the process.

Also, it's not clear what LLU has achieved in a place like say Denmark:
[https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/media/publi...](https://erhvervsstyrelsen.dk/sites/default/files/media/publikation/bilag_-
_analysis_of_market_structures_in_the_danish_broadband_markets_-
_august_2014_-_wik.pdf).

60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC
must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are Telenor
(the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those three
account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system?

> I installed fiber (from the street outside) in my house in Sweden and had a
> pick of 18 ISPs, of which I chose 100/100 Mbit/s for $38/month.

Where I live, I only have two choices for fiber, but 100/100 is $40/month,
gigabit is $70-80, and two-gigabit is $150/month. Also: did you or a previous
homeowner pay a one-time fee to build the fiber to your house? In the U.S.,
the ISP usually eats the up-front cost and recovers it in the monthly charge.
Finally, U.S. prices include implicit cross subsidies (to build fiber or cable
in poorer neighborhoods) that Swedish prices do not.

~~~
croon
> Besides, Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Denmark either don't impose unbundling
> of cable/fiber, or set very high prices for wholesale access:
> [http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf](http://www.oecd.org/sti/broadband/2-7.pdf).

I'll go with Sweden as it's the one I know closest. It doesn't... anymore, but
it did for maybe 10 years from late 90s, and if Telia (the previously state
owned and now privatized incumbent) which has a lot of the FTTH market would
start being anti-competitive you can bet regulation will return.

> 60% of Danish subscribers are with TDC, the privitized former incumbent. TDC
> must offer DSL access over LLU, but the two companies that do that are
> Telenor (the Norwegian incumbent) and Telia (the Swedish incumbent). Those
> three account for 80% of all subscribers. Is this better than our system?

Yes? As long as all three has access to all customers (in the US the big ISPs
have local monopolies so it's deceiving to look at them as many providers),
there's at least some market forces available. But I also think DSL is kind of
backwards to look at to begin with.

------
kaplun
In France, the main mobile operator Orange, offers you tethering only as an
option to be additionally paid on top of your data plan. They basically
monitor the connection to check if your mobile is forwarding packages and do
mitm in order to display advertisement about the additional paid option.

~~~
TheCowboy
AT&T USA also charges extra for tethering on top of a data plan. Apple's
iPhone will even block you from tethering if you don't pay extra to AT&T.

~~~
celeritascelery
Same with Verizon

~~~
AndrewGaspar
I'm positive I don't pay an additional charge for tethering on Verizon.

~~~
TheCowboy
You might not given that provider plans and bundles do change over time.
Sometimes there are still restrictions and drawbacks (e.g. throttling) since
providers are opaque about their services. There could be new plans that
include tethering but cost more or have bandwidth caps.

------
PebblesHD
I hadn’t considered the impacts such a ruling would have on zero ratings
schemes, the two hadn’t even connected in my mind, but now that it’s been
mentioned it would clearly fall afoul of any existing regulations. There used
to be a similar plan from Optus in Australia to zero rate Facebook, and
there’s currently one to do the same with Spotify, but today these accompany
generous data plans in general, whereas originally it was offered on very low
cap plans such as the 100mb/mo plan. Curious to see how this plays out
internationally in countries like Aus where this already occurs unchallenged,
and whether they will now go further following the ruling in the U.S.

------
FidelCashflow
My account (US, MN) with Virgin Mobile is already doing this with "free"
streaming music. A hand full of apps (Pandora, iHeartRadio, Slacker, 8tracks
and Milk Music) don't count towards the monthly data cap.

~~~
maxyme
Yep T-Mobile does this as well. There is a way for any streaming music service
to put in a request to be added to the list, but I'm not sure if smaller
companies get accepted or not.

Edit: There used to be, can't find the link anymore...

------
PeterStuer
Outside the wireless space, the local loop is a rather strong classical
mono/duo/-poly. While there may be several re-sellers, and more players at the
national level, in practice for most individual homes the choices are
extremely limited. Network effects (in an economic sense) are in play at the
ISP level so entering the mature market as an 'independent' isn't as
straightforward as it sounds. Consumer Internet is furthermore already
packaged in with a TV/PSTN/Mobile bundle offer. Keeping an open Internet has
definitely been a struggle in Europe. One that is under constant attack. A
strong Net Neutrality stance has been the only defense, but also over here it
is failing as we speak.

~~~
phlo
In Switzerland, some cities have started to break this up, and it's wonderful:
Responsibility is split between the local utility and telcos. The utilities
are responsible for the last mile (just as they are for power and water), and
provide a fiber connection from the customer to one of several points of
presence per city. Telcos rent space in these PoPs. They get to skip the
expensive last mile and focus on Internet connectivity.

In places where FTTH is available, a wonderful ecosystem of mini-ISPs has
sprung up, serving different niches. Some focus on integrated multi-play
(Internet/TV/Phone/etc.) setups, others offer affordable quick connections
without the bullshit. Choice and competition are alive and well, despite (or
because?) part of the infrastructure is publicly funded.

------
ccvannorman
>“From a user perspective, I don’t think it’s a problem and I think most
consumers don’t think it’s an issue,” said Magnus Haglunds, a Stockholm-based
independent music producer who uses the Telia service. “There are those who
may have to change from Apple Music to Spotify. But then they get free surfing
on Spotify.”

What kind of a sheep customer thinks, "Well I guess I'll just totally change
the service I use because that's what my provider wants!" People like that
need, if you'll excuse the gendered metaphor, a swift kick in the balls.

------
binarynate
Call your senators!
[https://www.callmycongress.com/](https://www.callmycongress.com/)

