
California Introduces Its Own Bill to Protect Net Neutrality - MilnerRoute
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2018/01/california-introduces-its-own-bill-protect-net-neutrality
======
thaumaturgy
Relevant anecdote: I've recently switched to full-time hotspotting with
Verizon, and I'm still adjusting my Netflix habit to match.

Verizon, as usual, sent me my "you're at your last 10% before we throttle you"
notice just as I went over my limit, and at the exact same time, DNS stopped
working for netflix.com.

Everything else worked just fine, but none of the netflix.com properties would
resolve.

I had lazily been using Verizon's DNS for my hotspot. Changing to
8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 immediately brought it back online.

I can't prove it wasn't just a glitch, but it was pretty damn suspicious
anyhow, and exactly the sort of underhanded behavior I'd expect from today's
telecoms.

~~~
misiti3780
I do full-time hotspotting on verizon, always max out over my limit, and have
never experienced this.

What specific configuration did you change from 8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4 - i would like
to know for future reference if it does happen.

~~~
webkike
They changed their DNS to point to Google's servers, which have the static IPs
8.8.8.8/8.8.4.4

------
Pilfer
Before anyone gets ahead of themselves, this bill only _protects_ net
neutrality and does not enforce net neutrality as defined here
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Net_neutrality)
.

ISPs are still allowed to discriminate traffic under this bill. They are
allowed to block and throttle content such as illegal streaming downloads,
some torrents, spam, and other traffic that degrades network performance. For
example, this bill does not prevent Comcast, At&t, Verizon et al. from
blocking port 25 as they have been for the past decade. The bill also does not
preclude zero-rating.

This bill is a good thing yes, but let's not get ahead of ourselves and call
this net neutrality.

~~~
tzs
I don't see any real point in including zero rating under net neutrality, for
several reasons.

1\. The usual argument is that if an ISP can zero rate service X, that makes
it harder for competitors of X to compete, and so we need to ban zero rating
to encourage competition.

This argument fails because a last mile ISP like Comcast can easily side step
any internet neutrality rules in offering X by making a deal with the X
provider to serve the service from Comcast's own servers. Then it is not being
provided over internet and so is out of scope for net neutrality.

They could even go farther, and not even use IP at all to deliver it from
Comcast to the home. They run IP on top of lower level protocols, and they
could use one of those lower level protocols to deliver to an app running on
the set top box, which could then serve on the LAN using normal IP protocols
(which would be out of scope for net neutrality because they are just running
on a LAN in this case).

If we want to stop this for competition reasons, we'll need to use antitrust,
not net neutrality. Antitrust cannot be evaded by simply changing the
protocols.

2\. We accept zero rating in every other or nearly every other common carrier
service. In telecommunications. for example, I've never seen any objections to
zero rated telephone service, whether paid for by the phone company (such as
free calls to government offices), or paid for by the company called
(commercial toll free numbers). In transportation, we don't get our feathers
ruffled when a bus or cab company offers free rides (possibly paid for by a
sponsor). What is different about internet?

Generalizing this, in general we allow nearly every provider of goods and
services to give you MORE than you have paid for. As long as they deliver the
service that you paid for, if they want to give you a gift of more service to
promote a particular offering of their own, or to promote (possibly for pay)
some sponsor, we allow it. Regulation is concerned with making sure they don't
under deliver, not preventing over delivery.

It is hard to make a case to the typical consumer that there is something
fundamentally different between, say, Safeway giving a discount on Pepsi, and
an ISP giving a discount on bandwidth used for Spotify.

3\. Suppose I'm a company selling something that uses a lot of bandwidth, such
as a game that requires a large download. I'd like to pay major ISPs to zero
rate it. If I cannot directly do that, but the ISP sells prepaid bandwidth
cards that you use by entering a code from the card, I could simply buy
prepaid bandwidth this way, and when someone buys my game I could give them a
bandwidth code for their ISP to cover the costs of the download. Are we going
to ban prepaid bandwidth to stop this?

If we want to get net neutrality back, and have it STAY back instead of just
flipping every time we change which party is in control we need to keep it to
just involving things ON the network. That's basically throttling, blocking,
and paid prioritization. Billing is OFF the network. I think it should be
reasonably possible to get bipartisan support for those.

