

AT&T’s fascinating third-way proposal on net neutrality - petethomas
http://www.washingtonpost.com/atandts-fascinating-third-way-proposal-on-net-neutrality/2014/09/15/9fb1c264-f1c4-4dea-8b96-001fdb9c39d4_story.html

======
kristopolous
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.

~~~
pmh
>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.

~~~
kristopolous
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/](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.

------
ssivark
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?

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

~~~
smtddr
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...](http://muncievoice.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/net-
neutrality.jpg)

~~~
gavinpc
Is that image for real?

~~~
smtddr
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...](http://www.nationaljournal.com/tech/netflix-has-replaced-google-as-
the-face-of-net-neutrality-20140915)

------
crusso
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.

------
_greim_
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.

------
silveira
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.

------
pwarner
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.

~~~
vonklaus
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.

------
lawnchair_larry
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.

------
pacmon
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.

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

------
rayschmitz
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.

------
TheCoelacanth
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.

------
Kortaggio
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.

------
smutticus
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.

------
mgarfias
Why not end the last mile monopoly?

