
House of Representatives Passes Net Neutrality Protections - glitcher
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/04/victory-house-representatives-passes-net-neutrality-protections
======
zachwood
Mitch McConnell has already stated that he will refuse to allow the Senate a
vote. Because he is trash.

[https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/438133-mcconnell-net-
neu...](https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/438133-mcconnell-net-neutrality-
bill-dead-on-arrival-in-senate)

~~~
JosephHatfield
In the last election cycle, McConnell received: $99K from Comcast, $66K from
Verizon, and $49K from AT&T.

~~~
educationdata
There is no reason to believe this small amount of money is the explanation of
his position.

~~~
jchw
Who do you treat more favorably, people who just happen to pay you a
collective amount of around $200,000 or people that yell at you but otherwise
effectively can't do anything to stop or even discourage you? Yeah, I bet ISPs
accidentally signed checks to politicians without intending for it to cause
them to be treated favorably, just out of the good of their heart.

Dropping the sarcasm now, because it's obnoxious, but honestly, it's silly to
pretend nobody knows what's going on here. Frankly though singling out ISPs
here is silly, I'm sure most big businesses do exactly this same thing and we
all let it happen so ¯\\_(ツ)_/¯

~~~
paulgb
I despise McConnell, but I think it's just as plausible that he genuinely
believes that net neutrality goes against his ideology (free market, low
regulation) and Comcast et. al. make their donations because his ideology
futhers their desired outcomes, as opposed to donating to bring him to their
side.

~~~
heavenlyblue
I would assume the problem is that for the consumers, even if they are a
larger group - it’s way more expensive to collect the same amount of money to
lobby for the opposite.

So obviously it’s way easier to hold an extremely narrow point of view because
it’s so easy to get campaign money for it.

~~~
educationdata
$200,000 is a very small amount of money in grassroot crowdfunding.

Against net neutrality is not "an extremely narrow point of view".

------
mekane8
Why do the Republicans hate Net neutrality so much?

~~~
wmf
Because Republicans are "pro-business" and favor "small government" while net
neutrality is "anti-business" and "large government".

~~~
AnthonyMouse
That doesn't really ring true. If they were actually in favor of those things
then they would also be eliminating build-out requirements and other
regulations so that it would be easier to start a small ISP with e.g. 500
customers in one section of town, without having to raise enough capital to
cover an entire region or being sued into bankruptcy by the incumbents under
existing laws.

This is less ideology and more corruption.

~~~
president
People against net-neutrality either:

1\. Don't know what net-neutrality really is

2\. Are against it because their "team" is against it.

3\. Or are getting paid to oppose it

~~~
Agustus
Negative. People who support net neutrality do not know what net neutrality
really is.

Net neutrality is a push by the big corporations to avoid having to pay for
the pipeline they use. Google, Netflix, and the like that use huge amounts of
bandwidth. You are witnessing rent seeking 101, the corporations on one side
are trying to get regulations to help themselves.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Companies that use large amounts of bandwidth pay for all of it. They pay the
full cost of bringing that traffic to a peering exchange. Comcast isn't going
to pick it up for free from Google Headquarters.

Carrying the traffic from the peering exchange to the end customer is what the
end customer is paying the ISP for. Charging for that again is double dipping,
using the leverage created by the last mile monopoly to charge for what has
already been paid for.

------
carnagii
This net neutrality is far from it when Google, Amazon, etc have their own
private networks to which net neutrality rules don't apply. If carriers are
prevented from offering differentiated services, which are required for next
Gen products like self driving cars, video games in the cloud, Tele presence,
and even just reliable video conferencing, then the only companies that will
be able to offer these services will be the ones with existing multi billion
private networks. Or you have to run your business on aws or gce and pay them
10X and they get all the profit. The only way a true competitor could get
started is if they can buy the network service they need from an independent
carrier. The fcc is right on this and Google is full of bs.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
Network neutrality applies to last mile providers like Comcast and Verizon,
and only to the extent that one of the endpoints is one of their last mile
customers.

You're talking about transit providers like Cogent and Level 3, which it
doesn't apply to any more than it does to Google.

It also applies to Google to the extent that they have Google Fiber last mile
customers.