~~~
will_hughes
The argument for prohibiting zero-rating under NN generally goes like this:

If provider X provides a very limited (or no) quota for regular internet
traffic, and provides access to sponsored zero-rated services - then this
inhibits competition, and (depending on how agressively it's implmented) can
inhibit free speech.

This has been seen seen in some countries such as India where facebook.com was
zero-rated traffic, and data prices for regular internet access were extremely
high.

It's also seen today in Australia where Apple Music, Spotify and Google Play
Music services are zero-rated traffic on certain mobile (cellular) plans -
many of these plans also have zero-rated access to various popular social
media platforms too (facebook, instagram, etc) - and data quotas are generally
fairly limited (2-10GB/month is typical for mid-range plans). A competitor to
these services is going to have a very hard time entering the market, since
their customers will all have the data usage come out of their regular quota.

Continuing with Australia - Most ISPs provide zero-rated access to Netflix (or
provide 'unlimited' quota). Telstra does not zero-rate Netflix traffic, but
they do zero-rate Foxtel and their own movie/tv services. At the same time,
having rather low data quotas.

So those who're stuck with Telstra (eg because they live in an
apartment/development that is a Telstra-exclusive estate, or just because
they're on a 24-36 month contract, having been unaware of the problems) - are
unable to use Netflix.

~~~
hhw
With Australia, submarine transport costs to Singapore (nearest 'major'
Internet hub) or all the way to North America or Europe for the largest hubs
is an order of magnitude more expensive than continental terrestrial transport
within North America or within Europe. So that Netflix offers free caching
boxes to ISP's meeting minimum traffic levels allows the Australian networks
to save substantially on their overall bandwidth costs. It's reasonable for
them to zero-rate that traffic as they're effectively passing their cost
savings on to their customers, as opposed to trying to double dip by charging
content networks for access to their subscribers. This may violate more pure
definitions of net neutrality, but should be desirable behaviour as it's pro
consumer.

This goes back to the distinction between the real problem, the lack of
competition in many markets compared to net neutrality which mitigates
situations where there's a lack of competition, but it's not necessarily a win
all across the board. What's needed is to separate last mile access, from
eyeball network service, from carrier network service, from content network
service, from actual content. This would ensure competition across the board,
and prevent excessive power accumulated by such a small number of large
corporations as is currently the case. However, the nearly religious reverence
to capitalism in the US would make such a solution nearly impossible to
legislate.

~~~
will_hughes
> With Australia, submarine transport costs to Singapore (nearest 'major'
> Internet hub)

There's very little direct bandwidth to Singapore - there's only one cable
going west (SEA-ME-WE-3), it's old, and constantly has breaks.

Unless you live in Western Australia, your traffic (even to Singapore) doesn't
go via that - it goes via the US over SXC or Endeavor to the east, or to the
north to Guam (PIPE-1) or Japan (AJC)

> It's reasonable for them to zero-rate that traffic as they're effectively
> passing their cost savings on to their customers, as opposed to trying to
> double dip by charging content networks for access to their subscribers.
> This may violate more pure definitions of net neutrality, but should be
> desirable behaviour as it's pro consumer.

I agree, however I've had (heated) arguments with people on this aspect. Not
everyone agrees, and thinks that all traffic should be zero-rated if any
traffic is going to be.

------
staunch
Comcast and AT&T set data caps at 1 TB per month, knowing that we will all
soon be doing much more traffic than that. Every year bandwidth requirements
go up and it's accelerating.

Home internet access in the US went from unlimited usage to capped with $200
overage fees overnight.

