
Portuguese ISP shows us what our non-neutral internet will look like - joeyespo
https://boingboing.net/2017/10/28/warning-taken-as-suggestion.html
======
PaulRobinson
Whilst I completely think net neutrality should be enshrined in law, I do
wonder whether "the market" will ensure it is always available.

If you have a choice of two ISPs and one of them is net neutral, the other is
not, which one are you going to choose? If you are not able to choose your
provider, you have a monopoly issue - the way to deal with that might be net
neutrality for now, but you _really_ need to break the monopoly irrespective
of that.

Some consumers may be ill-informed. I think if plans are explicit, that's
actually going to cause pause for thought and consumers will educate
themselves: there is some evidence of this younger consumers at least and the
choices they're making (e.g. Facebook is dying off with < 30 year olds).

For me the really scary option is when your ISP is preferring traffic for a
major incumbent and limiting traffic to a new competitor and not making that
explicitly clear to you. At that point you don't get to make an informed
choice of ISP, you don't get consumer education calling out there are options,
and you don't get shifts in the market. That's the really dangerous one we
need to be wary of, IMHO.

~~~
mikeash
I agree that net neutrality becomes much less important if there's real
competition between ISPs. But for most of the US, there isn't. Monopolies and
non-competitive duopolies are common. Yes, this should be fixed, but it's
really, really hard, far harder than regulating neutrality.

~~~
BoorishBears
Getting blanket downvotes for going against the hivemind so nevermind.

~~~
mikeash
What's complex about it? ISPs should be dumb pipes. They shouldn't care what
you use them for any more than the electric company does. Seems pretty black-
and-white to me.

~~~
BoorishBears
And I disagree, because the average consumer would not want to pay for what it
would cost if the ISPs priced that into their fees.

There’s no need for an ISP to throttle, they could just charge consumers the
exact cost to build out as much capacity as they need. But that cost would
raise rates to one that consumers don’t want to pay.

To me this is about idealism meaning the real world. In a perfect would I’d
love for ISPs to be dumb pipes, but even in your example, Electricity
companies don’t charge you like a dumb pipe and offer time of use pricing,
pricing based on zones, discounts or rebates based on energy efficiency.
Likewise different sites generate enormously different costs on the ISPs side,
and consumers are benefiting from ISPs balancing being a dumb pipe, with not
charging the consumers the price of a pipe that can carry every type of load
at every time at perfect speeds.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
I think you don't understand what net neutrality is?

Yes, electricity companies do charge you like a dumb pipe, exactly as ISPs
should (and most are).

A dumb pipe does not mean that the ISP cannot count your traffic and bill you
for it, possibly even at varying rates throughout the day. It only means that
the ISP doesn't get to look at the contents of your traffic, just as the
electricity company doesn't get too look at what you use your electricity for.

A non-neutral electricity company would be one that didn't charge you
according to load on their network and generation facilities, but based on the
application you use electricity for. Now, they usually do offer various plans
intended for different types of uses--but mind you that that does not mean
that you only get to use them for those uses, the contract is about load
profiles and energy prices.

For example, you might have a plan for storage heaters. But there is
absolutely nothing that forces or requires you to use the electricity for
storage heaters. The contracts is simply about different prices per kWh during
different times of the day. If you run a startup that produces gadgets at
night using cheap electricity from that plan, that is perfectly fine.