It's true that GCE and AWS have expensive bandwidth prices, but then buy from
someone else. It's not as if they have no effective competition, unlike
Comcast.

~~~
carnagii
Correct, but suppose one company has hundreds of edge's to their private
network very close to the last mile and they run 10-20% of all internet
traffic going across that last mile. If you are Google or Amazon and push a
lot of low priority streaming bandwidth, a neutral last mile dedicates a lot
of capacity to you, so when you prioritize high value data on your own network
that priority ends up applying to the last mile as well.

The only way a new company without a massive nationwide network could compete
with Google or Amazon is if they could pay a carrier for prioritized service.
If you prevent the carriers from offering prioritized service then you are
reducing competition because Google and Amazon can and do offer this.

Google and Amazon are far more dangerous monopolists than the traditional
telcos. They are already vertically integrated
hardware/software/media/everything companies. If some innovative startup
builds a killer product that requires their network to function then they will
either buy it, or create their own competitive product and kill it.

AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast are relatively small companies now and they are in
direct competition with Google and Amazon on many fronts, including this one.
The Google version of net-neutrality is nothing more than an attempt to stifle
what little competition they have left.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> The only way a new company without a massive nationwide network could
> compete with Google or Amazon is if they could pay a carrier for prioritized
> service. If you prevent the carriers from offering prioritized service then
> you are reducing competition because Google and Amazon can and do offer
> this.

You're confusing two different things. The reason companies build networks
with many edges is the speed of light. If the server is in California and the
customer is in New York, you're looking at about 100ms of round trip latency,
because physics. Putting a server in the Northeast can get the RTT to that
customer down to around 20ms. There is nothing the ISP can do about this; if
the server is thousands of miles away, you can't change the speed of light.
(Another reason to do that is then you don't need as much long-distance fiber
capacity, but that's a cost _savings_ and doesn't really affect performance
one way or the other.)

Moreover, small customers with latency-sensitive applications can do the same
thing as Google and Amazon -- use a CDN. There are multiple competitive CDNs
with edges all over the place that will cache your content closer to your
users.

By contrast, if the ISP's network isn't exceeding capacity, ISP prioritization
does _nothing_. A well-provisioned network forwards 100% of packets
immediately. There is nothing to prioritize when nothing has to be dropped.

Now suppose you want paid prioritization. The first thing you've done is
encourage the ISPs to underprovision their networks sufficiently to cause
significant congestion, because they can't charge to relieve congestion if
there isn't any. So yay, now the ISP purposely saturates their uplink and the
default type of network connection you get is one with 90ms of bufferbloat and
significant packet loss, that way they can charge extra to make it the way it
should have been to begin with.

Now you can pay the ISP to put it back the way it was. But that isn't any
advantage over Google or Amazon because they can do the same thing, only they
can negotiate a better price than you because they're bigger. (They still
don't like it because they'd rather not pay monopoly rents to Comcast at all
than have to pay $X even if smaller competitors have to pay $2X.)

The only thing paid prioritization gets the little guy is a bill from the ISP
-- from every ISP -- and a correspondingly even more competitive disadvantage
against larger competitors with more leverage. Along with more transaction
costs, because good luck negotiating as a small business with every ISP
everywhere.

> Google and Amazon are far more dangerous monopolists than the traditional
> telcos.

Google and Amazon are not monopolists in this context at all. Google has a
dominant position in search and Amazon has a dominant position in online
retail, but that has very little to do with networks or data centers. They
have no monopolies there -- they compete with each other, along with
Microsoft, IBM, Oracle, the ISPs themselves and a zillion different smaller
providers.

~~~
carnagii
> You're confusing two different things

both things are true. having edge nodes cuts latency between the client and
edge, but it also allows priority for longer distances if you have a private
network connecting your edges.

> There is nothing to prioritize when nothing has to be dropped.

Prioritization is absolutely required for any safety critical application
(remote control in a bunch of different fields). No matter how over-
provisioned a network is it can always be flooded, and for a safety critical
applications that is unacceptable.

For the high value applications of the future guaranteed low latency delivery
is an absolute requirement. You cannot get that with "net neutrality" rules.

The only reason to impose rules that make next gen applications impossible on
public networks is to decrease competition for private networks.