We need an "Effective Sustained Rate" law that says something like:

If you sell internet access with a 1 terabyte cap, you have to market it as a
3 megabit connection. The effective sustained rate. Or preferably, just outlaw
data caps entirely.

~~~
rayiner
> If you sell internet access with a 1 terabyte cap, you have to market it as
> a 3 megabit connection. The effective sustained rate. Or preferably, just
> outlaw data caps entirely.

That's like saying that laptops must be marketed with their "effective
sustained" battery life. The MacBook Pro can't be marketed as having 10 hours
of wireless web, but rather just 2 hours of "effective sustained" performance.
Regardless of whether it's a sensible measure for your typical user, who is
actually likely to get the 10 hours because they're using their laptop for
office and web browsing.

Residential ISPs are selling burst connections, which is an entirely sensible
thing to do in a world where the top use case for a home internet connection
is sucking down a 5MB Facebook page as quickly as possible then going idle.
It's not like they're hiding the data cap in fine print:
[https://dataplan.xfinity.com](https://dataplan.xfinity.com).

Note that outlawing data caps doesn't address the phenomenon of companies with
market power being able to charge monopoly prices. It just redistributes the
burden of that upcharge away from heavy data users to ordinary users. _E.g._
consider if you outlawed Apple's practice of charging $100, $200, etc., more
for $15-20 worth of flash memory on an iPhone. Do you think Apple would just
lower those prices and leave it at that? No, they'd raise prices on the base
model. All you'd do is hurt the users who keep everything in the cloud in
order to favor those who store a lot of data locally. (Unsurprisingly, price
discrimination tactics that benefit ordinary users at the expense of power
users are unpopular among power users.)

~~~
com2kid
> Residential ISPs are selling burst connections, which is an entirely
> sensible thing to do in a world where the top use case for a home internet
> connection is sucking down a 5MB Facebook page as quickly as possible then
> going idle. It's not like they're hiding the data cap in fine print:

Go idle? Since when?

Steam auto updates my games, Windows downloads multi-gigabyte updates in the
background. My Android phone syncs files in the background to cloud storage,
and on a nightly basis finds a good dozen or so apps to auto-update. For many
people, Alexa now streams music in the background whenever they are home.
Multiplayer online games nowdays have voice chat, increasingly richer and more
populated worlds, and support video streaming of one's exploits.

Even that 5MB Facebook page is actually an endlessly scrolling multimedia
fest, that starts streaming videos as they come into view.

Heck Hacker News is one of the few paginated sites left!

~~~
icebraining
It's not "endlessly scrolling", it's scrolling for the few minutes you're
looking at it. Nobody scrolls FB pages - or even downloads updates - for 24h
in a day, and it would be absurd to limit speeds as if they did.

~~~
com2kid
Average usage of FB is 50 minutes a day.

Snapchat has 30 minutes. Reddit has some ungodly number, but is much less
multimedia heavy.

And that is average, I know multiple people who average ~2hrs a day on
Facebook.

~~~
rayiner
Even if you’re reading FB 50 minutes a day, you’re probably only downloading
5-10 minutes of that time. In the last two months, The FB app has used 557 MB
of data on my iPhone. That’s about 1% of my soft data cap over that time with
VZN.

~~~
com2kid
Checking my Laptop's network usage, over the last 30 days, Chrome has
downloaded 88 GB of data.

To be fair, I stream movies using the Netflix website, 3 movies, so
approximately 18GB to video.

The rest? Who knows. Youtube is certainly part of it, though I rarely watch
videos full screen so whatever 480p takes up.

Then there are mobile apps like Snapchat which, for heavy users, can eat up an
easy 5GB or more per month.

I had the Chrome bandwidth monitor open while researching that number. The 3
or 4 articles I read to figure out the average Snapchat data use ended up
themselves using 36MB of data! (and this is with an ad blocker running...)

Figure it took me 3 minutes (not really) to do the research. that is 12MB per
minute of data consumption just browsing the internet for references!

My overall point here is that data usage has exploded, and not just for
consumption of streaming media.

------
jokoon
I don't want to be a bummer, but video streaming might stress the hell out of
the internet infrastructure.