Fetching email from gmail's IMAP server produces exactly the same load on an
ISP's network as fetching email from some local email provider's IMAP server.
Net neutrality is about not distinguishing between those. There is nothing
wrong with offering a "1 GB/month, 1 Mb/s" plan that is well-suited for only
receiving and sending emails. The problem is when they want to prevent me from
using IRC instead, or they only allow specific email providers.

~~~
BoorishBears
I do understand net neutrality, my example might have been poor though.

Electricity companies can’t (reliably) tell what you’re using the power for so
in a sense they do act as dumb pipes (except they do care if you use it for
commercial vs residential), but they don’t _strive_ to be dumb pipes. To put
it in terms of your space heater analogy, they can’t give you electricity that
only works with your space heater, so they’ll give you rebates for using a
specific space heater.

The goal is the same, the implementation just takes the limitations of
granularity in metering electricity usage.

I know what net neutrality is, and I have no problem with a non-neutral
internet. It’s not the same as a lawless unregulated internet. Right now zero-
rating is what ISPs have taken advantage of it for. People argue zero rating
means base prices must be encompassing the cost of the “free” service, but
it’s coming with strings attached like reduced bandwidth or as a way to
attract new users. While I do feel certain companies might be able to use
zero-rating to reinforce monopolies, I don’t feel zero-rating inherently
creates an environment where companies can’t compete.

If ISPs do take further moves to absurd it, those moves can still be
regulated/blocked, but my experience in many other countries has been that it
doesn’t progress further than that, certainly not to the 2 mock images shown
in the article (the one real one has a subtle, but important difference,
access isn’t blocked if you don’t choose one of those packages, you just pay
the normal base rate)

That being said, I’ll refrain from talking about net neutrality on HN. This is
the crowd that would have the most reasons to support it. After all, zero
rating on Netflix doesn’t help a unicorn become the next Netflix, and there
are plenty of people here who feel like all of this goes against the very
spirit of the internet.

But it’s impossible to have a meaningful discussion when everything you say is
immediately downvoted to ghost status. I mean I made that were barely more
than a single fact got downvoted until they couldn’t easily be read anymore,
and people are _still_ mass downvoting my statements hours later.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
> Electricity companies can’t (reliably) tell what you’re using the power for
> so in a sense they do act as dumb pipes (except they do care if you use it
> for commercial vs residential),

No, actually, they don't. That is what the plans are labeled as, but they
really don't care about whether you are commercial or residential, that is the
point that I was trying to make. What they care about is your load profile.
Residential vs. commercial users on average have a very distinct load profiles
(throughout the day and throughout the week), and that leads to different
costs, which is why they want to bill you according to your load profile.
Ultimately, if you happen to run a business that has the load profile of a
typical residential user, they would often rather want to have you as a
residential customer because that matches their costs. It's just that billing
using load-dependent prices throughout the day has traditionally not been
technically feasible, which is why the simplified distinction of residential
vs. commercial plans was developed, because that matches reality well enough
in most cases.

> People argue zero rating means base prices must be encompassing the cost of
> the “free” service, but it’s coming with strings attached like reduced
> bandwidth or as a way to attract new users.

How is that a contradiction? Yes, it comes with reduced bandwidth ... which
still is being paid for with the income from the base prices, isn't it? And
yes, it is being used as a way to attract new users ... while also hurting the
existing customers, the new users, and their competition!? I really don't see
how this in any way reduces the negative impact of it all, and thus why you
even bring it up?!

> While I do feel certain companies might be able to use zero-rating to
> reinforce monopolies, I don’t feel zero-rating inherently creates an
> environment where companies can’t compete.

Well, what do you mean by "can't compete"? Do you mean "are unavoidably
destined for failure", or "have an increased risk of failure"?

The former probably isn't the case, but also is not a useful standard. Almost
nothing that is generally agreed to be bad directly guarantees total failure.
Does putting carcinogens into food mean that everyone will die of cancer? No,
it doesn't. Do we still consider putting carcinogens into food a bad thing?
Yes, we do. Why? Because it increases the risk of dying of cancer.

Now, if you do agree that increased risk of failure is a good enough reason to
consider something bad ... isn't it obvious that having higher costs than your
competition increases the risk of failure for a business?

> (the one real one has a subtle, but important difference, access isn’t
> blocked if you don’t choose one of those packages, you just pay the normal
> base rate)

What practical difference does it make whether access is blocked or
prohibitively expensive?

Suppose we introduced a new law that requires you to pay a million bucks, not
refundable, in order to leave the country (for travel or otherwise), except if
you purchased the travel package for 100 bucks that allows unlimited travel to
Australia? Would you also say that it's a subtle but important difference that
traveling abroad was not forbidden and relations to other countries would not
suffer, you would just have to pay the base rate?

> After all, zero rating on Netflix doesn’t help a unicorn become the next
> Netflix, and there are plenty of people here who feel like all of this goes
> against the very spirit of the internet.

I guess there are. But isn't that much more importantly against the spirit of
a competetive market economy, and thus in particular against the interests of
the customers?

> But it’s impossible to have a meaningful discussion when everything you say
> is immediately downvoted to ghost status. I mean I made that were barely
> more than a single fact got downvoted until they couldn’t easily be read
> anymore, and people are still mass downvoting my statements hours later.

Really, looking through which of your comments got downvoted, my impression is
that's mostly for glaringly obvious errors in logic, primarily a failure to
consider solutions to problems that are possible without a violation of
network neutrality. The mere fact that there is a problem and an ISP that is
not bound by network neutrality can solve that problem by violating network
neutrality just doesn't say anything about whether net neutrality is a good
idea, if you don't ever consider how the same problem might be solved with
network neutrality.

------
kirykl
“I don’t need anything more than the free Facebook plan. If a new startup
creates something FB will just copy it and I’ll soon have it for free anyway”
-future internet user logic

~~~
saas_co_de
If a user can get FB services for free and can't afford internet otherwise is
it better for them to have no internet at all?

~~~
JoshMnem
Yes -- otherwise they are squandering their long term Internet freedom for
short term access to addicting garbage (Facebook).