------
nintendo95
Please, could someone more knowledgeable explain to me. I have used computers
since mid 1980s. Started with Atari 800XL. I have used Internet since mid or
late 1990s. So first thing: please _forget_ what the name of the Act is.
Forget it. Not Net Neutrality. Let's call it "Act ABC". I know, ridicilous,
but I want you to look at the issue... hmmm... in neutral manner. I remember
the Internet that the ABC Act is supposed to protect us from. Internet in
which you pay for the data used. I used a modem and was paying for my time
online. So websites that took forever to load or didn't employ caching
(looking at you youtube without cashing just streaming, but wth). This was
_much_ _much_ more diverse internet. That was the internet that forced p2p
sharing and p2p platforms. Non-existent now because the current system where
you don't pay for the data privilleges big oligopolies, big corporations that
have the most data. Google (with its subsidaries), Facebook, Twitter are like
what 70% of the internet now? Why? How is that good? I want my crazy websites
back. I want diversity. I want copyrighted streaming to be kicked in the
stomach. I want competition. I don't want Google, Facebook and Twitter
monopolizing the internet. Look, ISPs have _never_ censored the content.
Google, Facebook, Twitter do it all the time. On the one hand they say, oh
we're platform. On the other they edit content. So which one is it? Obviously
you can't have both at the same time.

Paying for data would disrupt Google, i.e. it would kill youtube (owned by
google) overnight or at least far reaching changes in it. Facebook also,
spending 3-4 hours a day on it, and _paying_ ? Noow, wouldn't it be better to
spend 20 minutes there and then browse for other locations? Just to spend your
expensive online time more wisely. With free cost of bytes send developers,
and I'm sorry to say it, I'm a developer too though, can be lazy. No
optimization what-so-ever. Building websites to make sure they are small, load
fast, put important content up-front, don't waste users time... now how this
could be bad?

Net Neutrality is the step in the future. Future of Googles, Twitters and
Facebooks, Amazons, 3-4 oligopolies taking all traffic, killing all the
innovation and competition in the process. This isn't the future I hoped for.
I hoped for neevr ending 1990s internet. With dozens of websites I visited
regularly. And these dozens changing every year too. Future of the internet
looks so regulated now. The last step will be the Government taking over, or
rather regulating, FANG. This is death of the innovation for this Industry.

And make no mistake: if Republicans won't pass Net Neutrality then Democrats
will surely do it. But still they seem to recognize the same problem, Ms.
Elizabeth Warren wants to break-down Google, Twitter, Facebook into smaller
competing companies -- employing anti-trust laws against them via Department
of Justice action. So I think we see the problem on both sides of the aisle.
The thing is that solving the problem of big corporations governing the
Internet like their own turf might be better done via making time on the
internet or data sent paid again. Just seems more natural than taking Judical
action against the offenders.

~~~
bo1024
First, thanks for writing this post. I find it very hard to understand because
you don't say what you think net neturality is. It sounds very different from
mine.

My definition is roughly "price you pay only depends on how much data you want
and how fast you want it, not what that data is or who it comes from."

So metering the internet is totally in line with net neutrality, as long as
you don't discriminate and meter some websites at a higher price than others.
In fact, this definition pretty much fits everything you say is good and
avoids everything you say is bad. But you seem to say net neutrality does the
opposite. Now I don't know the details of this exact bill but can you explain
what you think it's doing and how that relates to your post.

~~~
wmf
There's a significant group of people adjacent to and overlapping with net
neutrality advocates who are opposed to any form of bandwidth metering.
[https://stopthecap.com/](https://stopthecap.com/)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
This is largely because metering is a precursor to network neutrality
violations.

The vast majority of an ISP's costs are independent of usage. The actual
incremental bandwidth cost is below $1/TB of transfer and is constantly
declining. And if that's what they were charging, probably nobody would care.
But if that's what they were charging then they would probably make less doing
the charging than it costs to do the accounting. Also, customers hate metering
in general and will happily pay $5/month extra to not have to worry about it
even when their actual metered bill would only have averaged $1/month extra,
which across all customers more than pays for that one guy who pays the extra
$5/month and then uses $100 worth.

But that isn't why metering is imposed, and those aren't the prices charged.
Because the point of metering is to exempt things from it, as a way to favor
those things. If you have to pay $10/GB of transfer for Netflix but not for
cable TV, advantage cable TV. If it wasn't for that, metering wouldn't be used
on wired connections.

~~~
bo1024
Thanks, that's a helpful explanation.