Before YouTube and Netflix, video broadcasting meant that you send data once,
but a per view service sends a copy each time.

I'm all for net neutrality, but to be honest I think that some use cases might
add a little pressure to the whole network when you compare them to more
classic uses (HTML, images). I don't think that Snapchat, YouTube and Netflix
can really be sustainable models if they keep growing and growing forever.

At some point, transmitting video online, on a large scale, at a good
resolution, at peak hours, is going to be expensive.

Netflix is popular because the real cost is on the ISP, and there never are
any guarantee of quality of service, it's not up to Netflix.

~~~
ploxiln
If you pay for 250 GB of data from your ISP, then they're on the hook for the
cost of delivering that 250 GB. That's what they sold you - or actually what
you should be able to buy.

The problem is when they'll deliver 250 GB of $PARTNER_SERVICE but not 250 GB
of Netflix or YouTube, and none of the 1 or 2 ISPs in your area will give you
a reasonable deal on your GBs from Netflix. (And to be clear, Netflix is not
charging them anything.)

(The other problem is when they say "unlimited" but of course it's never
really unlimited.)

~~~
shard972
I agree with you but then I believe that with the recent developments in video
streaming (becoming mainstream) it would then be totally reasonable for ISP's
to start charging a lot more for packages that give you the data to stream
that much video.

It just seems like underlying the whole NN debate is the very large uptake in
the average user's data usage over the last 10 years that is just sort of
ignored when it comes to how do such upgrades get paid for and before such
upgrades take place, who or what gets slowed down in the case of congestion?

~~~
revelation
Moore pays for that. My internet hasn't gotten 10 times as fast, but
networking equipment did. So much exponential growth and here you are
discussing if we can really deliver 10 Mbit to the population?

ISPs want to pay so little industry is still spending R&D money on how to make
that fucking copper cable go all the way to Shannon capacity. G.fast is now
doing over 100 Mbps on 500m copper.

~~~
toomuchtodo
Radio spectrum does not follow Moore’s Law. It is finite.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
The radio spectrum isn't the bottleneck for wired Internet. The bottleneck is
in the routers, switches, etc. that sit in between the pieces of wire. Moore's
law is highly relevant to how much bandwidth they can handle.

------
velodrome
I wish ISPs billed like a utility. Something like $10 connection fee + 10-15
cents per GB.

This will force bandwidth hogs to self-regulate. If you have the ability to
purchase 4k/8k TVs, then you should be responsible for the associated
streaming costs and not have others subsidize it.

Also, NN does nothing to foster competition - the real problem. All we have
are a bunch of local monopolies/duopolies.

~~~
gregmac
That's not actually what bandwidth costs. The cost to the ISP is based on the
connection speed (eg, bits per second) not on how much is transferred.

The ISP needs to size for peak usage, and they over-subscribe because that's
the only way to be profitable. This is why your speed will often be slower at
night than during the day. It also means when you pay for data transferred at
non-peak times, you're not actually costing anything since the bandwidth was
sitting there unused anyway.

~~~
thomastjeffery
> your speed will often be _faster_ at night

Fixed that for you

~~~
gregmac
Sorry, poor wording on my part. I meant slower in the evening (peak time), and
you're right: late at night is typically the least busy and thus fastest time.

------
jancsika
> However, state laws can only restore network neutrality for some Americans,
> and only a federal rule can ensure that everyone in the country has access
> to a neutral net.

To accurately reflect the scope of the problem that should read "some
Americans some of the time," no?

I doubt California businesses and residents restrict their internet traffic to
stay within the state.

------
bb88
This is my simple proposal.

Regulate the use of the term "internet service" to include network neutrality
principles. If the provider violates these principles, they cannot call
themselves an "internet service provider".

They can all themselves "network provider" or "mobile data provider" but they
can't use the term "internet" anymore.

------
BrainInAJar
Why not just solve the problem once and for all and build out a statewide
public ISP?