~~~
return0
jesus that's judgemental.

~~~
JoshMnem
Here is some information:

* [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/12161461/Facebook-addiction-...](http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/12161461/Facebook-addiction-activates-same-part-of-the-brain-as-cocaine.html)

* [http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/](http://www.salimvirani.com/facebook/)

* [https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2012/04/05/the-tru...](https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2012/04/05/the-true-costs-of-facebook-addiction-low-self-esteem-and-poor-body-image/)

* [https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-...](https://www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-our-phones-tristan-harris-wants-to-rescue-them/)

* [https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609104/smartphones-are-we...](https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609104/smartphones-are-weapons-of-mass-manipulation-and-this-guy-is-declaring-war-on-them/)

* [https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peop...](https://journal.thriveglobal.com/how-technology-hijacks-peoples-minds-from-a-magician-and-google-s-design-ethicist-56d62ef5edf3)

* [https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-bin...](https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2016/11/the-binge-breaker/501122/)

* [https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/25/facebook-...](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/25/facebook-orwellian-journalists-democracy-guatemala-slovakia)

More things are happening in real life, email/telephone, newspapers,
magazines, and in books than on Facebook. I think that Facebook is bad for the
human mind and bad for society.

~~~
return0
I 'm not disputing that facebook is an addiction (like many things in life).
But there is a big chunk of users who learned to use the internet SOLELY for
facebook, they remain there solely for that and would stop using it if it
wasn't for facebook. Having the freedom to research any topic, while sounding
noble as a thing, is just not something that a lot of people want to do.

~~~
JoshMnem
> But there is a big chunk of users who learned to use the internet SOLELY for
> facebook, they remain there solely for that and would stop using it if it
> wasn't for facebook.

I'd argue that it would be better in most cases not to use the Internet if
Facebook were the only option. Accepting Facebook as your "Internet" means
that the next generations probably will not have a Free, open Internet.

I grew up before the Internet was widely used. Many aspects of life were
better without the Internet. If you aren't doing something critical to your
life with the Internet (and Facebook is not one of those critical things in
most cases), then the Internet is not a necessity.

(The Internet _is_ a necessity for many people these days, but Facebook is not
a genuine necessity.)

~~~
return0
What kind of thinking is that? TV was equally bad in our times (if not far
worse). You realize how horribly authoritarian is what you propose?

~~~
JoshMnem
It isn't authoritarian at all to say that Facebook is not a necessity.

TV is mostly-garbage, but it isn't as bad as Facebook.

------
guhcampos
People need to stop spreading this without even knowing what's going on, this
is the kind of behavior that gets Trumps elected and creates mass histeria.

What that Portuguese ISP is selling has nothing to do with net neutrality per
se. It's just a promotion, a marketing campaign, and a very common one around
the world. I'm not saying it's okay or that it does not hurt competition, user
choice and neutrality to some extent: but get your facts together before
spreading half truths.

So for the facts: these are add-on packages to an otherwise common 10gb/mo
mobile data plan. You don't get to buy them individually and they won't
otherwise affect your plan. What they do is to make the access to the
particular services in the list unlimited.

So you get your 10gb for everything, but maybe you watch a lot of Netflix and
are willing to pay a few extra bucks to have it not counting a giants your
data plan. That's all this is.

Again, I'm not saying this is fair, ideal or neutral, but it's also not what
the article is saying it is. It's also more tailored to get such services
users into the carrier business than the other way around. It's more like a
"join us to use Netflix for free" than "we allow you to use Netflix only" kind
of thing.

It is concerning to some extent, but it isn't new, exclusive to Portugal, or
hurting the core concept of Net Neutrality at all, at least not directly. One
might be right in argue that making some services cheaper is essentially the
same as making other services more expensive - this being a clear violation of
the neutrality concept - but it does not block, censure or otherwise limit
access to any particular service or domain.

Call it an ethical loophole if you will, but please don't spread mass hysteria
with images you can't read.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
A lot of words for "it's a violation of net neutrality that hurts competition
and makes using non-mainstream services excessively expensive"!

~~~
walshemj
and I am not sure if it doesn't violate eu law

------
MilnerRoute
Our Silicon Valley congressman points out that this offers "a huge advantage
for entrenched companies, but it totally ices out startups trying to get in
front of people, which stifles innovation."

[https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/92370196295609139211111](https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/92370196295609139211111)

~~~
icebraining
You have a few extra 1s at the end :)
[https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701962956091392](https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/status/923701962956091392)

------
apeace
I work for an indie ISP, so I really hope the big incumbent ISPs in the U.S.
start doing this.

Customers will flood to my company instead, since we would never package like
this. And I'll be rich!

The reality is this isn't going to happen, because the incumbent ISPs know it
will destroy them.

~~~
mwilliaams
The real problem is that there is far too little competition in this market.
When consumers only have 2 options, or even just 1, that's a problem.

------
rocky1138
This is horrendous. The only way to combat it is for the companies in these
plans to block ISPs that do this.

~~~
spodek
Another way is to legislate net neutrality.

------
ngcazz
You know what I'd like to see a net neutrality exception for? Adverts should
be zero-rated. If ISPs are gonna shove bullshit down my throat they sure as
hell deserve to accommodate the cost of getting that to me.

------
rootsudo
This is the norm in Philippine mobile data ISP for Smart or Globe.

------
chewbacha
Just in time for Halloween. This is chilling.

~~~
icebraining
Nah, Meo has been doing this crap for a while. Plans by other operators (like
Vodafone) also have zero-rating, although with a fixed set of apps.

------
jancsika
So what does the ISP get out of doing this?

~~~
craigvn
Product segmentation. Currently this is normally just done by speed or data
limits. This gives another option to screw people out of money.

------
thisisit
This whole thing reminds of something happened (happens) in the consumer
product world.

In India, long time ago, there was 300 ml Coca Cola for Rs. 10. For years,
they tried to find a way to penetrate the rural market. You see, people were
poor and normally couldn't afford the Rs. 10 worth of coke. Coca Cola came up
with a brilliant plan. They started selling 200ml for Rs.5 . This achieved two
things -

a. opened up the market for people who "couldn't otherwise afford" coke

b. Make the soda "considerably cheaper". Now 400 ml could be have for Rs. 10

Over time things have changed, 300 ml is no longer readily available. The 200
ml variant rules the market at the price of, you guessed it, Rs. 10.

~~~
icebraining
So they dropped the prices, how is that a problem? If it's because it now
costs more, if it was so long ago, are you sure that's not just inflation?

~~~
thisisit
It is due to both inflation and clever marketing. I was trying to make a point
about the latter.

It started out about being about "affordability" and choice but it no longer
was about that.

Same goes for people talking about this net neutrality being about
affordability and access. That is not true. It is a simple marketing tactic
which will cause the internet prices to go above and beyond inflation.

------
RA_Fisher
The concept of net neutrality seems very short sighted. Cell provided is
starting to compete with cable. There's also satellite and copper wire from
the phone companies. As a consumer, I feel like the trend is in the right
direction. Why would I want to setup a regulatory environment that would
likely deliver higher rates and poorer service?

~~~
an_d_rew
(First of all, satellite in no-way can compete with copper. That's lunacy, and
not even remotely comparable.)

But to answer your question, the regulatory environment helps ensure the
desired outcome.

I mean, why have building codes? If enough buildings go up in flames or
crumble down killing everyone inside, then maybe we could look into regulating
the building industry.

Why have food safety standards? Nobody really dies that much these days from
food-related illness, so shouldn't we get rid of all that pesky regulation?

But more to the point, just because they _seem_ to be going where you want
today, what has that got to do with where they will go tomorrow?

~~~
RA_Fisher
From my view wealth is the primary mechanism these really great changes are
delivered.

I used to work in electricity regulation on the side of consumers. I watched
the utilities use the regulatory process to bilk customers. The regulatory
process sets the stage for rent seeking. The companies out match the state
over and over.

------
BoorishBears
I’m so tired of seeing this example being brought up.

The packages are for making those services _cheaper_ not more expensive. This
is essentially partial zero-rating.

Zero-rating has its own effect on competition, but people are acting like an
ISP is blocking access based on subscriptions which is an doomsday of a non-
neutral internet I’ve seen trumpeted that’s I don’t believe will happen, and
hasn’t happen in other countries.

Well I guess net neutrality is another one of those topics I’d better know to
not go against the guard on.

~~~
zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC
You do realize that there is no difference in the result whether you start
with high prices and then selectively make some services cheaper or you start
with low prices and then selectively make everything else more expensive,
right?

~~~
rnhmjoj
Reading the articles it seems this ISP is forcing you to buy a package of
services to get any internet access at all; this is terrifying. Optional zero-
rating is bad but not much worse than internet with a stupidly low data-cap
already is, even if the net result may be the same.

~~~
BoorishBears
That’s not true, this image has made at rounds already, multiple first hand
users confirmed this is a set of options to save on top of a base package.

~~~
icebraining
That depends on the base package, if you get a pre-paid plan you don't get any
included Internet service. You _can_ still access the regular Internet, but it
debits 2€ for any day you use it, and only gives you 60MB for that day. To use
more you must purchase some extra package.

------
return0
I 'll be that guy. What's so bad about consumers having more choice? E.g i
dont use facebook or netflix, would enjoy the (cheaper rates|larger speeds).

~~~
mikeash
What makes the choice to pay extra for Facebook superior to having it
included?

~~~
return0
makes it cheaper for everyone else

~~~
mikeash
How?

